Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Thanks to John Battelle, was able to attend the Web 2.0 Conference today — wishing I could take more time off work for this — incredible group of thinkers and speakers gathered in one place to discuss the theme “The Web as Platform.”
Lots of loose notes and quotable quotes below.
David Sifry of Technorati: “Weblogs are the exhaust fumes of personal attention streams.”
Continue reading “A Day at Web 2.0”
We’re considering our first new Macs in years for the home office. Both of us have fallen in love with the new iMacs, but I’m still inclined toward the expandability of the PowerMac — I’ve got a stack of external drives on my desk that I’d love to mount in the case. One of our goals is to eliminate or greatly reduce the constant hum of computers around here, but I’m not coming up with much concrete info on the relative noise levels generated by these two (aside from trying to listen closely in a store crowded with people and machines). Sent a question for publication to MacSlash last night and they’re running it. Will be interesting to see results from the field.
My mother owns a store – a gallery of Native American artifacts – in Morro Bay called Earth Spirit. After all these years, she’s finally decided to make an online play. She’s been hearing from neighboring shopkeepers that they’re doing better on eBay than they’ve ever done with walk-in business. So I went on a domain hunt for her, only to find that pretty much every variant of earthspirit.com, .net, .org, plus every variant of earth-spirit, not to mention the .biz and .info TLDs, were taken. Most of them not used, just taken. Trying to access most of these domains gets you one of those default homepages you get when you’re deep in squatter territory.
Curious, I wrote to a few of the domain owners to see just how deeply they wanted to scalp me (pun intended). I wrote innocent-looking notes offering “up to $100” for each domain. The response I got on earth-spirit.net asked for $999, to which I responded:
Hi –
To be sure, is that a typo below? Did you really mean $99 for earth-spirit.net? Or are you actually asking $999 for this domain? If the latter, all I can say is, “good luck” and, um, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha! You very funny man, Mark.”
Again, I’m offering $100 for this domain.
To which I received canned counter-responses listing the insanely high prices the pond scum had earned for “similar” domains in the past year. Only the examples weren’t similar – they were for .com domains without the hyphen – like comparing Beverly Hills real estate to a little lot in downtown Watts. I left it alone, and a week later received a message telling me how lucky I was – they were having a blowout sale, and earth-spirit.net was suddenly 20% off! Imagine that. Still, no way. Mum’s not going for it and neither am I. We’ll figure out some sort of creative, memorable variant that doesn’t support gravel-licking opportunists.
Just launched a rebuild of John Battelle’s Searchblog. Got some first-hand experience with the holy grail of CSS — 3-column layout with fluid center column (he wanted a right column to drop ads into). Quickly realized that this is clearly one of those areas where a table-based layout would have been infinitely easier, but just can’t bring myself to step back that far in time (or to accept defeat).
With Glish’s sample code, the initial implementation wasn’t difficult – what sucked was butting heads with IE/Win’s horribly broken box model. With the layout working in virtually every modern CSS-compliant browser, checked IE/Win only to find the left and right columns lapping up into the banner space. Trouble is, you can’t float three columns — you have to specify screen placement as absolutes. But do that, and you find out just how far off IE/Win’s reckoning of vertical height is from non-broken CSS implementations. At that point, it becomes a game of seesaw — fix one while breaking the other, or vice versa. Gad, it’s frustrating.
In the end, everything is working fine in IE/Win (IE/Mac was fine all along, of course, since IE/Mac has always had a better CSS implementation than IE/Win) with one small side-effect remaining for the working browsers. Feh. I’ll lick that too… eventually.
Got a business? Hate your competitors? Hire a mafioso gang of hackers to hammer your enemies’ web sites with distributed denial of service attacks. I’m thinking this would make a great theme for a future Sopranos episode. The younger family members could hang up the “garbage” business and jump feet first into the bloody underground world of packet sniffing. They could call it “Th3 50prawn05.”
Scientists are pretty convinced at this point that Mars once held water, but other curious features on the surface have turned out to be the mission’s own footprints — strange flower-like patterns in the Martian dust are imprints from seams in the landing airbags, and shiny objects in the distance turn out to be discarded heat shields.
Unfortunately, the operating system on the Rover has taken to rebooting itself every time they download data from the craft. Appears there’s an issue with the FAT-formatted memory card in the craft, which leads to the OS thinking it’s out of memory when it isn’t. Talk about shipping with bugs.
Note: This post has been changed from the original – the cnet article implies that DOS was involved, when the OS is actually by WindRiver — I was taken aback. Nevermind…
Scripting my butt off. On request of a customer, just finished developing mtblogmail, a PHP utility that emails weblog summaries to a mailing list or the MT Notifications list at regular intervals, filling a mysterious void in the MT notifications feature (“Sure,” I said, “cake! A few SQL queries and…” turned out to be a full-blown utility). Released it as free software. Tested it here first, and migrated everyone who was on the birdhouse notifications list into subscribers. To get weekly email updates on recent birdhouse posts, enter your email in the box to the right.
Also just turned in final project for the shell programming class — a menu-driven script that creates / deletes users and groups, generates apache configurations, installs SpamAssassin preference files, configures webalizer or awstats, reports spam and virus traffic for the user and domain, etc. The instructor asked me to be a T.A. in the class next semester, but no have time.
The AirPort Express has worked as advertised — when it works. Trouble with our house is that the layout forces WiFi signal to pass through the fridge/stove and through a dense wall. The reception light on the AX has always blinked, indicating that it’s out of range even though it’s less than 50′ from my Mac. It worked, but picking up the cordless phone or using the microwave would cut the tunes. With a tot in the house, we use the microwave a lot. Finally decided to run ethernet cable under the house and hardwire the damn thing.
Drilled a hole between the baseboard and the wall similar to how the phone cord is wired, but hit a joist and didn’t have a long enough bit to go all the way down (hole’s okay, barely noticeable). Plan B: Remove cover plate from the adjacent wall socket, drill just next to the box, and put a hole in the cover plate to match. Pushed 50′ of CAT-5 into the hole, put on old clothes and knee pads, and ventured into the crawlspace. Here’s where it gets fun.
Our office was built after the rest of the house, and has its own foundation. Turns out the main crawlspace doesn’t offer access to the space under the office (hereafter referred to as “the crypt of shacker”). The only access is from a tiny opening under the deck. Shimmying Navy Seal-style on mildewy ground, rocks under belly, dark. A hole in the main foundation opened up to the crypt. Trouble is, we had central heat installed when we moved in, and the opening was mostly filled by a 12″ conduit, leaving a space just about large enough for a cat. I’m somewhat larger than a cat. Exhaled all my air, arms forward, and pushed forward with my toes, praying I wouldn’t get stuck. Came close to backing out, lungs squished, elbows munged, but got through, shimmied forward up to the wall… only to find that the cable wasn’t there waiting for me. Apparently bunched up against the same joist I had hit with the drill. Backed out to startling daylight.
Back in the office, went to pull the cable back out… and it was caught, apparently tangled inside. Tug, cajole, sweet-talk, nothing worked. Finally had to cut it off. Now there’s 50′ of CAT-5 permanently entombed in our office wall. It was then I came up with Plan C: use the heating duct itself! Pushed aside some flashing with a screwdriver, and bingo — I could see dirt. Spooled in more cable, then back into the crypt of shacker. Upside down, threading a tangle of wire wherever I could, no reasonable way to hold or position the flashlight, hair full of damp dust, sweating like a boar, finally through to the main crawlspace and finally up through a pre-existing hole in the floor behind the stereo.
Terminator crimping time — I never get it right the first time. Finally the router registered that it saw something on the other end. Went to reconfigure the AX… only to find that the Setup Assistant wouldn’t run without the now-removed Aiport card installed. The documentation only covers working with wireless networks. Later found the answer to using AX over Ethernet: Use the Aiport Admin utility, not the Express Setup. Go to the Airport tab, click Base Station Options, and check “Airport over Ethernet.” Joy to the world.
Another 30-minute project turned into half a day. All good projects are that way. Gorgeous day, too. Except for the view from the crypt.
This slashdot comment reminded me of a story that used to get tossed around at BeOS gatherings:
lcsaudio used to sell BeBoxes (remounted in a custom rackmount case) as part of our show control system. One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that a 66MHz BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.
I finally got my wish.
Despite being used for nearly two hours per day for the past couple of years, being thrown from my bike in the accident, dropped to concrete on several other occasions, used by Miles as a very small stool to reach the bathroom sink and other ignominious fates, my first-generation iPod simply would not die. The jog-wheel has been popping off lately, revealing dirt in the works, the battery has been charging down quickly, and the face-plate is badly scuffed. Lately I’ve been wishing it would just die, so I could justify a new one, but the damn thing apparently thought it was better to burn out than to fade away.
It finally stopped booting last week. Riding to work in silence was more jarring than expected. At the Apple store this morning, the girl who assisted me announced that her name was “Boots.” That’s a good name. She went into the back room to get a 20GB 4th-gen iPod and returned empty-handed. She stood before me and pronounced, “Umm… peace and love, but we’re out of stock.”
Peace and love? I’m all for it! But, what was behind the Lenon/Ono sentiment? Was she anticipating a violent, non-love reaction when I learned the truth? Did she think I was going to smack her just for being out of stock? Seeking to pre-emptively diffuse my inevitable rage with a prayer for world peace and a global bed-in? Boots! It’s OK! I understand! I dig the sentiment, but I wasn’t going to holler, really.
It all turned out for the best. After another trip to the stock-room, she found one in an opened box, with a 10% discount. I’m in heaven. Coincidentally, the Airport Express arrived yesterday, so the living room is wirelessly wired now as well. AE works perfectly, but sits on the edge of good reception — the status light blinks perennially yellow, but the audio signal is solid — no drop-outs until we run the microwave, at which point the music pauses (I don’t mean the signal drops out; iTunes actually stops moving until the signal is clear again; amazing).
Speaking of peace and love, where was it at the Democratic National Convention? Lots of rousing speeches, but the DNC was militaristic from top to bottom. Must be the price of admission back into the white house, but still found myself wishing we were watching Kucinich instead. Here’s some more peace and love from your friends at Halliburton.