The Blog of Harald

It seems that our approval of a TV show is the kiss-of-death. Cancelled:

• Journeyman
• Men in Trees
• Moonlight
• New Amsterdam
• Bionic Woman
• Back to You

To be fair, other than Journeyman, these were all interesting ideas that suffered from bad writing, or bad acting, or both. I think Journeyman was a bit too unusual for main stream audiences; it would have succeeded on SciFi or another smaller network, I think.

On the other hand, renewed:

• Chuck
• How I Met Your Mother
• The Big Bang Theory
• Brothers & Sisters
• Pushing Daisies
• All three CSIs (OK, CSI:Miami deserves to die; oh well)
• Kyle XY
• The Closer

So I guess our track record really isn’t that bad… :-)

(See Debian Security Advisory 1571 and SSLkeys)

This seems appropriate somehow:

So last Wednesday I fell down stupidly and either subluxated or dislocated my right shoulder. I spend just over a week with my right arm in an immobilizer, after which the doc said “take it off”. I’m allowed to do a lot of things, but no “arm above the shoulder” movement and no “external rotation”. The shoulder is a little sore, especially when I first wake up in the morning, but otherwise I can do stuff again!

I’ve been tinkering under the hood recently (that is why I set up this server, after all!). I’m in the process of moving a bunch of the older sites around here to use Wordpress MU as the underlying CMS. It’s going well so far, so I should be able to formally move the sites in a couple more weeks. We’ve also finally upgraded Gallery to Gallery2, and there’s an Ubuntu 7.10 → 8.04 upgrade to look forward to!

I need to take more photographs. Maybe it’s time to challenge a few of my friends to 365 (a photo per day for a year)...

A recent version of MythTV added some “special” searches; 3.5 stars or more, science fiction, etc. Between TCM and AMC I’ve been catching up on movies from the various lists on the blog, as well as a bunch of other classics:

Top 50 Movie Adaptations
102 must-see movies?

• The Graduate
• The Maltese Falcon

sf film canon and AFI Tpo 50 SF Movies

• The Stepford Wives
• The Thing From Another World
• 28 Days Later

Others:

• Singin’ in the Rain
• The Silence of the Lambs
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn!)
• The Odd Couple
• Harvey
• The Philadeplphia Story
• Casablanca
• Key Largo

you’ve all heard of lolcats by now, right? Well here are new, never before captured photos of lolgrues in teh wild…

(well, I laughed… :-)

Well, to our American viewers, anyway. To the rest of us, it’s some less exciting number :)

Today I finally learned how to solve the NFS UID problem on Ubuntu.

You see, NFS normally does it’s permissions by numeric UID. If the UIDs on two different machines don’t match, then NFS permission checking doesn’t work; you don’t get access to your own files, and you might get access to somebody else’s files instead!

Ubuntu, of course, has no standard UIDs, not even for system services. So my four ubuntu boxes here each have different username <> UID maps.

Enter the ugidd package, which is an RPC daemon that runs on the client. The NFS server calls this daemon when a mount request comes in, and dynamically builds a UID map between the server and the client, based on the string usernames. As a side effect, it also seems to map userids that are not assigned on the client to ‘nobody’. In this way, the nfs server can map UIDs between systems, without the administrator (that’s me!) maintaining static map files.

The one downside is that this feature requires the user-space NFS server instead of the kernel nfs server, so performance suffers a bit. I have CPU to spare, though!

Now I can use NFS between my MythTV boxes :-)

It seems the “news” has finally leaked out to the general public:

• http://identityblog.burtongroup.com/bgidps/2008/03/hps-identity-re.html
• http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/171
• http://blogs.sun.com/IdentityCrisis/entry/hp_is_withdrawing_from_identity

I’m not allowed to say much in public, so I’ll link to these stories without comment.

vapour lock isn’t really the right term, but I can’t think of a better fluid-dynamics term right now.

In the sudden torrential snowfall this afternoon, I got stuck south of an intersection for about 20 minutes, unable to move. The traffic lights were synchronized, which works for normal traffic flow, but with the snow everyone was going slowly. The net result was that:

• when the light was red to me, there was space north of the intersection for cars, but that space was quickly filled by people turning from the cross street.
• by the time the light was green to me, there was no space left on the north side of the intersection. In fact, there was no space in the intersection, because the turning traffic was consistently filling the intersection. So I was stuck, along with everyone else.

I finally gave up, turned around, drove all the way around the block, and came at the intersection again from the cross street :). After which I encountered another roadblock; York Mills eastbound was closed at Don Mills, because cars could not make it up the hill.

It took me 1:45 to get from my office to the school…

Episode One of Shadow Unit is up. In case you were actually thinking of getting work done today…

SCI-FI Wire announced today that AFI has picked a “Top 50” list of science fiction movies. I’ve taken their list and bolded the ones I’ve seen. I have 18 16 movies to see to catch up!

• A.I. Artificial Intelligence
• Alien
• Altered States
• The Andromeda Strain
• Back to the Future
• The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
• Blade Runner
• Children of Men
• A Clockwork Orange
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Cocoon
• Contact
• The Day the Earth Stood Still
• Destination Moon
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
• Escape From New York
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Fantastic Voyage
• The Fly (1986)
• Forbidden Planet
• Frankenstein (1931)
• The Incredible Shrinking Man
• Independence Day
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
• The Invisible Man (1933)
• It Came From Outer Space
• Jurassic Park
• Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
• The Matrix
• Men in Black
• Minority Report
• Planet of the Apes (1968)
• Repo Man
• RoboCop
• Rollerball (1975)
• Silent Running (one of my favourites)
• Soylent Green
• Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
• Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope
• Starman
• The Stepford Wives (1975)
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• Them!
• The Thing From Another World
• The Time Machine (1960)
• Total Recall
• Tron
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The War of the Worlds (1953)
• Westworld

after a long drought, I added another country to my 419 spam list : Iran!

The entire development team here in Toronto has been “WFRed”, HP’s fancy term for “your job no longer exists, thanks for playing”. (To be fair, HP’s process is actually quite generous; they offer everyone lots of time to try to find another job inside HP, resume services, interview skills training, and so on).

I’ve been asked to stay on, because my job has always been customer facing, and they need someone with that experience to help with the transition. I’ve always joked that I’d be the last one let go; I didn’t actually believe it though! Anyway, for a lot of different reasons, I’ve decided to accept. So while everyone else is out looking for work now, I’ll be looking for work in November.

It’s going to be a lonely 9 months. On the plus side, I don’t have to start commuting to Mississauga every day! I’ll have the ever so challenging “three flights of stairs” commute…

From the site:

We are looking to push the envelope of episodic television by offering Season Two of Firefly in a groundbreaking new format. Each episode (or the entire season) would be made available for purchase in Standard or Hi-Definition.

Head over there and fill out a survey. And while you’re at it, check out Sanctuary , a show that was developed first on the web, and has now been picked up as a 13-episode series by the SCI-FI Channel. Anything is possible…

I predict that there will be six more weeks of winter…

I found wright house, a site that has a long list of so-called Steven Wright jokes. The difference? They’ve annotated the list; they mark jokes as authentic, or else name the comedian who actually said them.

“what’s another word for synonym”?

I just finished reading through the Livejournals of three FBI agents. They apparently work for a subdivision of the Behavioural Analysis Unit? Interesting reading, though. There’s certainly something going on out there that they’re not telling us about…

The very nice wildlife guy replaced the shingles that blew off my roof in this week’s windstorm, and refused to take a tip afterwards; he said he needed the practice :).

So if y’all need wildlife extracted, I continue to highly recommend AAA Wildlife. They’re friendly and knowledgeable and professional!

At least it’s not raccoons; this time there are squirrels frolicking in my attic…

Options:

• status quo
• update the weblog more often
• switch to LiveJournal
• switch to FaceBook
• become a luddite