Terminally Incoherent

Lost fans assemble! Seriously, Work kicked my ass, and I don’t have anything useful to post, so I’m just gonna go and play HL2 for a while to unwind. In the meantime you people go read this interesting post on symbolism in recent episodes of Lost. Or if you are lazy I will give you a super condensed version (my information compression is lossy, so go read the whole thing for more):

J. Wood notes that Juliet’s mark looks a little bit like the Rosicrucian Cross. Rosicrucians were a secret esoteric, mystical order established in 17th century. The served as a model for many later secret societies such as free masons and etc.. I’m still processing this stuff but it is very interesting.

Also, this is Rosicrucian chart:

And here is the map from the Swan blast door. Note that if you remove all the writing and markings, the lines drawn in the background create a shape very similar to the chart above:

What does this all mean? I have no clue. Possibly nothing, or perhaps something very significant. From J. Wood:

The Rosicrucians also were followers of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who also held to a very mystical cosmology. Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls, sacred geometry, and that concepts and matter could be represented numerically. At this point, the Valenzetti equation should come to mind, because that’s exactly what each of the 4 8 15 16 23 and 42 numerals are meant to represent.

Both DHARMA and Rosicrucian order had similar goals - to aid humanity in it’s growth and development through their secret work on the esoteric mysteries of the universe.

Of course I realize that many of these theories are just wild goose chases… Even if these references are completely unintended, I still enjoy reading them. They help me to experience the show on a completely different level than than a casual viewer.

And you have to give credit to the creators of the show for giving us all this material to meticulously analyze, and theorize about each week - intentionally or not.

This is totally dumb, but I just can’t figure out how to do this “in place”. I want to find all the files of a given type in a certain directory, and it’s subdirectories that were created in a given time interval. So for example, find all the jpg images that were created in 2006.

I can do it in 3 steps (4 if you count cleanup of temp files):

touch --date="01/01/2006" /tmp/t.06$$
touch --date="01/01/2007" /tmp/t.07$$
find ~/scans -newer /tmp/t.06$$ ! -newer /tmp/t.07$$ -iname "*.jpg"
rm -f /tmp/t.0*$$

It works, but it seems to be way to much work for something this silly. There really should be a way to do this in one step. What am I missing here?

It’s a pain in the ass to send shit to Canada. It really doesn’t seem like it would be. After all, they are just skip and a hop north from here. We have people flying in there on business all the time and it never seems like it’s a big deal. But apparently, you just can’t send stuff to them without jumping some some hoops at the customs stage.

Here is how this started: a dude called me asking for more “Rams” for his computer. I’m not that much into football, and I really have no reason to root for the St. Louis team, but whatever.

Or maybe he was talking about male sheep? I don’t know, but I’m open minded and I’m not gonna hold this against him. I figured he might need more RAM to watch his football and/or bestiality. Windows media player is getting more bloated with every release these days so adding memory seemed like the right thing to do in this situation.

I ordered a band new 512MB DIMM from dell. My football/sheep enthusiast he stopped by the office the other day, and I helped him to install it. I was really hoping that he will use it to watch sports, and not the other thing. The machine booted just fine, and was running without any problems so I sent him off on his way.

Next day he had to fly into Canada on an assignment. The laptop worked fine in the airport, and on the plane. But when he got to his destination, and actually had to do some work his machine refused to boot up. Agh.. Stupid asshole memory chip - why couldn’t it fail when he was here and I could have fixed it?!

Removing and replacing the DIMM did not help. So in the end we decided to just take it out and leave it running with just a single DIMM in there. Unfortunately, this essentially downgraded him from the 768MB to mere 256MB. Poor guy is iving in a world of slow right now, with his computer paging out to disk every time he moves a mouse.

I decided to send him back the old memory 256MB DIMM that he left with me in the office. I needed to overnight it, because he would only be there a short amount of time. In the meantime I would try to find out what the hell happened to the brand new 512 chip and order another one.

I filled out the UPS overnight air slip, and spelled out CANADA in big letters in the address field. I even drew a maple leaf and a moose next to it just for a good measure. Unfortunately my maple leaf came out looking like weed, and moose ended up looking retarded so I was pretty sure it’s going to get held up in customs.

Long story short, id did. I had to fill out an invoice form, attach a stupid NAFTA declaration statement, and state the reason for exporting the item. What a major pain in the ass. Even after going through all that, I doubt that he is going to get the memory shipped to him today. Sigh…

Remember my post about the unused Starbucks cards I got for Christmas? I forgot to mention that I also got an unused $25 gift certificate for Comp USA that I didn’t have a chance to use until this past weekend. I have a good excuse for that too - the closest Comp USA that I know about is completely out of my way. I regularly pass by a BestBuy, Radio Shack, and Staples which all pretty sell similar stuff.

The other day I actually made a point of going there and using up that useless piece of plastic. I walked around the store for 10 minutes and I could not see anything that I wanted that wasn’t too expensive, or stupid. So I walked over the game isle and started wading through the sea of crap that was there.

Half of the isle was taken over by a whole batch of RTS games, that all look exactly the same, have “empire” in the name, 7 sequels and 50 expansion packs each. Then there was a whole wall of MMOG’s that I just can’t afford to waste money on. And then there was sea of games that I either own, played, games I hate, and ones that I have no interest in whatsoever. So I was walking around and counting things off. Crap, crap, crap, piece of shit, hate this one, crap, Half Life 2, crap, can’t stand this one, looks dumb, crap…

Ok, here is a confession - I never played HL2 when it was released. I keep hearing good things about it, and I never fully get those head-crab jokes in online comics. I couldn’t remember why I never got it. I figured that I got distracted by bigger and better things, and just never got around to it.

So I grabbed the copy from the shelf, and looked at a price tag. It was $29.99, which was nearly a perfect fit for my $25 gift card. So I bought it, brought it home, popped the DVD into the drive and suddenly remembered exactly why I was avoiding it all this time:

At some point, long time ago, I decided that Valve is a bunch of assholes for implementing this freaky DRM thing, and I’m not gonna give them my money. Especially since I heard so many horror stories about Steam doing crazy things to people’s computers, locking up, verifying files for hours and etc. But it was to late to think about it now.

I braced myself for hard times ahead, and clicked install. 15 minutes later, the game was installed, but steam was still churning around downloading some updates, or whatever. Two more minutes and I was playing the game. So far I had no problems with it whatsoever. So perhaps steam is not that bad anymore. It seems that it matured over the las few years and seems relatively stable now.

I still think it’s a pain in the ass, and an unnecessary burden for the users who are forced to jump through the registration hoops. And it’s still evil - no question about it. But at least steam tries to be something more than just a DRM system - it tries to add value to the product doubling up as a content delivery system, an online store, a social networking tool (via the friend system which I haven’t really explored yet) and etc.

Oh, and HL2 kicks ass, but you probably knew that already.

I ran nmap on my home network today to see which machines are up without getting up from my desk. I noticed something strange. I own a Dell Axim X5 Pocket PC. It is an old model which did not have a built in wifi. So I bought a chepo D-Link card for it on Ebay. Its a big thing that sticks out of the device, and prevents it from fitting in my pocket, but it works. Today the Pocket PC was sitting in it’s cradle with the card in it and wireless communications enabled.

Nmap found it, identified it as D-Link device, and communicated that port 990 is open. In case you didn’t know 990 is the dedicated ftp over SSL port. I found that strange because I knew for sure there was no server like software running on that pocket toy. I removed it from the cradle, and ran nmap once more. This time all the ports on the device were closed.

It’s odd, but it seems that ActiveSync uses ftps to sync up the files between your computer and the hand held device. I don’t really see why did they set it up this way, especially since the cradle plugs directly into a USB port and they could use a myriad of other network independent protocols to do the sync-up.

Since this protocol uses SSL to encrypt the ftp communication I don’t see it as a big security risk. Still, I find it odd that they would do it this way. Anyone knows what is the justification for syncing data over ftps? I guess this would make sense if they offered some sort of remote sync options, but my device does not have that feature.