Standard Mischief

I used to bring in my old belt-buckle to the Tandy leather store in Rockville, Maryland, where the clerk would gladly pick a dyed blank off the rack and customize it for me. He’d spend about two minutes and cut the blank to length, rivet on my old buckle, and punch any needed holes. For under twenty I’d walk out with a rugged plain black or brown belt that lasted about two or three times as long as any name brand belt from the department store.

“Rugged enough” means being able to rack the slide on my pistol one-handed by snagging the rear sight on the edge of the belt. [1]

Sadly, the Rockville store (which seemed always slow) closed. I’ve found a few okay belts local, but never as good as what I used to get there.

I’ve just looked, and Tandy is on-line. Even better is that their 80% finished (no FFL needed) leather belt blanks, (with a slot already cut and snaps installed and ready), are on sale now at 50% off. Even better than that is coupon code 9bret-cr-10 , which will give you $10 off (or almost free standard shipping). I’ve got a few on order as of today. Hopefully the quality will be up to their past high standards.

I hope everyone has something to cut the belt to length. If you don’t have the proper punch for the belt holes, in the past I’ve used a pin punch, using a 2×4 to back the belt up and punching from the finished side first, and then again from the back. Leather dye is also available at Tandy, but I’m going to try the shoe “touch-up” dye I have left over from another project. I got that at Wal*mart.

Normally I’[d wait for the belts to arrive to tell you for sure that they as good as I expect, but the 50% sale says it ends this Tuesday (30june2009).

[1] Only practice this drill with the pistol unloaded. Remember the four rules.

I was actually surprised today.  Scanning my favourite gunbloggers I’ve only found one that remembered that today is a special day. One year ago today the Supreme infallible superheroes finally released the Heller decision. The score was 7-0 on the recognition that the Second Amendment is an individual right, but an amazing 4 out of 9 lawyers in black robes thought that a total prohibition against people keeping functional firearms in their own private homes was constitutional.

That’s like saying that in theory, everyone has the right to free speech, but in the very special place that is the District of Columbia, laws that keep ordinary people from even clearing their throat still pass constitutional scrutiny.

I expected amnesia from the mainstream media, but not this. At the very least y’all ought to join me in burning some powder this weekend. After all, the first anniversary is suppose to be the paper one. Let’s punch some holes in some targets!

Just a little something I whipped up one night before the long drive home. Yea, after losing my 5 minute commute, I’m starting to get into pre-recorded talk shows. I’d have started this post a little differently, but 2003 called and they wanted their podcasting howto post back…

Anyway, here it is:

curl -LO $(curl "http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gunnuts.rss"|egrep -o "http://[^ ]*mp3″|uniq|head -1)

The first curl command uses the L option to allow the request to be redirected with a 3XX response code. Blogtalkradio.com does this.

The O option just assigns a filename based on the original rss feed URL (sans path). This works well unless you get someone clueless who names their files like this:


http://www.blogtalkradio.com/MarketTicker/2009/05/18/TBA.mp3
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/MarketTicker/2009/05/11/TBA.mp3


I’m not going to explain the regex and remainder except to say that the -1 can be changed to a higher number to get more shows unless everything goes foobar because Karl named his files with exactly the same name.

Oh, and the files just end up in your current working directory, and you’ll have to get out of it if you want to cleanly unmount your flash card, but you knew that already.

You’ll need to get curl though. N00buntu users could use something like

$ sudo apt-get install curl

but if they really are n00bs they’ll probably use the GUI tool to get the job done, and then never touch the command line and get their podcasts using Amarok or something. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just that you are not the audience I’m writing for. The audience I am writing for will find their way here using the “search engine friendly” URL.

Oh and since I’m new to this podcasting stuff, I have to ask. With the proliferation of mp3 players like the iPod shuffle that don’t have a display, shouldn’t we be starting our broadcasts with “gun nuts #54 for May 27th” instead of “Goooood evening ladies and gentlemen…“? That would allow a user to shuffle through a bunch of shows to easily find the one he has not heard yet. Much nicer if the shows don’t all sound the same until a half a minute in.

Thanks for making my commute a bit more interesting, everyone.

At work, I double-checked that the special magic bit in the MySQL database is set at “0″ before shipping some prototypes of our embedded Linux thingy out the door. It’s the bit that tells us whether or not the customer agreed to our “click-wrap”. That’s the legal agreement that covers our ass. I follow instructions and then let ‘em go out the door.

Not good enough. The next day while the devices are in transit, the boss wants the triple-damn-dog check. Since it’s a single digit’s worth of prototypes, I go ahead. I log into the first future customer’s web GUI thingy with a username and password and get the legal notice. Everything’s fine. I get ready to go onto to the next one. Instead of declining the click-wrap, I take what I think should be a shortcut, and just hit Shift-<reload> to reload the URL in Firefox. Bam! I’m in. Whoops, that’s not suppose to happen!

Closer examination exposes some very lazy programming. Someone’s going to be busy fixing this just before the long weekend. There are also some related browser cookie problems that could be exploited with just the standard mischief. Good thing they have me around to break everything.

On top of that, I’m now getting paid to brush up on MySQL injection attacks.

.. but I wonder how many Front Sight certificates Ignatius Piazza is going to have to give away this time around in exchange for using your blog as a link farm to bury the latest round of bad press deep, deep, deep in the results from your favorite search engine.

No, no first-hand knowledge, in advance or otherwise. It’s just that my bullshit meter pegs at full scale when it gets a whiff of a “Clear Catholic”.

(not a “Cleared Christian” or a “Cleared Catholic”, BTW)