The Planet, the parent company of the ServerMatrix hosting company I'm using for my servers, is having a contest for female entrepreneurs who have a good idea for an online business. A winner will receive free web hosting for a year, $10,000, and other support:

Women with a great idea for an online business are encouraged to submit a brief proposal to equeen@theplanet.com. Contestants will be narrowed to five and Mark Cuban will select the final two during a live broadcast mid-August.

The two finalists will be charged with preparing their online business in just five days. The Planet will assist finalists with designing and hosting their websites, and set-up of merchant accounts and a database management system. Contestants will receive on-air mentions and promotions of their business on Kidd Kraddick in the Morning. At the end of seven days, the contestant with the most successful business will win the contest and prizes. The winner will be announced at the end of August.

2005/08/01 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Grampa Joe and the Chocolate Factory

I saw the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake this afternoon. Some parts were weak -- Johnny Depp's childlike Willy Wonka is much less interesting than Gene Wilder's menacing adult chocolateer -- but I was extremely glad to see that Grampa Joe is still a bastard.

The web site Say No to Grampa Joe documents all of the ways that Joe, played by the great Jack Albertson in the original movie, was an anchor dragging down the rest of his family.

At the start of the story, we meet Joe, who has spent 20 years bedridden, supported by his daughter and his 10-year-old grandson's child labor. In the new film, he's also sponging off a son-in-law.

When Charlie finds a golden ticket, we learn that Joe's been pretending to be invalid:

... his long bony body rose up out of the bed and his bowl of soup went flying into the face of Grandma Josephine, and in one fantastic leap, this old fellow of ninety-six and a half, who hadn't been out of bed these last twenty years, jumped on to the floor and started doing a dance of victory in his pajamas.

David Kelly's new version of Grampa Joe is more lovable, but he still elbows his way to the front of the line for a chance to visit the factory, blocking any impulse Charlie has to bring a parent.

Movies · 2005/07/31 · 1 COMMENT · Link

My Saturday in Sendmail Hell

Sendmail problems are like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. You have to kill them a couple of times just to make sure they're really dead.

I returned home after the jaunty 1,104-mile drive from Dallas to find this server with an 100 percent full disk, which was 70 percent more than the day before. The culprit was Sendmail, which bounced the same e-mail back and forth until it filled the disk.

I burned a Saturday at the keyboard as feeling slowly returned to my butt cheeks -- one of these days, I'm afraid I will break one by driving for hundreds of miles.

Solving a problem with no available disk space takes hours. Commands can take 10 minutes or more to execute, because the CPU's throttled by the process filling the disk. I began by killing the most likely cause, Sendmail: /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail stop.

Although I've been running a Linux box for years, I know little about Sendmail, which I regard charitably as the worst software that will ever be written in any language, open source or commercial, under any programming methodology on any operating system. Unlike Apache, MySQL, and other programs on which I rely, Sendmail can't easily be reconfigured. The software's configuration file is so complex that it requires a configuration file of its own!

When Sendmail sends a message, the e-mail ends up in two files in /var/spool/clientmqueue. I deleted each 100+ megabyte e-mail as it showed up, rebooting Sendmail and the server several times, but it took 24 hours to stop coming back.

Like all Sendmail problems that I fix, I was left with absolutely no knowledge of what I did that worked. My best guess is that I could prevent a recurrence if there's a way to tell Sendmail to reject all incoming or outgoing e-mail larger than a set size, such as 10 megabytes.

Linux · 2005/07/31 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Bush Courts Another Souter

Words I can't recall saying before: I agree with Ann Coulter and Charles Krauthammer. In John Roberts, President Bush has nominated another David Souter, a jurist without a public record that would justify the confidence Republicans are expressing in his approach to the Constitution.

Perhaps he'll prove to be a reliable member of the Scalia-Thomas bloc, but evangelical conservatives who returned Bush to the White House for a full assault on Roe v. Wade ought to be wondering why the president snuck another stealth candidate forward. The GOP's in solid control of Congress largely because of religious voters who care about no issue more than the criminalization of abortion. Roberts could perch atop the Constitution for 30 years. How much of a governing majority does a pro-life Republican president need before he'll nominate an explicitly anti-Roe jurist to the court?

My cynical suspicion is that Bush wants abortion to be safe, legal, and rage-inducing for the GOP base. A Roe overturn would provoke a strong backlash -- a majority of the country is pro-choice, according to recent polls. A return to back-alley abortions turns a significant number of those people into strong single-issue voters while giving the GOP's most loyal voters one less reason to go to the polls.

Politics · 2005/07/28 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Finding Latoyia Figueroa

Latoyia Figueroa, a 24-year-old woman five months' pregnant with her second child, disappeared in Philadelphia July 18. She has a seven-year-old daughter and never missed a shift at the restaurant where she worked, so her loved ones are fearing the worst.

The Citizens Crime Commission of Delaware Valley has offered a $10,000 reward for information about her whereabouts.

Richard Blair, a Philly blogger, is trying to get her case on the same television news programs that have covered Natalee Holloway, Laci Peterson, and the Runaway Bride. He's already managed to attract the attention of CNN.Com, based on coverage Figueroa has received on blogs, and has been invited by several networks to talk about the blog angle:

Latoyia's story has moved from CNN to MSNBC and Fox this evening. So it's getting some exposure. Still nothing on Nancy Grace. I've been answering email and on the phone all evening, so I apologize in advance for not having a whole lot more to offer today. Just to give you an idea, I've turned down on-air interview requests now from all "big three" cable news nets, as well as ABC's Good Morning America. This isn't about how we collectively pushed Latoyia's story out there (yet, anyway) -- it's about finding a missing young pregnant woman who needs to be found.

Figueroa's an unlikely subject for round-the-clock treatment, for reasons you might have surmised. Wrong color, wrong class, wrong background. Sadly, she lost her own mother at age 2 to a violent death.

Blair's desire to make the broadcast media address the substance of this story, rather than covering the novelty of the blogosphere's outrage-motivated adoption of a missing person, may greatly limit the exposure he could have gotten for her disappearance.

Speaking from personal experience, there's an extremely short window of time in which the national media cares about a no-name blogger's unusual media hack. Thursday may be the last day he gets any invites; no one outside of the fruit fly family has a shorter attention span than TV news producers.

2005/07/28 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Catching Up with the Five of Hearts

I've begun reading How America Lost Iraq, a book by Aaron Glantz, a war correspondent for the liberal Pacifica radio network.

Glantz's premise is that the Iraqi people were extremely receptive to the U.S. after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, but their support has been lost because of the imprisonment of innocent people, an inability to restore basic services like water and electricity, and widespread anarchy.

The first chapter takes satisfaction in the downfall of Huda Amash, a Saddam loyalist who was the five of hearts on the U.S. most-wanted card deck and the highest ranking woman in Iraq. She was arrested in Baghdad in May 2003 and remains in custody, where she's reportedly suffering from breast cancer.

One of Glantz's friends, a documentary filmmaker, described how she ran a youth conference he was permitted to attend:

"Under her guidance," James [Longley] explained, "the conference was turned into a series of Stalinist rallies for the Great Leader. Attendance was mandatory. In the great hall of the convention palace children's choirs competed with dancing Japanese peace activists while odes to Saddam were screamed out in fake spontaneous outbursts from the crowd. A large number of doves were released in the hall and flew madly around the edges of the room, searching frantically for a way out. I sympathized with them entirely."

Today's Washington Post includes a commentary from a childhood friend of Amash, who grew up in D.C., asking for her release.

Her friend reveals an unusual aspect of Amash's background -- she was in the inner circle of the man who ordered her father's death:

The family soon returned to Iraq, and we lost all contact with them. Maj. Ammash's career prospered; he rose to be defense minister. In 1981, however, Saddam Hussein convened a meeting of party leaders and tearfully read out the names of those of his old comrades who were to be led from the hall and shot on the spot. Salih Madhi Ammash was among them.

Journalism · 2005/07/27 · 1 COMMENT · Link

To get around Bayesian filters, some spammers have resorted to ASCII art, spelling out words with characters and really small text.

I've been online long enough to remember when people used to create ASCII babes you had to print to view. Back in the late '80s, whenever I retrieved a printout from the University of North Texas computer science lab, there were always a bunch of suggestive or even explicit ASCII trollops waiting to be picked up.

It wasn't easy for the object of your affection to be vulnerable to smudging.

North Texas · 2005/07/24 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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