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14 Apr 2003 (updated 14 Apr 2003 at 05:32 UTC) »
postnuke has officially become too bloated. I often get "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 184320 bytes) in <path to script> on line <some random number>" randomly. Could a single postnuke page request really require 8+ Mb? More than the default maximum? This is with a mostly empty implementation on a mostly idle server for which i have postnuke installed for the purpose of developing a god-forsaken postnuke module, but development has been hindered lately as half the time i get error messages related to using too much resources. And this is on a 1 Ghz, 1 Gb ram server.
cm: Thanks for the advice, I just hope it doesn't happen again.
On another note, today was a very odd day for me, I fainted during class. Not in class, but when i went to get some water after feeling nauseous. I've never fainted under those circumstances and don't know exactly what happened. I remember getting up to get some water, exiting the classroom and waking up on the floor in the hallway with a tremendous headache.
In the hour that followed, I had a distinct blindspot in the upper right portion of my visual field. It was fun to be able to look at a persons face and see only their right portion of their face, but still see the entire head, it was just as if that portion of their face didn't exist and i mentally filled in with skin tones, but quickly got to be annoying when I realized it practically killed my ability to read and comprehend what I was reading as I could only see one word at a time and only when the word was not directly in front of me. I had to go back and forth often just to understand a sentence, which basically meant I wasn't going to be able to get any work done until it cleared up.
Afterwards, I had and still have pains in my knee, hip and right side of my face, which, I assume are my points of contact when I hit the glazed brick floor, it also hurts in the right side of my jaw when I bite down.
I later felt very tired and had to go to sleep. I stayed in bed for a few hours damn near unable to move when I finally awoke.
Among the first things in my mind after waking up on the floor was the amazement that no one had seen me, or if they had, they ignored me. The very least I'd expected was a "hey are you OK?" type gesture. I would think that someone passed out on the floor in the middle of a hallway in a major university would be pretty much out of the usual.
I almost went to see a doctor or someone to make sure I was OK but i'm pretty much back to normal now. I don't think i experienced any memory loss, except for the actual event of losing consciousness, and if I did experience memory loss, how would I know? I just hope this was a one-time thing. It's as if my brain segfaulted and forced a reboot.
But while i'm on the topic of memory, i've found the subject matter more and more interesting lately. There are some who theorize that the process of remembering is such that all things perceived are stored and remembering is the process of selective retrieval, that everything you experience is and will remain in your brain for as long as you live. The stronger the memory, the stronger the link between the neurons involved and the more easily the memory is retrieved. The other theory is reversed, that everything that is stored can be retrieved and that storage is selective, i.e. that somewhere along the lines a memory is either sent to long-term permanent storage for easy retreival, or it remains in short-term memory until it is replaced with another memory. The truth probably lies somewhere in between the two theories.
Memory is an interesting thing. I've read stories about people who can literally remember everything they experience. You can point to a specific day and time and they would be able to recite exactly what they did at that moment. If they were told to read a list of words, they could reproduce the list of words perfectly on the spot, regardless of how much time had passed. For such people, it's a huge burden, for example, they would have difficulty reading poetry because the words would bring back meaningless memories. Remembering everything makes it difficult to put weight on that which should be remembered and that which shouldn't, important events are hidden among useless memories.
While an overactive memory could be a burden, I sometimes, actually quite often wish my memory were better. If i've learned anything in the past few years, its that my memory cannot be trusted. I cannot recall facts when asked to do so on paper or remember test dates. I sometimes can't even talk because I can't think of the words I need to say. I will linger on a particular word i've said a thousand times before, frustrated with having forgotten the word, i can't think until the word comes to mind or I look it up in a dictionary. The same goes for names, I don't even know why I bother asking peoples names when I know i'm going to forget it 10 seconds later. I've gone days, weeks, months even, talking and socializing with people, who for the most part are strangers to me, I can recognize them and know how to talk to them and what to say, but their name escapes me.
It's especially frustrating for me. I have a tremendous ability to learn. I can learn anything if I devote enough time and energy towards learning whatever it is that needs to be learned but for the life of me, I cannot recall the information when tested. I can master anything in practace but cannot perform in a test-like setting and as such, my grades have suffered horribly. It's frustrating to struggle through school in subjects I'm fully confident and competent in.
Anyways, i've probably said too much. So, i'll leave it at that. I'd like to get in the habit of doing some serious writing, but don't want to maintain a blog and I hate to post such ramblings here as they are so off-topic and interest few, if any people. Perhaps, i can start a new section on my website with a series of writings on various topics. There are a number of things that interest me that I feel should be expressed in written form from Artificial Intelligence, to Foreign Policy to Science Fiction.
In other news, i started messing around with OPML via OmniOutliner. I wrote a PHP class to extract the info with expat and return a structure with the relevant info. So far, everything works as planned, when I put together a helper app, i'll make an official release somewhere.
I write all my class notes in OmniOutliner and it would be nice to be able to share them in a neat usable form without requiring others to have OmniOutliner. There are other applications, like maintaining heirarchal databases, Documentation and dare I say, for use with blogs.
OmniOutliner is a really cool app and is tremendously more useful than, say, a word processor when taking notes in class.
4 Apr 2003 (updated 4 Apr 2003 at 03:10 UTC) »
Examples:
I'm sure there are others, those really stick out at the moment, but it's important to note that the term "blog" is more popular than "michael jackson" and "britney spears" combined according to google.
It just makes me wonder if in the future, weblogs will start calling themselves webblogs. Since, if weblog was originally a combination of web and log, under the new "blogcabulary", would a blog in the traditional sense have to be a combination of web and blog.
[note], i hearby take credit for coining the term blogcabulary, as of April 3 2003, Google returns zero results and hereby define it as "the vocabulary of blogging or blogs".
I would like to further re-iterate the fact that PostNuke is a horrible abomination upon the world of PHP.Malcom XpnUserGetAll() works in pnadmin.php in a module i'm (reluctantly) writing without a problem. I cannot, however, use pnUserGetAll anywhere else. So, I RTFM. Apparently one should nhot use pnUserGetAll because it is to be deprecated in favor of pnModAPIFunc('users','user','getall');
After some clever grepping and database querying, no code anywhere exists to support pnModAPIFunc('users','user','getall'). Furthermore, pnUserGetAll() isn't formally used in postnuke, not even Member_list uses it.
The next step was to walk through the code to see why it worked in pnadmin.php and nowhere else but that yielded nothing. The conclusion was that it *should* be working, but it wasn't.
The solution was to copy/paste the code from pnUserGetAll and run it locally, and it worked. So, i copy/pasted with some modifications to a local .api.php file as part of the module and called it saneGetAllUsers() and it all works. Go figure.
So, instead of getting some much needed work done this evening, I spent 3 hours debugging postnuke and "fixing" it to do what it's supposed to. Having to explain why this particular project is late is not going to be fun.
In one of my classes we were talking about defense mechanisms and were asked to give two examples of defense mechanisms. For some reason, i felt the need to explain some serisouly significant irrational acts i nterms of ego defense mechanisms. The first was a shameless "attack" on our foreign policy, which now seems to be shoot now, take names later. The second was on racism. I used Malcom X as an example and in the process made myself sound as soem crazed racists lunatic. Malcom X said that the white man hates the black man because of the guilt they feel towards the black man. Taken out of context, that can be taken the wrong way. Basically, I should have rephrased it by saying that racism can be a Reaction Formation defense mechanism, or possibly even projection or displacement. A person who feels guilty will avoid those negative feelings by passing the blame on to the victim through hatred. For example, a neonazi hating a Jew because of the guilt he feels for the persecution of Jews thoughout history. Or how a homophobe may be homophobic because of the shame they feel for secretly being homosexual.Either way, the way I quoted Malcom X made me, a young white male, look like a crazed hippocritical radical living in the past.
Speaking of which, I was able to watch the first half of the Malcom X movie on BET. I was dissappointed. There was alot of key imnportant events from the autobiography that were skipped over or ignored in the movie which would have helped to put things into better context. It completely ignored his childhood and his relationship with his half-white mother. The first half of his life was literally summed up in five minutes, and briefly touches on his life of crime which led to his incarceration which was so important in making him who he became. There was no mention of Roxbury or harlem, or how he was a drug dealer or his role in prostitution, nor did it talk about his friendships and popularity in harlem before he was put into jail. His life as a street thug is probably what made him so successful as a speaker as a muslim in Harlem. He could relate and talk to the people where others couldn't becuase he talked the talk and walked the walk. It also left out alot of the narrative criticism from the first part of his life which is so important in understand his background and why he felt the way he did.
I didn't see the last half of the movie, but I doubt it could make up for everything that was left out of the first part of his life. What I saw of it was over dramatized and didn't accurately portray was was said/written in the autobiography.
It was just downright frustrating to say the least. I would have to recommend that anyone/everyone should read the book instead. As ironic as it may sound he's probably one of the historical figures I admire most and it's a shame that he, for the most part, is absent from the textbooks and that the most people will know of him will be from that movie and what people say, which is rarely accurate.
Saddam, being the dictator that he is, starves his people and has become rich in the process, supposedly through selling oil on the black market by his sons. An exiled Saddam would presumably take his money, family and "regime" with him to a friendly nation. Saddam, obviously a power hungry, evil man, without a country to run and millions (billions?) of dollars at his disposal could presumably become a seriously legitimate international terrorist threat.
So, I find it ironic that while the US is fighting a war on terrorism, largely focused on another rich arab exile, is demanding a course of action that could result in *another* serious terrorist threat as a solution to the Iraq situation. The "Iraq situation" admittedly part of our war on terrorism through pre-emptive strike.
While I have mixed feelings as to the justifications of the Iraq situation, one thing is clear, Saddam's exile is not the solution. If we are going to go through with this, Saddam must come out of this either dead or as a tried war criminal.
One thing I am sure about is that alot more people could be helped (both domestically and internationally) with the amount of money that is being devoted to killing others than by waging war half-way around the world.
I also wish people would stop with this oil business. There are better, cheaper ways of getting oil out of Iraq. Not to mention the fact that we get a significant, if not most of our oil from outside the middle east, like Venezuela, which with it's current political situation and oil crisis has been largely ignored by the US.
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