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On Overhearing "Diggnation"
“What is this, Gilbert Gottfried teaches children about the Internet?”—laloque
Denver Rails Admin Presentation
At November’s Denver Rails Group (Derailed, but really, shouldn’t it have been DRUG?) I gave a talk that covered basic System Administration, geared towards folks that might be signing up for a VPS account and are driving the # prompt in production for the first time.
The slides are light on words and the presentation was heavy on blather, so standalone they might not hold up too well, but here they are:
Eat that, Mavis Beacon
http://labs.jphantom.com/wpm/
112.18 wpm
473.33 cpm
Player With Railroads, Part I*
Back when February when RailsConf was announced, I waffled just log enough to miss the week that it took to sell out, and then was on deadline when 150 more tickets went a few weeks later in 24 hours.
The Argon Express
When Robby posted that some last-minute tickets had become available via the Argon Express, I jumped.
When you’re young, you think that as you age, your circle of friends and acquaintences will grow over outward. I’ve found the opposite to be true—as you age, responsibilities and habit make the circle contract, reducing your opportunity to just be around people you don’t like long enough to realize that maybe you do like them. Blizzards that stop traffic, military service, transcontintental trainrides.
Enough reflecting and more Reservoir Dogs-esque theme music:
Advice for the Novice Long-Haul Train Traveler:
- Pack a serious picnic basket. The dining car meals are passable, but the lounge car is essentially a 7-11 on wheels where the few remaining foodstuffs have been through a very grueling natural selection process whose highest honor is sitting on a shelf for the longest period of time
- Bring one of those life-preserver wraparound pillows, perferably filled with vodka instead of air
*Title from Carl Sandburg’s Chicago
Denver Tells You to Have Low Self-Esteem about The Bigger and Cooler Cities
I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you “you should make more money.” LA tells you “you should be better looking.” Rome tells you “you should dress better.” London tells you “you should be hipper.” The Bay Area tells you “you should live better.” And Cambridge tells you “you should read some of those books you’ve been meaning to.”
—Paul Graham Eats Breakfast
The Dreaded Whine
Heard Around the House
“Oh cool, Music For Robots put together a filtered list of the good SXSW mp3s.”
“Send me the link.”
“music dot for dash robots dot com”
“Oh, come on, you can’t just send me the link?”
“I just did, wirelessly!”
(rolls eyes)
FADE OUT
Spammers Woke Me Up (or, Why I Loathe PHP)
On the Ideanode site, there are a few important forms that go to email addresses that copy me on my phone.
Last night as I was fitfully getting to sleep, spammers abused these forms with scripts that sent a blast of email to my phone, blasting me awake with a cavalcade of well-meaning tones.
Slogging through it, it looks like the culprit is the poor ‘mail’ function in the Personal Home Page language. Since there is no specific argument for the From: sender in PHP, you have to manually specify it at the end as a ‘custom header’:
mail($mail_recipient,$subject,$mail_body,”From: $final_fromrn”);
This, sadly, seems to leave a mac-truck sized hole through which spammers can, giving a massively long list of addtional recipients, bccs, etc, all that turn your unsuspecting mailform into spammer’s delight.
Yes, it’s simple to wrap a regex check around it to prevent it, or use something like SmartMailer, but really, should I have to? Should I accept a mail function that doesn’t presume the need of a seperate from: address and to do a little sanity checking around it? It reminds me why I never enjoyed my time with PHP—it’s a big pot of Stone Soup that everybody just threw whatever they needed into, all with clumsy definition, no review, and no overriding design philosophy.
I’ll spend my time in the Cathedral of Rails , thanks.
Creative Services, Soon Available to the Common Man
Introducing the iPumpkin (protective case not included)
Scrambling to get the pumpkin yesterday for my friend Wendi’s third-annual pumpkin carving at the Skylark last night, I decided to whip up a simple carving pattern based on everyone’s favorite portable music player.
Here’s how my attempt looked:
I decided that the display needed a little extra oomph, so I stuck in a logo. That should do it!
Download the patterns(click on the image to get a nice high-quality PDF suitable for printing), carve away, and upload an example of your handiwork to Flickr when you’re done(tag as ‘ipumpkin’):
Warning: iPumpkin may scuff or scratch during use, take care to protect it from ravenous squirrels.
