Archive for September, 2006

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The Numbers

Saturday, September 30th, 2006

Over the past 2 weeks I watched all Lost episodes from season 1 and 2. Can’t wait till the show starts again next week. Wohoo!

To kill time I’m now catching up on all the wild theories regarding the numbers and assorted stuff. Here is some interesting stuff:

Mapquest places you in the middle of Pacific Ocean when you use them as coordinates. Google maps actually shows a real island close to the location of these coordinates.

Someone use the nifty web application to plot the shortest path between Sydney and LA. This would likely be the path taken by most flights between the two cities with some slight variations. Our point, seems to lie just a little bit off that course…

You may want to check out the Shaw-Basho Polynomial thing. One would think that a named polynomial would turn up in Google at least once. But this one only appears in LOST related articles. Obvious fake, but very creative one.

Then there is that stupid Lost Experience immersive reality games. There are tons of clues and snippets of information that are churned out by the game producers, and analyzed to death by players. I’m not sure how much of this is actual LOST canon.

Someone put together all the video snippets released in the game so far and posted them on Youtube. If you are to lazy to click on the link, watch it below:

So the numbers are supposedly factors in the Valenzetti Equation which predicts the time till the collapse human civilization or something like that. The goal of Dharma institute is to change one of these factors by modifying the environment, human behavior and etc..

Interesting stuff, but unless this info trickles into the show somehow then it is just useless peripheral fan service. If they do include this footage in the show, then it would be an awesome treat for the guys who spent countless hours cracking the Lost Experience clues…

Someone at Lostpedia managed to transcribe the Blast Door Map from Swan. Very awesome work:


Blast Door Map
click to enlarge

What is in the Flame hatch? Is the crossed out hatch the fake door that Sayid found in the fake other’s village? There are two other un-named hatches with dashed outlines on there that are left to be discovered.

Note the reference to a zoological facility – this may help to explain the polar bears on the island. Also there is a manufacturing facility note on the map. Hmm…

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Posted in entertainment, lost | No Comments »

How do mermaids reproduce?

Friday, September 29th, 2006

Penny Arcade totally stole this joke from that Futurama episode, but it is still funny:

Penny Arcade - Mermaids
comic © penny arcade; click to enlarge

Here is a question to ponder: why do mermaids have boobs?

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Posted in comic, humor | 10 Comments »

Service Engine Soon

Friday, September 29th, 2006
Service Engine Soon

My dad’s car had the scary Service Engine Soon light flicking on and off at random for the last 3 years. Every once in a while, it would just switch on and stay lit for few days. Then it would go off, and stay off for months on end. He saw several mechanics about this in the past, and most of them said the same thing.

The problem was either a faulty Oxygen sensor going haywire, or there was something wrong with the way onboard computer handled the signal from the said sensor. In either case, it was nothing serious. It was only one out of n similar sensors that was fucking up and if something was really wrong with the oxygen levels they all would be going crazy. There were essentially two options:

a. go to the dealer, spend mucho dineros to do a thorough diagnostic and replace some of the onboard electronics, or

b. just ignore the damn thing, keep on driving, and do periodic checks to make sure nothing else goes wrong.

Of course my dad picked the second option, and chose not to worry to much about it. Then, few days ago, when he realized that he needed to do the state inspection and the stupid light just happened to be on for the last week.

He decided to visit our local mechanic, The Turkish Guy (from now on I will refer to him as TTG). TTG is a very nice guy actually, but I can never remember his name. My whole family goes to him, and we never really refer to him as anything else but TTG. I bet to him we are The Polish People or something like that so it all works out. :P

I tagged along because my dad’s English is about as good as my Japanese (all I know is Konichiwa) so someone had to do the translating. TTG futzed around with the electronics for a bit, and managed to shut the light off using some 1337 car-hacking skillz. He recommended to wait 48 hours before doing the inspection so that the onboard memory is overwritten with fresh data, and the O2 Sensor Failure message disappears.

Naturally, 15 minutes after we pulled out of his garage the damn thing flicked on again. Somehow I knew that something like that would happen. Stupid asshole dashboard light! Sigh…

So we sat there staring at it for a while, and in the end decided to just risk it. There were only 2 days left on the old inspection sticker and it just had to be done. If the car would fail, then at least it would give us an incentive to haul it to the dealer and get that annoying bug fixed once and for all.

I ended up tagging along for the inspection trip too. I had to drag myself out of the bed early so that we can hit Rahway before work. I was pretty much napping in the car on the way there, and I only woke up when we pulled into the inspection lane and the guy told us to get out and wait on the sideline while the run the tests.

As I was climbing out of the vehicle, I glanced at the dashboard and I saw the light was off. The car passed with flying colors, and they haven’t even noticed that there was some shit going on with the sensors. WTF?

This was either blind luck, or that car is just seriously fucking with me.

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Posted in personal | No Comments »

Mutt with SSMTP

Friday, September 29th, 2006

Here is how you set up Mutt without a working sendmail or exim installation. Most linux boxes I work with already have some kind of mail transfer agent installed by default, so I never really had to do this. My cygwin install on the other hand only had a bare bones, minimalistic ssmtp application that forwards emails to an SMTP server. This is in fact perfect for my needs. Here is how you set it up.

First you tell mutt where is your MTA – add this line to your .muttrc:

set sendmail="/usr/sbin/ssmtp"

You may need to configure your ssmtp to send out the emails properly. Here is what you should have in /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf:

root=username@youremail.com
mailhub=smtp.yourisp.com
rewriteDomain=youremail.com
hostname=youremail.com
FromLineOverride=YES

Note that mailhub is the address of the SMTP server provided by your ISP. For example, in my case I would use smtp.comcast.net as mailhub, but and terminally-incoherent.com everywhere else.

SSMTP has an annoying tendency to rewrite the From line as it sends out emails. In my case it ended up being my_local_username@mydomain.com instead of myemail@mydomain.com.

To prevent this put this line into your /etc/ssmtp/revaliasses:

local_username:myemail@mydomain.com:smtp.myisp.com

This should do it. Enjoy! :)

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Posted in software, technology | 6 Comments »

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