A better liquor cabinet. [20 Dec 2009|04:45am] rexar ( RAM upgrade. ) I installed the board months ago, so it's about time I checked to make sure it worked. 1 Inspired... Lift Your Voice

Musings of a Painter [10 Dec 2009|12:55pm] fire_adonis [ mood | Puzzled ] [ music | None ] The other day Josh came into my room in a rather depressed mood. He was stressing out about certain things that were decided at the Shoetree Company meeting at Quarryhouse this past Monday, and he felt that he didn’t have enough time to accomplish them. He was also worried about a few theatre related events that were pooling in his mind. While he was discussing this with me he drifted off in mid-sentence and sat down in a chair. In his melancholy reverie he stared at an abstract painting that I was working on that was across from him. Then something remarkable happened. He stared at this painting for a few minutes and his demeanor, once lively, became drained. I realized from watching him that the parts that held on to hope, dreams, a desire for accomplishment were being slowly pulled out of him and absorbed into the pigment of the canvas. I became very uncomfortable with this so I drew his attention away. “It’s horrifying isn’t it.” I said. He looked at me with a grin and said something about getting back to work, then left the room. He never finished his project. This made me realize that art can be a dangerous thing. While art can be a imaginative communication that serves to inspire, a particular work of art placed in the wrong place at the wrong time can apparently serve to do the exact opposite. Previously I had not thought this possible, but after this odd little occurrence I couldn’t help but make a correlation. I’m sure to Josh the painting was just a tiny little nudge in the wrong direction, but when someone is teetering a nudge is all that’s needed. He had never really been comfortable with this particular painting, seeming to be unsettled by it on a subconscious level, and I am a little disturbed that it had such an effect on him at the time. Perhaps he sees something in the canvas that I don’t. After all, it is well known that what people see in a painting is a reflection of themselves, and what I see as something beautiful and wondrous Josh maybe sees something… a little more morbid. Oh well, there really isn’t anything that can be done about it. Still, it’s interesting. Lift Your Voice

[10 Dec 2009|07:08pm] snaury ...I was recompiling libxml2/libxslt at work, when I found that there are some new versions. So I download them, build them, rebuild nokogiri/etc, and think that everything's all right. But then I try running test suite (just for fun) and find that it crashes. Turns out I'm not alone. So there's some obscure bug from 2004 where someone couldn't build something against libxml2, because people have no brains they failed to define LIBXML_STATIC (many libraries (e.g. zlib, iconv, maybe readline I can't remember) follow the same convention: if you want to build statically, define BLAH_STATIC to stop declaring things with dllexport/dllimport). But even though it's such an old and obscure bug, recently it was "fixed". And what a brilliant fix! Declare everything dllexport (which is fucking ingenious)! Doesn't matter that things start to crash (including, oh my gosh, the test suite... apparently since test suite doesn't complete without errors anyway, nobody bothered to run it for two months before releasing), no link errors anymore! This reminded me about openssl vulnerability in Debian. Easy fixes without understanding (or thinking about) the whole picture, is what I think causes screw ups like these... Lift Your Voice

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