I literally laughed out loud.  More of a bark.

I needed some help with a PHP function.  I typed php help in Google, and the first match was phphelp.com.  Pretty obvious, I guess.

And under the heading “How send mail using the mail function”, I get this.  Seriously, look at it.  Looks like I’m going somewhere else for help.

If you don’t know of them, and you use Firefox, I’ve been remiss in not exposing you to Greasemonkey scripts.  They are little bits of JavaScript that do cool things to the way sites are displayed.  Install Greasemonkey through the previous link, then try Gmail Beautifier, Google Search Results Ultimate Makeover, and, if you use WordPress, Akismet Auntie Spam.

I beat my Windows Mobile Solitaire for the first time today.  I scored 3696 points and solved the puzzle in 228 seconds.

In other news, my work XP notebook crashed today.  Hard.  It won’t boot in Safe Mode.  It won’t boot in Recovery Mode.  I’ll be playing Alt-F8 debugging games over the weekend so that I can be productive on Monday.

My question is, does Microsoft have a rebate or exchange scheme for these items?  Could I trade in my valuable Solitaire win for a machine that just, say, works?

Sweet baby cheeses.  I would have thought that devising theoretically-unsolvable Solitaire puzzles would be difficult, a problem beyond Microsoft’s grasp.  But I have now played 1.232 trillion games of Solitaire on my mobile phone, and have yet to win a single one.  Shenanigans!

The Cowon A2 is a portable media player (think juiced-up iPod).  I can strongly recommend it.  Key features:

• Mounts as a USB volume, so it’s Linux-compatible (as well as Windows and Mac)
• Has a 4-inch 16 x 9 (widescreen) high-contrast LCD display (much larger than the iPod’s)
• Plays a ton of formats, many more than iPod, including XviD and FLAC, as well as your normal MP3, AVI, etc.
• Can output RCA A/V, or record from any RCA A/V source (such as your DVD player, TiVO, VCR, camcorder, etc.)
• Ten-hour playback time on one charge
• Case folds back into a viewing stand.  Case is also really cleverly designed, to allow open access to ports, switches, buttons, and speakers.
• Ability to work as a USB host, so you can plug flash drives, digital cameras, and so forth into it
• Lots of features I haven’t explored yet: use it to read documentation, see lyrics to your songs as they play, graphic equalizer, tune/record FM radio, schedule A/V recordings

Wishlist:

• Wi-Fi connectivity plus web browser (via USB WiFi adapter)
• “Shuffle” toggle from within playlist browser rather than through Music Options
• Automatic recognition of letterboxed NTSC, to expand into full-screen 16 x 9

All these should be possible through firmware hacks.  I don’t know if anyone is working on it yet.

In Windows, the easiest way to convert DVD video to video viewable on the A2 seems to be DVD Decrypter followed by AutoGK.

The presumably-foreign spammer who keep asking me to go to their site to talk to a pretty girl have a list of names they are pulling from, apparently.  Clue: you won’t pique my interest by talking about a girl named Hellga [sic].

Bandwidth!  Bandwidth bandwidth bandwidth.  Now that I’m back to mental acuity, as it were, I need to look into how long I’m locked into my DSL and DirecTV contracts.  DSL is unacceptable.

I switched to DirecTV because my local cable company doesn’t carry Setanta.  But at this rate I’d rather have the bandwidth and download (read: steal) the matches.  I max out at 90kBps.  70 is more normal.  That’s all my copper can handle, living in what the phone company considers the boondocks (read: in the middle of a city).

Bandwidth!

My household ISP’s name resolution server is down.  Drat.  It has gotten to the previously-inconceivable place where I would rather give up electric lighting than web access.  If anything is a sign of the information age having arrived, this is it.

I can browse on my phone and access my email (all specialized GMail options are lousy on a phone, but that’s a story for a day when I can touch-type the account, rather than use a phone keyboard.)

More here and here.

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

where phonenumber = your 10 digit phone number

(Courtesy of tech-recipes)

Here is a graphical picture of my hard disk usage:

(click to enlarge)

The teal on the left is my ripped CD collection.  The red and gray in the upper right is movies.  Everything else is everything else.  And this is post cleanup, going from 90% usage to 76% usage.

My needs are outpacing hard disk space, even with the huge hard drives available now.  I think I need about a petabyte to be really comfortable.

(Image created with GdMap 0.7.5)

Google Book Search: Buy your books by the chapter.

ITunes model for books?  Will publishers go for it?

I got a web-enabled phone today and thls is my first mobile post.  The site doesn’t look too shabby on it either.

I am training myself on the handwriting recognition now.

In letter recognizer:

L ne qvlck brown aox jumlyfd over tre laz y dog.

In Transcriber:

i-re quick brown fit jumped over the lazy dog.

More work to come.

i-nequick R 71

Google has a new calendar function.  Predictably, it’s really slick.

Also, try texting stuff to 46645 (GOOGL).  Try define sherried, for instance.  (Fun, huh?)  Or 1 furlong per fortnight in parsecs per microsecond.  Or 1 usd in gbp.  Or price squeezebox.  Or lakers.  Or gdp of norway.  Or the proposition 91775.  Or translate “this is impressive” to french.

“As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.  Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share.  Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?  Is this fair?“

Client-side PHP – The Daily WTF.  Holy crap.  Why not just publish your password on your homepage?

Internet Explorer hit by new phishing flaw.  I hear a death knell.  Anyone not switched to Firefox yet?  You are missing out.

Pop-up Potpourri: Funny, funny error messages.

More Legal Protection for FOSS Developers: “The Software Freedom Law Center has launched the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is designed to permit certain projects accepted as members, such as Wine, uClibc and BusyBox currently, to apply for and then benefit from nonprofit tax-exempt status… [W]hat the Conservancy is offering is, for those accepted as members, to take that administrative load off of you developers, because they know how to do this, and you probably don’t.”

Got Time?: “Please program in more days.”  Or, if you like, “Please teach your programmer arithmetic division.”  It hurts the brain.

Google Reader, for syndicated site feeds.  In Beta.  Good, needs a lot of work and a blogroll export feature.

Context: You’ve recently switched to apache2 with separate vhost configurations in sites-enabled and you are trying to get CGI scripts to execute in a directory called something other than “cgi-bin“.  You’ve turned on the ExecCGI option for the directory.

Symptom: You are getting “Access Forbidden” errors, and your server’s error log shows “Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden”

Further context: You’re not running any RewriteRules.

Solution: Uncomment the line AddHandler cgi-script .cgi in your main apache2.conf file.

Reason this is the error you get: Hell if I know.

In closely related news, ScotchFinder is back.

If Blogger stopped publishing to your server four months ago, change (or ask your sysadmin to change) “PasswordAuthentication” to “yes” in your sshd config file (check /etc/ssh/sshd_config).

In related news, mcgees.org is back.

Last weekend’s upgrade, as it was intended, was unsuccessful. After setting all my installation options, RedHat told me it didn’t support my hardware. At least it had the grace to inform me before it reformatted my hard drive. So I took the burst of energy, the Mountain Dew, and the gummi worms, and applied them to getting the things that were bothering me fixed in my Debian installation. I succeeded in getting X running, a bit of a chore under Debian, switched out mouses, and upgraded all my packages. I wanted Firefox, so I used Konqueror to get the installer from the website. Konqueror wasn’t that bad, though, so I was on my way to Blogger to report that fact when Konqueror crashed. So go ahead and ignore that recommendation.

I couldn’t get the Firefox installer to run, so I looked around, and found the proper way was to set apt-get’s distribution to unstable so Firefox would show up in the list of packages and use dselect to install it.

This server runs Apache 2.0 under Linux.  I tried to archive an access log using mv mcgees_access_log mcgees_access_log.2, then I executed touch mcgees_access_log, assuming that Apache would continue writing to mcgees_access_log.  It didn’t.  My second guess would have been that it would start appending to mcgees_access_log.2.  It didn’t do that either.  Instead it stopped writing log files and I lost three weeks’ worth.  Restarting Apache fixes the problem.

Wow, I just received a 4-1-9 letter en français.  New export markets for Nigeria?

Ten years ago, Ron Avitzur was sneaking into the offices of his former employer, Apple, to continue development on a project that had been officially discontinued:

Q: Do you work here?

A: No.

Q: You mean you’re a contractor?

A: Actually, no.

Q: But then who’s paying you?

A: No one.

Q: How do you live?

A: I live simply.

Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing here?!

(via Richard Eriksson)

Joel has some interesting ideas on software pricing.

Google begins to digitize paper books.  Amazing potential.

If you install the Audible DownloadManager for iPod & iTunes, don’t spend a long time debugging why it doesn’t seem to do anything. Simply download a program from Audible, and it will automatically be added to your iTunes library. No documentation I’ve been able to find, but there you go.