Author: fheald

Just to let y’all know I don’t spend ALL my time complaining. I’m posting this message from my iBook, connected via a wire I bought from eBay (the wire Sprint doesn’t want you to know about) to my Sprint PCS phone. So now I can be on the grid anywhere I can get phone service. Not that this will stop me from wardriving for available 802.11 connections!

The connection is supposed to be 115,200 and it seems to be fairly fast. The plan I’m on gives me “unlimited” internet usage – the quotes are because apparently if you abuse this they’ll take it away.

So I guess I’ll wait till I’m at work to surf p0rn.

Oh, and OSX 10.2 – needs no (extra, non-standard, plug-and-pray) software drivers. It just recognized the phone when I plugged it in. This is how it should work. We don’t need no stinkin’ drivers.

And another one. The guy sponsoring this bill, Senator Florez, drives a 12mpg GMC Denali. Even my Pinz does better than that.

Please vote NO on SB 708.

A few old cars owned by poor people and hobbyists are NOT the problem.

Over the years, I’ve owned and restored half a dozen old Land Rovers and other utility vehicles. Rather than paying $30,000 for a new SUV, I have chosen to save old vehicles from the scrapyard, clean up and maintain them and drive them occasionally, adhering to the community standards of “Tread Lightly” and “Leave No Trace”.

I currently own a 1972 Steyr-Puch Pinzgauer. It is insured, it is in great mechanical condition, and I drive it on weekend camping trips. I pick up trash and repair trails and leave natural areas in better condition than I find them. People who own old vehicles and take care of them are MORE likely to care for the environment than conspicuous consumers.

New smog equipment for old cars is unreasonably expensive and generally causes worse performance. If I could purchase smog equipment, catalytic converters, new engines, or even propane, biofuel, or electric conversion systems for these vehicles at a reasonable cost, this might be an acceptable compromise. Sending these few old vehicles to the scrapyards and forcing me to purchase a new vehicle is NOT going to protect the environment.

Not enough public transportation, and decentralized communities forcing massive commuting is the problem.

This bill blatantly supports new vehicle manufacturers and auto dealerships while penalizing hobbyists and the poor.

Please, consider sponsoring more bicycle commuting paths, more subsidized public transportation, more support of earth-friendly communities, instead of this legislation.

I’m quenching my aggravation with government by writing them letters. Here’s a letter I sent to several CA assemblypersons.

I am a California voter. I wanted to express my displeasure with elected officials wasting time on resolutions such as AJR 15 and others which express sentiments like “supporting the troops”. I feel this is meaningless partisan bickering and does nothing to address our state’s actual problems.

I learned about this issue from the LA times, 3/31, Patt Morrison’s column which mentions Ray Haynes, Jackie Goldberg, and Todd Spitzer by name. Apparently Sarah Reyes agrees with me, as quoted:

“…maybe we should get back to the business at hand in the state Legislature. We have our own war brewing in California, if you haven’t forgotten that. Recall the budget. We’re $35 billion to the worse in this state [and] we just spent the last two hours debating a resolution.”

Please stick to important issues instead. Thank you for your attention.

…the more they stay the same. Well, hopefully so.

I’ve been making some changes to the web pages – moving stuff around, rewriting php, that whole deal – mostly centered on making sure things continue to work. I’ve been chasing down 404 errors (“Page Not Found”) which either mean that I moved something and someone later asked for it, or someone for some reason asked for something that didn’t exist. The latter being harder to discover – I don’t know whether I had a bad link on one of my pages, or someone manually typed in a bad link. Sometimes they (y’all) are trying to get to directories manually – for example, so they can see all the pictures in the pix directories. Or trying to exploit Windows vulnerabilities (as the High School saying went, “psyche!”, or something to that effect…)

All I see on my end are their IP address and the pages they were trying to get to (as well as some browser info and other crap). Sometimes I think it’s really too bad you can’t track users back to an email address; on the other hand, I don’t really want the people whose pages I’m visiting to be able to track me down, either.

I notice I’ve got a lot of pictures online – some are available from this site, some not; several different methods of viewing them. Bah. Photos also seem to be in the more popular items on my pages. Need to unify and organizize.

justfred/pictures.php (new php)
pictures.php (just an index to pix)
pix (old manually created pages)

I think I like the interface for the justfred/pictures.php page – it saves the picture information in a database (as opposed to just sitting in an html, or in a text or excel file – and I can edit the titles and descriptions – there’s still some work to be done, since (as you may have noticed) the next/previous buttons don’t do anything.

I’m also still not sure of some things, like should I allow picures to be in multiple albums? It makes programming harder, but it’s easier to tell a story – of course I could also just have multiple copies of pictures if and as necessary. Goes against the database designer’s ethic (AKA Nth normal form) but will probably work better.

Seems like every time I restart my (Windows) computer, then restart Internet Explorer, it decides to re-add all the standard links I deleted: Customize Links, Free Hotmail, Windows Media, Windows. As well as a host of other unwanted links in my “Favorites” menu.

The only possible explanation for this, is that the computer has realized that removing these links pleases me, so it wants to give me the opportunity over and over again. (More likely it isn’t saving settings when I exit – but somehow it manages to keep bookmarks I add…)

If they want to put these links in the first time, fine – but once I’ve deleted them they should stay gone.

Even worse is webpages that try (either asking or not) to change your default (“home”) page. My home page is either www.obtainium.org, or my.yahoo.com – do not try to change this, don’t even ask.

Basically, don’t do intrusive crap that I don’t want – and especially don’t do it more than once!

(fair warning)Once again I’m going to complain about a Microsoft product.(/fair warning)

I’m working on asp pages (for work – the pages here are php, which is much friendlier), and for the past day I’ve been fighting some strange problems where included pages weren’t being updated when I’d made changes to them. Included pages let you do things like write the top-of-page stuff, headers, database connections, styles – and then just include them in any new pages you create. But the problem was, when I made a change, nothing would happen!

Somewhere on the web (can’t find it now, of course) I read that if you resave the (unmodified) page that includes the modified page, it would work. And it did – but then I had to keep saving ALL the pages any time I made a change to an included page – sorta defeats the purpose.

Tried all sorts of things I found on the web, settings in the IIS Webserver, trying to get it to work. Nothing. So finally I restarted the webserver – when in doubt, restart.

Now ALL of my web pages are failing. Including the ones customer support people need to do their job. Much hilarity ensued in the form of people coming in to tell me, “do you know the web pages are down?” and me jumping up and down and screaming. Lucky I have no hair to pull out.

I won’t keep you in suspense – turns out one of the settings I changed, tho it had an Apply button, didn’t actually get applied till I restarted the webserver. And it’s a setting that should not be changed if you want your ASP pages to keep working. And it’s typically three levels down in webpage setup/configure…/advanced… Fortunately, I found this answer on the web – “If you get this error, try this”.

Kids, don’t try this at home. Save yourself, get an OSX server and PHP.

Okay, that’s wierd.

I’ve just installed Analog, a website monitoring tool that lets me look at number of pages accessed, failures, search items, etc. It’s quite cool.

But here’s the bizarre part. At the moment, if you do a web search on Google for Diet Mountain Dew, I’m the second link that comes up – just for this little article!

Today’s Math Question:

Von’s has one pound of apples for $1.00 (* ValueClub members only!). There are five apples in a pound. How much is a single apple? A: around 50c. For extra credit, explain how schoolchildren will ever gain an understanding of basic math.

Bonus question:

It’s the day before Halloween. Half a dozen eggs cost $1.50. 18 eggs cost $1.00. Explain the social ramifications of a special on eggs at this time of the year.

Great, if you’re reading this you made it here!

By now you’ve noticed that I’ve been making massive changes to Obtainium – new logo, all sorts of sections. There’s two focuses (foci?) there – pointing to cool stuff (as well as, eventually, explaining how to make your own cool stuff) and helping out friends of mine. So if you’ve got a cool product or service, let me know, and I’ll make a link to your website. And if you don’t have a website – we can make one and put it here. By the way, if you need your (low-traffic) website hosted, I can do that too.

Let me know what you think!