/dev/random

From the Sun-Sentinel:
Andrea Levin is grateful that Broward County schools care about her daughter’s safety. But this year when they posted a sign that demanded “no running” on the playground, it seemed like overkill.
“I realize we want to keep kids from cracking their heads open,” said Levin, whose daughter is a Gator Run Elementary [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve tried listening to a few podcasts with my new iPod & iTunes 4.9 and I just can’t get excited about it. I really hate talk radio and most podcasts I’ve listened to are full of the same boring chatter, lousy interviews, and annoying commentators. The only podcasts I really like are Benn loxo du [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve temporarily disabled anonymous comments since I’ve been getting hit hard with comment spams today. Registered users can still post comments.

[Read more →]

Via Boing Boing:
You can download Plan 9 from Outer Space for free from the Internet Archive! (Link)
“Plan 9″ is widely considered the worst movie ever made, but there are many much worse. It doesn’t even come close to “Manos: the Hands Of Fate”, which is truly painful to watch.

[Read more →]

Raccoon

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

There were two raccoons by my building this afternoon. I saw something moving and at first I thought it was a cat until I saw the tail.

[Read more →]

Via MetaFilter: Muslims are speaking out against terrorism to anyone who will listen.
I have some good friends who are Muslims, mostly Sufis and Senegalese Mourides. In his album Egypt, Youssou N’dour exposes Islam’s peaceful, tolerant side with songs about saints like Amadou Bamba.

[Read more →]

It looks like the change I made to MacMegasite had a big effect on my bandwidth & CPU usage.
A few days ago I was seeing stats like this:

Successful requests: 48,036
Data transferred: 205.68 megabytes

Since I’ve been using a permanent redirect in my .htaccess for the RSS feed, it looks more like this:

Successful requests: 30,059
Redirected requests: 14,875
Data [...]

[Read more →]

Tropical storm Emily has formed and it looks like it’s aiming at is, although it’s still much too early to tell. I don’t think we’ve ever had this many storms so early in the season.
UPDATE: the current tracking map shows Emily moving further to the south of us.

[Read more →]

MacWorld Boston is going on this week and nobody seems to care. This is about the least excitement I’ve seen for a Mac show.

[Read more →]

We dodged this one. All we got was some strong wind (about 20 MPH) and lots of rain. A few branches down but no damage. My patio enclosure held up nicely and stayed dry.

[Read more →]

drupal.org is collecting donations for a new server. They needed $3000 for a new server, but in 16 hours they got over $6000 (including my small donation). The new server will be ordered tomorrow. Open Source Lab is providing free rack space & bandwidth for the new server.

[Read more →]

I think I came up with a solution that will fix MacMegasite’s heavy resource usage. A lot of my hits - maybe 60% - are coming from RSS readers. I’m already using FeedBurner to process my feeds. Until now I was using a hack to cause /node/feed to redirect to the FeedBurner URL and Drupal’s [...]

[Read more →]

I now have store.worldbeatplanet.com and

[Read more →]

I’ve upgraded all of my sites to Drupal 4.6.2, which fixes the recently mentioned security holes. For my one non-public site which was still using 4.5, I upgraded it to 4.5.4, which also fixes those holes.

[Read more →]

I see that Drupal.org has been down for a few days. This also prevents other drupal sites with shared authentication from logging in users with IDs at drupal.org.
update: There’s some information at http://www.webschuur.com/drupal.org:

Drupal.org is down for maintenance.
And a quick command to “fix” the xmlrpc issue is to get rid of the XMLRPC file. But removing [...]

[Read more →]

I received my order of 100 professionally duplicated & printed copies of Jimi M’baye’s “Yaye Digalma”. The packaging looks great & they sound perfect. I’m now selling it at the WorldBeatPlanet Store.

[Read more →]

I just got my new iPod, the 60G color model. I bought it from PowerMax trading in my old 40G 3rd generation iPod. I’ve bought every Mac I currently own from PowerMax (except for the old B&W G3) since they accept trade-ins and give a decent price.

[Read more →]

My friend’s cat Toby, who was missing for 6 weeks, is home! Someone found him a few blocks away from here. He lost some weight and needs a bath but he seems healthy.

[Read more →]

I’ve added a subscription feature to worldbeatplanet using the Drupal paypal subscription module. For $5/month a user gains upload privileges and gets their own weblog at http://www.worldbeatplanet.com/blog.
Until recently I’ve been concentrating on MacMegasite due to the higher news volume and more or less ignoring WorldBeatPlanet since it gets very few news submissions and I haven’t [...]

[Read more →]

In a surprise announcement Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court and a key swing vote on issues such as abortion and the death penalty, said today she is retiring.
O’Connor, 75, said she expects to leave before the start of the court’s next term in October, or whenever the Senate [...]

[Read more →]