All posts by John Goerzen

Our New Pickup!

General, Humor

Yesterday, we got our new pickup! It is exactly what we wanted. We didn’t need one of these yuppie trucks that works year-round, goes faster than 55MPH, and has a fully intact body. No, what we need is something that we can use every other week or so to haul stuff off to the dump. Something that works most of the year. Something cheap.

So I’ve assembled some photos of this wonder. We’ll begin with the high-quality metal body:

Click here to read more (and see more photos)…

Next up, the jug of antifreeze it came with, “just in case”:

Next, the luxurious interior:

And now, the high-quality floor — only one hole in 25 years:

Recent bodywork to improve the exterior:

Loose mystery wires at the rear bumper:

And finally, this wonder of modern transportation in all its glory:

The Yes Men

Entertainment / Arts, Politics

Greencine just sent us The Yes Men, a hilarous real-life documentary about a group of activists who run a website that parodies the World Trade Organization. The funny thing is, people periodically think that these guys are the real WTO and invite them to appear on TV, speak at conferences, etc. And they do it.

The film documents their various hijinks. Whether its from a program recycling human waste to end 3rd-world starvation and boost the profits of McDonald’s, or an assertion that private schools would lead to fewer people that question the WTO, or even an outlandish costume resembling the male anatomy, the really horrifying thing is that everybody thinks they’re serious. The real people at these conferences think that they are absolutely serious in their descriptions of the WTO. They were even quoted in the Canadian parliament.

It’s a fun film to watch, as well as being eye-opening. It is shocking what people these days are willing to accept in the name of free trade.

No More Captcha

Entertainment / Arts

Well, I’ve got to say, Drupal’s captcha module is a huge disappointment. The idea is good but the execution is terrible. It caused serious confusion for the session management mechanism, causing people to be randomly logged out, or even sessions confused between different people. That’s a huge security risk, and just made the site so unusable that I couldn’t keep it on.

The good news is that I upgraded to Drupal 4.6.0 in all of this, and the new spam module looks much nicer than the one in 4.5.x. So maybe this will keep me happy for awhile.

Be Gone, Comment Spam! (Again)

Online Life

I’ve had a lot of trouble with comment spam. This blog has blocked many thousands of comment spams. And unfortunately, it’s blocked a few of Cliff’s legitimate posts, too.

So I have switched to the new captcha module for Drupal. In case you don’t know, a captcha is an automated test designed to tell humans and computers apart. It often takes the form of a graphic with letters or numbers in it — letters or numbers than humans can read, but computers can’t.

I used this idea before with WordPress and it was 100% successful.

So now, you can prove that you are a human right when you make a post — and you will be told instantly if the post is accepted or not. And if it is, it appears instantly.

A lot of comment spam is arriving via trackbacks, and captchas can’t be used with them, so I’ve disabled trackbacks for now.

I think this should make blogging a lot less annoying.

This change also applies to the other Drupal sites hosted here: The Haskell Sequence, Forest of the Plains, and Rail Passenger.

I’ve Switched to Darcs

Software

I’ve converted 24 public projects from Subversion or Arch to Darcs, preserving full history, as I mentioned earlier. It all went very smoothly. I’m even maintaining my Arch utilities in darcs :-)

Some small observations:

  • Committing early and often is good.
  • When a commit is virtually instantaneous, it’s easy to commit early and often. A commit in darcs doesn’t require it to hit the network.
  • Branching is a frequent need and is done far to infrequently. But Darcs makes it even easier than Arch. Very nice.

I’m Switching to Darcs

Software

I’ve been using Arch/tla/baz for quite awhile now; I switched from Subversion awhile back. But they’ve got a bunch of things that annoy me. Offline working is clumsy. Performace is bad, and to make it even approach decent, you have to dedicate a huge amount of space to a revision library cache. Commands, even with baz, are clumsy and require an inordinate amount of typing. It’s still better than CVS and SVN, with its merging and all, but still — it’s been annoying.

Enter darcs. I’ve been keeping an eye on it for awhile, and it looks like it’s become quite stable, useful, and fast recently. I tried it out awhile back, and it wasn’t really “there” yet. I tried it out again this week, and must say that darcs is great. I’m converting all my Arch and Subversion stuff to Darcs.

The thing that really impressed me is this Darcs mirror of the Linux kernel Bitkeeper repository. Darcs is fast over this, far nicer than Arch was (I did a similar project in Arch awhile back), and it uses less than 1GB of disk space for a complete mirror.

Oh, and I wrote a 100-line Haskell program to convert Arch stuff to Darcs: arch2darcs. You can see an example of a converted repository at here. There’s also a program called Tailor (I didn’t write this one) that does a bidirectional sync between Darcs and CVS or Subversion. Sweet.

I’m happily converting the rest of my Arch and SVN stuff to Darcs today. Woohoo.

Randomly-Generated CS Paper Accepted at Conference

Humor, Software

Now this is absolutely hilarious. A randomly-generated computer science paper has been accepted to a conference. Not just that, but the grad students behind the program that generated it are raising money so they can attend and deliver a randomly-generated talk.

Read the paper and you’ll probably burst out laughing.

If you don’t know much about computer science, it may look shockingly real.