Plaidophile

Gingerbread is a very green OS. By that I don't mean it's particularly eco-friendly, though; I mean it is imbued with the color green. Here are some screenshots I took after upgrading my Nexus One today. (Warning: massive image dump)

For the past two and a half years, my commute has been slowly wearing me out and killing me. So for the past week I've been driving to work, and the difference is profound. When I get to work I'm immediately productive instead of taking an hour or so to get into the swing of things. When I get home at night, even after an 11-hour workday (due to my own recent obsessiveness over my project) I still feel energetic and don't feel like just collapsing on the couch and crying for an hour. It's an amazing difference.

I'll still try to ride my bike on nice days (since it's good exercise and doesn't wear me out like the bus or BART), but holy cow, I am so over mass transit now, at least for my daily commute. (I'll still use it for going downtown to meet up with people, since it's still cheaper and quicker than parking and of course leaves more drinking opportunity and whatever, but work pays for my work parking.)

Basically, San Francisco mass transit sucks and it was pretty much killing me. And I'd rather be alive (and even happy!) than smug.

For some reason a lot of people care deeply about what the actual lyrics are to the theme song of Spliced!, especially a couple of words which are rattled off fairly quickly and seem like they might be out-of-place in a kids' show (but of course, Spliced isn't a kids' show).

On a tiny little island
In the ocean called Pacific
There's a mixed-up group of creatures
Who are really quite horrific
Stitched together with whatever crap was
Found or could be grabbed,
Re-invented in the bowels of a lab.

Spliced! They have all been spliced;
Half baked and diced
And regurgitated
By some crazy doctor (Spliced!)
Who went vamoose
And now you'll pay the price; They have all:

Bits of human, chunks of lab mouse
Swap the hind legs for an udder
Splice a parakeet with donkey feet
And season it with butter.

It's no ordinary island, do we have to say it twice,
It's no ordinary island 'cause they're spliced, spliced, spliced!

I finally got sick of how crappy my laptop's hard drive was for Logic, and upgraded to a nice big SSD. Holy cats this thing is fast. 190MB/sec write speeds, booting is really fast (it's kind of weird having all my startup apps start up right at startup!) and everything works great. I also managed to get it for $445 shipped; the deal at SSD Solutions seemed too good to be true, but the reviews said it was legit, and yeah, so far it's exceeded expectations. Not a refurb, not an obvious bootleg... I think they might be loss-leading in an attempt at becoming a "featured merchant" on Amazon (since right now they're pretty much buried in the listings).

Transferring data from my old drive was pretty easy. I used a SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter and the Mac OS X data migration tool (which was also nice enough to let me turn off transfer of my iTunes folder, which is way too big and is now going to live on my NAS, with all the problems that implies).

I think the most striking thing about it is just how quiet my computer is when the CPU fan hasn't kicked in. I hadn't realized how much of its idle noise was the hard drive. It's also running a lot cooler and presumably the battery will last longer. I am also of course looking forward to not having Logic constantly complain about a "system overload" every time I try recording on a project that I haven't gotten entirely in the readahead cache after letting my computer go to sleep for a couple seconds.

As an attempt at getting rid of some stupid spammers who are also trying to exploit nonexistent scripts on my site, I'm trying to redirect all requests that contain /../ in the original request URI (which are basically guaranteed to be an exploit attempt) elsewhere. However, it looks like mod_rewrite is only performing the substitution rule on the resolved path (i.e. it's treating /foo/../bar/ as /bar/) despite the fact that the REQUEST_URI environment variable still has the original /../-containing expression in it. I know my regexp is written correctly because the rule is working on other things (such as QUERY_STRING and HTTP_REFERER).

So, does anyone know if there's any configurations to mod_rewrite which might fix this behavior?

It's not a big deal but I've noticed a high correlation between the spammers who get through and the folks who are trying to find stupid CGI exploits and I figure anything that trips them up can only help.

In C++ you can mark a method as being abstract pretty trivially, e.g.:

class A {
  virtual foo() = 0;
};

which makes it so that you can't instantiate anything that derives from A until the method foo has an implementation. This is a very useful pattern.

What it's missing, however, is a way of insisting that every instantiable instance of A must provide its own implementation of foo; for example:

class A {
  virtual foo() = 0;
};

class B: public A {
  virtual foo() {}
};

class C: public B {
};

It would be nice if in this case, there were a way to make it so you can't instance C until it gets its own implementation of foo.

Of course, the situation I've run into where this would be exceptionally useful (having a complex DOM which needs per-class script bindings) is kind of nichey, and I can't really see it adding much value to the language as a whole. Still, I can dream...

Since Song Fight Live is coming up in a few months (June 11-12 in New York!), I'm trying to get another album done by then. I've got about 2/3 of a decent-sized album right now. This is a great time for people with specific requests of back-catalog songs of mine to put in.