Awww Mom,
Why can't I have a blog?
Everyone else is doing it...

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Monday, March 31, 2003

What took you so long?

Apparently the 101st Airborne Division has kicked Geraldo Rivera out of Iraq for revealing tactical information in his broadcasts. This must be some kind of record. He's been annoying the 101st for a only week or less. Can't they strap him to the front of a tank or the underside of an Apache and send him into combat? Can't they drop him into Baghdad from a C130 and let him annoy the Iraqis instead? What I really want is a broadcast where Geraldo bites the bullet and we all get to watch, so we can be absolutely sure that he can't annoy us on TV ever again.

Then, we can get on with our lives watching Peter Arnett betray America on Iraqi TV.

Update: Geraldo insists that he's not been asked to leave, and he's deeper into Iraq than ever before. Indeed, I watched him broadcast this morning from the 101st Airborne Division's current location interviewing soldiers. Could it be that NBC is out to get him, publishing these wild rumors? Maybe his own Fox TV, which has been blabbing this rumor all morning too? Or is he ignoring the "request", waiting for it to turn into an order and then perhaps a full-on deportation? Inquiring minds want to know when we'll be rid of Geraldo once and for all.

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 07:41 AM PST [Link]

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Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Military Optical Fibers

"Military fiber optic cables are tools used by Saddam and his regime to suppress the Iraqi people."

http://www.centcom.mil/galleries/leaflets/images/izd-011a.jpg

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 03:41 PM PST [Link]

Arrrrgggghh!

I spent 3 hours yesterday screwing with rpmbuild spec files trying to understand why my spec file worked last Friday but not today. RPM hates dos files! Dammit! Once I ran dos2unix blah.spec everything worked perfectly again. I HATE all the unix/dos/Windows file format differences. I HATE having to strip out ^M and other invisible formatting from my dos files. Why didn't RPM complain that the file was in DOS format in the first place? Why couldn't I get an actual, meaningful error message? All I got was random crap about stuff totally unrelated to the real problem. It should be able to traverse the file and search for the offending formatting, either stripping them out or telling me to do so. This really, really sucked.

Arrrrgggghh!

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 08:00 AM PST [Link]

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Monday, March 24, 2003

Payback Time?

After hearing of the Russians' sale of night vision goggles to the Iraqis and the US Guvmint's formal protest of same, I can't help but think back to the Russia-Afghanistan war and the "secret" aid the CIA provided to the local Afghan forces in the form of weapons (missiles, etc.) and advisors (e.g. Rambo's boss). This sort of technology sale ought to be expected since the CIA has upgraded anti-commie rebel forces for decades. It might even fall into the classification of 'blowback', or the usual unintended consequences of CIA activities.

[more]

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 08:35 AM PST [Link]

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Monday, March 17, 2003

Iraq Rejects Bush Call for Saddam Exile

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=586&u=/nm/20030317/wl_nm/iraq_exile_dc&printer=1

I don't get the political hyperbole - the fact that Sadaam was so miserably defeated 12 years ago and his army isn't any better now than it was then ought to be a key indicator of how it will perform this time. I get the impression that he just doesn't care, because regardless of the outcome, he has an escape strategy in place. I suspect that before he is done losing he will launch a few attacks on Israel in the outlandish hope that he will get the rest of the Arab world to at least unite against Israel in war and give himself some sort of Arab world hero status.

[more]

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 03:29 PM PST [Link]

I'm all for spiking babies' juice to get them to shut up on flights, but it's customary to ask the mommie first.

href=http://www.nandotimes.com/weird/story/807041p-5741370c.html

Anyone who has ever endured a long flight with a screaming baby is that much closer to advocating abortion - especially if its retroactive. Until airlines have crying rooms where fussy babies and particularly noisy and demanding passengers can be isolated from the rest of the paying customers, I think both should be banned from flights over 2 hours long.

[more]

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 09:18 AM PST [Link]

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Thursday, March 13, 2003

Hate ^M in your unix files, but it's a pain in the ass to reconfigure SourceSafe or your regular non-emacs editor? Here's a little script to clean those things out of files en masse. (Hey! That's French! I'll let it slide just this once.) Any constructive suggestions for improvement or enhancement are appreciated.

[more]

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 11:52 AM PST [Link]

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Tuesday, March 11, 2003

So the US House of representatives wants to change "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries", and "French Toast" to "Freedom Toast". Why don't we just call them what they really are: "Frog Fries" and "Frog Toast".

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/sprj.irq.fries/index.html

You know you want to...

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 09:24 AM PST [Link]

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Thursday, March 6, 2003

And in the obscure C trivia category...

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/DeveloperTools/gcc3/cpp/Variadic-Macros.html

Microsoft Visual C 6.0 doesn't support variadic macros! And I really want them so I can deal with some stupid weirdnesses between the Linux version of wsprintf and the Microsoft version of wsprintf!

Waaaaaaa!

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 03:03 PM PST [Link]

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