Locked Out

Personal

My key works but it seems the door is jammed somehow, so I’m currently locked out of my house, which is as they say a bummer. My battery runs low, but thank goodness for WiFi. I just need to wait a little while longer for someone to wake up (or answer the phone or doorbell) and I’ll be snuggled up in a warm bed. But right now I am very tired, very uncomfortable, and very annoyed.

Working backwards, earlier tonight was great. Put WordPress out, which felt great. After a little client work I hooked up with Josh, Sarah, and Ramie, whose blog we just set up so the domain might not resolve yet. (Power update: I just ran the extension cord on the side of the house to the porch, so it looks like I can finish this.) I ended up not getting out of the house until about 11:30, and after I picked everyone up we decided to go House of Pies (of course) because Ramie and Sarah were hungry, despite Sarah having already eaten twice already that night. (Having big hair must really work up an appetite.) Food was great, but after I stepped away for a phone call from Mike concerning WordPress (he had a funny PHP setup) they managed to pull the salt trick on me. This deserves a tangent.

My friend Rachel is deadly afraid of two things: mayonnaise and ketchup. So when I was eating with her, Josh, and Rene several nights ago at House of Pies (of course) I thought it would be funny to mix the two together and dip one of my cottage fries in it. When I held it up she responded with a fight or flight response and started waving two toothpicks at me in defense. It put it down and proceeded to eat my cottage fries (with just ketchup) but somehow I got persuaded into trying the ketchup/mayonnaise concoction. It was gross, and I’m told the reaction on my face was pretty amusing. (Actually I think that’s why most of this stuff happens, because I’m told that I tend to respond “animatedly.”) I went to the bathroom to wash my mouth out a little. Tangent time again.

I don’t know when, but at some point, most likely after I started hanging out with Josh a lot, I started putting a lot of sugar in water at restaurants. It’s cheap, which is nice, but it’s actually gotten to the point where I prefer it to soft drinks sometimes. I don’t always do it though, for two reasons: one, I use a lot of sugar, not as much as Josh does, but still enough that it freaks some people out; two, if the restaurant has the sugar in packets, it’s unusable because of said amounts of sugar required to make it good. (My Dad just left for work, and in coming out of the house ungummed the door for me. The morning has become rather pleasant though so I think I’ll stay out here and finish this up.)

This brings be back from the bathroom, and when I sat down I took a big gulp of my water, sticking my straw all the way to the bottom where the sugar was to help get the taste out of my mouth. I put a lot of sugar in my water, so the white at the bottom of the glass didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was the salt.

Anyway tonight I fell for it again, but it was just a minor gulp from the middle of the glass so not nearly as potent as the last time. I had chocolate cream pie to get the salt taste out, so overall it wasn’t that bad, but I thought it was pretty funny that I fell for it again. (My Dad just looped back home, donuts in hand. How nice is that!) Dinner was a lot of fun, and it was neat catching up with Ramie who I haven’t seen since winter when she left again for New Haven (she attends Yale). We discovered there is no spoon.

Ramie had never seen the Red Button so that was the natural next step, and Ramie pushed it. I don’t think she has yet felt the full repercussions of the experience, but she will. During the meeting with the Button Guy we were told there was another hidden treasure we hadn’t discovered yet, namely a motion detector that set off a horn when you walk under the bridge. So we did all we could to set off any motion detectors in proximity but to no avail.

Somehow that turned into wrestling though, and two questionable characters accosted me by the bayou and even though they never got me close to it, I think everyone had fun trying. Josh had his turn too. I think at some point during the night (maybe a Josh tackle) I managed to scrape my knee; I don’t remember the last time I scraped my knee, which means I need to get outdoors more.

We ended up in a internet café type place in Sarah’s Dad’s apartment building (which was quite swank). There was some IM mischief, I set up Ramie’s blog, but most of the night was spent showing Sarah all the hilarious memes she missed because of her dial-up connection at her house. She got to know the Chubby Jedi, Angrybot, dancing and rapping plushies, and a few others I can’t remember.

The hour was late, and so we parted ways and went to get some rest.

Which brings me back to this porch, this door, which I think I’m going to go in now. It better not have jammed again…

WordPress Now Available

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Extra, extra, read all about it.

I am very happy to announce that the first release of WordPress is now available for download. A full change log is available, but here is a brief overview of the new features.

  • Texturize — So good it’ll make your quotes curl.
  • WordPress Links — A link manager with everything you’d expect, from Weblogs.com support to a handy bookmarklet. Manage as many blogrolls as you like, and have complete control over their display.
  • XHTML 1.1 — WordPress is complaint with XHTML standards up to 1.1, though by default it sends a 1.0 document type to avoid compatibility issues.
  • Highly Intelligent Line Breaks — Occasionally called “nl2br on steroids,” this brand new function adds line breaks except where there is already a block level tag or another line break.
  • New Administration Interface — We’ve made it as simple as possible, and no more. Everything has been restructured from the ground up in a fully compliant XHTML/CSS interface.
  • Manual Excerpts — This allows you to handcraft summaries of your posts to appear in your RSS feed and other places.
  • New Default Templates — Again we’ve streamlined theses with the latest in simple, easy-to-understand standard XHTML and CSS. And not a CSS hack in sight.
  • Plus numerous behind the scenes code cleanups, making this release faster and more stable than ever.

WordPress is available completely free of charge under the GPL license. Enjoy!

Go get it, and then go tell everybody about it. Many thanks! And now, it’s time for a party.

Adaptation

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Adaptation was a really excellent movie, with more twists and turns than I could keep track of. I think there is so much I still don’t get though. For now though, it’s time (finally) for some sleep.

Kin Than Kind

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Hamlet was great, it was the opening night though so it ran long. Three and a half hours to be exact. Now if I was sane I would get some much needed sleep now, but Rachel is leaving town tomorrow so I’m going to hang with her and Josh for a bit. I hear he might have Adaptation.

Slow Burn

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I feel like Neo in the first Matrix when he looks around everywhere and sees code, because code is all I’ve seen for hours, far too many hours. I’ve basically been working non-stop on getting WordPress out the door. In a bit I’m heading out for a meeting but after that it’s right back to work. This evening should be a nice chance to relax though, as I’m seeing Hamlet at the Alley Theatre. I’ve never seen Hamlet on stage before, so I’m curious to see how they do it.

Whoa. WordPress.

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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. 🙂

On Unison

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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:\Music on my laptop and i:\Music on 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.

Horde of Projects and Matrix

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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. 🙂

Reloaded Redux

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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.

  • There should be a FAQ everyone should read before posting about the Matrix.
  • There needs to be a single place we can all trackback, so that some meaningful cross-blog conversation can happen, and the discussion is aggregated in an easy-to-follow manner.
  • People should watch the movie again, preferably at an afternoon matinee where the reality of the movie-going experience doesn’t keep you unpleasantly grounded in your surroundings.
  • Most of the Matrix fan sites I’ve seen, like the movie site itself, are amateurish. At the least a tasteful design would be appreciated. Leave the media (pictures, clips, etc.) out to keep bandwidth costs down, and just offer insight to the movie. A wiki would be a nice, allowing everyone to lend their individual interpretation and respond in kind, but that model works so badly for all but the geekiest audiences that I think a “letter to the editor” setup might work better.
  • I’m sure there’s more that could be done, any suggestions? Is some of this already out there?

Oh No

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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.