What ever happened to 'I disagree with what you say, sir, but I will defend to the death your right to say it?'

I just LOVE drivethrurpg.com.

All sorts of RPG goodness in PDF format, available generally for 30 to 50 percent off of cover price, with minimal DRM bullshit. "Just enough," says the guys running it, "to make sure that Joe User realizes he shouldn't be emailing copies to all of his friends."

I'm playing with m0n0wall, looking for a nice little 'firewall on a cd' I can plop between our router and our network, transparent and bridged.

Anybody have anything they'd like to reccomend?

Useful tricks would be bandwidth shaping and all the various NAT permutations. It looks as though m0n0wall might do what we need, but there might also be something better.

T'would be somewhat nifty if /. would remember which comment you used, if any, to change somebody's friend/foe status.

If Bell Sympatico is a wholly separate and distinct business from Bell Express-Vu, Bell Mobility, and Bell Telephone, with no inherent advantages dealing with Bell Nexxia as compared to every other DSL reseller, why the hell can they bundle DSL service with Digital Satellite (from Express-Vu) and/or cell phones (from Bell Mobility)?

How can you claim 'separate company' on one hand, and 'integrated billing' on the other hand?!

Grumble grumble stupid Bell grumble

Anybody have any favorite anime/manga/comic stores in/around Toronto they'd care to reccomend?

Is that how you spell 'reccomend?' I'm too lazy to check dictionary.com, I'll admit.

Looks like there's been a massive fibre cut, somewhere near Sudbury, is my understanding; it's taken us off line, as well as Barrie, Windsor, and others.

Audio recordings of the 9-11 commission hearings from a few days back are available, for free, at Audible.com.

This might already exist, but if so, I haven't seen it; I just came out with it during an innuendo war.

Some pr0n star, say Jenna Jameson, should come out with a 'best of' set on DVD, and call it....

"Jenna Jameson: The Box Set"

Having just spent the morning tracking down how to make qmailanalog work with the qmail files that are generated by multilog, the current qmail logger of choice, and not by splogger, the old logger of choice, when qmailanalog was written, I will now write things down here for my own edification, as well as any others.

This information was compiled via Life with Qmail, the qmail mailing list archives, the poor qmailanalog docs, and some cursing.

1: The logs your're looking for are in /var/log/qmail/send, probably. Strangely enough, this is both email being sent in, and email being sent out. /var/log/qmail/smtpd is not at issue.

2: The logs timestamps are in tai64 format; they need to be in tai64nfrac format. See below for a c program to do this.

3: Therefore, you takes your qmail log, and runs it through tai64nfrac. This converts the timestamps.

4: Then, you runs it through the matchup program that comes with qmailanalog. This converts the log file from mutliple lines per session to one line per session, sendmail style.

5: Then, you runs the output of THAT through the 'zwhatever' programs, such as 'zoverall,' to get the stats you need.

The trick here, obviously, is that the logs aren't in the format that qmailanalog wants, and qmailanalog was never updated to deal with that fact. That, and the tai64nfrac program isn't included with the qmail programs.

Here's that program, gotten from http://www.qmail.org/tai64nfrac and hopefully slashcode won't mangle it into uselessness.

/* $Id$

Convert external TAI64N timestamps to fractional seconds since epoch.

Written by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
This work is in the public domain.

Usage:

tai64nfrac < input > output

Expects the input stream to be a sequence of lines beginning with @, a
timestamp in external TAI64N format, and a space. Replaces the @ and the
timestamp with fractional seconds since epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC).
The input time format is the format written by tai64n and multilog. The
output time format is expected by qmailanalog. */

#include <stdio.h>

/* Read a TAI64N external format timestamp from stdin and write fractional
seconds since epoch (TAI, not UTC) to stdout. Return the character after
the timestamp. */
int
decode(void)
{
int c;
unsigned long u;
unsigned long seconds = 0;
unsigned long nanoseconds = 0;

while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
u = c - '0';
if (u >= 10) {
u = c - 'a';
if (u >= 6) break;
u += 10;
}
seconds <<= 4;
seconds += nanoseconds >> 28;
nanoseconds &= 0xfffffff;
nanoseconds <<= 4;
nanoseconds += u;
}
seconds -= 4611686018427387914ULL;
printf("%lu.%lu ", seconds, nanoseconds);
return c;
}

int
main(void)
{
int c;
unsigned long seconds;
unsigned long nanoseconds;

while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
if (c == '@') c = decode();
while (c != EOF) {
putchar(c);
if (c == '\n') break;
c = getchar();
}
}
}

So the wife and I catch a few minutes of a show on A&E called 'Cleveage.' It's about Western civilization's fasination with breasts and cleavage throughout the ages. Pretty standard stuff.

Now, this is a very sensitive subject for the wife, as she's a very small woman. 34A or so; multiple pregnancies wern't good to her. She was never a well-endowed woman to begin with, and she's from a family of large-breasted women. So, growing up, she got a lot of what I'm sure her family called 'good natured fun' made of her, but it left it's marks.

As an example, she completely ignored the parts of the show illustrating that most models, cheerleaders, Hooters girls, and so on, go for falsies or implants, but latched onto the offhand remark by a lingere designer that they aim for '34b, 34c, 36c and 36d.' "See?" she hectors, jabbing a finger at the screen. "See? They didn't even mention A."

I point out that all of the women I know who are well-endowed hate it. They get stared at, they get treated as though they were idiots, they can have trouble fitting clothing, they can't sleep on their stomachs, they get sore backs, in fifty years they'll get bruised knees, and so on.

I've suggested surgery multiple times to her; not because I particularly care what size her breasts are (anything more than a handful is wasted, after all.) She, however, won't go for it. (As an aside, the lingere guy also mentioned that they require their models to be natural; apparently fake breasts don't sit in the bras properly, as they don't have the requsite natural consistancy or malleability.)

I was thinking about it, last night, however. I'm sure a lot of women would say 'men wouldn't understand.' That is, in my most humble opinion, bullshit. Men have just as much a 'Hollywood ideal' to live up to as women do. "But men can just work out to get a huge physique, where was women can't exercise their breasts larger." Yes, and have you seen what Arnie did to get his massive muscles? It's NOT a matter of spending an hour at the gym three times a week; hell, women can do some pec work and get a size boost (not to mention perkiness boost) out of it.

But, as I was thinking along those lines, I realized that we Westerners do a hell of a lot of artifical and surgical augmentation to ourselves on a regular basis. From something as simple as make-up (the very name of which, I think, is a sublte joke) to diet and exercise regimines, which are, more often than not, very artifical, to dentistry. Why is it that putting a bag of saline water in your breasts such a terrible thing, yet you see absolutely no problem with putting wire guides on your teeth to haul them into a certain alignment, punch multiple holes through the fleshy bits of your body to put in shiny things, use various chemicals to alternative improve and then hide your complexion? Hell, the wife's on birth control strictly to try to pump up her hormone levels to a) lessen her acne and b) hopefully bulk up her breasts. Why is artifical physical augmentation so wrong when artificial chemical augmentation is OK?

So, I brought up a few of these points last night, then said in chorus with her 'but that's DIFFERENT!'

I don't think so.

I have long believed that freedom of the press is a very good thing. Nevertheless, freedom should come with responsibility.

I'm in the process of listening to Al Franken's 'Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.' Now, I'm not going to claim that he is giving Absolute Truth, but he does have some pretty well documented cases of outright lying and what not by journalists.

And I was thinking, why is it that every profession with such a profound ability to fuck people over; doctors, lawyers, engineers, money mangers, and so on, have both strict professional guidelines, and methods of removal from the professional field?

Therefore, I propose for discussion a few things that, although leaving freedom of the press, should stop them from so (in many cases) overreaching their bounds.

1. Just the facts, ma'am.
   You are no longer covered by 'freedom of the press' if you start opininating or editorializing. Period. "President Clinton today said 'blah blah blah.'" Fine. 'President Clinton today demonstrated what some would call a compelete lack of knowledge of foreign affairs when he said 'blah blah blah.' Not fine.
2. Quotes cannot be taken out of context.
   Admittedly, this one's a bit harder. But something like 'the line that you're wanting to quote must be preceeded and followed by the same amount; if you're quoting a ten second sound clip, you'll have thirty seconds worth of quote.' There should be a better way of doing this.
3. Disbarment.
   There needs to be some way of preventing somebody who has blatently abused their 'rights' as a journalist from continuing to practice journalism. Perhaps a board similar to the bar, the AMA, whatever, where grivences can be brought up. Something. But when CNN can spend a week harping on something, then give five second 'retraction' and never speak of it again, that's bad.
4. New retraction policies.
   Wouldn't it be interesting if a newspaper, or news show, had to give equal billing to a retraction or correction that they did to the incorrect story? If the NYT has a front page, above the fold, half-page long story 'Michael Jackson Eats Babies!' but it then turns out that he eats *with* babies, the retraction/correction couldn't be a dinky little half-inch blurb buried somewhere in the text, but would have to be the same dimensions and what not? If CNN spends a week claiming that John Kerry sacrifices virgins, but it turns out that he sacrifices virgin oil, they need to say that just as many times, during the same prime-time slots, and so on? Admittedly, it would be hard, again, to differentiate between honest mistake and willful ones, but still...here's where that journalism board comes back in.

I'm all for a free and open press. Unfortunately, the concept gets abused, pretty much as a matter of course these days, and I think something really needs to be done. These ideas, the best I came up with off the top of my head.

Why is it that TiVo is decried for associating viewing info with postal codes, yet Google is recommended for searches, and yet they have the ability to track and tie together all of your searches?

How is TiVo telling us that Janet Jackson's breast is popular a bad thing, yet Google, let alone other search engines telling us exactly the same sort of thing is OK?

One of the downsides, or at least potential downsides, of being an INTP is my unfortunate tendancy to see something neat, throw myself whole-heartedly into it for a few weeks, 'master' it, then become bored with it.

Well, now I have a hankering to try my hand at building and painting resin Anime 'garage kits.' This could lead to tragedy.

There was a much publisized game show, a while ago, about a Japanese man who was locked in an apartment and forced to live only on what he could win through mail-in contests.

I am, however, having a real bitch of a time finding references to it online. Anybody happen to have a pointer in the right direction? His cute little nickname, a remembered news article, anything like that?