I finally beat Metroid!
Earlier in the week I bought a copy of Metroid for my GameBoy Advance. I used to love that game, would stay up incredibly late with my friends and try to beat it back in the late 80's. I was never any good at the game and generally considered it the hardedst Nintendo game I'd ever played. Mostly because I didn't own it and never had a chance to get better at it...and no subscription to Nintendo Power to help either.
Anyway, I sat down tonight and started playing, no cheating. I didn't get very far. So I started trying to cheat. Like I always used to. I couldn't remember the one bitchin code that everybody used back in the day so I did some searching on the net to find a good code. I found this one:
NARPAS SWORD0
000000 000000
Which apparently puts you into a debug mode that gives you all weapons, infinite health and infinite missiles. Initially I thought this had something to do with a sword, but it makes a lot more sense for it to be: "NAR PASSWORD" where NAR means "North American Release". Hehe. I could barely remember how to get around in the game but I managed to beat it in about 1.5 hours. I didn't get to see Samus in the bikini but I did see the Leotard.
The code that was famous back then was JUSTIN BAILEY. According to the Wikipedia article it was just a fluke, not a programmer of the game like we all believed.
So, a few codes and 19 years later, I finally got to destroy the mother brain and see the credits roll. Hehe.
Greatest American Hero
This is old news, but new to me. I guess that they have finally released the Greatest American Hero on DVD. I didn't even know they were going to. Another memory from my childhood has been restored. Amazon link here. I probably won't be buying it, I didn't like the show that much...but it was a total trip to watch the trailer on the website. ;)
strange device on the I-5
Anybody know what this is on top of a 50ft utility pole? They're all along the I-5 just north of the 5-805 merge. Looks like a probe droid on a stick to me.
Klingon Fairy Tales
The holiday schedule has knocked my sleeping patterns all out of whack. And going on call hasn't helped that much. So, I've been doing a lot of late night reading. Wikipedia, del.icio.us/popular and catching up on the best links of 2005. One jewl I discovered is McSweeney's lists. I liked this one best:
"Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears"
"Snow White and the Six Dwarves She Killed With Her Bare Hands and the Seventh Dwarf She Let Get Away as a Warning to Others"
"There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe With a Big Spike on It"
"The Three Little Pigs Build an Improvised Explosive Device and Deal With That Damned Wolf Once and for All"
"Jack and the Giant Settle Their Differences With Flaming Knives"
"Old Mother Hubbard, Lacking the Means to Support Herself With Honor, Sets Her Disruptor on Self-Destruct and Waits for the Inevitable"
"Mary Had a Little Lamb. It Was Delicious"
"Little Red Riding Hood Strays Into the Neutral Zone and Is Never Heard From Again, Although There Are Rumors ... Awful, Awful Rumors"
"Hansel and Gretel Offend Vlad the Impaler"
"The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates"
Personal Made Public: Wikipedia vs. Britannica
Personal Made Public: Wikipedia vs. Britannica: "Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."
I can get lost in Wikipedia. For hours. But I always come out smarter. I love Wikipedia.
Hubble is cool
HST rocks. Check out this pic:
And this gallery:
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/
I can't believe they're going to decomission it, but I guess that the size and capability of ground based scopes has grown so much that I can understand it a bit.
renewing an expired SSL cert for IMAP
On my host, which is Debian:
cd /etc/ssl/certs
openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out imapd.pem -keyout imapd.pem -days 365
It will ask a few questions, give a few answers...Done!
I had forgotten how since I did it last almost 2 years ago. I have just been putting up with the annoying warning when I connect to my server. Link here: http://www.knowplace.org/pages/howtos/linux_imapd_with_ssl_howto.php
vi on a dark background
I use Vim at least 100 times a day. And I like my terminals set to light on dark. Over the last 10 years or so you would find me in a dark office with a dark screen and bright text. I've since moved to a new office that is a little brighter but I still prefer the darker screens. With vi, the default syntax highlighting settings are too dark to actually read the text...the blue's are almost unreadable with background glare. So, a quick search revealed an option that fixes all my problems:
set background=dark
or
set bg=dark
Now my text is much brighter and still readable in the brighter office.
More: http://cephyr.cid.net/doc/vim/html/options.html#'background'
Web Hosting providers
People ask me frequently how to get started with a personal web site. I generally point them to a route that takes them to setting up Apache on a cablemodem connection. But since web hosting is a commodity now and is highly competitive, it's extremely cheap to get a site hosted on professionally run servers and they come with a lot of features. Two that I have seen and would recommend for a personal site:
Dreamhost and Powweb both have plans for $8 a month and include your own domain name, nearly 5G of disk, mail, MySQL and a host of 1-click software packages including blogs, wiki's, forums and other typical website type things. I wouldn't put a business critical or revenue generation website on these low-end services but they work perfectly fine for a personal site. I do see that each of them offer higher end services, but I can't comment on the reliability of those. A friend of mine uses Dreamhost's higher end stuff and it seems to do well for him, buy YMMV.
Funny link of the day: Beef Panties?
"Quaker Maid Meats Inc. on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of frozen ground beef.."
make firefox a little more writer friendly
Geek to Live: Turn Firefox into a web writer - Lifehacker *
The rise of the read/write web makes the term “browser” a misnomer. If you use web-based e-mail like Gmail, or if you post to forums or write a blog, you’re using a “browser” to author documents as well as browse them. A plain, tiny web page textarea is not very conducive to writing. If you spend a lot of time writing the web with Firefox, soup up your “browser” with a few extensions that will turn it into a powerful text editor.