Lackhead.org

Castleton and the Creek, March 2011 edition

lackhead — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 23:24:08 +0000

Recently, an amigo from out East traveled to the wild, wild west, to see if the rumors of excellent skiing and climbing in Utah were true. Well, I think he found out.

-c

New word: dramity

lackhead — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 06:45:59 +0000

I made up a new word today:

dramity: the fondness one has for a freshly poured pint of beer, wine, or other potent potable

This is a particularly intimate moment, as any drinker knows, and I’m shocked as to why it has eluded the honor of its own word for so long.

You’re welcome, English language.

-c

Solaris, perl, and CPAN

lackhead — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:19:13 +0000

Today I finally ran up against a problem that I’ve been avoiding for some time. You see, I have the misfortune for working at an organization that has standardized on Solaris, whose time came and went some time ago (like we really needed Oracle’s acquisition to put the final nail in the coffin). This causes problems with me, because I like to code in bash when I can, and perl otherwise. Call me old fashioned, but that’s how I roll.

The big problem is that Solaris ships with a perl that has been Solaris-ized, one effect of which is that it relies on those compilers when doing any C/C++ based work when installing modules. This is due to the fact that perl knows what compiler it was installed with and that’s what it uses. The problem is that not all of our machines have the Sun compilers on them, and honestly, the Sun compilers suck (I’m spoiled from years on Linux, really).

How I’ve gotten around this in the past is to hit up Sunfreeware, or compile things by hand, and build a bitchin’ /usr/local tree. Did I mention I was spoiled on Linux? I just don’t have the fortitude for such drudgery these days. However, faced with having to do some perl programming on a Solaris box without much in /usr/local, save for gcc, I found myself smacked in the face with this problem, and that’s when I found perlgcc.

perlgcc is quite easy to use; all it does is front-end perl by levering the levers and switching the switches that are need to get perl to believe it should use gcc as its compiler. Then, all you need to do is run perlgcc -MCPAN -e shell and you’re in a workable CPAN environment. Module yourself to your heart’s content at this point.

Big shout out to whoever came up with perlgcc!!

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Firefox tip of the week

lackhead — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:27:40 +0000

I’ve been using Firefox for ever and ever, but I can’t say that I’m super into all the little tricks and kung-fu magic it can do. It’s basic functionality, with a few add-ons, have kept be happy for years. But today, I ran into two things that have made my life oh-so-happier:

Lazarus, an add-on that saves your text boxes so that you don’t lose it when you run into network issues, or even stupid user errors (the later is what hit me today).

Control-Shift-T: or, for us mac-types, Command-Shift-T. This opens the last tab you just closed. Again, this should inure me to self-inflicted productivity losses!

Yay for Firefox!

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Julian Assange and the philosophy of Wikileaks

lackhead — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:50:13 +0000

Just a shout out in regards to a well-written and fascinating article on the subject of Julian Assange and the philosophy of Wikileaks. Very much worth the time to read.

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An update of my French Verb Summary

lackhead — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:10:00 +0000

Over the last week or two I’ve put a lot of time into expanding and improving my French Verb Summary. It’s now a whopping 22-pages, and you can download the PDF version or the Open Office version. Any corrections, additions, comments, or suggestions are always welcome!

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Summit @ San Rafael Swell

lackhead — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:59:27 +0000

Another from this Spring- and the end of a long dirt road in the San Rafael Swell, on the way back to civilization.

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Summit @ Joshua Tree

lackhead — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:30:32 +0000

At this point, I’m thinking of doing a Seven Summits, stinky style. Do they have outhouses in Antarctica?

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A 21st Century Approach to Sex

lackhead — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:44:05 +0000

A single sperm has 37.5MB of DNA information in it. That means that a normal ejaculation represents a data transfer of 1,587.5TB.

– from Reddit

Of course, one could claim that the majority of that is duplicate data, so really the transfer rate is much lower, with lots of effort to make sure the data is not lost. It’s also encoded information, so with the right algorithm one could decode it and get a lot more data out of it. Of course, one usually doesn’t think of a fertile woman and 18 years of child-rearing as an algorithm, but there you have it.

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Dear Citibank, I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee.

lackhead — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:57:52 +0000

Today I received a letter from Citibank informing me that, “in order to provide our customers with access to credit, we have had to adjust our pricing.” Uh-huh. Do we need to talk about the billions you’ve received of ourmoney, you fucks? Do we need to talk about how messed up a 29.99% APR is?

16 years ago I got my account with you, and it took me 10 minutes waiting on hold to break that relationship. Good bye, and good riddance. You won’t be seeing my business ever again.

Piss off and die, you financial rapists.

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