GreenReaper's Bibble

greenreaper @ 2009-12-18T05:18:00

2009-12-18T10:18:33Z

GreenReaper exmly hot. GreenReaper push herb.

It's late. I can only see the glow of the screen, and my hands. I'm a tad feverish. I'm on holiday.

I'd be upset if I wasn't in a warm bed with water, ibuprofen and a chocolate cookie. Also making great progress over the last week on what I hope will be a kickass new community website. Well, sort of new. You'll see.

Also, this is shiny.

Maybe self rest now . . . *z-Z-Z*

Sometimes even release versions are too close to the bleeding edge

2009-12-03T08:24:54Z

I was trying to install a local test version of Drupal but couldn't get past the database selection dialog. Oddly, it seemed to be failing when testing mysql_connect . . .

It turned out that I'd stumbled on a bug. When using PHP 5.3 to connect to "localhost", the script will time out when attempting to make a test connection to the database as documented at PHP's mysql_connect page.

This is because the mysql native driver that PHP now uses cannot properly handle two addresses being returned for localhost, and Vista will return ::1 (the IPv6 localhost) in preference to 127.0.0.1.

To avoid this problem, either change to using 127.0.0.1, or comment out or remove the IPv6 entry for "::1 localhost" (leave the other "localhost" setting). Or, of course, don't use PHP 5.3.

Furry topics in Wikipedia offline release; others soon to be deleted

2009-11-30T19:10:22Z

Just over a year ago I mentioned on wikifur that WikiProject Furry had managed to sneak both furry fandom and furry convention into Version 0.7 of Wikipedia - the latest offline release of the wiki-based encyclopedia. This has finally been cleaned up and is being prepared for release (it's a little over 2GB).

I derive far more enjoyment than is proper from the thought that children in developing countries are going to look up hobbies and get furry convention as the first hit. Kudos to the Lego and philately [stamp collecting] groups as well!

For the curious, here's the ranking of topics by importance, and the criteria for ranking. This data is over a year old; its publication triggered reassessments and the removal of several articles that didn't really belong in the project (such as Rocko's Modern Life and CatDog).

Coincidentally, we still have 110 articles due to the addition of other topics - though sadly a few, like Furrlough and Shanda_The_Panda, are likely to be deleted today or tomorrow for lack of third-party references. They will follow several other furry topics purged recently. The information within them is preserved on WikiFur, of course - it's greatly improved our articles on The Suburban Jungle and Newshounds - but it's still a shame.

BBC News magazine investigates that "furry" thing

2009-11-13T21:17:57Z

Those within the fandom may already have heard about this, but for those who haven't . . . drop by BBC News and you should see a little something about furries there.

It's not perfect, but the tone is appropriate, and the large proportion of quotes from those who know what they're talking about gives it a lot of value.

Further reading: Marshall Woods - Ian Wolf - Kathy Gerbasi - Fred Patten (Wikipedia) - Mark Merlino - TaniDaReal

Being "a good person"

2009-11-07T17:52:31Z

A recent post made me think about something a friend once asked: whether I thought they were "a good person".

To be honest, I didn't know them well enough to have a good answer; even now, I'm not sure it's my place to render an opinion. Hopefully they can judge for themselves how this would apply:

We all¹ have the capacity to be good. But being good is a journey, not a destination; not who we were, or are, but who we're resolved to be. To be good, we must strive to do good - today, tomorrow, and thereafter.

Now, nobody is perfect. We make mistakes all the time; perhaps even deliberately violate our own moral code. But failing to do good in a particular circumstance does not preclude or excuse us from doing good in the future. As long as we ultimately admit our failings, and seek to redeem ourselves, we can look for forgiveness from others.

Conversely, those who have been wronged don't have to forget past mistakes; but it helps little to condemn others—or ourselves—for them. Instead, we should hope for future improvement: "go, and sin no more."

¹ Unless you believe Mark 10:18.

Ride share to MFF?

2009-10-30T18:31:48Z

Anyone heading up to Midwest FurFest on Thursday evening, and - ideally - back on Monday (Sunday might work too)? Got free space and can swing by the Northville/Plymouth, Michigan area? I don't take up too much room, and I can pay for gas. :-)

Edit: Found a ride - see you all there!

Anthrocon 2009 photographs

2009-10-21T14:24:55Z

My Anthrocon 2009 photos are now up. You can see them in a slideshow - though if you're not a fan of parade pictures or flags, you might want to skip to the end of it once you get to that point, as there are a lot of them.

Honestly, there are no shots that jumped out at me as super-awesome this year. The event itself was a lot of fun, though!

GitHub discriminates against non-humans

2009-10-12T01:14:50Z

At a suggestion from giza, I was looking into Git tonight, and thanks to a coincidental comment from Kakurady I happened across GitHub, an online repository-hosting service.

Unfortunately, they appear to discriminate against non-humans in their terms of service. I guess devout furs, therianthropes and otherkin just have to host their own repositories . . . *grin*

SSL certificates just got cheaper

2009-10-09T18:35:08Z

I was interested to learn that StartSSL has been added to the Windows root certificate list. StartSSL offers free email and domain name SSL/TLS certificates, and low prices ($30 and $100 respectively) for corporate identity/code signing and Extended Validation (EV, "green bar") SSL/TLS certificates (Verisign wants $1500 for the latter).

Some addresses cannot be used to sign up (notably Hotmail and Yahoo, but not Gmail), but you can issue certificates for them once you've passed initial authentication.

This offers a new perspective on why Thawte is shutting down their Web of Trust initiative, which I've used in the past.

The StartSSL root certificate is only distributed with Windows 7, but this may not be that much of a problem, as it's been provided in an optional update, and both Windows Vista and (I believe) Windows XP SP2 will automatically check back with Microsoft if presented with an unknown root certificate. Users can also get an update manually.

I'll say this . . .

2009-10-05T06:52:57Z

Every time I visit ArtSpots, I wish I were more of an artist so I could get to see my stuff there.

(I also think it'd be a neat way to grow the site if they let me upload art by other people into galleries reserved for them, and have those people approve it before it would appear publicly, but that's just me. :-)

Public Service Announcement: You run a con? We know who you are.

2009-09-28T01:18:57Z

If you run a charity or other tax-exempt organization in the USA - say, a large furry convention - don't be surprised when we know your real name . . . or where you live.

By law, most such non-profit organizations must annually file some variation of Form 990. These are open to public inspection; organizations are required to make copies available on request at pain of significant penalties, and (more practically) they are freely available on the web.

These documents contain an overview of the organization's financial activities for the year, including sources of revenue, expenses, and asset levels. Some organizations choose to provide more detailed budgetary information; others do not. They also contain a list of directors and key organization members - often the chair and vice-chair - including their real names and addresses.

This information is public. If you do not like the idea of your real name and address being available on the web, do not become a director or key member of a tax-exempt organization. If you do, you are working for us; we have a right to know who you are, and what you're doing with our money.

This does not apply to those normally termed "volunteers" by conventions, or even most "staff", only those with a direct hand in running the event's organizational body.

(cross-posted to furoperations)

Reinventing search

2009-09-23T15:31:59Z

I'm not a huge fan of Yahoo (though they did send me a corkscrew set once), but I have to admit they're doing some pretty cool stuff with search. You can actually make your own plugins for results. Here's a shot from one I ~~spent several hours cursing at~~ whipped up last night:

Yep, those are links to section headers, and a thumbnail, both using data extracted from furry art with XSLT and massaged with some PHP. The title and description are customizable, and you can add tags to display structured data. It's not perfect, but it's possible to do interesting stuff with it.

greenreaper @ 2009-09-22T12:39:00

2009-09-22T16:41:39Z

I got (most of) my photos from RainFurrest 2009 (slideshow) up last night. Still have a backlog from other conventions this year, but at least that's one off my list.

For the record, I had a good time. There are certainly worse ways to spend your birthday than being chased by zombies with tails.

You are what your friends eat

2009-09-17T14:34:14Z

The New York Times has an interesting report on how your friends - and their friends - control your lifestyle to a surprising degree.

Possible applications to fandom? Maybe we need to encourage the popufurs to lose weight, so we can too. :-)

greenreaper @ 2009-09-05T22:45:00

2009-09-06T02:49:12Z

You know you're a geek when you're poring over decade-old research on cache replacement policies and their implications for handling flash crowds for fun. :-)

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to do it for profit, too.

And a person who sounds like they could be talking about furries, but isn't:

America has always been the land of self-invention, but lately that concept has been applied to the body in unprecedented ways.

Obama announces plans to expand savings credit

2009-09-06T00:59:23Z

Well this is interesting . . . looks like we might be getting changes to the retirement savings credit - in particular, expanding the range of those eligible. Possibly good news for those of us who already save, but are over the current limits in earnings.

The auto-enrollment in IRAs probably isn't a bad idea, either, though it'd be interesting to know who was going to be involved in running them. (I imagine the Thrift Savings Plan might be involved.)

Of course, the vacation days to 401k idea will encourage USAians to take even less time off work, which is unfortunate considering how little is taken (and given) already.

(cross-posted from financial_furs)

A good reason to bring your No. 2 pencil to Anthrocon next year

2009-08-31T18:50:40Z

For those who don't watch drg_kcgerbasi - Kathy recently released a significant piece of research - preliminary results for the survey taken at Anthrocon 2009. In case you don't know her, Dr. Gerbasi was the lead author of perhaps the only serious treatment of furry fandom in published academic literature so far, Furries from A to Z.

While the findings she made are of great interest, it's a shame her team couldn't manage to get more people to take the survey this year due to last minute review-board issues - several noticeable statistical differences were at the borderline of significance. I suspect changes will be made for next year, and I urge everyone going to AC to take the survey (especially non-furries and female furries).

I'm also eager to hear more of 2008's results, which were delayed due to data entry issues (outsourcing to your nephew is apparently a losing proposition). The few details about fursuit ownership/interest released at the debriefing this year were very interesting; it's a topic that hasn't been seriously considered, mostly because we didn't have a significant fursuit population until the last decade.

(Cross-posted to anthrocon)

End of an era

2009-08-28T03:33:06Z

WikiaFur is dead. All hail WikiFur!

4GB memory on 32-bit Windows? It can be done . . .

2009-08-26T00:52:20Z

Apparently the barrier that stops Windows Vista 32-bit from using all 4GB of memory is mostly a licensing issue. I tried the instructions in there about 3/4 of the way down for setting up a test kernel and they work beautifully for me.

For reference, on Vista SP2 kernels the required offsets are 30C43A and 30C47B. If you don't know how to follow the instructions on the page, I suggest you don't do it. Your mileage and drivers may vary.

A non-surprising result

2009-08-24T15:32:11Z

So it turns out that shisha - the stuff you smoke with a hookah - is just as bad for you as cigarettes, if not more so. Which wasn't really a surprise, was it?

I know some people out there in the fandom are fans of this, so please: don't smoke, period. I'd hate to lose anyone to brain damage or cancer, but probably not as much as you'd hate dying from it.

greenreaper @ 2009-08-24T02:32:00

2009-08-24T07:51:13Z

Spent the night tidying up a few things on WikiFur, including selecting new featured content for the front page (with a little help from bogglerat). This year's move has been a pain, but it's nice to see it all coming together.

The server's coping just fine with the increased traffic - it barely broke a sweat, despite bots hitting it over once a second for new (unrendered) pages. The APC cache really makes the difference between slow and super-fast there, although the new version of DynamicPageList with its own caching probably helped a bit, too.

Time flies. I swear, the Upcoming Events section is four times as long as it was when we started . . . I'm pretty sure the timeline used to fit on one page, too. At least the map still does, though it's a stretch.

Need a room for RainFurrest!

2009-08-21T15:37:26Z

Edit: I've found a room! See you all there.

I've decided to celebrate my birthday at RainFurrest this year. It's my first event in the Pacific Northwest, so I hope to meet a lot of new friends - and perhaps catch up with some I know from afar who live in the area.

Does anyone have a free room slot for Thursday night to Sunday/Monday? I'll be leaving on Sunday evening for a redeye flight back to Michigan. I can pay an equal share of the room fee - ideally just for the three nights, but I can cover the fourth if you're staying until Monday and can't find someone who needs the room just for that night.

I'd like to stay with no more than four other people if possible. I don't mind sharing a bed (with male or female), or sleeping on the floor some nights. Fursuiters are fine - I like fursuits! :-) I'm a non-smoker, and I don't drink, but I don't mind those who do in moderation. I am registered for the convention. More information on WikiFur.

InnoDB Plugin offers table compression

2009-08-19T20:52:55Z

Warning, geek talk ahead . .

Version 1.04 of the InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1 was released recently. This plugin replaces the existing InnoDB functinality within MySQL, and offers several new features - one of the more interesting being transparent zlib-based compression. This has obvious benefits given the amount of I/O that can result from certain queries.

Even better, the compressed versions are held in the internal caches, increasing the amount that can be stored within them. They're only decompressed when actually used. For some applications, this may be the difference between being able to fit within the buffer pool or not.

Of course, your application may be able to store compressed data within fields anyway - assuming you don't manipulate it using SQL. But if you can't or don't want to do that, your app is I/O bound, and ARCHIVE tables don't fit your needs, this limited compression can offer the best of both worlds.

Note that when it says "8K" or "4K", it means it will try to compress each 16K database page to that size, excluding any CHAR/VARCHAR/BLOB columns, into that amount of space. The other fields will be stored and compressed separately. If you have lots of highly-compressible text, but the other fields are not so compressible, 8K (or even 16K, just compressing BLOBs) is likely to be a lot faster than 4K.

Delayed self-gratification: the most important factor for success?

2009-08-13T20:48:50Z

I read a New Yorker article about this a few weeks ago. Good thing I hate marshmallows!

( It's not what you eat, but how long you can resist eating it )

Making MediaWiki smaller, and Knol

2009-08-09T22:09:24Z

I just made my first commit to MediaWiki's codebase. Hopefully it won't break anything - it's only (smaller) images!

I've been thinking about writing some stuff on Knol. They promote the AdWords support, and it'd be nice to have a secondary means of income; but honestly I don't think anyone there is making significant money. Makes more sense just to edit Wikipedia. At least then you know someone is going to read what you write.