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I'd like to wish a Happy New Year to all as we prepare to leave 2004 behind and begin again the process of learning to write the correct year on various forms and documents.
Be safe this evening.
I was desperate the other day to find a way to create a cross platform CD with some pictures for my mom. macosxhints came to the rescue again.
hdiutil makehybrid -o cd-name /path/to/cd/data/
It's just that simple and the result (using the defaults) is a file called cd-name.iso with hfs, iso and joliet partition information. Use Disk Utility to burn the CD.
This is almost certainly only going to be humorous if you're from Southern California and even then, perhaps only if you have some idea what the Dodgers (an impossible club to figure out) are up to lately.
It all started with some weak humor surrounding Adee Plumbing (Adee Do!) and new team member J.D. Drew and snowballed from there. The peanut gallery got into it and had quite a time with the idea.
There's a pretty funny set of replies related to Cal Worthington (and his dog spot) and some mixups about the precise wording. I heard them as an adult, but there was some serious filling in the blanks going on for some people.
The comment that really got me going was this:
"We'll match any price or your pitcher is FREEEEEEEEEE!"
I was expecting someone to come back with the retort about "You're killing me..." but alas, it didn't happen.
Weird note here, while trying to find something about Irwin, the guy who always says "You're killing me, Larry!" I found an old post of mine by that name. Some day I'll pull that stuff in (I hope).
Anyway, go read the thread over at Dodger Thoughts.
David Brooks pointed out his recommendations for the years most important essays.
My favorite is The Other Sixties by Bruce Bawer, which describes the period between the end of 1959 and 1965 when he officially dates the era known as "The Sixties". It's a different perspective that you'll find in many other places.
The first bunch are all good and there is supposed to be a new bunch on Tuesday.
Update: It's been a busy week and I forgot to add this: Hookie Awards, Part 2.
As I was writing the headline above it struck me as being pretty funny because what I'm about to discuss seems preposterous. The subject matter here is internal drives for portables and how they're not growing quickly enough. Laugh it up, but I'm serious (sadly).
I have an 80G drive in my Powerbook, but I did a couple things wrong. I used partitions (three) and I didn't give enough room to the system partition (failing to understand last year how the system tree would grow and grow). 12G is not enough for a system partition, period. 20G would seem about right, but then I'd have to start dumping other stuff I keep around. It being time to start over again, I thought I'd look into getting a bigger drive and fix several issues at once.
Before diving into the issue of drives, let's examine how I use my "portable" and why it seems so full.
It has become my primary system for everything digital; development, communication (instant, less so and the more old fashioned document) and play. Outside of media (mostly music and pictures plus some shorts and shockwave media), the biggest loss of space on my system is source code. We've got a pretty big CVS based tree and I have a lot of it checked out. Add to that apache (big gobs of that), darwin, jboss, openldap and various smaller repositories. And then there's the Eclipse idea of how to use CVS... rather than fight it I also have a lot of java stuff checked out elsewhere to make the IDE happy. There's also all the fink stuff (just under 1G). It's not on the boot partition because it never would have fit.
There are also a whole bunch of work related applications that live under another top level directory (again symlink'd off to a non boot partition). The C based applications are pretty small but the group I work in also has apps that run under tomcat (big) and jboss (even bigger!) which also need to be installed. I need Oracle for a few things and that's a one stop shopping disk hog, especially after you have a few databases setup. Eight years of documents and other debris litters another 4G directory. Eudora is using almost 4G too.
Summed up? History has a price. Being able to pull up five year old decisions, the documentation and some source code fragments requires a lot of seemingly wasted resources. The cost is space, which seems to be dear right now...
I went looking for a 100G drive and was shocked by what I found (or didn't find). None of the normal Mac outlets (that I know about and checked) carry a 2.5" 100G drive. Expanding my search a bit, I found some 100G drives, but they were all 4200 RPM.
It's interesting (or something) that the first mention of 100G 2.5" drives was back in June. It sure took the manufacturers a long time go from 80G to 100G. I guess I'm spoiled. The growth in drive size over the previous five years had been phenomenal. The high end drive on a Powerbook in mid 1999 was 6G, and by late 2003 it was 80G. It seems like we're stuck there.
If you've followed the market for a while (I do so only occasionally, usually when I need a new drive), it was defined by IBM (now Hitachi) and then Toshiba. The Travelstar series was always first at a particular density and rotation speed and then came Toshiba, always with a quieter drive, sometimes with better caching or some other tiny improvement based on being six months late and a bit more expensive. At this point, all four of the major manufacturers (Seagate, Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba) of 2.5" drives (honestly, I never thought I'd include Seagate in that mix) are shipping 100G drives at 4200 RPM in quantity sufficient that you find them somewhere. What's weird, and may have challenged the middle man vendors we all deal with are vendors making new inroads.
Amazingly, Seagate has somehow jumped into the lead on 2.5" 5200 RPM drives with the Momentus 5400.2 (ST9100823A for the ATA-5 version). It's the only drive in this class that I can find that's widely available to consumers. I don't recall them ever making a 2.5" drive before, although they may have. The only alternative is the Travelstar E5K100 (HTE541010G9AT00 for the ATA-6 version [I think]) which doesn't seem to be available anywhere for consumers.
After digging around, I think the reason for the delay is a conversion to Serial ATA (aka SATA or ATA-7). I'm not sure exactly what kind of devices are taking advantage of the slim drives, nor how the SATA conversion will affect future laptops (and other portable devices), but everyone is making changes to enable a SATA version of their drive.
The log jam will likely end soon, but it's problem for the portable toting data pigs (like me) right now. Seagate seems like the only solution available.
I didn't start out intending to rant about Wikipedia, but it is occasionally possible to see why professional researchers hold their noses.
Case in point: Ventura Boulevard.
The shallowness of the article is what astounds me. The worst part is that I don't know how to change it. The modern version of the description is going to be useful twenty years from now (probably), so how do you add the past history? I don't really know all that much about Ventura Boulevard, but I was hoping to learn a lot after learning that it was part of the original El Camino Real (I believe that means the royal road) of California. It's likely that Ventura Boulevard follows along (or near) what was the major trail in this area long before the Spanish arrived.
What I do know is that for many years, Ventura Boulevard was the main route from Los Angeles to Ventura and when the 101 freeway was built, the end didn't evaporate in Woodland Hills (nor on the other side in Hollywood). For instance, todays Thousand Oaks Boulevard was once a part of Ventura Boulevard as were some parts of Old Conejo Road, and on the opposite side, Agoura Road and Calabasas Road.
At a minumum, a history of Ventura Boulevard should contain some information about the Stagecoach Inn. It should also include something about Tarzana, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the legend of Tarzan. There are doubtless many of these stories directly (or peripherally) linked to the road of today that were completely missed.
It would also be useful to document how Ventura Boulevard contributed to the settlement of western Los Angeles County and eastern Ventura County. Most of the stories I've heard from old timers describe coming out this way as kids or young adults on the Boulevard and finding a place where no one else lived. What's interesting (perhaps) is that a lot of these folks now have second homes off in the weeds on the central coast (they're doing it again where possible). The best story I've heard is that of a retired pilot who basically determined which piece of property he was going to buy out here after scouting the area from above, but didn't move until Ventura Boulevard was well enough developed to make the commute possible.
A good dictionary in the classic (leather bound) sense provided a small summary for subjects like this and some good references within the set. An online dictionary is less bound by size and should provide more, even if only in the form of external links (and on this subject, there are many).
If you think the people making making sports programming decisions at KCBS have rocks in their head (Titans vs Oakland instead of just about anything else including the Jaguars vs Packers) go send some feedback and if you're really adventurous call the programming comment number: (323) 460-3432.
ESPN needs a Joe Theisman mute button. My ears are bleeding. While he's not in the same stratosphere with Dick Vitale (who more or less ruined college basketball for me) he goes on endlessly. Feh! Maybe it's the whole danged crew. Everything is hype or soap opera (or both). On and on and on. Sadly, I can't get KLSX here or I'd try that.
Yes, the fat man cometh, but he made it a short stay and now he goeth. He was supposed to start in April, but has already departed. Did he ever really arrive? The way I figure it, at -103 days, that has to be the shortest (or the most negative) tenure ever. It'll be fun to watch the USC faithful squirm this week (and really weird if they convince him to stay).
The Ben Olson watch still isn't over but it's looking a lot like UCLA is going to be the place. For those who don't know, Ben was a local quarterback legend who went off to BYU, sat on the bench for a season and then went off on a Mormon mission. His mission gives him the ability to transfer without a loss of eligibility and there have been stories floating around all fall. Even for non athletes, I think there's something good about the idea of finally diving into school after becoming twenty and having dealt with some real life. For those confusing faith with staying at BYU, they need a bit of perspective.
It's interesting to contemplate this hypothetical woman and how she got there. It's pretty likely that at some point she was a normal woman, had a cat or three but really cared for them. And at some point, a couple strays show up and one cat has a litter, human attachment or fear of taking action gets in the way and before you know it, it's out of control.
A prolonged period of procrastination on most tasks will make it just that much harder when you finally get around to it. I have the fear of acting problem at times, so I know I need to watch out for it. And yet, it sneaks up in odd places.
Like with Fink.
Every time I realize that I really need to do an update I'm in the middle of something, or I don't have a couple hours to get it done. And then it had been a few months and I understood it was going to take more than a couple hours. A couple months back I realized that I had no idea how long it might take (at the rate I was going, forever was a strong possibility).
And finally, I had to do it, because a friend was sending me patch files that required an update-all and because I'm on vacation, so justifications about how long it might take or what might break are irrelevant (mostly).
It took most of yesterday, but now it's done. It took hours to pull all the files because I kept getting blocked by CVS locks or running into errors with old files that needed to be removed and only about five hours to recompile the set of extensions I use. Now I need to figure out how to rsync for future updates.
It's been blowing here for two solid days and no one had predicted it going away (dropping to 15 to 25, yes) but it's completely still outside.
At this point, if feels (and sounds) quite odd.
I've been searching for a USB 2.0 hub which meets certain criteria. It needs to be small (it's meant for my PowerBook and must travel well), it had to provide bus power for devices which require it and it absolutely could not have a wall wart.
I hate wall warts with a passion, life would be a heck of a lot easier if vendors would separate the transformer and plug with 10 cents of cord.
After having lunch with a friend today, I decided to drop by Best Buy to see what options they had (I was interested in looking at the Targus portable hubs). What I found, and wound up purchasing is the CyberPower CP-H420MP, a USB 2.0 Mobile Battery Powered Hub. This fascinating little hub (about 10% larger than a credit card) uses four rechargeable AAA batteries to provide bus power for USB devices which need it.
I've been playing with it for the last few hours, plugging things in almost randomly (I've got a lot of USB crap as it turns out) and pulling them back out.
It might have some problems, but I don't have anything to compare it to. I had some glitches when putting in new devices, with my sound occasionally moving back to the internal sound system from my USB headphones. Steady state (whatever that might mean on a bus), it seems to work quite well. I've used a mixture of USB 1.1 and 2.0 devices including a USB 1.1 hard drive (which needs bus power) and it seemed to work quite well. The most important items all seem to work well together: EyeTV (1.1), Headphones and mic (1.1) and the SanDisk ImageMate (2.0) as long as I don't screw around too much.
The jury is certainly still out, and the EyeTV seems to be the most sensitive to the hub (it's just goes dumb at times), so I may try moving things around a bit more. I'll update after I get a bit more experience.
I ordered Vonage service one year ago today on a lark. I guess you could also call it my year of living VoIPly. It has worked out beyond my expectations. Warts and all it was a lot more ready for prime time than I believed it to be. I work at home pretty often and wind up making phone calls all over the country, they can be quite lengthy and I've found that I no longer care where I call or how long the calls last. It's a flat rate, all you can eat, voice buffet.
Although it was meant primarily for my use, it's become a family resource, used by all. We started a year ago with monthly bills running around $35 (sometimes quite a bit higher) which made a transition to Vonage an easy concept (as long as it worked). Over the last year, our long distance usage has grown while the fee for unlimited service has shrunk by $10 per month.
There is an interesting glitch we've run into, although we don't deal with it much. Fairly often, there is a bit of a time lag associated with starting up an incoming call, which can make the typical "Hello. How are you?" dance a little weird. After a few seconds, things stabilize and conversation flows normally. I've seen this in other VoIP implementations too. We'll all either adapt, or the technology will get better or more likely, a combination of the two. Our family and friends call on our existing, bare bones local line, so it's not normally a problem.
The voice mail system is both a blessing and a curse. The good part is the delivery of voice mail .wav files to an email account of your choosing (intended for my wife? I can easily forward it to her!) Over the last year the quality of those files has improved quite a bit. They're also stored and can be accessed via a web interface for playback with additional information (incoming phone number, etc.). And there's the curse. The Vonage web interfaces (all of them) are often glacial. There's a lesser problem with resetting the voice message blinking light on our VTech phones (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't) but I'm inclined to believe it's a web side message issue because they're infrastructure is groaning.
Ten years from now we're all going to be using IP based voice, even if we're doing it the old fashioned way with a dedicated phone. What seems likely is that voice (via SIP or something else not yet created) will become a commodity protocol on the ever growing IP stack. The telco's will still have a piece and will likely still be fighting every advancement on both ends (technical and legislative) to keep their piece of the pie.
On the other hand, there seems to be a significant need to merge roaming of the cell vendor type and roaming of the type people do with the networks available.
Technically, there isn't any reason that my cell can't wander into an alternative network outside of vendor will and customer requests. I'd really like to have my cell calls ring on my Vonage line when at home. The big thing everyone gets upset about is delivery outside their network. I get that, but we should be able to use recent concepts like micropayments to compensate for the network traffic caused by lookups and slightly larger charges to deliver traffic. The end result should be like redirection (or aliasing). If delivery isn't local, systems should be able to perform the equivalent of a rewrite. I mentioned the micropayment idea because reasonable billing is going to need to embrace this idea soon. That blows up the new flat rate pricing, but may help drive it lower.
Realistic billing is going to a big part of future systems. Two thousand SIP rewrite's at 31 micro cents apiece is $0.62, probably a better estimate of cost than charging $10.00 for one rewrite.
Real time billing... we'll leave that for another time.
I knew this was coming, but it startled me none the less. I haven't seen a popup in about three years (unless I accidently mashed cmd-K in Safari which happens from time to time as I pound the keyboard bouncing around my little world).
I'd followed a link a friend sent me to Wired (ostensibly to read Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead) when up popped an old dead dragon, long ago slayed but risen again wearing new clothes.
I guess you'd call it an in window popup, but the idea and annoyance were the same. A slab in the middle of the browser window was obscured by an ad for Microsoft Office for Mac. I had to click (click? who clicks? where the heck is that mouse anyway!) to make it go away.
Here we go again.
I don't want to go back to the luddite ways of turning JavaScript (or whatever demon is feeding this pest) off, but I will if I must. This really sucks.
Let's clear this up. Thousand Oaks is not 'as seen on TV' by millions of golf viewers this weekend. And even if were, we're about out of room; sorry. I can't get over the incredible luck of the people putting on the tournament.
This time last weekend we were in the middle of a four day (plus some) bout of grey days with scattered rain (which we call bad weather). That had followed three or four days of sub freezing temperatures at night and highs in the 40's and low 50's. A friend came back from their place in upstate New York after Thanksgiving and declared the temperatures nearly identical. Our neighbor across the street got back from Florida the first night of the freeze (and his grass did freeze) and was wondering what the heck had gone on. The cold snap was very uncommon (but so were 100 degree temperatures back in April — it's been a weird year).
With the early rains this year, the hillsides were back to being green and lush (from a distance). By Thursday, the weather was pretty nice. It had started warming up and was quiet clear. Several days of rain had knocked all of the crud out of the air and we started one of those incredible cycles.
Friday, was gorgeous, not a cloud in the sky and absolutely clear conditions. When I left the John Wayne Airport area in Orange County (Friday morning), you could see Pasadena foothills. It was clear all the way through Los Angeles County even down around beach areas and was in the low 70's after I popped over the Santa Monica Mountains.
And today was even better, if that's possible. Same basic conditions (a little hazier) but the temperatures reached the 80's in places around the Conejo Valley. I guess that's why we deal with the possibility of earthquakes... days like this in December will do that to you.
The course is located at the south end of the Hidden Valley area (there are a lot of horse ranches along that section of Potrero Road) by Lake Sherwood (I wonder if that's man made like Westlake?) There are some great pictures in this review (more good timing).
The shot above (my favorite of the day) was taken in the early afternoon from the southern end of town looking northeast. The shot below was taken a couple hours later, near the north end of town also looking northeast (not that great a picture really, but it's a view I love).
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With the incredible weather, and because I'm supposed to be on vacation, I just had to go out and wander around the city.
Walter Lewin has finally explained the cause behind his mystery Astronomy Picture of the Day from September.
Even if you don't care about materials science or wavelength theory, it's interesting (and the picture is neat).
It's a little bit late, but I was too busy to get to it last night.
I'd sent out an agenda on Monday night that reminded everyone that Tuesday was Pearl Harbor day. Early yesterday, I was sent this interesting Pearl Harbor timeline which ate up most of an hour poking around.
It's pretty cool.
Ross Karchner has made a plea for money to help him register a LLC, with the intent to bring back Localfeeds (I hope).
Tom and I banged around the idea of creating a similar service over the summer (at the Dodgers game perhaps?) and it's not really all that difficult, but I've got no idea where I'd find the time. Time is the single most valuable element I have (sadly, it's regularly wasted) and every time I turn around I have less of it.
While I could pretend that I'd have time over my vacation for the next few weeks, I'm mostly going to spend that working on Identity Management and Address Book related stuff (work stuff that needs the focus that can only happen if I'm not doing work).
Anyway, I really hope Ross can bring the service back and in that spirit, I sent $30 (it's worth that much at least).
I've got a few other Geography based items I need to get written up, but I don't seem to ever be able to find time to get it done.
I'm looking for input to a suggestion I need to make on a digital camera for someone who isn't adverse to powerful technology as long as it's simple.
The requirements as I see 'em:
