Ready for birthday

{moszoomimglink:Sparkling sunrise}Incredible morning sunrises have become the norm, while I am getting to complete yet another year of life. Somehow, I think I chose to be here on that special day, but I quite regret it now. For the first time ever, I’d rather be in San Francisco. Let the flight back be my best birthday present!

MP3 Players for the Gym Geek

{moszoomimglink:ifp790}So far, I have been using an iRiver iFP 790 at the gym, and it has worked pretty ok for me. Not spectacularly well, not spectacularly poorly. Its 256MB are definitely getting to be a little small; after a year or so, it’s definitely acting up: the headphone plug is noisy and doesn’t grip the jacks any more; the buttons on top (not the best placement anyway) are starting to become insensitive; and the luster on the shiny red exterior is wearing off. Continue reading

Who is using moszoomimglink?

So, I realized after the upgrade to Joomla 1.0.11 that just *MAYBE* my version 2.1 of zOOm was a *TAD* outdated and upgraded to slick new 2.5.1. Great job, guys! I made everything work, imported my data into the new zOOm, and everything worked just fine – except for my favorite mambot, the trusted moszoomimglink, that delivers those saucy thumbnails that you have gotten used to in my posts. Well, I went to work on the problem, quickly found out that the only issue was the invocation of the correct set of include files (which I found quite astonishing), and there we were. Continue reading

Acts of Faith (P. Caputo)

Sometimes a book can be astonishing. Acts of Faith, a story of relief agency work in the misery of South Sudan, is such a work. In one fell swoop, it clears the mystery surrounding the actual state of affairs in Sudan, and makes a compelling case for the uniqueness of the situation. Nobody comes off as the good guy in this book, and not many as the bad guys. Sudan is one of those places, like Rwanda a few years ago, where you only hear bits and pieces of a catastrophe unfolding. Continue reading

Fixed moszoomimglink for zOOm 2.5.1

Well, it was easier than expected to port moszoomimglink to the new release of zOOm! All you have to do is install the new mambot after disabling the old one… Well, ok, not that easy, I haven’t had a chance to repackage it yet. To make your life bearable, though, I can tell you all that needs to be changed is the initiation sequence. In the file moszoomimglink.php, there is a long list of statements like the following: Continue reading

hugin

It’s been a while I stopped using hugin, an open source panorama stitching tool, because it crashed all the time on me and it was unclear how to work with it. I just downloaded the latest release (an ominous 0.6.1), and they somehow got it to work just fine! I am impressed! Download it from here Use is a bit of a problem on first try. You install the application, start it, then add a bunch of pictures that can be stitched together. Continue reading

ZooM broken

Darn it! After upgrading to Joomla 1.0.11, zOOm didn’t allow me to upload images any longer. It just shows me an empty page, no matter what option I select to add images. That’s certainly a security upgrade, but not necessarily the one I was after. Independently, I went online and found out that there is a brand new version of zOOm available, 2.5.1 (I am still at 2.1.something), and I am deciding whether to upgrade. Continue reading

[Joke] Submitted to Slashdot

Slashdot was discussing a lobbyist being appointed to the post of Cyber-Security czar at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The dominant mood was that lobbyists are taking over the country / have taken over the country. There was though this little pearl of a comment: The Department of Homeland Security was originally created using an alloy of Bureaucratritum and Administrontium. Sadly, the amount of alloy used exceeded the critical mass, resulting in a Black Hole of un-imagined proportions. Continue reading

Stars, stars, stars

I woke up early again, this morning (around 2:15a) and decided I might as well stay on California time for the next week. So I went down to start the generato and realized the sky was perfectly clear. An anemic sickle of a moon was shining its yellowish light from low on the horizon, and from Hilo an orange cloud poisoned the sky – undoubtedly the city lights, probably much closer Pepe`ekeo and not the real City. Continue reading

My little koki

Every night, when I go to bed, there is a little frog singing the praise of the land. It makes a strange sound, first a lower pitched, short vowel, followed by a much higher pitched, longer vowel, that sounds like it has the stress. Low pitch-high pitch. Sounds like ko – ki. And that’s what the little critter is called: a koki. Unfortunately, koki can be a real pest. They are minuscule (males reach about 40 mm, or tiny), but emit this sound that can easily reach 100dB. Continue reading