All the clever titles were taken.

And frickin’ HOW!

Aces High (Live)
2 Minutes to Midnight
The Trooper
Wasted Years
The Number Of The Beast
Run To The Hills
Can I Play With Madness
The Clairvoyant
Powerslave
Fear Of The Dark (live)
Hallowed Be Thy Name (live)
Iron Maiden (live)

June 9th.  Ah yeah.  Now as long as they do a proper drum track for Run To The Hills; the version in RB1 had the hi-hat mapped to the red pad, which really screws up people with the Drum Rocker or other ‘properly’ laid-out drum kit.

So on the weekend, Kali (…9 years old?  Somewhere around there) and I went to see Star Trek.

It was an excellent movie.  I’m not sure that it was a good Star Trek movie.

First, the effects, the ship models, all that were awesome.  I’ve seen a lot of bitching online about lens flares, but I didn’t even notice any, myself.

The casting was all good.

Strangely enough, as the movie started, and the music swelled up, I teared up.  I don’t know why.  I kind of think it’s because for my generation (and the generation before me, I think,) Star Trek represented what was *good* about humanity, technology, and the future.  Most other sci-fi of the day was dystopian, cautionary, or Cold-War-influenced.  Sci-fi was all about warnings against authoritarianism, robots, genetic science, robots, nuclear war, robots, lack-of-privacy, robots, and encountering aliens that want to eat us.  And robots.

Star Trek, though, was about what good could come of these things.  How, when you get right down to it, Humans have value because they’re human.  A good heart and good intentions aren’t everything, but they’re a good start.  And even when we start to stray, we have it in ourselves to pull back from the brink.

And that was the selling point.  The characters were all people.  Extraordinary, but still not superhuman.  Kirk was an excellent starship captain, in a fleet full of them.  Spock was an amazing intellect and scholar, but not the only one.  Uhura was a communications wizard, but so were lots of other communications officers.  The ship was a large naval-style ship, with a crew that actually needs to work together.  When you need somebody with, say, archaeology experience, it doesn’t just so happen that Spock knows what needs doing; they call up a frickin archaeologist.  Plants got you down?  Call Sciences and get a botanist up here.

Contrast this with Star Wars.  Every main character is either super-human, or comic relief.  Battles are won or lost based on the actions of a single person, either in a one-man fighter, or blade-to-blade.

And that’s the problem with this Star Trek movie; the characters were all super-human.  Uhura is better trained and knowledgeable than the commo officer of the flagship of the fleet.  Sulu has ‘fencing’ training that somehow lets him do front flips, from a standing position, in Vulcan gravity (something like 1.2 G if I remember correctly.)  That’s not Star Trek.  That’s Star Wars.

They utterly fucked up Kirk’s solution of the Kobayashi Maru.  Kirk’s ‘solution’ was the future version of typing “10 PRINT “FUCK YOU” 20 GOTO 10” on a display machine at Radio Shack.

They should have just made it a clean reboot, too.  No spending half the movie trying to justify the reboot, no literal speeches from Captain to Crew about how the timeline’s been altered and destinies have changed.  Just start fresh, like Casino Royale did.

Great movie, though.

http://www.giveitupnorm.com/index.php

Silly Republicans.

Saw this on the Mikrotik forums.

You can't bridge a l2tp interface because it's layer 3.

(If you don’t get it, reflect on the fact that ‘l2tp’ stands for ‘layer 2 tunneling protocol’.)

Now, that having been said, I believe that before 3.10, Mikrotik’s l2tp implementation lacked vital MAC-related features that would, in fact, allow it to be used as a layer-2 bridge.  But that’s not the point.

Having recently installed CactiEZ and started looking into performance optimization, here’s a really quick but effective tip:

Install a more recent version so rrdtool 1.2.x. 

Just by doing that, I’ve had poller times go from 200+ seconds to 20 seconds.

Sure, I have more stuff to do (data=writeback, reservation, and so on) but this helped a lot, and right away.  The fix, I believe, is that it now uses fa_advise to not need to read more of the rrd files than it needs to; given that writing to an rrd file involves reading headers and what not a few times, this is a good savings.

How to do it:

1: vi /etc/yum/repos.d/dag.repo

[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

2: Download the PGP key for dag from http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/FAQ.php as, say, dag.key and install:

rpm --import dag.key

3: Install updated rrdtool

yum install rrdtool

4: Marvel in amazement as your load average and  poller times drop!

I performed this little big of magic at 10:34 this morning.

The wife and I finished the Witchblade anime the other night.

I quite enjoyed it; the wife did too, which surprised her, as one of the selling points is the rather bountiful assets of the assets of the main character, and the armour-which-armours-nothing that she wears alot.

(Side note: the character’s given name is ‘Masane.’  One of the other characters, upon first laying eyes on her, promptly utters ‘Masamune!’ which would translate, perhaps, as ‘Super Boobs’ or ‘Mighty Rack’ or ‘Invincible Chest’ or the like.  And Masamune she is, to most of the characters, for the rest of the series.)

The story is better than I'd thought it would be, though I did think they tried to cram too much stuff into it.  There are entire plotlines that are lovingly and intricately built up, slowly intertwining to reveal a complex set of complex relations..that are then discarded out of hand in the final two episodes.

This anime is, however, an excellent example of the versatility of the voice actors and actresses.  Just watch the interviews.  I dare you.

What a disappointing season finale.  Spoilers ahoy.

First of all, killing off Nathan Petrelli.  With Claire handy.  Who’s blood has already been proven to fix people when administered intravenously.

Second, Hiro’s power suddenly having deleterious side effects.  Out of the blue.  With no previous hinting.  And no other super having such an issue.  Riiiiight.

Third, Mama Petrelli suddenly wanting to have Sylar impersonate Nathan ‘because I can’t lose him.  Not like this.’  This actually would have been awesome if she’d then said ‘And you’ll need to edit my mind, too, so I don’t know it’s Sylar.’

(Of course, I’d assumed that they needed Matt Parkman to use his power to make Sylar think he’d killed Nathan, then lock Sylar into his own little mental landscape, similar to what he did with his father, and later with Daphne.  That would have been awesome.  Final sequence is Sylar living in a world where he’s prez, and in charge, transisitioning to a shot of Sylar in a coffin with a smile on his face, Matt standing over him doing his thang, then Noah and Mama Petrelli sealing the coffin and burying Sylar alive, but in his own mental world.)

On the other hand, it could just be an absolutely BRILLIANT reference to the fact that comic books tend to write themselves into corners all the GD time.

Really.  It’s quite nice out.

http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

This is the shit.  Install it, attach it to your web browser, and do some web browsing.  Fiddler then records the entire HTTP transaction, and allows you to view it in various ways.

This program was exactly what was needed to figure out why a form submission through a browser was working, and a form submission through an ASP.NET using httpwebrequest was failing miserably.  Turned out that the device in question was looking for a referrer, and would simply close the HTTP connection if it didn’t get one.

(I wrote a program similar to this, about ten years ago, called FakeBrowser, when I worked for Everyware Development/Pervasive Software, for doing just such things; debugging form submissions, custom HTTP headers and the like for the Tango web development platform.  There was also a FakeServer version.  Very cool.

Just for a lark, I ran a google search for ‘fakebrowser’ and found references on a mailing list for the product that Tango became.

So for further lulz, I ran a google search for ‘tango fakebrowser’ and look what I found!

The original product announcement on the Tango mailing list:

http://www.fmpro.org/news/57760811935/announcing-two-new-support-utilites.html

And here’s a mailing list thread that actually uses FakeBrowser to do it’s thing:

http://www.mail-archive.com/witango-talk@witango.com/msg05362.html

What a fascinating example of self-archaeology on the Internet!

Bonus points to anybody who can name the reference.

No, I’m not dead.  Just resting.  And now I’m back, baby! Spring has sprung, the grass is slowly greenifying, we got a new barbeque, and life is generally good.  Back to posting!

Fuck New Year’s resolutions.

This has always been a pet peeve of mine.  New Year’s Resolutions.  Bugger’em.

Setting goals?  Great.  Plans to change or improve things?  Go nuts.  Ascribing some sort of special, magical significance to a particular set, simply due to an arbitrary point of the Earth’s orbit?  Folly.  Doomed to failure.  Self-fulfilling failure.

Dammit, set goals or resolutions because you want to meet them, not because it’s that time of year.  Like they say about alcoholics: they can’t be helped until they hit bottom, see what they’ve become, and help themselves.

I’m tubby.  I probably need to lose a good thirty pounds, every single flippin’ inch of it being my spare tire.  My other bits are all slim, sleek and svelte, but not my tummy, no no no.  But you know what?  This happening to be January isn’t going to motivate me to exercise.  No sir.  Like an alcoholic in denial, no external force can convince me it’s time to lose weight.  Only when *I* truly and deeply realize it’s time, will it be time.  Not because robot Dick Clark exhorted me to.

Dammit.

But it’s not for lack of trying.

Holidays weren't too bad, other than spending New Years Day in hospital; they tell me I was likely passing a kidney stone.  Ouch.

Otherwise, nothing too exciting, really.

I am really REALLY disgusted by the CPC, and the Canadian Media.

Seems to me that the media should be doing less 'what do Canadians think of this Parliamentary crisis?' and more 'This is a Westminster-style Parliament.  Saying that this coalition is ANYTHING other than perfectly legit is like saying that the PM living at 24 Sussex Drive is a terrible usurpation of public lands.'

Seriously, it disgusts me that it's even a topic of discussion.  'Coup?  This is how our system works.  We just don't often run into it, what with a electorate that tends to produce majorities.'

Seriously.  Canada needs some serious education in how it's system works, and papers like the Toronto Sun that keep going on about how 'Canada elected Harper as PM' should be, honestly, criminally sanctioned.  30-someodd-thousand people voted Harper; those in his riding.  Harper is a PM.  Harper was given first chance to form a working government; that is, 50% + 1 votes in Parliament.  Harper failed to do that.  Therefore, somebody else gets a chance.  Welcome to Parliament.

Found this analogy on a fark thread:

10 coworkers want to go to lunch together.

On the way to the minivan, they realize they fall into one of 4 groups:
4 people want pizza
2 people want a burger from McDonalds
2 people want a burger from TGI Friday
2 people either want a burger or pizza (except Hawaiian; fruit doesn't belong on their pizza)
(oh, and one guy who isn't even invited who yells that they should be eating vegetarian)

The pizza group declares they're the largest so everyone is going to get pizza, and since they make up the plurality they're going to only order Hawaiian. They refuse to bend from their position, so the McDonalds burger, TGI Friday burger, and any burger/pizza group team up and comprimise on burgers from Burger King. The Burger King group now outnumbers the pizza group, but the pizza group gets pissed and flushes the minivan keys down the drain. Now nobody is going out for lunch until the plumber arrives.

It ain't Christmas without my annual Christmas tags!

(last year's here)

A rock opera in about 1:40.