Category: Geekitude

Some fellow(s) with too much time on their hands, a lot of christmas lights, and a passion for the Trans Siberian Orchestra managed to choreograph their house christmas lights to the music. This is just masterful.
Check out the the full video in WMV form.

The legions of Stonekeep minions took on a new dimension today as we set up the Stonekeep Cluster Computing team on Seti@Home. We’ve got some fairly high-power hardware lying around, so we figure it was time to put all that idle silicon to work and band together.
If you’d like to join, feel free. It’s certainly a good cause (I think the Seti project is fascinating in its own right, and this lets folks participate in some small way). I doubt the Stonekeep team will ever compete with the big boys, but I still hope to rack up some good unit counts.

This is a cute little toy. Kayak Buzz lets you type in an airport code, and it’ll show you, on google maps, a list of discount tickets radiating out from that airport, color coded based on price. This includes international flights. Nifty.
I’m honestly not sure about the usefulness of this. The listing of the flights available is nice, and it’s great for looking up “Hmmm, I think I’d like to go somewhere this weekend”, but the map is somewhat hard to view on a reasonable scale. Though the slider for eliminating things based on price is verrahnice.
Thanks to Ringel for the pointer.

Talk about fun. This fellow has taken a 1948 Sportsman trailer, torn it down to its component parts, rebuilt it, redesigned it, and built it back up again into a beautiful camper. Talk about a wonderful project. I’ve had dreams of doing similar, perhaps with a sailboat though, but this his photo-log of all the steps the project went through is fascinating.
Found via Boingboing

There’s always a sort of tongue-in-cheek banter between boosters of Emacs (aka ‘The One True Editor’), and ‘vi’, the old workhorse that it is. Note that ‘vi’ has pretty much been replaced by ‘vim’ (aka ‘Vi – Improved!’), as the old version hadn’t really been updated in 15+ years.
One of the weapons in this give and take was the vast number of plugins and tools and full-on applications people had written to run inside emacs. Ticket management, email clients, news readers… all written inside emacs. One of those was in a fact an IRC client, so Emacs users could chat online without ever exiting or switching away from their beloved editor.
On a lark, I went looking to see if someone had done the same for vim. Sure enough, VimIRC is a script for vim that… lets you connect and talk to IRC servers inside the vim environment. It’s sort of painful actually watching conversations happen in editor buffers (you actually say something on channel by inserting a line into the buffer), but someone had fun doing it.

There’s hardly a more contentious subject among the geek crew than “What IRC client is best?” I suppose “Which Linux distribution is best” may eclipse it, and lets not even talk about ‘What’s the best editor?’. But the IRC client argument certainly ranks up there.
Recently my trusty laptop ‘hunter‘ went in to the local shop for some repairs. My keyboard problems had become too much to ignore, and a new keyboard didn’t fix it. So off to the local IBM Warranty repair office for a new mainboard.
This of course leaves me to work on the red-headed stepchild in Chez Geek, my ShuttleX Windows XP system. Now, normally this box simply runs Seti@Home, or tests out viewing pages in IE, or runs Azureus, but today it needs to belly up to the bar, and actually do -work- for me.
Naturally, the first thing required is a decent IRC client. Priorities, yanno.
I’m a fervent user of X-Chat, the excellent GTK based IRC client by Peter Zelazny. Were I on my Linux box, there’s no question what I’d run. Alas, Pete decided a while back that building under Windows was too much of a hassle (and, to his credit, it is), and changed the licensing agreement on the product so that Windows users had to pay for the official builds of the client (the Linux version was still free). Needless to say this annoyed a lot of folks who are forced to use Windows.
Ah, but the joys of the GPL come to the fore. Since the application is licensed under the GPL, anyone can pull the source and build it and offer it for distribution, and someone has done just that.
The folks over at Silverex.org are providing up to the minute rebuilds of the Xchat client for windows. Latest versions are online and install cleanly without a license or hassle.
I’m happily running Xchat on my windows desktop now. On to pillage…

Over on Blah Blah Blog, Nathan has come up with what he describes as the “Holy Grail” of RT authentication in a Windows environment:

A lot of people use RT to track helpdesk requests, problem reports and other incident data at their jobs. An even larger number of people use or are forced to use Microsoft Active Directory as the central repository of username and password information at their jobs. As a result, probably the single most-asked question on the rt-users mailing list is “how do I unify logins between RT and ActiveDirectory?” Following close on behind that is “how do I get RT to use Windows authentication so people don’t have to type in their password twice?” Strangely, these are questions that seemed to lack any authoritative answers.
Until now.

Link to article on Blah Blah Blog

It’s sort of hard to describe – you just have to watch it. Painting with live video and photographic sampling.
Thanks to SarahShevett.

I admit I spent a lot of time working with older computers. But there was a time when there were no ‘older computers’ that I could get my hands on, and I was working with state of the art machinery.
Like Tandy / Radio Shack TRS-80’s.
Yes, that’s what I learned on. BASIC, Z80 assembler, the whole schlamiel back in high school. Occasionally I get a hankering to go back and noodle with these fossils. Fortunately, some folks have written some cute little apps that let me go back and tinker, just like it were 1982.
Mocha is a dead on copy of the original COCO, aka the Color Computer. Radio Shacks first real foray into ‘color’ ‘home’ systems (this was built in direct competition with the Commodore VIC-20 and the Apple II). I never really got into the Coco – it came out after I had moved on to different machines.
However, the TRS-80’s, starting with the Model 1 and through to the Model III – these were my bread and butter. I owned a Mod I and a Mod III at different times, and took ribbing from the Apple crew all the time. But the machine was solid, fast, and even though it had abysmal black and white graphics, those graphics were _FAST_. The best TRS80 emulatir I could find is this one on Jeff Vavasours site. It’s a re-creation of the Model I BASIC environment which, quite frankly, sucked, but it was nice noodling around on the READY prompt again.

There’s been a lot of noise over in Livejournal by the user base complaining about Google’s new Blogsearch indexing tool. Most users are reacting by changing their entire journal over to ‘friends only’, and casting aspersions upon ‘the evil google search engine’.
This post is primarily aimed at that audience.
Folks, Livejournal is a blogging tool. It’s purpose is to post your entries onto the public net for you. What it can and cannot do is made pretty clear. People seem to have an assumption that once you post something on the net, somehow you have total control over it, and can control what happens to it, and who can access it. This is a notion people should get over.
Livejournal automatically creates RSS feeds for all your journals. Those RSS feeds are publically available, and have been forever. There is no ‘protocol’ on the net that restricts who can read an RSS feed, therefore ‘robots.txt’ and the like will not affect it. Google’s blogsearch system reads RSS feeds and indexes them, just as any other RSS news aggregator on the planet can do.
Google is doing nothing wrong, and not breaking any rules, and Livejournal is doing nothing wrong, though they should have the option of providing RSS feeds or not. My point here is casting aspersions upon Google is inappropriate. Having a realistic view of what a blog host, and what blogging software does is more appropriate.
Livejournal DOES give a small bone to the community though. You can cut down the amount of public information fed into the RSS feeds. See this helpdesk ticket for more information.
My point here is twofold.

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

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

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

• It’s SMALL!
  No, really, it’s small. It’s easy to lose. I have a nice Ogio laptop backpack with an ‘mp3 player pouch’ on the top of it. It fits nicely into that, which gives me a good place to ‘always keep it’.

• It goes FOREVER
  I have not had an opportunity to even come close to killing the battery in it. I’m not a power-listener by any stretch, but noting “Hm, it’s been 3-4 days. Maybe I should plug it in again” is a nice feeling.

• The headphones are ‘eh’
  The stock white headphones are nothing to write home about. I have a set of Shure E2C earbuds that are mighty sexy, but take longer to just ‘pop in’. And because they’re sound insulating, its hard to just put them in and leave them in. Durned checkout drones are hard to understand when they say “For here or to go?”.

• It works fine with Linux
  Thanks to the wonder of GTKpod, syncing from the laptop is a breeze.

• Yes, the screen scratches easily
  Do not put these things in your pocket with your keys. The screen will scratch up terribly, as reported in The Register. Fortunately the carry spot in my bag has a felt lining, but when I’m carrying in my pocket, I choose a spot that has nothing else in it.

• 2 gig is not enough
  I’m a disk space hog. 2 gig is not quite enough for me. I think the 4 gig version would be okay, but I could see myself doing the same thing there. “Not enough!” I see the attraction to a 40gig ipod.

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