This has been my private hell. What you see are 2 HP ProLiant servers and an IBM BladeCenter. I’ve been up all night trying to get these beasts configured with OpenSUSE 11.
I’m about to bail and try FreeBSD.
Sweet idea to create new crayons in funky shapes from stubs of old ones:
Recycle Crayons
An interesting interview that explores the assumptions we make about the technology around us and the unintended consequences those assumptions have:
Downloaded and fired up the latest version of ecto tonight, and to my surprise I found my last 20 or so posts listed in the editing window. Given the infrequency of my posts in the last year or so, this pretty much accounts for everything I’ve published since we moved to the house. I spent a few minutes editing categories and modifying dates and Bob’s yer uncle.
Edit: well, almost, This is the third time I’ve attempted to post this. The latest version of ecto ate my first two attempts, so maybe not all is well. At this point it won’t insert a link either. I’m using the latest beta version, since the latest production version crashes when I try to submit a post. Oh well.
So isLog is back after some extended downtime. Long story short, I ran an image editing tool on our shared server, caught a segfault, and then spewed random bits across the surface of our drive. Fortunately our backup allowed us to restore most of our essential services. Unfortunately, the WordPress database was corrupt and I lost 5 years worth of blog posts. Oh well, fresh start and all that.
Two new features: the Image Gallery to the right shows a feed of my last 3 months worth of pictures. Unedited, so you get a view of whatever I’m dumping into the memory hole. The pix link at top right takes you to my MobileMe gallery where you can see all the images I’ve uploaded.
Enjoy.
Max’s teacher sent me this excellent picture of her hard at work writing a report on China.
Not sure why I’ve been so taken with the whole Lolcats phenomenon, but I have. And I even find many of the spinoffs snort-out-loud funny. Dear reader, I never promised you shining prose or sparkling intelligence. Or a rose garden.
But the ultimate, the absolute best, has to be LOLCODE. Yes, I know it’s an almost unbearably geeky in-joke. But I submit that the whole Lolcats thing is an unbearably geeky in-joke, so this becomes more like the difference between 7,000 nuclear warheads and 12,000 nuclear warheads. Once you can utterly nuke the entire earth (or your social standing) further measurements are pointless.
P.S.: WANT!
P.P.S: Where LOLCats come from
I admit it: I’m an 80’s music geek. I hate to sound like those annoying old farts I grew up hearing who always said “Music was way better 20 years ago..”, but honestly, I do think music was better 20 years ago. The most innovative bands I hear today are bands that would have easily fit into the alternative rock scene in the 80’s. You have to admit that there’s a much bigger gap between The Rolling Stones and The Clash than there is between Joy Division and Interpol. What new has happened in the past 20 years?
All this is provided as background for the amazing archive I ran across the other day: the Kino Digital Video Portal. Most of these are Boston bands or bands that played Boston in the late 80s, and there are some incredible videos here. My faves:
Human Sexual Response – “Land of the Glass Pinecones”
The Specials: Too Much Too Young
Cool thing is, I saw all these bands perform these songs at one point or another in Boston. I actually got to see the Thrills perform “Hey” at the Rat, which just shows you how freaking old I am.
Been a biut of a while since I posted. Not a whole heck of a lot to say. For those that are interested, here are the highlights of what’s going on in my life:
JB (Jelly Bean) is doing well. I felt the first kick this weekend! We had a doctor’s appointment on Friday morning for a quick sonogram and everything is going well. We still haven’t found out JB’s sex and don’t want to. We’re now at 21 weeks and looking solid. We need to get moving on refinishing the nursery.
As far as the house is concerned: work continues. I’ve been doing a lot of work on the yard lately, not so much inside. The bare patches in the back 40 are filling in nicely, and I planted 12 boxwoods along the front yard to give us a nice hedge which makes the front of the house look slightly less hideous. At least now it looks like someone cares. We got an estimate on painting the exterior and some parts of the interior, which we read and laughed over. We’ll do it ourselves and take a vacation for that amount of money.
Laying the floor in the basement has really paid off – while we were watching the game last night, Beth mentioned that she really likes that room now, and that’s before repainting or finishing the baseboard heaters. It’s the job I’m proudest of so far.
The Red Sox dropped 2 out of 3 in the recent series with the Yankees, and it’s particularly painful because the win came as a result of monkey-boy (Alex Rodriguez) hitting a solo homer in the top of the 9th. Of course, that only puts the Yankees 12.5 games back from the Sox and 1 game ahead of the last-place Devil Rays, so no reason to start hand-wringing yet. Especially given how badly the Yankees fall apart when things go wrong. Second-place Toronto is 10.5 games back, so we still have a pretty nice cushion. And I know it’s still early, but I’d love a post-season without the Yankees. Far as the Yankees are concerned – as Yogi Berra once said: “It’s getting late awfully early”.
Have I mentioned that the mlb.com site is not only miserably designed but painfully slow? Why is it still so hard for people to get websites reasonably well-done in this day and age?
Been learning Ruby in preparation of moving further into Rails (I did some quick test stuff with Rails and was pleased with the results). I’ve looked at some other web-development frameworks (most notably CakePHP) but I’ve noticed that none of them really made code easier to manage or resulted in fewer bugs or faster development time that my own home-grown framework.
After years of developing in PHP, Ruby is a liberating. Even at the initial stages, the language is a joy to use and incredibly powerful. I look forward to eventually ditching PHP altogether and moving all my development to Ruby/Rails.
As an adjunct to the above, I’m pushing again to get Max and Lucas to learn programming. My experiment with Logo wasn’t terribly successful – I would need more time than they were willing to give to get them walking on their own with that language. However, I’ve found a great alternative teaching tool, based on Ruby: Hackety Hack. It should be released for the Mac this month, so Max, Lucas and I will all be learning Ruby at the same time.
Work is going great – I now have two major projects going on: adding mapping to the core application and extending functionality on the State House video servers. Reasonably interesting work, although I still get frustrated by the other small jobs that keep coming in and taking time away from these.
We went to the Doc’s recently. Everything is still right on track as far as Jellybean’s development. No surprises, baby and mom are both healthy and doing great. One thing – while the Doc says that JB’s size is almost dead median, Beth does seem to be big for having 3 months to go. We get a lot of “Wow” when we tell folks baby’s not arriving till October. Whether this means a big baby or an early delivery, we don’t yet know. I’ve attached a picture of Beth that everyone’s been asking for so you can judge for yourself. On another note, Jellybean has started doing a lot of moving around. We playa fun game some nights: Beth lays on the bed and I put my hand on her belly, and do a light squeeze and jiggle. Jellybean usually responds with a kick or arm poke, and then waits for the next squeeze and jiggle. It’s pretty wonderful to be able to communicate with our child already.
UPDATE: Beth says that she’s not insane – she was making a silly face in that picture.
my birthday, Beth gave me a wonderful little camera – an Olympus Stylus 720sw. It’s a point-and-shoot camera with a few extra features, which is what I really want. I’m more about getting the picture than fiddling with setting to create the perfect shot. The killer features on this camera are the rechargeable battery, the huge dispay, and the fact that it’s incredibly tough, sealed against dust and sand, and waterproof (!) down to 30 feet.
I was a little worried about the size – it’s bigger than the (disontinued) Sony DSC-U50 it’s replacing. But it turns out to be just as pocketable. I took a few shots at the beach with it, and I have to say that it’s nice to be able to hand the camera to the kids and not have to worry about it being damaged. The kids actually took some of these shots.
Battery life is pretty solid, at least for my type of usage. It’s a bit of a bummer to not be able to buy batteries and drop them in – it uses a custom-size Lithium Ion rechargeable, requiring a special plugin charger, but I’ve yet to run out of juice, even with that huge 2.5″ screen. It includes AV-out cables so you can share the pictures on the camera with others via a TV screen. Being the clever lady that she is, Beth also included a 2-gig memory card, so even at the 7.1 megapixel resolution I can store about 200 pictures on the camera before needing to tether up to my mac. Works great with iPhoto.
Overall a great addition.
Pictures from the Olympus 720sw
So, I couldn’t resist. I bought myself an 8-gig iPhone a day after they went on sale. The Braintree Apple store had plenty in stock, and no lines: the whole process took me a total of about 5 minutes. Activation was quick and simple – although I didn’t try to port any numbers over, just created a new one and forwarded calls – and I was up and running about 20 minutes after hooking it up to my computer, with all my contacts and music preloaded. An easy and painless process.
Trying out the phone has been a joy. Compared to my piece-of-shit Treo 700w, this….well it doesn’t even compare. I was always on the verge of throwing the Treo against the wall due to some newly-discovered frustration. The iPhone is in a completely different class. A friend who just bought one calls it “the single best consumer product ever produced”, and he’s not really one prone to exaggeration. After years of putting up with phones that hate you, having one that just works is incredibly liberating and an awesome relief.
Having usable web access in a portable device is also amazing. It’s hard to believe that other companies had years to get this right and failed so miserably. Clearly, they think very little of their customers to make them suffer so badly, when something like the iPhone was always possible.
I’ve read a lot about how access speeds on AT&T’s network are painfully slow. Perhaps my experience is unique, but so far I’ve been quite happy with the access. About half DSL speed. There’s a lot you can do with 180k/sec, and if a web page takes a long time to load at that speed….well, someone screwed up because no web page should take that long to load (I’m talking to you ESPN).
I’ll write a more detailed review later, because there are some problems with the device as it currently stands, but they’re all software problems that should be able to be addressed by a software update. As far as hardware goes, the device is solid: it feels great in the hand and the glass face is disconcertingly difficult to scratch. Battery life is impressive so far.
Beth described it best: it’s a smile machine.
I am now officially 41 years old. *sigh*
Had a really nice birthday / Father’s day. Beth and Max and Lucas made a cake for me, and Beth gave me a really nice present: a tough little digital camera to replace my beloved Sony DSC-U50. For Father’s day, I received something I’ve wanted for a while: a shiatsu massager seat cushion. It feels awesome, really relieves the tension and tightness in my back.
It was a great day – lots of hugs and kisses all around. And the cake was very good. I have a wonderful family.
Here are a few more pictures of JB, done with a really high-resolution sonogram at Beth Israel Hospital (!). Be warned – clicking on the links to the high resolution images will pop open a *really* big window and may take some time to download.
Gah! Is there really nothing we can do about domain name squatters? I can’t think of an equitable solution to this, but it’s incredibly annoying to be developing a web application, come up with the perfect name, and find that some moron has been sitting on it for 3 years with a placeholder page.
I’m really starting to feel that anyone who has a placeholder page for longer than 1 year should be challenged. Paying some spam-king squatter $5k for a domain name is just not feasible, and we devs shouldn’t have to resort to awkward naming structures or alternative TLDs to avoid this kind of BS.
….
OK, I’m all better now.
Amazing how quickly these little guys develop. Beth and I have taken to calling the baby “Jellybean”, based on the last set of sonograms. Not accurate anymore, but I have a feeling the poor kid will be stuck with the name for life now. Could be worse. Could have been “Seahorse” or “Lizard”. At any rate, here are some more sonogram pictures to check out.
Lucas went to a birthday party today, where all the kids were asked to wear their favorite color. Being the crazy man that he is, he wanted to kick it up a notch. This meant we had to rush around Boston on a Sunday morning to find a place that sold temporary red hair coloring. Newbury Comics FTW, but you probably already knew that. I certainly didn’t – that’s why I married into cool. Beth knows where to get anything in this city. At any rate, we wound up spraying-painting Lucas’ hair in front of Emack & Bolio’s, and made it to the party just in time.
Of course, Max also needed to get some blue streaks. This is the end result. And yes, it all washed out with a little shampoo, although the explanation of why he couldn’t go to school like this was a lengthy one.
Doesn’t he look a bit like Billy Joe from Green Day?
I’ve been a longtime ecto user, but have always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. What with the long hiatus in my posting, my upgrade to WordPress 2.1, and some activity by the developers, I decided to give MarsEdit another try. I’d heard good things about it (some folks swear by it) and it appeared to be pretty professional.
After spending 15 minutes with MarsEdit, all I can say is WTF? How can folks even compare this to the latest ecto? ecto is far and away the better editor, boasting integration with iPhoto, iTunes and Amazon, modifiable templates, customizability up the wazoo, and excellent scriptability.
Granted, I’m running into an iPhoto image upload problem right now, which is what prompted the second look at MarsEdit, but MarsEdit doesn’t even know iPhoto exists, and is definitely not ready to have a conversation with it about how to resize and upload my images.
After looking at the alternative, I’ll gladly put up with ecto’s foibles and debug the problem.
I recently came across mention of this book. Sounds pretty interesting, if more than a little creepy. Apparently, not only are the Blackwater mercenaries used by the military in Iraq, but they were also used by the Government in New Orleans after Katrina to “maintain order”, although oddly they only tasked with protecting the rich parts of town, while the rest of the city descended into nightmare.
Maybe I’ve just read too many dystopias about exactly this kind of thing happening, but I have to ask: WTF? A bigger question is why this isn’t all over the news media. Fox I can understand, but why aren’t the rest of the networks or papers covering this? Are they afraid that Blackwater will be sent to “maintain order” at the corporate headquarters, or do they just think this isn’t a story worth telling?
Seriously, this is a creepshow.
As you can see, there’s a new peanut in the Alvarez Family. We went to the doctor’s last Thursday and got this picture (click to enlarge). I know it’s not much to look at yet, but we’ve gotten a few requests to see the latest addition, and this is what we have. The doctor estimates that Baby is 8 weeks old in this picture. That means baby’s birthday will be right around Mom’s. We did get to see and hear the baby’s heartbeat – incredibly fast, but strong.
Beth has been feeling reasonably well so far, no real morning sickness. She has been amazing – dealing with work, pregnancy and the move with her usual style and class. She sure looks great, even if she doesn’t believe me when I say it.
About two months ago, I bought a television. The last television I owned I bought about 15 years ago, a cheapo 14″ with tinny speakers. Honestly, TV sucked so bad at the time that I never watched it. Recently, though, I decided I wanted a large screen for my Mac Mini, to surf the web, play DVDs and iTunes, display pictures, and generally get into all that digital media goodness that’s available to us today. Everything works quite well – the display is indecently good given how much I paid for it (an open-box post-holiday 42″ plasma with QAM, ATSC, PIP and dual HDMI in for under $850). The Wii looks amazing, and the NetFlix DVDs look wonderful. Everything works great….until I actually try to connect my cable.
Cable itself works fine. I have digital Comcast in Boston, and we can certainly watch whatever we would normally watch. Problem is, this TV really shows how bad the picture quality is. Comcast offers HD programming, but my existing box won’t receive it, and Comcast wants a monthly fee for an HD-capable box, which I feel religiously opposed to paying.
No problem, my TV has a QAM tuner (QAM, for those of you who don’t know, is a federally-mandated transmission of unencrypted free HD content by all cable companies). Of course, Comcast has figured out a hack here – the cable only carries QAM upstream of the cable box. Connect anything downstream of the cable box and QAM is gone. So I’m in a situation where I apparently have to choose between QAM and regular cable. I could connect my cable box via one of the other inputs (it’s currently on the RF coax) which I suppose I’ll have to do, even though it means adding another significant mess of wire to my current setup. Since we’re moving in less than a month, no point in going through the trouble yet – I’ll just deal with it once I move. Quite annoying though – makes you wonder how much these media companies actually want you to consume their product, given all the hassles they put in your way.
Next Episode: EyeTV Hell, wherein we discover the horrible limitations of an “Integrated Device”
So it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted, a full year. A lot of things have happened in that year. New job (at Sage Systems), new house, and a few other things which I’ll save for later. I finally got the isLog up and running again and am pretty happy about that. I have a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to write about lately, so it seemed appropriate. And hopefully I’ll find a decent gallery tool that plays nicely with Wordpress and iPhoto and put up some pictures soon.
Not sure if anyone even reads this blog anymore but that’s ok too – my main audience is myself and my kids when they grow up. A little window into what Dad used to be like.
