Sunny Breaks

What else are saturday night for except posting nerdy bits?
Has anyone one else noticed how google gmail have just decided to bring on the Technological Singularity all by themselves? Sometime today the size-o-meter on my mail storage thing started increasing and it hasn’t stopped. It’s up to 2050 megabytes and still going.

Basically, it’s a downgrade – me going to the laptop. Half as much RAM, 6gig hard disk instead of 40 and probably hardest of all, back to 800×600 screen resolution from 1156by864 or whatever it was. All a bit cramped and I apologise to others who’ve been looking at SBreaks in 800by600 because it’s that bit too wide. I’ll fix that.

I didn’t realise how sensible the old desktop was physically set up. I’ve been getting crampy soreness in my neck, hands and wrists because of all the bad posture. I used to use laptops and sat like this all the time — hunched on the couch over the coffee table or cross-leged on the bed. It was a bad idea to get the small ‘laptop’ sized mouse; it’s uncomfortable to use and why the hell did I get one with blinken lights in? I have to throw a shirt over it at night so it don’t disturb sleep.

There’s been several to many-a-time when I’ve mentally bemoaned the deficiencies of Linux as an OS, mainly to do with plugins / multimedia support, and hardware compatibility. But over the last four years of using it I’ve found a lot of programs I can’t hardly stand to be without. The file structure’s logical, it’s got user prefs up the ying-yang and it’s very money-cheap.

There are good things about Apple’s OS X, like the way iTunes has the radio bit built in, and the way it starts up iPhoto as soon as I plug the camera in — also I’ve been able to watch the .mov multimedia add-ons that come with a couple of music CDs I have; Amon Tobin’s Out from out where, and Skalpel’s eponymous release.
But it cost 60 bucks to get the disks, which is 50 more than Linux with heaps less functionality and only a little more smoothness (given that it’s a bulky OS on an older computer — slow slow slow!).

I can’t say I’m much of a Safari fan. Of all the applications where familiarity counts for everything, it’s web browsers. Safari won’t open Gmail, doesn’t give those tool-tip indicators of where I’d be off to when hovering over a link. Most times I don’t want to visit a link, I just want to see where it goes.

The partial solution is Fink, which will run Linux apps on OS X. I want GIMP among others, although it’s having to download a shitload of stuff to get it run, and I’m already pressed for space.
I intend to get an up-to-date apple laptop when I get some moola together.

Okay, I was holidaying at The Horse’s Mouth during this month. Entries can be found in July and August.

Dear Valued Reader, please note that the place where to be emailin’ me at has changed and I’m giving the gmail thing a go. Thanks to Quanta for offering it, I probably wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. At some poiint just about everyone has a whinge about spam and for the most part I’ve thought what’s the big deal? I’d get one, maybe two a day. Then I made that change of server a couple of months back and felt the full brunt of meaningless, confusing folly that is 98% of what was sent me. The thing that gets me is that while the subject line offers some kind of product, the content is a bunch of random words with no link to what they’re pushing. Anyway, I sure did start missing the filters that the other (otherwise flakey) webhost had. And maybe this new mail arrangement will fix that. Would it be a reasonable trade for everyone to use the same email system (gmail) if they could defeat spam completely? No way Hosé.

Google could be as benevolent as god itself and I still wouldn’t like the idea that so much of the storage and indexing of public (and now private) information is in their hands. It’s not really the immediate and much-talked about privacy issue that concerns me because let’s not be naive kids, The Man was already using gigantic computers to funnel all your electronic based communications through anyway. Echelon? The name isn’t important, it’s way bigger than US + UK based and I’m sure they’re interested in much more than repeated use of words like ‘bomb’ and ‘aeroplane’.

I think it’s interesting how much attention Google pay to the task of coming off as goodie-goodies. Why?
One comment in a thread re: their IPO stuck in my mind — if they don’t [want to] be evil, then why do the IPO at all? Greed, fear, evil. From what I’ve read they were already making plenty of clams out of their existing set up, certainly enough to fund whatever R&D they were interested in. Besides, the pot of gold isn’t gold, it’s ideas — and they’ve already got the biggest drawcard for getting more ideas = the highest concentration of pointy-heads on the planet. Money will only lure a certain amount of nerds, most want to work with other top-notch nerds.

The community edition of mandrake’s latest offering was on the May LinuxFormat mag. DVD. I got it and plunged headlong into another irreversible clean install.
It’s like stumbling into the house, blurry eyed and seeing that someone’s rearranged all the furniture, smashed up your favourite chair, ate all the porridge except for one bowl which was smashed against the far wall. With all bits of oats and dried milk draining down the wallpaper.
And then jerked off on you bed and they’re still in the bed, snoring…

I think it’s the last time i do things that way. It’s like the longer there is between a new install, the more I get things just the way I want them, and the more I forget of how to fiddle things into order.
But i did want to enlarge the partition it was all on because of the ever-growing music collection.

Back in the old days there were people who wouldn’t touch the .0 release of a distro because there wes bound to be a lot of bugs in it — better to wait for .1 they’d say. The way mandrake do things (grabbing the newest of everything and shoving it into the next distro) you’d think there wouldn’t be a difference between a ‘new’ and a ‘revision’. But there was because once I’d installed, there was over 700Mb of updates (bugfixes, security updates and general updates) waiting to be d/loaded — which is a lot through a dial up.

- the evolution mail client is broken. Lucky it’s not my choice for mail. – whatever new version of XMMS doesn’t have the hotkey ‘S’ to turn on/off the shuffle feature. Damn. – Konqueror as a web browser is getting better (Kde 3.2, and this is the one that has the Apple Safari offerings incorporated) but for me at least still wasn’t rendering pages in a consistent way. Also, there needs to be some way of seperating some of the settings out from the file manager / web browser components.

- For the first tew days XMMS was broken, so I used Kde’s Noatun, which still sucks. It’s ugly and when the CPU got busy it’d mess with the continuity of a song.

- As a seperate issue, I gave Opera 7.50b a spin but it’s still really half-baked and had this stupid way of spreading the google text-ad window right across the browser frame.

— Neat things are: in Konqueror there’s this thing that’ll render images in a folder as an HTML page complete with thumbnails, which can be easily saved and shoved on the web. – a screen saver I hadn’t seen before that will randomly show images from a file of jor choosing.

- connectiong to the Penguin Liberacion Frente via urpmi is a must for any ‘drake enthusiast.

I hadn’t bought any computer magazines for ages but saw this copy of Wired with google plastered all over it the other week. I got a 4000 word assignment coming up next month

and it’s got to be on some communications company and maybe google would be interesting.
I’m no business economics guru but the vibe i was getting from the article about how Initial Public Offerings go was that it sounded like a huge pain in the arse to be part of.

It’s funny — a while back I was thinking there’s almost no chance that I’ll ever be absurdly wealthy because I’m reluctant to get into a) fucking people over or b) fucking the environment over — and essentially all major enterprises do that in some form. This of course only leaves c) winning tattslotto … and I never buy a ticket.

But I was trying to pin down how it is that Google, as an enterprise is exploiting people or planet, and essentially they’re not. They treat their staff well — or at least this is the impression that pervades. Apparently their hardware philosphy is many and cheap boxes, so maybe they’d have to look into a friendly way to recycle or dismantle the machines when their time is up. But this is way-small fry.

So why is it that this one company can be so successful outside of the mainstream way of doing things? What do they have?
Answer = Good ideas. Some in the form of code – their PageRank system. The only weakness with ideas being your capital is that someone might possibly come up with a better idea.

I was wondering why they’d have to have an IPO at all. If it was me I’d be inclined to take the money and split — who’d want to go to all those stock holder meetings? Anyway, I read this today. Very interesting. Of course people will still throw money at them like crazy. I thought the little bit – a clause they wrote in, “don’t be evil” apt to what I’d been thinking.

Google adsense is a really amazing kind of development too when you think about it. Probably worth a whole post itself, but essentially, if communists were going to have advertisements then they’d probably look like those little text ads.
I mean – all things that are screwed up about advertising are removed – the way it denigrates people, and presents unrealistic representations of people, makes you want things you don’t need and screams in your face. You could say it takes all the art of it out too, but I can live with that.

There’s not even the option to be briefly wordy-clever. The text ads are just stating the ‘facts’. Maybe then the lying is done by the actual website that the ad. links to though.

Well I must say it’s nice to be setting this site up on an apache server — a L.A.M.P. set up no less. This is going to be a nerdy entry, you’re warned.
Yup, Linux, Apache, MySql and Php. The first year of spouting on the internet was on a unix server, but it was Zeus – and poorly maintained. And then, most recently – a microsoft server which has a lot of disadvantages. The other day I was able to set up an .htaccess file and put an end to hotlinking of images. Goodo!
Eventhough it’s only been a week or two that I’ve been using this new server, why spoil a fine record of opining on things way before time. I’m impressed with the unchangingness of the SmartArtist serving behaviour — it’s always there so far which is actually pretty good in these procrastination-filled times because I’m clicking through several times a day.

[Addendum to entry; 15/12/04. I’m not vindictive, but I think it necessary to add to this entry if people are going to google SmartArtist to here. My end personal experience with SmartArtist was that, while thier servers were reliable, they failed miserably in the customer service dept and were not true to their word.]

Stretched out on a RAQ, it all is, with a little picture

Was a little miffed at Nukulus, because I did my database backup just like I was supposed to before the move and then when it got to business here, I find out from the lads down at R&D that backing up with Mozilla doesn’t work, which is preposterous really when you think about it.
So I’m slowly dragging my way through hand cut n’ pasting 400 entries back into shape. I’ve done this kind of thing before — there’s actually this unhealthy little bit of my head that likes doing it. But it’s heaps worse this time because some MySql quirk means that everytime I did “this” or contracted a word, it stuck dreaded \‘s next to the inverted commas.

On the upside I had a little fiddle with pivot 1.10 and was rather impressed. Truth be told, Pivot was another of those things that didn’t cope very well with the MS server. But it set up smoothly and I tried out its conversion tool, switching over the other 400 entries from movable type to Pivot without any problems at all. So even though the archives are still split between two CMSes, at least I’m finally rid of all those movable type hyperlinks. It converted comments, tracbacks no probs.

And nucleus eXtreme Edition looks interesting. Just tried it out on the internal server and even though I don’t like the slickness and bland ‘skins’, some of the plugins it has configured are neat. If it’s not extreme or monster these days it’s nothing, am I right? I think I dislike the misappropriation of the word ‘skin’ re: the oter surfaces of computer programs even more than I find the word ‘blog’ reminds me of sitting in the toilet.

For the last 12 months I’ve been using the internet service provider TPG and it’s coming up to when I fork over for another 12 months — I pay that way because it\‘s easier since I don’t have a credit card. And it’s still easily the most economical plan around.
I envisioned myself writing a little note to stick in with the money order that was gushing in nature about how they’d done such a good job at doing what they do, considering there’s so many other gigantic scuzzballs in the same bidness who can’t get it right. And also I was going to say that a good definition of success in implementing a service/technology was that the user (ME) tends to forget that they’re even using it — it’s just part of the whole …um thing. Anyone who knows me properly will know that I have serious hang-ups with 1) receiving praise, 2) giving out praise. Yet I was going to.

But then, the service in the last couple of days has been really dodgey, and dang that funny old recency effect, I just don’t want to write that little note now, despite the other 360 odd days being fine.

It only takes a couple of episodes where I’m sitting here staring into the void at 39 bits a second before I start to think about lugging all this nothing-coloured, plastic-shelled junk out to the footpath and then writing another kind of little note:
“Digital Age,       [notice I didn’t say ‘dear’]
come and get me when you’ve got those problems sorted out.
YS”

and I’d go back to writing ridiculous poetry and taking to pre-appointed public venues to read it out to people who I’ve been assured will clap quietly, quite politely — no matter how bad it is.

It’s just like 4000 years ago when sandals were just getting off the ground. They’d break down — straps would rip, soles would fall off at the most inconvenient of times. When was there a convenient time for your shoes to disitnegrate? Certainly not when you’ve got a mob of angry Essenes chasing you.
Only the intrepid wore sandals into mission-critical situations.

As a matter of fact, the whole Gnostic sect got started due to same basic sentiment mentioned above. With that wavery “I’m so close to losing it” sound in his voice, Simon proclaimed loudly to his posse, while pointing to small island yonder, “Right. We’re going over there. No. shoes. [swivels arm back to point at general population] YOU don\‘t come there with shoes.”
Then the Gnostics split.

Yet, here in the 21st century we’ve pretty much got the shoe construction thing licked and it’s rare that I think about all the trial and error that went into keeping my shoes together.

I’ve had this digital camera for 4 or something months now and still haven’t done a review of it. There’s still a lot of things I still haven’t tried with it too.

Here is my first effort as a motion pikkachure guy. I’d never bothered to try the motion-shot function at all, and even here I hadn’t either. It was an accident the dial was set to that function.
So it’s just of a big picture I saw in an op-shop, probably from some italian house — and only a couple of seconds but is 2Mb. I don’t know what the deal is there. I might have to read the manual.

I installed this a bit over a week ago and backed up everything then switched over from Slack. Mandrake’s been going very nicely. A while back I was put off by reading a review that said it wasn’t much different to 9.1. That’s probably true, but there’s very few gliches in it. Maybe all the distroes could try this, just holding back for a bit and fixing all the probs before introducing a whole bunch of feature that inevitably bring new bugs.

All the things that I wanted to try to get working – like camera connectivity and streaming of quicktime .MOVs when they show up — have worked – hooray. Although, I now realise that watching streamy things will always be an excercise of patience while still on dial-up.
For some reason i always have hassles setting up Apache in ‘drake. Probably because I over-complicate things from the start and mess with permissions.
It took a lot of fiddling but finally got it running, and MySql too – double-hooray.
The only minus is the boot-up takes a bit longer, which has always been the case when compared to Slack. But that’s nothing really.

comments:
jon
the spork
date: 2003-11-25-13-30
I haven’t even looked at linux for a while. Been quite happy with this ‘ere OSX thing =). Redhad is making some sort of changes atm so I’ll pobably be busy nxt year switching some stuff across.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-11-25-17-07
I imagine I’d be satisfied with OSX too. :^)

Lots of stuff happening on the distros front, what with Novell buying SuSE and this n’ that. My first thought was that it doesn’t sit well with my conspiracy theory that SuSE was the EU’s distribution. But it was a good move for Novell and my bet is that they give RedHat a whipping.
I know it could be argued that Sun has some decent proprietary software – with SunOne and whatever, but this purchase is the move they should’ve made ages ago – instead of piss-farting around with just the Ximian desktop.

It appears that there’s not so much reason to get snarky at RedHat as I thought – there’s a little backdoor so the average user can still use it via Fedora which is like a solid but ‘in testing’ version of RH.

And Debian has constructed an installer, which does hardware detection etc. which is a great idea. I’ll have to give that a go.
___________
Quote from Futurama, “My old life wasn’t as glamourous as my web page made it look”.

what the last comments bit is doing.
It’s a bug in Pivot. When I delete a comment (thanks comment spammer) them last comments bit throws back to ages ago.

Some small web related things:

The Open Diectory Project blogs section has started moving again. For what seems like years it hasn’t been updated due to not having an editor. I was thinking it was becoming way too big to ever be properly maintained. Oddly, they re-catalogued this site as, ‘sox, yak – spouting’. Whatever. At least it doesn’t say I live at in the beach in on anglesea. Can you believe it? I made a grammatical boo-boo when filling out the description bit.

Another RSS feed searching mechanism hit the scene, called Bloogz, which hails from Italy. Webby mechanisms are a dime a dozen, so if one doesn’t work then there’s not much chance you’re going to return to use it. And that’s why I’ve switched from using Feedster to Bloogz as a weblog search-thing. Feedster would hang more often than not.

Ah rats – I can’t find it now. I came across one of those quizzes on a weblog last week. Benny Boy would’ve liked it, if he was ever on the internet anymore. It was, “What completely random blogger are you?”. I didn’t do it for obvious reasons.
Essentially, from there the only place to go is, “which member of the human species are you?” and it asks you to punch in your tax file number, social security and driver’s license details. Then it spits back a picture of you from high school (the kind that They keep on record just in case you ever get mixed up in shoplifting, again).

<%image(20040113-tug.jpg|246|118|toot! toot!)%>
I took this foto of the tugboat today, and recolourised it just for the heck of it why not? One day I want to be a tugboat captain. And i really like the phrase, “Toot! Toot!” — if I was going to rename the weblog that’s what it’d be. It applies to so many things – tugboats, trains … tugboats. It’s upbeat and tooting enthusiasm.

I’m really liking the camera. I saw this bird flying toward me — a pacific gull or something – big thing. I was able to whip the camera out of my pocket, turn it on and then take a couple of shots of the bird – which turned out okay. The point is, the start up time is way better than the old one, and there’s no real delay between clicking and the image being recorded.

But the connectivity to Linux situation isn’t so hot. I’m tiring of it and have quietly started wanting a 12 inch, G4 iBook laptop. All I ask for is a bit of connectivity and more multimedia support, woe, woe woe.

I changed what kind of wiki I’m using because the last one caught on fire.
TipiWiki – is neat because it makes valid xhtml. The codey bit it uses to get bold, italic etc. seem a bit quirky but that’s probably just me who hasn’t used wiki much.

Golly, it almost doesn’t seem right to be switching to daylight savings on sunday. I think satan has taken over my bit-that-I-type-stuff-into because I keep making typos — much more than normal. Maybe it’s just a bug. I may have to report it to Pivot Central Command, dubbing it the Satan-Bug.

comments:
Jon
the spork
date: 2003-10-25-14-20
Hmm yeah there aren’t too many wiki’s out there that produce wiki content in xml and then render it out as xhtml with xslt. <— the fact that that line made sense to me worries me.

I too can’t wait to get hold of a new camera. I was planning on visiting melvourne today to get it, but they are out of stock, and frankly I’m sick of dealing with them. There seems to be this correlational law that they who have the lowest prices will also be the rudest arseholes in the business — when it comes to device sellers. When a fella rings up your business on daytime STD rates, he don’t like to be sent straight to commercial radio Hold.
So what price decent service? I’m still on a budget, but I think I’d pay an extra $30 to not deal with Computer World in Richmond.

Up to my nose in browsers. I grabbed Mozilla 1.5 and installed it, but it’s not picking up the anti-aliasing which is a bit of a shame. Firebird 0.7 is the same but I knew it would be — just nice to have a go of. Switching back to Opera (7.21 Final for Linux) for a main browser. It always manages to pick up the a-a-ing.

Having a little squiz at nucleus weblog system. I’ve got no intention of switiching, but I’ve had this MySQL database as part of this webspace, sitting here for the last 6 months and I haven’t done anything with it. Nucleus has a fairly large range of plugins.

I ditched blogrolling because it was sub-par. Maybe it’s not it’s fault or maybe it is for relying on weblogs.com – either way only half of weblogs on my list that were updating were being displayed as updated — and particularly all those here and generally based anywhere a long way from where the weblogs.com servers are. I don’t really know how it works. But a link-list isn’t that hard to edit myself.

Have used Mozilla 1.4 for a week and a half and it’s pretty good. Bits where I like Opera better: managing (ie. adding + moving around) bookmarks, jumping to a google search, Opera can be set to never open another window (just open in tabs). Bits where I like Mozilla better: pages just seem to ‘look’ a bit better (maybe Moz makes better use of available typefaces), it’s just a touch less crashy and more flexible with html.

I’ve been using the Mozilla mail program too, and that’s fully alright. Am a bit surprised more hasn’t been done with the Sidebar bit of Moz — I thought I could open AIM (and therefore the Linux mexican non-unionised equivalent, Gaim) in it. So there’s not that much that the sidebar is useful for.
Any speed difference between Moz and Opera is unoticable. If I open up someone’s weblog comments pop-upp in Moz, and there’s a link there I want to click on, I don’t get the option to open it in another tab, just another window.
I used to be 100% dead against the way browsers (like IE and Moz) would open new windows. It doesn’t bother me as much anymore but I still don’t think it’s the best way to do things.

Anyway… that football thing is on… “Hooray for football!”… “You’re all Winners!” .. and so one and so forth.

I noticed two of the compter mags here have stuck different versions of Linux that can run from a CD on thier covers currently. Aust. Personal Comp. has LindowsCD 4 and aust. PC World has Knoppix 3.2. The idea is that the whole thing runs from the CD. You just whack it in the drive, boot up and the operating system runs the same way it would if it was on the hard disk, but it’s not — so once the CD is taken out again, it’s back to Windows (or whatever is normal) liike nothing ever happened.
A good thing if you’re left slightly dizzy by the thought of accidentally obliterating everything you’ve ever created or collected onto you computer.

Files created while running either of the CD OSes can be saved onto the hard disk in a small folder in Windows. Supposedly Lindows should have more drivers for bits of hardware in your machine, but in almost all versions of Linux this is much, much less of a problem these days. Any machine bought or put together with bits made in the last 4-5 years should be fine with either of the two CD OSes.

Knoppix is a dedicated ‘system on a CD’ project, while the Lindows CD is kind of like a promo-tool with the intention of impressing you enough to buy the full system. A promo-tool, but very much a value-added one — like the chemist show-bag.
There’s something like 800 programs in Knoppix, LindowCD has a smattering of the essentials with the idea being that you cough up some cash to join the ‘click n’ run’ warehouse.

If I was going to get one of these I’d go for Knoppix.

comments:
Quanta
url: please don’t eat me!
date: 2003-09-21-19-25
APC has a free complete version of Linux a few months ago, I forget what type it was, but it was interesting to toy with the idea of actually using a non-ms OS. Luckily I stopped myself before actually going through with the install.

;)

(p.s I think it might have been Debian-something.)

Hehe – I couldn’t resist that – it was the title of a spam. The spam situation here has improved markedly lately. The TPG isp put some filters on and now I just get one update link email from them each 3 days. I click through to their postmaster setup and take a quick look to see if there’s any real ones.

I’ve been watching how blogrolling works on please don’t eat me! and myrr purrs and am giving it a go. I think it could save me some time by me not clicking through to weblogs that haven’t been updated.

At last! Those three.com.au people have made a mobile phone that can be held at arm’s length and yelled at, instead of wedged against the ear. The fact that it has a small tv screen is an unasked for bonus. They let a good opportunity go begging by not tying in Original series style communicators in the ad. Some pointy ears at least!

comments:
Myrr
url: myrr purrs
date: 2003-09-20-10-40
about the blogrolling thing – it’s ok up to a point, but sometimes people update but the roll doesn’t tell you, so in the end you have to click through everyone anyway … I have thought about going back to doing it the old way but I’m too lazy.

yak sox
date: 2003-09-20-17-28
Yeah I was wondering about that – i thought maybe I hadn’t configured it right.
Ah well, worth giving a try for a little while.