Categories
Category: technology
Categories
HEY!!! That’s not nice.
While filling out an online form today, I was presented with what we in the web biz call a CAPTCHA image. It’s one of those graphics that has text you need to confirm. The text is either distorted, covered with lines, shapes, or colors, or even both. It is presented in such a way as to obscure the text enough so that a computer can’t automatically guess what it says. They’ve become quite popular and for good reason. They work. But what happens when they start fighting back, or at least letting you know how they feel about you.
I kid you not, this is what it asked me to confirm…
Categories
and 15 cents in change
WOOT!! Just really excited about my first IPO ever!!!!! we priced at $11 a share and ended the day at $14.15 per share!
It’s been a long time in coming. I moved out here in ’98 and have lived through the lean times of the post-2000 bail-out of all things Internets. It’s nice to be on the upside of good times.
Thanx to all those that deserve but don’t get naming (sorry, for strict reasons of privacy). If you think you deserve thanx, then I give you those thanx and more. You know who you are. I’ve worked with the best and it shows. Many amazing people have stood alongside me and I have worked for many amazing talents during the downturn in the .com economy and we’ve come out of it all and stood tall. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can’t begin to express my thanx.
[holding a glass of Veuve Clicquot in the air] here’s to the future everyone. Keep your feet on the ground and keep looking to the stars… or what ever Kasey Casem used to say. 🙂
Categories
WTF? A TV?
So I’m buying gas today and I hear someone talking nearby. There wasn’t a car next to me so it couldn’t have been someone on their phone. What was it? Shell has installed small LCD tvs in their stands now. WTF?
I thought the grocery store checkout lanes was bad enough. It’s starting to get ridiculous now. What’s next? Above the stripper poles? At the crosswalks? Jeez.
I uploaded this through 
heh. This software is called “iPhony”. it’s a glorified app launcher for the Treo.
I uploaded this through
[insert evil grin here]. I sooooo wanna see. This is a new remote-controlled dragonfly that’s being made by the same people who brought you the Robosapien. Unfortunately it hasn’t been made available for sale yet. It has only just been approved by the FCC.
I’m betting that Daphne runs under the dining room table or under the couch. I bet Jasper looks at it frantically for a bit but then goes to sleep in his box.
Update April 2, 2009: This post is REALLY old. Do yourself a favor and install Passenger. I have and it’s a life saver for my Rails sites. No more crashing mongrels, or mongrels that don’t want to restart. Just sites that know they need to spin up if they’re down.
Jeez this has been a confusing day. I’ve been trying to figure out why the mongrel clusters powering my websites weren’t starting after a reboot of my servers. I’m initializing the reboots so don’t worry that my servers are unstable. 🙂 they’re not. They’re well-behaved children.
FreeBSD has the /usr/local/etc/rc.d directory for shell scripts that will autostart services for you. Kinda like the “Startup” directory in windows. Great. So I found a shell script someone had written and sent in this email on the Mongrel-users mailing list. I copied that to the rc.d directory and placed the require mongrel_cluster_enable=”YES” line into /etc/rc.conf.
reboot.
Nothing. Apache was starting. Mysql was starting. WTF.
Tonight I was stuck at work trying to get my capistrano deployments working and I was listening to game 5 of the World Series. I couldn’t watch it and the Cards were quickly moving towards winning the game and The Series. However, with no TV nearby I couldn’t watch it. And everyone knows (you know. you really do) that you can’t just listen to the game when it finally ends and the winner is announced. What was I to do?
I realized that at some point in the past I’d downloaded this lovely piece of software called TVUplayer. It’s TV over the web but not like you’re used to hearing about it. They’re clever about how you receive the data. Kind of like how BitTorrent is a large mesh of users sharing data so that the speed can be very high, same here. Many users are watching the channel I want to watch so the datarate is better. Less users, the crappier the channel will look. Lifehacker may have described a little better than me.
Long story short. I got to WATCH the end of the game… sitting at my desk at work!!!
Isn’t technology wonderful? heh. Oh… and BTW – CONGRATULATIONS St. Louis!!!
Categories
Mini Microscope
Cathy needs this so she can show off all the gorgeous “wheating” around the band on her engagement ring. If only I knew Japanese… or could even see the characters on the website…
Does someone have an option for something like this in the US? Thinkgeek.com doesn’t have anything.
Oooh. I just did a search on Amazon for a “loupe” and I got all SORTS of great options. Never mind. go about your business. nothing to see here.
Categories
COOL video site
Just found this awesome video site. Flash required. It’s fullscreen (press “f” to toggle) and has several different categories of videos. Hover your mouse at the bottom of the screen to see the tabbed list of videos. Some great ones. The picture below is a computer representation of Claire de Lune by Debussy. Cool stuff.
Other ones I liked