Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

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.

From the wilds…

It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that I’m someone who enjoys alone-time. On that Myers-Briggs thing? The ‘I’ gets pegged and glows orange. Others may argue, and possibly rightfully so, that I’m one of the most extroverted introverts around, but when it comes to “What do I want really?” – frequently it’s “I want to be alone.”
This week, in a fit of randomized events, things came together that allowed me to head up to my favorite refuge for a few days of quiet alone-time. The practicals of this cosmic convergence aren’t all that interesting – a long holiday weekend approaching, Zach having an overnight sleepover at his camp, an infininately understanding partner who recognizes and supports my antosocialness, and the ever present job that doesn’t require me to be anyplace in -particular-, as long as I’m productive.
mainhouse-1So, off I went. Thursday saw me speeding north toward our refuge in the hills. The house has been in Cat’s family for about 50 years now, progressing from a small shack up to what some would call a compound. Regardless of the configuration, it had the things I find most soothing, most conducive to my away-ness. It was quiet. I was the only one there. It had a coffeemaker and a broadband wireless internet connection. It was my Utopia.
So the last 2 days have had me sitting quietly with my laptop, a tasty cup of coffee at hand, the local radio station playing classic rock on the kitchen stereo, and me being… productive.
The last bit came as a hoped for, but not necessarily expected, result. While I certainly like ‘getting away’ and being on my own, if I don’t actually produce anything, the afterglow fades quickly into the overwhelming list of things that STILL need to be done. And just being on my own with no distractions is no definitive recipe for productivity. I can easily manufacturer a thousand distractions on my own.
Not so this time. The combination of the space, the wide-open schedule, the laptop, and the amazingly cool, clear weather have all combined to let me get into my ‘groove’ – the term I use to mean “the brain is working, problems are being solved, the complexities of what the work at hand are meshing well, and I’m not getting distracted”. A fellow with an unpronounceable last name termed this mode “Flow”, and wrote a book about it.
But there’s more to it than that. Flow or groove or whatever you want to call it is great, but it needs a larger environment in which to thrive and return. In my office at home, I can groove along for a few hours, then need to go… somewhere. A walk, a bike ride, something, and hope that lets me slip back into Groove when I return, which doesn’t always work well. Here, however, I can step outside, and I’m on the shore of a mile long lake, with wind, trees, and the ever-present slap of water on the docks to remind me that the world is still fine, take a rest, you can go back when you’re ready.
Snapshots and images…

  • A storm moving along Thursday night. The clouds were perhaps 200′ up, but no rain. The lake angrily tossing up waves under the steady gusting wind. The clouds churning over my mainhouse-2head as the entire front slid by. The clouds had the look of a steady ocean wave, constantly collapsing on itself, leaving tendrils and whirls behind.
  • The quiet of Friday morning, the lake smooth as glass, dotted here and there with early morning fishermen. The sound of someone’s voice, realizing that it was one of the fellows in the boat, almost half a mile away, quietly talking to his fellow angler.
  • Hastily closing the windows as another storm came in last night, then standing on the dock as the gusts washed over me.
  • Waking in the morning to just the sound of wind, water, and trees rustling, making morning coffee, and sitting on the chairs out on the waterfront, watching as the boats on the lake slowly change from morning fishermen into jetboats and skiers, like a shift change at some loosely structured business. Later there will be sailboats and kids on innertubes, and as it gets dark tonight, with the inevitable quieting of the breezes, the deck boats will put in their appearance.

It has been a great few days, but I’m also looking forward to the arrival of the rest of the family, they should be here soon. Another 4 days here, socializing, playing, and with a little luck, sailing.
I feel a bit like Lazslo in Real Genius. I haven’t actually spoken to anyone in 2 days, I wonder if I’ll remember how.

Firefox, ALSA, Flash, YouTube, Google Video and SOUND!

This one’s been bugging me for a while. I run Firefox on yawl and hunter pretty constantly, and occasionally would like to view some of the videos posted on YouTube or videos.google.com. While the videos have been playing just fine, sound has never worked.
Sound is always a tricky thing on Linux machines. Although ALSA has solved many of the audio problems that have traditionally plagued Linux boxes, many applications have not ported to the new interface, and therefore won’t work on modern systems.
After finally getting frustrated enough to take the time to do some research, I found a post that described how to do it.
First, for all Debian based distributions, there’s a very handy ‘interface’ package called alsa-oss, which, according to the description:

…contains a program loader, aoss, which wraps applications written for OSS in a compatibility library, thus allowing them to work with ALSA.

Sounds good to me! First, I had to install the package:

apt-get install alsa-oss

Next, a change to Firefox’s configuration to tell it to use said interface:

cd /etc/firefox
edit ‘firefoxrc’ and change
FIREFOX_DSP=”none”
to
FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss”

Stop and restart Firefox.
That’s it! Enjoy videos in full sound and motion like sharks being attacked and eaten by octupi.

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.

Giving a bit back.

Back when I first started doing conventions, I wrote up a series of pages on how to convert iOpeners into X-Terminals. The idea was “this is a great way to get low cost terminals for your computer network”. I know the page gets a reasonable amount of traffic, but I rarely notice except for seeing it in the traffic reports.
This morning I got mail from a fellow in Malawi saying he was in the process of collecitng iOpeners and using them for low cost terminals in hospitals there, and had some questions about the setup. He was very appreciative of what I had published and said it was instrumental in getting them up and running. He was even using the boot image I had generated.
I happily helped him out with an install problem. Reminded me a lot of the old Usenet days “Hey, I know of a guy who did that. Drop him some mail, he’ll help ya out!”

And now for something REALLY offensive.




Welcome to Massachusetts

Originally uploaded by eidolon.

Caught sight of this particular bit of lovely political expression on the way to the supermarket this evening. It’s somewhat hard to read, but the bumper sticker says “Marriage: One Man, One Woman” with a url to StopLiberalJudges.com. A charming site, really. Probably the most amusing bit of all of the drivel on it is any occurance of ‘liberal” can easily be replaced by “conservative” and it would reflect how I personally see the current judicial makeup. Perspective is a wonderful thing, ain’t it? 🙂

Just a note – the tagline on that site proclaims:

StopLiberalJudges.com is a ministry of the American Family Association, a leading conservative, pro-family organization
committed to motivating and equipping citizens to change the culture to reflect Biblical truth in today’s culture war.

Deep thoughts from Dunkin Donuts

Overheard this morning whilst picking up supplies for the trek to connecticut. A very
large woman was in line ahead of me, putting in a rather large order. Now, granted she
could have been ordering for friends / coworkers / family / dogs / whatever. But she was
taking an inordinate interest in choosing boston creme over chocolate iced over jelly
doughnuts. With nothing else to focus on, I engaged in the age old practice of
evesdropping and listened in on the order…
2 dozen donuts
such and such boston cremes, glazed, iced – the whole litany of insulin shock inducing
materials.
But that apparently wasn’t enough cholestrol and salt, so she added on…
1 Sausage egg and cheese croissant
1 Bacon egg and cheese bagel
I guess somewhere along here she decided it would be nice to have something to drink.
But folks have to be careful of their weight remember! So she ordered…
A large french vanilla with 4 equals.
Words fail me.
[Written on Friday morning on the Treo]

Stuff Done RIght

Found purely by accident. I’ve been using x2vnc to let me share a single keyboard and mouse between yawl and the winxp box. I’ve been needing to support my Eclipse project stuff on both Windows and Linux, and being able to slide the mouse from one machine to another across a pair of monitors is just the ticket for this.
I had forgotten to turn off winxp after work, and so had moved into my normal evening relaxation of playing Eve. I casually bumped the mouse on yawl by mistake, and noted that the cursor in Eve moved.
Apparently the Eve client is written ‘smart’ enough to not override keyboard and mouse drivers, so remote mouse / keyboard controls work fine. I can now happily roll my mouse from my work on yawl over to the eve screen, do some fiddling there, and roll back. This is something that DID NOT work for a number of other games I’ve run.
Ain’t technology grand?

Is Gore an alarmist?

There’s no secret I’m one of those pinko lefty anti-bushies. No question there. I see Bush and his cronies as a wave of darkness engulfing the US political system, tainting not only our own lives, but affecting the world with their ideological ultra-conservative mores.

So I’ve been following Al Gores An Inconvenient truth with interest. It’s gotten a lot of attention and support, with not just a little haranguing from the right. A lot of the chatter has been “Why didn’t we see this Gore in the election?”, but there’s also been support for the ideas he’s presenting in the movie. Is global warming a real threat, and are CO2 levels from carbon emissions precipitating a global temperature change? Surely it must be right. Environmentalists agree, the Bushies disagree and cast doubt on it, so it must be true, right?

Right?

Maybe not. An article on Canada Free Press states that there’s a ton of misleading and flat out wrong information in Gore’s film.

I went into reading this article with a typical skeptical attitude. “This must be just a few anti-ecologists. The few ‘scientists’ drummed up by the right to counter Gore’s arguments, to cast doubt on the whole thing.” But, reading it, no, this isn’t. These are the people who really do make the climate predictions, and they’re saying… Gore is completely off the mark. Read the article all the way through, and you’ll see what I mean.

So, who to believe? I don’t know now. I don’t believe Gore’s ‘imminent death of the world’ scenario. I believe our activities on the planet are having an impact, but we’re not about to turn stretches of the US into desert, nor are we looking at a 30ft change in ocean levels. But, I do believe what we do changes the environment around us, and we need to make sure our ecological footprint is as small as possible.

What’s your ecological footprint?

Here’s how I fared:

	CATEGORY 	ACRES
FOOD 		4.7
MOBILITY 	1
SHELTER 	5.2
GOODS/SERVICES 	5.7
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 	17
IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER
PERSON.  WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 3.7 PLANETS.

Thanks to Slashdot for the initial link.

Update 13:30pm – Kai has pointed out that the Canadian Free Press hardly an objective, balanced journal. Their front page articles are filled with judgemental and biased commentary. While the article linked is well written, the rest of the content of the site seriously calls into question any of the ‘facts’ stated. Regardless, the ecological footprint information IS valid and interesting.

Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped for lunch.




Damp Dave

Originally uploaded by eidolon.

In my ongoing “bike a little further each day” track this week, I decided to run some errands while I was out riding. Today’s trek took me about 9.5 miles down to the Natick DPW and back.

Wunderground showed no storm clouds in the area, though the report said there may be some, so I decided to give it a whirl. I don’t mind getting wet, but I would have liked to avoid it.

Wellll, I didn’t. I stopped for lunch on the way back (really the main reason I was going out), at a less than exciting pizza place (Pizza Plus in Natick. Okay food, not exactly a charming venue) for about 20 minutes. As I was leaving, I noticed it was a lot darker, and a light rain was beginning to fall. Oh well, I’ll just suck it up and deal. I only had about 2.5 miles to go to get home.

As I was making my way up Rt 27, the rain got steadily harder, and I was hearing thunder. I stopped for a bit under a tree to move my Treo from my front pocket to my backpack, and to take my glasses off. I thought maybe the rain would subside quickly, but after 10 minutes of waiting, it was obvious it wasn’t going to, so I pushed on.

I’ve never really ridden in a downpour before. At first I was a little irked by the steady strip of wetness up the back of my pants (I had a backpack on, so that keps my back from getting splattered), but after 5 minutes or so, I was soaked through and through anyway, and just laughed and started enjoying it.

I was chilled initially, but warmed up quickly, and started cranking along at a good pace. Initially avoiding puddles, I gave up and plowed right through (some a few inches deep). I took great pleasure in noting I was moving quite a good clip -faster- than the folks on Rt 27 (where traffic has steadily gotten worse over the last year or two), and realized about 15 minutes in that I was in my stride. Average speed was about 13-14mph, I was moving smoothly, and was in my groove. I was completely soaked, but I was laughing the whole time.

Passed a jogger on the way “Another beautiful day, eh?” I called out. She gave a ‘Yeah!’ and continued on.

All too soon I was back at the house. I wanted to snap a quick picture – it doesn’t convey the total drenchedness of the experience, but I there I was.

A few things I’m thankful for out of this experience.

  • I didn’t need to be anywhere where I had to be DRY. Was able to come home and strip down.
  • I can see ‘okay’ without my glasses. In that rain, if I had to keep them on, it would have been bad news.
  • I brought my backpack. I was able to transfer my Treo into it to keep it dry, and my book stayed dry as well. Yay my O’Gio backpack.

Tomorrow? Hopefully we can crack 10 miles. We’ll see! For now, it’s time for towels and warm clothing.

Google Browser Sync

I found this one while doing my daily browse through Digg. It’s a tool from Google that lets you sync multiple Firefox installations in realtime. I personally have 3 different machines… nowait, 4… that I run Firefox on, and being able to seemlessly keep my bookmarks, cookies, form elements and tab/button bar layouts synchronized is a total win, not to mention having an off-site backup of all these goodies.
I recommend starting this on the machine you have your most complex and involved bookmark mechanism on, as when you add a new machine to the mix, it appears to import your saved bookmark collection from Google Sync, and then synchronize. So the first one in should be your largest. I probably have 400 bookmarks in my setup, organized into dozens of categories.
Give it a try!
As found via DesktopLinux.com.