Christopher Cashell

Wow.  Product placement advertising has really gone to a new (bad) level these days.

I was just watching the season finale of My Name is Earl and at two different points in the show did they feature a Klondike Ice Cream bar.  The first time it was the central feature of a series of scenes, while the second time was briefer.  However, in both scenes the Klondike tagline was repeated at least once.  And in both cases, immediately following that show segment, there was an actual Klondike commercial.

Now, to be honest, I don't mind much if there are products or advertisements featured in a show.  It's not that big of a deal. . . provided it's unobtrusive.  Have a character drinking a Pepsi, or eating lunch at a McDonalds, or whatever.  Not a big deal.  But having a scene in the show that is specifically written around a placed product, and then followed with product commercials?  It just feels sleazy and dirty.  Like the whole show is one big commercial.

Note for advertisers and script writers. . . keep it subtle.  When you stuff annoying and blatant advertisements into regular programming, it's annoying.  As it is, this was enough to turn me off of My Name is Earl some.  I'm not saying I'm going to boycott it, but I don't think I'll worry as much about whether I catch it or not in the future.  And if I see something like this again, I probably will stop watching it.

Using the latest release of sudo, I was finally able to get sudo working with LDAP enabled on RHEL/CentOS 4. Previously, I had no trouble getting sudo working with LDAP on RHEL3 and RHEL5. However, when I added '--with-ldap' to the compile options on RHEL4, it completely broke sudo, preventing it from authenticating anything.

This is a huge win for us at work, because it makes handling sudo configurations significantly easier. Normally, you have to store the configuration in /etc/sudoers on every single box. With this, you can store your sudo configuration in LDAP, and have all of the sudo rules in a single centralized location. Update it once, and all configured machines will then pull it.

I've become a big fan of LDAP, and with sudo supporting it, I think that anyone using LDAP and not storing sudo information in LDAP is crazy.

A few things that have seriously pissed me off over the past two weeks. . .

"Are you doing okay?"

Okay? Seriously? No, I'm not okay. Less than two weeks ago I went through the single worst day of my life. Last week was basically the worst week of my life. Am I okay? I'm a hell of a long way from being okay. My brother died. That's a rather permanent condition. It's not something I'm going to get over or feel better about quickly.

The fact that you're actually asking me if I'm okay suggests to me that you have no idea what I'm going through, and you're probably an idiot, too. I'm hoping that someday I'll feel okay again, but don't expect it this month. Or next. In fact, the next six months aren't looking real good from my perspective. Maybe sometime next year. I hope. I'm not real optimistic about it, though. Perhaps 2010 will be the year that I start to feel okay.

"I know how you feel, my cat died^[1] a few years ago. . ."

[1] (Insert other random dead pet, ended relationship, or bad event you went through)

Everyone who's said this to me is so lucky I didn't tear their arms off and beat them to death with their own arms. I've held my tongue so far, but I don't think I can manage it anymore. I've had pets that I loved, and I've had them die. I loved my cat Snickerdoodle, and I loved my dog Lady. It hit me really hard for each of them when they died, and it still saddens me to think about them.

But you know what? It isn't the same thing. It's not even close. Take what you felt for your dead cat, and multiply it by a thousand, then you'll start approaching the loss of a brother. So don't be offended when you mention your damn cat, and I hit you upside the head and walk away saying "Piss off. . . fuck your damn cat." Unless you've lost a sibling or a child, don't make a comparison with your situation to mine. It's just going to piss me off.

"I don't really know you, we're not really friends, and we don't really talk, but what happened to him? How did he die? You know, they say if you talk about it you'll feel better."

Who's "they"? And what hell do they know about my mental health? The story of what happened to my brother is not something you can tell in a few sentences. You need at least 10-15 minutes to go through it. And you know what? It kicks my ass each and every time I have to do it. Seriously, it sucks. I don't feel better after talking about it, I feel exhausted, sad, angry, and a hundred other things that are a long way from feeling "better". Unless you knew him personally, do not ask me this right now. Ask me sometime next year. Maybe.

And if you're someone that I don't have a friendship or other personal relationship with, why are you talking to me? If the sum of all of our conversations over the past month consisted of "Hey." and "What's up?" while walking past each other in the hall way, then you're not my friend, and I don't want to discuss my brother with you. Hell, under normal circumstances I don't really want to talk to you, so right now I'd rather throw you out of a window than have you stand there awkwardly trying to talk to me about someone you never met, and now never will. If you really feel you have to say something, then just say, "I'm sorry for your loss." And then walk away. Seriously, just walk away. If I want to talk to someone, I know how to find them.

[Note: This isn't directed towards my real friends, or anyone on LiveJournal. It's the result of some casual acquaintances and coworkers over the past two weeks that I'm tired of dealing with.]

July 19, 1979 - March 31, 2008

Farewell, Brother. May you now find the peace that eluded you in life.

You will be remembered.

Google has announced that they're adding IMAP support to Gmail. This will include both the standard Gmail, and also mail from Google Apps for Domains.

Awesome.

I wonder if Yahoo mail and Hotmail will follow suit, now? It seems like they're always a little behind on Google on the mail features (such as with AJAXified interfaces and with huge amounts of mail storage).

This just boggles the mind. This should absolutely not be this difficult, complicated, or frustrating.

At work, I need a web server (RHEL4) with PHP installed, along with the support libraries for PostgreSQL and Oracle. With the stock RPMs for PHP, adding PostgreSQL support is a piece of cake, you just install the PostgresSQL client libraries and php-pgsql.

So then I go to add Oracle support. I download the Oracle instantclient libraries (we're not running a database on this box, just connecting to an existing one), and figure there's probably a php-oracle or php-oci8 RPM from Oracle to add the PHP glue, right? Wrong. All of the documentation from Oracle describes how to take your RHEL4 box, download Apache, from source, download PHP, from source, and then recompile both.

What the hell? I'm going to have to duplicate this on a dozen machines, and then maintain them. In this day and age of software management, why in the hell am I supposed to recompile major parts of the system from source? And for one little oci8.so? Is this a joke?

So then I find Zend Core, which advertises it's "Universal Database Support", and built-in Oracle module. Wow! Cool! That'll solve this. . . assuming I don't mind using an alternately supplied install of PHP that will no longer be supported with security fixes from my OS vendor, nor do I have any kind of upgrade roadmap for it. But at least I have Oracle and Postgres support, right? Well, erm, no. Actually, the "Universal Database Support" just means that it supports the big guys with money, like Oracle, IBM DB2, and SQL Server. Oh, and MySQL. Wait, what's the obvious exclusion? Where's PostgreSQL? And Zend Core is a binary install, so I can't recompile it to add PostgreSQL support, even if I wanted to?

I went through some crap like this back when I was trying to get Oracle support compiled for Perl a year or two ago, though I'd forgotten how annoying it is. It honestly makes me wonder how in the hell Oracle ever managed to convince anyone to develop against them. This is just asinine.

At this point, I'm really annoyed at Oracle for not offering a php-oci8 RPM from their freakin' "PHP for Oracle" portal page, and at Zend for making it really hard to add any additional extensions that they don't feel you need.

Hrm. I thought I tried this before and it worked, but I appear to be having trouble getting a post to go through from jabber. Every time I try, LJ Bot (Frank) is complaining about an error.

Grrr.

Thank God the weekend is finally here. For a short week, this week felt four times longer than normal. I'm not sure if it's because we're trying to compress a five day week's worth of work into a four day week, or if it was just a 'lucky' week of blowups and stupid stuff, but it was not fun.

Luckily I don't really have any firm plans this weekend, so I'm thinking I'll take a little time out and be antisocial for a while. Two good ones came in from Netflix today, too. Tank Girl and Can't Buy Me Love.

I've been playing with a new website (or web application) I came across, called Mugshot. It's pretty slick.

Kind of a social networking (plus other stuff) aggregation-ish tool. it's a Red Hat sponsored project, and apparently the main man behind it is Havoc Pennington (one of the founders of Gnome, and fairly well known in the Linux development community for his desktop code work).

I'm definitely going to have to play with this some more.

*ahem* I think I'm still alive.

That is all.

(But I intend to post again tomorrow, and more frequently again. I'm feeling a need to "think out loud".)

Why didn't I find about the ultimate holiday sooner?

Now I have to wait until next May to enjoy No Pants Day!

I need a new cell phone. Desperately. My current cell phone is a Sanyo SCP-4500 from late 2001. In cell phone years, it's about 247, and it looks like it's been run over. Repeatedly.

So, I'm looking for a new one. I've checked out a ton of them, but I'm hampered by the lack of decent non-flip phones (I really dislike flip phones), especially from Sprint, my current provider.

Of course, since I've been on the same plan for 4 years, I'm not exactly locked in right now.

The phone I'm currently leaning toward is the Nokia 6682. It's a non-flip phone, looks good, seems to have every feature I could ever want, and I just managed to find it for free after rebate.

Any comments, or suggestions?

Here's the basic requirements: Non-flip, non-fugly, decent battery, good reception, the ability to easily create my own custom rings.

Everything else, camera, internet, bluetooth, etc., I care far less about.

Why is it, that after all these years, Microsoft Outlook's support for e-mail threads is still so unbelievably crappy? How is it that even Outlook Express handles mail threads better than Outlook?

Threaded e-mail is not exactly a new concept. . . it's been supported since the early by numerous mail clients, and nearly every mail client in exsitence, other than Outlook, has supported it for years now.

This is without even getting started on the horrible habits that Outlook has pushed on to people such as top posting and quoting an entire e-mail (and all subsequent e-mails) in replies.

The more I'm forced to use Outlook at work, the more I realize that it is a truly crappy program.

I've realized that I've gotten really bad about posting again. I'm gonna try to do better about that.

I'll start off with a post about all the crap that's been going on at work over the past few months, shortly.

03:42 < mystal> when life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons and make super lemons.
03:50 <@egypt[guitar]> lots of lemons can be easily assembled into one, large, robotic, superintelligent lemon
03:50 <@egypt[guitar]> capable of space flight.

Yeah, so I was IRCing earlier, and I switched to a different screen
session for a moment, then switched back. . . and *BAM*, I got really
confused.

Here's what I was seeing:



Yeah, that's what I thought.

Here's an interesting article that is something of a "reality check" regarding the next generation video game consoles. It follows roughly with what I've been thinking, that Sony, Microsoft, and (to a lesser extent (mostly because they've offered fewer details)) Nintendo are promising the world, and will likely deliver on about half of what they're claiming.

I have no doubt that the new consoles will be impressive, but I'll be even more impressed if they manage to deliver this time what they initially promised last time. ;-)

Why is it so freakin' hard to find a USB/Firewire external hard drive
enclosure for SATA drives? Every single damn enclosure in existence
seems to be for IDE drives.

What, SATA drives don't need no portable lovin'?

I've been searching for one for a week now, my only requirement that it
not cost me more than half what the drive did ($50, the drive was $100).
I don't care what it looks like, whether it has flashy lights, or a
brushed aluminum look, or any of that crap. I just care that it exists.

I don't suppose anyone has seen one anywhere, have they?

Okay, so I'm in the market for a digital audio player, and I'd like some
suggestions.

Here's the requirements:

• Ogg Vorbis Support
• Audible.com Support
• Decent size storage (>20GB prefered)

I have yet to find a single player that can meet those three simple
requirements. The Rio Karma almost does, and should have. . . according
to a press release last year, Rio was going to be releasing a firmware
update to add Audible support. Unfortunately, they've since flaked out.
iRiver has made a similar announcement a few months ago, but I'm not
going to buy a player based on "expected" features promised in a press
release. The Rio example shows what folly that would be.

So, anyone have any suggestions or recommendations?

Ugh.

Had a short power outage last night, and after everything came back up,
I noticed that one computer was showing a blank screen. After playing
with it for a few minutes, I determined that it's probably dead. Powers
on, fan starts spinning, but nothing else. No display, and nothing to
indicate it's actually starting/POSTing.

I'm gonna try to pull it apart and see where the problem is tonight, or
possibly tomorrow. This is so not how I wanted to spend my
weekend.