And the weather is gorgeous! Rode the BART from the airport, and it was the most comfortable public transporation I’ve ever been on. The Muni was about the same as any other subway/train thing I’ve been on, except every third person had white iPod earphones on and a Powerbook in their lap. I’m sitting in Crepes on Cole and it’s a very nice place, the food smells great and the music is good. Very cozy. Can’t wait for Tantek to get here so we can eat. What amazes me right now is the number of people just walking around. Lots of babies, lots of dogs. Lots of people holding dogs like babies. It would be easy to sit here and people watch all day. What’s funny is in the back of my mind I half expect every face that walks by to belong to a web celebrity, like at SxSW.
Category Archives: Travel
Meetup Update
The three top cities for the WordPress meetup right now are San Francisco, Houston, and Manila (in the Phillipines). Four people have confirmed their attendence at the Borders in San Francisco so far. If only four people come, we’ll still have a blast, but I suspect there will be some surprise guests that should make things very interesting. Saturday at 4 PM, possibly in a city near you. Don’t forget.
Well That Was Fun
I said I would take it down, I never said for how long. Thank you to everyone for taking a little time out with me in celebration of the big day. I was as surprised as everyone else, and watching the reactions come in was pretty interesting. The emails ranged from shocked to congratulatory to incredulous to angry. Thank you to everyone who wrote in. Many people linked to the site being down which should help solidify the #1 position in the eyes of the fickle mistress Google. Thank you all as well.
You’d think it would be cooler here in Houston, with hell freezing over and all, but it is as hot as ever. At the same time I’m told in San Francisco I need to dress in “layers.” I packed all my layers up months ago! Might have some <div>s around though…
I was able to get some of the work I was planning to do on the site done, mostly tweaks to the look and layout of things. I wouldn’t call it a redesign, more like a summer variation on a theme. Many of the changes are very subtle, but in my eyes important. The most obvious change, the sun in the corner, looks nothing like I want it to, so I’m not sure what will happen to that. (If you have any ideas, send them in.) Many other things still need attention, so expect to see occasional breakage and constant tweaking over the next week. I finally closed the comments on the mosaic. So it will stand at 1,017 comments,. The page is still huge, so I’m going to move the comments to a separate page just for that entry. The jazz quotes need some cleaning up, and I’d like to add a little information about each player to each page, including at least a picture. The photolog is being overhauled, and the long-promised classics section is almost done. Finally I promise that photo will be random again, any day now.
It was just a little over a day, but it feels good to be back. Let’s not do that again though. I really missed writing here.
I’m going to be in San Francisco next week, so if you are too I’d love to meet up. Drop me a line.
Mosquito Bites
So it wasn’t even the first day of the bug tracker’s existence when bug notes got rowdy and prompted Shelley to write a post lamenting WordPress developer communication and more. I started to write a reply in the comments, but it got pretty long so I decided to post it here.
Shelley: Different people particpate with the development process at different levels. While I appreciate the point you were trying to communicate, it seems like an inappropiate place to role play a clueless user. (Particularly posting under your own account.) Ryan and I fully realize that the reply would mean very little to someone who didn’t know PHP or diff, but it was a dialogue between you—Shelley Powers the bug reporter who has written several advanced hacks and plugins for WordPress—and a developer who wants to address the problem. Someone else probably would have been treated differently. In the past you have been very indignant when someone assumed you didn’t know something and addressed you at a level you deemed patronizing. In that situation, how is anybunny supposed to respond?
It’s silly for it to come up in the first place. Communication is much more than 50% of successful application, it’s 100% essential because without it the code doesn’t really matter. The project falls in the forest without making any sound. However the bug tracker doesn’t seem like the best place to make this point. If you really feel strongly about this, why not write some guidelines or best practices in the wiki and send a note to the documentation list.
There a thread on the forums which addresses some of this.
The Coffee Guy
I write this from the comfort of a tall stool in the brand new Coffee Guy store at I-10 and Highway 6/Addicks. Some of you may know the Coffee Guy as that cute little place at Richmond and Sage that mostly caters to a drive-thru crowd. They’ve decided to expand their business and have moved out to this swank new shop they built and designed from the ground up. The old place was so small it wasn’t really conducive to lounging the way most coffee shops are, plus it didn’t have any internet access, a requisite feature these days. I can’t speak for the coffee, because I’m not a coffee guy myself, but I can safely say that they have the best hot chocolate I’ve had anywhere—think multiple layers of whipped cream, caramel syrup, and chocolate syrup. However I have heard from people who do know coffee that The Coffee Guy at their previous location was quite good and I don’t see why this one should be any different.
With the new design they obviously had high-tech coffee lovers in mind, with power outlets everywhere, wi-fi and wired internet access, a big plasma TV, and lots of seats and tables. I can’t vouch for the coffee, but what I can vouch for is their internet connection, which has speeds consistent with a high-end cable connection. Connect to SSID TheCoffeeGuy and you’re good to go. I’ll have to tell my friends in the Houston Wireless Users Group about this. Here’s a few pictures I snapped:
I was going to end this on a bright note and recommend you try the Coffee Guy out, but Elissa (who works here) just tricked me into eating what’s called an “espresso pancake” by disguising it as a cookie, so I’m going to say whatever you do, do not visit or patronize The Coffee Guy. Unless of course you like good drinks and free internet.
How could Elissa do such a thing? Look at how evil she is! (She’s even evil looking with real cookies.) Anyway if you do decide to visit, I can tell you when Elissa isn’t working so it’ll be safe. Here’s their address:
14725 Katy Freeway
Houston, Texas 77079
Charles Platt on FCC
I got this via the Politech list and it absolutely made my day. From Charles Platt.
The FCC ruling pleases me in a way. Any shortsighted policy that discourages consumers from watching broadcast TV or raises the price of equipment for receiving broadcast TV is a step in the right direction from my point of view. Broadcast TV is an entrenched politically sanctioned zone of zero effective competition, with all the usual consequences. In addition I think it helps to make people stupid. Ideally it should be taxed into oblivion, but crippling it with DMCA measures is better than nothing I guess.
Of course even more ideally the FCC should be abolished and the airwaves should be auctioned, but that isn’t going to happen. Since government appears to be unavoidable at this time, it should behave as self-destructively as possible.
A good summary of the FCC ruling is available at the Washington Post.
Blogging the Milt Friedman Conference
I knew I kept the economics category around for a good reason. Tonight through Friday I’m going to be in Dallas because I was invited to the “Legacy of Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose” conference here at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. Internet access during the conference is probably not going to happen, as it’s unlikely I’ll be able catch anything wireless or just plug into the wall somewhere, so I can’t promise live-blogging of the sessions, but I can pick up a few access points here where I’m staying so I’ll try to catch up every night. I’m very excited about the oppurtunity to meet Milton Friedman, who was very influential in my early studies. His influence is undeniable, and I’m honored to be here.
The drive was long but in good company with my old friend Iram in the passenger seat. We discussed a lot of current issues, Plato’s Republic which she is also studying, and how our economic viewpoints have changed in the two years since we won the Houston and district-level Fed Challenge competition. I dropped her and her mother at their relative’s house, and made my way back by the Bank where Scott Roman, my former teacher/coach and now head of education for the Dallas Fed, lives and also where I’m crashing. It was a little tricky getting here, but now that I am the exhastion from the drive is starting to catch up with me and I think it’s time for some sleep. Breakfast at 9 tomorrow. Planning to take lots of pictures.
Keeping Links Kosher
As part of the re-vamp I’ve put together a 404 script that emails me whenever it’s called. This has certainly been an eye-opener as to the misguided traffic that this site gets. An email is so much different than just seeing the hits in your logs, and I would recommend anyone serious about maintaining a site do something similar.
There are a few links to my old curly quotes entry that link to a rather funky perversion of a fly-by-night URI scheme that has long since gone by the by. These links worked just fine until I deleted the file that was keeping things going, now it’s time to move things into the magic .htaccess file.
Let’s take a look at the URI in question:
http://www.photomatt.net/archives/m/200209?p=186
My first thought was to just plop latter part of the request and create a rule just for this link, as such.
Redirect Permanent /archives/m/200209?p=186 http://photomatt.net/p186
Didn’t work, never matched. Next try I decided to go for something a little broader:
RedirectMatch 301 .*p=([0-9]+) http://photomatt.net/p$1
Didn’t work, never matched. Some research found that the problem lies in the query string, and the Apache redirect directives don’t address the query string. So let’s give mod_rewrite a go:
RewriteRule ^.*p=([0-9]+) http://photomatt.net/p$1 [R=301,L]
Still no luck. (For those that wonder, the HTTP response code 301 indicates that the resource has been permanently moved. “Permanent” in the first try is just a synonym of “301”.) It looks like the magical mod_rewrite doesn’t match query strings either. Some more research turned up that while redirect doesn’t match or rewrite query strings, it does pass them all. So we are left with:
Redirect Permanent /archives/m/200209 http://photomatt.net/
Which, counter-intuitively, works. The ?p=186 on the end is just passed to the root of the site, which gives it to my index file which knows just what to do with it. I would like to eliminate the query string entirely and forward the URI to http://photomat.net/p186 but while that would be trivial in any scripting language I can’t nail down how to do it on the Apache or mod_rewrite level. So my options now are to add something to the global header to catch p=something query strings and redirect it, but I’d like to keep that file clean, so more likely is that I’ll start adding some URI management code into the 404 handler and generally make that file more sophisticated in general. We’ll see.
Inside
Have you ever driven slower just to spend more time with somebody?
In Austin
As of last night I have been happily in Austin, a much needed vacation and also a wonderful oppurtunity to visit my sister Charleen whose birthday is the driving reason for this visit. It’s interesting because we didn’t get along terribly well when we were both younger (and there were ten years between us) but now we seem to grow closer every year. The goal for this weekend, when not partaking in festivities, are to finish all of my email, including the ones from January and December that I still haven’t taken care of. I tried to get it done yesterday to try and beat the weekend email rhyme policy but there was just too much.
Yes, it’s a policy now! I’ve decided for the forseeable future every weekend all emails except ones where it would be wildly inappropiate will be composed and responded to in some sort of poetic form. Sure it will probably increase the amount of time each email will take, but whistle while you work, spoonful of sugar and all that.
Calling Houstonians
Just in case you are like me and get all your news through non-local online sources, I would like to inform my neighbors that there is a big freakin’ storm heading this way. This has been a public service announcement.
What’s crazy is this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Let’s take a trip down Photo Matt memory lane to last October, when a category 4 hurricane was heading this way and I found out much in the same manner as this time, through instant messaging. That entry contains a humorous comment from 6 months after the post was written, I guess from some random search engine visitor stumbling by. She’s right. I should update my weather more often. Perhaps I need one of those nifty weather boxes in my sidebar that were all the rage a couple of years ago.
Update: It wasn’t that bad.
Hey Hey Hey, Z1A
I don’t know how to describe my mood except elation. Remember the laptop that broke last week? Well I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to take it in to Best Buy until today. If you remember, my hard drive was hosed. I was bringing it out of hibernation and it hung. When I restarted it I was informed that there was no operating system found. Many hours, recovery disks, and general messing, it seemed that the hard drive was fubar.
Obviously it had gotten jolted out of whack or something, and I went in to the store expecting them to send it away and maybe it would be an easy fix so I would have my laptop back in two weeks instead of a month and a half. However they just checked if they had another Z1A in stock and exchanged it out for me. Sweet! The timing couldn’t have been better because I had just started to notice the wear and tear that inevitably happens.
Anyway now we’re trying to fix Josh’s computer, which he’s trying to upgrade to work with Star Wars Galaxies, however Murphy has intervened and nothing seems to be working right. Hopefully we can work things out though.
Update: Josh’s problem was a bad CD-ROM drive. He’s now up and running with Windows XP (which is running really fast on his machine) and everything seems to be working. He hasn’t installed the game yet that prompted this slew of upgrades (XP and 120GB HD) so it’ll be hilarious if it doesn’t work.
Good Fireworks Pictures
The New York Institute of Photography offers firework photography tips and tricks that are a great read. I’ve been thinking about getting a tripod lately, but then many of my photos would lose that distinctive blurry quality that makes them so distinctive. 😉
Looong Day
I was at work for 10 hours today doing cabling and other things that need to be done by tomorrow. We didn’t finish, so I’m going in tomorrow morning as well. That actually wasn’t that bad, the work was hard but it needs to be done and it’s not like I’m not getting paid. What really blew though was when I booted up my laptop and it told me “No Operating System Found.” What? Where did it go? What could have happened? Who knows.
On my old laptop I would have just popped the drive out and plugged it into my desktop (I have an adaptor) and seen what was wrong, however a tradeoff of the nice look of this new one is that there seems to be no good way to open it without messing a whole mess of things up. So I’m downloading Knoppix to boot from the CD-ROM and see if I can see what’s up. Honestly I wouldn’t care and just go straight to a recovery CD if it wasn’t for the Vegas pictures that I haven’t uploaded yet that are still on there. I really hope this doesn’t become a recurring issue like the ones I had with the GRX.
On a brighter note, I got my review copy of Andy King’s Web Site Optimization yesterday. I had some time to get started on it and it looks very interesting. I’m going to be doing a review of it for the Web * SIGs here in town and I’ll also post something here. I have to be back at work at 9 tomorrow, which means I have to wake up at 7-ish (hour to get ready, hour to get there) so I better get to bed soon.
Bah… Yeah!
There are three hundred and seventy-two emails in my two inboxes; with the way I work each represents something I need to do, respond to, tweak, fix, file. I’m going to try and get each inbox (@mullenweg = personal projects, @swcdesign = work) under a hundred messages tonight, though I’m pretty tired.
The tiredness is great though, because it comes from a very active night. Things started at about 5 at The Button. I arrived with the Sarahs and went to see everyone when out of nowhere popped out Julie! How crazy is that? Well, you wouldn’t think it was that crazy unless you thought as I did that she was in New York. The whole gang—Sarah W., Sarah C., Ramie, Julie, Josh, Elissa, and Chris. (Yes that’s pretty much the whole “clique” list which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is also a pun. :)) So Julie pushed the button (she waited for me!) and then everyone headed to Van Loc for some pho but I actually had to go to Kim Son to meet a client.
I ended up at the wrong one, when he said the Kim Son downtown I assumed it was the one off of Travis where the big Kim Son sign is, but no. There is actually no restruant there, something I found after walking a few blocks to get there. The weather was comfortable though, so it wasn’t that big a deal. I ended up being a few minutes late though (theme of the day) to meet him at the one in midtown, about 10 minutes (drive) away.
David Caceres was going to join us but he couldn’t for some reason, but I have a lesson with him tomorrow so we’ll catch up then. So I ate dinner at Kim Son for my first time. Talking with Woody was great. He was one of my very first clients (two years ago!), and looking back he really took a chance in a way in hiring someone who really didn’t have much experience. Anyway he wants a redesign, and I’m exciting about it because it’s really time for one; the site is starting to show its age. Some things will be trimmed, some things will be added (including a psuedo-blog), and it’s going to look very different. Everything has changed so much in the past two years. Also discussing a redesign with my very first client, whose web page I’m slightly embarassed to link to now. :-p
The all-star big band concert at Moore’s was so good, I’m not even going to try and describe it. Basically it’s the best musicians of every instrument, most seldom seen together because they all lead their own groups. It just blew me away, and I was delighted to see my non-jazz friends were digging it as well. Sarah C. ducked out for the concert and really missed out.
The night wouldn’t have been complete with some pie, so the House of it was. Great fun, chocolate brownie, bavarian banana cream, coconut, peaches, and lots of whipped cream (melt). Also saw Joe and Marcos which was a nice surprise. There are a million pictures on the camera, but Elissa has some up already. All her pictures are going to end up here as she becomes the first official photomatt.net guest photographer. (Inspired of course by Julie’s guest entries.)
Now, I need to go practice.
Flush Time
The quirks on my laptop were just getting too weird, so when the control panel stopped working I decided it was time to do a system recovery. I have actually never done one of these before as I’ve always used home-built systems except for my last laptop, and when I wanted to do a system recovery on that I couldn’t find the CDs. Well this came with six CDs to do just what I need, so I guess we’ll see how this goes. It’ll be a pain reinstalling everything, but I think deep down inside I really enjoy doing that. Funny side note: when it was starting up the CD drive made a sound like the violins from Psycho. How appropiate. 16 minutes and 59 seconds later, all done.
On Unison
Ever since I first got a laptop I’ve struggled with trying to keep some semblance of uniformity between it and my desktop. My first and most significant obstacle was with email. Email parallax was killing me and so I made the leap to IMAP, and I haven’t looked back since. Before I decided to use IMAP though, I kept looking for a tool that would synchronize between my two Outlook files; I had become so spoilt by PalmOS synchronization that this seemed like a common sense feature. Apparently not though.
Anyway the 60GB hard drive on the new laptop opened the possibility of having my entire music collection with me at all times on the laptop. I remember surfing by a new tool that worked on both Windows and *nix and was essentially a two-way rsync. A little Googling led me to the Unison File Synchronizer. Bing.
I grabbed the Windows executable and fired it up on my laptop, thinking I would be able to point to the network share with the music on it. I had already transferred a couple of genres over so this would be a nice way to get the ones I hadn’t. Also the idea of synchronization because I might clean up a bunch of ID3 tags on my desktop or rip a new CD on my laptop when I’m out; my former (copy and paste) method of synchronizing these changes was messy and often missed things. Anyway it brought up a dialog that let me choose the directory on my local drive I wanted to synchronize, but it looked like before I choose a remote drive I had to start the Unison server on that computer. What followed was a long and complicated episode to boring and detailed to go into here, so if you just want Unison to work, here’s what I had to do.
- Put the executable in the directory you want to sync. Yes, I know there is a path argument, it never worked right for me. So for me I have Unison.exe in
d:\Musicon my laptop andi:\Musicon the desktop. - Start the server from the command line, I used:
unison.win32-gtkui.exe -socket 1234. - Start up the client. I created a new profile using “socket” as the connection method, the local IP of the machine as the host (192.168.1.102) and left the rest blank.
- Run it, and hope for the best.
I should tell you that it never successfully synced my Jazz directory, which is about 17GB. It would get further and further along, and then crash. I should warn you that it’s very resource intensive as well. In the beginning it’s tough on the server machine, and later it’s very hard on the client. Both times before it crashed on my Jazz directory it was using about 400MB of memory and slowed the computer down to a crawl. I was able to work around the crash because it had actually already transferred most of the files over to the laptop, it just had them in a strangely named dot directory, so I simply moved all the files out of that, deleted the now-empty temporary directory, and ran it again. This time it tried to do a lot less at one time, and syncronized the remaining files and few file properties as well. I think it’s a testament to the quality of the program that its crash was relatively easy to recover from.
Since the initial bumpy setup, it’s been working well for me. I tested it out by updating some things on the desktop and the laptop, and it caught all the changes just fine. When it’s not sure what to do it just asks you and you can tell it how various conflicts can be resolved. I’m happy with this tool, but I’d be quite hesitant to recommend it to somebody without much computer experience. The documentation is relatively poor, and the interface and behaviour of the application are anything but intuitive. Now when I run it to catch up on minor changes it is CPU intensive for a little while, but nothing compared to the earlier runs. All in all, I think this is a nifty tool, but it isn’t quite at a level of development where I would recommend it to the masses.
Happy Ending to a Long Story
If any of you have been following in the counter on my sidebar, you know that as of today my laptop has been under Best Buy repair for 31 days now. That’s a very long time to go without a laptop when you’ve become quite accustomed to one, and I went in to the store today with every intention of talking to them quite harshly. When the service man checked the status of my repair though, he said, “Oh, that’s been marked for replacement. Go pick a new one out.”
Sweeter words have never been spoken. I went to the car to get my receipt information. A quick glance in the laptop section revealed they had the exact model I was hoping for, the Vaio Z1A. The exchange still had some credit left over, so I picked up a nice case for it and they renewed the service plan to cover another 3 years and another replacement. I might regret that later, but right now I couldn’t be happier.
This new laptop is everything I could want. It’s light, which my previous powerful but heavy (10 pounds with power supply!) companion wasn’t. It’s faster, the 1.3ghz Centrino processor feels as snappy as my faster clock speed desktop, and benchmarks seem to put it on par with at least a 1.8ghz Pentium 4-M. Integrated WiFi is a must for all future laptops. 512MB of memory gives my programs room to breathe, and the ginormous 60GB hard drive will let me carry my entire music collection around with room to spare.
Best of all, it’s really beautiful. Most PCs are really not well designed, but with this one I can sit in a circle of Powerbooks at SxSW next year and not feel like the ugly cousin. My faith in Sony has been restored. All is forgiven. Pictures are most definitely forthcoming. Maybe an entire gallery worth. 🙂
Call Me Speedy
Well the 512MB of DDR333 memory I ordered came in today, and so now I’m up to 768MB, which is quite nice. I feel like my applications can breath again. Even more importantly I upgraded the 900MHz processor that was in there on accident to a Athlon XP 1600, and it’s making a huge difference. My desktop is starting to feel like a real work environment again.
In other news, we’re going on 3 weeks since they took my laptop, and it’s really starting to get to me. I really could have used it to keep up with things these last few weeks, which incidentally have been my busiest in a long, long time. I had my next to last final today, and I was really ecstatic afterward. Knowing there is just one more (on Thursday) is a great feeling, and I can’t wait for summer to finally get started.
It’s going to be a summer of road trips, beaches, tans, jogging, and some very cool web stuff.
Nominations Closed
Yes it should have happened yesterday, but there was always the chance that a absolutely brilliant submission would come in under the wire of the deadline and blow all the others away, and I didn’t want to kill that chance. That was the theory at least anyway. Anyway it’s closed, though if you visit it there is some new content.
Now of course comes the task of picking which categories are the best. Rather than make it a long and arduous personal cross, I think a party of some sort is in order. (Hmmm, tagline: “Mixing metaphors since…”) Thoughts?