Well, it looks like WordPress is going to become the official branch of b2, once we put out a release of course. Which should be soon, very soon. Time to start burning the midday oil. (I switched my sleeping hours.)
In other news i’m looking forward to seeing Michel’s new site, which he has some pretty cool thing planned for. He’s also doing more photography now, so maybe some cool b2 photolog features will come out of it. 🙂
Move along, nothing to see here.
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.
d:\Music on my laptop and i:\Music on the desktop.unison.win32-gtkui.exe -socket 1234.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.
After the requisite battles and explosions, you gotta love any review that sums over half the movie in six words. I disagree with a lot of what he’s saying, but it’s a good read nonetheless. I fixed that weird CSS that was making the comments light grey on white, sorry about that. Don’t expect too much from this website, it’s a first draft. 😉
Legitimate use of the blink tag. For this reason it should obviously be included in XHTML 2.0, and perhaps as a module in 1.1. Perhaps Mr Distler or Mr Lloyd might have some insight into this. (I’m like a month late on this, but what’s new?)
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I’m working on some things so the photolog is going to be down for a bit, so don’t go there. Hopefully some very exciting things in store there.
The Horde Project really has a lot of applications under its reign. In my opinion it’s by far the best web email client out there, but Kronolith, Jonah, and Gollem look really good. There should be a directory of high quality free PHP scripts. I’ve started using the Task application to track things I’m doing and should be doing, though the interface is a litle clunky. Something small and simple might be more in order.
Speaking of websites that should exist, Josh picked up This is the Matrix.net yesterday. Hopefully something cool will come out of it. 🙂
SPOILERS. I think I may need to make a new category for this. After reading Kottke’s thoughts and following the subsequent discussion, I was amazed at the level of ignorance on what normally is an insightful forum. I’m going to try and pull together a couple of my thoughts on all the discussion I have seen so far, though it really warrants a new site, something I’ll have to do in my copious free time.
It’s probably better to completely ignore the philosophy in the Matrix than to look at it superficially. It’s not light stuff, and offhand comments that just confuse people do more harm than good. A good place to start would be Philosophy and the Matrix, which I’ve deep-linked partly thanks to the movie’s awful website. (You would think that with all the millions floating around they could hire a decent web developer.) There are some excellent essays there, but to really appreciate it I think you need familiarity with the original works of Kierkegaard, Hume, Baudrillard, the Bible, Plato, Hok, Descartes, and probably more than those that I missed. Can you criticize what you don’t understand? Yes, but not from a philosophical point of view. It’s like reading T. S. Eliot without knowing Dante; you may appreciate some of the words but you miss the deeper meaning. There are so many levels of allusions that you get a lot more out of it. I admit that every time I have seen Reloaded (three times now) I pick up something new.
For example: As the Nebuchadnezzar explodes, Morpheus (Greek god of dreams, son of god of sleep) says something to the effect of “I had dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me.” Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian king in the Book of Daniel, has troubling dreams (2:2) that deny him sleep and orders all the wise men killed when they can’t tell him what his dream was. Morpheus goes further, let’s look at Ovid’s Metamorphoses
King Sleep was father of a thousand sons —
indeed a tribe — and of them all, the one
he chose was Morpheus, who had such skill
in miming any human form at will.
Is Morpheus, as an instrument of the Oracle, and possibly the Architect, simply the one chosen by the Architect (who as the creator of the world that keeps humankind in a state of perpetual hallucination would be a good parallel to Hypnos) to lead the One (anagram: Neo) to the “garbage collection” that is the reinitializing of the Matrix? It’s obvious that a lot of thought went into the creating of the story of the Matrix, and seeing it merely as an action film with sketchy CGI or a Christian allegory or a product of the internet boom mentality doesn’t really do it justice.
All that from one line, and yet you have reviews that devote half their ranting to the experience of going to the movie rather than going to the movie itself. You have people who built the first Matrix up so much in their minds that anything less than a total orgasmic experience is a complete let down. You have the otherwise brilliant Anil Dash saying that Bane/Smith at the end is Cypher, who as everyone knows died in the first movie.
Intelligent discourse on the movie is really lacking; a couple of things should happen in the blogoshpere.
0-day photos are back, including an especially interesting one of Josh with a nice backlight, and a strange pink photo.
It looks like Kymberlie and Christine have both been hacked, I only hope that the crackers didn’t do anything bad to their files and that it was a simple vulnerability and not one in Movable Type or something. Calling now… These guys (girls?) are so cool they did the hack announcement in FrontPage. Now that’s l33t.
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If you glance over at the sidebar, the photolog is now italicized, which can only mean one thing. It’s back! Over two hundred new pictures, eleven new albums, and more captions than you can shake a stick at. Go check it out, and be sure to leave comments. It’s going to be another summer of photos, so be sure to check the photolog regularly. I’m going to see now if I can do anything about the horrid HTML there.
“Their daily utterances, even on topics they know nothing about, are generating high traffic from search engine queries.” — Search Results Clogged by Blogs, Joanna Glasner. At least most bloggers admit when they know nothing about their subject, unlike say, journalists.
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. 🙂
Those of you who know what the Red Button is, and those who are curious, should come to today’s meeting of the Red Button Fan Club at Tropioca at 12:30. The Creator of the button will be in attendance.
No spoilers here. I liked it, but several people I talked to either flat out didn’t or were on the fence. Not what I was expecting. Tek suggested elaborate preperations and such (contrast mine), but overall the showing I was at seemed pretty laid back. Theatres all over town had it, generally with at least one show starting every twenty minutes, and tickets were relatively plentiful. We got there early and they had already opened the theatre and were letting people choose the seat, overall the opening of X-2 seemed more crowded.
The truth is I really liked it, and after Tantek’s two day blackout (which I think is an excellent idea, and I hope it sets a precedent) I’ll be happy to discuss it with anyone who thought otherwise. What was really fun about the night though was hanging out with the gang of Joe, Kyle, and Rene. With Rene in Boston and Joe and Kyle busy with their senior year, plus my obligations, I didn’t really see much of them for a while. Hopefully this summer we’ll be able to catch up.
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Just a reminder: I love all the links that have been coming in recently, but if you link to something here, save yourself four keystrokes and leave off the “www.” It’s three months now, all the useful search engines (except Blogdex) have figured it out, why are two thirds of the HTTP responses from this site still 301 Permanently Moved? It’s going to take years to shake that thing.
If you would like to see the new Matrix with me and a few others tomorrow, here’s what you do.
I can’t wait. In others news Tantek recommended a number of books to me (some of which he’s posted about) and I’ve started it out with Neuromance and I haven’t been able to put it down. Finishing it tonight. Thanks for the recommendations! (To the certain person who has seen Reloaded already, shhhhhhhh.)