The acronym script I discussed in my last post is now finished and ready to go. Check out the acronymit function if you think you have someplace to use it. I have to stop naming these things myself, it gets worse as time goes on :).
Also there are tons of new photos in the photolog so check that out if you haven’t yet. Note that some days have been updated!
I believe that in the weblog medium, nothing should come between the world and your words. Ideally you should be able to type a block of text, and it will be presented in a typographically sound, semantically meaningful manner without any intervention from you, the blogger. Unfortunately, everyone is caught up in presentation. Personally I’m very familiar with this because my aesthetic compels me to do things like curl my quotes, define every single acronym, and use paragraphs instead of multiple break tags, but this is a barrier to publishing. Before I had the curly quotes script, I would manually type in the HTML entities every time I used an apostrophe or quote, which as you can imagine can be very tedious. That’s been taken care of, and the code has even been integrated into Cafelog, the classiest weblogging software out there. I’ve addressed the paragraph problem in a rather superficial way that needs some looking at, and today I decided to take a look at the acronym problem. I’ve got it working just fine, I just need to hash out a little code that sorts an array based on the length of its key, and then I’ll put it up on the scripts part of the site. After this I want to clean up the paragraph code to deal with block-level tags, and then maybe port this BlogTimes thing I’ve been seeing around to PHP.
Update: Darn recursive acronyms! How ironic that the acronym PHP is messing up my script!
Update: It’s now online.
There used to be a relatively nice random number generator on the computer where we do the HPUG meetings, but when they redid some stuff they took it off. We used to use it to pick winners for door prizes, and all was good. But since it’s been gone we’ve been resorting to less-than-random methods for picking winners, and the Web-Tech SIG was having the same problem. So I decided to put a little something together. Enjoy!
Apparently on December 20 Logitech will be giving away a wireless duo to anyone who visits that site. 20,000 of them. Shiny.
The problem with too many modern day manufacturers is that they’re too concerned with selling the whole package. I for one would be more than happy to buy a nicely designed laptop from say, Sony, sans an operating system, free internet from AOL or MSN, an office suite, and any other fluff that I’m convinced accounts for several hundred dollars in final cost. In addition, I would like the option to buy a laptop without a hard drive or memory, because from the manufacturer it’s going to be overpriced and I’ll probably upgrade it anyway. Why should I have to pay twice for things like a hard drive or Windows XP when I already own what I need? There are of course a number of third party manufacturers from which I could buy just a laptop shell, or something equivalent, but their design is laughable. I don’t need to give my Mac friends another reason to laugh at me ;).
Well, I am currently on what I hope is the tail end of the stage one bootstrapping process for installing Gentoo. The advantage to compiling everything from source using their BSD-like Portage system. We’ll see how this turns out in a bit. Supposedly 1.4 final is coming out this month if things don’t work out for me now. In other tech news my twin 80-gig Western Digital hard drives came in today, and I got them mirroring just fine. However it got an itch going, so I’m setting up a full-fledged Linux file server using Samba to talk to Windows, ReiserFS as the file system to be stable and fast (Thanks Mat!), and it’s going to have half a terabyte of storage when all is said and done. All the computers on our network are going to do automated backups to this machine on a nightly basis.
I’ve added a script that I wrote a while back to overcome a fairly simple problem I was running in to. It’s nothing spectacular, but it works pretty darn well. In other news, I’m as sick as a dog. Earlier today I was feeling moderately okay, thinking maybe I could take a nap and skirt whatever this is, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen. Any get-better-quicker suggestions would be welcome.
Who would have thought that the evil empire would have donated $100-499 to the Free Software Foundation? There must be a glitch in the Matrix.
I mentioned the other day that I had a 120 gigabyte hard drive crash irrecoverably on my desktop, but at the time I didn’t realize everything that was on there. It was about 80 gigabytes full, and had my personal DVD rips, 25 gigabyte backup of my music collection, several years worth of documents, all of my original digital “negatives,” and my graduation pictures. This is going to be harder than I thought. Backup now!
Okay I’m going to be reviewing a number of email clients almost solely on their IMAP4 functionality. So far on the list are Pegasus, one of the first clients I used back in the early ninties, The Bat (I refuse to repeat exclamation points from the name of a product. Yahoo this.), Eudora, AllegroMail, and of course Outlook Express and Outlook XP. We’ll see what happens.
Well, who would have thought that installing a keyboard and mouse could be so difficult. After my first few words, and using the mouse just long enough to start to really like it, everything has crashed and burned. One of the questions burning in my mind was if I could use the keyboard a,nd mouse with my existing Bluetooth dongle, partly because I don’t want to have to carry anything extra around and mostly because the “laptop adapter” for the Microsoft Bluetooth receiver sticks out from the laptop at least 4 inches. I plugged my old dongle in, and nothing special happened. Not surprisingly, the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse stopped working. I went into the Bluetooth software that came with the dongle to see if I could “discover” them and pair them somehow so they would work. The good news is that it was able to detect both the keyboard and the mouse. The bad news is it had no idea what to do with them. Any attempt to discover their services turned up blank.
I should have known that the operative word when dealing with Microsoft is “proprietary.” I wasn’t entirely dismayed though, I was ready to stomach carrying around the ridiculously long MS Bluetooth dongle just to be able to use the very cool Explorer Mouse; I like buttons and this mouse had them in buckets. But being able to dial up to the internet through my cell phone (T68) using Bluetooth is even more of a must, so I decided to try that with the ugly Microsoft Bluetooth adapter. It worked, beautifully. Many times when dealing with the current Bluetooth software implementations I’ve felt like it was back to the old Windows 3 days, when the interfaces were clunky, buggy, unresponsive, and ugly. The wizard that set the phone up was elegant and felt like a real part of the operating system. In fact it was apparently, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Anyway the phone works just fine with the MS adapter, however I couldn’t get it to talk to either the mouse or keyboard now. I thought maybe this is just a software glitch, so I went through all the regular motions. Reboot, retry, un-install, reboot, reinstall, reboot, try again, uninstall other Bluetooth software, reboot, try again, reinstall, smash mouse to smithereens against head. Okay, I made that last one up, but I did all of the others, perhaps more than listed. At this point I was thinking it must be a simple hardware issue, so I changed the batteries in both devices to fresh ones that I was sure worked, and tried again. Still no go, it simply wouldn’t detect either of the devices.
Having isolated nearly every variable I could think of, I decided to try it all out on my desktop. So I went through the first step of installing the software, and it tells me that for it to work it has to have Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed. Life is too short.
As a last ditch attempt, I decided to try and pair either of the devices with my phone. I think the keyboard might have paired, even though it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, but I’ll never know because of the proprietary and non-standard way which the keyboard and mouse pair works only with the Microsoft software. Which only works on Windows. The latest version. With the latest Service Pack. (Did I mention it un-installed the special software for my touchpad on the laptop?)
What I suspect happened is something about the way the old non-Microsoft Bluetooth adapter tried to interface with the devices messed something up, and that is what’s causing them to not work. But at this point I really don’t care.
Maybe Logitech will come out with something nice to counter this, and maybe then I’ll try it, but right now I can only think of disadvantages to using Bluetooth HIDs, such as no current BIOS supports it, it tricky, it takes up two of your seven possible Bluetooth devices, doesn’t offer anything extra, the range isn’t worth it. Also on the range note with my Logitech Cordless mouse (the original model) I was able to walk all the way across the house into the garage, and it would still move the mouse on the screen, but I think that may have been an anomaly. Still, how far do you need to go?
So I have packed everything up from the batteries to the cruddy documentation, and tomorrow I will attempt to get store credit and buy something that actually works. Oh joy.
Here are the first words from the Bluetooth keyboard, with Kel:
bigkelbo: heh heh!
bigkelbo: 30 ft range?
bigkelbo: you’ll need binoculars, though….
saxmatt02: you forget i have a 16 inch LCD
bigkelbo: yeah yeah
saxmatt02: this is me from across the room
bigkelbo: HA!
Well I finally broke down and got the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop for Bluetooth (what a mouthful!). Thanks to Sarah for accompanying me around town while we looked for someplace that had it. In a perfect world, the keyboard would work just as well with my desktop as with my Clié or T68. We’ll see if this is the case shortly. Update: Didn’t work at all.
Well as of several minutes ago the official announcement has gone out for the release of Launcher X, the wildly anticipated competition for SilverScreen, the current king of launchers. I’m going to download and try this out tomorrow, because it’s to late now to give it any sort of good look. I mis-anticipated this a couple of days ago when I was sent a review copy of Launcher+, which has a similar name but is really a mediocre product. I’m not going to judge X before I try it out, but there has really been an almost Microsoft-like delay in the release of this project. When it was first screenshots were posted, it implied that the product would be released that month (it was about half a year ago if I remember correctly) and people were bouncing off the walls. Months later, there are more units with high resolution than ever before, but Pocket Sensei is going to release version 3 of Silverscreen any day now, and I’m thinking it’s going to rock the boat quite a bit. When Silverscreen was in the early 2.x releases it could have been cut off early; now it has gained quite a bit of well-deserved momentum and dislodging it will be much harder.
Preparing for the new server has been taking up a lot of my time, telling clients about it and also making sure everything is tidy before we move stuff over. The plan, after everything is locked down, is to move all the accounts over (shouldn’t take more than about two hours) then point the DNS records on the old server to point to the new, and in the meanwhile the nameserver IP addresses will be rolling over to the new server, and we should be able to take down the old server by mid next week, after making double sure nothing got lost in the shuffle.
I’m extremely excited because I found a wonderful deal on a new dedicated server and I’m faxing in the contract finalizing everything today. The company worked with me getting exactly the specs I wanted, even though they were a little strange. The new server is going to be at a much nicer datacenter as well with higher quality bandwidth (not Cogent). Also I’m going to be working with Mat of HLUG to lock the box down pretty tightly. Mat was on News.com yesterday along with HLUG for their discovery of the Tcpdump trojan. Also on Slashdot here.
Anyway I’m trying to think of a good hostname for the box. Right now I’m leaning towards “Plato” but I’m open to suggestions. It’s hard though, like naming a child. Of course I would never call a human child Plato. 😉
I finally updated to the official .61 Cafélog release, and I couldn’t be happier. I was using the CVS version for a while, but I was inconsistent in updating it so some files were older and some were bleeding edge. The posting interface has improved quite a bit, especially in terms of making the pingback and trackback features easy to use. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that my smart quotes for PHP script is included by default and can be turned on in the config file. Speaking of which, I have a new version ready that is much faster then the current one, and this is actually the second day it’s been on this site. I’m going to test it a bit more just to make sure nothing slipped by, and then I’m going to release the Movable Type version at the same time. Oh that reminds me of my new favorite feature of b2: you can “filter” nearly everything through any number of functions. How cool?
The meeting today of the Houston Wireless meeting tonight was very interesting, with a lot of blue sky concepts being discussed. Tonight’s guest was Alan Levy, the adviser to the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force. To be honest I was a bit confused by his terminology for probably the first part of the meeting, as he tended to throw out the terms OS and VPN quite freely. I’m still not sure what to make of the whole thing, but the gist I got from it was that the current state of WiFi technology is a fluke, a mistake by the governments and corporations in that they created the space for a technology which completely bypasses traditional and monolithic communications infrastructure which is completely unregulated. He described this state as an accident, and stated that there was a small window of opportunity of about ten to twelve months where this advantage could be pushed and reach critical mass in changing the way we communicate before it can be trivialized by regulation. He also intimated that there are several “extremely subtle” measures working their way through legislation, but he failed to identify any of them, saying there was really only one and he didn’t want to comment on it specifically because he hadn’t had a chance to look at it very closely.
He also emphasized several times the insidiousness of corporations with vested interests in the markets that WiFi can engulf, and I got the feeling that he had dealt with this before. That message combined with the sense of urgency he instilled made me feel like a freedom fighter or something, or someone who was around at critical times in the development of the internet or radio. Barrett likened it to the start of Linux, with the analogy following that we’ve been flying under the radar, so to speak, until now and so it’s time to really buckle down and take the platform to the next level. So what was his goal? I wasn’t altogether clear on this either, but what I got out of it was that he envisioned wireless ad hoc networks existing on a community level over which a number of “applications” could operate. The applications he referred to are things that are normally provided to us by large corporations in monopolistic fields, such as television, telephone, cable, radio, and anything else that the community can provide and there is a need for. His main point seemed to be that cost and security weren’t holding back widespread WiFi adoption one bit, it was familiarity and applications. Just like an operating system with nothing to run over it, right now the applications of current wireless networks sans the internet are pretty sparse. Seattle Wireless and their goal of creating a distinct network separate from the internet was brought up several times. What he called on us, and by us I mean the Houston Wireless group, to do is create the platform which would allow the current wireless broadband community to create a Metropolitan Area Network which replaces many of the current communication infrastructure and promotes near universal access to its resources regardless of economic status or location.
At least that’s what I can get out of it at this time of night. The great erewhon has the whole thing on video, including some of the questions from people who appeared to be as confused as I was at points. When the video finally goes up I’ll take a look at it and maybe reexamine my thoughts on the subject. At this point I’m not sure exactly how much of this was what he said and how much is me mixing other thing in, but if you note any crazy discrepancies leave a comment and I’ll patch things up. With that, I bid you all adieu and I think I’ll try and get some sleep. (Finally.)
Oh yummy, another server-side language, this one claiming to be faster than both PHP and Perl. Perhaps, but does it do anything?
Whoop dee doo. Maybe if this had come years ago before CD were as common as floppy drives. Maybe if it was priced significantly lower than CD technology is now. Maybe if everyone still used Zip disks and this was completely backward compatible. Maybe then I would consider this worth it. It’s strange to see a one-hit-wonder company struggling for relevancy like this.
Update: I forgot to say what made me really mad about this: I got seven emails from Iomega to the same address telling me this “wonderful new product.”