End of month misc

Caught The Bourne Supremacy last night. My review: Eh. It wasn't bad and I'd definitely watch it on cable but it seemed to be lacking something. I thought the ending looked tacked on and a reliable source has told me it was added after the initial ending was tested and found to be too ambiguous. Was an ok movie for a summer night getaway. I think the theater we saw it in didn't plan for it to get many people because they ran it in the theater which is the hardest to get to (up multiple escalators, and most importantly, several levels removed from a concession stand).

Travel

I'm returning to Chicago at the end of the week to do more estate disposal stuff. Fun fun fun. Will be there Friday through Monday, returning Monday night.

Obscure Perl comment:

From the totally obscure department...I have a script I wrote on June 28, 1998. I know this because the name of the script is x980628. Naming things wasn't one of my strong points at IBM.

Anyway, this script has a singular purpose: run through a two column list, ignore the first column (just copy it to STDOUT), and run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address in the second column. I've run this script literally thousands of times over the years. I've been very annoyed that output got buffered if you piped the output to a file.

I need to point out here, briefly, that I'm a pretty good Perl programmer. Not a master, I hate the object oriented Perl and generally avoid it to this day, but otherwise, I think I'm pretty good.

So, why on earth did it take me, what, six years to realize all I had to add was (wait for it):

$| = 1;

to the stupid program? I mean, I used that all over the place in tens if not hundreds of other programs (including the infamous nph-index script that slowed www.ibm.com to a crawl for years).

Duh.

Our ever growing MP3 collection

I moved our mp3 collection to a 120Gb RAID array earlier in the month. We have about 28 days' worth of music encoded (I'd guess 99% from CDs we own in case there are any RIAA weenies reading this). With that much time invested in ripping the CDs I decided I didn't want to run the risk of losing it all in case a drive died. I looked into backups but why bother with backups when I can create a RAID array easily under OS X? Anyway, I also found an entire box of CDs from when I moved from 99 Battery Place to Sydney in 2000, an entire case which I hadn't listened to or ripped in over four years. So that's this weeks project: ripping another 40 or so CDs.

Ok, that's one of this week's projects.

So, how's the weather?

Rainy, humid. I could use a dry stretch here. It gets tiresome hiding in the rooms which have A/C. The top floor gets into the 90s during the day and that's with the windows opened.

Work

I'm researching server planning for a friend's startup. Also looking at MovableType 3.1 now that they've re-re-jiggered their licensing. I continue to toy with getting a G5 Macintosh but I think I will put that on hold until after the wedding and possibly honeymoon. I may be starting another blog, mostly as a place to test some ideas out and not intended to be a real “blog”.