Never been one to let the carrier drop

For those of you unfamiliar, check out Tom Smith’s web site.

Some lust for gold and silver, and some for gems and jewels
But some want greater treasures, and they use their software tools
For some of us quest for knowledge, and we wants it undefiled,
But now and then you get a troll who thinks he’s Oscar Wilde.

Beware the Wiki Pirates, who sail the server seas.
They flaunt their fake credentials and their advanced degrees.
They control the information with bullying moderation,
‘Cause arrogance and online swagger trump your expertise.

No matter what your sources, no matter whom you cite,
He doesn’t want to hear it, ’cause he knows for sure he’s right
There is no compromising, no bargain or accord,
He’s never heard of you, or doesn’t like you, or he’s bored.

Beware the Wiki Pirates, they love to wield their clout
All day they’ll argue details that no one cares about
They don’t see as overreachin’ their demands for page deletion
Web pages are in short supply, and what if we run out?

Yo ho, yo ho, no one ever thought,
Yo ho, yo ho, in this web we’d be caught,
The Wiki’s meant to document the stuff the mainstream missed,
Instead we’ve got a pompous sot who’s building up his wrist.

So if ye’ve got a subject that really interests you,
Beware the Wikipirates, they’ve got nothing else to do.
Someday we’ll have a knowledge base with all you want and need,
Till then we’ll take cold comfort that they’re likely not to breed.

Beware the Wiki Pirates, who whine at our attacks.
They’re only trying to help us, never mind the rules and facts.
They’re just honest, not unpleasant, it’s not their fault that we’re peasants,
If we’d only see their brilliance, everybody could relax.

Beware the Wiki Pirates, that basement-dwellin’ band.
They regulate and obfuscate what they don’t understand.
The grief they give ya will reduce ya to trivia and minutiae,
And prayin’ that you really do get banned,
Only “public noteriety” will get you in their library,
Be grateful they’re all lost at sea… they’d try to delete the land. (Anyone know any project managers like this?)

Audio restoration plugin

Assuming they have a version that will play nicely with Digital Performer. Oh, and for Intel Macs. [I am still planning a transition to Intel Mac for my audio recording stuff in the nearish future]

When I was a kid my dad had pictures of these clowns
He hung them on my wall and wouldn’t let me take them down
I didn’t understand then and I still can’t figure out
What those goddamn clowns were so sad about
A clown was my boss at every job I ever had
Clowns run all the record companies that ever said we’re bad
A clown pretended to be a girl who pretended to be my friend
Ths world is run by clowns who can’t wait for it to end

I have yet to meet a kid not scared to death of clowns
They can’t walk and they don’t talk they’ve got painted on frowns
A clown with a gun I hope I never see
Would he shoot himself or shoot me?
A clown taught every class I took at my old high school
Clowns all wear Speedos when they hang out by the pool
Clowns dress up like cops and threaten to call my folks
This town is filled with clowns who don’t get my jokes
They fall on their asses
It takes lots of practice
I have nightmares filled with clowns and you’re there too
You have a big red nose and stupid floppy shoes
You’re becoming one I can see the signs
I hate clowns almost as much as I hate mimes

I was wondering if anyone knew where I could buy a Krosp costume?

Shear Panic, the game

WordPress is going to have to change the format of their page sooner or later.. I mean, imagine I continue to live, and blog, for 30 years.. can you visualize what the sidebar with every month you’ve written a entry in would look like? 😉

As various of you know, one of the things I occasionally do is port code back and forth between using Oracle, MS SQL, and Mysql as database engines. One of the problems that has perpetually been a thorn in my side is that MS SQL didn’t have a equivilant to the handy MySQL LIMIT clause. Oh, you could achive the same effect with sub-selects and use of the TOP keyword, but it was ‘expensive’ – whereas LIMIT querys always execute very quickly. This matters very little when you have 10,000 or 100,000 rows, but get up into the tens of millions and it’s a problem.

Well, as of SQL Server 2005, there is a solution that executes, to all appearances, as quickly as the MySQL LIMIT clause. It’s detailed in this blog, but I’ll give the overview.

There’s now a function called ROW_NUMBER() that returns the current row number of the query. You can’t *directly* use this to define a range (as in SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY column) AS RowNum WHERE RowNum > 1000 AND RowNum < 500) but you can create a temporary object, and then select from the output of it, like this:

WITH testRN AS (SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY field1) AS RowNum, * FROM test) SELECT * FROM testRN WHERE RowNum BETWEEN 500 AND 1000;

I’m currently using this function to dump a 219 million row table, a million rows at a time, and I don’t see any performance degredataion as I move deeper into the table, so I’d say it’s a pretty good solution, unlike the many LIMIT clause suggestions out there in network land that use sub-selects.

Well, today I had all sorts of fun with http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/. I doubt if I’ve changed the world, but at least I got to post my questions. (A few of them anyway..) and read and vote on the questions of others (mostly good, although people are really stupidly obsessed about this birth certificate thing. Who cares? He’s doing the job. Do *you* want to be POTUS? I sure don’t..

Kayti introduced me to Girl Genius, and while I really, really wish I could find naked pics of her (I searched and searched. The internet has failed me. It’s supposed to be a infinite pr0n generator, but there’s no luscious nudie pics of either Agatha Heterodyne or Ferretina anywhere that I could find) the comic is sometimes funny, always beautifully drawn, and just plain wonderful. “Fools! I will destroy you all! Ask me how.”

This of course led to me rediscovering the humor of Tom Smith, filksinger extraordinaire. Very funny. Death Sheep 8 – Baaaah!

Other than that, I’m planning on going out tonight to the K1Speed EV Go-Kart racetrack in Anaheim tonight, which should be entertaining.

Kayti has been reworking Numbermining’s web site – or rather, giving it a web site at all. I especially love Allie Cat’s resume. As you can see, at the moment we’re not taking ourselves too seriously, which makes me happy. Like having to cut my hair to get a job, having to have a company web site that contains no jokes, cuteisms, or sheerisms would make me very sad.

Sadly, I missed the news about this little event. Very, hmm, funny?

for google to have a A record for wwww.google.com?

Well, last night I finally replaced qmail on my main mail server with courier. I’ve been meaning to do this for months – qmail doesn’t actually check recipients before queueing messages – preferring instead to send bounce messages – which causes a unplesent phenomenon known as backscatter where spammers burn cycles – sometimes significant numbers of them – by dumping a bunch of spam into your queue which is difficult to deliver. (Not to mention that bounce messages from forged senders really qualify as a sort of spam themselves, even if they’re not selling anything)

The migration wasn’t *entirely* painless, but it was pretty close. I renamed all my .qmail files to .courier files (using this possibly lame script: http://sheer.us/svn/perl_tools/renamer.pl), moved all the contents of /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains into /etc/courier/aliases/virtualdomains and added a @ sign in front of them (i.e. so radioalchymy.com: eben became @radioalchymy.com: eben), created entries in /etc/aliases for all of /var/qmail/aliases (to do this, the script cd /var/qmail/alias; for i in `echo .qmail-*`; do echo $i : `cat $i` ; done was very helpful), coiped /var/qmail/rcpthosts to /etc/courier/esmtpacceptmailfor, ran makeacceptmailfor, copied /var/qmail/locals to /etc/courier/locals, ran makealiases, edited /etc/courier/me to contain my fqdn, created a file called /etc/courier/locallowercase  (without this courier is case sensitive i.e. Sheer@sheer.us is not the same user as sheer@sheer.us, which will annoy almost everyone), edited /etc/courier/courierd to make DEFAULTDELIVERY=./Maildir/ instead of ./Maildir, and aside from fixing a couple of .courier files that had been relying on qmail’s setting every enviornment variable under the sun, I was done.

The upshot of this is that if you can’t reach me via email, you should email me at my gmail account and tell me. 😉 I only mention the blow-by-blow above in case someone else is doing the same conversion, comes across this page via google, and wants a overview.

In other news, recent events have caused me to install – via cygwin – exim on a windows machine, and the result is a suprisingly well-performing li’l mail server. If you need unix-style mail serving on windows, give it a try!