Dave Kellam

Earlier this year, I replaced by old desk with one of those triangle-shaped Ikea tables that fits nicely into the corner of the room. It has served me well, but it’s not exactly ergonomically sound. I’ve been meaning to raise the monitor up a few more inches for awhile now.

Enter our old amplifier, we blew it out this year and were planning on tossing it at some point. I was looking at it and figured that it would probably be the perfect height for a monitor stand. The problems were that the thing weighed a ton and it was filled with useless electronic guts. That said, it was pretty easy to get rid of insides.

Old electronics were a lot more serviceable than they are now, so it only took a few mintues to get the amplifier apart. I had to remove five screws from the bottom and the whole thing slid out from the wooden case. The last step was to remove all the knobs, and unscrew the faceplate from the rest of the inside rack.

I glued all of the knobs back onto the faceplate with super-glue and punched two holes into the top of the amp, so I could put nails in to secure the front. It would probably be a lot cooler if the faceplate was hinged, but I didn’t have anything usable lying around. The empty space where the electronics used be is a good spot to store cds, spindles, monitor cleaner or whatever other crap you have lying around. Unfortunately, I had to sacrifice the functionality of the switches and the knobs.

Here’s the full photoset on flickr, although it was a rather poorly documented process.

For lack of a more eloquent argument we’ll leave it at that. Copy protection is a waste of time for all those involved. As far as tech arguments, people seem to like making analogies between whatever issue they’re debating and the car industry. It’s worth a shot:

Car Dealer: This is the fastest, nicest car we have.
Me: Wow, it sure is. I like the gold-plated-orphan-catcher on the front.
Car Dealer: Ah yes, that particular model was designed by William Morris.
Me: And the stereo, man…
Car Dealer: Yes, the Linn…
Me: I can’t wait to get this out on the open-road, blast some tunes and hit some orphans at high speed.
Car Dealer: Sir, I’m afraid that the noise-pollution laws have locked the volume knob at 3.
Me: And the high spe…
Car Dealer: The 80km limit.
Me: But, you don’t get the spatter at 80.
Car Dealer: Sir, we all miss the old days.

So, that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But what if I said that I’d been playing GTA: San Andreas? It probably explains the splatter anyway.

Now that you’re thinking about the poor little children, it would be a good moment to mention the game’s copy protection. That’s right — the game with the punching and the shooting and the stealing of cars doesn’t want you to play on a modded xbox.

Seriously, Rockstar paid someone at least a few hour’s wages to make sure the game had copy protection. Now, let’s sit back and think about this: I have a game about the criminal element and I have an xbox that I’ve gone to the effort of soldering an extra chip on to. Do they really think copy protection will do anything other than annoy me? I don’t really want to buy any Rockstar products right now.

Wasn’t a big fan of the brick header, so I switched it over to the new “bunch of lines” header. Body font has been change to Lucida Grande, was sick of Verdana.

I was having some database problems earlier. I’m not sure if it was WordPress related or Dreamhost related, but the database seemed to stop cold at 10mb, I couldn’t post anything. I had been using the ShortStat plugin for WordPress and had amassed a tidy 7mb worth of stats, so I cleaned them out and everything seems to be back in working order.

I’ve been with Dreamhost for almost five years now and the service has been continualy improving the entire time. Up to their usual trick, they’ve gone and done a few new things this week. The first big on is installing the new version of Ruby and Ruby on Rails for everyone. That’s gotta make the Rails people happy. It also means I can start playing and don’t have to spend time installing.

The second thing I found was a Gmail-esque announcement in my admin panel:

This is a big one. Starting today, we’re the only web host in the world
(as far as we know, and we didn’t check) that automatically GROWS every
shared customer’s disk and bandwidth quotas every week!

That’s right, every week from now on your quotas will be increased by
this much per active shared hosting plan:

• L1: 20MB disk and 1GB bandwidth each week!
• L2: 40MB disk and 1.5GB bandwidth each week!
• L3: 60MB disk and 2GB bandwidth each week!
• L4: 80MB disk and 2.5GB bandwidth each week!

Now, that’s a pretty solid announcement — it raises the bar for other hosts and means lots of space for me to play with. They also found the time to update to PHP 5 and MYSQL 4.1. And add CPU usage tracking.

Al-qaeda has once-again proven that they are a force to be reckoned with by testing their mettle against tin-cans full of people. Bombs were detonated on the Underground and a bus earlier today in London, with the terrorist network claiming responsibility.

A spokesman for Al-queda put the attacks into perspective for western viewers:

Fighting trained soldiers was starting to get a little ‘old-hat’, you know? We had heard whisperings of the great mechanical dragons and their riches living beneath the Misty City. The stories of sneaking weapons into such a tightly guarded and private sanctuary will live on forever.

Anyway, weblogs seem to be the way that people are getting information. They can usually be trusted:

• Wikipedia entry
• Wikinews entry
• CNN Timeline
• Flickr photo pool
• Google News
• Technorati: london bomb
• Al Jazeera

Bombing mass-transit is absolutely despicable. You see photos roll in from Jerusalem, Tokyo, Baghdad and Madrid and you have to wonder what people are thinking when they do these things. They’re only hurting people like themselves.

People seem to be searching for information related to the puzzle game called Sodoku, so here we go. The game (officially known as Sudoku) was first popularised by Japan in 1986, but in the past few months it’s been appearing in many newspapers around the globe. The Sodoku surge is primarily the responsibility of Wayne Gould, who wrote a computer program that allows for the easy creation of puzzle boards.

The puzzle itself is relatively simple; the common format consists of a 9×9 grid, that’s further sub-divided into nine 3×3 grids. The object is to fill each column, row and 3×3 grid with the numbers one through nine (other characters or symbols can be used) without any repeats. The game’s difficulty lies in the initial board configuration — both the quantity and frequency of the given numbers. True Sodoku puzzles have only one unique solution per puzzle.

Further Links & Reading:

• Sudoku.com – official website of Wayne Gould, populariser of the game
• Wikipedia Entry – has pretty much anything you want to know about the game
• Frazer Jarvis’s page – contains info on the enumeration of Sodoku grids
• Sodoku Grandmaster – a Sodoku humour site
• Puzzles Online – list of online puzzles
• Dashboard Widget – play sodoku on your mac
• Websodoku – play online
• Sodoku.org.uk – fairly comprehensive Sodoku site

That’s about it for now. The next thing up will be cryptic crosswords — I’ve been figuring out how to do them over the last week or two. Alanah, Will and I managed to finish off the Globe’s Canada Day cryptic puzzle (it was a little on the intense side of things).

Updates:

• CNN article on Sudoku – September 19th, 2005
• The Times has an extensive Sudoku section – November 5th, 2005

I’m heading up to Will’s cottage for a couple days, I’ll probably be back Tuesday night, so there likely won’t be any updates around here for a few days. Hopefully you can find something else to occupy your time. If you can’t, spend some time on the July Contest. There should be pictures when I get back, the camera still kind of works, it just doesn’t have the lcd anymore.

This is the story of my new favourite word: unfusly. I’m not sure what it means yet — but you can help me decide.

So how did this word come to be and why don’t I know what it means? The answer is simple: Google. Not that anything Google does is simple, but the origins lie deep in the heart of the Google-plex. Gmail was kind enough to demand that I answer a captcha and produced the word unfusly. It seemed real enough to me — I was under the impression that captchas produced garbage text. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to save the image.

Now I like unfusly, but it needs to mean something. I have some shiny PayPal dollars (Dreamhost gave them to me for telling people about their super hosting abilities) that I’m willing to part with for some solid work. Here are the basic categories and prize-disribution as it stands now:

• Best Definition of Unfusly – $5
  The one I like the best
• Best Display of Unfusly – $5
  The best display of unfusly in the real-world
• Most Professional – $5
  Make me think it belongs in a dictionary

Anything you submit needs to be your own, and if you’re using images they should be hosted on your own webspace or a photo-sharing site like flickr. The judging will be done by me, likely after the contest closes. Which we’ll say is one week from today (July 7th). I’m not likely to change the contest, but like anything in life, it could be subject to radical change with little or no warning. Go nuts.

The site appears to be borked in Internet Explorer, the sidebar floats down at the bottom. Yea CSS! I don’t care that much, but a good chunk of the people who visit still seem to use IE for some reason. Either that or they’re Or at least they’re spam bots identifying themselves as such. I should really redo the template. There are lots of things that should be redone though.

I pulled my camera out of my bag this afternoon to snap a photo and was confused by an entirely white lcd screen. Then I noticed a little black blob in the corner. And that’s pretty much how it’s apt to stay. I forgot to take it out of my bag last night and must have stepped on it at some point. Normally, stepping on the camera in the bag probably wouldn’t have done anything, but there was an uncapped pen in same pouch that was likely positioned directly under the screen.

The camera can still takes photos and is capable of transfering them over to the computer, but all of the advanced features are unusable. Without the screen, it’s essentially been reduced to one of those 35mm knockoffs you buy at a drug store.

Can’t really say whether I’ll try to get it fixed or pick up a new one. The camera wasn’t that old, only about a year and a half, but there are much better ones on the market now. I was planning on riding this camera out for another year or so before I invested in a digital SLR. The current cash situation probably won’t faciliate the purchase of an new SLR, but it’d be nice.

I unscrewed the camera housing and found that the screen looks replacable, but Sony’s likely to charge me over a hundred dollars to have a new one put in. For a little bit more money, I could probably invest in a newer camera with more dohickeys.