Election Predictions 2004
Screw 'virtual dead heat' polls, this is my kind of election prediction.
Screw 'virtual dead heat' polls, this is my kind of election prediction.
Why do geeks and developers love Mac OS X?
Fresh out of the box install, click on 'Terminal', and presto:
Andy-Wismars-Computer:~ wismar$ python -V
Python 2.3
Andy-Wismars-Computer:~ wismar$ ruby -v
ruby 1.6.8 (2002-12-24) [powerpc-darwin7.0]
Andy-Wismars-Computer:~ wismar$ php -v
PHP 4.3.2 (cli) (built: Sep 13 2003 22:04:20)
Copyright (c) 1997-2003 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v1.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2003 Zend Technologies
Andy-Wismars-Computer:~ wismar$ java -version
java version "1.4.1_01"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.1_01-99)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.1_01-27, mixed mode)
Andy-Wismars-Computer:~ wismar$ perl -v
This is perl, v5.8.1-RC3 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
(with 1 registered patch, see perl -V for more detail)
snipped overly-verbose perl verison message
Andy-Wismars-Computer:~ wismar$
It's a geek's dream come true. Unix with eye-candy that just works. And has apt-get. When Mac OS X first came out, I thought it would be fun to give it a spin, but my x86 life just kept telling me it was a fad. This cycle continued with every subsequent release of OS X. At some point in the recent past, Mac's moved from being a technology that I envangelically promote to others without actually owning (Tivo) to a technology that I feel I absolutely need to survive.
Based on my previous experiance with this sort of thing, it won't be long now until I cave in and pull the trigger.
Update 9:18 PM: Trigger pulled. That was fast.
As if I needed another reason to sing the praises of Bloglines, which is rapidly becoming an obsession of mine, and as my uber-blogging dad already pointed out, blog disaster-recovery is yet another wonderful service provided by those fine folks.
How so? By creating a subscription to your own full-text feed, you've instantly created a fault-tolerant, remote backup of your entire blog from that day forward.
On the 'from that day forward' note, I tried modifying my templates to create a feed with EVERY post ever from the blog (by removing the "lastn='x'" stanza from the template) but bloglines refused to parse and recognize the atom feed when it had 1000+ entries. What's up with that, fellas?
Not that I'm complaining.
So, as has been accurately pointed out by my partners in crime, we had a little snafu with my 'internet playground'. The kind folks at Valueweb moved the machine physically from Ft. Lauderdale to Miami, which ended up in a hard drive failure according to their tech guys.
$100 bucks in recovery costs later, I had the drive in my office, plugged it in, and managed to recover all but about a dozen files from the disk. That eneded up saving J$ and myself countless hours of attempting to recreate our mess of LAMP configs.
I don't know if the drive really was bad at all, as it worked for me on the first try. It's also entirely possible that the tech jockeys in the datacenter had no idea what was going on with a Debian/LILO prompt on the machine, as they all come pre-installed with Fedora/GRUB, but there are plenty of clever ways around that.
In the end, we're all back and blogging, and we've come up with a significantly more robust backup plan. And were we really that missed in the 6 days and 20 hours of downtime? Probably not.
After I bought my iPod and fell in love with iTunes, I was even further immersed in the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. Then after reading the positive comments on JZ's Airport Express inquiry I was feeling the need for a portable wireless access point, some cool streaming music, and an Apple product less expensive than a new G4 Powerbook, I picked up an Airport Express last weekend.
My initial testing was nice and smooth. Quick, easy setup, and within minutes I was up and connected to the WEP-free network at J$'s house. However, things got particularly nasty when I tried to connect to my 128-bit WEP network at home.
The trick? Thanks to this guy, I found out that you have to preface the WEP key in the airport setup with a '$' character.
Where the HELL was that in the Apple docs? I have no idea how my new friend Simon came up with that answer, but it worked for me.
And allegedly, this is tremendously easier with a homogenous Apple Airport network. But interoperability has never really been the hallmark of Cupertino, has it?
Built in ethernet...and it's cuter. Shadow Hearts can't be far behind.
Ok, I love bloglines as much as the next guy, maybe more so, in fact, but there is one feature that I would really like to see. As much as I like to read the hundreds of feeds to which I subscirbe, I want to regex filter the titles of all posts, and not see anything with "[flickr]" in the name. Not to mention how cool regex post title filtering would be in general.
Now, this should of course be on at least a per folder basis, if not per feed. There are some people who I want to see photos from, but there are many, many others where I really have no desire to see a grainy cell-phone picture of a road sign from some guy who writes good web design articles.
When will have truly innovative and genius services like this one show up here in the US?
They keep on coming...Bloglines Notifier Extension now Firefox 1.0 compatible
How come I can't get any new gmail features love?