Month: July 2003

Posted on

XServe Online

One distraction after another for weeks has kept me from spending much time prepping the XServe, but got to get cozy again with it this week. Today finally dropped it in the rack and went into production. The Win2K machine had become so fragile and unpredictable I really didn’t expect it to live this long – could no longer start or stop any services, drag files, or access any properties panels. Windows eats itself, scares the hell out of me sometimes (virus hunts turned up nothing). For the first time since I’ve been at the J-School, I feel 100% good about the server situation.

The dual 1GHz XServe is lightning fast, a dream to work with, but it was surprising to discover how different from OS X client it is. Lots of prefs panels moved to other locations or integrated into other functions, and lots of new utilities not found in X client. They’ve done a pretty good job of creating a workable GUI for the most-used Apache config options, including virtual hosts. This is tricky though, since it means a GUI panel reading and writing text files. So what they’ve done is provided a standard httpd.conf, which in turn has an include for httpd_macosxserver.conf. The latter is machine read/writable. You can hand-edit either of them, with a few caveats.

Other stuff present in OS X Server not found in client (though most anything can be installed in client, they’ve done a great job of integrating and providing interfaces for this stuff in Server): Tomcat (JSP), PHP/MySQL, QuickTime Streaming Server, LDAP / Active Directory integration, full user/group mountpoints/permissions controls (using either locally stored or directory users), WebObjects, MacManager (for remote management of lab Macs), NetBoot (lets you host a disk image that networked client OS X machines will seek out and boot from), POP/SMTP/IMAP mail serving (being overhauled for Panther), a full suite of server monitoring tools (CPU temp, blower speed, disk space etc. — will email or page notifications on problems), a full suite of remote control apps, fully configurable FTP server, SLP tools… the list goes on.

Migrating from Win2K was mostly a matter of transferring my httpd config options into the new arrangement, adjusting a bunch of PHP includes, appropriately unix-ifying permissions on the MySQL databases, setting up logins and shares parallel to what we had, locking things down as necessary. Still have some less-apparent work to do (most notably getting a replacement search engine set up), but it’s going to be great to not have to sit under the fans in the server room to do it!

Music: Etta James :: All I Could Do Was Cry
Posted on

Lone Cheerio

Cheerios on the table. Cheerios on the floor. Cheerios in plastic baggies ground to a fine powder by little boy banging. Cheerios after squash and peas. Cheerios after high-fat yogurt. Cheerios in the folds of the car seat. Cheerios to buy time. Cheerios goggles to make baby laugh. Cheerios race car under foot. Cheerios bit in half by tiny front teeth. Cheerios soaked with slobber, goobering down side of high chair. Cheerios on baby boy’s sweet breath.

Amy shot this poignant little Cheerio this afternoon.

Music: Traffic :: Shanghai Noodle Factory
Posted on

Design Is the Art of Making Choices

User Interface Design for Programmers includes some great examples of terrible interface choices made by programmers. I like the point that any app’s Options panel is an anthropological record of arguments that took place inside the company.

Should we automatically open the last file that the user was working on? Yes! No! There is a two week debate, nobody wants to hurt anyone’s feelings, the programmer puts in an #ifdef in self defense while the designers fight it out. Eventually they just decide to make it an option.

And everyone can relate to his skewering of the wizard that appears when you first launch a Windows help file. Thanks Lars.

Music: Brian Eno :: Cindy Tells Me
Posted on

Hedwig Stars, Tom Waits To Perform at Matthew Sperry Benefit Concert

For the most part, I’ve tried to keep Matthew Sperry-related info at matthewsperry.org and not x-post here, but this is exciting: The big benefit concert scheduled for this Thursday, which was already looking really exciting, just got bigger. Tom Waits has confirmed that he will perform, so it should be a sold-out house. Details here. If you’re in the Bay Area, definitely consider turning up – it was going to be great even before Waits confirmed. And Stacia and Lila could really use the financial support.

Music: Chicano :: Rose Giganta
Posted on

Time Is Real

Graffiti scrawled on the back of a sign, underneath the BART tracks along the Ohlone Greenway, just outside El Cerrito station:

Time is real. Your life has meaning.

Music: Love :: AndMoreAgain
Posted on

Mirrors

Good question posed by warmbrain:

Why do mirrors reflect left-to-right, but not up-and-down? I mean, they’re mirrors right? How do they know?

Hmmm…. is it due to the horizontal orientation of our eyes? If our eyeballs were stacked top-to-bottom on our faces rather than left-right, would mirrors reverse the up and down?

Music: Altai Hangai :: Praise song for Bogd Khan Mountain
Posted on

Automated Checkout

On the way out of Home Despot today (planting urn, blinds, butterfly bolts), found that the fastest line seemed to be the one with no tellers at all. It’s finally happened — fully automated checkout. You scan and bag your own items as a gentle robotic female voice describes your purchases and tells you whether any “unexpected objects” are in the way. If you have anything too large, an attendant overrides and runs over with a hand scanner. When done, pay the machine via cash, credit, ATM, even get cash back.

Technically, it’s not that different from a you-pay petrol pump. Conceptually, it seems like a leap forward as significant as the ATM machine – humans gave up their jobs for your convenience (Home Despot claims that no one has been laid off as a result — clerks have merely been moved onto the floor, which in their case makes sense – nowhere is it harder to get floor help).

During the industrial revolution, saboteurs fearing that machines would leave humans high and dry threw their boots into the cogs of machines to break them (sabot is French for boot, hence the word saboteur. No one at Home Despot seemed to have any similar inclination, the system works marvelously. It was a trip to think that Miles is born into a world where the checkout clerk is becoming a thing of the past.

Music: The Fugs :: Ah, Sunflower Weary of Time
Posted on

Keep Your Head

This Indian fellow is driving along when a truck full of rebar stops in front of him. Iron bars pierce his windshield and … his neck. His head is nearly severed, the spinal column alone keeps it attached to his body. He stays conscious, realizes no one is coming to help him, and ties his own head back on with a piece of cloth, then drives 30 kilometers to get help. Beyond surreal.

Music: Tom Waits :: A Little Rain
Posted on

After the Accident

Arm is healing pretty well — no surgery or pins required. Starting to do small things with the hand; now tying my own shoes at least. Can’t change a diaper quite yet. Can lift a wallet and remove money just fine.

After a week and a half of trying to get ahold of the woman who hit me (kept getting phone ringing into empty space, or a teenager who would say “I’ll get her” and then put the phone on the table and wander away, leaving me hanging for five minutes), finally talked to her. She opened with “But you hit me!” (referring to the fact that I hit her right rear flank). Oh my god. Me: “That’s a matter of a half second’s timing, and was only because I swerved to avoid being hit head-on! Has nothing to do with who had right of way, who turned left into oncoming traffic.” She softens. “My life sucks. I’ve barely left the house since our accident. I’m afraid. The clutch went out. I have a seven-year-old boy. I’ve been looking for work for six months but nobody is hiring. I still live with my mother.” and so on. It’s pretty clear she’s got nothing, which is why she was uninsured to begin with. I’ve decided not to go after anything. She’s agreed to try and help pay for damage to bicycle, maybe some of my medical co-pays.

Well, okay. Me, I’m ready to heal up and get back on the horse. Just want it to be over, move on. Walking to BART now, the commute takes ~45 min total, twice the time it took to ride. People wonder whether I feel cursed, this happening so close to Matthew’s death. Nope, not at all — I’ve been riding for many years without incident. I ride hard, but do believe I ride pretty safe, and that this was a freak incident. I’ll be wearing an orange safety vest from now on, though.

Music: Tamlins :: Woman’s Love
Posted on

Google Abuse

The new era of weblog comment spam is upon us.

Google determines rank in search results depending on # of incoming links from other sites. Posting a comment w/URL on someone’s else’s site causes Google to “like” the commenter’s site more. So essentially someone is hijacking my comments system (and probably lots of other blogs’ comments systems) to abuse Google’s algorithms.

Back when Alta Vista was the King of Search, META keyword stuffing was the primary mechanism of search rank abuse. Google had seemed to put an end to that, but where there’s a will… Clever. Though stupid that they would drop both fake comments on a single post out of nearly a thousand, three months apart. Also, it’s hard to imagine these not looking suspicious to any blog owner.

Update, 10/15/03: As it turns out, this has become the single-most spammed-upon entry at all of birdhouse. If you are reading this without having had to wade through tons of spam, it’s because I’ve deleted tons of them manually, and (later) because excellent tools such as MT-Blacklist have made dealing with rising blog spam much more manageable.

Music: Godley & Creme :: Foreign Accents