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February 2001 |
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| 02.27.2001 |
YAFLI (Yet Another Failed Linux Install)... Linux on a PowerBook notes... (This may be relevant to me someday!) The female and I recently watched 'Office Space'- I think she understands me, and why I am the way I am, much better now... Speaking of Office Space, I remember seeing the old Mike Judge cartoons featuring Milton back 'round the early 90's on Night After Night with Allen Havey. I think that made it all the more funny. Of course, I sort of knew what was going to happen, so it was a bit strange. Milton is not Milt. Sure, maybe they've both started buildings on fire but -- oops, I've said enough! Yesterday I got out of work late, so I decided to sleep late, and get in late today, as it's sometimes impossible to leave early (or even on time) but things somehow backfired in a good way. I did sleep later, but I still ended up getting in early. Which I'm assuming means I can sleep later every day and still get in on time. There may be a shift in the space-time continuum to investigate. Hey! Let's design a user interface where the 'Delete' button jumps into the position that the 'Properties' button usually lives - right after you select something you'd like see the properties of. What!? Microsoft already did that? damn... "Innovation" indeed... When you flex your wrist 90 degrees, should you hear a loud cracking sound? |
| 02.26.2001 |
While out shopping Emma picked out a new toothbrush, but I didn't get to see it until we got home and put the groceries away. She picked a Princess Leia toothbrush. If you had told me in 1977 that someday I'd have a child that thought Star Wars was cool, well, it would have been pretty unbelievable. Although in all honesty, the reason she thinks Star Wars is cool is because her Daddy does... Which in itself is pretty cool... ;) Another failed Linux install... Mozilla has many menus and many menu items,and many components. I've started to explore them. An IRC client is in there... interesting, but I could do without it. Newsreader? Sure, ok. I can use that. Search Bookmarks/History? Extremely cool! Composer? Why why why??? Address Book? I probably won't need it... Stylesheet choice? Cool... I've only got abut 50 more menus to go! ;) I did try to load Mozilla onto my 4 year old PowerComputing clone... it's a bit painful. So it's the choice of NS4 or MSIE5 on that machine... I want SVG to work dammit! I really do! (Oh, please don't crash my browser, SVG!) I'd also like a smaller SVG browser plug-in, but that might be too much to ask for right now... and isn't SVG supposed to be rolled in Mozilla at some point? I need to read this: Dive Into Python The squirrels really hate it when you pour bleach all over the trash, juts like they do in the big city to keep homeless people from eating food from dumpsters... D.S.F.A. |
| 02.23.2001 |
It always amazes me when people who build web sites/applications don't even know how to create semi-valid pages. At least put an <html> tag in there. Oh, and maybe some <title> and <body> tags while you're at it - is it too much to ask? I ask these ColdFusion guys to do something. They don't know how. I know how in perl. I post it to a mailing list. I get an answer. I test it. I tell the ColdFusion guys how to do it. Hurm... How to tell when someone doesn't get the web: When you ask someone to send you the url for something, and they email you a message that just says "Here it is!" and has an attachement of the actual file from their hard drive... they don't get it. Here's what I say about Napster: "It's an interesting application in the P2P and file sharing space." Here's what someone else says "Dur, Napster is neet, it's got lotza songs..." I then say "Hurm...' I've borrowed a Windows 98 laptop from someone. Wow, does Windows 98 suck or what? I suppose it's no suprise, as Windows 95 sucked as well. Really, Windows 95/98 makes Windows NT look good, and Windows 2000 makes Windows NT look bad... I suppose they all look kind of bad though, if you think about it... "Look a giant screw... hey, wait - what are you doing with that hammer! Aaaiiieeehhhh!" |
| 02.22.2001 |
Do you read the <!-- comment --> tags found in some of the sites you visit often? You should. It's been said before, by many others, but I should reiterate. Many web applications suck. They can suck for many reasons. I think the main reason is that many of the people building them don't understand the web. A crucial error. Maybe these people can go on to create applications for handheld devices, or something other than all they seem to know. At least get some input from a UI designer, or test with multiple browsers, platforms, resolutions, connection speeds, etc, etc, etc... Perl poetry is always popular, here's some odd stuff that is perl, but isn't exactly poetry:
push (@up, "bra");
shift (@postitions);
pop @corn;
split (/my/, $pants);
join ("with", @us);
while ($eating) {&no ($talking)};
sleep unless (not ($tired));
sleep while $tired;
study $homework;
pack ($your, @bags);
pos $computer;
y/ou/silly/;
qw/eer/;
read (<A>, $good, $book);
write <ME>;
tell <A_FRIEND>;
There's more, but I got bored... if they're not valid, well, neither am I really... |
| 02.21.2001 |
I need help. There's a Mac application that is supposed to be top-notch for downloading images from digital cameras. I'm pretty sure I read about it 6 months ago. It was recommended that you toss out whatever came with your camera, and use this instead... but I can't remember the damn name of it! Can you? I think I could add many words to the PSEUDOdictionary. Marcus Welby, fullapopsicles, Deuteronamy... Another day, another failed Linux install... See this later: chez snarko... Oh, and this too: Mac Edition... |
| 02.20.2001 |
I have this templating problem... See, I created part of a web site and properly used templates to separate content from presentation, while someone else worked on the rest of the site and didn't do this. Now we need to make a change, so I'm changing my part (easy) rather than the other person changing their part (difficult.) The problem? I have to do more work! And the other person still doesn't get the benefit (to themselves) of properly separating content from presentation... (or something like that.) Whew, bizzy weekend. I got in a big fight with Slave1 which ended with it losing it's video card. I finally beat it into submission though, and it lost one of it's heads in the process. I've been having Mac problems for quite a while, mainly due to video signals not being recognized, which caused me to do major monitor futzing for quite sometime. It's smooth now, with only one monitor and an external 2x speed Power User CD-ROM drive. (Did I mention the internal drive rarely recognizes CD's?) It's what we'd call a 'hobbled' together system. Hey, it's 4 years old you know. See the Linux page for details. We took the kids to the Discovery World Museum where they could "touch everything" as Emma liked to put it. It was great to be able to do something out of the ordinary and just plain fun with the kids. When we asked Emma what fun thing she wanted to do, she suggested going to KMart to look at the toys. Sigh... Madeline also had a great time, she did manage to get hurt, of course, both kids usually do, it's genetic though, they can't help it. We had no meltdowns, so the day was considered a great success! From Aaron comes this story about the Hernandez brothers, but there's no mention of Jaime's time in Dr. Know... an oversight? Perhaps... Quick question - how do I make an XHTML page validate when it contains links with query strings and parameters in it? We've taken up rocks against the squirrels. They're running scared. RasterWeb - we put the 'fun' in funeral! |
| 02.16.2001 |
Upgrade my browser? Sure, as soon as the WaSP sends me a check to purchase a new PowerMac (the new Titanuim PowerBook would do nicely) that will run Netscape 6 or Mozilla adequately, I'll do it! Until then it's good old reliable Netscape 4.75, creaky as it is... Yesterday something snapped. As a result I copied the useful stuff off of Slave1's second drive, and reformatted it. I'll be loading Yellow Dog Linux on it this weekend. Will it work? Who knows! On the way into the office I was driving behind a truck with "DBI" on it in big letters. I was afraid that if it tipped over there would be perl modules spilled all over the freeway... Scripting News Word of the Day: cesspool! (...it just beat out 'sweet') Yesterday I worked on some code to email the contents of the RSS file to people, sort of like xmlTree does... I think I'll back-burner it for a while though... I may be hitting my limit. We all have limits. Mine is supposed to exist somewhere later in the year 2001, or maybe even (shudder) 2002... but it might be getting closer. |
| 02.15.2001 |
In a lapse of intelligent thought, I had looked into using Ameritech as a DSL provider. It didn't take long to realize that using a phone company for DSL service is a bad idea, ask around... anyway, while investigating their "speedpath" service, I noticed it's only available for Windows OS based computers. I emailed them asking why computers that support standard internet protocols could not be used, but never got more than an automated response. I did get a somewhat unrelated phone call, probably in response to our asking about it a month ago when setting up phone service, but wasn't home. Maybe I'll get to talk to some Ameritech moron and ask my questions... Or should I forget DSL and go with cable? I mentioned Brandon Cruz the other day, but forgot to mention that I caught a bit about him on some VH-1 "Child Stars Where Are they Now?" type of show... interesting... Nardcore! What's my problem? Well, one of my problems is that it's hard for me to think in terms of generating revenue off of the buying decisions consumers make. Why? Because I rarely make purchases, I'm a very poor consumer. The only thing I purchase on a regular basis is gasoline. (By that I mean I personally make some sort of transaction.) My family doesn't go out to eat much, we don't go to the movies, I don't buy fun new gadgets very often... I'm out of touch with what they 'typical' comsumer goes through to make a buying decision. At least that's how I'm feeling about things lately... ask again later... Is it all just the state of the economy? I don't know a lot about such things, but it's starting to hit very close to home, and it stinks... Will things get better? When? Argh... it's hard to not compromise in the face of armageddeon. Good gosh! An ftp link? Sure... for BBEdit lovers... What the duck? Duck Microsoft! ...snitches get stitches... Mark of the Squealer!!! SCOh-No! I saw some of Spin City yesterday, haven't seen it in a while... Geez, does Michael J. Fox look bad! I asked my female what happened, and she reminded me that he had some horrible disease. I think it's called "Charlie Sheen disease" or something... I also saw that guy from the Ferris Bueller movie on the show... what's his name - Matthew Broderick? He looks like hell too, I guess hanging out with Sarica Jessica Parka will do that to ya... Seems MrBarrett ran into Meg Ryan recently... lucky bastard! |
| 02.14.2001 |
redhat seems innocent enough, I mean if you reverse 'hat' to be 'tah' and do a ROT13 you get 'gnu' right? But... if you just swap the words around you get 'hatred' - hmmm, I wonder if redhat helped out that Hitler fellow just like IBM did... There seems to be less squirrel activity, and we're assuming less squirrels. I attribute this to the anti-freeze and rat pellets that someone left outside near the trash... I watched part of Return of the Jedi yesterday as well. I'm still waiting for the director's cut where they show the scene where Boba Fett flies out of the Sarlac pit and kills Luke Skywalker... I missed work yesterday, and got to catch a little daytime TV. Among the lineup was Hogan's Heros, where there was some top secret device (with lots of dials and gauges) in the camp that Hogan and his crew we're trying to get a picture of... when they finally did get a good look at it, I swear there was an IBM logo on it! I overheard someone say they had to go "let the dogs out" later today. Perhaps the mystery will soon be solved! I've started looking into sitescooper again... can't seem to get it working with MacPerl... hmmm... Y3k problems... |
| 02.12.2001 |
Hey, found this nice Gulker column about GNU (Gulker's Not Useless) and GPL (Gulker Public Licence) which explains the open-sourcing of Chris Gulker. It also states that: "...kids today better get used to PowerPoint, especially if they're going to be entrepreneurs..." Har... more Gulker stuff as well... More reasons to avoid Dreamweaver, from a mailing list posting: "Also, Dreamweaver 4 has no support for XHTML, whatsoever. It will even rewrite correct XHTML in such a way it isn't valid XML anymore." Hmmm, last time I checked, my text editor and scripts dealt with XHTML just fine... Hyper-wowza, we had a busy weekend. We had Maddy's second 2nd birthday, this time with the other side of the family - at our house, with heat and everything. It all went pretty well, and we - I mean the kids - now have more Lego's to build with... I shot at the squirrels a lot, and no, I'm not crazy, see deadsquirrel.com for proof that squirrels are evil creatures that must die. Speaking of squirrels dying, this electrocuting squirrel platform might be just what I need, and yes, you can get a stun gun on eBay for cheap. We got a new staple gun for Xmas, and the female sure likes it a lot. I really didn't like pulling the staple out of my foot the other day. Two holes and lots of blood, damn that hurt... Maybe we can shoot the squirrels with it, it's probably more powerful than our BB gun. When you buy 2000 BB's you think it'll be enough, but... Hmmm, I remember when I was a kid, seeing some sort of automatic-rifle BB gun, sort of like an UZI for BB's - gotta look into that. Maybe I'll buy the female a new BB gun for Valentines Day... The hatred of squirrels was escalated. See, we're not crazy. The started by making a mess of the trash, then we retaliated by putting broken glass & peanut butter treats out for them, and shooting at them. They struck back by chewing through the screens and pooping in the back porch, as well as tearing up the trash. this was akin to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (was that his name?) We responded by feeding them anti-freeze, rat pellets, and shooting at them some more. Next step: I've heard of a peanut butter sponge trick my uncle uses, we'll try that, as well as a big rat trap. My dad's suggestion of a garbage can full of water won't work until the temperature goes up a bit, we thought a garbage can full of anti-freeze might work, but may be a little costly. And of course, if I was crazy, this electrocuting squirrel platform might be a good thing to try. But I'd have to find a cheap stun gun, and where would I find one of those... eBay? Hmmm, you don't say? I started reading the Watchmen the other day. It's been so long I pretty much forgot the story. Looks to be pretty entertaining, that Rorshach is a hoot! I found myself in Waukesha the other day. Waukesha is always one of those places where I think I sort of know my way around, but end up getting lost anyway. (That's probably everywhere for me actually.) I did end up driving past the von Bohlen's house, the one on Roberta, and the old one on Wabash. I thought about stopping by, but I don't think Rick ever liked me, and I couldn't remember Davey's Mom's name... anyway, what if Cory had been there? Too risky... Pine - a Program for Internet News & Email - is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages... |
| 02.09.2001 |
Does pre-school equate to "free day care?" It does to some people... Emma went to pre-school for 2 hrs 2 days a week when she was 3 (she dropped out after 2 months, by her own choice) so now that she's older we'd like to try again, but it seems there is only one other child for the 1/2 day class. Why? Because most people who put their young kids in school want them to be there all day so they can go off to work, secure in the fact that their child is 'learning' and being 'cared for' by professionals. I used to hear the arguement from people I used to work with, "Oh, it's better to have my child in day care, they get to play with other children..." That sounds like guilt talking. Is putting your child in day care *better* than your child being home with you? Doesn't say much for some parents... The sad truth may be that the state of society today dictates that both parents must work. Sure, you can get by on one full-time income, we do it, but just barely. It's not easy... but it's the sacrifice you make when you decide to have children. If you can't put the kids first, in all of their needs, and make yourself the last thing on the list to take care of... well, I dunno... it's something I've tried to do. Some people are too selfish to have children, and that's fine, they shouldn't. The problem is when selfish and self-absorbed people do have kids, and then don't know what to do with them... argh... Whilst talking to a ColdFusion programmer today he said "ColdFusion doesn't let you do that..." and I thought to myself, when has anyone ever said "Perl doesn't let you do that" and I think the answer is never! Perl is all about getting the job done! It freakin' does it! If there isn't a module to do it, you can probably call some external application, or write some C code, or something, but... it'll be able to do it. Right? ok then... Actually the more I talk to some programmers the more amazed I am at how little they know about some things. Sure, they may know a language and know it really well, but they just don't have the creative problem solving mind needed to program. Maybe they do, I dunno, from my own experience, I'm more of a problem-solver (aka 'hacker') in that I know a lot and know how things should/could be done, even if I can't write the code for it. ugh... Remember kids, if you can't make your code elegant, at least make it readable... Have you got a BBEdit feature request? Yesterday I had what the female called a 'hurrmmm moment' - Watchmen fans will know what that means... Note to self: Read this later... Lateral Readings. formmail? No... soupermail? maybe... Overheard today while discussing Microsoft file formats: "I thought those were usually backwards compatible" Har Har! I nearly fell off my chair! They then grumbled that the data in question should be put in some format everyone could read. My response... "plain text." I suppose I should have said said XML, but I wasn't in the mood to explain... |
| 02.07.2001 |
I've been using that damn HP again... ugh! Fixed length files! Argh... And what does 'POSIX compatible' mean anyway? sh! 80's hardcore trivia: Remember the kid from "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" starring Bill Bixby? His name was Brandon Cruz and he went on to sing for Dr. Know, briefly anyway. So, when Brandon sang Dr. Know had a song called "El Salvador" and near the end of the 80's long after he left the band and they turned metal, I saw them at the Odd Rock and shouted "El Salvador" during their set. Kyle Toucher kinda snapped to attention and then gave me the evil eye. Or at least some sort of look like I was insane. (Update: Seems things have changed and Brandon is back in Dr. Know, while Kyle is not... crazy times indeed...) And hey, remember Scared Straight (you probably don't) but they we're another Mystic band and what was their thing? Well, the singer (Scott something, forgot his name) was a pitcher for the White Sox, and they were a straight edge band (hence the name.) Ok, that's a bit odd right, let's add to that the fact that El Hefe, who joined NoFX to replace the 'insane' Eric (or Erik) was in the Bad News Bears movie(s) - yup, it's all true. Someone (it might have been Fat Mike) told me that Doug Moody used to use old tapes from the TV studio dumpsters to record bands on, which is why so many of the Mystic records sound like crud. I'm tellin' ya, I can't make this stuff up... |
| 02.05.2001 |
Bleargh... the HP3000 is driving me nuts... ftp, telnet, perl - they're all there - but not of them seem to work right! And I'm forced to use vi, which might be a good thing, since I'm actually learning something inbetween the banging of my head on my desk... Hey, we just got a unix server from a company we recently acquired... someone said I can 'have it' in May. I'm assuming that means I can do less on NT and more under unix. yay... I hate birds. They annoy me. Some people at work talk about birds. I really dislike birds. Someone at work said they spent $800 on a bird. Sheesh. You can get an iMac for that much... and you probably won't have to listen to it screeching and worry about it flying around the room. Or maybe you will, that all depends on Steve Jobs plans... anyway I still hate birds and I wish I had $800 to waste on something frivolous, like paying bills... Speaking of squirrels, I heard someone capped a squirrel in it's fat ass this weekend. I'm not at liberty to discuss it anymore than that. Amusing though, eh? |
| 02.01.2001 |
New featuritis... I added the BlogVoices thing. It really does seem to add a "3rd dimension" to the sites I've seen it on, and wanted to try it here. I've wanted to write my own commenting system for a while now, but the lack of cgi/server side processing has prevented it. I also added a backflip link. Backflip is a neat thing, check it out if you haven't yet. Oh, I also opted not to do these things with JavaScript, as most people do. I've found that load times can increase quite a bit when the page needs to request JavaScript code from remote servers. So, you get the added features, with no JavaScript, and hopefully no loss of quality - or something like that. Wheee! (Note: BlogVoices seems underpowered, so if things don't improve, perhaps I'll get rid of it... maybe it's time for a BlogVoices Server Fund!) Wow, it's as if Chuck said "Dude! We're gettin' the band back together!" MacHTTP Returns! Bricors! Ahhh, it's just like old times... Battling the squirrels... since I was denied the right to buy BB's by the female, and I can't find any in the boxes, I thought I'd make a special treat for the squirrels that tear apart the trash bags at our place. I hope they enjoyed the peanut butter mixed with broken glass... Muwahaha... |
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