a blab by idle

I just downloaded the MacOS X beta of Skype. Let's see if this is as good as I've heard!

I'm always open for a call, if you're a Skype user (it's free!). Assuming I've got the client running, of course.

If you use iTunes on MacOS X, you gotta check out Synergy, a definite crazy cool iTunes widget that seems to be worth every centieuro of the €5 price.

And, yes, there's a Quicksilver plugin for it.

So let me get this straight: for over a decade, I've been searching for a great canonical list of C preprocessor defined macros, and all this time all I needed to do was run cpp -dM ?

*laugh* You learn something new every day… or even decade.

Get Firefox!

I think I've finally decided to upgrade to MT 3.x, so over the course of the next few weeks, watch for changes (and apologies in advance for any accidental downtimes).

I am hoping this will allow me to add more facile Atom/RSS support to the metablog as well.

I've already converted all the office Mac users over to this, and others have been IMing me from all over asking me "So, how are you having your iTunes song pop up in your status message?"

Ah, the joy of a great little piece of donationware: iChatStatus, by Infinity to the Power of Infinity.

Are you a Mac user? An iApps user? Then you should check this out. Don't worry that it only mentions working with OS X 10.2; it works just fine with 10.3.

And if you're not? Well, the new iBooks, announced today, are very tasty — and very cheap, too….

Usually I don't solicit on my blog. In fact, I'm not sure I ever have before.

But this is different.

Open source software is, for some, a totally new paradigm; for others, an irrepressible part of life. It defines an entirely new approach to the development of the tools that make these hunks of iron, plexiglass, lead, tin, silicon, and such actually useful. Software that enables people, because people define the software — not the other way around.

On November 9th, the first ever national print ad campaign for a piece of open source software will be unleashed. Firefox 1.0 will be released, and the announcement will be a full-page (or more!) ad in the New York Times, nationwide.

Open source is a community-driven effort. The intersection of open source and commercial media requires community-driven funding.

Please consider joining this historic campaign today.

My good friend Anthony's new portfolio just got linked dead top center on Gaper's Block, probably the rockingest Chicago-centric events-blog on the net! (He's got today's entry in the photolog section, Rearview.)

GO TONY!

Okay; an extra $100 for the 60GB HD I can understand. But $200, just for 16 bit color and usage of firmware that's already in the 4G iPods?

I was lusting after it. Now I seriously have to think about it.

But, it has been officially released, and will be available in just a week or two: the iPod Photo.

The flu is annoying. Truly annoying.

In other news, I'm finally making some decent progress on the new server. Upgraded to Fedora Core 3 release (heidelberg) from the DVD I made earlier this week (which also marks my first use of BitTorrent, which appears to have been written by a former employee of mine from EarthWeb days). daily babble 2.0 is now in development; MT 3.121 is running fine (though I'd like to get it working under mod_perl 2.0 and I still haven't gotten a successful test of the XML-RPC stuff, which is unnerving me since SOAP::Lite refuses to pass a 'make test' no matter what I do to it.

I did get a DVD player program running the other day; with the NVidia X.org drivers, it actually looks quite nice. Too bad I don't have anything hooked up to the sound output to see how that works, but there is a S/PDIF optical out, so in the future, there may be a possibility there. Still, I doubt I want my server to waste cycles on MPEG2 decoding, so this would be more for amusement value than anything else.

My god, Tiger — OS X 10.4 — has some cool features.

I mean, incredibly cool.

The tastiest thing I've seen so far: Dashboard.

Speaking of which, I'm in the Dashboard seminar right now, so I'll have to post more later….

There's been a bug found in MT-Blacklist 2.x that apparently can, at times, cause a second blog to accidentally be deleted if you delete one on purpose. Apparently it doesn't necessarily nuke it from the database, but it does hose it enough that even MT-Medic can't retrieve it.

I mention this just because of the gravity of this situation. Doubtless most of you know already, but, just in case….

MovableType 2.x/MT-Blacklist 1.x users are not effected by this.

There were snowflakes, beautiful large heavy snowflakes, coming down as I waited for the train this evening.

You can't help but smile with snowflakes like those.

–§–

In other news, daily babble 2.0 is definitely making progress. The metablog client has been running completely stable on the new server for weeks now; soon it will be time to test the server out there. From there, it's only a matter of confidence in the DSL link before I can cut over daily babble itself.

Hopefully, there will be some extra things coming online — both old and new — when I cut over to the new server. I'm really excited about the possibilities of what I can do. As is ever the case, sometimes it's just the inspiration that's a little muddled in the meanwhile.

And, of course, I stayed up waaaaay too late hacking on the templates. You think after this many years I'd learn something….

Okay. The web server encoding is utf8. The default MT character set is utf8. The database default character set is utf8. Now, the server and connection default charactersets are even utf8. And yet, though I can hand-insert kana into the database, and cleanly input and preview kana in a blog comment, any communication between MT 3.121 and MySQL 4.1.7 seems to mangle multibyte Unicode.

So close. And yet so far away.

くそ。

Well, between a quirk in the configure arguments allowed for MySQL 4.1.7 and a bad assumption made in MT 3.1, I found the place the bug in Unicode translation was creeping in. I even came up with a workaround, but it causes a cardinal sin for me: it requires modification of MT source code, something I absolutely loathe doing.

I'll be posting that to the MT dev list soon to ask if anyone else has had to do this. (Plenty of people using PHP5 have had to do this; I just didn't find any record of other MT3 users needing this hack.)

Oh, the trick itself? Just after the DBD::mysql handle is built in lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI/mysql.pm, you have to force a SET NAMES 'utf8' down the line. And, no, you can't override it anywhere in my.cnf; I tried seven ways to Sunday, and it just doesn't work.

If you're interested in the change in patch format, check out the extended part below.

Mad props go to Sergei Golubchik from MySQL AB (from this article) and Angie Ahl for her post last week to Web Server Talk.

Thanks to Mira for this little gem:

What do you want to do with your life?

(and, yes, I already made my list….)

Sometimes you see something beautiful, fluid and graceful, a nearly perfect capturing of a series of moments in time… you realize that this is the essence what you wish you could do, but all you can do is marvel at this brilliant execution and bow your head in tribute.

Check out Nowhere Under the Sky.

Thanks again, Mira.

BITTER is as BITTER does.

Part art, part science, part bloody stump.

Welcome back to the BITTER.

I've been having a problem with MT-Blacklist 2.x for a while now; it stopped saving my preferences.

After loads of fruitless and frustrated (and frustrating) Google and code searches, I finally found an oblique reference to the same problem with someone using Postgres — and a workaround.

It turns out that it's another bug in MT 3.1: in the mt_plugindata table, the plugindata_data column is of type mediumtext. However, there's no binary-to-text conversion performed on a Storable freeze/thaw of this data inside MT::PluginData, so any plugin using binary data has a data loss.

David had a replacement for MT::PluginData::data already written that worked like a charm for mysql as well. In effect, all it does is perform a simple pack/unpack to convert the data.

David Raynes: Thank you, dude. Seriously.

Sixapart: That's two codebase mods I've made to 3.121. Please don't let this continue! I really hope at least the Storable fix is present in the forthcoming release (3.13) that Jay announced regarding the resource drain bugs on comment firehosing.

Mira (responsible, it seems, for at least 30% of the nutritive content of this blog) has pointed out a visual gem from a blog entry two days ago about the fact that people will sign anything.

Right, so, apparently the dynamic address updater on fungus doesn't actually work correctly quite yet….

I think I need to fix that. Today. Even before I upgrade the BITTER.

Thanks to Crystal for getting us back on track in an IP sense.

You may have noticed that things look a little different. A little strange. Sidebars don't work quite as before. Fonts are smoother.

For a new year, it was time to roll out a new daily babble. Any comments that you have would be appreciated, both for things that used to work and things that you think could work (or look, or behave) better.

Welcome to 2005.

Welcome to 2.0.

I have enabled all the various comment moderation and braking systems endemic to the new version of Movable Type and MT-Blacklist, so hopefully the days of bursts of comment spam that I dutifully would then purge are over. I check my email quite often, so please don't be dissuaded from commenting because at times it will not appear immediately — rest assured I'll have approved it most likely within hours (or less).

I also hope to be leveraging some of the new extensibility of this version of Movable Type to add more features and goodies as time and inspiration allows.

I've been having a couple of problems with the DSL that feeds the new server lately, but I think that it's safer overall this way than having it on a server that's all the way across the country and is subject to more environmental variables than I even care to think about.

So, again, welcome to daily babble 2.0. I hope you enjoy the evolution.

It isn't as pretty as I would have preferred, but at least the daily babble zeitgeist is back. (I'll work on making it cooler later; I just wanted the functionality back for now.)

Enjoy!

Now this will be fantastic: a Mac Mini powering a Roku Soundbridge.

I can't wait to prototype this. Delicious.

Heck, once I get a place to live again, an array of Mac Minis, combined with wall-hung flat panels, will finally give me the ubiquity of computing I've always been looking for. Plus, using Xgrid, I can also have it as a background compute cluster distributed in my own home.

Oh, how sweet it could be.

Congrats to Aster on the evolutionary launch of her blog, guide.subetha.net!

Looking at it and some of the other key blogs I read (or would read, if I could bring myself to use the net recreationally anymore), I find that, even after my relaunch, I still have the most mundane, least attractive blog in my local blogsphere. Sigh. Some day I'll have to find a friend with graphic design skills to actually help me take daily babble into the post-1994 era of web design.

Tried to hit a livejournal site recently?

You can't. At least, not right now.

Not only is Internap going to have to do some serious fast talking — mind you, this from a company whose CEO was recently appoined by Bush to the National Infrastructure Advisory Council — but also the LiveJournal ops people are going to be in a world of finger-pointing hurt when the dust settles.

I don't like seeing people getting blackballed from the industry because of honest mistakes, but then, operations is all about having to never say you're sorry.

I started playing around with A2B just now. I've always been a fan of geographic linking, and have supported ICBM tags on my blog for years now; in addition to those, there are now also more-abstracted geotags. I found an interesting looking article on this topic (which happens to be from this week) on linuxjournal.com; if you're interested, it's a pretty good overview and intro.

I've added an A2B button on the sidebar just for grins; not sure if it'll last, but at least it keeps the exposure of geoblogging present. It also feeds into the concept of bridging the online and RL worlds, which is something I find myself needing to do more and more. Being here in the abstract just isn't cutting it for me anymore; though I love the net for making connections, there's a point past which they simply cannot go without RL interaction. That point, however, is far beyond the point where they should not go without RL interaction, and sadly I have blown past that point any number of times in the last two decades… arguably the last four years being the most present example thereof.

For what it's worth, I'll be adding geotags shortly.

It's a brave new world in search engine unity and spamfighting.

Welcome to nofollow.

I was alerted only yesterday to the existence of this, and it's perhaps a good idea, but it'd be hellishly difficult to execute even with much more media saturation and planning: a boycott for the inauguration day to protest by boycotting the spending of any personal monies, referred to in the vernacular as "Not One Damn Dime".

Is anyone out there (that is, in the readership of this blog) going to participate in this?

It would appear that MT's comments system now constitutes an open mail source that can be freely abused by spammers:

http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/forums/index.php?showtopic=461&st=0&p=2279&#entry2279

As much as I don't like to do this, I think I'm temporarily disabling comments. You may wish to consider doing the same until 3.15 and/or the patch is out.

Based on the what Jay said about an hour ago on the 6A Pronet list, it might not be too long before we can re-enable things.

When I used to volunteer for the Naperville EMA, those of us who worked command would get a lesson in how to do all sorts of really important but vaguely scary things, one of which was sounding the sirens in event of a tornado. There's a second button, next to the "constant siren wail" button, that was just labeled "warble". I asked when, if ever, the warble tone was used. I was given a simple answer: "That's only used in event of an air strike. God help us all if we ever have to hit that button." Then he paused and added, "Try not to hit that one by mistake."

Looks like someone in Connecticut pushed the wrong button.

Thanks to yukino for that little gem.

Got a surprise at work today: a copy of iWork for my Mac! It looks gorgeous, though Pages feels a little… spartan? Perhaps I've just gotten used to the mass overage of Word.

Oddly enough, I almost wanted to stay and write doc late into the night ;)

The next treat? With some R&D money we've scraped together, my boss and I are each getting a Mac mini. The P.O. has in theory gone out, so now it's just a matter of getting in the queue of people wanting the little beaut.

I'm definitely trying out some Xgrid action with all the Macs I can sneak the client onto on devnet….

I was just going to try to go along, minding my own business, ignoring the Monday blip this year until quite unexpectedly, I received perhaps the most witty, charming valentine I've ever seen in my life.

Check out Aster's keen find of Anti-Valentines.

You know, I should start a bar graph on the sidebar tracking percentages of content from various sources. Of course, my fear is that the only two visible bars will be Aster and Yukino.

So, has anyone else started playing with Growl for MacOS X yet? I finally installed it today and I'm already very much enjoying the notification consolidation of Smoke Stack, GrowlMail, and Synergy. Plus, the developer's API is what's most exciting for me — that I'll actually be able to build Growl support easily into my own application is just groovy! With perl, Java, and Cocoa/Objective-C support, how can you go wrong?

It's not as cool as Quicksilver — but, of course, even that has plugin support for Growl.

If anyone out there has been playing with it or has any experience, I'd like to hear about it!

Can I just say how utterly cool it is that the iPod auto-pauses when the headphone cable is pulled from the jack? The 1G definitely didn't do that and it's a very nice touch, both for the frustration of the accidental "oops, moved wrong, my headphones popped out, and now I'm missing the song" as well as the nice battery-saving implications if you've been known to doofishly not pause the iPod reliably when removing it after a walk.

David, our mole in the mountains of the west, has surfaced long enough to bring to my attention two pieces of very disturbing news about AOL's view on the privacy (or lack thereof) of instant messages: first a warning from Ben at Thrashing Through Cyberspace, and then analysis of AOL's waffling about it from boingboing.

Breaking news! As I was writing this post, he sent me a third article, this also from Cory at boingboing on AOL's scrambling to save face. Apparently, Cory thinks that they've done the right thing and should be commended. Do you all agree? Much as I am quick to villify AOL when given the chance, perhaps this is a moment where unclenching and relaxing is in order….

I love Apple. Anybody who knows me knows this. I carry my PowerBook with me almost everywhere. I have owned the first generation Newton, iPod, and iPod photo; I've owned maybe 8 or so different Macintoshes in my life, including curios such as the G4 Cube. I started back in 1982 with a lowly 48K Apple II+.

So when I hear of Apple screwing over and burning a loyal, faithful, and good personal and business customer — specifically, my friend and co-worker Neal — it really saddens me.

Don't get me wrong. They've made me downright mad before. When Steve killed the Newton not too long after I bought my MessagePad 2000, I cursed him loudly. When they unhired me (illegally, I might add) after hiring me to work at one of their retail stores, I was seething — though still not enough to bring legal action against them; how does one, after all, sue one's dream company?

But still, for almost 23 years now, I've been a zealot, a true believer, one of the insane fans who will travel to San Francisco or Boston just to go to MacWorld.

So to read of how they keep screwing him over is just plain demoralizing.

Come on, Apple. Get it together already, will ya? I've seen you work wonders and pull off last-minute miracles before. Pallets of iPods for Oprah on 48 hours notice. An Xserve G4 for me on 24 hours notice so I could pull the rug out from under Michael Dell in his own back yard.

So why can't you make good on a simple PowerBook G4 17"?

For a Subversion repository: bdb or fsfs?

I need to decide very soon on a very important one (well, important to my work, anyway), so any input would be appreciated.

From the "I get most of my content from two people, one of whom is Aster" department:

Check out the salvaged reviews for the ViewSonic TPCV1250S.

No, really. Look at them.

Aster has, once again, found a li'l beaut and has blogged it for all to see.

Prepare, all ye unworthy: the Unitarian Jihad hath commenced!

Just enabled SETI@home on my two home computers — morel and polaris — as well as my two main work computers — reiki and ichabod — each of which thinks it's a dual-processor box (and, in the case of the Macintosh, really is). Of course, I want to do real work on these machines sometimes, so all the setiathome processes spawn with -nice 19, and of course there's the issue of "battery? what battery?" on the laptop, but I'll monitor that as it goes.

Why did I suddenly do all of this? For reasons that I'm far too tired to blog now but will definitely mention soon.

Although I am two days behind the times, some of you still might not know that MT 3.16 has been released (though at this point, with their plethora of postings and news links, I don't know if there's much reason for me to repost the info anymore).

They have a good ProNet post on it too (even if it's been buffed by a marketing pass).

I'll be upgrading soon, of course.

Unlike Selva, I actually sometimes dig a good meme. So when she passed this on to me, I realized it was the perfect activation energy necessary to start blogging again.

Total Volume Of Music On My Computer

I have two "computers" of music: my local laptop, and the server in Arizona that I can infrequently pull from but is still used by the residents of the house there. iTunes on the laptop reports 1979 songs, 5.5 days worth, totaling a mere 10.83 GB of music, all of which is replicated on my darling iPod Photo. On the server, find /export/media/music -iname "*.mp3" -not -path '*.AppleDouble*' -printf "%k\n" | perl -nle '++$c;$i += $_; END{$i /= (1024*1024);print "$c: ${i}GB\n"}' shows me that there are 4578 songs using 26.3 GB on disk. There's a fair bit of cross-pollination between the two, but there are some things on the laptop that simply aren't found on the server (specifically, anything I acquired after June of 2004).

I have over 700 CDs in Arizona, many of which I hope to recover some day and rip to digital audio. I haven't purchased many in the last five years; fiscal reality has pressed upon me like a leaden weight. Most of that is all from my miscreant days in the 90s.

The Last CD I Bought

I bought several CDs from Mark Stanton Welch back in March after attending a seminar where he taught several evening sessions. He is an amazing musical teacher and tonal/music therapist (and, I maintain, healer), and his sessions are always universally loved by everyone who attends. Actually, I can't say enough good things about this guy; he's one of those priceless treasures of humanity, truly someone here in service for the good of all.

Most recently before that, I purchased a reissue of something I had been hunting for almost twenty years, something that cut my breath away and brought me to tears the second I finally saw it on the shelf at Borders on Michigan Avenue one blustery day this winter: Carlo Maria Giulini's seminal recording of Brahms' Fourth Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This work was a defining musical theme of my childhood — arguably my favorite classical work on the planet (though Brahms' most excellent Double Concerto has been contending nicely of late), and of the six or seven recordings of this I own (and more that I have been exposed to), this is still my absolute favorite, bar none.

Song Playing Right Now

"Love Beat", by the Art of Noise, originally from the "Moments In Love" single. Randomly presented from my "Prime Steak" iTunes smart playlist.

5 songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

Very difficult to isolate; how often do tastes, moods, moments change? And how do you isolate a mere five from that? I'll try to compose a "moving average" of recent times:

1. "No One Knows My Plan," by They Might Be Giants. The grinning of a man who might be mad, but who definitely has a plan about life, and with a latin beat that is infectious beyond belief. Plus, any song referencing Plato's Parable of the Cave scores huge points in my book. And, hey: it's TMBG.
2. "Halcyon and On and On," by Orbital. Perhaps cliché, but it's truly a classic grooving track that helps me find the center of my power when I need to actually focus in on something.
3. "Koladi-Ola," by Yello. A brash, energized, track that makes you want to just start moving.
4. "Fatherland," by Die Krupps. I first found this track through one of Joe's industrial mixes, and it's a song of loss, betrayal, and being unable to come home — and the anger that surrounds it.
5. "Addicted to Bass," by Puretone. I hear this, I think of my daughter, and I smile. A slightly sad smile, perhaps, as she's that which I miss most of Arizona— but definitely a smile.

Five already?! Darn, and I was going to put Frank Sinatra/Jimmy Buffett "Mack the Knife" in there, too….

3 people to whom I'm passing the baton

Difficult; all my friends seem to dislike memes such as this (at least, as far as I am aware; perhaps this will be a revealing exercise). So, whether or not they take up the charge: Aster, Zanon, and Sorcha.

From my Chicago writing buddy, Adams: the true hacker's keyboard.

I know I'm actually quite tempted. If only they had a bluetooth edition!

Due to a major network change at my Chicago network site, I'd completely lost all mail and web hosting capabilities for most of my domains. That has now been resolved with an actual hosting provider; mail and blog services are back up and running. I will be finishing migrations and updates in the days to come.

Thanks everyone for your patience!

(I've also taken the opportunity to upgrade MT to 3.17 and apply the utf8 dirify patch.)