House of the rising Moonglum

So my wife and I went to NextFest today. It was shockingly cool. It started out pretty poorly though. We intended to take the train, but were told that the southbound traffic was all stopped. Turns out someone fell under an El car. Now that would suck. But NextFest was cool. The theme is basically the future. They wanted to show what the x of the future would look like. They are calling themselves a “mini” world’s fair. Accordingly it is being reported from a blog. Go there for all the details. I just wanted to comment on a few important things I saw there. First, the reason I went. Then of course there was seeing all the cool dancing robots. Don’t forget the cloned pets. And of course the flying cars. Here is a pic of me with my company’s car. Oh, and in response to Mike’s post, we saw the Phillip K. Dick android.

So, I’m all reading Alien Loves Predator this morning when I come across the song grammar nazi episode. I don’t know if you read AlP, but having spent to much time in NYC recently I find it absolutely hilarious. Don’t forget to read the comments as well:

“And that old Sophie B. Hawkins song, DAMN! I Wish I Were Your Lover. Although I cut her some slack because she managed to write a love song whose chorus starts out with “DAMN!”"

Also, the Shake Shack is right next to where I work.

They don’t give the details of the crime, so it’s hard to say for sure, but boy does it sound bad. So, for those who don’t get it yet:

Don’t buy from scalpers. And if you must, buy an original non-transferable ticket, not an online ticket printout!

The technical reason why is that when you buy an online ticket it gives you a “token” (the barcode on the ticket) which lets you (well someone) in the venue, but only once. You see the token is verified online and then marked as invalid. That’s the whole point of buying tickets online. You can make another copy if you need to. Or, apparently, if you want to make money off of U2 fans.

I always like getting the soldier’s view of Iraq, Ginmar when she was there, the more usual MilBlogs, and then there is this generation’s real story. The fourth quarter is a rap group who did all of their recording on duty in Iraq. Turns out it is a little hard to get recording equipment there, but you can read all about that at their site. Want a quick introduction? Watch the video. A couple warnings, the video is disturbing and violent, and from a technical standpoint, huge and in windows media format.

I was listening to the radio on my way home from Aikido when I decided to go channel surfing. I normally leave it locked in on the loop, but tonight for some reason I went surfing. I passed a channel that was playing Secret. That happens to be a favorite of mine, but not one I ever expected to hear on the radio, so next they played Howard Jones, and now I was really intrigued. Well the next song was something that sounded like PIL from a band that I had never heard the name of, but the first sound except music was the guy who was talking about his new head phones and rambled for a few minutes, got out the names of the songs and bands (too bad I can’t remember the name of that third band, it was good.) and then played three more songs before I got home. Two of which I didn’t recognize! No ads, no talking except for the brief rambling about headphones. It was really odd. I wonder if it was a college station? I’ll have to check out the dial tomorrow and see where it is.

(FWIW, it appears to be Northeastern IL Univ. with a HORRIBLE web site.)

I haven’t posted about the war in a while, so I thought I would give something that I saw the other day that struck me as particularly interesting. There is a woman, Rita Katz, and Iraqi born Jew who has been working Intelligence for the US for the past few years. She recently wrote a book about her life and work under the title anonymous, but the cat seems to have gotten out of the bag somehow. In any case, her group, the SITE institute tracks terror websites and tries to figure out what is going on in those circles.

If you are interested in her, you can listen to a radio show she was on where they are basically talking about wether or not they should take these web sites down. Basically: is the information gained useful and is taking them down useless since they will just move elsewhere? Unfortunately it is a call in show, so you get some real nut jobs (actual quote from a caller “the first amendment is just an amendment”) but she handles herself well and explains a number of interesting topics. She is all over at this point including an interesting story about her being outed and the lawsuits that came afterwards, as well as some details of her life. One really interesting thing about her story is that she was pretty much just interested in seeing what these supposedly relief groups in the US were all about. Only after discovering that did she get into the intelligence side of it. Her particular interest now is in cyberterrorism as well as tracking terror web sites through her SITE organization.

All in all an interesting person who has led an interesting life. I think I’ll have to pick up her book and check it out.

I complained recently about how hard it is to know that you are disposing of your computer equipment in an environmentally friendly way. Well it looks like after a recent lawsuit, Apple has taken to taking back used iPods at any apple store and recycling them for free! And since you need to have some business spin on everything, you can use your old iPod as a 10% off coupon on your next one! Brilliant! Encourage recycling and the next purchase at the same time.

In addition they have a program through a recycler to take any old equipment for $30. Not great, but better than I thought. I do love how those interest groups are pestering Apple. I would think that Sony or someone who actually sells a lot of electronics would be a much better target, but maybe they just thinking that they have more of a shot of getting apple to actually do something? I also didn’t realize that apple has free recycling programs in other countries.

WARNING: this post is meow of the highest order. The upgrade to mac os X was nice and smooth. As always you should check for updates on any of your apps before running them though. The syncing was a bit hairy, but I would suggest overwriting the .mac data the first time you sync, do that sync first, and then sync your devices. One everything had synced once, it seemed to work ok. All the other apps seem to just work. So, onto the blog…

The Problem

So, the problem is that I moved the base address of my blog. If I had just kept the file structure the same as the URL structure I would have been totally fine. I wanted to be able to get to the blog from /blog/ and not make people type in /~josh/blog/ In order to do this certain rewrite rules were required. Specifically ones that would make everything go from /blog/ to /~josh/blog/ without the reader ever knowing.

The official (Mac OS anyway) way of doing that is to put those rules into a special file, /private/etc/httpd/users/username.conf. I put them in an equally valid though less permanent place… httpd.conf The problem there you see is that when they upgrade the system, they might upgrade the httpd.conf file. Oops. Well that file reads in the user specific files, so you don’t really need to change that one, but oh well.

The Solution

Well just go to the admin pages and get the rewrite rules again. Except for the fact that a) the admin pages require the rewrite rules to be in place already and b) even once you fix it, they don’t actually provide that info any more and suggest another way of achieving the same effect. In any case, undaunted, in order to make it work in the old location I went looking for the place to change where the “site” definition was. Of course it is actually in the database. In a couple places. So I got to do my favorite pastime. Editing the WP DB by hand! For your enjoyment:

UPDATE wp_moonglum_options SET option_value=’http://lair.haggisnet.org/~josh/blog’ WHERE option_value=’http://lair.haggisnet.org/blog’;

Now you can go directly to the admin page and reset the permalink rewrite rules.

The Continuing Problem:

Once I had that done, I stuck in some rewrite rules at the top level to forward /blog/ and /blog to the real blog. Of course all of the internal links fully qualify out so you quickly move away from that nice short URL. Actually some people have seen the behavior of the link redirecting them to localhost/~josh/blog/ which I find to be truly odd behavior. The rewrite rules that cause this were:

RewriteRule ^blog/(.*)$ /~josh/blog/$1 [R]

Changing that R to L seemed to fix that, so now blog/ blog ~josh/blog/ all work, but ~josh/blog seems to still rewrite to localhost. Any thoughts? The only thing I can think of is that there is some rewrite rule in .htaccess in josh/blog that messes it up. I might just give up and stick it in the actual location. Which FWIW might actually be the real solution to the initial problem. Stick it there, which lets you get to the admin pages, and then move it back once you have fixed everything and put in the rewrite rules you want.

Wow was I wrong in all my doubts. They really are switching.

I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong. Wow.

I’d post more about it, but they really didn’t give any technical details at all about how they are going to go about it, will it run on real PCs like Darwin currently does? Will it use Open Firmware for Intel instead and end up as a closed system? (Schiller said so, but it is so far off yet they might not really know yet.) There were so few details that it is hard to actually figure out what their purpose in even doing this at all is. I did like the irony of showing the toasting bunny suit ads though.

So rather than speculating like every other blog with mac interest out there, I will leave it at that until we get more info.

Now here is a fun dissertation topic. How to contaminate the US milk supply. Oh yeah. And I thought my dissertation was going to piss people off. At least it includes some ideas on fixing those holes. The old problem in computer science of what to do when you fins some possible exploits, say and let people try to fix it or not say and let it be an unknown potential disaster.

(Answer to above BTW is say, because security through obscurity is no security.)

Finally got the rewrites working again, and I figured out what the “officially supported” way of doing it is, so it should stick through future upgrades. Got to that site from a poor set of 10.4 installation instructions.

Now need to unfix the permalink format to match the old one and I can get down to the hard work of actually playing with the OS.

Note to self: Can’t just forward /blog like you are doing, need to actually make the rewrite work for real since all of the old “permalinks” rely on the site actually being at /blog. Ugh. Maybe next week.

Well I have finally upgraded to Tiger (OS X 10.4) and it is really fun. Except for the fact that it overwrote my http rewrite rules in httpd.conf. Oh well. My blog is all stashed away in a nice safe database, no problem. So how did I get those again? Oh yeah, from the admin pages on the blog. Which rely on getting info using the rewrite rules. Sigh. Reduced to SQL hacking to manually change the base location so it goes around the rewrite rules. So I think I have everything fixed now, all the rules in the correct place, but they still don’t seem to be working….?? Thus the inability to see this from the root directory, or the /blog directory. Oh well. The real location is here for those who care. Since the rewrites still don’t work I guess the rss feeds don’t work either which kind of stinks. Oh well. Enough of this for today.

Looks like Apple might actually ditch the beautiful PowerPC RISC architecture after all this. I have to admit I find it a little bit doubtful for a number of reasons, but there are enough rumors converging that it is worth thinking about. For most programs this wouldn’t be a problem, just a quick recompile. Building a nice emulator like they did switching from 68K to PPC would be a bit harder going to x86 I would think. More to the point, they just did a major switch to OS X (which works just fine on an x86) so doing another one again now seems brutal to the developers. OTOH, they did just promise to not change the OS API any more.

More interesting is… does this mean that they are going to be open to cloning again? That seems a little deadly… too hard to make it all “just work”. OTOH, maybe they just want to make the stuff that goes with the computer now (read iPod, airport, etc…) Just seems so… odd.

We’ll know more in two days in any case.

Other doubters have come out as well.