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)

Iron Man Mini-Review

With all the failures in comics movies, sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they REALLY get it right, and it’s all good. Gets you up, gets you hollering, and the “WOOHOO!”s come with ease.

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.

One more nail in the coffin of Palm

According to Palm’s website:

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.

Movies Movies Movies!

I have a post about Ubercon brewing, but until that’s ready to come off the burner, lets talk about movies for a few minutes.
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.

Okay okay okay.

Fine. Ya’ll can stop tempting me further.
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? 🙂

Cons, Gaming, and Machines!

I’m off to UberCon for the weekend! This’ll be a bit different than the last 9 events (8? I’ve lost count). IMG_4584.JPGThis weekend, Zach is coming with me as a con attendee (and gopher for reg). Barb and her son Justin will be there as well, so Zach will have a friend he knows to hang out with.
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!

Go go gadget Greylisting!

Our spam levels here at Chez Geek are, shall we say, astronomical. About a year ago, we installed and configured SQLGrey, a tool for Postfix that enables Greylisting on inbound mail. Initially, it had a great impact, but somewhere along the lines, our configuration got modified in a way that stopped the greylist from working.

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.

Alas Windjammer Cruises

the_cloud_at_coopers_island.jpgBack around, oh, 1996? Something like that, Cat and I took our first trip to the British Virgin Islands to spend a week aboard the Flying Cloud, a 207ft Barque (3 masts, square rigged on the first mast). It was a delightful trip, and our first time in the BVI’s. We were hooked.

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.

Goings on

A couple quick What’s Going On updates…

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.

Piece by piece, Mame cabinet progress




IMG_4415.JPG

Originally uploaded by eidolon

With Ubercon coming up next week, and the successful debut of my cabinet at the last event, I wanted to get some more work done on the assembly before we shipped out. To that end, I had been pondering using industrial pipe assemblies to build a sort of ‘framework’ to hang the monitor on.

With some advice from my brother in law, I ordered up the pieces from MSCDirect (in conjunction with a fortuitous find on ebay), and tonight, with most of the parts in, I set about assembling the stand.

This is the one part of the build I had NOT worked out on paper ahead of time, but working with metal assemblies has the advantage of “Don’t like it? Disassemble it and try it a different way!” They’re just like big tinker toys.

The piping is 1 1/4″ aluminum conduit courtesy of Lowes. It was relatively low cost, convenient, and easily strong enough for what I was doing (in fact, I could probably have done this with 1″ piping – the fittings are sort of overkill for this type of work, but it lends to that industrial look 🙂

The monitor hanger is another ebay find (got 5 of them for about $15), though I needed to modify the mount to fit into the crosspiece (it’s times like this I pine for some shop tools I don’t have, like a drill press. Drilling holes in an clamped aluminum pipe with a handheld drill is NOT fun).

The two assemblies right above the control panel are going to be braces going up to the monitor hangar. Because I’m missing some pieces still, they’re not yet hooked up.

I also took the time to fasten down the control panel properly using angle brackets and some machine bolts I had.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the result. Next step will be to make sure the software interface and emulators all work properly.

Linux vs Windows XP Bootup Speed

I got into a conversation on IRC today about relative performance between Linux and Windows XP machines. A true blue dyed in the wool fellow was falling all over himself about how much faster WIndows XP was, and how sluggish Linux was, and he couldn’t see how anyone would use Linux because it was such a performance hog.

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.

Coconut gets a facelift

Ever since I first wrote Coconut, the web interface to CONGO, I’ve been using the same stylesheet. It was really my first foray into stylesheet-driven design and layout, and while it was a good first try, it was ugly as sin.
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!

Tagged!




IMG_4330.JPG

Originally uploaded by eidolon

Everyone is prepping for their move to Mosaic in their own way. Having worked with groups of friends many times on big projects, it always seems at the end that you end up holding a hammer going “Okay, whose is this?”

If we’re all living in the same place, we’re going to be sharing tools and the like constantly. Why not adopt the same scheme we’ve used in the Techno-Fandom world, and use paint pens (or tool dip) to mark tools and personal items with a unique color scheme?

My scheme, used in the TF crew, has been Black-Blue-Silver for about 10 years now, so it makes sense to use that in Mosaic as well. Most of my convention gear is already tagged, but a lot of my tools haven’t been yet.

A nice rainy Saturday morning, and some spare time, and voila – another handful of items marked up.

I still have to do my big toolbox, but at least this part is done.

Oh Apple, you guys crack me up!

Those crazy guys at Apple. Look at this wonderful April Fools joke they did.
So. So. Check this out. They modified their Apple Updater on Windows machines to pop up a window, and… I swear, I can’t stop laughing… even though I don’t even HAVE Safari or iTunes installed, they’ve put them on the updater list (as a “Software Update” *BWAH*), and automatically CHECKED them! Not only that, the highlighted button on the dialog is to “Install 3 Items”, so anyone could easily come along, see the update window “Oh yes, I need the Quicktime update” and… and… BANG! They have another 88 megs of software installed that they probably don’t even want!
I tell you, those guys have the best designs, the best platforms, and they make some great stuff, but it’s the little tweaks like this, the little jokes, that just crack me up. I mean, cmon. An updater that tried to trick you into installing software you don’t have. Hee hee hee!
Thanks Apple, for making my week!