BunkBlog

Although my Galileoscopes (ordered in February) stubbornly refuse to arrive, I’m still digging the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Here’s a really amazing set of images – artistic, not photographic – of the planets. Consider it a graphic version of the Holst piece.

This is an artist’s concept of a cyclonic vortex on Venus. Much higher resolution available at the site.

Click for 1280x800

Inspired by the recent news article on Roxanne Shante, I got all old skool and looked at my stack of tapes, hunting for those obscure bits that I’ve not found on digital media yet. I was reminded of the strange and jarring hiccup in “La Di Da Di” at the 2:38 mark, which was not present in the original and kind of obscures the next phrase in complete non sequitur. Seriously, they didn’t try to record an alternate version of the song when they got smacked by the lawyers, they just clipped 10 seconds of expository story out of it. The listener ends up wondering why this girl is crying over Rick and feeling blue. Sure, you’d like to tell her not to cry and dry her eyes, but why in the world is she crying in the first place? So, I grabbed my trusty patch cord, and now I have the original, found only on cassette, full version of the classic Doug E Fresh song on my computer. Take that, sampling copyright violations!

Now, to see what else I’ve got hiding out. Ooh, the LA Beats megamix…

The intro to the original Battlestar Galactica said, “There are those who believe that life here began out there…”

OK, so this discovery is not in any way going to support the rather outre hypothesis of panspermia, but it’s interesting nonetheless, to see that perhaps amino acid creation is not as rare as some would have us believe. Unless, of course, this comet was once part of our planet, and then somehow achieved escape velocity without destroying all the delicate biological bits stuck in it? I’ll take Occam’s Razor for $1000, Alex.

Science is cool.

Microsoft, which recently applied for a patent on XML documents (how one can patent an open standard that was written by others remains a mystery), has lost a $200 million lawsuit for violating someone’s patent on XML documents. Now, MS is ordered to cease selling any copies of Microsoft Word that work with XML. That would be Office 2007 and the upcoming Office 2010 or Word V13 or whatever they’re calling it.

Software patents are good why?

It’s just so easy.

How do I reconcile not trusting the cloud with using Gmail as a universal inbox? I’m a complicated man. As Lewis Carroll said, sometimes I’ve believed six impossible things before breakfast.

I consider email to be essentially ephemeral to begin with, so if Gmail were to suddenly disappear, it wouldn’t really kill me. Also, it seems that webmail is one cloud service that has staying power, as contrasted with the vast litany of failed and gone sites I listed previously. Basically, I consider the convenience of having my email easily accessible everywhere to be more important than the slight possibility of an outage.

Of course, I’m also a paranoid geek. I copy all my email from Gmail and put it into an Mbox file in Eudora, then back that up. So, if Gmail were to die, I’d still be able to bring my email into Thunderbird or the seemingly-mythical Eudora 8 or Pegasus or Mutt or any number of Mbox-based email clients. This seems to be a decent compromise – I don’t trust the cloud, but email isn’t really permanent anyway. It is quite funky to see email from 1998 in my Gmail listing, though.  🙂

After a few hours of deciding which email messages I wanted to have available online and which were unlikely to be referenced in the future, I think I’m done with my transition to Gmail as my universal inbox. I even turned off the Spamassassin feature on AndySocial.com, just so I don’t have to check two places for false positives.  We’ll see how this goes.  And, if I decide to go back to Eudora, I can just drag all the messages back across the IMAP barrier.  Yay for geekery!

After 15 years of mostly-loyal use, I’m considering curing myself of my Eudora addiction. I love Eudora, no matter how odd it may seem to the unitiated. It’s certainly less odd than Mutt. Anyway, I’ve been watching the “new and improved” Eudora plan for three years now, and it’s still not out of beta. The last announcement was some time ago, and it sure doesn’t look like anyone cares about it anyway. Converting one of the most venerable email clients on the Windows platform (it was once the primary email client all ISPs gave to their uses, along with Netscape 0.9) into an extension of Thunderbird seems almost sad to me. I’ve been using Gmail regularly since 2005, and more frequently of late. Their spam filters beat anything my host’s SpamAssassin configuration has shown me so far, and it’s convenient to look up old messages no matter what computer I’m using.

What has kept me from giving up on Eudora was that I have a stupendous amount of email stored in it. I tried to use the Gmail Loader program a couple years ago, and it kept timing out on me and otherwise made me feel like it was not working right. Since it was actually re-sending each message via SMTP, it screwed up the dates besides, making it more challenging to figure out how old messages were. Seeing email from 1997 suddenly show up as being from 2006 was surprising, to say the least. Stumbling around the internet, I came across a great idea to move my old messages into Gmail – IMAP. If I turn on Gmail’s IMAP, move my archived email from the mboxes into the IMAP folder within Eudora, then exit Eudora, open the IMAP folders in Gmail and move the email into non-IMAP folders in Gmail, I should preserve the headers and dates and all that jazz, while getting my email all on one platform.

Wish me luck…

Google recently announced the Chrome OS, to meld their Chrome browser with their various online offerings into a cloud-based computer architecture. No need for large amounts of personal storage or even powerful computing hardware – it’s all in the cloud, and Google will take care of it for you.

Although Google appears to be a 900-pound gorilla that will stay on top and keep their sites going for as long as you need them, let’s take a look at the history of the cloud so far, shall we? Kodak has recently told users they need to spend money at the Kodak Gallery or their photos will be deleted. Sony Imagestation shut down in 2008. Yahoo shut down their photo site in 2007, mostly moving files to Flickr, if you asked them to. If you forgot, they’re gone. Personal site hosts Sampa and GeoCities are shutting down.

Youtube frequently shuts off videos or entire accounts, without notice or seemingly any recourse. Google Video is killing that separate service entirely. This follows iFilm, PutFile, ClipFish, MyTunes, and many other user-content-driven cloud sites into oblivion.

That doesn’t even touch on the for-pay sites that no longer work, even after charging similar prices for now-inaccessible content than that which you would actually own. Amazon remotely deleted files from Kindles, blah blah blah.

So, I have my own site rather than relying on the cloud. I mirror my public comments here onto Livejournal, Facebook, Myspace and even Twitter. But, those are just mirrors. My content resides on my site, which I control. I also back it up to my local machine, because even Dreamhost may go the way of Jennicam into digital dissolution.

I worry that an over-reliance on The Cloud will end with a great deal of individual personal histories disappearing over time. As it is, people of my generation and younger are disinclined to have photo albums that they can touch – why bother when there’s Flickr? I can imagine if we ever do move to a pure-digital society, some of us will be more paranoid about who we trust with our data. When in doubt, make a backup copy – clouds always seem to evaporate over time.

Way back in 2003, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration looked at the available data regarding phone usage while driving. Their recommendations would have included a total ban on phones being used by drivers while in motion, whether with or without hands-free devices. I say “would have” because they never released the report. They were afraid of angering Congress. Get that? Public safety took a back seat to political expediency. The only reason we’re hearing about it now is because of Freedom of Information Act requests/lawsuits by two consumer advocacy groups.

Shouldn’t the NHTSA be a consumer advocacy group? Interestingly, cell phone usage has increased greatly since 2002, the year they gathered data. About half of Americans had cell phones then, and nearly 90% do today.

Wow, that was a long outage.  My hosting service has had a rocky week – I spent two days with email being rejected (if you sent me something and it said I didn’t exist, I do now), and then the servers lost their network connectivity this morning for about six hours. For Dreamhost, that’s very unusual. When I was with CCLhosting, I expected random outages but DH has been very reliable for years now. I’m sure this was just a really bad coincidence of unlucky events.

Back to ripping my CDs – I’m up to nearly 39000 tracks now.

Every few weeks, I update my MP3 player with a “new music” playlist. I used to draw this from the “New Release Rack” at a long-running Midland radio station that had a simulcast here in San Angelo. The simulcast ended (replaced by yet another hits of the blah blah I believe), and then the Midland station turned to Tejano music itself. What a firestorm of mediocrity. But media consolidation has no effect on variety and quality.

Moving on, I decided to use my old favorite from high school, KROQ, as inspiration to keep in touch with the cool new tracks from the music world. They kept a nice set of playlists online, to include their most-requested, most-played, and newest additions. I’d select a few from each list, and away I’d go with a new set of tunes. Last month, I noticed they’d added something even cooler, the Top 106.7 lists. Every year, the station compiles a list of the top 107 songs (they claim 106.7 because of their FM frequency, but 7 tenths of a song is odd). They had listed several of those annual lists on their site. I took a look at the 2008 list and added that to my Sansa. After a few weeks, I had heard all the tracks enough and went back to KROQ for a refresh. Their lists are all gone. Even using deep links from Google searches ends up at their newly-bare homepage. *sigh*

Thankfully, KNDD in Seattle is another great station and their playlist is still listed, so that takes care of my New Music Rack list. And, I found someone online who compiled all the KROQ annual lists from the 80s. Now I’ve got the 1988 list on my player, and I’m very amused. Some of the songs from the year I graduated high school stand up quite well, others not so much. Cocteau Twins are on the “not so much” list for sure. And, what happened to the band Camouflage? They sounded just like Depeche Mode, yet Martin Gore continues to play and Camouflage is gone. Listening to the Sugarcubes is an interesting flashback to a time before Bjork became such a spectacle. Sadly, I did not have nor could not find some of the tracks, so I have the top 93 of 1988.  Close enough, for 20 years later.

On a related note, combined with burning through the Amazon gift card The Boy gave me for Father’s Day, and ripping the several boxes of CDs hiding in the closet, I’m up to over 200 gigs of music on my computer. I’m not addicted.

The rather useful service Loudtwitter seems to be dead.  Thankfully, the geeks who program for WordPress have a cool tool I can use in its stead. So, you’ll continue to get all my blog posts, and tweets on my blog (and Facebook), and all that plus locked LJ entries on LiveJournal. Myspace’s RSS support remains MIA, so that particular backwater is not on my list of things to worry about. Or, you can just link to the Unhub bar and be done with it.

This has been your overdose of geekery for the day.

Caution: extreme geekery ahead.  Do not continue reading unless you know what hda and hdb are, and the joys of logical volume managers.  Cheers.

Way back last weekend, the DVR I built in 2006 decided to be cranky. I had originally built it with a 250 GB IDE drive, then added a 160 GB IDE drive which I’d salvaged from an older WinBox I replaced.  Sometime after that, I put in a 400 GB SATA drive.  That brought me over 800 GB total capacity, which has been enough for the past couple years. I noticed the temperature was increasing on the hard drives a while ago.

I didn’t worry about it, as the machine worked just fine regardless.  Then. last week, I noticed a little hiccup in the video feed while watching the news. As ever, when the tuners have ever had a problem, I rebooted the DVR to reset the tuners. Turns out, the tuners weren’t the problem. As the machine rebooted, it came up with an error which I’ve never seen before, and then halted the boot. Linux boxes don’t tend to halt their boot processes for much beyond catastrophic failure. I spent that night and part of the next day doing the research I needed to, and ran all the appropriate fixes (LVM activation and E2fsck with alternate master record blah blah). Finally, nearly one day after the machine went down, it was back again.

As you can see from the thin white line near the end of this graph, this is the only significant downtime my DVR has suffered in at least the last year.

I looked through the messages log and saw a lot of errors for hdb that imply some hardware failure. Since I bought that hard drive about 6 years ago and it’s been in constant use for over three years (the DVR never sleeps), it’s not surprising I suppose. Now, of course, I have to take care of this. Since I’ve got the machine set up as an LVM drive, I can add a new hard drive and move the data on to it, then remove the old drive. This is complicated by the fact that I have about 100 GB free, and the dying drive is 160 GB. So, I need to add a new drive before I can remove the old drive. That case is kind of crowded. The joys of vgreduce, pvremove and all manner of other exciting commands are in my future.  I’ll probably get a 500 or 750 GB drive, so the DVR will finally crest the 1 terabyte mark. I’ve already got more than a terabyte on my desktop, so it seems only fair that the DVR get to the same level.

The LVM setup is very confused right now anyway.  I’ve got hda1 (4.5 GB) as a standard ext3 boot and root drive. Simple.  MythTV originally required a “live TV” partition, so I had hda3 (15 GB) as the cache and hda4 (212 GB) as additional storage space (the recordings and such). When I added the 160, that became one big hdb1, still simple. The next upgrade of MythTV removed the necessity to separate live TV from recorded shows, and so the hda3 partition became useless. I added it to the LVM pool, which is a bit silly – hda3 and hda4 are both in there, and not just one merged partition. When I bought the 400 GB drive, that got tacked on as sda1. So, my LVM pool is hda3 hda4 hdb1 sda1. When I get done with the next planned upgrade, it will be hda3 hda4 sda1 sdb1.  Maybe I’ll go ahead and merge hda3 and hda4 while I’ve got the thing down anyway. Pretty much any drive I buy today will be large enough for the 217 GB of hda data and the 160 GB of hdb data, and then I’ll have to delete and recreate the hda3 partition so I can add it back to the LVM pool.  In case you want to sympathize with my plight, here’s the full sequence: physically add sdb, partition sdb1 as LVM, pvcreate sdb1, vgextend VG to include sdb1, pvmove all extents from hda3 hda4 and hdb1 to sdb1, vgreduce hda3 etc. to make them no longer active participants in the LVM, repartition hda3 from the old hda3 and hda4, vgextend to include new hda3, turn off machine and physically remove dying hdb.  Then, it’s back and room for more packrat behavior!

More DVR fun… This morning, one of the five fans in the DVR started making the grinding sound that indicates something has brushed against the fan blades. After two years of never opening the case, I finally cracked that bad boy… yuck. After giving every fan and air duct a good vacuuming (sorry Leo), the machine is now five degrees cooler inside.  Guess that worked.

Sadly, I now have 20 minutes of downtime this morning. Linux geeks are all about the uptime.

I left work an hour after I normally do, which is especially annoying when I was looking at a five-hour drive to Dallas right after work. Arriving before dark was my fervent hope. Anyway, I finally get the heck out of town and I’m tooling down the middle of nowhere when I realized that I hadn’t logged my hours on the corporate website before I left.  I got some gas in Abilene, popped open the netbook my lovely bride loaned me for the trip, and logged my hours, signed my time card and went back on the road. Gotta love free wifi from every hotel around, and living in the future.

Tomorrow – Six Flags with the Boy.

I tried out Wolfram Alpha today for the first time. The new search engine did not impress me. It found no notable events for my birthday (I’m notable!) and then the amazing thing: a search for July 20, 1969 said the most notable event was Josh Holloway’s birthday. Huh. I think something else may have happened that day.

This has been a great year for fossils (ironic, as it’s the International Year of Astronomy, not paleontology). Now we have a new adapid, Darwinius Masillae. Perversely, the fossil was uncovered over 25 years ago, but was kept away from paleontologists and biologists until 2007. What a delay!

Of course, the whole “missing link” discussion is so much nonsense.  It presupposes that evolution is a simple chain of events one after the other, and that we merely need to look hard enough to find every single species that led from amoeba to human. Gibberish, in other words. Darwin described a tree of life, with many branches that wandered and sometimes were pruned. Biologists since then have expanded this into more of a web of life, as there are examples of hybridization and DNA transfer between branches of the Darwinian tree. But, good luck getting a scientifically-illiterate journalist to discuss the latest in a long series of puzzle pieces that have made the theory of evolution one of the best-supported and most solid scientific theories of all time. No matter that my office mate just made some disparaging remark about how Ida is a big deal for those “Darwin believers” – I assume he meant, “any educated person.”

I realized that I may have mentioned a new job here and there through cyberspacewebland, and yet I haven’t said anything about it since taking the job.

So, here we go… My new job is running a simulator for a war game.  I make airplanes and tanks move around in virtual reality, and send messages that pretend to be from those planes and tanks to other planes or bases.  Troubleshooting new scenarios is a fun little puzzle, ensuring things happen when they’re supposed to and that no aircraft remain in the air without forward motion (hovering C130 anyone?).  It’s fun, at least for me.

And, there’s an RPG propped in the corner of my office.  I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in a Daniel Keys Moran novel like that.

The Galileoscope is finally being produced, and it’s a bit later than most people had hoped. When you’re trying to get people into the “International Year of Astronomy” it may be helpful to get the telescopes out before the middle of the year.  That being said, it looks like the $15 telescopes are making an impact even before anyone has one – Celestron has brought out a $50 scope that is tied to the IYA and is much better at light-gathering than the Galileoscope, while offering a 75x objective compared to the 50x objective on the Galileoscope. Cool deal, if you can’t wait for June.

I’ve got two Galileoscopes on order, and I’ll definitely have photos of The Boy assembling and using one when they finally show up. Patience…

Surprising many by the late date, Yahoo is finally killing off Geocities. I actually had a Geocities site back in 1994 or so, SiliconValley 7305 as I recall.  It’s long gone, part of a purge I suppose.  While Geocities was never a high-end site, it did offer an entrance into the world of the vanity web site for many over the years. When Yahoo bought them for nearly three billion dollars, they were obviously hoping to make money off the advertising-filled sites of catlovers and random conspiracy nuts.  This apparently didn’t happen, but blogging did. I remember manually updating my “thoughts” page back in the mid-90s – what a difference a good LAMP stack makes.

Anyway, farewell Geocities. Catlovers will just have to make do with Facebook and MySpace and LiveJournal and Flickr and … well, I guess they’ll survive somehow.