Archive for September, 2008

Look at what I’ve just bought:

Apologies for the photo; it’s one that the selling agent took. As you might guess, I’ll be super busy over the next few days (and weeks), so posting here will most likely be on the lighter side. Down the road, once I have things put together, I’ll take some pictures to share with everybody.

Does anyone even care about this guy anymore? His latest stunt, in which he’ll be upside down for 60 hours, might leave him blind. It’s sad to see him have to resort to stunts like this to get attention. But I guess that’s the way of things, seeing as magic lost its charm after all of those Magic’s Biggest Secrets Revealed specials.

At least he’s easy to make fun of. There are some really great David Blaine parodies on YouTube, all of which I have linked below. They really nail his demeanor and the jokes are hilarious. Mind the salty language, however. Each video is about 5 minutes long, so make sure you have some time to watch them.

• David Blaine Spoof: Part 1
• David Blaine Spoof: Part 2
• David Blaine Spoof: Part 3

I’ve recently been looking for a few new computer games to play. Seeing as there’s nothing on the immediate horizon that suits my fancy, I decided to dig into my existing computer game collection for something I hadn’t played in a while. The first title that popped up was Microsoft’s Rise of Nations, the one and only real-time strategy (RTS) game that I own. I’m not a big fan of the RTS genre, mostly because I’m really terrible at those types of games, and the only reason I own one is because my dad got it for free at a Microsoft conference. Surprisingly to me, it’s a fun little game. As I’ve already said, I stink at RTS games, so even playing on the 2nd (of 7) difficulty levels still presents quite a challenge. But I have fun playing the game, and that’s what matters.

As much fun as I was having, there was still an itch that I couldn’t scratch. Thanks to some recent Diablo III screenshots I found via a news posting on Blue’s News, it occurred to me: I needed a good-ol’ role-playing game (RPG) to play. So I dug through my still-boxed computer games (which I never unpacked), and found my old copy of Sacred. It’s a Diablo-like RPG and was just what I was looking for. While perusing the Wikipedia article on the game, I noted that an expansion pack had been released, something that I originally had not picked up. A ‘gold’ edition of the game had later been released, including the original game along with the expansion. I saw it for sale on Amazon for $25.99, which seemed a little high, considering I already owned the base game. Thankfully, the game is also available on Steam for a paltry $9.99. I was sold, immediately bought the game, and I’m already having a blast (and I’m looking forward to all the new content).

Score another win for the Steam platform.

Long, long ago, when I was first setting up my website at DreamHost, I wanted a way to store a personal wish list. I looked at the Amazon wish list, but it had one fatal flaw: there was no way to list items that weren’t sold at Amazon or one of their partners. This flaw was enough to drive me out to develop my own wish list software. It’s not flashy, but it gets the job done. But it, too, has some annoying faults.

Recently, while perusing Lifehacker, I ran across a link to this article that points to the Amazon Universal Wish List. Essentially, Amazon provides a bookmarklet to users, enabling them to save any product to an Amazon wish list! This new feature has me seriously considering whether I should switch over.

One thing I really like about the Amazon wish list setup is that people can purchase things for you without knowing your address. So folks who would like to support Born Geek could simply buy me something off my wish list, without worrying how to get the item to me. Another big benefit is that I no longer need to copy-paste the product link and information. With this bookmarklet, it’s simply a two-click process to save an item to my wish list. Pretty sweet!

I ran into a strange problem with a Perl CGI script yesterday. Upon script execution, I received the following error message from IIS:

CGI Error
The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers.

A quick Google search of this error message turned up a number of discussions mentioning bugs in IIS, server configuration problems, etc. However, I suspected that my scripts were to blame (I had been hacking on them on Friday). But how could I determine whether I was at fault or if the server was to blame? Thankfully, the solution comes through one of the Perl CGI modules (here’s the Perl tip):

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser warningsToBrowser);

The Carp module (and where does that name come from?) gives us the fatalsToBrowser and warningsToBrowser subroutines. When included in your script, any resulting Perl execution errors will be output into the browser window (very handy). After turning on these features, I immediately found my error. It resided in this line (here’s the gotcha):

$safeProductName =~ s/\$/\\$/g;

It was my intent to replace any instances of the dollar sign character ($) with a backslash-dollar sign pair (\$). At first glance, this substitution rule may look alright. But it’s not! The replacement portion of a substitution is treated as a double quoted string. So, the interpreter was escaping the backslash just fine, but then hits a naked dollar sign, indicating a variable (of which I didn’t provide a name). And so it chokes! The line should have read:

$safeProductName =~ s/\$/\\\$/g;

Note the three backslashes in the replacement string. Two to print an actual backslash character, and one to print the actual dollar sign. Subtle? You bet.

There a really great page with photos from this summer’s Paralympic Games, the forgotten little brother of the Olympics. The things some of the folks in these pictures are doing are way more impressive than anything I saw in this year’s Olympics (excepting Michael Phelps’ craziness). Soccer matches featuring blind players? Crazy. One armed archery? Epic. These people truly define ‘athlete’.

Tropical Storm Hanna slid up the east coast of the US on Saturday, and it dumped quite a bit of rain in our area. Subsequently, the Eno River rose to the highest level I’ve personally ever seen (17 feet), so my dad and I went down to take a look. This photo album is the result. Enjoy.