| Wednesday, July 9, 2003 |
16:31 - So that's where we're going
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2003_07.html#004146
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According to Andrew Sullivan, AOL will be unveiling blogging software soon; apparently whoever's in charge of the project "gets it", and that's all to the good. Far be it from me to cheer for AOL, but I've got to admit that even the ads are starting to get a little less annoying. (That one with the Franciscan Friars is actually pretty funny.) And now that they're in an earnest fight against MSN, they're actually starting to incorporate some useful features, like (gasp!) the ability to sort your e-mail. Trivial, one might say, yes-- but there's something to be said for keeping the interface even simpler than, say, a Mac's-- because for the vast silent majority of users, missing features are far less important than the ability to just do and understand the basics. All they have to do now is overhaul their pathologically dire support infrastructure, and they may have a fighting chance.
As for the blogging software: hey, good. Sure, maybe it means they're just giving birth to another LiveJournal; but if these reports are correct, they're not going after LiveJournal's target audience. They're going after the kinds of people who demand the sorts of features you get in Movable Type-style blogs, plus unique perks like the ability to post straight from IM clients. Cool.
Now, it must be said that blogging software is not rocket science. One thing that's mystified me for the past couple of years is just how difficult a time some of the blogging systems have had in keeping things straight. BlogSpot has had its perennial archiving/permalinking problems; Movable Type had some scandal recently. What's the problem, exactly? Blogging software is in fact stupefyingly easy to write. I wrote mine in just under three hours, a year and a half ago, and have barely had to modify it since then. I'm not saying the design of my system is any good, either-- there are some design decisions I might have made differently if I had it to do again, but that wouldn't have made the project materially more difficult. It's really a very simple concept. A blog is a degenerate case of a message board, itself a very straightforward piece of code to write. All you're doing is providing a schema whereby one or more people can write messages into a database, and then display the last few entries. Even the ancillary features aren't hard. Searching? Easy if you know how to do it. Comments? No problem. TrackBacks? Takes a little cleverness, but there's not much to it. Archiving? Depends on how you do it, but it can amount to almost nothing under the hood. XML? Easy. I'm not saying I speak from some kind of oracular position on the subject here, but compared to some database-driven web applications, blogging is an absurdly simple proposition. So how come some outfits have such a tough time of it?
Mostly load management, I think. Server-side execution can really kill things on a heavily centralized system, especially if a post gets Slashdotted; generating static pages is one solution, but it's not a total one. In order to really hold up, you've got to have a dedicated server farm with lots of redundancy and backups, and there aren't many services out there with more of those things than AOL.
So does this mean blogging is about to "grow up"? That the floodgates are about to be opened, with the legitimacy granted the Web upon the release of Netscape 1.1? Could be. Then again, it might be the death of the blogosphere as we know it; it might morph into something we don't recognize, something too big to handle, something where the current nexuses of attention lose their tether points and get washed away in the tide. I remember when AOL opened up USENET access to its users; the classic newsgroup structure was effectively useless from that day forward. It might have died the same death by spam and Me-Too-ism anyway, but AOL certainly hastened its demise.
I wonder if AOL's getting its hand into the game means a formalization of the tip-jar concept, too?
Nothing to do but wait and see, I suppose...
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14:14 - Because We Can
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No, it's not a Mac post; nor is it a hot-off-the-presses article (I've been woefully lax in posting lately-- not having net access at home will to that to you; you try posting by screeching like the TX into the phone. The HTTPS handshake is a real bitch).
It's still cool, though:
dB (as in decibel) drag racing is an obscure but growing international "sport" in which competitors go head-to-head for two or three seconds at a time -- hence the name drag racing -- to establish whose sound system is loudest. The 2002 record, set by a German team of secretive audio engineers, was 177.6 dB.
The roar of a 747 on takeoff is usually quantified at about 140 decibels, although there's really no way to correlate the wide-spectrum noise of jet engines in open air with a low-frequency pure tone inside a highly reflective enclosure. Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, with every 10 dB increase equivalent to a doubling of perceived sound (otherwise known as noise), dB drag racing enthusiasts create some seriously loud tones. (Another rule of thumb: All else being equal, every three dB of increased sound from a typical dB drag racing system requires a doubling of amplifier power.)
This is one of those "This is the kind of thing we do for fun, you other-people's-technology-hijacking throwbacks!" things, it seems to me.
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| Tuesday, July 8, 2003 |
15:24 - Get those eyes peeled
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/07/01/isight.html
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A couple of folks have sent me this link, though regrettably I haven't had much time to look into it deeply; but since I'll probably be getting an iSight of my own in a few weeks, once I have a network on which to use it, I figure the link is worth entering here so I can come back to it later. Sounds like fun!
By now you've probably iChatted with all your buddies and are wondering what you can do next with the iSight. As I explained in the weblog, Want to Do More with the iSight than Chat?, this little "cheese grater" of a videocam packs a lot of potential beyond serving as a simple webcam.
The iSight is a well-designed autofocus camera with a fast f-2.8 lens that focuses from 50mm to infinity. But what makes it so powerful is that its FireWire cable plugs into years of Apple QuickTime development lurking within your Mac. In my view, QuickTime is an underrated technology. And I think lots of people are going to discover QuickTime's versatility thanks to this $149 gem of a camera.
Streaming video with QT Broadcaster. Yay!
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| Monday, July 7, 2003 |
12:37 - What'd I miss?
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Now that's what I call a good long weekend.
Boy-howdy, did we ever get stuff done. We've cleaned out the garage, for one thing; that was sorely needed. With the help of doughty friends, we dragged everything out of there and sorted it in the driveway into piles of stuff to a) keep, b) give to Goodwill or someone, and c) hurl away. The third pile, it should surprise nobody, ended up dwarfing both the others. Enough so that I just ordered another 12-cubic-yard debris box to pile it all in. The sooner the better, too, because hidden in the piles of crap are lots of boards with nails in them and other such slobbering-alien-repelling weaponry, and there are inquisitive toddlers roaming around the cul-de-sac and just aching to discover new sharp objects on which to brain themselves. It'll be arriving tomorrow.
So then we were able to start moving the boxes from inside the house into the garage, which means we can now walk around more or less with standard human mobility, instead of navigating through towering cardboard canyons in every room. Naturally the dog is all used to the canyons now, so he's watching worriedly as the boxes gradually dissolve from his field of view. "What-- are we moving again?" he asks.
We got the major drapery done, too-- the living room now has our elegantly hung green curtains, with an 8-foot span across the bottom part of the picture window and then a peaked and stapled upper part that we're quite proud of. See, we (actually, Lance) took a six-foot curtain rod and mitre-cut it so it could be screwed together at a 90-degree angle. Then we hung that against the peaked top of the picture window, and hung curtains from the sloped sides so they sort of bunch together in the middle, but in a cool way. They can be separated and gathered at the corners of the peak so as to let in the sun, or pinned behind the TV to keep things cool. It works very well indeed, and it preserves the shape of the window even when closed. Slam-dunk.
My bathroom is just about done; I've finished untaping most of it, and the mirrors are up, with matching frosted edges against the green background. I still need to finish some touch-up painting, the door trim, and the crown molding up top; and the toilet could stand to be replaced. But that's something that can happen at our leisure. There's a new shower head, so I can now take showers without feeling like that shrieking guy at the end of the 70s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is pointing accusingly at me.
Oh! And I've gotten moving on the new book; at least, I've finished putting together the proposal TOC. This was an interesting adventure. See, the book is supposed to cover 10.3 "Panther"; and thanks to benevolent forces which shall remain nameless, I have such a beast in my hot little hands. So I thought I'd install it on my G4, which has two disks; see, the way the Panther DP works is that there's no upgrade path from it; you can't upgrade from it to the final shipping version of Panther, you can only do a wipe-clean installation, which will trash all your installed drivers and such. So I wanted to put 10.3 on the second disk, leaving the 10.2.6 on the primary disk untouched. But the installer didn't want to cooperate. Taking a cue from Windows 2000's installer, it seemed dead-set on thwarting me. Here's what happened: I would put in the CD; it would say, "Oh! you want to install, do you? Press Restart and the installation process will begin." And it would write to the boot blocks that it wanted to boot from CD, and restart. It would boot into CD. Or not. See, it would get to the gray Apple logo screen, and then freeze. It wasn't a hard freeze; the little twirly "wait" icon would still twirl. But it would never get anywhere. So I'd reset, and the same thing would happen; I'd reset and hold down "C" (to boot from CD); the same thing would happen. Or wait! No! It's actually booting-- though it took like half an hour for it to happen. So I don't know whether it would have finished booting all those other times if I'd just let it sit, or what. But it finally got to the installer screen, after nearly an hour, and plodded through the installer process unnecessarily slowly. In fact, it took some six hours to complete. (I know because I'd opened up the installer log, and it had convenient timestamps for all the events as they happened.) Then "Installer requested restart," said the log, and it rebooted. But apparently it hadn't cleanly installed, because it booted right back into the CD (it came right up this time), and started installing all over again. Crumbs.
So I aborted the process and tried booting from the hard disk. See, on a Mac, you can hold down Option after booting, and it will give you a listing of all bootable volumes. (You can bet this will get a special mention in the "Tips and Tricks You Probably Didn't Know About" chapter.) Select one of the icons and press the Boot button, and off it goes; it's non-persistent, though, and to permanently set the boot device, you have to use the Startup Disk preferences. Anyway-- so I tried booting from the half-installed 10.3 disk; and it ... got to the gray screen and froze. For hours. I went to sleep, got up later, and it was still there, twirling glumly away on the logo screen in the gray pre-dawn. So I shut it off and gave up.
Then it occurred to me: something that had been nagging at my mind ever since I'd read the Read Me file, absorbed its contents, and filed it away in the "Root around in later after you realize you threw something away that you needed" bin. And that was the stern warning that you could only install 10.3 on a Mac selected from a strict list (I was), that had an Apple-supplied video card and no third-party PCI cards (I wasn't). I knew it-- I knew I'd regret installing that new ATI card six months ago and throwing away my old factory Rage 128. Blah! Plus the machine has an Adaptec SCSI card in it. So I figured that had to be the culprit. The DP of Panther probably doesn't have all the third-party drivers done; since the system would occasionally boot (the freeze point was always right after it probed the USB devices, as I could tell from booting in Visual mode-- Command-V), and since it had the nice mouse drop-shadow and everything, I figured the video card probably wasn't to blame. It was probably that damned SCSI card.
I had a few options before me. I could try taking out the SCSI card, and maybe digging up video cards and swapping them in and out; but that just seemed so... so... exactly like what I was dealing with whenever I tried to install Win2K. Granted, this is a developer's preview, not even a public beta; but still, I felt I shouldn't have to do this. It was much simpler to just play by the stated rules.
This meant installing it on my iBook. But wait! The iBook only has one disk; and unlike Mac OS 9, where you could install lots of different copies of the OS onto the same disk (a bootable OS consisted solely of a System Folder that had been "blessed" properly-- it could exist anywhere on the system, deep inside folder trees, wherever), OS X can only be installed once per partition. (I hope they streamline this-- I've heard that they're working on it, but it's hard to get all those invisible UNIX directories to behave properly.) I was in no mood to try partitioning my disk. So then... what?
My iPod gleamed at me from the corner of my desk. Of course!
I plugged the iPod into the G4 and enabled manual mode, and deleted all the songs from it. Then I unplugged it and fired up the iBook, and plugged it in. Tossed in the Panther disk; rebooted to begin installation. It booted almost instantly. It asked which disk to install it on; with a flourish and a doffing of my flowing black cape, I selected the iPod. And it installed quickly and smoothly, taking less than 45 minutes all told. (I further suspect the SCSI card in the G4 as the culprit, now; it was behaving as though it had to keep waiting for the card to give it some kind of approval to continue, a signal that was never forthcoming.) It rebooted, the iPod clicking away in my hand, and asked for the second disc, which I happily fed it. It finished eating and spit out the bones of the CD, and rebooted again. O happy day! Behold: the joy of Panther!
Now I have a bootable copy of the OS in my pocket; I can take it to work and boot my iMac with it, so I can see the more video-intensive things like the hideously gratuitous (and therefore utterly delicious) Fast User Switching feature, and of course Exposé. I can take it to the park with my laptop, boot it into Panther, and explore the half-finished features and guess at what they'll eventually do. I can take it home, plug it into my G4, and watch it freeze at the gray logo screen. Then I can pretend it's the G5 that will be arriving just as soon as my bank account dips below the amount I'll need in order to pay for it.
This stuff's fun even when it goes kablooey!
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| Wednesday, July 2, 2003 |
18:59 - Virtual Friday!
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Since I'm still without net at home, and since there's no work tomorrow or Friday, that means there might be no blogging happening until... ugh. Monday. Maybe I'll sneak in to work to do some stuff, if interesting things happen. But most likely not.
Happy 4th, everybody!
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14:01 - Photographic Evidence
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Oh yes, I nearly forgot...
Here are a couple of photos, in lieu of many more in the future when the Forest Primæval of boxes has been clear-cut from our floors.
 
I love the way the street looks now that the trees are in full greenery. Since the house is right at the end of the cul-de-sac, facing square down the road, it gives the impression that it's some sort of aristocrat's villa with a long, wooded drive up to the portico; maybe we should put a fountain in the middle of the circle at the end. ...Oh wait; I keep forgetting: there are other people's houses all up and down the sides of the street. Damn and blast it all to hell. Never mind; I can pretend they're all servants' quarters.
On the right is a view of the new master suite, taken from one half (the sleeping portion) and looking through the arches into the other, with the Couch of L33tness and all my boxes. It's not really done, in any case; we still have to do the ceiling and floor trim, and the curtains in the archways, and build the furniture; but the color isn't false, believe it or not. It's actually very soothing. It'll look even better when the trim is up, and art's on the walls, and everything's all cleaned up.
Think this is messy, though? You oughtta see the garage.
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12:51 - What Makes a Lie
http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/000682.html#000682
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While I wasn't looking, a few days ago Rachel Lucas posted Michael Moore's latest letter to the President in its entirety. She didn't really even have it in herself to fisk it, because-- and she's entirely right in this-- "it sort of takes care of itself anyway".
Your blatant refusal to back up your verbal deception with the kind of fake evidence we have become used to is a slap in our collective American face. It's as if you are saying, "These Americans are so damn apathetic and lazy, we won't have to produce any weapons to back up our claims!" If you had just dug a few silo holes in the last month outside Tikrit, or spread some anthrax around those Winnebagos near Basra, or "discovered" some plutonium with that stash of home movies of Uday Hussein feeding his tigers, then it would have said to us that you thought we might revolt if you were caught in a lie. It would have shown us some *respect*. We honestly wouldn't have cared if it later came out that you planted all the WMD -- sure, we'd be properly peeved, but at least we would have been proud to know that you knew you HAD to back up your phony claims with the real deal!
I guess you finally figured that out this week. It started to appear that millions of us were calling you on your bluff -- those "fictitious reasons for the fictitious war." So you quickly produced this man and his rose bush and some 12-year old piece of paper and some metal parts. CNN broke in at 5:15pm and screamed they had the exclusive! "IRAQI NUCLEAR PLANS FOUND!" But a few good reporters started asking some hard questions -- and, barely 3 hours later, your own administration was forced to admit the plans were "not the smoking gun” proving that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
She's right... I can't think of anything helpful to say either.
Except the obvious, which is this:
Moore finds it patently more plausible that: <deep breath> Bush and the Pentagon, the State Department, backed up by Clinton, the UN's weapons inspectors, France, Germany, Russia, Iran, and China, fabricated a case out of whole cloth for war against Saddam; sowed dissent within the ranks of the conspirators so that none but the Brits, Aussies, Poles, and Americans actually were willing to commit military troops, and the others were willing to damage their own economies and diplomatic standing out of the principle of blockading the enterprise; orchestrated and carried out the most stunning military operation, in scale and scope and civilian casualty rate and technological leverage and speed and efficiency, ever yet seen on Earth; and then, availed of all the technology and manpower that won the war in three weeks, failed for month after month to find any of the alleged weapons of mass destruction, which should have surprised nobody because it was all a massive sham, but it was surprising that the occupying force wasn't dedicating itself from day one to planting evidence for retroactive justification of the war; and then, late in the game, decided that they'd better get evidence-planting, and so they constructed a piece of contraband so flimsy and so old and so ambiguous in its background that it would have been totally useless even as propaganda and a shameful blight upon the record of any covert operative who was trying to create fake evidence, and which was indeed agreed by Bush's own administration to be "not a smoking gun" --
...than that the war was fought on the basis of intelligence that was thought to be valid at the time, and the lack of WMD findings today is indicative of nothing but the inadequacy of that intelligence.
No barber of Occam, Moore.
Isn't it fascinating how the more ridiculous a conspiracy theory appears, the more proof it represents to those who believe in it of the conspiracy's depth?
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10:29 - Sweet relaxation
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Okay, well, maybe not "relaxation". More like "reprieve". Now that we're moved in, the hard-and-fast deadline is gone, and now we only have lots of little soft deadlines, like when we need to have the sod removed from the front yard so the limestone rocks can be delivered, when we need to get started building the deck, when we need to have our furniture (with its all-important drawers and shelves) built, and when the move-in parties should be held.
Not having Internet connectivity at home is weird, though. I'm finding myself sitting on my awesome couch (on which I'm also currently sleeping) at around midnight, gazing around the room looking for things to usefully unpack, and instead finding books that I haven't read since I started college and got myself wired. Whereas I would normally be sitting there at my computer desk, talking with people, administering my sites, blogging, angrily reading things, or otherwise being unblinkingly inert until 2:00 or 3:00, now I'm doing things like reading and walking the dog and going to bed early. What's especially weird is that I'm not even horrifically uncomfortable with it. I'd better get the network set up soon, or else it's going to be culture shock all over again.
It's kinda nice, really, to get up at 7:45 without feeling tired, do some morning reading, install a bathroom light fixture, spend some dog time, take a walk, and amble on in to work shortly after 9:00 when carpool times lift and traffic has dissipated, getting here in time to read my 112 pieces of spam and see what's been happening in the world. I feel a bit remiss in that I haven't been able to take proper interactive interest in the events of blogdom (like Dissident Frogman's interesting discovery at Bayeaux), or even to call proper attention to things like the leaked French version of the new "Morning Report" scene in the upcoming October DVD release of The Lion King (I've also found a very high-quality English version, but it's too big for me to want to post it as a link). Much has been going on, and I've been on the wayside-- deeply engrossed, yes, but my gears have definitely been shifted. I haven't even been able to keep up with the Iraq situation, or even with the Israeli/Palestinian road-map business, except to idly think that at the very least, as the Israelis dutifully pull out of various towns and dismantle outposts and refuse to respond with violence to attacks, the inevitable huge bombing that will occur within the next few weeks will be finally, deeply, unequivocally unprovoked, and not even the French will be able to call it otherwise. Even if (when) attacks resume at the end of the hudna, it'll still be hard for the usual suspects to treat it as "Oh, well, it's just business as usual-- back to the status quo". Since the things the Israelis are required to do are civil-type matters, like removing bulldozers and checkpoints and refusing to carry out retaliatory strikes on terror leaders even when attacks occur, while all the Palestinians have to do is stop killing people, there's really no practical way the Israelis can be at fault if the cease-fire fails. There are several ways in which this three months can positively affect the Cycle of Violence™ (by letting the air out of its tires?), no matter how peacefully or violently it actually plays out; and so I find myself less horrified by it than some do. This time it's the Israelis who get to be "martyrs". (Again.) If that's what it takes to get sympathy from Europeans...
Anyway-- it must be said, to return to my reverie about early mornings and leisurely drives to work along my new drastically shortened route, that I'm bloody glad to have my Jetta back. Nothing meant harshly against Kris' truck, mind you; but I've rediscovered the joys of a small and light car with ample power, and the thrill of sudden acceleration on call in any gear. I feel like I did when I'd just bought it: each time a light turns green and I'm at the line, I catapult off it like there's someone in a riced Civic in the next lane making faces at me and shouting anti-Apple slogans. Oh, and I got it paid off this month; I took the title certificate to the DMV yesterday. The oppressive heat of the past weekend has dissipated, and the air is clean and crisp and bright and the air is cool and still; life, in a word, is good.
Another Home Despot run tonight-- this time we get the curtain rods, and a new shower head for my bathroom (the current one makes a sound like the Eternally Shrieking Toddler from next door in the previous house, who never stopped screeching no matter what she was doing or what sort of mood she was in, for over three years), and a bath mat, and an AirPort Extreme hub. You know, the essentials.
Furniture can always wait.
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Brian Tiemann
