It’s strange sometimes how you find out about someone’s death.

Listening to my local ‘light jazz’ station while waxing the car yesterday, there was a blurb about Wayman Tisdale‘s next concert sets – some close enough for a drive.

I noted to myself ‘Good, he’s finally getting well,’ only to find that he died yesterday when I attempted to price tickets this morning.



Wayman had an interesting style, his more well-known, a remake of “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now“. Sorry to see you go, Wayman.

I had to snap a picture of this for posterity. On a sub-digital channel of a local affiliate, they run old old old-old shows which are generally considered to be out of syndication, or cost nearly nothing (but free advertising spots) to run. Some of these are interesting, and others are actually amusing – and the likes of which never duplicated, such as “The Rockford Files.”

Immediately after Crisis (AKA Kraft Suspense Theatre), I spotted this gem:

Yes, it’s an infomercial direct to us from TN.

This evening these enterprising individuals were selling 100 knifes for $100. Straight from their “Wharehouse”.

If you want an enormously oversized 6.2mpix image of it, it’s linked – please feel free to save it, as I did, for posterity, but do not hotlink the image. Thanks!

For the entire two of you who will ask “Why’s it so dark?”, I had the camera in “Stablizing mode”, which always forces the flash to be on; the automatic correction took out the rest of the TV, and the wall behind it!

Also, for Mother’s day, I thought I’d take ma out for lunch. It didn’t quite work out that way. I ended up doing some tree trimming with clippers AND hacksawing, bagging, dragging, cleaning up dead animal parts, and making no less than 200 gallons worth (why are garbage bags measured in gallons, anyhow?) of sagebrush and tumbleweeds to be re-greened at our local recycling dump.

Then, after I got home, I got to fix one leaky toilet (bad valve) by replacing the entire assembly. I ended up reusing that old flapper on a plastic/rubber guide to replace the one in the other toilet which has a rusted-out handle bar assembly. A quick hole through the plastic guide, a re-use of the clasp from the flap from the thos toilet, and a re-use of the overflow/bowl water guide from the replaced model slipped over the rusted-out end of the arm assembly, and they both work perfectly for a whole $16.32.

“Site News” has been in a stasis, if not a coma, since I migrated from my former CMS platform to TextPattern. As this proprietary and deprecated function was no longer applicable beyond a few homebrew extensions and updates beneath the hood, I have not used it.

However, with the upgrade to TXP 4.0.8, my ‘old redirect links’ that were automatically generated under Rollator have ceased to work properly; I’ve retooled the redirect parser to contend with this, and it functions as designed once again.

For those of you who are wondering about those ‘silly long garbage link urls’ above, it is simply a fully-qualified URI as a base64 hash with padding removed; in 2003 it was pretty spiffy – after all, this would allow you to link to other sites without losing PR in Google (remember, rel=‘nofollow’ did not yet exist – that was introduced in 2005)!

For the few interested in Rollator:

That was my homebrew CMS which I started work on late in 2001 and built upon through 2004ish – until eventually abandoning it because it had outgrown it’s usefulness in my mind, and I didn’t feel like maintaining a rather obnoxious code base or rewriting it – I decided that the world did not need yet another CMS.

However, in 2002 it touted RSS 0.9 and 2.0 feeds, Dynamic page generation (with content caching to use as few SQL calls as possible – it took 3 to build the final page if you had comments and QuickURLs enabled, and would generate a cached/rendered page every update so it was nearly as fast as static HTML content), A multiple-user administrative interface, redirect and URL masking, a simple ‘comment on this entry’ display/add subsystem, music-listening-to-now dynamic updates, the ability to make bookmarklets of sites you find interesting (which I called QuickURLs at the time), image/content upload and automatic linking, full SHA160 and GPG-protected dynamic checksumming (which was very CPU heavy, but allowed you to ensure that the content offered was that which you initially provided – rather, that it hasn’t been tampered with), XHTML 1.0 Strict templating (also HTML 4.01 transitional) – with a CSS based ‘format for printer’ display/print option for content, an archive browse, a full search system, a dynamic calendar which allowed you to see dates with entries and choose them for perusal, and very basic external function call-ability for importing/utilizing other code inline. You can see the very last stages of its’ development, if you really want to.

I’ll admit that I’ve been running nothing but Linux for years; it just makes my live doing dev and maintaining other unix based systems easier – however, when you’re in the Web 2.0 world, you’re expected to have some multimedia capabilities.

My laptop’s HD died with no warning (thankfully, I always keep a recent backup), and so I had to reinstall some tools. I generally use the bundled npwrapper which wraps the Netscape API for any shared library functions, but this time I found that it was oddly silent for Flash 10. I did an LDD on the binary, and discovered several support libraries required:

%ldd libflashplayer.so | wc -l
54

Yes, that’s 54 shared x86 (i386/32 bit) libraries required on my x86_64 install.

I went looking for the Adobe Flash 64 bit beta version, and found it here. Upon removing the 32 bit wrapper via npwrapper, and installing it into my /lib/lib64/browser-plugins directory, fixing permissions, and reloading Firefox, all works. Hope that helps the rest of you running 64 bit kernels who like to “keep multimedia up with The Joneses”.

This is what happens when you slide into home plate, and home plate happens to be beneath the washing machine.

Grotesque, isn’t it? Not the whole set are broken, but one has a clean break (second in from the left), and the middle one has a little crack in it. The pain is marginal, but it’s very difficult to sleep when there’s excessive pressure put on them.