Teleidoscope

Thu, May 31, 2007

Schrödinger's Download

Posted at 8:36 pm MDT to Technology

There is something flaky about either my wireless connection to the router or my DSL connection. or maybe Qwest is throttling the connection in some weird way. Or maybe I'm cursed.

I've been trying to do a very, very large download all week. It starts out chugging along nicely then gets slower and slower, then hangs so I have to restart it. (Fortunately, I now have things set up so it picks up where it left off when I restart it). Dial-up would probably be slower, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The weird thing is that it doesn't hang when I am doing other things on the same computer. It only dies when I am not looking at it... like just after I go to bed, so the overnight hours are wasted for downloading. It even seems to download faster when I am websurfing or doing other things on the same computer.

The download hasn't died completely in the past few hours (though it has slowed down a few times). That's partly because I've been busy on this machine, and partly because the next time it dies, I'm going to run a special setup program to try to get Flash running on Firefox. So of course it isn't hanging.

I need to get Flash running because the bozos at my credit union are installing a log-in tool for their on-line banking that requires Flash, which is not directly supported for AMD64 Linux, so I'm having to go the long way around. If worst comes to worst, I'll load a 32 bit Linux client in VMWare -- which will involve another long download.

Feh. I need to get cat5 working between my computer room and livingroom again. (I really don't trust the stability of the wireless connection.) Or I need to get my home server built, which will have a hard-wired net connection and a DVD burner. I've been using mostly laptops for so long, my desktop machines don't even have working USB ports.

Wired networking AND a server would be even better. Maybe after the septic system rebuild has been paid for.

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Wed, May 30, 2007

Bunnies and the Truck

Posted at 7:00 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I am convinced that wild bunnies think they get points for running in front of cars. There are a huge number of wild rabbits in my neighborhood and they obviously have a league organized.

When they are sitting by the side of the road in a perfectly safe place, they sit and wait and watch a car coming closer and closer and closer. Then when the car is very close... ZOOM, one or more rabbits will run across the road in front of the car.

It has to be a sport: sometimes they run from opposite directions.

An alternative mode is to race the car, running ahead of it for a little way before they dodge across. It seems to be the smaller bunnies that use the racing style. Maybe they are trying to get up their nerve for the crossing?

The rabbits in my yard like the truck when it is not moving, too. Sometimes I come home from shopping, haul everything into the house, and by the time I look out a window, there are already rabbits under the truck, sitting there and looking around, or sprawled out so they are twice as long as usual. I assume they like it because it has a high clearance so they can see a long way while being protected from hawks and the larger dogs. And of course, the clay and gravel under the truck stays dry when it rains, and doesn't heat up much on hot sunny days because the truck provides shade. On cold days the bunnies stay near edges of the truck where the sun can reach them.

I wonder if the rabbits think my truck is friendly toward them, because it protects them and is careful not to squash them? Maybe they don't realize how dangerous the running-across game really is.

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Tue, May 29, 2007

More Planets and Miscellaneous notes

Posted at 9:00 pm MDT to Current Events

It has been announced that 28 more extra-solar planets have been discovered, bringing the current total to 236, and the number of definite multiplanet systems (besides ours) to 4.

And they are still finding out strange and unexpected things about the planets in our outer solar system, too.

Resume

In unrelated news, I've updated my resume at the main Data-Raptors.com website.

Septic System

And most of the work of replacing the septic system is now scheduled to occur the week I will be in California. I'm just glad to have it scheduled. Since they have to destroy the old system in order to put the new leach field in place, doing it while the house is uninhabited has advantages. I just need to remember to shut off the water softener and humidifier on the Sunday I leave, so there will be no water coming out of the house while it has nowhere to go.

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Mon, May 28, 2007

Book Clubs

Posted at 11:25 am MDT to Miscellaneous

One effect of the internet is greater transparency of businesses and increased (though often one-way) connections between customers and the people involved in the business.

I'm a little worried at the moment. The conglomerate that ultimately owns the Science Fiction Book Club and a number of other book clubs engaged in a night of the long knives a week or two ago and reportedly gutted their New York operations. The book club operations were reportedly profitable, but the publishing conglomerates have been trying to commit suicide out of greed for at least the past 20 years, so it is not really surprising that they decided to squeeze profitable portions of their operations even harder, ignoring the risk that they would squeeze them out of existence.

I have been a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for more than 30 years -- I joined in college. Past upheavals in the club were annoying because of reduced choices (or reductions in the proportions of offerings I found interesting), but the organization involved was largely faceless. But in recent years I have become acquainted with Andrew Wheeler through USENET's rec.arts.sf.written and more recently through his blog, and his name and Ellen Asher's have appeared in the monthly club catalogs.

I'm not just worried about the service, this time, I'm worried about the people... I hope Ellen Asher and Andrew Wheeler both come out of this all right. I'm worried about Andrew's mood: he just published an article on his personal blog which he described as having been self-censored in the past, which suggests that he is depressed or angry enough -- or both -- to do things he considered reckless when he was thinking more calmly. This is not a good sign.

I believe the Computer book club I still technically belong to is part of a different conglomerate. I really wouldn't mind if that club went away, however. I haven't bought anything from them in ages: they don't carry O'Reilly reference books and these days most technical info is so out-of-date by the time it reaches hard copy that the books aren't worth the shelf space. (Google is our friend.)

Many of the non-science-fiction books I buy come from the Quality Paperback Book Club, which is related to the SFBC, I hope they survive. The Mystery Guild and the Military Book Club, which I have been a member of in the past are also part of the same organization. I have occasionally contemplated rejoining one or the other, (handling the memberships on-line makes this feasible, even when I am travelling so much) but I think that now I will need to hold off for a while and see how things shake out.

I've been wanting to get back to writing TechLands for a while. I know some later parts of the story, but need to get a chunk of political stuff sorted out before I can write the fun stuff that comes later. The more I hear about how things work in the modern publishing industry, the less I want to have anything to do with them except as a customer. I deal with enough corporate stupidity in my regular working life.

I don't want to "Be an Author", I want to have the audience I need to get the stories inside my head to come out, and the internet gives me the chance to do that without dealing with conglomerates that consider story-telling to be fungible.

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Salaryman Kintaro

Posted at 12:06 am MDT to Media

"Salaryman Kintaro" is an anime series, based on a manga series, that is very different from what American companies do with comics and animation. It is available on DVD subtitled, but without an English dub.

It's the story of a former leader of a biker gang who is hired by a construction company and begins rapidly working his way to the top because of his integrity, charisma, unwillingness to back down from a fight, and unfamiliarity with and unwillingness to tolerate the normal sleaze of the business world and local bureaucrats.

One interesting aspect of the series, and a contrast to the way Americans would tell a similar story, is the mixture of charcaters. There are people from all walks of life shown as good (or at least able to respond to Kintaro's wake-up call), bad, or complicated. Working people, the rich and powerful, yakuza...and the salarymen and officers of the Yamato Construction Company.

Americans would also probably not have the hero senteced to 6 months in jail at th eend for inciting a riot, while simultaneously making it clear that he had won, at least to the extent that some of the worst corruption was being cleaned up... partly though the intervention of some of the rich and powerful people who had come to take an interest in Kintaro. It's a much more complex and layered finale than one sees in most video entertainment.

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Sat, May 26, 2007

Fables

Posted at 10:55 pm MDT to Media

There was a time, about 15 years ago when I bought a large proportion of the comics that were being published. I still have many long-boxes of comics in my basement.

These days, I read web-comics, and translated manga, and a few selected hardcopy American titles. Fables, an award-winning series from Vertigo, is one of them. I have just received a shipment from Amazon including the volume 7 of the collected Fables (issues 48-51, including an oversized issue 50 that resolved some long-running plot threads) and a special hard-cover collection called "1001 Nights of Snowfall".

The art and writing are both gorgeous.

The characters in Fables come from Folk and Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes, but the stories are not aimed at children... more at fans of film noir. A couple of the stories in "1001 Nights" make even the original, pre-Disney, un-wimpified, versions of the Grimms' fairy tales seem mild.

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Fri, May 25, 2007

Acupuncture

Posted at 9:06 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I went to my acupuncturist today -- Jeffrey Chapman at the Louisville Clinic of Traditional Chinese Medicine -- to see if he could do anything about this vision doubling symptom I've been having. Muscle tremors seem like a prime candidate for being helped by acupuncture. I've had good results in the past with acupuncture for things like back pain. And a few odder problems.

He stuck needles in my face, hands knees and feet and gave me some Chinese herbs to take. I'll see him again June 4 to see whether there has been any improvement and get another treatment.

Jeffrey also said that eye problems seem to happen when the muscles get ischemic and suggested trying to get more sleep. I don't see that happening. I have always been relatively insomniac, averaging less than 6 hours of sleep per night (generally closer to 5). But I've got some equipment and references for 'restorative' yoga -- relaxation rather than stretching. I'll see whether I can find something about relaxing the facial muscles to improve blood flow. Just relaxing with a beanbag on my face would probably help when the doubling gets bad, if only because it would give the doubling some time to wear off.

A session with my massage therapist probably wouldn't hurt, either.

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Thu, May 24, 2007

Credit Union Website

Posted at 11:20 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My credit union has changed its website and arbitrarily stopped being willing to communicate with my favored browser, which is Konqueror.

And when I complained they gave me a completely bogus technical excuse, which is even more annoying. Not only did their excuse have nothing to do with the symptoms I was seeing, and not account for the fact that Firefox worked was accepted while Konqueor (which runs on a closely related browser engine) was being rejected, but they said the problem was because Flash was interfering with things.

I run 64 bit Linux. There is no good Flash implementation for my platform, and anyone who thinks Flash video is necessary for a page displaying bank balances is insane.

Now they are claiming that they mentioned Flash because they are going to be using some kind of Flash based authentication mechanism, which is certainly not going to work with anything on this box. I may find myself looking for a new bank.

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Wed, May 23, 2007

Civilization Day

Posted at 8:30 pm MDT to Current Events

From James Nicholl and also mentioned on MakingLight. According to scientists, today, for the first time, more of the earth's population is urban than rural.

And research indicates that cities show sublinear scaling on resource use and superlinear scaling on creative output: that is, a city of two million people uses less than twice the resources used by a city of one million, and produces more than twice as much jobs, innovation wealth, etc.

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Tue, May 22, 2007

Columbia House

Posted at 5:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I've been a member of the Columbia House DVD Club since before it was the DVD Club (and even at club prices, Laser discs were over priced. In recent years I've been buying fewer of my DVDs from the club and more from Costco and BestBuy, and occasionally Amazon for the really offbeat stuff, but I stayed with the club, partly out of inertia. I suspect I seemed like great customer, since I kept buying several DVDs a year from them, but so many of the DVDs I buy are in genres they didn't cover well that they formed a very small portion of my DVD purchasing for the past several years.

Last year when my mail was being forwarded around because I was out of town so much, I ended up receiving a couple of discs I'm pretty sure I told them I didn't want. By the time I found out about the discs, it was really too late to send them back. This was annoying, but I made a point of checking the CH website more frequently and declining selections with longer lead times.

This will no longer be a problem.

Today I was called by a telemarketer from Columbia House trying to get me to immediately order a disc to take advantage of a promotion they were having. I suspect they were working from an overstock list rather than my purchasing history: the movies she tried to sell me were a very bad fit.

After I hung up, I called the Columbia House Service Center and canceled my membership, and made very sure they knew why.

Bozos tried to push things a little too far. I am not a resource to be harvested at their whim.

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Mon, May 21, 2007

Heroes

Posted at 9:08 pm MDT to Media

I got interested in this show about mid-way through the season. It has a big cast in a nice tangled storyline. Some flat out nasty people, but also a lot of shades of gray and cases where

And for a show on prime-time network TV it has an impressive amount of subtitled dialog. Two of the dozen or so main characters are a couple of otaku (media fans) from Japan, who are trying to save the world, and much of their dialog is in Japanese and subtitled. There have also been conversations in subtitled French.

The character who does a lot of the narration is from India.

George Takei plays an ambiguous character, the father of one of the Japanese Heroes (who is named Hiro). They did a very nice sword-training sequence with Takei's character and Hiro last week... there had been an extended quest for an antique katana that provided Hiro's oportunity to grow up and into his power.

Tonight was the season finale. Mostly satisfying, except that I'm not entirely sure that Sylar (a psychopath who SERIOUSLY needs to be disposed of) was permanently killed.

And the teaser for season two put Hiro near Kyoto in 1671. In a field with warriors on horseback. Very promising.

I suspect there was a hint that next season will explain part of why the super people have their talents

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Sun, May 20, 2007

Jinxed Colors

Posted at 9:30 pm MDT to Technology

I'm trying to reduce the eyestrain I've been experiencing.

I ordered my new glasses yesterday, and coincidentally, the bulb in my main reading/work light burned out, so I replaced it with a slightly brighter, full spectrum bulb.

I'm also making a point of spending time doing other things besides read and write at the computer while I watch TV. (I very rarely just watch TV, I almost always multitask.)

My Kitsunebi cross-stitch project is 18 stitches per inch on black fabric -- not exactly suitable for reducing eyestrain. So yesterday I prepped a couple of kits from my needlework project stash that use white or offwhite fabric and 14 stitches per inch.

I ran blanket stitch around the edges of both cloths to reduce fraying while I work on the cross-stitching and mounted the linen fabric for the project with the smaller finished size on a scroll frame. The other project is too large for scroll bars, but the fabric is Aida cloth, which is quite stiff and less likely to deform when a hoop is used.

I also partially 'gridded' the larger project, loosely tacking a line of gray sewing thread to match the vertical and horizontal group lines closest to the center of the pattern. The pattern is printed on 4 sheets without any overlapping stitches indicated to help in lining things up, and even with the gridding I'm having a little trouble getting the stitch counts right at the page borders.

The gridding thread will be pulled out when the piece is finished. Or when I have stitched enough of the page boundary areas that I decide I don't need the guidelines any more.

One thing that I've noticed on other needlework projects seems to be happening here, too. One particular thread color seems to be jinxed and needs to be unstitched and redone more than the others. This can be tricky if the quantity of that color of thread supplied with a kit is skimpy. But the colors numbers used in the instructions seem to be standard DMC numbers, so if I run short I should be able to get more (though it will be a little annoying if I have to buy a skein of floss to finish five stitches or something.

I'm actually not too worried about running out of 842 floss: I've been able to reuse some of the floss I unstitched, and my stitching style is quite economical, so I usually have lots of kit thread left over.

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Sat, May 19, 2007

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Posted at 8:10 pm MDT to Current Events

Back in November I wrote about a deal between Microsoft and Novell which was aimed at splitting the FOSS (Free and OpenSource Software) movement by promising some but not all Linux users protection from Microsoft suits regarding patent infringement. That was when I switched Linux distributions from Novell SuSE to Kubuntu, and joined the FSF.

One response of the FOSS community to various large corporations trying to find loopholes that violate the spirit of the GPL free-software license has been to work on a new tightened-up version of the GPL, referred to as GPLv3.

Now it is reported (I found out by way of Groklaw) that the Linux vouchers Microsoft has been distributing as part of the deal have no expiration date. GPLv3 has clauses relating to patents, such that --

Once GPLv3 is finished AND

One or more existing packages that are part of the SuSE distribution release their updates and bugfixes under the new license AND

Novell SuSE packages those updates (which it cannot realistically not do if it wants to survive) AND

Someone who has a voucher in their possession redeems it

EVERYONE who uses Linux will have exactly the same protection against Microsoft patents infringement suits.

PJ of Groklaw implies that when a lawyer like Eben Moglen says he is confident that someone will redeem a voucher after GPLv3 goes into effect, it means he has a voucher locked in his desk, or has an ally that does.

It appears that Microsoft has the choice of repudiating the deal with Novell, or automatically licensing all of their relevant patents to all users of GPLv3-licensed software.

Major portions of the Linux kernel are not likely to transition to GPLv3 any time soon due to logistical problems in making the transition (and political disagreements about the transition withing the kernel developers community). But several other major components of Linux distributions are owned by the FSF and will transition immediately.

Microsoft's negotiators seem to have been too clever for their own good. Couldn't happen to a more deserving crowd.

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Fri, May 18, 2007

Cats

Posted at 6:43 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Dinah is currently yowling in full Siamese voice and trying to attack another cat through the sliding glass doors between my bedroom and the deck outside. The other cat, a beautiful golden-yellow longhair with very faint tabby markings that I haven't seen before, is laying casually on the deck and wondering what the fuss is about. I think it freaked Dinah out by coming up to the screen door and offering to sniff noses (the inner glass door is open about an inch).

I wonder what would happen if I opened the door and offered to let Dinah out on the deck. She might be taking advantage of the door to bluff.

She may be still upset and overreacting to the outdoor cat because I took her to the vet yesterday. I took her to a place where there were dogs and other cats! And the vet handled her and gave her shots! Obviously someone needs to pay...

It's really rather annoying that Dinah is so antisocial. I kind of miss having multiple cats. I had another cat, Little Kitty, when Dinah first arrived, who was a wonderfully friendly and sociable cat, and lonely after my older cats died of old age. (Or vanished, in the case of Slate, the sabretoothed kitty.) I had hoped that Dinah would be company for her, but Dinah hissed at Little Kitty and avoided her.

Dinah never actually attacked Little Kitty (or even tried to eat her food), even when Little Kitty was pretty thorooughly immoblized by age and arthritis. But Little Kitty had seniority in the territory, and Dinah got yelled at the first time she seemed likely to attack. If I brought another cat into the house, Dinah might very well attack it, since this has been her territory for several years now. She might kill a kitten.

And I certainly couldn't travel with two cats the way I can with just Dinah, especially if they didn't get along.

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Thu, May 17, 2007

Eyes

Posted at 9:07 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My eyes are being weird.

I had my annual eye checkup today -- the first one in years that has happened right after a long day of computer work instead of on a Saturday afternoon, so I was actually having the seeing-double symptoms I get when my eyes are tired.

My eyes are in good condition except for the seeing-double thing: my distance vision has actually improved (maybe because I hardly ever use it) and my reading glass prescription is about the same as before. No tendencies toward glaucoma or cataracts or some weird side effects of tamoxifen that we are watching out for.

But the seeing double thing is really weird. This is a vertically displaced ghost kind of seeing double, not the sideways eyes-not-focussing-together kind that I sometimes get without my glasses, which goes away if I close one eye or the other. When this kind of double vision happens, I see the doubling even with one eye closed (either eye closed).

It takes talent to see double with just one eye open.

What's really annoying is that the doubling seems to be worse in my left eye, which is way closer to normal than my right eye. When I was young, I was slightly far sighted in the left eye and moderately nearsighted in the right eye. Over the years of close work and reading, the focus on both eyes pulled in until the left eye was slightly nearsighted and the other one was even more nearsighted.

Everything the doctor tried to make the doubling less -- lenses, prisms -- made it worse instead. She finally agreed that it is a muscular tremor (which she can do nothing about), which I had pretty much figured out already.

I should probably see if my acupuncturist can do anything about it

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Wed, May 16, 2007

Extrasolar Planets

Posted at 8:07 pm MDT to Current Events

People have been announcing the discoveries of more and more extrasolar planets. And it seems like each one is stranger than the last: hot Neptunes, hot Jupiters, something only a bit bigger than Earth orbitting a red dwarf with a year only 11 terrestrial days long, planets ridiculously close to stars that are metal-poor. There's at least one star where 2 planets are currently known. This is fun.

There is a list of 215 (as of May 2, 2007) extrasolar planets maintained by the Geneva detection project.

It's kind of amazing to think that as recently as 1990, the number of Confirmed extrasolar planets was Zero (the first extrasolar was reported in 1989, but it took a while to confirm it). There have been 26 planets added to the list just since April 1 this year, and that probably doesn't include the ones I've seen announced this week.

There are reports about all sorts of weird things being learned about the planets and moons in our outer Solar System, too. (For the record: I think that if Pluto is a planet, so is Ceres)

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Tue, May 15, 2007

Bread

Posted at 11:46 pm MDT to Technology

sourdough starter
flour
salt
1 cup of water
olive oil

I bake bread quite frequently. My basic recipe is listed above. The are mostly no measurements because the bread usually decides how much of everything it needs.

It isn't a proper bread recipe by French or Italian standards because of the olive oil, but the oil helps the bread last the week or so it takes me to eat the loaf. One cup of the flour is usually whole-wheat or rye.

This week's loaf is more sour than I usually prefer: the starter was riper than usual and I may have used more of it. It also took up more flour than usual which threw off the balance of the other ingredients a little.

The texture is a little off. Probably the sourdough again, though I think this batch of bread also turned out to need more salt than I put in, to balance what the sourness does to the flour chemistry.

I need to look up the conversion for regular salt to kosher salt (you need more kosher salt if you are measuring by volume). And I need to figure out a way to add salt along with the later bits of flour when the loaf decides it wants to be big, without ending up with salty spots in the finished loaf.

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Mon, May 14, 2007

Shaping the Future

Posted at 9:09 pm MDT to Technology

Charlie Stross is a science fiction writer who used to be a technology journalist. He has posted the text of a talk he gave recently that is a very impressive analysis of the implications some current technological trends.

From what I know about current trends in technology, these are comparatively conservative, short term predictions.

I think I need to start learning to be less of a Luddite about extra functionality in cell phones. My phone is a constant companion and I find it really annoying trying to coordinate things with people who don't carry them (like my brother Larry). But I just use them for phone communications and the standard clock. The phone/info terminal/camera/recorder/mp3 player/GPS that is lurking on the horizon is something I will need to adjust to.

My family when I was growing up was less phone oriented than most.

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Sun, May 13, 2007

RAID drives

Posted at 10:42 am MDT to Code

The mail server that failed last week had two drives that were RAIDed. The machine should have still worked after one drive died. I suspect it may have been running in degraded mode with one dead drive for a while before it finally died completely.

We need to set up a cron job on the new machine that will check the status of the drives periodically, so if one fails we can replace it before things fail completely.

It looks like that should be fairly easy.

With a healthy system the command
# cat /proc/mdstat

should give results like
Personalities : [raid0] [raid1] [raid5]
md_d0 : active raid1 hda[1] hdb[2]
39082560 blocks [2/1] [UU]
unused devices:

A degraded system will look more like:

Personalities : [raid0] [raid1] [raid5]
md_d0 : active raid1 hdb[1]
39082560 blocks [2/1] [_U]
unused devices:

It should be easy to set up a little script that can run nightly or weekly and email Shawn and me if the mdstat changes.

This page has a lot of useful information about setting up and testing RAID.

I will eventually get around to my project of setting up a server at home that I can backup my laptop to across the network, and I'll want to use RAIDed disks to get some more practice with them.

The new home server can't happen -- financially -- until after the septic system gets rebuilt (the permit for that is finally ready, now I need to get the actual work scheduled). And it shouldn't happen -- practically -- until the reorganization of the study is more complete.

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Sat, May 12, 2007

Planning, and Lack of

Posted at 9:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Feeling a little down.

My current gig ends at the end of June. I don't know whether they will extend, or what the next gig will be. I would like to have a garden (or at least plant a few things in the yard), or set up my fishtank again, but I can't really justify starting any project around the house involving living things that would need ongoing care.

I keep getting reminders of old projects and hobbies.

Some reminders are because I'm still working my way through piles of stuff from the study: I just tossed out a bunch of old brochures I had printed up when I was trying to create Data-Raptors Associates as a network search service business. All that's really left of Data-Raptors is the website and my email address.

Other reminders are coming in from the outside world. I had a side business for a few years, Astral Trading Company, selling tarot cards and other items at science fiction conventions. Initially it was a partnership with my friend Nanette, but she dropped out due to lack of time after a couple of years. I still have a special event sales tax license, and some crates of Astral stuff down in the basement, though I haven't been to a science fiction convention (much less had a dealer's table) in years.

The bank account that lets me cash checks made out to Astral Trading Company still exists, and the bank sent me a note this week asking whether I realized that it still exists and has money in it. I think I'd like to keep the DBA name active, but I don't use that bank for anything else. My credit union supposedly has business accounts now, maybe I'll transfer the Astral money to an account there.

I think what I'd really like is just to be able to make plans more than a few months out. Seems like the few longer term plans I've made (like the Geek Cruise) have fallen through. It's easy to fall into a mood of 'why bother?'

I started taking extra vitamin D yesterday. I wonder if it is screwing up my brain chemistry: I seem to fall into clinical depression pretty easily. I should probably take some St. John's Wort.

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Fri, May 11, 2007

Air Conditioning

Posted at 9:27 pm MDT to Weather

Compared to last weekend which was so chilly and rainy, this weekend is supposed to be beautiful. They are predicting highs in the 80's, so I'll need to dress in light layers for farmer's market tomorrow.

The last time I worked from home during the summer was before I had the central air conditioning installed (one advantage of forced air heat, to balance the noise and dust: all of the ductwork was in place). This summer should be much more comfortable.

I do need to program the cooling side of the thermostat, though. The current settings are pretty weird because I haven't been home in weather since the AC was installed.The AC was installed late December 2005 and I was in out of state from the first week of May to the first week of December, except for a week in late September.

I don't think Dinah Kitty approves of cold air coming out of the floor vents. She seems to have abandoned one of her favorite lurking spots: the clothes hamper in the bathroom is next to a vent that it right over the furnace, and the top of the hamper is conveniently kitty sized.

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Thu, May 10, 2007

Project management

Posted at 10:25 pm MDT to Code

One of my specialties is tools for source code version management. I'm used to having good version control tools available, partly because I'm usually involved in managing or customizing them.

My current customer uses version control for their real software but decided they didn't want to pay for licenses for the contractors on this tools project. The final versions of code that go to production are being archived, but not intermediate working versions.

I have ways of working around this sort of thing. At my last regular job before I switched back to consulting, they insisted on using a versioning tool from Microsoft which was not trustworthy (it was one of the reasons I left). I acquired a habit of keeping lots of spare copies of older code sets squirreled away, so my employers were able to meet contractual and regulatory requirements for being able to reproduce old builds of their software, despite using a versioning tool built on an unreliable database.

Yesterday one of the programs I am working on started giving me some very screwy results. I wasn't sure whether it was something that I had done to it. The people speccing these programs are partial to the kichen sink school of user interface design, and it was possible I was hitting some weird side effct of one of my feature changes.

So I dropped back to an older version that had been extensively tested so its behavior patterns were well known. The older version of the program also behaved in the new, flakey fashion when interacting with the main software application. It turned out that one of the changes made to the main program on Tuesday had subtly broken the interface used by the external programs. My project interacts with the broken interface most extensively, and is under active development at the moment, so I'm the one that hit the problem first.

My schedule really did not need a day spent fighting a broken interface, but it's a relief to know I wasn't imagining the behavior I was seeing, and I didn't break my program by doing something I didn't realize I was doing.

But I really wish I had a version control system available where I could save script versions as new features are added and tested, so when something goes screwy I could drop back a little way to a recent known working version. Scripts involving thousands of lines of code are really too big to be worked on using such an informal process. But the most of the other external scripts in this project are tiny compared to the two biggest ones I'm working on

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Wed, May 09, 2007

Advice... probably wasted on the target

Posted at 10:32 pm MDT to Current Events

I got this link from James Nicholl, who got it from illian.

This is the kind of story, that, if someone wrote it as a TV episode, the critics would say it was too over-the-top.

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Tue, May 08, 2007

Dead Mail Server

Posted at 9:54 pm MDT to Technology

The mail server at the office died today. So instead of doing the billable work I had planned this afternoon, I spent about 7 hours at the office, much of it in the server closet, which is horribly, almost painfully, noisy.

We eventually decided to rebuild one of our lab servers into a new mailserver: 40,000 bad inodes on the hard drive suggested that we could not trust the old machine even if we got it running again.

I'm just beginning to see emails start to trickle in to my work email account, but at least they are coming through and the sales staff in the office will be able to do their work tomorrow. A modern company, especially a techie company, can't survive without email.

I was going to do some more sorting of the heap of stuff that got moved from the study to the livingroom, so that the livingroom will be tidy when the cleaning ladies come tomorrow. But I think that I will go to bed early and try to do some tidying in the morning.

I think it was the noise in the server closet that wore me out. (Staying up too late the past couple of nights playing with ancestry.com didn't help.)

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Mon, May 07, 2007

Family History

Posted at 10:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

After using the Social Security Death record links on www.ancestry.com to check the dates of my parents' deaths, I did some rummaging (they have a loss-leader: you get the first three days of playing in their databases free).

I have come to some conclusions:

• The census takers early in the 20th Century were really sloppy about names.
• It's a good thing the women in my family tend to have odd names.
• There are way too many 'Tom Buccino' fairly closely related to us. I think Uncle Tom's father and one of his cousins were also named Tom, and of course, my cousin 'Skip' is actually Tom Junior. There seem to be a lot of other 'Tom Buccino's in the database too.(On the other hand, I think I dimly remember the Elmo who showed up in one of the census records: I think he was one of my Uncle Tom's cousins.
• People named Breault really like to name their daughters 'Blanche'.
• There are a LOT of 'Louis Grasso's in the database: it's a good thing Nonna was Felicina (or Pasqualina), not a Maria
• I obviously did not pay enough attention to grownup gossip when I was young. I remember Great Uncle Roman Breault, who lived with my grandparents for several years before his death in 1963. (He was a mailman, I think.) I was surprised to find he had had a wife, Mae, who did not die until 1990.
• It's embarrassing how few birthdays of my living relatives I know.(The database makes it hard to find information about people who are probably still living, unless they are old enough to be in the 1930 census.)

One thing that came as a pleasant surprise: someone has created a family tree for the Robichauds that is very complete and goes way back. When I put in my grandfather, James Robichaud, and linked him to some historical documents that identified his place and date of birth,(Neguac in New Brunswick) the database almost immediately offered me 5 generations of his ancestors (mostly on his father's side). And I've been able to push back farther by letting the database offer me the family trees of some of his ancestors.

My family tree includes Jean Bastarache, born 1632 in Gascogne,Pyrenees Atlantique,Bayonne,France, died 1700.

Also Jean Blanchard, born 1611 in Martaize,Loudun,Vienne,France and who died in Nova Scotia at the age of 75. He was married to Radegonde Lambert, in Canada, in 1642, and they had 6 children. Five generations back from Jean Blanchard, the tree includes Jehan Poirier (born 1560, Martaize,Loudun,Poitou,France) and Jean Guillaume Blanchard, born in 1540.

I believe that after the 3 free days are up, the tree I've been building will still be visible I just won't be able to add to it without paying. And somone else who goes online and builds a family tree including people in my family tree will be offered sections of the linkages that I have defined (just as I have been offered the Blanchards and Bastaraches).

My family tree is named "Elyse Grasso" in the database and is keyed around my father, mostly because Remo Grasso is a rare enough name to be definitively identifiable. I worked out from him.

I should probably add a note the the record I put in for myself, indicating that the spelling on my birth certificate is Elise.

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Sun, May 06, 2007

Bullying

Posted at 10:27 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

A link to a good site on bullying was posted on one of the blogs I read (probably Making Light) within a day of the arrival of an invitation to my 35th high school reunion.

I will not be attending my high school reunion.

Once, a few years after I moved here from Connecticut (about 12 years after I escaped from high school) a woman who had been in my high school class turned up in a course I was taking on herblore, or the tarot. After the first session, she apologized to me for the way I had been treated in school. She never showed up for any of the later sessions.

And she hadn't been one of the nastiest ones.

Columbine has been in the news because of the anniversary and the Virginia Tech shootings, and that always brings back bad memories.

I will not send the reunion committee an answer. The people whose names I recognize on the Reunion committee treated me fairly decently (I wonder who the others were before they married, but not enough to ask) and I'm not sure I could give them an answer that would be both honest and suitably polite.

I have had no particular contact with anyone from high school since leaving high school except at my parents' funerals 25 years ago. I had very little in common with them in school, and I'm sure my life of geeky spinsterhood has left me with even less in common with them now.

I went to ancestry.com to verify my parents' death dates because it seemed so strange that it has been 25 years since they died, but I had remembered correctly: my mother died in the fall of 1981 and my father died in the spring of 1982, so it really has been more than 25 years for both of them.

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Sat, May 05, 2007

Kinetics Day

Posted at 11:10 pm MDT to Weather

In Boulder Colorado there is an annual event called the Kinetic Conveyance Race (referred to as Kinetics). Teams of people design costumes and vehicles on themes and race them on a course that goes over land and water at the Boulder Reservoir, while thousands of people party on the beach and listen to live concerts and supposedly . There is also a 5 K running race and a pancake breakfast and various other events.

The Kinetics teams get judged on things like design and engineering and creative bribing of the judges, and there are a number of prizes for the different individual categories. In many cases the over-all winner is not the first across the finish line -- back in the 80s I attended a couple of Kinetics races, and the fastest times were posted by the 'Kawasaki Ninjas': two guys in black with two bicycles and a kayak, but the over-all winners were teams with much more elaborate designs.

This is the first Saturday in May, so it was Kinetics Day. But Kinetics seems to be a weather jinx: either the race or the associated parade the previous week has horrible weather. The weather at the Farmers' Market, a moderately sheltered location, was chilly, breezy, and occasionally drizzly after noon. The weather in the open at the Res, a few miles away would have been worse. I felt sorry for 'Los Lonely Boys', the band whose set was scheduled to start at 1:00 pm, about when the rain came in. And even sorrier for the people who were getting dunked in the Res. Makes me shiver just thinking about it

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Fri, May 04, 2007

Busy Week

Posted at 8:48 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Besides work, the dentist, upgrading the computer, and the on-going septic system annoyance (the paperwork preceding the actual work is progressing very slowly), I got my ventilation ducts cleaned -- another part of the effort to reclaim the house from the obnoxious mice that took it over last year while I was gone.

I also got my dumpster emptied, so I can proceed to the next phase of excavating the study. The study is looking depressingly cluttered again because I had to move things around for the duct cleaning guy. But some of the stuff from the hobby room (which also needed access cleared for duct cleaning) has joined the to-be-sorted pile in the livingroom.

I'm plotting ways to disinter my weight bench, which is in the hobby room. It morphed into an auxiliary book case while I was travelling all of the time, like everything else here that is neither mobile nor electronic, and not in the kitchen. But there was a period of a few years before the travelling when I did yoga every weekday along with either free weights or treadmill-walking, and I really need to start exercising again. It's twitchiness speaking, not guilt, so I'm likely to actually do it, if I can excavate the equipment from the clutter. And at least the excavation involves doing more than sitting at the computer.

It's too bad the weekend is supposed to be another annoying one, weather-wise. If it's windy and rainy, I'm not going to feel like hauling stuff down the slimy clay of the driveway to the dumpster.

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Thu, May 03, 2007

Upgrade to Kubuntu 7.04

Posted at 9:28 pm MDT to Technology

I started this morning (it spent all day downloading new files) and finished about an hour ago. There are a few minor annoyances in the resulting configuration, but everything seems to be working.

This upgrade was much smoother than the one from 6.06 to 6.10. The new upgrade tool worked quite well, though it didn't log everything I would have liked. And in the cases where I told it not to over-write a config file, it doesn't seem to have left an example of what it would have installed. I would have liked to see what the new defaults were for, say, Samba or Apache, to see if I wanted to create a compromise between the old and new settings.

One thing that is very peculiar and a bit annoying: in Kubuntu 6.06 the lines in my Konqueror Bookmarks list were spread apart so that what had been a single column of bookmarks became a column and a half. In 6.10 they were back together. Now in 7.04 they are spread back out again. Some other things also look larger. I'm probably going to have to beat on my monitor settings again. I wish they wouldn't step on those things. Actually, I'm not sure why things video are misbehaving: my xorg.conf did NOT get stepped on: the date on the file is unchaged since the last time I tweaked it.

Maybe it's the KDE settings.

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Wed, May 02, 2007

WKRP

Posted at 11:07 pm MDT to Media

The first season of WKRP in Cincinnati is out on DVD. They had to edit out some (many) of the original musical numbers that were playing in the background because they couldn't get licenses to use them, but at least the stories are there. And the first season includes the legendary (notorious?) turkey episode.

Some people on the Web think the music in WKRP has been mangled too much (and some of the episodes are apparently the shorter versions that were used for syndication). I haven't watched all of these discs yet, and it has been a LONG time since I watched the originals (and I don't think I ever saw the syndicated reruns). It will be interesting to see what the actual effect is.

Actually, this problem with musical rights has affected at least one other DVD in my collection that I know of. When the 1980 PBS version of 'The Lathe of Heaven (which is actually quite faithful to the book by Ursula K. LeGuin) finally appeared on DVD, the soundtrack had been changed to include a version of "I'll Get by With a Little Help from My Friends" performed by someone other than the Beatles. They couldn't just get rid of the song entirely in this case because the song is an important catalyst for a plot point.

Some people on the Web think the music in WKRP has been mangled too much (and some of the episodes are apparently the shorter versions that were used for syndication). I haven't watched all of these discs yet, and it has been a LONG time since I watched the originals (and I don't think I ever saw the syndicated reruns).

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Tue, May 01, 2007

Dentist

Posted at 8:04 pm MDT to Technology

Patrick Nielsen Hayden needs to go to the dentist. Teresa put a note on Whatever to ask people to remind him.

This is especially funny because I just made an appointment this today for this afternoon. I got Nanette to make an appointment for herself, too. She's been saying for months that she needed a new dentist.

In a classic case of Murphy magic, the TMJ pain that had been annoying me for weeks went away this morning. So on the one hand the dentist couldn't look at the problem. And on the other, the hygienist was able to get into the back of my mouth without giving me too much temptation for homicide.

The worst bit was the bite-wing x-rays. They have fancy new digital ones that are quicker than the old ones and use 84% less radiation, but the thing they put in your mouth is stiffer, and my mouth is small enough that they sometimes had problems fitting even the old flexible ones into it without a) triggering my gag reflex or b) gouging holes into my tongue and gums.

I go to the dentist pretty regularly: my Mom had been a dentist's receptionist before she married (Dr. Kasler) and she made sure we all got into the habit of going to the dentist regularly.

She also gave me genes for really bad teeth. We were told once that instead of a few large valleys on the tops of our molars, we had lots of little branching valleys that made the enamel weak. It's a moot point for me and has been for years: my molar biting surfaces include 7 gold onlays and a fancy high-tech porcelain-like reconstruction.

My Dad had great teeth, but I didn't get those genes. And his infancy and childhood were spent elsewhere and may have had better water than what my Mom and I encountered growing up in Connecticut.

I had my wisdom teeth out in my twenties: they sort of came in at 45 degree angles and then started to crumble (I'm not sure they were really enamel). But since they were at least partially erupted, they came out pretty cleanly. I didn't use most of the high-powered pain killers they gave me.

I had the wisdom teeth taken out by an oral surgeon because I wanted to be under general anesthetic (because of the gagging thing) and because the medical insurance I had at the time would cover the oral surgeon but not an extraction in a dentist's office.

I also did something that seemed obvious to me, but no one else ever seems to do it that way: I had both wisdom teeth on one side taken out, then after they healed, I had the other side done. That way I always had one side available to chew with, without worrying too much about damaging the healing sockets.

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