posts | images | bookmarks

fair warning

By anders pearson 07 Oct 2002

we’re ordering a new rackmount server at work with failover gigabit ethernet, redundant RAID drives, vast expanses of RAM, etc. to replace the old desktop machine that’s currently doing our web serving.

<p>this means that in a couple weeks when we get the new server, things will get moved around. the rackmount replaces the old server. the old server replaces my desktop machine. my desktop machine turns into an automated network backup machine, etc. IP addresses will change. <span class="caps">DNS</span> entries will be updated. things will move around.</p>

<p>with all the upheaval, i see as good a time as any to upgrade things to <a href="http://perl.apache.org/">mod_perl</a>. i&#8217;ve been playing with mod_perl a lot lately and have got a copy of the thraxil engine on my home machine ported to mod_perl with some new features added and ready to go. for you end users, switching to mod_perl will mostly just mean a nice speed improvement. i&#8217;ve also vastly improved the caching model, changed things so urls will be more userfriendly (eg, diaries will be accessible through a url like http://thraxil.org/users/anders/diary rather than http://thraxil.org/diary.pl?user=anders), and <span class="caps">RSS</span> feeds are in the works.</p>

<p>i intend to minimize the effects of the server moves on thraxil but my priorities have to be with my employer&#8217;s systems. i don&#8217;t expect problems, but i just thought i&#8217;d warn everyone well in advance that there may be some turbulence in a couple weeks. your reward for putting up with the changes should be a speed improvement and some nifty new features.</p>

auyama

By anders pearson 06 Oct 2002

just noticed that there’s a new sushi restaurant across the street from my apartment. it looks small but classy. i’ll be very psyched if it’s good. i’ve already got my favorite mexican place, a decent ethiopian place and a punk bar all within a one block radius. i love new york. :)

<p>lani was up for the weekend. we had no plans and that was nice. met up with a bunch of people from work for one of gerard&#8217;s martini nights down in the west village friday night. saturday we picked up a sixpack and rented &#8216;Wham, Bam, Thank you Spaceman&#8221;, which we found in the &#8216;cult&#8217; section of the video store. bizarre, low-budget 70&#8217;s sexploitation. confusing and amusing.</p>

google changes

By anders pearson 03 Oct 2002

scott

the blogger crowd mostly seems to be concerned with how searches for their names don’t appear as prominently in the listings anymore. well, i personally couldn’t care where any of my stuff shows up in the search engines. but i have noticed and been concerned with a general decline in the quality of google’s results lately.

it’s hard to explain exactly what the changes are, but it seems that they’re not doing as good of a job of identifying the primary authoritative sites on a given subject anymore. random mailing list postings and stuff on big clearinghouse sites like rpmfind.net now seem to dominate the results.

eg, searching for “<a href=”http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=postgresql+python&btnG=Google+Search”>postgresql python</a>” <em>ought</em> to (and i’m pretty sure <em>did</em> about a month ago), point to the <a href=”http://www.druid.net/pygresql/“>pygresql</a> site since that’s pretty much the standard module for using postgres with python. but now, it’s at #6 in the ranking after some worthless mailing list posts and rpmfind.net stuff.

it used to be that if i ever got an error i couldn’t figure out how to fix with some piece of linux software, all i had to do was copy and paste the error message into google and it would immediately bring up either some FAQ or post explaining how to fix it. that hasn’t been working as well lately.

so i hope that whatever problems google seems to be having are just temporary and they’ll get things working better in the near future. i’ve become pretty dependent on google and i’m always impressed with the features they add so i’d be disappointed if they lose sight of what should be their main focus.

scanners

By anders pearson 03 Oct 2002

last night i was bad and stayed up till 3am watching David Cronenberg’s scanners. don’t know how i’ve made it the last 21 years without seeing it. very cool, freaky sci-fi. it’s hard to tell with Cronenberg sometimes whether the acting in a scene is bad, or Cronenberg’s just trying to do something strange.

<p>i also finally watched Se7en a few nights ago. yet another movie that i&#8217;d somehow managed to never see. good, although the ending was a little anti-climactic.</p>

waking

By anders pearson 27 Sep 2002

some people seem to have the ability to instantly transition from sleeping to awake and alert. as soon as their alarm clock goes off and their eyes open, they’re operating at 100% mental capacity.

i’m not one of those people. i believe that i truly should not be held accountable for anything i do or say within about 30 minutes of waking up. my mind just cannot go from sleep to awake in a short period of time.

when i was at <a href=”http://www.mssm.org/“>mssm</a>, we used to have fire drills in the dorms. sometime in late october or so, they thought it would be a good idea to have a 4am drill. being northern maine, 4am in late october means that it’s really cold and there’s a thin layer of ice on the ground. i didn’t actually become conscious until i was about 100 feed away from the dorm, standing in the parking lot, on the ice, in bare feet with no idea how i got there, what was going on, and why my feet were freezing. somehow my roommates had gotten me out of bed and directed me, zombie-like, out the door. naturally, all my classmates had been alert enough to grab some slippers or shoes so the next day, i was the only one with frostbitten feet.

that’s a pretty extreme example. most of the time, when my alarm goes off, i wake up in a semi-conscious state where i might be able to remember it later but i have no ability for rational thought. my brain seems to stay in that sort of dream-logic mode.

yesterday, when my alarm went off, i somehow “discovered” the snooze button. now, i’m a big fan of the snooze button; i’ve probably hit it 5 or 6 times a day, every workday for the last couple years. but yesterday, in my sleepy state, the discovery that “if i stick my arm out from under the covers and hit this button over here on the alarm clock, i get to sleep for another 10 minutes!”, was totally new to me and had all the perceived importance of discovering a practical method for cold fusion.

i’ve apparently been awakened numerous times by phone calls and managed to carry on groggy but somewhat intelligible conversations that i don’t remember any of later on.

my job allows me to keep pretty flexible hours and basically come in to work in the morning when i feel like it, but occasionally we have meetings scheduled early in the morning that i’m supposed to go to. of course, i’m notoriously bad at showing up on time for these (at other times, i can be annoyingly punctual). with my rational mind working, i know that if i have a 9am meeting, i need about an hour to take a shower, put in my contacts, get dressed, and walk to work so i <em>need</em> to get up at 8am to make it on time. of course, when 8am hits, this airtight logic falls apart and 4 or 5 snooze buttons later, i finally become alert enough to realize that i have a meeting in 15 minutes and i end up sprinting up amsterdam ave unshowered, wearing whatever clothes were within reach.

creating applications with mozilla

By anders pearson 20 Sep 2002

O’Reilly has released the entire text of the new book <a href=”http://books.mozdev.org/chapters/“>Creating Applications with Mozilla</a> online.

i’m pretty excited to see mozilla starting to turn into a real application platform. some of the projects at <a href=”http://www.mozdev.org/“>mozdev</a> and elsewhere show great promise. i’ve been playing around with the <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/“>mozilla calendar</a> a bit and i’m pretty impressed. it still crashes now and then and has plenty of bugs but is on the way to becoming a really decent calendar app.

since the vast majority of the programming i’ve done has been web-based stuff using html for the user interface, i’ve become very familiar and comfortable with using markup languages like html and xml along with display languages like css to design my interfaces. every once in a while when i decide to write a ‘regular’ GUI application, i have to struggle with the programmatic approach that various widget libraries (Tk, Gtk, qt, swing, etc) use for laying out the buttons and text boxes and such. html forms and user interface elements are very limited though and the stateless nature of http means that many standard desktop applications would be impossible or at least extremely difficult to develop as web applications.

so when mozilla started becoming usable and i first heard about <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xulref/“>XUL</a>, mozilla’s XML based user interface language, i was pretty excited. you can think of it as basically html expanded so you can actually use it to design interfaces for real honest-to-goodness GUI apps. this kind of thing sounds like a much shallower learning curve for me than other technologies.

because it runs on top of mozilla and mozilla runs on just about every platform, it promises to be very portable. what i’m really excited about is using XUL to write really nice interfaces for client applications that talk to a server via XML-RPC or SOAP.

the only things that bother me about XUL at this point are that from skimming through the book, it looks incredibly verbose. easier to learn isn’t that important if it requires writing 10 times more code. maybe i’m just a spoiled perl programmer, but i’m rather fond of concise code. also it uses javascript as the language for specifying the actual logic of the application. after years of pulling out hair over javascript’s idiosyncrasies and often bizarre syntax (eg, the ‘functions as classes’ object model) it’s just left a bad taste in my mouth. maybe some day someone will figure out a way to use python/perl/scheme/etc to script XUL instead of javascript.

anyway, i should probably go out and actually try writing a simple XUL app or two before i say too much about it. and if i decide that i don’t like XUL, i guess there’s always <a href=”http://sjbrown.geeky.net/metagame-sector/tutorial.html”>python with libglade</a>…

meet the makers

By anders pearson 19 Sep 2002

i somehow managed to talk my way into a VIP pass to the NYC <a href=”http://www.meet-the-makers.com/web/3/“>Meet the Makers</a> conference in november. the <a href=”http://www.meet-the-makers.com/web/3/guests.asp”>guest list</a> is starting to look pretty interesting with folks like <a href=”http://www.zeldman.com/“>zeldman</a>, <a href=”http://www.economist.com/“>david wertheimer</a>, and <a href=”http://leslie.harpold.com/“>leslie harpold</a>.

i’m skeptical about the conference in general but any excuse to meet some cool people is probably a good one.

perl and beer, beer and perl

By anders pearson 18 Sep 2002

thanks to <a href=”http://perl.meetup.com/“>meetup.com</a>, i had dinner and some beers last night with <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=26179”>tilly</a> and <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=104919”>perrin</a>. talked about all kinds of perl and computer stuff. for the most part i was just happy that i could follow what they were talking about. hardware setups, webserver caching strategies and modules (perrin has done <a href=”http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/10/17/etoys.html”>lot of research on this</a>), features tilly wants to see in perl 6, the new economy, some general commisserating over being from up north (perrin is from freeport, maine and tilly’s from canada), the life and eventual death of various online communities, got some more background on tilly’s famous <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=153046”>break with perlmonks</a>, and all sorts of other geeky stuff. tilly’s wife even joined us for a little bit and was amazingly tolerant of the computer talk.

chesapeake

By anders pearson 03 Sep 2002

lani, me, and two of lani’s coworkers/roommates kim and yura, left DC friday afternoon. by dark we were at our campsite at jane’s island state park with out tents set up and a dinner fire started.

saturday morning we went into town and got some breakfast. then we wandered around, checked out “Meatland” and the docks. we also happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch some kind of parade. shriner’s in their mini cars, firetrucks, cheerleaders, the whole nine yards. we even saw “miss crustacean”.

went back to the park and tried our hands at crab fishing. apparently crabs are about the stupidest animals there are. to catch them, you just tie a chicken neck to a string, dip it in the water, wait for a crab to grab a hold of it and then pull them up into a waiting net. you don’t need hooks or traps; once they get a grip on the meat, they won’t let go. it sounds all too easy.

after about 2 minutes, lani and i had both pulled up crabs. they’re not kidding. it really is easy. unfortunately, they have to be over 5 1/4 inches. for the next hour or two, we caught dozens of small ones. eventually kim caught one that was 5 1/2 inches, battle-scarred and missing a claw. we ended up giving to some kids who were fishing next to us; one crab wasn’t really worth cooking.

we’d planned on staying till monday but on sunday it was raining and threatening to get even worse that night. so we packed up the tents and got ready to leave. naturally, as soon as the tents were down, the sun came out. so we put everything in the trunk, crabbed for a while longer and then went and rented some sea kayaks. lani and i never entirely figured out how to steer the two-person kayak, but we still had fun zig-zagging around the bay for a couple hours. afterwards, my arms felt like they were going to fall off, my hands were blistered and i had a sunburn on my nose.

went out to a local restaurant to finally get some crab since we hadn’t really been able to catch enough to eat ourselves. unfortunately, the restaurant we went to was out of whole crabs. so we had to settle for the “world’s best crabcake” and a pitcher of beer. slept in the back seat of the car for most of the ride home as it started really pouring.

when we got back to DC, lani took me out and showed me the <a href=”http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s663636.htm”>&uuml;ber vending machine</a>.

monday lani and i went to the Hirshhold gallery to check out some photography and the <a href=”http://www.artmolds.com/ali/halloffame/ron_muek.htm”>Ron Mueck</a> exhibit. then we walked to Vegetarian Soul Exodus for some vegan soul food. finally we met up with mark in dupont circle for some dessert.