nyerm

Silly meme time

lonnon — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:19:12 +0000

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
Turn to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post that sentence along with these instructions on your LJ.

Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the closest.

Armadillos: This witty description of the armadillo was produced by the descit environment.

Alas, the nearest book to me is Leslie Lamport’s L^AT_EX User’s Guide and Reference Manual.

Apache hinkyness

lonnon — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:05:49 +0000

I encountered a weird web problem today when adding images to the company website. The new images I’d added wouldn’t appear on their page, and when pointing the browser directly at them, I received a 403 Forbidden error.

After insuring that the permissions and filenames were all correct, I sat down with the sysadmin to see if a second pair of eyes and a root login could find anything amiss. After spending half an hour of finding nothing in the logfile or permissions settings, we both gave up.

I returned to my desk, and on a whim, performed the following commands:

cp image-file.gif foo.gif
rm image-file.gif
mv foo.gif image-file.gif

I can’t imagine why this would have solved the problem, but it did. The implications — that something might be messed up deep within the innards of Apache or the Fedora filesystem — make me worry what other bizarre behavior I can expect from the webserver in the future.

This isn’t the first time machines have had odd behavior in my presence, which I’ve been able to dispel by performing seemingly unrelated actions. I’m obviously in the wrong business. I should pack my bags and hit the road as a traveling computer faith healer.

Only one

lonnon — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:16:22 +0000

One of the best bits about being me: I have a unique name.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are
1
or fewer people with my name in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

iPhone clone window bookmarklet

lonnon — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:58:10 +0000

Mobile Safari’s multiple window interface is amazing, but it lacks the ability to explicitly open a link in a new window. Being a fan of tabbed browsing in desktop browsers, I find it irritating not to be able to leave the current window in place while I follow a link or two.

I don’t have a clever hack to force Safari to open a link in a new window, but I do have the next best thing: a javascript bookmarklet that opens the current page in a new window. This makes following a link in a new window possible, if a bit inelegant.

To install the bookmarklet:

Drag the Clone Window link below to your bookmark bar in desktop Safari. Or if you sync to Internet Explorer, right-click the link and choose Add to Favorites, then save it to the Links folder.

Clone Window

Now that you have the bookmarklet on your browser’s link bar, connect your iPhone to your computer and sync bookmarks through iTunes.

To use the bookmarklet:

In Mobile Safari, tap the bookmarks button (open book icon) at the bottom of the screen.

Locate the Clone Window bookmark; it’s in the Bookmarks Bar folder if you sync with Safari, or in the Links folder if you sync with IE.
Tap the Clone Window bookmark. Mobile Safari opens a copy of the current page in a new window. You may now follow any link on the page, secure in the knowledge that the page you started from will still be there in another window.

Happy browsing!

Jott is a mind boggling…

lonnon — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:24:45 +0000

Jott is a mind boggling cool technology. I’m currently posting to my blog by calling a phone number and having it transcribe everything and stick it into a blog post. The future is here and man it’s really damn cool. listen

Running zsh on the iPhone

lonnon — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:44:03 +0000

I jailbroke my iPhone 3G as soon as the iPhone Dev Team had posted their tool to do so, and ever since, I’ve been screwing about with the command line. There’s something deeply appealing to my inner nerd about having Unix on my phone, and recreational command line hacking is more fun for me than many of the games available for iPhone.

The one thing missing on my journey to mobile nerdvana was zsh, my favorite shell. Cydia had a zsh package available as soon as Pwnage Tool 2.0 came out, and I promptly installed it. Unfortunately, though I was able to run zsh from the command line, I couldn’t figure out how to set it as the default login shell.

Well, a bit of googling later, and I found out that on the iPhone (and possibly Mac OS X, whence iPhone derives much of its unixy goodness) editing /etc/passwd won’t do the trick. In fact, there’s a big fat comment at the head of /etc/passwd that informs you that editing it won’t be particularly useful:

# Note that this file is not consulted for login. # It only exisits for compatability with 4.3BSD utilities.

How then to set up default shells? Edit /etc/master.passwd, of course. iPhone uses this file as its authoritative user database, and changes to the login shell in this file work quite well. Change /bin/sh to /bin/zsh at the ends of the root and mobile lines, and you’re good to go. Here’s /etc/master.passwd after I’ve modified it for zsh goodness:

## # User Database # # This file is the authoritative user database. ## nobody:*:-2:-2::0:0:Unprivileged User:/var/empty:/usr/bin/false root:rootpassword:0:0::0:0:System Administrator:/var/root:/bin/zsh mobile:password:501:501::0:0:Mobile User:/var/mobile:/bin/zsh daemon:*:1:1::0:0:System Services:/var/root:/usr/bin/false _securityd:*:64:64::0:0:securityd:/var/empty:/usr/bin/false _mdnsresponder:*:65:65::0:0:mDNSResponder:/var/empty:/usr/bin/false _sshd:*:75:75::0:0:sshd Privilege separation:/var/empty:/usr/bin/false _unknown:*:99:99::0:0:Unknown User:/var/empty:/usr/bin/false

Note that you must be logged on as root to edit /etc/master.passwd.

Finally moblogging

lonnon — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:54:43 +0000

WordPress for iPhone is finally out, which gives me the opportunity to post random stuff from wherever I’m standing, assuming I’m standing within range of AT&T’s wireless system.

This is the kind of thing I’ve wanted for years, and though there have been ways to do this for some time now, they’ve all been too clunky, expensive, or both for me to stay interested in them too long.

I can even include pictures right from the phone, which might never get old:

Sweet ride

lonnon — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:44:28 +0000

It’s long been surmised by tuners and drift racing fanatics that stickers not only add to the aesthetic of your automobile, they can actually make your car go faster. If you extend this theory a bit further, you realize that lots of stickers will turn your Honda into a hypersonic missile of cool.

That’s the theory. In practice, it makes you look like a complete dufus. Case in point: Mr. G. Antonov, better known to his friends as “Jawls,” as it’s written on the driver’s side door. He’s obviously put this machine through its paces, though; this isn’t some prettied-up curb queen with a big stereo in it. Have a look at the Flickr set for all the stunning details.

I can respect that it’s a real Japanese Honda. This baby’s got right-hand drive. I only wish him the best of luck next time he visits a drive thru.

Crossposting to LiveJournal

lonnon — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:13:12 +0000

I’ve been slowly warming to LiveJournal, not because I love its interface or features, but because I have a number of friends over there I keep tabs on. I post infrequently enough to this blog, and coming up with more posts to put in a LJ seems far-fetched, at best.

To the rescue: the LiveJournal Crossposter, a WordPress plugin that automatically copies posts from my blog to my LJ as I make them. I was going to let it copy every post from here to LJ, but that went poorly; somewhere after the first hundred posts or so, the plugin tried to shove some malformed XML at LiveJournal, and its parser barfed with a delightful Perl error message.

As a result, I only managed to push posts from 2003, and not wanting a gap in there, I went through and deleted them all from LJ. By hand. This is why I’m using WordPress. I do stupid power-user stuff like this all too often.

With any luck, this should be my first post on LiveJournal. To those of you following my blank LJ already: hello, and I apologize if I just spammed your friends pages with a honking huge pile of old posts that are now deleted. With even more luck (and possibly a miracle or two), I’ll post things often enough to make it interesting for people.

Don’t orphan my art

lonnon — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:50:56 +0000

My usual rants about copyright law involve unwarranted strengthening of copyright law to protect old works that ought to be public domain by now. This post, however, deals with the drastic weakening of copyright protections by the proposed Orphan Works Act of 2008 (H.R.5889). This piece of legislation would damage the livelihoods of living artists, amending the law to allow anyone to infringe on a visual work’s copyright after being unable to locate its author after a “reasonably diligent search.” In theory, this would allow works whose authors have died or otherwise dropped off the face of the earth to be used commercially, which could only be a good thing, right?

Not so much. The infringer would be allowed to determine what constitutes a “reasonably diligent search.” This goes far beyond fair use; the infringer would be free to commercially exploit the work for any purpose. The entire burden of proving copyright infringement of a so-called orphaned work would fall on the artist. Current copyright protections provide for injunctive relief, payment of attorney’s fees, limitations of damages in a countersuit, and a discovery process for determining infringement; none of these would apply to orphaned works. Even images that directly incorporate copyright and contact information would be easy prey for unscrupulous infringers who deliberately remove such information, because they could claim an orphaned works defense, making it nearly impossible for an artist to prove infringement.

The bill proposes a poorly designed technological solution: databases of known works, in which artists would register their work so it would be available for searches and comparison. However, these databases would be run by for-profit companies, and with no limit on what could be charged per work, it would be prohibitively expensive for artists to register their work. Anything not located in these databases would instantly become orphaned works; a cursory glance at the databases would be all an infringer would need to claim a “reasonably diligent search” for a work’s original artist.

On top of that, works created by artists outside the United States would be required to register, which violates both the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property, both of which prohibit the impediment to exercise of rights that a registration database would create.

I first ran across this alarming bit of legislation on Brad Guigar’s blog at his fine webcomic, Evil, Inc.. He provides a link to a page where you can take action against the bill, which also includes a good overview of the bill’s effects.

The IPA has been following this legislation from its inception earlier this year, and their Orphan Works Resource Page for Artists is an excellent source of further information. Included is a copy of a letter written by artist Michiko Stehrenberger, whose work was stolen by a tobacco company and who wouldn’t have had any legal recourse under the law proposed in H.R.5889. You can also read the actual text of the bill on the Library of Congress site.

I hope someday to make a living from my art, so seeing irresponsible legislation like this makes me extraordinarily angry. It’s hard enough making a living as an artist — I still don’t — without the government declaring open season on your intellectual property.