Remember the guys doing the no pants thing on the NY Subway, and getting arrested for it? Well blk pointed out they’ve done another great mission. This time repeating a sequence of events over and over and over again in a Starbucks.
The mission was called the Moebius, where a half dozen events were repeated, in sequence, about every 6-8 minutes in a Starbucks in NYC. The link documents each step, and notes how customers are reacting. For the most part, New Yorkers seemed to take it as it was intended – a public art performance. They were commenting, enjoying, waiting for what they knew was each step, and looking for other small elements they might have missed on the previous go around.
Broken Treo Screen
Okay, THIS I could have done without.
I’ve been using the Seidio belt clip holster for my phone. I find it very convenient to be able to snap the phone on and off the holder on my belt, and still have a swivel hook. Total space used up wasn’t very much – it didn’t stick out very far and wasn’t catching on things. Much.
Tonight it caught on one thing too many. Coming through a door at a meeting, I leaned too close to the door frame, the treo caught on it, and it went flying out of the clip. I didn’t notice the screen was damaged until I used it again a half hour later, but it was pretty obvious what had caused the damage.
Fortunately, I have insurance on the device, so Verizon -should- be able to replace it for me without any hassle, but it really means belt holsters are not for me.
So where does that leave me? Cat is ver fond of a big aluminum case style. I find these things incredibly unwieldy and impossible to use. You have to flip the case open (sideways) to talk or use the unit, which means you have a big piece of aluminum flapping either above or below your face while talking on the phone. Last but not least, this type of case doens’t support a belt clip. And if it did, it would stick out a tremendous amount. Not for me, thanks.
The ones I like the most are the leather magnetic-closure flip cases, which are belt-clippable, look nice, and do protect the phone quite well. What I’m worried about is how well the magnetic flap thingy actually stays closed.
I could use a top flip style case, which won’t have the magnetic problem, but these cases still seem to suffer from the “the clip part is very weak, and breaks easily.”
I could also choose something like a belt pouch style. My issue with this is the belt clip isn’t swivel, so it could get in the way (that’s probably not so bad), but the phone has to come OUT of the pouch to use it. Which removes a lot of it’s protection.
Maybe a belt pouch -and- a skin case. By day, the phone would live in the pouch, wrapped in it’s skin. At night, it could be pulled out, still protected!!!
Bleah. I’m open for suggestions here.
Edit – I just came across the Zcover which is a skin for the treo, with an integrated belt clip. Hmm.
Flat out documentation proving Bush Lied. Again.
Just have to share this one.
According to the Washington Post, A tape has surfaced documenting FEMA officials warning Bush directly that this storm could very well be “the big one”. The one to break the levees, destroy the superdome, wreck the city. Bush’s response? “We are fully prepared”.
Without a doubt, the tape provides evidence that the White House received ample warning of the catastrophe. Yet within days of that videoconference, Mr. Bush would excuse the federal government’s extraordinarily poor performance by telling an interviewer that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Moreover, at the time of the conference the White House had no idea whether federal emergency services were truly prepared. On the tape, the president doesn’t ask any questions about preparedness, and there is no evidence in documents since released that he was any more engaged before or after the conference. Had anyone called the Defense Department? Was the National Guard en route? Were local Army bases prepared to help? Were emergency food and water supplies in place? The president, like everyone around him, appears to have assumed that everything would run like clockwork, just as it was supposed to on paper.
Why is it no surprise that no one trusts anything this man says anymore?
Firefox Shockwave plugin. What, it WORKED?
Wow. In Firefox 1.5 under Linux, I got tired of “You need a plugin to view this blah blah” messages, and, fully expecting to see a failure, i clicked on the box “FINE, tell me what’s missing.”
And Firefox happily said “Would you like to install the Macromedia Shockwave Plugin?” “Uh, yeah, sure.”
And 30 seconds later, it was installed and working.
Linux isn’t supposed to work this way, is it?
Addicted to SMS.
Hello, my name is Dave, and I’m a text-a-holic.
Well, okay, it hasn’t quite gotten that bad, but I must admit, since Cat and I both got Treo 650‘s, we’ve been spending a lot of time just keeping in touch vis SMS messages, more colloquially referred to as ‘texting’.
For those still living in the dark ages, ‘texting’ refers to the SMS Messaging function most modern cell phones support. The protocol and capability has been around for ages, and in fact, in Europe, ‘texting’ is far more commonplace. The Wikipedia article, linked above, has a whole fascinating history about popularity and usage.
But for me, it’s just fun.
I admit that I’ve done enormous amounts of my inter-social-network communicatioin via text over the last 15+ years. From IRC, to Email, to IM conversations, and now to SMS, using text to keep in touch is just the norm. I find the moving of text chatting from the desktop onto my phone a normal step in the evolution of digital communications.
What’s the problem, I hear you cry? The problem is it’s not free. Verizon, as far as I can tell, has no system to roll unlimited SMS messages into their service. It’s not tremendously expensive – a 100 message ‘bundle’ can be purchased for about $6 a month, but even with that option, I can see myself going past that limit quite easily. There’s always the shadow of “I’m over my quota! Quiet!” hanging over me.
What’s the point of all this? Mostly that I see Texting as being the next phrase of digital personal communication. It’s already one of the most popularly used communication mediums in Singapore and Europe, and is rapidly picking up pace in the US. If you haven’t tried it, give it a whirl. It’s fun 🙂
(Want to text me? If you know me, you probably have my cell phone number. Just send an SMS message to that 🙂
Douse me in alcohol.
There’s certain painful things I must endure in my day to day wanderings along Geek Alley. One of which is that I must interact with a dreaded environment known as Windows XP. Painful as it it, there are things I must do that that loathsome environment can only provide.
I make the best of this unfortunate situation though. My second monitor is my WinXp desktop, and is an excellent place to park either unchangeing or automatically updating pages I’d like to keep an eye on. I have a set of windows showing me network status of all the machines I interact with (You’d think, working at home, I wouldn’t have that large a network – but there’s 2 main servers and a cloud of support machines that really all need to be working to keep Homeport and all the associated domains and services running). I also run a live video session there via OpenWengo. The combination of my Linux desktop (where I get real work done), and the Windows desktop (which is really just an auxiliary display) works well for me.
Occasionally though, I need to do maintenance on the XP box. To give you an idea of how loathsome I consider this, I haven’t even -named- that machine. It’s just ‘the xp box’, whereas all my Linux machines and servers have nice names to personalize them (hunter, endor, myth, boomer, etc). Anyway, today’s task was replacing Firefox 1.0.7, which had gotten fairly unstable (for no knowable reason other than it being old), and upgrading to FF 1.5.0.1. Of course, this means uninstalling the old FF, and getting the new one… since Firefox wasn’t even runnable, there’s only one other option. Run IE.
Now, I’ve never really hidden my dislike of this browser. Not just because the experience of using it is bad, but because it is so riddled with bugs, security holes, and bad design decisions. It is a browser locked into 1998-style thinking. Microsoft has made much noise about IE7 being all new and wonderful and things, but everytrhing I’ve heard, it’ll just be Firefox with an IE label on it. Gosh, tabs! What a concept!
Anyway, I needed to run IE to download the new version of firefox. I feel somehow sullied now, and have the urge to go shower and scrub. Fortunately, it was a short exposure, to a known set of websites. Chances of serious damage or inection are small.
Happiness is…
… getting Amarok to play MP3’s again.
Various n sundry pointerst to Kubuntu Dapper KDE installs pointed at installing libmad and using the gstreamer plugin. I ended up not going down that path, and there I found victory!
What I did was install the Arts MP3 plugin, and told Amarok to just play through Arts, and All Was Well!
libarts1-mpeglib - mpeglib plugin for aRts, supporting mp3 and mpeg audio/video
Yay!
Anachronistic buildings… The Ryugyong Hotel
Found this interesting article about the Ryugyong Hotel in the middle of Pyongyang, in North Korea. It’s apparently an ENORMOUS hotel (over 1000′ high), built in the middle of this city, and abandoned for 10 years. It was never completed, never occuped.
Further, the population won’t even refer to it. Ask someone where it is, they’ll claim to have never heard of it. But, as seen in the pictures, it’s impossible NOT to see it from just about anywhere in the city.
Fascinating stuff. Wikipedia has an article on it, pointing out that construction of the hotel was estimated to cost $750 million – almost 2% of the countries’ entire GDP. Unusual structures are always intriguing, and this one definately is unusual, not just for the politics and social issues surrounding it, but also because of the very design of the place.
I have to admit that building in concrete can be beautiful and organic. I spent many weekends exploring Fonthill, the home of Henry Mercer, who was active at the height of the Arts and Crafts design period, building not only his amazing home entirely of poured concrete, but also the Mercer Museum, a fascinating collection of antiques and artifacts, also in the poured / sculpted concrete style.
Castle Island, Boston, MA
While waiting to go to the New England Boat Show, Zach and I walked around Castle Island, home of Fort Independence, a well known sight to anyone who has sailed or boated in Boston Harbor.
It was extremely windy, and cold (well, it’s February in Boston. Whadya think?) but the clouds and light were just too beautiful to ignore.
This particular shot (one of 3 of this setting) was actually shot while sitting in the van getting up the gumption to go walk outside. 🙂
Linux Annoyances du jour…
It’s been noted I tend to fly off the handle a bit at The Worlds Largest Software Company, deservedly or not. But lest you, dear reader, feel I am one-sided in my condemnations, let us touch on some poor decisions made in the Linux camp as well.
Long ago in a college not so far away, it was decided that most of the proprietary Unix tools could be rewritten under the GPL, and made free. The tools chosen for this transition were the very basics of Unix shell operation. The command line programs that us unix geeks use day by day. We’re talking about the GNU Coreutils.
Now, in general, I consider the rewrite to be a good idea. The tools are aptly named – they are the core of the Unix environment. We’re talking ls and who here. Very basic stuff. But naturally, when a couple programmers decides to rewrite something, they can’t help but ‘improve’ on them a little. This means adding some new features, throwing in some little tidbits to make the tool a little more interesting.
None of these ‘features’ was ever really vetted or examined as to whether they made sense or not, they were just tossed in willy nilly, and now are in every Linux and Unix distribution on the planet.
I take as a prime example the addition of the ‘-h’ option to ‘ls’. In it’s basic concept, it sounds like a great idea. Lets add a ‘human readable’ format to display the size of a file. Instead of counting decimal places to find out what order of magnitude a file is, just ‘ls -lh’ it, and you get a readable form:
dbs@boomer:~$ ls -l mbox -rw------- 1 dbs dbs 8629133 2006-02-23 18:33 mbox dbs@boomer:~$ ls -lh mbox -rw------- 1 dbs dbs 8.3M 2006-02-23 18:33 mbox
Simple, eh? Well, sure, except when you realize ‘ls’ is rarely used on just a single file. It’s used to compare and list out large directories, sorting things by size, or getting an overview of what you’re looking at. The bright lights who wrote the ‘-h’ option into ‘ls’ apparently had never considered anything approaching a human interface guideline, so we end up with some serious readability problems. Remember, this is meant to be HUMAN READ. I give for reference, an example directory listing, taken from my home dir:
-rw-r--r-- 1 dbs dbs 58 2005-11-23 23:13 cipher.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 dbs dbs 40K 2005-07-05 22:52 claimit-backup.tgz -rw-r--r-- 1 dbs dbs 3.8K 2005-06-28 14:55 claimit.dump -rw-r--r-- 1 dbs dbs 6.6K 2005-07-05 23:48 claimit.tgz -rw-r--r-- 1 dbs dbs 162K 2005-09-09 12:07 commons-collections.jar -rw-r--r-- 1 dbs dbs 3.6M 2006-01-10 10:25 congo-20060109.tgz -rw-r--r-- 1 dbs dbs 4.7M 2005-07-25 22:41 cvsdir.tgz -rwxr-xr-x 1 dbs dbs 3.1K 2005-11-20 10:55 dbs@boomer.homeport.org -rw------- 1 dbs dbs 1.8K 2006-01-17 12:11 dead.letter -rw-r--r-- 1 dbs dbs 12K 2005-09-02 12:37 decisions.dump drwxr-xr-x 20 dbs dbs 4.0K 2004-10-18 12:09 docs drwxr-xr-x 5 dbs dbs 4.0K 2006-01-13 23:19 dumps -rw------- 1 dbs dbs 509 2005-07-21 11:56 INBOX.Drafts -rw------- 1 dbs dbs 22K 2006-02-09 12:52 INBOX.Sent -rw------- 1 dbs dbs 3.0M 2006-02-22 19:57 INBOX.Trash
This format is now well established in the Unix world, and probably will never go away. I’m assuming some shell hack wrote it 15 years ago on a lunch break, and it will never be removed or updates. ‘ls’ is such a core utility, changing any of its functionality to remove or alter the output will raise a huge outcry from script-writers everywhere, because scripts that had been running perfectly for years will suddenly break.
Sure this is a small thing. I’m picking nits. But when I see BAD DESIGN decisions, I feel it’s my moral duty to stand up and foam at the mouth about it. Thank you, and good night.
Grumpy Geek! T40 Radeon driver twitch
Okay, I’ll admit it. This is a bit of a rant, as I’ve had a less than stable day, and coming home to annoying system problems is really not what I was up for tonight.
Faithful readers will know my pet laptop hunter intimately by now. Well, since I did my conversion to Kubuntu, I’ve been pretty ecstatic with stability, constant updates and upgrades, and general “This is a machine I don’t have to think about maintaining, it just keeps itself configured and clean.” And so things had been… until…. (“Quick Bob! Bad guy! Minor key!”) … something changed…
It took me a helluva long time to track it down. The symptons were the T40 wouldn’t sync right with the external monitor. In dock, out of dock, monitor off when powered up, monitor on but in ‘green’ mode, restarting kdm, some magic combination would make the external monitor come up in the right resolution when I asked it. This HAD been working flawlessly (see my posting on Xorg configurations for some tidbits about it). When I went to Kubuntu, it Just Worked. Now it wasn’t, and I wasn’t sure what was wrong.
It turns out somewhere in the last 2 weeks or so of constant apt-get upgrades, my driver settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf got reset back to the opensource ‘ati’ driver. This driver is fully GPLed and opensource, but is not as robust as the driver provided by ATI, called fglrx. I KNEW I had been running fglrx, somewhere it got reset. One change to the ‘Driver’ entry in Xorg.conf, a restart, and voila! I had my external monitor back and functioning.
What changed, why it changed, and why the apt system didn’t nudge me before changing it, I’m not sure, but it sure made me grumpy. Really the first serious yak-shaving I had to do on this machine since I installed it, so I shouldnt’ complain, but I sure didn’t need it at the end of a yucky day.
Honda putting out a new Hybrid
As reported on on Yahoo news :
TOKYO (Reuters) – Honda Motor Co. (7267.T) plans to sell a low-cost hybrid car, a version of its popular Fit subcompact, a Japanese daily reported, signaling the auto maker’s long-term commitment to the fuel-sipping powertrain.
Japan’s third-biggest auto maker aims to sell the Fit hybrid as early as next year for around 1.4 million yen ($11,790), or about 200,000 yen more than the gasoline-only version, likely making it the world’s first hybrid to cost less than 2 million yen ($16,840), the leading Japanese business daily said on Wednesday.
The model could be launched in the business year starting April 2007 and would be sold globally, the paper said.
The newspaper said the Fit hybrid would have fuel economy comparable to that of the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius, which the auto makers advertise in Japan as getting around 35-36 km to a liter (82-84 miles per gallon).
The cars.com entry on the Fit has pictures and other details.
Low teens price-wise, 4 door hatchback, getting 82-84mpg? Now to see if I can actually FIT in it. Hah. I’m such the funny.
Profile of a Work at Home Dad
I often enjoy telling folks what I do for my day to day life. They frequently get that wide-eyed “Wow, that sounds perfect and awesome and my dream job”, and for the most part, I have to agree. It’s pretty nifty having a total commute of only 4 1/2 feet, and I can work most of my morning in… err… attire that probably wouldn’t pass as business casual.
However, this arrangement is not without it’s challenges. Challenge of the first part, I’m always home. That means I’m also first in line to get things done that need to be done at home, or can be done best by someone with a flexible schedule. I don’t really mind these things, since I can always flex things around so I’m working a little later, or doing some work at night, but it does make for chaotic scheduling.
Lets look at today’s life-example. This week has seen me ramping back up for deliverables to my current contract – this tends to involve some fairly intense coding and communication with a client that’s over 200 miles away and somewhat email and phone call averse. Layered on top of this we have the following challenges…
- Another client has just notified me they need their badges printed TODAY and overnighted BY TONIGHT. They have not confirmed badge design, layout, or other details.
- Zach is on vacation this week, so is home. Now, this is not as big a challenge as it was when he was, say, 4, but every erg of parental energy in me has to be applied not to give in to the “Zach, go play games on your computer, I’m busy” temptation. The digital babysitter is mighty compelling, but I shall resist. Thankfully, we have other families in Mosaic that are in similar straits, and arrangements for kid-hangings-out have already been made. Rockin.
- I’m still getting over this cold that laid me low over the weekend. I arose saviour-like after 3 days of death yesterday morning, and I didn’t even have to move a big honkin boulder. Alas, I missed something along the way, and my malaise hasn’t totally left me. Must’ve been skipping the whole nailing bit I guess.
- The band continues to limp forward toward a fairly busy March schedule, doing 2 gigs, one of which is a Biggie, playing the Mayoral Ball in Marlborough. I’m naturally worried about how well we’ll be prepared for it, and practice is tonight. Chalk off the evening for catching up on missing work, but practices must go on! (We’re hunting for a new lead singer, btw. Got a strong voice, like being on stage, and want to lead a blues band? Let us know!). We’re also playing the Cottage Street Pub in Franklin (see our gigs page if you’d like to see us. Poke me in email for details and disclaimers about the venue 🙂
- Very few offices include piles of laundry that also need to be put away *waves hands airily* at some point.
Pile all these together, and it sure doesn’t sound like a normal day at the office, but all in all I still wouldn’t give it up for a forced daily march to cubeland.
Coffee’s brewed, gonna go fix me a mugful and start planning the haulout of the badge printer.
Nifty posting on software development
Came across this nifty posting about software development evolution. It’s a very good rundown of how a software project should be run when it involves a team doing various roles (as opposed to ‘just a couple developers’). The graphic is particularly amusing.
Planet Geek word cloud!
Okay, this is pretty neat. Snapshirts has a system that’ll make a word cloud out of your blog or livejournal or whatever. They’ll even put it on a T-shirt.
Thanks to Adam over at Emergent Chaos for the pointer.