Grimm's weblog

PHP 5.1.0 strtotime()

11.29.05 - 11:44pm

music playing: Tosca - Busenfreund

The PHP 5.1.0 Upgrade Guide, makes no mention of changes to strtotime(), but don't let that fool you.

5 hours of debugging later. I've tracked down a bug on Tribe that was caused by the way freakin strtotime() no longer correctly handled the way I was passing a date to it. But seriously it's my fault, since burried in the changelogs is this helpful entry:

Rewrote strtotime() with support for timezones and many new formats. Implements feature requests #21399, #26694, #28088, #29150, #29585 and #29595. (Derick)

How could I have foolishly not interpreted that to mean "hey your code is about to screw the date up by 5 days cause it no longer likes your date format!".... !$!@%^%

Book: Illustrated Fairy Tales

11.26.05 - 07:01pm

mood: meh

music playing: Bill Laswell - Zurvan Akarana

I was reading a review of the Die-Gestalten book Andersen: The Illustrated Fairy Tales Of Hans Christian, and while not a big fan of Andersen, I did like seeing the pictures so reading the review was time well spent. If that was the whole of my post this would have been quite pointless, so don't worry I have more to say.

While reading the afore mentioned review, I found out that this was in fact the second Illustrated Fairy Tales book that Die-Gestalten had published. Their first book being one based on my namesakes The Brothers Grimm! It is called Grimm: The Illustrated Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, and this gets even cooler, one of the many artists that worked on the book was Miho Sadogawa. Miho (aka Erotic Dragon), whoms book Life Of Buddha I still need to acquire, drew the cover of the Grimm book.

I'll leave you with nice pictures and links:

Grimm: The Illustrated Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Curse You Headers!

11.25.05 - 10:58pm

mood: meh

music playing: BT - Orbitus Teranium

I've spent the last 5 hours reading RFC specs and white papers on HTTP headers, and I think I'm about to pop a blood vesel this is so boring.

Watching a documentary on the history of sand would have been more exciting than reading this stuff.

In case anyone is wondering, my code is no closer to working.

[adendum]: ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! The problem was with the response headers not the request headers!!! Meaning that the HARD code was working like 4 hours ago!!! And I screwed up on the SIMPLE part!!!!! I'm going to go smash my head against a wall for a while.

Confessions of a Photocopier Repairman

11.24.05 - 06:52pm

mood: meh

This might be the funniest thing I've ever read on c|net:

Christmas period... hike in service calls due to incidents such as the classic backside copying prank. Such a stunt, a mainstay of the office party, often results in cracked glass on the copier, with 32 percent of Canon technicians claiming to have been called out to fix glass plates during the Christmas period after attempts to copy body parts went wrong..."

Silly kids, let me impart some advice to avoid broken glass in the ass (heh that rhymed).
Don't put your weight on the copier, you want to hold on to the edges of the copier and have all your weight on your hands, with the ass area just barely touching the glass. This will ensure an injury free copying experience.
[disclaimer] How do I know so much about the topic? ...No comment : P

Rhoda's Birthday

11.22.05 - 11:41pm

mood: meh

Today was Rhoda's Birthday, so it was decided to take her out to dinner. Let me preface this story by saying that Monika was involved in this dinner, and that there was a dinner involved in this dinner, so as to be expected with that combination, disaster ensued.

While looking over the menu, I turned my body to my right, in order to chat with someone. While chatting I started smelling a funky odor, so I turned back to my left to see what the smell was. It turns out that the menu I was holding had burst into flames, due to the fact that while I chatted, I had held the menu over a candle. The funky smell was the laminated cover which had melted, and when I noticed the menu pages were burning. I frantically threw the menu down and tried putting the fire out, somehow during all this, I managed to make the wax from the candle I had put out, splatter wax everywhere.

After that a nice dinner was had.

But they took the candles away from my section of the table after that incident : (

Code Snippet: BASH, Test Web Servers

11.20.05 - 11:22pm

mood: meh

for ip in `cat server_ip_list.txt`;do echo $ip; time echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n" | netcat $ip 80 | head;done

Everything's Dandy

11.17.05 - 08:43pm

mood: Numb

music playing: Lamb - Till The Clouds Clear

"And then I take some sedatives, and everything's dandy. Everything's dandy

My Ride Got Messed

11.14.05 - 06:29pm

mood: Distressed

music playing: Lamb - Bonfire

On my way to work today, I stopped by the mall for a second... literally less than 10min. I came back out, and the front end of my car, right above the license plate was ALL scratched up. It looks like someone backed into it and then rocked their car back and forth repeateadly or something equally insane... I dunno, it's fuckin badly scratched is all I know. They aren't deep scratches so they'll be able to buff them out at the car fixing place, or so I've been told by people in the know. But I'm still pissed that someone did that to my car, and didn't even leave a note! People suck.

On to other news. If that was the worst thing to have happend ~~today~~... this week, then I'd be happy.
...stay tuned for worse as the week progresses.

Have you ever wondered why those days exist,
When life just seems to be the conspiracy against you?

I burn like a good bonfire
In whatever I do

Movie: Stay

11.13.05 - 01:23am

mood: meh

Going into this movie I had no idea what to expect. I'd not seen any commercials for it, nor heard any reviews, or any opinion from anyone, one way or another about the movies quality. Which I guess is to be expected from a small release film.

I really can't go into any sort of detail about the movie without ruining it. So I'll just say that it was very well made. One of the things I really liked was that there were NO cuts in any scenes for this movie. That's not to say that it is one continuously shot, uncut movie, like that Hitchcock film. No this movie wasn't like that, it just had no cuts , every scene sort of melted into the next, with some impressive transitional effects done by Kevin Tod Haug. Whom, if you're any sort of self respecting movie effects nerd, you'll know did the effects on the visually impressive, The Cell, and Fight Club. So what KTG did was transition each scene into the next, in such a way that everything is sort of melting together in a very ethereal way. From what transpires in the movie, the visuals start making more and more sense, until the point where you find out exactly what's going on, and by then everything has just gone mental... visually wise.

The acting was top notch, I had no idea Ryan Gosling didn't suck. I just remembered that kid from Breaker High, and had no idea he actually had any talent. Ewan McGregor was of course great, as was Naomi Watts.

The brief premise is that this kid played by Gosling, is really messed up, and plans to kill himself, on Saturday at midnight. McGregor is a psychiatrist, that learns of the suicide, and spends the next three days leading up to Saturday of that week, trying to stop the suicide from happening. It may not sound that impressive, as a plot, but trust me, it gets VERY interesting very fast. Like I said talking about it in any more detail, without ruining the film is not possible, so you'll have to take my word for it. I will say that it really made me sad, and, I loved it, it was a really great film. After you watch it, call me up, and we'll discuss it in detail!

What if one person's nightmare, became another persons reality?

Floria Sigismondi - Immune, Book Release Party

11.11.05 - 11:58pm

mood: Artsy

Floria Sigismondi's follow up to her 1998 photography book Redemption is being released by German art book powerhouse Die-Gestalten. The new book is titled Immune, and is suppose to be released soon, that is pretty much all the information I had about this project up until earlier today.

For no particular reason, earlier today I happen to be downtown, near Queen St and decided to head over to Pages Bookstore. At the entrance of the store, I was greeted by a big poster promoting the release of Floria's new book, along with information about a book release event being held at the MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art). The book release gala was happening 2 hours from the time I saw the poster!! If not for the random act of going to the bookstore and seeing the poster I would have completely missed out on this event!! So we quickly booked it to the MOCCA (heh, booked it... we were at Pages book store... I said we booked it... okay shut up, that was a great pun and you all know it).
Well, long story short, $117 dollars later, we were at the MOCCA's new location on Queen W, talking to Floria, and getting my new book signed by her, and she even started hitting on me and asked me my name. Others will scoff and say she was just asking because she wrote "to pat" on the book, I say she was hitting on me, and I'm very willing to be her photography groupie.

Looking through the book, so far I'm very impressed, there a lot of great new photos in here. Two of my favourite are a set of the Virgin Marry with a giant bomb, and this abstracty green sparkle face girl, both of which are pictured in this post, so look at the photos and skip my crappy descriptions.

Floria Sigismondi - Immune

[addendum]:
Now Magazine's cover story this week is an interview with Floria.

Stupid Parking Cops

11.11.05 - 11:50pm

mood: Enraged

music playing: N.W.A. - Fuck The Police

Before the concert yesterday, a bunch of us got together for dinner. Food was nice blah blah.

Dinner didn't take that long, which was good because I had only put an hour worth of time into the meter. Thanks to my good timing, by the time we finished eating and got back to the car, we still had 14 minutes of parking left on the meter. Well not so much meter as that paper print out they give you at the parking machine. Anyways the paper said I had until 18:01 to stay parked there. But when I got to the car, at 17:47 mind you, I had a god damn ticket on my windshield! The fine was for "Park At Expired Meter#", WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?

I had 14 minutes left and they gave me a ticket for being at an expired meter. It was such a bullshit ticket that I could not just let it go and pay the $30 fine. No sir, I could not let that go, my vindictiveness demanded that I fight this thing.

So earlier today I took the ticket, along with my receipt from the parking machine, and went downtown during regular business hours to fight this thing.

It took me a while to find this stupid Parking Tag Operations office, and when I got there, parking cost me $10, which I Was going to demand back from them after winning my fight against that bullshit ticket.
Fuming about the cost of parking, I walk into the lobby, and I ask the guy at the front desk where Tag Operations is. He informs me that it's on the third floor, make a left and then it's the fourth door, number 5 or some other such crap. Then he ends his sentence with, "but they are closed today because they get Remembrance Day as a holiday", ARGH!!!! Why the hell did he give me all those directions just to tell me they were closed? Are they just trying to piss people off as much as humanly possible? Stupid bureaucrats!!

Since they were closed, and I was unable to fight the ticket yesterday, it means that I'm unable to fight the ticket at all now. Because, you need to fight it, in person, within 7 days or else the fee goes up from the "Voluntary" to the higher "Set Fine" amount. And I'm not going to miss work to go fight it, so they are going to get away with this crap, and it really pisses me off, damn cops trying to keep the people down with their oppressive tactics. Plus they got my $10 for parking, so it's now $40 that these jerks are getting from me!!

Concert: Nine Inch Nails - Live With Teeth, Toronto

11.11.05 - 01:24am

mood: meh

music playing: Nine Inch Nails - The Wretched

Nine Inch Nails - Live With Teeth, Toronto

Nine Inch Nails put on a fantastic show tonight. Lots of old material mixed in with the new stuff, all very well received by the audience. Some of those that attended The Fragile concert, said that during that show they only played material off that album. If that happend this time around, I would have been really pissed off. Luckily, I was worried for nothing.

~~The third (or fourth?)~~ [edit] sixth song into it, they played March of the Pigs, which is one of my favourites so I was quite happy, right from that they went into Something I Can Never Have, yet another favourite of mine !! But that song is a bit too slow for some. When it came on, Monika turns to me and says "blah so far its been too much slow stuff". Sure the first few songs were, but then it was March of the Pigs!! So I replied to her comment with "are you crazy I love that song", referring to Pigs, she misunderstood me and thought I meant "I love this song". So she starts making fun and says "is it your favourite, because you touch yourself while listening this song". So I wittily retort with, "Ohh yes, I blast the song and beat it mercilessly while yelling at the damn Pigs!", so then we're both laughing and carrying on with the joke for far longer than it really deserved, up to the point where I ended it off with the line of "I whack it so hard while yelling at those Pigs that I usually pass out, and wake up with no socks on" (I'm not even entirely certain what that meant... I mean... socks? WTF?).

Back to the topic of the actual music. I was really happy with the show, they had a good mix of old and new stuff, and the old stuff... well you know how great it is. At the middle point of the show, these see-through curtains with the consistency of gauze came down, so you could sort of see through it while they projected videos on top of them. The videos told a progressive story beginning with footage of micro-organisms, diseases, animals killing animals, and eventually leading up to people in war-torn countries, bombs falling, kids with limbs missing etc, all while playing Eraser, Right Where it Belongs and Beside You In Time. The best touch was that during all this terrible footage of suffering, they interspliced footage of George W Bush, dancing at formal parties, executives laughing in board rooms, rich people flaunting their money, and other clips depicting greed, and corruption. Did I mention those George W clips were poping up between footage of kids with limbs missing? I did? Well I'll mention it again because they were just superb pieces of video to match those songs to. While showing this footage all you could see through the curtain was a spotlight on Trent singing and playing the guitar, while the footage was overimposed on him... it looked very cool.

By the time that they played the With Teeth single The Hand That Feeds, it was past eleven, and I turned to Monika and said "they better play Head Like A Hole for the encore. But there was no need for an encore since from The Hand, they cut straight into Head Like A Hole, and the whole place went nuts for the last song of the night. Truly great show, if given the opportunity I highly recommend catching it during the rest of the leg of the tour.

The concert setlist:

Pinion
Love Is Not Enough
You Know What You Are?
Terrible Lie
The Line Begins To Blur
March Of The Pigs
Something I Can Never Have
The Frail
The Wretched
Closer
Burn
Gave Up
Eraser
Right Where It Belongs
Beside You In Time
The Collector
Wish
Only
Even Deeper
Dead Souls
Suck
Hurt
The Hand That Feeds
Head Like A Hole

Lets close this post with the Something I Can Never Have lyrics, since their depressing poignancy never seems to be far off:

I still recall the taste of your tears
Echoing your voice just like the ringing in my ears
My favorite dreams of you still wash ashore
Scraping through my head 'till I don't want to sleep anymore

Come on tell me
Make this all go away
You make this all go away
I'm down to just one thing
And I'm starting to scare myself
Make this all go away
You make this all go way
I just want something
I just want something I can never have

You always were the one to show me how
Back then I couldn't do the things that I can do now
This is slowly taking me apart
Grey would be the color if I had a heart

I just want something I can never have

In this place it seems like such a shame
Though it all looks different now, I know it's still the same
Everywhere I look you're all I see
Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be

Come on tell me
Make this all go away
You make this all go away
I'm down to just one thing
And I'm starting to scare myself
Make this all go away
You make this all go way

I just want something
I just want something I can never have
I just want something I can never have

Think I know what you meant
That night on my bed
Still picking at this scab
I wish you were dead
You sweet and Perry Ellis
Just stains on my sheets

Till The Clouds Clear

11.05.05 - 06:38am

mood: meh

music playing: Lamb - Till The Clouds Clear

So here you are, demons screaming in your head
You try to shut them out but they just get louder instead
And nothing you do can seem to break through
This darkness smothering you
When it takes hold, your heart turns cold
The very soul seeps out of you

What you gonna do
When the storm, the storm takes over you?
Can you hold this thing?
Till the clouds clear...

Well duhh!

11.05.05 - 01:15am

mood: meh

I've been saying that for years : P
The ladies love the PHP.

STILL HYPERVENTILATING, I FUCKED UP SO BAD

11.03.05 - 06:33am

mood: meh

If this post doesn't get updated, assume things are okay.
If it does get an update, it'll be bad, and I will be far from okay.

We'll know tomorrow when I get to work...

:O

Making Of: Sleeping Girl

11.02.05 - 03:35am

mood: meh

music playing: Hooverphonic - Battersea

What follows is a brief, behind the scenes look, at the making of Sleeping Girl.

First a quick background is made to give me a sense of the space.
The black pieces were drawn first, they are the basic shape of the couch I'm going to draw. Once the silhouettes were made, the white lines were layed down to set the vanishing point for the purpose of proper perspective. With the guides down the grey parts were made by extending the silhouettes along the perspective, to give the whole thing depth.
With the shape of the couch done, I then proceeded to texture it with a velvet like texture.
We now have, a finished couch

Some shading is added to give the couch some life. Reflections, shadows, and radiosity are added to make the couch inhabit its surroundings.
With the main set pieces done, it was time to being the focus of this piece, the Girl. This screen capture is from quite a bit into the drawing.

The hair drove me crazy, this is the best I got it to look. Shading was added to take away the cartoon look, and give her some depth.
Shading was then carried onto her pants and bum area. Which if I do say so came out quite nicely (the ass that is ; )
The set and the girl are now complete, so it's time to start sprucing up this sterile looking scene.
Playing around with some ideas, I took a fancy to writing on the wall. I'll have to come up with proper text to write, but the look works so I carried on with it.
Still playing around with ideas, another thing that I hit upon were swirly lines strewn abouts.
I then started playing with diffident swirlies, settled on the text for the background, and played with different croppings.
At this point I was up to at least 200 layers. Lots of textures were overlayed, more swirlies, and the colour palette was tweaked to give the image more warmth. The layout still needs work, as the balance is way out of wack and far too heavy on the left side
A final cropping, some colour adjustments, softening of some objects, and it's complete. I give you Sleeping Girl