For those of you who don't like computer stuff, this entry will be pretty boring. Sorry.

It looks like MSN's upcoming update isn't about security, or at least is about security only peripherally. A MS spokesperson has commented that running an IM service is expensive, and expects third parties to pay for continued access. One question I have -- they're providing free access to MSN Messager users, a free product. How does that work exactly? Does Microsoft get money from some strange source for MSN Messager, but only when Microsoft's free client is used? Or is this just about control? Anyhow, in sum, to those of you with whom I chat using my MSN Messager account (there's not many of you), I'm not going to be able to keep using it soon. Now's a good time for you to install AIM/ICQ.

Last night, at Coffee Tree, after much pain and frustration, I figured out how to send/get cookies on mod_perl. When I get done with this, I'm going to probably write some better documentation for the mod_perl folks, so other people won't need to do what I did. It's simply not cool to need to run nm on a XS library to find out what methods a Apache::RequestRec object takes. I'm lucky I come to Perl from a C background -- the poor Perl developers who don't probably need to spend a week on mailing lists to figure out what they want. The practical effects of this is that my BLOG will very shortly have the ability for visitors to set their preferred colors, and I'm a step closer to having comments working. For those of you immediately curious, here's how you do it.. Setting a cookie: use CGI::Cookie; my $cookie = new CGI::Cookie( -name => 'test', -value => 'yes', -expires => "+3M"); # Seconds $apache_r->headers_out->set("set-Cookie" => $cookie);

Getting cookies: my $cookies = CGI::Cookie->fetch($apache_r); foreach my $cook (keys %$cookies) {

       print "Name: " . $$cookies{$cook}->name() . "
";
       print "Value: " . $$cookies{$cook}->value() . "

";

} Of course, $apache_r is whatever you called the apache request object that you got in the handler() method you declared that was required. Needless to say, this low-level interface is meant to be wrapped.

On friday, I ordered a new wireless card for my laptop. Redhat 9.0 (and 9.1) have wireless support builtin, so no more of the old painful process involved getting that working. I just wish that the builtin wireless in my laptop had worked. I guess I might get a base station for home eventually, although for right now, having places to plug in in my bedroom and compter room is enough.

I'm finding myself using my desktops a lot less often nowadays. This laptop, unlike my last, is actually good enough to be a desktop replacement, and now that dachte (my virtual server that's probably hundreds of miles away, to the extent that it exists) handles all my mail, well, I only tend to use forrester and holly when I don't want to wait for morose to boot or when I want to play CivCTP. Morose is actually faster than either of them. Although it gives me no pleasure to say it, I'm beginning to think about backing up the data on forrester, shutting it down, and putting it in the closet. Holly's still useful for games, and torgo is still good for being a NFS server... Hmm. I'll think some more about it.

It seems like the spam is picking up again. This time, my filters are ready for it though... Of the latest swarm that're all pretty much the same, my filters caught 80 messages over the last 12-hour span, and only missed 2. This doesn't count the small number of diverse spams, of course.

Finally, unrelated to computers, some meditations on "Cogito ergo sum". As I've written before, it isn't at all convincing to me -- a system could think without being real -- thought is a sequence of states. and such sequences can be examined in the abstract. Oops, sorry, had to go run an errand while writing this, and forgot where I was going. Anyhow, here's something i just found on google on the topic. It's interesting, but if you don't find it so, at least enjoy the weird painting.

Finally, some more pics from the Hypatia event are up. Not sure what I'm going to do today.