Title:	Peletweets
Author:	aaaamory
Date:	2009-12-23 00:03
Security:	public

• 16:18 I'm getting my H1N1 flu shot today.
• 18:12 I've had my H1N1 flu shot today!

Title:	Convergence Report
Author:	sean_kennedy
Date:	2009-12-22 23:55
Security:	public

• 09:38 Rant media ; Official Station of the "Desert Wars" : tinyurl.com/ye2efaz
• 13:43 Polar Bears tinyurl.com/yfavfvy ....They're big. .

Title:	Future obsession, present awareness
Topics:	identity, obsession, present awareness, taylor ellwood
Author:	teriel
Date:	2009-12-22 22:11
Security:	public

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

The present unfolds when a need is met that previously was bothering you to the point of obsession. The shift of energy away from that place of obsession frees up awareness of the present and can help a person get more focused on living in the present. When you have an obsession, you’re always living in the future, living in that moment of imagining what will happen when the obsession is realized. Nothing else exists after that moment and in many ways nothing exists before it.

A person living in the present is likely free of such obsessions. S/he is living in the moment, hopefully aware of multiple possibilities, but not overly attached to any specific outcome. This occurs when we can leave behind the focus on the future and/or have the obsessions that fuel the focus on the future met. The clarity that results when those obsessions are realized is a clarity of purpose and awareness, for those obsessions no longer occupy your thoughts or emotions, freeing both resources up. The issue then is can a person keep those resources for the present or have them snapped up into the future?

Title:	Brokenness on the web.
Topics:	geeky, ranting, standards
Author:	gushi
Date:	2009-12-22 23:31
Security:	public

Note: since I started writing this entry, in that half hour or so, the problem I was writing about went away, although it hadn't been for at least the past few days. This is one example of a problem I see fairly regularly, a site that answers on www.domain.com, but not on domain.com. These are the details, but they're far from an isolated case.

Back in the day, when IMDB first was started, they had a partnership arrangement with a little online-video company called reel.com.

Since that point, reel.com has been bought by hollywood video and has discontinued their online business, and their one storefront store still stands in berkeley.

However, this entry isn't about this, it's about countless websites that do a stupid-but-annoying thing.

reel.com has an IP address. www.reel.com has an IP address. They happen to be the same, but they don't have to be.

If you go in a browser to http://www.reel.com, you get to a "thanks for your patronage" page that points traffic at the Hollywood Video page. If you go to just plain http://reel.com (no "www"), you get...nothing. You get a "Virtual Directory Denied".

Finally, if you go to the ip address of reel.com, which is http://72.5.61.11, you get the main page.

Why?

Well, for starters, lets make it real clear. The webserver that serves this site is running Windows. That "Virtual Directory" error is an IIS thing.

Sending along a hostname isn't part of the original HTTP specification, it's part of a little add-on known as HTTP1.1, when it was realized the proliferation of the web would quickly exhaust the number of ip addresses out there if there was only a 1:1 mapping.

IIS, the piece-of-garbage webserver built into windows, has a site config window that looks like this.

Note that there's an option to specify ONE name for a site, and only one.

So, if you connect to an ip, but don't send a hostname (or send a hostname containing only an IP address), you get a site. If you send EXACTLY what's in that box above, you get a site.

In order to add multiple host headers, to the same site, even if they are really just aliases of the same site, requires work, it requires clicking that "Advanced" button, and putting the hosts in, OR it requires having your site be the ONLY one on that IP address, and specifying no header.

So, let's make it clear, what could the administrators do better?

1) They could configure a different site in IIS for reel.com, and configure it to be a redirect to www.reel.com. They can even preserve the path so a request for reel.com/images/logo.gif just gets handled the right way, instead of redirecting everyone to the "front door".

2) They could remove the need for host headers entirely, since chances are, the reel.com site is the only one running on that ip.

3) Radical option: they could simply remove the A record for reel.com. What this actually means is that the user will get an error that the domain doesn't exist. You can't tell me this error is any better or worse than the "Virtual Directory Listing Denied" error.

4) They could use a real OS/Webserver. Seriously, you're working for a publicly traded company like Hollywood video. I'm sure they're paying you good money to click the little boxes to turn on IIS. Perhaps they could instead pay someone who knows what they're doing? And if the OS and webserver require a degree of clue to get running instead of "click I Agree, click next, click next, click Finish", then maybe that's not a bad thing.

Don't get me wrong, windows is good for a lot of things. I run it at home because I don't feel like fighting my hardware just to run a GUI, and because I like working video, sound, and USB drivers. I like my stress-relief games to work without having to deal with the stupidity of an emulator.
I like being able to buy anything at the store and know I can plug it in and have it work without installing a bleeding-edge kernel.

But for a server? None of those apply. People all the time cite "But I need something supported" as a reason to use Windows, but nobody pays the per-incident Microsoft support fees, everyone just calls someone with more clue, or Googles. You can afford better than that. Unix is darwinistic: people who figure out how to use it are the ones that do. The clueful people advance. You want one of those, Hollywood.

I mean, potentially, this is free advertising for them. Don't you want money? Can you imagine if say, netflix.com didn't work, but www.netflix.com did? Think that would be a problem?

Title:	Here's a treaty we need...
Author:	gushi
Date:	2009-12-22 23:26
Security:	public

Listening to NPR tonight, I heard recently about a climate summit that had recently been worked out in Copenhagen. India, China, and Brazil had at one point walked out of it.

While you'll get no argument from me that keeping global warming under control is a useful thing, while we're working something out, let's start with this:

We share one internet, let's make a commitment to run it responsibly.

Every IP address that originates packets needs to have an RDNS record, needs to have a listed abuse contact within that domain, and needs to answer it. If not in English (the language that all the RFCs that define the protocols are written in, not because I'm trying to be geocentrist, then at least in a standardized format like ARF). And everyone needs to agree on, and take action on spam, to simply shut off hosts that are doing the wrong thing,

People need to keep logs for reasonable amounts of time, and people need to understand that if they can't patch both their OS as well as the web applications running on it, then they need to be laughed off the goddamn internet.

Everyone to be allocated ip addresses needs to agree to follow BCP38, and take a "five hour class" on it, simple as that. If you're too stupid to manage your own router, your ISP should hardcode this one for you.

Think this isn't as far-reaching an issue as Climate Change? You'd be wrong.

Sitting next to prime.gushi.org, is another identical Dell Poweredge named quark.gushi.org. All Quark does, all the time, is filter spam. And scan for viruses.

It would be really nice to be able to turn that second machine off, if people could be mindful of the fact that their using my CPU, Network, Memory, and Disk when they push packets at me, and should only do so if requested. It would be really really nice if perhaps network operators realized that hammering a website's PHPBB dozens of times a second might just be abusive, and woke up and took notice.

But that's just my little buy-the-world-a-coke dream.

Title:	The politics of Body Modification?
Author:	modblogbme
Date:	2009-12-23 03:37
Security:	public

http://news.bme.com/2009/12/22/the-politics-of-body-modification/

http://news.bme.com/?p=23544

I removed the post that Sean put up earlier which was causing such controversy. I didn’t want the discussion to keep revolving around one person’s tattoos because we don’t know if that person is a racist or just an idiot (if it’s the first then it looks like the answer would be both).

Shannon and I have been discussing the post via email earlier and he reminded me of this old post of a Hitler portrait from a tattooer in Singapore. As it stands now and has been the policy for years, racist and hategroup tattoos go into the Political Section of BME. Similar to the Animal Tattoo & Piercing sections, we don’t support it but BME’s mandate is to archive and catalog the evolution and history of our community, even the ignorant aspects of it. However, that doesn’t expand to other parts of BME like IAM.

IAM’s long standing TOS states the following:

“IAM is a community built around principles of tolerance. You may not post hatespeech (race, gender, or sexuality-based attacks). This includes use of terms like “gay” or “fag” or “kike” in a derogatory manner, even in jest. This rule is very strict, and extends to racist codes and iconography (”14″, “88″, and so on), as well as NSBM and racist band lists and so on. This includes verifiable offsite posts. To be very clear about this: if you are a bigot, onsite or off, stay off IAM. This is not a ban on racism. This is a total ban on bigots.”

This begs the question as far as political commentary on racist tattoos. I personally don’t want to see them get any more attention than they deserve, which is why they’re generally quietly filed away, along with other ill advised modifications. We can’t sit back and pretend that they don’t exist but we also don’t need to give them any room in the spot light that is Modblog.

As both Sean and I have said in the comments section, neither of us recognized the tattoo as a Totenkopf. At first glance I thought it was three skulls because you couldn’t see the entire tattoo. I was sent some messages stating that the racist aspect of the tattoo should be ignored because it wasn’t the focus of the post. The focus of the post was the small boobs and not tattoos. I don’t agree with that line of thinking. One of the other reasons we can’t flat out reject racist tattoos is that we simply don’t have the manpower to be fully adept at all the secret racist codes out there. As none of the staff on BME are racists, we don’t know the secret handshakes. So we try to file the tattoos where they belong. Maybe it would be more helpful if racists grew balls and weren’t so embarrased by their beliefs that they have to disguise them.

The reasoning for this post was to give you guys a post to comment on that wasn’t attacking a specific individual. So let your thoughts fly.

Title:	Christmas Doom from the Many-Angled Ones.
Topics:	tentacles
Author:	jwz
Date:	2009-12-22 18:17
Security:	public
Music:	A Place to Bury Strangers -- Keep Slipping Away

Overtime by Charles Stross.

Title:	Stomach suspension
Author:	modblogbme
Date:	2009-12-22 22:53
Security:	public

http://news.bme.com/2009/12/22/stomach-suspension/

http://news.bme.com/?p=23232

Hello! I’m San (aka BlueStar) and this is my first post to Modblog.

I found this while checking out Allen Falkner’s blog, and was completely blown away! This is a video of Neil, from the ARGO suspension team doing a single point stomach, or better know as “resurrection”, suspension. As Allen said, this is something you should definitely not try at home!

Title:	How to use Facebook with a feed reader
Topics:	lazyweb, www
Author:	jwz
Date:	2009-12-22 16:33
Security:	public
Music:	The Coathangers -- Bury Me

I almost never actually visit the Facebook web site: I follow it through a feed reader (in my case, NetNewsWire) along with all of my other feeds.

Besides the obvious benefits to this, one great side effect is that you never, ever see the output of applications (e.g., quiz results) or the other useless noise like "so-and-so is now friends with someone else you already know". The only drawback I've found is that you also don't see notifications about photos that your friends have uploaded. (You do see links that they post, however: just not Facebook-hosted photos. It's a bizarre omission.)

Anyway, I just had to explain to someone how to accomplish this feat, which made me realize how completely non-obvious Facebook has made this. Finding these feeds is a complete pain in the ass. They've really gone out of their way to hide the URLs you need to use.

So. You have to subscribe to three or four different feeds.

1. Posts: Find the Posts feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php. On the upper right of the page is a gray box, and at the bottom of that box is a link entitled "My Friends' Links" with the RSS logo next to it. Copy that URL. Subscribe to it in your feed reader. This is the RSS URL for any links and (external) images that your friends post.

2. Notes: Find the Notes feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things that your friends post via the "Notes" app, which is (I guess) the more blog-like way of posting long things to Facebook.

3. Notifications: Find the Notifications feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things like "so-and-so commented on your status". You might not care to subscribe to this one because you can get all of these kind of notifications in email.

4. Status Updates: This is the RSS URL for the "What are you doing?" Twitter-like part of Facebook. This is the one you probably care about, and it is trickier, because Facebook no longer links to the feed URL! Nice one guys. You have to construct this URL by editing one of the above URLs. E.g., take the "Notes" URL and change the part of the URL that says "friends_notes" to "friends_status". Keep the parts of the URL before and after that, including the magic numbers at the end.

There. Wasn't that SIMPLE?

Previously: How to use Livejournal with a feed reader.

Title:	Here's to Roman Polanski:
Author:	coyoteseven
Date:	2009-12-22 12:42
Security:	public

AKA...


...that girl raping motherfucking sack of shit.

Title:	How much for a picture?
Author:	modblogbme
Date:	2009-12-22 19:04
Security:	public

http://news.bme.com/2009/12/22/how-much-for-a-picture/

http://news.bme.com/?p=23459

At first when I saw this photo, the tourist posing with photographs from super heroes on Hollywood Blvd popped into my head. Luckily enough for us though this is just one kick ass couple that met through BME. I love the juxtaposition of his heavily modified face and her perfectly plain skin. Gnomoweb and his bride to be are yet another couple from Brasil. :)

See more in “Couples who met through BME“ (Culture)

Title:	Don’t get hit by a car!
Author:	modblogbme
Date:	2009-12-22 18:04
Security:	public

http://news.bme.com/2009/12/22/dont-get-hit-by-a-car/

http://news.bme.com/?p=23456

I dedicate this post to Google Adsense. The more Google tells me I can’t post images like this, the more it makes me want to post them. I hate being told what to do. I like to make my own decisions and this is one reason that I’ve never wanted to have advertising on BME. I don’t want to be forced to bow down to pressure from advertisers telling me things are “too extreme” or “too weird”. This is my community that I love and cherish. I will fight for our rights to do what we want with our bodies till the day I die and I hope you all will stand up and fight with me.

Thanks to Jared from The Loft in Columbus, OH for the photos. Click through for more, including googles version of pornography!