Well, that heat wave is here. In the high 80's and low 90's yesterday, it looks like today is going to be a repeat of that. We had a very quiet day yesterday, just trying to keep cool, welcoming the onset of hot weather with a Law and Order: Criminal Intent marathon and some wonderful broiled fish for dinner. I finally got around to setting up the fire pit for the patio, planning on cooking the fish over the open fire. That plan was thwarted, though, when I went to get the tripod grill out of the RV and found that we had the grill surfaces, but the tripod was missing. The probable cause was error during the daily take-down/set-up routine duing last year's cross-country excursion. I'll stop up to one of the wilderness outfitter stores in the area to get a replacement today.
We've got all the windows open and the ceiling fans going, the cat is lounging in front of the patio doors, grabbing what little breeze there is. Time to catch up on email and clean the kitchen from yesterday's debris.
May 2006 Archives
One word to describe to concert last night - out-freaking-standing! I think my ears have just about recovered and I want more! The Tweeter is an excellent venue and parking about 3 blocks away made for a quick getaway at the end. Unfortunately, the Camden PD had basically set a path out of the area and put you on the road in the opposite direction from Philly. So, after finally finding a jug handle, a New Jersey roadway invention to get you going back in the right direction, we hit the Ben Franklin Bridge in no time and were on our way home. Thanks, Hal, for inviting me along - enjoyed it totally!
Only a couple of hours from now, I will be heading out to see Pearl Jam! The weather appears to be cooperating as well since the Tweeter Center is an open-air/covered venue and the forecast is for clear and in the mid-60s tonight! I am ready to rock!
I was tired of seeing the TV ads for IM.com I decided to go take a look, download and install it. Take my word for it - don't waste your time and hard drive space. Installed easily as well as hung easily - three times - while selecting video channels. They also don't tell you that they autosubscribe you to one of their premier channels which is half-a-gig of informercials. It is just another glitzed up podcast player with an optional sidebar that takes up farr too much screen real estate. and, of course, it is only for Windows.
I have Democracy Player which I like. Very simple interface with enough sex appeal for those who choose software by the glitter. The good folks at Participatory Culture also realize that people do use Macs and run Linux, too, and DP is available for them as well.
The problem I do have with DP as well as most of the turnkey podcast products is that they decide where the files are going and you have no opinion in the matter. Personally, I would rather they not use the My Documents structure but allow me to fly them out to a larger, network device. So I have to farm out stuff I want to keep. DP does have an auto-expire feature that helps with disk clutter, too.
That's the only word I could come up with, but coping may sound a bit harsh. Getting started would probably have been a better choice. As with any new software environment, in particular the operating system, especially in the open source world, the documentation gives all the bloody parameters, but, unless it is well written from the end-user point of view, it is probably useless for most.
With regards to Fedora Core 5, I have found that there are several folks who have put their care and feeding tips on the web in a well-organized and easy to read way.
- Fedora Core 5 Installation Notes: Stanton has put together a very easy to read and follow description of how he installed and customized FC5. He included the common tools, in particular how he configured yum. Well worth reading before and during installation.
- The Unofficial Fedora FAQ: Max has put together a super site with tips and hints about FC5 (as well as FC1, 2, 3, and 4). He also has a by subscription newsletter ($) that gives further help.
I enjoyed so much when I was a kid playing in the sandbox that my father built for me. It was a place of fun and exploration, using the sand as a modelling tool, making roads, paths, or just simply enjoying the feel of the warm sand on my toes. It was a place to smile and laugh. When they day's activities were done, the sand could be raked and placed back into its original state, shovels, buckets, and toys removed. The next day, the cycle of fun and discovery could start all over again.
I think this is why the technology term sandbox is so descriptive of its purpose. It is a place where you can play and discover and not be afraid of mistakes, because you can always set the stage back to its original state. Enter VMware and my current adventures with Fedora Core 5. By backing up the Virtual Appliance, if I screw something up, I can simply restore the latest (or not so latest) image and try it again. Makes it so easy!
After three plus decades in technology, I am still amazed every day by the advances being made. One of those bleeding-edge advances is virtualization. I have been toying with the idea of moving 100% to Linux but am still tied to the Gate$ Dynasty by toys that I use daily (like Slingbox). With the VMware Player and a Fedora Core 5 Virtual Appliance, I am currently watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent on one screen and updating with yum my FC5 on the other. Yes, I am running an external 17" LCD monitor and draping my desktop to 2048 x 764 across it and the laptop screen. Add to that the multiple desktops under FC5 and I have one hell of a lot of computing real estate!
I have the Virtual Appliance staged on a network attached, 200 GB hard drive so I can bring it up on any machine in the house. My eventual plan is to add the VMware Server component and buy the real VMware Workstation and build a Windows XP Pro Appliance so that I can get back to use the Windows toys I need while running Fedora as the real machine.
Bottom line is that for the time being (read: until the dead presidents becomes available), I will have the best of both worlds to pump up my development work, plus have my old WIndows toys and all the new Linux ones that am becoming enamoured with, like Stellarium and all the UCAR meteorology tools!
I feel like I will be on a random walk through the rest of the month. There are only nine days left, but still I feel like I have such a diverse group of things I want (and need) to get accomplished. Some are interrelated, but some are not. I feel like I have taken a long vacation since Election Day, basically recharging the body and mind from the numbing experience of 20-hour days, the one thing that I gladly left behind when I retired from the phone company. The major difference with these was the high level of satisfaction received from the hard work, something that was sorely lacking in the latter part of my IT career.
So here is my to do list for the next little over a week:
- Pearl Jam - yes, I am going to see Pearl Jam live in Philly!
- Begging forgiveness on course #3 - yes, I need to take care of this issue tout de suite! I have been avoiding and now I will have to pay the consequences.
- Business stuff - making money is important if you want to eat and the good thing is that we have yet another new customer with three more potential right behind. Also, have to get working on the next level of one of our best customers. Sharpen the pencils and get to coding!
- Weather data - I have to get the cron processes running on our meteorology server at school so I can get all of our observational and model data pulls from NOAA up-to-date. I have been running them manually, but it is a pain when Linux can take care of it all for me.
- Weather tools - now that I have Fedora Core 5 running on my laptop under VMware, I want to get some of the nifty weather tools from UCAR running. Just in time for hurricane season...
- The pool - yes, this is always hanging over my head... I am going to get this started this week, dammit!
- The RV - ditto
I feel like I am finally getting some things accomplished around here. I don't know if it was school this past semester, the campaign, or what, because I think that I am finally coming to grips with actually having both a lot of work to do and a life, too! I cannot remember the last time that I actually put in more than one entry in a week, let alone a day (I know, you're all bored already...).
It may just be that the weather is getting nicer and that I can actually sleep for more than two hours a night. Anyway, I am very pleased so far with moving back to MT. I have been watching the logs and the major spiders are running rampant at the moment. Yahoo! has jsut about finished roaming through the whole new file structure. Google is doing it much more efficiently, a few pages at a time.
One thing I did find during the conversion process was that WP has no export feature. So, I did a search and found one that someone had written. It had to be tweaked a bit to work on the latest version of WP. It also did not handle comments perfectly. I ended up without about 200 blank anonymous comments. The good thing was that I simply went into MT after importing and basically killed them all off in about 3 minutes, rather painlessly. That brings up another good feature of MT - most if not all of the selection menu-type displays can be easily optioned to show 10, 20, or all of the entries at once, something lacking in most of WP. Sure, I could have gone in and tweaked. My issue is that in the case of blogging software, I want to use it for the most part, not mod it. The analog I like to think of is comparing blogging software to a pencil. To write with it all I have to do is occasionally sharpen it. I always felt that when blogging with WP, I had to take all the wood off the pencil, mine my own graphite, form it into a cylinder, cut down a tree, whittle a cylinder, and put the lead inside of it. Sorry, I have better things to program - my blogging software is just a tool to edit, archive, and present my journal. Sure, I like the toys you can sprinkle through it, but that is not the reason I blog.
Back to cooking dinner (wow!) - have to get it done early since Monday night is drill night!
If your RSS aggregator doesn't automatically find the feeds, you will have to change them to one of the following:
- RSS feed: http://jimmetzger.net/sediments/index.xml
- Atom feed: http://jimmetzger.net/sediments/atom.xml
Yes, I have done it again. I have moved back to MovableType again. Not exactly a 180-degree turn since I have been on a wide variety of blog software - if someone writes it, I will try it. Started originally on Blogger right after it was first released (yes, that long ago). I tried GreyMatter, bloxsom (I really liked it, don't now why I just didn't stay with it), b2, WordPress, and MovableType. Of all of them, my favorite was WP. Yes, so why didn't I stay with it?
- php - Yes, first and foremost, it is because it is written, added-on, and hacked in a language that I personally do not feel comfortable with. My personal preference for programming has been, is, and always will be perl. Sorry, but I have been writing in it, professionally and personally, since I learned at the high temple of perl, Bell Labs, many years ago. Use all the arguments for php that you want, but the vast majority of the exploits against web site, whether it be spamming or hacking, are because of poorly written php scripts. If I had the time or the inclination, I would probably learn php better and take the time to go over the thousands of lines of code in WP and do some fixes. But time is not something I have a lot of and the inclination to get involved in a OS project is not either.
- perl - I can write perl code in my sleep. MT is written in perl so I can feel comfortable about mod'ing and debugging it.
- spammers - I think I'll just turn comments and pingbacks off. Farr too much useless traffic (and its associated cost) from the idiots who make it their business to trash other peoples' creative works.
- layout - I have always found the way that WP basically says use our wrapper, use kubrick, or spend a thousand hours developing your own. With MT, I can simply strip the shell, tweak my CSS, and it is done. No php mumbo-jumbo, no extensive testing. Then my blog fits right in with everything else on my web site. No, I never thought more than a few seconds about using the WP page creation routines. This facilty is rather stiff and allows little creativity and, again, you are stuck with the overall WP layout. My web site has a blog, not the other way around.
Well, since php has so many holes and there are so many a-holes in the ether, I have turned off comments and pings permanently. Too much spam traffic, too many referals from too many shitty web sites who are only there to rip you off. If you have a constructive comment, drop me a note. My email address? If you are a human, you can find me. If you are a bot or a sub-human spammer, kiss off.
And, yes, I think I may be moving off of WordPress, too. Why? Three letters - php. Sorry, but the vast majority of exploits out there are courtesy of shortcutting code, in particular in software written in php. One major reason I do not code in php - I can do it all and more efficiently in perl. So, there may be some other major changes here in the short term.
Back to watching the Law and Order - Criminal Intent marathon on the USA Network.
I have to make a personal observation. It regards my fellow geeksters on the Information Superhighway with personal web sites. Actually it is a question - how much revenue do you draw from such services as Google and Yahoo ads? I admit I have a minimal Google ads presence sprinkled conservatively through my sites. I don't have them back on my blog just because I have been too busy to add them since I upgraded WP.
Personally, I am not going to buy a new yacht from the proceeds. More like a Happy Meal from McDonalds. It just kills me that people can rant and rave about ads and yet weave a block of text ads in between every blog entry. Hello? My personal surfing preferences lead to backing out of a site when I see this. I find it humorous at what ads are presented with respect to the content on the page. I was just looking at a very nice Fedora Core 4 installation guide and the ads (far too many) were for VoIP services. I couldn't find a single reference on the page (or his whole web site for the matter) dealing with Internet telephony services.
So, I ask how much do you financially gain from the multiple repititions of text ads?
I know that title dates me, but what the hell. I am having far too much fun with VMWare's Player, running on my Windows XP laptop. I have been doing a lot of work on a system running Fedora Core 4 and have always run my web servers under some flavor of Linux. With the demise of my workstation at home and needing to do more work in the Linux versus the Windows environment, I have been using Cygwin to make my life easier. Unfortunately, it just ain't Linux and the software that is available under Cygwin is usually not the most up-to-date if it is available at all. Recent (mis)adventures with the official Cygwin ports repository caused me much lost time rebuilding my Cygwin setup four times (you think I would have figured it out after the first failure).
Anyway, I had heard and tried a very very early release of VMware and it didn't work out too well. I was reading an article online about VMware's contest to create virtual environments for the player so I decided to go have a look. What I discovered was a fairly long list of Linux environments that had been setup, including the latest Fedora Core 5. So, with a 700MB+ download and a fairly painless installation, I now have a fully functional Linux machine running on my laptop, side-by-side with Windows.
Because of a lack of hard drive space, I do have the virtual environment off on network drive so I can't work away from home, but this provides some interesting possibilities for my new (sometime in the future) laptop. I was having issues about going to a 100% Linux environment, but, with VMware, I can do that and run whatever Windows applications in a Windows virtual machine - yes, the VMware player is also available for Linux - a nice way to turn the tables around and have a pleasant development environment while still be able to use some of the creature comfort toys (like Sling Player) in a virtual one.
More on this as I see how things work out - right now using my favorite updating tool, yum, to bring my FC5 desktop up to current, with 332 packages changed.
I am too tired to write much - the results were not final until 5 AM this morning, but the end product was perfect. We have elected a Democratic State Senator where there has never been one before! Take a look at the web site - a pleasure to put this page up!
Now just to kick back and r-e-l-a-x for a day or two...
I am my worst enemy sometimes. I really like to use cygwin because it allows me to work in a user-friendly UNIX environment on my laptop. Most of the work I do is aimed at Linux servers and I have always for vi, grep, and less to be my good programming friends.
All would be fine if I would just leave well enough alone or just finally get around to moving to Linux on my main machine. Well, that's another story since my laptop is on its last legs and my desktop machine has been out of commission for over six months. So, until the dead presidents are in my wallet and ready to be spent, I settle, quite happily I might add, for cygwin and X.
I decided to look around to see what's been ported to cygwin, toys mostly, like gaim and xmms. Enter trouble. I don't mean this to be derogatory although it will probably come out that way but I would prefer an easy path to installing something. Yes, I know how to do it the hard way, but I just don't have the time or interest. So, I noticed on the cygwin site that the ported software repository has been moved/established. So, I cruise over to the web site and discover a virtual plethora of neat stuff. Enter danger.
So I read the sparce (read: non-existent) documentation and it appears to be as simple as adding another mirror to the nifty cygwin installer package. So I do and away I go clicking some new goodies. Then I crank it up and find that eventhough I can get into X, xterm fails. The error message seems to be one that I should be able to google for. Come to find out that my searching in a dozen ways yields nothing, zip dot nada.
I know the open source mantra. I sing its praises, but it almost seems to me that cygwin is a tease, a come-on to finally get real and switch to Linux. It is probably what I should do. But here is the concept: I have other things that need to be accomplished before that happens. Dumb stuff like school work and activities that make money. Eating and education come way before getting a box to run on Linux.
So, here I sit and re-install cygwin from the ground up again. Not really painful - more or less takes care of itself - but it is a pain in the butt. All because I want an environment that works better. At least the tunes on Radio Nigel help to soothe my frayed nerves.
Yes, another semester has come to an end. Well, almost... still have a bit of unfinished business to clean up, but that will have to wait until after next Tuesday's Special Election where we will be working all day at the polls to insure that Andy Dinniman becomes the next State Senator representing the PA 19th District.
I even have two posts in draft that I need to get out, but I just have not got the time right now. I spent the morning at the fire house with our annual Spring Clean-up Day where we give the station the once over, both inside and out. I spent the first part of the morning mulching around the trees behind the station and the rest of it cleaning floors inside. We did get a brief interruption, courtesy of a gas leak call in the shopping center across from the station.
Back to work - just three days remaining to get out the vote for Andy on Tuesday. A reminder - all registered voters in the 19th District can vote in the Special Election!
Since the fire company took over the old high band frequency formerly used by the township police, we have been struggling along using GE portables that were older than dirt. They did work, but just don't have the pizazz of more modern electronics or the small size.
So, Dan (our Fire Police Captain) and I decided to look around the market and see what was available. Well, Rich and the good folks at Metropolitan Communications who handle the company's communications and emergency lighting needs had just the solution for us. So, on Friday, we went over and picked up our new Motorola Mag One VHF Portables.
They work super and have programmed in not only our frequency, but the mutual aid companies that we work with in the area. Personally, I like Motorola because they have been making public safety radios for years and they are known for their quality and sturdiness. I also like the features that are available for programming the radio. Rich chose the four most common ones for the programmable buttons: monitor (break squelch momentarily), sticky monitor (break squelch until you press the button again), scan (channel scan), and (my favorite) nuisance channel delete (remove a channel from the scan list). Rated output is a full 5 watts and it works great so far in the initial tests. Our major problem is hilly terrain, full of metamorphic rocks - in the words of my old ham radio friend Fritz "those signal sucking rocks" - and our hope is that using high-band VHF will get the message through where the 800-MHz system doesn't.
So, back to finals' week work - still have a few more maps to pump out.
For the scanner listeners in Central Chester County, the West Whiteland Fire Police can be heard responding and on scene on 158.970 MHz simplex. I will add it to the live scanner stream today as well.
When I turned in my final research paper for Advanced Meteorology at close to midnight yesterday, I am one step closer to closing out yet another semester at WCU. I only have the final left in that class (Tuesday). Today, I am relaxing a bit by finishing up all my map work for GIS Applications and will get to writing my take-home final exam later. My project poster is all done. I just need to stop by the GIS Lab Monday afternoon, print it, and I will be done with that course, too. My third class is a whole other question... still trying to decide how to approach the inevitable... I'll ponder that in the back of my mind for the rest of the weekend... oh well...
I think I have 99% decided to take the summer off from classes. Since starting back to school, I have gone non-stop with two or three classes each summer plus the two field courses out west. This summer I think I will just take a break and get caught up on everything else around here (yes, the pool, the RV, the rec room, the network... the list goes on for several parsecs :-().
But the summer break won't come until probably June, not because of the school calendar (we only have exam week left), but because we are approaching the week of the campaign and we'll be putting in 28-hours-a-day on that effort. So, I look forward to taking a break from the madness to prepare for a busy fall semester.
Anywho, back to ArcGIS and map making with a mouse!
Well, not really, but Microsoft has launched a new way to get more people coding. Being a life-long keyboard hugger, I can only imagine what this will do, giving people the opportunity to try programming free of charge. But then again, you could already be programming your butt off with any of the wealth of languages that are available using free/open software, like perl and python.
Anyway, Microsoft is now making available Express versions of their Visual Studio product line, including:
- Visual Web Developer
- Visual Basic
- Visual C#
- Visual C++
- Visual J#
On the one day that I really need to get GIS data from the USGS, their wonderful seamless distribution system is down for the count. According to the All Points Blog, it has been behaving badly and should be back up on May 1st. Well, today is May 1st and it isn't back up and is still experiencing an interruption of service. Well, time to hit the USDA's Geospatial Data Gateway and hopefully get the DEM's and DOQQ's that I need to finish my project in GIS Applications.
Update 5/2: They are finally back up, but limping... it is amazing how so many people, including me, use this new system. Sad thing is that there is no dropback strategy when it goes down. The USGS took down the other sites that formerly provided this information, a dumb move in my estimation. There are a lot of times when I could just as easily pull the data via ftp, without the need for the sexy interface or selection/trim facilities it provides.
