c.oloss.us

For the 2009 RPM Challenge, a friend and I have created an album, called Deep Fried Trans Fat Experience.

It's best described as electrospiramental industrinoise with robotical mastication. Music to breed helicopters by.

Visit The Taxidermy Project for a listen.

Godaddy.com honestly believes they should police the content hosted on sites, and when they object, they pull domain names. Most recently, they pulled ratemycop.com, but it has happened before, and it has made a lot of people angry. I have registered a number of names with them in the past, and as they come up for renewal, I've been moving them to another registrar. It's not as though I post anything interesting enough to be pulled, I just don't think behavior like that is appropriate for a domain registrar.

Every time I leave town, on business or vacation, one of the machines I use regularly dies. It's not always the same machine, but it's usually one at work. After DragonCon, it was my macbook pro...it developed difficulty reading its hard drive. I don't back things up nearly as often as I should, but for some reason, I backed up just before leaving. I didn't back up the whole system, just my home folder.

I ordered a new drive, one a little bigger and a little faster, and replaced the drive. I reinstalled OSX, and did the software update thing over the network. I haven't done an easier operating system install since DOS.

Then, I copied my backup home folder over my new home folder (cp -R /Volumes/DESU\ BOX/backup/ryan/* .), logged out and then logged back in...

And there was my old desktop, my dock was on the right side of the screen, all my icons were on the desktop, my apps were back and set up properly, and everything was right with the world. There were a few things with question marks on the dock, but I dragged the apps back to the system Applications folder, and they showed up properly again (and having restored my home folder, they're still configured properly).

I have had many Windows machines crash. This is the first time I have had a mac crash, and it's the first time I have ever painlessly restored a system without losing anything.

I'm never going back.

After wrestling with vendors for far too long, I have created my own obfuscation tool. On friday, I released it as an open source project. Like the tool from Remotesoft, it uses massive overloading to scramble the metadata for assemblies.

It's a console application, designed to be run from build scripts. The files to obfuscate and other configuration is read from an xml file at runtime, specified via the command line. I've not yet had time to document it, or provide examples, but will do so shortly. At any rate, the code is out there.

It uses Cecil and C5 to work its magic. They are both really great libraries (thanks!). There's something quite ironic about an open source obfuscation tool.

End the tyranny of buggy obfuscation tools and poor technical support. Use Obfuscar.

We got our house, and have now moved into it.

It's a beautiful house, about 70 years old. It's about one mile to Duke University or downtown Durham, in the historic Trinity Park neighborhood (the house is one block off of the historic district itself). The neighborhood is quiet, with giant trees knitted together over the streets. Our neighbors are really nice people...one of them even helped me carry my severely overweight TV, though I don't think he knew what he was getting into when he volunteered.

Moving was difficult...I never imagined I'd have enough stuff to fill a 17' truck, floor to ceiling and front to back, nor that I'd have to carry it all. Next time, I will hire movers!

I don't plan to get telephone service, as our cell phones work well out there (they worked terribly at our old place). Since there's no land line, I had to get the 'cell guard' service for the alarm. It was expensive, but at least it can't be disabled by cutting the power. Instead of DSL, I'm now enjoying a cable modem. In the past, DSL has always been sufficient for my needs, since I don't really download a lot, but I can't go back now that I've tasted the bandwidth.

We are tossing most of our old furniture. We got couches and some chairs from Rooms to Go, and shelves, storage, and other goodies from IKEA.

IKEA doesn't ship large items, and the nearest one is in Woodbridge, VA (near Washington DC). The trip was quite an adventure...I had a friend drive us there (it's only a few hours away), where I rented a large truck. We then went to IKEA, and bought a lot of stuff, including some couches and things friends had asked us to pick up.

As we were loading the truck, it began to rain. I usually drive a very small car...driving a truck is very different, and in my opinion, it is fairly hard to do. It began to get dark, and it was no fun at all driving the truck in the rain at night. The mirrors got all fogged up, and it was hard to see.

Driving the truck was frustrating and nerve wracking. After some time, I decided to stop and get a bite to eat. Parking a truck is even more difficult than driving one, but some restaurants have parking just for trucks, and are relatively easy to get in and out of. There isn't a lot between here and Washington, and there aren't a lot of places to stop. I saw a sign that said there was a Cracker Barrel restaurant ahead, and decided to go there. I don't very much like their food, but they have truck parking and my options were limited.

I got off the highway where the sign said to, and then followed the arrow that said it was one mile down the road. I got about five miles down the road without seeing it before I decided to turn around. As I drove back towards the highway, I carefully checked each shopping center. Finally, I spotted a small sign that said Cracker Barrel, and turned into the parking lot.

Unfortunately, the restaurant had burned down.

Back on the road, I found an Iron Skillet restaurant, and decided to eat there. If you have never eaten there, don't. It was interesting to see all the truckers in their natural habitat, but the food was horrific and nearly killed me. I found a small piece of metal in my mashed potatoes, a thin wavy strip of metal.

On the way out, we saw a man that looked exactly like Brent Spiner, and I choose to believe that it was him. He got into his car very quickly when he noticed us looking at him. His car has Ohio plates.

I eventually got home, and ate there. We unloaded the truck the next day, and returned it the following.

Furniture from IKEA nearly all comes in flat boxes and has to be assembled. I got several pieces put together, but still have a lot more to do. When it's all done, we will be able to get everything unpacked...for now though, it seems like no matter how many we open and put away, the number of boxes around the house doesn't seem to be decreasing.