The LambCutlet Disorganisation

I’ve seen many many oddball things on the Internet, though never would have thought I’d come across anything that’d evoke childhood memories of 香港 (Hong Kong) visiting friends & relatives of my late mother on the crowded government housing estates where there was a constant cacophony of various Chinese dialects that often sounded like quarrelling (you could never really tell) along with recollections of little old ladies practising Chinese folk religion with a bit of 打小人 (Hit the little man) by the street-side whilst burning joss sticks & joss paper. :D

The YouTube video I stumbled across (above) is actually a bit of slapstick-come-observational comedy from Singapore, the other ex-British colonial outpost and is really rather hilarious even if you don’t know any of the Chinese dialects. I’d probably consider it “not work safe” on the basis you may be in stitches laughing like an idiot which may prove detrimental to your job. :P

Ignore the first minute where it’s some (unfortunately rather catchy) Mandarin song which features two of the actors in the sketch that follows. The woman actually starts the 打小人 (Hit the little man) proper in English followed by the man doing the same in Malay! Then cometh the Chinese dialects, which if I’m not mistaken include 閩南語 (Hokkien), 廣東話 (Cantonese), 海南話 (Hainanese) and 福州話 (Hokchew/Fukkien).

The 廣東話 (Cantonese) bit, spoken by the woman is if I’m not mistaken:

打你個死人頭！打死你唔出頭！打你個死人口！打到你爛死嘴！打到你全身爛晒！打到你全家……瞓低！打！打！打！

… translates (roughly) to:

Hit you on your damn head! Hit you till retract your head (like a tortoise)! Hit you on your damn mouth! Hit you till your damn lips are busted! Hit you till your body is all broken! Hit all your family until they are in a coma! Hit! Hit! Hit!

Then the man replies (in 廣東話 (Cantonese), though seemingly with a heavy 潮州話 (Teochew) accent) chastising the woman on what an evil vindictive person she is! Rinse, wash, repeat! :D

These guys have been commandeering a fair chunk of my time hence the lack of blogging, Photogasmic™ or otherwise, though I figured I’d abuse the former format and bring forth a little “making of” because you all love Bertie Bear! ;)

With the obligatory timeline:

1. In the process of creating a successor to phpBB “Creating Communities” Bertie Bear, the highly experimental –enable-bertiezilla configure option was accidently enabled and Bertiezilla started to romp his way around the world. Whilst this had the advantage of reduced shipping costs since he’d make his own way there, I decided that occasionally wiping the odd city off the map (even somewhere like Luton!) would just not be acceptable.
2. The first prototpye with the “Olympus Odssey” tag-line arrives by the way of a phpBB Mega-Bear and is checked out by Bertie and Domo. Curiously blond and overly nice looking… we weren’t too if we could trust this new guy!
3. The next generation Bertie-clones arrive, sporting a red sweater and red hoodie respectively, both with the “Olympus Odssey” tag-line. The Mega-Bear was starting to look too creepy at this stage so he was sent off to the gulags… :D
4. Original Bertie with his two potential successors… which of the two shall it be? How would two plush toy bears fight it out anyway? Out-cute each other to death? The mind of mere mortals, what with our limited perception, boggles…
5. During the evening whilst I wasn’t looking, the hoodied “Olympus Odssey” Bertie-clone had sliced to pieces the more mild-mannered Bertie-clone with the red sweater. Fearing what he could potentially do to pet humans, he was set off to the gulags too. Probably to be shredded and reused as suffing for a sofa or some such! ;)
6. The recipe for the next generation Bertie was tweaked and after a 1 week assembling period, he arrived! With the new “Conquering Olympus” tag-line, he seemed to be well balanced on the axes of cute-and-cuddleablity versus world-conquering-megalomania…
7. For the next generation Bertie, the back of the hoodie carried an extended version of the old tag-line too, in an effort to please the old conservatives… You just can’t trust the young’uns they say, whilst waving their walking sticks. Pah to all of you! :P
8. “Conquering Olympus” Bertie snarls for the camera just as he would do before devouring phpBB forum trolls and spammers alive! :D
9. Promotional photoshoots are always a pain though “Conquering Olympus” Bertie seems moe than happy to show himself off to the world…
10. … and of course his über-cool red hoodie which has a tag-line on the back too!
11. Next generation Bertie takes a little time out to conquer “Bertie Mons” as 50-something of his clones prepared themselves to be boxed up and shipped to their new pet humans.
12. Around about 110 boxes of “Conquering Olympus” Berties all ready to be picked up by Royal Mail to go off to the far corners of planet Earth…

If you’ve yet to opt to become a pet human for phpBB “Conquering Olympus” Bertie Bear, there still some left, though be quick as it won’t be that long till he’ll have to go back to Mars and finish off conquering Olympus! ;)

I think we can dub today as “Sysadmin Black Friday”! First thing for me today was an outage at OSUOSL (that is still being investigated) circa 11:34 UTC which took offline phpBB as well as all other hosted projects such as Freenode, Mozillazine, Drupal, Gentoo, et cetera. I’ve got phpBB back online now and Sysadmins at OSUOSL and other projects are busily beavering away getting their sites back up. :D

Ubuntu made a slight boo-boo in version 5.10 née “Breezy Badger” as the installation log file stored the root password in plain text, that was world readable since the file’s permission bits were set 0644. Patches for said distro are already available to fix the moderately critical brain-fart.

Windows users whom have McAfee as their anti-virus of choice faired little better as the virus definition update DAT 4715 caused a large number of false positives of the W95/CTX virus in executables ranging from Microsoft Office, Dell OpenManage, Cygwin, perl, Sysinternals pstools suite, and so on. McAfee today have release a further definition update by the way of DAT 4716 which should solve the false positive issue, plus release of a tool (buried somewhere on their homepage) to automagically restore mis-quarantined files.

Roll-on System Administrator Appreciation Day! ;)

I know I’ve joined in on this fun literally one month late (give or take a day), however I’m not exactly glued to the Internet right now (Susanne insists otherwise) so I have my excuses. Anyway, the little analysis would be ace if it were true as I would have been able to have travelled for the last 5 months (it’s really been that fucking long?) effectively for free! :D

I guess I do live in hope once I’ve got the 4610 (and counting!) photographs of my trip online, the extra traffic this site will get shall bring a few more pennies rolling in. ;) In other news, I’m actually still in Wien, Österreich having decided to extend my stay with Susanne and her boyfriend Phong… Two and a bit days was all a bit too fleeting really as the three and a bit days in Berlin were rather hectic as it was!

So the new date to Frankfurt am Main is now the 28th of November, plus changed my mind to make that a three day stop too, as opposed to the “original” overnight resting stop. This now puts my new “return” date to olde Blighty on the 1st of December, less I decide to add a few more things here and there. ;)

I guess I am secretly hoping to just keep travelling until I make it back to 香港 (Hong Kong) in late January 2006 (for Chinese New Year at the very least though a permanent move would be the ideal), though some things need my attention before I can do so and that stuff requires doing in the Empire which the Sun never sets… Oh well!

Feels rather strange to be back in Old Europe already as I certainly didn’t miss the public places which have their distinctive aroma… mostly constituting of urine, stale beer and vomit. I do conceed that Asia replaces that with open storm drains which in summer can smell “interesting”, add to that the general aroma of dried foodstuff & street-side cooking stalls where items consist of things Westerners wouldn’t consider edible (assuming they even have the slightest idea what it was in the first place). ;) As the old say goes: One man’s meat is another man’s cabbage. Still, I didn’t even mention about the cold European weather… wait, I just did! :P

In the wee hours of yesterday evening the new look Gurn.net launched, a site run by a couple of personal friends (Meza & Rowan) also living in good old Northamption, which has shared this very server for the last 2 and bit years. Aside from me being the “Linux Admin” for the old site, I was asked for my input as they were keen to move to the site design to something more CSS orientated, it appears the comment I put in the top of the mock-up page containing various XHTML elements all brightly coloured, annotated and placed pretty much as per the PhotoShop reference I had has survived to this day!

<!--
	
	This page is new Gurn.net by Gurn.net Ltd, thanks to
	Richard Deighton and Jonathan Stanley
	Page tests ok in:
	* Mozilla 1.7b
	* Firebird 0.7
	* Firefox 1.0 Win / OSX
	* Opera 7.54 Win / OSX
	* Internet Explorer (Win) 6.0
	* Internet Explorer (Win) 5.5 SP2
	* Internet Explorer (Win) 5.01 SP2
	* Safari 1.2.4 (v125.11) OSX
	
	The page however does get killed by Netscape 4.x, IE4.x and
	MAC IE5 but people who use those should really upgrade
	their browser to something modern.
	http://www.getfirefox.com
	
-->

There are some additions obviously as back when I made the page. Firefox didn’t exist for one as it was still Firebird, not to mention I personally didn’t have any OSX platform to test said mock-up page on. Also as the development site was worked on, “Structuralist Draconianism” I would have gone for gave way to something a little more pragmatic. Still, the results are impressive as the mark-up is much more readable and more or less validates and such remaining issues, if they wish to be tackled are actually quite trivial to fix.

So all in all, pretty impressive work consider that the lads had no experience with this CSS and structural XHTML lark not exactly that long ago plus they had to build the new site’s back-end system from scratch along the way… The things the two lads do for the British night-clubbing and DJ-ing crowd!

I can also give myself a pat on the back in setting up their new server which has handled the launch with their not exactly small community of 12 000 members and 2.4 million posts barely using any CPU cycles! ;)

19:34:11 up 10 days,  4:33,  2 users,  load average: 0.33, 0.30, 0.22
74 processes: 73 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:   3.3% user,   1.3% system,   0.0% nice,  95.4% idle
Mem:   1550684K total,  1504780K used,    45904K free,    53020K buffers
Swap:  2097136K total,        0K used,  2097136K free,   684728K cached

As the old site says… “Gurn is dead, long live Gurn!”. :D

With almost all the world having had the joy of April Fool’s Day… here are some of 2005’s best in no particular order (in my not so humble opinion, yadda yadda yadda!):

• Encyclopædia Britannica takes over Wikimedia Foundation!
• NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” with an exclusive new picture of “Water on Mars”!
• Scientific American conceeds to defeat by Creationists! [Slashdot has the whole article]

… and to complete an un-holy foursome, a real article that was apparently mistaken for taking everyone for a fool!

• British Home Secretary Charles Clarke is asked to pardon Anne Boleyn 500 years after loosing her head!

It’s a funny old world! ;)

Site’s grow and things often chopped and changed, so without further ado… I present you:

• Blogroll (of blogs I read… obviously)
• The Amazing Fortune Cow!

Though ominously, the Fortune Cow says:

 ________________________________________
< Your love life will be... interesting. >
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Have fun! ;)

Good old Easter Eggs… :D

domo:~# apt-get moo
         (__)
         (oo)
   /------\/
  / |    ||
 *  /\---/\
    ~~   ~~
...."Have you mooed today?"...

As geek humour is always obscure at best, and downright odd all other times… this may shed some light:

The Advanced Package Tool (APT) is a part of the software management system for Debian. Analogous to RedHat’s RPM, but infinitely more capable, APT features automatic dependency handling and much more. If you’re not a Linux type, it’s like Windows Update for adults.

1. Login to a shell as root.
2. Type “apt-get moo” and press ENTER.
3. An ASCII-art drawing of a cow will be displayed, with “Have you mooed today?”.

Reminded me of a certain image I had on the front page (and only page…) of LambCutlet.org that was in place for over a year.

Moo! :D