Plutor

Nomad and Mari converted his E3 Pac-man shirt from a XL to medium this weekend. I’m considering doing the same, because this shirt feels like an especially large XL, even after an I-hope-it-shrinks pass through the wash.

It’s fair to say that I was extremely impressed with the Xbox 360 at E3. The controllers are virtually perfect (and will be available for the PC), and going back to a (relatively) grainy PS2 after playing Full Auto at 1080i was palpably painful. A couple of hours into E3, we realized that all of the games were playing on dev kits (read: Apple G5 towers). Reports have started coming out that at HDTV resolutions, the Xbox 360 will not be able to render the games at full quality, which means that the final games will almost certainly not look as nice as they did at E3. Which is a damn shame.

All t-shirts at Threadless are on sale for only $10 apiece until June 6. Stock up!

A long time until the 24 Season 5 premiere.

E3 is over. We yelled ourselves silly for three days and played about a krillion games. Some of the most interesting things were the Game Boy Micro (so small, but so comfortable), Shadow of the Colossus, and just about everything about the Xbox 360. There’s a lot more, but I’m a bit exhausted and all of the muscles in my body (especially my throat muscles) are a bit tired.

This was totally awesome. I can’t wait until next year.

Day 0 of E3 is over. We survived some serious turbulence on the flight over the Rockies, and met boo_radley from Metafilter and his friend Dan. Plus, we met two people on the plane who are going to E3 (one of whom was the VP of Sales for Turtle Beach).

One of the rooms at the Westin is the perfect gaming room, because it’s right between two executive conference suites. We saw big groups going in and out of them a few times yesterday, but at night the doors were propped open and there was no one around.

Yesterday at the invitation-only presentations, Sony introduced their Playstation 3, Nintendo showed off the Revolution and surprised everyone with the Game Boy Micro (that thing is tiny), and several interesting games were demoed. I’m looking forward to the conference. T minus four hours!

I’ve noticed an interesting pattern on Slashdot. They’re notorious for duplicate stories (although, in my opinion, they have improved over the last few years). But a couple weeks after posting an article about a new Google feature, someone independently discovers it and the Slashdot editors feel the need to discuss it again. I only point this out because they did it not one month ago with search by numbers (original).

Update 25 Jul: Look, two more in the past 24 hours!

Update 26 Aug 2006: Another pair about Google Trends.

I hope that I don’t regret allowing any of the E3 folks to moblog to the front page here. The new design makes it really easy to integrate new sources of posts, like the E3 moblog, or the “standard” moblog.

The old location of the E3 moblog is also available, if this page is too ugly for you.

To try to counter an anti-chili-finger backlash and sales drop, Wendy’s is giving away Free Jr-sized Frosties this weekend, Friday 13 May through Sunday 15 May. (No purchase necessary).

For the curious, 160 calories, 4g fat, 21g sugar.

I never liked the side-by-side bars on plutor.org very much, so this morning I spent a bit of time using the mt-list and mt-rssfeed plugins to create a page with blog posts, del.icio.us links, and flickr photos intermingled. I like the simplicity better, and I think it’ll be easier to glance at and determine what’s new.

If I still like this design in the morning, I plan to migrate all of the archives and such to the new design at some point in the future.

I have about 250 photos from the six years of NVAD. I’ve decided to post a few of my favorites online. It’s clear that we were all very bad photographers, because even my favorites aren’t that great.

Yesterday, I was surfing through the “24” tag on del.icio.us when I found a site that had the ring that CTU uses in several formats. After I remembered that I have the exact same phone at work, I decided to see if I could get this ring on my desk phone.

The first step was to figure out if this was even possible. There are a number of rings already on the phones at work, and they’re apparently fairly programmable, so I wasn’t surprised when a couple quick searches led me to a document explaining how to make custom rings for the Cisco IP phone model 7960. The file format requirements at the bottom were a little challenging, though. I wasn’t sure what to do about “uLaw compression” or “Raw PCM”, But I figured it probably wasn’t going to be extremely hard.

Half an hour later, I had two free applications: wavetools, “a library consisting of 8 programs for manipulating mono WAV files” that let me resample the file to 8000 Hz and cut it to 16080 samples (the maximum length), and AFsp, which then converted it to a raw PCM. When all was said and done, I had my ringtone in the right format. I only hoped that it still sounded right.

The next step was less technological and more political, and I wasn’t kidding myself into thinking it would be easy. The Cisco IP phones use a centralized server to get their configuration information, firmware, and (apparently) ringtones. I sent an email to Paul the phone guy, asking him if it would be a big deal. As I expected, he referred me to a middle-manager, but luckily I knew him pretty well. I asked him if it would be possible, and at first he seemed receptive, but he started to realize that it might be setting a bad precedent. I could only imagine how many people would want to have their own ringtones on there, and chances are they wouldn’t have the skills to convert it to the exactly right format.

I was concerned that this was the end of my 24 ringtone story. I emailed the PCM and the link to the author of the original page, telling him that it was untested but that I was confident it was right. Then I went home.

The next morning, in the shower (as if you doubted it), I realized: the phones just use TFTP to get all of the stuff from the server. TFTP servers are, well, trivial to set up. In fact, I know of at least one of our servers at work that’s currently running a TFTP daemon. The hard part was telling the phone to use a TFTP server other than the one that it was told to use:

1. Go to Settings -> Network Configuration
2. Hit "* * #". Nothing will happen, but you've just made the settings editable.
3. Find the "Alternate TFTP" setting. On my phone it's #32. Set it to "Yes" by hitting the appropriate soft button.
4. Go back up to the "TFTP Server 1" setting (#8 on my phone), and hit the "Edit" soft button
5. Write down the current TFTP server. We'll need it later, and you should probably store it in a safe place, just in case something dies sometime down the road.
6. Type in your new TFTP server IP.
7. Save the changes.

Now, it was just a matter of figuring out what files I needed to get from the old TFTP server. I started my new server with verbosity turned way up, and rebooted the phone (well, I unplugged it and plugged it back in). When the phone requested files, I saw them in the log. I then used a TFTP client program to download them from the old server. I modified the RingList.xml and added my raw PCM to the directory, and rebooted my phone again.

When it came up, the ring was on the phone and looked and sounded just like any other ring.

I saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last night. It’s the first movie since Lord of the Rings I cared enough about to see on opening night. Here’s my very short spoiler-free review: Despite a poor review from Douglas Adams' biographer, and mixed reviews overall, it was much farther from terrible than it was from fantastic. It was more silly than wry, but it was surprisingly faithful to the book. And despite a number of departures from the canon storyline, all of the changes still felt Adamsesque. I was definitely happy with the movie.

Nine Inch Nails has made their entire upcoming album, With Teeth, available online for free. Granted, it’s a non-standard and weird streaming method, but it works fine through my work’s proxy. I love this.

This is my old 1990 Toyota Camry. I purchased it for (I think) $2700 in the summer of 2000. It was the first car that I ever purchased with my own money. My previous car, a white power-nothing Mazda 626, was given to me by my parents after I totalled my first car: a 1989 Toyota Camry that despite the similarities should not be confused with this one.

Read the rest of the story...

My parents put up a bunch of pictures of Brian’s new apartment. Granted, it’s bare-bones right now, and photos from next weekend will probably be more accurate, but you can tell from those pictures that it’s pretty big. Good party pad, from the looks.

What’s the attraction behind printing things out? The new guy at work has printed at least a dozen emails this week, and also printed several of the documentation pages out and posted them in his cube. When I’m showing him something, I’m sure to say “This has a Wiki page. You can just copy and paste these commands I’m running, just like I’m doing right now.” But he has to write down every command I run on a big ol' pad of paper.

I’ve been trying to stay virtually paperless. I take notes on my PDA instead of dead trees. I do have a notebook handy in case I need to do something that requires it, like diagramming an application or environment, but I rarely have to use it. I kinda feel like the wasteful habits of my co-worker are invalidating my good intentions. Looking around me in the last week, I’ve seen a lot of desks covered in stacks of papers, and I’m finally realizing how common this is. Why do so many people need paper copies of everything, when they just end up being unused clutter?

WE'RE GOING TO E3!!!!

Good luck to Brian and Nomad on their first days of work at new jobs. Stop reading this blog and get back to work!

Hooray, Connecticut! It’s a great day for equality, because the CT legislature has passed a bill allowing gay civil unions! Granted, it needed to have a provision attached saying “those people definitely don’t get to marry”, but this is a massive step in the right direction. The state has become the first state to allow civil unions that didn’t have to be forced into it by the courts.

Update 21 Apr: The Senate approved the bill, and Republican Governor Jodi Rell signed it yesterday. Simply amazing. I can almost (almost) forgive her give-him-the-chair tirade. Also, this story illustrates perfectly the difference between blue states and red states. As glassdog says:

The Texas Republican Party has decided that it's better to take a kid away from Steve and Chip, who love them and take them to school every morning, and were saving up to go to Disneyland this Summer, and put them in a state-run orphanage.

I’m starting to really like the looks (not to mention the rumored specs) of the upcoming PalmOne Tungsten X (a.k.a. LifeDrive). Since my current PDA is a six-year-old Handspring Visor, this would be a tempting upgrade.

Unfortunately, it’ll probably end up costing nearly as much as the LCD screen I’m fantasizing about considering.

Our new 3par storage mega-arrays at work are something else. They have some amazing hands-off features, and are extremely fast, but they also call home. They send the manufacturers statistics and apparently also our configuration information. It's a little disconcerting, but it does have one interesting advantage. Occasionally, they notice something is wrong before our NOC does:

From: Ken Hardin
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 10:01 PM
To: Unix System Administrators
Subject: Transfer overdue for 3PAR InServ

We received an alert from our monitoring system indicating it has not received a heartbeat file for over 4 hours from one of your 3PAR InServ storage servers (serial number [XXX], called nw-3par-02, in CT). The last time we heard from it was around 15:30 EDT (today, 4/9/05), and at about the same time there were network errors reported by the other InServ (S/N [XXX]). This probably indicates some type of network problem.

M just looked over my shoulder at the list of blogs that I read, and said “Do you really read that much shit every morning? How do you ever get any work done?”

Once a process in Linux is running for more than 24 hours, it's impossible to get an exact measurement of its start time from ps. The best you can do it something like this:

lingalls@foobar:~$ ps -o “user pid stime tty comm” -u lingalls USER PID STIME TT COMMAND lingalls 32237 Apr06 ? gconfd-2 lingalls 11813 Apr06 ? gnome-session lingalls 11940 Apr06 ? utaudio lingalls 11950 Apr06 ? utslaunch lingalls 11951 Apr06 ? utmhscreen lingalls 11960 Apr06 ? utaction lingalls 11975 Apr06 ? ssh-agent lingalls 11979 Apr06 ? bonobo-activati

Which is completely unhelpful. So I wrote a script to calculate the accurate starttime from information in the proc filesystem. Shared here for your conveniece:

stime () { if ( test ! -d /proc/$1 ); then echo “No process $1”; return; fi; U="awk '{print $1}' /proc/uptime | sed -e 's/\.//'"; N="awk '{print $22}' /proc/$1/stat"; D="$(( (U-N)/100 ))"; perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(time - shift)."\n"’ $D }

Copy and paste that script into your bash or ksh session (or append it to your .bash_profile or .profile), and then run "stime PID".

Reading through this four-and-a-half year old thread on the demise of MetaFilter bends my mind. I find it extremely ironic that the linked article complains about the increase of noise to signal in the blue, but the comments are some of the most well-thought, cogent, and intelligent things I have ever read on MeFi. I wonder what the author thinks about the current state of the site.