Is I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby the new Fall Guy? Given last Friday’s indictment, he seems to be taking the fall for the corrupt Bush administration, but will it work? Rove and Cheney are still under investigation, and if you ask me, Bush and his cronies have a lot of explaining to do about why they [...]
If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of crazy ideas, many of which need custom parts that you can’t just get at the local hardware store. Getting something made for you by a machine shop is costly, cumbersome, and annoyingly full of paperwork. Needless to say, I was really excited a while ago [...]
After reviewing my score sheet from my recent bonsai show, I realized how few of the Japanese bonsai terms I really knew. I had always been familiar with the more common ones like jin, shari, nebari, shohin, and so on, but there were a number that I had never heard of before. Not wanting to [...]
It looks like Pat Cavit who runs Zilla Smash has coded a nifty little plugin that allows WordPress to authenticate against an LDAP server. Needless to say, this has great potential for universities and organizations who have LDAP based account provisioning and would like to offer blogging to large numbers of people.
So here’s version 1.01 [...]
So you’ve got Oracle 10G and you want to install it on your RedHat Enterprise 3 server. Well, since Oracle can’t manage to create tar files like everyone else in the world, you have to find a way of dealing with the .cpio they send you. Here’s how to get it extracted:
cpio -idmv < /path/to/ship-version.cpio
This [...]
For good reason, the media has taken a beating for over sensationalizing their Hurricane Katrina coverage. Since then, a number of internet clips have come out poking fun at them for it.
This is a little South Park cartoon that makes fun of the media’s coverage of a flood in the town of Beverton Colorado, [...]
Crazy Lady Yelling at Skaters from Cliff Pearson on Vimeo.
There are a lot of angry people in the world, but I’m pretty sure that the lady in this video ranks pretty near the top by any measure. It’s a movie of a woman in a parking lot screaming at a group of skaters for no [...]
I finally got around to editing the video that was taken of my skydive at Z-Hils in Florida. It was my first jump, and my AFF level 1, which means that I was still able to jump from the plane despite the previous nine hours of terrifying instruction. That’s probably why I look a little [...]
After getting PHP 5.0.5 to compile on my Solaris 9 server, I got the following error when doing the make install:
ld.so.1: php: fatal: relocation error: file /u01/packages/src/php-5.0.5/sapi/cli/php: symbol xmlRelaxNGCleanupTypes: referenced symbol not found
Killed
make[1]: *** [install-pear-installer] Error 137
make: *** [install-pear] Error 2
Turns out that the Sun XML packages are stomping all over the xml2 package from [...]
Contrary to widespread myth, it is not a felony to possess lockpicks. Each state has its own laws with respect to such burglarious instruments. Here is the Massacusetts version quoted in entirety from the massachusetts general code:
Chapter 266 [...]
This appendix describes the design and construction of lock picking tools.
A.1 Pick Shapes
Picks come in several shapes and sizes. Figure A.1 shows the most common shapes. The handle and tang of a pick are the same for all picks. The handle must be comfortable and the tang must be thin enough to avoid bumping pins [...]
Lock picking is a craft, not a science. This document presents the knowledge and skills that are essential to lock picking, but more importantly it provides you with models and exercises that will help you study locks on your own. To excel at lock picking, You must practice and develop a style which fits you [...]
Real locks have a wide range of mechanical features and defects that help and hinder lock picking. If a lock doesn’t respond to scrubbing, then it probably has one of the traits discussed in this chapter. To open the lock, you must diagnose the trait and apply the recommended technique. The exercises will help you [...]
This chapter presents a series of exercises that will help you learn the basic skill of lock picking. Some exercises teach a single skill, while others stress the coordination of skills.
When you do these exercises, focus on the skills, not on opening the lock. If you focus on opening the lock, you will get frustrated [...]
Simple lock picking is a trade that anyone can learn. However, advanced lock picking is a craft that requires mechanical sensitivity, physical dexterity, visual concentration and analytic thinking. If you strive to excel at lock picking, you will grow in many ways.
7.1 Mechanical Skills
Learning how to pull the pick over the pins is surprisingly difficult. [...]
