alex chiang: web 6.0

Time for a few links…

Attention all computer dorks: Computerworld asks are you annoying?. The answer is probably yes. In other words, you ought to figure out how to overcome your Asperger’s syndrome (definitions here and here) so your career isn’t skunked. Here’s a clue: if you feel the need to debate linux vs windows, talk about your RAID setup, or constantly have Cheetos powder on your fingers, then you are annoying.

Next up, Ricky Williams announces his retirement. I didn’t pay too much attention to his career (apparently it was good), but my respect for him has increased by an infinite amount after reading what he had to say:

Most people encouraged Williams to continue playing for the money so he can support his three young children. But Williams, who has talked in the past about returning to college to get a postgraduate degree in psychology, dismissed the need for money, even for his children.

“I’ve had no money before,” he said. “People are worried about the future of my children, but a child doesn’t need much to be happy - needs food, a change of clothes and for you to pay attention to him. A bottle of baby food costs 79 cents. I have that much.”

Ok, first off, if the guy had any clue whatsoever, he’s had a financial manager ever since he signed his contract with the Saints, so you know he’s not hurting for money. But even if he was a complete asshat with his finances and is completely broke now, the above quote shows that he doesn’t fit into the stereotypical spoiled superstar mold. Williams is truly living the American dream, which is to pursue one’s dreams and grow successful via higher education and persistence in the face of adversity. Sure, he’s had an easier time of it due to his physical prowess, but that he can walk away from it all and tell the corporate machine to go fuck itself reveals that his true character is as solid as they come.

Appealing to the well-being of his children is probably the lamest possible way of pleading with your star back that he should continue to help your franchise, and Williams’ quote exposes how hollow and shallow and desperate people get when the curtain is peeled back and the men in charge aren’t quite so in reality. Good on ya, Ricky!

And last but not least, everyone needs to go watch breakdancing Transformers. (it’s Flash animation and carries on a bit longer than it should, but it’s worth watching all the same)

Everyone should go see this movie. Hands down the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.

There’s no real plot — the movie is a continuous series of awkward moments and one-liners revolving around Napoleon Dynamite as he tries to survive high school in Preston, Idaho. You spend the entire film just watching this kid say one fucked-up thing after another and wondering why laughing hurts so much. Sure, there are some high school film genre cliches, but you don’t care because at that point, *everything* Napoleon does is funny and you’d be willing to watch him eat tater tots for half an hour.

Go see it. Now.

Just a quick note here that if you’re not watching the Tour de France this year, you’re truly missing out on an amazing performance from Lance. He is dominating the field like a man possessed, and is en route to a record breaking 6th (consecutive) victory.

Why should you care? Because the sheer amount of athleticism and high level of competition is just plain sick. The disparity between Lance’s performance and the NBA finals, say, is simply ridiculous. The two shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same breath.

Do yourself a favor. If you don’t have cable, get thee to a bar and watch le Tour. If you do, flip over to OLN and watch a fellow American crush his competition like a bunch of skirt wearing sallies.

I’ve changed my mind. TotalChoice Hosting sucks. Trying to cancel an account with them is annoying because they still think my domain is hosted on their computers. Thus, any mail they send out gets sent to *their* systems as opposed to going out over the internet to the new host.

What this means is that you don’t get to see any mail they might be sending you, which is extremely annoying if you are trying to cancel an account with them. Additionally, the billing department rep, Michelle Barnhill, decided to invoke the 30-day cancellation notice policy on me.

Fine, you fuckwads. Go ahead and have another $5. I recommend spending it on a real sysadmin (you could probably hire 3 of them from India who are 10x more competent).

TCH sucks. Total Choice Hosting sucks. Use Dreamhost instead.

My old hosting company was Total Choice Hosting. While they don’t suck per se, I do not recommend them. They are no longer giving out ssh access, and if you do manage to complain loudly enough to get a shell, they will give you a jailshell, which is some sort of weird restricted bash shell. The implications of this are that you do not have access to gcc or other normal utilties you would expect in your path. Annoying.

The major problem with TCH is their mailing list implementation, which truly sucks. Apparently, mail sent to a mailing list in your domain goes and sits in some queue somewhere. Then, some cron script occasionally comes and checks the queue. If it finds messages, it then invokes exim to send the messages out. This might be ok if the job ran more often than once every several hours. Imagine trying to have an email conversation between 30 people, but you could only communicate once every three hours. Yes, you are correct in thinking this is dumb.

I switched to DreamHost. Much better in every aspect. You get a real shell via ssh and you get real mailing lists. The knowledge base they have set up is actually useful, and everything else Just Works ™. I’m on the $8 / month plan, so it’s slightly more expensive than the $5 / month I was paying at TCH, but for $3, it’s worth it. DreamHost has their act together.

Making the actual switch was pretty easy. I just setup an account with DreamHost and then started ftp’ing stuff over from TCH. I was able to setup a subdomain under dreamhost.com to test things like this blog and my gallery, and once everything looked like it was working, I simply changed the DNS entry to point to DreamHost’s servers. Easy.

The only minor gotcha was that I’m using an older version of MovableType. I don’t know much about the new version 3.0, but I’ve read a few muddled reports about people complaining, so I wasn’t too inclined to switch. Additionally, when I went to the sixapart website to check it out, you have to register for this typepad thingy that I wasn’t too keen on. So I just moved the old installation to the new server hoping that things would Just Work.

Close, but no cigar. In the installation instructions for MT, they instruct you to run the mt-load.cgi script, which sets up the MySQL database, among other things, and then to delete it since you’ll never need it again. Not such a good idea if you ever switch hosts and can’t find a tarball of the version of MT you’re using. After some creative googling, I managed to find a copy of mt-load.cgi, which I was able to run and setup my databases with.

The correct solution is to rename the file to mt-load.cgi.bak and remove execute permissions for the file. This way, if you ever decide to move hosts again, you’ll have the script needed to setup your blog database.

Everything else went without a hitch. Switching hosts is pretty easy, which should scare the crappy hosting companies out there.

The DNS change is complete, and things are going well at the new hosting company. I’ll write a bit more on gotchas to look out for when switching hosting companies later because right now I’m exhausted and my ankle is swollen from playing in an ultimate frisbee tournament over the weekend.

David over at Mind Poison thought that Spiderman 2 sucked. I’m sorry David, you’re absolutely correct. It did suck. A lot. And that’s after my boss paid for all of our tickets.

David actually put some thought into his review which is more than you can say for what I’m about to write. But then again, if you want intelligent thought, go read his blog. You’re here reading mine, so that must say something about you too, buddy.

First thought — ok, ok, I get it. Peter Parker’s real life is getting him down and he only has a good time when he’s Spiderman. Why do we spend the first 45 minutes of the movie exploring every single reason why his life sucks? This is supposed to be a summer blockbuster. Let’s get into the action already instead of piling the shit on top of more shit. Were this character development limited to one or two scenes, it would be bearable, but I really thought it was overdone.

Second, why did Dr. Octopus have to make his robot arms contain artificial intelligence? This is out of a comic book, so I’m willing to accept the fact that he must have 4 arms connected directly to his neural system so that he can multitask appropriately. If he just had the sort of setup where he is behind a shield and controlling two robotic arms via a joystick setup or something as goes the common nuclear power plant image (think Simpsons here), that protects him from the fusion (more on that later) but it’s still only two arms. Not enough multitasking. Fine, he needs 4 arms, and the only way to control them is to hook them into his spine. But why oh why does he need to imbue the arms with their own evil agenda? Why couldn’t he have just made them neutral extensions of his own nervous system? Then, there would be no controller chip thingy to get fried and the arms wouldn’t have tried to take over Doc Ock and make him evil. They simply would have gone unconscious, just as the good Doctor did. Dumb.

Lastly, I’m again willing to suspend my disbelief since this is a movie based on a comic book. Great, you invented fusion. That’s pretty swell, except when it gets out of control. Then, you either have to pull the plug on the reaction (feasible) or drown it by putting it under water (stupid). I’m no physicist, but the last time I checked, you can’t even put out a grease fire with water, let alone a fucking fusion reaction. No class C fire extinguishers lying around? WTF? Oh wait — I have a brilliant idea! Let’s put out our scary mini-sun by sticking it in water! What’s that you say? The chemical composition of water you ask? H₂O, right? Oh shit! Look at ALL THAT FUCKING HYDROGEN WE JUST INTRODUCED TO OUR FUSION REACTION!

Yeah.

So this entry borders on the Too Much Information category, and it really won’t be funny unless a) you know Chinese and b) you can picture my mom saying these things.

But anyhow, an IM conversation with my brother went something like this the other day:

• chizanger: hey, did mom have an operation or something?
• victor: yeah
• victor: she had a colonoscopy
• chizanger: jeez
• victor: she had to take some heavy duty laxatives last thrus nhight
• chizanger: maybe i should call her eh?
• victor: yeha, she’s fine
• victor: i dont think it was too big a deal
• victor: she was sitting on the couch, like 30 min after taking hte laxative, and said in chinese:
• victor: kai-seh fang-pee-la!
• chizanger: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
• victor: hahahahahahaah

For a change of pace this weekend, I went hiking instead of climbing. I headed down south to the Sangre de Cristo mountains with Jules where we met up with her bro Brian and spent the weekend camping and hiking in an idyllic mountain setting. Over the course of two days, we tagged the summits of Milwaukee Peak, Pico Asilado, and Tijeras Peak. Check out this link for the elevation information.

All in all, a good time was had by all. The weather cooperated, the whiskey flowed like water, and we saw nary another soul the entire time out there. For more pics, check out my Sangres gallery.

Warning: amateur foray into political analysis.

Steven Den Beste attempts to answer one of his reader’s questions, namely why do bills with riders get passed in the Senate.

He spends some time explaining the difference between the British and the US systems of government, and then describes how bills get passed in the House and the Senate, concluding that bills get amended all the time by both chambers. There’s some more discussion about big states and little states, but that discussion isn’t relevant to the question, which another reader clarifies:

“… Tom meant ‘riders irrelevent to the original stated purpose of the bill’; for example, adding a dairy subsidy to a bill on regulating pornography (or vice versa). In many parliamentary systems, such a rider would be deemed out-of-order and rejected by the Speaker of the House; however, it appears to be quite common in US politics.”

To this Den Beste responds that the process of making law is an ugly one. This is in fact true, but I found his answer unsatisfying in the sense that stating the process is ugly doesn’t explain *why* it’s ugly. Making sausage is gross because you are dealing with scraps of dead pig being shoved into the intestines of said pig. If you can understand why scraps of dead pig are gross in and of themselves, then you’ll know why the act of making sausage in its entirety is gross.

So I’d like to clarify Den Beste’s answer. Making law is ugly because humans are involved. Humans who not only have their own desires and interests, but are supposed to represent the desires and interests of *lots* of other people. If you can understand that the way humans interact with each other is not via a nice clean set of standardized interfaces (APIs in geek talk), then you’ll know why the act of getting them to agree on a set of rules by which the rest of us abide by is not an easy one.

In a phrase, quid pro quo. Humans are about give and take, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. This behavior is far from bad. Rather, it’s the lubrication of society’s gears. We all bring different assets to the table, and when we want an asset from someone else, for the most part, there is an exchange of value. This happens every day at every level of society. It’s called compromise.

So it should be no wonder that our representatives have to compromise when they want to get a bill passed. Different representatives with different constituents will obviously have different interests. And perhaps the senator who has no strong feelings on porno but is very concerned about his constituents who are yammering because they can’t sell their milk is willing to vote against porno as long as he can take care of his destitute milk farmers.

And so on.

There are lots of other areas to explore, like the fact that if you’re willing to do a favor for someone means they’re a lot more likely to do a favor in return in the future (and conversely go out of their way to screw you if you don’t do them a favor), and so forth, but all I’m really looking to do here is give a quick and dirty answer to Tom’s original question. Again, the answer boils down to quid pro quo.

Incidentally, this is also the reason why the President hasn’t been given the power of a line item veto. If the President could just strike out the irrelevant riders from a particular bill, then that nullifies a lot of the bargaining power that individual senators (or representatives) have. Imagine going along with some bill that you kinda don’t agree with, but are willing to vote for in order to get something favorable for your own constituents, only to have your reward taken out by the line item veto. You’ve just given up your value (your vote) for nothing.