You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
 
July 30th, 2003

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 in Mac, Work | 2 Comments »

July 30th, 2003

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 in Family | 22 Comments »

July 29th, 2003

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 in Geek | 2 Comments »

July 29th, 2003

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 in Culture | No Comments »

July 28th, 2003

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 in Out there | 1 Comment »

July 28th, 2003

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 in Out there | 14 Comments »

July 28th, 2003

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 in Culture | 9 Comments »

July 26th, 2003

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 in Out there | 1 Comment »

July 25th, 2003

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 in Misc | 1 Comment »

July 24th, 2003

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

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Posted in Blogging | 13 Comments »

July 23rd, 2003

TiGutz

Had a great visit from an Apple rep yesterday, came to help us solve some persistent Final Cut Pro lab issues. When he booted his laptop, saw this great wallpaper — an x-ray of the very TiBook he was using. He sent me a copy. Higher-def version for posterity here. Something about this seems vaguely naughty, like it must have felt in the 1800s to catch a glimpse of a woman’s calf or something.

Music: Hüsker Dü :: Afraid of Being Wrong

Posted in Mac | 6 Comments »

July 23rd, 2003

Federal Bike Lane Funding Cut

Salon: A new congressional transportation appropriations bill will entirely eliminate some $600 million worth of annual federal funding for bike paths, walkways and other such transportation niceties in fiscal year 2004. Meanwhile, “highways would receive $34.1 billion in fiscal year 2004, which is $2.5 billion more than this year.”

Never mind the political fallout of U.S. oil dependency on the Middle East, or the fact that the average mileage per gallon for new cars and trucks in the U.S. is at its lowest level in 20 years.

We worked very hard to find a house within biking distance to work. The bike path that gets me 80% of the way there has turned out to be more of a blessing than I had imagined (when I’m not getting atomized on the remaining 20%). Being able to ride or walk to work through the city amongst green grass, away from threat of cars, is an experience I wish every American — and every congressperson — could have for just one week. Instead we encourage the problem and discourage the solution.

Music: Ray Anderson :: Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love

Posted in Politics | 10 Comments »

July 22nd, 2003

Baghdad Journal

Three of our grad students are in Iraq for a while, reporting on post-invasion conditions. I set up a Movable Type blog for them, where they’re posting words and images daily.

Posted in Politics, Work | 1 Comment »

July 22nd, 2003

Remembering Netscape

A few people have asked how I feel about the death of Netscape, so thought I’d peck out (still one-handed) a browser evolution brain dump.

Netscape wasn’t the first browser I ever used — Max and I first turned on to the Web at ZiffNet via Cello, and later Spyglass Mosaic. Looking back, it’s almost impossible to imagine an interweb with no corporate presence, no ads, no porn, no spam, and no Internet Explorer. But that was the early web Netscape was born into — flat grey, plain text, blue links, and a few images. And yet, between around 1994 and 1996, Netscape became synonymous with the web itself.

Over the next few years web technology exploded and it was all developers could do to hang on. Netscape brought us background colors and tiles, tables, animated GIFs, frames, layers, and tons of other innovations now considered so fundamental we take them for granted. Netscape even brought us the almighty blink tag (if the word “blink” there isn’t blinking, consider yourself lucky). It seems almost ho-hum in retrospect, but it really was an exciting time. The sky was the limit, the ground was moving fast, the self-publishing door was wide open, and people were coining and abusing phrases like “the internet changes everything.”

For those reminiscing along with me here, bake your noodle on the memory that browsers were not always free. Navigator (and later, Communicator) cost around $30, only being forced to go free on later to respond to IE being free (keep in mind that Microsoft had other revenue streams, Netscape did not). How strange is it that Office still costs money while Explorer doesn’t?

What’s actually surprising is that Netscape held on as long as it did. Navigator has been losing share for a very long time, and Mozilla gets all the non-IE attention anyway. When AOL acquired Netscape, it seemed there might be enough non-IE momentum in the gigantic AOL userbase to re-ignite the browser wars, but that too fizzled when AOL decided to use IE at its core after all.

Let’s face it — Netscape may have innovated dozens of web technologies, but Navigator did not remain the best browser, and many of Netscape’s innovations were rejected by the W3C (e.g. OBJECT was accepted over EMBED, and Netscape’s weird, proprietary LAYER approach was rejected in favor of the much cleaner DIV/CSS model). In fact, Netscape 4.x’s CSS support was so half-baked that it single-handedly delayed broad CSS deployment at probably thousands of organizations for years. I personally excised it from dozens of J -School Macs rather than wrestle with CSS workarounds to accommodate its frustrating brokenness. Netscape 6 looked promising, but was ultimately a dud.

Anyway. The news itself isn’t that exciting — Netscape is already pretty much irrelevant, and has almost become synonymous in developers’ minds with “legacy browser.” Watching Apple choose the little-known KHTML over Mozilla for Safari was emblematic of Netscape’s current lack of relevance (not to mention performance). What’s interesting is that the rise and fall of a great company and such a successful innovator can occur in such a short period of time. That a single product can so fundamentally alter the way we interact with information, and that the creator of that product can be slaughtered in an anticompetitive marketplace with virtual impunity in the course of a few years.

But Mozilla lives on, with a user base that seems to be growing rather than shrinking. If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that Mozilla devs won’t have to compete for attention from Netscape. And while companies like Netscape, who are bound by the profit motive, may fail in the marketplace, open source projects are immune from the wiles of capitalism in its most raw form (though open source has other weaknesses, such as misdirection and ill communication).

Thanks for the good times, Netscape. I’ll never forget the original pulsing purple ‘N’ in Netscape 1.0.

Music: Fila Brazillia :: Freakpower – New Direction

Posted in Web Dev | 20 Comments »

July 21st, 2003

Lonely Lights

It’s a small thing, but it took me by surprise — I’ve run a web server of some flavor from home for the past five years. Now that the box is in a colo, the router lights at home stay solid most of the time — no activity. I wasn’t even aware of it, but I had subconsciously learned to see those lights in my peripheral vision, to be subtly aware of the stream of visitors — the network of unknown friends blinking into and out of the office. Strange, but it feels a little bit lonely tonight in here.

Music: Marion Brown Quartet :: Capricorn Moon

Posted in Geek | 1 Comment »

July 21st, 2003

Miles Month 9 Photos

miles_cables.jpg In the month 9 gallery, Miles learns to crawl, cruise, and then walk. We move into a new house and Miles digs it. Going to the zoo, trip to Arcata, stealing keys, messing with cables, and cuteness coming out our ears. This is a big gallery — 32 photos in two sets.

And now the mimicry has begun – he wants to do everything we do. If Amy cleans something up, he takes a hunk of cloth and wipes things at random. If I drive a toy car up his arm, he returns the favor. And Amy and Paula swear that when Paula said Hi to Miles yesteday, he said Hi right back.

Music: Miles Davis :: Budo

Posted in Family | 2 Comments »

July 20th, 2003

Birdhouse in Colo

Moved our web and mail server into the colo facility at Cliq tonight — birdhouse now hanging off a lightly shared T1. Enough moving around – it’s been a bumpy few weeks. Should be nestled in for the foreseeable future now.

Music: Billy Bang Quartet :: Bien-Hoa Blues

Posted in Hosting | No Comments »

July 20th, 2003

Retro Toddler Propaganda

On 4th St. today, in a toddler shop, a pair of books caught my eye. Little Golden Book Classics The Good Humor Man (1964) and Scuffy the Tugboat (1946). The idea of of these reprints is to cash in on the sentimentality of people who were raised on the same titles and now want to share them with their own children. The pictures were groovy and the plots innocent (or so I thought), so we bought them.

Once home, it dawned on us that “The Good Humor Man” is not called “The Ice Cream Man” — that the book cover uses the actual Good Humor logo, followed by a trademark symbol. It’s the oldest example of product placement we could think of. The stereotypes inside are excellent: Mommy with her apron, Daddy with lawnmower and pipe, Tommy and his trains, Dinah and her dolls.

It takes a deeper read to uncover the insidious subtext of Scuffy the Tugboat. Scuffy starts out secure, at home, floating in the bathtub. But he soon grows discontent, wants more out of life. Gets his wish, ends up floating down streams, caught in a logjam, tossed in a flood. In the end, Scuffy is back home, in the tub, higher ambitions dashed, wings clipped, more than happy to conform to standard expectations for toy tugboats. “This is the life for me!,” Scuffy exclaims. One of the reviewers at Amazon cites the book’s “important lesson.”

Of course, for Miles it will be more like “bo!” (for “boat”). But it will be fun to pretend he’s being spoon-fed a diet of “the man”’s pre-PC propaganda.

Music: Orchestra Baobab :: Ndiaga Niaw

Posted in Culture | No Comments »

July 18th, 2003

Class Schedules, Multimedia Training

Long stretches of time pass at work where I feel I’m work work working on things that never see the light of day — projects that end up waiting for someone else’s bits, or priorities shift, or… Today actually launched two projects that have been in lengthy germination.

Course schedules and descriptions have always been done in Word / Excel and then exported to ghastly spaghetti HTML (and PDF) for public consumption. Steps then taken to clean up code and add links. Every time there was a change, all that had to be redone. An ongoing battle last year I vowed to fix. This summer I databased all the course details, prof bios, etc. and built a PHP front-end for it. Descriptions too. The back-end was the larger project, but you can’t see that. No more Office docs, no more spinning wheels with menial conversion work.

The Knight Foundation funded a distance-learning site for mid-career journalists wanting to improve their multimedia reporting skills. So we produced a series of software and equipment tutorials and packaged them up with a course on multimedia reporting. There’s more there than meets the eye. We still consider it a work in progress, but good enough for jazz (I hate what that phrase says about jazz, but it sure rolls off the tongue nicely).

Music: Steve Lacy :: The Cryptosphere

Posted in Web Dev, Work | 1 Comment »

July 17th, 2003

Fleischer on Being a Republican


“I guess if Ari had to rebel, being a Republican is better than being on drugs, but not by much.”

—Alan Fleischer , Ari Fleischer’s father, in The Advocate

Oddly, this much-linked-to piece seems to have gone offline. The same quote appeared in Newsweek, but isn’t online there either. Hmmm.

Music: Django Reinhardt :: DJangology

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments »

July 17th, 2003

Dedicated Box

All options exhausted — DSL too slow, Comcast seals off port 80, and we’re just outside range for 5.8GHz microwave. So colo it is. Scored a healthy G4 off craigslist and used Carbon Copy Cloner to image birdhouse hosting onto it, so our mail and web server is finally on a dedicated box. Transition went flawlessly. I’ll let it run for a week here to break it in, then haul it up to fortress geek (most likely) to ride on their T1. If anyone can suggest other East Bay colos, I’m all ears.

Music: Roots Radics :: The Death Of Mr. Spock

Posted in Geek | 3 Comments »

July 16th, 2003

Final Vinyl

Last night started to digitize some 20-year-old cassette tapes of unreplaceable music*. Have been threatening to do this for ages, then when I got it all together six months ago, couldn’t find the tapes! They surfaced in the move.

Old cassette deck –> RCA-minijack adapter –> Griffin iMic –> Final Vinyl

From there I’ll import the AIFFs into iTunes and add metadata, encode to MP3. Final Vinyl is a great piece of freeware, if a bit awkward. Gets the job done. First tape I stuck in got tangled in the capstan and detached at the spool. That one will need surgery once the hand is usable again.

* As a teenager I worked in a surf shop. “Al the reggae mailman” delivered our mail. He used to make these two-turntable reggae mix tapes with choice 70s cuts straight from the island. He would trade us tapes to play in the shop for wetsuits and other gear. This is not the reggae that shows up on Trojan and Studio One compilations – this is true rare groove stuff — music I won’t listen to often but that is burned in my soul from those years in the shop.

Music: Lennie Tristano/Lee Konitz/Warne Marsh :: 317 E, 32nd

Posted in Mac, Music | 4 Comments »

July 15th, 2003

Miles’ Brush with Stardom

Almost forgot: A couple of weeks ago we were at Hidden City Cafe’ in Point Richmond, Miles between us in a high chair banging Cheerios into a fine powder, when suddenly he breaks into that huge smile he reserves for people who are really turning him on. We turn to see who’s eye he’s caught this time, and it’s Elliott Gould, stopping to make goo-goo faces at a baby on his way out of the restaurant. He grins at us and slips out the door, probably too soon to avoid hearing one of us stammer, “Hey, isn’t Robert Gould?” Doi.

Music: Reggae Disco Rockers :: Baby

Posted in Culture, Family | 1 Comment »

July 14th, 2003

See an Orthopod

Before and after, one wrist/arm with twin fractures, the other normal. Click if not squeamish. Although the E.R. told me to “see an orthopod in a few days,” my PCP wouldn’t give me a referral over the phone. Tomorrow I go in, no doubt, to waste two hours and half a day of work, take my blood pressure, and get referred to “an orthopod.” I hate that aspect of HMOs — against all common sense, referrals always required. Actually worked today one-handed, which is NOT half-speed, but around 1/4 speed since left hand has to float and search for each letter. Patience wearing thin, going to file a police report tomorrow and am now considering suing after all. I can’t change Miles’ diapers, can’t even pick him up. Can’t drive, can’t ride, can’t pull change out of my pants. Amy has to tie my shoes. My life is screwed for a month while the driver is scot-free. It’s a moral imperative to get her off the road, that’s a given, but I’m starting to think compensation makes sense too … unless it would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

Music: Fila Brazillia :: Asthma

Posted in Misc | 6 Comments »

July 14th, 2003

Polyester, Desperate Living

Part of the fun of breaking limbs (Amy commented today that I’m starting to look familiar in a cast) is staying home, checking out, and renting movies. Saturday brought home a pair of John Waters films.

Waters’ goal for years was to make sure that each film outdid the last in bad taste … though Polyester broke that tradition somewhat in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. It’s still my favorite, and I still have one of the original Odorama cards in a box somewhere.

Desperate Living somewhat harder to watch unless you’re thirsty for 90 minutes of extreme, wonderful trash. Picture Queen Carlotta as a “special” actress missing two front teeth, half-spherical, giant red hair, ruling prone from her perch on a four-poster cot held aloft by Castro boys in leather motorcycle caps and black mesh shirts.


Peggy Gravel: The citizens of Mortville are beneath contempt. Only the rich should be allowed to live.

Queen Carlotta: I like the way you think. I’ll give you a trial run. Your first duty will be to help my soldiers spread rabies to the whole town. Do you think you can handle that?

Gravel: Oh, yes, your majesty. And I know just the person I want to give it to first.

Now imagine 90 minutes of similarly insane scene making and you get the basic idea of Desperate Living. If you’ve already seen your share of Waters’ films, his directors’ commentaries on the DVDs make them worth re-watching.

Music: Count Basie and His Orchestra :: Broadway

Posted in Culture | 4 Comments »

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