Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/01/29/damn-it-is-cold-again/
It got cold again. I seem to only post when it gets cold. Gives me something to ramble about, I suppose.
Ah, so, my laptop is getting older and older. The mini keyboard I hacked in to replace the old internal keyboard has now failed. Just before that though, I invested in a desk. Yayoi gets her own desk, ya see? Well she liked the first one I picked out so much, so I went and bought another to go with it. Where she had liked the broad, open spaces of now-cluttered desktop, I opted for a compact footprint that reaches for the skies. It’s designed to hold a nice computer system.
Well, so what good is a desk designed to hold a nice computer system without a nice computer system to hold!? I went over to MicroCenter and spent a whole bunch of money on parts. I already had a hard drive, you see, and a sexy video card, and a mouse, keyboard, lotsa stuff. So, I bought a case, a motherboard, a CPU, and half a gigabyte of DDR RAM.
Dennis volunteered a DVD drive and a CD burner, and with all these parts and a fair bit of patience, and a lot of weird random black majic and mojo tweaking to get Windows XP to accept its new environment, I’ve now got a nice workstation in my home.
The system is nice. 2.66Mhz Intel Pentium 4, 800 Mhz bus, to 400Mhz DDR RAM, weighing in at half a gigabyte, which is excessive, unless you’re trying to do something with Windows XP, as I am, in which case, it is just right. ASUS Motherboard has such bells and whistles as on-board RAID, gigabit ethernet, an AGP slot for the graphics card, and a WiFi expansion slot. The case is really nice, with low-decibel fans, and rubber bushings for the hard drive mounts, all to reduce noise. I can not hear the computer, especially with the apartment’s heat, water heater, washer, dryer, or dish washer running, or the space heater, which we have out here because it is so damned cold!
Eh, I lost my train of thought. As if I had one. Let’s play SimCity 4! Now I’ve the first computer I have where this game doesn’t suck through a straw.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/09/fearless-failure/
In case you haven’t already received some e-mail from your favorite nerds about it, it is noteworthy that if you visit Google, enter the phrase “miserable failure” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” you’ll be treated to the official biography of our featured American President.
Well, I felt it my patriotic duty help elevate the status of our Fearless Leader by posting this. Huzzah!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/02/spam-count-mail-config/
Since Monday, October 27:
Total Number Folder
----- ------ ------
746632 233 .IN.tuna/
40458402 2303 .spam/
66014448 8323 /dev/null
1144201 104 /home/djh/Mailbox
24251285 1358 /home/djh/Maildir/
51940 15 IN/tuna
2470117 245 spam
----- ------
135137025 12583
Yup, 8,000 messages delivered directly to the trash upon arrival, and another 2,000 detained as likely spam. 1,400 messages deemed legitimate and routed to my mailbox. A lot of those are boring stuff like cron output and legitimate commercial e-mailings and news notifications and whatnot. I don’t actually have folks writing me 2,000 messages every few weeks.
You can also see a shift from mbox to Maildir. I’ve found that Thunderbird isn’t a bad e-mail client for offline, but Courier IMAP requires Maildir, so Maildir I use.
So, just in case this ends up in someone’s search, I’ll share the Thunderbird-Maildir portion of my .muttrc:
# Courier-imapd compatability
# Where does mutt look for subfolders?
set folder=$HOME/Maildir/
# Subfolders begin with '.' -- default value excludes these
set mask="^."
# Where do we store our ingoing / outgoing messages?
send-hook . "set record=$HOME/Maildir/.archive-`date +%Y-%m`/"
save-hook . =.archive-`date +%Y-%m`/
# This is compatible with Phoenix "Drafts" folder
set postponed=$HOME/Maildir/.Drafts
# Mailboxes
mailboxes ! =.IN.tuna =.spam
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/25/worth-a-chuckle/
From an item in The Register, on Dell’s efforts to off-shore tech-support calls to India:
Customers had complained of “thick foreign accents” and “scripted” exchanges – although this proved to be a winning combination for Arnold Schwarzenegger in his successful bid to become California’s gropenführer last month.
EETS NOT UH HARDAWUH ERA!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/14/frankensteins-laptop/
I’ve spent a little too much time hacking on my laptop lately. And by hacking, I mean hardware, and by hardware hacking, I mean an iron file, wire cutters, trimming off chunks of plastic, and of course carpet tape, electrical tape and duct tape, all in an effort to install an internal keyboard.
You see a good while back, the keyboad controller in my laptop started flaking out. So, I removed the internal keyboard and have been using external devices. One external device is a compact keyboard that fits very well in the space the old internal keyboard used to occupy, so I’d pack that along with the laptop whenever I wanted to go portable. But now I’d like to roam about the house with wireless, without having to drag a seperate keyboard around.
So, I liberated the mini keyboard from its plastic case and plopped it in the hole in my laptop, which it fits pretty well except it has a little printed circuit board connected to it by a couple of ribbon cables … and I really couldn’t fit that IN the laptop anywhere. Well, it sort of crammed underneath the keyboard fairly well. Also, the plastic from the laptop case chewed into the function keys, so, I trimmed back the laptop case somewhat and filed the plastic edges of the keyboard down a bit, but I still couldn’t get the thing in there with the circuit board tucked underneath. Too springy. Hrmmm.
So I puzzled and pondered and hit on snaking the ribbon cables underneath the LCD hinge and mounting the circuit board on top of the computer. Ugly, sure, but it worked! I wrapped the circuit board in a trimmed plastic baggie, and used electrical tape to mount it on top. Mmmm, not quite — the electrical tape, while black, like the laptop, is just a little too weak to keep the thing on. So, today I upgraded to good old-fashioned silver duct tape, reinforced with carpet tape to fasten the back of the circuit board to the surface. And after much dicking around, I was able to trim the three foot cord down to about four inches, that comes out of the back of the LCD and snakes around the corner and plugs in to the PS/2 port.
Much more portable, so now I can wander off to the living room and sit back in the recliner and type, as I’m doing now.
If only I were doing something useful with my little Frankenstein’s monster CPU buddy.
/d
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/11/contingencies/
Exactly two months of unemployment left.
If I’m still collecting unemployment December 10, I’m going to start chasing the local restaurants around for a job. December may not be best time for restaurants, though I could be wrong, but there should also be some New Years / Holiday turn-over to help me slip in to the sector.
A long, strange trip indeed.
Meanwhile, dev.toldme.com now has a CVS repository, and a feed search interface. So, it is coming along, but still has no recommendations, and lots of things I don’t like and want to change around, and lots of clean-up, and some serious work to do on performance and scalability.
I need to share some pictures here. If you’d like to hasten this at all, nag me via e-mail.
G’nite!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/11/amazoncom-feedback/
Your web site is becoming a useability nightmare, which is discouraging given that this has traditionally one of your core strengths.
I have a gift certificate. I try to buy something with it. I order a used item, I go through all this stuff, and it says NO YOU CAN’T BUY A USED ITEM WITH A GIFT CERTIFICATE. Why not? Hasn’t someone given you $10 to send to a third party?
Okay, so a few days later I want to see your price on color sidekick. You don’t have them. Pity. Ah, but I could afford a heavily-discounted hiptop carrier! Okay, let’s put that in.
And it says “your gift certificate wont cover it” which is interesting because the item is $8 and the GC is $10. How much IS shipping? It won’t tell me HOW MUCH my order costs, just that it needs a credit card, and submitting my credit card is the ONLY navigational option.
Okay … well, let’s do that, and there are items in my cart from WAY BACK, like the used item I tried to purchase the other day. The only option is to confirm my thirty dollar order. Where do I say no? There is what LOOKS LIKE a navigation bar on the top of the screen, but it doesn’t do anything, not even clicking on “Amazon.com” to start over.
So, I go in to my web browser and TYPE Amazon.com to get to the point where I can clear out my shopping cart to just the item I want, proceed to check-out, and you STILL want $3 shipping for a little piece of neoprene. After all this hassle? FORGET IT! I could stuff that thing in a padded envelope and smack an 80 cents stamp on it and send it USPS, but you can’t, because you’re designed to extort money out of your previously-loyal customers.
Please fix your user experience.
Thanks,
-danny
I try to be very laid-back about most things, but I guess I take customer service really personal now, huh? And it is all the more frustrating to be thwarted by Amazon.com because for a long time they distinguished themselves by being pretty clueful and user-friendly.
4 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/09/linux-will-dull-the-pain/
I decided to really really really clean out my e-mail inbox, purging anything I can. So I’m running across little ideas for things I should try and right about, and interesting links, and there is this wonderful post archived on Keith’s web site with this beautiful reflection from Anne:
From what I have observed from my male friends, though, this is exactly the climate required to learn Linux. Without a full and happy lovelife or distraction of soft lips and a reason to kiss them, there is enough room to grasp the intricacies and nuances of such a fine operating system.
It has already begun to happen. As I walk down the street I am not thinking of emptiness, kising, nathan or any other previous SO’s, I am thinking of penguins, rm -rf / and lilo.
I am already convinced that linux will dull the pain better than heroin.
I am reminded that in my youth, during times of family strife, it was suggested that one of the reasons I spent so much time playing with my computer was because it helped isolate me from the unpleasantries swirling around me. Being a geek was an anti-social reflex; I’ve always been such a nice boy, but for a long time I vented my Id on computer networks.
Since the layoffs and that wonderful little trip all over the world, I sense that frustration and a lot of the negative emotional energy is just not useful, so I tend to let it go. Every time I find things that upset me, I figure out a way to explain to myself why I shouldn’t be upset. Legitimate grievances with The Way Things Are are left as a big karmic to-do wall against which to I can formulate frustration in to little bits of positive action.
Or something. We’ll see how it goes.
You know, where computers used to be my escape from a troubling family situation, now it serves as a creative outlet for my surplus of time when I have the energy to interact and refine ideas, but I don’t know of an appropriate audience, so I work out in this little room here, and maybe if someone passes by and notices something and can provide feedback, that is all well and wonderful. But, I’m not waiting for them, because talking to the wall here is cathartic enough.
For the time being.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/05/02/all-the-latest-k-rad-3-day-memezz/
Here’s an interesting thought that compares modern bloggers to the warez couriers of the BBS age. Thanks to my feed aggregator, I can 3-day warez this meme to you. I’m not in it for the ratios though.
I have been watching the blog phenomenon from a bit of a distance – I’ve been doing online journalling forever, in Internet years. Now all the kids have these crazy terms like “backtracks” and “blogrolls” and there was even some embedded reporter who started a blog and blog-ified everything to be hip. For example, he was no longer posting humble photos on web pages, he was photoblogging! Wooh! (Gag me!)
So, I’ve purposely avoided overly-bloggifying my humble web log. (A “blog” is a contraction of “web log” which is a term I adopted myself.) You won’t find “backtracks” here, which is where a blog site lists URLs that link to a particular post in some sort of point-whoring contest. You wont find “feedback forums” with floating heads of friends and bored strangers dissecting the minutea of my life, and I try to avoid the sort of post which basically amounts to “Woah, this link is the coolest thing ever I’ve seen in the past five minutes of web browsing!” (“Holy poop my ass is numb someone please come over and beat me until I get off the computer and interact with some real people!”)
But if someone wants to riff off one of my posts, I now have these little bylines to each post’s anchor. Citations are great, in my opinion, if they act as footnotes to original thoughts or otherwise provide a jumping-off point for discussion on a topic. If a reader has something to add, they can drop me a line.
Back to the aforementioned interesting thought which inspired this little rant, I find myself asking what my role in the, ahem, blogsphere is, in the context of the “blogger as courier” metaphor. And I guess what I am is a shareware author tinkering about as a hobbyist, trying to create the occasional interesting bit of software, or in this case, memes, that I can share with the community. Since I’m a low-budget hobbyist who is more interested in creation than self-promotion, I eschew the whole “warez trader” mentality of trying to be the first to post links out.
Of course, I’m not even focusing on memes so much, just trying to flex my muscles, because I enjoy the activity, and I have the vague idea that I could develop the skill into something marketable. I’m just playing, trying to come up with the occasional interesting thought. In the meme-coder realm of the blogsphere, I’m one of the older guys who isn’t into the hip, new scene, but instead puttering away on low-key “demo” releases.
I should try and break into the publishing biz sometime.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/03/21/dispatch-from-the-dawn-of-the-twenty-first-century/
I just finished watching a movie, so I decide to flip channels and check on the War. The satellite television is tuned to BBC America, and is in the middle of a live audio report from a British reporter who is reporting from the front lines as Marines take in Iraqi Prisoners of War.
The War in question is being broadcast live around the world. It is being waged so far with an eye towards avoiding not only allied casualties, but civilian casualties. At the same time cities around the world are dealing with protesters, who oppose the war because they see it as the precedent of imperialism on the part of the contemporary empire.
The empire regards itself as a fairly benevolent, often isolationist Republic that is being forced into acting in this war on the grounds that since it is the world’s great empire, it is threatened by barbarians who pose a magnified threat because in our time, there are weapons of such fantastic destruction and cruelty that would be used without warning.
I think a good reason to have children, is so that if I live long enough to meet them, my grandchildren ought to blow me away on a consistent basis.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/03/08/marc-andreessen-lacks-time-ego-need/
Marc Andreeson answers two questions in a recent interview:
Q Do you blog?
A No. I have a day job. I don’t have the time or ego need.
Q FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo “God’s machine.” What’s your equivalent?
A I have four Replay machines. Each has 360 hours of storage and they are plugged into my home LAN (local area network). I have 1,400 hours of video storage. What’s on it? All kinds of stuff, like the last 80 episodes of Charlie Rose.
So, he does not have the time or ego to put his thoughts on the web in a “blog” like what I’m doing here, but he does have the time to store 1,400 hours of television, including eighty hours of Charlie Rose, and the ego need to brag about it. This incredible visionary can at least offer that “four Replays” is his “equivalent” of “the TiVo”.
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/02/23/incredible-products-that-change-the-world/
Microsoft maintains that its growth prospects are strong. The company will be coming out with “incredible products that change the world,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer John Connors said at an analysts conference last month in New York.
Still, Connors acknowledged the question that has been hounding Microsoft lately — whether “those products translate into the kind of profitability we’ve had from some of the very incredible products we’ve done historically.”
seattlepi.com
Maturing Microsoft looks to new markets to keep growing
The reason I’m not a successful businessman is that I would be hard-pressed to promise my investors that I would be coming out with “incredible products that change the world” with a straight face. I’d then start laughing my ass off when I had to explain that even though I was about to release “incredible products that change the world” that they may not make us much money as the other incredible products I have released before.
The fact that I haven’t encountered a Microsoft product that I’d call “incredible” or that I expected “would change the world” probably doesn’t help. Historically, Microsoft hasn’t relied on releasing incredible products that would change the world, they take an existing product that looks set to make a lot of money, perhaps because it will change the world, and appropriate one of their own to make money off of.
You’d think the CFO would at least be honest. If I were an investor, I’d get excited by news that “We’ve found some excellent software products in the Open Source world that we can re-implement and bundle with Windows.” Even that, though, sounds like another Microsoft strategy employed to manipulate the market: vaporware.
Microsoft has a history of observing a new software product emerge from somewhere else that they can’t compete with, so they squelch it by announcing that they’re already developing an alternative that will destroy their competitor. They don’t actually have to ship anything, they just have to scare away the competing investors and potential customers who would be reluctant to purchase the new software before they knew what the more-likely-to-win-marketshare alternative would be. The promise of “incredible products that change the world” sounds like some sort of blanket statement to cover whatever the next innovation in the high-tech industry will be. “I can’t tell you what the next big thing will be, but you can rest assurred that we will 0WN it.”
Which they have to say with a straight face, because they’ve run out of new products to force down our throats.
It seems like Google has a solid track-record of creating new services that rule. I wonder if the reason they haven’t gone public yet is because they’d prefer not to be bought out by Microsoft. I’m curious to see what they will do with blogging.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/02/21/microsoft-and-commoditization-of-software/
Microsoft sells OFFICE (the suite) while people may only need a small part of Word or a bit of Access. Microsoft sells WINDOWS (the platform) but a small org might just need a website, or a fileserver. It no longer fits Microsoft’s business model to have many individual offerings and to innovate with new application software. Unfortunately, this is exactly where free software excels and is making inroads. One-size-fits-all, one-app-is-all-you-need, one-api-and-damn-the-torpedoes has turned out to be an imperfect strategy for the long haul.
David Stutz
_Advice to Microsoft regarding commodity software_
Amen to that, brother!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/02/19/why-python-sucks/
Say, I want to know the semantics of a built-in function. In Perl, I type in perldoc -f <function-name>.
In Python, I have to go searching on the web, and the best thing I can come up with is a third-party HOWTO, which amounts to a tutorial on how the function works, rather than a quick, fifteen-second reference on calling semantics.
Dang.
57 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/02/14/operas-sense-of-humor/
Microsoft are at it again, feeding Opera bogus stylesheets so their MSN.com site will come out broken. I shall link you here, to a good technical explanation of what is going on and, perhaps more interesting, Opera’s novel response.
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