Bibbles and tidbits.

I find myself with a whole series of little things to yammer about, but any one of them don’t really add up to an interesting post of it’s own, so rather than let them slip away into the dark musty corners of my head, might as well spew them out upon the ether, so they can clutter up your collective consciousnesses as well.

• 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)