Random Crap

Random Crap:

Man Sues Himself for Vehicle DamageWhen a dump truck backed into Curtis Gokey’s car, he decided to sue the city for damages. Only thing is, he was the one driving the dump truck. … After the city denied that claim because Gokey was, in essence, suing himself, he and his wife, Rhonda, decided to file a new claim under her name.

Robo-carp could monitor fishy businessThe 80-cm (32-inch) carp can also use sensors in its mouth to monitor the concentration of oxygen in water, a key to fish health, said project leader Tetsuo Ichikizaki of Ryomei Giken, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, in Hiroshima, western Japan. … The robotic fish, which cost 30 million yen ($250,000) to develop from a previous prototype, is unlikely to meet the fate of many of its living counterparts, which are sliced up and eaten raw as sashimi. I always though koi were fish you Japanese didn’t eat as it was unlucky to do so…

Mini pya! Flood: (I’ve finally caught up!!!)

mario goal
Click image to start the animation or view it in the gallery.
ゴール・・・ – Goal

(vid) 立ちション – Standing Shaun – prank done to someone while he’s peeing on what appears to be on a frozen lake. doesn’t look like anything was “damaged” in the process
(vid) 240個のねずみ取り – 240 Mouse Traps – what happens when you have 1 ping pong table, 1 ping pong ball, and 240 set mouse traps?
(img) 盗難防止 – Theft Prevention – pretty neat trick!
(img) 街灯の娘 – Lamppost lady – interesting advertisements
(img) ハート – Heart – a human heart model made with valentines candy!
(img) フロッピー? – Floppy? – floppy disk cookies
(img) 時計 – Clock – made with furniture. actually nice design
(img) ニンテンドーDS Lite – Nintendo – DS Lite – cardboard version even comes with a stylus toothpick
(img) アンビリーバブル! – Big Words – low on self esteem? visit this encouraging bathroom
(img) 世界のレベル – World Level – what an amazing shot for this curling game
(img) 高速アクセス – Fast Access – bullet holes through your hdd
(vid) バブルリング – Bubble Ring – think puffing out smoke rings is hard, imaging puffing out bubble rings underneath water. this amazing dolphin can do it
(vid) ハプニング動画47選 – 47 Animated Events – yet another dumb and dumber video
(img) 擬人化 – Personification – toothbrush sex

lowfat – document viewing with a twist (from /.) – What he’s missing are some pretty screenshots, but if you have the patience to download a 30-40meg video, this software looks pretty neat. Reminds me of that other software where you use your hand to manipulate: Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Pentagon plans cyber-insect army (from /.) – The Pentagon’s defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions. Yet another reason to fear insects.

Guy snorts wasabi… (from Rayalome) – I wonder how much he got paid to do that. After his wasabi snort, he snorts water and milk, trying to soothe the pain.

Now THERE’S a couple that knows how to fight!A Mexican couple were recovering separately after a marital spat got out of control and saw them firing guns, throwing knives and hurling homemade bombs, Mexican daily Milenio said on Monday. … Espinosa told reporters he was glad his wife had suffered burns, while Contreras said she was only sorry she had not “hacked off his manhood” during the fight.

Fake $1B Bank Notes Found in Apartment– Federal authorities investigating a man who smuggled money into the country have seized 250 counterfeit bank notes in billion-dollar denominations, they announced Tuesday. It’s like that WalMart lady that tried to pay using a million dollar bill and demanded change. Hahahaha!!!

CollegeHumor mega-mix! (from MS newsgroup) – Who put this together? He was nice enough to include his own darts clip. You’ll know when you see it. A compilation of funny videos of people being dumb and pranks being played.

Hot and cold running beer…A woman thought she was in heaven when beer instead of water flowed from the taps in her apartment in west Norway. … Beer in Norway is among the most expensive in the world with a 0.4 liter (0.7 pint) costing about 50 crowns ($7.48) in a bar. … It turned out that a worker in a bar two floors below had mixed up the pipes on Saturday evening, wrongly connecting a new barrel to a water pipe leading to Gundersen’s flat. The bar got water in its beer taps.

Motorcyclist Clocked at 155 Mph Jailed“He pulled over once he saw all of us, without incident,” Riley said. “He just said he didn’t think he was going that fast and he didn’t know we were behind him. He thought he was only doing 120 or 130.

hoffman soap
Woud you ever feel clean again after using Hoffman Hasselhoff “soap”?

Keeping Mum

Mr. Bean is back! This British movie was quite funny, though Mr. Bean was a bit more serious in this film than his previous ones. Yet another movie I’d recommend you watch if you have some free time.

keeping mum poster

Official Site
IMDb: 6.9/10 (601 votes)
Yahoo! Movies
Amazon.com

Spoilers: (Show)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Just watched this movie yesterday. I thought the movie was pretty fun. It was a mixture of comedy, detective, and sexiness, though I’ll admit I didn’t solve the mystery before they did. Then again, I wasn’t really trying.

kiss kiss bang bang poster

Official Site
IMDb: 7.9/10 (6,570 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B / Yahoo! Users: B
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com

Spoilers: (Show)

There wasn’t much to the plot itself, it was the the way the story was told that made it fun. Something I’d recommend to watch if you have time.

Referer Parser

So I spent most of yesterday working on relearning how to parse Apache logs and how to get it automated and onto a working online user interface, which was rather fun. Haven’t really had much time to do web development after I started working, hence why I decided to use an existing framework and slowly build off of that.

So what I ended up with is a simple parsing of my logs directory. It’s a bit unpolished, but for now, it’ll do.

* links do nothing in this preview

When you click on a link, it calls the tool I wrote called and passes in the log file I want (i.e. parse.php?log=access.log.2006-03-10.gz). The tool can distinguish between compressed files (.gz) and raw files (no extension). If it detects it’s a gzip file, it’ll decompress it and then rerun the tool with the location of the extracted file.

What the tool does is generate the results in XML format, similar to the following:

<domainlist>
<domain name="search.yahoo.com">
<referer from="http://search.yahoo.com/" to="GET /blog/ HTTP/1.0" date="2006-03-11 04:01:56" ip="125.247.105.242" />
</domain>
</domainlist>

I actually group the entries by domain. There’s no sorting yet, but I didn’t find that necessary in my case, since all I really wanted was a easy way to see who’s linked my site and be able to collapse all the google ones if they’re not interesting.

After it generated this file, it would automatically zip that file (reduces my ~2MB xml files to ~100KB) and then email it to me. I’m trying to figure out if I’m allowed to schedule to run this once a day instead of having to do this on demand.

The next thing I needed was an XML viewer. I was contemplating at first to use IE or Firefox, but decided against it. IE was finicky about expanding and collapsing items. Firefox just hang when trying to load a 2MB xml file. So I searched online and the first couple of links in my search result ended up with either: MindFusion XML Viewer or IBM XML Viewer. The IBM one is no longer available, so I went ahead and got the MindFusion one. It was free after all and the screenshot looked decent. At first it didn’t show me all the information I wanted as fast as possible, but after enabling Name and Value in tree and Expand On Load, it was a lot better.

The final thing I wanted to do was to require authentication in order to load this page. Turns out there was a easy way just by creating a users file (htpasswd -c ~/users username) followed by a .htaccess point to that file. You can find more information on how to do this if you’re running Apache by clicking on the link under my reference list below.

Here’s an example: access.log.2006-03-11.gz

Finally, to give credit for references I used:
Apache log file parser class
PHPMailer
Using User Authentication

Religious Joke

I was watching Keeping Mum (review to come later), and Mr. Bean was searching onilne for religious jokes, which got me searching for the site “Giggle with God”. Turns out the site doesn’t exist and was probably created for the movie only, though the several jokes posted on that page when I paused are in fact real jokes. So while, I was searching for this site, I ended up searching for religious jokes too and found this really funny one:

A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her five and six year olds. After explaining the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother,” she asked,”Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?”

Without missing a beat one little boy answered, “Thou shall not kill.”

Most of the other religious jokes gave a few chuckles, so they weren’t really worth posting.


Random Crap:

Short pya! flood:

(img) 撃ち抜かれたハート – Bullet through the Heart – bullet going through the Ace of hearts in slow motion.
(img) 禁止事項 – Prohibited Items – No Durian! Doesn’t have a fine associated though…
(img) あったかメガネ – Hot Glasses – flame on!
(img) よろしくお願いしますnya – Forgive me please – cute praying cat
(img) キリスト – Christ – do you see Jesus?
(img) wan・・・・? – puppy flower basket
(vid) 食事の邪魔をするnya! – Don’t Disturb Me While I’m Eating – cat pushes dog away when dog tries to take his food
(vid) 棒術使い – Crazy Pinatas – I always thought a game where you give a kid a bat and blindfold them and let them swing crazily was a bit crazy
(img) パンチングマシーンならぬ… – Not a Punching Machine… – I wonder what you’re suppose to do in this game… spank?
(img) ウッシッシ – Totoro Bush
(img) それとなく似てる件について – The case isn’t that it’s similar – don’t really care about the airplane, but the bunny is cute.

Man Says Stripper Delivered a Rob-O-GramA retired salesman alleged a stripper and her friend beat and robbed him in his home. John Skinner, 54, said he was on his way to Bible study on Jan. 23 when exotic dancer Maureen Murphy, 25, knocked on his door and offered him a free strip-o-gram.

Canada’s lost, lonely whale feared killed by boatThe young male whale, which often played with boats in an apparent search for companionship, may have miscalculated the tug’s power and was pulled into the blades, a Department of Oceans and Fisheries biologist said. so sad…

Cat Comforts Grieving Orangutan at Zoo – these articles about different species mingling with each other are coming up WAY TOO OFTEN NOW.

Live action Pacman running around a library (from Deadlock) – I would’ve appreciated this during finals. Then again, I never went to study in the library.

Absence makes the glass glow fondlyWhen either person picks up a glass, red light-emitting diodes glow on their partner’s glass. When one puts a glass to their lips, the other glass glows brightly. Article wasn’t too interesting, but I did start wondering what technology is this based off of. Is there a wifi connection on the glass itself? Would the glass still glow in remote areas or in the middle of nowhere where technology and cell phone signals can’t reach?

A plant that glows when thirstySome people like to talk to their plants. Now, students at Singapore Polytechnic say they have created a plant that can communicate with people — by glowing when it needs water. – Maybe now they can make people glow when they’re being sarcastic, so I don’t have to guess.

Mayor Probed in ‘Speed Trap’ Check CaseCrosby told Morgan that he had to either write another check that didn’t have the words “for speed trap” written in bold letters or face the charges in traffic court. … “As mayor of this city, if I accept that check from that gentleman, I’m admitting we run a speed trap, and that’s a bald-faced lie,” Crosby said Tuesday. Coopertown lies about 20 miles northwest of Nashville on a state highway used by motorists to travel between interstates 24 and 65. The town generates nearly 30 percent of its revenue from traffic tickets.

Tree-climbing robot (from /.) – A remarkable, if slightly creepy, tree-climbing robot is being developed by robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon and several other US Universities. Check out the video.

Considering the aesthetic and psychological effects of your color choices (from MS newsgroup):

One thing I found interesting is what particular colors do for the eyes, how they are received by the parts of our eye and what happens when those messages are sent to the brain. Color plays a large roll in how we react to situations, how we relax, how we are stimulated, and even affects the way we eat and socialize with others.

RED: Did you know that red was one of the first colors a baby can discern, that male babies prefer yellow based reds such as tomato colors. And that female babies prefer blue based reds such as raspberry. The chemical reaction of red while eating will cause a person to eat more, and stay longer. Thus making this an ideal color for restaurant decor or in bars.

ORANGE: This color is associated with low quality or being very accessible. This color is used in both the restaurant and hotel industry to convey low cost to passers by. Wether its a lobby, a roof, or a bill board, it gets our attention and tells us its a bargain. Orange is not what one would use to bring about a feeling of elegance, but of something informal or very casual.

YELLOW: The color yellow is transmitted to the brain faster than any other color, in nature yellow represents caution (hornets, bees, and fire). In our world yellow represents caution in warning signs, construction signs, and fire trucks. Babies will cry more when surrounded by yellow, and studies have shown adults to lose tempers when around yellow. Its a very high anxiety color, but in turn is good for drawing attention, or for packaging products. Yellow flowers in the foyer are said to be great when selling a house, the people remember the house with the beautiful yellow flowers after a long day of home shopping.

BLUE: This is the number one favorite color of people by far, it represents respectability, responsibility, knowledge, caring, and trustworthiness. Country type blues are the number one color in homes, but blue is not a color that sells houses well. Blue is a color that encourages fantasy and at the same time is very tranquilizing. This color is ideal for calming, such as doctors offices and in the rooms of over-active children. Blue is not a color that goes well with eating, if you want to push away from the table sooner (or the in-laws are coming)…..dig out the blue dishes.

GREEN: These are living colors. Green is a great color around food and diminishes sweetness. Green represents wealth and money, makes people feel secure and tended. Some health disorders such as eczema, diarrhea, and stomach upset tend to lessen in a room painted in green.

BROWN: This is a very friendly color, its will represent someone as being believable. Browns work very well in interiors, and its known to be a warm and friendly color.

GREY: Its the only color without an after-image, known as a color representing creativity. Grey is best for a background color and will inspire people to do more for a longer period.

BLACK & WHITE: These are not colors, but are known as the power twins because of the bold statements they make. Black represents dignity, sophistication, refinement, and authority. White represents delicacy, purity, and cleanliness. White also encourages precision in the workplace.

Quadruped humans discovered – interesting news video on how some people walk on all 4 limbs.

Fate/stay night Episode 10

Yay! More FSN!

Fate/stay night Episode 10 – A Peaceful Interlude

fate stay night 10fate stay night 10fate stay night 10fate stay night 10fate stay night 10fate stay night 10fate stay night 10fate stay night 10fate stay night 10

Spoilers: (Show)

Difference between TKIP and AES

If you’re using WPA-PSK (Pre-Shared Key), the Linksys WRT54GL gives you two options for WPA Algorithm: TKIP and AES. I knew AES was supposedly the newer and better solution, but I wanted to find out what the main difference between the two was. After searching online for a bit, I found this Wireless FAQ.

19. Q: What is TKIP?
TKIP is a quick-fix method to quickly overcome the inherent weaknesses in WEP security, especially the reuse of encryption keys. TKIP is involved in the IEEE 802.11i WLAN security standard, and the specification might be officially released by early 2003.

20. Q: What is AES?
AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), a chip-based security, has been developed to ensure the highest degree of security and authenticity for digital information, wherever and however communicated or stored, while making more efficient use of hardware and/or software than previous encryption standards. It is also included in IEEE 802.11i standard. Compare with AES, TKIP is a temporary protocol for replacing WEP security until manufacturers implement AES at the hardware level.

RedOctane Ignition 3.0

In my previous post, I mentioned I started playing this DDR like clone called StepMania. So I’ve got fed up with the Kraft Dance Pad. I finally figured out why I sucked so badly, not to say that I’m good, but I’m not as bad as I originally thought I was. The dance pad has what StepMania refers to as the Joystick Axes Problem where Up+Down won’t work and Left+Right won’t work because they implemented the the up, down, left, right buttons as joystick axes instead of buttons so to a computer up+down and left+right is never possible simultaneously.

So I asked around and apparently the industry standard for home dance pads is RedOctane Ignition, where 3.0 is the current version which supports PS1, PS2, Xbox, and PC USB. I was told to just search eBay and look for clones. The clones themselves costed more than used/refurbished Ignition 3.0s, so I decided to get the Ignitions instead. The going price for used Ignition 3.0 on eBay was ~$50 shipped. I decided to get 2 since I could probably save on shipping and it’d be fun to play with 2 people or even enter solo dual pad mode. Ended up purchasing 2 for $94 shipped. Sent payment on Wednesday and got my package today.

Setting it up was actually pretty fun. I didn’t know how they were going to break the foam apart to ship in such a small box.

redoctane ignition 3.0redoctane ignition 3.0redoctane ignition 3.0redoctane ignition 3.0redoctane ignition 3.0redoctane ignition 3.0

Turns out it’s puzzle-like and it’s working out pretty well. I gave it a try and all the buttons are associated with a button and not just the axes.

So I finally got my first B score in StepMania, which I’ve never gotten before with the Kraft Dance Pad (now I know why), though I still get E’s for over 50% of my attempts. I am getting better though, or at least I hope so.

Favicon Picker

So I decided that my bookmark toolbar real estate was getting expensive, so I was wondering what I could do to give it more real estate. I saw a bunch of browser screenshots from other people, and saw a couple where no name was next to the icon, but instead the user would use the image of the icon (usually called the favicon – mine is detective conan) and I thought that was interesting. I’ve been doing that for some time now and I can have so much more bookmarks on my toolbar, it’s amazing.

However, I’m a bit irked with sites that don’t have the favicon setup, so I have to leave the name next to it. Then I remember there used to be something I can do to change the icon, even if the site didn’t have one. I googled for it and found: Favicon Picker, however this version wasn’t compatible with the latest Firefox 1.5. In one of the comments, it pointed to Favicon_Picker 0.3.0 is available for Firefox 1.5 Beta. This version worked! and now I can update all my icons and removed their names.

My precious bookmark real estate is back! I know it didn’t matter on my Dell FPW2405 24″ LCD, but on my laptop that has a 12″ LCD and can only run at 1024×768, bookmark real estate gets precious.

Here’s a piece of what my bookmark toolbar looks like:
toolbar