Category Archives: Uncategorized

Caching

I went caching this evening. Didn’t find anything.

I did, however, go fix Wild Blue Yonder, which has been rather damaged for a long time. WBY is the most interesting cache that I’ve ever hidden, and has been destroyed more than any other cache I’ve ever hidden. Any hide that involves a Dremel is a good hide. 🙂

I also discovered that the problems that I’ve been having with my Magellan appear to have more to do with the serial port on the ancient computer I’m using, than with the GPS itself. I tried using the USB Keyspan serial adapter thingy, and not only did it work great, but it worked considerably faster than the serial connection is supposed to work. I wonder how much speed I can coax out of it.

Update: It looks like 19,200BPS is as fast as I can push it, but it’s still a step up from what I was able to do before. I wish I had done this a long time ago.

Spinhome

Rob, aka lilo, is trying to get spinhome off of the ground, so that he can take Freenode on the road to raise awareness, and raise some bucks. For those of you who use Freenode, you probably know just how vital a resource it is to all of us. Those of you who don’t use Freenode, but use free software of some kind, go read what he’s doing anyways. Freenode is how many of us communicate, and it’s “free”, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap.

Powerbook migration, take two

Based on my less-than-stellar experience, I took the laptops back to the helpdesk folks, who did a full backup of my original machine, and then restored it to the loaner, which is now working wonderfully – after a teensy bit of initial pain. Thunderbird still didn’t like me much, and I had to re-setup the imap accounts. Fortunately, since it’s imap, everything is on the server anyway.

PowerBook migration

Apple has a migration utility for moving stuff from one Mac to another. My PowerBook is going for repairs, so I had everything migrated off to another one, so that I’d have something to use while it was gone.

So I wanted to tell you, my loyal readers, about a little bit of caveat emptor that you might want to know about should you use this utility, and if you’re a Unix geek like myself. You see, I install a lot of stuff via somewhat non-standard means. For example, I have Apache installed, from source, because that’s the kind of guy I am. And I have a variety of other weirdnesses installed in various places – mostly in /usr/local it seems, although there’s probably stuff elsewhere.

You see, if you don’t install stuff in the accepted Apple way, the migration utility doesn’t notice it. So right now I’m manually copying over /usr so that I’ll at least have that stuff. I don’t actually know what else is missing, but I imagine I’ll run into a few things. Mostly, it will be fine, because eventually I’ll get my original laptop back, and all that stuff will still be there, but I expect some pain in the meantime.

The worst thing thus far has been Thunderbird. I don’t know what the deal actually is, but Thunderbird launches and then hangs for a while, then tells me that the security bits didn’t start up properly and that things might not work. So I can’t get to my email. Which is a pretty big deal. Hopefully copying over /usr/lib will help, but who knows?

Alert. Could not initialize the browser’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your browser’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the browser and fix the problem. If you continue to use this browser session, you might see incorrect browser behaviour when accessing the security features.

Yes, it says behaviour, not behavior, which I find interesting.

Stolen bike locks

Matsu posted about locks, indirectly, in reference to folks getting sued for exposing vulnerabilities. Fortunately, my bike lock isn’t susceptible to this vulnerability.

The lock on my bike is a chain with a combination lock that I’ve had for 23 years. It was the lock that was on my locker at Florida High School, in Tallahassee, and apparently I stole it from my locker when I left there. For years, it sat in various crates and boxes as I moved around, and I rediscovered it last month when I was looking for my other bike lock.

I remember coming across it at various times over the years, and feeling vaguely uneasy about it. I don’t remember the exact incident, but I *seem* to remember that I swapped it for another lock, because I thought it likely that whoever had the locker the previous year might remember the combination, as I remembered my combination from the previous year’s locker. Whatever the real story is, I still have this lock, and, through some bizarre trick of memory, my fingers remembered the combination, although I couldn’t think of it when I stared at it at first.

Pedal straps

I went one more step and got some toe straps. The way that these seemingly simple things work is that rather than just pushing the pedals, now you’re pulling too, so every stroke is twice as strong. I just rode down to Great Harvest for breakfast, and the difference was immediate. Now I’m going 10 and 11 mph on the uphills, rather then 5 or 6, and going 22 on the flats, rather than 13. Of course, now my legs hurt in all new places, too.

So, a couple more days of practice, and I might be ready to make my friends, family and coworkers more nervous by biking all the way to work.

Field Day

Today was Field Day, and I spent almost the entire day at school with Sarah, which was wonderful. I worked at the Texas Moon Walk, which was an inflatable bounce thing. We’d let 5 or 6 or 7 kids in for a minute or two, and then persuade them to come out again.

In a special application of Boyle’s Law, I observed that 6 boys take up enormously more room than 6 girls.

After the field day events were done, I hung out with Sarah in her classroom while they wrote letters about what they loved about Field Day, and what they thought could be improved. Unfortunately, after lunch I had to come home to meet the air conditioning repair guy. As soon as he left, I biked back to school to spend some more time there.

All told, a wonderful day. I should take days off to hang out with Sarah more often. 🙂

Soylent Green

Finally saw Soylent Green this evening. I was disappointed, to say the least. It could be because I knew the ending, I dunno. I found the whole premise impossible to swallow (no pun intended), and everything about the plot development was contrived and shallow.

Sure, global warming, destroying the environment, and all that, but I can’t quite figure why anyone would find this movie particularly thought-provoking. I found it yawn-provoking, and more than a little hard to endure through to the end.

error_reporting = E_ALL

Over the last several days, I have discovered that PHP, much like Perl, is very forgiving of bad syntax if you want it to be, but can be downright pedantic if you ask it to.

In php.ini, you’ll see a configuration variable called ‘error_reporting’. On your production server, you generally want this set to E_WARNING or perhaps even E_ERROR, so that you only see the critical stuff. However, if you set it to E_ALL on your development server, and tail -f your error log while you’re working, you’ll see all sorts of extremely helpful warning messages that tell you when you’re making small syntax blunders.

Ordinarily, stuff that is displayed is unimportant, in the sense that if you don’t fix it, things will keep working. However, if you attempt to eliminate all the warnings, you’ll end up with better, more maintainable code, and, more importantly, you’ll find small problems long before they have a chance to become large problems.

Setting error_reporting to E_ALL on your production server, on the other hand, is a good way to generate multi-gigabyte logfiles in a very short time.

Caveat: I have no idea if this applies to PHP 4. If you’re using PHP 4, you really should upgrade to PHP 5. It’s a vastly better language in so many ways that it’s really hard to make a fair comparison between the two.