And so it goes...

Net Neutrality

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:28:37 -0500

I'm watching this:
Real Audio Link
The first speaker after the chair was Representative Cliff Stearns. He goes on and on and is wrong, wrong, wrong. Guess who's paying his way in DC?
Here comes Fred Upton. Guess where his money comes from?
Here is Mike Ferguson His top donors?
His argument is that piracy, read bit-torrent traffic devastates the internet; and yet, check this out.
John Shimkus?
From what I hear so far, it's a three hour hearing, these shills for the telcos are full of it. They want content creators to pay for the privilege of residing on their networks. It's the same as saying that only Lamborghini's will be allowed to drive on surface streets. That's great if you can afford a Gallardo; unfortunately, that's going to make we mere mortals unable to play. This is how the ISP's want it. I think the chairman of the hearing has it right on the money that there are so many red herrings in this debate you could fill an aquarium.
Please write your representative and tell them to support network neutrality

Here is another place, saying it better than I can…

Reviving sick wrt54g v2

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:08:05 -0500

Another success for DD-WRT! I just revived my cousin's old v2. I had to flash it twice, once with the mini to get passed the usual Linksys crap, and then up to the full v23 with dd-wrt. Fun. Now what to do with it? I haven't quite decided yet. I've got an Airport Express that does pretty well on one side of the house; so I guess I'll put this one in the wire closet for the back yard. That is, unless I give my cousin back his now working router, even though he was going to throw his away. Oh well. I have a Buffalo router that needs the dd-wrt treatment in case I do the right thing.

Finally getting around to mt 4

Tue, 06 May 2008 03:43:21 -0500

So I've been playing around with Movable Type 4 again. It's a bit frustrating. I think my problems are with specifying the proper paths. The documentation is lacking, or I'm an idiot. Either way, I keep getting 500 errors whenever I try to publish anything other than the index pages. Scouring through the error logs, I can see that the wrong url is supplied despite my best efforts to figure out what and where mt wants to point. Once I figure it out, I'll put the rest of the pages up.

Up too late.

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 01:53:16 -0500

Even though I've found the chemical answer to my sleeplessness; sometimes the pills take a while to kick in. Anyway, if I'm standing on the front stoop doing my computing thing, I'll hear something crunching through the leaves. I was on my way outside tonight and got to see the source of the noise. I wasn't fast enough to get a picture while he was on the steps; but, I did get this:

Returning to Lilypond

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:27:53 -0500

After receiving a short note from Graham Percival regarding the known issue in the Lilypond GUI and Leopard, the latest release does play nice with TextMate. I have been able to start the tutorials and even create a little midi file. The reason I'm doing this is because GarageBand finally adds the ability to create custom ringtones for my iPhone. I can create the music in TextMate, use Lilypond to make a midi file, pull it into GarageBand and go nuts. Fun. I've almost got Christopher O'Riley's version of Bulletproof in there. I haven't played with Lilypond in some time and it's the learning curve is a little steep.
On another note, Tess has taken her first ballet class. Tammy asked her, "Don't you want to be a doctor?" "No, I'm going to be a ballet girl." So much for the fancy retirement community. I love her so…

Leopard vs Free Agent Pro

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:17:52 -0500

So it seems Seagate Promise and Apple need to get their folks together. Those who know my Mac loyalty will also know that I'm not completely blind to Apple's faults.
I'm used to having to wait for third parties to get their Mac software together; but, several of my Mac program are almost unuseable. Soundtrack Pro 2 freezes consistently, for example.
My latest problem is with the drivers for Promise SATA controllers and Seagate's Free Agent Pro external drives. So far, knock wood, the USB 2.0 side works reasonably well, but the eSATA side causes my Dual G4 to panic. The Sonnet cardbus card fails with the FAP too. What a pain!
I feel confident that these issues will be addressed; but, it seems I'll just have to wait. One would think that Apple would have tested multiple configurations of available external drives, what with the whole Time Machine business. I'll try to be patient.
Patience = dispair disguised as a virtue.

Hillary

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 12:44:27 -0500

Tam and I are in Aiken to see Hillary. I understand she is notoriously late; one more reason for me to like her. Though she probably would've gone nuts, I think we should've brought Tess. 12:42 There was a small rumble in the crowd. Nothing happening though. Tam and I are near the media folks.

Let's help Heather win!

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 22:47:32 -0500

One of my good friends and former partners is competing in�For Ballet Nouveau Colorado's 21st Century Choreography Competition.

Here are the requirements for the competition:

Must demonstrate expertise within the ballet idiom
Must be set on multiple dancers
Must have been created within the past 3 years
Include no more than 2 continuous segments of dance� no video montages
No longer than 5 minutes TOTAL
Samples that use 20th or 21st Century music are encouraged

Check, check, check, check, check, check.

Although I have other friends competing; Heather should have this one in the bag.

View her vid and rank it up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYFEa3IO9L4

Quicksilver

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:33:54 -0500

I'm probably using a one-hundredth of the features of Quicksilver; but, Apple is going to buy this guy's software and incorporate it into 10.6 at the latest, right?! Turns out I can't live without this software! It's truly inspiring work. Check out this rare appearance by the developer:

Mac Trojan

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:08:55 -0500

Well it had to happen sometime.
I looks like there is a trojan (properly named) out there in the wild. It only seems to affect patrons of porn sites. It goes like this: you want to look at a video and you are asked to download the proper codec. You say 'yes' and download an installer that mounts itself and asks for your password. You give the password and it changes your dns settings and sends you on a wild ride around the internet. Oh yeah, it also sends itself to people on your buddy list in iChat or AOL. Fun.

Symantec is calling this a 'worm'. Although it displays worm-like behavior once it's installed, you have to grant it the privilege of running on your machine; and that, my friends, is a trojan. Whatever the name, everyone should know better than to download and install things from untrusted sources.

I can see where this exploit could confuse people. If the trojan called itself Adobe Flash, few people would think to go to Adobe's site, to see if they had the latest version of Flash and get it from there. Instead people might have heard of Flash so they'd be tempted to install it. This is dangerous.

I've sent out warnings to my clients so that they understand that part of what I do is keeping them current, or at least one generation behind cutting edge, anyway. Hopefully, they'll trust me and not do something stupid.

At any rate, Windows users can rejoice that some Mac users who live with a false sense of security are now actually being targeted. I just want to make sure that everyone who knows me and uses Macs, knows to be more careful and smart enough to know that no system of ones and zeros can ever be completely safe.

Pain in my butt.

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:30:29 -0500

OK. So the MT4 templates are cool; only you have to know what you're doing and the online documentation isn't much help. Also, the default templates use a different syntax than any of the other documentation. So, I'm having to feel my way around; which is why the site looks like crap. I'm working on it when I have time; which lately has been slim to none. Things will improve eventually. You'll just have to bear with me.

Permissions Problems.

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:54:41 -0500

There is something interesting about upgrading MT4 involving permissions. It took me a little bit to get to the bottom of the problem. I'm typing this message simply to see if I haven't screwed everything up.

iThink I like MT4

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:17:14 -0500

The new templating system does kick ass.

Farewell faithful companion…

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:32:48 -0500

Tomorrow we are sending Jake to a higher karma. He's suffering. I wish he'd get better; but, its unreasonable to think that he will. He was a faithful companion for fourteen years.
So long ago, Tammy and I were supposed to meet at the Cup and Chaucer at the Oxford Book Store in Altanta. So, I'm in the coffee shop and Tam walks in with this adorable little black puppy, so small he fit into the palm of my hand. Loud enough for all to hear, she asks me if we can keep him. You could hear a pin drop. Of course I said yes. He stayed with Tam in Atlanta, moved to Augusta, Charlotte, Gainesville, Asheville, and back to Augusta. He's been all over the place!
It's only been these past two weeks that he started to rapidly decline. He was already losing his sight and hearing; now he can't get around on his own. It seems that it is time. I hate it; but, it must be done.

Do not install PHP5 on WinXP

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:45:28 -0500

Well. Do, if you know how, and if you know how please tell me! I've used XAMP in the past and it was fine until I tried to add SVN to the mix. I've been all over the web trying to figure out how to do it and then I opened my WROX book "Professional PHP5" and read this:

Let's be clear about something—this book is not about operating system wars. Those of you interested in the great Windows versus UNIX debate can find literally thousands of great pages of well–spoken denizens of Slashdot…
It is, however, worth our making the following bold statement: “Windows is bad at being an Internet application server, just as UNIX is bad at being a workstation operating system.”

They said it, not me. In fairness, this book is devoted to PHP5 and not ASP.NET 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever they are selling in hotel conference rooms. So, I've tried and failed to get this thing installed properly because of some trailing slash or another and I'm admitting defeat. It is very nice to have a Windows box around for testing; but, it's time for me to install some Linux or another to handle my meager hosting needs.

Of course, I am still pissed that I can't figure out where I've gone wrong. I'm probably going to stay up another hour or eight trying to get it to work. Lord help me.