Month: March 2005

thinking about a better way

The Hideout:

Greg Lundgren has figured it out. Today marks the opening of his beautiful bar called “The Hideout” at 1005 Boren. Jennifer and I went down to see what’s going on and chat with him. Greg is known around town for putting together really great art shows. Now he’s got a gallery where he doesn’t have to worry about selling art. He gets to sell drinks with some of the freshest art in town on the walls. So, go down, get a drink, gander at the paintings, and even submit an article to the quarterly journal that will be put out with work made up right in the bar by the patrons!

A gallery with refreshments is a great idea.

copy protection? not much

In the course of my struggles with computers this AM, I decided to freshen up a backup of one system and wanted to use a DVD recorder I just assembled from a bare drive and a USB enclosure.

Of course, it’s not supported natively by Apple, so I had to find a third party tool: the drive came with Toast Lite, so I pulled over a copy of that. Of course, I had updated it since installation. Turns out I can’t use an updated version unless I can first re-installed the shipped version and upgrade that.

<sigh>

I just backed up to a firewire drive (another bare drive/enclosure assembly project). But now I am armed with a copy of BurnXFree (untested) and I found a way to get the updated version of Toast to work. I made an archive of the application bundle and the various *.plist files, about 1800 items. Pulled that across, unzipped it, and hey presto. Toast thinks it’s good to go.

“locate Toast” is your friend.

I [still] hate Comcast

A power outage this morning created a host of issues. Comcast, for reasons known only to them, has issues with DHCP lease expirations and renewals. Sometimes it becomes impossible to renew a lease on a given network interface. The only resolution I can find is to swap the cards (WAN and LAN), but that creates a mess. If I make some notes here, perhaps it will make it easier to remember it all next time.

  • The configuration files that manage network address translation need to be fixed.
  • Firewall configuration needs to updated
  • zoneedit client config — where DNS gets handled for self-hosted people like me — needs to be updated.
  • the new nameservers need to be added to named.conf for forwarding/resolution works

A lot of this can be automated/scripted with the use of templates and if it arises again, I may do just that. The only manual step will be physically swapping the cables.

should this rub me the wrong way?

RSS: Really Shortsighted Statement (1):

[Chad relates someone else’s comments on] Geoff Ramsay’s personal view of RSS:

Strangely, Geoff doesn’t subscribe to any RSS feeds because, “I don’t want to go out there and have to get the stuff every day. That’s the pull model. My research team does that.”

Maybe it’s just the irritation of not having a “research team” to read stuff I could read for myself, but something about that dismissive comments just bugs me. Isn’t one of the advantages of this whole decentralized publishing model that we can dispense with filters and find those original voices? As soon as you have someone recommending “must reads” have we really moved beyond the Big Media/Little Consumer model?

next gen web stats

Tim Bray: ongoing &#xb7; Aggregator Market Share (1):

In reply to one of my Browser Market Share postings, Ian Brown wrote to point out that with an increasing portion of the traffic going through newsreaders, it might be interesting to do some breakdown on that. So I did.

Here’s my top ten:
3040 37.7% (unrecognized)
2996 37.2% Ocelli
759 9.4% msnbot
189 2.3% Firefox
168 2.1% Bloglines (1 subscribers)
140 1.7% ShopWiki
124 1.5% w3search
94 1.2% NetNewsWire
82 1.0% NewsGatorOnline
59 0.7% Opera
Not sure that tells me all that much (unrecognized as the top vote-getter is bad enough, and I have never heard of the next one either).

Ocelli Information Page (2):

Ocelli is a Web crawler owned and operated by GlobalSpec®, the leading specialized search engine and information resource for the engineering community. Ocelli’s mission is to find and index web pages for The Engineering Websm from GlobalSpec, a unique slice of the World Wide Web focusing solely on engineering and technical content.

So I guess I have some relevant material here, but they promise (threaten?) that if they don’t find engineering-related content, the robot won’t return. As the wise man said of the Thermos, how does it know?

I guess they can tell if people link to the content they gather and use that for ranking/relevance.

Below the fold, the rest of the story for the day so far (I roll logs each night).
Continue reading “next gen web stats”

Staticize and ecto don’t play well together

I tried using Staticize [Photo Matt » Staticize 2.5 (124)] but it seems ecto doesn’t like it.

What does Staticize Reloaded do? It is a highly advanced caching engine that dynamically and automatically caches pages on your site that need to be cached, when they need to be cached.

Something in the handshake seems to be off (looks like Staticize passes back data on how well it worked and ecto barfs on it).

So, for now, I have to be content with 4+ second page load times, instead of 2.5 seconds . . .

<update> One possible fix is to turn off the downloading of entries in Preferences->Recent Entries, but it also messes up the RSS feed (entries disappear). I’ll do without it for now.

a new kind of bubblebabble

Nambers (14):

A namber is part name and part number. Each number between 0 and 255 has a namber. For example, 1 is fun and 213 is star.

From their site:

67.171.37.87 [the current address of this host] is duck.pig.cat.food.mysteryrobot.com

It’s a little more memorable, I guess.

via http://earth.frog.brown.tooth.mysteryrobot.com/

<updated in the wake of a network issue> now this site can be called bone.bike.wind.bag.