Linkstew

"Hey, I just tried to pkill a service and I got disconnected from the machine and now I can't reconnect." a co-worker just said.

"What'd you kill?" Jim asked.

"Um... oh, I used -v instead of -f. What does -v do?"

PGREP(1)                      Linux User’s Manual                     PGREP(1)

NAME
       pgrep,  pkill  -  look  up  or signal processes based on name and other
       attributes

...

DESCRIPTION

...

       pkill  will send the specified signal (by default SIGTERM) to each 
       process instead of listing them on stdout.

OPTIONS

...

       -v     Negates the matching.

OH. Worst, option, ever. To be fair, I suspect that that option exists because pkill is probably just a thin wrapper on pgrep. But still.

It probably didn't help matters that he ran pkill via sudo.

Secure RSS Syndication. This is a pretty rad application of Greasemonkey to do client side decryption, in this case of encrypted information in an RSS feed. It's worth noting that he implemented blowfish in JavaScript, should you ever find yourself needing such a beast.

While looking at a couple of maps of Vegas in preparation for this weekend's trip, I noticed there's a new hybrid view, but I can't find any mention of it on the web yet. It does a pretty awesome job of overlaying information on the satellite view, finally making the satellite view something more than a novelty. I also don't remember google maps including so many landmarks, but this makes finding which casinos are within walking distance of my hotel super easy.

I really need to learn the google maps API so I can just embed a map in the post next time. Too bad your average aggregator probably wouldn't take very well to that.

Update: Oh, they also added a scale!

The best letter ever written to the airlines - scroll down past the poker talk to the scanned images. Very funny.

The Costco Challenge: An Alternative to Wal-Martization? - As if you needed another reason to like Costco better than Wal-Mart.

I've decided that the 4th of July is going to be my holiday for spontaneity. Last year I decided at the last minute to drive to Anaheim to go to Anime Expo for the first time since high school to catch up with some old friends.

This year, I decided at the last minute that I'd join some friends at a cabin near Gualala for the 4th. We took turns doing some cooking, enjoyed some wine (I missed out on the wine tasting thanks to getting a late start after a late night at work), and generally had a pretty good time. On the 4th, we kayaked down a river that ended at the ocean. As we neared the ocean, the wind really picked up and it was a serious workout to get out to the island in the lagoon where we decided to stop.

Here are the pictures of the weekend, but due to some technical difficulties the movies of the rope swing will have to wait. This map is centered on our cabin, and if you scroll just a little bit north you can see where the river ended up at the ocean.

I was excited to hear about the movie support in iPhoto 5, but it turns out it's just not any good. Here are the problems I've had with it tonight:

• When you double click on a movie, it opens in QuickTime. iPhoto doesn't have any built in support for trimming my movies, so this finally spurred me to buy QuickTime Pro for the third time.
• So I enter my new QuickTime Pro registration key and start editing the movie in QuickTime pro, assuming that it's going to work in the same was as PhotoShop does as an external editor for photos. In particular, I was expecting that I'd be able to hit "save" and it'd save a new copy of my movie, preserving my original movie in the process. Nope. It prompts me where to save the movie, and it doesn't automatically import it.
• After tracking down where I just saved the movie and dragging it into iPhoto. Unfortunately, iPhoto apparently doesn't recognize QuickTime Pro 7's default save format, and informs me that "The following files could not be imported (they may be an unrecognized file type or the files may not contain valid data)."
• So I finally figure out which format iPhoto can import and I get all my movies edited and ready to export to my Gallery, but the export module will only export photos. Apparently I'm going to have to manually upload each of my movies to my gallery if I want them there.

Though now that I look at the iPhoto product page, they seem to only claim the only new feature with regard to movies "Import video clips from your digital camera," which seems accurate since I ran into problems with editing, importing from the file system, and exporting.

Needless to say, this isn't exactly motivating me to finish sorting through my New York and Las Vegas pictures for posting.

iPhoto feedback goes here.