ORA blog: The last thing we expected when installing Pro Tools 6 on our multimedia lab computers was that it would require us to give normal users administrative privileges… but that’s exactly what happened. We’re fuming.

Congratulations to Amy, who was just contacted by Harvard’s Fogg Museum — they want to purchase one of her murals for their permanent collection, and the curator wants another one for her private collection. Between this and Peter Palmquist bequeathing his collection to Yale, this will put Amy’s photos in both Harvard and Yale’s permanent collections. I’m so proud of her!

Finally, good news in the saga. Plumber came out. Turns out I don’t have to replace the flange to replace the bolts — the bolts were always replaceable; I just couldn’t see it because rust had obscured their entry points. Plumber Dude chipped away at rust until gateways opened up… old bolts came out and new ones went in. Since he had to charge an hour minimum, had him install the new toilet, even though I had kind of looked forward to it. All groovy, except that the flush handle mechanism had been assembled backwards and thus ineffectual. Could not be disassembled. Toilet shop closed, wanted this to be over, replaced with an Ace version. Pooped promptly. It’s all good.

Much gutter week this weekend - cleaning out, pumping water through, extending downspouts to get water clear of the foundation, re-attaching bits and pieces, scooping gravel from troughs. Miles thinks it’s hilarious when Daddy climbs up a ladder. We don’t know why.

Central heat installed a couple weeks ago, and we’ve had landscapers out the last few days installing a monstro French Drain (oops, “Freedom Drain”) — nearly 80′ of trench 2/3 of the way around the house, tied into downspouts. Right out to the curbs, holes in concrete. They also rototilled and de-rooted the desolate moonscape of a backyard into something workable, ready for planting.

Continuing saga of the home repair project that started as a simple leak fix but subsequently yawned out into a miasma of interrelated problems.

Saturday selected a fine turlet to replace the broken one. I joked with the Toilet Dude that we were there to buy a bidet for Miles, but my joke backfired when he took me seriously. “Great idea. I installed one for my little ones as well, and my wife loves it.” Puh-leeze.

Silver lining is that we go from traditional 7-gallon flush to modern 1.6 gallon, awesome. Some of the Japanese toilets we looked at also had buttons for half-flushes, but the French don’t seem willing to go the extra mile for the half flush.

Since new tank is smaller than the original, first had to refinish and paint the wall so the outline of the old tank wouldn’t show.

Remove old bowl, and two of the bolts snapped under light pressure - rusted to the core. Oops. An inch and a half of solid soggy mineral deposits caked on the floor came up easily, but the main retaining bolts spin freely from their mount in the flange, dissolved loose with the years. OK, so I’ll replace the flange as well.

Not so fast, big feller. The flange is inserted 6″ down into the main pipe, which is cast iron. The flange is rusted solid to the pipe. As in, solid. Attempts to wrest it free just damage what remains. To Ace for advice. Ace Dude doesn’t skip a beat: “You need $200 worth of tools you don’t have. Call a plumber.”

The irony is that rust has betrayed us double: It has made soft what we need to be solid, and made solid what we need to be loose. Rust never sleeps.

Recently came across this in a drawer at my pop’s house — the announcement of my birth, which my parents sent to their friends and family (10/19/64, 8lbs 14oz). Pictured is the IRS’ 1040 long form as seen through a blue (for boys) filter, with a possibly reasonable facsimile of me superimposed over the top. Inside, the announcement is signed: “The Tax Payers (And Proud Parents), Jim and Avis Hacker.” It’s good to be loved.

Miles just had his first birthday on 9/23, but woke up with a bad headcold, snot bubbles bubbling. His party was cancelled, but he got a little pounding bench and a new pair of shoes anyway :). We’ll have a makeup party soon.

Caught bits and pieces of the gubernatorial debate on the radio this evening, but none of it was as revealing as these samples of candidates speaking with their language removed. Thanks Sean.

When the east coast lost power back in August, birdhouse lost both its primary and secondary DNS servers. For extra insurance, I then set up 3rd and 4th DNS servers through another host. Shortly thereafter, I started getting occasional reports that people couldn’t send mail to birdhouse addresses. We were handling thousands of messages a day, but a few inbound messages were bouncing back to senders undeliverable. birdhouse wasn’t bouncing them, the senders’ mail servers were.

Finally sleuthed the solution. Unlike A records, MX records should always reference domains, not IPs. This enables them to stay linked to A records if machines change IPs. Not knowing this when I set up the 3rd and 4th, I had entered the IP rather than the domain. As it turned out, certain sending mail servers were looking up the backup DNS before the main, and refusing to send to a mail server that wasn’t registered per spec. Tweaking the backup MX records fixed the problem.

The RIAA is now suing dentists (and chiropractors, and etc.) to get them to license the music they play for their patients. The punch line is that in most cases they’re being asked to pay to play easy listening, adult contemporary… the quiet storm. As if getting drilled wasn’t bad enough.

Just discovered that you can abuse the seldom-used @ syntax for passing user/pass combos into URLs to make your domain look to the untrained eye like it lives elsewhere than it does. e.g.:

http://www.nytimes.com@birdhouse.org/blog/

The browser simply ignores everything prior to the @ sign and carries on. Which means an unscrupulous soul can copy a template from any site, populate it with any content they like, and pass out a URL that will fool many viewers.

I’m not interested in doing this, mind you. Merely a technical curiosity.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but The wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig huh?

Feeling under the weather, channel surfing. Home Shopping Channel is selling electric guitars and amps, showing you how easy it is to play “just like those 70s rockers,” and they bring in a master guitarist to prove it. Dude jabs out a few licks from Hall and Oates, the guitar/amp combos fly off the shelves at $179.99. Then they bring out a classical guitar. They know they can’t convince the viewer how easy it would be to pluck Segovia, so try another tack:

“Ed, this is the kind of guitar that’s so beautiful you buy it for its looks alone. Even if you can’t play, it will look great sitting on a rack in a corner of your living room.”

Kid you not.

The 2003 Worst Manual contest winners have been announced. Who among us haven’t encountered amazingly bad instructions? But this bad?

1. Be tights part E with part I together by fitting M. Also can be installation handle part J in this side.

2. Be tights part D with part H together by fitting M. Like a step No. 1. And may be installation handle in this side too.

Honorable mention went to a manual for assembly of a baby bed:

To protect baby’s eyes offending by dazzling light; To prevent baby from dust.

And so on. No wonder people don’t read Joyce anymore.

Weekend in Central Coast : Brother John married Jamie Sheridan after several years of Tru Luv® at Sycamore Mineral Springs in Avila Beach. Classic, non-denominational, lovely law-enforcement wedding (John is a sheriff of 10 years, Jamie is daughter of a cop and is herself a prison guard). Both of them are adventure-hungry - he proposed to her after scuba diving with sharks in a great undersea basin in Belize. He’s also way into no-holds-barred mixed martial arts. Dangerous couple.

I was the best man, stood by my bro on the altar to bear witness etc. Gave the big toast - three minute allotment I parlayed into seven, but it was fun. Oh, did you say toast? I thought you said “roast.” :)

Miles wore a dashing blue satin Chinese outfit, cut a rug, slept on Amy’s back, danced on my shoulders, kept his cool. He’s turned out to be mostly a breeze in public, we’re blessed.

Much love and respect to John and Jamie. Congratulations!

The news was somewhat buried — reading page 8 or 9 of USA Today — Rumsfeld sees no link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11 and Bush: No proof of Saddam role in 9/11. Well, it’s really big of them to come clean on this, two years after the fact, and long since it was shown that 70% of Americans thought that Hussein was responsible for the attacks. Exactly why would the people have thought that? Because the Pentagon dropped Afghanistan like a hot potato when the going got non-productive, and pursued Saddam instead? Because the insinuation was made over and over again that there absolutely was a connection?

I’m frustrated that this is page 8 news because the war could not have been fought without support of the American people. Therefore it didn’t behoove the pimps in power to come clean on the non-connection, though Rummy says he knew all along that there was no connection. So remind me again what the supposed goal of the war was? (”Removing a terrible dictator from power” is the wrong answer, sorry).

p.s.: U.S. weapons hunters find no evidence Iraq had smallpox and Senator Edward Kennedy says the case for war against Iraq “was a fraud.”

None of this related to the recent disocvery of ancient Venezuelan Buffalo-sized rodents, of course.

A seldom-mentioned side-effect of “the RSS revolution” is the weird way it skews web traffic. If a person subscribes to my RSS feed, index.rdf is going to be pulled off my site every time the person’s (or site’s) aggregator checks to see whether I’ve published updates. I leave NetNewsWire up and running 24×7, and set to refresh its feeds every hour. That means I generate 24 hits a day on Radio Free Blogistan and around 100 other sites I like, even though I actually look at the site only once or twice a week.

In August, I had 24,000 requests for index.rdf — fully 6x more requests than for my homepage. More than ever before, traffic fails to equate with readership. In fact, the numbers are way off. And the more popular RSS gets, the more skewed the numbers are going to get.

If you’re dishing up RSS, make sure all feed paths are removed from your traffic summaries (this is easier and more effective than trying to trap the UA strings of the various readers). You’ll still want to count those requests, but don’t be misled: You’re not nearly as popular as you think.

A few days before his first birthday, and Miles can point to objects in a book by name. In “Clifford the Big Red Dog” he can show you cars, airplanes, trucks, houses when you ask him where they are. In “Baby Animals” he can point out the duck. Then he goes to the bathtub and gets his rubber ducky, brings it back to compare and contrast.

This morning he demonstrated that he knows that keys go in keyholes. Keyholes that he’s never seen us use. i.e. he’s seen us use the door, but we’ve never locked or unlocked the filing cabinet, which is what he’s trying to do right now.

His passion for FireWire (pictured) and other cables continues unabated. However, his favorite grown-up toy is probably the iMic — endless swinging, chewing, dragging joy. I’m resigned to it.

One of the J-School profs I share an office with brought in an hilarious (and scary true) cartoon on copyright madness from the New York Times today [free reg required]. The fine print at the end:

WARNING: Do not forward this column through email, make photocopies to send to a child in college, tape it to your dorm-room-door or put it on a bulletin board in your office… or you may be receiving an unexpected knock on your door.

I made ten photocopies and passed them out to iPod-wearing (or similar) students.

birdhouse hosting is pleased to host orvilleschell.com.

Orville Schell is the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. He is also the author of 14 books — nine about China, including “Virtual Tibet,” “Mandate of Heaven,” and “Discos and Democracy” - Dean Schell has also written widely about Asia and other topics for Wired, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Newsweek and other national magazines. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship, a Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award and numerous writing prizes. Dean Schell has also served as correspondent and consultant for several PBS “Frontline” documentaries as well as an Emmy award-winning program on China for CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

EBMUD set us straight with the main valve, so back to the task at hand.

To replace the toilet shutoff valve, remove the feeder tube that supplies the tank. This one was installed before the dawn of flex hose, so it’s a straight, stiff shot. Oops, that means there’s no way to get it out of the fittings without removing the tank!

Keep in mind that the goal here is merely to replace the rubber stopper in the tank to stop a minor leak, and that we’re way sidetracked by now.

Grunt, skin knuckles, try every wrench on the pegboard, finally succeed. Behind tank, the wall is black. Scrub and clean wall, tank.

Ace Hardware for replacement everything. Ace Lady says at a certain point you may as well replace the whole durn turlet. But I like this one. 1942 original. Much respect to this turlet.

Return and replace shutoff valve. Restore water pressure. It holds!

Replace main gasket. Lower tank into position. Begin cranking down retaining nuts to compress the fat main gasket. A little here, a little there. A little more here, a little more there. CRACK the day is shot as toilet bowl shatters from pressure (I wasn’t giving it much, must have been ready to go). Well, not shot — I did fix the shutoff valve — but now we have to replace the toilet.

Anyone who thinks I’m complaining about home ownership is off their rocker. I’m in heaven. I feel whole. Computers suck the life out of you.

I generally applaud judgments against Microsoft — they too rarely reap what they sow, and a little smattering of justice every now and then feels karmically right. But this Eolas thing is out of hand. The suit is targeted at MS, but ultimately affects every browser vendor and every Web developer.

In a nutshell, Eolas has a 1994 patent on the ability to seamlessly pull plugin data into a web browser. Read that sentence again. In the web atmosphere, that’s the equivalent of saying someone has a patent on breathing without assistance.

If the suit is not successfully appealed, web developers will have to retool every instance of embedded Flash, QuickTime, Shockwave, Real, Acrobat, etc. to make the experience not seamless. We may have to launch everything in external players, for example, or throw up a dialog before rich media content is able to play. Right back to 1994, yippee.

Intellectual property is important, but determining how original an idea has to be to warrant a patent is a difficult thing. Once a patent is issued, it’s very hard to recall. No matter how you slice it, allowing one company to retroactively reshape a huge slice of an industry — with a negative effect on innocent users no less — is just wrong.

I can only imagine how much more difficult this would make the teaching of our multimedia skills class.

In the 1940s, a chicken lived two years without its head. For reals. The incredible tale of Mike the Headless Chicken. Some kind of tie-in with baald’s chicken head helmet, the chickenfat song, the chicken transformation set, and Tim’s chickenfoot pads. Somehow connected to the original Superchicken: “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred”

Henry Cabot Henhaus III, the richest chicken in the world, and an amateur scientist, would drink the Super Sauce that his trusty side-kick and butler, Fred, would mix up. The Super Sauce would transform Henry into Super Chicken although it gave him no discernable powers. Thanks baald.

Urban Dictionary is the best place to look up words like “hodad” and “doofus” … Bill Maher: DVDs are for losers! … Standing on the bleepin’ moon … Gorgeous wagons (and other ephemera) … Etch-a-Sketch - hit spacebar to erase … Not fake news: Giant lizard terrorises Beirut … For someone who needs, nay requires unfettered, unbuttered, poeticized truth upside the head, dole out slackards — with parallels to Eno’s Oblique Strategies … Can a music snob learn to love the ‘Dead? … Disney and Dali collaborated on a movie “I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney” … Time for a rousing round of hipster bingo … New movie about Robert Anton Wilson, “Maybe Logic.” Now it turns out the good man is running for governor … Jesus has his own homepage … CSS Zen Garden … Howdy! … If you’re gay and you love NASCAR … Nicotinis being offered to smoking customers in Fort Lauderdale bars - soak tobacco leaves in vodka before shaking martini … So am I governor or not? … Telemarketing at midnight … 75 years of Band-Aid … George W. Bush - U.S. President and Naval Aviator - 12″ Action Figure … How to stick it to the man.

Water bill is huge.

Toilet’s running, jiggle the handle.

Not quite. Sewer dude says there’s a constant flow.

Food color in the tank, wait a few seconds, shows up in the bowl. No problem, replace the stopper.

Turn off the valve. Oops, water still flows … valve shot, must replace. Shut off water main. Here it is, embedded in a root ball near the sidewalk. Main won’t budge. Get more leverage, no joy.

Call EBMUD to have main valve replaced. Not an emergency, wait for Monday.

Nothing is simple.

Had a sewer dude out with his ’scope Friday. Watched on the monitor as he pushed a camera through our pipes, like a public colonoscopy. Tree roots woven evenly through 1942 clay, from one end to the other. “It’s a miracle this system hasn’t totally collapsed,” dude said.

Decided to get ahead of the game. With trenchless line replacement, they don’t dig your yard. Instead they attach a conical steel anvil to the end of a length of HDPE (not PVC) pipe — HDPE is more flexible, can bend without deforming in a 4′ radius. Draw a cable through the old line. Attach one end to the anvil, the other to a honkin’ winch on a big old truck. And start pulling. The anvil breaks the old pipe into tiny pieces in the soil where it lies, leaving the HDPE in its place. Cut, attach the ends to existing system, split.

The weird thing about sewer work is that you spend all this money and have nothing tangible to show for it. The toilet flushes just like it did before. Can’t see nothin’ different. Amy said that when our friends come over we can invite them to go hog-wild.

FileMaker is more than happy to set users up with “value lists,” which coyly store multiple values in a field — a concept that’s pretty much anathema to “real” databases. Values in the list are separated by a weird ascii character. To forge a bridge b/w MySQL and FileMaker, wrote a routine to grab each element in a form array and insert this weird character between each. If all elements were named perfectly, FM would show the proper boxes checked upon data import. In a prior incarnation of this system, data was output from MySQL to a web page, then imported into FM. But now that this weird ascii character is present, we were getting inconsistent results. After much sleuthing, turned out that some browsers (Make 7 Up Yours, IE/Mac) were conveniently discarding the special character, so nothing matched on import. Rewrote the app to write the export to a text file on the server, the offer the file for download, taking browser discrepancies out of the mix.

A couple of days ago the Unix clock — which measures time in elapsed seconds since the epoch (January 1, 1970) — ticked its billionth tick. Planes did not fall out of the sky. What did happen is that computers “paused for a second, then changed to 1 billion and 1 seconds.”

I confess that I used to store “real” date/timestamps in my databases. Discovering the total liberation afforded by reinterpreted Unix timestamps opened several of my projects up like happy oysters.

To celebrate, I bought a Bingo Wacky Wobbler tonight. Bingo, my favorite Banana Split, who was probably conceived right around the time a bunch of bearded Unix weenies were conceiving second zero of Unix time.

You might want to celebrate by defraggling your motherdisc.