Emotest

This is a test of the Emo Broadcasting System.

This is only a test. Were this an actual emogency, this post would be followed by crappy poetry or a long dissertation on the mournfulness of a bizarre dream I had last week.

I suck.

Thank you. This was a test of the Emo Broadcasting System. This was only a test. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet.

This blog is not delicious

Even when I hadn't been blogging regularly, I did update my del.icio.us page frequently. Sure, I could make notes for myself by ssh'ing to my home computer to check on or update the list of things I wanted to remember, but this way is quicker and more convenient when showing others.

Anyway, it's a good list of what was rummaging around in my mind recently. The history of how instruments are tuned is still blowing my mind -- I knew modern instruments make compromises, but it's another thing entirely to have the math of those compromises quantitatively spelled out for you. I've been watching Good Eats on TV, thinking of signing up for martial arts classes, and playing around with various computer tools, both useful and time-wasting.

And I was pissed that my genius idea from October -- to have 3-D glasses that work by alternately shuttering in synch to a monitor's refresh rate -- I found it in November already sold by someone else.

Lessons learned so far this year

Since my loyal readers (how you two doing?) complained about me not posting enough, here you go.

I'm going be optimistic here: last night was a flawed ending to a flawed year, as opposed to a bad sign for the next. And what's more, it was a learning experience.

Here's what we learned yesterday, chum:

• While you may want to do something impressive for New Year's Eve dinner, an hour or two prior is not the best time to try some culinary cleverness you have never before attempted.


• Don't use quite so much oil.


• Don't thoroughly clean your kitchen and then start cooking.


• When you follow DIY instructions from a guy on television and he shows you how to use oil you already own, but suggests some other oil that would be better, go ahead and spring for the better stuff.


• The smoke alarm still works.


• While it's a good idea to take a 450°F cast-iron pan of smoking oil outside to forestall it catching on fire, and it's a good idea not to put it on the matting covering the stairs leading to your door (because, hey, won't that catch on fire, too?), the front sidewalk next the building's gutters is not the best place, especially if you're going to leave it there while you dash to the local 24-7 grocery store for cleaning supplies and air fresheners, because your brand new pan will not be there when you get back.


• If you start with good supplies, horrible mistakes are often still redeemable.


• Buying quality cookware when it's half price during a post-holiday sale is a good idea because someone's just going to steal the pan anyway.


• While spraying aerosol air freshener to cover a large area, do not simultaneously spray forward, face forward, and walk forward.


• Seriously, who the hell walks by the sidewalk on New Year's Eve and takes someone else's brand new cast iron pan full of bubbling oil?


• Preparing for something, even when preparation goes wrong, can still be far, far more worthwhile than the thing itself.


• Where the fsck is the damn pan?

I'm sure we all can agree these are universal life lessons that will serve us well in the year to come.

Putting the antic in pedantic.

And how small am I that I can't resist pointing out this sort of thing?

I didn't want to say anything because you don't correct friends when you're not too sure you're right yourself, but detritus. Three syllables there.

"I'm not smoking crack"

Dave Chappelle is OKAY. (HWHAT?)

Public Apology

I think a public apology makes sense for a public mistake.

Some bad timing here, a poor choice there, and a few weeks ago I'm pretty low. It snowballs, bad news from other people becomes contagious, and when I get that depressed, the best thing I could possibly do for myself is just to walk outside and do something.

Talk to people. Go; do things. So I tell everyone, "I'm going. I'll be there. I'll do it," because I want to believe that I am doing right, that I am becoming better. When I freak out and cave in, I make a liar of myself, and fools of others. I'm sorry.

Finance and you

I balanced a checkbook. I think this is the first time I've ever properly done that. This is probably not something I should be bragging about. I put everything in Grisbi, an open-source personal finance tool, because I (a) don't have the hard drive space to install an X Windows/another OS to run GnuCash, (b) didn't feel like buying hardware or software, (c) think Grisbi it does the basics of what I need it for. It's a bit unstable on my WinXP Pro box (read: mean time between crashes is 30 minutes of continuous usage).

Hunter S. Thompson's passing reminded me of an image that was my desktop background for a while. The quote's from Fear and Loathing:

Something about the expression on Spike's face gets me.

Also, in the last post, てまえ (temae) would be more insulting than お前 (omae). Pronounce it tey-mey, and sound like a gangster.

Your Mom's box

Since .Pete asked:

I'm not using this space for anything else this week, I might as well figure out the Japanese and Hebrew translations of "Your mom's box". Also, editing this post was a pain, so sorry if my misspellings make it worse

Japanese was easier because I knew of a reliable on-line dictionary that contains slang terms, but it was harder because I don't know it as well. お前のお母さんの箱(o-ma-eh-no o-kaa-san-no ha-ko) would be the literal translation of "Your mom's box". The only slang term I could find was 玉門 (gyo-ku-mon, a "beautifully decorated gate"). Judging from the few sites I could find it used in the desired context, I'm guessing it's more of a literary or formal euphemism than the neatly abrupt 'box'. If it's any consolation, お前 (omae) is often used in an insulting context. Use あなた (anata) if you want to be more straightforward, or, even better, leave it out if it's clear from context whom — or whose mom — you're talking to — or about. So: お前のお母さんの玉門 (your mom's "gate") would be o-ma-eh-no o-kaa-san-no gyo-ku-mon.

For Hebrew, a quick run through a translator yields a perfectly acceptable literal translation. I also went looking for a dictionary and found this as incomplete as it is. Here's a citing showing koos is apparently in common use (though the 'mom' part is more commonly spelled emek instead of ummek). This page looks like to be a slang dictionary (maybe) that includes the term. Koos has the opposite problem from the Japanese term — it's way more crude and explicit than "box".

So: הקופסה של אמא שלך, pronounced hakufa shel eemah shelcha, with a guttural ch, stress on the syllables ku, ee, and cha, is literally "your mom's box", and the modern slang derived from Arabic is קוס אמק, koos emek.

Laying bear a PHP bug

I've been playing around with security profiles on my main home computer (XP Professional), and have found new ways to destabilize my system. Upshot is, with the non-admin account I usually use, Firefox is crashing occasionally on form submittal.

I wanted to post here my response to a problem Mr. Bear was having at "The Truth Laid Bear" was having in case I lost it again:
This might be due to a known PHP bug.

The one thing I noticed from the lsof output is the value in the size/offset column for the one Unix domain socket (~544MB). Not the IP socket — I think that's stuck in CLOSE_WAIT because that's how Apache deals with connections while it's waiting for possibly dependent file handles to close.

If this is an error with Unix sockets, then it's probably an inter-process communication problem. Running 'lsof -U -r' should who that one socket going out of control parallel with the HTTPD process. Something in Apache is going nuts trying to talk to some other process, most likely MySQL.

The best match I could find is this bug first reported for PHP 4.3.4. There's an official PHP bug page for it. It's been fixed in CVS, but I don't see it incorporated into any 4.x release yet. As a bonus, the bug descriptions include test script to recreate the problem on purpose.

If that doesn't pan out, I did find one other thread where it looks like mysql_close wasn't behaving as the guy expected it to.

What image scares me

I was reading Erica's post and was reminded of a TV news item about the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mind you, I only heard about this when I was flipping through the TV channels in order. I saw a picture on one of the Spanish-language channels and instantly thought, "that looks like Birkenau. What a creepy thing to show a picture that looks so much like Birkenau." I was surprised that a straight-forward brick gatehouse would be instantly recognizable to me on television when the only other time I had ever seen it was one day eight years ago.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the most infamous concentration camp complex built by the Nazis, and estimates place deaths there during WWII at 1-1.5 million. The site now is a protected historical landmark, which is a good thing: I visited one concentration camp where the Nazis did their best to cover their tracks; the site was found because of eyewitness accounts of people who escaped.

But making a site of murder into a place to visit is an odd proposition at best. If you have an odd fascination, or a morbid curiosity to get out of your system, visit the Auschwitz part of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There you'll find the signs and exhibits you'd expect from a historical museum: a pile of shoes, a pile of hair, signs with dates of events, a plaque stating what this or that building was used for. Afterwards, you can eat a muted lunch at the picnic tables while the kids to young to understand play tag.

If you want a first-hand feel of the scope, the history, and the passage of time, go to the Birkenau part of the complex, preferably with someone who was interred there who is actually willing to talk about his past (an inevitably dwindling group of people). It is large. There is no plexiglas in front of the furniture. Half was preserved, reconstructed here and there to fill in blanks, and half is in ruins. Cramped wooden bunks are still intact, the buildings still stained and painted on the outside in dark brown. Grass is growing over the train tracks where the cattle cars ran. One of the caved-in gas chambers is now a muddy, stone-strewn morass. Half of it is neatly kept so that you understand, and the worst is left to the decay it deserves.