Moon Song We Like The Moon by the Spongmonkeys. Pretty much guarenteed to be the most surreal thing you see/hear this week.

Matrix Quake Anyone tried out the M A T R I X mod for quake3? Looks good, but I'm not gonig to wait 220 minutes in line at fileplanet to download it :(

Apple Product Lifestyle An oldie but a goodie.... The Apple Product Cycle.

Another MT Spam CPU Load Hack Here's another hack to reduce cpu load from comment spam on MT 3.1. Via Planet MovableType.

Nuts Building a Real Life Hobbit Hole This came by email, wasn't sure if it was spam or not, but I'll give it a plug anyway. Our Hobbit Hole.Com is a site dedicated to:

We hope to build a Hobbit Hole. Yes, we mean a subterranean dwelling as described above. No, it will not be in Middle Earth, and no, we are not (completely) insane. We are actually quite serious about doing this.

Hey, who wouldn't want a real life hobbit hole?

New MovableType Release Addresses Spam Load Issues The new Movable Type 3.14 apparently addresses the load issues that have come up from comment spammers attacking system and driving up the load on the server.

I've blogged about the problems I've had with this. So subtle hint to all of you guys with MT3 on the UFies.org server, please upgrade :)

Posted by Arcterex at 12:05 PM

Car Confessions Car talk has their favorite confessions of stupid things people have done. An example...

I stepped closer to the job, firmly planting my feet under the car for leverage and continued to turn. When the bolt finally gave way it stopped doing what it was supposed to do, which was to HOLD THE ENGINE IN THE CAR. The back of the engine fell on to the driveway and on my FIRMLY PLANTED FEET.

Half Life 2 Demo Released Cool, now everyone can enjoy the Half Life 2 Demo.

Great Image Blog Caution, this site contains images that are generally Not Safe For Work, but quite hilarious (mostly). For example, Nazi Goth Asian Midgets. Thank god for the Internets.

Prompt Magic Some really cool links with some nifty keen prompt magic:

Phil!'s ZSH Prompt

BASH way as well (server down ATM though).

Posted by Arcterex at 12:46 PM

Mod_Perl Book Online Cool, Foz pointed to a free online book, Practical mod_perl.

Playboy Rolling with the Times.... iPorn Glad to see that Playboy has accepted the challenge of delivering porn to the masses through new and interesting mediums and has created iBod - Portable Player Nude Photos. Via NSLog.

I Love Idiots Man, I've always thought that Ann Coultier was an idiot, but this video purely demonstrates her immense knowledge of Canada, geography and politics. The phrase "we allow them to exist on the same continent" is uttered more than a few times. Some other jerk off named Tucker Carlson is also in the video, but he sounded a bit more tongue in cheek.

Via Going Canuck.

The Rubik's Cube Prank Funny pranks include turning the famous Astor Cube into a Rubik's Cube. Very cool.

Gentoo Boot Speedups Some intersting info (again?) on Bootup Time Reduction/General Speedup using some of the boot visualization stuff that I've linked to before.

Tiny P2P App in Python Cool, check out TinyP2P, a "... functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language."

Police Arrest 10 Year Old Wow, this should be up for some sort of award... police arrest 10 year old for carrying scissors in her backpack. Wow. In other news, apparently in Philly scissors are banned in school as they are a potential weapon. Wow.

To quote George Carlin (badly), what about newspapers? You could beat someone to death with a newspaper, and what about big hands? Someone with big hands can strangle someone, better ban anyone with big hands!

MSN Toolbar Suite Preview at WinSupersite I love completely unbiased and totally accurate reporst and reviews like this one for the MSN toolbar. Some of the gems:

Spotlight's biggest claims to fame, presumably, are its near-instant search results and support for document meta data, both of which are, again, planned features of Longhorn. But no matter. While Apple has been busy copping Windows features since Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996, the company's tiny market share ensures that very few people will benefit from Spotlight, despite Apple claims that it will deliver on desktop search a year before Microsoft ships Longhorn.

Then, in October 2004, Google released a buggy Google Desktop Search beta just two months after the company heard about Microsoft's plans to release a beta MSN desktop search tool by the end of 2004. [...] The most notable feature of Google Desktop Search, so far, has been its widely-publicized security bugs.

...

Maybe you're using the new MSN Search beta to find out information about your favorite musical group. If you search for that band's name, the first link on MSN Search will direct you to MSN Music, from which you can find out more information, or even buy music, which is kind of amazing.

Anyone tried this? Will it use Firefox if it's the default browser? Will it search firefox browser cache? How does it deal with the security implications that google's desktop search had to deal with? None of these questions, funnily enough, are answered in the review.

Update: After a few minutes and a download I found the answers. Sort of (sometimes it opens an IE window, sometimes it's firefox), sort of (by default it only searches email and the My Documents folders, but you can tell it to search all folders or specific locations, not sure if it'll recognize the browser cache for what it is), and kinda (see previous answer, I think that it will have the same problems with security as the google solution if you choose to search all files and folders).

Additionally I notice it's IE toolbar looks a lot like the google toolbar for IE, and the popup blocker has a wack of msn type sites allowed by default, and it also has the ability to automatically fill in form information, including credit card info. Oh, and if this is a beta why is the version number in the 'add remove programs' set as 2.0?

But go on, drink the kool-aid and know it's the best thing since sliced bread.

Firefox Trunk Builds Cool, head to the burning edge to get the latest builds from Firefox's main trunk (the version number is 1.0+). They seem faster, but it's hard to tell if it's really faster or just seems that way. There is some more discussion over at mozillazine.

IIS 5 and Tomcat 5 Configuration For my own reference, here's a link with instructions on Getting IIS 5.x & Tomcat 5.x to play nice. Here's a pdf of an old page with the IIS 6 info.

And another link. Hey, why not another. I wonder if anyone can guess what I'm trying to do right now :)

Another hint for issues I've had. Now to find out how to do it with a remote tomcat.

Broken Remote X Over SSH in Gentoo Linux? This might be the reason for some of the problems I've been having lately getting a previously working remote X to work from work to my Gentoo Linux system with the $DISPLAY variable just not working. Anyway, the mailing list came to the rescue again with these two links telling you to comment out the DISPLAY variable declaration in /etc/security/pam_env.conf to fix it.

Beagle 0.4 Release Another note to self, as I can't get to my own system to put it in there, a cool GNOME file lookup system called Beagle has released version 0.4.

Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for.

They have a wiki as well as some info for those of us using Gentoo.

Photoshop Masking Techniques Note for myself, a page with 5 Great Background Masking Techniques in Photoshop. Via etc.

Diakatana Timeline This is interesting, a timeline and story (and other goodies) showing a Daikatana timeline going from Ion Storms funding in 1996, the first Diakatana E3 display at E3 in May 1997 all the way to the final release in April of 2000.

Still waiting for Duke Nuk'em Forever....

John also notes that it's the 11^th anniversary of Doom.

Shirt Folding Shirt Folding, again but different.

More Linux Boot Speedups An intersting post on trying to get ubuntu linux to boot faster. Lots of optimizations and surgery to reduce some bad and old code. I can't wait until some of these updates and optimizations make their way down into "stable" distros. This is a follow up to the challenge thrown down (well, kinda), in this earlier post.

New Movie Trailers Funky new movie trailers for a Friday

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - not sure about this, the original had something special, and Gene Wilder was awsomely creepy in it. However, I have been impressed with Johnny Depp in some of his "odd" roles, he can definately jump into a character. I just hope they don't screw with the storyline like they have done with the book already. I want my Oompah-Loompas to be from the right continent!
• War of the Worlds - Tom Cruise? Not sure about this, I'd love to see an update of this classic, which scared the crap out of me as a kid and was one of my first introductions to sci-fi movies.... I can't forget the scene when the preacher is walking towards the aliens saying his "I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..." speal, then getting vaporized. Creepy man. Just don't make it all about Tom Cruise, this story is about earth being invaded, not about the square jawed handsome dude kicking alien ass. This rings of Hollywood's Lord of the Rings.
• Last up is the new Batman Begins (new trailer) - looks pretty cool, I'm glad that it doesn't look like it'll totally suck. Looking at how Batman turned into Batman sounds pretty cool though. Do the comics cover this at all?

Some More Dual Monitor Backgrounds A direct link to the dual monitor wallpapers on deviantART.com, including this beauty.

iPod Mini Ad This ad for the iPod mini is pretty nifty. It's a fan production that I have to say is pretty well done. Via nslog.

Remembering Lennon A cool 360 VR Panorama (quicktime vr) at the central park memorial to John Lennon, who was murdered 24 years ago. Link from here.

Another Take on the Half Life 2 "Stuttering Bug" This post is an absolutely hilarious take on the Stuttering Bug that is plauging some Half Life 2 players. Also some good commentary on the state of gaming forums in general :)

Secure Password Creation Neat tip to one of the redhat lists on creating secure passwords using a tool called mnencode.

One Click DVD Ripping One click DVD ripping software. Nifty stuff, anyone used it?

iTunes Music Store Comes To Canada Oh great, the iTunes Music Store (where you can buy legal (DRMed music online) is now available for canada. Glad to see we're no longer left out, which is good, but now I can spend money there, which is bad. Evil I say, Evil!