Category: observations

decisions

The 120 Gb drive I picked up on eBay the other week arrived today. But it doesn’t look like I’ll be using it anytime soon. I was planning on replacing the internal 12 Gb drive in my aging G3/G4 Blue & White with an 80 Gb drive and then adding the 120 as an external in a FireWire enclosure. But the 80 Gb drive won’t work reliably in the B&W: at 133 MHz, it’s a bit too fast for it, since the chassis was built when 33 MHz was reasonable. So I put the 80 Gb drive back in the enclosure, put the 120 on the shelf, and am preparing to wipe clean the internal drive to make what use I can of it.

Do I throw $35 at this box to add an ATA card that can handle these better drives? Or do I get another enclosure for the 120 Gb drive?

I’m leaning toward B, since that allows me to move the drives around as needed. And when the mini or possible a new iMac should arrive, I’ll be able to use them all with that.
Continue reading “decisions”

Ben recruits

Ben Hammersley reminds us that the internets don’t care about the Supreme Court.

The curse of the missing clause:

Declaring filesharing illegal across the net because it’s illegal in the US is like declaring the web broken because it’s censored in China. All it means is that people in the US wanting to write filesharing apps and make money from them will just have to move somewhere warm and cheap and do it from there.

While developers in the US are being hamstrung by their courts, and their counterparts in Europe are about to have software patents kick the chair out from under them, the developers in the warm and cheap places are getting busy. If you really care that your software was written in the US, then the Grokster case is quite a big deal. If not, you just shrug and move on. The rest of the world’s a big place. They make software there too.

Not the first he has suggested that rest of the world beckons clueful people. Does the New Colossus’s offer still stand but as guide to the exit?

“Give me
your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your
teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden
door!”

Continue reading “Ben recruits”

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]

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]

ecto and WordPress 1.5.1.x at loggerheads

Kula support forum (ecto, 1001) :: View topic – category issue with WordPress 1.5.1:

I upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1 today, and, now, every time I make a post from ecto, the default WordPress category (ID 1 or “Uncategorized”, in my case) is automatically assigned to the post, even though it is not checked in the category list. I tried refreshing the cache and also recreating the account from scratch in ecto, but the problem still persists.

This was biting me as well. There were some suggested fixes, all having to do with commenting out two sections of xmlrpc.php. They didn’t seem to work: commenting out code is a bit simplistic in released software — it’s a debugging technique, not something you want to run with.

What does seem to work is testing for an existing category setting at post time, and setting it to the catchall (id 1) category if no other category has been chosen: otherwise, leave it alone. Since ecto can already check that the category != “”, things are OK again.

The fix is documented here.

[composed and posted with ecto]

manual update of WordPress 1.5.x to 1.5.1.2

WordPress › Development Blog › Security Update:

You can upgrade by overwriting your old 1.5 files or if you would like to apply the fix manually it is relatively simple:

Open the wp-includes/template-functions-category.php file in a text editor like Wordpad.
Go to around line 103 where it says get_the_category_by_ID.
Create a new line after that and paste in $cat_ID = (int) $cat_ID;

And then you can update version.php to match reality (or just so you don’t keep thinking you’re a step behind).

[composed and posted with ecto]

trapped

I re-upped my subscription to NetFlix (sorry, no link: I’m annoyed with them) and have been catching up on stuff: I took the two-at-a-time option, one for me, one for the young’uns.

Things have been proceeding nicely, as I finally got to start watching the Lord of the Rings series. I had seen the first a while back, so I reviewed it, then watched the second, and was all prepared to see the Return of the King [DVD][book] this weekend.

But no. The fine print is that I get two-at-a-time, with a maximum of four in a month. Now, they were either gracious or deceptive in comping us several titles this month: we saw a lot more than four. I’m not sure if this is a miscue on their part (in sending out too many DVDs) or a clever ploy to get me to upgrade, since they see I have not rated the last of the trilogy and can deduce I haven’t seen it.
<grumble>

[composed and posted with ecto]

so people will buy music even if they’ve heard it?

about radiohead:

Three months prior to the release of Kid A MP3 tracks of the entire album made their way onto the file sharing service. As Richard Menta of MP3 Newswire detailed in his essay Did Napster Take Radiohead’s New Album to Number 1?, millions of fans had possession of this music by the time the CD hit stores. The record industry assumed the album was now doomed to failure since fans already had the music for free. Instead the opposite happened and the band, which had never hit the US top 20 before, captured the number one spot in Kid A’s debut week. With the record’s absence of radio airplay, big time marketing, and any other factor that may have explained this stunning success, Menta declared this was proof of the promotional powers of file trading and of word-of-mouth generated by the Net.

Who’da thunk it?

Interesting piece: if you’re not familiar with the above anecdote or the Offspring’s attempt to pre-release an album via the net (nixed by their label: what if it worked and they couldn’t blame Napster for their failures anymore?), check it out.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Pop Stars? Nein Danke!

Pop Stars? Nein Danke!:

In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people…

A little nugget Gary dropped in my lap . . . .

Imagine Elvis never happened. Imagine Elvis Presley recording all his music for a dollar in the little booth where he cut that first 78 for his mother’s birthday. And imagine a music industry which, instead of investing in a single massive star called Elvis, distributed ten thousand stars, all recording for a dollar, in totally different styles, all appealing to small, highly self-conscious cults in a fragmented society. A society in a state of fabulous confusion, exploding into fragments. Our society, now.

The music industry is changing organically, adapting to this new world of ‘cults’ — tribes discovered one by one by the pioneering independent labels of the 70s and 80s. But many major labels still operate in the old way, investing huge sums in relatively few groups which they then try to bludgeon us into accepting as stars on the old model, acts which must cross over to the ‘mainstream’ or be dropped.


[composed and posted with ecto]

Continue reading “Pop Stars? Nein Danke!”