As I’ve mentioned previously here, I’m a huge LOST fan. In my travels on the internets today, I came across an article posted in the New York Times by Damon Lindelof, co-creator of LOST.

Most of you don’t also know that I, a 29 year old male, am also a big Harry Potter nut. Damon submitted an editorial to the NYT which I’m going to re-print here due to their stupid registration requirement. I will however, fold like a wet noodle and pull it down if I receive a DMCA notice

By DAMON LINDELOF
Published: July 8, 2007

HARRY POTTER must die.

We Americans like closure. No — we need closure.

The Brits have no such hang-ups. They demonstrate almost limitless patience (which explains cricket) when it comes to the rather touchy issue of “resolution.” We Yanks, however, do not want froufrou endings. We want things definitively tied up.

And by “things” I mean lots of people dead. And by “definitively tied up” I mean in excruciating ways that ideally involve lots of gratuitous explosions.

We really like gratuitous explosions. And we like it when characters have pithy catchphrases as the embers rain down on them in slow motion. Like, “You should quit smoking, McCorkle.”

Over here at the TV show “Lost,” we’ve announced our grand finale 48 short episodes from now. Shockingly, the pundits have already announced that they pre-hate it. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that our ending will be either too wacky to make sense or too anticlimactic to have justified the six seasons preceding it.

I am thrilled by this assessment as there is almost certainly nowhere to go but up.

J. K. Rowling finds herself with the opposite problem. Her story and writing have so captivated the world that expectations are through the roof. In fact, it shouldn’t matter how Ms. Rowling executes her final dive, but some people (O.K., I mean me) will judge all that preceded it based on how little splash there is when she hits the water.

Fair? No. But what do you expect from people who like unnecessary explosions and pithy catchphrases?

I read an article recently saying that 80 percent of American poll respondents said they thought Harry wouldn’t survive the final book. As is the case in many polls, there’s probably a degree of wish-fulfillment here. In other words, we want the little bugger to die.

O.K., it wasn’t an article. It was an inset in Us Weekly. This makes my point no less valid.

So why do we want Harry to go to the great Quidditch match in the sky?

The poor kid’s parents were brutally murdered, he spent his childhood in a closet, and every year one of his friends dies. Yet we do not offer him our sympathy. We offer him our bloodlust.

Do we feel sorry for Harry? No. We want him to take a dirt nap.

And that’s because we want to be surprised.

Because if there’s one thing we like more than explosions, it’s surprises. And even though 8 out of 10 of us want him to die, we know in our hearts that he won’t.

And that’s because Ms. Rowling wouldn’t dare.

She can’t whack Harry because there are rules that must be followed when it comes to how one ends a grand mythology. Good triumphs over evil. Hope overcomes despair. Paper covers rock. Harry wins. Voldemort loses. The Ewoks sing.

And this is precisely why Harry has to die.

Because it will be tragic. And emotional. And surprising. But most of all … it will be fair.

When Ms. Rowling first took us by the hand and led us down the path of her story (a brilliant one, I’ve neglected to mention), she boldly titled her first chapter “The Boy Who Lived.”

We come to learn later that Harry has survived an assassination attempt … both his parents had sacrificed their lives to spare his. The most rewarding ending would be one in which he performs a similar act of self-sacrifice. I would just about giggle with glee were I to get to the last chapter (I never peek ahead) and find it titled “The Boy Who Died.”

So yes. Sorry, kiddies. I hope Harry buys the farm. Even though I know he won’t.

However…

Maybe if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named tossed one final spell at Harry? Like a mega-Avada Kedavra curse that nobody had ever survived? And if Harry, like, did some kinda Matrix-slow-motion move and used his wand to deflect? And then his opponent like totally exploded everywhere into a thousand pieces of reptilian flesh? If, like, Harry blew on the end of his wand and said, “I told you not to curse, Voldemort.”

That’d be fine, too.

Link to original article here

In what’s sure to be called some sort of god-given miracle by creationists, scientists have discovered that a group of butterflies in Samoa who were on the verge of extinction mutated to preserve their species.

In 2001, male Hypolimnas bolina butterflies on the Samoan islands of Savaii and Upolu comprised a mere 1 percent of the total population. The butterflies known commonly as Blue Moon or Great Eggfly were under attack by the Wolbachia bacteria, a parasite passed down through the female that kills off male butterflies before they hatch.

Last year, however the balance of male to female butterflies was equalizing, thanks to a mutation that suppressed the bacteria. This is one of the fastest observed mutations/evolutions ever recorded in a species. Most evolutions take place over a hundred years or more, but when extinction is on the line, apparently things can happen far more rapidly.

Researchers aren’t sure if the mutation happened by chance, or if it was introduced by migratory Southeast Asian butterflies in which the mutation existed.

What is clear, though is the repopulation of male butterflies illustrates rapid natural selection. Score 1 for science.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about iPhones selling for thousands of dollars on eBay. And a couple days later I posted a video about a lady who had dreams of making $100,000 by selling all the iPhones she could buy there. Apparently today iPhones are selling for very little profit, and sometimes even a loss. I’m betting that lady is breathing a huge sigh of releif right now that all she did was lose $800.
Cory Spring of Newsvine compiled an 8 hour snapshot of iPhones sold on eBay. Out of the 993 phones sold, the average profit was only $54.53, and a couple phones even sold for more than $200 in loss, including this one which took a $285.93 hit.

Even though the iPhone sold 500,000 units on it’s debut weekend, Apple has been able to keep up with the demand. The laws of supply and demand state that people won’t buy stuff from you at a higher price if it’s readily available to them at a lower price elsewhere. My hat goes off to Apple for actually keeping up with the demand on a new product.

Google Earth has been known for turning up some strange and funny images in the past, but this one might just be a bit unnerving and could be downright scary.

Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), found this image of a new nuclear submarine at the Xiaopingdao base near Dalian. The image was photographed by the commercial Quickbird satellite in late 2006. The image is apparently of the new Type 094 Jin-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine.

The Jin-class is about 35 feet longer than the Xia-class SSBN, “primarily due to an extended mid-section of approximately 115 feet (35 meters) that houses the missile launch tubes and part of the reactor compartment,” said the report by the FAS.

The extended section is to make room for the larger Julang-2 ballistic missile and may also be due to the size of the reactor.

Microsoft’s gaming chief Robbie Bach in a conference with financial analysts said that every single one of the XBox 360s produced in the last 19 months suffer from a fatal design flaw that could cause the gaming console to fail. “In the past couple of months we started to see significant increases in repair requests and call requests and significant attention from people,” he said.

The good news is, to cover their customers Microsoft has expanded the XBox 360’s warranty from 1 year to 3 years, however the extended warrantly is only limited to hardware failures that cause 3 flashing lights on the front of the machine. Users that wind up being covered under the warranty will get free shipping and replacement (with a refurbished machine) of their XBox 360.

Microsoft did not disclose the exact nature of the problems, but stated that thenecessary design changes were complete and that units currently in stock will be upgraded. They did estimate that in the end repairs will cost the company between $1.05 and $1.15 billion dollars due to the abnormally high return rates for existing consoles, and projected return rates under the new 3 year warranty.

Personally I’m a bit torn, I like to see Microsoft actually coming out and admitting shortcomings, and doing something about it. Granted it took them far longer than it should have, and possibly issues like this could have been resolved sooner and far better, but at least something is being done. Normally we get Microsoft’s typical there’s-nothing-really-wrong attitude.

Apparently complaining until you’re blue in the face really does help sometimes.

Well, the server move is complete, at least for this site. I still have yet to move Serverwiki to the new machine, but both this site (if you’re reading this) and War Ensemble are live on the new box.

I’m getting the hang of Debian, and I quite like it so far. What’s really impressed me though is the latest version of Webmin and Virtualmin. For the longest time it seemed as if both projects were really stagnant, but the last couple releases have made server management quite a bit easier, and are even comparable to control panels like cPanel, Ensim, DirectAdmin and Plesk.  It of course took a bit more work and some configuring as Open Source things usually do, but over-all the experience was quite enjoyable.

Over the course of the next week I’ll be working on something that those of you who’ve owned a computer for more than 10 years may enjoy. Yeah, that’s right, I’m setting up a BBS. A bit of nostalgia, and something to waste some time on , eh?  So far I’ve got Synchronet up and running. I just need to spend the time getting DosEMU working, and certain enjoyable door games running properly.  Then I’ll hook myself back up to FidoNet, perhaps find a few newsgroups to import, and we’re good! It’ll even have a web-based system that’ I’ll also spend time working on and making pretty.

Finally, I added some more ads to the site here.  Due to the fact that I’m now dishing out a hefty chunk of change for a server, I’m going to at least attempt to make back a little bit of it. We’ll see how it goes.

So, I spent a whole bunch of money at Softlayer on a new server, then spent 30+ hours setting it up, moving websites, coding, and tinkering with my BBS.  What did you do for your 4th of July?

I finally took the plunge. After leeching off of so many of my client’s webservers for so long (This site is hosted by LivingWithStyle as are my other websites), I’ve finally decided to get a dedicated server of my own. Also, after using Gentoo, Slackware, and various RedHat clones for so long I decided to install Debian on the box so I can get some experience with it. I’ll be moving this site, along with Serverwiki and War Ensemble to the new server in the next few days, so the 3 or 4 of you who are regular readers may experience some downtime.

The nice thing about finally having a server of my own is the fact that I may, finally after so long, be able to put up my old telnet BBS back up. It’ll be nice to not have to worry about users sucking up all my bandwidth here at home for once.

Finally, I plan to toss a couple game servers up there, The box has a quad core Xeon (3220), 2GB RAM, and a 250GB SATA II drive so It should be more than enough for what I need.

Thanks to the fine folks at SoftLayer who gave me a good deal on the box. It’s more than I wanted to pay, but I couldn’t pass up the offer I got on it

So, you got your iPhone, and after some playtime the irreplaceable battery decides that it needs to be replaced.

Wait, what?

Yes, that’s right, the iPhone battery can really kick the bucket. This generally happens to most electronics when the warranty runs out.

Good news everyone! Apple announced that you really can replace these irreplaceable batteries for the low-low price of $80! (and $6.99 shipping). They’ve also announced that while you’re waiting for your iBrick to be repaired, you can rent an iPhone for the flat rate of $29.99!

Unfortunately you have to own an iPhone to rent one. I mean, if Apple allowed you to rent an iPhone for a week, I’m quite sure people would realize that they’re not really worth the $500-$600 people are paying for them.

Regardless, I still want one.

MacRumors Story

Most Wordpress users who logged into their control panel saw the link to Holy Plugins Batman! today. The gist of the story is that there’s an ungodly amount of indexed wordpress plugin directories in Google. If you read the comments section on the blog however, many people are confused as to why this is actually a bad thing.

There’s really one simple reason. Security. Very few plugins are designed to be called directly, and generally will give you an error if they are. These errors usually give what’s called a “full directory disclosure”. In other words, they’ll tell you the entire path to the actual file you’re looking at. To the lay person this may not be useful, but to a hacker who knows what he’s doing it’s the first step in violating your website. For instance, with

The next security risk could be even more severe. Often times updates are released to wordpress as well as plugins that address certain security holes. If you have Indexing enabled, it just makes it easier for someone to figure out what versions you’re running.

I am by no means a security expert. I’m sure there’s 100 other ways to take advantage of the information you’re given just by having indexes open. There are plenty of plugins that allow you to “upload” files. If there was a security hole in one, a hacker could upload any number of scripts that would not only damage your website, but could be used to send out spam, create DDoS botnet, or any other of a thousand nefarious things.

Now, I’m not placing the blame here on bloggers shoulders. A lot of CMS and forum applications will include an index.html page in every directory, regardless if it’s used or not. Wordpress could solve this simply by including an index.php or html that redirects to the homepage.

Anyway, here’s how to fix it if you haven’t read the article:
Edit your .htaccess in your root web directory. Insert the following:

Options All -Indexes

Alternatively, create an index.html or index.php file and place it in each subdirectory (and each subdirectory of subdirectories, etc.). The file can be blank, or it can be something nifty like:

No, you can not access this directory! Not yours!

So, Next time, when someone as smart as Mark Ghosh suggests that something is a bad idea, it probably is.

Game Politics reports that an official at the Flordia Bar (The legal organization, not the place that sells alcoholic beverages) proposed that controversial Miami lawyer Jack Thompson recieve a 91 day suspension of his law license as well as submit for psychological evaluation.

This news, while unable to be confirmed by the Florida bar, was CC’d to Game Politics by Jack Thompson himself. The letter is as follows:

Mediation failed today because there was no mediation whatsoever… [Florida Bar official] Ms. Tuma not only did not move off her [suspension] demand one iota, not one smidgeon, but she instead upped her demand by requiring that Thompson undergo a battery of psychological tests as part of the fabulous deal The Bar offered him…

Ms. Tuma [sic] last demand going into the mediation was a 91-day suspension, and she opened and ended with that and a shrink’s couch. This is bad faith…

This “mediation” was a charade… Finally, [Thompson] requests a status conference herein as soon as possible so that we can… shut this Star Chamber down. Thompson is not the one who needs a psych evaluation.

Thompson is already facing a hearing on due to his misconduct in a case presided over by Judge Ronald Friedman. It addresses Thompson’s conduct during the anti-game attorney’s unsuccessful bid to have Rockstar’s Bully declared a public nuisance. The complaint claims that Thompson made numerous statements about Judge Thompson that were false, or were made with “a reckless disregard as to (their) truth.”

Personally I think it’s about time that someone does something about Jack. No one is going to take the “anti-video game” movement seriously as long as this nutjob is in the forefront. Seriously, Jack. Everyone knows that it’s not video games that are making our kids violent. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Ever since DOOM was released in 1992, violent crime rates have dropped. My statistics show that violent video games are a release for teenage angst, and help them to deal with their anger. They can take it out on the virtual world instead of the real world. I know video games certainly help me relieve stress.