It's pretty long, but feel free to skip straight to about 2:30 for the good stuff.

Bonus: I found this video while looking for that one. It's called "Girl With Unusual Talent":

Why, men being hit in the groin for screwing up their tongue-twisters on a Japanese game show, of course

But apparently this girl does the same thing blindfolded, and with real arrows:

You may also want to check out painfulcrotch.com, as they specialize in this sort of thing (yeah, and I thought _my_ blog was silly...)

The solution to this quandary: a motorcycle powered by 24 chainsaw engines.

If you actually want to see it moving you'll have to go for:

Can anyone translate the German at the end?

Its name is Princess Chunk, and it weighs 44 pounds.

You can see the clouds of ash coming out of the volcano in the small break between the other clouds. Bonus: there's actually two volcanoes erupting in Alaska at the moment, but I don't have a cool aerial photo of the other one.

On a scale of zero to awesome, I rate this one as awesome.

The explosions in the background are a bonus.

Or, you can just buy an $80,000 Porsche and plate it with eighteen kilos of gold. Like this Russian guy:

This is somewhat lacking in taste.

Man's penis struck by lightning

Now I'm just a little skeptical about the precise details of the story. Rather than being struck by lightning in the penis, it's far more likely that he was struck by lightning in the head. However, since he was wearing rubber and leather (being a biker and all) and urinating at the time, the penis plus urine stream formed the lowest-resistance path from his head to the ground. There was, however, no permanent damage to his penis, which may mean that a lot of the current was conducted by his wet motorcycling clothes. Anyway, he was pretty lucky. I'm not sure how he compares to the struck-by-lightning-then-won-the-lotto person below.

Bonus: A wikipedia article about the conjugate gradient method for the iterative solution of linear systems of equations. It's not very awe-inspiring, but maybe it'll come in handy for you one of these days.

This is one of those issues that has very little covereage on the web so hopefully this will help someone.

The majority of our workstations are Mac Pro desktops and we have quite a large number of them.  Due to this we tend to see problems that most people would not see with just a few workstations.  One of the most irritating problems these days seems to be exclusive to the newer Intel x86 Mac Pro workstations running TIger.  We have not run Leopard long enough to determine if it also has this issue.

The root volume will start to show file system corruption over a short period of time, but HFS and/or OS X will not reporting it to the user or in any of the log files and continue to make the corruption worse.  If the corruption is caught early on a simple Single User mode fsck will fix the issue.  If it not caught for some time then Disk Warrior is needed to repair the volume.  And if the issue is left alone too long even Disk Warrior will not help and a reformat of that partition (and re-install, being the root partition) is necessary.

These system are all on UPS Battery backup power so they do not shutdown uncleanly.  The systems are centrally managed and patched and updated regularly.  Only the Intel x86 versions show these symptoms.  PowerPC versions of our Mac Pros do not show any of this corruption.  The only reboots on these systems happen for System Updates so it is possible that System Update is rebooting the system before the file system is fully synced after the updates.

In order to detect this problem we routinely run a Verify with Disk Utility.  This can be done on the commandline with:

diskutil verifyVolume /

This command can be integrated into a cronjob which will email the administrator if a problem is detected.

Hopefully Leopard on x86 Mac Pro does not start showing these same symptoms, but time will tell.  Another post will follow if Leopard does show the same symptoms.

It contains Naga chillies, which are rated at 800,000 or so Scoville units -- for comparison a halapeno is rated at 8,000 and a Birdseye chilli (the little red ones) is rated at 100,000.

None of these chillies, however, can compare to the truly hot sauces of the world, which are listed on this page. The hottest I've had is the Death Sauce (rated at 1.1 million) and a single drop is enough to make your mouth burn for about half an hour. The so-called "sauces" go up as far as 16 million scoville units, at which point it's actually just a single crystal of pure capsician. Bear in mind, also, that pepper spray is rated at 2 million scoville units.

Anyway, since the article doesn't give a Scoville rating for the curry it's not possible to tell exactly how hot it is. However, given how easy it would be to make an insanely hot curry if you put your mind to it, I'm prepared to believe that it's probably pretty goddamn hot.

Now, if only there were a video of somebody eating it while jumping over something on a motorcycle...

The best I've found so far:

Did I strap red
nude, red rump, also slap murdered
underparts? I did!

Admittedly it doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's a palindromic haiku and it sounds vaguely dirty, so what more do you want?

Now Derek can kiss
Anais A. Nin, as I, an
ass (I, knackered) won.

This one takes a bit of parsing, but it seems to actually tell an interesting story of jealousy. Anais A. Nin, incidentally, was a Cuban-French author famous for her erotica. I had to look that one up.

A man, a prof, no
Rats live on no evil star
On for Panama!

Not so much thought put into this one, just stapled together from existing palindromes.

I feel compelled to think of one for myself. Here's the best I've come up with:

Solo gig on tub:

Flesh saw I! Mimi, wash self,

But no gigolos.

I'm gonna have to do penance after this one.

This guy rescued a drowning 375 lb bear.

That's pretty impressive. The fact that the bear was tranquilized at the time only makes it marginally less hardcore. Given the awesomeness of the photo, I'll allow it.

I recently set up a LAMP environment on my laptop, intending to do local development for one of our sites.

I did the usual setup of Apache VHosts and all.. only to find that the site had decided to stopped working. This was pretty strange since I'd just checked out a fresh copy from SVN, and the working copy on the dev server was.. well.. working.

Delving through the logs, I saw Apache trying to do something seemingly strange. It was trying to access files as if they were directories, looking into each of them for .htaccess files.

Like this:

[Sat Jun 28 17:14:36 2008] [crit] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: /home/ruiwen/Projects/app/webroot/favicon.ico/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

Last I checked, favicon.ico wasn't a directory.

Some Googling turned up this page, which hinted that this behaviour stemmed from the fact the HFS+ might have been presenting the files as directories.

In some cases, this error can also be caused by special file-systems that return unexpected errors on attempted directory access. For example, some file-systems allow files to be treated as directories in certain cases. If httpd believes that a file is actually a directory, it will try to look inside for an .htaccess file. If it gets a permission denied error in return, it will deny access. This type of situation is usually a faulty file-system behavior and cannot be fixed within Apache. In this case your only choice is to turn off .htaccess processing as in the first solution above.

Turning off .htaccess processing wasn't exactly ideal since the site needed the functionality.

However, setting more relaxed permissions on the site directory as recommended in the second solution on the page seemed to work.

Currently my permissions for the files are

-rwxrwxr-x 1 ruiwen www-data 3322 2008-06-28 16:39 index.php

This seems to work fine for now. Not sure why the relaxed permissions helped the problem though, and will be glad for any insight into this.

OK, that may be overselling it. In fact the cow doesn't wander into frame until the very end, just after the tornado passes, but it sure doesn't look happy about the whole thing.

So, how about a tapir penis movie?

Remember kids, it was only a few years ago that this kind of thing was almost impossible to find. Now, thanks to youtube, it's easy. Isn't technology wonderful?

There's a video review here. Sadly, it was done by somebody who runs a Knight Rider blog. I thought I was wasting my time by chronicling awesomeness right here for you, my lovely readers, but at least I'm not the guy with the Knight Rider blog.

There's only one thing that can make up for this, and that's another motorcycle jump.

Here's Robbie Knievel jumping "over" the Grand Canyon. Actually he's just jumping over a small side canyon, miniscule on the scale of the whole Grand Canyon (which, I might add, is very large) but it looks cool anyway.

Bonus: he crashes at the end.

The PK course teaches us about the work of the police in different areas and also teaches us different lawtopics which we can apply in daily life.

By learning about the work of the police force, it makes me want to join the police force in the future!

Law topics help us to use it in daily life to prevent others and ourselves from making those mistakes.

The HFS Course teaches us to be vigilant and the skills of identifying a terrorist or a suspected bomb. I have learnt how to deal with terrorist attacks and to also prepare for disasters.

These 2 courses have taught me many useful skills we can use in emergencies and also in life.

Posted by CPL Deshawn Toh.

The world record for flagpole-sitting was set in 1924 by some guy called Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly, who sat on top of a flagpole for 49 days. At the time, this was considered impressive, mostly because people in the 1920s were pretty bored thanks to Prohibition.

The record was actually set in Atlantic City, not Chicago. In fact, Chicago turns out not to have much to do with flagpole-sitting at all. Whatever, here's a picture of the guy.

It's all in Vietnamese so I can't tell what they're saying, but I'm guessing it's something along the lines of "Hey, look at my hair, it's really fucking long".

In other news, all my recent search traffic has been penis-based. Penis.