Gudlyf's World

Comic-Con 2008

2008-07-22T02:05:24Z

I’ve been almost as curious about Comic-Con as I am about Burning Man, and this year I’m finally attending it (Comic-Con, not Burning Man — no fricken way Burning Man). I’ll be in San Diego Wednesday until Sunday morning.

I’ll be sending twitter updates of where I’m at and what’s going on via the TV Squad twitter account, so if you want to meet up at some point, keep a look out or send me a note.

A pleasant day

2008-06-11T15:23:44Z

Yesterday started off with me waking up an hour late because my son decided to get up five times in the night. A dandy way to kick-off the day.

I had an oil change appointment with Wellesley Mazda later in the morning. I’ve gone there every time for my oil change, for the past five years — it’s where I bought my car, the RX-8. I know I pay more for my oil change there than … well, anywhere else, but I know they knew how to treat my car. Plus, I got a “free” hand car washing afterward. Sure, it takes an hour to get my oil changed, but they have WiFi so I’m OK.

Yesterday I waited the hour for my car, paid the bill (which is almost double what I’d pay at Jiffy Lube), and head out to my car. It’s fucking filthy. I swear it looked worse than when I drove it in. So, I head into the office and ask why it wasn’t washed. They told me it’s a “new policy” to not wash the cars any more, that I could have them wash it or ten bucks more. I told him I’d gotten it washed for years, but he just shrugged it off. Jiffy Lube from now on for me.

Then, I forgot to take lunch to work. So I figure I’ll grab some trail mix from our little snack area. Yeah, it’s free, but I’ve got a gripe with the packaging. Check out the photo on the right.

See that microscopic tear in the top-right corner? That’s where we’re supposed to open he bag from. So you’re forced to tear down on the package and you have fricken seeds, nuts and raisins spilling all over your desk, keyboard, lap and floor. I wanted to punch the Planter’s Peanut in the groin.

Buffering …

2008-06-10T01:04:25Z

Overheard on GTAIV last night

2008-05-01T20:34:40Z

“Joe, did you start the Biology paper yet?”
“No. You?”
“Nah. Want to do it together?”
“Uh… I dunno.”
“What, you don’t know or you don’t want to? Come on.”
“Uh, yeah, sure. I just wasn’t sure what I was doing yet but OK.”
“Good because I dunno this shit at all.”

Bullied over XBL. Poor, poor, young fool.

I’m just testing to…

2008-04-23T18:40:31Z

I’m just testing to see how jott works with Word Press. listen

Who is SxSW for, really?

2008-03-18T20:05:51Z

For the past couple of weeks, just about every online acquaintance I know has mentioned or attended SxSW. I heard about it last year and didn’t pay it much attention, but then this Twitter thing came by and then everyone I follow on Twitter was yapping about it and how drunk they were getting at it.

From what I understand of the festival, I don’t really get how bloggers are able to attend this thing on their employer’s dime. What are you really getting out of it other than debauchery and networking — not necessarily bad things, I might add, but do they really add to your employer’s investment?

Part of me writes out of jealousy for not having the time, resources or my once youthful desire to attend SxSW, but the other makes me really wonder what I missed in the first place. Would I be a better writer for having attended this thing? Would anyone paying my way to SxSW get their money’s worth? My bet is that most people attending by way of their employer’s checkbook somehow talked them into the value of the event, when they were really hiding their true goal: meeting people to party with while listening to new music.

That money they spent flying your ass to a multi-day party could have been used to, I dunno, send someone to cover a real event. Honestly, have you read any worthwhile posts that came out of SxSW that were newsworthy?

Something else I wanted to get off my chest about SxSW, though not exactly just about SxSW, is the Twittering thing. I can’t get over how many people Twittered from the event, and part of that just makes me sad. You’re attending this event to network with people, in person, and you’ve got your nose buried in your iPhone more than half the time. People are Twittering who they’re sitting with at dinner and at bars, so what the hell are they doing fumbling around with a fucking gadget when they should be enjoying the people they are with!

And… AND! That gets me to one last thing. If you own a blog and find that you have to apologize to readers for not updating, guess what? You’re doing something right! It means you’re actually busy with real shit and not bored to tears such that you have time to write in a blog. So, as my bud Joel at TV Squad said to me about this, stop being sorry for having a life — if you’re not updating your blog, we won’t hold it out on you.

On that note, back to my life.

HD DVD’s death: A unique perspective

2008-03-07T19:13:58Z

Apple Leopard feature request: Annotated Time Machine backups

2008-02-21T21:20:00Z

Maybe I’ll send this off to Apple as a suggestion…

I’d really love to be able to annotate Time Machine backups so I can better refer back to when I made a certain change to my system that I’d like to restore from. For example, I upgraded an application yesterday at noon. Let’s say it starts acting up on me now. Unless I remember I made the change around noon yesterday, I have to hunt around for it. Instead, it would be great if a user can manually add a note to certain backups for restore points. Like “installed new such-and-such application”. Then you know to restore from the backup just previous to that one.

This seems like such an easy and handy feature. Where the hell is it?

Toshiba on HD-DVD: “It’s just a flesh wound”

2008-02-21T18:23:07Z

I guess we’ll need to wait just a little bit longer to throw HD-DVD on the cart.

UPDATE: “He’s dead now!”

Techie Time: Fedora 8 problems with updating rpcbind

2008-05-28T20:12:18Z

It’s time again for another Techie Time post. I will sometimes use these to post notes about technical issues I’ve run into that had nary a single hit on Google for help. So, in the event someone else has the same issue, welcome!

For anyone uninterested in the subject, you can look away now. You were warned.

For the past few weeks I’d been keeping my work system completely updated with Fedora 8. Suddenly, at some point, I noted that ‘rpcbind’ wasn’t updating, failing with an RPM script error. Here’s that error:

error: %pre(rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 4
error:   install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8

Eventually, this error caught up with me and NFS started not working and was wreaking havoc on our network. Here’s what I had to do to get the latest rpcbind installed:

rpm -q --scripts -p rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm > /tmp/scripts

Within that new file I took out just what I needed and edited it a bit. In particular, note the ‘-o’ with useradd and groupadd:

/usr/sbin/userdel  rpc
/usr/sbin/groupdel rpc

# Now re-add the rpc uid/gid
/usr/sbin/groupadd -o -g 32 rpc
/usr/sbin/useradd -o -l -c "Rpcbind Daemon" -d /var/lib/rpcbind -g 32 \
-M -s /sbin/nologin -u 32 rpc

The ‘-o’ is necessary because this RPM kept failing because “32″ was not a unique userid. Thing is, it’s not in /etc/passwd (note that it removes it first!), so why it’s complaining I can only guess has to do with LDAP, though I haven’t had time to test yet.

Next, I forced the RPM to install without scripts, then ran the script:

rpm -U --force --noscripts rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm
sh /tmp/scripts

Anyway, I hope that helps someone else.