And by "we", I mean The Save Ardmore Coalition. The state of Pennsylvania will be giving us a $20,000 grant in just over a week. I could talk about this more, but pasting in our press release is easier.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AUGUST 25, 2008
ARDMORE, PA
http://www.saveardmorecoalition.org/

SAVE ARDMORE COALIITION TO RECEIVE GRANT SEPTEMBER 5TH, 2008 IN ARDMORE, PA

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The Save Ardmore Coalition is pleased to announce that we are to receive a grant in the amount of $20,000 from The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 6:30 p.m. in front of the Ardmore VFW in Ardmore, PA during our First Friday Main Line event with the American Troop Support Team (ATST).

This grant has been awarded to the Save Ardmore Coalition by State Representative Daylin Leach (149th PA), and is via the Department of Community and Economic Development’s Community Revitalization Program. $10,000 of this grant will be used towards a Community Mural and other streetscape beautification efforts.

State Representative Leach has be very supportive of the efforts of Save Ardmore Coalition in the community, and through this grant the Save Ardmore Coalition will be able to further its efforts as a group.

So please join State Representative Daylin Leach and members of the Save Ardmore Coalition in the shadow of the buildings in Historic Ardmore that we fought successfully to save from Eminent Domain for Private Gain. Join us as we take yet another definitive step forward into the future.

For more information on First Friday Main Line, please visit their website at http://www.firstfridaymainline.com/
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Save Ardmore Coalition P.O. Box 453 Ardmore, PA 19003 www.saveardmorecoalition.org

Getting new ringtones on your Razr without paying $1.99 or whatever Verizon charges is easy.

Send an email to yournumber@vzwpix.com, with the MP3 as an attachment.

When it arrives on your phone as a PIX message, the file has already been converted to the AAC format, and can be saved with the "Save Sound" choice under the Options menu.

It will now appear in your list of ringtones.

Thanks to this trick, my phone now has Dolph the Fascist Hippo ringtones on it. Guaranteed to confuse friends, co-workers, and family members alike!

While using the nginx webserver with a Drupal installation I noticed something odd. Whenever I submitted a form (with the GET method) or clicked on a link that had a space in it, it would be converted to a plus sign in the URL. Actually, that's not the odd path--the web browser is doing proper URL encoding since spaces are not allowed in URLs.

The weird part is that after the request got to the webserver, and the server processed it and passed it to PHP, and PHP loaded Drupal and executed the PHP code, the plus sign failed to be turned back into a space when using the nginx webserver. Works fine in Apache, but not in nginx.

The symptom is that if I tried to perform a search or edit my user profile, or anything else that involved a plus sign in the GET data, when that data was processed by PHP, the plus sign was still there. i.e., I would see "term1+term2" in the search box, instead of "term1 term2".

So, how to fix this? I could have spent some time reading RFCs, and looking through the source from PHP and nginx, or I could have my site working again. I opted for the latter, and found that this line of code at the very beginning of Drupal's index.php seems to do the trick:

$_GET["q"] = strtr($_GET["q"], "+", " ");

It's silly, and may even be a bit stupid, but it sure does the trick.

I haven't written here lately because I've been very busy at work, and taking care of some real life stuff that came up. As they say, "stuff happens".

I did however get to travel out to Pittsburgh last weekend to work Confluence with the Dorsai Irregulars. It was a smallish science fiction con, with about 300 people in attendance. The shifts I work consisted of an occasional rove through the hotel and badge checking at the door to the Dealers Room.

The DI working the contract were Rene, Steve Simmons, Mark Bernstein, and a few other folks whose names I can't remember right now. Also in attendance from the furry community were T'Chall, Swift Fox, Mrianti, Xander, and Uncle Kage. At any rate, it was great to see all of those folks again!

I didn't take many pictures at this convention, since I spent most of the time either working of socializing with folks. The full archive is at http://flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157606428079650/ for those who are interested. What follows are a few choice shots.

I had to work a shift with these guys.

One of these things is not like the others... anyone who got caught drinking the "odd one out" was cut off from drinking the rest of the evening.

The highlight of the con was a play that is put on no Saturday evening. A different script is written every year, usually involving parody of current events. This year's play was called "The Doctor's Sarcophagus". I did not get to watch it, as I had roving duty at the time.

After finishing off the scotch that was in this glass, I pretty much called it a night. My room was right next door to the Dorsai Room, so I could hear them singing through the wall. It didn't keep me awake, but it was kinda funny drifting off to sleep hearing filk music being sung.

Oh, and thanks for singing The Dorsai Cadet Song, guys. Can we just induct somebody newer already?

Having recently upgraded my machines to OS/X Leopard (which will be the subject of another post), I decided to try installing the program Duplicity onto my G4/G5 Mac so that I could use it in conjunction with rsync.net. Duplicity is a wrapper for rsync and rdiffdir that can be used to perform both full and incremental backups of your filesystem. It also supports many transfer methods including FTP, scp, rsync, WebDEV, and Amazon S3. In short, it's a pretty badass backup system.

While there don't seem to be any major issues when trying to install it under Linux, installing it under OS/X Leopard is a bit... interesting. The purpose of this post is to more clearly define "interesting" and document how to actually get Duplicity working, and to save others the same issues that I had deal with earlier in the afternoon.

First things first, make sure you've downloaded and installed Fink. Fink provides apt-get functionality to OS/X and gives you access to a whole bunch of UNIX software.

After downloading and untarring the package from the Duplicity website, try building the software with:

python ./setup.py build

If you're a lucky winner, you'll see a bunch of errors starting with this:

_librsyncmodule.c:25:23: error: librsync.h: No such file or directory

This means that librsync hasn't been installed. So go do that:

apt-get install librsync

Since the library will be installed in /sw (used by Fink to keep its stuff separate), you'll need to build Duplicity as follows:

python ./setup.py --librsync-dir=/sw build

Now install Duplicity:

sudo python ./setup.py install

Now try running it. Duplicity should promptly complain in the form of a traceback that ends with:

ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/duplicity/_librsync.so, 2): Library not loaded: /sw/lib/libintl.1.dylib
Referenced from: /sw/lib/librsync.1.dylib
Reason: image not found

Some quick checking revealed that version 3 of libintl was installed by the libgettext3-shlibs package. Why was version 1 not installed? I don't know. Why does librsync require version 1? No idea.

At this point, we do the computer equivalent of a "Hail Mary" pass:

ln -s /sw/lib/libintl.3.4.3.dylib /sw/lib/libintl.1.dylib

Yes, I really did just tell my system that version 3 of that library can be used as version 1. Amazingly enough, it actually worked! In general, doing this sort of thing is not a good idea, since we're expecting a library that is 2 major revisions older than what is actually installed. The fact that it does work however, does speak good about the programmer who wrote the library.

So, let's try and run Duplicity again:

File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/duplicity/gpg.py", line 22, in <module>
import GnuPGInterface, misc, log, path
ImportError: No module named GnuPGInterface

...somebody shoot me.

So anyway, now we have to go to the GnuPGInterface page and download that module. Assuming you downloaded and untarred it, here's how to install it:

python ./setup.py build
python ./setup.py install

Amazing. That was actually painless.

Let's try running Duplicity again:

[pardine:~/tmp/duplicity ] $ duplicity
Command line error: Expected 2 args, got 0
Enter 'duplicity --help' for help screen.

Success! Well, sorta. At least the program runs now. Documentation is is here and the manpage is over here. I can also offer some advice that I learned:

- The first backup is a full backup. Subsequent backups are automatically incremental backups.

- Want to list files in the backup? Use the list-current-files command.

- If you don't want to use encrpytion, try the --no-encryption option. Personally, I'm not a big fan of encrypting backups, because if you lose your key, all your backups go poof.

- If you are using SSH/scp to back up and you don't have an ssh key set up, be sure to tell Duplicity to ask for your password with --ssh-askpass. Even if you set the environment variable FTP_PASSWORD with your passphrase, you'll need to leave this switch in.

Happy backups!

I took a trip to the New Jersey beach last weekend, along with Omnibahumut and Ferian. Most of the time was spent hanging out, at the beach itself, or on the Boardwalk checking out the shops, and some of the uh... interesting... things in the shops:

No, I did not purchase any of those posters.

The beach itself was okay, but the undertow was up a bit thanks to Hurricane Bertha out in the Atlantic. The lifeguards only let us go in waist high and wouldn't let us use bodyboards. Naturally, I returned to the beach after they went off duty at 5:30 PM and used my bodyboard. I didn't get much wave action though, since the hurricane also caused some sandbars to form about 30 feet from shore. It was my first time on a sandbar however, so that wasn't a bad consolation prize.

I also purchased a "shorty" wetsuit before the trip. It helped with the slightly cold (65 degree) water temperatures and protected me from some nasty sunburn and from getting my back and chest shredded when bodysurfing. Not bad for $40.

Besides playing in the water, we also decided to dig on the beach a little. Actually, we dug on the beach a lot. Before the tide came in and destroyed our hard work, we had dug a hole that was about 4 feet deep and 6 feet wide. We also attracted an army of 6-year olds who were willing to help:

(pic by Omnibahumut)

Talking to the 6-year olds was probably the most interesting part. They kept saying "OMG", and one made some offhand comment about sushi. It blows my mind that kids are eating sushi these days.

Among the other things of interest I found was in an arcade called "Lucky Leo's"... remember the machine "Zoltar" from the movie "Big"? Well, here it is!

No, I did not ask him for my fortune.

As usual, I made use of PhillyCarShare to get to the beach and back. And hey, we even have our own group on Flickr now! It's at:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/phillycarshare/

If you made it this far, then I might as well point anyone who's interested to the full set of my pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157606168492404/

In summary, I came back slightly sunburned and very sore, but it was an otherwise awesome trip to the beach. I can't wait to go back next year!

Pretty much what the subject says. Running the latest version of the del.icio.us Firefox extension (2.0.72) in Firefox 3 on a G5 iMac with OS/X 10.4 ends up causing excessive CPU usage. And it seems that I am not the only one affected by this.

The main symptom of excessive CPU usage is starting up Activity Monitor and watching Firefox consume 10% of the CPU, even when it is sitting idle with a single empty tab open. Disabling the Delicious Firefox extension and restarting Firefox fixes the problem.

It appears that the folks who wrote the extension don't know what's going on either, so the only "fix" is to disable that extension. For the time being, I've added http://del.icio.us/post to my bookmarks so that I can still bookmark interesting sites.

[Edit: It has been pointed out to me that the buttons on this page will work nicely. Thanks Britta!

Wow. What a blast.

3,390 members. And 453 fursuits in our fursuit parade.

Simply astonishing.

I'd like to thank my hard working Operations Staff for helping make it happen, as well as the Dorsai Irregulars for doing their thing. I'd also like to thank our hard working volunteers who came by to help us set up and tear down. You guys rock, and are one of the reasons why Anthrocon Operations went so well this year.

I'll post a full report later, but for now I'm going to read through the post-con surveys.

Oh, you didn't fill one out?

http://www.anthrocon.org/survey

Please tell us what you liked, and what we can do to improve. Thanks!

I got mail sent to me the other day, c/o the Anthrocon mailing address:

The enclosed letter reads:

Dear Giza,

Please do not open the enclosed package until Anthrocon.

Thank you,

Dr. Sodic non Grok

"Dr. Sodic non Grok" is an anagram of "Gordon R. Dickson", the original author of the books that featured the Dorsai.

I've no idea who this person is, but they've been making Dorsai Trading Cards for some years now. First there was Series A, then Series 1, and now Series 2.

If you want to see the trading cards, find a Dorsai Irregular at Anthrocon.