I've changed dsn servers today for roborooter and few other domains, let me know if you had a domain and it stopped working. Or if you can't send me email, jabber requests or anything like that.
–Francis
PS For the record DNS Made Easy is a good service I just don't need it.
Instead of writing up a nice post about the party and showing off my brothers awesome video he cut for the occasion I instead was playing with jQuery. Specificly testing out Ariel Flesler's ScrollTo plugin which I think is pretty cool.
I present to you for your viewing pleasure, my slider test! I couldn't help but use some of Sara's throwie pictures.
And let me tout the video anyway.
Two years ago I got a crazy idea. For my twenty third birthday instead of the usual drinking and debauchery we'd do something different. Most of my friends thought I was crazy and it was a stupid idea, but since I was footing the bill I was able to convince a bunch of people to give it a try. If anything, good people, good food and good music usually makes for good times. =)
It went over well. (Photo Credit Jeanette Hayes)
Now two years later I'm faced with my approaching 25th birthday. This year I'd like to do "throwies year two". My only problem is that this year I don't have the funds to buy throwies for everybody again. So after talking it over with my friends and going over what it takes to get the parts for hundreds of throwies, I've decided to put throwies up for sale at cost. I'm still looking at suppliers but it seems that I should be able to get you about 25 throwies for $20. I'll know exactly how many after I see how many people get involved (you save in bulk of course).
My party this year will be on Friday the 20th and will have a $20 dollar cover which will include around 25 throwies. I'll order some pizza and soda. We'll meet at my place at 6:30pm to eat and build the throwies and then around 8pm leave for the east village tagging the city as go. Later in the night we will be stopping at a to be determined location to warm up and get something tasty. If you were there last time you might find this familiar.
So either pay me in person (please let me know if there's a problem before the party!) or just use the paypal form below.
This site demonstrates a point that I was talking about the other day. There is a lot fewer people in the "Bread Basket" then there are along the coasts (Including the Gulf of Mexico). I was relating the age of the civilization in the area of the country to it's tolerance for cultures and it's diversity. Notice I said relating, not correlating. I don't have any data for this theory yet, just some poor observations.
Election results by county.
Election results by country as an area cartogram based off of population of counties.
Cartograms are wonderfully powerful at conveying data (maybe not as wonderful at representing data). You should take a look at a few samples of them before you move on.
–Francis
I've got a nice compact archive for the majority of my writings. Inspired by Steve Yeggie mentioning he found posts of 16 year old him on usenet (his chat here), I decided to look into me. I don't think there is a single other place I've written more then for here. There's a distinct possiblility of instant messaging being a larger repository of my thoughts and plans, but I'm goign to argue it's a different medium. Those messages (Adium's got 8448 transcripts going back to May 2004) are much much much less thought out. Espicially if we've been talking for hours.
So what's in my non roborooter history?
I had a problem this week. I actually had the same problem lots of times. It was fustrating as hell.
I had quite a few Windows XP instalations to do, with new employees soon to arrive at work, new laptops arriving with Vista, and some old desktops that needed 'decrufting' in their OSes. I have a slipstreamed windows xp cd with sp2 that I like to use. I haven't bothered updating it to sp3 because I haven't made the time and for a while I didn't think it was worth it. SP3 seems more for microsoft then it does for the users. I do have a new xp disk with ie7 and a few other updates, but I haven't tested it so much. So I tried it out and it seemed ok but I hit a problem.
Windows Update would fail to install every single update after sp3 was installed.
And once you hit Microsoft Update (which you should) it would fail to install the office updates too. No error codes, no event log messages (well maybe but I didn't look too closely) nothing useful. I figured it was my new disk so despite spending all the time reinstalling windows (my disk does make it easier, setup the partitions and walk away for 20 minutes and you have windows waiting for you when you get back) I tried with my older trusted disk. Same problems.
It took me a while to figure out it was sp3.
Well I have a fix. Run these commands.
::http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943144 for details use on 32bit winxp only
net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll
net start wuauserv
Put that in a batch file or just run it and it will re-register the new sp3 windows update dll file and all your problems will go away. So in an effort to take pride in my work I decided to fix it twice. Once for the problem and again for the cause of the problem. According to the knowledge base article I found to fix it, if you update windows update (which is common after a reinstall) and don't restart before installing sp3 then sp3 will ignore the updated windows update and there will be a version missmatch when you try to update. So restart early and often when installing updates. I haven't tested it but in the back of my head there's a voice saing "I think other updates might cause this problem too!" so maybe even something other then sp3 can cause this, but I don't feel like collecting proof.
That would involve "fixing it" 3 times and twice is enough for me today.
–Francis
UPDATE: So far this has only applied to new installs for me, but if you're worried you wont hurt anything by running those commands.
My GPG key for the next year can be found at his address.
https://www.wizardcomputing.com/gpg/wizard-roborooter.com.asc
I've had a few others for my roborooter.com address over the years, but somehow I always loose them. The private key that is. It's usually because I don't use them that much. There are only a handful of people out there I communicate with that know what gpg is, know how to use it, want to use it, and most importantly need to use it. That's actually a tall order to fill.
So what happens to my keys that I loose? Well lets look for the public counterparts.
MIT PGP Public Key Server Search Results for wizard-roborooter.com
Public Key Server -- Index wizard at roborooter.com
Type bits /keyID Date User ID
pub 1024D/C556B1A8 2008/09/02 Francis Gulotta
pub 1024D/2B74810B 2005/01/27 Francis Gulotta
pub 1024D/C6677DA7 2002/01/08 Francis Gulotta
The first one I ever published was back in 2002 (Unless I submitted one earlier elsewhere, damed if I know — but a blog search tells me no different — I need a better search). And if I had the tools with me today I could tell you when it expires if at all. I was probably brash and didn't think I'd ever loose the private key. It's not that hard to make a new key so once a year if I'm going to use it, I can. I can even sign it with my old key (if I still have it) to keep the chain of trust.
–Francis
PS Looks like I've discovered a bug in how wordpress automatically makes email addresses hyper links
As I was walking towards the turnstiles I dug into my pocket for my authentication. Its the wrong way to think about metrocards but I can't help it. Security, passwords, authentication, identification and privacy have all dug their ways into my consciousness. I'm faced with a plethora of different systems all requiring me to prove something one way or another. If its not the subway wanting proof of fair, its my phone wanting to be unlocked for access to my contacts, calendars, and email. At work I have it easy, I log in whenever I sit down. (I lock my screen when I leave, half for security, half because I've earned retaliation from pulling pranks.) Every windows server, workstation and even some of my linux services, everything in the domain recognize me for who I am when I try to talk to them. My workstation takes care of all of the details.
When I try to get into the office its a RFID swipe card that beeps me in. The server room has a regular key. My laptop has a long password and keeps all my files (not my music) encrypted when its off, my desktop has nothing, no private data, just some games and movies, so no password. It doesn't even stay logged into my email.
During my day I type probably 5–10 different passwords a combined total of a few hundred times. Maybe not that much. I've started using SuperGenPass for websites so even though its one password to me, its a different password for each website. Which is very very good. I do a similar thing with my shell and ftp accounts (of which there are many) I generate a random password (often using this handy site) and save it to my OSX keychain. I still use a text file for passwords sometimes and even though its locked behind filevault (the encryption on my laptop) it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
My mail has a long, annoying and different password then everything else. I change it from time to time too, its annoying. But since almost everything else I use a password for will use my email to verify me its important. I've known that for a long time, I've only stopped using my 'legacy' default password for everything (which has grown in length over time but still plastered on any site that would have it) about 2 or 3 months ago. It was a sad and sorry state of things, but I changed it before it bit me in the ass.
I do use openID (check the source of roborooter's home page and you can see my provider information) which let's me log into any site using only my url and let me log into only my provider for the password. (So I don't have to trust or use a different password for every other site.) So far I use it for only a few things, but more all the time. Stackoverflow, livejournal, sourceforge, roborooter.com itself, and a hodgepodge of other sites I can't remember. I could actually check and remove access to my openID for some of those sites if I cared to.
This is my context when I walked up to the turnstile this afternoon and pulled out my keys. Or yesterday when I walked into the turnstile's bar and smashed it against my groin with a loud thump. I had already logged into my network account, why did I need to log into the subway again? For most people a metrocard is money, I pay a lot for (and use it plenty) a monthly card. I have unlimited rides, not a dollar amount on a card. For me my metrocard is just another form of authentication. "Hi, It's me let me in, I'm good for this month. What? Oh OK I'll log in again."
–Francis
(Now with better spellings, more links, and a recovery from DreamHost's databases reverting.. even with review, writing a post on my blackberry has it's disadvantages.)
Me and Miracle Berry Tablets
Miracle fruit or berries makes sour things taste sweet. An effect that apparently is quite amazing.
From the supplier's website.
The active ingredient in the Miracle Berry Fruit, known as Miraclulin coats the tongue and blocks out the taste bud receptors which are responsible for sour, bitter and acidic flavours. The outcome is that all foods which taste sour, bitter or acidic miraculously come to taste sweet.
Once I was told you could solve the problem with transporting "Miracle" berries by freeze drying them (they spoil quickly) and that you could buy said berries online for $20 dollars, I immediately bought them.
It comes with 10 pills each formerly being 3 berries. Think geek says you should cut them in half for twenty servings. The official supplier claims that even fresh berries start loosing their effects due to age and that problem doesn't exist after it's been freeze dried.
I'm going to have to try it to find out =)
–Francis
If only I had the cash to burn…
This would have been the best website ever. But some squatter will pick it up no doubt.
