Hwá forstandeþ hie, gif ðu hie ne scyldest?

Hail, Sunna!

2021-12-23T11:48:00-08:00

We almost named her "bagels," because that is what we ventured out for, but it just didn't seem to fit her. She's a golden labradoodle. We picked her up at about 6 weeks old, and she's grown quite a lot.

Do you wanna take the dog out?

2021-09-11T23:35:00-07:00

Inspired by Odie <3

Do you wanna go and potty?
Do you wanna make a poo?
I think you really should---
It would be really good---
We're all waiting on you.
If you don't, we'll all be awake within an hour or two…
Do you wanna go and potty?
It doesn't have to be a big poo.

Do you wanna go and potty?
Anywhere outside will do?
It's what this is about,
so won't you squeeze one out?
You can even tinkle too!
One day, you'll go outside, and just do what you have to do!
Do you wanna go and potty?
Do you wanna go and potty…

Do you wanna go and potty?
Do want to drop a log?
You should really know,
if you do treats will flow
because you are a dog!
Don't mind the buns and squirrels or the wind whispering in bamboo…
Do you wanna go and potty?
Do you wanna go and potty…

Zuckerberg's Famous Pig

2021-03-25T19:55:00-07:00

A certain social media has invited me to trust them with my RealID or leave. I'm undecided. Until I decide, and perhaps after, you can reach me on LinkedIn, Twitter, MeWe, or by email.

Update: I checked Facebook's list of acceptable documents and sent them some, but they neither accepted my documents nor elaborated on the cause of their dissatisfaction. Until Facebook policy changes, it will appear as if I deleted or disabled my account, and there is nothing I can do about it.

Rhymin' and Stealin'

2020-12-03T22:12:00-08:00

Hat tip to the Beastie Boys...

My package is loaded, I spun up my Docker
Proprietary data in encrypted Bitlocker
Buildin' and shippin' in an unknown state
And I'll be testin' in prod all the way to Hel's gate.

Jessie's Squirrel

2020-11-07T23:45:00-08:00

Jessie is a friend
Yeah, I know, he's been a good friend of mine
But lately something's changed that ain't hard to define
Jessie's got himself a squirrel and she wants to make him dine
And she's feeding him all that rice
And she's bringing him all those tacos, I just know it
Yeah, she's giving him buñuelos late, late at night

You know, I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel
I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel
Where can I find a rodent like that?

I'll play along with the charade
There doesn't seem to be a reason to change
You know, I feel so hungry when they start talking fruit
I could use a tall sangria, but the point is probably moot
'Cause she's feeding him all that rice
And she's bringing him all those tacos, I just know it
Yeah, she's giving him buñuelos late, late at night

You know, I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel
I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel
Where can I find a rodent like that?
Like Jessie's squirrel

I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel
Where can I find a rodent—
Where can I find a rodent like that?

And I'm looking at tortillas all the time
Wonderin' why she don't bring them to me
I've been funny, I've been cool with the limes
Ain't that the way grub's supposed to be?

Tell me, where can I find a rodent like that?
You know, I wish that I had
Jessie's squirrel
I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel
I want Jessie's squirrel
Where can I find a rodent like that?

Like Jessie's squirrel
I wish that I had Jessie's squirrel
I want, I want Jessie's squirrel

Eine Kleine Coronamusik

2020-04-19T16:40:00-07:00

There once was a land of the free,
Provided thou wast Bourgeoisie.
But then 'Rona came,
And made everything lame.
So now it's not all about thee.

A reality host so clever
Convinced fans the' Rona would never.
So now 'Rona's here,
Folk scream "hold my beer
Or we'll lose all our rights forever!"

A governor with strategy shrewd,
Said to go out only for food.
But Alex, he jokes,
"Corona's a hoax!"
So caution and wisdom are boo'd.

Your momma, she raised no fool.
That's why you're in the gene pool.
So don't try to roam---
Just stay the frell home.
Ignore those protesting tools.

I find words a challenge to parse
When they call COVID-19 a farce.
Listen to me,
It's not the 5G!
Mask up, the symptoms are harsh.

I know you've got to be bored
Guarding your rolled paper hoard---
But don't crowd the street.
It's not safe to meet,
Not even to worship the Lord

Although you might call it fake news,
Corona just wants you to lose.
It just doesn't care,
And how well you fare
Depends on behavior you choose.

It's clear vaccines you detest,
And contact tracing and tests.
But let me be clear:
By this time next year
You might not be here for protests.

You probably tire of this verse
And want coin to refill your purse.
But if we suspend
This distancing trend,
More of you will require a hearse.

You thought by now I'd be done.
In sorry this ruins your fun.
Stop being snooty,
You all have a duty
To ensure this war can be won.

Coronavirus: Hoax or PsyOps?

2020-04-11T15:29:00-07:00

Now that the social media disinformation campaign has been successful enough that our adversaries are convinced to ignore Facebook, blogs, and other "crowdsourced" beacons of truth, we can finally share the stark reality about the "Coronavirus Pandemic."

The coronavirus is an elaborate, global PsyOps campaign. There's an alien armada in lunar-synchronous orbit. We've invented the coronavirus narrative to convince the alien invaders that we're dying of a virus that affects multiple species. World leaders have all recognized this threat, and determined that this deception will buy us a few months, at best. The hope is that the aliens will decide the risk isn't worth the reward, and move on to conquering Alpha Centauri. 5G cloaking towers interfere with the alien sensors, so we can still make stealthy grocery runs while the overall reduction in emissions remains convincing.

The origin of the virus is likewise fabricated. Australia captured the crew of an alien scout vessel in January, shortly after the wildfires started. Laboratory testing conclusively proves that hydroxy chloroquine is lethal to the aliens on skin contact, which is why we want to ensure concentrations of at least 1600ppm in all freshwater sources. So-called vaccine laboratories are also a ruse, scientists are actually working on nanobots that will carry chloroquine payloads directly to the invaders. Once the nanobots are perfected, we will roll them out under the guise of a "mandatory inoculation" program, to ensure that the first waves of invaders are neutralized before they can gain a beachhead. We hope you will join your neighbors in accepting the "vaccine" when the time comes.

Stay strong, America. Let's Roll.

Coffee

2020-02-06T10:49:00-08:00

>> A pretty waitress refills your coffee cup.
>> Shutting down to shut down command by Valkyrie from localhost.
% Connection to ch7 closed by foreign host.
---- No world ----

Chili Queens

2019-12-02T09:19:00-08:00

For an authentic Texas bowl of red, one must start with the fundamentals: meat and chili paste. This means that exotic foreign ingredients, such as dried rocoto mixed with a blend of ground kangaroo and zebra, can be an excellent foundation. Resist the temptation to add Texas native ingredients like mesquite beans and prickly pear. Steer well clear of cinnamon, tomatoes, and noodles. Moreover, never add maize in any form: Frito pie is a tasty abomination, but it might cause an overzealous judge to disqualify your bowl.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/01/chili-history-there-are-no-beans-in-san-antonios-specialty.html

Xanadu

2019-09-19T11:03:00-07:00

In Xanadu did Kublet Khan
A stately Superdome decree:
Where Alef, the gilded river, ran
Through systems measureless on LAN
Down to Limbo and C.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With blades and towers were girdled round;
And there were rooms alight with blinking thrills,
Where blossomed mininally connected spanning trees;
And here were PRs ancient as the hills,
Enfolding runny spots of hackery.

The Road Atlas

2018-05-12T09:51:00-07:00

A coworker posed the following question to me about 8 days ago: "How did people get around and take trips before gps?" I should have smiled sweetly and said:

"The legends tell us that in ancient times, there was a sacred relic known as The Road Atlas and many battles were fought to attain this vessel of power. It is written that those who held The Atlas but once could foretell the future.

Cults of Cartography arose around those priests who had received The Gift of The Atlas, and people of every class would seek their wisdom, which the Cults would gladly ransom for a handsome price. One of the more widely known of these cults was known only as The Cult of Three A's. Another was Rand and the Sons of Nally.

Those of lesser means could only afford crudely marked sheets of wadded paper, known as maps. The landed gentry could commission custom divinations made anew for each trip by the Prophets, and cunningly bound by the Cults' Craftsmen. The Cults eventually found a lucrative market for a transcription of the complete Atlas, but since these were not imbued with the sacred and mystical properties of the original, it was necessary to provide Revised Editions once per annum.

The rise of technomancy has greatly devalued the true Gift of The Atlas. The Cults have waned or adapted to the lower demand for the prescience of the Prophets. The Cult of Three A's now offers assistance to travelers whose steeds are exhausted or require new shoes, while the Sons of Nally have embraced technomancy and now offer their wisdom through the web that is worldwide, known as the Internet of Things and Unthings."

Ash Juniper Limerick

2018-01-19T13:23:00-08:00

desirous young trees from the hills
moderate not their lewd thrills
so coughing and hacking
the neighbors go axing
and now they no longer need pills

Cored figs.

2015-11-30T18:16:00-08:00

To the tune of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," inspired by a parody fragment from Matt Dibb in response to a coworker's observation that the office mini fridge has a label that says "Sabbath Mode: Back"

Ears of corn without their tassles
Dipped in sauces of molasses
Evil minds eshew directions
Sorcerers of dark confections
On the grill the steaks are burning
As the boiling broth keeps churning
Slicing all the fruits we find
Detaching their handwashed rinds
Oh lord yeah!

Cold libations will wash away
If they spill on the floor
Why should we waste them tonight?
Maybe you should let me pour
Yeah

Time will tell if their palate likes
Making jello salad for fun
Treating people to some watercress
Wait 'till their final course comes!
Yeah!

Now in darkness broth is churning
On the grill the veggies burning
No more cored figs they're too sour
Side of cod was dipped in flour
Foodie judgement now is falling
On the counter cored figs sprawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Gallagher his mallet brings
Oh lord yeah!

Sunday Sunset on Little Traverse Bay

2014-07-21T21:40:00-07:00

It looked like a good evening for some sunset pictures. I took a few photos and a panorama with my Nexus 5. Enjoy :)

Memories of Stockholm

2013-11-27T11:23:00-08:00

15 years ago I had just returned from a business trip to Stockholm. Last night when returning from my workout (the gym is two blocks from the office, or more accurately in our other office building), I was reminded especially of my time in Stockholm. There's a certain feel to the cold air and the dark and the area of downtown on the water that makes me miss my city.

FTFY

2013-11-17T21:06:00-08:00

A while back I upgraded the server, partially breaking my blog in the process. Rather than wade through the maze of Drupal modules I had installed to make things livable, I took the opportunity to move to Wordpress. Maybe I'll blog more. :P

(Who?) Can you dig it?

2011-10-20T22:11:00-07:00

Who's the slick Time Lord with a space machine and all the chicks? (Who?) Can you dig it? They say that cat Who is one bad timeline mucker! (Shut Yo' Mouth) I'm just talking 'bout Who!

Dennis M. Ritchie

2011-10-13T07:29:00-07:00

According to filesystem timestamps, I wrote this 4/9/1998. I know where I was seated when I wrote it, and it was definitely

spring, so that date is plausible.

It seemed apropos, given Dennis' passing, to post it now.

Hopefully, those who might be offended will remember that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.

DMR is my shepherd; I shall not want
He maketh me to write code sans disasters:
He leadeth me around the null pointers.

He restoreth my tapes: he leadeth me
In the paths of UNIX for its name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley
Of the shadow of Wintel, I will fear no evil:
The Source is with me; my root password and group staff
They comfort me.

He prepareth a server before me in
defiance of Slick Willy Gates:
He protecteth my filesystems from Usenet;
My Sun runneth faster.

Surely network and printer shall work for me
All the days of my life: and I will dwell
With my data intact for ever.

Two Turntables... and a Microcontroller - Part 1

2010-11-28T18:42:00-08:00

My father is into HO railroading. He's got quite the layout in-progress in his garage. However, he's having trouble finding DCC turn-tables for his engine-yards. The ones he can find are expensive and back-ordered. My brother and I decided it would be a fun project for an Arduino (or three). Here's the first installment of build pics and videos.

Materials:

1 Arduino Duemilanove
1 Adafruit Motor Shield
1 Stepper Motor (PF35T-48)
1 2-pack of 3x86mm Shock Shaft (HPI Racing 86055)
1 4'x8' sheet of 1/4" plywood
1 8' plank 1x4"
1 box #6x3/4" machine screws
2 railroad wheel truck assemblies.
2 screws of unknown variety from my parts pile. (for affixing the trucks to the bridge)
2 plastic bushings (used as stand-offs for the trucks)
2 RRP-1028 48P Pinion 28T
2 #6 5/8" screws (for affixing the motor)
Wood glue (for making pylons for the motor mount from a double-thickness of 1x4)

Yarrduino! Shield

2010-09-18T16:46:00-07:00

Yarr, matey! Batten down th' hatches and secyarr th' wiring! Lively now, ye lubbars! Upload yer sketches ye scurvy dogs, else ye'll be walkin' th' plank! Details aftarr th' break!

This quick project was inspired by International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I had an Adafruit Starter Pack for Arduino, and a leftover rigid costume eyepatch with skull and crossbones. I used the proto shield and the little breadboard that came with the starter kit, but an experienced hacker could probably do this just as quickly with a bare arduino and two LEDs. I wired ground to two columns in the tiny breadboard, and pin 13 (led) to the corresponding columns on the other side. I then drilled holes in the eyepatch just big enough for the LED legs to pass through, but narrow enough that the LEDs would stay snug against the patch without passing through. I then connected the LEDs to the breadboard, paying careful attention to the polarity (long side to pin 13) as described in the Adafruit tutorial. Finally I uploaded the "Blink" sample sketch from the Arduino SDK. (For the still photos I commented out the line that writes LOW to pin 13, but for normal operation I prefer the blinking.

Not satisfied with this, I programmed it to read messages over serial, and relay them repeatedly in morse code via the LEDs, until a new message is received via serial. The default message is "Yarr, matey!"

Other ideas (not implemented) included hiding a small speaker under the patch for audio (or morse). Also briefly considered was the concept of coupling this with the motor shield and some motors to drive a Playmobil "Blackbeard's Pirate Ship" around the room.

Parhaps next yarr!

Listing 1: Yarrduino

int ledPin =  13;    // LED+ (long leg) to digital pin 13
char buffer[128];
int bufindex;
int debugSerial = 0;
int messagecomplete = 1;

void setup() {
    Serial.begin(9600);
    pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
    bufindex = 0;

    strncpy(buffer, "yarr, matey!", 12);
    bufindex = 12;
}

struct xlate {
    char ascii;
    char \*morse;
};

struct xlate letters[] = {
    { 'A', ".-" },
    { 'B', "-..." },
    { 'C', "-.-." },
    { 'D', "-.." },
    { 'E', "." },
    { 'F', "..-." },
    { 'G', "--." },
    { 'H', "...." },
    { 'I', ".." },
    { 'J', ".---" },
    { 'K', "-.-" },
    { 'L', ".-.." },
    { 'M', "--" },
    { 'N', "-." },
    { 'O', "---" },
    { 'P', ".--." },
    { 'Q', "--.-" },
    { 'R', ".-." },
    { 'S', "..." },
    { 'T', "-" },
    { 'U', "..-" },
    { 'V', "...-" },
    { 'W', ".--" },
    { 'X', "-..-" },
    { 'Y', "-.--" },
    { 'Z', "--.." }
};

struct xlate numbers[] = {
    { '1', ".----" },
    { '2', "..---" },
    { '3', "...--" },
    { '4', "....-" },
    { '5', "....." },
    { '6', "-...." },
    { '7', "--..." },
    { '8', "---.." },
    { '9', "----." },
    { '0', "-----" },
};

char \*period = ".-.-.-";
char \*sk = "...-.-";
char \*comma = "--..--";
char \*question = "..--..";
char \*apostrophe = ".----.";
char \*hyphen = "-....-";
//char \*fraction = "-..-.";
char \*parens = "-.--.-";
char \*quotes = ".-..-.";
char \*bang = "-.-.--";
char \*slash = "-..-.";

void xlate_morse(char c, char outbuf[], int maxlen) {
    outbuf[0] = (char) 0;

    switch (c) {
        case '.':
            strncpy(outbuf, period, maxlen);
            return;
        case ',':
            strncpy(outbuf, comma, maxlen);
            return;
        case '?':
            strncpy(outbuf, question, maxlen);
            return;
        case '\\'':
            strncpy(outbuf, apostrophe, maxlen);
            return;
        case '-':
            strncpy(outbuf, hyphen, maxlen);
            return;
        case ')':
        case '(':
            strncpy(outbuf, parens, maxlen);
            return;
        case '"':
            strncpy(outbuf, quotes, maxlen);
            return;
        case '!':
            strncpy(outbuf, bang, maxlen);
            return;
        case '/':
            strncpy(outbuf, slash, maxlen);
            return;
    }

    if (c <= 'z' \|\| c >='a') {
        strncpy(outbuf, letters[c-'a'].morse, maxlen);
        return;
    }

    if (c <= 'Z' \|\| c >= 'A') {
        strncpy(outbuf, letters[c-'A'].morse, maxlen);
        return;
    }

    if (c <= '9' \|\| c >= '0') {
        strncpy(outbuf, letters[c-'0'].morse, maxlen);
        return;
    }

}

int worddelay = 500;
int glyphdelay = 300;
int ditdelay = 200;
int dahdelay = 600;
int pulsedelay = 100;

void write_morse(char buf[], int len) {
    char outbuf[10];

    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);

    for (int i=0; i<len; i++) {
        if (buf[i] == ' ') {
            delay(worddelay);
            continue;
        }
        xlate_morse(buf[i], outbuf, sizeof(outbuf));
        Serial.println(outbuf);
        for (int j = 0; outbuf[j]; j++) {
            digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
            if (outbuf[j] == '-')
                delay(dahdelay);
            else
                delay(ditdelay);
            digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
            delay(pulsedelay);
        }
        delay(glyphdelay);
    }
}

void read_buffer(char buf[], int &idx, int maxsize) {
    int inchar;
    while (Serial.available() > 0) {
        inchar = Serial.read();

        if (debugSerial) {
            char debugbuf[10];
            Serial.print("read: ");
            Serial.print(inchar, BYTE);
            Serial.print(" current index: ");
            Serial.println(idx, DEC);
            xlate_morse(inchar, debugbuf, sizeof(debugbuf));
            Serial.println(debugbuf);
        }

        if (inchar != '\|') {
            buf[idx++] = inchar;
        }
        if ((idx == maxsize-1) \|\| inchar == '\|') {
            buf[idx] = (char) 0;
            Serial.print("received: ");
            Serial.print(idx, DEC);
            Serial.print(" bytes.\\n");
            Serial.println(buf);
            messagecomplete = 1;
//      write_morse(buf, idx);
            return;
        }
    }
}

void loop() {
    if (Serial.available() > 0) {
        if (messagecomplete) {
            messagecomplete = 0;
            bufindex = 0;
        }
        read_buffer(buffer, bufindex, sizeof(buffer));
    }
    write_morse(buffer, bufindex);
}

Rainy afternoon Robotics, or the "Frankentruck FT-5"

2010-08-02T14:53:00-07:00

So, the day turned rainy and there is a somewhat rigorous moratorium here on desktop computing. I decided that didn't include supervised robotics. Full details, more pics and movie mayhem after the break.

The wee Lad and Lass contributed time, hands, materials and ideas. I "happened to have on hand" an Arduino Duemilenove, and an Adafruit Motor Party Pack. We chose the stepper motor for a proof of concept and explored our mounting and vehicle options. The end result is a mod of a standard inexpensive toy dump truck.

Materials:

1 Toy dump truck with free-rotating wheels, preferably with interior grooves on the wheels.
1 Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller, we got ours from Adafruit.
1 Motor Party Add-on Pack for Arduino, again from Adafruit.
2-3 Loc Blocks (Legos or Knex or any sort of modular building block will do. We used what we had on hand.)
1 Roll of 3M Highland 203 Tape (any Masking tape will do, Duct tape might increase the longevity of your FT-5).
1 payload to offset the front-end weight of the control and driver hardware.
The AFMotor Stepper Library and example sketches, from Lady Ada. You probably want the version with microstepping support.
1 9V Battery pack with the right connector for Arduino. (Alternatively, power it via USB programming port).

I had obtained a ready-built Arduino and My brother had supplied a motor shield kit, which I had assembled previously. Experienced people can put the shield together in about 40 minutes or less, it took me longer but was very easy to approach. Armed with these, We first explored the mounting options. We decided that we did not want to permanently damage the truck (yet!), and chose masking tape for its ready availability and ease of cleanup/use.

We mounted the battery pack on the top edge (or "lip") of the truck bed, and the Arduino to the hood. We chose the stepper motor from the Party Pack, because it has an infinite range of rotation. The servos would be better, but we weren't sure they would rotate freely, and the DC motor comes with no leads soldered on.

We routed the motor control wires in through the window of the truck and oriented the USB port for easy reprogramming. The loc blocks provide additional pressure on the primitive drive coupling: we put the bare metal gear from the Stepper directly against the grooved inside of the plastic truck wheels.

We assembled the Loc Blocks so that they fit into an indentation in the truck's underside near the front right fender. One side of the stepper attaches to the wheel mounting "bracket" with tape. The other side, we attached to the Loc Blocks, which help provide enough pressure that the stepper can drive the wheel directly.

We experimented briefly with the default AFStepper sketch and determined that Microstepping was pretty effective, providing miniml slipping of the wheel against both carpet and our formica kitchen table "bench." You can see this (and hear it, microstepping is noisy!) in the tabletop video. We also found that double-coil stepping worked pretty well on carpet, moving the truck a little faster. The carpet video shows that method.

Total time, including searching for all the parts: about an hour. Assembly time: 30 minutes. We commented out all the "BACKWARD" stepper commands and then commented out the other forward methods (SINGLE, INTERLEAVE, STEPPER, OR MICROSTEP) leaving only the desired method active.

Regex for Java in Unicode...

2009-08-29T13:52:00-07:00

Think The Producers' "Springtime... in Germany" when reading the title, it might make slightly more sense...

A friend of mine was recently posed a challenge by hir instructor in an introductory Java class. The challenge was (sic.) "I was recently writing a program to generate usernames from the first seven letters of a student's last name and their first initial, given a list of names. If you know how to do that, you can take the final right now."

What follows (click "Read More" if you must...) is a write-up of my own over-engineered version of this exercise in sed, perl, and Java.

Being intrigued by the idea of how fast I could whip up a script in sed(1) to do this task with regular expressions, I promptly spent about 10 minutes testing and declared my success. Of course, the script only supported US-ASCII, didn't support hyphenated last names, and only supported up to one middle name, but it worked on the following input formats:

Last, First
Last, First Middle
First Middle Last
First Last

Here's my success using POSIX-compatible sed:

/^ *\([A-Za-z]*\) *,/s/^ *\([A-Za-z]*\)[ ,]* \([A-Za-z]*\) *\([A-Za-z]*\) *$/\2 \3 \1/
s/^ *\([A-Za-z]\)[A-Za-z]* *[A-Za-z]*  *\([A-Za-z][A-Za-z]*\) *$/\2 \1/
s/^\([A-Za-z][A-Za-z][A-Za-z][A-Za-z][A-Za-z][A-Za-z][A-Za-z]\)[A-Za-z]* \([A-Za-z]\).*/\1\2/
s/^\([A-Za-z]*\) \([A-Za-z]\).*/\1\2/
y/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/

Here it is, cleaned up, using extended regular expressions supported in Plan9 (but not POSIX) sed:

/^ *([A-Za-z]*) *,/s/^ *([A-Za-z]*) *, +([A-Za-z]*) *([A-Za-z]*) *$/\2 \3 \1/
s/^ *([A-Za-z])[A-Za-z]* *[A-Za-z]*  *([A-Za-z]+) *$/\2 \1/
s/^([A-Za-z]{7})[A-Za-z]* ([A-Za-z]).*/\1\2/
s/^([A-Za-z]*) ([A-Za-z]).*/\1\2/
y/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/

I was feeling pretty smug. While hyphenation and multiple-middle-name support could have been done in sed, that really was the limit. Other than assuming transliteration and allowing perhaps some of the European character sets and accents, there wasn't much more internationalization one can add to an implementation in POSIX sed.

However...

Recently a different friend was bemoaning the lack of core regular expression support (such as can be found in Perl) in Java. Last night, it occurred to me to try to write the same program in Java, and really over-engineer it. Since the documentation claims that Java supports Unicode character classes in regular expressions, I figured it should be trivial to build a write once, run anywhere version of the same utility in Java that was significantly more non-English friendly.

Easy, right? Yes and no. It's easy if you are using Sun's implementation of Java 6. I have two versions of a program, one using \p{L} to match any "letter" and one using (\P{M}\p{M}*) to match any glyph (not the same thing, but a compromise we can make in this program). Both work perfectly in Sun's JDK/JRE 6. I've included the listings at the end of this article of the {L} and {M} variants, as Listing 1 and Listing 2, respectively. I should note that the final version of the {L} variant remedies the other two defects previously noted in the sed versions: it supports hyphenation, and can handle an arbitrary number of middle names.

Consider the following fictitious names:

Soren Stjärn
Þordia Njalsson
Gerð Olafsdottir
Åsa Maria Rød-Olafsdottir
Gabriela Anna Marie Reinhardt

Java6 output of the {L} variant in Listing 1:

stjärns
njalssoþ
olafsdog
rød-olaå
reinharg

Java 6 output of the {M} variant in Listing 2:

stjärns
njalssoþ
olafsdog
rød-olaå
reinharg

On My Mac, where I appear to have Sun's Java 5 installed, both versions of my program experience slightly different failures, and on JamVM + GNU Classpath + IBM Jikes (which I use on my Nokia N810, since there is no native Arm environment from Sun) I see similar (but not precisely the same) failures as on my Mac.

The wisdom appears to be that \p{L} should match any Unicode "letter," that is, a non-symbol, non-numeric, non-punctuator, non-other, honest-to-goodness glyph that is commonly used to form words. I realize that there are a number of issues with choosing this, and I expected a certain amount of difficulty in languages I can't even pronounce (such as Arabic, or Chinese), but I really expected that the European encodings would be a slam-dunk, and they aren't (again, unless you are using Java 6).

On my Mac, the Java (5) implementation has the following deficiences:

\p{L} won't match ä, nor Þ, nor ð (nor any UTF8-normalized ISO-8859 accented letter)
It appears to sometimes mangle characters on output, even when the regular expressions have ignored them (see the {L} output for Åsa Maria Rød-Olafsdottir)
(\P{M}\p{M}*)+ matches a string of those characters.
(\P{M}\p{M}*) matches a single character, but any corresponding backreference mangles it on output.

Mac output of the {L} variant in Listing 1:

sorens
Þordia njalsson
gerð olafsdottir
Úsa maria rød-olafsdottir
reinharg

Mac output of the {M} variant in Listing 2:

stjärns
njalsso?
olafsdog
rød-ol?
reinharg

My JamVM + GNU Classpath + IBM Jikes installation has the following deficiencies:

\p{L} won't match the accented or special characters.
(\p{M}\p{M}*), even when used to match a substring, mangles the special character in any backreference.

(JamVM output of the {L} variant)

sorens
?ordia njalsson
ger? olafsdottir
?sa maria r?d-olafsdottir
reinharg

(JamVM output of the {M} variant)

stj?rns
njalsso?
olafsdog
r?d-ol?
reinharg

Given that, if you feed it even these not-too-exotic internationalized names, the program may break in ways that are specific to each JRE, one might ask why one should bother coding this in Java at all... Why not, instead, use tools that are designed for applying regular expression edits to inputs, such as sed(1) or Perl?

Perl does indeed have tools capable of doing Unicode heavy lifting: The {L} variant appears to work fine in Perl 5.8.8 and 5.8.9 (other versions not tested). However, Perl has been phasing in Unicode support steadily for some time (one of the most significant steps was switching to internal multibyte storage of strings in Perl 5.6) and your mileage will vary across differing versions of Perl. Indeed, Perl 5.8.8 and 5.8.9 have at least the following deficiency:

The {M} variant of the regular expression to match a single glyph mangles the glyph in any backreference.

However, traditional batch editing tools like sed are no better for this task. GNU Sed (and indeed, POSIX sed) doesn't handle POSIX-extended character classes in regular expressions and may not handle unicode at all, depending on how it was built and your current session settings. Plan9 sed, while specifically designed to support unicode via UTF8, doesn't provide any pre-defined character classes at all. So, things like \p{L} don't exist. That's both good (because you should be understanding exactly what you are matching---what's \p{L} really match?) and bad (because there's no shorthand for something like \p{L}). In fact, it appears that {L} matches hyphens in Java 6... but the program in Listing 1 explicitly forms its own class from "\p{L}" and "-", just in case.

For processing Unicode text with regular expressions, there appears to be "more than one way to do it." Given that all the tools tested here seem to have some version/implementation constraints, the best tool for the job may well vary from task to task based on other constraints in of your software system.

Listing 1: husername.java: {L} Variant of the username generator, supporting hyphenation and multiple middle names.

import java.io.\*;
class husername {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
// input record format:
// Firstname Middlename Lastname
// Lastname, Firstname Middlename
// Middlename is optional.
// Any of the names may contain hyphens.
// last record must be 'quit' or exception is thrown.
        String Record = ""; // person name
        boolean Debugging = false;

//        System.out.println("Prompt: ");
            InputStreamReader converter = new InputStreamReader(System.in);
            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(converter);

                while (Record != null) {
                    Record = in.readLine();
                    if (Record == null) continue;

                        if (Record.matches("\\\\p{Blank}*([\\\\p{L}-]+)\\\\p{Blank}\*,.\*")) {
                            if (Debugging)
                                System.out.println("matched last, first middle");
                            Record = Record.replaceAll("^\\\\p{Blank}*([\\\\p{L}-]+)\\\\p{Blank}\*,\\\\p{Blank}+([\\\\p{L}-]\*)\\\\p{Blank}*(([\\\\p{L}-]\*)\\\\p{Blank}\*)*$", "$2 $3 $1");

                                }
                        Record = Record.replaceAll("^\\\\p{Blank}*([\\\\p{L}-])[\\\\p{L}-]*\\\\p{Blank}+([\\\\p{L}-]*\\\\p{Blank}+)*([\\\\p{L}-]+)\\\\p{Blank}*$", "$3 $1");
                        Record = Record.replaceAll("^([\\\\p{L}-]{7})[\\\\p{L}-]*\\\\p{Blank}([\\\\p{L}-]).\*", "$1$2");
                        Record = Record.replaceAll("^([\\\\p{L}-]\*)\\\\p{Blank}([\\\\p{L}-]).\*", "$1$2");
                        System.out.println(Record.toLowerCase());
                }
    }
}

Listing 2: utf8username.java: {M} variant, without support for hyphenation nor multiple usernames.

import java.io.\*;
class utf8username {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
// input record format:
// Firstname Middlename Lastname
// Lastname, Firstname Middlename
// Middlename is optional.
// last record must be 'quit' or exception is thrown.
        String Record = ""; // person name
        boolean Debugging = false;

//        System.out.println("Prompt: ");
            InputStreamReader converter = new InputStreamReader(System.in);
            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(converter);

                while (Record != null) {
                    Record = in.readLine();
                    if (Record == null) continue;

                        if (Record.matches("\\\\p{Blank}*((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)+)\\\\p{Blank}\*,.\*")) {
                            if (Debugging)
                                System.out.println("matched last, first middle");
                            Record = Record.replaceAll("^ \*((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)+)\\\\p{Blank}\*,\\\\p{Blank}+((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)\*) \*((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)\*) \*$", "$3 $5 $1");

                                }
                        Record = Record.replaceAll("^\\\\p{Blank}*((\\\\P{Blank}\\\\p{M}\*))(\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)*\\\\p{Blank}*(\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)*\\\\p{Blank}+((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)+)\\\\p{Blank}*$", "$5 $1");
                        Record = Record.replaceAll("^((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*){7})(\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)*\\\\p{Blank}((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)).\*", "$1$4");
                        Record = Record.replaceAll("^((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)\*)\\\\p{Blank}((\\\\P{M}\\\\p{M}\*)).\*", "$1$3");
                        if (false) {
                        }
                        System.out.println(Record.toLowerCase());
                }
    }
}

A UNIX Wizard...

2009-08-01T16:18:00-07:00

So, I heard "Pinball Wizard" on the radio the other day and it reminded me of a parody called "UNIX Wizard..." While googling for the text for all of you, I also ran across this "UNIX Heirarchy," which explains the difference between mere mortals and sucessive progress towards enlightenment.

Unix Wizard by Jamie Mason (jmason2@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca) with additions by Wayne Throop (...!mcnc!aurgate!throop):

>Ever since I heard of Unix
>I've always had a ball,
>From SunOS to Minix
>I must have run 'em all
>But I ain't seen nothing like him
>On systems large or small
>That tired, squinting, blind kid
>Sure makes a mean sys call!
>
>He sits like a statue,
>Becomes part of the machine,
>Feeling all the limits,
>Knows what the signals mean
>Hacks by intuition
>His process never stalls,
>That tired, squinting blind kid
>Sure makes a mean sys call!
>
>He's a Unix Wizard,
>I just can't get the gist
>A Unix wizard's
>Got such a mental twist
>
>How do you think he does it?
>I don't know!
>What makes him so good?
>
>Ain't got no distractions
>Don't hear no beeps or bells
>Don't see no lights a flashin'
>Ignores his sense of smell
>Patches running kernels
>Dumps no core at all,
>That tired, squinting and blind kid
>Sure makes a mean sys call!
>
>I thought I was
>The process table king,
>But I just handed
>My root password to him.
>
>Even on my favorite boxen,
>His hacks can beat my best.
>The network leads him in,
>And he just does the rest.
>He's got crazy Finger servers
>Never will seg-fault...
>That tired, squinting blind kid
>Sure makes a mean sys call!

Integrated Gallery While You Post...

2009-07-22T20:12:00-07:00

I wanted to use Drupal to post pictures, much as LiveJournal can. However, I already have... an image gallery. And, while it is a good and wondrous thing to have the gallery integrated with Drupal, what I really wanted was to be able to nicely choose images mid-post, without having to do crazy things like write my own <IMG> tags. Yes, I can do it that way... I learned how last millennium. So, I found that once I had gallery2 integrated with drupal... it was supposed to be trivial to install TinyMCE, which provides a nice "rich text" style editor, and g2image, which provides the in-editor image chooser for gallery2. It turns out TinyMCE 3.x is now part of the aptly named WYSIWIG module for drupal. And, it turns out there was a bit of trickery that had to be done to get it to recognize g2image 3.x inside Drupal 5.x. Hopefully, this link should help anyone with the same woes, namely that after extracting all the plugins and installing them, the editor still didn't provide the g2image button on its toolbar. The issue appears to be that TinyMCE doesn't dynamically find its plugins. You have to modify wysiwig/editors/tinymce.inc.

14.2 miles

2009-07-22T19:02:00-07:00

The Little Traverse Wheelway is a bike path that circumscribes Little Traverse Bay. I've personally seen about 12 miles of it from a bike, and its pretty spectacular. Most of the wheelway is specially set aside and paved for bikes. Some of it is sidewalk, and a few segments are officially marked bike lanes on public roadways. The path is peppered with places to stop and enjoy the views, as well as some seating and even a few picnic areas. It connects several area parks and at least three incorporated municipalities. Yesterday before work, I had the pleasure of an intense early morning ride, my longest yet this summer, 7.1 miles out and then back again (14.2 total). I didn't need to walk the bike, though I did take a quick break for some photos---"read more" to see them. The whole trek was 1.25 hours.

After lunch this chipmunk was chirping away outside the window...

This morning was less sunny, and in fact rainy and 65F. I did see a rabbit on the trail, and it was a good ride. However, I had to turn back early (only 9 miles today) when the lightning started in the distance, and I managed to beat the lightning back to safety. No pictures this morning.

Sunset

2009-07-20T20:45:00-07:00

Not quite the land of the midnight sun here. :)

A Three Story House... built inside.

2009-07-19T23:59:00-07:00

Spent the evening assembling the sets for the musical Jennifer is in, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. The pinnacle was, of course, the three story house (7 foot ceilings) installed on the stage. After a number of people put the first story together, three of us bravely climbed to the second level. While we had a lot of help lifting things up to the second and third levels, it was only the three of us who assembled the upper two floors. So, we did the only thing any self-respecting theatrically inclined nerds could do: the Charlie's Angels pose at the top.

goofy kids

2009-07-17T20:45:00-07:00

They wanted their pics taken. Wee lad on Tuesday and lass today.

USCGC Mackinaw

2009-07-13T20:41:00-07:00

The USCGC Mackinaw pulled into the bay this afternoon, shortly after lunchtime. What she was doing, exactly, is anyone's guess, but she appears to be capable of tending buoys, and that seemed to be what she was doing. After work, she still hadn't left, so I lugged the telescope down and started getting insane with optics.

I first tried just using my Nokia phone, but that wasn't really cutting it. And our full-size Olympus cameras, try as they might, couldn't get any good shots without digital zoom, and at that distance it wasn't looking pretty. So, I opened up the scope and pressed my Nokia carefully up to the 25mm eyepiece... then the 13mm. And we got some good shots that way. My father-in-law has some better shots from his Olympus using the same technique. We have an adapter but it doesn't fit this model Olympus so we had to make do. After a bit of fooling around with that, we got serious and put in the Logitech QuickCam 4000 Pro that I had previously modified for astrophotography.

a day around the beach

2009-07-03T21:42:00-07:00

I snapped a shot of the new bike rack (attached) in the better light after lunch today. After a quick chat with Dad about that we geared up to go riding. There's a bike path that goes for quite a few miles around the bay, all the way down/over to Charlevoix and all the way the other direction up/around to Harbor Springs. Wee lass rode with training wheels and did very well, and her brother did equally well without training wheels. He has learned to start without help, so his training is essentially complete. Their enthusiasm got the best of us and before we knew it we were over a mile out... and somehow they made it back.

After that, since the sun had come out we put up the swing, it hangs between two trees. And then Dick decided to get his massive eagle kite aloft, since the breeze was vigorous (movie attached). So we hopped the rock wall and hung out for nearly an hour on the beach. I found a petoskey stone, which are these neat little stones that look neat when wet and almost boring when dry (pics attached). Grace built a sand castle (pic attached), Bill and Nana joined us eventually and the kids and I went wading. The water is brisk this time of year but it was nice, it brings back good memories from South Haven when I was growing up.

The pics and movie were shot with my phone, and then after the kids were down for bed I made the post from my n810 tablet. The video is some odd phone movie format. I'll try to convert it to something more convenient later.

Lego Star Wars II: Stuck at Echo Base?

2009-03-28T19:55:00-07:00

So, the Wee Lad got this rather fun, puzzle-oriented game from his uncle (my brother) for his birthday, and we've been having a lot of fun with that. He gets to play it as time allows, but if he has a particularly good day at school, I reward that by setting aside time that night to specifically work with him on a spot or unlock that is giving him trouble. If you are having trouble in Episode 5, scene 2 (Escape From Echo Base) as we did, read on.

We've had a *lot* of trouble with the very end of the 2nd scene in Episode 5. What follows here will contain a spoiler to the end, but it won't matter because if you are playing the PC or Mac version of the game, you have a high probability of hitting the same known bug that we did. If you are playing on a console, I'm told this level doesn't end the same way.

So, the problem we were having is that we are supposed to shoot the force field generators until they go boom three times, thus freeing the Millennium Falcon and letting us proceed on our merry way. However, they only go boom once each. I don't know whether they are supposed to boom three times each or just three times total, but the first two booms come in the first 30 seconds of shooting, and the remaining booms don't come at all (after 30 minutes of shooting).

The workaround from the publisher is to turn off all the advanced video options. A few other forum users suggested that doing "everything" you can actually do in the main story (leave no stone unturned) also seems to help. People for whom the workarounds work seem to agree that if you aren't able to destroy the generators within the first 5 minutes of switching cannons, and shooting again, at both generators, with the workarounds, that you aren't going to see success. Conceding that some systems at the low end of the graphics compatibility list simply can't complete the level normally, the publishers refer us to the thread in the next paragraph containing a cheat code. If you don't want to know it, stop reading now.

If this happened to you, then you need to enter a cheat code. It allows you to use the action button while controlling C3PO or R2D2 to self destruct. It has the same area effect as a bounty hunters' grenade, and this will destroy the generators. You need to destroy them both.

To apply the cheat, go to the cantina (yes, you have to start over.) and talk to the bartender. Scroll through the options to cheats, then enter the code: DRX728 and then hit enter/return. Now you can go into the game menu any time during the level, select "Extras" and scroll down to "Self Destruct." Hit enter to enable it. While it is enabled, the droids will self destruct when using the action button (J or 1) unless they are immediately in front of a droid panel.

May the Force be with you. Always.

We kick pain in the teeth!

2009-01-26T20:00:00-08:00

Power Kickbox Orthodontist! Not photoshopped. This building on 79 (E. Palm Valley) at N. Georgetown Ave in Round Rock. It's behind the restaurant on the NW corner.

Ummm, Sand!

2008-10-26T22:09:00-07:00

Wee lass was completely engrossed in this virtual sandbox that my brother linked to me. She made the picture you can see below or in the gallery at thisissand.com.

shift...

2008-10-23T17:09:00-07:00

Who's the bitwise instruction that's in state machines on all your chips? SHIFT! Can you dig it?

They say that cat SHIFT is one bad input MUXer! (Shut your mouth!) I'm just talkin about SHIFT! (Then we can dig it!)

(Yes. I *could* do the rest. But WHY?)

squee it's bruce!

2008-10-02T18:00:00-07:00

Slackerwood has the scoop. Of course, I *liked* The Man With the Screaming Brain, although I'll admit that it may have been the antics of Comrade Joxer that saved the movie for me. It was Alien Apocalypse that left me feeling betrayed.

The Coffee House, Reloaded

2008-09-28T21:18:00-07:00

The Coffee House, reloaded. Windows users may want Tinyfugue to connect. Then use Start->Programs->TinyFugue->TF to run it.

Mac Users can get TF 4.0s1 from that site, but when you mount the DMG, install only the TinyFugue.mpkg file, it installs the others for you. Then you can open a terminal (Applications->Utilities->Terminal) and type /usr/local/bin/tf to get started.

If the links above are broken you can get them here. The zip file is for Windows, the DMG.gz file is for Mac.

telnet://rootaction.net:2626/

If you have a shell account and no ssh client, you can try AppGate Web SSH, which runs inside your web browser.

Captain Creel, the "substitute" CC.

Office 2007 / DOCX files got you down?

2008-08-07T08:00:00-07:00

Recently a few people have asked me how to open DOCX files, which are created in Word 2007 / Office 2007. I have found 4 solutions so far:

Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is perhaps the canonical solution. It won't make new Office 2007 documents, but I haven't tried doing that in the other solutions either.
NeoOffice 2.2.4-Patch 3 is known to open at least some non-trivial DOCX documents. NeoOffice only runs on Mac OS/X.
OpenOffice 3.0 can now open Office 2007 files, but I haven't tried it. OpenOffice runs on Windows and Linux, as well as other platforms.
iWork '08 seems to open these documents. Again, iWork only runs on OS/X.

A "Word" about Microsoft's converter. The article links to the Mactopia downloads page, which is organized by category, and by default shows the "latest" new power toy available. To select other tools, you use the menu at the bottom. Currently, the converter is filed under the "Additional Tools" category, and the tools in that category are revealed only when you click on the category name. So, it will appear at first that you are taken to the wrong page, but it is in fact the right place.

Particle Physics: Putting the FUN in FUNcertainty!

2008-08-06T08:00:00-07:00

Feeling uncertain? Gain the confidence you need with our Large Hadron Collider!

In these uncertain times, we all need results we can trust. At CERN and Fermilab, scientists are working around the clock to address these problems, taking very precise measurements which, by their very nature vary nature. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will introduce further uncertainty in the velocity of countless Higgs Bosons, which may or may not exist, and may or may not have mass between 115 and 135 GeV/c².

LHC: Putting the UN in uncertainty. :)

So much fun it should be illegal.

2008-07-18T05:30:00-07:00

So, yesterday some of you may have noticed that sessrumnir.rootaction.net was down. Today you might notice that it's back up. I bet you are wondering what happened. Or not. That's ok, I'm going to give you the short version anyway. :)

The system experienced multiple concurrent physical failures. Specifically, the connector on one of the disk drives crumbled (not the cable, the SATA II connector block with the "pins") and the mainboard failed. It is possible, but unlikely, that the two are related. Read on, if you dare...

The system appeared to have spontaneously powered off, and would not power back on. Suspecting the power supply, I reached for my trusty voltmeter and, using pinouts and procedures from elsewhere, determined that the power supply was likely still good. Next thing to do was unplug everything and start plugging cables back in until the system wouldn't power up anymore. During this part of the process, the SATA connector block (not the cable, the block) on the back of one of the RAID drives (a Maxtor 7H500F0) crumbled as I was carefully unplugging it. I reasoned that this might have been the culprit, but set the disk aside and continued plugging things in and the system fans kept coming on (which they hadn't been doing before I unplugged everything) so I was rather encouraged...

...until I plugged in the final mainboard power connector, which is responsible for powering up the CPU, whereupon the fans stopped powering up. Not long after this, my friend K. showed up with a new disk in hand and we faced the increasingly appealing prospect of dismantling the machine to extract the CPU and MSI K9AGM2 motherboard for return to Fry's.

So, K. volunteered to drag the hardware back to the returns desk so that I could give the kids some attention before bed time. We now have a new MSI K9-A2GM board, courtesy of Fry's protection service contract. We also have a new disk, courtesy of K., to keep things running while Maxtor replaces the failed one under warranty. I may try taking it back to Fry's now that I know the data is safe. Even though it was obviously an opened-box item when I bought it, I expect them to try to tell me they won't cover physical failure. This may be a good time to point out to the reader that I've owned a number of MSI boards and Maxtor drives over the years and been quite pleased with them, they usually perform well for 5 or more years.

The process of recovering the RAID was rather painless. Luckily, the disk that failed was not the one that had the boot sector already set up. So all we had to do (really) was:

Tell the initramfs that it was ok to start in degraded mode (mdadm -R /dev/md[0-5]; exit) then wait 2 hours for filesystem and quota checks to finish.
Partition the new disk.
Add the new partitions to the RAIDs, using: mdadm /dev/md``X``-a /dev/sdb``Y`` for each raid device/partition pair.
Watch /proc/mdstat to see that it was actually doing something.

3 hours later, the RAID was rebuilt (not too bad for 500GB). The harder part was getting the on-board RTL8168c/8111c ethernet to work (it had worked with the K9AGM2), and it turns out this was inadvertently made more difficult by some auto-configuration subsystem called "udev" which tries to make sure that the same devices always have the same names, even when they are detected in different order:

eth0: RTL8168c/8111c at 0xffffc20001040000, 00:1d:92:b5:79:6a, XID 3c2000c0 IRQ 509
...
udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth2
r8169: eth2: link up
r8169: eth2: link down
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth2: link is not ready

In this case, udev was renaming the on-board LAN (eth0) to eth2 because it was reserving the name eth0 for a different PCI ID and MAC ID from the previous mainboard. Even though tcpdump -ni eth2 would monitor traffic on the LAN, the device reported the link was down, and the kernel wouldn't listen (non-promiscuously) or route traffic with it.

To fix this, since the old LAN port was never coming back, I edited /etc/udev/udev.conf and removed the entry for eth0. I then renamed the auto-generated entry for the new board's LAN port from eth2 to eth0. It seems that for some reason the r8169 driver doesn't handle renaming after initialization, and won't detect that the link is ready if udev renames it. At least, that's what "seems" to be going on in Ubuntu 8.04LTS with linux-2.4.26-19 and prior kernels.

Leopard!

2007-12-29T15:23:00-08:00

So, after much deliberation, I have installed Leopard. So far, I am quite encouraged. It "feels" a little zippier. It looks a little better (Apple has been slowly re-vamping the look since at least the release of Panther, and it's finally beginning to look consistent again.)

This is the ongoing checklist of things I need working under Leopard (Mac OS/X 10.5) and the list of steps of taken to meet it.

Things that must work:

- Gimp a post about some X11 tricks and Gimp and a thread about inkscape, X11, and GImp, and one on fixing the Gimp
- Parallels/VPN (curr build 3214/June 21, 2007) recommended build is (nonexistent?) 3224, uninstall, upgrade to leopard, reinstall.
- Boot Camp
- X11 article on recovering Tiger X11 in Leopard one on problems with X11 in Leopard a thread on keyboard problems in X11
- UTF-8 in Terminal (i.e. MacPorts)
- Tiger /bin/cp failed on some large files, does it work for Leopard?
- Firefox
- MS Office (an article about fixing Office Icons in Leopard)
- VNC Client (builtin support in Leopard and Jolly's Fast VNC freware.
- Emacs
- Vim
- MacPorts
- Adium
- GPGMail
- NFS

Things that must work eventually:

- ClamXav
- Keyspan / MacTNC
- MPEG Streamclip
- iMovie PiP plugins
- Scanner stuffs
- iStumbler
- ffmpegX
- EFax Messenger
- Documents to Go
- Missing Sync
- Lyx
- Yacas
- NeoOffice
- Audacity
- Celestia
- Plucker
- VNC server

Steps:

Backup Tiger Boot Disk with SuperDuper
Upgrade Leopard
Reboot
Login, changing keyboard to US-Unicode
Enable Spaces, 2 rows of 3
Turn off Spotlight on external disks.
Quit Setup Assistant because it was hanging on registration.
Turn of Secure Virtual Memory
Try, in vain, to change the desktop background.
Install Parallels 2.5.
Install XCode.
Turn off the .Mac Sync icon in the menubar.
Wait for Time Machine backup to finish so I can reboot and see if my desktop backgrounds will work.
Reboot and find that yes, backgrounds now work.
Test Gimp. Find X11 lacking. Download Gimp-app and X11 from here.
Test Parallels, it worked after re-plugging in the usb key for the VPN.
check the office icons post above. it turns out the icons are diff in leopard because they show a preview of the document with the type text (DOC, PPT, XLS, etc) superimposed. i'll keep the preview i don't need the super-prettified goofy official microsoft icons that badly and the only way to turn it off is to turn off Finder preview for ALL icons.
Add the printer back in (wi-fi) and make it default. I'm a little curious as to why this was not brought forward in the upgrade.
Install Heirarchical Dock so that some of my (larger) docked folders ("stacks") work the way they did under Tiger.
Enable VNC sharing in Preferences->Sharing->Screen Sharing
Update NFS exports list on my server because for some reason Leopard is requesting something different for /home/user than Tiger and Panther did. So no, instead of just exporting /home like I have done for years and years, I must export individual user directories. This is very strange.

ban dihydrogen monixide

2007-11-04T20:09:00-08:00

i am so totally signing a petition to ban this.

two cleanups on my property in two years. totally done with it. up the irons!

click here to see the most recent carnage...

Book Swap Goodness, maybe!

2007-10-17T15:04:00-07:00

A friend of mine pointed me to a book swap site, where you just pay the shipping for books you want. I haven't figured out entirely how it all works nor had time to really browse it, but it sounds really neat...

They use some sort of point system, you accrue points based on books you have that people want. Then you spend them on books you want, and pay only the shipping.

Neato!

Ert Þu að læra Íslensku?

2007-09-18T21:57:00-07:00

That's Icelandic / Old Norse for "Are you learning Icelandic?" If you really want to know more... you can learn Icelandic for free (registration required) online courtesy of University of Iceland.

best deal in town

2007-06-18T19:51:00-07:00

Today was a work day for me, as is most of this week. However, we are still up north and Monday night at Swift Field (in Bayview) is Hot Dog night. They have shirts that say "The Best Deal in Town"... You get two hot dogs and a can of soda (you have to bring everything else) for some reasonable price. The turnout is usually good even in the rain. Around the field are some various playground equipment for the Boys and Girls club houses, so after the meal you can hang out and play.

When we returned to the cottage, Jen dropped us off and ran off to the Mart of Wal to acquire summertime pajamas for the kiddos and a kid-safe fan for their window. However, right after she pulled away the Fire Department showed up. It seems the next door neighbors had a gas leak so we summoned Nöel and we all skedaddled down the street to the park while the Fire Dept and gas company did their jobs.

Exciting!

Kites!

2007-06-17T19:35:00-07:00

We went to Mackinaw City today to see the Kite Festival. It was held in a park on S. Huron Ave, right on the water. The turnout was pretty good, and even though the wind didn't seem very strong down low there were plenty of lofty sights to see. Bill and Grace liked looking at the different designs, and a few people had some "trick" kites and were making them dance. We also got to see a dragon kite that was 150ft long. We managed to get Wee Lad's standard-shaped Fish pattern kite up to a respectable height. I still had plenty of line left but I wanted to leave myself plenty of room away from the other kites. His favorite seemed to be a kite shaped like a giant lizard.

After flying and watching kites for a little while we went across the street to Mackinaw Crossings for some shopping. They had put in a new playground in the middle of the shopping center, and Wee Lad and Lass enjoyed that for a while while Jennifer looked around. Then we went into Mackinaw Outfitters, where there was a 10,000 Gallon freshwater fish tank to look at, and a rock wall. Wee Lad scaled the wall to a height of 7ft, about 1/5 of the way to the top! Then we went to Enchanted Knights and looked at all the fantasy offerings, jewelry and collectibles. We stopped at Scalawags for a quick snack and drinks. | Then Jen took the kids to play some more while I stopped in at Harbor Wear to see what kind of touristy shirts I could find. I found one with a pirate theme advertising "Skully's Charters", with a tagline that says "We always get the booty!" They also had a companion shirt that I didn't pick up, babydoll T style, ... that says "I AM the Booty!" I also found a pink "Polar Bear Club" T for the lass and a Pirate themed T for the lad.

After that we walked back down S. Huron Ave to Alices Kandy and Korn. I am sure we walked out with more candy than anyone actually needs but it's quite good.

Biking the Bay

2007-06-16T20:20:00-07:00

Little Traverse Bay has a fabulous, 26 mile bike path called the Little Traverse Wheelway that runs from Charlevoix through Petoskey to Harbor Springs. In addition to connecting several parks (including Bayfront Park in Petoskey, which is referenced below) it also includes places to stop for picnics and scenic views that you really can't enjoy from a car.

We biked 15 minutes over to Bayfront Park for "Taste of the North", which showcases food and other activities around petoskey, hosted by the Little Traverse Historical Society. There was a petting zoo, face painting, some crafts and games for the wee ones as well as a varied offering of food and music. Primarily we heard some wonderful, rhythmic, tribal music while we were there in the afternoon. The kids enjoyed the petting zoo. Wee lad got a red, sword-shapped balloon from Haystack the clown. Wee lass got a crown "with a bird" made from a pink baloon. Then they had their face painted at a different booth. He had a red sword put on his face, and she got a pink heart on her cheek.

Then we took a short ride halfway back to the Bob-In for frozen custard. The lass fell asleep on the short (~7 minute) ride but she did manage to wake up in time to get a cup of chocolate custard. The lad got a cup as well, and Jen and I had mini "Concretes," which resemble Blizzards from a certain other frozen confectioner. After that we biked back and it was naptime for everyone but me :)

The End of an Era

2007-06-15T21:48:00-07:00

We have several traditions for the trek north, some of which trace back to Jennifer's childhood. One of these is to drive around the bay to Juilleret's, which has been serving hot meals on the waterfront since 1895. After this, we go across the street to Kilwin's (which is no longer across the street, but around the corner) for some ice cream and then go walk the piers to ogle all the yachts. We did not ogle the yachts tonight (it was getting late and the kids needed to get to bed) but we did notice that the Juilleret's staff is wearing blue shirts that say "The Last Hurrah! Juilleret's" on the front and "Last Staff Standing, 1895-2007" on the back. Tentatively, I inquired of the waitress as to whether this was as dire as it sounds, and she affirmed our fears. It seems the owners are retiring and there's no one in the family to carry on the tradition. So... this is the last season. Get it while you can!

Arr, Matey!

2007-06-14T22:22:00-07:00

We took the kids to Pirate's Cove Adventure Golf today. They had a blast, and the Wee Lad actually did pretty well (no where near par, but clearly trying) once we told him he couldn't touch the ball with his hands until he was done. Wee lass seemed to enjoy having Mommy help. I think everyone got an honest hole-in-one.

Twirly

2007-06-13T21:57:00-07:00

We went up to the park on the Bayview campus today. Wee lad ran into a friend named Nora, who he met at last year's "Tot Lot" summer program. They were testing out the new playground equipment near the Post Office. It's a very nice setup, I discovered I can still do pull-ups while the kids were playing. We arrived on bike, which was quite novel to the kids since they were riding in style in the new bike trailer. Jennifer calls it a Burley, although I don't think it's Burley brand. The lad calls it a "Twirly"...

it's Cute!

2007-06-12T22:04:00-07:00

This morning while Nana and Wee lad and Jennifer were out shopping, the Wee Princess and I took a walk. We walked around the block, and then we walked over to the swings by the Memorial Garden and she was content to swing there for probably 15 minutes. We watched boats in the bay and birds and butterflies. Then we went for a walk down on the beach, we must have walked 2/3 of the way to the marina, but I turned us around before we found the stairs. I didn't think we needed to be going up them, since I don't know where they come out and if she saw them there'd be no hearing of the end of it. During the course of the adventure, she would point to something and declare its name or ask what it was, and then when I asked her about it, she would declare that "It's cute!" Primarily this applied to water, or rocks, or flowers or birds, even to the airplane but curiously, not to the boats. As we walked along the beach she would pick up rocks and try to make them splash in the water, and as we left she said "Bye Bye Water! Bye Bye Rocks!"

Cloudberries!

2007-06-11T20:57:00-07:00

We went shopping today in town at several of our favorite places. First stop was American Spoon to get a few treats and stuff for the grill. Next was Symon's General Store for Cloudberries!!!.

Cloudberries are Sweden in a jar. They are yummy on ice cream, yummy on breakfast starches such as pancakes and waffles, and just generally yummy in a way that their raspberry relatives are often not, although thimbleberries are also yummy. Cloudberries are also... Sweden on a disc, at least if you like groovy bossa nova sounds.

Then it was off to McLean and Eakin to browse books and buy some word magnets for the refridgerator. It's a nice little bookstore that has a small town feel you just dont find at the big guys. It reminds me a little of my favorite bookstore in the whole world, John Rollins, Books, although I haven't been back that way in years so I have no idea if they are still up. It looks like they had a web site but it doesn't appear to be active.

Next was Grandpa Shorter's, which is a great place for knick knacks, moccasins and gifts, and one of Jennifer's favorites.

One place, Capricorn Moon, that had been fun to browse fairies and knick-knacks has closed up its brick-and-mortar and gone entirely online. Hopefully Enchanted Knights will still be open.

We ended the trip with a quick stop to Rocking Horse for rewards for the Patience of the Wee Ones, who were quite well behaved through the whole trip.

I should also point out that earlier in the day (before lunch) we had gone over to Bay Harbor to meet up with Wee lad's friend Parker (from St. Richard's pre-school), who was up vacationing with his parents for the weekend.

Ramlösa in paradise!

2007-06-09T20:35:00-07:00

We pulled in to Bayview, via the city of wind and cherry town. Whee! Of course, one of the first orders of business was to head to the nearest store for enough food to last the morning. While there, I stumbled across a column of shelves filled with Swedish goodies, including Ramlösa, which is very hard to find (or so it seems to me) in the states. Ramlösa is Sweden in a bottle. It's mineral water, and after a somewhat unpleasant introduction (I didn't realize it was carbonated) I managed to warm up to it after I knew what to expect. It's quite refreshing and many other such silly fizzy waters just don't quite measure up next to a bottle of Ramlösa. Apparently the bottler has a new plastic bottle, I wonder if that affects the taste. I am used to the glass form you see at the left, and this is what Glen's of Petoskey had to offer as well. Now I just need to find some Hjörtronsylt...

RIP Khazad Mk IV, 1/2001 - 1/14/2006

2006-01-23T20:40:00-08:00

Yes, it's true. Khazad-dum (Mark IV) is dead. Some sort of hardware failure. I have a suspicion it's motherboard damage, possibly brought on a by an ailing power supply. At least, that's what killed the last one.

The short version of the story is that I found some unrelated trouble with one of the new disks while trying to perform a backup this morning. In diagnosing this further, I encountered a number of increasingly serious symptoms, including extra beeps on reboot and system lockups while running a memory test. In honor of the roughly 5 year service of the Mark IV khazad-dum, I'll recount a brief history of its predecessors, and pose a few questions about its successor.

Mark I, 9/1995 - 10/1996

P54C 100 MHz
Shuttle Mainboard
32MB RAM
250MB 0.25" tape drive
2GB Disk (later updated to 8GB)

The Mark I was top of the line when it was built. It was also my workstation. I hope the Mark V will be top of the line when it comes online.

Mark II, 10/1996 -

P5 150 MHz
32MB RAM
250MB 0.25" tape drive
8GB Disk

The Mark II sported a faster CPU and larger disk. It performed both server and workstation duties.

Mark III, 12/1998 - 1/2001

P5 150 MHz
64MB RAM (later upgraded to 128MB)
12GB Disk (later upgraded to 20GB)
2GB Jaz Disk

The Mark III replaced outdated (and far too small) tapes with a 2GB Jaz drive for backups. It was supposed to be a 350 MHz Pentium II with 128MB, but I took that for my workstation and salvaged most of the parts from the Mark II, including the CPU and Mainboard to build the Mark III. Thus, the Mark III was the first model to be a dedicated server.

Mark IV, 1/2001 - 1/14/2006

Duron 700 MHz (Socket A)
128MB RAM (later upgraded to 640MB)
GigaByte ZA-X7? Mainboard
30 GB Disk (updated to dual 120GB disks, and later dual 200 GB disks).

The Mark IV was the first incarnation to use a second hard disk as its backup. The Jaz disks proved invaluable as random-access backup devices, but they were still too small and slow to contain the vast amounts of data that modern systems tend to acquire.

The Mark V

One might wonder exactly where I'm hosting the web site now. Everything is currently living on some parts that used to be in Jennifer's workstation, Vega. I was planning on putting them in my gaming rig, since they are better by far than what I am currently using. However, this more immediate need is served pretty well by the parts I scavenged. They will continue to run the site until I can select and acquire more appropriate hardware. The current specs: Athlon XP 2200+ / 333 FSB, MSI NF7 Mainboard, 250GB disks, 1GB dual channel RAM.

I've been sifting through some motherboards and pre-packaged systems for about a week now and I'm a little uncertain. It looks to me like we are at a crossroads, in terms of the expansion slot technology, and I don't really want to select a board that is too heavily loaded with slots that turn out to be the losing type. So, I am researching which of the available technologies seem to be the most widely adopted and what the trends are. In the meantime, I've come to another short list of desirable features:

64-bit processor
Dual core processor
Expandability to more than 4GB of RAM
RAID 1 or RAID 5, 300GB or better capacity
Multiple ethernet ports
Firewire (for backup disks)

I don't strictly need a 64-bit processor unless the mainboard can take more than 4GB of RAM. I don't need the dual core, but it would make the system run more smoothly when SpamAssassin or several other processes (gatekeeper, webalizer, etc.) are running. The RAID will handle failures between backups, and I think that's essential. The dual (or more) ethernet ports are needed for khazad's firewall duties. Finally, USB 2.0 is just too slow in general. Firewire is faster. Ideally, I'd like to use Firewire 800, but I'll settle for 400. I'd like to have some room for more cards in the future. Most boards are offering either PCI or PCI-X, and one or two PCIe slots. My gut says that PCIe will be the winner, but right now finding cards (other than video adapters) for PCIe is nearly futile.

Intel Macs Today... My predictions through 4/1/2007

2006-01-10T21:26:00-08:00

So, I was a bit surprised at the choice to release a 32-bit iMac to succeed the G5. Most experts seem to be saying this won't matter for most people, but I disagree. The 64-bit capabilities of the G5 are pretty important for editing home or professional video, and that is one arena where the Mac is competing very well for market share against Windows. At 12 GB/hr of footage, it's simply not possible to fit even 30 minutes of video into 32-bit memory space. With the iMac being a dual core, you will actually be wanting to fit almost twice the video you could before into RAM. With a 32-bit processor that won't be possible, and it really won't feel any faster for video editing than the iMac G5.

I had been predicting that we would see an iBook and a Mini. My primary reason for this is that Yonah (the dual core processor driving the Intel Macs) is only 32-bit. The Pro notebook and desktop lines, as well as the iMac, I reasoned, would wait another quarter until the 64-bit bigger brother of Yonah is available. But Apple would want to release both a desktop/media center capable entry and a laptop showcasing the low power, dual core processing muscle of their new CPUs. That pretty much left the Mini and the iBook as likely candidates.

I was partly right: they did go for the desktop and laptop spaces simultaneously. However, they did something that in retrospect should have been, at least partially, obvious. The MacBook Pro is clearly meant to fill the gap left by the missing PowerBook G5. Apple wanted to fill that gap, and the PowerBook (now MacBook Pro) does that nicely when compared to the G4 models.

The iMac is still a bit of a mystery to me, but it may be that most people who want lots of memory buy PowerMacs, so Apple didn't feel that address space was an issue. It's also, as has been documented elsewhere, the "flagship" line, and so it makes some sense for it to be one of the first models available with the new chips.

So, I've got some new predictions. First, Apple's 30 Year Anniversary is 4/1/2006. I think we'll see at least another desktop model and whatever iBook becomes announced 4/1. I think the desktop will probably be whatever PowerMac becomes, with 64-bit processors. It may well be that we see the entire rest of the line announced (i.e. Mini, PowerMac, iBook and, if not entirely dead, eMac).

We'll see iMac refreshed with 64-bit processors in September. And I think we will get a preview of Leopard (the successor to OS 10.4.x) at WWDC in June/July, to steal some thunder from Vista. We may also get an announcement between now and 4/1/2007 that OS/X for Intel is available with limited support for generic PCs, for exactly the same reason. This would be the right window, if they are ever going to do it, because it will capitalize on the confusion that the Vista launch will bring to the Windows marketplace.

Bloodrayne Movie Review... 3 out of 5 stars or something... :)

2006-01-08T21:55:00-08:00

Went to see the Bloodrayne movie. If you aren't familiar with Bloodrayne, it is loosely based on a video game about a half-vampire, half-human young woman who sympathizes at most closely with humans. At least, the non-evil ones... My bottom line is that this movie was better than average, at least by the Sci Fi/Fantasy standards of the last 5 years. So, if the reviewers think this movie sucked, I think that says something quite obvious about the last 5 years of Sci Fi / Fantasy film.

The video game had a decent storyline and was set in or just before WWII, with game play occuring in Louisiana, Argentina and Germany. The plot and conflict centered around preventing Nazi Germany from succeeding in its quest to acquire certain occult artifacts. Most of this is fiction, although the Nazi interest in obscure artifacts and odd bits of mythology/history is well documented in respected non-fiction publications.

The movie departs largely from the plot of the video game, replacing the Nazi element with Rayne's father, who is seeking the same artifacts from the video game. It is set several centuries earlier, in Europe. Discarding the Nazi element was probably a good idea. It made the story, I think, a little more believable by keeping most of the fantasy elements well separated from known history. There were a few elements that I felt were underdeveloped. Given the overall quality of the scenes and development that was present in the film, I'm guessing this is largely the result of errors in the screenplay stage of production.

Without spoiling the movie, all I will say is that the most notable of these underdeveloped aspects is probably the involvement of Billy Zane's character. He plays a pivotal role, but we really don't have any insight into his psyche. His motivations are thus unclear, and it makes the pivot point seem very contrived and mechanical. I should take this opportunity to point out that what the movie lacks in depth it more than makes up for in blood. This is one of the bloodiest movies I have ever seen outside the horror genre. I'm not talking about body count, I'm pointing out the actual spraying of barrels of blood in combat. Given that it's a film about vampires, and rated R, that's probably not a bad thing, but this isn't Buffy and most people definitely don't want their kids watching this in home theater.

There were a few continuity issues as well, but most of them are minor and I'll let others dwell on them. All in all, I found the movie to be enjoyable. Rayne's character started out too vulnerable for my liking, and some of her choices seemed far too naive. Issues with the screenplay aside, the sets were good, the acting was primarily great, and the director did a superb job of translating the less than stellar screenplay to the screen. In fact, I think Boll did a finer job directing than he will be credited with, but that seems to be typical for game-turned-movie ventures.

Get your Bambi on...

2005-11-28T18:31:00-08:00

So, the young Master comes in to get his breakfast this morning, toting the DVD case for Bambi and says "Hi Daddy. Want get my Bambi on!" ... As far as I know, he's never heard that particular construction of speech and it just sounded too funny coming from a 3 yr old who had no idea what he'd just done. :)

The lowdown on the disk of doom...

2005-11-23T20:29:00-08:00

Monday we heard back from OnTrack. They say there's nothing more they can do. It's dead, dead. No bits to scrape off. All gone. Apparently it suffered massive head crash and the surface damage was too severe.

However, there are some other prospects for recovering some of the data. For example, Jen sent her sad tale of woe to the fine folks at Apple, including a note saying she had backed up all of her iTunes in May, but had bought about $40 more since then and had not yet backed up those subsequent purchases. They promptly put the entire set (2 orders) of 1 album and about 25 songs in her purchased queue for re-download! Yay! It probably didn't hurt her case that she mentioned she had replaced her ailing PC with a 12" iBook, or that she had been backing things up on a schedule. So, back up your iTunes and if it still happens to YOU, there might be hope if you write them a nice note.

Jen also has started to write people who may have some of her files. For example, the files for the Musical were usually sent out to Board members or cast members, so someone probably still has a copy. Also, some of them were put on my iBook this summer so she could work with them on vacation. Or on my old laptop (I still have the backups) for the same reason in previous summers. So, we are sifting through what we have and hoping others can fill in some of the gaps. I think this will probably get us about 60% of the stuff.

Some things, like last years Christmas mailout list are probably gone. Although, I think we only did an e-card for most of the people last year so there's a chance I can probaby reconstruct that from the mail log, if I kept it. Her e-mail (since 5/24/2003) is all gone, including her profile and folders. I have an old version of the folder I have to try to coax Thunderbird into using, and the mail aliases we can probably reconstruct because I'm in most of them and have some of the mails. There's a possibility we lost some pictures, but I think that almost all of them are on the web, and those that aren't are on backups of my old laptop because the ones she'd have pulled from the web (to make space, instead of bugging me for more quota!) would have been older pics taken with the Mavica. I used to copy the floppies to my laptop to make more space. Rarely did I ever delete them from the laptop... so it's just a matter of realizing they are "missing" and repopulating.

Her collection of clip art is toast, that wasn't replicated anywhere, but some things, like the MS Office Clip art, and a few others, we have on CD and can actually load. If anyone knows of a good, cheap source of quality clip art, let me know. Christmas is coming, after all... :)

Anyway, it's not the ideal situation but there are still a few things looking up and each day gets a little brighter as she sifts through what she does have and breathes big sighs of relief.

And yes, she has a big backup drive and is using it.

Kiddos Better, YAY!

2005-11-18T18:57:00-08:00

So... as of this afternoon both of the wee ones are eating normally and sending things through ok... That's probably enough said, but YAY! Let me just say that again... YAY!

You will give me Tiki!

2005-11-15T05:15:00-08:00

All (remaining) Beavis and Butthead jokes aside, this rather nifty looking device is the perfect gift for any tech wizard with a desk that wishes it were in Hawaii. Admittedly, I think it would be a bit more useful if it were a touch larger and housed a 2.5" hard disk. However, this device uses flash (a-ah...) memory and tops out at 512MB.

what goes down (the hatch) must come (back) up...

2005-11-14T21:10:00-08:00

At least... that is the way it has seemed for the wee lass and her brother. He started on Saturday morning with some symptoms too disgusting to describe in detail, followed quickly by fatigue and a general lack of energy that lasted until late today. Most of the fatigue and its disappearance are probably due to the fact that he couldn't keep anything down Saturday, and while he could eat small bits of bland stuff on Sunday he is only just getting his appetite back.

The wee lass has a lesser set of symptoms, no fatigue (so far) and is able to eat a full bottle in one ounce increments every 5 to 10 minutes. Any faster and well, everybody needs fresh clothes. So, we're not sure if its really the same thing yet but neither one has been feeling all that great. :(

As the hard disk churns...

2005-11-11T17:38:00-08:00

So, we heard back from Gillware yesterday. They were unable to recover any files. They did, however, suggest that the drive might still be recoverable by OnTrack, and offered to put them in touch with me. OnTrack called within an hour and was very optimistic. Gillware offered to send the drive to OnTrack free of charge, and it arrived OVERNIGHT!!! OnTrack claims that they will have their analysis ($100 non-refundable fee if you are interested) complete in three business days. At that time, I can expect a list of what was recoverable and how much it will cost to get the data. It usually takes a day after that for them to ship the recovered files.

Gillware, if they had been successful, would have cost between $368 and $668. OnTrack will cost a total of $700 to $2100 if they succeed, just $100 if they don't. I should mention that we have the option of backing out after the estimate. They said that most cases like this fall into the $1200-$1700 range. So, we're not happy about having to spend money, but still hopeful that we might at least we'll have the option to contemplate the cost.

Will post again when we know what OnTrack can do.

That sucking sound ...

2005-10-23T21:20:00-07:00

That sucking sound you hear is Jen's hard drive imploding under its own mass. Around noon it died, and bad us, we haven't backed it up in a long time. I have a backup set of DVDs labeled May 2003...

So, the question, in addition to what to do about the data loss, is what to do about her computer. We took the kids to Fry's this afternoon so Jen could mull that over and browse laptops. We were planning on getting her a laptop after the tax refund in April, but after some deliberating we decided to go ahead and do that now. The advantage is not sinking $$ into a machine that is slated for replacement in 5 months. So, a few moments ago, we ordered her shiny new iBook 12.

As for the drive, we have found a few places that will recover it for an arm and a leg. We're going to try Gillware because they will analyze the disk for free and charge nothing if they can't recover. We're not sure yet how much farther we are prepared to go with this. Most of the digital pictures and such are already on the web server, which is backed up. A lot of her PowerPoint documents and spreadsheets are not. So, hopefully, we can get them back.

You ain't all that.

2005-10-10T04:10:00-07:00

Very few things amuse me more than insignificant wannabes who think they can own my box for more than a few minutes. My system paged me last night about 5 minutes after some dork exploited a hole in Drupal 4.6.1 and started laying down tracks all over /tmp, /usr and /lib. Unfortunately for the snot-nosed little weasel, my machine is smarter than the average script kiddie and immediately detected something was amiss.

On the slightly sophisticated side, the attacker used chattr to try to make clean-up a bit more difficult for me, denying the removal, replacement or renaming of offending files. However, the idiot pulled down a rootkit that should have replaced a number of system utilities and didn't even use it to cover tracks. What a loser.

Unfortunately for me, when such things happen, I need to run a full analysis to be sure they didn't leave anything behind. Believe it or not, that is easier and takes less time than restoring from known-good backups. So, a few hours later of letting the machine do most of my dirty work and confirming key details by hand, and we're back up, patched and running.

I have to assume the little spaz got the password files. So, everybody better change their passwords.

And to the script kiddie from 206.57.225.86 with your lame-o xmlrpc exploit... You ain't all that. You're nothing. Grow up and get a real hobby. I eat bottom-feeders like you for breakfast.

Birthing an Empire

2005-06-02T23:45:00-07:00

Went to see Revenge of the Sith... I think it was very enjoyable. I've heard a lot of people saying it was the best (of episodes I-III). I can't really refute that but I'm not sure I agree. It was certainly worth watching and I do recommend it.

Without spoiling the movie, I'd like to point something out. If I remember right, in Episode IV Obi-Wan claims that Vader "systematically hunted down and killed the jedi, one-by-one" (sic). The theater cut of Episode III showed a lot less Vader-on-Jedi action than Obi-Wan indicated. To me, that was the only disappointing part of the movie. The effects were amazing, as always. Is it just me, or do all of the personal conveyances seem recycled from American Graffiti? On a good note... Jar-Jar has only one line in the movie... :)

Taming the beast - Part 3

2005-06-02T18:53:00-07:00

As a brief follow-up to my experiences with the Tiger upgrade, I have some news about my iFruit. As you may recall, I had trouble syncing my PDA after updating to Tiger. The fine people at Mark Space made a valiant effort to walk me through isolating the issue, with little success. However, their 4.0.5 "final" update to the Missing Sync was released since then and even though they were never able to confirm my issue, something else they fixed in this update has done the trick: I can now sync. So, if you have been unable to sync with your Tiger, get the 4.0.5 final version before tearing your hair out!

One other issue I had is that while X11 "seemed" to work after the upgrade install, without installing the optional package from the Tiger DVD, I discovered that there were some missing dynamic libs when trying to run KStars. This is probably because I build KStars on the Mini where I had already installed the new X11. Installing this on the iBook solved the problem.

Grace

2005-05-18T10:29:00-07:00

Welcome Sarah Grace "Grace" Bolton, born 5/16/05 @ 8:34AM. Click for details. <http://sweetpea.rootaction.net/?q=node/55>`__

Jennifer's pregnancy web log.

Pictures of Grace in the gallery.

Taming the beast - Part 2

2005-05-12T23:21:00-07:00

After taming the Mini... it was time to update the iBook. This went pretty smoothly. I used the "upgrade" installer, since this was a machine that had never been tainted with the kind of firewire brain swap that seems to have affected the Mini originally. Having built Fink on the Mini in advance and done my homework on a few other apps really paid off. I was able to rsync Fink and was ready to rock within about 2 hours. Also, 10.3.9 seemed to cause my iBook to really heat up when plugged in to wall power. Tiger seems to have restored the nice, cool operation I was used to under 10.3.8 and prior.

Now for the not so rosy part of the tale: I can't sync my Tapwave Zodiac (PalmOS handheld)over USB. Pressing the hotsync button on the cable results in nothign happening on the iBook, and the Zod eventually times out, saying "computer no workie! help!" or something dissimilar.

I dug around quite a bit on Missing Sync's support site and mailing list archives, to no avail. I tried re-installing, uninstalling, and re-installing again. I even took the "testing" 4.0.5b1 update of Missing Syinc, that is just for (or just because of) Tiger. Same result. I do see some console messages, they say "Tapwave Handheld : device failed family specific matching" but I was seeing those under Panther even when the stuff was working. I checked with kextstat and the Markspace extensions are loaded. I'm at a loss, so I mailed Missing Sync support and hope to hear back soon. It's a great product, and so is Tiger, but they are "enjoying" some Tiger teething issues together.

Taming the Beast - Part 1

2005-05-11T21:29:00-07:00

aAfter a few days of exploring Tiger on the Mini, I had a small but important laundry list of things that simply must be fixed before I can use it. First, the system seemed sluggish, which is odd because everyone that is happy with Tiger remarks on its speed. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Classic environment didn't work at all. It would hang very early in the startup, and take the system disk with it! Inspection of the logs shows "disk error" messages during the times when Classic was starting up. Disk Utility didn't show any problems, and so it was time to hit the web. I did manage to get everything sorted out. The rest of Part 1 is a log of the process. Part 2 will address the iBook.

In looking for solutions to my problem with Classic, I first checked Apple's knowledge base. That turned up nothing useful, the problem is too new. I did, however, find some helpful people in Apple's support forums. Unfortunately, none of their suggestions helped but I think they did help others. Our Mini just had a slightly different problem with similar symptoms. I eventually decided the only quick solution was to re-install. So, I backed up everything important (primarily our iPod playlists which are not on the iBook) to an ext2ernal disk, and made another copy of everything just in case. Then I decided to try an "Archive and Install" operation. In theory, if this solved the problem it would be less work to restore all of my apps and configuration than I would face in an "Erase and Install."

If you read my First Impressions posts, you may recall that Spotlight brought the system to a crawl after the Upgrade install, to the point where it took a long time just to get a password prompt for first login. Not so with the "Archive and Install" method. Login was quick. The animations were a little less smooth than usual and there was a brief pause after the Spotlight icon appeared and before the rest of the desktop and Dock were ready. After that, Spotlight's influence was noticeable but non-interfering: I could explore the system freely with only occasional, brief delays. Once Spotlight finished indexing it was very zippy. It was at this point that I decided to explore the "damage" done by the "Archive and Install." My desktop, documents and iTunes seemed to be in good order. I found a few configuration and app issues that warrant mentioning. Here's the list and how I fixed them.

X11 wouldn't start. Fixed by reinstalling package from Mac OS X Install DVD::System:Installation:Packages:X11User.pkg
Printer was no longer configured. Fixed by attempting to print, then selecting "Bonjour Printers" on the Printer dialog. Remember that Rendezvous is now Bonjour.
I had a shortcut to Macintosh HD::Developer on my shelf (on the left in the finder). It didn't work anymore, the message was "The volume for Developer cannot be found." I re-installed XCode (don't know if it worked before re-installing the package) from Mac OS X Install DVD::XCode Tools to try to fix my shortcut. The shortcut still didn't work, so I removed it and dragged a new shortcut that did work.
Garage Band couldn't find loops, other resources. Fixed by re-installing bundled software only from Mac Mini Restore CD.
Installed KeySpan USB/Serial Driver 1.8 for USA-19HS. Tested with MacTNC 1.1
OSXVnc works, the startup item needed to be reset from the Preferences menu.
NeoOffice/J seems to work.
Celestia works.
GPGMail update from 4/29 is compatible with Tiger (v1.1)
Desktop Manager wouldn't start. Fixed by getting the latest version.
Fink Kstars starts but must manually start dcopserver and kill 3 kdeinit processes before Kstars will load. Fixed by reinstalling all of fink.
New fink refused to install Lesstif due to missing Automake 1.6, but Automake 1.9 was installed. This appears to be due to a restriction in 1.9 that precludes installing 1.6. I forced the installation of Lesstif with no ill effects, and sometime later another program needed 1.6, installed it, and removed 1.9. I haven't noticed anything broken yet, but I am still a bit puzzled.
Yacas won't build, but there is a Mac native installer.
Install new XCode.
Install new CHUD.

Unresolved:

iMovie/iDVD untested.
Mail untested.
Quicken untested.
Glade2 doesn't seem to start with new Fink.
iWork untested.
Missing Sync / Palm Conduit untested.

Tiger: First Impressions

2005-05-01T12:26:00-07:00

The install on the Mini went rather smoothly. I popped in the install DVD, clicked "install," rebooted, answered a few questions, and walked away. When I came back, the familiar LoginPanel.app greeted me with a list of users, inviting me to log in. This is where the only two issues I have experienced surfaced. First, the system was so busy with something it took considerable time (long enough for the screen saver to kick in thrice) before the password prompt appeared. This, as I discovered on logging in successfully, was due to Spotlight running its indexer, locating all our stuff for future searches. I expected this to be painful, but I also expected a neat little dialog box that said "please be patient. spotlight is making the grass green and the birds sing." I did not expect to have to wonder if the system was ever going to let me in, nor did I expect to have to hunt around to verify my guess.

I clicked the little Spotlight icon in the upper right of the screen. It dropped down a box that said "calculating..." so I suspected it was indexing. I then pulled up a terminal and did some nifty UNIX goodness with top(8) to find out what was hogging the CPU. To my mild surprise, it wasn't a CPU time issue, it was all the I/O that Spotlight generates on first index. Page faults out the wazoo... bla bla bla don't want to bore you. I did, however, find one thing that those who aren't bored by this might want to know: the process that was faulting the most was an instance of mdls, which is in fact part of Spotlight. No real surprise there.

In addition to this unheralded but short-lived resource hogging issue with Spotlight, the other thing I noticed was that the Setup Assistant seemed to hang. It reached the "congrats! Tiger is ready to rock!" screen, with icons for all the new features that don't appear clickable and a nifty "Go" button at the bottom. I clicked "Go", but nothing happened... for hours. I eventually discovered that even though it wasn't doing anything, I could quit Setup Assistant. I did so, since it hadn't done anything with my "Go" click, and rebooted for good measure. These two issues are the only ones so far. I still have some devices to test, including an external FireWire drive, USB card reader, Camera, Camcorder and USB serial port. I need to check how well some of my favorite apps work, especially Desktop Manager. I'm looking forward to working with Automator. And I need desperately to test iMovie HD. Speaking of ...

For those who don't know, QuickTime 7 ships with Tiger. If you had a QT Pro 6 license, get ready to buy a new license for v7. So far, there doesn't appear to be a way to install 6 on Tiger. I may give that a try soon, or I may decide QT Pro doesn't matter. I haven't really used it. I played around with it while trying to export some DV last summer, but I ended up blasting the edits back out to tape because it was much faster (i.e., it took an hour) than waiting 72 hours for the QT converter. I'm sure QT is faster on a 2.7GHz Dual G5, but I have G4's clocked under 1.5Ghz so I dont' think I've ever gotten the benefit of QT Pro.

Dashboard is very cool. I had thought the widgets would be free-standing things you could just drag around your screen while using other apps. Instead, it would appear that you can only access these handy dandies from a special view that is activated by clicking the Dashboard icon on the Dock, although I have read that there is a hotkey I don't know which one it is. The view is overlaid atop your running applications, and all the activated widgets pop up at once. I actually like this better, the more I play with it, than the workings that I had expected. The whole paradigm reminds me of the classic "Desk Accessory" from the old-school Macs. One very nice thing is they included a "stickies" widget, where you can put notes. Unlike the version of Stickies that came with Panther, these only clutter up the dashboard, not the desktop. It's a much cleaner way to work.

So far, I've seen only minor annoyances related to the install and everything else has been smooth. I'm looking forward to working with Tiger more after I finish this class, the last one (hopefully) until Fall or Winter.

The Tiger Pounces...

2005-04-29T18:48:00-07:00

So, my Tiger arrived today. I probably won't install it on the iBook until next week after class is over. I may install on the Mini sooner, we'll see how the weekend plays out. And why, you may ask, do I need a Tiger? Because I looked that muppet in the eye and said "give me the test!"

And here is the result:

` <http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_cg.php?im>`__

A friend sent me this link to the test and I figured why not...

The Zod...

2005-04-12T18:30:00-07:00

My new PDA arrived today, a Tapwave Zodiac 1. The Zod runs PalmOS and thus is near 100% compatible with everything on my ailing Sony Clie. So far there are only two features I am missing from the Clie: voice memo and built-in remote. I probably won't miss the voice memo very much, I hardly used it. The Clie remote control app was very nice, and shipped with pre-sets for almost every device in the house. I'll have to try out OmniRemote when I get a chance, because I will find the Zod lacking without this. The unit will take a little getting used to, but it feels very comfortable, and aside from the left and right flippers (for gaming) along the top, the controls are convenient. The flippers keep getting in my way...

I ordered the Zod from Harmony Computers, and at the time of this writing, they still offer Zod1's at $70 below list price. On Saturday, I logged in to check the order status and it said "partial ship, call for details. items shipped 1." Of course, I just *knew* they shipped the SD card and that the Zod was on permanent backorder... I nearly dropped the phone when the rep told me on Monday that in fact it was the SD card on back order, to be filled Tuesday, and that the Zod was already on its way. :)

The Tiger Pounces!

2005-04-12T08:00:00-07:00

Steve finally announced The Pounce! With the release of Tiger, Apple will be bringing a few new features to their desktop OS. While many are singing the praises of the new Spotlight and Dashboard features, I think I'm most looking forward to computer--computer synchronization in the new iSync. I need to be able to keep Bill's Mini and iBook in sync, in case Bill needs to steal my iBook for DVDs on a trip that I don't take.

I ordered two Tigers and an iWork... to GO Go go... iWork is supposed to ship immediately, with the kitties to arrive on the 29th.

Yay!

Photons R Us

2005-04-09T23:59:00-07:00

So, we finished the wiring and install of the track lighting in the Den today, with much help from Jen's parents. There is such a thing as too much light, and for a few minutes this evening, we had it. There will still be some adjustments to do (and with track lights, that's easy) but I've been doing homework here for the past 4 hours with the new lights and I really like how they turned out. Much better than I expected. Jen has some pictues in the gallery.

PDA Madness, revisited!

2005-04-07T19:11:00-07:00

So, I finally decided. I evaluated 13 models on their merits and decided on the Zodiac 1. Instead of running down to Fry's right away, as I was tempted to do, I went online and checked my options. I found the Zod1, which lists for $269, online for $199. Since the only difference that I can see between the Zod1 and Zod2 is about 92MB of built-in storage, and I can get a 512MB SD card for around $40, I decided to get the Zod1 (the Zod2 lists for around $349). My weighted scoring results (summary only) are below.

One interesting thing: the iPod Mini I received for my birthday has the ability to hold much of the same information as a PDA, but no way to input. I scored it anyway, just to see if I thought I could get by. The answer was a very loud "no."

Model	Score	List Price
Ipod Mini 4GB	175	N/A (own now)
Zodiac 1	604	269
Zodiac 2	615	349
Archos PMA400	569	699
iPaq rx3115	440	279.99
iPaq rx3715	444	199
Tungsten E	594	199
Tungsten T5	551	399
Tungsten C	594	399
Zire 31	551	149
Zire 72	594	299
Treo 600	579	349
Treo 650	601	449

PDA Madness!

2005-04-06T18:03:00-07:00

Since there are clearly just too many choices for replacing my dead or dying Sony Clie, I went to Fry's today and laid my hands on a few of the options. Based on in-person observation and very few specs, I'm tempted toward either one of the low end h-Paq's (pronounced h-pock, like the rapper) or the Tapwave Zodiac. The high-end Tungsten T5 looks like a dream machine, but it's a bit pricey. If I was going to pay that much, I think i'd have to go for the Archos PMA 400 and get what I really want: a small Linux workstation. The Zodiac, on the other hand, is reasonably priced, is compatible with my existing PalmOS apps, and has two expansion (SD) slots. I very nearly dropped the cash on the spot, but I decided to go home and do some research. Time for a big weighted scoring spreadsheet...

Clie of Sadness

2005-04-05T18:46:00-07:00

The shiny, metal beast lay resting at the top of the cliff, sounding its warning cry to remind its master of his next appointment. Without warning, the beast was run through by the single tooth of the spearlike creature whose jowls run blue with acrid, staining saliva. The force of the attack sent the shiny beast plummeting down the cliff face, dutifully shrieking its shrill reminder to the very last. With a single, sickening *whack* the beast made contact with the valley floor, bouncing not even once...

The screen on my Clie being mortally wounded, I now need a new PDA. Time to hit the trade rags and reviews... I was hoping to get another year out of the device, and theoretically I could. However, the screen has vertical pinstriping and the right 1/5 of the screen no longer renders. The digitizer (touch screen device) seems fine, but I rely on this device too frequently to live with a missing 1/5 display. I was very surprised to have brushed the unit off of my desk by bumping a nearby pen. Very disheartening...

iPod and TFT birthday happiness!

2005-04-03T21:27:00-07:00

Jen managed to pull a bunch of friends and family together for a belated birthday (too many people couldn't make it if we had held the party on Easter weekend, and my birthday was Good Friday this year). She also convinced them to pool their cash and get two sweet mega-gifts. The Philips 170B5CS flat panel display that I'd been lusting after, and an iPod Mini (4GB) that I've been wanting but would never have bought myself. The iPod was a snap to set up on Bill's Mini, and later this week I'll set it to sync contact and calendar info to the iBook. The Monitor is very crisp. It worked great with my desktops right out of the box. To get it working well with iBook took some time with Apple's calibration program, because the iBook can't generate the full resolution of the monitor. On flat panels, this makes text look rather fuzzy. The calibration program helped get the color right, and adjust the brightness. For some reason, this gives the illusion of less fuzzy text and the result is quite readable.

And there was much rejoicing... I'll be sending Thank You's within two weeks (school is kicking my behind), but if you're reading this, chipped in, and never receive a thank you... THANK YOU.

Jen has some pictures up somewhere in the gallery. If I get a chance, I'll find them and link them in here directly.

Kick-Kick

2005-03-13T21:06:00-08:00

For a little over 7 weeks now, Sweetpea has been kicking hard enough that I can hear thumping when I press my ear up against Jen's tummy. Long before that I could hear little swishy noises. The baby has been responding to light tapping and voice for some time. In the last week or two, baby has become strong enough that you can actually see and hear some of the kicks without having to glue your ear to a tummy. :) I'm sure that must be uncomfortable for Jen, but most of the time she seems to think it's neat, so I guess I do, too :)

"Mac ee tosh"

2005-03-11T20:56:00-08:00

Wee lad's computer arrived yesterday. He calls it "Mac ee tosh." We have a couple of games he likes, although I won't be buying more from the JumpStart series. They claim to be Mac OS/X compatible but they don't work well on the iBook, and according to some searching on the web, this is a problem common to all the JumpStart programs, because the company doesn't test with laptops. So far, the three CDs are working fine on the Mini. We'll probably get Reader Rabbit PreSchool once he can mouse around a little better. He understands that clicking makes things happen, but I don't think he's quite made the connection between the tiny little mouse pointer and the mouse itself yet.

The Mini is a pretty zippy little machine and it is nice and small. I think we'll be pretty happy with the purchase. When he isn't using it, I plan to use it to turn all the video we've taken into DVDs, finally.

Finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel...

2005-02-21T19:50:00-08:00

In between my school paper and clean-up from the painting and bookcase project, I managed to get my bookcases and storage shelves loaded. You can almost see the dining room table now (not pictured) and I only have a few more boxes to go through, two of which are destined for the filing cabinets. It's beginning to feel "done," even though there is a lot of final sorting and putting away to be done. I guess soon we will need some "final" pics.

I took a vacuum to the floor and that feels better, too. Best of all, it looks like the paper will be done on time and maybe even get a good grade :)

Bookcase R Us

2005-02-20T20:03:00-08:00

Thanks to the help of a great many people, the painting was finished yesterday. I touched up the stained spots this morning and they have not bled through the new paint, so the blocker works. You just have to let it cure, otherwise it continues to bleed through. Applying more blocker dissolved the blocker and lets it run, also!

The bookcases are up, with whiteboards. We found that a jigsaw at half speed won't rip the laminate, especially if you tape both sides with masking tape before cutting. That took a lot of experimenting, but we finally got a nice edge on our scrap and were ready to make the cuts. Jen put pics up on the gallery. Yesterday's progress was a lot more efficient than I had hoped. Today did not seem to go so well, but I think I was being unrealistic. I don't have any of my books loaded, and I have to work on the paper. Maybe tomorrow. :)

Painting is done! Yay!

2005-02-19T20:59:00-08:00

The room is a lot brighter. When everything is dry it will be very nice, and hopefully less... stinky! Love those paint fumes! Tomorrow is the bookcase build-out. Jen put up some progress pictures on the gallery.

Hopefully this one spot on the wall will bind with the stain blocker. It's inkjet tint, and it's been bleeding through the blocker and the paint. My theory is that if the stain blocker cures overnight, the ink will be bound up in it and we can paint over it.

Pit of despair! (heh)

2005-02-18T17:56:00-08:00

Tonight we start the taping and moving and preparing for the painting of the den and build-out of the bookcases. :)

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. With luck, I'll get my paper done for class, too.

Taming the beast...

2005-02-16T17:32:00-08:00

Moving my machines to the closet under the stairwell was the year-end project. Had to run my own power, network, and telco cables. We had an electrician inspect it and do the final circuit hookup. Jen has put up pics of the new desks from IKEA in January. We have since managed to sift through every box, stack, drawer, cabinet, and shelf in the Den in prep for its new multifunction configuration. This weekend, we paint.

Rinky Dink Online Schools?

2005-02-03T06:58:00-08:00

I've heard a lot of criticism of online universities. I'm sure the rinky dink outfits exist, but University of Phoenix Online is not one of them. I'm taking one 3 credit hour class and putting in about 14 hours a week. I'm getting 0wned, here.

I'm doing well, but its taking a lot of effort, at least 33% more than I expected. For the most part, my classmates and instructors are pretty good. The last class got a bit of a bumpy start but things seem to have smoothed out for now.

Rinky Dink outfit, indeed.

Mini Madness

2005-02-01T06:51:00-08:00

It looks like Wee lad is nearly ready for a computer he can explore with less supervision. We've weighed several options, including cobbling a PC together from spare parts, and come to the tentative conclusion that he is better off with a Mac mini. Among the reasons are the fact that some of the programs we want him to use (educational games) require administrative privileges on the PC, but not on the Mac. I've watched him come dangerously close to wiping \WINDOWS with random key hits. Also, the mini is very small, and even though we have just upgraded to much larger desks from IKEA, space is a consideration. Moreover, he seems to handle mice with one button better than those with three. The Mac interface is designed with one button in mind, but my iBook is busy with my schoolwork much of the time. Lastly, I've decided I really like the video editing capabilities that come with every Mac. Since my iBook doesn't have a SuperDrive, I can't take advantage of the iDVD software, which claims to do everything I want. So, when he isn't using the Mac mini, maybe I can finally get around to editing all of this DV we've been taking since his birth. So, we're probably going to get the mini, but not until after the tax refund and hopefully not until after Apple ships their next major system upgrade, Mac OS/X Tiger.

14 months as a Mac user (or, a NeXTStep user comes home)

2005-01-29T21:04:00-08:00

In September of 2003, I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about. I acquired a secondhand iMac (original, Bondi Blue) and the latest OS/X (Jaguar, followed quickly by Panther). Since October '03 I haven't looked back. Even that slow 233 MHz gem was quite peppy compared to Windows. The only thing it wouldn't do to my satisfaction was run video of any kind. I managed to get all of my everyday apps running and committed myself to using the iMac exclusively as my desktop for 10 months, as research into the laptop market. I was looking to replace my aging Wintel laptop with something that ran Linux or some other friendly system. I wanted long battery life and a light payload, and if OS/X was good enough, I reasoned, I'd consider an iBook.

I bought the iBook in July and haven't looked back. It's quite simply the best computer purchase I have ever made... except maybe for that iMac. There was a time when I'd have laughed about the prospect of buying a Mac. Frankly, before OS/X it really wasn't an option for me. But OS/X has its roots in NeXTStep, and I'd like to take this opportunity to say that it's good to finally be home again, where everything is stable, fast and intuitive.

I first encountered the joy of working with a well designed interactive system in my high school days. The year was 1990, and a few of us at "nerd school", as it was affectionately known, had signed up for some extracurricular activity to prep for "SuperQuest." As it turned out, we were entirely unready for the challenge, but we all ended up with UNIX accounts at WileyMUD University on the CS departments Sun3 an Sun4 cluster. We also had access, at some point, to the i960 (or was it 860?) nCUBE. At least, that's what my tired mind remembers. The point was to come up with some innovative application or solution in the supercomputing domain. The winning entry would earn their school a supercomputer...

The joy of true multitasking! A real compiler! Access to Usenet! And multiple windows (at least on the console) all running programs concurrently! Clearly... this was the future and it was bright! Little did I know... it was already the past. For deep in the heart of a small computer company in California, a quiet, dark, cube with a magnesium (yes! magnesium!) skin, the heart of a daemon, and a stylized "M" stamped on its 30MHz brain was springing to life.

Fast forward to August of 1991. As a freshman at RHIT, I was privileged to be one of a select group of students whose perspective on computing would be forever changed by a maze of tiny black boxes, all alike. Allegedly, only 50000 of these machines were ever made, each proudly wearing a badge with four colors and a 2D form that resembled a diagram of a cube. Each little badge had just four letters. NeXT. These machines were the perfect blend of design, technology and ease of use. The OS was UNIX, but it was as easy to use (if not moreso!) than a Macintosh. They were multimedia ready, with full Internet mail and voice attachments. There really wasn't anything these machines couldn't do at the time, and the development environment was the richest I've ever seen.

Sadly, these little beasts were about 15 years ahead of their time, and they were rather pricey. Worth every penny, if you had the cash. They were much more than computers, they were information appliances. And they were reliable. Even six years later they still put Windows 95 to shame. By then, I could finally afford one of my own. But the company had long stopped production.

Apple was having its own woes. Faced with redesigning their aging system, they acquired NeXT (check my facts, I'm not sure) around 1996 and began work on "Rhapsody." The rumor was... NeXTStep for Mac! The rumor was true, and for the last 4 years now (since 2000) it's been known as Mac OS/X.

"Dude"

2005-01-26T19:53:00-08:00

Most people who know Wee lad know that in addition to some of his other favorite fascinations, he is a big fan of fish and Pixar's Finding Nemo. For about four weeks now he's been making big progress in assigning names to everything. Usually he uses a close approximation of the actual name, but sometimes he makes interesting connections of his own. He's been calling Crush the turtle "Dude" for about five days now. :)

Oh... and I was rather surprised to learn the first song in the credits was a (very good) remake by the UK chart topper Robbie Williams, formerly of Take That. I first encountered Robbie's eclectic style shortly after the release of the video for his 1998 performance of "Let me Entertain You."

On Uninvited Guests at Christmas

2004-12-24T21:25:00-08:00

This makes Christmas Eve #2 that I woke in the morning to discover a nasty surprise on my server.

In case there is any doubt as to how I feel about this, allow me to make it painfully clear: STAY OFF MY COMPUTER!

Today's incident wasn't catastrophic, although it easily could have been. On 12/24/98, some dork rooted my server and attempted to remove everything. Clean up was a real pain, and the worst part was that I *knew* about the hole and had mistakenly left it active--I thought I had disabled it. Since '98, I've redoubled my efforts and have managed to keep this server free of riff-raff until today. Fortunately for me, my multi-tiered approach to security has paid off. Today's would-be intruders were trying to get that shell for weeks. When they finally managed to get in, they couldn't get any of their root kits to work.

Poor babies.

With that, I'm off to make cranberry sauce, wrap one last gift and rest easy knowing this hole is finally plugged and nothing really bad happened. Not only that, but I even had time for some last minute shopping...

Merry Christmas!

Say you're happy now, once more with feeling!

2004-12-10T07:10:00-08:00

Looking for something to sing about? We went to Alley Mo's last night for Buffy's High School Reunion. Watching Once More, With Feeling as a sing-along in a sold out house of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer fans is a rare viewing experience only possible at venues like the Alamo. Viewing Hush in silent community adds new depth to a fantastic episode. They've added 2 shows next Friday (today's sold out!) so call ahead for tickets!

Ho Ho Ho, Y'all

2004-12-09T21:35:00-08:00

We went down to Gruene, TX last weekend to see Cowboy Kringle and Wee lad seemed to like that. He also got to run around at the Gruene Hall. It was a long day for him, and he was wiped out by naptime, but it was a good visit with Grandpa.

nana

2004-11-27T20:32:00-08:00

lil dood made nana's day. he said "nana" and meant it :)

other new words this week: nice, nose, mouth, ear, eyes, and phone.

Catherine Zeta Jones made me do it...

2004-11-21T08:48:00-08:00

We switched from at and twireless to T-Mobile yesterday. We're keeping our existing numbers, although Jen won't have hers ringing on the new phone until her contract is up in January. On the downside, my phone went active at 2AM and started beeping incessantly. On the upside, it costs less for both of our phones with T-Mobile than it did with AT&T for either phone!

Wee lad was a big hit at the store, too. The nice people loaned him a bouncy ball while Jen and I took turns talking to the rep. We rewarded him with a cookie at Schlotsky's, but he was more interested in the croutons.

Ni Ni

2004-11-20T21:15:00-08:00

Wee lad has been saying "bye" at bedtime for a couple of months. Tonight was different.

"Tell mommy night-night," I prod.

"ni ni," he says.

A sibling for Wee lad...

2004-11-18T18:00:00-08:00

Jen's pregnant! But I'll let her tell you all about it. We went for sonograms today, and they claim she's at 12 weeks, 2 days. You can look for "Sweetpea" on the photo gallery page.