Plutor

Congratulations to Brian for getting his first full-time job at TV Guide On Screen in Bedford, MA, outside of Boston!

Update: Also, he passed the test he needed for graduation! Hooray!

This is a test of the moblogging interface that I’m setting up. Some other weirdos are going to be testing this interface as well, so any questionable things inside are not necessarily my responsibility.

• Plutor: I am posting this from my cellphone. (2 April, 01:15PM)
• Plutor: I can hardly believe this is working! (2 April, 01:56PM)
• Plutor: Ikea is a barren wasteland. (2 April, 04:08PM)
• Plutor: Why is it so hard to get anywhere in new haven without getting lost? (2 April, 05:49PM)
• Nomad: My mouth is burnt, everything is good. (2 April, 07:29PM)
• Chris: Im in philly! (3 April, 04:52AM)
• Manish: I got blisters on me fingers (3 April, 12:59PM)
• Nomad: Blogging while running in cold ass drizzle (fo shizzle) (3 April, 05:32PM)
• Chris: Philly was fun. (3 April, 07:25PM)
• Plutor: I'm blogging from the can. (4 April, 08:50AM)
• Nomad: Who can blog from the weirdest place? (4 April, 09:46AM)
• Plutor: There's always someone who'll cut to the front of the line and pretend to not even see it. Establishments that send those people to the end get my appreciation. (4 April, 12:10PM)
• Nomad: Days I wish I didn't work inside: 1. Today (5 April, 02:52PM)
• Nomad: 2. Today (6 April, 10:45AM)
• Plutor: I'm sitting in awesome traffic. (8 April, 03:36PM)
• Plutor: Nomad's cellphone blows. We're on caleb's peak on the appalachian trail. (9 April, 04:43PM)
• Nomad: In the middle of the effing woods! (9 April, 04:44PM)
• Bizarro: This is just a test (16 April, 10:38AM)
• Nomad: Idea: sms allmusic ratings and picks (27 April, 06:02PM)
• Nomad: Idea: sms add to idea tada list (27 April, 06:04PM)
• Plutor: I'm at brian's party. His apartment is amazing! (30 April, 09:39PM)
• Plutor: Test (13 May, 08:46AM)
• Nomad: I am at E3! Just kidding at crappy work. (13 May, 10:14AM)
• Nomad: First coast! (17 May, 03:18PM)

The conventional wisdom for when you’re pulled over by a traffic cop is to not admit anything. You’re always told to deny knowledge. “Sorry, officer, I don’t know how fast I was going.” I’ve never been able to do that convincingly, so I usually try to just be deferential and apologetic. It doesn’t really work, but it’s better than having the cop kick out my tail light and give me another citation.

This morning, I was pulled over on the I-8 on-ramp in Naugatuck. The officer asked me if I knew why I was stopped. I wasn’t sure, but I had a pretty good idea. “Because I didn’t fully stop at the stop sign?” “Yup.” I got a written warning, and he told me that it was because I owned up to what I had done. If I had argued (and I bet traffic cops see a lot of that) or said I didn’t know, he said he would have given me a ticket for violation of §14-301(c). (Well, he didn’t cite the penal code section, but it was implied.) I’m glad that my wuss-ness saved me a ticket.

My boss at work just told me we’re going to be getting ten old Sun Rays that he found on eBay for something like $20 apiece. We’re going to put a Sunfire v20z behind them, probably running Xen. That’s a dual-Opteron beasty with 8GB of RAM. They’re fast, and they’ll be about a kajillion times better than my current 500MHz desktop. I’m really super excited about this.

Update 6 Apr: We got the Sunrays in today. They're exactly as awesome as I expected.

The space shuttle Discovery was moved from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building this morning, to prepare it for its expected May launch of STS-114. NASA has spent a lot of time and money making a number of improvements to the shuttle and its support systems.

Hooray for human spaceflight!

I discovered the Firefox extension Greasemonkey in early March 2005. I had probably heard of it before then, but I don't know why it had taken so long for me to really look at it. It's exactly the kind of thing that appeals to me: injecting Javascript (often with DOM actions, possibly with Ajax) into any web page. Every once in a while, I come up with an idea for a one-off script. They're all available from my profile on Greasemonkeyed.com.

I love Chris Onstad, the mind behind Achewood. Only he would try a joke like today's strip, and make it accurate. Read it, and then read the rest of this post.

The aforementioned major deploy went out this morning. It went well. More than 5000 man-days culminated in a very smooth site rollout this morning. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

Remember a few months ago, when I said that we had gone with SuSE instead of Redhat? Apparently, before we could sign a contract with Novell, Redhat turned around and told us “We want your business. We will match any offer Novell gives you.” So although nothing (still) has been totally resolved, it looks like we will be going with Redhat for our Linux needs. It’s been a long, wild ride, but it looks like we’ll soon finally have enterprise support for the roughly sixty servers under my domain.

A couple years ago, the great web zine A List Apart featured an article about rewriting the tech news site Slashdot with XHTML and CSS. Not only was it a neat exercise in a site rewrite while keeping the same design, but it also demonstrated the financial (yes, financial) advantages to using web standards. The article estimated that Slashdot would save thousands of dollars in bandwidth per year. (Calculating savings based on ease-of-maintenance wasn’t done, and would be very difficult to estimate).

Despite being perhaps the most well-known technology website, and a number of posts about web standards, it’s taken a while for Slashdot (or rather, Slashcode) to come around. Now, the work is going forward.

Had a little time this weekend to do some HTML hacking, so I got rid of the much-derided orange header. Mount Everest forever! I think I might come up with some way to rotate the header image, too, but then again it might stagnate like the Metablog. Reply if you see any funkiness with the new header.

Update 18:55 - Fixed some IE issues

Just to allay any fears, I have not forgotten this blog. There’s a huge new site launch next week for which I’m in the middle of configuring and tweaking 50 Linux servers. I’ve heard some people say that this is our single biggest launch since the dot-com bubble burst. I can believe it.

I was called for Jury duty (petit jury, thank goodness) on May 3. As a heavy-duty Law and Order fan, I look forward to watching the real thing from the inside. Believe it or not, I actually hope I’ll get picked. I just hope it doesn’t interfere with E3.

I was reading through this AskMe today, and it started me thinking. Emailing yourself five or ten years in the future isn’t a difficult problem (in fact, that thread includes several solutions). But what would be the most reliable way to get a message to yourself in, say, 50 years? Not necessarily an email, and inexpensiveness and plausibility are important (becoming President and renaming the country “Hello Future Me” won’t work).

Would Doc Brown’s method of sending a letter from 1888 1885 to Marty standing in the road (not even an address) in 1955 even work back then? I doubt it. How could it be done today?

Tada Lists were a blog-world meme a few weeks back, and I’ve finally come up with a good use for them: keeping track of my reading list.

This is something that I normally would just put in my links feed (to the right, if you’ve never noticed it before), but it’s just so exciting that I wanted to gush about it here. Not only are there going to be playable versions of all three upcoming next-gen home consoles at E3, but Nintendo might be giving us a little extra to look forward to: a next-gen Game Boy. Plus they may reveal PalmOS-for-the-DS at E3 as well.

(BTW, some of the comments on that link make me laugh).

The other day, I finally got ahold of a copy of last year’s Franz Ferdinand album. M happened to be in the car when I decided to listen to it for the first time. Thirty seconds into the first track, she says “I want a copy of this.”

That never happened to me before. (Her review, after a track or two, was “This is very Operation Ivy.")

The “Alt-Tab Replacement” Power Toy never behaved properly with my text editor of choice, EditPad Lite. So yesterday, I set off on a search for a new screenshot-enhanced program switcher for Windows. I came across (and am extremely happy with) TaskSwitchXP. It’s both more configurable and Open Source. Anyone who often has more than 4 or 5 programs running at a time should try this out.

A new trigonometry challenge: Given a hexagon inscribed in a square as shown below, what is the ratio of relationship between the length of segment a and segment b? Assume the hexagon’s sides are all of equal length.

Update Feb 26: The solution, props to Brian.

Dandelions are what’s called an apomictic plant. Apomixis is essentially asexual reproduction. A single dandelion, even in quarantine, will create seeds that are identical to itself. As random mutations happen over time, a microspecies will form, since genetic changes are not contributed back into any gene pool. Some botanists have identified thousands of separate dandelion microspecies, often confined to a single meadow.

Also, dandelions are delicious, and are extremely high in Vitamin A and C.

The operators of FleetCenter in Boston decided it’d be a good idea to auction off single-day rights to rename the stadium and give the proceeds to charity. Honorable idea. Unfortunately for them, the winner of Monday, February 28, was the crude news site Fark.com. They held a competition this afternoon to decide what the name should be. The winning entry: “Fark.com UFIA Arena”.

(This post cross-posted to Metafilter as my first Front Page Post)

Update Feb 16: Both Waxy links and Kottke linked to my Mefi post. And no one was really anti-Fark in the thread, which I expected from the Mefites. I consider my first FPP a success! Hurrah!

I switched from a big bookmark folder of blogs to using the great free website Bloglines only about 30 hours ago, but I can already see that it’s changing my surfing efficiency. Instead of repeatedly hitting blogs, hoping to catch an update, I can just keep bloglines open and it’ll tell me when there’s something new. I’m taking the bandwidth off of the little guy’s server.

But it’s got a downside, too. Now, like Jon Rentzsch, I want RSS feeds for everything.

Update Feb 15: Ask Metafilter gave some good suggestions.

Yesterday, after three months of indecision, we finally decided on a Linux distribution. We’re going, not with the (essentially) industry standard Redhat, but with SuSE. The codebase is obviously virtually identical, and the featuresets are pretty comparable, and Novell (who bought SuSE January 2004) gave us an amazingly good deal. It’ll be an interesting exercise trying to get all of our Dev and QA stuff moved over in the next few weeks, and there are apparently a couple of vendors we’ll have to pressure to hurry up their SuSE support, but it’s nice to have this decision finally made.

Update 3-23: It didn't go as easily as expected.

Medical terms for parts of the body that don't really otherwise have a name:

• Antecubital fossa - Elbow pit
• Popliteal fossa - Knee pit
• Philtrum - That groove in your upper lip
• Natal cleft - Buttcrack

Okay, that last one doesn't entirely belong, but I like that it has a technical unoffensive name.

I gave blood today. You should, too. Every two seconds, someone in the US needs blood, and artificial blood is still a ways off. It’s an easy way to lose a pound, plus you get free juice and cookies.

The information on the next generation in game consoles is becoming more firm. We know that they’ll all be playable at the next E3. We know all about the technology behind the PS3’s Cell processor. And now we’re starting to hear information about official names. Continuing with their tradition of sticking with development names, the Nintendo Revolution is rumored to become the “Nintendo Revolution”. And afraid that X-Box 2 would sound less edgy than Playstation 3, Engadget is reporting that Microsoft’s next console will be the “X-Box 360”.

Okay, so maybe nevermind on the whole del.icio.us thing. I like being able to keep single links through there, but I don’t like the dialy upload process, and it makes the blog look pretty boring. I’ve been meaning to redesign this page slightly for a while, and this might be a good excuse to do that. It’s harder to put aside time for web development when you’re a Sysadmin than it was when you’re a web developer.

Update: Set aside some time. What do you think so far? Still to do: integrate my flickr photos and some sort of simple del.icio.us links list.