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Can anyone offer some insight on this error:

Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI.pm line 103. at lib/MT.pm line 867
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Got an error: Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI.pm line 103. at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 906

I've been getting it since I upgraded to MT version 3.32; Googling doesn't find much.

It happens when I save an entry after adding or editing it, but not when I preview those changes. I believe it's part of the page-rebuilding process (though simply rebuilding files doesn't trigger it either).

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Be sure to read not just the page titles, in order, but the URLs for a second message: "the top five reasons you should avoid Search Engine Optimization". (via mezzoblue)

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Listing the most popular commands in my shell history:

$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r (via IBM developerWorks)

 506 cd
 460 emacs
 321 cup
 298 cvs
 229 grep
 193 ll
 101 rm
  45 cleanup
  41 find
  35 python

Of those cup is a cvs update variant, ll aliases to ls -l and cleanup is a script that gets rid of emacs backup files.

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I skipped a MySpace-promoted preview last night (I wasn't guaranteed a seat, but it was at a theater close to my job), and now there are rumors that Kazakhstan's second most famous television reporter is going to be on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine.

You know when I am starting to get tired of all the Borat shit, it's getting excessive.

This blog will enter a Borat silence until the movie comes out in a month and a half.

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So, Nick's redesign has me wondering — is there any connection between the subliminal message in "They Live"

and the Andre the Giant Has a Posse stickers?

The guys at Everything2.com seem to think so, but it doesn't seem very authoritative.

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In this anonymous essay on PerlMonks, the writer declares that Perl is dying, and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

Give it another five years, and I think Perl will be largely a niche language, for system administration and text processing.

PHP, Python and Ruby are all comparably easy to learn. Python and Ruby are easier to read. PHP is designed for use on the web. Other than CPAN, Perl's comparative advantages are minor. And its downsides are numerous (the often-obnoxious community, the over-use of syntactic shortcuts, the crufty support for OOP).

I just don't see any compelling reasons for a new developer to learn Perl and that, I think, is the death knell for a language.

(via Dossy)

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On November 11, 1998, I made my first purchase at Amazon, four investment books:

• The Real Life Investing Guide
• The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need
• Learn to Earn : A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Investing and Business
• The First Book of Investing : The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Wealth Safely

I had started my first "real" job. Despite the meager salary of $23,500 a year (no, seriously), I started a 401(k) and put the cash savings I had into stocks. I have subsequently realized that I should be putting the majority of my money into solid mutual funds, instead of trying to pick stocks.

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Muslim students burn an effigy of Pope Benedict XVI at a protest rally in Allahabad, India, Friday, Sept. 15, 2006. A growing chorus of Muslim leaders has called on the Pope to apologize for the alleged derogatory comments made by him about Islam. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)

Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.
– Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam.

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The President of Kazakhstan is coming to the US to talk about our own Commander-in-Chief about Borat's unflattering portrayal of Kazakhstan.

This reminds me of the Simpsons-Rio de Janeiro scuffle.

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On September 11, 2001, Monica Lyons died at the World Trade Center, where she had worked as an executive assistant at Marsh & McLennan Cos., for over 30 years.

When I agreed to join the 2,996 project, I wasn't sure what I was going to write about. I mean, what hasn't been said about that awful day?

Then I read a mini-biography of the woman to whom I was assigned to pay tribute, and one particular fact resonated with me: this woman had worked at the same company for longer than I had been alive.

And it occurred to me that there was a common thread that united almost all of the people killed during that tragedy — they were at work that Tuesday morning.

Secretaries and stockbrokers, Department of Defense employees and janitors, the police and firefighters that came to their rescue, all died at work.

On the planes themselves, the flight crews were doing their job, and many (most?) of the passengers were business travellers.

On the morning of 9/11, the first person I spoke with (not the first person I tried to call) was the receptionist at my job, to let him know that I wasn't coming into work that day.

I heard a disgusting anecdote about my previous employer, where a boss insisted that people continue working and meeting, instead of watching television or (gasp!) going home.

And I knew someone who was an attorney in the World Trade Center and managed to escape with her life.

The only time I'd been to the World Trade Center was for work (during a brief stint as a financial reporter). If I'd graduated three years later, who knows — I could have been interviewing an analyst that fateful morning.

Work is where we spend most of our waking hours, most of our lives. I wonder if there isn't some significance that the terrorists attacked workplaces, rather than purely symbolic (e.g. the Statue of LIberty) or person-dense (e.g. a huge football stadium) targets.

Perhaps they recognized that these were quintessentially American targets.

And now, I am off to work.

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Note to self: that site with the "Z" where you can look up addresses is called "Zaba". (It has my five most recent addresses, and no false positives. Pretty impressive. And creepy.)

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After the 5-3 atrocity in the 2004 Olympics, this year's team was 8-1 and that loss was a close one.

Yes, that Greek team ultimately got their asses whipped by a Spanish team that was missing its best player (Pau Gasol, whose foot was fucked up) — and the Spanish squad never played the US, which could have been a second loss.

But Team USA was hardly our best players (you know: Kobe, Duncan, Garnett, Kidd, etc.) and they were a really big improvement over the previous squad.

Another upside: it drives home the point that basketball is a team sport — practice and team defence matter. Spain had one NBA star and Greece had zero, yet they both medaled.

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I give the Jewish Robot props for being honest about his below-average height and even linking to his JDate profile.

I swear to G-d, one time I went out with a girl who looked so much different from her photos (like, no exaggeration, 50 lbs. heavier) that I didn't recognize her. I also know a dude who's divorced and puts "single", because he split with his ex-wife like ten years ago.

JDirt's very cynical phrasebook isn't all fictional.

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The not-exactly-objective DHH has a nice takedown of Joel Spolsky's weird anti-Ruby essay.

One noteworthy point he missed:

Joel writes, "Ruby [is] known to be slow, so if you become The Next MySpace, you'll be buying 5 times as many boxes as the .NET guy down the hall." But the current MySpace is written in ColdFusion, the laughingstock of server-side development. And they're pretty damn successful.

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Congrats, Mr. starved-for-attention, you just made the top of my list:

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So there are now reports (I'm personally skeptical) that US Marines forced Saddam Hussein to watch the South Park movie. (via Karol)

Then again, he is one of the most evil people in the world and the nobodies at Abu Ghraib were subjected to far worse.

What I wonder — and have wondered for some time — is whether or not Saddam knew about "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" before the recent war. I mean, if you're a Stalinesque dictator who hates the US, you have got to know that there is an American movie that portrays you as Satan's butt-buddy, no?

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The South Park movie is pretty funny, even though the show was pretty stale that year:

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Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's latest nuclear stall tactic is insisting on a televised debate with George W. Bush:

"I suggest holding a live TV debate with Mr. George W. Bush to talk about world affairs and the ways to solve those issues," he said.

"The debate should be go uncensored in order for the American people to be able to listen to what we say and they should not restrict the American people from hearing the truth."

The sad part is that I think Ahmadinejad — far more articulate and canny — would whip Bush's ass.

The funny part is that the president of Iran is concerned about media censorship in the US.

Or maybe it's the other way around.

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Terry L. Hunt refutes the central case study of Jared Diamond's "Collapse"

I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island's prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today's problems.

(via Dan Drezner)

I wish more people were that principled in evaluating and publicizing evidence that could undercut their argument (myself included).

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Jared Diamond is one of the most accessible writers on anthropology. Here are his