Every day I hate Apple a little more.  (I know... and you thought I already hated them as much as possible.)

Why do I have to pay $300 for an adapter to use an Apple LCD on a VGA video card?  Why does the nohup command fail to log output if I run it in the background?  Why does the entire system lock up if I use any part of the GUI while fscking a partition?

My friend Tom from Unisys tells me there’s a tsunami relief concert coming up near my hometown.  There will be 15 local bands and the show is from noon to midnight.  If you’re in the West Chester area on February 12th, check it out.

The other night, Kim noticed that the moon was huge and orange on the horizon.  I wanted to take some photos, but by the time I was able to get to a location with a low enough view of the horizon, the hugeness and orangeness were gone.  I snapped a few photos anyway, and I don’t think they’re great, but here are 3 of the best ones.

These are all unedited except for lossless cropping, and all were taken with my Sony DSC-S85 set to 3x optical zoom, and with my Kenko Tele Converter KUT-500 5x zoom lens attached.

The moon appears to be orange when it’s right on the horizon because the light is travelling through more air than when the moon is high in the sky.  When the light collides with molecules in the air, the molecules steal some of the light’s energy, and this happens most readily at the blue/violet end of the spectrum because of an obscure inverse-quad law.  Anyway, when the moon is overhead, its light isn’t passing through enough air to strip out all of the blue energy, so the light that makes its way to us still appears white.  But when the moon is on the horizon, its light has to travel through a lot more air to get to us, so many more collisions take place causing much more blue energy to be stripped out, leaving mainly the orange/red hues to reach our eyes.  This phenomenon also explains why you can get sunburn during the day but not around dusk or after: ultra-violet light, being at the short-wavelength end of the spectrum, is the first to be stripped out.

(And it also explains why sunset skies are red and orange.  It is a myth that pollution causes pretty sunsets -- in fact, pollution diminishes the vibrancy of such colorful skies.)

But all that to say this: why isn’t the moon huge and orange on the horizon every night?  Or is it so, and I just don’t see it?  I definitely don’t see the moon every night, nor indeed that often at all, but I can only recall a handful of times that I’ve seen it huge and orange.

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At the beginning of the song "Vertigo" from U2’s latest album, you can hear the lyrics "unos, dos, tres, catorce."  That’s almost Spanish for "one, two, three, four," which would make sense.  But it’s actually "ones, two, three, fourteen."  Why is "one" plural and why "fourteen" instead of "four"?  With U2 being the world-travellers that they are, and being very plugged in to other cultures (especially helping the less fortunate in other cultures), I wouldn’t guess that it’s an error.  On the other hand, while I could see "catorce" being maybe some kind of joke, "unos" just seems honestly incorrect.

Margie and I watched this movie, twice so far.  It’s freaking hilarious.  Best movie I’ve seen in a long time.  Watch it if you haven’t yet.  I know you’ll like it.  You can’t stop the moonboots!

Family++  •  Love++  •  Mom has photos  •  ( :

With the switch from PHP to SSI/Perl, and the modifications to my visitorlog that allow it to run without any manual maintenance for log-rotating, I can now deploy my website system (blogger, vlog, stats, and photo-scripts) on other sites with minimal hassle.

Kim has a new website at kimi.is.dreaming.org and my scripts are running there.  I did most of the script-setup work, while Kim did most of the design work, except for me pestering her to say "ew, I don’t like that color..." :)  What’s particularly cool is that the whole site is running from her laptop.  Anyway, she’s got scads of photos, and heck, I’m even in some of them, so go see (:

For the past 8 weeks or so, I’ve been slowly re-coding parts of my website to improve performance and fix a few bugs.  The work has been focused mainly on my visitor logger and my weblog script, with one big exception: I switched the entire site from PHP to pure SSI+Perl.  I switched mainly because SSI/Perl can do everything that I had been using PHP for, with the added bonus that SSI is built into Apache and Perl is installed on every Linux server already (and easily installable on Win32 systems), whereas PHP is often not installed by default and is somewhat of a pain to configure.  (At least compared to Perl, which requires no configuration whatsoever.)

If none of that means anything to you, you can still appreciate the results of the performance improvements and bugfixes.  The site loads much faster now, because the visitor logger now automatically rotates its logfiles and caches the site stats, so it’s not scanning through tens of thousands of lines of logfile every time a page is loaded.  (But don’t look at the rewritten stats page yet; the tables still need to be organized into a more presentable layout.)

On the bug-fixing tip, the blogger’s spell-checker now properly ignores any special tags (notably links) in posts, so the preview no longer barfs when trying to display them.  I also fixed a bug that truncated any posts that contained both an image and a double-quote character, but of course you’ve never noticed that bug since I don’t allow people to post images unless they are logged in with an admin account, and only I have such an account around here :)  (Well, the blogger on the photos pages allows image-posting even for not-logged-in users.)

I also fixed the bug whereby if you entered a name into the site that contained spaces, the spaces would be displayed in their encoded form, as ’%20’ instead of ’ ’.  The fix was trivial, notwithstanding allegations that I had been "making excuses" for it, ostensibly because I didn’t feel like fixing it.  In the process, I also discovered an off-by-one bug in Apache, which will be fixed in the next release of that program.

In other news, my trusty old (OK, maybe just "old") 233mmx system recently decided to start booting again, so I’ll now start to debug the strange disappearing-text bug that some people have reported when using IE.