So, my MacBook Pro was dropped off at Apple support late monday night, and has been shipped out by them to get fixed.

I was having issues when while it was charging, and I was using it that I would get shocked really bad every so often. After some checking, I found out there was a grounding fault, and that every so often it would pump a full 120 volts through the case itself rather than back out to the power brick. Also, my screen would every so often flicker off and back on. Sometimes every hour, and other times it would not do it for days.

My power supply also when charging, I would know a shock was coming because the little LED in the power adapter would stop glowing orange/green and instead would go out entirely (still charging the battery though).

The genius was awesome, he immediatly shipped it off to the apple repair center, and told me that he would do that for me since I knew one of the ex-apple employees there. So I got rush shipped :P. He said it was easier than ordering parts and hoping it would fix the issue, so I should hopefully be getting a laptop with new guts in it!

That being said, since I am without my MacBook Pro I have been feeling rather naked, like I am missing my phone, or left it at home. So in feeling of desperation and eye-candy, I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on an old P4 with 1 GB of ram. Please don't shoot me!

I must enjoy pain on a huge level, as I am still using MySQL, and even worse, I am still using software that is using reserved words in MySQL, so doing a dump from the DB and then re-inserting it will cause some funny problems.

Now, since that will fail because of the reserved words I have to manually edit the field names, and add the proper quotation marks around it, so MySQL will grok it. I have a multitude of editors available to me: TextMate, SubEthaEdit, nano, vim and a few others.

I try to open it in SubEthaEdit. It goes on it's merry way and allocates a gig of ram, and then fails miserably. Same thing happens with TextMate. These programs were designed to do text editing on text files, with syntax highlighting.

nano causes the system to lock up while it tries to allocate about 1.10 GB of ram before it too is cut off by the kernel. This is insane, text editors that are unable to deal with a relatively small dump. Only 600 MB worth, I have done dumps where the data was well over 16 GB.

So after all this, I open it in the application I knew could handle it, but hate to use since it's syntax is really still baffling to me. vi.

vi uses 10 MB of memory, and has the file open and ready to be used within a few minutes. Searching through the file is just as fast as using grep or other tools. The makers of all the other text editors should take a page from vi's book, and figure out how they got so much functionality into such a small package, and off course being able to open multi-GB files is always a big plus for people that have to deal with such things!

And why I will never use it: Slide by creator, about people who don't like Ruby on Rails.

Now, for a more serious reason, I absolutely dislike how it is structured, and I dislike Ruby itself. I have never been able to wrap my head around Ruby because of the way it does certain things, and it's syntax. Not only that, in my experiments, and working on more mature projects I have NEVER been able to find a way to scale it in any reasonable fashion, as the RoR people all seem to think that throwing more CPU's at the project is the way to go. That too me is retarded, as soon as I need to scale bigger with PHP, I implement some caching of the op-codes for PHP, then I implement an op-code optimiser, and then I start looking at doing load balanced servers, maybe even just a few front end squid servers with one apache back-end, or one front-end lighttpd server and a few back-end PHP fastCGI implementations ready to rock.

Yeah, that slide just puts me off the language forever. Fuck you indeed.

So today I found out that I had accidently broken my blog by trying to nest a url.rewrite-once in a $HTTP["URL"] statement in my Lighttpd config. Which meant that my rules for rewriting Drupal nice URL's were not being executed, as apparently you can't nest them like that. Took me a bit to track it down, but once I did I found a link to nordisch by nature which included a new mod_magnet script which did the same thing the rewrite rules but better.

Looking at mod_magnet now, I think I like it better than the Apache .htaccess stuff, as it is just like a programming language so it is extremely powerful. The thing that kind of scares me is that it runs within the server's core, not as a seperate module, then again, PHP runs as a module within the core of Apache when it is known as mod_php. (Lighttpd does not have mod_php support, but does do FastCGI properly, unlike Apache).

More about mod_magnet as I come across other neat tricks. Maybe I will finally get my "About me" website back up and running, as Lighttpd does not do SSI includes like Apache did (no nesting. Understandably, but still ...)

The car is apart in pieces, and we finally figure out that the way it is all situated underneath the car is not that great. We had to disassemble pretty much everything since the A/C and power steering where an after thought, so those had to come lose and hang down so we could get to the two bolts on the water pump.

Casey is taking care of it, and I am grateful for that, so now I can go to Vegas and have my fun, go to DefCon and other such fun activities. I wanted to drive up in my car so I would not be dependent on Steve to drive me around, but I guess that kind of luck was not in the cards.

"It is the challenges in life that grow character. It is in growing character that we become wiser. It is through becoming wiser we find out we really don't know anything" - Unknown

I am pretty sure I butchered that quote. It was in one of those rip off calendars. I love quotes!

Off course my car has to break again. This time with a part that is VERY hard to replace. The water pump. It means I need to take almost the entire engine apart:

1. Valve head cover
2. Timing belt cover
3. Pulleys
4. Timing Belt
5. Other belts (2)
6. Alternator (since the bracket is screwed into the water pump)
7. Water pump

This is going to be a heavy job, and I am not looking forward to it. But it will mean the timing belt will be finally replaced, something I was not looking forward to doing, it has to be replaced every 60k, and it is at 90k+ and the previous owner was not all to nice to the car, so I doubt it has ever been done. At the same time I am replacing the lower and upper hoses, the clamps on those, and the thermostat, since I was planning on doing that anyway.

$person->sweat();
$car->remove($car->parts->type("Waterpump"));
$person->sweat();
$car->add(new $parts->type("Waterpump"));
$person->sweat();

$person->sleep(); // Required! :P

I unfortunately live in the state with the worst drivers ever. The amount of crap I see on the roads daily is not even funny, and I can't even begin to explain!

So the last few days it has been really dusty outside, sand storms and all that jazz. Now, for anyone that has not had that happen to them, it is just like fog, visibility is near zero, and it has one more downside, sand tastes bad. There are however these dumb drivers who decide that it is best for the world, and especially themselves to turn on their bright lights. Yes, if you are thinking of how that is an bad idea while driving in fog, it is the same concept in dust. Turning on their bright lights causes the light be reflected off the sand particles so visibility is further reduced, and at the same time you are being an major pain in the ass for people coming from the other direction, since bright lights are bright sand or no sand. People who do this on major highways should be shot, since when you are driving next to such an ignorant fool you are blinded as well from all the whiteness of their lights. Best thing to do, turn on fog lights, they shine low and are amber coloured and thus let you see further and at the same time not blind other people on the road.

Then there are those people that don't know how to use a blinker. So while you are driving along, and you properly signal that you are going to move into a the left lane for example, some guy in the far lane may decide he wants to move over to the right, and does not turn on his blinker. So as you make your move, some huge truck or SUV comes hurling at you sideways.

Coming back to the bright lights, apparently people find that if they turn em on at night, they are able to see better, not understanding that when someone approaches them they are blind as a bat and could make a bee line for their car. Same goes for people that are in the middle of a long row of cars, and they have their bright lights on shining directly into the car in front of theirs mirror. Learn how to drive, bright lights are only allowed to be used on unlit streets, and where there is no on-coming traffic that could be blinded.

Other dumb crap I have seen people pull: Figure out how a car looks wedged underneath a FedEx truck. I have to sit in traffic because some 18 year old in a Honda Civic lost control of his car and got stuck underneath a huge FedEx truck. Thanks, now my already long drive is even longer because everyone has to see what happened. The kid is okay, now hurry it up. Beat that orange just that last second instead of stopping and waiting, and off course getting hit by the driver who was waiting for it to turn orange so he could make his left hand turn (for you people driving on the wrong side of the road, that would be a right turn).

Coming back to stand storms, there are normally huge gusts of wind associated with these. A small car like mine will get tossed around quite a bit, but I can feel it and correct, some of these people have apparently never had a gust of wind hit their car, as you see them swerve, over-correct, almost hit the guard rail, over-correct into the other direction and end up in a different lane.

My all time favourite dumb thing to do is inch up at the traffic light. Slowly but surely roll your car over the line until it turns green, and then when it turns green? Well off course, we not in a hurry anymore, we slowly accelerate and do 5 Mph's BELOW the speed limit. Come on grandma, hit the gas pedal, if you were in such a rush to not be able to have your car properly stopped at a traffic light, please for the love of whoever you love, HIT THE GAS PEDAL.

My car has been leak free, and has not had it's oil level drop, and I have driven almost 1000 miles on it, since we replaced the gasket, so that worked really well!

Now, I just need to get a new compressor, Receiver dryer, and an expansion valve to replace those, and then I will have an A/C compressor that is under warrantee which would be great, since in Arizona one really does need A/C, even-though I am getting quite used to driving in 42 C weather. It will also come in handy when I drive up to DefCon at the end of July, beginning of August. Looking forward to that.

So far I have an average Miles per Gallon of about 30, which is absolutely not bad considering I drive it like Roger Ramjet :P. Gas prices have also been going down, which means it is becoming a bit easier to afford the gasoline to drive places, which is nice. It really is false hope though, gas prices will be around $5 by the end of this year, just wait for it. Unless something drastically changes, it will happen.

On a better note, the US government is considering upping the requirement for car manufacturers as to the MPG they need to be able to get. All the way up to 35 Mpg, which would be awesome, means the US should finally see more fuel efficient cars, so that when I update my car to something newer after I drive the wheels off of my Sephia, I can buy a car that can get at least 40 Mpg. America should take a look at European cars (Renault, Opel and others).

Yesterday I took my time, got a new valve head cover gasket, so I replaced that, and while I was at it I replaced my spark plugs. There were some american spark plugs in there, something one just does not put in a korean car. So I got some DENSO spark plugs:

Also, as I was removing the old spark plugs, my friend and I noticed that the spark plugs were in the engine VERY loose, which would have meant I would not have been getting such great compression. So after we got the new ones in, we went for a test ride. And WOW that made a difference. Ive got more power on the lower RPM's, it is guzzling down less fuel, and on the highway it is doing almost 500 RPM's less at the same speed. More MPG is better!

We also painted the Valve head cover, but we have to sand it down and redo it again some other time, as last night we did not have the time for it. It does not yet look as good as it could, so I am not going to be posting pictures yet.

A post on the DefCon forums prompted me to go find some free Nerdcore, which is Hip Hop/Rap which is geek oriented and created by geeks. It appeals to me since it uses sounds and songs that I know as a computer geek, as well as references, and other such cool things. I have found quite a few free songs here and there, but the best one has got to be Rhymetorrents. There is quite a bit available under the Creative Commons licenses. Let me know what you guys like!

Some of the ones I like:

Emulation Station - 1337 G33K B3AT
WoW - Futuristic Sex Robotz
Fuck the MPAA - Futuristic Sex Robotz
Vampire Girl - MCeeP

This stuff is awesome.