roguelazer's website

So, I've been in San Francisco apartment-hunting for the past couple of days (I found a place!), and the only computers I brought with me are my iPad and my iPhone. It occurred to me that this might be a useful basis for a review, so enjoy. As a reminder, I have the 64GB model with 3G and WiFi.

In brief, I am extremely satisfied. I have been using the iPad to browse Craigslist, listen to music, keep up with my e-mail (including a community-l thread that made me long for the upcoming threaded mail view), and so on ...

The universe smiles on me today: on the day that I finish all of my work for my undergraduate degree, my new iPad 3G appears. It's currently doing its initial sync (photo "optimization" takes ruddy forever, and I'm only synchronizing 3000 photos). For the time being, here are my unboxing photos.

So, yesterday was the big day. The Coming of The Tablet. I'm not exactly a big tech pundit. I've never seen an iPad in person. I haven't even played with the emulator yet. But I thought I'd still post my immediate reactions.

The Name: It's not that bad. It doesn't trigger the same juvenile "feminine products" joke urge in me that that it does with all of the commentators on Slashdot. It kind of reminds me of PADDs from Star Trek, which is a good association for a high-tech device. It's better ...

Hey all. One of the sysadmins at Mudd, Claire Connelly, pointed out that there's a widespread bug in SpamAssassin that might cause large numbers of false positives on mail sent after 2010-01-01. Apparently, the "date in future" rule is hardcoded to look for years after 2010. You can read more at LWN; the short of it is that you probably want to add the following to your SpamAssassin config:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

sa-update may or may not be pulling down updated rules. You can find the relevant bug at the SpamAssassin Bugzilla (#5852). Anyhow, something fun to be ...

I picked up a new "computer" last week. A virtual one, that is. I ran into this site called prgmr which offers very low-cost, bare virtual private servers. So far, so good. Got Debian set up all the way I like it. Now just to find something fun to do with it. :-)

Here's a fun thing that I've just discovered:

1. Purchase an Amazon Kindle 2 (this trick may work on other versions)
2. Download the MobiPocket version of The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce
3. Copy the .mobi file into your Kindle documents folder
4. Open the copy of the book that appears on your device
5. Enjoy the frequent crashes and random "java.lang.integer" exception errors that pop up (even when you do not have the book open!)
6. Fight with the Kindle for a while until you realize that it's this book, remove it from your device, and reboot the ...