$words[rand()]

Via Pharyn­gula

Appar­ently Wednes­day night’s episode of South Park was cen­sored by Com­edy Cen­tral after it was deliv­ered. Matt and Trey posted this on the South Park Stu­dios news feed:

In the 14 years we’ve been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn’t stand behind. We deliv­ered our ver­sion of the show to Com­edy Cen­tral and they made a deter­mi­na­tion to alter the episode. It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part. Com­edy Cen­tral added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle’s cus­tom­ary final speech was about intim­i­da­tion and fear. It didn’t men­tion Muham­mad at all but it got bleeped too. We’ll be back next week with a whole new show about some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent and we’ll see what hap­pens to it.

Com­edy Cen­tral has failed by giv­ing in to a group of idiots who only know how to get what they want through threats. By cen­sor­ing this episode, they showed that those threats will get exactly the desired reac­tion.

Stolen from Some­thing Awful

Sat­ur­day night I was dri­ving home from a friend’s house around 11 PM. I get off I-71 at SR18 like usual and then cut in to a neigh­bor­hood that leads me around to Smith Road so I can bypass all the stop­lights on 18. A few sec­onds later I see head­lights gain­ing on me rapidly which are clearly a Crown Vic­to­ria, and as I come to a stop and the car behind comes up to me, I can see the 800-GRAB-DUI plate up front indi­cat­ing it’s a police car. I turn on to Smith and the car con­tin­ues to fol­low me at a very close dis­tance down a fairly steep hill that I have to ride my brakes on to stay at 25 MPH. Obvi­ously no one ever does 25 MPH down that hill unless they have a cop rid­ing their ass wait­ing for them to speed. (by the way, if I was to have fol­lowed as closely behind that cop as he did behind me I’d have a ticket for tail­gat­ing. why does he get a free pass?)

At the bot­tom of the hill there’s a stop light, I con­tin­ued on straight and the offi­cer behind me turned off back towards route 18. About that time I get a call from a friend of mine who had seen the cop pull in behind me. Appar­ently he had flipped his lights on and cut across three lanes to fol­low me, so my friend thought I had been pulled over. I had made a bit of an aggres­sive turn in to the neigh­bor­hood and it was late on a Sat­ur­day night, so at the time I just fig­ured they were out on DUI patrol and had left once it was clear I wasn’t weav­ing (or even buzzed, I hadn’t drank a drop that day).

I keep going down Smith, then turn down 57 towards my apart­ment. As I pull away from a four-way stop, I see the same Med­ina PD unit that had been fol­low­ing me (I made note of the num­ber) pull up to the other side of the inter­sec­tion and then pull in behind me again. Approach­ing my street, I see a Med­ina Town­ship unit sit­ting in the street with his rear lights on. Com­ing around the cor­ner, there are three other units includ­ing Brunswick PD, Montville PD, and another Med­ina PD car in the park­ing lot of one of the other apart­ment build­ings on my street. The car that was once again fol­low­ing me pulled in behind the Town­ship unit in the street and fired up his lights as well. There is also a mid-90s Cadil­lac in the mid­dle of it all with some younger males stand­ing around it.

At this point I’m of course inter­ested. Rarely do you see five units on scene when noth­ing of inter­est has happened.

Today I fire up the Med­ina City PD Pub­lic Infor­ma­tion Log and pull up the infor­ma­tion for the weekend:

Incident #: 10-004590

Nature of Incident: Traffic Violation

Offense Reported: Traffic-Moving Violation

Time Reported: 23:20:10

Time Occurred Between: 23:20:10 02/20/10 - 23:20:10 02/20/10

Responsible Officer: Lynn S

Complainant:

Incident Address:
Springbrook; 300 Blk
Medina, OH 44256

Narrative:
No plate light

Five units from four agen­cies, two of which are out of their juris­dic­tion, for a license plate light? Really?

Everybody’s friends over at the TSA had a nice fail at some point when they posted a redacted ver­sion of their “Avi­a­tion Secu­rity Screen­ing Man­age­ment Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dures” on their web site. Unfor­tu­nately for them, redact­ing by draw­ing boxes over the text and images in Acro­bat doesn’t really do any­thing use­ful, the con­tent is still there. It took a few months before some­one noticed, but once that hap­pened the Inter­net took hold and the great guys over at Cryp­tome stripped all the cen­sor­ing, replac­ing it with red boxes to clearly mark what the TSA con­sid­ers “sen­si­tive” and posted the result on their web site. I’m also mir­ror­ing the same here. I’ve skimmed the whole man­ual and read the cen­sored parts in their entirety, I hon­estly can’t fig­ure out why they even felt the need to cen­sor. Gov­ern­ments should be open unless they can pro­vide good rea­son not to be, not closed by default.

If you are see­ing this post, your DNS servers have updated and noticed that my old VPS on JaguarPC is no longer where they should look. My blog and other ran­dom shit has now been moved over to Lin­ode, where they don’t block IRC and other things I run on my box.

Today I had Steam start throw­ing an error that it is being run in com­pat­i­bil­ity mode when I had never set such a thing, nor were either the short­cut or EXE itself flagged for com­pat­i­bil­ity mode. Thanks to a lit­tle googling, I found this thread on the Steam forums which finally had a solution.

Open the reg­istry edi­tor (if you don’t know how to do this, you should not be mess­ing around in the reg­istry) and browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers. Look for entries in those keys men­tion­ing steam.exe and delete them. Restart Steam and you’re set!

Got back home from the Day­ton Hamven­tion around 8 PM last night. I went there plan­ning on buy­ing an entry-level HT, but I ended up get­ting attracted to shiny things and bought a Yaesu VX-7R rather than my intended tar­get of some­thing in the FT-60R range. Made a few con­tacts on the trip back, unfor­tu­nately I don’t remem­ber many calls or names, the only ones I can recall are Ron (W8RON) and I think another guy both Ron and I talked with was named Kyle, I can’t remem­ber his call.

So I’m finally on the air the “proper” way rather than just being tied to Echolink. Woo!

–KD8JQS

Evo­lu­tion

A quick primer to send to any cre­ation­ists you may know.

Edit: Appar­ently the Youtube Word­Press auto-post thing neglects to set the title.

Yes­ter­day Pat Robert­son made another one of his trade­mark idi­otic state­ments. In response to Maine pro­vid­ing homo­sex­ual cou­ples the right to marry, Mr. Robert­son went on CBN and opened his mouth to let this shit drib­ble out:

Here is a tran­script, snagged from Think Progress:

HOST: Mean­while, the New Hamp­shire leg­is­la­ture has also voted in favor of gay mar­riage, but Pat, the gov­er­nor there still isn’t sure if he will approve that bill.

ROBERTSON: Lee, we haven’t taken this to its ulti­mate con­clu­sion. You got polygamy out there. How can we rule that polygamy is ille­gal when you say that homo­sex­ual mar­riage is legal. What is it about polygamy that’s dif­fer­ent? Well, polygamy was out­lawed because it was con­sid­ered immoral accord­ing to bib­li­cal stan­dards. But if we take bib­li­cal stan­dards away in homo­sex­u­al­ity, what about the other? And what about bes­tial­ity and ulti­mately what about child molesta­tion and pedophilia? How can we crim­i­nal­ize these things and at the same time have con­sti­tu­tional amend­ments allow­ing same-sex mar­riage among homo­sex­u­als. You mark my words, this is just the begin­ning in a long down­ward slide in rela­tion to all the things that we con­sider to be abhorrent.

He starts off with what is actu­ally a very good point. If polygamy was made ille­gal for reli­gious rea­sons, then it most cer­tainly should not be ille­gal. Of course my posi­tion is the reverse of his, so I see it as “so why is polygamy still ille­gal?” He then steps off the logic bus and boards the crazy train by claim­ing the next steps would then be bes­tial­ity and pedophilia. There’s this lit­tle detail he’s ignor­ing of course, and that is informed adult con­sent. Homo­sex­ual mar­riages are between two con­sent­ing adults. Polygamy would also be a num­ber of mar­riages between con­sent­ing adults. Bes­tial­ity, pedophilia, and all the other things the Chris­t­ian cra­zies claim nec­es­sar­ily fol­low gay mar­riage clearly don’t.

Can some­one please tell me why peo­ple keep lis­ten­ing to this igno­rant idiot?

Video cour­tesy Media Mat­ters.
Tran­script and inspi­ra­tion to write cour­tesy Think Progress.

This morn­ing I rebooted my test box run­ning VMware ESXi 3.5 to com­plete the upgrade from Update 3 to Update 4. The hyper­vi­sor came back up, but no guests were run­ning and when I popped open the VI Client it indi­cated that there were no data­s­tores con­fig­ured and it could not find any of the vir­tual machines I had in inven­tory. It saw the inter­nal disks and that they were for­mat­ted VMFS, but would not allow me to do any­thing other than for­mat them over again.

Nor­mally this would have sim­ply annoyed me since I would have lost my test VMs, but they don’t take long to build so I’d have just for­mat­ted them and gone on with my day. Unfor­tu­nately within the last week we had tem­porar­ily moved a crit­i­cal application’s VM to this box and we had not prop­erly recon­fig­ured backup. I could restore from the week old backup, but there would be hell to pay.

Since the VMFS par­ti­tions were clearly vis­i­ble I felt I had a chance, but I’m still new to ESX/ESXi so my first step was to flip over to my always run­ning irssi ses­sion (if you use IRC and do not use screened irssi, go Google it now and enjoy) and ask for help in #shsc and #vmware. #shsc always has a few guys who work on large VMware installs idling, and of course #vmware is obvi­ous. While wait­ing for any input from IRC, I went to Google for my next step. I knew ESXi has the capa­bil­ity to be accessed via SSH, but it’s dis­abled by default, so I looked up how to turn it on. A few min­utes later after bring­ing a mon­i­tor over to the machine and reboot­ing it I had SSH access and could go through sys­tem logs from the com­fort of my laptop.

In /var/log/messages I found two entries ref­er­enc­ing my SATA con­troller which looked inter­est­ing:
May 5 14:34:35 vmkernel: 0:00:06:39.406 cpu0:3616)ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba000:0:0:3 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide.
May 5 14:34:35 vmkernel: 0:00:06:39.408 cpu0:3616)ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba0:0:0:1 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide.

This infor­ma­tion, after a quick trip to Google, led to VMware’s SAN con­fig­u­ra­tion guide which ref­er­ences sim­i­lar issues occur­ring on SANs, so I tried enabling the res­ig­na­tur­ing option and mag­i­cally my data­s­tores reap­peared. After renam­ing them back to their orig­i­nal names and turn­ing the res­ig­na­tur­ing option back off I had all my data and was able to down­load the disk images and VMX files so I was safe in the event of a major problem.

At this point, I could see my VMs but the VI inven­tory was still con­vinced that they were on the “old dri­ves”, so after a bit more time on Google I dis­cov­ered the Import fea­ture within the data­s­tore browser and I was able to bring the VMs back in and get them boot­ing up.

Screen­shot show­ing my data­s­tores and two VMs running

After con­firm­ing that the VMs I really needed were boot­ing and oper­a­tional, I shut every­thing down to move the server back to its spot in my rack. For­tu­nately every­thing came right back up so the pres­sure was now off.

Now my con­cerns shifted. If this hap­pened once, what’s to stop it from hap­pen­ing again? I needed to fig­ure out why it hap­pened. For­tu­nately at nearly the exact moment I started think­ing about this IRC came through for me. “jidar” in #shsc linked to this thread on VMware’s forum with lit­er­ally the exact same symp­toms. A few posts down was a link to this page which again matched my expe­ri­ence exactly and says that U4 updated a num­ber of SATA dri­vers includ­ing the one for the ICH9 con­troller in my Pow­erEdge and changed the way they appear to the hyper­vi­sor, which led to it not rec­og­niz­ing the dri­ves for what they are.

Right now I’m mod­er­ately annoyed at an update that’s not even enough to earn it a minor ver­sion num­ber bump on a piece of soft­ware intended for enter­prise use hav­ing a change with the poten­tial to cause this, but on the other hand I don’t expect any­one who really cares about reli­a­bil­ity to be using SATA local stor­age. Ah well, I learned a bit about nav­i­gat­ing around ESXi’s internals.