Last week I finally broke down and bought a Nintendo GameCube. I’ve wanted to play Metroid Prime for a long time, and finally broke and bought the system. At the same time, I got a WaveBird wireless controlled, the 251 Memory card (it’s the larger one), Metroid Prime, and Super Mario Brothers Smash Brothers Melee. Best Buy had a deal going where if you bought two GC games, you got $25 off.

The last few nights, even though work has been busy and basketball season is well underway, I’ve tried to squeeze in as much Metroid game play as possible. SMBSBM hadn’t even been cracked out of the plastic until this weekend, when Tedd came into down to celebrate Josh’s birthday. As soon as we started playing it, I realized two controllers is not near enough. The game would be much better with all four players active … next time the boys are in town, I’ll have to fix that.

The system is pretty smooth, and the games really nice looking. Metroid is large, and it’s different to play the game in 3D. I like the scanning mode, where you can get information in the game about your opponents/enemies, your environment, and specialties in the levels/areas. The game is very dexteral — to do some things, you need to press 3-4 buttons and move a directional toggle. That took a few days to get the hang of, but the game is classic Metroid — a fun, challenging mix of shoot-em-up bang-bang with map, item, and puzzle solving. I like it. And I’m still learning Smash Brothers Melee, but that’s a lot of fun too.

While Tony and Tedd and Eric were playing Smash Brothers, I was looking around Amazon.com for GameCube releated shopping lists, I saw the new Zelda game “The Wind Waker” is available for pre-order, shipping in late March. They have a promotion running right now on Amazon where if you order Wind Waker, they’ll throw in Ocarina of Time/Master Edition (for GameCube - they ported it, and added a ‘hard mode’) for free ($70 value) when it’s released next month. I had an Amazon.com gift certificate to spend, so $33 later I’m getting both games.

I hope Zelda comes with a gold disc.

I broke my RSS feed with the Cutting Back entry. Actually, PC&M broke it. Or the & in their name did. Apparently, as CK noted a while ago, a lone & isn’t valid code in XML. If you change it to & it works.

I spent the last 30 minutes, and helping Andrew most of the afternoon trace down a really strange perl CGI.pm file upload problem. The solution? He was looking at /usr/bin/perl instead of /local/bin/perl. DCS-non-standard-installation-paths strikes again!! *sigh*

I went to the store the other day, and I was in there for only about 5 minutes. When I came out there was a motorcycle cop writing a parking ticket. So I went up to him and said, “Come on, buddy, how about giving a guy a break?” He ignored me and continued writing the ticket. So I called him a pencil-necked Nazi. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for worn tires! So I called him a piece of horse s**t. He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first. Then he started writing a third ticket! This went on for about 20 minutes… the more I abused him, the more tickets he wrote. I didn’t care. My car was parked around the corner. I try to have a little fun each day. It’s important.

I’m going to go into geek mode for this entry. Sorry.

I spent some time this afternoon investigating why our web authentication wasn’t working as it should. We’ve started protecting websites with mod_bluestem, a way to take us out of the password business while still getting a good, reliable, secure authentication source. The problem is bluestem is only authentication, not authorization. For a while, we were updating lots of .htaccess files with Require user netid each time a user needed access to a website.

Using the mod_perl Perl authentication modules (Apache::AuthzPasswd) we could expand authorization out to the underlying unix groups. For example, the user would authenticate via bluestem, and then the system would check to see if they’re in the CSIL group (class) so they can view lecture files, etc. This has been in place for about a year, and works nicely.

But it failed poorly. If the user was NOT in the proper group for access to that directory, they wouldn’t get a forbidden error. Instead, they would get prompted by the browser for a login and password. This concerns me because a) it would just reprompt over and over without notifying the user they weren’t allowed access, and b) the user might type their bluestem netid/password into the browser authentication box. That password is U of I’s most-secure-important password … we shouldn’t even give the user opportunities to potentially send it over insecure links.

The fault? The AuthzPasswd notes the failure (user not in the group,) and responds with a AUTH_REQUIRED statement. It makes sense, I guess — if that login failed, try again with a different one. Most of the authentication modules have something called authoritativeness. This, when enabled, says if the login fails, don’t fall back on another authentication/authorization source — just bong the user. (In fact, we needed to turn mod_bluestem’s authoritative settings off for it to pass the user data down to AuthzPasswd.) AuthzPasswd should have included a configuration setting, like AuthzPasswdAuthoritative — but did not.

So I created AuthzPasswdDCS which responds to authorization denied requests with FORBIDDEN instead of AUTH_REQUIRED and the problem is solved.

It feels good to figure this out, since it’s been bugging me since we set it up a year ago.

/me struts

I noticed coming back from lunch today that O&M (recently renamed to PC&M after their merge with PD&C) was cutting the hedges around Grainger. It’s like 15 degrees outside, and it’s supposed to snow tonight, and they’re trimming bushes. Worse off, they’re doing it with hand clippers. Not an electric tool, or even a big set of shears, but those small, one branch at a time, clippers. Two people (because O&M almost always works in pairs — even when I’ve seen one of the working and the other taking a nap,) wasting their time cutting one branch at a time.

In January.

We had emails about cutbacks in O&M and the impact on services. ie: lawns further from the quad would not be as well groomed, some cleaning would be delayed/longer intervals between cleanings, some other services delayed/impacted. (That’s the important thing for us — when we need carpenters or electricians to come by and do work for us.) So is it possible they’re just now getting to the work they should have been doing in October/November?

And why the dinky hand tools? Too cheap for the power tools?

Walking between my parking lot and DCL, I make a loop around the new Siebel Center every day. It’s neat because I get to watch the building come up. Today, on my walk in, I noticed they have glass panes starting to fill in the lattice above the main SW entrance. Cool. If I had my camera here, I would snap a picture or two and put it up.

[ Edit: I asked our webmaster to snap some pictures and send them to me. She did, and here you go. See the small windows? ]

Since most of work was gone through December, we decided to hold off on our Secret Santa stuff until January. Now it’s almost 1am, I’m already a day late on gifts, and I’m stumped on ideas. Well, I think I have tomorrow’s planned, but then there’s the stress of getting it and delivering it safely. The hard part is disciplining myself to get up and do it, and I already have a feeling I am going to want to sleep in.

Attention person who I am shopping for: Sorry I suck at this.

In other news, I showed up at work today and found a light houses calendar on my chair. Someone in the group knows I dig lighthouses, and that’s odd because I don’t remember mentioning it to anyone at work. But whoever’s buying for me — right on. I think you had inside help. *glares at roommates*

In case you’re also up at 1am, wondering what else to get me and browsing my site, I wouldn’t mind a set of darts to throw on Thursday. Metal tipped, and some cool flights.

You live in California when…

1. You make over $250,000 and you still can’t afford to buy a house.
2. The high school quarterback calls a time-out to answer his cell phone.
3. The fastest part of your commute is going down your driveway.
4. You know how to eat an artichoke.
5. You drive your rented Mercedes to your neighborhood block party.
6. When someone asks you how far something is, you tell them how long it will take to get there rather than how many miles away it is.

You live in New York City when…

1. You say “the city” and expect everyone to know you mean Manhattan.
2. You have never been to the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.
3. You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Columbus Circle to Battery Park, but can’t find Wisconsin on a map.
4. You think Central Park is “nature,”
5. You believe that being able to swear at people in their own language makes you multi-lingual.
6. You’ve worn out a car horn.
7. You think eye contact is an act of aggression.

You live in upstate Minnesota when…

1. You only have four spices: salt, pepper, ketchup, and Tabasco.
2. Halloween costumes fit over parkas.
3. You have more than one recipe for moose.
4. Sexy lingerie is anything flannel with less than eight buttons.
5. The four seasons are: winter, still winter, almost winter, and construction.
6. The mosquito is the state bird.

You live in the Deep South when…

1. You can rent a movie and buy bait in the same store.
2. “ya’ll” is singular and “all ya’ll” is plural.
3. After five years you still hear, “You ain’t from ’round here, are ya?”
4. “He needed killin’ ” is a valid defense.
5. Everyone has 2 first names: Billy Bob, Jimmy Bob, Mary Sue, Betty Jean, etc.
6. Grits is served with everything three times a day.

You live in Colorado when…

1. You carry your $3,000 mountain bike atop your $500 car.
2. You tell your husband to pick up Granola on his way home and he stops at the day care center.
3. A pass does not involve a football or dating.
4. The top of your head is bald, but you still have a pony tail.
5. Any tree not pine is a foreign transplant. Come to think of it, sums up diversity there too.

You live in the Midwest when…

1. You’ve never met any celebrities, but the mayor knows your name.
2. Your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor.
3. You have had to switch from “heat” to “A/C” on the same day.
4. You end sentences with a preposition: “Where’s my coat at?”
5. When asked how your trip was to any exotic place, you say, “It was different!”

You live in Florida when…

1. You eat dinner at 3:15 in the afternoon.
2. All purchases include a coupon of some kind - even houses and cars.
3. Everyone can recommend an excellent dermatologist.
4. Road construction never ends anywhere in the state.
5. Cars in front of you are often driven by headless people.

I did some work cleaning up my bedroom and hanging wall decorations today. I got the cape hanging in the living room, and a few of the framed MI pictures up. I finally started buying poster frames, so I put the Guinness poster Leah gave me last year up in the bedroom.

I added support so that any links out of my site are tracked now (with the same goto script I’ve been using for years.) This nice thing is, this is automatically done without me having to type it in (I can disable that per entry.) The idea is originally from CK, as he does that on his site — but uses a DB and not (just) the apache logs to track outbound links.

Yes, I added that link above to test to see if it’s working.