All posts by Dan

The Preznit on Global Warming

Idiots, Movies, Politics

For some reason, I was never a huge fan of Will Ferrell. His turn in MTV’s parody of “The Matrix Reloaded”, however, first made me think that I should consider changing my mind. His dead-on characterization of George W. Bush seals the deal.

Apropos the Commander-in-Chimp, last night I was stopped at a light behind a bumper sticker which read:

My child is an Honor Student
My President is a moron

Alas.

GameSlut

Games, Movies

If you’re acting as a carrier for viral marketing, you know you’re acting as a carrier for viral marketing, and you persist in doing it anyway, what does that make you? A typhoid moron?

Anyway, these ads for Xbox and Xbox 360 are pretty cute. (If any of the games released for the 360 at launch showed half the cleverness or ingenuity that the ads do, I’d have been standing in line to get one at midnight along with all of the other suckers.)

First, there’s a touching vignette about the transience of existence. This is followed by a meditation on the importance of a willing imagination. My favorite, though, is this cautionary tale about the dangers of hot-rodding. “Alles klar, Jungs?”

Original infectious vector provided by Faisal. Thanks, Faisal!

Firefox 1.5

Software

…was released yesterday. So far, I see no radical differences from its predecessor, which in this case is a good thing. You can now reorder tabs by dragging-and-dropping them, which is neat, and the preferences dialogs have been substantially re-organized for ease-of-use. Also, there’s an option to capture new windows opened by web sites as tabs instead. Given how annoying and distracting I find it when sites insist upon opening new windows, I suspect that this may become my favorite feature in short order.

Details and downloads can be found at Firefox’s home.

Time, Time, Time

Hardware, Software

I’ve mentioned that PC clock hardware is a raging piece of shite, right? Ah, yes, I see that I have. Good. Then I don’t have to repeat myself. I just need to elaborate: it’s even worse than I realized. I thought that the uncorrected Linux box was in a bad way, but one of my Windows XP boxen appears to be gaining minutes a day. I’m hesitant to use a gratuitous explosion of profanity like “holy fuck” in a public forum, but little else comes to mind that’s capable of fully conveying my astonishment.

So: weekly synchronization with an external time server is clearly not going to suffice, and more-frequent synchronization might be considered rude by the target servers’ owners — especially since I’ve got my own perfectly servicable stratum 3 server at home. It’s therefore time for me to figure out how to make Windows talk to said server — often enough to keep its own sorry ass in some reasonable approximation of sync.

A bit of Googling later, I discover that there are Registry keys you can tweak to both add a server and change the polling frequency. I’ll have to play with them.

Some of these values may be more-easily manipulable using the command-line w32tm utility.

If all else fails, I can have the machine run its own instance of ntpd slickly packaged by the good folks at Meinberg. I’m sort of hoping it doesn’t come to that, though.

Dick is a Killer

Music

If you’re suffering an acute deficit of hearing the Preznit say what he really means, The Party Party has the rx for you. Given the veep’s recently-expressed feelings about the permissibility of torture, “Dick is a Killer” seems particularly timely. (Note that the server on which the songs are hosted seems to have a fondness for resetting connections: if you’re going to download them, you’re advised to use a tool that will recover gracefully. wget seems to fit the bill; others may, too.)

Gigapxl

Art

The Gigapxl Project (“Gigapixel” wouldn’t fit on a license plate, apparently) is a fascinating study in what happens when an engineer with too much time on his hands decides to pursue photography with a vengeance. Popular Science recently ran an intriguing article on the subject.

The project’s web-site gallery is worth checking out; the photos don’t look all that impressive until you follow the chain of zooms and realize that their detail just goes on, and on, and on…