Red Drag Diva

• A tantalising platter of winged penis lovingly made in cast glass.

• Just when you thought supermodels couldn't get any stupider.

• What is this I don't even (NSFW for artistic nudity).

• Unicorn poop cookies.

• My Wikimedia blog: SOPA blackout post-mortem; Open Street Map beats Google Maps for business use.

• Rocknerd: The Damned, January 20, 2012, Melbourne (by tcpip), Just three more!

"If you delete the web-pages we asked, it's gonna be fine or else my friend, an astral projectionist is going to bring you to justice" — actual threat received by RationalWiki.

Huge success at work automating every aspect of deployment with mod_brainfuck Ant (with ant-contrib). Building a full-sized working replica Titanic from toothpicks, complete with iceberg. Bletcherous spaghetti hidden behind innocuous-looking macrodef or target calls. Lots to go, but we might even get all our stuff shifted to the new hosting in time. If your hammer is Turing-complete, one day you will have to use it as a screwdriver, spanner, soda siphon and nail.

(This is the largest substantial piece of actually useful coding I've ever done. I'm getting the thing where you wake up with the solution to yesterday's problem and have to LOG IN RIGHT NOW to get it down.)

Yesterday's problem is generating an arbitrary number of htusers files. With one, it's easy, the data goes like this and the code will follow obviously:

apache.htusers.file = appname-htusers
apache.htusers.list = user:letmein,admin:irl33t,bob@example.com:keepmeout

However, one app just has to have two htusers files. And if two, then later three or four. So my question is: how to human-obviously represent the data for an arbitrary number of htusers files as name-value pairs in a .properties file? For now I've special-cased that app, but I'll need something better later.

arkady is writing a novel (with cavalorn, eithin and me sniping from the sides), so is using the "inspiration shall strike every morning at 9:30am" method, and cranking through it nicely. And is successfully writing on an Android phone in a Google Doc when out and about. I've decided if I want to make music then I need to make music, and have determined that I shall write a complete something every day for a month. Even if it's entirely terrible, it just has to be a done and completed thing. This is in fact causing new stuff to pop into my head. I recommend the method. (I'm not linking any of it sans polish, because it's literally just sketches in LMMS. I might later.) If you can actually play, just get a guitar, a microphone and a copy of Audacity to record into, and PRODUCE.

Does anyone just happen to have the rule sheet for the In The Night Garden Rainbow Adventure Game? We just got it for 50p complete except the rules ... boardgamegeek doesn't seem to have heard of it.

After the previous attempt, it occurred to me to ask debian-java. eagle noted the existence of the ancient java-package. This is what Debian used to use to package Sun Java before the distributor licenses. It is not what the recently-available packages were built with (they were built with this, which I can't work out what to do with), but it does build a usable Sun Java. Cédric Pineau updated it and I have, with a patch, used it to package Oracle JDK 6u30 for our actual business use. Here's what I did on my work PC (Ubuntu 10.04 amd64).

1. sudo apt-get install debhelper
2. Get the zip of Cédric's java-package from github, unzip to a suitable directory. cd there. (Mine was /home/fun/bin/cedricpineau-java-package-b77d4f0.)
3. Move all files from ./lib/* to the same directory. (I ran the script as-was, not as an installed package on my system.)
4. Edit make-jpkg and change lib_dir="/usr/share/java-package" to point to where you've unzipped the thing (e.g., /home/fun/bin/cedricpineau-java-package-b77d4f0)
5. Edit oracle-j2sdk1.6/install with this patch so that even obsolete and horrible stuff is linked in /etc/alternatives the way it was by 6u26. (Note that Matthias Klose, who used to package Sun Java for Debian and Ubuntu, considers parts of this patch an abomination unto Nuggan.)
6. Download the self-extracting JDK bin file from Oracle. (I put it in /home/fun/Downloads/jdk-6u30-linux-x64.bin.)
7. ./make-jpkg /home/fun/Downloads/jdk-6u30-linux-x64.bin

The resulting file has unmet dependencies — so to install, you need to do:

sudo dpkg -i oracle-j2sdk1.6_1.6.0+update30_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

This is guaranteed in no manner whatsoever. However, we've just deployed it to the template image all our new VMs will be cloned from. I'll keep you updated ...

• A petition to privatise Thatcher's state funeral. (No, she's not dead yet.)

• Just imagine what would happen if freeman-on-the-land nutters met TV licensing. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine.

• Wikimedia blog: Go try the new visual editor prototype.

As a critic, my life's hobby has been tracking beauty to its lair, suffocating it and pinning it to a page.

I'm going with the Mach III. Of course, just as I made that post, arkady had already ordered one with the Christmas groceries ... but the discussion leaves me reasonably confident it's the right answer.

It's been a thankfully unexciting couple of weeks. Christmas is annoying enough, though Freda is WILDLY ENTHUSIASTIC. Work with Freda at home is only feasible in thirty-second bursts. School doesn't start again until January 9th, leaving me fantasising about going to the office ...

The death of Kim Jong-Il is, of course, the first miracle of Christopher Hitchens. Beatification awaits.

• Wikipedia: Sylvanus Stall, H. L. Mencken's Sunday school teacher, who released what may be the first audiobook ... about the perils of masturbation.

• RationalWiki: Food and Drug Administration, 187 Fake Cancer "Cures" Consumers Should Avoid, Bentham Science Publishers.

Froze ourselves to icicles at Walthamstow Winter Wonderland today, but at least Freda had fun. Raar!

If you're ever suffering an excess of joie de vivre or delusions that there is any goodness or hope in the universe, try cleaning a keyboard instead of throwing it away and buying another. Makes ichneumon wasps look like prima facie evidence of a loving God. I wonder if this is what sent Lovecraft over the edge. And it didn't actually fix the keyboard (I suspect a broken trace). We're eBaying a replacement. Next time I KILL IT WITH FIRE.

"PONPONPON" is a virus, but the writer/producer, Yasutaka Nakata, has a proper band, Capsule, of much higher quality. Sort of Japanese Daft Punk. (With a bit of cheese in there. Well, a lot of cheese on the earlier records, which were hipster indie pop.) "Jumper", "World Of Fantasy". "Jumper" is ridiculously good. I'm quite surprised they're all but unknown outside Japan. This sort of thing should do really well in the UK.

Oh, that relentless shiteating grin. Tim Ferguson on Don't Forget Your Toothbrush in 2000. If you looked closely, every word he was actually saying was "Please kill me, for pity's sake. Bullet to base of skull. Take me out. Fuck."

It's always cheering when a new vendor we send data via SFTP says they only support user/password, not public keys, i.e. a fundamental part of SSH since it was invented. Said vendor also demanded a zip file as they couldn't handle it gzipped. I wish I wondered what operating system they are processing this on.

Stuff's been occurring to me and I've been just completely failing to note it, so I actually bought a notebook yesterday to build Bayesian postmodernism in. I just filled ten A7 pages with spider scrawl and my hand is aching from more writing than I've done in a burst in years.

Fucking Derrida. Differance and the Web of Meaning very nicely describe the Bayesian network of meaning that is how humans actually operate: every word is defined in other words, with roots in your evolved predispositions; you can't have certainty of meaning, you have to make do with what you've got and can get. Derrida successfully hit upon this purely by feel, with no maths and no evidence I can find that he'd even heard of Bayes.

The Wikipedia article is full of annoying deepities, with the problems the concept brings to light presented as semantic stopsigns you're supposed to go "oh, wow" at rather than actually answerable (and pretty easy to answer, at that) questions, but makes the congruence pretty damn clear if you know the Bayes half.

But this is where I'm enormously glad for Wikipedia, and people who try that hard to explain things actually clearly. Here's the actual chapter. See how far you get before you want to throw your computer against the wall. I managed about a sentence into the third paragraph. I might finish this thing before I die, if I manage to hate myself enough.

• Comparing prices is such a security issue for Tesco that it wants you booted out of the store. I'm tempted to carry a clipboard on every visit from now on.

• Rocknerd: several posts. Random interesting crap welcomed.

arkady's arm is better! So on Friday A's knee went. A&E say it's a cartilage problem (possible meniscal tear) exacerbated by the car incident. Fracture clinic next week, expected recovery time a few weeks. I'm sure we'll get the bed built one day ...

A busy week at work, frantically moving services from failing hardware to the new VM cluster. Metal Machine Music turns out to be the perfect headphone fodder for thinking in a noisy office. Use sparingly.

Now using Xubuntu 11.10 (Xfce 4.8). Installing GNOME apps as I need them, as long as they don't pull in large chunks of GNOME. Nautilus 3.2 is way more stable in Xfce than 2.32 was in Unityfied GNOME2.

It's noticeably more responsive on my aging Mini 9. There appears to be a blissful absence of background services sopping up CPU. Xfce mostly just stays out my way.

I had to install gvfs-backends. I installed Nautilus as my file manager, which also appears much more stable in Xfce. Totem instead of Parole. (Yeah, if there's one thing free software needs, it's another media player with a nonsequitur name.) There are occasional jarring lacks: the absence of any clear way to edit the menus (the wiki instructions don't actually work, nor lxmed); having to go command-line to make capslock a control key.

The forum is quite good. Even if the actual answer to questions is often "that's not implemented, feel free to write it."

The project is tiny and lacking in developers; if the devs are smart, they can take advantage of the GNOME3/Unity car crashes to boost their numbers of power users who are actually capable of fixing problems — when Linux kernel developers start posting rants about how they can't do actual work in GNOME3/Unity, that's a powerful untapped userbase. Perhaps an easy hacks list like the one for LibreOffice?

Anyone else trying Xfce or LXDE or whatever? What papercuts have you hit?

(also posted to Facebook and G+)

• Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.

I forgot to note that arkady has a new hobby: stage crew. If you thought that was A you saw stage left at VNV Nation last Sunday, you were quite correct.

I am in bed ill, semi-coherent, occasionally delirious and very bored. Listening to lots of music, though headphones get annoying in very short order and I wish I knew where the shitty speakers were. All my old Psychophile CDs and live tracks — they were really quite good, weren't they. HTRK, who I will always call "Hatrack": slow dubby bass and guitar screeching. Old Fall and Church. Malcolm Mclaren Duck Rock, which stands up surprisingly well. The latter was after reading Ian Macleay's biography of him, which is awful. Terrible writing, strained allusions, comparing everything to the year 2010, lots of apparently new and interesting information but with no cites. Avoid.

• The last "Yo Dawg."

• Saying the rich should pay taxes is just like saying the government should force hot women to put out more. Well done, libertarians.

Last week, Freda and mummy made tiny cupcakes, and Freda and daddy iced them!

( cake! )

On Saturday, the new fountain near the Co-op was on. It doesn't just spurt water continuously — it randomly goes on and off at varying strengths. This is just how to lure kids in to play in it on a hot summer's day in October, e.g., Freda, who got soaked.

( water! )

arkady has been sick in bed for the past week. We have a house inspection Wednesday morning. It's been a little wearying, yes.

• Fresh from their resounding success^{[citation needed]} with the Conservapedia Bible Project ... the Conservative Dictionary Project!

• I am keeping vast swathes of Google+ whining off here. But here's a summary.

Freda has started school! So far it's exhausting her. Good. Now I deeply understand parental dread of the holidays.

I have made the soundtrack for something to amuse Freda and annoy you. Forward it to your friends! Waiting on arkadyrose to draw an 8-bit parasaurolophus farting rainbows.

More Wikipedia obscurities: Manufactured Romance, Berlin Blondes. Manufactured Romance are actually surprisingly good pop-punk.

In an amazing occurrence, I plan to leave the house tonight and go to a party. See you there, perhaps.