K-Squared Ramblings

Klingon Honor Roll

You’ve all seen those bumper stickers that say things like, “My child was an honor student at XYZ school.” You’ve probably seen parodies like “My child can beat up your honor student.” But have you seen the Klingon version?

Sorry about the phone resolution: it reads, “My child has more honor than your child.” And yes, it’s in English.

(Yes, Photoblog catch-up week is still going.)

Paper cutter with laser sight!

Every once in a while you see something that gives you the feeling that yes, you’re living in the future. I got it the first time I saw Wolfgang Puck’s self-heating coffee at the grocery store. I also got it when I saw this:

I mean, how can you go wrong with a paper cutter that has a laser sight?

A few weeks ago, Warren Ellis wrote about “detecting outbreaks of the future” and possibly setting up a website for “future hunters.” His latest Bad Signal mentions setting it up at the currently-defunct DiePunyHumans.com. This kind of stuff should fit right in.

Chocolate Mint

After our trip to the nursery this weekend, Katie started seriously looking at our existing plants. We have a mint plant that got so pot-bound it grew down, through the drainage holes at the base of the pot, and back up the outside of the pot. She decided to make cuttings out of those bits… but what to put them in?

Well, she’d just finished off a container of baking cocoa…

Don’t call ’em squares

Continuing Photoblog Catch-Up Week, here’s another great example of what happens when specialized jargon conflicts with general usage:

It doesn’t take much geometry knowledge to realize you can’t have a 7×9″ square—but in the context of crochet it makes perfect sense. If you take it literally, it’s right up there with non-organic food.

(Found in a Michael’s craft store.)

Street Guacamole

Photoblog Catch-up Week continues!

Last weekend we stopped at a nearby nursery to pick up some potting soil. We walked out with two tomatoes, one fuchsia, three herbs, a couple of pots, some bamboo… and the potting soil.

We parked in front of this sign. Yes, it was next to an avocado tree.

Left and right

Just saw Snopes’ post on Ben Stein’s commentary on the Oscars and the politics of Hollywood, including this rather disingenuous statement:

Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else.

Sure, he’s talking about Hollywood specifically, but it’s the kind of “You’re not really American” rhetoric we see a lot in political polemic.

Has it occurred to people on the right that us “lefties” (which seems to mean anyone who is less conservative than President Bush) do think that fighting terrorism is a good thing, but that our nation is currently going about it the wrong way? That maybe invading Iraq wasn’t the best way to curtail global terrorism? That it might be possible to spy on terrorists without bypassing that Constitutionally-guaranteed “due process of law” in a way that sets precedent for warrantless spying on citizens who aren’t terrorists?

We don’t hate America, but we’re not particularly thrilled about some of the things our government has been doing lately.

I do agree that the Academy Awards are pointless in the grand scheme of things, but I’m sick and tired of the false dilemmas rampant in what passes for political discourse these days.

Yoda’s World

I’m officially declaring this week Photoblog Catch-Up Week, since I’ve got such a backlog of photos I’ve been meaning to post. First up:

Unfortunately this isn’t particularly near the Hobbit Center in Laguna Beach. It is, however, in Lake Forest, the city known for its Middle-Earth street names.

The pairing with the Plaza Suites sign does make me wonder, though: the last time I checked, accommodations on Dagobah weren’t particularly extravagant!

Fixing Flash in Fedora Core 5

I upgraded two computers at work to Fedora Core 5. One was a network upgrade that went without a hitch.* The other was trashed so badly I had to do a fresh install.

I’ve run into a couple of gotchas, among them the fact that text is missing in Flash animations. I messed with my font settings, checked SELinux logs, tried switching from the binary installer to the RPM package, to no avail. I tracked down a Fedora mailing list post that pointed to a mozilla bug that had been languishing for a few months, then added what I knew—which was that it affected Flash regardless of the browser.

On Sunday, commenter Dawid Gajownik tracked down the problem: Flash hard-codes the paths where it looks for fonts, instead of letting the X server tell it where to look. Fedora Core 5 includes a new X server, which no longer puts things in /usr/X11R6. Apparently symlinking the old font paths to the new ones works around the problem:

[root@X ~]# mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
[root@X ~]# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
[root@X X11]# ln -s ../../../../etc/X11/fs
[root@X X11]# ln -s ../../../share/X11/fonts

I tried it with absolute links (to /etc/X11/fs and /usr/share/X11/fonts) instead of relative, and it worked fine.

Also, if SELinux is in enforcing mode, you need to allow text relocations on the Flash library. More info on that in Dawid’s bugzilla comment.

So this should take care of Flash until Macrodobe releases an updated version. They’re apparently heading straight for 8.5 on Linux, which is why they haven’t released Flash 8.0 yet.

*Almost. It turns out the repodata on disc 1 isn’t enough for a network or hard disk installation. I copied all the discs onto an internal web server, then had to grab the repodata folder from a mirror. Would’ve been fine with the CDs except for the annoying problem that the CD drive on that machine doesn’t work. Once I had that, though, the upgrade went smoothly.

2-Item Combo

Drove past this place last weekend and only noticed the convenient pairing of the Karate studio with the Impact Rehabilitation Center. Came back this week to get a picture, and noticed it also seemed to advertise Red Hot Curves…

Cheese!

This just looks like something out of a Wallace and Gromit movie. I mean, seriously. “Cheese Information Center?” “The Ultimate Cheese Guide?”

(Found at an Albertson’s grocery store.)

IE7 disappearing float bug

I’ve reported this bug to the IE team as suggested on IEBlog, but I’m posting it here as well. Bear with me, this is a fairly obscure one.
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Fedora Core 5—and Airport Extreme on Linux?

Fedora Core 5 was released today. I started downloading it this morning, and it should be done this afternoon. I’ll probably start updating the Fedora boxes at work later this week, though for my home system I may wait until RPMForge catches up.

Meanwhile, I’m reading the release notes, and found one item particularly interesting:

There are new experimental drivers that provide support for the widely-used Broadcom 43xx wireless chipsets (http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/).

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Park. Villa Park.

OK, it’s not quite as confusing as having, say, a First Street and a First Avenue in the same city, but sometimes you have to wonder what went through the mind of the city planner who approved certain street names.

Going to the Movies—Not!

Apparently the movie industry is trying to come up with an ad campaign to get people back into theaters. The LA Times doesn’t seem to take the idea terribly seriously, as they’ve suggested the slogan, “Movies: Just like DVDs, but Larger.” Meanwhile, theaters and studios are blaming each other for the decline in attendance:

Theater owners blamed Hollywood for making inferior (and overly long) movies, studios worried that theaters were turning the multiplex (with its barrage of pre-show commercials) into as much of an ordeal as an escape.

How do you figure out who’s right? Oh, wait, that’s easy: Both of them.

Make better movies, and more people will brave the long lines, high prices, 20 minutes of annoying big-screen commercials, 15 minutes of previews for movies that aren’t terribly interesting, people yakking on cell phones, people narrating the entire @%!# movie for their friends 30 seconds ahead of the action, etc.

Clean up the theater experience, and people will be willing to go for movies that look kinda interesting instead of really interesting.

It’s not just the big screen and immersive sound. Watching Serenity at home lacked the intensity of watching it in a theater full of fans (even the second time, when we knew what to expect). Neither canned laughter nor a studio audience can compare to dozens or hundreds of people laughing together in the same room. And it’s hard to match the collective “Oh, $#!7″ that swept the theater in each showing of Return of the King when Shelob showed up again after Frodo thought he had escaped. The communal experience strikes a chord that you just can’t reach with a couple of people and a TV set.

People who talk through the entire movie aren’t just distracting you from the movie, they’re interfering with that communal experience. There’s only so much theater staff can do, short of kicking people out, but at least we know in the future they’ll get to inhabit a special level of Hell.

Speedsters, Sorcerers, and Sergio

DC has announced their comics for June, and I’m really looking forward to three books.

First, they finally announced a release date for the re-launch of The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive. It was getting to the point where I was in more suspense over when they’d launch it than who was going to be wearing the mask. And at least we know that Wally and Bart are “not dead” (in the words of Infinite Crisis writer Geoff Johns), though that doesn’t necessarily imply we’ll see them anytime soon. Now I only have to worry about who’s going to be “the” Flash, and whether the new book will be any good.

Almost as good was the surprise return of Michael Moorcock & Walter Simonson’s Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer. They got half-way through this mini-series in 2004, and issue #3 just never appeared. It looks like they’re finally going to finish it. Which reminds me, I should look for the final book in the Elric/Von Bek trilogy and see if it’s in paperback.

And then there was the real surprise: An issue of Solo by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. (Shouldn’t that be Duet?) Need I say more?

Also interesting: Astro City: Samaritan and Fables #50.

Snowblogging

Click to enlarge

We don’t get snow here in the middle of Orange County (heck, this is the first time I’ve seen hail here in at least a decade), but we do get to see it from a distance. Mostly off in the San Gabriel Mountains to the north and northeast. While stopped at an intersection this morning, I caught a glimpse of the snow-covered range rising out of the clouds in the distance. Unfortunately this is the best shot I could manage on short notice:

Click to enlarge

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Dancing Liberty

Add this to the list of jobs I don’t want: Dancing Statue of Liberty mascot.

This poor guy—yes, guy—was dancing around in front of a tax preparer’s office last weekend. Faces have been blurred to protect the innocent.

Opera passes Acid2

OperaWatch reports that this week’s development build of Opera passes the Acid2 test. This makes Opera the first browser for Windows to pass! Previous browsers included Safari (Mac only), iCab (Mac only), and Konqueror (Linux/Unix). I’m sure you could get Konqueror to run on Windows under Cygwin, but it seems like a lot of effort just to run a web browser.

Opera cautioned that upcoming development builds could regress, but we can expect the final version of Opera 9 to pass the test.

Neither Internet Explorer 7 nor Firefox 2 will make any attempt to pass Acid2, but Mozilla is working on Acid2 fixes in the next version of their rendering engine, Gecko 1.9, which will likely appear in Firefox 3.

WordPress 2.0.2 Out

All software that deals with the outside world needs the occasional security fix, and WordPress is no exception. Version 2.0.2 was just released today. As usual, the upgrade was quick and painless.

Geek Rivalries

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, now: the Geek Rivalries Meme

Star Trek or Babylon 5? Babylon 5
Windows or Linux? Linux
Windows or Macintosh? Mac
Farscape or Stargate? Farscape
Linux or BSD? Linux
Intel or AMD? AMD
Star Trek or Star Wars? Star Wars
Firefox or Internet Explorer? Firefox
Firefox or Opera? Firefox
Wordpress or Movable Type? Wordpress
Marvel or DC? DC
Neanderthal or Neandertal? Neanderthal (with the TH sound)
Slashdot or Digg? Slashdot
Anime: Dub or Sub? Subtitled
Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew? Dr. Pepper

The rules: You must choose one. If you like both, decide which one you like better. If you don’t like either of them, figure out which you dislike less.

You know you need coffee when…

• You pour yourself orange juice, then very carefully put the carton back…in the cupboard.
• You walk into the lunch room for coffee, but forget to bring your mug.
• You momentarily forget how to make coffee.
• You set up the coffee maker, but leave out a critical step like positioning the coffee pot.
• You get the coffee, then forget to drink it.
• You pour yourself a bowl of Wheat Thins.
• You try to slice fruit into your cereal, but you do it over the sink instead of your bowl.
• You pour yourself coffee, then immediately wash your mug and head for work.

Feel free to add to the list in the comments!