House Hunting

Posted on

Two quick things I've realized now that Staci and I have started to look for a new house:

  1. Google can make a killing by licensing their beta maps application to real estate listing sites. The maps are so much better than the stuff microsoft and other map providers are selling.
  2. Trust your realtor for the most up to date listings, especially in a fast market like in the DC area. Realtor.com's listing of houses can lag the market by a week.\

Tags: Real Life

─── ✧ ─── ✦ ─── ✧ ───

Cyrus Authentication

Posted on

When setting up a Cyrus IMAP server and you want to use a MySql database to hold user names and passwords, you must use the mysql module for PAM to authenticate because it can handle passwords that are stored using crypt ( the ENCRYPT function in mysql ). While there is also the aux_prop plugin that supports looking the information up from the same source, it does not support crypt without patching. Especially if you'd rather install from packages than from the source code - ie, your time is valuable.

Tags: Linux

─── ✧ ─── ✦ ─── ✧ ───

Should I be scared of Sandy?

Posted on

I'd hate to call this pack of fallacies an informed interview, since that presupposes a reasonable grasp and analysis of facts, but there are plenty of grandstanding quotes from a lawyer who like to misdirect the blame for violence onto video games. It's the same paranoid, "blame the culture" crap that promised we'd have packs of devil-worshipping, human-sacrificing, suicidal people running around today because they played Dungeons and Dragons in the 80's. According to this nutcase, I should fear for my life because my friend Sandy plays Grand Theft Auto.

How lovely that GTA weds sex and violence in the same game. We are training a generation of teens to combine sex with violence, just what America needs.

He then goes on to use this statistical misdirection:

Question: According to the Center for Child Death Review, 1,242 kids were murdered with guns and 174 children died from accidental firearm-related injuries in 2000. Aside from stories that get covered in the news like Columbine, there are few, if any, actual statistics that show how many children's deaths are directly linked to video games. Do the facts speak for themselves? Or is it just that nobody is really keeping tabs? A: The federal government found that in the school year 2003, there were 48 school killings. The year before that there were 16, and the year before that 17. Something is going on. I submit that the video game generation is coming of age.

Clearly it also correlates with George W. Bush's presidency and his "No child-left-behind" reforms. Shouldn't someone be looking into that? Won't anyone think of the children!?

Tags: Games

─── ✧ ─── ✦ ─── ✧ ───