The best movies are those you’ve never heard of. Why is that? Shattered Glass is one of them. This one kept me riveted the entire time. It’s the true story of Stephen Glass, young hot-shot reporter for the prestigious New Republic magazine, and the eventual discovery that he was fabricating most of his stories.
Turns out that Hayden Christensen isn’t half bad as an actor. We can probably forgive him that little Star Wars thing.
A young woman from Kiev grabs a camera and dosimeter, hops on a motorcyle and travels through the Chernobyl “dead zone.”
The result is a powerful series of photographs .
I had forgotten that Mr. Camp already pointed to this earlier. For those of you who also read his weblog, (and you should), sorry for the double post.)
You’ve probably noticed that every day, the media makes us painfully aware of the world’s sorry state. We’ve had a couple of wars, economic “downturns”, kids with bombs strapped to them and whatnot. Folks hanging the charred bodies of murdered civilians from bridges was the last straw–I’ve decided to stop watching the news for a while. Put my head in the sand, so to speak.
In the meantime, whenever the world, (i.e. America), has been in a funk for any length of time, we tend to start some sort of happy-happy musical/cultural revolution. I say it’s about damn time. Of course I hope it’s not disco again this time, but at this point I’ll take just about anything.
Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother,
you’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’,
and we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive.
D. Keith Robinson has some ideas on handling clients when it comes the sometimes difficult task of promoting/explaining/defending the use of web standards.
Turns out there’s an obscure bug in some versions of internet explorer that choke on http POSTs when using SSL. Suddenly, form validation scripts get inadvertently triggered and variables that you’re absolutely certain are there just go POOF! but only once in a while. Makes it a bugger to debug.
For those interested, the following addition to either httpd.conf or a valid .htaccess file in Apache seems to be the solution:
SetEnvIf User-Agent ”.MSIE.”
nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown
downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
SPF: Sender Policy Framework looks to be a very workable solution to forged mail headers and spam.
Excitedly, I opened the “new entry” window in Movable Type and prepared to enter something. Then…
Oops! Noodles are done… run into kitchen. Lay the noodles out nicely and cover with the meat sauce that took me like three hours to make. I use the term “sauce” loosely, as it ended up with a consistency of say, beef barbeque. Oh well, I finish putting together my very first attempt at real lasagna and head back into the office.
… I have no idea what I was going to write. None. It was probably something devilishly clever too, dammit!
So I wrote this instead.
It used to be that weekends were made for Michelob. Now, they’re made for software (and a little scotch). This past weekend I had to get my hands dirty with:
Postfix configuration
Courier IMAP/SSL setup
pop-before-smtp with Postfix
Goofy details of Debian’s Apt system
Spamassassin
Apache/MySQL/PHP5 install
Tweaks to a couple of Python scripts
CVS Repository move from one server to another
ViewCVS.cgi setup
Awstats install
Importing Blosxom entries into Movable Type
And several I’ve forgotten or would rather not mention
Dealing with a few of the above felt like I was looking for my ass with both hands and a flashlight, but for the most part, it was successful. And for some reason, satisfying and a helluva lotta fun.
Ballmer:
I want to make sure [a user] can’t get through … an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad,” he said.
Oh goody.