Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

I went shopping last night for gifts. On a Wednesday night, Best Buy was quite crowded… I had a list of what I was looking for, otherwise I would have been sucked into the aisle after aisle of DVDs, games, and other cool stuff.
My father-in-law was along for the trip and he was dsitracted by the plethora of techno-goodness.
We stopped by Zany Brainy to pick up stuff for the girls and got a ton of good stuff. Itold my father-in-law that Michele woudl not approve of my choices. He didn’t believe me. So we bet a dollar on it. Of course, Michele disagreed with the majority of my choices and I won the dollar.
For some strange reason, I am still looking to buy GMRS radios. I need to choose between the Motorola and the Uniden options. Any suggestions?

Okie, dokies. I feel asleep early yesterday night. This resulted in a serious lack of websurfing and nazi-killing….
In a comments thread below, BillB requested the direct link to the Firefly cancellation news. Here’s the news from the director Tim Minear. Here’s the news from Entertainment Weekly.
My brother Matt did a cool new flash animation for his work. Check it out. Matt’s skills are impressive.
Over on Anita’s weblog, I found a link to a test to see if you are a PHB (Pointy Headed Boss). Hopefully I fail the test. I think the writer of the test is Anita’s husband.
Mister P’s fun with his automobile continues. If ever there was a man that needed a wife to straighten him out, it is Mister P.
I was reading about the Creative Commons site today. I’m not sure I understand it fully, but I’m sure someone will explain it to me. From what my cursory glance reveals, it’s a method to declare rights to your works in varying levels of control over what people can do with the content. Traditional copyrights are pretty black and white in what people are allowed to do. The Creative Commons people appear to offer shades of grey.
Best. Casemod. Evar.
That’s enough for now. I need some sleep.

The holiday is approaching at light speed. My daughters are quite excited. They already had the fun of Hanukah and now they get to enjoy Christmas.
We decorated the tree yesterday. Much fun was had and we had the traditional ‘how do we put lights on the tree’ arguement.

Left is the trimmed tree. Right is the tree without the harsh flash of the camera.

A while ago I posted about #houseofmovies on dalnet. As a result, people often emailed me asking the same question. What is the song in the beginning of the movies. I didn’t know. It’s interesting music, but not a mainstream tune.
Today I was in the kitchen and I heard the song come out of the computer. I was streaming off of a shoutcast server. I looked down and saw the name of the tune. Breakdown by Tantric.
Most of you regular readers won’t care, but once google vacuums the site, this answer will be available to those that search for it.

I’m sitting on the couch in the living room. The Christmas tree is here with me, unadorned.
After putting the kids to sleep, I caught the second half of Ocean’s Eleven. Then I caught the last 20 minutes of LotR. Now, Apocalypse Now Redux is on. It’s the final scenes when Willard is with Kurtz in the camp.
It will be over soon. If Last Temptation of Christ is on next, I’ll get no sleep tonight.
No links tonight. I did a geocache today, but I haven’t written up the story yet.

I’ve decided to Help Trent Lott Resign.
I’m sending him a pen so he can sign his resignation.
Read the page and see if you want help as well.
Spread the word. Spread the idea far and wide via weblog, email, and carrier pigeon.

We picked up a Christmas Tree tonight. I washed it down and it’s outside drying off for tomorrow’s decoration.
I’ve finally posted the wish list for Michele & myself. I assume you voyeurs want to check it out.
Firefly was cancelled by Fox. This completely sucks. There’s a glimmer of hope at fireflysupport.com but the chances are slim. I told you all to watch the show.
I would have paid large amounts of cash to be in the back seat for this encounter.
Ethan has completely reworked his web page. Looks way cooler than mine now. Please post a comment. He feels unloved.
And a hearty welcome to Dean as he begins his weblog experience. The site still has that new car smell.

No energy for a long entry.
The guys at Penny Arcade agree with me, Equilibrium is worth seeing. Check out the comic as well. Go see the movie, tell you friends to go see the movie.

I got this in my email today about a PNG vulnerability:

Twas the night before Christmas, and deep in IE
A creature was stirring, a vulnerability
MS02-066 was posted on the website with care
In hopes that Team eEye would not see it there
But the engineers weren’t nestled all snug in their beds,
No, PNG images danced in their heads
And Riley at his computer, with Drew’s and my backing
Had just settled down for a little PNG cracking
When rendering an image, we saw IE shatter
And with just a glance we knew what was the matter
Away into SoftICE we flew in a flash
Tore open the core dumps, and threw RFC 1951 in the trash
The bug in the thick of the poorly-written code
Caused an AV exception when the image tried to load
Then what in our wondering eyes should we see
But our data overwriting all of heap memory
With heap management structures all hijacked so quick
We knew in a moment we could exploit this $#!%
More rapid than eagles our malicious pic came —
The hardest part of this exploit was choosing its name
Derek Soeder
Software Engineer
eEye Digital Security

Who says hackers don’t know literature?

Alrighty there loyal readers, how the fuck are you? I’m doing well, but that’s probably do to the scotch and too many cookies tonight.
Reader Nick Bloom posted a comment to a Cruftbox entry from October. He sounds like Brad…
Mister P has declared war on a 6 year old girl. I wonder who will win.
Speaking of Mr. P, here’s the story of the power of the blog. A few days ago, Mr. P posted a rant on his weblog about the Trio network. Amazingly, he got a response from Hyperactiveman, who just so happens to be working on the rework of the Trio logo. He has promised to keep the comments in mind as he helps design a new logo. A rant out on the wild internet ends up actually having an effect. Amazing.
Star Trek comment: Tonight’s episode of Enterprise included a firefight, spaceship chases, dilithium hydroxl, T’pol as a bloodthirsty judge, alien sex in the jungle, and a fist fight. Not one stupid ethical dilemma!
A rare thinking bit:
I was reading Doc Evil’s weblog and read this post. Go read it. At first, I thought, wow that’s pretty cool, meeting someone who isn’t a freak and having a chat. I wondered if it would ever happen to me.
In his post, Doc asks, “I wondered, after Greg was gone if some of my peoples who aren’t black go through these same types of things. When they see another yella, another, vanilla, or whatever comin’ their way, do they harden up? Are they not acknowledged as another human being on the street?”
At first, I thougth no way. White men aren’t allowed to act like that. Can you imagine two white men talking in a public place about how white men need to network and stick together? That’s the realm of skinheads and the Klan. White males enjoy tremendous advantanges in American society. The very idea of white men banding together fills many with dread. I can’t say I blame them. Groups of white men have done some pretty horrific things in the last 500 years.
So I thought to myself, “Self, this is an experience that you will probably never have.” There are many things in life I won’t experience and this is one of them I thought.
And then it struck me. White men do have a way of achieving this sense of community. We don’t band together by race. There’s no reason to and society doesn’t much like it. We band together by our hobbies.
We band together around sports teams. We network together around cars. We nod to each other when a hot chick walks by. We group up around technology, be it stereos, power tools, or computers. A man can talk to any other man when they are standing in the same aisle in Home Depot. The normal barriers are gone. Race doesn’t matter. All that matters is how cool that Sawzall would be if we bought it. All that matters is our team going to win the game. All that matters is the size of the hooters on that woman.
So, if I’m walking down the street and I see someone with a GPS unit, I’m going to stop and talk to them, just like Greg did with Doc. I’m a geek and I need to give other geeks my respect. Lord knows we don’t get much of it from the world.
To my geek brothers out there, much respect. While the rest of the world thinks we are strange, we know that we keep the wheels of society turning. All those nimrods out there that can’t stop their VCR from flashing 12:00 and think “Math is hard” are wrong. D&D was fun. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings are great. Faster computers do make you cool.
And if you disrespect us, we’ll crash your fucking computer, deprogram your cell phone, and make you read the instruction manual yourself.