Joe Maller: Site Notes Archive - June 2002

June 30, 2002

Install MySQL on Mac OS X. It's not as scary as I expected.

update: I just spent way too long fighting with "Error 1045: Access for user ... denied" messages. When assigning users to the MySQL database, use this page, Adding New Users to MySQL, as a guide, it worked on the first try.

another update:Using PHP to send HTTP headers which will post variables without using forms.

June 26, 2002

I finally posted a preliminary version of War Strolling & Cabbing.

June 25, 2002

Last week was a good week for aliens and a bad week for cows.

UFOs visited sacred sites and tourist attractions in Sri Lanka, Chile declared an official UFO tourism zone, and Scotland claims to have the most reported sightings each year.

Argentine cattle mutilations continued (in English, some background with graphic photos, ew.), Ranchers are freaking out and the Argentine government is sending a team of scientists to study the dead cattle.

Chinese scientists are also on their way to study a group of Chinese pyramids known as the "ET Relics", said by locals to be a launch tower left by space aliens. Chinese pyramids? I had no idea there were pyramids in China!

Not to be left out, residents of South Carolina even got a (floating) piece of the action which is apparently unconnected to these strange round objects which washed ashore in New Hampshire.

Otherwise, the more conventional UFO sightings continue. These people have a lot of work to do.
Thanks to New World Disorder for getting this all started. And yes, I do find these reports amusing. A version of this posting is also on MetaFilter

June 24, 2002

Followup to yesterday's post: CNN has posted Victims of Terror, a moving collection of photos and brief obituaries of civilians killed in terrorist attacks in Israel this year. One of the things that struck me, besides too many photos of children and the elderly, was the victims' surprisingly diverse backgrounds. It reminded me of Portraits of Grief, the obituaries of September 11th victims published by the New York Times. Apparently, like America, the face of Israel mirrors the face of the world.

CNN also published a bizarre statistical estimation "based on a per capita comparison" of how many people would have been killed in other countries in comparable attacks. What exactly is the point of this? One is too many. A better thought experiment would be to pick a group four or five tables from a crowded restaurant, and then try to imagine all of those people blown to pieces in the next moment. Think about that every time the waiter asks how you're doing.

June 23, 2002

An excellent introductory tutorial on MySQL and PHP. This would have been helpful to me last night...

"CNN is ... fair, we're responsible in our reporting, we try to be as accurate as we possibly can be." I thought that was the tagline for Fox News?

Disgusting that CNN had to be threatened with losing the Israeli markets to Fox before admitting suicide bombing is absolutely barbaric, inexcusable and threatens all civilization. I wonder if CNN's Eason Jordan worried for his safety when his bosses sent him to Jerusalem? He should be worried, but that fear shouldn't be contained to Israel. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were suicide bombings, but most Americans still seem to think of September 11th as a moment of weakness and of suicide bombings as a foreign problem that can't happen here. I wish I were that optimistic.

June 20, 2002

Why is the telephone touch-tone key pad arranged differently from the calculator key pad? Similar, shorter answer here.

And now back to wondering about less trivial things...

June 19, 2002

Over the weekend I got a letter from Cid of CIDtalk. "CID" is not an acronym, it's a nickname (a unique shortening of Cindy).

June 13, 2002

CIDtalk linked to Everything on my Desk and All Day Ice Cream (why do so many people think the name is All Day Ice Cream Cone instead of All Day Ice Cream?)

I've never visited the site before, but it looks interesting. Also, I think I really like the term "Observational-ist", and might start using it even though it would probably sound pretentious in non-artsy company. I looked around a bit, but I couldn't figure out who's running the site or what "CID" stands for...

Lila and I took a moment to ogle "The World's Largest Duck Tape Flag" at Union Square this afternoon. Lila was more interested in her fingers.

The flag was created by "Canadian Duct Tape Sculptor" Todd Scott, commisioned to help celebrate 60 years of duct tape.

From the official, city-sanctioned sign:

The World's Largest Duck Tape U.S. Flag...
Measures 50 feet by 95 feet
Took over 150 hours to create
Equals the size of an NBA Basketball Court
Is over 13 miles of duct tape long
Equals over 1,120 rolls of Duck brand duct tape
Weighs over 500 pounds
Can seal Central Park from end to end five times
Can tape the Empire State Building 23 ¹/₂ times.

The Duck Tape products home page has more information about the duct tape flag and it's also mentioned briefly in this week's Village Voice. Last weekend Mr. Scott appeared on the CBS Saturday Early Show where he was credited as the world's only "professional duct tape sculptor."

True to form, duct tape was employed to secure the easels holding up the signs.

Was the dirty-bomb suspect Oklahoma City's John Doe #2 Bryan Preston has compiled a creepy, thorough and fascinating essay, that manages to be speculative without drifting into conspiracy theory. Executing McVeigh was a huge mistake. Were he rotting in a cell somewhere, at least he could be interrogated about potential connections to al Qaeda. There's also a Metafilter discussion about the possible connection, with additional links.

10% of this essay may turn up on the evening news tomorrow or this weekend, and if anything is substantiated, 70% of it will show up on one of the prime-time news magazines. Regardless, big media news was stumped yet again.

How's this for a crazy coincidence: Yesterday I linked to Enabling Virtual Hosts on MacOS X by Bob Davis. Today I got an email from Bob, who was visiting my site for Final Cut Pro information and saw the link. Amazing timing. Small world.

Bob mentioned that he likes helping people with computer stuff. Me too. Also, we both use three letter first names.

June 12, 2002

Last night I figured out how to get virtual hosts working locally with OS X's built in Apache web server (Web Sharing). I was very close but what I didn't know was virtual host declarations in the httpd.conf settings are only half of the process. On non-OS X machines, the second part involves modifying the computer's "hosts" file to include the additional host names. OS X uses NetInfo to manage all that information and the edits need to be made using the NetInfo Manager application in the Utilities folder.

This site, Enabling Virtual Hosts on MacOS X contained nearly everything I needed to know and confirmed that most of my early explorations were well-directed. The one major hangup I had was that the two virtual hosts were both returning "403 Forbidden" errors when I tried to view anything in those directories. I spent about an hour twiddling with settings and chmod'ing the files and directories over and over before I came across this perfect explanation in Apache's documentation:

In the case where file system permission are at fault, remember that not only must the directory and files in question be readable, but also all parent directories must be at least searchable by the web server in order for the content to be accessible.

I had mistakenly placed the site directories inside my Documents folder, which Apache didn't have access to read. I'm still new at this Unix stuff, so I didn't think to check the parent folders of the site directories, even though the concept is consistent with file sharing under OS 9. Anyway, moving the two website directories into the Sites folder, to which Apache has full read access, immediately cleared up the forbidden messages.

For the two test sites I'm working with, I decided to change their top-level domain from ".com" to ".joe". So now if I want to see my local copy of this site I just open http://www.joemaller.joe in any web browser on this machine. The URL http://www.joemaller.com still goes to the live site on my ISP's servers.

Using these modifications it's possible to tell your computer to ignore the internet and load any URL from a local copy. Cool as this is, it has the potential to really screw up web access. Back up the configuration files and keep track of what you're doing.

update: I forgot to link to Oreilly's incredible series Apache Web Serving With Mac OS X, which I've been consulting repeatedly. – posted 6/12/2002 01:17:05 AM

Region-Free DVD playback under Mac OS X came up when my friend Dave asked about watching a region 2 DVD of One Leg Kicking, a movie he filmed. Current software/firmware limits computer DVD players to five (5) region switches before the change is set as permanent.

DVD Region Codes are xenophobic, archaic and a nuisance, this information should be made widely available.

I haven't had a chance to try these out yet, so I'm not sure if any of them work.

• Mac DVD Resource
• DVDRegion 1.5 a region modification tool available on VersionTracker.
• Region Free DVD Conversion

Another possibility might be the open source DVD player VLC, although it probably can't do anything about region-based hardware lockouts.

I don't think it's illegal (under US Code Title 17, Chapter 12 §1201(k)(4)(D) -- third paragraph from the bottom) for me to talk about this, although it might be illegal for a "non-professional" to use the linked applications. Whatever non-professional means. It amazes me a law like the DMCA was ever passed.

I've been meaning to post this:

June 10, 2002

Just in case anyone is wondering what I'm up to, here's some of what I'm currently working on:

• Joe's Filters update (at least 6 new filters, probably more. new organization and bug fixes, hopefully a new registration engine as well.)
• A second chapter for an upcoming FCP book
• Packaging for Joe's Filters
• Printed/PDF documentation for Joe's Filters
• Transitioning the filters site to joesfilters.com
• transitioning the filters site to XML (write once publish everywhere?) That includes learning XML and InDesign.
• Transitioning the FXScript Reference to fxscriptreference.com
• Transitioning the FXScript Reference to a database model. That includes learning PHP and MySQL (I've given up on the various content management solutions I was testing)
• Automating the posting of new Lila photos
• writing several articles related to FXScript and video filters
• writing an article about CSS rollovers
• fixing my permalinks permanently (htaccess redirect?)
• figure out how to set up virtual hosts with the OS X Apache installation so I can have all my various web sites working locally. I almost had it, but wasn't sure how to differentiate without DNS and named servers. Once I figure that out, write about how to do it.

add learning how to work while helping take care of Lila and my plate doth runneth over.

June 9, 2002

My long, slow train ride to bizarro-world must be nearing the station: Ann Coulter and I agree on something. Back on September 14, I said the same thing about rebuilding the World Trade Center here and on MetaFilter.

Thankfully Ann reminds me that I'm still in the real world and that she's still nuts. The column is filled with her usual hate routine, attacking (in order): Arabs, liberals, Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Charles Schumer, the Maasai tribe who gave the US 14 cows (or was that a compliment?), Arabs again, Japan, Muslims, Aesthetes & Islam.

On a side note, somehow I'm in Google's top ten for "Ann Coulter sucks". Strangely, this is the first time I've ever used the phrase, however mentioning it will only push me higher up the list.

June 5, 2002

Of the 338 spam emails I've received since last Thursday (more than 56 junk messages per day), 40 contained "/remove.", 26 contained "/unsubscribe.", 25 contained "link2buy.com" and another 19 contained "qves.com". Altogether, those four terms isolate more than 32% of my recent junk mail.

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