Planet Geek

My Gibbons Runneth Over

Now there's a topic that won't make much sense unless you're in the Linux community.

This week saw the release of Ubuntu 7.10, aka 'Gutsy Gibbon'. I've been firmly in the "Stick with the stable releases" Linux camp for quite a while, even when Debian was pushing 2 years behind on their 'stable' release.

I've been running Ubuntu 7.04 (aka 'Feisty Fawn') on yawl for the last year or so, and have had nothing but good things to say about it. It's been stable, useable, and lets me do my work. Excellent.

Yesterday I ran the update process and told the system to update itself to 7.10. The total processing time would be about 2.5 hours, due to a gig and change of data that needed to be downloaded (okay, I have a lot of packages), so I decided to go to lunch.

Upon returning, I answered 2 questions about local files I had modified, let the installation finish, and, with a small dose of trepidation, rebooted.

It came back fine.

In fact, everything came back fine. I have seen not the tiniest indication of a problem. Ubuntu just upgraded something like 1100 packages on this machine to newer versions, and everything Just Plain Works. All my basic tools are fine, if upgraded and showing some new bells and whistles. The traditional boondoggles of Linux system maintenance never even flinched. Sound, network, accelerated graphics (I have an nVidia card) - all came back up flawlessly, even with my desktop back as it looked before.

There are some noteable changes in the new release. The file manager has been replaced with 'Dolphin', which I have to say the jury is still out on. Initially I was very nervous about replacing my beloved Konqueror file system browser with something new, but my initial impressions of Dolphin are good. Everything seems there, if a little heavy on the big icons. I'll play with it a while and see if it will cut the mustard.

This is how computers are supposed to work. No license hassles, no nightmare changes from one revision to another, no "Burn it to bedrock and reinstall from scratch" problems with upgrades, or problems with "This app worked with my old OS, but doesn't work with the new one!" - one big distribution contributed to by everyone, with everything updated at once and confirmed to work together.

Yay Ubuntu!

Radio Silence

And now a word from our intrepid explorer...

I've been quiet the last couple of days due to some health issues involving an abcessed tooth, hence the reason there's been a shortage of geeky blatherings of late. Through the magic of Amoxicilin and liberal use of Tylenol, I'm back to almost human again, though there's a long road of further dental work ahead.

I'd like to take a moment to talk about pain though.

I've never had direct experience with chronic pain. The sort of pain that is omnipresent, and can never really be ignored. The last 3 days though have given me a glimpse of what it's like. Even with vast doses of Tylenol, the ache is always there, and I can tell within minutes when it's time to re-dose.

On the one hand, I can generally deal with pain on a point by point basis. "This is going to hurt" "Okay." What I can't deal with is the constant, wavering hurt that never goes away. The worst part of it is it completely destroyed any attempts at concentration. I couldn't latch onto a concept for more than a few minutes before being distracted or whiny. For someone like me who is VERY active mentally, this was horrifying. My pain level was waffling between "Ow" and "I want to curl up in a ball and whimper". I hated every minute of it.

Now I'm back on something approaching functionality, and there is a sigh of relief heard in the land. Not only from me but from other important folks in my life, who have had to deal with me being far wiftier than I am even on my worst days.

Thanks for everyone for their patience. We now return you to your previously scheduled life, already in progress.

Vague amusement at technology.

I find it terribly amusing, coming from a long history of data communications involvement, that my tactic, when deciding to walk away from my computer, is to turn the volume down so I don't disturb others.

Why is this amusing?  Because I don't even bat an eye at the fact that I'm streaming 128kbps worth of music from a server in California through 4 companies' networks and 2 dozen routers, moving something like 20k worth of data a second (that's 10 full pages of text, to give it context) into my machine where... it is not heard, and discarded.

We've become so bandwidth-jaded.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Looking for a poster? Or maybe an album cover?

Back in high school I remember an image of a full size sailing vessel - a galleon or the like (we're talking old school wooden round hull), but it was up on ice runners, and was zipping along on the ice, rather than in water.

It might have been part of the black light poster set, as so well catered to by Spencers or the like, or maybe it was an album cover?  Does anyone remember this image, or better yet, have a pointer to it? <a href="http://images.google.com/">images.google.com</a> is not helping me.

Powered by ScribeFire.

ScribeFire - A handy blog posting tool?

I'm trying out a new tool today called ScribeFire. 

The idea is to provide a rich user interface for doing blog postings via a Firefox plugin.  I've tried this a few times before with other tools, and have always gone back to just using plain old HTML pages.

So far, the interface is useable, and appears to support many different blogs (including Livejournal, Wordpress, and other content management systems). 

It appears to also support editing existing postings and content, but maybe it's because PG has several thousand posts, the list never actually came up.

The intriguing thing is that ScribeFire is supposed to support Drupal, which would be awfully handy for some of the work we're doing, but I can't seem to get it working.

Folks who do LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogger.com, or Movable Type should definately give it a try.

Lo, I am blocked

So I frequently park myself at the local Panera to partake of their free wireless, tasty coffee, and comfy chairs. It's also convenient that it's halfway between home and my son's school.

Yesterday, I stopped by just to get out of the heat. Since I had an hour to kill, I worked up my last blog post, put it together and posted it. So far so good. I traditionally look at the site at it's base URL (http://planet-geek.com/) just to make sure everything is okay. This time, apparently everything was NOT okay.

Apparently access to my blog has been blocked by the infamous Sonicwall 'content protection' system. Nice of them, eh?

Further research into this problem, by following their url, showed that I was not blocked for my abysmal spelling, my poor site layout, or my lack of meaningful content, but that I was simply classified as... pornography.

I had no idea geekitude had slipped so far into the internet's dark underworld.

Naturally, I immediately put in a request to have it reclassified, and demanded an explanation as to WHY my little corner of geekness has been classified as Pornography. Alas, Sonicwall doesn't provide such information, you may simply ask for a reclassification, and they might get around to it. In 8-10 days. What do you bet that I won't hear a thing from them in that timeframe?

If you'd like to grease the wheels against this idiocy, please go to Sonicwalls' ratings page, look up 'planet-geek.com', and request to have it reclassified as an "Information Technology" website.

I still would very much like to hear from Sonicwall, or from anyone else, who has had their site randomly excluded from anyone who uses their product, with no notification and no recourse except for a 'request for reclassification', why this occurs and what can be done about it. I'd also recommend that ANYONE who hosts or runs a website to plug their URL into that page and check to see if they're being blocked.

Kids Programming?

There's been a lot of chatter around the net lately about trying to find programming and introduction to computers-type software for kids to learn on. I mean, we all know where we started, right? TRS-80 and a READY prompt, or the wonderful ] prompt. 5 1/4" floppies, simple programs, and tinkering through the weekends were how we learned.

But how do you get a young one into these environments nowadays?

There's been various attempts at a 'kids' software environment, things like Logo and the like. The problem is nowadays finding implementations that are either free or useful. The only real Logo environment I've been happy with is KTurtle, a Logo implemention for the KDE desktop. On the one hand, I'm terribly amused that by far the best Logo setup I've seen REQUIRES Linux to run, and at the moment, Zach doesn't have a Linux desktop to work with. This sorely tempts me to set it up for him, I have to admit.

But Logo has limitations as a fully useful programming environment. In the modern age of "games a click away", kids really want to start writing adventures and excitement right off the bat. We all remember spending weeks debugging "PICK A NUMBER FROM 1 TO 10" programs. How do you code Tetris in a few weeks when you're still learning your multiplication tables?

A long time ago I read an article on SmallTalk in BYTE magazine (yes, a REALLY long time ago, like 1980). It was a discussion about object oriented languages and environments, and described the model of "Everything is an object". At the time, it was somewhat of an intellectual oddity, though many folks really got into it.

Apparently there is an outstanding opensource project to build a comfortable Smalltalk based environment that can be geared toward kids. It's called Squeak, and I first learned about it associated with the One Laptop Per Child project, which incorporates some of the Squeak environment. Once I got past some of the initial environment oddities, I found that Squeak provides a platform independent runtime environment, where object-oriented programs can be run compeltely independent of the OS they're running under. This means apps written on a Mac will work fine on a PC or a Linux box.

Squeak really isn't something ready to take on the Windows desktop or an environment to write accounting packages in. However, in educational circles, distributions in Squeak have really gotten quite a following. The Squeakland site is designed for educators who are looking for Squeak based information.

I'll be writing more about Squeak as I get more and more comfortable with it, but unless someone else tells me about another educational / intro to programming environment that's available for kids, that does NOT require a commercial license, Squeak is where I'm going to put my energy.

Chasing the Power

Every once in a while I get a good dose of greeniness, and look around my little corner of geekiness and sort of wonder "How much juice is this actually using?" After asking Cat what our monthly electric bill was ($300!), I decided this question needed a closer look.

A month or two ago I had picked up a Kill-a-watt (terrible name, ain't it?) power monitor. This little gadget plugs into a wall outlet, and tells how much power is being used by things drawing through it. Today I jacked it into the single outlet that feeds my nest o machines, and powered things up.

The meter dutifully reported the load as things came online, and steadied out at about 280 watts. All in all, that's not too bad for 3 computers, 3 lamps, and associated peripherals, but I was curious how that load was distributed. What was actually pulling all that juice?

Unsurprisingly, the single largest draw is yawl, my 2.2gig P4 Linux box. It accounted for about 85watts of power (without monitor). The second biggest draw was, oddly enough, lights. I have 2 compact flourescent desk lamps (about 15watts each), and a single halogen desk lamp (35 watts). I knew the halogen light was pretty dreadful, and this pretty much confirms it. That chalks another 65 or so watts. Which leaves me with 140 unaccounted for.

Well, the two laptops were about 30 watts each (pretty nice considering the horsepower in clipper and hunter). Down to 80 now. This last chunk was pretty much the combined load of the LCD monitors, various chargers and other desktop doodads, a pair of external USB drives, and the like.

So what's to be done about it? Well, I've been considering moving to LED based lights for a while. They're small, cool, draw -very- little power, but have the current drawback of being ridiculously expensive. A single bulb equivelent to a 100 watt incandescent bulb would cost around $52. The equivelent compact flourescent bulb costs around $5. The advantage to using LED is the current draw is miniscule. For the equivelent amount of light, the bulb would only consume about 2watts of power, AND have the advantage of being dimmable - something impossible with CF bulbs.

If I replaced my 3 desktop lamps with LED lamps, I could cut my power consumption by a third. I also have 4 other lamps in the room that could be replaced as well. The question is, is it worth it?

I'm still puzzling this one out. If anyone has suggestions for good sources for inexpensive LED fixtures and lamps, please let me know!

Idiot AP Reporters

What is it with supposedly 'technical' reporters? They apparently haven't clue ONE about the material they're writing about.

Take for example an article appearing in the Herald Tribune - Europe. The subject is a good one, Tim Berners-Lee discussing research into the future of the 'net. A worthy topic, but the short article contains this little gem:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who is credited with creating the Internet, said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. that the way the Web is used should be examined by a broad spectrum of experts.

NO. WRONG. TBL had nothing to do with the 'Invention of the Internet'. TBL is credited with first linking hypertext documents with a mechanism for linking these documents to remote servers. He wrote the first webserver, and the first web browser, and coined the term 'World Wide Web'. This is an application that runs OVER the internet.

LJ RSS Feeds suck it. New methodology ho!

Apparently LiveJournal / SixApart have collectively decided that external RSS feeds aren't worth fixing. Rather that continue arguing against this idiocy, with help from Lisa and MTLJPost, I've set up Planet Geek to crosspost new entries both on the blog and directly into LJ.

How does that impact you, dear reader? Not in the slightest if you don't use Livejournal. However, if you're part of the teeming masses schizophrenically reloading your friends page, you can probably relegate the shayde_blog RSS feed to the back burner for now. From now on, anything posted to Planet Geek will automatically appear in my livejournal page in realtime.

Until I can figure out how to turn off comments in Livejournal, though, I ask that you please comment back on the blog, rather than in LJ, though it's less of an issue now (under RSS feeds in LJ, comments were deleted after two weeks).

This ends this test of the Emergency Rant System. Had this been a real rant... well, it was actually. Deal.

Cmon LJ, what's your problem?

Folks who read PG via Livejournal may notice that the time it takes a post to show up there has gone from a tolerable 1 hour up to 6 hours. I really don't like having to post something at 3 am so the morning reading crowd picks it up the next day.

I've opened a ticket with the LJ support group asking for the problem to be looked into, but so far no response.

If anyone has LJ RSS fu and wants to look at it, all the salient details are in the request.

Article Subscription fixed

A week or three ago our wonderful blogmaster installed the subscription module into Movable Type. Unfortunately, a configuration wasn't quite set right, and subscriptions were not working.

If you want to receive mail notifications when a thread updates or changes, you can now subscribe to the thread (see the article detail for the field). You'll get a piece of email asking for confirmation (this is to avoid spammers), and then you're in like flynn.

Sorry if you tried to subscribe before!

Comments problem

I'm having a problem with comments on the site - things are saying "Moderated" but they're not actually showing up in the moderation queue. I'd suggest holding off on posting comments until I get things fixed. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Comments are happy again. And you can sign in using TypeKey now if you'd like.

Feel free to help us test by leaving comments for Dave.
Thanks,
Lisa/blogadmin

Another small contribution to RadioParadise

Recently Radio Paradise got hacked (the full story is on their home page). Bill has been working diligently restoring the site and fixing the code, but I had noticed that one little aspect hadn't been fixed it (and in fact, was outdated).

So last week I spent some time with The Gimp and created a new 'favicon' for the site, and mailed it off to Bill.

He put it online last night. *preen*

(For those who don't know what I'm talking about, a site 'favicon' is the little graphic that appears in a browsers toolbar next to the URL, or in the bookmarks folder next to the sitename. Also, in Firefox, it's in the window tab. If you're looking at RP, and don't see it, then you have a cached version. Hit shift-reload, and it should appear)

'The Connection' getting the axe? Gordon leaving WBUR!

According to an article in the Boston Globe, WBUR is cancelling the outstanding talk show 'The Connection', hosted by Dick Gordon. The new station manager, Peter Fiedler, states that the changes are part of a cut back program. "We decided to strengthen local focus because that is where our core listener base is", he said in a statement.

The Connection is produced at WBUR, but is heard on 66 national stations, including XM Radio. According to the press release, 'The Connection' will go silent after August 5th.

I for one am deeply saddened by this news. Dick Gordon made turned the flagging Connection flow into a truly fascinating hour of interviews and details after Chris Lydon's famous meltdown with WBUR staff. Apparently Gordon's firing was a surprise to Gordon as well, given to him after his show today.

I hope that another station will pick up the Connection and continue it's production.

If there is...

... a more magnificent piece of music than Beethoven's 9th Symphony, played in it's entirety, I don't know what it is.

XM Radio Classics did a wonderful 1/2 hour introduction / lecture on the piece before hand, and then presented the entire symphony, on period instruments, beginning to end. I ended up driving past the house and up the highway again to catch the 4th movement without having to pause to put Zach to bed (we were on our way back from Maine).

During the intro, I had forgotten this bit of history. When the piece was first performed in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven's hearing had deteriorated completely. He was completely deaf, and therefore never actually heard his masterpiece performed. As related on the wikipedia entry for the Ninth :

At the conclusion of the performance Beethoven had to be forcibly turned around to accept the audience's cheers and applause According to one witness, "the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them."

Can you imagine being in the theater and hearing this piece performed for the first time, not knowing what was to happen next, and being blindsided by the masterful 4th movement? And there, in front, the composer himself, not hearing the public's jubilant reception of his final work, not knowing of it until one of the members of the orchestra stood up and turned him around to see the audience's applause and cheering.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder.

While reading my favorite weekly column by James Randi, I happened upon a discussion where certain individuals were taking some of the Mars orbital photographs, magnifying them past all levels of sanity, washing them through photoshop several times so that all the JPG compression anomalies stood out bright and shiny, and then pointing to these anomalies and going "LOOK! BUILDINGS! IT'S A COVERUP!"

Now, this -must- be a characterization out of line of what these people were saying. Right? Mustn't it?

Sadly, no, it isn't.

I direct you, for your own entertainment, to the... comments of one Joseph P. Skipper, of MarsAnomalyResearch.com. Mister Skipper goes on for many many pages about how there is this vast coverup by scientists about existing advanced civilizations right here in our solar system.

Now, sure, give a guy some slack. The tin-hat folks can say "But, how do we KNOW? They're feeding us bad information!"

But, for argument, let me present Skipper's commentary on banding on the moon as presented by the Deep Space Program Science Experiment, aka Clementine. Skipper comments on this 'banding'...

Note that these poorly seen rows of artificial structures of some kind do not give the impression of buildings so much as of giant solid, sectional, possibly contoured, appearing reinforced alternating clamping system structures. Note how precisely horizontally distance separated one vertical row is from the other forming a clear definitive rigidly uniform south/north north/south orientation and precisely spaced apart pattern. So, not only does each of the individual bands speak clearly of artificiality, so to does the over all pattern of the many bands. It is very difficult to regard this as anything less than conclusive definitive proof of massive scale artificiality present on the Moon and on a colossal scale.

Now, it's quite easy to dismiss this fellows rantings as the standard woo-woo "The aliens are there!" twaddle, and that "the public is simply being deceived about the reality" and other bits, but Skipper tries to back up his rantings with 'facts' pulled from known sources.

But here's where it gets fun. The images that Skipper posts are pulled directly from the Clementine Lunar Image Browser, an online database of all the images from the survey. Skipper himself says how to retrieve the images, and he states that you should set the query to "1 pixel = 1 kilometer". His sample images are 768 pixels wide, which would make the pictures he's viewing 476 miles across. The moon has a diameter of 3,476 miles, so the pictures he's looking at would be about 1/7th of the diameter as we see it here from earth (not taking into account parallax errors due to curvature, etc). So, given those numbers, don't you think we could see those bands just standing out in a field and looking?

No? Lets go closer. A $100 pair of binoculars would give you a 10x resolution. Heck, lets go nuts - spend that $99 and get a 420x resolution telescope, and take a look at the moon. At that resolution, you should be able to discern objects down to something about 100' across. According to Skippers page, there is apparently a building that, according to his scale, is about 40km across. Should be pretty easy to see it, don't you think?

Alas, Skipper spends no time even considering the inanity of his arguments, and continues with the 'obvious cover-up' chatter and the declaration of deliberate obfuscation by the government.

Because the entire Clementine Moon imaging is visually a sea of a great many different types and levels of image tampering applications and obfuscation techniques covering and hiding evidence and creating false illusions as to terrain detail in the process and essentially covering and obscuring most of the Moon's entire surface as well as these bands.

It's amazing how people will persist in their delusions when all they have to do is walk outside and look up to see that what they're proposing is so ludicrous it defies explanation.

By the way, the 'banding' that Skipper goes on about was due to the fact that the Clementine probe was inserted into a polar orbit around the moon. When you take interlocked pictures of a globe while orbiting it, and piece them together to attempt to display them on a flat surface, there is interference where they overlap. That, combined with the fact that the CLIB database consists of JPEG images - compressed versions of the original imagery, which introduces 'square' and 'noisy' artifacts into an image, resulted in the 'bands' and 'buildings' that Skipper latches onto with such tenacity.

Moderation disabled

We're going to give a try to running without comment moderation for a while. So folks posting / commenting on things should be able to see their posts immediately. Let me know if anything odd crops up.

Aliens sighted over Florida! Or not...

This is sort of interesting. If you go to a few specific spots in Google Maps, you can see what appears to be huge spheres over parts of Florida.

A bunch of folks have been chatting about this, and several theories ("It's a Mentos ad!") have been suggested ("Swamp gas from a weather balloon got trapped in a thermal pocket and refracted the light from venus.").

Curiously, there appears to be several of these 'Florida Spheres' aligned in a loose grid pattern. I'm sure the tin-foil hat crowd will leap on this as either proof that the invasion has started, or to explain the sporadic voting record in Florida. Hmm.

What seems the most likely answer is this is a bit of condensation within the camera body itself (if it were on the lens it would be invisible). These pictures were taken via an airplane flyover, so it could very well be water. In fact, on the Flickr site above, you can see the 'drop' has evaporated or moved around a bit.

Not to say this'll stop the UFO-ites, but it should be interesting to see what spin(s) folk take on this.

Another great idea on 'solar' power

Saw this one over on GizMag...

Want cheap, green electricity? The Australians have a simple answer. First, build a 20,000-acre greenhouse to trap and heat air. Then build a colossal tower 1 km (.62 miles) tall in the middle of it. The warm air from the greenhouse will rise through the tower as it would through a chimney, turning turbines and generating enough electricity to power 200,000 Australian homes. It may sound like science fiction, but the project is on track to get approved by the Australian government. If completed, the $800 million solar tower will be the tallest man-made structure in the world.

Time Magazine had it in their 2002 'Best Inventions' category.

$800 million, powers 200,000 Australian homes, and uses up no fuels, and has very little maintenance. AND the greenhouses can be used for other things - all they have to be is hot. I'll take it!

CSS noodling, PHP coding, and other geek fun.

I've just arisen from my death-like existence for the past 2 days, and it appears I've just about shaken off the evil cold that has had me in it's grips since Sunday night. I wasn't even able to read email for more than 5 minutes without getting woozy. Talk about tragic.

So, in a burst of "I'M BACK!" I've done a bunch of LONG needed updates to Planet-Geek and the MT Comments Counter:

• Fixed the Comments preview function so it actually renders properly.
  
• Revamped the color scheme in the individual archive view - so comments and their authors are no longer in that weird green tint. Not sure what I was thinking there.
  
• CSS layout on individual archives and the main page were blocked wrong so it was very easy to have the 'links' sidebar disappear, relegated to the bottom of the page. This should be fixed so that sidebar will only move if you make your browser VERY narrow (comments on this please, I'm only evaluating with Firefox).
  
• We still don't have TypeKey support enabled, but we're still working on it! Anyone who has suggestions on how to get it working properly in MT 3.14 I'd love to hear it.
  
• On the MTC counter, I've changed from a single-image stream function to generating the graphic totally on the fly. This allows multiple-digit displays for very comment-heavy postings, as well as removing the need for a directory full of graphic images.
  

A good few hours of noodling. Check it out, let me know if anything needs tweaking, or if things just Look Terrible [tm].

Bob Parsons goes off the deep end

Recently I was pointed to a series of postings on Bob Parsons blog regarding some decisions made by the company that administers the .US domain (that being Neustar).

Mr. Parsons, who is the founder of GoDaddy, a very successful domain registrar, goes on to comment that the recent decision by the NTIA made it 'illegal to have a private registration' of a domain.

While the decision by the NTIA may be poorly founded, and Neustars interpretation of the decision flawed (nowhere in Mr. Parsons postings, nor on Neustars site, nor on the NTIA's site did I find a link to the rule change that is being talked about), I feel Mr. Parsons reaction to be overly dramatic and in fact harmful to the clear and informed process that should be followed when things like this arise.

From Mr. Parsons posting on March 29th :

But Mr. Parsons doesn't stop there. This is not a poor decision by a government beaurocracy. This is an ASSAULT on our RIGHTS to PRIVACY! I will quote here:

It's ironic that we lost our right to privacy on the one domain name that says we are Americans! I find it ironic that our rights to .US privacy were stripped away (without due process) by a federal government agency that should be looking out for our individual rights. For them to choose the .US domain name is the ultimate slap in the face. .US is the one domain name that is specifically intended for Americans. Think about this for a moment: These bureaucrats stripped away the privacy, guaranteed by the first amendment and that you're entitled to as an American, on the only domain name (.US) that says that you are an American. I am outraged by this --- you should be also.

Let me be clear here. I think the NTIA's decision was a poor one, and should be addressed, but I feel that Mr. Parsons has gone off the deep end equating a poor decision by a government agency with an all out assault on our rights as US citizens.

Domain registrations are a process of creating a space in the public forum where you wish to voice or present information that is uniquely associated with yourself. It is not an anonymous forum. "Private Registrations" are a false workaround to publishing Whois information, by registering the domain through a secondary proxy (in GoDaddy's case, they are using DomainsByProxy, an affiliate website. The legality of this form of registration is already questioned, since the ownership of a domain could already be perceived as being misrepresented.

I wholly support the process of calling the NTIA and/or Neustar to task for this decision, but it should be pursued in a sane, intelligent way, not via rants and handwaving in the style Mr. Parsons seems to prefer.

NYYC to host 100yr Rolex Transatlantic Challenge

With its entry list now final, the Rolex Transatlantic Challenge 2005, hosted by the New York Yacht Club (NYYC) with the cooperation of the Royal Yacht Squadron (RYS), is holding true to its promise of being one of the greatest sailing races of the 21st Century. On May 21, 20 entrants—ranging in size from 70 to 252 feet (21.3m to 77m) and averaging 112 feet (34.1m)--will set out on a course from New York to The Lizard in England, recreating the Great Ocean Race of 1905. In that historic race, the schooner Atlantic, skippered by the legendary Charlie Barr, set a record that has not been broken by a monohull in a race for 100 years.

For those who like sailing pictures, there's a fantastic gallery of high resolution pictures of all the entrants available at the NYYC site. Full story at nyyc.org

Asta la vista, baby... VHS is outtahere.

According to this article from Reuters, VHS is gettin the boot...

"Accepting the inevitable, Britain's biggest high street electronics retailer Dixons announced over the weekend that it was taking VHS video players off its shelves for good."

Good riddance.

Why don't I use the Livejournal Comments system?

I have a fairly large readership that uses Livejournal as a news aggregator for reading my blog postings. This posting is for them...

Ya'll probably notice a tagline in the postings you see that ask not to use the Livejournal comments mechanism to post replies. The reasoning behind this is that I want to keep commentary on the postings in one place - on the blog itself. When you comment on the feed in Livejournal, you're just commenting on 'a copy of' the article, not the article itself.

I do understand that there are elements of the Livejournal comments mechanism that I do not have available in Movable Type (my blogging software), such as threaded comments, etc. I'm working to add that functionality via plugins, but for the time being, I do ask that if you want to comment on my postings, please click through to the original article, and comment there.

JFK Non-conspiracy analysis by Discovery Channel

Being fairly active in the web-news-blog-chat-whatever community, it always amuses me to watch the general public spin itself into ever more complex and improbable situations, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. I guess people just have a hard time accepting that sometimes things are just what they seem to be.

Case in point. On November 22nd, 1963, John F Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. This one event has been the target for ceaseless analysis, arguments, theories and other bruhaha. The question that always comes up is "Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?"

Lyndon Johnson created the Warren Commission to review all the evidence on this event. After 10 months, it determined that Yes, Lee Harvey Oswald had in fact acted alone.

From my side, there were several things I had heard bandied about regarding conspiracy theories. I've watched numerous documentaries that set up some pretty wild concepts, but there were a few things that did concern me, that I hadn't heard reasonable explanations for.

For instance. The "single bullet theory" that describes a single shot that hit both JFK and Governor John Connelly has been called into question many many times, and referred to as "a magic bullet", because, so say the conspirists, the bullet would have had to make a 'right angle turn in mid air' to take the the path people say it has.

Another element is that the bullet was found on a gurney at the hospital, apparently totally undamaged. How could a single bullet have gone through 2 men (including breaking John Connelly's wrist) and not be deformed at all? "It can't have" so says the theorists.

Lastly, there are "inconsistencies" in the coroners report, such as an initial report that the president was struck in the middle of his back, right side, which was later changed to show an entry wound much higher. The theorists say "The evidence was changed to match what they wanted us to believe!"

Last night I watched a fantastic show on Discovery Channel regarding many of these questions. Lately some of the cable channels have really gone off the deep end, dedicating entire shows to 'ghost hunters' and other drivel, all under the guise of scientific investigation. Last nights show was outstanding in that the goal not to bring up interesting theories and speculate on "ooo, what's the REAL story here!!! Lets get some dirt!", but to seriously examine what happened, and posit "Could this have happened just as the Warren Commission and other more reasonable voices have said?"

The answer they came up with was 'Absolutely.'. Looking at the few things raised above:

The single bullet theory: Arguments have been made that the path the bullet took from Oswalds gun could not have lined up as theory states. In fact, the Discover Channel team did line up things perfectly, taking into account several small details that the theorists tend to ignore. First, Kennedy's right arm was up on the side of the car, raising up his clothing and changing the placement of his back. Second, Governor Connelly was not sitting directly in front of hte president. He was sitting on a 'jumpseat' in the limousine, which is about 5" lower than the presidents seat. Third, Governor Connelly was not facing forward when the bullet struck. He was turned about 20 degrees to the right. Given these 3 positions, and assuming a slight deflection when the bullet broke one of Connelly's ribs, the line up is near perfect.

The non-deformed bullet: The bullet fired from Oswald's gun was a 6.5mm 'Full Metal Jacket' bullet. Using the exact same ammo and gun, the Discovery Channel team used ballistic gel and human bones to line up the same shot. Striking ribs and gel on the 2 targets, including muscle sinew and cartlidge, the bullet was more deformed than the one found on the gurney, but only slightly. This was determined to be caused by the bullet striking 2 entire ribs in the target dummy, instead of just the one in the actual shooting. Also, the 'pristine' bullet found on the gurney was not pristine at all, but was in fact quite bent and flattened, with part of the lead internals deformed out of the casing. So much for pristine.

Given these details and the meticulous work done by the Discovery team, I am fully convinced that the 'single bullet theory' is valid, and the 'magic bullet' theorist yammering is total BS.

Planet Geek? Try.. PLANET CHAOS! AHAHHAHAH!

Okay, maybe not quite that bad.

Ya'll may have noticed that I've been posting some new reviews, and made a new section just for Linux and Mac playable webgames. I was getting tired of going to websites that advertise WEB GAMES! Play online for free!, only to find the links for the games are either ActiveX applications or simply a downloadable .exe file. The net is far from homogenous, guys, get with the program.

Anyway, as part of my fight against The Man, I decided to start collecting the best of the online games that are not windows-dependent. As I started working through them, I realized that my Flash player for Firefox was not working. While this doesn't affect Java based games, it really does limit access to some of the more entertaining stuff.

What followed was 3-4 hours of arguing with multiple Firefox installs trying to get the libflashplayer.so plugin to work. Firefox would recognize it, and 'about:plugins' would show it, but nothing would display. I'm still not running, so until I do, no more game reviews. (If anyone has deep insight in to configuring Debian Linux and Firefox to run this correctly, I'd love to hear about it.)

The other chaotic element is we're going to move all the MovableType based blogs off Homeport and onto Dwight's machine, which is a managed system located at Serverbeach. This'll give us greater bandwidth, better support, and less dependency on our home connectivity.

This will affect Planet Geek (Yours truly!), Emergent Chaos (Adam's fine blog!), HandsOffMyBag.com (Voice your rights!), and Stonekeep.com (Conferences are cool!). We're planning to do it in a way that will generate zero downtime, so even the people running the blogs shouldn't notice the change, but there may be a bump or two along the way.

Fun right here in river city!

New MovableType version

This weekend blog goddess Lisa spent a couple hours and upgraded the blogging software that drives Planet Geek and my business site Stonekeep Consulting. It was a bit of a rocky upgrade, but tonight everything is up and running properly.

A HUGE thanks to her and all the work put in. Yay!

One sideline... MovableType can now use TypeKey to verify people posting comments on the site. This is a way to help cut down the amount of blog spam my site gets (hundreds of attempted posts per day). If you don't use TypeKey, comments postings will remain 'queued' until I approve them, so things posted may take a bit of time to appear.

Aiee! Comments problems!

That'll teach me to be heavy-handed with deleting blogspam.

I inadvertantly turned off comments on my blog for about a day (from Saturday through today). Thanks as always to Lisa for finding the offending rule in my configuration.

All fixed now. You may resume flamage!

Slashdot: Neal Stephenson interview

In my delerious state, I decided to read the interview with Neal Stephenson over on my favorite geek news site Slashdot. They do a fair amount of interviewing there, but this is one of the best. Neal is in his prime. Highly recommended.

Trivia tidbit du jour

Did you know that Canadian coins stick to magnets?

I was carrying around one of the spiffy Google pins I got at Gnomedex in my pocket this weekend, and noted that one of the coins I had stuck to it (quite strongly). Fishing it out, I noticed it was a Canadian quarter.

Having been brought up with the knowledge that "Coins do not stick to magnets" this was quite an interesting discovery.

A quick bit of relaxation. Best space-military portrayal?

Finally got a few minutes to sit down and watch a little tv... and what should be on, but Aliens... and it got me thinking. This is an 18 year old movie (1986! Can you believe it?) and to me it's still one of the best portrayals of a future military. Equipment, personnel, and everything, it's something I can actually watch and go "Yeah, I could see that." This is as opposed to garbage like Starship Troopers which had me rolling my eyes every 5 minutes with "Oh PLEASE!". (Planetary drop operation - why is every carrier within a few hundred feet of the other? Where, oh, if one drifts off line just a bit, it'll smash into the next ship over... sheesh.)

So, what do you think? Movies that even come close to being believable about a future military. Marines in space, if you will.

Blogspam and Livejournal feed updates.

I got nailed 3 times in the last 24 hours with blogspam to Planet Geek Now, normally spam doesn't bug me that much, It's there, its' a part of dealing with life on the net. A minor annoyance. But the way we had the LJ feed set up, anytime someone posted a comment, even in an old archive, the posting will show up on LiveJournal, because the RSS feed content changed (the 'Comments (4)' went to 'Comments (5)').

This is why folks are seeing old postings from me in their friends list. This drives me absolutely nuts, because I know it really annoys you all as well.

I've just altered the feed to take the 'count' portion of the comments out of the feed, so that even if someone adds a comment on the blog, it won't update the feed (proper). The problem there is you never see if there are comments available, and there's no way to avoid this using the mechanism that Livejournal provides.

Anyway, this change will most likely cause my entire feed to update, and everyone may get a pile of rehashed postings. My apologies, this should be the last time.

Baby's First Trebuchet - fixed!

Well silly me. I had this spiffy link on Planet Geek's home page to Baby's First Trebuchet ages ago, but when I moved Stonekeep's site over to the new format, the old directory disappeared.

It's fixed now, and at some point I should work on the next generation of that thing, but it was fun when it was working :)

Bah!

I just got my first phone spam. A hotmail return address and everything. I've had this number for probably 3+ years now, I hope this doesn't get to be a problem. I may have to disable msging on it (which I almost -never- use - but it is set up for downtime paging from offsite monitoring... have to figure out how to let that through)

Ptui.

From the folks who did 'Grow'

Another fun Flash game - my highest is 31.7 feet. How bout you?
Try Vanilla.

Oops

Sorry bout that folks, we made a change to the LJ feed setup, which caused livejournal to assume all the posts happened just now. THis'll make the postings look better (there was an extraneous link in there).

Overheard on NPR

"Relationships are 2% sex, 98% trying to figure out where to go for dinner." - Kyle Smith on NPR's Morning Edition

When Brass Was King.

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.

Semantics debate.

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?

That's no boat. That's a SPACE STATION!

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.

Listening to Schooner Fair with Zach...

From Schooner Fair -- Alive!

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.

From Portland, Maine, to Yarmouth Sound
Two-twenty miles we ran
In eighteen hours, my bully boys,
Now beat that if you can.
The crew said it was seamanship;
The skipper, he kept dumb.
But the force that drove our vessel
Was the power of Portland rum.

Come all ye hardy haddockers
Who winter fishin' go.
And brave the seas upon the banks
In stormy wind and snow
And ye who love hard driving
Come listen to my lay
Of the run we made from Portland
On the Mary L. McKay.

We hung the muslin on her
As the wind began to hum.
Twenty hardy Nova Scotia men
Chock full of Portland rum.
Mainsail, fores'l, jib and jumbo
On that wild December day
As we passed ole Cape Elizabeth
And slugged for Fundy Bay.

Storm along, drive along
Punch her through the rips.
Northeast gale's a blowin',
And we'll take all that she gives.
We're homeward bound to Yarmouth Sound
Two-twenty miles today
We made the run on Portland rum
On the Mary L. McKay.

We slammed her by Monhegan
As the gale began to scream.
Our vessel took to dancing
In a way that was no dream.
A howler o'er the taffrail, b'ye
As we steered sou'east away
For she was a hound for running
Was the Mary L. McKay.

We slammed her to Matinicus.
The skipper hauled the log
"Sixteen knots! Lord Harry!
Ain't she just the gal to jog?"
The half-canned wheelsman shouted
As he swung her on her way
"Just watch me tear the mainsail off
The Mary L. McKay."

Chorus

The rum was passing merrily
And the crew was feeling grand
Longnecks dancing in our wake
From where we left the land.
Our skipper he kept sober
For he knew how things could lay,
And he made us furl the mains'l
On the Mary L. McKay.

Now the captain didn't care to make
His wife a widow yet.
He swung her off to Yarmouth Cape
With just her fores'l set
Past Fourchu in the mornin'
And shut in at break of day
And soon in shelterin' harbor
Lay the Mary L. McKay.

Chorus

From Portland, Maine, to Yarmouth Sound
Two-twenty miles we ran.
In eighteen hours, my bully boys,
Now beat that if you can.
The crew said it was seamanship;
The skipper he kept dumb.
But the force that drove our vessel
Was the power of Portland rum.

A good argument for those pesky anti-gay activists...

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.

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

g) Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?

i) I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan

An interview with George RR Martin

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!

A quicky survey, if you please...

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!

Mmm. Biodiesel.

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.

What we need now is a general station or two in the Boston area so I can switch over to using biodiesel fulltime. This ladies webpage has a lot of interesting tidbits about her and her son switching to TDI engines running Biodiesel fulltime, including the problem of going 100% biodiesel (it tends to clog the fuel filter right after you switch, since the biodiesel will clean out a lot of the deposits already in the