lifebsideben

I had said I wasn’t going to watch season 2 of ‘Lost’, in large part because they strung me along though a lot of crap I didn’t care about (e.x., anything about the Kate character), when I wanted to know about what was In The Hatch. And at the end of the season, ABC figured, eh, it’s a smash hit! Screw explaining things, we could get syndication out of this beyotch!

So really, I wasn’t going to watch season 2, that’s how pissed I was. But then I started reading the Lost forums over at Television Without Pity (or TWoP for those of ya kewl kidz), and learned that (a) they were going to reveal what was in the hatch in the first episode of season 2 and (b) that the show’s producers promised it would be worth it. Sigh. So, I watched.

And WHOA! It was a damn good episode, except for the amount of flashback to the Jack (also-don’t-care-about-him-much) character, but that was partially needed to advance the mystery that unfolded. So yes, we saw what was in the hatch. And no, it didn’t answer many questions, but certainly introduced a ton of new ones. Nice. I’m sucked in. Damn you ABC! One more thing to fill up the tivo with this fall.

On the other hand, I also caught the pilot of ‘Invasion’ afterward. Bah. Pod people. Characters doing things that make no sense. Funny looking actors, not acting particularly well. I think the pilot was it for me on that one.

Had to watch Martha Stewart Apprentice, too… partly because a bunch of folks at the office are playing the fantasy game. So far, so blah. The first episode was pretty lame. Martha just ain’t The Donald, and the contestants are… well, first-season-Apprentice caliber at best. The absolutely most annoying character Jim seems to be the wiliest of the bunch, although I don’t think he can win because (a) he is just sooo fucking annoying and (b) he doesn’t look like Martha’s type. But then again I wouldn’t have expected Martha to hire the cigar-chomping ex-EMI, “I can run anyone’s company while they’re in prison” dude, either. (I forget his name, but he ran Steve Madden’s business while he was in da slamma too.) Anyway, I’m giving A:MS a couple more episodes.

Tags: Apprentice, Lost, TV

Due to some other work I’ve been doing in PHP5, and wanting to host on the prince.org server, I finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade the server’s PHP (for the sites). I had been dreading it, because I knew the eAccelerator wouldn’t work properly with the PHP 5.1 code, and I have my misgivings about APC, (even though we use it in production at Yahoo everywhere) but I desperately need the cache. Plus, the legacy “org” code was written in the PHP4.0 days, so you know there’s going to be issues… like all that wonderful “you really can’t return a reference here… now that’s an error, we used to ignore it (and sometimes segfault)” thing.

I did recompile it though and slam it up, along with building the APC (”pear install apc”, whoo hoo… except for the gotcha in the docs, if you can even find them… it’s an “extension” now not a “zend_extension”). I also built in both the mysql and mysqli stuff (old code uses my own large mysql wrapper class, new code uses ADODB with mysqli underneath for cursors, etc.) All went pretty
smoothly, once I hunted down and killed a rogue line in my php.ini.

I did have a couple places where I had to change the return values of functions to not be references, and now I’m getting a lot more undefined variable warnings (my code sets error_reporting(E_ALL), and apparently it’s stricter now), but basically all went pretty well. And so far, I think I actually like APC better than eAccelerator. I definitely like that some of the Yahoo extensions (for loading constants and storing arbitrary values in the cache) are now exposed. Yay Open Source, yay Yahoo.

So far, so good. Only thing left is to get a weird older version of the Pear class NNTP_Realtime working again (it went missing, after the PEAR install on PHP5, oddly). I need this for some of the Usenet interfacing code. But hey, that shouldn’t be too bad. Way to go PHP5!

Tags: linux, php, princeorg

FINALLY Clinton seems to have decided to stop brownnosing the prez… maybe he’s got a good whiff of Lame Duck cooking. Here’s some of the excerpts from this news story:

“What Americans need to understand is that … every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq,
Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts,” he said.

“We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else.”

Clinton added: “We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don’t think it makes any sense.”

Simple. Now if Kerry could have spoken anywhere near that plainly… well, at least he would have been less frustrating as a candidate.

Tags: politics

Pretty much no extensions have been updated for the Firefox 1.5 beta 1 release yet. That sux. I feel naked without my favorite extensions! Oh web developer toolbar, where art thou?! Greasmonkey! Sniff, sniff!

I am impressed that the Yahoo toolbar has been updated though! Way to go, guys!

Tags: Firefox, greasemonkey, Yahoo