Getting close to nailing down an alternate SMTP port for traveling Birdhouse users. Have confirmed that it works with SBC/Yahoo!, and want to make sure it works with Comcast Cable Internet as well. If you use Comcast (or another cable provider for that matter) and would be willing to help me with a quick test, please contact me. You don’t need to be a Birdhouse customer to do this. Thanks in advance!

Not sure how many people are using the Opera web browser these days, but if you’ve ever hesitated to try because it isn’t free, the company is celebrating its 10th birthday by handing out free reg strings for all platforms. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Opera has always been great, and I remember how grateful the BeOS user community was to see the BeOS port of Opera. But in these days of free Firefox etc., there isn’t a whole lot of incentive for people to try unheard-of browsers. Still, Opera has always been famous for its strict adherence to W3C standards, so it’s an important element of a webmaster’s toolkit.

Had a mini-disaster a few nights ago and corrupted most of my email inbox (long story), slashing my “To respond to” list from ~150 to ~20. After the initial “Oh, crap” reaction, a strange feeling of peace washed over me, and lingers. Can’t tell you what a relief it is to have that much perceived obligation erased in a flash. I do feel bad about all those great unanswered threads vanishing into ether, but ultimately, it was like getting a big stinky boot off my neck. 

After witnessing newfound lightness in my step, Amy has promised to start deleting random blocks of messages from my inbox.

File under “Long overdue”: With the release of Movable Type 3.2 finally comes the ability to switch between installed template styles with a few clicks, bringing weblog customizability more into line with what WordPress has offered for quite a while.

Several nice ones in the library of styles Six Apart is offering in its first round. Oddly, three-column designs are conspicuously absent from the display of new styles, though they say that the designs work neatly in three-column layouts (hacking a two-column CSS design into three columns has traditionally been non-trivial for general users; one of those areas where table-based design is vastly easier). Now that MT styles can be neatly packaged for download / install, looking forward to seeing what kinds of contributions the user community comes up with.

I’m pretty content with the current Birdhouse design for now, though I do enjoy messing with things from time to time. But lately I’ve been almost begrudgingly recommending that customers setting up new blogs use WP rather than MT, primarily for this reason. StyleCatcher evens the score.

“… with the nation’s libraries and classrooms filled with overtly liberal children’s books advocating everything from gay marriage to marijuana use, kids everywhere are being deluged with left-wing propaganda.” So what we apparently need is a primer for children of conservatives. Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed:

This full-color illustrated book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland.

Yep, that’s what we see at every turn — a deluge of left-wing propaganda. We’re swimming in it, apparently. Damn liberals and their damn broccoli.

Toilet installed last week and in use, tackled the sink today. Used a grout saw to remove a hex tile to make way for the pedestal’s lag-bolt. A bit of caulk to the base and it went into place neatly. Drilled bracing holes in new wall, test-mounted basin. Perfect level, looking good.

Installed most of plumbing into basin last weekend, thought it would be a simple matter to plop it on top of the pedestal, bolt it to the wall, and walk away. Spent most of the day wrestling with atrocious installation instructions. Sample sentence:

Unscrew the nut from the pop up body and take off the spring clip from the ball rod (please note: retain the white packing ring on the ball rod), and place the nut in the ball rod. Insert the ball rod into the side hole of drain, slide the nut on and tighten securely).

This might not sound unapproachable, except for the fact that there were three different parts that could accurately be called the “pop up body,” and that they used the word “in” wherever they mean “over” or “on.” In other places, the directions were completely muddled by attempting to cover six different fixture models in one set of text. “Let’s see… if I don’t have the white washer then I need to apply plumber’s putty between the black gasket and the porcelain. Wait, they must mean the other white washer. In that case…” And so on. All compounded by the impossibly cramped working quarters behind a pedestal sink - had to use a mirror to check my work, check for leaks, etc. Getting the drain lever assembly installed took 90 minutes alone. Finally got it all watertight and working. Not done yet, but the bathroom is actually usable again for the first time in two months! And looking great.

Miles was a great help, too. Pictured: learning all about vice grips, then turning them on me — “Bite! Bite! Cheetah chomps!”

Next up: Install shower/bath fixtures, locate source for ball-bearing cabinet rails, build sliding drawers, install lighting (assuming it ever arrives).

Birdhouse Hosting is happy to welcome a pair of sites belonging to a regular Birdhouse reader:

Simple Dreams Dolls: “Fine Fashions and Better Casual Wear by commission for your Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls. Also a doll gallery.”

Litterbox.com: “Personal web pages of two people and their cats. Twelve years of personal stuff plus anime cel galleries.”

From time to time, raving pays off. Got SBC Maintenance on the phone this morning and they activated service in under an hour — four days before scheduled activation. Set the service up tonight. Goal was not to have to use the installer CD and all the crap that comes along with it. The last thing I wanted was a corporate monolith sticking god knows what god knows where in the bowels of the OS.

Turns out that the key to sidestepping the installer CD is knowing in advance the initial PPPoE user/pass, so you can pre-feed your router. Obviously.com to the rescue. Once the initial connection is made, SBC does this weird thing where you have just enough DNS to access their online registration page, without being able to access any other sites. And the registration page — surprise — only works in Explorer. Of course they don’t tell you this. What you get in Safari or Firefox is a full-screen form with no Submit button. Nice work, jerk-brains. Only going by hunch did I think to launch IE and complete the signup. What this means for all new Tiger users with no legacy copy of Explorer sitting around is anybody’s guess.

And it’s fast. Ran a speed test at dslreports.com, and we’re getting 1.12 Mbps downstream — reasonably close to our 1.5Mbps cap. Not lightning by today’s standards, but almost 100% faster than we were getting with Speakeasy, and at 1/3 the cost.

Short story: As much as yesterday’s experience put a bad taste in my mouth, as much I was prepared to regret our decision to switch, you just can’t touch the speed and price anywhere else in the broadband market. I’ll really miss Speakeasy, but for a measly $11/month extra, we just got cable TV and doubled our DSL speed. I’ll stop complaining now.

Come home to find DSL offline. Speakeasy has been incredibly reliable for us over the past couple of years, so I find it suspicious that it should go offline five days before activation date for the switch to SBC. Call Speakeasy, they can’t bring up the line. Dude suspects someone has “pulled the crossover,” whatever that means. Call SBC, who tell me that DSL takes five days to activate, so this is normal. “Normal?,” I ask. I was very specific with the salesperson that this was a “switch” order from another provider, and that cancellation of Speakeasy and activation of SBC would happen on the same day. Big downtime was not an option for me. On this particular I could not have been more clear.

“We have no record of any technician starting the conversion, sir.”

“But you also just told me that conversion normally starts five days before activation, right? And it’s exactly five days before scheduled activation. Doesn’t it kind of seem obvious that an SBC tech knocked my existing service offline prematurely?”

Silence.

“Hello?”

“Yes?”

“Sigh. You say you have no record of work being done, but you also say that you “normally” take people offline five days before activation. While the salesperson guaranteed that cancellation and activation would happen the same day.”

“Sir, you’ll need to talk to our maintenance department. But they’re closed.”

God, dialup sucks. And Mail.app gets really ornery when the connection type gets changed out from under it, which sticks me with webmail (saving my litany of complaints about Mail.app for another day).

So, “Beispeil #22″ that you get what you pay for. Low-cost service means corporate armies of uninformed, low-tech employees reading from scripts while customer sits in limbo. Will take on the drones tomorrow. Worth it? We’ll see.

Your sound I understand the languages.

I don’t understand the languages.

I hear only your sound.

The sun is shining slowly

The birds are flying so low.
Honey you’re my one and only,

So pay my what you owe me.
Beispiel Nummer zweiundzwanzig.

- Laurie Anderson, (Example #22.)

After midnight, hear strange rumblings coming from the side of the house, outside Miles’ window. From my office window, I see the large acacia bush moving, as if in a strong wind, but there is no wind. A bit freaked, thinking maybe some kids are setting up shop in the bushes, grab a flashlight and head outside. Sneak around the corner, throw a beam, and out pads a young buck, looking brave but a bit frightened. His antlers (substantial) had probably become entangled in the dense bushes while foraging, and now he was looking for a way out — but a human was blocking the only route.

I crouched, snapped off the torch, tried not to project a threatening vibe. His big black eyes were illuminated by a nearby streetlight, tranquil but a little bit scared. From a distance of about eight feet, we stared at each other for the longest time, equal parts curiosity and fear flowing in either direction.

This would not be such a surprising event if we were in a more rural location, but we live on a fairly busy street in a thoroughly suburban neighborhood, the last place one would expect to encounter forest creatures. But this is not the first time I’ve seen deer stray this far down from the hill. On evening walks, sometimes see them venturing into neighborhood gardens, snacking on suburban gardens. “Deer are just rats with good P.R.,” or so they say. Have even seem them on occasion traveling in groups, bounding down the street, hooves clacking against the asphalt, oblivious to stop signs, worse than those packs of kids buzzing around on 2-stroke scooters.

Eventually he made his move. Slowly, cautiously, as he had to come even closer to get past me. I’m sure the bulk of fear in the equation was on his side, but can’t say it didn’t cross my mind that those antlers could do serious damage if he decided for some reason that it might be fun to disembowel a bi-ped. Not that that’s ever happened, just saying it crossed my mind. Briefly.

Suddenly he broke into leaps, and was gone, up the street in seconds, tail bobbing in the darkness, clacking his way toward another garden.

Related: Wonderful interview by Forum’s Michael Krasny with poet and naturist Diane Ackerman. Ackerman talks about her conflicted feelings about deer, why she gives necklaces to squirrels, why she plants weeds, and how it’s against the law in some cities to let your front yard become a meadow.

Bzzzpeek: Sounds of frogs, firetrucks, cuckoo clocks and donkeys as spoken by children from around the world, wrapped up in a nicely done international flag interface. Accepting contributions from children around the world.

This project focuses on the pronunciation and comparison of these sounds by presenting them side by side as each language expresses them differently.

Impossible to tell how much of the variance is due to culture and how much to individual differences in kids, but this is interesting to me in part because Miles had such a gas with it and in part because I’ve been working on a sort-of-similar project for about two years now (but in video, rather than Flash). Promise to have it done by this Christmas (famous last words).

Making progress. Grouted the chicken wire a couple weekends ago. After taking so much care to protect tile from damage, almost painful to smear adhesive-laden mud all over the job. But a few hours sponging, swabbing, wiping and it came out nicely. Used the tile saw at a local shop (free!) to re-cut a few pieces of coving, then installed that last weekend and grouted it yesterday. The corners are a bitch (can’t believe they don’t make pre-fab corner coving pieces).

Today set out to install toilet and sink. The old toilet (excuse me, “closet”) was bolted to the floor through the sub-floor. New one didn’t have such holes, and is attached only to its own drainage flange. But surprise! Previous workers cut a big hole out of sub-floor around the drain, no place to screw down a new one. Ended up cutting a big donut out of 3/4″ ply with hole- and jig-saws. Screwed that in, which provided a platform for new flange. Worked out nicely, but knocked a big hole in the day.

Finally tracked down a source for chrome sink feed pipe covers (so you don’t see plain galvanized pipe when viewing from the side). Stupidly hard to find these, but they cut nicely and make a world of difference. Now if I could just find a source for ceramic toilet bolt covers; these are apparently officially extinct in favor of plastic. The modern world blows.

Assembled sink fixtures and prepared to install pedestal, when I discovered that the new sink has a 1 1/4″ drain, while we have a 1 1/2″ drain in the wall. Also needed more height for new drain assembly. And I’ll have to remove a hex from the floor to bolt down the pedestal, which meant I needed a grout saw. Fourth trip to hardware store.

The cable guy arrived (90 minutes late, we get a discount!), which meant it was time to drop everything and reprogram the Tivo. First night with cable learned how to change sprockets on a dirt bike to suit muddy conditions, watched the removal of immense face tumor from poor Malaysian boy, and was reminded of just what an ass Sean Hannity is. Sink will have to wait.

When we moved into this place two years ago and discovered we could get 10 channels via antenna, decided not to get cable. Tivo helped keep an OK menu of OK fare available, but the pickin’s have become increasingly slim. As much intellectual nourishment as we get out of Nova, American Dad, Spark, and Fire Me… Please!, I can never shake the feeling that I’m painfully out of touch not having access to the Daily Show and Bullshit! But it’s been hard to cost-justify standard cable at $43/month, especially when we’re paying $50/month for Speakeasy DSL with static IP (it’s kind of amazing to me how popular cable TV is, given the pricing; but then I suppose a lot of people would consider DSL access non-essential too).

Finally decided to rearrange things and switch to SBC for DSL at $15/month, go dynamic IP and use DynDNS for the limited inbound access I need. Not expecting the platinum service I get from Speakeasy, as long as the reliability is good. But we’ll be able to put the money saved into cable for a few extra bucks per month.

All I need now is for cable subscribers to let me know what’s worth watching.

Addendum: When I was on the phone with SBC, they asked whether we were on Macs or PCs. I told her Mac and she reacted with surprise, as if a customer had never said that before. She asked me why, and I gave her a short version of the usual security spiel. She then proceeded to tell me that her entire office at SBC had been sent home early the previous day, as they had been hit so hard by the latest round of Windows worms. Someday the light will go on for the sysadmins of the world.

Keepers wondered why they kept finding shark carcasses on the aquarium floor, until one of them decided to stay up all night with a video camera. When they put sharks and octopi together in the tank, nobody guessed that a mere invertebrate could inhale sharks like nachos. Video at KQED/Nature (works in Firefox, not in Safari).

Quit complaining, Yankee. The Dutch are paying the equivalent of $6.48/gallon for petrol. On the other hand, Venezuelans are practically paid to haul it away — they pay a mere $0.12/gallon. Accounting for the disparity is government policy — from huge taxes to extreme subsidies. Wonder which country on the list comes closest to actual free-market prices.

Christopher Walken is preparing to run in the 2008 presidential campaign.

“Our great country is in a terrible downward spiral. We’re outsourcing jobs, bankrupting social security, and losing lives at war. We need to focus on what’s important– paying attention to our children, our citizens, our future. We need to think about improving our failing educational system, making better use of our resources, and helping to promote a stable, safe, and tolerant global society. It’s time to be smart about our politics. It’s time to get America back on track.”

No argument from me there, and I do think Walken would likely be a better untrained politician than Schwarzennegger, but I still don’t want an untrained politican running the country. Even if he does bring us more cowbell. Which we sorely need.

Culture jamming in bookstores: Avant Game has launched the Ministry of Reshelving project, which encourages people to visit bookstores and re-shelve incorrectly categorized books. Steps 3 & 4 in the reshelving guidelines:

3. Go to the bookstore and locate its copies of George Orwell’s 1984. Unless the Ministry of Reshelving has already visited this bookstore, it is probably currently incorrectly classified as “Fiction” or “Literature.”

4. Discreetly move all copies of 1984 to a more suitable section, such as “Current Events”, “Politics”, “History”, “True Crime”, or “New Non-Fiction.”

They also post a clarification on the site:

Note: this project is not a critique of bookstore culture, the state of the shelving industry, or even of pervasive government surveillance. It is merely an observation that 2 + 2 = 5, and 5 is no longer fiction.

Photos at Flickr.

Miles suddenly became very curious about what I did at work all day.

“Do you have lots of toys at your work?”

“Well, not really, but I do have a good time. Most of the time.”

“Do you have a park at your work?”

“No, but we have some grass where we can sit and eat lunch.”

“Are there a lot of kids to play with at your work?”

“Ummm, depends what you mean by kids.”

“Daddy, do you have a funny clown at your work with three arms?”

“See son, it’s like this…”

ISPs are clamping down on port 25, preventing users from using 3rd-party SMTP servers such as Birdhouse’s, even with authentication. Some have even gone as far as requiring outbound mail to belong to a domain the ISP knows it controls. All a well-intentioned — but naive — attempt to thwart spammers.

Unfortunately, the trend makes it difficult for Birdhouse to offer SMTP services to a lot of customers. At this point, I simply recommend up front that people use their ISP’s SMTP for outgoing mail.

Now add to this the hassle of using a laptop and traveling from place to place — I hear from some customers who are changing their SMTP servers several times a day. And I hate recommending webmail because I myself hate webmail with a passion.

Solution: Birdhouse needs to open an alternate SMTP port, which people could use from anywhere. cPanel makes this easy to do, but the question is, which port to use for the SMTP alternate? In the first few hours of experimentation, have already discovered that SBC/Yahoo! also blocks port 26, which is the cPanel recommendation. In fact, some ISPs may be preventing their customers from using all non-standard ports.

mneptok helped to clarify the question: Need to choose a port that’s common enough to not be considered non-standard, but that we also don’t need for anything else. If you’re using one of the big commercial providers for connectivity and have found surprising ports blocked, let me know!

I remember in the early-mid-90s, it was still possible to find wide-open public mail relays, and it wasn’t even considered a problem. Now it’s hard even to use closed private relays. Doing business in a world full of bad guys is a drag.

My friend Guy D2 just released a really nice Dashboard Widget for web developers — SeeSS gives you instant access to “all CSS1 & CSS2 (and some CSS3) properties with their values, examples, descriptions and other valuable info.”

After the initial “Wow!” factor of Dashboard wears off, you quickly start to separate the wheat from the chaff and pare down the collection. This is the kind of thing Dashboard was made for - useful info at your fingertips. I liked the distinction made between Dashboard and Spotlight made back at WWDC:

Spotlight - Find Stuff
Dashboard - Find Out Stuff

Though truth be known, 99% of my Dashboard use can be boiled down to punching F12 as I get out of the shower to see whether I can wear shorts to work.

Speaking of methane, the UK Guardian reports frightening data on the thawing of Siberia.

The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world’s largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

The thaw may represent a “tipping point” of global warming both because of its scale and because of its role as part of a vicious cycle. The thawing is “undoubtedly” caused by human-driven global warming. But once triggered, the thawing itself spawns further warming.

“When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it’s unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply,” said David Viner, a senior scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

So while humans take warming risks by scrambling to mine methane for energy from the briny depths, nature’s methane stock may release itself uncontrollably… as a result of other human energy production activities. A spiral reactor.

Via Weblogsky

Got partway through Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes tonight. Brief vignettes of people sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, talking, being awkward, uncomfortable, going nowhere, living. Tom Waits and Iggy Pop (priceless meeting - who knew Iggy could be so sweet?), Steven Wright, Bill Murray, Steve Buscemi… everybody fits. In one scene, Jack White of the White Stripes is sitting in a cafe’ with ex-wife Meg (who is commonly thought of as his sister), homemade Tesla Coil sitting in a little red wagon beside him. Meg wants to know more. Won’t give away the rest. Cinematography is gorgeous, dialog typically Jarmusch. Boring and enthralling and totally beautiful.

Constructed with assistance, but the idea was Miles’, wanting to put together toys from different toy microcosms (QuickTime). Starting to show lots of mechanical interest. Has a take-apart plastic airplane with big plastic screws, bolts, nuts and a power drill with removable attachment heads. Within a week learned to swap out the attachments, remember which way to flip the switch to screw screws either in or out, and to take apart the whole thing; can almost put it all together again by himself. He’s been a big help with the bathroom remodel too - sticks screwdrivers down the toilet drain hole, munges walls with a putty knife, sweeps up… couldn’t get the job done without him.

Miles starts mixing up dinosaur names to keep himself entertained, playing with words. “Daddy, my favorite dinosaur is Triceradon!” Google Images to the rescue. We quickly pull down images of Triceratops and Pteranodon, collage them together into the beastie pictured. Miles is strangely unimpressed. The ability to Rip, Mix, Burn is neither novel nor amazing to him. It’s just The Way Life Is.

David Sifry posts an interesting chart comparing the number of inbound links (which are a strong measure of influence) to top blog and non-blog sites. Only Boing-Boing makes it into the top 10, but that puts it ahead of USA Today, Fox News, Reuters, SF Gate, Salon, and MTV. Other popular blogs are interleaved on the curve of influence with well-funded, heavily staffed, traditionally journalistic sites. Power to the people, or the death of journalism? Fascinating either way.