Month: June 2004

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Duckomenta

Die Duckomenta features dozens of famous museum pieces spanning ancient history to modern interpretive abstraction, each with Donald Duck transposed into the theme. No cheap Photoshop tricks – these are real works, artfully created and beautifully collected. What makes it work is that they took such a seemingly trivial idea so seriously – went all the way. Don’t read German, but think I get the idea. Disney’s lawyers have got to be breathing down their necks right about now, but this will certainly qualify as satire (not that the obviousness of that fact ever stopped Mattel’s raging a-hole lawyers from attacking Barbie art).

Music: Hombres :: Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out)
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Miles Paints

miles-paint   miles-paint-wall

Miles and Amelia went to the Museum of Children’s Art to try their hands at painting. Michael the painting gorilla got nothing on them. So joyful. The era of refrigerator art has begun. Miles also got his first haircut recently – bittersweet to let go of original curls. He’s not a baby anymore – he’s a little boy.

Music: Burning Spear :: Any River
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Good Deals on Plam Pilots

In an excellent synopsis of why the utopia of the Semantic Web will never work (Metacrap), Cory Doctorow points out that, at the time he wrote the piece, a search for “plam” on eBay produced nine results for “Plam Pilots,” all of which of course were hidden from everyone running a normal search on the string “palm.” Hidden, and therefore barely bidded on. Need to find a good deal on eBay? Try searching on misspelled versions of the thing you want.

Music: Momus :: Billy Hardy
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Umask Animations

Getting so much out of this shell class. It moves fast, and the focus is on how things really work, not just how to get things done. Muster showed off some great instructive Flash animations demonstrating how umask works differently on directories and files. Try entering masks like 022 or 555 and see how the behaviors change. Never would have imagined Unix instruction lending itself to Flash animation, but wow.

Music: Blind Willie McTell :: Drive Away Blues
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Infectious Optimism

reaganIn the midst of a week of relentless lionization of Ronald Reagan, it was interesting to read another take on the canonical tales of how Reagan single-handedly ended communism in the Soviet Union. The Globe and Mail’s Gorby Had the Lead Role, Not Gipper points out that it was Gorbachev who was taking great strides to reduce the arms buildup while Reagan scoffed that it was all “propaganda.”

…the U.S. administration was reeling. Polls were beginning to show that, of all things unimaginable, a Soviet leader was the greatest force for world peace. An embarrassed Mr. Reagan finally responded in kind.

The “kirktoon” linked above offers biting reverse spin on the week of worship. And the UC Berkeley News Center has an interesting piece on how Reagan used the UCB campus as a political whipping boy. The Free Speech Movement, for example, was one of Berkeley’s great accomplishments – not just for Berkeley but for campuses across America. Students mobilized to make sure that Constitutional rights were more than just empty promises. Reagan saw the movement as the work of spoiled college kids:

Reagan took aim at the university for being irresponsible for failing to punish these dissident students. He said, ‘Get them out of there. Throw them out. They are spoiled and don’t deserve the education they are getting. They don’t have a right to take advantage of our system of education.’

But he was, we are told, infectiously optimistic, so that’s got to count for something. I was young while Reagan was in office, and did not grow up in a very political family. But I remember to this day the absolute scorn my parents held for the man, and how livid they would become talking about his policies. I know my parents were not alone in their hatred of Reagan. But he was, after all, infectiously optimistic.

Music: Ornette Coleman :: Chippie
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Panther Server, DBD Hair-Pulling

Spent the better part of last week at work wrestling with an upgrade of Jaguar Server to Panther Server. There were a lot of things we wanted out of Panther — the honed Active Directory integration and overhauled mail server chiefly among them. The upgrade seemingly went fine, and we were back online in an hour. Then I hear from one of our Movable Type users that they’re getting errors trying to post stories. Hmm… the installation can’t seem to find the DBD::mysql module. It’s still there, I can see it. Reinstall the DBD package to be sure. Installs successfully, but problem persists. Compile Bundle::DBI and DBD::mysql from CPAN — the latter fails. Start doing research — I’m not the only one with this problem — some wonky interaction between multi-CPU threading, the version of perl installed with Panther Server, and the module in question.

Over the next few days, tried every possible trick I could think of or find reference to, but no joy. Editing bugs out of perl’s Config.pm, tweaking the makefile, changing environment variables. What tanned my hide was the fact that all of this worked perfectly before the upgrade. Some small bug buried somewhere in the bowels of perl or the OS wasting days of my time.

Finally ran out of options and decided to do a clean install rather than the upgrade, which meant recreating users and shares, updating databases, etc. Everything I had hoped to avoid. But after the clean install, three tweaks to the makefile and one to Config.pm convinced DBD::mysql to compile cleanly, and MT came back online.

Nothing is as simple as it seems. Nothing.

Music: Gong :: Est-ce que je suis
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Power, Corruption, and Lies

Why am I suddenly starting to receive funding solicitations and other propaganda from the RNC? I take a certain perverse pleasure in scrawling “Power, Corruption and Lies — Bush Must Go” across the pledge sheet and sending it back in the postage-paid envelope that is inevitably provided. I’ve done this about half a dozen times now, but it so far has not gotten me removed from their mailing lists. That’s OK — I’m patient. And I’ve got lots of Sharpies.

Music: Burning Spear :: It’s a Long Way Around
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On Off On

Mission of Burma tonight at the Fillmore with Roger. Their first new record in 22 years, “On Off On,” and touring again. Expected the show to mostly showcase the new album, but heard tons from “Vs.” and “Signals, Calls, and Marches.” First set didn’t seem to cohere as well as last time we saw them, but something happened in the margins, and the second set soared. Stratmospheric. Check out the MTV trailer for a sip. Something sounded strangely familiar. A cover. Was it Cream? No, wait. Early Pink Floyd — something from Umma Gumma, or Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Have to figure this out. Never heard Floyd sound like this. The only other cover I know of Burma doing is a version of The Stooges’ “1970” on “The Horrible Truth About Burma.”

Sudden strange impulse to know how Burma would sound unplugged. Maybe with Conley on Mariachi bass, Miller on Spanish guitar, Prescott with Tito Puente’s drums. Or even tablas.

Disproportionate number of Moby scalps and Drew Carey glasses in the audience. First encore Penelope Houston jumped onstage. Second encore finished with a totally plugged-in “Max Ernst.” Just electrified.

Caught the last few pieces by Kinski, one of the openers. Some blend of Hawkwind, Spacemen 3, and Can. Psychedelic jam bands still exist (Kinski, not Burma), with modern electronics. And flute! Should have heard more.

Music: Pink Floyd :: Interstellar Overdrive
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AirTunes

Intrigued by Apple’s Airport Express / AirTunes announcement. Finally, an Apple-centric (but not Mac-centric!) way to get the iTunes library across the house and into the stereo. The solution is pretty unique — not at all what I (or almost anyone) expected, which was more like a wireless iPod-like home stereo component, maybe with video capabilities bolted on. AE plugs into a power outlet and into your stereo’s audio-in (analog or digital). Your Wi-Fi capable Mac then auto-discovers the device, and music flows like water. Cake. And it doubles as an AirPort Extreme base station and print server.

The good people at Slim Devices must be hating this. I personally sold our sliMP3 a while ago; had finally come to see our home stereo as the final refuge, a fortress from which I could escape the ubiquity of MP3 in my life. But AirTunes is a tantalizing prospect…

Music: Can :: Cutaway