the eelful hovercraft

And here I was, sitting and thinking it’s going to be yet another placeholder post, when the beloved linux-elitists mailing list comes to rescue with the following:

A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx – a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others – on Sun’s Solaris operating system. The site-operator decided that this “unusual” event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor’s door and arrested him.

Boing Boing

What’s even more interesting, though, is the BBC’s version of the story. “I’ve noticed that the press tends to be quite accurate, except when they’re writing on a subject I know something about.” Indeed.

Meantime, in other parts of the world, your captain made himself a photolog and somebody else made some fantastic Hiëronymus Bosch action figures. Do enjoy.

Totally surprised by the fact that the end of the year has come so early I’m serving you yet another placeholder post, this time with the two discoveries of the passing 2004: Sinfest in the Sights category and A Night at the Hip-Hopera in Sounds (at least check out Break and Listen, and perhaps Ride, and Sniff, and Plan…).

The Foxy One tells me to leave this Internet café immediately and get in proper New Year’s Eve mood, so I’d better listen. Have a happy 2005.

There is that meme of blogging live from a WiFi-equipped conference with more or less useful thoughts instead of paying attention to what the conference is about. Hello, my name is Piotr Szotkowski and I’m attending Localisation Sprint at the moment.

More or less useful, as I said.

(In all seriousness, though, the Sprint is great fun and I met more fantastic people here already than I did during the past half year, and learned more about localisation than I ever wanted to. Go TTC!)

A lot of things have been happening lately, with the brightest spot being your captain (how else) turning twenty-five last Sunday; I’ve been spending some time at the Foxy One’s, on a short holiday after the final marathon of turning in the thesis not a day later than a week and a year past the initial deadline (go us!).

Having had a month of coding PHP, drawing graphs and writing LaTeX like a PHP-coding-graph-drawing-LaTeX-writing powerhouse for fourteen hours a day I really couldn’t stand the sight of my laptop, so I spent the better part of the birthday lying with it on the couch and re-learning Python; after reintroducing myself to Python Tutorial, skimming through Python Grimoire and reading most of Dive Into Python a small script sprang into life, downloaded all of the Wulffmorgenthaler archives and made all of the hovercraft crew declare Python the best programming language evah. And just when I thought life couldn’t possibly get any better, all of a sudden this appeared before my very eyes – stating, in pasta, that “WOJTEK IS 25 YEARS OLD.”

To say I was stunned would be a great understatement, but soon it turned out I didn’t know anything about being stunned just yet.

A pair of classy boxer shorts.

A black-and-blue-striped blouse.

A 1910s map of Łódź, the Foxy One’s home city.

A variety of old Łódź postcards.

Two (two!) boxes of chocolates.

A selection of small bath balls filled with liquid soap, which certainly have their own name in English, but I can’t, for the life of me, figure it out at the moment.

But

above all

seated modestly next to the other presents

was

a duck.

A rubber ducky.

Yellow. With a red beak.

No, really – see for yourselves (the ducky is the one without the boxer shorts on the head.)

Who’s the leader of the bath
That’s made for you and I?
R-U-B B-E-R D-U-C-K-Y!

Who is floating coast to coast
And looks up to the sky?
R-U-B B-E-R D-U-C-K-Y!

Rubber duck (rubber duck!)
Rubber duck (rubber duck!)
Forever float on bubbly waters
High! High! High! High!

Come along and sing a song
(Or just to tell us “hi!”)
R-U-B B-E-R D-U-C-K-Y!

(with apologies to Walt Disney and Stanley Kubrick)

I think I’ll call her Lady Duck.

…or what you can learn while idly tracking the debian-devel mailing list.

I hate when I’m so busy that I don’t have time to write, and I hate it even more when I have to put a placeholder post like this, just because I don’t have the time to test what would the machinery of the hovercraft do if there were no August entries. My current situation can be pretty much sumed up by the following, shamelessly stolen from alt.ascii-art:

             __.............__             
     .--""```                 ```""--.     
      `:--..___             ___..--:'      
        \      ```"""""""```      /        
      .-`  ___.....-----.....___  '-.      
    .:-""``     ~          ~    ``""-:.    
   /`-..___ ~        ~         ~___..-'\   
  /  ~    '`""---.........---""`        \  
 ;                                       : 
; '::.   '          ~     .:'    _.       :
|   ':::    '            .:'           ~  |
|~  .:'   .      _        ':.             |
| .:'                       ':.~          |
|  ':.      .  ~     .    _   .:          |
: '::.                   /|| .;'          ;
 :    ':          (}     \||D            ; 
  \.:'.:':.     | /\__,=_[_]            /  
   \ ':.     ~  |_\_  |----|      `    /   
    '. '::..  _ |  |/ |--. |_      ~ .'    
      '-._':'   |  /_ |    |  `'-_.-'      
         (``''--..._____...--''``)         
          `"--...__     __...--"'          
                   `````                   

Also, spotted today on pl.comp.os.advocacy:

shot@chastell:~$ curl -Is georgewbush.com | grep Server
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

shot@chastell:~$ curl -Is johnkerry.com | grep Server
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.1.2

Not that I’m really surprised, no. :o)

I’m aware that my general nitpickery is well known worldwide already, but this gem simply made my day (via /.). :o)