What isn’t Apple, audiobooks, or alcohol is probably cats.
Commentary and analysis about new technology and business developments.
“I don’t have nightmares about you cheating on me, I have nightmares about you giving me horrible technology.”
“I don’t have nightmares about you cheating on me, I have nightmares about you giving me horrible technology.”
Daily Home Improvements: Computer hardware installation, software installation, a little home safety, and a little world safety.
DHI 51: We ordered a new LCD display for Rochelle’s PC, but to make the most of it, you need to connect it to a digital video interface on the graphics card. Rochelle’s existing graphics card was too old to have even heard of DVI, so I bought her a new one off of eBay. It came today (before the new display!), and I installed it in her PC. So now she can use her computer in 800×600 pixels, at 16 colors (that’s colors, not bits), and 60Hz refresh rate.
In other words, it currently sucks to be using the new card. I am trying to download the correct drivers from the ATI Technologies web site, but they’re totally fucked up, and every download link gives the same two-word error message: “Not Found”. Not helpful. Not impressed. ATI sucks. (For now, anyway.)
DHI 52: More computer work for Rochelle, installing Quicken 2003 onto her system. Another DHI will surely be getting together this weekend to work on initial configuration of our accounts, especially for online access and automatic downloading of information.
DHI 53: I reattached the smoke detector to the wall. We had detached it for the paint stripping work, because the heat gun kept setting off the alarm. We’ve been done with the paint stripping for weeks, but only this morning remembered we’d detached the detector. Oops.
DHI 54: I made a contribution to fund ads advocating inspections over war. If I help improve our country, my little corner of it will be better, too.
I’m not done with the week, yet, but wanted to post the link to MoveOn.org earlier, in case you wanted to help fund those ads, too.
Daily Home Improvements: The water closet is finished, a VCR hookup, debt service ends, this blog officially moves, window washing, and undoing a previous DHI.
DHI 44: I moved a few dozen books from other bookcases to the new shelves in the water closet. We’ve decided on themes for two of our three shelves, but neither theme completely fills its shelf, so there will need to be some rethinking done.
DHI 45: I connected the TiVo and the VCR, so that we can transfer shows off of the TiVo to tape, for long term storage. Strictly for personal use, of course.
DHI 46: I paid $300 to the MasterCard, which sounds like a daily chore, except we just transfered all bill-paying responsibilities to Rochelle, and that $300 will completely pay off our credit card, leaving us with no non-real estate debt for the first time since our wedding/honeymoon/bathroom remodel (which was followed closely by the stock options fiasco/stock market meltdown, which was followed by 3 months of unemployment each). Now that’s a home improvement!
DHI 47: I finished moving this weblog to aldoblog.com, moving the appropriate files from one location to another, and setting up some redirects in Apache to make links to the old site continue to work. In the process I discovered I had not completed the DNS configuration for the aldoblog.com domain, so I finished doing that, too.
DHI 48: I collected more books to move into the water closet, this time all of our travel books. I found a couple more SF and food books to move, too.
DHI 49: I stripped off an old photo that had fused to our front window, cleaned with Windex, and then scrapped off the glue residue and the accumulated grime of 11 years on Haight Street with a razor blade. The front windows are now about 90% more clear — I can’t wait until tomorrow afternoon when the sun is shining through them, and I can see the improvements the best!
DHI 50: After much research (scanning log files), and even more dithering, I turned off my server-side spam filtering software, because it is apparently occasionally dropping random messages. This basically undoes one of my prior DHIs, where I implemented the anti-spam measures. Which kinda sucks, but then, how often do you get every home improvement right the first time?
Daily Home Improvements: Loan applications, some domain twiddling, a little cash, but otherwise a week where I came up short.
DHI 41: I filled out my portion of the mortgage loan application we’re working on to refinance the house. The amount of money we get from lowering our interest rate is staggering (mortgage math is crazy!), but we regrettably have to plow it right back into the house.
You see, our house is more than 100 years old, and the foundation is original, and brick-and-mortar. A new foundation is going to be $75,000, a very scary number…but not as scary as having our house slide out into the street!
DHI 42: I finally got around to configuring aldoblog.com, so that this blog can move to a shorter domain name and URL. DNS now resolves (primary and secondary name servers), Apache recognizes it as a virtual host, and some initial redirects are in place to make the transition seamless. I still have some work to do, moving directories around, and setting up the real redirects, to move y’all over to the new location. That’ll have to come this weekend, though, when I can focus for a couple hours straight.
DHI 43: I coughed up $100 for our contractor when Rochelle was short of cash to pay him one evening.
The rest of my DHIs didn’t happen this week. I was too tired, or too lazy, or both. I plan to get back on track this coming week, but I haven’t yet decided what to do about the shortfall…
While I moved the BeBoxes out of the parlor, I have not actually moved them out of the house, the ultimate goal. So, while I technically avoided having my systems thrown out on the street, I haven’t finished the project, a fact Rochelle reminded me of just this evening. We discussed it, and now I finally have the motivation I need to move along in a hurry: Lust.
I’ve written previously that, while I moved the BeBoxes out of the parlor, I have not actually moved them out of the house, the ultimate goal. So, while I technically avoided having my systems thrown out on the street, I haven’t finished the project. Indeed, Rochelle reminded me of this fact just this evening, and wondered if I was planning to keep them in my office for another year.
The good news is, I have another motivation for making progress. We’ve decided that we get to upgrade our computer displays to LCD screens. Rochelle’s is ordered, and should arrive early next week. Mine, though, remains on the Wish List, and will stay there until I’ve earned the money to buy it. By selling off the BeBoxes.
So hopefully, what fear could not accomplish, a little (a lot!) technolust will.
I’ve written before about the interesting things that are taking place on the internet today. Two articles over the last two weeks made me think that the links that are spontaneously happening between the many active websites (mostly blogs) are similar to the formation of “neuronal paths.” We are building a giant, global brain.
I’ve written before about the interesting things that are taking place on the internet today. In one of the prior postings, I referenced an article that compared the structures forming on the internet to the trails that ants lay down when hunting for food, which eventually build up very sophisticated (and efficient) food gathering behavior.
But two articles over the last two weeks made me think of something different, namely, that the links that are spontaneously happening between the many active websites (mostly blogs) are similar to the formation of “neuronal paths.” We are building a giant, global brain.
The first article was Ben Hammersley’s Trackback in the Saddle Again, which describes quite a number of different ways that articles can semi-automatically form linkages to each other. The second was an interview with Cameron Marlow, the creator of Blogdex, and in particular his Social Network Explorer. Both articles illustrate how complex structures are being formed in the nodes (sites) and paths (links) between nodes.
So my thought today was, blogs and news sites are the neurons. Links from one to another are the neuronal paths, or connections between neurons. (TrackBack and its ilk are especially cool here, because the connections are two-way.) And services like Blogdex, Daypop, Social Network Explorer, and especially Google, are how the paths are reinforced to create “preferred” pathways through the internet, which alter future queries and explorations by making those paths more likely to be reused.
What’s especially neat about some of the services like Daypop is that the pathways are reinforced not only by people publishing on the web, but also by people who are just browsing the web. That is, when you follow a link off the Daypop Top 40, it records it, and that will influence how popular that link is, and therefore how many other people will see it, how long it will be around, etc.
These structures are certainly influencing how people think, if only because news stories are now frequently emerging in the blogsphere first, and once they’ve become sufficiently interesting and widespread, they cross over to the mainstream media. One could make a case that that’s how Trent Lott fell from grace.
Powerful stuff, but it’s a long way from having a giant brain. But that’s OK, on the scale of things, websites vs. neurons, there’s not enough nodes on the internet yet. Google indexes about 3 billion web pages today, but most of those don’t participate in the kinds of services described above. Blogdex and Daypop each index less than 20,000 blogs or news sites. So we’re talking pretty small numbers, today. There are thought to be 100 billion neurons in a human brain.
So our “giant” brain probably won’t be waking up and taking over the world tomorrow.
Mucking about in Mac OS X, fun with water, more gas, desktop action, FM broadcasting, curtains for Rochelle, and a party!
DHI 34: I updated software on my Mac, on a second hard disk that I’ll transition to, once I get all my stuff moved over. I did a small part of it today. Pretty lame, but sustaining a daily pace for these tasks is turning out to be a killing pace. Plus, when I get finished, I’ll be able to disconnect the very noisy hard disk in my Mac, making the office quieter, which will be a major improvement.
DHI 35: We had the missing gas line replaced yesterday, providing gas to our groovy vintage heater once again. But, the alterations to the gas lines required cutting off the gas for an extended amount of time, and blowing out the gas lines. Once hooked back up, our contractor re-lit the pilot light, but there was air in the lines, which caused the pilot light to go out on our hot water heater. In the middle of the night. Cold bath the next day. It took quite a bit of figuring to realize that it was air in the lines that caused it to go out, and make it hard to re-light, but I did eventually get the pilot re-lit.
DHI 36: While the hot water heater contained cold water, I drained it, to get the silt and stuff out of the bottom. Apparently you’re supposed to do this a couple times a year. So I did it.
DHI 37: Cleared off one side of my desk of the crap piled up there. The other side will be harder, a weekend DHI for sure.
DHI 38: I hooked up a $4 antenna to the stereo in the front of the house, so now we can listen to the radio when we’re in the office working on the computer. Or, hey, maybe someday we’ll have another party, and people can sit in the parlor, and, like, hear music!
DHI 39: I helped Rochelle hang curtains that our decorator picked up for us. We had to replace the old curtain rods, which were far too flimsy to support the heavier velvet curtains he picked out, so that was most of the work. It would have gone a lot faster, but both batteries for our cordless drill were dead.
DHI 40: We threw a small party at our house, our first in nearly a year. (We plan to do better in 2003 than we did in 2002.) This was a small gathering (10 people) with a focus on tasting fine champagne (more on this in a post tomorrow). Of course, there was a lot of cleanup and so on beforehand, but the DHI is really for inviting people into our house and making sure they had a good time. That’s a home improvement, in any sense of those words.
“Microsoft sees IBM spending money on Linux, making Linux more robust, getting in the way of their aspirations. I think it makes them very unhappy,” said Steve Mills [senior vice president of IBM’s Software Group].
This rather understated quotation was in the context of a CNet article about how much money IBM is investing in Linux:
“Microsoft sees IBM spending money on Linux, making Linux more robust, getting in the way of their aspirations. I think it makes them very unhappy,” said Steve Mills [senior vice president of IBM’s Software Group].
Competition makes the industry better, so anything that makes Microsoft unhappy has got to be a good thing. Go Steve!
Magazine reorganization, another basement disposal trip, long efforts on the computer, sanding, and more.
DHI 27: I pawed through my stack of unread technical magazines, unwrapped all of them from their plastic, threw out all the ad inserts and CDs, and grouped and sorted them. They’re back in the same bin that held them previously, but there’s less stuff there, and it’s at least organized. Culling out the junk will have to wait another day.
DHI 28: Rochelle and I took a large sheet of particle board down to the basement (we had been using it to firm up our bed a bit, to see if that would help my back problems; wasn’t helping, don’t want it in the house).
DHI 29: More magazine sorting and purging, this time from the pile under my nightstand.
DHI 30-31: Long, long efforts spent on troubleshooting my MySQL database installation. I finally resorted to downloading the binary installation from the mysql.com web site, and replacing my existing installation with the pre-compiled version.
DHI 32: Migrated the database for this weblog from my desktop Mac to the server, so that I can actually shut down my Mac without disabling my weblog.
DHI 33: I spent 45 minutes doing the “polish” sanding on the wainscot in the water closet, as my (very minor) contribution to Rochelle’s efforts to finish that project.
The DHI I spent the last few days working on was moving the data for this weblog from my desktop Mac to the main server. I was able to move the data easily enough, but when I tried to actually connect to the new server, I was getting an error message that the connection was lost during the query. Searching Google for the error string usually leads quickly to a solution; it was a little trickier this time.
The DHI I spent the last few days working on was moving the data for this weblog from my desktop Mac to the main server. I was able to move the data easily enough, but when I tried to actually connect to the new server, I was getting an error message that the connection was lost during the query. When I looked on the server, I could see that for some reason MySQL (the data server for this weblog) was barfing and restarting every time I tried to connect.
So I tried what I usually try in cases like this: I searched for the error message in Google, and read through the postings and solutions on message boards and archived mailing lists until I found something that worked for me. Unfortunately, this not uncommon error message was reported via a web page on my server — as it would be by any web server using PHP to access MySQL which had a problem. Can you see where this is going?
Yes, indeed, there are thousands of web sites with fucked up configurations spewing the same damn error message. All being spidered by Google. And being returned in my results. Out of 500 or so search hits I reviewed for the error message (out of 7310 hits total), only two were actually not an error page, and of those, one was in Russian.
Grrr.
The fact that you can read this means that I solved the issue, but it took me the better part of two days to solve, and in the end, the only way to fix things I could figure out was to re-install MySQL from an official binary distribution, not my preferred way to install software on my FreeBSD server.
More CRAP improvements, getting rid of boxes of stuff, a dozen items of clothing, and rearranging all the BeBoxes to give Rochelle most of her parlor back.
DHI 20: I emptied a box in my office, from the pile of many next to the office door. I cleared and sorted the nearly three inches worth of papers I accumulated in my last Java class. And I threw shit out.
DHI 21: Killed another box; it’s by the back door, waiting to be taken to the Goodwill pile in the basement. Among the things discarded are a couple of old messenger bags, a padded shoulder bag for my also-discarded StyleWriter printer, and a slew of baseball caps I culled from my collection.
DHI 22: I put my old ADB keyboard away in the dressing room, cleared out a large pile of old mail, filed some other papers, and cleared off the entire surface of the footlocker in the office. Then I moved the two plastic bins on top of the footlocker, for a later effort.
DHI 23: I culled from the back of my closet, getting rid of a pair of slacks, a couple sweaters, and a bunch of sweatshirts, none of which I wear anymore. (I did my shirts a while back, before 2003 got started. My closet’s ready for me to buy a few new items!)
DHI 24: Emptied a box of miscellaneous computer items. Kept the interesting items (a few lights parts), and will give the rest away (a very old scanner and a very old, semi-working inkjet printer).
DHI 25: Cleared off the sofa in the parlor of all my stuff, and a few of Rochelle’s items, too. The sofa is now actually usable for the first time in 10 months or so.
DHI 26: Moved all but one BeBox out of the parlor. Packed up all the crap I had littered on top of our bar. Consolidated a dozen shipping boxes, and prepared them for storage in the basement. Rochelle almost has her parlor back!
We also paid the interior design consultant Rochelle found, for the week’s worth of work he’s done with her, including amazing progress on the water closet and the lovely new arrangement for the back deck. Our house could actually be pretty cool in another month or two!
Rochelle suggested that I should write up a Top 10 list of reasons why I should get an extension on my BeBox project, instead of her throwing them on the street.
Rochelle suggested that I should write up a Top 10 list of reasons why I should get an extension on my BeBox project, instead of her throwing them on the street. So here goes: