September 2005 Archives

There's been a lot of noise over in Livejournal by the user base complaining about Google's new Blogsearch indexing tool. Most users are reacting by changing their entire journal over to 'friends only', and casting aspersions upon 'the evil google search engine'.

This post is primarily aimed at that audience.

Folks, Livejournal is a blogging tool. It's purpose is to post your entries onto the public net for you. What it can and cannot do is made pretty clear. People seem to have an assumption that once you post something on the net, somehow you have total control over it, and can control what happens to it, and who can access it. This is a notion people should get over.

Livejournal automatically creates RSS feeds for all your journals. Those RSS feeds are publically available, and have been forever. There is no 'protocol' on the net that restricts who can read an RSS feed, therefore 'robots.txt' and the like will not affect it. Google's blogsearch system reads RSS feeds and indexes them, just as any other RSS news aggregator on the planet can do.

Google is doing nothing wrong, and not breaking any rules, and Livejournal is doing nothing wrong, though they should have the option of providing RSS feeds or not. My point here is casting aspersions upon Google is inappropriate. Having a realistic view of what a blog host, and what blogging software does is more appropriate.

Livejournal DOES give a small bone to the community though. You can cut down the amount of public information fed into the RSS feeds. See this helpdesk ticket for more information.

My point here is twofold.

1. Yelling at Google for doing what they do, index public information, is a foolish endeavour. They are not doing anything wrong, they are indexing information that has been made public.
   
2. Putting your faith, thoughts, and information on someone elses server means you are automatically signing on to their practices and policies. You've already partially lost control of your information, don't be surprised when something happens you didn't expect.
   

This post was posted on my own blog installation, on my own servers, in software I control. I fully recognize that by hitting [Save], I lose the possibility of controlling who and what has access to this content, and where it goes. I accept that even in my own environment. Don't expect more in someone elses system.

Such is the nature of the Net.

There's something surrel bout being stuck in New Jersey with lptop tht hs broken 'a' key. (tht ws done, by the wy, by cut nd pste with the mouse.). Time to browse eBy nd try nd find replcement I think. (IBM Thinkpd T40).

Thanks to the generosity of our friends Tim and Ellen, we now have a hottub in our back yard. Titan Movers hauled it over this morning, using a mighty cool big truck. It was a little alarming to see a hottub suspended over our house, but it was only swaying there for a few minutes. Only slight fingernail chewing occurred.

This weekend I had much Manly Man Tool Fun as I built the platform for the tub (levelling it with gravel, concrete, and the like - you can see it under the tub here), using 'rest points' as documented in the manual. It's not a flat pad, but the 2x8's are under all the points they say should be supported. This, coupled with some inside shelf carpentry, definately filled out my tool-geek needs for the day.

NB: the Ryobi 18v drill and associated OnePlus battery system rocks the house. I drove 36 3" screws through slightly damp pressure treated 2x8s, and the unit never even flagged. It went on to mount some shelving and hooks later in the afternoon, and is still going strong.

Now to get the wiring hooked up.

Or, another title... "If you BitTorrent, please try Azureus"

I've recently been tinkering with BitTorrent to pick up some old TV show episodes, handy for when I'm on the road travelling. My first forays into the world weren't so promising, as the clients and tools were pretty primitive.

Then I came upon Azureus.

This is as full featured, complete, and beautiful an application as I've seen anywhere. It's written in Java, obviously with the SWT toolkit, and is simply striking in its detail and complexity. It even includes a live animated display showing the 'swarm' of machines you're connecting with to do uploads and downloads.

I've been using it off and on for the last day or so, and I'm staggeringly impressed with how well it works, and how complete and detailed it is.

If you're interested in BitTorrent, check out this system.

Well, it's been about two weeks since I got an iPod nano for my birthday, courtesy of my sister. A couple observations, and I'll let this whole thing fade off into history...

• It's SMALL!
  No, really, it's small. It's easy to lose. I have a nice Ogio laptop backpack with an 'mp3 player pouch' on the top of it. It fits nicely into that, which gives me a good place to 'always keep it'.
• It goes FOREVER
  I have not had an opportunity to even come close to killing the battery in it. I'm not a power-listener by any stretch, but noting "Hm, it's been 3-4 days. Maybe I should plug it in again" is a nice feeling.
• The headphones are 'eh'
  The stock white headphones are nothing to write home about. I have a set of Shure E2C earbuds that are mighty sexy, but take longer to just 'pop in'. And because they're sound insulating, its hard to just put them in and leave them in. Durned checkout drones are hard to understand when they say "For here or to go?".
• It works fine with Linux
  Thanks to the wonder of GTKpod, syncing from the laptop is a breeze.
• Yes, the screen scratches easily
  Do not put these things in your pocket with your keys. The screen will scratch up terribly, as reported in The Register. Fortunately the carry spot in my bag has a felt lining, but when I'm carrying in my pocket, I choose a spot that has nothing else in it.
• 2 gig is not enough
  I'm a disk space hog. 2 gig is not quite enough for me. I think the 4 gig version would be okay, but I could see myself doing the same thing there. "Not enough!" I see the attraction to a 40gig ipod.

Final thoughts? A mighty cool piece of equipment. Thanks sis!

While finally getting into some more serious coding, I had this thought. THings you don't hear very often anymore, but were pretty common back in the day.

"A snack? Sure, let me just start this compile running, it'll hopefully finish by the time we get back."

Compiles I'm running now usually take less than 6 seconds, sometimes a larger build and deploy and initialize may run for 10-15 seconds.

Ah the good old... days?

This coming Friday, September 23rd, my band Deluded Blues will be playing at the Cottage Street Pub in Franklin, MA. This is the first time the 'new' band has appeared on stage in its current form, and we're only doing a 'mini-set' in the middle of a longer set by the 'old' band.

We go on at 9pm, and should be playing for about 45 minutes. Much support from attending audience folks would be a huge win, as this is also the first time I've -ever- performed on stage :)

I'll be heading down to Franklin earlier to pick up our gear and muscle it over to the gig (leaving home around 6:15-6:30ish). If folks want to ride along or caravan, ya'll are welcome, but you may be drafted into roadie mode!

We had a great pre-gig practice tonight, going through the entire set beginning to end, and I think we sound pretty good, if I do say so myself. If you like bar-blues type music, leaning heavily on early 70's blues (Allman Brothers, Free, CCR, etc), then you'll know what to expect in our show.

Hope to see folks there!

Spaceworms is a nice simple flash game, but fair warning! It will really suck you in.

The idea is you're trying to out-maneuver the spaceworms. Use the arrow keys to move your 'dot'. The worms are faster and more maneuverable than you, but have slightly slower reaction time. Use the edges of the screen to your advantage.

Avoid getting caught for 10 seconds, you go up a level, and get another Worm chasing you.

I got up to 7 worms chasing me, and almost wore out my arrow keys.

Thanks to Screenhead for the link.

OkCupid hosts another good 'where are you on the political / social spectrum' quiz here. I took it, and came out, unsurprisingly:

• You are a SOCIAL LIBERAL (76% permissive)
• You are an Economic Liberal (21% permissive)
• You are best described as a: Socialist

Shocking. The entire results (With splufty display graphs showing how I show up on the grid), is available here.

So while working with some other geeks this afternoon, the subject of Ruby on Rails came up. I've heard good things about it, but I voiced my skepticism about shelving my current workcycle (in Java) and learning Yet Another Language. I mean, how many folks can be looking for Ruby programmers nowadays?

Well. Gee. How many are looking? Good question!

So off to Dice, one of the better job / tech search boards out there, and I did a little keyword searching. The summary of what I found isn't all that surprising, but still interesting...

Sampling 75,117 entries...

Keyword... Number of matches...
Java: 12210
C: 8235
C++: 6828
Basic: 6369
Perl: 3718
C#: 3516
Cobol: 1177
PHP: 639
Python: 383
awk: 138
REXX: 72
Ruby: 40
Pascal: 27
Lisp: 24

Interesting. How about platforms?

Keyword... Number of matches...
Windows: 10753
Unix: 11474
Linux: 4859
Mac: 461
VMS: 275

So apparently being a Java programmer on Windows is the way to go :)

I normally don't comment on current events outside of politics, but this one struck me as worth bringing up...

According to AP via Yahoo News:

CHICAGO - A commuter train was going almost 60 mph above the speed limit just before it derailed, killing two people and injuring dozens, the acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday.
Mark Rosenker said the Metra train was traveling at 69 mph and should not have been going faster than 10 mph when it switched tracks at a crossover just before jumping the tracks Saturday.

Nothing wrong with the tracks or the train, it was just going 'too fast'. Yeah, I'd say so. Sheesh.

Break out the bandanas and eyepatches! A reminder that tomorrow (September 19th) is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Remember to brush up on your Pirate Vocabulary!

(And if you want to hear quality PirateSpeak, I played a pirate in a radio comedy called "The Fantastic Fate of Frederick Farnsworth the Fifth". You can hear some of the choice bits on my Voiceover site, including the reason pirates say "Arrr!" all the time.

... a successful off-site backup.

Now, to flesh out that commentary - most of our services are colocated at various Undisclosed Locations around the US (usually one door down from Dick Cheney). This means it's sort of difficult to trot over to the machine, pop in a backup tape, make a copy, and toss the tape in the storage vault. Sure, colo facilities provide this capability, but it tends to be painful to work with, not to mention costing extra money.

With broadband now as widely available as sand, it's possible to take on the concept really put forward 10+ years ago. "Why not back things up over the net?" When I was first approached with the idea (oh, 1995-ish), network connectivity was just edging out of dialup, and if you were SUPER lucky, you could have a T1 line, but it would most likely run you $800 a month. That sort of connectivity at home? Not likely.

Nowadays folks have DSL and Cable modems that have huge amounts of bandwidth. We're no different here at Chez Geek, happily slurping at the nozzle from Comcast.

Last night I finished noodling a 4-5 line backup script that synchronizes various Important Directories [tm, reg us pat off] on our server (things like, oh, say, /home), and a spare 160gig USB drive I picked up at Microcenter for $80.

What does this have to do with Linux, I hear you cry? Because all of this was done with free software, and it did it fast and efficiently. Using the rsync utility, it takes one command to synchronize one set of dirs on one machine with another. It even compresses and optimizes the transfers, only copying those files that need to be updated.

So we have free software, cheap bandwidth, cheap disk space, and cheap hardware. It's Geek Nirvana.

For the detail-oriented folks in the crowd, here's the end result:

sent 3756414 bytes received 7763330071 bytes 530665.56 bytes/sec
total size is 13301911159 speedup is 1.71

That's some nice throughput.

I haven't had more than a few minutes to look at it, but the wizards at Eyezmaze have a new Grow game up on their site. More details later, but I wanted to drop everyone's productivity as SOON as possible.

Thanks to rollick for the heads up. (Note - this link contains a SOLUTION. Click at your own peril!)

In the midst of hyper-geekery today, Barb msgs me and asks what I'm working on.

So I answer...

publishing WSDL-driven servlets into an Axis environment to expose J2EE stateless session beans' methods via webservices - then i don't have to have the client apps deal with JNDI and RMI calls directly to the jboss server, they can just use SOAP calls, browsing via wsdl.

And just realized how much that looks like total gobbledygook. No wonder I sometimes feel like I'm in my own little world.

Apparently the extremely liberal and well spoken host of Prairie Home Companion is suing a blogger for making a parody t-shirt.

The blogger tried to make simple amends with the lawyer, saying this is a ridiculous lawsuit, but Mr Keillor apparently wants to pursue legal action against this guy.

Does this make ANY sense?

So one of my many hats involves helping out running the Arisia website. We changed the site over to being managed by Mambo several months ago, and have been 'mostly' happy with it, though it has its quirks.

One quirk raised its head today. We couldn't upload files via the media manager other than graphics and pdfs. One of the users wanted to punch up a preformatted HTML page, and the system was not allowing it.

After digging around the code, I found the culprit. The system was hardcoded to only accept certain extensions, and I have to admit, the code that did it was... er... painful:

if ((strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".gif")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".jpg")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".png")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".bmp")) &&(strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".doc")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".xls")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".ppt")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".swf")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".pdf"))) {

Ew. Just. Ew. Bleah. Ick. In the immortal words of Tim Allen... "So I rewired it!" :

# The valid file extension list is:
$validList="fluff|gif|jpg|png|bmp|doc|xls|ppt|swf|html|htm|rtf|";
$fileInfo = pathinfo($file['name']);
if (! strpos($validList,$fileInfo['extension'] . '|')) {


Muuuuch better. This patch goes around line 139 of admin.media.php, if folks are looking for an update.

This is just too funny. A fellow has, in full and complete detail, documented all the Dr. Pepper clones he could find. Sample cans and pictures and taste-tests and everything.

As a long time Dr Pepper fan, I was shocked to hear that he ranked Mr. Pibb (the most popular Dr Pepper clone) only 2 out of 5 pepper points. It's one of the few that is regularly on tap around here in the northeast.

Anyway, check out FakeDrPepper.com.

Okay, okay, I admit it. I like going to Chuck E. Cheeses with Zach on occasion. It helps that there's an open access point nearby. I get to geek on the laptop, Zach gets to play skee ball and run around in the hamster tubes.

I chanced to catch site of a video on their ubiquitous monitors. A very silly and somehwat simplistic animated piece called "Carl and Phil - Monkey Ninjas!. It was silly enough for me to remember to look it up when I got home.

Well worth watching a couple of these.

Here's a neat trick. Firefox has outstanding popup blocking in by default. I'm always amazed watching IE users as they close popup after popup, and take it in stride as 'normal'.

Recently Firefox has started showing popups. The clever (?) ad writers are now writing their annoying functions in plugin-based languages, such as shockwave and flash. The page runs a flash program, which generates a popup. A popup blocker in HTML misses this, and you suddenly have a blinking bouncing button on your screen. Ew.

To tell Firefox not to allow popups from plugins, do the following:

1. Type 'about:config' in your tool bar
   
2. Right click anywhere, and select "New->Integer"
   
3. Type in: privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
   
4. Set the value to '2'
   

Voila! The fellow who showed me this simply said "Hey, not my trick." :)

For my birthday, my sister bought me a 2gig iPod Nano, the latest offering in the iPod line from Apple. I've never owned an iPod, and in fact haven't really purchased anything directly from Apple for myself in perhaps 10 years. I've avoided them because I disagree with many of their business practices, but you can't argue with the sexiness of their products.

At any rate, I found myself stuck with an Apple product in a Linux world. Of course Apple wouldn't consider supporting Linux directly, so the question was, how was I to use my new little iPod with my Debian Linux laptop?

I've sort of fallen into a task where I need to set up a website for a small group of people. The site will be used for general marketing, schedule information, and as a resource the group will use to pick up materials and information to share between themselves.

As someone who has been pretty active in the Content Management arena, I'm finding myself stymied at how difficult it is to find a simple web-based content management solution that will allow other users in the group (a limited number - onlye 1-2 other technical folks) to maintain the site.

We already know we'll use a Wiki for the 'internal community' aspects - we're doing this now - it's allowing uploading, downloading, content editing, etc. But using a wiki to drive the main site seems... out of sorts. Wikis are not made for general-consumption-by-the-public websites.

So I'm looking around. I haven't found what I'm looking for yet, but I'd like to hear from other folks what they'd recommend.

What I've looked at so far, and my feelings on each, follows...

Found this quote in a thread on the MFC Professional site. The topic is "Will Java replace C++?" - the conversation is from 1996:

No way. Java is far to simplistic to compare with C++. Also, Java is too complex to be a threat to Visual Basic. I don't really have much hope for the continued existence of Java over the long term. It will probably last a while, but eventually, it will be replaced by something better (easier to use) for common programming. Professional programmers will continue to use C++ (or some future COMPILED language) to do the heavy duty work. Java will go the way of SmallTalk, a niche product that won't every really go anywhere.

I really do enjoy working in the Mail / Calendar / Groupware application, 'Evolution'. It originated as a Gnome project, then went on to be taken on as the core of Ximian's operations. It continues now as a product from Novell, and is still free, clean, and rather a pleasure to use.

Every once in a while though, it throws out some very... strange things. Such as this 'error dialog' I just got while moving my laptop. I'm glad I wasn't doing anything important. Success is apparently a problem!

have the COOLEST friends. And tops in that list is my wunnerful wife.

Ya'll amaze me constantly.

I need to slap in Java 1.5 aka Java5 aka... well, whatever the marketing weenies are using today on our colocated box. Because it's... well... colocated, I naturally don't have an console there. So I decide to run the installer anyway...

root@boomer:~/storage# ./jdk-1_5_0_04-nb-4_1-linux.bin
InstallShield Wizard
Initializing InstallShield Wizard...
Preparing Java(tm) Virtual Machine...
The installer is unable to run in graphical mode. 
Try running the installer with the -console or -silent flag.

Okay, that's fair. So...

root@boomer:~/storage# ./jdk-1_5_0_04-nb-4_1-linux.bin -console
InstallShield Wizard
Initializing InstallShield Wizard...
Preparing Java(tm) Virtual Machine...
The wizard cannot continue because of the following error: 
Invalid command line option: console is not supported (1001) (403)

Just gonna be one of those days.

Oh this is not good. Apple has announced the iPod Nano, a flash based successor to the iPod mini. Physically smaller, more memory, and with a SCREEN. $199 gets you 2gig, $250 gets you the 4gig version.

Some of the relevant specs:

• Holds up to 1,000 songs and full-color album art
• Only 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 inches and 1.5 ounces
• Bright 1.5-inch color LCD display
• Up to 14 hours of battery life(1)
• Apple Click Wheel

Shields... weakening... hull breach imminent...
Tip o the hat to Dr. Memory for the pointer. The rat bastard.

Many folks have seen this elsewhere, but just in case.

I spent an hour or two last night doing data entry on the Katrina Peoplefinder Project. If you have some spare time, this is a great way (beyond financial donations), to help out people trying to find relatives and friends in the area.

The nutshell description - there are zillions of resources on the net where folks are posting messages asking about loved ones. The Peoplefinder Project is pulling all those requests and calls together into one database that will be available as a 'one-stop' resource.

Someday, I'm going to sit down in a diner, and this is going to happen to me.

Really. There is no bounds the level of surreality you find in american eateries.

I was hunting around for a tool that would let me do hierarchial diagrams, and auto-arrange them for me, doing path analysis along the way. I had used GraphViz before, and while the end result was okay, it was totally a batch-driven application. Build the data file, feed it into the tool, it generated a graphic.

Enter yEd, a Java application that is fully interactive, and allows dataset editing, node and edge property modification, save/load styles and graphic exports. The blurb on the website says:

yEd is a very powerful graph editor that is written entirely in the Java programming language. It can be used to quickly and effectively generate drawings and to apply automatic layouts to a range of different diagrams and networks. yEd is available as a free download with unrestricted functionality!

The best part about it is it's a pure Java Swing application, and it's set up via WebStart, so to install and run it just takes a single click on the Webstart logo, no matter if you're on a Mac, Windows, or Linux platform.

The program does has it's faults. It crashes on a fairly regular basis (just plain quits without an error message). I've become fond of the 'save' button in the toolbar - I click it regularly to make sure my work is up to date. Other than that, this is an OUTSTANDING demonstration of a thin, portable, webstart-enabled, WORA application.

I whipped up a page that is showing live data coming from the donations ticker on the Red Cross donations page. The page is updated on the server once a minute.

The page is here.

I'm running a small program that's watching how fast money is flowing into the Red Cross from donations. As of this morning, the rate is running between $9k and $17k A MINUTE.

              |Total amt | Last   
Datestamp     |donated   |minute 
--------------+----------+-------- 
20050902-1332 | 35332065 | $54340 
20050902-1333 | 35344485 | $12420 
20050902-1334 | 35354175 | $ 9690 
20050902-1335 | 35369140 | $14965 
20050902-1336 | 35385620 | $16480 
20050902-1337 | 35397525 | $11905 
20050902-1338 | 35412485 | $14960 
20050902-1339 | 35428895 | $16410 
20050902-1340 | 35443220 | $14325 
20050902-1341 | 35460745 | $17525 
20050902-1342 | 35470625 | $ 9880 
20050902-1343 | 35487250 | $16625 
--------------+----------+-------- 

I'll have a live version of this up and running in the next hour or two.

Update at 16:09pm -The live version is online. See this post.

Now that I'm back behind my desk regularly, the setup I have for my desk, mouse, chair, and keyboard is starting to be problematic. I rather like how it's arranged - I have a nice monitor and natch keyboard (I can't type on flat keyboards anymore. Ow ow ow), but my chair is really becoming a problem. My older leather standard joe office chair finally fell apart, and I'm using a similar shaped one now, but it's causing all sorts of aches and pains.

I don't trust 'ergonomic' chairs in general, since it's just a buzzword nowadays. The concept is totally valid, but you can't 'shop' for an 'ergonmic chair' - you have to go sit in a lot of chairs until one clicks in. I was under the impression that most chairs are basically the same, and there are minor improvements left and right, but really, being 6'6" means I'll never be totally comfortable.

Oh, woe, was I wrong. I found a chair and a situation that is incredibly comfortable and perfect and great. But there's a catch.

Next to my current favorite lunchtime spot there's a Relax the Back store. I'd seen these around, but never actually stopped in. I figured, in my search for a good chair, lets start with a specialist.

Had a great chat with the owner - the store was large, had some normal-looking office chairs - they don't look particularly edgy or special, just regular high-back chairs.

I sat down in one, and started fiddling. And then fiddled more. And the manager fiddled some more, and... eventually... it just clicked in. The position was right, the support was right, the armrests were right... it.. was just right. I'd never been that comfortable in an office chair before. We added wrist rests (sort of palm-sized cups for the hands), and a foot rest (normally I don't do foot rests, and actually started to tell him that, but then he adjusted it right, and... voila! It worked!) and I felt I could work there all day without a single twinge. Delightful!

So, after 15 minutes of this, realizing I was running a little late for lunch, I finally asked the fellow how much the chair was, with the accoutrements I was using (wrist rests and headrest). "Oh, that chair is... lessee... 1495."

1495. One thousand, four hundred, and ninety five dollars. For a chair. Granted, an amazingly cool comfortable wonderful chair. But YIKES!

Ah well, guess I'll keep shopping. At least I have a baseline to compare it to now.

<small voice> yeah, but, it was a really nice chair. </>

One of the fun bits about having kids when you're a geek is you can justify going back and playing with cool kids toys all over again. When I was a kid, (boy isn't THAT a lead in), we didn't have Rokenboks but I sure as patootie wish we did.

Zach and I spent 2 hours tonight setting up the layout again on the train table we had from back in the Brio days. This table is perfect for Rokenbok setups, because it has high sides and is a fixed physical dimension, so the layout won't spread all over the place.

We have misc pieces from at least two starter sets, a couple bridges and roadways sets, and at least 2 elevators and mixers from pumping stations. We have 3 RC trucks (two loaders and a skipjack) and 4 controlers. It can make for quite a complicated setup.

It's a great system and a great toy, and Zach and I love spending time together on it. I have great fantasies (!?) about getting a barrelful of rokenbok pieces and building huge structures all over the place. Doesn't every kid?

There's not a lot to be said here that isn't being said everywhere else on the web. It's not a time for finger-pointing, blame-gaming, or politicing. None of that will help the people who need help right now.

The logistics for me going to Louisiana to help out in person would be complex and ultimately not very helpful, as I'm not a trained emergency volunteer. It may seem crass, haughty, or elitist, but the best thing we can do right now is send money. The American Red Cross has consistently and IMHO skillfully handled disaster after disaster, avoiding politics and scandal (other than those created by folks who like nothing better than creating scandal out of nothing). During this time, they need our support more than anything, as they are the most organized and have the best planning for this sort of disaster.

I've donated. I encourage anyone who has the means to donate. $100 to them would mean meals and blankets and shelter to a family for weeks. There are thousands of families who need this help now.

As posted on Repent America :

PHILADELPHIA - Just days before "Southern Decadence", an annual homosexual celebration attracting tens of thousands of people to the French Quarters section of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina destroys the city.

Yes, apparently New Orleans deserved got what it was asking for. At least according to this wingnut.

Thanks to scherzoid for the link.