I had a pretty busy Memorial Day weekend.

First, omnibahumut came by on Friday night. We hung out and watched some TV shows. The usual.

I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning up the apartment [Edit: with some help from Omni!] so that we could have some friends over the evening:



I spent Sunday afternoon cleaning up the fur that was shed. :-P Then I spent some time that evening playing Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. I never realized just how much of a jerk Strong Bad was. Also, I could have done without seeing Homestar Runner naked, kthx.

On Monday morning, mongologue came by and we spent most of the day taking care of Anthrocon business and testing out the registration system that I have been working on. I got some good feedback for the system and was generally pleased to see that my development efforts have been on the right track.

It sucks that I missed Eurofurence this past weekend, but I'm please that others who went had a good time. Oh, and if anyone saw a blue hippo plushie at the con, I totally don't know anything about that. Honest!

So apparently, the owner of Furry Art Pile up and decided to close the site last night.

No warning. No notice. Just gone. *poof*

I feel badly for the artists who lost any artwork or commission info from the site.

Guess I'll be visiting ArtSpots a lot more in the future.

My younger sister and my aunt had the idea of throwing a surprise 38th anniversary party for my parents so they could renew their wedding vows. While their actual 38th anniversary isn't until October, she felt that Summer would be a better time to hold an outdoor party, and especially since their last Summer was pretty much wrecked with a couple of hospital trips.

So on Saturday afternoon, about 80 friends of my parents arrived early in the afternoon, followed by my parents arriving around 2:30, and finding a big crowd of their friends waiting for them.



Then Monsignor Murphy walked out and renewed their vows in front of everyone, which was all sorts of cool.

I also got to chat with Msgr. Murphy for a little while, which I really enjoyed as he was a childhood hero of mine. No really--straight from the muzzle of Mr. I-hate-religion here. While I'm not a huge fan of religion, praying, or churches, I was raised as a Roman Catholic and went to church nearly every Sunday until about age 15 or 16. I got to see many of Msgr's homilies, and I never once heard a word about politics, gays, or evolution. What I did hear lots of was tolerance, forgiveness, and understanding. In other words, he acted the way a Christian should be acting.

Maybe I should change my name to Mr. I-hate-religion-mixed-with-politics.

Anyway... getting back to my post about the weekend, a cake maker was hired to create a replica of my parents' original wedding cake, and it turned out pretty well.

After the party, it was back to my parents' place to crash, then back again to my aunt's place on Sunday to finish cleaning up. I then spent the afternoon amusing myself by doing some channel surfing and playing pool against myself (I lost) while my parents chatted with Theo and Kathlene and played catchup.

The full dump of pictures can be found here.

Finally, we got to see some deer wander through the yard on Sunday afternoon:

And by "we", I mean The Save Ardmore Coalition. The state of Pennsylvania will be giving us a $20,000 grant in just over a week. I could talk about this more, but pasting in our press release is easier. :-)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AUGUST 25, 2008
ARDMORE, PA
http://www.saveardmorecoalition.org/

SAVE ARDMORE COALIITION TO RECEIVE GRANT SEPTEMBER 5TH, 2008 IN ARDMORE, PA

Image and video hosting by TinyPic
The Save Ardmore Coalition is pleased to announce that we are to receive a grant in the amount of $20,000 from The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 6:30 p.m. in front of the Ardmore VFW in Ardmore, PA during our First Friday Main Line event with the American Troop Support Team (ATST).

This grant has been awarded to the Save Ardmore Coalition by State Representative Daylin Leach (149th PA), and is via the Department of Community and Economic Development’s Community Revitalization Program. $10,000 of this grant will be used towards a Community Mural and other streetscape beautification efforts.

State Representative Leach has be very supportive of the efforts of Save Ardmore Coalition in the community, and through this grant the Save Ardmore Coalition will be able to further its efforts as a group.

So please join State Representative Daylin Leach and members of the Save Ardmore Coalition in the shadow of the buildings in Historic Ardmore that we fought successfully to save from Eminent Domain for Private Gain. Join us as we take yet another definitive step forward into the future.

For more information on First Friday Main Line, please visit their website at http://www.firstfridaymainline.com/
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Save Ardmore Coalition P.O. Box 453 Ardmore, PA 19003 www.saveardmorecoalition.org

Been setting up a new machine for the migration of Anthrocon's webserver. This should address some of the speed issues we've been having as well as allowing us to use SSL on the site. Plus, since I now have root access and things like crontab available, I can start doing nightly rsyncs of the data.

Fun fact: Nginx lets you chain SSL certificates merely by appending the extra certificates on the end of your site's certificate. No extra webserver configuration requried!

Been building the pre-registration system for 2009, too. I expect that to be finished in the next few weeks. Also, I will be releasing the final product under the GNU Public License. I figure I can at least entertain others by letting them laugh at my code.

I slept poorly a few nights ago and must have done something to the muscles in my neck. This has resulted in me having headaches the last few days. Advil helps the symptoms, though.

Heading up north tomorrow to visit the family for a party. We're celebrating my kid sister's Masters Degree. Let her be the highest educated person in my family for a change. :-P

[Edit: Forgot to mention co-worker J. He wants to tag along with me to the next furry convention I attend, which would be FurFright. He has NO idea what he's in for! :-)]

For the morbidly curious, that pic was used on a paper tray liner at a Burger King at an airport. The original blog post about it can be found over here.

And yes, *what* is Burger King thinking? Pickles do NOT perform body cavity searches on onions!

Whoever made this had WAY too much time on their hands. But it's a job well done.



I'm unsure if they created their shaky camera footage or used pre-existing footage.

Getting new ringtones on your Razr without paying $1.99 or whatever Verizon charges is easy.

Send an email to yournumber@vzwpix.com, with the MP3 as an attachment.

When it arrives on your phone as a PIX message, the file has already been converted to the AAC format, and can be saved with the "Save Sound" choice under the Options menu.

It will now appear in your list of ringtones.

Thanks to this trick, my phone now has Dolph the Fascist Hippo ringtones on it. Guaranteed to confuse friends, co-workers, and family members alike!

http://www.elliott.org/blog/grandmother-arrested-after-refusing-to-delete-jetblue-fight-video/

http://consumerist.com/5036981/jetblue-has-grandmother-arrested-for-refusing-to-delete-an-unflattering-video-recording

http://www.kingmandailyminer.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&subsectionID=1&articleID=16860 (The most detailed writeup)

To summarize, there was a verbal altercation in mid-flight between passengers on JetBlue Flight 195 over a noisy child. That in itself isn't too unusual. Passenger Marilyn Parver, who was sitting a few rows back, recorded a video from her seat, with a video camera. Also not too unusual.

The unusual part is when the flight crew came around asking questions about the altercation, and when Mrs. Parver reported that she had video of the incident, was summoned to the back of the plane by the flight crew, who asked to see the video. After she showed them the video, they demanded that she delete it from her camera. When she refused, they attempted to bully her, and made threats that she would be arrested.

Sure enough, when the plane landed, Mrs. Parver was removed in handcuffs by two police officers. JetBlue again demanded she remove the video. When Parver refused, and asked the names of everyone present, she was "arrested", and taken to the police station. By now, JetBlue's story had changed, and she had "taken pictures of the cockpit, the galley and other suspicious things on board".

The best part is that since an arrest wasn't officially made, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department doesn't have any actual documentation of this incident. Funny, that.

I can't help but wonder what is on that video tape anyway, and why JetBlue is so insistent that it be deleted? I hope it gets posted to YouTube.

So, Gmail dropped offline for a little over an hour yesterday... and it was like a blackout or something. Hundreds of messages were written on various groups complaining about it, and a search on Twitter revealed dozens of posts about Gmail every second. Within an hour, CNET had coverage of the issue as well. The incident even caused Google to apologize in their blog, which is rare for them.

It's funny that even though the outage was just over an hour, many people (myself included) got all up in arms and acted like their world was coming to an end.

All things considered though, Gmail has an astonishing uptime, even for being a free service, and for being as heavily used as it is. I usually have Gmail running in a tab in my browser whether I'm at home or at work, and the last time I can remember a significant outage is at least a year ago. I can certainly say that they have better uptime than my current webhost (3-4 outages over the last year) and certain companies I have done business with in the past.

*goes back to hitting "refresh" obsessively on his Gmail*

While using the nginx webserver with a Drupal installation I noticed something odd. Whenever I submitted a form (with the GET method) or clicked on a link that had a space in it, it would be converted to a plus sign in the URL. Actually, that's not the odd path--the web browser is doing proper URL encoding since spaces are not allowed in URLs.

The weird part is that after the request got to the webserver, and the server processed it and passed it to PHP, and PHP loaded Drupal and executed the PHP code, the plus sign failed to be turned back into a space when using the nginx webserver. Works fine in Apache, but not in nginx.

The symptom is that if I tried to perform a search or edit my user profile, or anything else that involved a plus sign in the GET data, when that data was processed by PHP, the plus sign was still there. i.e., I would see "term1+term2" in the search box, instead of "term1 term2".

So, how to fix this? I could have spent some time reading RFCs, and looking through the source from PHP and nginx, or I could have my site working again. I opted for the latter, and found that this line of code at the very beginning of Drupal's index.php seems to do the trick:

$_GET["q"] = strtr($_GET["q"], "+", " ");

It's silly, and may even be a bit stupid, but it sure does the trick.

I just made "Pick of the Twitter":

http://pickofthetwitter.com/archive/2008/8/3/7.html

I haven't written here lately because I've been very busy at work, and taking care of some real life stuff that came up. As they say, "stuff happens".

I did however get to travel out to Pittsburgh last weekend to work Confluence with the Dorsai Irregulars. It was a smallish science fiction con, with about 300 people in attendance. The shifts I work consisted of an occasional rove through the hotel and badge checking at the door to the Dealers Room.

The DI working the contract were Rene, Steve Simmons, Mark Bernstein, and a few other folks whose names I can't remember right now. :-P Also in attendance from the furry community were tchall, swift_fox, mrianti, boomeroo, and unclekage. At any rate, it was great to see all of those folks again!

I didn't take many pictures at this convention, since I spent most of the time either working of socializing with folks. The full archive is at http://flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157606428079650/ for those who are interested. What follows are a few choice shots.



I had to work a shift with these guys.




One of these things is not like the others... anyone who got caught drinking the "odd one out" was cut off from drinking the rest of the evening.




The highlight of the con was a play that is put on no Saturday evening. A different script is written every year, usually involving parody of current events. This year's play was called "The Doctor's Sarcophagus". I did not get to watch it, as I had roving duty at the time. :-)




After finishing off the scotch that was in this glass, I pretty much called it a night. My room was right next door to the Dorsai Room, so I could hear them singing through the wall. It didn't keep me awake, but it was kinda funny drifting off to sleep hearing filk music being sung.

Oh, and thanks for singing The Dorsai Cadet Song, guys. Can we just induct somebody newer already? :-P

Having recently upgraded my machines to OS/X Leopard (which will be the subject of another post), I decided to try installing the program Duplicity onto my G4/G5 Mac so that I could use it in conjunction with rsync.net. Duplicity is a wrapper for rsync and rdiffdir that can be used to perform both full and incremental backups of your filesystem. It also supports many transfer methods including FTP, scp, rsync, WebDEV, and Amazon S3. In short, it's a pretty badass backup system.

While there don't seem to be any major issues when trying to install it under Linux, installing it under OS/X Leopard is a bit... interesting. The purpose of this post is to more clearly define "interesting" and document how to actually get Duplicity working, and to save others the same issues that I had deal with earlier in the afternoon.

First things first, make sure you've downloaded and installed Fink. Fink provides apt-get functionality to OS/X and gives you access to a whole bunch of UNIX software.

After downloading and untarring the package from the Duplicity website, try building the software with:

python ./setup.py build

If you're a lucky winner, you'll see a bunch of errors starting with this:

_librsyncmodule.c:25:23: error: librsync.h: No such file or directory

This means that librsync hasn't been installed. So go do that:

apt-get install librsync

Since the library will be installed in /sw (used by Fink to keep its stuff separate), you'll need to build Duplicity as follows:

python ./setup.py --librsync-dir=/sw build

Now install Duplicity:

sudo python ./setup.py install

Now try running it. Duplicity should promptly complain in the form of a traceback that ends with:

ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/duplicity/_librsync.so, 2): Library not loaded: /sw/lib/libintl.1.dylib
Referenced from: /sw/lib/librsync.1.dylib
Reason: image not found

Some quick checking revealed that version 3 of libintl was installed by the libgettext3-shlibs package. Why was version 1 not installed? I don't know. Why does librsync require version 1? No idea.

At this point, we do the computer equivalent of a "Hail Mary" pass:

ln -s /sw/lib/libintl.3.4.3.dylib /sw/lib/libintl.1.dylib

Yes, I really did just tell my system that version 3 of that library can be used as version 1. Amazingly enough, it actually worked! In general, doing this sort of thing is not a good idea, since we're expecting a library that is 2 major revisions older than what is actually installed. The fact that it does work however, does speak good about the programmer who wrote the library.

So, let's try and run Duplicity again:

File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/duplicity/gpg.py", line 22, in <module>
import GnuPGInterface, misc, log, path
ImportError: No module named GnuPGInterface

...somebody shoot me.

So anyway, now we have to go to the GnuPGInterface page and download that module. Assuming you downloaded and untarred it, here's how to install it:

python ./setup.py build
python ./setup.py install

Amazing. That was actually painless.

Let's try running Duplicity again:

[pardine:~/tmp/duplicity ] $ duplicity
Command line error: Expected 2 args, got 0
Enter 'duplicity --help' for help screen.

Success! Well, sorta. At least the program runs now. Documentation is is here and the manpage is over here. I can also offer some advice that I learned:

- The first backup is a full backup. Subsequent backups are automatically incremental backups.

- Want to list files in the backup? Use the list-current-files command.

- If you don't want to use encrpytion, try the --no-encryption option. Personally, I'm not a big fan of encrypting backups, because if you lose your key, all your backups go poof.

- If you are using SSH/scp to back up and you don't have an ssh key set up, be sure to tell Duplicity to ask for your password with --ssh-askpass. Even if you set the environment variable FTP_PASSWORD with your passphrase, you'll need to leave this switch in.

Happy backups!

For those of you without a background in computer science, Bruce Schneier is one of the leading experts in cryptography and security. His book Applied Cryptography is still required reading for anyone who wants to learn more about cryptography and secure practices in general.

That being said, there are some important facts I'd like to share about Bruce Schneier:

This is one of the coolest campaigns I've seen come along in awhile. Sean Tevis is running for State Representative in Kansas, and is has an XKCD style comic that explains what he is doing and why.





The rest of the comic can be found here.

The two issues that made me take the most note him are his interest in turning around Kansas schools and adding transparency to the government. I believe that both are good investments in the future and will ultimately help the state as well as society in general.

I've added his weblog to my RSS reader and intend to check back and see how he's doing in the future.

I took a trip to the New Jersey beach last weekend, along with omnibahumut and ferian. Most of the time was spent hanging out, at the beach itself, or on the Boardwalk checking out the shops, and some of the uh... interesting... things in the shops:



No, I did not purchase any of those posters.

The beach itself was okay, but the undertow was up a bit thanks to Hurricane Bertha out in the Atlantic. The lifeguards only let us go in waist high and wouldn't let us use bodyboards. Naturally, I returned to the beach after they went off duty at 5:30 PM and used my bodyboard. :-) I didn't get much wave action though, since the hurricane also caused some sandbars to form about 30 feet from shore. It was my first time on a sandbar however, so that wasn't a bad consolation prize.

I also purchased a "shorty" wetsuit before the trip. It helped with the slightly cold (65 degree) water temperatures and protected me from some nasty sunburn and from getting my back and chest shredded when bodysurfing. Not bad for $40.

Besides playing in the water, we also decided to dig on the beach a little. Actually, we dug on the beach a lot. Before the tide came in and destroyed our hard work, we had dug a hole that was about 4 feet deep and 6 feet wide. We also attracted an army of 6-year olds who were willing to help:


(pic by Omnibahumut)

Talking to the 6-year olds was probably the most interesting part. They kept saying "OMG", and one made some offhand comment about sushi. It blows my mind that kids are eating sushi these days.

Among the other things of interest I found was in an arcade called "Lucky Leo's"... remember the machine "Zoltar" from the movie "Big"? Well, here it is!



No, I did not ask him for my fortune. :-)

As usual, I made use of PhillyCarShare to get to the beach and back. And hey, we even have our own group on Flickr now! It's at:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/phillycarshare/



If you made it this far, then I might as well point anyone who's interested to the full set of my pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157606168492404/

In summary, I came back slightly sunburned and very sore, but it was an otherwise awesome trip to the beach. I can't wait to go back next year!

Click on either of these for options to get (much) larger pictures:



 
 

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For those folks with significant bandwidth, the full 13,223 pixel wide picture of all of the fursuiters on the balcony can be seen here.

Gmail now has this:



In case the above is not obvious, Gmail now has the ability to tell you if you are signed on from any other computers, and what the IP addresses of those computers are.

It's a cool little feature, in case you were to say, sign on at a friend's place and aren't sure if you signed out. Or signed on from an encrypted access point and are worried that someone may have sniffed your session cookie.

Furthermore, you have the ability to sign out those other sessions, which is a great way to ensure that no one else is using your account. (Changing your password regularly helps, too!)

Yeah, so it looks like people are using the rebate checks they've been getting to uh, "stimulate" certain parts of the economy. Of course, I don't think this is what President Bush had in mind...

I think he enjoyed the con...

I just ate an entire tin of sardines. They were perhaps one of the ickiest things ever.

So... anyone know how to make sardines more palatable? :-)

Just in case people were wondering how busy the Anthrocon website is:



Incidentally, for those folks who were seeing form validation errors when trying to post to the forums, this seems to be a direct function of load on our site. And with record load comes higher numbers of such errors. I will be investigating other webhosting options in the near future.

Wow. What a blast.

3,390 members. And 453 fursuits in our fursuit parade.

Simply astonishing.

I'd like to thank my hard working Operations Staff for helping make it happen, as well as the Dorsai Irregulars for doing their thing. I'd also like to thank our hard working volunteers who came by to help us set up and tear down. You guys rock, and are one of the reasons why Anthrocon Operations went so well this year.

I'll post a full report later, but for now I'm going to read through the post-con surveys.

Oh, you didn't fill one out?

http://www.anthrocon.org/survey

Please tell us what you liked, and what we can do to improve. Thanks!