Thanks
January 21, 2007
I’d like to go ahead and that the New Orleans Saints for their 2006-2007 Season.
Sure, It didn’t go as far as we’d have liked it to go, but we went farther than anyone expected.
Thank you, Saints, for giving us our Sunday back. Thank you for giving us something positive to talk about. Thank you for a wonderful football season, and I’ll see you in the fall.
9th homegame’s a charm
January 14, 2007
Yesterday, I witnessed my 9th Saints home game this season, and our progression to the NFC Championship Game. Sweet merciful crap.
My condolences to The Pirate Dorgenois on the Eagles’ loss. But c’mon brah, are you really vroken up that your other home team, the Saints, are progressing to the NFC Championship for the first time ever? Yeah.
The view from Section 630, Row 8, Seat 8.
Ceiling Banana is Watching Texas Masturbate
January 11, 2007
I’m sure that most of you are now familiar with Ceiling Cat:
Well, my friend Alex linked to an article in the The Globe and Mail about Geosynchronous Banana Over Texas, which said the following:
A 300-metre airship shaped like a banana is expected to be released in Mexico late next year and allowed to drift across the border into Texas airspace, an unconventional art project that has received funding from the Canadian government.
If all goes according to plan, the helium-filled balloon made of bamboo and synthetic paper will circle over Texas for up to a month. It will drift in a low orbit some 20 or 30 kilometres above the Earth until it disintegrates.
Yeah. Pretty awesome. So, I decided to quickly combine the ceiling cat with concept art for GBoT, and here’s the result:
Gentoo Linux on a G4 Mac Mini
January 10, 2007
Since the storm and the later apartment move, I’ve been slowly paring down and simplifying my home network.
So long, rack. Hope you find a good home, HP ProCurve 400m, Cobalt boxes, and various multi-U rack cases.
Over the past few days, I have taken another step. For a long time now, I’ve been running an AMD Athlon 750 MHz (Slot A!) based system as my main home server. Still running strong and stable, if noisy.
Well, that box got turned off the other day. It has been replaced by a much smaller, quieter, G4 Mac Mini. It had been sitting in a box for a while, and I decided it was time to Linux-ify it.
It was a pretty easy install and is much quieter and faster, and I’m going to go ahead and post up a caveat or two and a config or two for you other G4 Mac Mini Linux (Gentoo specific) peoples.
#uname -a
Linux halo 2.6.18.4 #5 Sun Jan 7 14:51:37 CST 2007 ppc 7447A, altivec supported PowerMac10,1 GNU/Linux
1) Kernel configs: Mine doesn’t have wi-fi or bluetooth, so I turned it all off. Your integrated ethernet device uses the Sun GEM driver. Also, weird thing here, you _must_ enable framebuffer support and compile in your proper video card. Lame, but necessary. A simple lspci yielded the following relevant info:
0000:00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200] (rev 01)
2) /etc/make.conf (your use flags will vary, but you should add altivec anyways:
CFLAGS=”-O3 -pipe -mcpu=7400 -mtune=G4 -maltivec -mabi=altivec -fno-strict-aliasing -mpowerpc-gfxopt -fomit-frame-pointer”
CHOST=”powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu”
CXXFLAGS=”${CFLAGS}”
MAKEOPTS=”-j2″
PORTAGE_NICENESS=3
AUTOCLEAN=”yes”
FEATURES=”ccache”
CCACHE_DIR=”/var/tmp/ccache/”
CCACHE_SIZE=”2G”USE=”altivec apache2 ssl php session unicode mailwrapper mysql mysqli nfs zlib -ldap -doc -java -X -X11 -opengl -cups -ipv6 -gdk -gtk -gnome -qt -qt3 -qt4 -kde -alsa”
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~ppc”
3) Well, that’s really all. It wasn’t a very bad install, outside of figuring out that framebuffer issue and the inherent dumbness of yaboot.
The continuing saga of spam comment fighting.
January 9, 2007
Latest version: “Hidden” Subject field, 2 hour cache window (from current day), optional manual keyword filter.
//config file
// ‘Cache Buster’ extra data to make sure the md5 checksum it generates in the
// comment form is not reverse engineerable. In the installation process, it would auto-fill
// with a rand() echo;
define(‘COMMENTCACHE’, ‘Were gonna need a bigger boat.’);
// This is a word list, comma separated (no spaces), for comments. If one of these words is in a comment,
// it will not be posted.
define(‘FILTER’, ‘tramadol,casino,poker,phentermine,insurance’);
//comment area ( I like to add the style to the beginning of the page, seems less obvious to the human/bot eye )
<style type=”text/css”><!– #subj input, #subj p { display: none; } –></style>
<div id=”subj”><p><label for=”subject”>Subject</label><br /><input type=”text” name=”subject” id=”subject” value=”" size=”22″ /><br /></p></div>
<input type=”hidden” name=”cache” value=”<?php echo md5(date(YmdH).COMMENTCACHE); ?/>” />
// server-side comment logic
if( !$_POST['subject'] ) {
if( $_POST['cache'] == md5(date(YmdH).COMMENTCACHE) || $_POST['cache'] == md5(date(“YmdH”,mktime(date(H)-1, 0, 0, date(m),date(d),date(Y))).COMMENTCACHE) ) {
if(FILTER) {
$filterList = explode(‘,’, FILTER);
foreach($filterList as $badWord) {
if(
stristr($comment_author, $badWord) ||
stristr($comment_author_email, $badWord) ||
stristr($comment_author_url, $badWord) ||
stristr($comment_content, $badWord)
) { $badCount++; }
}
if($badCount == 0) { $comment_id = wp_new_comment( $commentdata ); }
}
}