random($foo)

11/30

Got around to upgrading to Panther on the ol' 12" and setting up the Treo 600 w/ iSync. Some discussion on TreoCentral, but it appears to have gone pretty flawlessly. The only I have left to do is to import the vcards I'm generating from my hiptop scraper.

Instead of doing work, I sat down and finally finished watching the rest of The Elegant Universe sitting on my hard drive (hence writing a simple SMIL file to err, string everything together). There were some good moments (the M-brane visualization was good), but over-all felt like a lot of repetition, not a lot of insight. Personal, I would have liked more talk about supersymmetry, compactification, how string theory impacts the standard model, and also touching on competing theories, like loop quantum gravity. This is a perspective of someone somewhat familiar with the ideas, but seeking deeper understanding on a layman's level.

Trying to figure out making QuickTime Playlists right now. There's a free program called QT Xlist which will play text lists, however one can't navigate sections... There's also a program called QT Playlist Maker, but it's $15. It looks like it's just generating SMIL, so I'm putting together something to do just that.

11/29

One of my drives died on me yesterday (what a pain). However, this did make me stop putting off building that file server. So, I went ahead, caught up on research, and did the deed today. If you're interested, you can compare what I ended up with and what I spec'd out back in February.

Qty Component Price
1 SuperMicro SC733T-450 (black) $245
1 Panasonic 3.5" FDD (black) $7
1 SuperMicro SUPER X5DPA-TGM (MBD-X5DPA-TGM-O) $191
1 Intel Xeon 2.4GHz (533MHz bus) $165
1 Vantec CCK-7015 1U Heat Sink/Fan $17
2 Crucial 256MB DDR PC2100 ECC $134
1 LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-6 $360
4 Western Digital 250GB SATA Caviar w/ 8MB cache (WD2500JD) $972
1 APC Smart-UPS 700VA $286

The final result, will either be about 700GiBs of RAID 5, or about 475GiBs of RAID 1 storage. Actual cost w/ shipping, tax, etc: $2,515; about $3.50/GiB or $5.30/GiB respectively.

The case was probably not the best idea for future expandability, but the Enermax I was looking at had been discontinued, and the SC942s were just way too expensive... Hmm, now that I'm looking, the SuperMicro SC742T-550 might have been a good idea for future epandability ($352 @ GGS). Well, not going to worry about it too much.

11/27

11/26

Jason Nolan (PhD, Knowledge Media Design Institute, UToronto) gave a presentation on Journaling Communities for Scholars @ RCAT recently. Ahh, video online. Also interesting: KMDI - an institute in the School of Graduate Studies and is dedicated to research and graduate education in all aspects of knowledge media design (KMD). [yay referer logs]

Hmm, I still have yet to write/present on blogging in academia... or doing more fun exploratory tech (what I've done at work so far). (Technically, I'm in the 'Center for Scholarly Technology') Although something interesting did come up today... social software technology built into a student portal? That might be *very* interesting.

I've been digging through some of my old music recently, which has been really cool. It's easy to forget about on some great stuff when you're constantly going through new stuff. Been listening incessantly to Spoon's Girls Can Tell. I am your shadow in the dark/I have your blood inside my heart - so frickin' good.

Good-bye to my hiptop soon.

# Login
$a->get('http://www.t-mobile.com/');
$a->field('txtMSISDN', $phnum);
$a->field('txtPassword', $passwd);
$a->submit();

$a->follow_link(text => 'Desktop Interface');

11/25

Thought about iTunes Music Store: why doesn't it allow you to use your/other people's playlists/libraries to generate personalized suggestions?

Speaking of music, Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums of the 1990s Redux is all up. Wish I owned more of these, there are some classic gems in there.

Yesterday I wrote a simple ics2sql script using PHP iCalendar's ical_parser. It was pretty easy to integrate, although it's not really modularized that well. It'd be great if the iCalendar parser was an object. I'm sure there's one out there, but well, free is free. It works.

Notes
---
* need to init (cal_filelist[0]) after loading includes, or init in includes
* $master_arry output is really straightforward, arrays contained are days

11/24

How do you organize your gear?

New at Freeway Blogger

I take it that this guy didn't know that he could get an iPod replacement battery for $50.

Wireless local number portability: Guidelines for switching carriers

I've been paying $5/mo for the past year to retain my old SprintPCS number with call forwarding to my T-Mobile line. For a while, this was quite useful, and I had a couple months to make sure that anyone I talked to regularly had my new number. I've realized, however, that nowadays, no one uses my old number at all.

I really should have just waited a couple days and gotten a new activation with my T-Mobile number (and gotten an activation discount), but it looks like at the very least, from an email exchange with Sprint Customer Service, I should be able to port the number over without too many shenanigans.

See also: GigaOm: The Number Portability Tips for Consumers

Why ALA's "JavaScript Image Replacement" Sucks - ppk blasts Christian Heilmann's JavaScript Image Replacement article. Overly harsh maybe, but for the most part accurate. The arraying and O2 looping is fugly, and ppk makes a really good point about replacement after image-loading (this would solve the Mozilla incompatibilities as well, yeah?)

ppk also launches into an attack on ALA's JS articles, which again, while harsh, is... true. I love the design stuff, but the dev/tech stuff is hit or miss, which probably is most attributable to the lack of actual domain expertise of the editor(s).

11/23

Jon Johansen (of DeCSS fame) has released QTFairUse, a QuickTime AAC memory dumper.

My Treo's touchscreen was freaking out on me for a little while, but it seems ok for now. I'm thinking I'll need to give Handspring a call and see what's up. In any case, I think I'll do a little blogroll list a-la what I did for the hiptop (to this day btw, most of the list remains accurate; Danger never fixed anything).

The Blazer 3.0 browser has fairly complete CSS + JS support; and for the most part renders stuff well. It does take a while to render stuff (it's not efficient about letting you navigate partial pages - still not bad, avg time to navigation is about 20s from hitting the request button, full page typically loads in about a minute), and doesn't seem to be very smart about its caching (it'll try to reconnect the last page when you don't have a signal but won't load up the cache). I've included the page sizes that it gets (spoiled by broadband). These are of optimized views (wide layouts seem to be even better; congrats Blazer team):

+ randomfoo.net - no header in optimized mode; 270.5K
+ a.wholelottanothing.org - header compressed, otherwise good;  221.1K
+ lyd - looks real good, miniblog shows up first; 47.4K
+ waxy.org - looks real good; 55.2K
+ torrez.org looks real good; 10.3K
+ sixfoot6 - looks real good; 192.2K
+ onfocus - loads, eventually; 334.7K
+ megnut - looks real good; 48.8K
! kottke - causes a soft reset!  no joke; tried multiple times
+ anil - legible, has two columns (?)
~ Simon Willison - wraps just a little wide; 37.3K
- 0xDECAFBAD - content space is a thin sliver, funky even in wide mode; 216.5K
+ Zeldman - nav first, otherwise good; 103.7K
+ Mezzoblue - long nav at top, works; 108.7K
+ whatdoiknow - scaled headers, otherwise good; 74.4K
~ Clagnut - text column half-width; otherwise ok; 139.4K
+ meyerweb - some design overlap, but quite legible; 77.6K
+ eatonweb - all nav on top, otherwise good; 45.0K
+ unoriginal creativity - nav appears first, otherwise good; 53.8K
+ disastro - no header, nav text/bg color rendered the same, otherwise good; 14.9K
+ boingboing - looks real good; 298.6K
~ mefi -  slightly thin text columns; 63.6K
+ /. - looks really good; 82.9K

Friendster, Tribe, and Upcoming.org load up fine.  Friendster sometimes renders
weird (ads or frames space weirdness?), but I was able to use it well enough 
over the weekend to look up an event location from a bulletin board posting.

Browser improvements I'd like:

To look into: more into browser info, does it support handheld stylesheets?

11/22

I have a great hate for the Real Player, but on OS X, I couldn't figure out how to install the RP8 MPlayer codec (although the PPC binaries are there on the Binary codecs for MPlayer page.

In any case, for future reference: direct link to free Real Player, via download.com

MSNBC: Test Your Digital IQ - I scored a 238 on their test. I think the only thing I got taken off for was not customizing a Yahoo/Excite type Portal. I agree with Heather, there definitely needs to be a 'get out more' category.

I'm at the SCALE conference right now. I was up late last night; it's too early for me to pay attention to what Andrew Morton is talking about wrt to inode caching schemes.

11/21

George W. Bush Loves Michael Jackson (This Is Important)

A number of explosions tore through the British consulate in Turkey today, killing scores of people. George W. Bush is in England, surrounded on all sides by enraged British citizens whose massive protests have required nearly every police officer in London to be put on the line of defense.

This is happening in a nation that has been, both in government and among the populace, one of the strongest allies America has ever known. There are a couple of wars happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which are going very well. A great many soldiers and civilians have died in the last year. Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, and after nearly 750 days, the American people have still been given no explanation for why September 11 happened.

It is 3:16 p.m. on Thursday afternoon as I write this. CNN has been covering, with total exclusivity, a parking lot outside a police station for the last hour. They covered an airplane landing. They covered the same airplane sitting still on the tarmac. They covered the airplane slowly moving into a hangar. All the while, talking head after talking head explored every conceivable facet of the parking lot, the plane, the tarmac, and the hangar, as well as a variety of parallel issues. No stone of data was left unturned.

Why? Michael Jackson is about to surrender to police.

In the last two years, CNN has not devoted this much energy and coverage to any story in the manner that is unfolding right now...

Fuck the media.

AT&T Wireless Re-Launches mMode

AT&T Wireless today announced the re-launch of its mMode mobile Internet service. Using the new xHTML standard on phones that support it, the service offers richer graphics and is designed to be easier to use. New services include Mobil Traffic, a location-enabled application that provides color-coded multimedia traffic updates for 40 metro areas, including traffic alerts, speed flows, and incident reports.

Ryan has a Nokie 3650, so I decided to chedk out the Mobil Traffic. After several minutes of confusing navigation, I did get to it, where I was confronted w/ a 30-day trial offer. OK, well, I wasn't going to subscribe him onto it, but I did take a look at the sample. Not bad. Although being able to get my TANN and LADOT reports directly beats that out I think.

ok, here's a pic; TANN on the Treo

Recently I've been spending a fair amount of my work time working on WebISO (Web Initial Sign-on) and portal integration, specifically Pubcookie, which we've adopted as part of the NMI R3 recommendations, and uPortal [#4 in InfoWorld's Top 100 IT Projects of 2003] integration (my preferred portal framework).

Unfortunately, previous Pubcookie integration efforts have stalled out, buton the bright side, uPortal's security framework looks pretty adaptable...

Here's a great quote:

Middleware is the intersection of what the Network Engineers and the Application Programmers don't want to do.

Some great links on 0xDECAFBAD today, including Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog on Fresh Air.

I skipped out on last night's EDGE (Electronic Digital Game Expo) on campus last night; they introduced a new video game minor at USC.

Hey, it looks like I'm the 'Feed of the Day' over at Feedster. Just goes to show that you don't need things like 'regular updates' or 'finished templates' or 'permalinks' and 'date stamps.'

My Treo 600 finally got in yesterday. It feels amazingly tiny (good in the hands) and the keyboard is squished, but fairly usable. More review stuff later. Interestingly enough, although it feels much smaller, it's actually not too much smaller than my co-worker's Treo 300. Here are the dimensions as compared to my Sidekick:

Treo and Sidekick side-by-side

Treo and Sidekick stacked up

Kevin Werbach made some observations on the size in his recent article in The Feature: The Triumph of Good Enough.

11/20

Hmm, so this is pretty interesting behavior. Been noticing that AIM's been giving me a system message that I'm signed on in different locations instead of kicking me off when I log in from multiple systems. It doesn't have a jabber-like presence, but instead duplexes all incoming messages. Wackiness.

Ahh: AIM: Instant Message Routing

When you are signed in more than once, messages sent to you will be delivered to all locations. You can control which locations will receive messages by setting your Away Message.

When signed into multiple locations:

Please note, that you will only receive these notifications from the screen name AOL System Msg.

I trucked out to the desert over the weekend to shoot my last short for my 519 class. I put a few pics online. Man, I can't believe it was raining in the Mojave on Saturday.

Was randomly clicking through the Blogger site (finding the date created link Andy sent me a while ago) and saw suggestions on what to do when your mom finds out about your blog (also, less tongue in cheeck, how not to get fired because of your blog) in the knowledge base.

Good suggestions, but it also highlights the need for more fine grained publishing control (Towards Semi-Permeable Blogging), and (ideally), a concurrent wide adoption of some sort of federated trust infrastructure [this could help to alleviate the comment spam problem. implemented properly, this could retain privacy fairly well, pseudonymity is all that's required])

Sorry guys, I think I have downtown nerdville covered.

11/19

I've been neglecting the blog recently as classes and work have conspired against me. A quick linkdump:

11/18

11/17

11/14

11/12

/. comment:

Worried?

From everything I've read since the fiaSCO started, I think the Judge(s) will be very convinced when Linus loses it on the stand and starts calling the SCO people morons.

Linus: YOU MORONS!
SCO Legal Minion: Objection!
Judge: Overruled, statement of fact.

More links from other weblogs you probably read:

11/10

Foxtrot hilarity

* not structural markup

If you're a student looking to buy a Mac, it looks like joining up as a Student Developer ($99) and using the one-time hardware discount (20%) from the ADC Hardware Store would be your best bet if you don't have any special connections/deals. You can get a Dual 2GHz G5 for just over $2000, 1/3 off list-price. (a normal academic discount is 10%)

Of course, my plan is still to get my G5 for free.

White House Puts Limits on Queries From Democrats:

The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

Since this whole CPU issue seems to be blowing up, I decided to follow up on where my friend got the original information, which is from this MacNN thread. While he swears that this isn't a reporting error, but a noticeable speed difference, an email exchange led me to try to double-check Xbench CPU scores. It appears, at least in my case, that there's no difference pre or post PMU reset. Also, some people have mentioned this is only happening w/ 12" AlBooks, but I do have at least one report of a 1GHz TiBook being affected. So, real problem? Reporting error? I'll keep an eye out, but my own tests seem to point to the former, but your experience might be different.

Update: second report of the 867MHz being significantly faster than the 533MHz

11/9

I got an email that apparently the processor speed issue isn't restricted to 10.2.8, as someone who was running 10.2.6 had the same problem. Also, I checked today, and it looks like my processor speed has gone down to 533MHz again. I double-checked my power settings to make sure I wasn't going crazy (I'm not, it's supposed to be running at highest performance). I'll be upgrading to Panther tonight. Here's hoping it'll go away. Did I miss something? It seems like half of the people I've talked to are affected by this problem, but no one I've talked to has ever heard of the issue before.

11/8

I have VLC and MPlayer OS X, so I haven't bothered with playing DIVX in QT Player (also, X-Lab article), but last night it occurred to me that it might be useful (say, if you're trying to burn an SVCD or DVD that uses QT to encode).

So, apparently I missed this, and I was more or less oblivious to it over the past couple of weeks until a friend filled me in tonight, but since the 10.2.8 upgrade, my laptop's been running at 2/3 speed. And I thought it was just me. How do you tell for yourself? In the terminal, type:

sysctl hw.cpufrequency

If this isn't the right clockspeed (mine was running at 533 when it should have been at 866), curse Apple, and then shutdown. Once shut down, hold the CTRL-SHIFT-OPTION keys and the power button for 5 seconds to reset the PMU. Boot up and check the frequency again. If successful, it'll be back up to full speed. Then upgrade to Panther before it resets the speed again. Be sure not to get drives wiped while upgrading.

(Resetting you PMU will also reset your clock, so be sure to network time-sync afterwards)

Also, resetting your PMU is different for different models, here's the Apple KB article on it: PowerBook and iBook: Resetting Power Management Unit (PMU)

11/7

I've probably posted this before, I'm always forgetting how to chmod against only folders (directories):

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod g+s

Using the 0 character delimiter fixes newline and ending-with-space corner cases; that's something new, would have saved me some trouble last time.

11/6

A friend had a spare ticket for an afternoon screening of Matrix Revolutions at Mann's Chinese. Hmm, well, I'm glad I didn't have to pay $10 to see it, I guess. Not as bad as Reloaded, but man, what happened? These sequels happen in a completely different world from the original. Anyway, no spoilers here, you might even really like it. Some comments:

Ahh well, it is what it is (and for the most part, it works as a spectacular spectacular sci-fi actioner). Totally different note, on the way, I caught a snippet of today's Bookworm show w/ Chuck Palahniuk. I really enjoyed the parts that I caught.

11/4

Highlights of last night's Elliot Smith tribute: Papa M's cover of "Not Half Right" (guitar, violin, cello, pedal steel), Rilo Kiley's set, including Jenny singing "I Didn't Understand" acapella. Beck showed up and played a great bunch of songs, as did Beth Orton w/ M Ward (amazing virtuoso guitar playing, as always).

I took some photos, may put up some on a gallery somewhere if I get a chance:

Jenny, Rilo Kiley

Beck

Matt Ward

Beth Orton

Mac observations:

11/3

11/2

via ch's ramblings

Software Development proccess as applied to Tree Swing

Barlow on BM:

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then . . . ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.

See also: McBurners

Wrote a little php script last night that uses Danger's pimsync XML-RPC API to grab hiptop info (contacts, events, tasks, notes). Unfortunately this is only works against my dev acount (boo-urns). Back to LWP/Mech for screen-scraping.

Go Maciej!

11/1

I've long thought about programming some airtime usage calculators. There's some out there (DialStat, Comet, Treo Call Log), but it'd probably be a worthwhile learning experience to program my own.

Capturing entire tapes certainly makes the whole process easier. Much faster to go back and subclip online than shuttling tape back and forth.

I did my first Panther install last night. First thing I noticed, bootups are significantly faster, going from three or four times slower than my PC to probably 2x faster. Also, the Panther upgrade CDs I had required a previous OS X install... As the 2x800MHz system I was upgrading was running Gentoo, this presented a problem. I was about to break out the Jaguar CDs (tedium), but the Netboot servers that we (USC ISD) run came in supa-handy. Hoo-ray.

(Originally, this Quicksilver machine was running OS X server as our workgroup file server. This caused no end of problems, and I inherited it and threw Gentoo on it. Better, but Linux PPC definitely has some issues; I just got a replacement IBM x335 running Debian in our rack set up, using this machine now for editing while my 12" PB is in the shop. Having 135GB of 10K SCSI-2 RAID-0 goodness is definitely good fun)