I've decided to run a dead pool this year. You can sign up at http://sarinity.com/deadpool/ by guessing 10 famous persons who you think might die during the next calendar year. The younger they are the more points you get, and the highest point total wins. Remember, it's not any more morbid than fantasy football is athletic.

I wanted a way to quickly append text to Moin Moin wikis. I wrote a Perl script to do just that. It relies on the email address suffix features available in most modern MTAs to get the page name.

Once the procmail recipe included in the accompanying procmail.rc file is in place for the user 'wiki' email sent to wiki-TextHere@somewhere.com will be appended to the TextHere wiki page.

I cheaped out on the formatting and just put the text inside literal/pre blocksblocks. The subject line and from header are retained and displayed.

My all time favorite board game is called Diplomacy. It's got the tactical simplicity of chess mixed with the social aspects of poker. It's been popular in quite a few white houses -- reportedly the Kennedys played ferociously.

Unfortunately, it can be a difficult game to learn. Not because the rules are complex -- they're not, but only because there aren't a lot of good presentations of the rules. Oral descriptions quickly devolve into edge cases and exceptions, the printed rules look like they were written by lawyers, and just looking at the game board gives one the totally wrong impression that Diplomacy is like Risk or the hateful Axis and Allies.

It's not much of a creation, but I recently made a T-shirt that says, "I BUY LIQUOR FOR MINORS" in nice white on black lettering. I've worn it out a few times including to the Minnesota State Fair, mostly just to gauge responses to the sentiment. It seems the average parent furrows their brow, the average teenager looks intrigued, and the average bartender will still sell me two beers. I didn't actually have a single youth ask me to buy liquor for them, and all the people who actually told me they liked the shirt were in their 20s or 30s. Completely not the responses I expected.

As mentioned previously I'm a tool of the media machine and am thus now playing poker. I don't like online play so I host local events here at the house. We're getting more and more people and I wanted something nicer on which to play than folding card tables. Louis Duhon, a friend, and I drew up some plans, bought a lot of materials, moved the cars out of his garage, and spent four days working on a "one day project".

I don't like color in my command line windows. Colorization in ls's directory listings drives me bonkers; it's the first thing I turn off on a new system. I have, however, relented and added a little bit of conditional color to save me from an all too frequent error.

I have access to a lot of UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Some are machines I run, some are my employer's, and some belong to customers. Most all of them I've never physically seen but instead access through remote ssh, secure shell, connections. My normal command line prompt on these machines looks like:

A few weeks back I got a Roomba Robotic Vacuum (http://www.irobot.com/consumer/product_detail.cfm?prodid=9) as a wonderful gift. Shipped with it was the optional remote control. The Roomba is fully automatic, but it's programmed to pick up dirt not to chase the cat -- you need the remote for that.

However, long time readers (you poor bastards) will remember that I try to maintain a strictly one remote coffee table (https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00022.html). That meant the Roomba had to go onto the Phillips Pronto TSU-2000 Universal Remote. I thought for sure I'd find a CCF file for it, but it looks like only the people with newer remotes are getting the Roomba. Fortunately someone in the RemoteCentral forms helped out with instructions on how to back-convert the remote configuration and after a few wasted hours I can now steer the vacuum from the couch. Apparently I became a yuppie when I wasn't looking.

The tool scp, UNIX for secure copy, is a wrapper around ssh, secure shell. It lets you move files from one machine to another through an encrypted connection with a command line syntax similar to that of the standard cp, local copy, command. I use it 100 times a day.

The command line syntax for scp is at its most basic:

scp <source> <destination>

Either the source, destination, or both can be on a remote computer. To denote that one just prefixes the file name with "username@machinename:". So this command:

I've got a policy here on the unblog where I only do entries about things I've created. When I wanted to hype the Diplomacy at Sea V/Dip Con event coming up March 2005 I had to find something to do with it first, so I volunteered to set up their website.

Whenever I need to set up a quick site I head over to the Open Source Web Design site (http://oswd.org/) and pick from their vast array of great designs. This time I went with one called Evolver. It has a clean look and clean code. Rialto did a great job of synthesis and design on this one.

I added a RSS feed to the Minneapolis Security Camera Project site. Subscribers to it will see any new cameras as soon as they're posted. If you're not yet using an RSS aggregator let me know and I'll chisel the list on a stone tablet and mail it to you whenever it's updated.

The feed is at http://mpls-watched.org/map/rss.xml