The medical facts in this motion picutre are authentic.

Luminous toxin is a descriptive name for an actual poison.

Technical Adviser, Edward F. Dunne, M.D.

So archive.org is good for something, after all.

And in related news, my shiny new MSI motherboard wasn't DOA, and works with the new Radeon 9200SE. A marked improvement over my Soyo KT400 board, which didn't.

I'm slowly working my way through Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python, a tutorial that doesn't seem to be written for beginner programmers. Which is a good thing. But why does he have to introduce the language's introspection features before defining your own classes? It's neat that they seem so easy to use, but I'd rather just find out about the python equivalent of blessing hashes.

I've got some email. It says that I've been excepted as an OOSPLA 2004 Student Volunteer! So, providing I can extract flights out of my supervisor (which means I'll need to have a good excuse to go, like attending a workshop) I'll be in Vancouver in late October!

And if you call within the next minute, you'll get not one, not two, not three, not four, but five free Debian installs!

Some friends and I are going to share one of ValueWeb's cheap dedicated servers, but don't really want to run Fedora Core. So I found an appropriate howto, installed qemu, installed Fedora Core 1 inside the qemu instance, and converted it. The howto is a little out of date, and does things that look slightly dodgy (dding a rw mounted ext3 filesystem to somewhere else in order to copy it?), but I muddled my way through, and didn't stuff things up too badly. And ignored a lot of the instructions, because I wanted / to be XFS, and FC1 doesn't seem to support that.

The BT101 in my office now has a US toll-free number.

Maybe I should start my own telco :-)

Having decided that it would be great fun to wander down Lambton Quay with a phone connected to CafeNet, I've ordered a Linksys WRT54G (the sort that runs Linux) from PCwise. When I recieve it, I'll assess it's power requirements, and obtain an appropriate power source.

Stay tuned for Episode Two: Attack of the Phones!

I hate javascript: links.

Sorry. That's not really what I meant. Let's try again.

I loathe javascript: links.

That sounds better.

Particularly when they're used to link to other documents. Which could be done so easily without involving LiveJavaScript. It makes things hard to spider. It makes loading pages in new tabs impossible.

Grr.

Er. Good points: it's set in the 1950s, has Tim Curry, a mansion, thunder and rain, two cars that break down but only one driver who wants to use the mansion's phone. Bad points: there's not a lot else - and they borrowed the synthesiser from Tron (but thankfully didn't use it too often). The multiple endings thing is a bit gimmicky, too. It is a silly movie.

Well, I've just released AutoTun 0.1, a useful little utility for simple IPv4 over IPv4 tunneling. The one neat feature that you should care about (really) is that it doesn't require tunnels to be set up statically in advance - it uses DNS to lookup tunnel endpoints on the fly.

On the other hand, there's nothing to stop you faking ethernet packets and confusing hosts. Which is probably not good. But it's really only a proof-of-concept at this stage :-)

So, my brilliant scheme for the day was to stay at home and get some work done on PDF2you. This necessitates using my desktop linux box, as emacs on the iBook is just utter crap - only one mouse button, and no sloppy focus.

Of course, this meant that my PC had to decide to die. Current problems include

• Mail client claiming it's forgotten how to retrieve mail, then doing so anyway
• HDD making odd noises
• occasional freezes
• When I tried downgrading to a 2.4 kernel, my onboard NIC wouldn't work
• More to come, I'm sure.