Obsolete Your Idols

I made two trips to the co-location facility today.

First trip was terminated when I realized the install media had somehow become corrupt since I performed three successful installs with it.

Second trip was with fresh media and I went around in circles because once I had a good install of Ubuntu onto the Sun v20z I found that grub wanted to try to boot off of the first logical volume in the external T3 array. Even when I told it that the internal SCSI drive was (hd0), it wouldn't boot but now because it wanted to use a mythical IDE drive.

I finally resolved it by lying in /boot/grub/device.map and telling it to consider /dev/sdc to be (hd0). What a pain.

My clue that it was going off the rails was that it would boot, say GRUB and then ... stop. Bad disk geometry, no positive affirmation.

All that and I had time to sit in a meeting and have a vision of the future.

I'm a slow adopter. I spent 12 days thumbing the 40404 sequence into the SMS To: field before I gave it an entry in my contact list and now it's down to four keys to generate a message to Twitter: select, t w ok. I haven't yet given it a unique initial letter but it has the built in uncommon pairing.

So that's my personal time-line between playing with twitter and deciding I'm going to keep using it.

After having seen the twitter stream at web2expo I'm convinced there's something interesting to twitter so I've joined. I'm still not sure what the most interesting bits are but I'm still looking.

I am, almost of course, binderodaemons.

Here's another one of those notes I leave to myself.

This game engine sounds interesting. Too bad it's a 0.03 release.

So if you love Mozilla like I love Mozilla, you'll have tripped over all sorts of plugin foofarahs as things which should Just Work in fact Don't Work. So Devil pointed me at a page of plugin help for Mozilla on x86 Linux.

If you do something like update your system with reckless abandon often, you may find those tips helpful.

I love Mozilla's tabs. Now I can love them even more.

UPDATE 2007/12/30: Or Not
Installing Mozilla tab extensions makes Mozilla literally unusable for me. Pooch. If your setup is similar to mine, you probably want to avoid it, too.

Oh, this rant gave me a big smile and the place I fond it made me smile even more. It's like other places but without all the tedious commentary and discussion. Super sweet.

Well, this is quite pretty and might almost be worth going to the dark side for. Or I could wait a while and there will probably be something similar for the other dark side. It's unlikely to manifest soon in my favorite window manager trimmings because my favorite window manager doesn't have any trimmings.

It Just Works.

Setting up this blog took a small amount of effort because it's hosted on a Debian stable system. That meant building the blosxom deb in a stable chroot [debootstrap is incredibly handy for something like this] and then installing it. It has minimal dependencies and the only thorny one I fulfilled using equivs to tell apt not to worry about giving me an httpd.

Then I wrote flavour files so blosxom would generate two variants. publicfile doesn't know how to handle .xml files so that became .text=xml and I added a .text=html for xantha and other readers who prefer an inverted color scheme. [Yes, I do realize the mouse-over color in the xanthatized version is horrible and I will fix that soon, it's a legacy of my simple minded inversion.] An hourly cronjob parses the .txt files I write [I long ago got past the suffix == filetype mapping but it was the blosxom default so I use the convention] and outputs them in the tree where I told publicfile to serve from in the three flavors I want.

The biggest annoyances have been in modifying my templates and the plugins I use to append / after their paths. Publicfile is adamant about wanting it there to find the index.html underneath and blosxom's default templates and the plugins I've found all neglect to do so. Of course, some plugins are absolutely unusable because they require CGI but I can live without them. Who needs writebacks, anyway?

Following a link from boingboing took me to doxpara which took me to the Linux Userspace FileSystem which took me to this excerpt:

You mount a gnetfs in ~/gnet. You wait a couple of minutes so it can establish its peer connections. You start a search by creating a subdirectory of SEARCH: mkdir ~/gnet/SEARCH/metallica mp3. You wait a few seconds for the results to accumulate. The you chdir to SEARCH/metallica mp3 and try a ls: surprise the files are there! You shoot up mpg123 and enjoy... You are happy.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, it's here...

Oh me, oh my. If someone implemented shadow-fs in it, maybe it'd get more press. Of course, it's already in Debian, so I have no excuse for not having heard of it before.

Here's an article I ran across the other day about the idea of a canonical object in Java. It's quite dated but it might serve as a leg up on OO thinking.

Vylar sent me this link on Friday, but I didn't get a chance to look it over until today.

It is, in fact, fairly freaking awesome. A simulator for artificial life, a magnitude more interesting than RoboCode and not only is it a wizard in the kitchen, it's a snappy dresser.

I rather think I'm going to have to spend some time playing with this. I especially enjoy that there's source available.
I'm sick of software which supports both kinds, Windows and MacOS.