Before I begin let me explain my motivations for sending this letter. Sunday, August 8 2010 I decided I wanted make Kahlua cake, a beloved family cake recipe that’s been passed down within my family for many years. One of the ingredients in Kahlua cake is 1/3 cup Kahlua. Excited, I drove to the grocery store to get baking ingredients. After leaving the grocery store I then drove to my local liquor store to pick up a bottle of Kahlua. I was extremely disappointed to realize that it was Sunday and that all of the liquor stores were closed. Upon further analysis of the situation I grew increasingly upset, frustrated and disappointed. I don’t drink alcohol save an occasional glass of wine with dinner, I’ve never had a DUI or other alcohol related legal problem, and yet here I am, of legal age, unable to purchase ingredients to make a cake due to what appears to be a completely arbitrary restriction on liquor sales.

When I returned home I decided to look into the law so I could discern why the state of Texas has, indirectly, infringed upon my making a cake on a Sunday evening. Upon revision of the Texas Alcohol and Beverage Code in the sections denoted above I noticed that the central theme relating to days in which alcohol sale was prohibited appeared to be in alignment with Christian theological ideals and have no discernible motivation to protect the people, their interests or the the state of Texas. This is demonstrable in Title 4 105.01(a)(1), 105.01(a)(2), 105.01(a)(3), 105.02(a), 105.02(b)(1), 105.02(b)(2), 105.03(b), 105.04, 105.05(b) and is particularly egregious in section 105.02(b)(1) and 105.02(b)(2) showing definitely that prohibition on Sunday is directly related to Christian ideology, and not simply an arbitrary day. This information considered, the language “Sunday” is more accurately interpreted as “On the day of the Christian Sabbath”. Furthermore the document makes no references to any other religious holidays of any other religion, but instead adds national holidays such as New Year’s Day and Thanksgiving Day (105.01(b)) in a poorly concealed effort to obfuscate ideological motivation.

This sentiment is further entrenched in section 109.33 of the document describing buffer zones for institutions such as hospitals, schools and churches. In this section, no mention is given of the various other types of religious institutions or buildings such as Jewish Temples, Buddhist Temples, Muslim Mosques, etc., once again showing an obvious favoritism towards the Christian mode of worship. For these reasons I assert that the language in the Texas Alcohol and Tobacco Code in the sections named above are in conflict with Article 1, Section 6 of the Texas Constitution stating in part: “…no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.” and must be amended or revoked to align with the Texas Constitution.

1. Install a hard drive in a laptop
2. Perform a clean OS install on a machine with two OSes
3. Swap out the battery on your iPod/iPhone
4. Jailbreak an iPhone
5. Wire your house for Ethernet and Coax cable
6. Use BitTorrent and RSS to automatically download new shows from trackers
7. Use an A/V receiver to its fullest capability (every port is taken)
8. Calibrate an HDTV without the manual
9. Use a DSLR in full manual mode
10. Hack the encryption and mooch your neighbor’s Wi-Fi
11. Solder cleanly enough to get around a circuit board
12. Use your 3G phone as a Wi-Fi access point
13. Shove the guts of a modern game console into a retro game console
14. Design a webpage in HTML by hand that features a picture of your cat
15. Use Photoshop to imperceptibly doctor a photo
16. Abstain from buying extended warranties
17. Know where to buy cheap cables and accessories
18. Fix your parents’ computer over the phone without looking at a computer
19. Enter the Konami code
20. Comment on Gizmodo from your phone
21. Type quickly using T9 texting
22. Program a universal remote
23. Contribute code to the Linux kernel
24. Hide porn from your significant other
25. Avoid DRM on everything
26. Know how to back up your data to networked storage—and actually do it
27. Watch TV shows on the internet for free
28. Edit together digital video ripped from YouTube
29. Play any SNES game on your computer through an emulator
30. Reset expired trial software by messing with the registry
31. Hackintosh your PC
32. Download pre-release movies from Usenet
33. Hack the Wii to play homebrew games
34. Get around web content filters on public computers
35. Get into a Windows computer if you forgot your password
36. Securely erase your data so it can’t be recovered
37. Share a printer between a Mac and a PC on a network
38. Build a fighting robot
39. Write your own Firefox plugins
40. Navigate and reorganize the files on your computer in DOS
41. Get something on the front page of Digg
42. Get through to executive customer service
43. Rip a CD to V0 quality MP3s
44. Rip a DVD to DivX
45. Build your own computer from parts
46. Swap out the hard drive in your DVR for a bigger one
47. Get an NES cartridge working again by blowing in it
48. Calibrate a 7.1 surround-sound system
49. Play downloaded games on a Nintendo DS
50. Talk about things that aren’t tech related

My Score:

Your score:
]]> http://www.egeste.net/2010/06/how-geeky-are-you/feed/ 0 http://www.egeste.net/2010/06/man-v-food/ http://www.egeste.net/2010/06/man-v-food/#comments Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:40:52 +0000 Egeste http://www.egeste.net/?p=59

Every time I turn on this guy’s show I see him eating some kind of lard-fried 2lb doughnuts in a competition.

He has my vote for the dead-pool.

MC Frontalot - The Final Boss

“I’ve said for years, shadow government already has scaregoat related disinfo hypnology”

It’s amazing to me how so many people seem to think that because they don’t understand something, it has no explanation, or is in some way “magical” or a “miracle”.

“And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist, yall just lying and getting me pissed”

lololololololololololol

ThePirateBay Logo

So, apparently, Swedish corporation Sandryds Handel AB noticed that The Pirate Bay logo isn’t registered or copyrighted to anyone in particular, so what was the next logical step? Well to register/copyright it for themselves of course! Obviously, this is soliciting a reaction from the collective forces of the internetz, including (but not limited to) the torrent community.

According to Sandryds Handel spokesman Bengt Wessborg, the company is intending to “sell USB drives using this brand”, which is actually kind-of a cool idea (especially if they donated a certain percentage to tpb). Here’s the issue, The Pirate Bay logo isn’t registered or copyrighted because it was never meant to be at all restricted, in alignment with the opinion that information should be free, so using the image for USB drives or t-shirts is one thing, but registering and copyrighting the image to your company? That’s completely different.

ex-Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: “It will be turned over quite easily, it’s a preliminary registration that is being ‘tested’” indicating that this isn’t something to be terribly worried about, adding later that “It’s a person at the registration office that has made an error – willingly or not, we’re not sure”. So no worries, pirates, your beloved logo will be safe for now.

Torrentfreak article

SR

Install mod_rewrite
If you already have apache installed, chances are that you already have the mod_rewrite module. If not, install it.

Debain only

egeste:/etc/apache2# a2enmod rewrite

Load the module in your apache config
Like all other daemons, apache relies on configuration files to tell it how to behave. Common configuration changes for apache would be to load/unload modules, change error or access log locations, etc. If your version apache loads modules in the configuration file, uncomment or add the following line to your config.

LoadModule /path/to/mod_rewrite.so

If your version of apache loads modules from the mods-enabled folder, create a symbolic link to the mod_rewrite config file in mods-enabled. This is what it would look like for me.

egeste:~# cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
egeste:/etc/apache2/mods-enabled# ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load

Enable .htaccess override in your web application root directory
Enabling .htaccess to override some settings in the root dir of your application allows you to change the way apache will behave in that directory without the need to restart the apache daemon. I like to add this setting to my vhost config. This is what mine looks like (some info redacted).

egeste:/etc/apache2# cat sites-available/egeste.net.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 DocumentRoot /path/to/site/root
 ServerName www.egeste.net
 ServerAlias egeste.net
</VirtualHost>
<Directory /path/to/site/root>
 Options FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride All
 Order deny,allow
 Allow from all
</Directory>

At this point go ahead and give your apache server a restart.

egeste:/etc/apache2# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Cool, if all went well, you should have mod_rewrite installed, loaded and configured to allow .htaccess overrides in your site root. The only steps that remain are to define a ruleset in .htaccess and write your web application to handle the requests. I won’t go into detail on mod-rewrite rules and regex, but here’s my wordpress .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Happy coding =)

-Egeste

get_pages() is a method that returns an array of $post objects (which is very well documented here). There are multiple arguments you can pass to get_pages() for the purpose of filtering the results you get back (these args are well documented here). For example, if you only want to retrieve sub-pages of the current page, you could say:

$pages = get_pages("child_of=".$post->ID);

One of the args you can specify is the meta_key arg, which will only return pages that contain the meta_key you specify. (See: Custom Fields) This is where I ran into some trouble.

It turns out that get_pages has an argument called hierarchical, which according to the codex does the following:

hierarchical

(boolean) Display sub-Pages in an indented manner below their parent or list the Pages inline. The default is true (display sub-Pages indented below the parent list item). Valid values:

• 1 (true) – default
• 0 (false)

What’s not intuitive about this argument is that it will filter subpages, (that is, not top-level pages) when using the meta_key arg. Here’s an example:

Data Set

• Homepage
• About
  • Foo
  • Bar (This item has a meta_key named banner_title)

Code

count(get_pages("meta_key=banner_title"));

Output: 0
The output indicates that 0 results were returned, despite the fact that we have a page with a meta_key named banner_title. So lets try something different.

Code

count(get_pages("meta_key=banner_title&hierarchical=0"));

Output: 1
Ah, now we’re getting the results we want.

TL;DR – you have to use the hierarchical=0 arg to list all pages that contain your meta_key, otherwise you will only get top-level pages.

-Egeste