Chris' Blog

More than two years have passed since my review of the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, begun with The Golden Compass. The second book is called The Subtle Knife and it has been sitting on my shelves for a few months. With the first review, it was difficult to address the story first because the underlying philosophies literally jumped off the page at me. This book is not much different in that respect, although I must admire Pullman as a storyteller. He spins his story better than the Left Behind authors have told theirs.

To summarize the philosophic themes quickly: The worldview is somewhere between pantheism or panentheism. A large push exists to destroy the "Authority" (God). This second book also pushes trascendental meditation as a way to contact the global consciousness in or around all of us, which does appear to predestine events (oddly, at one point there is talk about ending predestination?).

During the last few months, I have become a system administrator for two dedicated web servers. One of them is hosting ~100 accounts, and one of the smallest accounts got onto the "bad list" of some eastern block spammer last weekend. The account owners don't even have their MX record pointed at our server -- we aren't supposed to see any mail for them.

On this past Monday alone we received over 1 million emails from over 31,000 unique IP addresses. Yes, it was all for this one account. After sending "their mail" into a black hole, our server was still unusable. All of the mail lookups, log writing, &c. continued to take a toll. The company that houses the server added an additional iptables rule:

iptables -I INPUT -m string --algo bm --string "@example.com"  -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with tcp-reset -m comment --comment "STMP Block"

From http://thehill.com/homenews/house/179623-pelosi-drops-the-word-stimulus:

“We have tried shrinking the economy and sowing economic uncertainty for 8 months now, and it has failed. It's time for job creation and economic growth as our first order of business to strengthen our middle class.”

And... for the preceeding 8 months, we tried spending our way out of economic decline. Stale-mate?

That the democrats are trying to drop the word "Stimulus" from their vocabulary is amusing. As Shakespeare once wrote, "A rose by any other name would prick just the same" (or something like that).

As a small reminder that I haven't forgotten this poor, lonely blog (despite the lack of posts), I want to present you with a picture of this dog:

(Just in case you missed it, try this video and the auto-tuned version.)

As a group, the Waldensians began in the mid-1100s. The man who started it took the story of the rich, young man (Matthew 19:16-30) to heart and did what that man could not. He purposed in his heart to own nothing and to tell others to regularly attend local Catholic Mass. Others joined him and they were soon reproved for not becoming monastic monks. They were labeled as heretics by the Roman Catholic church within only a few years.

Over the first handful of decades, the Waldensians began to see large differences between what the Roman Catholic church taught and the writings of the Scriptures. The poem that follows sums up several of those differences (even if it does teach a forged document -- see note at the bottom -- as true history). Copied from a back issue of Christianity Today:

Suppose that your website allows people to download information. Now pretend that you are providing this information as a way to attract people to your business -- a common situation on the web today. It follows that you would want to collect some contact information from your users before allowing them to begin the download.

Most websites require a registration for this. Some are blatant about it while others create the account behind the scenes, so that the user does not know they have been granted access to a member module and protected downloads.

What happens if you don't want to sign up new users? This may be a fringe case but it is desired more commonly than it is implemented. This was the situation for one of my customers. He wanted a pop-up window that would collect the user's name and email address before allowing the download.

If you open a new window (or tab) where the address belongs to a downloadable file, web browsers will then close the window once it starts. I thought this might be the best way:

 I don't typically read USA Today, but this week I am on vacation and there was a copy laying around. An opinion piece by two friends -- a conservative columnist (Cal) and a liberal strategist (Bob) -- caught my attention:

cPanel has some bugs. If you are trying to install a cPAddon and only see this error message:

Unable to set configuration! This will need done manually!

You may be falling prey to a bug in the procconfigfile sub. This is located in /usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/cPAddons.pm.

The fault lies in the usage of _log_say(), which utilizes print(). Normally that would be fine except that procconfigfile() replaces the STDOUT pointer (due to mapping) that print defaults to using. This is only a temporary and is shortly restored -- but it does obscure the error message.

This code would be the fix is to update the __WARN__ call (circa line 2662):

This year the united States federal government required 13.39% of the money I earned last year. That wiped out the savings account that I had opened earlier this year, which was the first that I have had in three years.

For that amount, I honestly think we should do away with state and local governments (or keep the lower and shrink the higher -- the Libertarian's cry).

Those dollars were planned for use, and while it was accumulating it helped to provide a job at the bank... and was surely being lent to other bank customers so that they could spend the money in our current economy. I fail to see how this tax burden is helping to stimulate the economy.

In fact, to complete the irony of the "taxation stimulates" idea that our politicians love, I have finally chosen to use the $300 stimulus check that was sent out under the order of George W. Bush. In the last few years, I have intentionally chosen not to use it (as the country has not had the money to back this check) and the choice this year was as a protest.

As it turns out, my customer did not want only one imported page modified by vBulletin before it was displayed. He wanted all imported pages to be condensed if the user was not logged in, and he wanted to add or remove pages at will.

Again, minimal documentation. To do this, I modified my polls-process.php file to work as a plugin via the "vba_cmps_print_output" hook. "var_dump(get_defined_vars())" was very useful for finding the proper PHP variables to modify. vBulletin had not one or two, but three copies of the page loaded in memory. I needed to change "$home['leftblocks']" for my modifications to show on the output page.

Happy hacking.

Paid CMSes can be useful or painful. I've ranted about vBulletin before, and have recently had a chance to work with ExpressionEngine v2 (built on CodeIgniter). The phraseology is strange at first, but I actually kind of like EE. Quick reference charts like this one or this one make most of the coding a breeze.

vBulletin, on the other hand, I thoroughly loath. The customer who had wanted it installed several months back now needs the install to be modified. Where the EE community is fairly open because the underlying framework is open source, vBulletin decided to silence complaining customers by locking them out of the forums. Their stranglehold also prevents people like me, who freelance but do not own our own vBulletin licenses, from accessing any useful community information on how to modify vBulletin.

Church is a big business. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic church amassed an enormous wealth in land and artifacts. Many of today's Christian leaders have done or are doing the same thing. Where the superstars go, plenty of mini-popes wish to follow.

Despite the recent depression and tighter spending, we continue to hear passionate pleas to give money in many churches and conferences across the united States. There is the building fund that needs to be filled, or missionaries who are to simply go. We can do these things because we have faith that God will provide the necessary funds for our grand visions. After all, God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, right?

It turns out that if you turn to Psalm 50, David is writing that God doesn't want your sacrifices or offerings. He says that he has plenty... but this verse continues to be misused during instructions to donate more because "God will give it back to you."

Maybe we are counting our chickens before they hatch, or being prodigal with our inheritance.

Life has been very busy for the last month or two and, as you may have noticed, there have not been many posts here. The quotes section has gained several entries but those do not show up in the RSS feed or email notices.

Activity (especially lots of it) has a tendency to cause tunnel vision. We ignore everything except what has to be done. If that continues for too long, a sense of frustration often develops and I wonder if this isn't what God was attempting to prevent when he commanded a rest on the Sabbath.

Yesterday required a small pause in the midst of everything. It is hard to ignore a friend who has died in an accident. Life here will go on. It must. But there are times when this life does not provide the answers that we want. We need something more.

Have you ever considered that? And why do we need more?

The topic of a wife's full submission to her husband is a topic that I have posted on before, starting with the Patriarchy post. Due to the number of discussions that I run into on this topic, I am going to present a stronger argument from a secular point of view. Because I find it disturbing, I set this aside for a couple weeks. You may not wish to read on unless you believe that total submission is a good thing.

I was introduced to the ideas of a wife's total submission to her husband about four years ago. Shortly afterward, I obtained a copy of Elizabeth Handford Rice's book Me? Obey Him? and was convinced for a few weeks that submission to the husband was always right -- both of kids and wives.

With Thanksgiving last week and the TSA's stepped-up usage of intrusive backscatter scanners, there has been a lot of chatter on blogs and tech websites.

Take Gizmodo for instance. They reported that the MythBuster's Adam Savage walked through a backscatter scanner (while commenting on how small it made his penis feel), and the two 12" steel razor blades in his jacket were not detected.

Today they reported that a woman who is wheelchair-bound stripped to her lingerie and was still subjected to a 1-hour pat down and interrogation. She missed her flight.