Month: June 2005

now with DropCash

I added a DropCash campaign button to the index page of ye old weblog, to see how it would work for me.

I guess if I am going to beg, I may as well be upfront where the proceeds will go. My list of desired additions to this modern lifestyle is long (a MiniDV camera, a Mac mini, an iMac from this century) but my hope is that perhaps the images I have warehoused can help fund those other items.

That’s what the purchase of a DVD burner and a larger disk have been about in recent months: I figure the scans are going to take a lot of space (20 Mb each) and it would be useful to be able to store them somewhere other than on a rotating platter.

The inventor of DropCash reports he has routed US$75,000 through it so far. Not a fortune, but I expect every cent was gracefully donated and gratefully received.

Moore’s law and it’s corollaries

Museum of pre-historic technology (I):

From The Hunt for Red October (1984):

During her last overhaul, the Dallas had received a very special toy to go with her BQQ-5 sonar system. Called the BC-10, it was the most powerful computer yet installed aboard a submarine. Though only about the size of a business desk, it cost over five million dollars and ran at eighty million operations per second.

Emphasis mine.

Twenty years and 13 or so cycles through Moore’s law later, this kind of massive computing power comes in a rather more convenient package.

The link is to a Palm Zire, retailing for a whopping US$99.95.

I just bought a 120 Gb drive on eBay for US$51, less that 50¢ a gigabyte. I paid less that a dollar/GB a year or so back and felt good about that.
Continue reading “Moore’s law and it’s corollaries”

technically vexed

One of those days.

Tried to bring up my Speakeasy circuit but it failed to work properly. All the blinkenlights worked but no connectivity.

My iBook continued to act wonky but not predictably or reproducibly.

Things that have worked in the past — automounting music libraries, setting up instances of MySQL — have silently and stubbornly failed today.

And then this:
pink:~ root# fsck -y /Volumes/backup/
/Volumes/backup/ is not a character device
CONTINUE? yes

** /Volumes/backup/ (NO WRITE)

CANNOT READ: BLK 16
CONTINUE? yes

THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31,
ioctl (GCINFO): Inappropriate ioctl for device
fsck: /Volumes/backup/: can't read disk label
Feh. The disk was corrupted (never a good sign when it’s a backup) but that incantation of fsck wasn’t useful.

Perhaps I’ll take it easy tomorrow and see if this, like all things, passes.

[composed and posted with ecto]

user experience

To the Apple Store today, to consult with a Genius. My iBook continues to act wonky — weird trackpad action that seems attributable to the combined effects of disk use (ie, heat) and pressure (as I rest my wrists and hands on the assigned space). The case warps ever so slightly, and that makes the trackpad lose track, for lack of a better description.

Of course, I couldn’t reproduce the problem in the store, since a. I had the lid closed when I took it in, and b. I was testing it on a nice firm wooden countertop.

Next time I lounge in their comfy chairs and see if I can repro it there.

I did hunt for a Mac mini and it was kinda hard to find: they’re small, and always smaller than I expect. But using one hooked up to 20 inch display, with some 3D visualization software just makes it clear how far behind the times I am.


[composed and posted with ecto]

primer on sed

The Tao of Mac – sed:

sed is the ancient UNIX “stream editor”, mastery of which is every UNIX newbie’s test of true geekness. I find it vastly preferable to the Perl behemoth for parsing simple files in embedded systems – or brain-dead semi-proprietary UNIX boxes that have nothing but the most basic userland components.

bookmarked for later reference


[composed and posted with ecto]

gloom and doom, part deux

Not what I would have expected from Steve Jobs, a reflection of how little I know about him. This is the conclusion of his speech: the whole thing is worth reading.

[IP] Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

I love the Whole Earth Catalogs: I have the first (in a reprint) and the Millennium version.


[composed and posted with ecto]