July 2002

I've yet to see The West Wink, though I understand it's a hee-larious half-hour sitcom about the President of a large corporation, played by Charlie Sheen. I heard that Chad Lowe was upset that Charlie was making more money, so he's leaving the show. Charlie's step-son Emelio Estevezian was unavailabe to play the role of the wacky neighbor, so I thought, who better than Bill Clinton! He's got a lot of acting experience, most on news shows and press conferences, but he did a bunch of movies with an ape named Bongo back in the 80's...

Today I experienced a bad Mozilla bug. In the past on the Mac OS X build I've had times where my sidebars disappear, but a quit and relaunch always seems to bring them back, irriting, but not devastating. So today I launched Mozilla 1.1a under Win2k and went to my Bookmarks menu, only to find there were no bookmarks. Or I should say, the bookmarks I had were all gone. This was very irritating. Luckily I had a backup of it less than two weeks old. Another reminder that those pesky 'backups' you always hear about are a good idea...

Bugzilla has the following classifications:

• FIXED
• INVALID
• WONTFIX
• LATER
• NOTABUG
• DUPLICATE
• WORKSFORME
• INCOMPLETE

I think I'll start responding to people with WONTFIX and NOTABUG everyday at work and see how things progress. As it is now, LATER is my most common response, right behind FIXED.

Delivery Boy still needs some cleaning up and complete docs, but Delivery Boy 0.9 is now up...

Well, as the old saying goes "get a second opinion." The female went to an orthopedic doctor, who told her she actually did break her foot. This is after the ER doctors told her it was a 'bad sprain' um, yeah... thanks Doc!

Today I had to step away from my workstation, but didn't feel like locking it up, but since I was ssh'd into one of our Very Important Remote Servers (VIRS for short) I decided to take precautions. I dug a burmese tiger pit in my cubicle and rigged up a robotic arm holding pepper spray controlled by X-10 devices, so that if anyone walked by an attemped to look at my terminal, they would be sprayed with the pepper spray, and if they got too close and thought about any sort of rm -rf action, the robotic arm would knock them into the burmese tiger pit. We take security very seriously around here.

Do you have a help desk/tech support person where you work? Are you that person? We proudly present: The life cycle of the help desk/tech support person...

1. I love to help people!
2. What can I do for you!
3. Um, see the little picture of a printer? Just click on it.
4. Remember? I showed you how to do that last week?
5. Yeah, I'll get to it later today...
6. I showed them once, why can't they remember!? Are these people idiots!?
7. Damn lusers! Do their brains even function?
8. RTFM! RTFM!

This can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years, but eventually it will happen.

I've mentioned my To Do list and putting it smack dab in-my-face via my browser, now I can have it show up in any RSS reader as well. It outputs HTML, OPML, and RSS. I should really implement a true template system, clean up all the code, and release it... Hmmm, one of these days...

Let's see:
10.2 - 10.1.5 = 0.0.5
0.0.5 = $129
If the math seems off to you, let them know...

Oh, that Hyatt is funny...

PBase.com is a cool idea. Lots of interesting photos to be found...

Today's fun involved the Text::Template perl module. Every day of fun should involve at least one perl module. Don't you think?

Well, I went from having no boss to having two bosses. One is on the east coast, one is down south, I'm in the midwest... Things should be interesting...

Whew, a fun couple of days... On Monday I get home from work to be greeted by Maddy who says "Mom got hurt" and I then ask where Mom is... Seems Mom is on the couch with her foot elevated and covered with ice. There was an incident involving playing 'freeze tag' with the kids, falling over, and crawling to the house. So after examining it, and cosulting with a friend we decide a trip to the ER might be a good idea. So we load up the van, and head to the friend's house, who offered to watch the kids while the female and I went to the ER. We get about 95% of the way to the friend's house when BLAM! We blow a tire on the van. So after changing the tire we're back on track... Luckily it was just a nasty sprain, no breakage, but she's on crutches for a week. Dang...

So I stay home Tuesday to care for the f, and get new tires for the van. See, I can't get to work anyway since we're riding on the spare and the transmission in my car went bye-bye a week ago. So anyway, I take the kids with me to get new tires. A process that ended up taking roughly 4 hours. Which is roughly 3.5 hours longer than it should take... Anyway, we got new tires and the van rides fine now. Oh, and I find out my car is finally fixed. Of course we can't go get it because the female can't currently drive, crutches and all that... Note: I may need some corporate sponsorship to manage the repair payments of both vehicles in one week.

Can I complain about all of this? Not really, a bad day at home, consisting of 4+ hours to get new tires, is still better than a good day at work. If that tells you anything...

The name seems to be Blog, and it seems to have neat stuff...

Sorry, but so far I have no commentary (witty or otherwise) on the MacWorld Expo announcements... look elsewhere for that kind of thing, it shouldn't be hard to find...

For your friends still using Windows: Open SSH on Windows and FileZilla - The open source FTP client... I wish FileZilla, or some other nice, graphical, open-source ftp client was available for Mac OS X... I've yet to find one...

Of course for Mac OS X geeks check out Marc Liyanage's Software section...

And for the Fink users out there, we have FinkCommander, a GUI for Fink.

Weblog-related: Memento is a lightweight knowledge management system based on the principles of memetics, the theory of memes. Naturally, to facilitate distribution of the Memento meme itself, this project is entirely open source.

Has anyone used stumbleupon?

I heard from Mike Chubbuck (of Silent Scream fame) last week, he says he's got lots of neat stuff to tell me... Stay tuned!

I tried to explain RCS to someone today. They said it sounded great and asked how much it costs. I said it was free. They asked if it was any good. I said yes, and that it had been in use for probably 10 or 15 years. They wondered how it could be free if was so good when you often pay so much for other (crappy) software. At this point I tried to explain the concept of open-source software. I did explain that using RCS is not the easiest thing in the world. (Usually powerful tools are not extremely easy to use.) I demonstrated how to check in a file. At this point the person became slightly agitated, and walked away making a comment about having to be 'checked in' somewhere if they had to do that everytime they modified a file...

Actually RCS is 20 years old according to the rcsintro man page...

I finally got around to getting MySQL and perl talking to each other properly on my OS X box, what with the proper modules and so on... It's something I should have done last year, ah well... Let the fun begin...

blogChalking is a neat idea. Of course syndic8 had their meta-data thingy for location long ago... I wish the syndic8 way of doing things caught on, as it would probably open up more possibilities in the future... oh well... here it goes (with appropriate tweaks): Google! DayPop! Etc! This is my blogchalk: English, Perl, United States, Wisconsin, Oconomowoc, Fowler Park!

It's Big Gulp Day! Do you know why?

I started to draw up plans for the MacKiosk, I'm a little worried about portability and the size/weight aspects of it. Ah, no one said designing and building a kiosk would be easy...

In A few valid points, they ask if developers really do develop for Windows/IE only. I can say that yes, they do. The lazy developers, and the ones that just don't care about the web. I've worked with a company where the head cheese said that they should develop everything for Windows/IE since that is what most people used. I pointed out that he was doing work for a publishing company with many Macs, and many users who did not use IE. He didn't get it. One of his employess wrote code, tested it on Windows/IE and declared it good to go. I then would test it under Netscape, Mozilla, etc. on the Mac, and on Windows, and find the problems. Argh... It's lazy people who don't care about the web who are ruining it for the rest of us...

Oh, as for me, I use Mozilla 98% of the time nowadays. I happen to like it very much. I like it better than IE without a doubt. One of the IS guys at work was amazed at the control Mozilla gave him when he first started using it. I'm sure most other IE users would feel the same.

I've been working on my MacKiosk thing. It's an Apple Workgroup Server 80 that will be used for slide shows of digital photos, and possibly as a CD player (sorry, no MP3's on this box) as well. I think I've got the software figured out, and I might build some sort of case for it. I hope to have it ready to go in the next two weeks. More details to come... Want more? try Finding New Uses For Old Macs, or if you have a business, there's other uses...

Whew, well, the last week has been chaotic. We spent July 4th at Naga-Waukee Park on Nagawicka Lake, and I spent most of that time on a boat, getting terribly sunburned, attempting to waterski, and being flung off of an innertube at high speeds. Yes, we have some photos... We had visitors from Michigan there, the female's half-brother and half-sister, and all of their kids. I've never met them, and the female hasn't seen them in more than 10 years. It was a nice reunion thing. It's a shame we can't see them more often.

Anyway, as stated, I burned myself beyond any sunburn I can remember getting. My arms are still sore. I did put on sunscreen, but I think once I hit the water and got dragged behind the boat, it wore off... My advice to you is: wear sunscreen, and re-apply it frequently. Especially if you sit in an office 95% of the summer...

After we beat the heck out of ourselves on the lake, we headed out to Hartford for the fireworks. I looked for the dork but had no luck. I attempted to take photos of the fireworks, as did Emma...

We also saw a (small) parade near our house Saturday. I got photos of that too of course...

And if that wasn't enough, I took the kids to Bender Beach yesterday. I kept expecting a robot to sneak up behind me and say "Bite my shiny metal ass!" but it didn't happen...

P.S. Open source software is good...

We watched (part of) The Iron Giant last night. It was cool. The funny thing is, I had heard it was good (I know Kottke is a fan) and every time we went to the place where you rent movies (that I won't name) I'd suggest to Emma that we get it. She always said no, thinking I was trying to trick her or something. Ha! She loved it...

I just wanted to warn you that I will be discussing Robot Monster soon...

Speaking of Emma, as proud as I am for her loving Star Wars (Maddy loves it too) I was almost over the top of the proudness scale when we were driving last week and she started to sing along with a Common Rider song. If you know me, and you know about Common Rider, you probably understand...

Do you see a section on the side of this page titled 'imagery'? It used to just be random little images I'd put there. Now it's a random photo from the RasterGallery! on each reload. Some 30 odd lines of perl is involved. Perhaps I'll throw it in src later...

Now it's time for a special message: Happy Birthday Mom!

Well, when I came into the office today it seems my Windows box had died again. It last died in May 2001, so next time someone tells you that Windows PC's are cheaper than Macs, remind them how reliable they are. Oh, in related news, the Apple Workgroup Server 80 (which is more than 7 years old) is doing fine running Mac OS 8.1 now, and Moto is now the kids' game machine at home.

Mark hits home run today in advising people to not open new browser windows, but should have gone a step further, noting how this functionality is built into almost every modern day browser... (I've mentioned this before - how many times?)

I had forgotten what an incredible show Invader Zim was, I remember hearing a while back that it had been cancelled, but was quite happy to see on Friday night. (I'm still not sure if it's officially cancelled or returning...) Gir seems to have some good stuff... If you need some sound files look here... If you just want to search Google for Invader Zim, that's a good idea too...

We took the girls to see Lilo and Stitch Saturday. I was all set to not like it, since it's a Disney film, and I don't like Disney for various reasons... Anyway, it was pretty cool, I mean, if you're a kid and all... It's got aliens in it, so that helped quite a bit. Still, it's no Pixar masterpiece... (No link? Like I said, I don't care for Disney...)

More Gallery goodness...

June Updates