Archive for July, 2005

Punishment for Kindness

Thursday, July 28th, 2005

A short while ago I had the opportunity to (re) watch the movie Ronin (1998). This movie is quite good and most well known for the intense chase scenes which set the standard for many movies that have followed. However, the part that stays with me after the movie is over is a [...]

Greylisting, Some Good, Some Bad

Monday, July 18th, 2005

Greylisting has had much said about it over the past year or two and it seems to be a valid concept at reducing spam. This is my experience implementing it using Qmail, SPP, Debian and Ubuntu. The idea is that since most spammers do not use proper mail queues to handle their SMTP [...]

acdctl Controls YourApple Display Brightness

Saturday, July 9th, 2005

Having that software itch again I just had to get my display brightness turned down on my Apple Cinema Display. It’s a wonderful piece of equipment, but it has no external controls to manipulate brightness. Just a soft-key that when touched flashes. When connected to a mac this key launches their display [...]

Terror of Tiny Town - Just Another Bad Western

Thursday, July 7th, 2005

After being on my to-buy list for over a year, I ran across a copy of The Terror of Tiny Town (1938) while out shopping with a friend and I’m sad to say it’s just another bad western. I watched through the whole thing (about an hour) and aside from the obvious schtick of [...]

Somebody Explain Terrorism Please

Thursday, July 7th, 2005

Someone needs to explain the whole concept of terrorist bombings to me. From what I’ve seen, the logic of the terrorists is as follows.

We don’t like something (in this case, apparently the war in Iraq)
We cause death and destruction/pain to you in your home country
You are thereby disuaded from continuing to do what we [...]

Obviously Nobody Cares

Wednesday, July 6th, 2005

There is much lament over the dearth of signups for the ONE letter to be delivered to the G8 conference despite a TV campaign asking people to simply go and sign up. All this says to me is that people really don’t care. At least, people that aren’t bleeding heart liberals with too [...]

Airport/3c905 Packet Loss Solved

Wednesday, July 6th, 2005

I was experience 30-60% packet loss on my Airport Extreme network, here’s how I diagnosed and solved that problem by forcing the link speed to a slower rate.
After my firewall/gateway Linux box died due to a bad hard disk, I temporarily used my Airport Extreme as my primary network access point. When I finally [...]

Robots Get to Second Base

Wednesday, July 6th, 2005

It’s a fucked up world when there’s not enough men around to grope a woman’s breast, but that’s appears to be the very problem that scientists are looking to deal with according to the new scientist. I would tend to agree with the analysis stating that delays make such devices of suspect utility, however [...]

Hard Rock Zombies

Wednesday, July 6th, 2005

When I went to the video store to look for new additions to my bad movie collection, I had no idea what I was in for. My friend ended up purchasing a little gem called Hard Rock Zombies. Don’t let the IMDB review get you down, this movie is incredible. The back [...]