Rhonabwy

burgers

Had some burgers on the grill tonight that turned out fantastic. Since Karen and I were picking up the market basket today, we stopped by a butcher's we really like and picked up some meats, including some really lean hamburger. A little soy sauce, onions, and garlic later and we were ready for some serious grilling.

I'm still really learning when it comes to the grill - never having really had a decent one in the past has sort of stunted my knowledge. But now it's coming along pretty darn well. Being on the atkin's diet isn't hurting either - seems I'm doing a lot of grilling because that is one of the few places where Karen's low-fat diet and mine overlap.

complete reinstall

I guess I don't have much else better to do with my evenings.. tonight I completely reinstalled my laptop with the latest seed from Apple. Now to go back through all those strange things I reported as bugs...

Firewire target disk mode (where you can use the laptop as one big firewire attached drive to another computer) made it amazingly simpler - a huge number of things didn't need to get downloaded again because I could just drag them onto the drive. 10Gb of music (my entire collection) wouldn't be on here at all if that wasn't possible.

T-2 weeks

T-minus-two weeks to the day, and the news starts up. Sept 11...

Maybe I'm a heartless bastard, but I wish they'd just let it fucking drop for a while. The last thing I want to be thinking about on my 10th anniversary is that terrorists smashed planes into buildings and the ground.

Yes, our wedding anniversary is September 11th. Makes it pretty damn hard to be thinking happy thoughts when you're surrounded by both the constant media blare of the tragedy and the reality of the outcome - that our government sold our rights away for what they thought was safety.

Karen and I are planning on being way, way out of touch with the rest of the world starting Sept 5th.

coal fire

Karen and I walked from the office down to Pike Place Market to pick up our market basket this week. We went down 1st Ave from Battery to Pike, and while we were walking down near Battery, I smelled a familiar smell that I hadn't really scented in a while: coal fire.

I guess Black Dog Forge (who has an operating forge on 2nd ave) was probably doing something with a coal fire, although I know they mostly work with propane. As I walked, I smiled - recognizing it, even though I haven't been around one in about 3 or 4 years. It was nice to catch the scent on the breeze and think that someone was keeping up the traditional blacksmithing fire skills.

"corded" phones

The opposite of a wireless phone is a "corded" phone, which I'm pleased to say is now installed at our house. We used to have one in Missouri, but have been doing just the wireless thing since moving to Seattle.

The only problem is when the battery dies - then you're screwed. After having this piss me off a few dozen times, a quick trip to Fred Meyer produced an $8 phone that is now hanging on the kitchen wall, available regardless of battery function. A significant bonus, to my mind, is that the handset can only get so far away from the phone as well! Now I won't have to dive into the basement, karen's studio, backyard, etc. to find the phone when it's ringing before the answer machine picks it up.

dave?

Dave, Do you still have a job?

Update: Gus says yes.

revenge of the paperclip

A short but intriging article at Wired. The article speaks fairly highly of it - where the software sounds like it does what it was designed to. Then again, that fucking paperclip did what it was designed for as well...

I can't even begin to explain how badly Microsoft blew some great technology research with a lousy implementation. The concept of an agent helping you out is just amazing - only they screwed the implementation with something that interupted you FAR too often and screwed up your normal workflow. I've heard that completely novice users loved the feature - but anyone who'd been using Office for over a year doesn't really fit into that profile very well, do they?

darned addicting game

It's past midnight with me playing that thing three nights in a row. I've got to admit, the guys at BioWare made a compelling UI for a console based RPG. I'm impressed. The storyline feels a tad linear in some places, but it's pretty good.

Ok, time for bed. I really do have to go to work tomorrow, all evidence to the contrary.

Quicken and the Mac...

If you use Quicken on MacOS X, then you should check out this hint at MacOS X Hints. It's a script to prepare Safari-downloaded Quicken files - the folder action script that automatically recognizes any file with a "qfx" extension, and changes the file type and creator codes. [Studio Log]

speeeeeeed.

This tech has the capacity to make some blazingly fast boxes. And if you thought the current laps burned...

Rather timely with the recent cover-page Wired article, eh?

ESR

Ryan posted me a link to ESR's latest ravings, which is unfortunately quite compelling. I actually rather side with him in this particular little tidbit, in that thinking that SCO is both manipulative of the media in the most overt, sort of train-wreck-watching hideousness way - and that they have a rather serious disconnect from the reality of the marketplace.

But I really dislike most of ESR's writings because he takes a few good ideas and liberally slathers them with personal attacks and bigotry. I met him once - at an Open Source gig in Missouri. I recall how excited we all were to see this "great guy". But you know what? He's really not all that compelling in person. He came across as rather arrogant, stand-off-ish, and unwilling to listen to another person's opinion. By the end of the conference we were hosting, I think most of us were ready to be done with him - which is really too bad. One of our "hero's" from early on - well, he opened his mouth and removed all doubt.

Oh wait - someone else seems to feel that ESR's writing ain't quite kosher too...

Morrowind

It's funny if you look at the save game dates on our Xbox at home for Morrowind. It's pretty clear that Karen and I get interested in playing this in the fall - about now, in fact. And we give off playing it in spring. I think it's related the amount of daylight out - it's sort of a dark game (dark as in screen brightness - with no user control of the gamma) which leads us to not play it until it's dark outside.

These days, that's running about 8pm here in Seattle, and soon to get much earlier - we're at the time of year when you're really noticing the changes in things like that.

Not having played it for 6 months, we picked it back up pretty quick. It's an odd style of playing - Karen loves the puzzles and storyline, but doesn't want to deal with the controls. So I "drive" and she "navigates", which sometimes gets us snapping at each other in a way that I'm sure anyone watching us would start laughing.

All in all, it's been an amazing value of a game. It's retailing for $20 now (it was $50 when I bought it), but I'd definitely say we've gotten our entertainment dollars out of it! Especially when you compare it to a movie or a book. Movies are, come to think of it, probably the most expensive form of entertainment we really indulge in.

I rather expect Knights of the Old Republic to keep me well entertained for a while too.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Jasper was talking about getting sucked into the Star Wars Galaxies game a few weeks back. I haven't investigated that one, but it looks like I'm in danger of getting sucked deeply into Knights of the Old Republic - an console based RPG by the folks at BioWare. I picked it up yesterday, but didn't touch it until late.

Well, that was a mistake - I ended up playing the intro stuff, learning the game, etc. until about 1am. Not as bad as it could have been, but it's left me sleepy today. None the less, the game is engrossing and compelling (at least for me). The UI is really pretty incredible (a very good interface), and of course the graphics are sweet.

If you've got an Xbox, and you're looking forward into the "long dark" of winter, and you like RPG's... well, check it out.

omlettes

Well, I'm slowly getting better at making Omlettes. A couple of tricks that I've learned to make it go more smoothly:

1) a fairly wide, flat skillet with curved walls is essential. Trying to make too large of an omlette in a small skillet is just asking for disaster.

2) get one of those rubber-scraper thingies that's resistant to heat - it's about 300% better than your average spatula for making omlettes.

3) Start with a hot pan and hot oil, and pour in the beaten egg mixture. Milk in the mixture hasn't made that much of a difference for me - except that it can make fluffier omlettes.

4) through your omlette internal goodness in after the eggs have had a second to form up in the hot skillet.

5) Using that scraper thing, lift the edge of the eggs and tilt the skillet to allow the uncooked bits of egg under the edge of the omlette. Do this on four sides of the skillet, and you'll have a very nice outside texture with that.

6) add the cheese last - giving it just enough time to really melt down before you split and flip the omlette closed. Oh - and then split and flip. I used the scraper to lightly "cut" the omlette down the center, tilted the skillet so one half was easily "down" from the other, and then used the scraper with a quick flip to match up the two sides. Give it a few more seconds, and it's ready to hit the plate.

That last wrist flick bit is where I'm the worst - I get all hesitant, which of course is causing things to go really awry. I'm guess just practice will resolve it. Fortunately, the Atkin's diet is a good excuse to practice.

OS tidbits

Wes Felter pointed out the notes from HotOS 3, which makes for some interesting (if short) reading. Bunch o' OS geeks getting together on the beaches of Kauai to talk issues, wild ideas, and review the state of the art... or at least that is what I get from the notes.

time to relearn...

You don't use something for long enough, and when you come back to it you end up having to relearn. Well, at least me with programming languages. I haven't been playing in Objective-C for far, far too long now and I'm paying out the price. Time to break out the books and start going through pieces again.

Most of the basics I remember without issue - it's more like the vocabulary just isn't there. I still know how to hook things up in Interface Builder and such, but I don't remember the libraries and the details associated there worth a damn.

It's funny too, because as I'm looking at the new stuff that's coming with Panther, it's pretty easy to see that there's going to need to be some 2nd and 3rd editions of these master tomes. Some significant stuff is coming available.

Information management tools

I've been keeping an eye on the latest geeky stuff with information management tools. Two of the more interesting projects out there include Chandler and the less well known Haystack project.

On a lookup whim to keep updated, I thought I'd swing by the Haystack page to see if anything interesting had happened - and it had - they released a new drop of their code just a last wednesday!

They're promoting the code for Linux and Windows - I'm not quite sure why not for MacOS X. In terms of interesting code pushing the edges - these guys are definitely there. Some really experimental UI and data management pieces. Last time I tried to run the code they provided, it was damn slow and cranky - so this will be a fun one to see what happens next. They've got a fascinating architecture, as well as bunches o' bunches of papers on the research they've done.

Editing

Gus kindly pointed out that I'd had up some inappropriate stuff (in terms of level of detail) on the latest Panther seed. So - if you missed it, tough luck - I edited that entry. I'm happily fiddling around in it's depths, sending in bug reports, and exploring a lot of the cool new stuff in there.

amusing icon for a story

I was out scanning news and generally wasting the evening surfing websites (while installing Panther) and I came across this "icon" for a SCO related article at Ecommerce Times

You've got to admit - it's an amusingly symbolic icon. Makes the whole piece utterly subjective (although being objective about SCO's moves is a darned difficult thing for me), but it's amusing.

This may be abysmally stupid, but...

I'm installing the latest seed of Panther on my laptop - my "everyday" machine. I've got a copy of all the data I wanted to keep on my desktop at home (thank you Firewire Target Disk Mode) - and it's in the "upgrade" process now.

The biggest thing I'm looking forward to really working with is the new developer tools and tidbits that I saw in the WWDC presentations. I think that sort of finished off the decision for me - I really want to play with that stuff.

Ya just gotta love it...

I get annoyed at Slashdot, at the readers, the whole thing, but I keep reading it. And every now and then, the accerbic attitude that seems to pervade their news towards "Anti Linux" people (whomever that may be) just strikes me as exceptionally funny.

Today, it's SCO Says IBM is Beating Up on Them. That seems to have been derived from an InfoWorld Article: SCO CEO says IBM behind open source attacks.

ARGH!!!!

Apple's latest Panther seed is available to those people with the appropriate keys... in segments. ARGH!!!!!

That's damn frustrating because I don't have an easy way to get all those pieces - I'd have to sit here and click on each one individually, queueing them up for download. PAIN IN THE ASS!!!

I suppose it makes sense from a software distribution point of view, as they could segment up those pieces across networks, machines, etc. You just know those servers are getting hammered today.

Makes me wonder if it would be possible to enable a BitTorrent like system for downloading it - something to "share the bandwidth wealth" for those heavy download days.

I can't imagine Apple would ever release that sort of thing without reasonably strong controls on who had access to it though. Something yet to be added to that style of download mechanism I guess.

105? Holy...

Karen and I walked down to the Market today to pick up our subscription produce order. It sure seemed hot. In fact, it was 80 degrees outside (thank you Watson) and both Karen and I were really complaining up a storm about the heat, how we were getting all sweaty, etc.

Well, Karen called back to her folks in Columbia, MO today. According to the airport weather, it peaked there at 102. Karen's folks reported 105... and that it's been that for the past five days!

Well, at least they're getting some relief - looks like they're about to be a tad beaten around by the latest Thunderstorm chain.

It'll cool things down for a little bit - maybe down to our high of 80 - and then it'll get really, really humid...

Yeah, living in Seattle... Definitely the way to go.

cell phone

JDD is writing "
AT&T Wireless Goofs Again", which reminds me that I was smart enough to sign up for only a year contract - which ends in another two months. So I'm starting to think about a) if I want to continue to have this kind of service at all and b) who I'm going to use if I do.

I have a very nice little phone - one of those Motorola clamshell jobs with the old technology bits (not GPRS). I've had to replace it twice (at my cost for shipping) due to hardware defects. The phone cost me $250.

There's a strike.

Now add on the incredibly bad reception at my house (I live underneath those monstrous radio towers on Queen Anne in Seattle, so I won't completely blame ATT Wireless for that), and you've greatly reduced the effectiveness of that phone. While I'm walking in downtown Seattle (belltown), the reception is spotty at best, and between my office and the bus stop (all of two blocks), I can't seem to keep a signal to maintain a conversation with my wife at home...

More strikes.

It's not going to be ATT Wireless for future service, that much I've decided upon. What I haven't decided is if the service is even valuable enough for me to continue. I *like* the access of a phone at all times for calling out, and aside from the spam that I get on my phone (which pisses me off), I get very few calls to me (thank god! It's NOT a leash). For $50 a month subscription, I'm just not sure it's worthwhile.

The one thing that tempts me is the RIM Blackberry's and/or the TMobile (read Danger HipTop) Sidekick. The always on, low-data-rate, everything data feed is really appealing. Email would be nice, but I think the Danger product is more appealing to me in the end.

Nathan has a PocketPC cell phone/thingy combo that's pretty appealing too though - and seems to get reasonable utility out of it. I don't use Windows to sync nicely with the pocket-pc type stuff, so that's sort of a negative. Then again, I haven't a clue if MacOS X would sync with a Danger HipTop either.

Guess it's time for some consumer market research. I keep an eye on Steven's Frank's blog because he's sort of a fanatical reviewer of these kinds of toys. Ok, maybe "sort of fanatical" is an understatement.

IRC, dragonflies

I've recently started reading Joi Ito's blog, just because it looked interesting and different. While I was there, I noticed that he maintains a fairly active IRC channel. Having not been involved with that sort of game in ages and ages, I thought I'd check it out.

So with the help of Mozilla's IRC client, I've checked in and have been lurking, watching the messages flow across the screen. I've got to say, that IRC client is really pretty darn good. Maybe it doesn't have the advanced spam/bot/flood/pain features that things like BitchX does, but it's easy and straightforward.

While on the channel, I caught a link to "Steph's Blog", and on a whim I was off. (Yeah, I'm watching logs spin at work again - waiting for results, so I'm looking for something else to do that won't take that much time). The first thing I noticed was this incredible picture of a dragonfly, which was really cool.

I'll guess that Steph is Quebecois, er.. scratch that. Just saw her CV online, and she's definitely a world citizen from that... Regardless of where she's living or doing, I've got to say I'm really impressed with her photography.

Rowling for Nobel Prize

Yeah, I wrote about this previously, but more recently I saw an article in the The Scotsman, a UK paper, talking about Jim and his latest project

4:30am hairballs

Sleep wasn't exactly restful last night. Somewhere around 4:30am, one of the cats decided that a hairball needed to be "dealt with" - while he was on the bed. That immediately caused Karen to start marking lots of noise and thrashing about, which in turn generated a completely full adrenaline dump for me.

So at 4:30 in the morning, I was flinging the covers off and jumping up out of bed, not mentally really ready for anything, but damn I was trying. This commotion caused the cat to leap off the bed to finish his process, and about 10 seconds later I realized that this entire situation was a cat coughing up a hairball.

Since I was already up and now completely awake, I took care of cleaning it up. Getting back to sleep was, however, completely out of the question for a while. I laid down and tried, but the muscles all over my legs where doing that little "twitchy" reflex thing that felt like I was getting my calves massaged by 300 pixies. After I while, I moved to the day bed and under some open windows so that the cool breeze might help lull me to sleep.

That would have worked fine, except that the same hairball-coughing-cat decided that it was time for me to feed him, and spent the next few hours alternately walking on me or heading into the bedroom to walk on Karen in an attempt to get food.

I finally rolled out of bed at 7:30, with some really pitiful sleep for the night. Karen fed the cats - I wasn't really willing to be nice to them at that point.

catchin' up

Apple has some of the WWDC sessions available on ADC TV. Yeah, you still need to do that NDA thing to see the streams, but they've got some good ones up there. Makes me feel like I've caught up a little bit from the info and details that I missed at this year's WWDC.

Definately some neat new stuff coming down the road with Panther (10.3).

Anyone have a good RSS Aggregator for Windows?

I'm trying to find some Windows code that comes close to the functionality of NetNewsWire. I'm really just looking for a good RSS aggregator that I can subscribe various feeds to that I like to track at the office (yes, meaning I don't give a crap about them 'after hours').

Anyone have some suggestions there? I've tried a few, but have generally been disappointed in them...

MySQL from Applescript

Now that's cool: MySQL access from Applescript (thanks Studio Log)

Yahoo Maps Broken on Mac...

Well, with anything using Apple's WebKit API anyway.

Works fine with Camino, Netscape, IE, and older versions of OmniWeb, but Safari and OmniWeb 4.5 just don't work. The "zoom" buttons are essentially non-functional - it appears to load something, only it doesn't change the screen.

Heidelberg

The 'Berg is no more - or at least temporarily burned out. I heard from a friend in Missouri that it caught fire sometime last night, and then caught the news story from the local university student press.

It was sort of a local landmark - a place to go for hot buttered rum in the dead of winter, or beers on a sunday afternoon. Spent plenty of afternoons ensconced in the corner of that place. Odd to hear it burned down.

Thank god it wasn't Shakespeares. That would have been criminal.

Karen's Birthday!

Today is Karen's birthday. Yeah!!!

We went out and played miniature golf, had lunch at Bellevue Square Mall, and have generally had a wonderful afternoon messing about outdoors. It's been a terrific day.

Karen's just coming off a fast, so there's not a whole lot of sweets or anything about at the moment. None the less, deserts and goodies are planned - just spread out over this coming week as she moves back into heavier and heavier foods. Pan seared salmon is somewhere in there, as is some ice cream I think.

It's so odd comparing today to all those summers in Missouri - being outside all day would generally not be something I'd be rejoicing in. Today it was between 75 and 80, and that seemed pleasantly warm for it all. Certainly bright - the were almost no clouds out today at all.

Any of you...

Hey,

Any of you "readers" using some of that social software: friendster or tribe.net?

I've been curious about it, but hesitant to dive in, fearing the same "four accounts" thing that happened to me with IM.

new directions

It's sort of a day for new directions for me.

Today I resigned from the crew of the Manta Ray. I really like everyone there, but the experiences racing were getting much less than fun, coupled with an increase in stress. A friend asked me the other day "If it's not fun, why bother?". Good point.

So after gnawing on that for a while, I decided to give it a few more weeks go. I took a break from racing for a week to see if it was just a "recover from personalities" thing, and then came back for another race (last night). Last night was just as stressful as ever, and really none of it was even directed at me. The vibes, as they say, just weren't there. So as we came back into port last night, I looked out over the Sound with the sun setting behind the Olympic Mountains to the west. "Last view of this", I thought - then realized I was being stupid - I'll be back out there, just with a different setup, doing a different thing.

There's some sailing classes to be found in the area for not all that much money, so I'm heading in that direction. One person, two person boats - that sort of thing - all the way up to keel boats within a relatively constrained environment (Lake Washington). Now I can learn to work all the sails, steer, etc - everything I need to know to really sail in my own right.

Maybe I'll go back to racing in the future - but it'll be a bit. I need to progress more, and if I go back to the Manta Ray, the stress levels there need to be about 3000% lower.

It's been something fun - and utterly non-geeky - that I've really enjoyed. Time for some new directions there.

Lady Washington

Karen spotted this article about the Lady Washington, a "local" tall ship that featured as the Interceptor in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. We saw it at the Tall Ships festival last year in Seattle, and I've been enthralled with it for some time.

sailing

Not much to really say about work today. A lot of hurry-up-and-wait sort of things which eventually sort of left me lurking about not really doing anything relevant most of the day. I did manage to wrangle a last minute code fix in this evening, which was sort of nice - a race condition that Vas spotted immediately that's been lurking for ages and ages. Only recently did it start to expose itself in running code.

Went sailing this evening - a race out in the Sound with the CYC. I think we might have done reasonably well tonight, but it was hard to tell because I was focused on not falling in more than anything else. The swells were really impressive tonight (3' to 4') which rolled and yawed the boat around quite a bit, making flying the spinnaker a real pain in the ass. That and the boat behind us was screwing with us causing us to duck around to try and keep cover on them. The spinnaker collapsed several more times than I was ready for, or happy with. Managed to get a rope burn some where in amongst all that as well - the winds were tricky as well, so we had some heavy pressure on the sails tonight on top of everything else.

It may have been an even more unfortunate night for our captains, who seemed to be having a bit of fight to begin with that escelated with the general stresses of the race. The worst was probably the crew of the Marionette, who all got to watch their mast break in half and tumble into the sea, completely screwing them for the race. We were behind them, and as we came up on them we made sure they were OK and didn't need help. They were stunned (from the scene - not damage), but otherwise OK, so we kept on with the race.

insomnia

insomnia sucks

I don't know what to think...

about the fact that a recent Washington Post article on how to recover from the latest Windows virus is making both top headline news and seems immenently reasonable.

I saw somewhere earlier tonight posing that perhaps this would encourage folks to migrate to Linux, but I can't imagine that it would really push all that much. I do hope, however, that IT managers, CIO's, and information dirers get a fucking clue in regards to having all their eggs in one very well known buggy basket. I'll actually advocate for Microsoft code in a lot of places and for a lot of uses, but not as a sole infrastructure architecture ideal.

Course, I'm still sort of pissed off from the "remaking an active direry domain" debacle and how much pain that caused that. The integration down into the desktop user profiles seems to be there without any corresponding significant benefit that I can tell. Why? To lock people in is my only explanation.

XP

There's an interesting article in the latest Wired about XP programming. It's a somewhat balanced, but mostly favorable, review of the practice and sort of a high level overview of it. It'll be interesting to see what /. makes of it when it becomes available online (Aug 22nd).

KLA BIRTHDAY!!!

Happy Birthday KLA! - now forever entombed into the Internet archives...

great, just great...

We're in the middle of rebuilding our windows infrastructure, and a new worm is out scouring to knock it all back down again.

Actually, the rebuild is looking good. We have a few DNS freakishness pieces yet to resolve, but we managed to recover almost everyone's user profiles. Turns out that as long as you haven't moved the Win 2K machines into a new domain, the old user profile can be copied to a local profile. Then you can do the magic to place the machine into the new domain, log in the user, and then log in as a domain administrator to finish the user profile copy routing back again.

It's 3pm, and I think we've got everyone here covered. We had a few "plan B" individuals (manually copying stuff around), but mostly it was pretty smooth.

Another day, another domain

I've spent the majority of the day pounding a saturday keyboard in a machine room, fiddling with the finer aspects of what I'm now considering "Microsoft's Biggest Flaw" - that the SID from an active direry is supremely locked into the details of a user's desktop environment, and that with it's loss - so goes the details of that user profile.

Unless, of course, you're some kind of freaking mutant that can spin up the knowledge of RegEdit and tweak the details of those registry maintained files.

Loose a domain, and you loose all the user profiles. There's plenty that can be manually copied, but plenty more that can't. User preferences of all sorts get out of whack. The worst part is the damn stuff is still right there, just unknown and therefore unavailable. Google has rendered up some possibilities for recovering them, but the "prefered" method only appears to work in some cases, and the "hack" method requires more knowledge of the detail than I have.

Tomorrow (or later this morning), I intend to sleep late and long. I've got some personal project bits that were put off for the day that I'll jump on for the late morning and afternoon, and in the evening there's a feast. Nathan and Leah have recently returned from Napa Valley and it's cullinary delights with fresh ideas and a whim to make them real. I fully intend to eat and drink a merryness tomorrow.

So the later part of the evening was actually spent as a bed for my cats and reading a book: Westmark, by Lloyd Alexander. As a kid, I was enthralled by his children's books, which I learned much later in life were retellings of welsh folklore. In some respect, I owe to him the name of this domain: Rhonabwy, because I fully expect it was those books (coupled with other events about that age) that permanently instilled an idea about folklore, history, and the Middle Ages. To say he had an effect on my life would be a bit of an understatement.

So it was neat to read through a book of his that I hadn't ever read before (I keep a copy of his Prydain series to this day, periodically giving it away and getting a new set). There's a second in the series, which I hope to read later this week.

But for now - it's late, and I'm way too warm from having two cats lounge upon me for the better part of the evening. Time for bed.

Kapow! It's dead.

If you heard a crying scream from Seattle this afternoon, it was the dying breath of our Active Direry domain. Dead. As in "never gunna be raised again" dead. A single domain controller in mixed mode with no replication. All the eggs in one basket. Mirrored drives. One drive fails. Mirror doesn't work as expected - failed. Backups - useless.

Yep, we're fucked.

Spent most of this afternoon and evening alternately installing a new server and domain and blowing the shit out of things in Halo. It was a reasonable way of coping I think. So now we have a new Windows 2003 Server, a new domain, our Netapp upgraded in firmware and attached to the new domain, and a pile of desktops to update and move into the new domain.

Know what? It's this last part that sucks the absolute most. Everyone's loosing their user profiles, and I've just learned exactly HOW much stuff is intimately tied into those user profiles. It's a freakin' pain in the ass, and I haven't yet found a way to cleanly migrate all these folks to a new domain. Fortunately, we've only go 25 desktops to do - but still, that's a big hit.

Tomorrow we're back it, researching any way possible to migrate these machines WITHOUT loosing all the damned preferences on them. That and adding a couple of new Windows 2003 servers and replicating the new domain so that this will NOT happen again. And verifying the backups. And verifying that the mirrored drives are actually WORKING this time.

Now some folks have been complaining about loosing just a few hours to installing Windows XP. I'm here to tell you - this sucks a whole lot more.

Coding and the Internet

It's becoming clear (maybe a tad late - sorry for the lame-headed-ness here) that programming resources have expanded way, way beyond the original boundaries of user group meetings and OReilly books. For a while, you could find the periodic 'vanity' website devoted to a language, but they tended to congregate and consolidate pretty quickly, which led to things like the mighty and amazing CPAN, or Python's Vaults of Parnassus.

Now we've expanded into blogs (read: really easy to create websites and publishing systems), and instead of consolidating, they've simply (and I think more appropriately) clustered. Combine that publishing mechanism with the classic USENET groups (if they're not completely encumbered with noise) or a good discussion list, and you've got something really interesting. I can't even imagine programming these days without access to the resources that other programmers make available on the Internet. That would feel so incredibly restrictive.

EFFBOT

I was reading the latest from BBum and he mentioned Fredrik Lundh's website and blog - effbot. In just glancing around there, I thought "Whoa! Look at all the articles and detail he has on Python!". His blog, or what sort of is a blog, is full of details and examples of Python tidbits. If you're into Python, and don't know about this site - well, then I think you should. He's got some really incredible information there.

REI

Tonight was the long planned trip to REI. I was planning on getting a new pair of shoes and getting a pair of my chaco's resoled. I also had a dividend check to go ahead and spend...

So REI didn't disappoint. In the end, I spent 5 times my dividend... Almost all of that really being on a dry suit. They aren't cheap things, but if I'm going to sail a dinghy in Lake Washington in the winter, well - I'll want it for when (yes when, not if) I capsize the boat. We found one on clearance and the price looked pretty good, so we went for it.

While we were checking out, we ran into Paul Shannon - I guy I worked with a couple of years ago. He was there with his son Leo, getting various miscellaneous stuff in addition to a bike. Turns out that Phil Evans is now working with Paul at a biotech place, which was cool to hear. Paul's a sharp guy.

Omni*

OmniWeb 4.5 has been released, along with a new look for the OmniGroup's Web Site. It's a free upgrade for the OmniWeb 4.x users, so I've got it and have been working it a little.

Looks nice - renders fast. Lots of options appear to be available in the preferences, although I just hit my usual "abuse" sites to see how it looked for my everyday stuff.

It, like Safari, appears to have some quirks with the way Bugzilla responds to pages. I haven't investigated enough to determine if that's some freakishness of Bugzilla or a browser problem. I guess it wouldn't surprise me to find out either.

clear skies

The rain has cleared away, and it's clear sunny skies again. I'm sure Gus is happier with that - I think they're out hiking and camping somewhere north of Seattle about now. It was a nice walk in to work today. Reading other folk's blogs and such, I'm reminded how nice it is to be able to walk into work. For too long, it was commute - even in Columbia. When I first moved to Seattle, I lived on the east side and didn't really have a choice about commuting to get to work - so the bus came across Lake Washington each day. Now I can walk - and I do.

Alerts

Jeremy notes that Google has announced a new "Alert Service". Then he points out that Yahoo has had an Alerts service "for ages". The funny thing is to me - I never knew that Yahoo had that service. Shoot - I don't know half of what Yahoo has in there, because it's all buried deep under the covers and not exactly easy to find.

wet pavement

It's been months since the smell of wet pavement permeated the neighborhood - but tonight it's raining. A good solid soaker, on and off since about 3pm this afternoon. Actually, I don't know what all happened in between 3 and 8 PM because I spent most of that time driving to and from Oak Harbor to pick up Karen from her workshop.

But the smell is great - everything was getting pretty bone dry around here - and you can already see the grass greening right up with the water.

Oak Harbor again

This evening I'm on the road back up to Oak Harbor again - to pick up my sweetie from her workshop and bring her back to Seattle. It'll be nice to have her home again.

It was a bummer that she missed getting to go out to dinner with Gus, Kirsten, and their friends Mike and Chris. Although I think dinner was disappointing for them (Thai Kitchen in Queen Anne was really poor last night), we had a good time. After dinner, we went to the Cinerama and took in Pirates of the Caribbean (yeah, second time seeing it). I rather expect that Johnny Depp was drunk (or something else) through that whole movie - watching it a second time, he just didn't quite look right to me with the acting. It's hard to tell if that was all stylized, but it sort of looked like it, er, wasn't.

Anyway, it'll be nice to have Karen back home again. I suspect the drive up there won't be so thrilling given it's timing (I'm supposed to pick her up around 5:30 or 6pm - which means driving in some rush-hour-ish traffic through Seattle when I head out of here).

Dinner with Gus

Gus is in town, spending a week unplugged and visiting the lovely pacific northwest. I don't think he has snowboarding in mind this time, but you never know. (last time he swung through here was winter...)

So he called up this morning, and we're set to have some dinner together. They're swinging by my house, which has encouraged a sudden flurry of doing all that stuff that I should have done over the weekend - cleaning, mowing, etc. Karen leaves town for a class, and I turn hermit - funny, eh?

home again home again, lickety split

I got to work somewhat later than I expected today. Not outrageously late, but it wasn't exactly early. All morning I was just dragging. Yeah, even remembered to eat breakfast today, had my coffee - the usual and some. But nothin' doing, I was just hangin there. So the big plan today was scripting - we've got a new system coming online and it's needs (to me) some nice visual informational record. So a little Perl, a little RRD, and a little rsync+ssh to piece it all together and get the information displayed in a central location.

I figured I could do that from my couch as easily as I could from my office chair - and the couch is infinitely more comfortable. With that, I've headed home and am online again, scripting away and fiddling with rrd graphs to make them look "purty". A fellow by the name of Dave Plonka wrote RRGrapher which makes the turn around time on a trial incredibly short - not to mention allows you to mix and match RRD files to create whatever graphs you happen to be interested in. If you're using RRD, I recommend you check it out. Shoot- for that matter, every time I get back to the RRD Site, I see more and more people using it and embedding it into their front ends for visualization. Nice stuff!

Cnet

CNET is reporting, along with half the rest of the tech world, that Novell is purchasing Ximian.

Sometimes they do decent stories, but when they publish tripe like 'battle of the blogs' I go back to thinking that yes: they really are a modern journalism outlet. Maciej was also dissing them for the very same article, I see a few seconds later.

Evolution in action, commentary on the web

UK (That's University of Kentucky) appears to be using Genetic Algorithms to good effect...

In other weblog interesting-ness, Eric Albert pointed out a Tim OReilly bit that I missed talking about talking - well, more specifically, using different forms of communications (specifically statistics in this case) to illustrate what's 'important' and talk about it using a different way to think than just plain ole English. Sort of a bounce off the Ruby talk at OSCON and Babel-17.

Seems like Tim is being prolific in his writing over the past week or so too - commenting on Open Source and the mainframe legacy (that a lot of folks are somewhat clueless about in all honesty), the problems with common productivity apps, and some commentary on our government.

Actually, Danny OBrien has a good article relating back to the Dashboard demonstration at OSCON. I'm sort of amused that he bashes the Erik Horvitz research in the midst of it - "too clever-clever". If you're curious, there's apparently a pretty decent article on getting Dashboard running for yourself under Linux.

lessons?

Every now and then you think you generally have some lesson learned. Then an example comes along and clearly illustrates there were permutations that you hadn't taken into account.

Today... for me... it was "fire is hot".

Got some ground beef from Safeway and fired up that cool new grill I got. After beautifully searing the hamburgers I'd created, I reached up to close the lid. Ended up that I wasn't paying close enough attention because the back of the knuckles on my right hand brushed the shell of the grill while I was reaching.

BING: Lesson:

the grill is hot.

Damn. Now I've got a small blister forming on my right hand. Could be worse, but I hate relearning those lessons. Fortunately, I also remember the lesson of the Aloe plant, which is about to loose a portion of it's foliage as tribute to my increased awareness of heat.

Port Townsend

A picture from tidepooling last weekend on the beaches just north of Port Townsend, WA

I wish I could have captured something that better displayed the texture to the air itself as it moved by. The fog was really incredible.

crescent moon on the horizon

I'm in an odd frame of mind this evening. Have the windows open, and the neighbors are having quite the bash next door. It's been a while since I've been anywhere near a fairly large and active party. Sort of odd.

I took a very long walk today to try and clear my head a bit, but I'm afraid it's just as cloudy as it was previously. The only thing that seems to have really impinged itself onto my reality is the crescent moon hanging from the sky. It's a large moon with a haze scattering the light from around it. You can see some of the dark of the moon by earthlight. It's a stunning sight tonight, low on the horizon. And it reminds me very much of crescents in heraldry tonight. The crescent of islam, the crescent of the old soviet union, the crescent found on older heraldry that just isn't well known these days.

I spent most of the morning and quite a bit of last night working on some projects at home that have been consuming a fair bit of time. Frankly, more than I expected or intended. I'm not really sure what to make of it at this point, as several of the "quick little things" have become more detailed and entrenched than I ever expected.

To keep things even more up in the air, Karen's out of town this weekend, leaving me feeling a little at wits end just from that. It was tempting to just blow off the local scene and spend the weekend with her up in Oak Harbor, but there was a lot to get done at home and I've spent so much time away from here lately.

porting to MacOS X

It's nice to see technotes like this one (porting command line unix apps to MacOS X) at Apple. Aside from being handy in my world of day-to-day admin work, it's nice to see them focus some amount of effort on the historically unix crowd.

CJ Cherryh fan?

You might need to be a fan of Sci-Fi writer CJ Cherryh to understand this reference. The Washington Post has an article today that reminded me of HellBurner.

Blue Angels

So the Blue Angels have been practicing recently in Seattle for the upcoming SeaFair. Yesterday we heard them roaring all over downtown, and you could periodically catch a glimpse of one of them in that insane rocket-ship turn of theirs, screeching across the sky.

But when I went home, I got a real surprise. Queen Anne is about 400 feet above the core of downtown, and as I was walking down the street, the whole flock of those things came roaring across Queen Anne in a tight turn. The seemed like they were only a few hundred feet above me - they were so crisp and large... and loud. Something else watching those guys - it's something else. Quite a change from the stories I heard of my grandfather - who flew in the Army Air Corp doing the same kind of thing (formation flying) before there was an "Air Force", or jets.

Oak Harbor, again

Drove back up to Oak Harbor, WA again last night to take Karen to her workshop. I was there all last week, racing in the area known as Penn Cove, south of Oak Harbor and north of Coupeville.

Karen's class has another 12 months or so to go - she's taking a course from the City and Guilds of London system - the only one in the United States. I had no idea when we moved to Seattle a few years ago that this corner of the US happened to be a small mecca for textile artists. But it is... so Karen's involved in this 18 month course at Gail Harker Creative Studio's - that sole output of the London guild system that remains intact and functioning today.