Send child away for a trip with grandparents, get fudge when she returns.

Playing with posterous and proving I have the humor level of a fifth grader.

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Behold the unnatural love between a gnome and a turtle.  Saw this in Walgreen and just had to take a picture.  Probably due to the influence of the Gnome meme happening on the Slice of SciFi voice mail show.

I decided to look at the XML-RPC API to see if I could get it done that way, and then write a script to be called out of procmail to create the mail.  There is a function there that will do what I want, wp.uploadFile aka metaWeblog.newMediaObject.  The specification for that call says that the file being uploaded must be Base64 encoded.  No problem, a few line of ruby later and I have everything ready to test an upload.  The file goes up, but its unviewable in a browser.  A quick check of the file on the server and its revealed to be a text file filled with Baes64 looking data.  Somewhere along the line it wasn’t being decoded.

After about an hour of screwing around, I determined it wasn’t anything obvious in my code, so I thought I’d look at the code for WordPress 2.5.1 to see if I missed anything obvious.  In reading their code, I found that the WordPress folks forgot something obvious, their code never Base64 decodes it before it writes it to a file.  A quick one-line change later, and *boom* I’m off.

Here’s the patch in case its useful to anyone else. I’ll have the script up when I’m done with it.

(Also, in a small bit of embarrassment, I must admit fixing this took me 10 minutes longer than it should because I forgot ; is end of statement in PHP.)

Index: xmlrpc.php
===================================================================
--- xmlrpc.php  (revision 7840)
+++ xmlrpc.php  (working copy)
@@ -1880,6 +1880,10 @@
                        $name = "wpid{$old_file->ID}-{$filename}";
                }
 
+                # The specification says that this is base64 encoded,
+                # we should really decode it.
+                $bits = base64_decode($bits);
+
                $upload = wp_upload_bits($name, $type, $bits);
                if ( ! empty($upload['error']) ) {
                        $errorString = sprintf(__('Could not write file %1$s (%2$s)'), $name, $upload['error']);

Yes, hopefully its a lot more than 4 more years, but the title brings the funny to me.

Basically, Mark Kirk got his panties all up in a bunch because Second Life have some adult stuff going on and in his opionin its too easy for minors to get into that area. While I understand his concern, I disagree that the government should be stepping in here, even with something as minor as an FTP consumer alert. Parents should be monitoring what their children are doing on-line. If you can’t take the time and/or education commitment to do that as a parent, disable your internet access.

The part that really chaps my hide is the following (quoted from the Tribune):

Kirk said he knew of no cases in which children were targeted by sexual predators on Second Life, but he said he considers the virtual world an emerging danger.

So…there’s been no reported problems, or at least none visible to him, but OH MY GOD! RAISE THE ALARM BELLS!  THE CHILDRENS!  WON’T SOMEONE THINKS OF THEM??!?!?!!!  I hate election year fear-based  attention-getting pandering.

For the record, I have no particular love for Second Live either.  I’ve played with it a bit but I don’t get all the hype around it.  I must just be getting old.

Just to show it off, I present to you some random ruby I wrote the other day when I was working on something. I’ll leave it to you to guess what I’m doing and why with this code. (And I also think I could do it better than using a while loop, but I was able to bang it out quickly for what I needed.)

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#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'fileutils'
 
srand(Time.now.to_i)
offset = 214
 
files = Dir['*']
 
count = 1
while !files.empty?
  file = files.delete_at(rand(files.size))
  extention = File.extname(file).downcase
  name = sprintf('%d%s', count + offset, extention)
  puts "#{file} -> #{name}"
  FileUtils.move(file, name)
  count += 1
end

I can just see Jiminy coming in with a lead pipe and a blowtorch.

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I made the switch this morning.  The ability to drag and drop the sidebar widgets is a killer feature and what will keep me on sandbox for awhile.  If you’re visiting the page, you can see i still need to tweak the CSS to be less ugly.  Its not a big deal and it can certainly wait.  Tweaking CSS always causes my brain to bleed.  However, this looks straight forward.  I made the big hurdle which was switching themes.

I am certain it will be the subject of intense debate among some scientists, believers, historians and writers regarding where, when and how the shroud and its image were created.

(Click on the image for a bigger view.) 

Let me know if you see anything weird.

STEPHEN KING BREAKS NEW GROUND AT MARVEL WITH ORIGINAL COMIC SERIES BASED ON HIS EPIC THE DARK TOWER

It looks like they’ll be following the young Roland when he started out his journey. Hopefully we’ll see Cuthbert and Alain.

Also, this marks the first time Stephen King has done original content for comics, so that’ll be good. I guess I’ll have to tell Keith to hold them for me.

I’m not sure why I took this picture. Something about the Bible word-finds hanging on a garbage can like that said I should take it. I didn’t stage this photo in any way, I found this layout at lower Michigan and Hubbard when I got off the bus this morning.

The camera in the hiptop is not the best, but I at least have a camera on me. Its pretty terrible in low light situations. I fixed up the photo as much as possible in gimp, but its still not hot. I need to get a better small camera I can carry with me at all times.

On the front page was: For sale: Trailer w/ocean vu, $1 million obo

So wonderfully Californian, Marsha Weidman’s home has it all–along the beach, far from noisy traffic, with a Jacuzzi used to watch sunsets over the Pacific.

For this, she and her husband recently paid $1.05 million.

For that, they got a trailer, built in 1971, without any land.

Plus, the family must pay “space rent,” which at two Malibu parks dotted with seven-figure trailers ranges from $800 to $2,500 monthly.

The nation’s frenzied housing boom has come to this: Even trailer parks, long the butt of jokes about tornado targets and redneck living, are enjoying fat greenback prices.

My mind started to melt at that, but then I read on…

The seven-digit prices, touching only those trailers parked permanently beside the sea, have made for giddy moments with neighbors such as George Keossaian, 46, who with his wife and two children moved five years ago into the gated Point Dume Club mobile park, where Weidman also lives.

The mobile home he bought for $140,000 then will be worth $950,000 once he completes an 800-foot addition, Keossaian says. A reappraisal this year assigned a $750,000 value to his home, which has no ocean view.

My mind asplode…

The other article was: Bush backs teaching of intelligent design along with evolution

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Bush said Monday that he thinks schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about creation.

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to detail his views on the origin of the universe. But he said students should learn about both theories.

“I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”

I shouldn’t really be suprised by this, but I am. At the same time, he didn’t really say (at least as quoted) what the headline says. However, given his background, I’m sure he feels that way.

I should really report this bug upstream, I’ll try to remember to tomorrow.

—

Body Worlds was pretty interesting. There have been some pretty in-depth discussions about Body Worlds on some of the mailing lists I’m on. There were people who questioned the ethics of such a display as well as the taste. Now that I’ve experienced it and had a few days to reflect, I think I can comment on it.

I have to say it was one of the most educational things, outside of my profession, that I’ve done in years. I found the side by side displays of healthy organs next to diseased/cancered/etc to be informative. Also, after looking at the black lungs on some of the pieces, I don’t know why you’d continue to smoke. The other thing is that all the bodies used in the display either donated their bodies or had them donated by their next of kin with a very good release form that asks many reasonable questions including “Why are you doing this?” It looks like they would reject donations if they felt the people weren’t fully understanding or believing in what they were doing.

For the most part, I thought all the displays were tasteful and put in positions that emphasized a part of physiology they were trying to show. There was only one or two that I turned me off. For example, there is a piece called “the wingman” where the bodies muscles are fanned out, but I forget now what it was demonstrating. I think maybe it was the thickness of muscles in certain parts of the body. That part was fine, but he was wearing a straw hat with the caption of the display saying something akin to “He’s wearing a hate to further blur the line between life and death.” In any case, that kinda turned me off and made it less educational and more silly. Sarah pointed out that maybe it was a request of the person who donated their body or a reflection of someone he was known for.

One section of the display that was difficult for me to view was separated off in a curtained area, probably for just that reason. It was displays of mothers and fetuses in various stages of pregnancy. Previous to having a daughter, I don’t think it would have affected me, but I know that’s why it bothered me now. I couldn’t help but think of how sad it was for them to have lost the baby and/or for a husband/father to lose his wife and potential child. One of the things about the display is that they don’t share with you the reason for death of the donated bodies, they say its to focus on the body and their life and not to dwell on their deaths. I agree and understand why they did it, but for this section I wanted to know, if only for selfish reasons of feeling lucky about how well everything went for us. That being said, I think I also got more out of this part of the display post-fatherhood as I had more of an interest and could remember back to how we were and what we were thinking about at that time.

Another interesting part of the display was they had a horse they had put through the plastination process and displayed with a man. They invited you to compare and contrast between the human body and the horses and really examine how we were similar and different. For most of the display I had only been thinking about myself or people I knew when looking at the bodies. The horse display forced me to put humans in context with the rest of the animal kingdom and I liked its inclusion for that. However, part of me knows that this piece was there for the sensationalism of it that its size brought to it.

“I’m not going to buy the cow if I can’t at least sample the milk to make sure its okay.”

“I’m not going to buy the cow if its FUCKING CRAZY”

The mat under the urinal, which goes by the name of “hygoMat by hygolet“, appeared in the men’s bathroom on our floor this week. I’ll spare you from what the hygoMat does, its marketing page can help you with that.

However, it makes me wonder, do the men on my floor have aiming issues or something? How hard is it to take a leak? It scares me a little bit.

Congrats, Joe!

However, I still think you’re insane due to the following:

I ride 40 miles from San Francisco to Mountain View (and back!) twice a week.

Chicago and three other government bodies will announce a formal agreement Tuesday to move forward on building a western-access roadway into O’Hare International Airport, according to transportation officials.

The agreement calls for extending the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway into the airport, but only after Chicago’s massive O’Hare expansion project is completed.

Behold! The Elgin-O’Hare Expressway might actually reach one of the destinations in its name! Well, within the next 10 years. For now, its still more the Hanover Park-Itasca Expressway.

CHICAGO — Morningstar Inc., the research firm best known for its mutual fund data, on Monday filed to sell about $140.8 million of stock in an initial public offering.
…
The stock will trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol “MORN” when it goes public Tuesday.

Anyone who watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine will remember Morn as that dude who always hung out at Quark’s bar.

Hmm, I think this is my second Star Trek related post of the day.

Your Linguistic Profile:

A post on Jess’s blog pointed me at this test. Its a fun bit of fluff, but it has one thing wrong with it. The question on what you call a water fountain should also include the term bubbler which is popular in Wisconsin. Although, I’m not sure where it would fit into the categories it puts your speaking style into.

I felt like I’m freaking out and didn’t know why. Now I know its just the drug making me feel that way. But I’m still freaking out.

I’ve gotten a new LCD monitor at work today. (The small one on the right.) For some reason this inspired me to take a quick picture of my main work area with my phone.

For months we’ve just been leaving our bedroom door closed when we’re not in it, to keep Baby from having the chance. Yesterday, I left the door open for a five minute window and Baby took his chance. Of course, we didn’t discover it until about 10:30 at night when we were going to bed, and by then it had soaked all the way down to the mattress.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time. Baby was the perfect cat (at least in regards to waste elimination) until he got a urinary tract infection in Dec. 2002. Now the UTI has become a yearly occurrence, and as a side effect it opened his eyes to the wonders of doing his business in inappropriate places.

Sarah is at wits end and we can’t figure out what to do. We’ve tried all sorts of techniques to stop him from peeing in all the wrong places, but there is always a point where we get complacent and forget to put the technique in place, or Baby just learns to ignore the deterrent. We’re also concerned because we have an infant crawling around and we’re uncomfortable with the thought that one day Dinah will come across a puddle we hadn’t yet identified.

Our options are starting to become limited and the options we are starting to be left with don’t make me comfortable, especially because of how much Dinah lights up when Baby comes into the room. Some of these options would be easier if he was old or infirm, but he’s neither. Its really quite depressing.

This just reminds me of the old joke of the Kenworth Pilgrimage, which it seems someone took too seriously. Also, its makes the P-Diddy/Puff-Daddy/Whatever-the-fuck-we’re-calling-him-this-week-and-for-saying-this-he’ll-bust-a-cap-in-my-ass/Sean “Puffy” Combs Diet Pepsi commercial from the Superbowl much less funny.

[Update: I don't know how I missed this in my first reading, but this quote was pointed out to me (emphasis mine):

Daughter Shaylin, 15...adding that her Hummer is more practical to take to school, although "the International is way cooler. Now at school they call me either The Hummer Girl or The International Girl."

If you're being called "The Hummer Girl" I suspect that 1) you're very popular and 2) its not due to your parents' car. Either way, "the Hummer is more practical to take to school"? Sure, if you're in IRAQ!]

Today I walked by the Sun-Times building while returning from lunch. Its coming down pretty quick. I snapped off two quick photos with my camera. Part of what lead us over there was the earth-shattering thumping from the machine destroying what remains of the road.

Rachelle Bowden once again has bested me by doing a series of shots of various stages of destruction.

I should also point out the time-lapse flash animation of the deconstruction.

Thanks to Boing Boing for bringing it to my attention

I’ll probably be paying for it tomorrow, but at least I experienced the wonder that is Pinnacle Peak Patio.

[Update 11:55am: It does not "smell like LUG" at the meeting this morning. Looks like I dodged the bullet.]