biting kneecaps

Last week, Shilo was having problems breathing: he was diagnosed as anemic with less than a third of the red blood cells he should have.

An emergency transfusion (and Shilo, of course, had a rare blood type: so they had to use artificial hemoglobin since there was no blood available) and he seemed a bit perkier.  But he was still losing blood internally, and was too weak to be a surgery candidate.  It seemed his kidneys were losing the blood.

MeriAnne and I went to the Umpqua River Lighthouse last weekend... sadly, it may be the last time we will get inside: for reasons unknown, the Coast Guard is considering closing and dismantling it.

Yes, it serves no 'real' purpose in the days of GPS and radio beacons... but it's still historical and costs a pittance to run: the Coast Guard doesn't even pay the electric bill.

So my fun for the week is "add h.264 support" to a web site.

If only it was that simple: "okay, flowplayer supports h.264 so, just change the encoding from .flv to .m4v".

Oh, no.  It's really code for "make this work on an iphone".

Oh, yeah, and don't break the existing users using IE and Firefox.

Which means we need to keep flowplayer (since IE doesn't support <video> tags at all at this point, and it will be years before we can rely on it..., and since Firefox doesn't support H.264 videos without Flash) and add <video> tags for Safari.

Just so I don't lose this link...

http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/05/02/creating-a-custom-compound-field-for-cck/

(Though the example is incorrect, since it doesn't iterate correctly over the delta's.. compare and contrast with some other cck module 'multiple' handling...  Need to loop over the defined values first, then add a couple blank ones.)

"The best firewalls won't save you from a weak password."

So said someone who was compromised a few weeks ago by this attack....

What is it?  It's a botnet of several hundred compromised machines, centrally controlled to perform dictionary attacks against other machines.

So much to post, but, well, I'm busy and it's not all that interesting....

But I ran across this while parsing some police logs for a project:

Wow, didn't notice that Sony signed a deal with Emusic in June... I just noticed a ton of Dylan music show up on my recommended list there...

(Too bad I already had them...)

This is huge, though, bringing tons of major artists to Emusic, the original home of flat-rate drm-free downloads.

Very nice, and nice to see that DRM is slowly dying in favor of affordable downloads.

Remember how Obama promised a more transparent government, where the people would actually be able to see government documents?

I finally got around to adding WFMUs blog to Liferea, just so I can find interesting things like the Rolling Stones from an alternate universe.

Worth a listen even if you don't like the Stones... or maybe especially so.