This is the first time I had to fire up a Weendoze box to do something I couldn't do on jboat. I needed to get some pictures off a CF Flash card via the Viking multi-reader (USB) I have. Linux just wasn't mounting the filesystem right, so I bailed, and *sniff* fired up the windows machine and copied the files off.
I'll fix it's little red wagon though. I'll get it WORKING next time! Hahhahah!
As gleaned from a mailing list I'm on...
The Harbin Snow and Ice Festival
Quoting the page:
"The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, both farenheit and centigrade, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the cold, the residents of Harbin celebrate it, with an annual festival of snow and ice sculptures and competitions. This is the amazing sculpture made of snow greeting visitors to the snow festival in 2003."
Radio Paradise comes through again for me, and plays a track that is impossible to keep still to.
January 16th, 1938, Carnegie hall... as told on Gene Krupa's biography:
"Benny Goodman urged Gene to join his band with the promise that it would be a real jazz band. After joining, Benny soon became discouraged with the idea of having a successful jazz group. The band was relegated to playing dance music and Benny was considering packing it in. Upon the band's engagement at the Palomar, Benny decided to go for broke and play their own arrangements. The audience went wild and the band took off. The Goodman group featured Gene prominently in the full orchestra and with the groundbreaking Goodman Trio and Quartet. The Trio is possibly the first working small group which featured black and white musicians. On January 16, 1938, the band was the first "jazz" act to play New York's Carnegie Hall. Gene's classic performance on "Sing Sing Sing" has been heralded as the first extended drum solo in jazz."
"Sing Sing Sing" to me represents all things seductive about swing music. It's powerful, driving, and beautifully executed. It's an example of a piece, performed in this style, with Krupa's driving bass and Benny's mesmorizing clarinet that calls to me to give up all this computer noise and truly take up music.
We're making progress, really! Catya and I have published our iCal calendars onto a common website now, and have a piece of software that lets us browse them via a web browser, but still no updating online.
There may be a ray of hope though. The Mozilla Project has a nifty tool that plugs right into their platform simply called Mozilla Calendar. It uses iCal format calendar files, and allows publishing and subscription via webDAV. Spiffy!
One of the tidbits I liked the best was it can 'think' in 'my calendar doesn't live here on my machine, it lives on the webDAV server' mode. This means if I want to edit a calendar, I run up Mozilla Calendar, select the entry from the subscribed lists, make the change, and Calendar says "Re-post this to the server?" - and voila, it gets updated.
This still doesn't do record locking, meeting invites, or busy planning, but it's getting there. :)
I'm still using Evolution as my mail and calendaring program. I'm thinking of also setting up my contact lists, but I worry about the 'local storage' problem again, since there doesn't seem to be a server manager implementation for contact management like there is for Calendaring, unless maybe it's LDAP? Dunno. More to explore!
Okay, how many people does this strip resonate with? Cmon, you know it's true.
Why is it that the tech world has never really grasped the concept of communal calendaring? Whenever you ask someone about shared calendars, they immediately mention the only one that seems to be in use, that being Microsoft Exchange. The evils of this system are well known, and need not be ranted about here. Beside the fact that the environment I'd like to deploy in is primarily NOT Microsoft.
I'll be posting more about this as I move through it, but here's my initial foray.
I know there are very few people who read my blog that do not read Slashdot, so I'm sure most of ya'll have seen this, but I think it bears talking about.
These pages are the photo journal of a woman taking a motorcycle trip through the area surrounding Chernobyl, where, in 1986, a soviet-era nuclear reactor exploded. These direct and moving images document an area that has basically been frozen in time for the last 20 years.
The impact of the disaster is still being felt not only by the people who lived within the 30 kilometer "dead zone" around the reactor, but also the communities and families all through the region, who are still reeling from the impact.
By the way, in doing some research for this posting, I found the ibiblio entry above. I highly recommend reading some of the links from there, it's a fascinating look into what the USSR was like during the cold war.
If so, it may be time for therapy.
DorkTower's latest comic regarding blogging.
I'm still here! I'm so immersed in Stonekeep work that I haven't had a lot of time for general life chitchat. I'm remembering what it's like to be totally absorbed in a project, and coding on it, and developing. It's refreshing in many ways.
Working from home fulltime again is as usual bringing its own challenges. Fortunately I do take Zach either to or from school each day, so that gives me a chance to get out of the building, but 90% of the time I'm home I'm in my bedroom at my desk. Wasn't this my life in my early 20's? But then it was hacking Apple stuff or playing Wizardry. Now it's Java code and Debian system configuration.
I think I'm learning again, so that's a plus. Debian is a great environment, and I'm having that "Why isn't EVERYONE using this?!?" sort of feeling. Linux sure has come a long way.
Current fun is figuring how where the world is on shared calendars. Catya and I are wiggling around trying to find a way she and I can share calendars. We're almost there. Expect a geeky post on this shortly.
In the meantime, I highly recommend Evolution as a mail client. It's very outlook-like, but don't hold that against it. Extremely well written and works great.
Part of the dramatic switch to a full KDE desktop included getting back into working with Konqueror, KDE's internal browser. Now, I had gotten mighty addicted to FireFox, Mozilla's browser, over the last few months. I was pretty much planning on just using Firefox for all my work, rather than Konqueror.
Those of us from the Dark Ages remember Usenet with feelings of fondness tinged with sadness. Fondness because (certainly for me), in the earlier days of the net it was the ultimate discussion forum. A global discussion medium that was well structured, easy to browse, and wide-ranging. At it's height, Usenet contained tends of thousands of newsgroups, a large majority of them global, organized into the standard hierarchies. Sadness, because the Usenet that once was is mostly gone.
Something passed along on the Techno-Fandom mailing lists.
Note carefully the labelling of the jacks on the back of this pre-amp.
A month or so ago I embarked on setting up my working environment on a laptop running Linux. The iniitial platform was an IBM Thinkpad T20 running Redhat Linux release 9. I was reasonably happy with it, but RH9 is being end of lifed, so perhaps learning all there was to know about that platform wasn't the best approach.
At a recent event, said T20 Thinkpad was stolen. But, out of adversity comes opportunity. I saw this as a reason to not only upgrade to a more powerful laptop, but also try a differenr Linux distributions. I'm super happy with what I ended up with, and knowing there are others either using this combination of hardware and OS, or are just curious how to go from scratch to full environment, this is a rundown of what my system is like, how I built it, and my thoughts on the state of the art in Linux desktops.
I'm at Lunacon this weekend in Rye, NY. It's a very relaxing, enjoyable event we've been going to for years. Unfortunately, this'll be the last time at this hotel (a hotel referred to as the Escher Hilton, due to it's odd floor arrangements). Lunacon has simply outgrown the space.
It's sort of odd going to an event thatt I'm -not- working at. I'm relaxing, enjoying company, and basically having a nice time. How strange!
At the moment I'm in fair-geek-heaven. I'm sitting in the pool area, watching Zach play in the pool with some other kids. I'm on the laptop (alas, plugged in - battery power is not so hot), with reasonable wireless coverage. On the one hand, I'm such a geek. On the other hand, I'm getting some things done, and enjoying it. I even got some Real Live Work [tm] done prepping some artwork with a designer for an event coming up.
Should be back in Boston tomorrow [Sunday] afternoon, then an event meeting Sunday evening in town (at the infamous Boston Park Plaza!).
More good geeky stuff to come :)
Another good music track on the drive home from Lexington where I attended a Center for Entrepreneurial Growth meeting. Nice folks there, got some good networking time.
Anyway, on the way home there was a block of ZZ Top, and man I forgot how much I like their stuff. I only caught their last 2 tracks, but they were La Grange and Cheap Sunglasses - two pieces with some great grooves.
Cheap Sunglasses has a mean bassline in it.
So apparently I'm out on my own here, but to me, when someone says "next Saturday", they are talking about the very next Saturday that will occur.
Apparently I'm in the minority here. When someone tells me, on Wednesday, "Hey, we're doing something next Saturday" - I naturally assume they're talking about the day 4 days hence. Nonnon! They're talking about the day 11 days hence! The one in 4 days is 'this' Saturday.
Who thought up this goofy plan? Days are individual entities. If I say 'take the next thing in line', you pick up the next available thing, right? You don't 'skip' one and go for the next one after that, do you?
Is this a Boston regionalism or something? Was my brain just counter-programmed when growing up in New Jersey?
You call that a snowstorm? There were noises of this snowfall being somewhat dramatic, with forecasts of up to a foot of snow, yaddayadda. Total snowfall ended up being about 5 inches. Enough to cover the ground, and enough to need snowblowing,
Ahh, the snowblower! What is it about working with machinery that's so satisfying? I mean, granted, it's no backhoe, but it's a lot of fun. This is a Craftsman ride-on tractor, with a 42" blower on the front of it. We add about 100lbs of weight to it for winter use, with wheel weights and a large bucket o stones on the back.. This, combined with my own not-exactly-insubstantial mass made the whole thing easy to navigate in the snow. The little 18hp engine doens't have any problems doing the work, the trick is always the traction.
Anyway, snowblowing was successful, the driveway is again safe for navigation (we have a pretty steep hill, it really does need to be cleared).
On to work!
Folks on IRC pointed me at 'Grow' today, and I spent probably more time than I should ahve playing it. I'm still fiddling, I'm up to 9000pts, with 8 maxed. I'll amend this if I get better.
'Grow' is available here.
Remember that Thinkpad I just bought? Well, the drive is... well, iffy on it. 20gig 9.5mm laptop drive. It's whining something fierce. A little birdie reminded me that IBM warranties are totally transparent to who owns the laptop. So first checking in on IBM's website, SCORE! It's still under warranty! Off to IBM's tech service, get a human being within 2-3 minutes, and he has me remove the drive, give him the part number, and a replacement drive should be here tomorrow, all free of charge.
Kewl. Once again, my opinion of IBM's laptop division goes up a notch.
From The Progress Report on www.americanprogress.org....
RUMSFELD DISHONESTY CAUGHT ON FILM: The most vivid display of the Administration's widening credibility gap came when CBS's Bob Schieffer asked Rumsfeld "If Iraq did not have WMD, why did they pose an immediate threat to this country?" Rumsfeld retorted, "You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' I didn't...It's become kind of folklore that that's what happened." Schieffer repeated his question but Rumsfeld challenged the reporter saying, "If you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em." At that point, NYT columnist Tom Friedman read Rumsfeld his own words, pointing out that the Defense Secretary had told Congress on 9/19/02 that "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people" than Iraq and that "some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent [but] I would not be so certain." According to the transcript of the show, Rumsfeld replied "Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know." American Progress has posted a video clip of this exchange.
Other entries follow... I challenge anyone to read this simple summary page, with citations, supporting information, transcripts, and facts gathered together... and contine to have faith that the Bush Administration is worth the American people's trust.
Ahh, day 1 at home full time. Work is getting done, UPS is delivering and picking things up, I've had my coffee, and I'm going to get lunch shortly. Clients contacted, emails exchanged, contracts negotiated.
AND 5 FRIGGIN TELEMARKETING CALLS IN THE LAST 3 HOURS!
I responded to every one of them with "Take me off your list", we'll see if it helps. Have folks signed onto the National Do Not Call list, and has it worked? This is gonna drive me batshit.
On Friday I got a verbal agreement from an angel investor who has agreed to finance Stonekeep's operations at least for 6 months. We've agreed on financial arrangements and other details necessary to make this work. This will allow me to focus completely on Stonekeep's client base and systems and build the company up into a self-sufficient business.
I'm hyper-excited about this. I've got great expectations now that I have the opportunity to really build CONGO (and to some extent Keystone) back up into the high end systems I think they can be.
Exciting times ahead!
When a J-Class Racing Sloop just isn't enough. A company has almost completed the largest sloop-rigged sailboat ever.
The Mirabella V is 246ft long, sports a carbon fiber mast 300' high, carries a 29' 400hp tender in a special 'garage' in the transom, as well as a full complement of jetskis, laser racing boats, and zodiacs.
Personally, I think the boat is ugly as sin, but it -is- enormous. Make sure you check out the gallery.
I have to admit, I'm a big fan of Dance Dance Revolution, or just 'DDR' for short. In premise, it sounds like a bad joke. "Okay, so you stand in front of this computer, on these pads, see, and it shows you the steps to make in time with the music. When it lights up, you step on the arrow. Keep up with the music and the steps, and your score goes up. You get scored on timing. You can compete against someone else at the same time, too!"
Wow, how... uninviting-sounding.
But in reality, this game is a -hoot-. It's far more social than I expected (as in, it's a lot more fun to play when either you're playing with someone else, or with a group of people). It's a helluva lot of exercise. A half hour of playing and you're generally drenched with sweat. Fortunately we have a big room wit a big TV in it, so folks can sit around and watch and have fun, as we did last night.
Arora and I just took a midday break and played for about 45 minutes. Fun! It's great when the two players are in sync, and keep up with each other and the game.
Now, back to work, but I'm sure we'll hit it some more later.
For folks who know this game, we're playing Konamix on a Playstation 1. Absolutely prehistoric by DDR standards, but for us newbies and wannabees, this is just right.
Lifted from Ascription is an anathema to any enthusiasm...
Apparently this is a short animation from Sheep Films.
MAN i wanna get sailing again.....
THE MARY L. McKAY
Frederick W. Wallace / Arr. & Adapt. Schooner Fare
We first heard this song in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Later we found it in a North American folk collection. The story is unchanged but the rhythm, melody and chords have been rewritten. It's the story of a record-setting voyage between Portland, Maine, and Yarmouth, N.S., with a little help from Portland bootleg rum.
Boy, nothing like having a couple really busy days, then when finally sitting down for First Day On the Job, you don't get diddly done. *sigh*. Today was nutty with a dentist appt this morning, and 2-3 hours of aftermath where I was hurting a lot more than I normally do after dental work, then a rapid fire series of visits from various in-laws.
Durn. Maybe I can get some quicky code done tonight.
Just ranting. Back to blogland...
Salon has has posted an amazing article on how "Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war."
What's also remarkable about this is that Salon has removed their normal 'you need to watch an ad to read this article', because they feel this is just too important.
Today was my last day at my fulltime employer. It was harder than I expected to walk out the door, but I still truly believe it's the right decision for me personally.
I'll be focusing my energy fulltime on my own business now, and all that entails. Part of that will include doing some contract work on the side to help pay the bills, but it's all part of Business [tm].
Onward....
I've changed where I pull my blogrolls (displayed as the 'other blogs' section on Planet Geek's main page. I had been using Blogrolling, but I found their interface cumbersome, and their features lacking.
I'm now pulling the roll from Bloglines , a great site run by the same fellow who originally founded eGroups, (now Yahoo! Groups).
The other advantage is BlogLines is an online Aggregator, which can summarize multiple websites and blogs into a nice browseable form. Feel free to add Planet Geek to an account on Bloglines, and you'll see postings show up there.
The LiveJournal 'Friends' pages are an example of an aggregator, though they've tailored the concept considerably to LJ's particular view of the blogging world.
Between your own LiveJournal friends page and Bloglines, you should be able to read virtually all the news / blogs / comments sites on the net.
Remember the days when people wrote long involved wonderful stories and posted them on usenet? One just showed up on the slashdot archives:
An apocryphal story from 1987 regarding DEC VAXen, IBM server rooms, and large financial organizations.
Make sure you read the comments below it for full attribution.
USA Today Poll (we all know how accurate these are, but gotta fight 'em...) on whether Congress should amend the constitution to ban gay marriages.
Thanks to Pookfreak for the pointer.
[corrected on 3/9/04 5:24pm - the attribution was incorrect. Sorry! -dbs]
Seems to be the day for me to post links to other blogs and the like. However, I make it a rule to, every couple days, check into Snopes.com and check out the 'Whats New' section, which covers the current rumors, blatherings, and other joy that tends to circulate on the net. I don't know how many times people have sent me something in email, only for me to reply with "That's an urban legend, here's the link to snopes..."
Today I saw a great blurb, purportedly to be an open letter to Dr Laura. I'll reproduce it here, though the original authorship is unknown (the Snopes article refers to a "Kent Ashcraft", but it's certainly not definite.
Found via Boston-Online. When yer out having fun, make sure you DON'T drop your cellphone in a creative location, because someone will pick it up and call your wife.
Did I say spring? Fool that I was. It's been snowing for the last 5 hours. We have about 2 inches of snow on the ground, and it's still going.
There's a book series I'm in the middle of reading called "The Song of Ice and Fire" by George R. R. Martin. It's one of the best things I've read in a VERY long time.
Only problem is, it's not done yet! GRRM is still writing book 4, and there will most likely be six books. This 4th one is taking FOREVER, but it's going to be worth it.
There's an interview available where he talks about where the current book "A Feast of Crows" is, and how far along he is.
One other bit is there's a sample chapter from the new book on his site. If you're reading the series, and waiting for the next book, check out the interview and the sample!
Today is was absolutely gorgeous in scene Bolton, MA. So much so that Zach and I decided to go out for a hike. After running an errand or two, I checked out Geocaching.com to see if there were any new caches in the area. A few, but because we only had 2 or so hours, we decided to hike a trail very near the house.
This was called the Powerderhouse cache, which was along a trail in some town-owned land behind town hall. Unfortunately, the antenna for my Garmin GPS III+ is missing, so I couldn't take the unit with me (it normally lives mounted to my dash in the VW).
This is an interview between RobLimo (who interviewed me a while back) and a fellow who got fairly into the hacker community. (for the uninitiated, in the security community, folks refer to younger kids who don't really understand the systems they're hacking as 'script kiddies'. They just download a tool and run it, and it hacks the systems for them)
Anyway, this fellow really lays out how the community operates, and how they network together.
Check out the article on newsforge.
Wow. What a day.
After feeling pretty grim last night, I slept in a little this morning, getting up around 9:30 to Cat making breakfast. The Zachster had slept in with me, but somewhere during the morning had gotten up and left. The joys of the barrier means I got a decent night's sleep, and really didn't notice Zach getting up and leaving the room.
Rick and Gabe spent the night, so I assumed that Zach was off playing with Gabe.
Breakfast was very yummy, and helped me get started. After a quick shower, I got started on the project of the day...
So it costs bux to host all these websites at Homeport. Our T1 is through Cambridge Bandwidth Consortium (great bunch of guys, lemme know if you're in the Boston area and want Good Bandwidth [tm]).
So how do generate some revenue? First thought is of course advertising. The least noxious of all the adserver networks I've found is Google's AdWords program. (A good example of what pages look like with AdWords ads in them is Google itself - a few snapshots are here.)
Has anyone had experience with these folks, good or bad?
Course, the second possibility is paid hosting, but that market is _so_ crowded now, and the costs are so cutthroat, we'd need tremendous volume just to break even, and we just don't have the time or money (though we do have the physical resources in bandwidth, servers, and infrastructure :)
Curious about all the stuff we host on our line? I'll throw that into the extended link... lotta neat stuff :)
Always neat to poke fun at the LJ community :)
So I'm trying to get a little bit of feedback on the blog. Been at it now for a couple weeks, and I'm enjoying it. But what I wanna hear from is you folks - could you take a minute to hit this survey? I'll post the results when things are done:
Take the Planet Geek! readership survey...
Thanks!
Remember that cool device on the back of the deLorean labelled "Mister Fusion" in Back to the Future? The concept that a fusion reactor producing virtually unlimited power could be brought down to the level of a coffeegrinder was whimsical, but gave that 'gosh the future's gonna be cool' feel.
Well, we might be one step closer. Far from the Cold Fusion whoop-tee-do from the 80's, these folks seem to actually be on to something.
As Reported in the Purdue News:
Evidence bubbles over to support tabletop nuclear fusion device
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers are reporting new evidence supporting their earlier discovery of an inexpensive "tabletop" device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions.
Whoah. :)
Ha, suddenly thought you were reading Ben's Livejournal, weren't you? Neener!
For some reason my favorite pair of sweatpants has gone missing for the last month or so. Since I'm working from home a lot of the time now, the requirement for business dress is lowered a bunch. Nothing like dropping the morning commute from an hour and a half to 15 seconds!
Anyway, my sweatpants seem to have returned from some bizarre nether region, and I am happily re-comfied. (Actually, once my friend and I made up the theory that this is exactly what Saturns rings are made out of. When you lose something you just had, it's actually warped out to Saturn for a little bit, then will zip back and appear under your chair or behind the door or something like that. This works for pencils, books, carkeys, and lost pants apparently).
With some help from the folks on the #apache channel on irc.freenode.net, I've set up a bunch of aliases for the blog. So you can now URL to the blog as 'planetgeek.homeport.org' or any other variations, such as 'dbs' 'dave' 'geek' 'shayde', etc, and they'll all go to the same place.
The trick is to have multiple ServerAlias lines, or a single one with a bunch of names after seperated with spaces. That combined with a named wildcard entry for homeport.org, and voila!
Neat, huh?
Today I gave my employers final notice that I'm leaving as of Wednesday of next week. That means the dreaded exit interview, and all that jazz.
They're really in a hard place, and I wish my teammates well, but I have to get out of there. It's doing me no good to hang on there, and I've already gone 5 weeks -past- when I said i was leaving, and even THAT date was 3 months notice. They're still understaffed. *sigh*
Now all I need is customers.
Hey, someone's on the right track! Arora just pointed out this article about Harvard University installing a Biodiesel station in Cambridge. This is pretty cool, though it looks like it's not a public station.
Why is this important to me? Well, I drive a VW Golf with a TDI (Turbo Diesel Injection) engine in it. It's a wonderful car, and I get obscene miles on it (about 45mpg)... this is great for a car that has a heckuva lot of torque for only a 93hp engine.
