Rantings of a Lunatic

This is an animation I saw years ago, back when I was at MIAD as a student, and I think about it every few months. I stumbled on it again last night, and I really think its brilliant. There is something about the desire to find happiness, and the soulessness of corporations that I see in it. Also the style of the animation is just fantastic. Unfortunately, the compression is pretty bad, but, thats a good incentive to buy it considering it was shot on 65mm, which I was not aware of previously.

So that everyone is aware, we are at Priority Level Huge:

So, I am no stranger to SSH, I use it practically every day. And I have used SSH tunnels here and there before, but I haven’t ever really used it for any “heavy lifting”. Well, that changed the other day, when I realized that I could use Putty to setup SSH tunnels to forward port 3306 from my local machine to port 3306 on my server. The adept will realize thats the MySQL port, and that would allow me to use MySQL’s GUI tools like Querry Browser on my local machine while making live connections to the database. I have previously been doing all of this with the Command Line through an SSH terminal session. I admit, I have become pretty adept with MySQL and can write my querries by hand. It is nice to be able to browse the tables and their definitions in more than an 80×24 text interface. It is little things like this that make work better some times. And, an awesome side-effect, I have 3 different servers all running their own MySQL databases, and by telling the client to use say, 3306, 3307, and 3308 and setting the appropriate tunnels they all forward out to 3306 on the server end, which is awesome. I can have one instance of the app, with 3 windows, and be connected into all three servers. Now that only makes me wish that where I do have one development database, and a live database that I could copy the result set of a query and paste it into an other window, but as I am new to the GUIs, I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

So, I have known about stumbleupon for a while now, but I have never paid much attention to it. Well, that changed the other day, when I actually signed up for an account, installed the toolbar, (which had a few flaws), and started using it. I have to admit I love it. Aside from the initial installation issues in IceWeasel, which are probably not the fault of the plugin, it has been great. I am sure the installation issues are based specifically around me running a 32bit version of IceWeasel in a 64bit environment. I signed up for an account, dnovotny is my username if you are curious, and started stumbling. I have seen a lot of the things I have “stumbled” across already, but, there is a wealth of content that I hadn’t seen before. One such thing is Justin James’ 10 types of programmers you’ll encounter in the field. Its an interesting read though I do have one complaint. I don’t know which category I fall into, because they all sort of apply to me. Obviously, as I used to be known as “the ninja”, that one applies, but so do most of the others. Though there are a couple which are diametrically opposed, and I find it easier to see the delinations there, at least I hope. But, then there is the Vince Niel,

This 40-something is a throwback to 1984 in all of the wrong ways. Sporting big hair, ripped stonewashed jeans, and a bandana here or there, Vince sits in the office humming Bon Jovi and Def Leppard tunes throughout the workday. This would not be so bad if “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was not so darned infectious.

Vince is generally a fun person to work with, and actually has a ton of experience, but just never grew up. But Vince becomes a hassle when he or she tries living the rock ‘n roll lifestyle to go with the hair and hi-tops. It’s fairly hard to work with someone who carries a hangover to work every day.

which I don’t think applies to me at all.

Anyway, this is only one of the things I have found through stumbleupon. Another thing that I found out through using this service is that I am specifically halfway through the bracket of men who find velociraptor attacks as the number 3 cause of death. This information is courtesy of www.velociraptors.info, and it really brought a jolt of reality to my life. I am in the process of velociraptor-proofing my life right now. I have ordered 2000 tire irons, so that they are never more than an arms reach away. In addition, I am working to board up all my windows and doors, at least for the next 2 years. It might seem a bit drastic, but it wouldn’t seem that way if I were attacked by velociraptors, now would it? In addition, I am also working on “inventing” a pair of mirror glasses that point behind me in an equilateral triangle so that I can precisely see the two velociraptors that might be attacking from behind.

I created a new interweb sport the other day, and I have named it URLLenghtening. Everyone uses tinyurl.com to make urls shorter, but what happens when you use it to make them longer? It all started when I “DonRolled” a friend, sort of the equivilent of “RickRolling” someone. This is what TinyURL responded with:

TinyURL was created!
The following URL:

http://donkasprzak.com/

has a length of 23 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 25 characters:
http://tinyurl.com/3vctps

So, it started me thinking, there can’t be that many sites who can be transmogrified through TinyURL and made longer, so would that be an interesting pass-time? After that, I started to think about their systems, and I wonder if they have logic to prevent someone from using their service to “shorten” (obfuscate) a link they already have. If not, think about the recursion that you could do by continuously embedding tinyurls inside tinyurls. I am not advocating this, but it started me thinking about how this could reek havoc on their database. In dealing with online advertising, I deal with embedding multiple calls through different ad-servers, and I personally know of places where an ad displayed on pages redirects through 4 different servers/databases before the click is actually delivered to the final destination. And in watching this, I have become innately aware of the lag that happens from this redirection. Which is why I had to wonder if they wrote the logic into their system to specifically ignore their own urls, though I have not tried it.