Happy Pi Day!

Pi Day.

March 14th.

You could even get more specific, and say, 
3/14 16:33 (converting 3.1415926... to m/dd hh:mm)

Regardless of how you want to split it up, today is the honorific holiday dedicated to one of the mathematical constants that has gained a near mystical reputation. 

I still remember the first time reading Carl Sagan's Contact (not the movie, youhave to read the book), and wondering if, in fact, God would leave his "signature" in the physics which governs our existence.

Don't forget to have some pie for dessert!

The passing of a Legend

Ernest Gary Gygax passed away today, March 3rd, 2008.

The original creator of Dungeons and Dragons, he set the framework for the genre of role playing games.

More info at efluxmedia.com

Thank you Gary, you have touched our lives and your many, many fans will miss you.

The geekiest concert of 2008

I just spent an awesome evening at one of the most enjoyable, and best performed, symphony concerts I have been to in a long time.

Distant Worlds: The Music of Final Fantasy.

Composer: Nabuo Uematsu
Conductor: Arnie Roth

Performances by: 
The Chicago Pops Symphony,
The Chicago Festival Choir

My good friends Jim and Paul from St. Louis drove up for the concert, along with their sister Catherine and friend Brandy. We also met up with Brandon, who plays in our World of Warcraft guild. Half the fun was just hanging out with that crew, of course. I wish I could see them more often!

The performance was superb. I attended the "Dear Friends" concert that was last at Rosemont, and as a Final Fantasy fan I thoroughly enjoyed the music, but as a music critic recognized a few flaws in the performance level. But this show was nearly flawless.

Here's a few highlights from the set list:

Liberi Fatali - One of my fav pieces, the choir was spot-on and was a great opener to get the crowd emotionally into the performance.

Vamo' alla Flamenco - the classical guitar soloist was amazing. I love this scene from FF9, the music gives you a sense of the adventurous but playful spirit in this game, and the performers nailed this one.

Main Theme - the guitar soloist also played for the main theme, was a great rendition of the main FF theme.

Opening Bombing Mission - This one took me by surprise as a most exellently performed piece, better than what was recorded on the Distant Worlds CD.

Fisherman's Horizon - Memoro de la Stono - These two pieces have never been played live by orchestra before, and were a nice addition to the show.

Opera "Maria and Draco" - Absolutely the highlight of the entire concert, the very popular opera piece from FFIII (FFVI jap) got the standing ovation it deserved. The Opera voice trio played perfectly to the crowd, adding some amusing but subtle expressions to their performance that prompted an overwhelmingly positive response from the crowd. As One reviewer put it, "Nothing less than a standing ovation is deserved. Bravo."

Terra's Theme - Another piece not often played live, a superb performance and a favorite of many.

One Winged Angel - The conductor introduced the last song as "And for our final piece... well, you don't need me to tell you..." A cult-classic favorite of Sephiroth fans, and excellently performed by symphony and choir.

I was very lucky to have a VIP ticket, which allowed a brief yet exciting meeting with the composer and conductor after the show (after 2 hours in line) but it was entirely worth the wait to get the awesome pics. It was a blast cracking jokes and talking to the friendly Rosemont staff while waiting in line. To Travis, the ultimate bouncer, who could break a man while blind-folded and with one arm tied behind your back: you rock.

I truly had a great weekend at that show, with friends as geeky about Final Fantasy as I am. What a blast!

If you ever have a chance to listen to the recorded Distant Worlds CD (performed by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Arnie Roth), you have to turn it up LOUD, close your eyes, and pretend you are sitting in the front section of an auditorium.

XML, ex-em-schmell!

I pulled up my rss feed in IE today, and got an error:
"Use of default namespace declaration attribute in DTD not supported."

Apparently, IE doesn't support the very valid code that specifies the document type in an xml feed.

So, while w3.org recommends specifying a doctype in every webpage, I had to pull my doctype specification in my RSS/XML feeds.

It should be working fine now. If not, drop me a line. I'll keep an eye on it over the next few days.

This is probably OK. The doctype I was using was XHTML, which XML should fit, but for example I can't guarantee that the code posted by my blog users will be strictly XHTML-only, which would break the doctype.

Lesson learned: even if you are writing valid, standardized, even recommended code, check first to make sure Microsoft decided to support it in IE. And periodically re-check your code to make sure Microsoft didn't decide to suddenly STOP supporting valid coding practices after the fact.

Resume material

So thismorning Freyja IM's me:

[Freyja]: heard on NPR that online video games such as WOW can help with future business careers
[Freyja]: something about learning how to work together, lead a team...pretty funny
[Freyja]: ;)
[Me]: hehe, nice
[Me]: So I can put it on a resume?

[Freyja]: lol!!

[Me]: "I make weekly runs with my guild through the underbog with my level 60+ draenei shaman! great leadership skills! can off-tank in a pinch!"

Use "greylisting" to help eliminate spam

This article outlines another potential tool to stop spam.

http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/whitepaper.html

This method claims to help your existing spam filter strategies to identify and eliminate 95% of spam from the most obvious spam filters.

The way this works is a combination of blacklisting and whitelisting, hence the name, greylisting.

When a message comes in to an email server with greylisting, the message is analyzed for the following three pieces of information:
- incoming IP address
- advertised sender email address
- intended destination email address

These three pieces of information uniquely identifies the message to the greylisting method. If this identifier has not been seen before, the email server simply sends an RFC 821 message back to the sending server that basically states, "sorry, the message wasn't received correctly, please retry sending after a short wait."

Since email is not designed to be 100% reliable, email servers are supposed to accept this sort of reply and shortly attempt to resend an email message when the "sorry" reply is received.

So if the sending email server sends the message again, with the same identifier, the greylisting email server will add the identifier to it's internal whitelist. If the message is never resent, the greylisting server can assume the sender was a "fire-and-ignore" spam source.

This strategy is great for eliminating spam in a number of ways.
- identified servers that don't respond can be blacklisted
- identified servers that DO respond can be processed by existing DNS-blacklist services

There is an added cost of the traffic necessary on the greylisting receiver's server, as well as the extra traffic to confirm messages to and from valid senders, but this does add to the processing cost for spammers as well. Hopefully the added cost to the spammer, if they bother to respond to greylisting at all, makes spamming unprofitable to them.

In the meantime, this is yet another way to try to identify and eliminate spam email (from the most oblivious spam sources) before it reaches your inbox.

D&D, the pathway to hell!

Someone was quoting a few lines from this great Dead Alewives skit, and I had to go find the video again.

I loved the intro and 8-bit goodness of this version. Here's the link for your enjoyment.

via YouTube, 8-bit D&D video