shaver

As “beltzner laments”:http://www.beltzner.ca/ifeelafel/archives/000451.html, comment spam is making the feared transition from annoyance to full-fledged scourge.

In response, I just added the “CloseComments”:http://thought-mesh.net/MTCloseComments.html plugin to bitchcake’s MT installation, after discovering that all the comments that went in more than 14 days after the post were spam. By happy happenstance, the converse is also true: spam comments come in uniformly to posts that are more than two weeks old, likely due to the orbital rate of various search engine crawlers.

After that, I worked around the “MySQL 3 limitation on multi-table delete”:http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Rewriting_subqueries.html to remove the pre-existing comment-turds, and now I have a shiny diary again.

I don’t have much to add beyond what “Hoye mentioned”:http://neon.polkaroo.net/~mhoye/blarg/archives/001736.html, but yes, “this”:http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=f3d6dba0-21ac-4d23-a182-39c5fd8efe26 is pretty disturbing. I’m guessing that Canada’s position on next year’s “press freedom ranking”:http://www.rsf.fr/article.php3?id_article=8247 won’t be quite so high. Not that the Citizen’s/Southam’s “press-freedom record”:http://www.globaljournalist.org/archive/Magazine/FPhero-20023q.html is all that fantastic itself, but I guess this is worse.

Happy “Year”:http://chineseculture.about.com/library/weekly/aanewyear2004a.htm of the “Monkey”:http://neon.polkaroo.net/~mhoye/snapshot-pics/chimpgonewild.jpg!

Coop has been exhorting me to “marinate with miso”:http://coop.deadsquid.com/2004/01/index.html#20040101, and recommended, especially, “this recipe”:http://www.wolfgangpuck.com/recipedetail.php?Alias=REWP3099. That does look good, indeed, but I’ve had very little sake luck of late (both LCBOs that I went to were out of it, against all expectations). So I figured, sure, that recipe was finely honed by Wolfgang Puck and Nobu Matsuhisa, but how hard could it be to make miso and booze tasty? I decided to throw caution to the wind and marry my nice red-brown miso with a bottle of “Dragon Stout”:http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/rateresults/221/747/ that I just happened to have lying around. We’ll see how it is when I pull the flounder out on Friday (that is not a euphemism for anything, “beltzner”:http://www.beltzner.ca/ifeelafel/archives/000449.html#000449) but it sure smelled like a winner.

That didn’t resolve tonight’s dinner issues, though, so I brined some chicken breasts with lemon zest and pepper, and then pan-fried them to what I consider to be within the bounds of perfection. Since I’d had such fantastic luck with the technique during Sunday’s impromptu “steak au poivre pour quatre”, I figured I’d try my hand at a reduction sauce to finish up, and it turned out pretty darned well itself. A little heavy on the lemon — the sauce was “bright” in that “do not look into laser with remaining eye” sense — but otherwise a fine piece of work. As a bonus, deglazing is a great way to make the cleanup a lot easier.

Tyla made a very nice salad.

I wonder if I’d like any of “Jamie’s music”:http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/music2003.html. I bet “iTMS”:http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/ can’t help me very much with this problem, but maybe I’ll poke around tomorrow and see if they have any relevant samples.

We finally got around to spending some quality time with the “eyetoy”:http://www.eyetoy.com that Jacob gave us for Christmas. A little TV-watching, a small group of friends, some booze: a perfect setup.

I think our favourite games so far are the rocket rumble and “kung foo”:http://ps2media.ign.com/ps2/image/eyetoy1104031med.jpg. Emily’s been on her “last game before she goes home” for about ten games now, and counting.

If you own a PS2, I highly recommend it as a party game. I’m not sure if it’d be as much fun solo, but with three or more, it’s an utter riot.

(If there’s anything cuter than Tyla playing the boxing game, I don’t know what it is.)

We are an international company, and so there are occasionally elements of slang that cause confusion for our co-workers for whom English is not a mother tongue. Permit me to demonstrate:

16:37	<bzzz>	phik: all the bits are already committed
16:37	<phik>	bzzz: roger, thank you
16:41	* bzzz	just found roger’s description in dictionary: “if a man rogers someone, he has sex with them”
16:41	<phik>	hmm, well, yes, that is _one_ definition, when used as a verb
16:43	<bzzz>	aha. one more: “used for saying that you have received and understood a radio message”
16:43	<phik>	there you go!

I’ve been thinking about switching the mail system on bitchcake to use maildir instead of mbox format, mainly so that I can use a version of webmail that doesn’t take six months to open my wife’s old inbox. “This page”:http://www.pocock.com.au/linux-doc/mbox-maildir.html makes it sound like a man of even my meagre talents could handle it, and probably without losing anyone’s mail!

Should I be resisting this urge?

I’ve been working on Lustre recovery for quite some time. Probably a year and a half, I guess, and there was some good work done in there. Not all of the work was good, mind you, but I’m not totally ashamed of what I accomplished. After a few false-starts at the process, though, responsibility for that subsystem — some people would consider it an “aspect”:http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-aspectj/?dwzone=java because it cuts across so many otherwise well-layered subsystems, I suppose — has passed on to one of my co-workers. He’d assisted me a fair bit in the past, and I think he’ll do a fine job. Which means I won’t have to, at least as far as recovery is concerned, so I’m pretty psyched.

Instead, I have taken over responsibility for a few other Lustrey things. Don’t worry, I”m not hurting for things to do. (more…)

Looks like we’re on track to make “Apple customers”:http://clusterfs.com/db/pr/2004-01-07.html kinda sad when “they type ls”:http://www.off.net/diary/2004/01/#20040106. (Actually, there’s some excellent work underway to improve that dramatically for the next release after Lustre 1.0.x, which I would like to think was in some way inspired by “my previous work in this area”:https://bugzilla.lustre.org/showbug.cgi?id=1645. I don’t _actually think I contributed a lot to the rocking “LVB”:http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/dlm/reviewbook/maniplvb.html work that Peter and Phil and Zach are doing, but I would like to.)