Karsten Obarski, the father of computer assisted sequenced music, is 41 ^{or 46} today. ^{(Somebody has their dates wrong!)}

Telephone still has one of the best sequences I can think of. I spent I don’t know how much time decoding MOD15 and later, MOD31 formats.. and here, 20 years after your creation, I’m still enjoying them. If not for you, Mr. Obarski, I’d probably would have spent far less time on computers.

I ran a free image hosting service in 1997. 1997, when the internet was still young, and, well, anyone who wanted to have a website ponied up the $35/yr for the privilege of the domain, and another $10-$100/month to host it. It was written in Perl, and was an unholy mess. I probably could have fudged it in a Bourne script.

These days, people don’t want to bother logging into their free hosting to share a cute picture they just found when browsing MySpace.

I’m guilty of this, too. If it takes more than an extra 5 seconds, is it really worth sharing? Sometimes.

Enter ImagePup. It doesn’t have the ton of obnoxious ads that ImageShack is now toting, and since it’s mine, I don’t have to worry about it being gone tomorrow – unless, well, I want it to be gone.

Featuring the joys of HTML 3.2 markup (Hey, Netscape 4 and Lynx still deserve SOME love..) with JavaScript supported AdSense ads (What? Hosting still isn’t all free!), two clicks, and one copy/paste, and you’re done. No intrusive popups, popunders, or the unholy flash ad.

I will be tweaking the design slightly, so it’s not quite so combersome giving you the multitude of options for displaying, sharing, or consuming your image of choice: Just another little way of turning back the clock, and giving back, while hoping to have it sustain itself.

I was looking through my cupboards, and in the mood for a sweet snack. I ended up making these; They’re pretty good, and quite easy to make!

What you’ll need:

• 4 tablespoons (half stick) butter or margarine


• 3/4 cup Karo (corn syrup) – I use the light stuff


• 1/2 cup sugar


• 1/2 cup peanut butter (creamy works best)


• 2-1/2 cups rolled oats

How to prepare:

Mix syrup, sugar, and butter in a saucepan. Mix/blend over medium heat until it begins to bubble. Let it cook for two minutes longer. Fold peanut butter into mix, stir until entire mixture is liquidy. Slowly stir in oats; it should get quite difficult towards the end, with barely enough peanut butter mix to seep through. Immediately spoon onto aluminum foil. Let cool, or chill in fridge.

Makes about 2 dozen small (teaspoon) or 1.5 dozen large cookies.

I know it's been forever since I've written anything; I've moved on to 'Real Life' - and it's been a wonderful replacement.

I write this merely as a useful hint to folks who might have a use for this. Several of my new projects are colocated on another system, of which I do not have root access, and do not want to localize installation of GNU utilities, only to have them. One of these being GNU date.

GNU date is much easier to use than BSD date, because, say, if I wanted now - but the month and day of exactly a week ago, I could just say:

date --day="seven days ago" " +%Y.%m.%d"

Not so in BSD. BSD's command line DATE utility will output the time in several formats - one of them being the epoch (%s), but will not allow you to feed it the date in this format, so, for my purposes, it's useless.

I ended up making this throwaway little perl script, which I call *lastweek.pl* (Originally I localized my $time with ARGV[0] to feed it the epoch and have it spit out the date, but honestly, I have no need for that, and this will make things just a touch faster in a few million years of use.)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my ($sec, $min, $hour, $day, $month, $year, $wday, $yday, $isdst) = localtime(time() - 604800); # 604800 is 7 days in seconds.
$year += 1900;
$month += 1;
printf("%04d.%02d.%02d\n", $year, $month, $day);

What this script does is print out the year.month.day, in the same format which I store the local date (today) in my shell script. Today's date is obtained:

TODAY=`date +%Y.%m.%d`

So, to use this:

LASTWEEK=`/usr/bin/perl $HOME/bin/lastweek.pl`

Now, for the (horrible, horrible) script. Many of these things aren't commented, because they're a waste of resources (using 'tr' to print the domain in uppercase, an abuse of pipes, etc). However, my goal was to make a script that will work anywhere that has tar, gzip and the most basic system tools. (Perl is a requirement for the old file removal process, but virtually all systems have Perl 5 by now):

#!/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin
DESTDIR=$HOME/backup
FAILED=`false`
DATE=`date +%Y.%m.%d`
LASTWEEK=`/usr/bin/perl $HOME/bin/lastweek.pl`
SITES=`for n in $HOME/hosted/www.*.com; do echo $n; done` #Dumb, but gives us a space delimited array, no globbing required, and no thrashing with find.
echo "Backing up hosted sites on $DATE, "`date +%H:%M`"."
echo ""
for HOST in $SITES; do
  DOMAIN=`basename $HOST | sed s,'www.','',g`
  echo -n '>> '`echo $DOMAIN | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'`': '
  tar cPf - $HOST : gzip -9 > "$DESTDIR/$DOMAIN-$DATE.tar.gz"
  if [ $? != 0 ]; then
    echo "FAILED!"
    FAILED=`true`
  else
    echo -n "done."
    if [ -f "$DESTDIR/$DOMAIN-$LASTWEEK.tar.gz" ]; then
      rm -r "$DESTDIR/$DOMAIN-$LASTWEEK.tar.gz2"
      echo -n " Removed last week's backup."
    fi
   echo ""
  fi
done
echo ""
if [ $FAILED == `true` ]; then
  exit 1
fi

So, yeah... That's it! If you need something simple that cleans up after itself - you can either install GNU's date for your shell needs, or do as I did, and abuse Perl. ;)

NewsRadio was probably the funniest show I’ve ever enjoyed. The timing, cynicism, and internal struggles made it so… well, in a word: brilliant.

The (albient dated, but by design) cultural references from Soylent Green to Flowers for Algernon only made the witty dialog all the more relevant, somehow. You see that these young adults are entering their careeer paths, and still have (at least most of) their personalities intact. If you don’t like thinking, or a bit of slapstick humor, you won’t enjoy NewsRadio – however, even my mother has learned to enjoy the show – so much that she “borrowed” my DVDs (which I doubt I’ll have returned..) Paul Simms created magic.. in the time of grunge music.

Season 3 is finally on DVD. In this season, the characters have really grown into their personas, and the story lines are fresh, and exciting. The commentaries are generally a bit weak, but still quite enjoyable – I only wish they’d tell us what the ‘secret lyrics’ are that they made to go with Mike Post’s theme music! (Ok, I’d also pay $20 more per DVD set if there was no laugh track.. that annoys the heck out of me.)

In related news, I’ve purchased a WNYX mug. Yes, I love this show; nearly as much as these folks seem to.