flog

The Lyrics board got me thinking last night about my musical tastes. Stepping back as an outside observer I wouldn't peg myself as someone who'd like the blues (or bluegrass, for that matter). But as soon as I brushed up against the blues (in the person of Robert Johnson) I was instantly hooked.

The old-timey acoustic blues from the era when blues, folk and bluegrass were first being recorded (and consequently becoming a commercial endeavor, but that's another flog entry) situates itself in a particular context and takes on all the flavor of its concreteness. The music conjures up ghosts. At one turn there's the dark mysticism of Deep South voodoo; at another turn there's the technology of 1920s modernity, and at its heart are rhythms based on West African beats. But the blues don't just look to the past, they morphogenetically presage the future of American music, indelibly influencing the course of the disparate strands that eventually broke out into Country and Western, R&B, and Rock and Roll.

Does anyone have an idea why my for loop doesn't execute? GCC compiles it without any warnings in regular mode. The only help I get in -pedantic mode is that there is a statement with no effect on line 20. I already knew that, but can't figure out why...

$ cat rot13.c

/* Rot 13 the command line */







void rot13(char);



int main(int argc, char **argv) {



  int rc = 0;

  int i = 0;



  printf("argc == %i
", argc);



  if (argc <= 1) {

    printf("Usage: %s 
", argv[0]);

  }

  else {



    for (i = 0; i++; i < argc) {

      /*  rot13(argv[i]); */

      printf("%s
", argv[i]);

    }

  }



  return rc;

}

A sort of Dark Ages Trainspotting sounds like a decidedly kickass adaptation of Beowulf (written by Roger Avery/Neil Gaiman, directed by Zemeckis).

And as if that isn't enough, there's another movie, Beowulf & Grendel due out sometime this year (2005). It looks to be an Icelandic production.

It sounds as if these 2 movies will complement each other well. One is live action and the Zemeckis film will be motion capture (i.e., the technique used in "Polar Express").

Well, in what seems to be a continued streak of good luck, it seems that my seized rear shock problem has resolved itself. The shock seized during the day Monday, which was the first day the car had sat outside since the cold front came through. Upon inspection after arriving home from work Monday night, I noticed some frozen water splashed around the top of the wheel well. It seems that combined with the fact that the rubber boot that is supposed to cover the region from the bumpstop down to the top of the shock cartridge/housing has long since disintegrated, the water got into the mechanism and froze. Yesterday morning, after things start warming up again and I had left the 2 60W bulbs on in the garage overnight, I realized in a flash that the rear end was absorbing shock again. Yay.

I know how to grab it.

Goddamn! I say, "Goddamn". This Kyuss is good. I must get "Sky Valley" and "Wretch" just so I can experience more of this sonic grandeur.

For whatever reason my thoughts have been wandering over the terrain of the absolutist/relativist debate lately. For the longest time I've held to the existence of at least some set of absolute truths. The contents of that set has changed over time, but even after my successful deconversion I figured there were some aspects of reality that stuck to their guns no matter the context.

But now I'm not so sure. What does it mean for something to be absolute? In a world governed by quantum indeterminancy on the small end and general relativity at the large end does the word 'absolute' have any real meaning? There's some evidence that the fundamental constants of physics may change overtime, probably in relation to how "stuck together" the forces are.

The concept of there being some moral absolutes woven into the fabric of reality is utter nonsense. First, the great majority of matter in the universe is completely amoral. There's no right or wrong to H₂. Second, there isn't really any great agreement in the moral memosphere of human culture, either, outside of a handful of cross-cultural taboos like don't fuck your sister and don't eat your own shit. However, these aren't even absolutes because people fuck their sisters and eat their own shit all the time. Looking at other moral "injunctions" for more rudimentary cultures (such as that of chimps in the Gombe) one can see more clearly that morality in social animals is a matter of codifying ways of interacting to facilitate social bonding, to discourage biologically harmful behavior, and to exert and maintain control. In some circumstances morality also works to effect an equitable (or less inequitable) distribution of resources.

About the best you could do is talk about absolutes within a particular context. Everything has a context. The ironic thing is that many of the most ardent absolutists have to admit this when the rubber meets the road. "Thou shalt not kill." Well, unless you have to defend yourself or you have to protect someone else or that person commits a heinous crime. "Thou shalt not bear false witness." But also, "For if the truth of God has increased through my lie to His glory, why am I also still judged as a sinner?"

One domain where absolutes definitely have residence is mathematics, but I have never been able to figure out to my satisfaction if mathematics exists as a complex of memes cavorting about in human culture or if there is something more "real" about it.

My guess is OCR funkiness rather than a serious notice from the State of Caulifournya on "panticulate matter".

Of course, the State of Caulifournya can't just put up signs that say
"Smoking Permitted in This Building" No, it's
"This building may contain chemicals known by the State of California to cause CANCER!!!!"

Implying a) the maids dust with asbestos or b) The state of California is the only governing body on the planet aware of the carcinogenic effects of tobacco. So, who knows. Maybe we should be worried about exposure to panticulate matter.

Well it appears I finally got my first spam message in my main Verizon mailbox today. The account was created back in May-2004, so I think this is the longest I've ever gone before getting SPAM. Of course, this account hasn't seen the light of day on the Internet. It had to have been calculated using some sort of brute force method.

I'm still not 100% sure if this is commercial automated SPAM or if the sender a) knows me or b) thinks they know me and got the email address wrong. So, the designation as SPAM may be premature. It certainly qualifies as ugly, unsolicited email.

Dear SPAMbots, feel free to harvest the senders email addy:

top 2 100

+OK 5600 octets

To: 

Cc: 

Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 12:34:52 -0500

Subject: return

From: Betty J Gardner 



This message is in MIME format.  Since your mail reader does not understand

this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.



----__JNP_000_5846.7d4c.141e

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit





----- Forwarded Message -----

From: 

To: beege2@juno.com

Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 03:03:22 +0000



Okay, I picked seven people who I thought would do this. I hope I chose

the right seven. Please send this back to me (you'll see why). In case 

anyone is interested, Saint Theresa is known as the Saint of the Little 

Ways.  Meaning she believed in doing the little things in life well and 

with great love. She is also the patron Saint of flower growers and 

florists. She is represented by roses. May everyone be blessed who 

receives this message.

I just rolled over 200,000 miles in the Jetta this morning (9:30 EST 2005-01-18). I was literally within yards of where the old man in the Toyota ran me off the road last month. It's a testament to something (i don't know what) that these "milestone" numbers are achieved on routes that are taken on a regular basis.

The odo rolled over to 100,000 miles right in front of the Mini-Mart in town. And this time (see VehiclesJetta) on my way to work.

All the little things are starting mount up to the point of causing real stress, though. I have to put in the new leather seats because the padding in the drivers' seat is toast, the parking brake cable needs to be adjusted so that we don't have to use a chock on steep hills, the accessory belt needs to be re-tensioned, I need to put the new alloy wheels on because 2 of the 4 steel wheels are bent, the starter motor makes a lovely whiny noise after starting in cold weather (which means it will surely die before I'm done with the car), the muffler has a gigantic hole in it, and just last night I think the right rear shock seized (most likely due to unrecognized damage caused by the aforementioned running off the road).

I guess a lot of this has to do with me just procrastinating on stuff. I've had the seats for about 3 months and the wheels for several weeks. I haven't messed with the brake cable because the last time I pulled the rear drums off I nearly fucked up the wheel bearings. I really need to adopt a fuckit dude attitude wrt my car now, but its hard to be cavalier when its the only working set of wheels we have.

In the long run, though, none of these problems are real major mechanical issues (at least not yet anyway). It's just annoying and makes me worry because I'm in the bind of having to try to fix it myself (not a good idea) or shell out way more money than is necessary to have someone else fix it for me. It basically boils down to a matter of confidence and resources, and I lack both.

Well, we had our first snowfall of the season last night. It really seems a bit grandiose to call the paltry sum of flakes that accumulated on ground in shaded, wind-corralling crevices a "snowfall", but we're talking statistics. It was about -5° C yesterday when the snow began falling and was about 17° C two mornings earlier before the cold front had moved through.

Star Wars pants should not be this funny.

It seems dick face hasn't ever heard of Google. Or maybe he's just trying to weed out the stupid.

From the files of tracking down dead bookmarks.

I have literally nothing to do at work today so I'm going through my old bookmarks and had to track down the Easter Challenge since the URL I had was stale.

Hell, it feels like Spring out there today, so I figured why not flog it.

If anyone out there can reconcile all the infallible scriptural accounts of Easter morning, please email me with the chronology (God knows how to get in touch with me, so just ask him).

I just learned mere minutes ago that one can define classes in VBScript using, of all things, the Class keyword. So now I have to decide if I ought to re-write the modules I've put up here so far. Since VBS modules aren't compiled I'm not sure I really get any better encapsulation or abstraction than I already have. Although Initialization and Disposal could be handled much more cleanly in client code if objects are being used.

I'll probably go ahead and rewrite everything. Well, there shouldn't really be a lot of re-writing rather it will be re-arranging. Stay tuned.

Ok, as far as I can tell these are the various locations and methods needed to pull the binary data that appears on the summary tab of a file in Windows Explorer.
The summary tab fields referred to in this document are Title, Subject, Author, Keywords, and Comments. (Actually, to be able to save and subsequently pull summary info for the full gamut of data types I refer to below the file must reside on an NTFS 5.0 volume (meaning Win2k/XP); the exception being complex OLE documents (e.g., DOC, PPT, XLS) and certain image files (JPEG and TIFF) which store the data within the file itself and so their summary tab info is preserved on FAT32 volumes.)

• JPEG and TIFF - The summary tab information is stored in the EXIF header section in tags with the following tag numbers:
  • 9C9B = Title
  • 9C9C = Comments
  • 9C9D = Author
  • 9C9E = Keywords
  • 9C9F = Subject
  
  
• Other files (e.g., BMP,GIF,ICO,WMF,AVI,HTML) - To date I haven't been able to store the summary info listed above for these files. The Summary tab in Explorer displays read-only data on the image itself.



• Complex OLE documents (includes DOC,PPS,PPT,XLS,MSI, Thumbs.db) - The summary tab information is stored inside the file within the OLE file system of the document itself. It is stored in a stream named "SummaryInformation" which has a 0xFEFF0000 (not translated from little endian format) marker at the start of the stream and a section classid of 0xE0859FF2F94F6810AB9108002B27B3D9 (again not translated from little endian). (Details of the binary format of Property Set streams graciously provided by Rainer Klute.)



• Simple documents (have tested TXT,VBS,WSF,ZIP,TTF,MPEG, EXE,PDF,ASA,ASP,CUR,MDB,OCX,DLL,MOV) - The summary tab information is stored in an NTFS alternate data stream named ^ESummaryInformation. The stream can be accessed using the FileSystemObject in VBScript by doing:

  fso.OpenTextFile(sFileName & ":" & Chr(5) & "SummaryInformation")

  This works because OpenTextFile uses the Windows CreateFile API. The binary format of this NTFS stream is exactly the same as the SummaryInformation stream used in Complex OLE Documents.



• Unknown (WMV,MP3) - These files store summary info but not in any of the methods listed so far. (I think the MP3s may be storing the information in ID3 tags.)

Apparently, to embed HTML in an RSS feed (and have it validate) one must place the HTML tags inside a CDATA area.

Updated ReadSumInfo so that it can pull SummaryInformation either out of NTFS streams or Complex OLE Documents.

In fact, I think Writhe, from the aforementioned "Blues for the Red Sun" may be the best rock and roll song ever. Yes, I think it just might be better than "Kashmir".

Could you ride my sticks down on the floor? Out you go and into one hundred more.

I think Kyuss's "Blues for the Red Sun" has got to be the best album there is for listening to while hacking out code.

• Updates to BeoGallery. GetFileComments() in content.asp tries to read SummaryInformation stream, if no comments were pulled out of the EXIF headers.
• Updated ReadExif and ReadIniFile. I renamed Cleanup*() to Dispose*().
• Added new module, ReadSumInfo, which reads the fields stored in the SummaryInformation stream of files stored on NTFS that have data in the Summary tab. Summary tab information for neither image files nor Microsoft Office files can be read in this manner. SummaryInformation for image files is stored in the EXIF header section of the file and Microsoft Office files duplicate an NTFS-like file structure within the complex OLE data file.

ReadIniFile is a VBScript module to read a standard Windows INI file. The code will work in WSH (can be called unchanged if using WSF), ASP, or VB6.

Stores the INI file data in multiple dictionary objects, so Scripting Runtime must be enabled.

BeoGallery is a bare-bones picture gallery ASP website application that can read EXIF Comments out of JPG files. It comes with a WSF script to generate an RSS feed of your pictures.

I pulled some ASP code for reading EXIF headers from JPEG files and have reworked it quite a bit. I basically pulled the code for the actual parsing of the binary data and scrapped the rest.

My take on the module can be used unchanged in WSF or ASP includes and provides a small number of public interface functions, hiding somewhat the data storage details from the client.

An example WSF script using the module follows (it's there in a <pre> block, which apparently, isn't showing up for some reason).

Imagine that. Reed City has Premium Diesel and not just premium diesel but the premier premium diesel. I don't even recall there being a BP there during my summer of hell.

In a startling reversal of fate, I caught a break. Whilst driving home last night, I downshifted into 4th in anticipation of the fun 80 degree right hand turn that I love to take at 45. As I downshifted, though, I noticed that the shifter didn't notch into 4th as usual.

Upshift into 5th, hey wait, 5th isn't in the right place, nope neither is 3rd...or 1st and 2nd and 4th don't lock into place like they should.

After getting home it is discovered that the shifter cannot be manipulated into R. So, about now I'm shitting my pants (again). After what passes for a thorough inspection on my part, I discover and retrieve a C-clip that is sitting in a little nook on top of the transmission. I then call my buddy Matt and set up an appointment to stop by his house today so he can look it over. He's not confident he'll know enough to be any help, but I'm desparate.

Well, it turns out the problem simply was that clip wasn't holding the lower spring for the shifting mechanism any longer and the linkage was all verfucked. Matt pulled the spring back out and slipped the C-clip on and blamo, shifty shifty worky worky.

Things are gonna change, I can feel it.