Deleting the Impossible

It finally happened – a customer managed to give a pair of files some impossible names:


\*\*somefile_&name.mov
\*another_file.mov

(how they accomplished this is anyone’s guess) and then complained that they couldn’t delete or rename them. Which is true — the mv, rm, stat, and file commands all complained that they couldn’t stat the files, no matter how I quoted their names. Remembered reading once that you could nuke such files via inode, but had never had cause to try it. Sure enough: “ls -il” gives you the inode number in the filesystem. You can then use:

find . -inum [inode_number] -exec rm -i {} \;

There’s always a side door.

Music: Otis Redding :: Security

CMS – Build vs. Buy

A few months ago, I posted about the newsinitiative site I had spent most of the summer working on*, and mentioned that we had decided to build our own content management system for it from scratch. Promised to say more about the CMS “build vs. buy**” decision process we went through, but never got around to it. After installing Search Meter for WordPress a month ago, discovered that people have actually been searching this site for more info on that decision.

CMSs are a funny category of software. When you go to choose a word processor, you’ve got three or four serious options to consider (but it generally comes down to Word). Image editor? Maybe a dozen (but it generally comes down to Photoshop). There are usually more options for server-side web application software. Survey package? Maybe a dozen. Blogging platform? Again, maybe a dozen (but it generally comes down to Movable Type and WordPress). But the game changes immensely when you start looking at content management systems.

Continue reading “CMS – Build vs. Buy”

Diplomatic Immunity

Diplomats from other countries living in the U.S. enjoy a certain level of immunity from local laws, e.g. they can park wherever they want, damn the tickets. Whether diplomats choose to use the privilege seems to have a direct correlation to corruption levels in their home countries. The Economist on parking tickets issued to U.N. diplomats living in New York:

For instance, between 1997 and 2002 diplomats from Chad averaged 124 unpaid parking violations; diplomats from Canada and the United Kingdom had none. The results from 146 countries were strikingly similar to the Transparency International corruption index, which rates countries by their level of perceived sleaze. In the case of parking violations, diplomats from countries with low levels of corruption behaved well, even when they could get away with breaking the rules. The culture of their home country was imported to New York, and they acted accordingly.

But the sword of immunity cuts both ways – American diplomats in London have apparently stopped paying the congestion charge for bringing a car into central London, racking up unpaid charges of $.75 million as of August. If the “corruption levels of home country” theory/pattern holds, what does that say?

Music: Otis Redding :: Pounds And Hundreds

iTox

Greenpeace has built a site based on the look and feel of apple.com, but chock-full of information on the environmental impact of Apple’s products and flimsy reclamation program. I’m not sure it’s fair to single out one computer manufacturer, since the entire industry is toxic. But targeting Apple does help to make the point more tangible. Apple is renowned for their elegant but excessive packaging, and its left-leaning userbase probably assumes that just because Apple is “alternative” it must ipso facto be doing good stuff environmentally. Thought this was a very good point:

You can’t recycle toxic waste If Apple doesn’t drop the toxics from its products, it doesn’t matter how good a recycling program they have. Because toxics make recycling more hazardous.

I like this idea too:

We’re not asking for just “good enough.” We want Apple to do that “amaze us” thing that Steve does at MacWorld: go beyond the minimum and make Apple a green leader.

Apple has responded to environmental criticism in the past, and has even been named one of the Top 10 Environmentally Progressive Companies. Not sure how that squares with Greenpeace ranking Apple the fourth worst

Anyway, the site is really nicely done, and drives the message home to Mac owners. It’s too easy to push uncomfortable truths under the rug when you’re involved in a love affair.

Music: Seeds :: Up In Her Room

Ukes for Troops

Uke Players Ramadi Iraq Best sounds to come out of Iraq in a long time: Ukulele-playing Marines. Thanks to world-wide donations to Uke Jackson’s Ukes for Troops campaign, 15 ukuleles have already been delivered to marine bands stationed overseas. “In little corners all across Fallujah and Habbaniyah, Marines are plucking the sing-song strains of the South Pacific.”

“When I first opened the box, I asked myself, ‘What are these things doing in Iraq?’” said Gunnery Sgt. Jay D. Dalberg, a euphonium and electric bass player … “These are usually related to tropical beaches like Hawaii, not Fallujah, Iraq.”

George Harrison writes in the intro to one of my uke songbooks: “Some are made of wood and some are made out of armadillos – everyone I know who plays one is crackers.”

Music: The Beach Boys :: I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times

A Love Supreme

SF Chronicle’s Greg Tate pays tribute to John Coltrane on his 80th birthday.

[McCoy] Tyner has said he knew it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted. An avowed atheist and libertine friend once told me that when he wanted to hear God, he listened to Coltrane. He was hedging his bets that the religious ardor Trane’s music invoked in him would be deliverance enough for his sins.

Miles and Coltrane share a birthday. On the eve of Miles’ “fourthest” birthday, Miles greeted me home from work with a lovely bush in a rattan basket, so that “When you die and go away you won’t get lonely” (seems to be some Egyptian philosophy going on here). We then talked about life and death for a while, on the way to the park. Suddenly he stopped at a corner, looked around, and asked, “But daddy, why is our world THIS world and not another world?” Always knew kids ask a lot of hard questions, but was unprepared for this kind of cosmological probing.

Music: Patricia Barber :: Call Me

Marquee Comes Home

Cerrito Marquee Back in the 1930s, an avenue near our house was graced by a gorgeous art deco movie house. It closed its doors in the 1960s and became a furniture warehouse. The marquee was nuked, and the entrance stripped down. We never thought much of it. In 2001, the building went back on the market, and locals found, to their amazement, that all of the original deco murals and mirrors inside had survived.

Around the time we bought our house, citizens organized a group to manage restoration of the theater, and we’ve been eagerly awaiting its re-opening. We don’t have any theater in El Cerrito, and the new owners also run a groovy theater in Oakland with couches in place of chairs, beer and pizza (ushers bring food right to your couch). Plans for this theater are similar.

We’ve been watching the slow construction of the marquee mount, architected from old photos. and this week the crowning jewel arrived from the manufacturer – the new marquee, exactly like the original.

Now we just need time to go to movies — and a cheap babysitter — and we’ll be all set.

One of our students did a multimedia piece on the restoration a few years ago — great resource for additional history and interviews with people who remember the the heyday.

Chronicle Reporter Statement

A federal judge has sentenced two SF Chronicle reporters to 18 months in prison for refusing to betray sources in their coverage of the BALCO case. Lance William’s statement to the court is worth reading. Excerpt:

They demand that I give up my career and my livelihood — for if I betray my sources, I cannot work any longer in investigative journalism, work that requires above all the ability to keep confidences. … And now we have reached a time in our country when the prosecutors say they have the power whenever they choose to subpoena reporters and make them government witnesses, and that they are going to exercise that power. Judge, I despair for our Free Press if we go very far down this road. Whistleblowers won’t come forward. Injustices will never see the light of day. Our people will be less informed and worse off.

At the end of the day, a judge has to weigh the benefits to the public of gaining critical evidence for a particular case on one hand and of upholding values that are critical to a free society on the other. We allow hate groups to assemble because the right to assemble and speek freely is a paramount concern, and this case weighs a similar tension. But I think this judge is failing to clearly see the far-reaching consequences of his decision. Open this door and you’ve removed a brick from the wall of free press.

Meat Water

As if bottled water for humans wasn’t already one of the most successful hoaxes in the history of capitalism, there’s now apparently a cottage industry in selling bottled water for dogs (and cats).

Mark Morford, Dog Water, Tastes Like Chicken:

Yes, it is meat-scented water. Even your dog is right now going, WTF? Like Britney Spears to new moms, like Dubya to presidential integrity, like Hot Pockets to actual food, they make all sensible dog lovers look bad. It’s also just sort of embarrassingly unnecessary. As if quenching his sheer dumb animal thirst at the garden hose wasn’t enough to make your dog blissfully happy. As if a world teeming with roughly 1 billion unclassifiable odors wasn’t already a wondrous canine olfactory buffet. Did you know that dogs have over 200 million scent cells? And that humans have a mere 5 million? The last thing dogs need is for their water to smell like synthetic cow. I’m just guessing.

Music: Tom Zé :: Sonhar