Thank you John!

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(matthieu on May 8, 2008 9:07 AM) Hi, for those who want to get a view from within about cohousing, watch the documentary "Voices of Cohousing. Rebuilding villages in the city", award winner at the 34th Ekotopfilm festival 2007 and nominated at 9th Gold Panda Awards. For trailer and info: http://notsocrazy.net. Enjoy!

It's no secret I'm a huge booster of KDE, and specifically Konqueror, the built-in web browser. It's fast, powerful, standards compliant, and just plain works.

But please, KDE folks, ferchrissake, fix the damned spell checker.

When editing things in TEXTAREA fields in Konqueror, occasionally you'll get the red text of a misspelled word (or one that is simply not in the dictionary). That's fine, no problems. In the Gnome world (and the variants such as those used in Thunderbird, my other most-used app, you can right click on the misspelled word, and it'll happily give you a list of alternate spellings.

But no, not in KDE. The right click menu has no context for the misspelled word. It simply gives you the option of 'check spelling', which pulls up a dialog that spell checks the entire textarea, from beginning to end. Every time.

That means I get prompted for 'href' and 'png' and 'img' and 'valign' and all the other fun things that I type into my blog postings, long before I get to the current word.

Dear KDE. Please fix this behaviour. Make a context-sensitive spell checker. Luv, me

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• Got my chair back!
  My trusty Aeron chair developed a bit of a problem last week, and after realizing I was out of my service warranty (apparently Herman Miller's 12 year warranty is only valid when sold a chair directly from a dealer. It is not transferrable), I took it to a local dealership who replaced the broken bits and gave the chair a general tuneup. I felt all yuppie-ish as I hauled my OFFICE CHAIR into the shop for service. "Gotta run, the Miller is ready to be picked up from the shop. Lets do lunch!"
• Cohousing from On High
  Check this action out. We managed to get pictures from a fly-by over the site. That's how things look in Berlin as of the middle of last week. The 5 'missing' buildings on Mosaic's side are the ones that were held up, and framing on them should be starting within the next week or two. Wahoo!
• FileUploader sucks
  This is a total random hassle, but I cannot for the life of me get the Apache Commons FileUpload library to work. I've written it just as the docs say, but I'll be damned if I can figure out why it doesn't work. Know Java? Know how this library works? Check out the code I'm using. Just won't work, durnit. Grump.
• Cuecat?!?
  This weekend I hauled out a CueCat scanner I picked up AGES ago, and decided to test it out using the ReaderWare application for DVD, CD, and Book cataloguing. The CueCat, for a free barcode reader, worked as advertised. It's uncomfortable to use, but it does what it's supposed to do - scans a barcode in as keyboard input, and hits [enter]. So I know it works under Linux just fine. I'm less impressed with ReaderWare. While it seems to do the basic job, it has a very clunky interface, and feels... old. I know it's an old app, but you'd think they could do something with the 90's Swing look. I may go ahead and license a copy of it, to get some other functionality, but I'm already considered spinning my own. In my copious spare time, of course.
• Websites moving
  Sometime soon one of the servers we've been sharing space on will be shut down. This means a good half dozen very busy websites need to be moved off it to other hosts. I've been slowly migrating sites and functionality off the machine, but it's slow going. Most likely I'll be moving away from Movable Type (the latest update - 4.1 - is so vastly different than what I'm using now, I might as well just move to Drupal and be happy. I'll keep folks posted.
• Ubuntu 8.04 - Hardy Heron is out!
  I've upgraded yawl to the latest version of Ubuntu (in reality, I run Kubuntu, but the differences are only in KDE vs Gnome). So far things are smooth. Nothing has broken, everything is working as expected. New versions of Digikam and GIMP were installed, as well as a beta of Firefox3. FF3 is not blowing me away yet. There's a lot of niceties in it, but it still can't come near the speed of Konqueror.
• Bose Lifestyle 48 is back too
  Speaking of things being back from repairs. I sent my Lifestyle 48 off to Bose (in Arizona of all places) for repair. It had been skipping in movies, including total disc lockups 3/4ths of the way through a flick (and some movies not loading at all). Even a firmware update didn't fix it. I can say happily that it's back and installed and working perfectly. I've only run 3-4 movies through it so far, but there hasn't been a single blip yet. Yay!

I'm sure there's lots of other goings on I'm missing, but there's a brief glimpse of Life at Planet Geek! (insert Garrison Keillor witty signoff chatter here)

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(sah on May 4, 2008 12:37 AM) Hmm, that almost looks like a little goat farm just beyond your border...

(Anil Dash on May 5, 2008 2:32 PM) Hi Dave, we've been glad to have you on MT over the years, and would love to keep you using Movable Type. If you've got feedback or questions about MT4, please don't hesitate to get in touch, and you might be pleased to know that you won't need to upgrade any of your templates if you do make the migration. Let us know if you've got any other concerns.

This one does it. Beginning to end.

Robert Downey Jr? Welcome back.
Gwyneth Paltrow? You're still hot, and this time, they let you act.
Jeff Bridges? Long way from Kevin Flynn, you still got it.

And for those who like the mechanics, the CGI, the detail, all the visuals? I once saw a quick review of Transformers that said "Less girl, more robot." - I was fully expecting not to get enough of Tony Stark's creations in Iron Man. In this, I was disappointed. There was plenty, and it was a steady stream of awesome.

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(chris on May 6, 2008 12:55 PM) Yea, pretty sweet ride! CGI was good and not too "And now for the CGI portion of the show." Well, okay, maybe just a bit. A bit. But I still enjoyed it - damn it. RDJr. - well done. GP - Looking more womanly (not girly) = hotter in my book. JB - Somehow you managed to capture the evil goodness of today's corporate elite.

(chris on May 6, 2008 12:55 PM) Yea, pretty sweet ride! CGI was good and not too "And now for the CGI portion of the show." Well, okay, maybe just a bit. A bit. But I still enjoyed it - damn it. RDJr. - well done. GP - Looking more womanly (not girly) = hotter in my book. JB - Somehow you managed to capture the evil goodness of today's corporate elite.

(chris on May 6, 2008 12:57 PM) argh. double post. noob!

JVM download for Palm OS® devices no longer available from Palm

As of January 12, 2008, Palm no longer has rights to distribute the IBM WebSphere Micro Environment Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to our customers. JVM allows users to install and run Java applications and games on Palm OS® devices.

Palm is not able to offer the JVM download or version upgrades. We will continue to support existing installations of JVM on our website.

Opera Mini
We have advised Opera support that the Palm OS JVM is no longer available. There is no alternate Java Virtual Machine that we are aware of for Palm OS. We know of no way to run Opera Mini on Palm OS if you do not already possess the JVM. We regret the inconvenience.

Sigh. I wish the iPhone SDK licensing didn't suck so much (which is also preventing the release of a JVM for the iPhone). Or that the Android phones had some hope of being more than vaporware in the near future.

My Treo 650 won't last forever. And I refuse to run Windows on my phone. What's a geek to do? As noted on the Palm Blog, the Centro seems to be the only thing left in the lineup to move to (of course Verizon doesn't support it), but it's still the same ancient platform, with no new features except coming in a nicer package. I want wifi, I want bluetooth that doesn't suck, I want a web browser that doesn't suck. I fear I am destined to be disappointed.

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(Lisa on May 1, 2008 12:45 PM) Sad! I like my Treo. :p

(PJH on May 1, 2008 4:04 PM) Have you seen http://websphere-everyplace-micro-environment.en.softonic.com/palm Didn't come up in FF but does in IE.

(Matt on May 1, 2008 11:38 PM) I'm trying to decide what kind of smartphone to buy. So far the Nokia N95 is high on the list. I won't run Windows on my phone and I won't do business with Sprint again. The iPhone doesn't run ssh and doesn't support tethering, even though there are no technical reasons why it couldn't. Decisions, decisions.

(Harimad on May 2, 2008 9:32 AM) My needs are even simpler. All I want is a clamshell that can be my address book . Nada. The two apparently don't exist in combination.

I Love 'em.

This will come as a surprise to no one, but still I must go on. While at the MIT Flea market last Sunday, I picked up another bag load of DVD's from Yet Another movie store closing down. At $3 each, it totally falls under my "never pay more than $10 for a movie" rule.

I updated my listing, sorted them onto the shelves, and added in 2 movies given to me as a gift from blk, and totalled things up. I'm over 315 DVD's now, and my appetite is not yet sated! More! More! I'm still not satisfied!

What I hadn't updated in a while was updating my wishlist, so taking some cues from Dumb Distractions (thanks crouchback), I filled out the list of movies I don't have, but feel should be part of the collection.

I'm sure I'm missing some good ones. Whadya think? Any suggestions?

See the collection and wishlist here.

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(Tamidon on Apr 28, 2008 10:41 PM) any interest in old movies? i can't pick out much pre1970s. 3 favourites of mine are: the Quiet Man, the Third Man, Gaslight...I could come up with more

(dbs on Apr 28, 2008 10:53 PM) Old movies are great. I already have The Quiet Man (and watch it at least once a year). Third Man I don't know at all, and Gaslight is an excellent suggestion. I'll add it!

(Tamidon on Apr 28, 2008 10:55 PM) Quiet Man is just about my favourite, but The Third man is seriously intense

(Dennis and Joanne on May 3, 2008 3:31 PM) FWIW - Seems we now have about 3k dvds - we enjoy nearly all the films made by FELLINI - we *very recently* viewed (and thoroughly enjoyed) "ILLUSIONIST, THE (2006)," "PI (1998)," "PRIMER (2004)," "PUZZLEHEAD (2005)," "SPACEMAN (1997)" and "WILD BLUE YONDER, THE (2005)" - Our ALL-TIME BEST FILMS at the moment include some of the oldies-but-goodies and are posted on the internet at: http://www.amazon.com/World-s-All-Time- Best-Films-My-Choices/lm/20ZFBDRBK3ZVE/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_full

(Dennis and Joanne on May 5, 2008 2:04 PM) Sorry for the broken Amazon link in our recent post above - quess we coulda/shoulda used TinyUrl. Seemed completely ok on the Preview/Edit before posting though. Edit, *after* posting LJ Comments, would be nice of course. :)

Rock band is mighty cool.

I've been avoiding it. I totally loved DDR, not only for the plain fun of the game, but it gave me a workout! Double bonus.

In the last 24 hours I've played about 2 hours of Rock Band, and I gotta admit, drumming is a lot of fun. Not as aerobic as DDR, but certainly not couch potato material.

Course, a full setup would cost a couple hundred bucks I don't have, so I don't see picking up in the near future, but, er, if folks are playing, er, lemme know? :)

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(Allen on Apr 26, 2008 1:02 PM) Oh, you will know when it's on, Dave. You will damn sure know. Brian, Ben, Christy and I had a damn fine night of rocking last night -- we collectively cleared one million points on some song which I can't even remember right now. And we did an 11-track setlist of songs from the 90s, during which I had to play drums the entire as I'm the only who's worked up to Hard on drums, and we were forced to play that set on Hard. Damn fun stuff, that. Glad you've come aboard. :)

(dbs on Apr 26, 2008 9:18 PM) Well, I just went another round. I'm playing drums and bass (duh) a lot - oddly, i'm clicking into the bass without too much trouble at all. I think it's just what I'm used to listening to when playing. Drumming is HARD! if I didn't have to deal with the kicker, I'd be just grand. But that foot action is tough. I'm a solid Medium in drumming now, I'll keep practicing :) Who is singing?

(Allen on Apr 29, 2008 7:17 AM) The other three (other two when Ben's not around) rotate out singing. I don't sing. :) The kick pedal is definitely the hardest part about drumming -- getting to where your foot moves independently of what your hands are doing is a real bitch. I'm getting there, but it's still tough. The guys who made the game say that if you can play the drums in the game on hard and expert, then you can play the real drums. I don't think they're far wrong.

(dbs on Apr 29, 2008 11:14 AM) Well, i can see where experience on the RockBand drums would translate to 'real' drumming, and being able to do proper syncopation with 3 limbs is pretty good. What is missing are things like velocity sensititivty (hitting a tom hard in the middle is very different than hitting a tom lightly at the edge, etc), and of course there's no high hat. So really, you're down one entire limb here (I use my 'unused' foot to keep the drum kit from skitting away from me while playing :) I actually did a stint singing this weekend, and I'm reminded I'm not very good - but picking 'More than a Feeling' to sing was a very very poor choice. Homey don't hit those high notes. So when are we playing? :)

I packed up the Mame Cabinet into the van. The new pipe-and-fixture arrangement worked well for quick disassembly, but it's still a large cabinet. This'll be the second 'field test' for the arrangement. I brought it to the last Ubercon, but it was missing much of the upper half. I've also replaced MythTV and MythGame with Kubuntu 8.04 and KXMame, which seem to be working very very well. We'll see how it all goes.

Might be blogging from the event, otherwise, see ya'll Sunday!

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(eagle on Apr 25, 2008 2:11 AM) Is there a meta-con-website where you find out about all these great conventions? I would sure like to know about upcomign cons in my area! :)

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Last week, the spam levels got to be too much, and I checked into the greylisting configuration on our main server. It wasn't enabled! Somehow our postfix entries had gotten removed (we're guessing an overzealous edit with an RCS checkout overwriting things).

Anyway, after restarting, I've had a few days to see what impact there is. The spam dropoff has been ridiculously dramatic, as my spam reporter shows:

Breakdown by day: (10172 posts, average of 1453.1 posts per day.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
	 Apr 20 | Apr 19 | Apr 18 | Apr 17 | Apr 16 | Apr 15 | Apr 14 
	   130  |   143  |   136  |   1393  |   3038  |   2417  |   2915

This is showing only mail that comes into my inbox, and has been tagged as spam by Amavis. This doesn't show how much mail is being rejected, but it's pretty obvious since I enabled greylisting (middle of the day on Apr 17th), things have... fallen off to something like 5% of the original level.

Now that's good stuff.

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(ceo on Apr 21, 2008 6:15 PM) Is this already set up for all users, or do I need to set it up? (And if the latter, how?)

We'd end up taking 4 more trips down there, once with her company, then 3 doing our own bareboat chartering (the picture above is from one of those trips, where we caught sight of the Flying Cloud while stopping at Normal Island). Our last trip was in 2002, after which most of our time and money was being sunk into Mosaic, so we haven't been back since. I miss it!

I've been off and on keeping an eye on Windjammer Cruises, thinking it might be nice to take a trip again. We thoroughly enjoyed our first time - it was very laid back and comfortable. They don't call it 'Barefoot Cruising' for nuthin.

Alas, the Windjammer company has basically fallen apart. There are many suggestions as to why this has happened, but it appears it's mostly due to infighting among the Burkes, the family that owns the business. The fleet is completely laid up, and even though the website is active, they haven't sailed in over a year. They are essentially closed up permanently.

I hope another comes along to take up the concept. Having a cruise that is part sailing, part exploring, part cruising, without all the stuffiness that tends to come with your standard 'big ship' cruising was very nice, and I'd hate to not have that opportunity in the future.

Edit, 11:40am - There is a fantastic, lengthy article on Cruisemates.com that details the entire history of Windjammer, and how badly they've come apart. Highly recommended.

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(hauntmeister on Apr 19, 2008 10:23 AM) I went on two Windjammer cruises in the early 1990's. One on the Polynesia, one on the Yankee Clipper, and I really enjoyed them both. But from the articles I've read, it's more than simple infighting. There seems to have been a longstanding dishonesty about the business, with any number of partners getting screwed out of their investments, and the venture being deliberately set up to obscure ownership of the business parts. And then there was the way the company collapsed, with them promising cruises, up to the last minue, on nonfunctional ships, so dozens of would-be passengers had to eat the cost of thousands in airfare. http://boards.cruisecritic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=113

(dbs on Apr 19, 2008 11:31 AM) @hauntmeister: Yah, I've seen a couple of the postings and the whole fiasco with their new ship. It's sad, really. I assume much of the pain had to do with the slump that happened during the dotcom days. I'm sure tourism and activity in the caribbean slacked off enormously, and they probably got caught in the backwash. Trying to expand when revenue is dropping. That's no excuse for bad management and shifty business practices certainly, but there's all sorts of issues to think about. (Interestingly, when I was in the BVI's in 2002, I was hearing some of the 'maintenance' rumors already. The Cloud apparently had either sunk or taken on a huge amount of water at one point, and they refloated it. Very reassuring :)

April 20th - MIT Flea Market
As part of the great cleanout, I'll be hauling a vanload of gear to the MIT Fleamarket on Sunday, along with a couple other cohousing friends. This is not a 'for profit' sell-off. I'm getting RID of stuff. A quarter for that 1U dual opteron? Go for it! (okay, not really), but I will have piles of stuff that I just don't need or want anymore, please take it away?

April 25-27 - Ubercon X
Yep, another Ubercon! Yay! I'll be down in NJ again working registration. The change this time? Zach will be coming with me (his first gaming con!). Pretty exciting stuff.

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(Harimad on Apr 15, 2008 11:30 AM) Based on my and others' experience, I think you'll get rid of stuff faster if you price them cheaply (and at different prices) than if everything's free for $1.

(dbs on Apr 15, 2008 11:51 AM) Isn't it weird? I've completely seen that behaviour. I'll do that for chassis, monitors, anything bulky or interesting in itself, but I'll also have an "Anything in this box for $1" thing set up. We'll see how it goes :)

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(Dave on Apr 15, 2008 12:57 PM) Nice! I woulda gone for a CRT monitor though. More authentic.

(dbs on Apr 15, 2008 1:18 PM) @Dave - Well, authentic has been done, done, and redone. While I admire the recreations of standard arcade cabinets, I wanted to do something a little different. WHile the bottom half of the cabinet is pretty 'standard', the top is obviously a different design. Where I'm going with this whole thing? Not 100% sure. I still dont' know how I'll handle the speakers (though that monitor has speakers in it), and I'll eventually rebuild the controller panel. But for now, I'm enjoying.

I have on my desk two machines that are relatively equal in use configuration. They are both development machines, configured with MySQL, Apache, various editors and other environments, including chat clients and a variety of daemons. In general terms, they're equivelent.

So I decided to boot each machine from scratch, starting a timer at the end of POST, when the first part of the OS loads. Stop-timer was when CPU usage went down to 'idle'. Windows XP meant the Task Manager CPU usage indicator was hovering around 6%, and on my Linux box, when my load manager showed the job queue was basically empty.

Machine 1 : yawl (Kubuntu Linux, Pentium 4 2.26gig, 2 gig memory):
Time to startup: 2 minutes, 0 seconds.

Machine 2 : clipper (Windows XP, Dual core 2.16gig, 2 gig memory):
Time to startup: 2 minutes, 53 seconds.

The XP machine was slower, but it shouldn't have been. It is a dual core machine. While that doesn't translate immediately to 2x the performance, it should at least show an improvement over the older, slower single core machine. Apparently not.

Lets try some other bits.

yawl: Time to start up eclipse: 22 seconds.

clipper: Time to start up eclipse: 34 seconds.

I don't know what other benchmarks I can run here. XP is a slower OS than Linux.

I'll caveat something though. There are tools for XP that are optimized for it. Some GUI apps are far faster under XP than they are under Linux. But to my mind that shows that things can be made to run faster on an XP box. But for folks who make blanket statements about XP being faster / less bloated / whatever than Linux, think a little more about what you're using as a basis for that statement.

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(Dave on Apr 15, 2008 8:39 AM) The guy's only experience with Linux was probably one of those LIVE cds that run entirely off the cd drive. Most common first encounter for Linux n00bs and a heck of a lot slower than a fully installed Linux.

Last night I finally sat down to rewrite the stylesheet into something reasonably attractive. I got rid of the dark background and greytones, and the 'All Caps' font styles, and used more pastels.

I'm pretty happy with the result, but for the hundred or so folks who are used to the old look and feel, it'll be a dramatic change!

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(Lisa on Apr 14, 2008 10:12 AM) It looks great!