TITLE: Thoughts on Übergeek Immersion AUTHOR: david DATE: 12/09/2007 10:15:00 PM ----- BODY: This post has been a long time in the making, both in my head, and now in type. Many people have written about this subject before, and certainly many people will after me, so this is just my take on things and from my point of view. Take is for what it’s worth. I suffer from what I have best seen defined as N.A.D.D. If you have not read this article, please do so now. (Command + Click the link) I’ll wait. That’s Rands’ way of putting things, and it is what resonates most with me. It describes how I can’t sit still on a computer. There are a thousand different things I could be doing, therefore I must do all of them. And the only way to be remotely successful at doing everything is to multitask - do many things simultaneously. This behavior comes in many forms - I browse the mobile version of bloglines on my iPhone with the latest album blaring when I ride the bus for instance - but manifests itself most strikingly when I sit down with my computer at any given point. When I open my computer, I have e-mail, a feed reader, my IDE, tomorrow’s presentation, and at least a half-dozen browser tabs open on any range of completely different topics. I’m at the point where I read both Digg and Slashdot daily, peruse Engadget and TechCrunch and even Valleywag on occassion. I’m subscribed to over 100 feeds - all of which ping me when they’re updated. Not to mention AIM, which I’ve been known to live on for days at a time. It’s information overload. And more and more I’m finding out that none of it matters. Or, I should say, very little of it matters. I was tipped off with my trip to Seattle a few weekends ago. We left on Thursday night and didn’t return until the wee hours of the following Monday morning - a full 3 days away from home - and I didn’t take my laptop. I limited myself to just checking email on my friend’s iMac once per day, something most would consider “normal”. I wanted to see if the world would keep spinning if I left it alone for a few days. It did. When I returned, I had nearly a thousand unread items in my feed reader, pages of digg to catch up on, and scores of forum posts to read and comment on. It was overwhelming to say the least. What I did haunts me to this day: I pressed “mark all as read”. I didn’t open a single one of them. Nope, not a one. I went to class on Monday, as usual, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I didn’t miss out on any random conversation before class, nor did anyone laugh at me for not knowing that Samsung’s new ZX-8000 had spy pictures leaked in Japan. I didn’t know that Kottke had posted linked a New York Times article about a restaurant owner being sued over his tomato soup and how ridiculous the world is. I had no idea. And I was strangely comfortable with it. I thought about it some, and checked a few things out. I realized that I have a choice in the world I live in. One is a world of A-List bloggers that keep up with the latest Web trends, already talk about Web 4.0, and link to each other with articles from other A-List bloggers until nobody remembers where shit came from anymore. There’s nothing bad about this all-digital world, and I would love to be in it if I had the time. But that’s the most precious resource to this group - time. If you aren’t in the first 10 comments, you might as well pack up and go home. If you link to something half a day late, you’re toast. If you think you have a scoop only to find out that Michael Arrington has had beta access for a month and a half, you fail. There’s something I found out about these people that live. This Lifestyle is their full time job. They literally get paid to live The Lifestyle. From Gruber to Kottke to Arrington to CmdrTaco, it’s the life they live, and we reap the benefits as consumers and they reap the benefits for doing us their respected service. I had the pleasure of spending some time with Anil “LOLCats and Goatse” Dash, who turned out to be an incredibly nice and down to earth guy, but he is just plugged in. He can’t get away from it, or he’d almost be doing a disservice to his cultish following. It sucks you in, this life does, and it’s incredibly hard to escape. Enter Me. I’m a 4th year (going on 5) Computer Science student who doesn’t really care about school more than just graduating and moving on. I’m not an A-List blogger, but I keep up with and read the best of them. I’ve been beta tester on some cool Web Two Dot Oh apps, and had a gmail invite before they hit eBay. My problem is that I don’t have a niche yet. I am a self-proclaimed Jack of All Trades, Master of None. I “sorta-kinda” know a lot of things - most of the major scripting languages, some database stuff, some sysadmin stuff, some embedded systems programming, a bit about hardware; I know how the internet works, and how to make a browser do a bit of DOM magic; I also keep up with all the internet memes. I know all the references in the Internet People YouTube Montage. So where do I fit in? My problem is that I’m not plugged into any of these things, I just know enough to get me by. I can’t focus on any one thing for some reason, and my guess is that it’s for fear of “wasting time”. In this world of N.A.D.D. it doesn’t take any time at all to check a blog. I find myself skimming the long posts because they take too long to read, or I keep marking them unread until I just say fuck it and move on with my life - if the author can’t say something in 2 skimmable paragraphs then it is not worth my time. I browse slashdot at +4 or +5 because anything else just doesn’t matter. It’s the thought that “I’m not wasting time if I check my feeds”, because I can get through them in 2 minutes anyway. Of course it’s only because I just checked them 5 minutes ago, and only one of them has updated. Where does this leave me? I’ve been incredibly unproductive for the last few months. I can’t seem to finish anything, and I can’t focus on school or work or even my own blog (which has been on a near two-month hiatus). I put this all together in my Software Engineering class when my teacher mentioned a thing called Flow. Flow. It’s a mental state that you’ve experienced before. It happens when you line up a shot in golf. You feel it when you drive fast in the rain and your tires slip, putting you in that hyper-aware mental state. Or, in the context of my class, you experience it when you are coding a big project. You are in the zone completely. You know what variables are instantiated in what scope and exactly what they’re doing and why. Every function is in your own human RAM, callable at a moments notice when you need it. You feel Flow. It’s a mental state that is difficult to achieve, and perhaps more difficult to obtain. It can take hours at a time to get to that state, but a single second to snap out of it. It can be the ring of a telephone or the bleep of an email notification that snaps you out of it, but it’s complete programmer’s bliss while you’ve got it. The problem with The Lifestyle is that it doesn’t require Flow to maintain it. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. You live in 15 second blurbs. You read a page while you have 3 more loading in the background because you don’t have time to wait around watching the page take form as the data is transferred from the remote servers. All this is happening, of course, while you’re debugging that 5-line script you are writing - any longer, of course, would require a train of thought that lasts longer than half a minute. When your email beeps, you command-tab-command-1 it, grok it, take action, and move on in mere seconds. The Lifestyle Becomes your Flow. If you can’t use quicksilver to eject a disk image (after calculating the number of milliseconds saved over using expose to view the desktop, select the image, and command-e it) then perhaps you don’t understand where I’m coming from. So what now? I’m addicted... Turns out, it’s a choice. Ask anyone who’s had a company-wide productivity meeting. Set a time - once an hour or twice a day perhaps - to check your email is what they say. Same thing with your feed reader. If you can’t read through all of them in one block of time once a day, then perhaps you have too many. Categorize them into “Must Read” down to “Only read on a Lazy Sunday”. Don’t even visit Digg. Unsubscribe from Engadget - you will thank me later. You have to realize that Life will go on whether you are caught up in the details or not. My grandpa used to let the phone ring (there was no answering machine) while he was watching Wheel of Fortune, lest anyone interrupt his TV time. “If it’s important”, he used to say, “they’ll call back”. It’s true. If the news is really that important, it’ll find you, I promise. Even as I write this, I had to close out everything else. I turned off my wi-fi, and migrated to one Space. I’m even writing in a plain text editor because anything else has too many buttons. As it is, I’m in the window of a coffee shop and am distracted enough by people watching. So I have to ask, did you skim this article? Was it “tl;dr”, or did you go through it line by line? I’m not offended either way, but take a look around, seriously... how many apps you you have open right now? :P

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BLOGGERID: 5598968362223597248 -------- TITLE: lazy with linux AUTHOR: david DATE: 7/21/2007 02:02:00 PM ----- BODY: I had big plans this weekend to go down to Fresno State for the Summer Arts program for a day or two, then come back up to have a tour of Pixar. All this was abandoned upon hearing from Johnny that the Pixar trip was canceled for one reason or another. The bear of it is that I had already taken Friday off of work. I was left with a free day to do whatever I wanted! So naturally I went to Linux. I have gotten the cross-compiling toolchain working on my Macbook Pro to get my own code on the gumstix board I've been working on - but there's a snag. The version I'm using is too new for the OS that came pre-installed on the Gumstix, so I had to upgrade it. After practicing flashing the file-system image on the gumstix with some pre-built images from Dave Hylands, I was finally confident enough to use my own home-compiled image, but the OSX version of Buildroot for the gumstix doesn't support the Verdex motherboard that I have. Long story short, I was in a major bind. Linux to save the day! I went to the Apple store (where I find myself at least once a week these days - even if I'm not buying anything) and picked up a LaCie pocket external hard drive. Using rEFIt which is an amazing EFI replacement for OSX, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn (who comes up with these names?) to the hard drive, and left a partition of free space to allow a future installation of another OS should I need to later. I can triple boot with no need to partition my meager 100 gig MBP hard drive! Plus I found that I don't even have to kill my uptime! I now have the current version of Buildroot - which does support the verdex motherboard that I have - up and compiling on Ubuntu. I just finished flashing the file-system image and kernel with my own build... I don't think I've ever been so happy to see "Hello World!" in my life! And mad props to Michael for letting me take over his kitchen table this weekend ;)

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BLOGGERID: 4195599510209345746 -------- TITLE: easy come easy go at iPhoneDevCamp AUTHOR: david DATE: 7/07/2007 09:06:00 PM ----- BODY: I'm sitting here at a now-empty table at the iPhoneDevCamp, pretty tired. I've been here for just over 8 hours now, a latecomer to the game, and a lot has happened since I arrived! When I first walked in at 1pm or so I perused the tables of people working on various iPhone web apps. I found a group of guys working on the next "killer app", so I pulled up a chair and offered myself to the group. It's pretty amazing, really, how quick it all happened. The guy who was taking the lead for the group explained what the app was, how it was going to work, etc... to me, and I was right on board. We had him doing backend development, a graphics guy, a logistics guy, me doing frontend stuff, and - get this - not one but two venture capitalists sitting with us going over the business model with checkbooks in hand. We worked for a few hours, throwing ideas and functionality back and forth at each other, going over every aspect of the app and how cool it was going to be. It was quite exciting! But ... there is a reason I'm writing in past tense. Right when we were getting into the meat of it, a group of four guys walked up and demoed the exact app we were working on that they started building 2 weeks ago. We were all a bit dumbfounded - not angry - when the VCs gave the other guys their cards and walked away. We had a company in the making and it was disbanded before it even came together. We spent the rest of the afternoon hacking on the iPhone and discussing the next steps for ourselves. I wound up working with a guy from Yelp getting their mobile site blinged out for the iPhone. All in all, a busy day!

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BLOGGERID: 7917926022907677413 -------- TITLE: iPhone Developer Camp AUTHOR: david DATE: 7/02/2007 09:55:00 AM ----- BODY: At the risk of having my 3rd iPhone post in a row, I'm giving a shout to the iPhone developer camp that's happening this weekend at the Adobe building in San Francisco. It should be a fun place to get together with other like-minded developers of iPhone optimized software. I'm thinking about making a web based SSH client, so if you want to collaborate, holla' at ya boy. (?) iPhone Dev camp I'll be there on Friday at 6 when the thing kicks off, and hopefully all day Saturday and Sunday as well. Hope to see you there!

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BLOGGERID: 2981398862254877536 -------- TITLE: iPhone AUTHOR: david DATE: 6/29/2007 09:11:00 PM ----- BODY: Yes. It's true. I'm the proud new owner of an 8Gb iPhone. And I love it. I'm not going to write a full review tonight, but my first impressions are that it's utterly awesome and amazing and everything it's cracked up to be [/fanboy]. Even the EDGE network is somewhat bearable. Anyway, I'm off to dive into the thing full bore tonight, so I'll let you know if I sleep at all, but my first impression is going to be a big fat "no".

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BLOGGERID: 7741288202778467972 -------- TITLE: iPhone hype AUTHOR: david DATE: 6/29/2007 06:25:00 AM ----- BODY: I hope it's worth it! I'm sitting in line about a block away from the entrance of the Apple store on Stockton and Market and am going to try to stay here all day if I can convince my boss it's a worthwhile effort... Follow my status through updates to this blog, or check out my twitter account. iPhone here I come! *** UPDATE *** Here are some pics I snagged from a guy in line: 8am line down the line corner of ofarrell and stockton *** Update*** (9:35 am) The List *** Update *** (11:00 am) Not much new to report. The line has wrapped around and is moving towards Powell. I'm #87 on the community list, and last I checked it has well over 120 people on it. Power is a scarce commodity, so I'm at starbucks recharging for a bit. 3 cheers for corporate T Mobile accounts :) A guy came around and gave out free bottles of smart water to all people waiting in line. How thoughtful of Apple! BTW, if you're reading this from line and need to go to the bathroom, starbucks on Powell and O'Farrell bathroom code is "5567". *edit* crate and barrel is 40141 *** Update *** (3pm) 3 hours to go, and the black screen is up! A Picture Share! *** Update *** (4:30) The line is now going around the block down Powell, I overheard there's 230 people behind us in line now. The clowns are selling their 4 spots for about $200 apiece. No word on if they've sold any yet. An hour and a half to go!

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BLOGGERID: 6391582731468074831 -------- TITLE: cablecam goes live and new internship AUTHOR: david DATE: 5/26/2007 08:18:00 PM ----- BODY: A few weeks ago, Johnny, Rick, B and I went to Roseville to set up our newly built cablecam over a waterslide at Golfland SunSplash for a commercial shoot they were doing. It was a 2-day event for us, the first day setting everything up and testing out the equipment, the second day doing the actual shoot. It was a lot of fun working in a "real" Hollywood environment. We worked together with the director, grips, lighting guys, and the whole bit; it reminded me of working with the community access TV guys in Redding a few years ago: always yelling at the camera people to tighten the shot or at the talent to scream louder :P We had two successful days of shooting with very few hiccups - in fact, nothing a little duct tape couldn't solve on the spot! As usual, there are plenty more pictures at the associated flickr photoset. I'm turning into a bit of a flickr whore, but that's okay :) Mobile Editing Studio Camera We have a bit of video footage I'll try to grab from Johnny before I skip town, plus we're supposed to get a copy of the final :30s spot eventually. Also, I just signed on with Six Apart to work as an intern for the summer on their professional line of products, namely TypePad and Movable Type. I'm quite excited to live in San Francisco for a few months and code perl all day long :) I start next Thursday - after, of course, the fun-filled day of bar hopping and general mayhem that is my 21st birthday next Tuesday.

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BLOGGERID: 4649842519195218316 -------- TITLE: Maker Faire 2007 AUTHOR: david DATE: 5/19/2007 11:25:00 PM ----- BODY: I'm exhausted, but I went to the Maker Faire today in San Mateo, check out my Flickr Photoset. Anemone Van De Graff 1 I'm working at a wine auction/fundraiser all day tomorrow, so I won't be returning, but it was so much fun, and I learned so much just from going from booth to booth today. Also have a bit of news to share, but I'm going to wait until Monday to spill it :P

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BLOGGERID: 7173122659659971842 -------- TITLE: hosting issues AUTHOR: david DATE: 5/03/2007 02:48:00 PM ----- BODY: This site's been around a few years, mostly as my personal playground and as a way to update my friends and family with what's going on in my life via my blog. I bought my domain name (stilldavid.com) from godaddy, who've been easy enough to use, and selected network eleven as my hosting provider simply because they were cheap and offered lots of storage. I've never had issues with them until recently. I've had a few support requests over my years at networkeleven, all of which were closed within 24 hours by their support staff. Last week I as having trouble creating a new subdomain on my account, a problem that I could not fix myself. I shot an email to their support address and awaited a response. And waited. After a couple days, I manually created a support request in their online database. And still waited. A week and a half later, I still hadn't heard back which made me nervous, because it was a bit of a pressing matter on my end. But this is where it gets interesting. Doing some generic research, I came across another hosting provider called Network Redux. A similar enough name to Network Eleven to raise an orange flag, but I didn't think twice until I saw this page on their website: networkredux I'd seen that before... on Network Eleven's site! Here's a screenshot of Network Eleven's site: networkeleven The similarities were striking. I ran a traceroute on each address: traceroute to networkeleven.com (66.162.134.135), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 132.241.253.129 (132.241.253.129) 2.022 ms 1.960 ms 1.781 ms 2 chi-misto-gig2.net.csuchico.edu (132.241.95.3) 2.433 ms 1.940 ms 1.957 ms 3 dc-cor-dc2--csuchico-egm.cenic.net (137.164.41.25) 3.793 ms 4.104 ms 3.669 ms 4 dc-sac-dc2--cor-dc2ge.cenic.net (137.164.22.154) 6.113 ms 6.506 ms 5.672 ms 5 dc-sac-dc1--dc2-p2p-1.cenic.net (137.164.40.100) 6.479 ms 6.503 ms 7.489 ms 6 dc-oak-dc1--csac-dc1-ge.cenic.net (137.164.22.110) 8.156 ms 7.884 ms 7.707 ms 7 dc-sfo-px1--oak-dc1-ge.cenic.net (137.164.22.203) 9.270 ms 8.174 ms 8.492 ms 8 peer-02.palo.twtelecom.net (198.32.175.111) 8.977 ms 9.120 ms 9.414 ms 9 core-01-so-1-0-0-0.okld.twtelecom.net (64.129.248.18) 10.200 ms 10.639 ms 10.120 ms 10 core-02-so-0-0-0-0.ptld.twtelecom.net (66.192.250.1) 37.084 ms 50.111 ms 24.478 ms 11 64-129-224-146.static.twtelecom.net (64.129.224.146) 26.002 ms 24.573 ms 24.565 ms 12 networkeleven.com (66.162.134.135) 24.250 ms 23.863 ms 24.381 ms And: traceroute to networkredux.com (64.128.80.35), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 132.241.253.129 (132.241.253.129) 3.580 ms 1.932 ms 1.560 ms 2 chi-misto-gig2.net.csuchico.edu (132.241.95.3) 2.396 ms 2.305 ms 1.650 ms 3 dc-cor-dc2--csuchico-egm.cenic.net (137.164.41.25) 3.516 ms 3.514 ms 3.474 ms 4 dc-sac-dc2--cor-dc2ge.cenic.net (137.164.22.154) 5.685 ms 5.625 ms 5.830 ms 5 dc-sac-dc1--dc2-p2p-1.cenic.net (137.164.40.100) 115.363 ms 202.512 ms 204.504 ms 6 dc-oak-dc1--csac-dc1-ge.cenic.net (137.164.22.110) 7.620 ms 7.750 ms 7.846 ms 7 sfo-px1--oak-dc1-ge.cenic.net (198.32.251.227) 8.146 ms 8.676 ms 8.228 ms 8 peer-02.palo.twtelecom.net (198.32.175.111) 9.482 ms 9.180 ms 24.519 ms 9 core-01-so-1-0-0-0.okld.twtelecom.net (64.129.248.18) 10.212 ms 12.336 ms 10.955 ms 10 core-02-so-0-0-0-0.ptld.twtelecom.net (66.192.250.1) 24.324 ms 23.694 ms 24.639 ms 11 64-129-224-178.static.twtelecom.net (64.129.224.178) 24.271 ms 29.666 ms 26.148 ms 12 redux.networkredux.com (64.128.80.35) 25.663 ms 26.147 ms 26.205 ms It looks like they're in the same datacenter (on Time Warner Telcom's network) in Portland, OR, and maybe even on the same rack. Something fishy indeed. The only difference I saw was that Network Redux had a phone number listed on their website. I called and talked to the owner of the company who said that he used to be a 50% owner of Network Eleven but branched out his own company in 2004 (he didn't say why). I told him about my issues with Network Eleven, and he said that he's had a lot of customers switch over for the same reasons. He went further to say that if I had any legal trouble to be sure to let him know because the Attorney General in Oregon is building a case against Network Eleven. Whoah. Time to change hosts! So I spent a good part of yesterday evening moving all my stuff over to my MediaTemple account. I cleaned out a lot of stale files and deleted 21,929 SPAM comments from my database (about 17 megs of SQL data) in the move as well. So I guess I learned my lesson through all this, whatever that may be. Now lets see if there's anyone at Network Eleven to cancel my account...

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BLOGGERID: 3871200200768959890 -------- TITLE: the autonomous car project AUTHOR: david DATE: 4/16/2007 12:01:00 AM ----- BODY: Several years ago, when I was in high school, I was into hobby electronics. I loved building circuits, breaking stuff to see how it worked, and I even started to build my own robots. (don't mind the tripod site... it's pretty old!) I never graduated past the BASIC Stamp microcontroller when I abandoned the hobby in pursuit of other things - like a real car! Well, I got the itch again, but I decided to take things a step further. A couple weeks ago I bought a remote control car from R/C Country in Sacramento, and I plan on making it fully autonomous over the next several weeks/months. Since it's been a few years since I've set out on a project like this, I've got quite a few ideas backed up of where to take it already. I've already bought 3 sonar sensors for range finding, a serial servo controller to manage steering and throttle control with room to spare, and a few other bits of electronics for it. I plan on having a gumstix motherboard as the brain - which is quite a step up from the BS2! This thing is going to have bluetooth, wifi, GPS for navigation, and a 3-axis accelerometer; it's going to be a fully autonomous itinerant webserver of sorts :) It's all still in early stages of development, with lots of discussion and thought about various things, but I'm excited to be working with my hands and even more so to be back in the electronics game! Here's a few pictures of me, Router Dave, and Johnny working (and playing) on our various projects: Trust The Workbench Sonar Units There are a few more on the Flickr Photoset.

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BLOGGERID: 3134788852048657159 -------- TITLE: joost beta AUTHOR: david DATE: 4/06/2007 09:08:00 AM ----- BODY: I received access to a beta account with Joost yesterday, which I was pretty excited about. Joost (formerly codenamed "The Venice Project") is a peer to peer internet TV application. I think it's a great idea and it's fairly well executed. Here's some screenshots to get an idea for the program. The idea is to get a "near tv" quality signal that looks decent when viewed fullscreen. watching joost joost catalog The fullsize versions of the above are 50% of the size of my 1440x900 macbook pro screen. All in all I'm impressed with the interface and channel/program selection. The program crashed on me a couple times - nothing major - and I discount that because it's a relatively new port for OSX (Feburary), plus it's still in beta. My biggest gripe with the program is the not-quite-perfect P2P live streaming. I'm on a dual gigabit connection plugged directly in to the internet at my uni, so I know it's not a bandwitdth thing, yet the video stalled for a second or two a few times while it was streaming from various peers on the internet. On the flip side though, this allows for many more on-demand programs to view at the click of a mouse. The channel selection is pretty bare at the moment, but it's filling in with what seems to be shows that are popular among my generation, as accentuated by the plethora of music channels, Top Gear, and various reality shows. Until they expand to more mainstream shows I don't see it as a viable TV alternative for myself, but I'm sure they are working on getting more networks to sign on.

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BLOGGERID: 1735640892541312039 -------- TITLE: um... cs3 is hot, mkay? AUTHOR: david DATE: 4/03/2007 08:39:00 PM ----- BODY: I have no restraint: dreamweaver But it's not dreamweaver I'm stoked about. It looks like it's just got some minor upgrades then recompiled as a UB for Mactel... it's Flash that I am in love with! I'll post more if the need arises... but for now, just know that I fell in love with my Macbook Pro all over again now that these are all universal.

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BLOGGERID: 8989295966940006965 -------- TITLE: 3 day weekend in the bay AUTHOR: david DATE: 4/02/2007 08:34:00 AM ----- BODY: We got Friday off from school (and therefore work for me) thanks to César Chávez, so I took the extra day to go down and take care of business in the Bay Area. On Thursday, I drove with Lauren down to San José in time for my sister's birthday on Friday (Happy 25th, Sarah!) which was pretty sweet. On Saturday, I drove north and dropped Lauren off at her home in Millbrae for her to spend the day with her family, and continued up to San Francisco where I met up with Michael and Andrew for the day. We geeked out for a bit - Andrew just announced the Partigen component for Adobe Flash he's been working on for almost a year. It's pretty amazing, check it out! After spending the night in San José again, Lauren and I drove south to Santa Cruz where we spent Sunday afternoon lazing around on the beach. Then - you guessed it - we drove back to San José to have a wonderful dinner with my family before driving north yet again - by way of San Francisco - to Chico where we finally got in just before 1am this morning. Phew, that was a lot of driving, but more than worth it :)

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BLOGGERID: 4638583130406472736 -------- TITLE: macbook pro lcd screen issue AUTHOR: david DATE: 3/23/2007 10:47:00 PM ----- BODY: When purchasing my oh-so-wonderful MacBook Pro from the Apple store, I was given the option to get the anti-glare screen seen on the G4 powerbooks or switch to the new glossy screen at "no extra charge". Thinking I would be doing a lot more photography than I have been, I opted for the glossy screen which has better color representation. (plus it's nice for watching movies :P) Well, I've had the machine for about a half-year now, and have had a couple issues which were resolved quickly - all in all, nothing to complain about. And I still don't, really, it's just an annoyance. So I'll let it rip: My screen has a weirdness. I don't know how else to explain it. It looks like a dead pixel cluster, but the pixels aren't dead... they are just miscolored. It looks like a deformation of the screen, but it gets worse when you look at the screen from an angle. I really don't know how else to say it, so here's a pic: pixels That's looking at it from an angle, so you're seeing it about as bad as it gets. (note the two whitish specks on either side of the crop tool icon) Like I said, it's not a terrible thing, just an annoyance. It's not a scratch that I can tell, it almost looks like it's part of the plastic coating itself... Anyone have any idea what it is or if I can fix it? But the best part is that I took that picture at work. I asked Brendan, the photographer, for a camera to take a quick pic of my computer screen. He handed me a Nikon D2X with a 60mm f2.8 macro lens (which is why you can see everything in such pixelicious glory) Check it out at a larger resolution. I have it in all it's 12.8 MP RAW glory as well :P

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BLOGGERID: 52987253590297163 -------- TITLE: happy pi day AUTHOR: david DATE: 3/14/2007 01:59:00 AM ----- BODY: Happy PI Day! Yes, I did stay up just to write this so I could get within 99.9999% of pi. (okay, maybe not JUST to write this, but it's cool anyway) If you're out of the loop, today is 3/14 1:59:26 (pi ~ 3.1415626...)

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BLOGGERID: 1646981227390796520 -------- TITLE: unix inode fun! AUTHOR: david DATE: 3/10/2007 03:42:00 PM ----- BODY: If you have talked to me about school recently, you probably know that I am working on writing a "mickey mouse" file system for my Operating Systems Programming class (CSCI 340). We are supposed to allot a section of memory on the computer and turn it in to a working file system we can manipulate with all of our favorite UNIX commands like ls, mkdir, touch, rmdir, rm, etc... It's pretty involvled, and there's a lot of lower-level stuff I'm learning (like managing actual bits instead of variables). Anyway, I'm working on the structure of this beast, and I started doing research on how much information is stored in a file's iNode. An iNode is what defines an actual file in a *nix file system (like OSX). It contains information like the permissions, creation date, and file length, as well as pointers to the actual data on the disk. If it is a directory (in *nix, directories are files... weird, huh?), the iNode contains information about its children. So this is really interesting stuff. The best part about this project is that it's been done before - in the unix file system! Since I work on a mac, I can easily drop in to a terminal and see the real deal! I quickly learned a few of the FS basics. Entering -i as a parameter for the ls command shows the normal stuff, as well as a files inode number. neptune:/ dave$ ls -i / 22 drwxr-xr-x 125 dave dave 4250 Mar 10 11:39 Applications 474198 -rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 54272 Mar 10 09:55 Desktop DB 474199 -rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 138194 Oct 17 20:18 Desktop DF 530660 drwxrwxr-x 16 root admin 544 Jan 8 12:37 Developer 2801 drwxrwxr-t 54 root admin 1836 Dec 7 19:07 Library 3 drwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 512 Mar 10 15:56 Network 3013 drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 170 Dec 30 13:14 System 26753 drwxrwxr-t 6 root admin 204 Oct 30 12:58 Users 1526179 -rw-r--r-- 1 dave dave 0 Mar 2 20:47 Utilities 10985 drwxrwxrwt 9 root admin 306 Mar 10 11:39 Volumes 475038 drwxr-xr-x 4 root admin 136 Jul 28 2006 automount 2755 drwxr-xr-x 40 root wheel 1360 Oct 7 19:59 bin 28483 drwxrwxr-t 2 root admin 68 Jan 13 2006 cores 2 dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 Mar 9 23:21 dev Next, I found that the unix command stat displays all the information you could ever want about a file. I found the -x option the most useful, as it has a verbose output so you can figure out what all the numbers mean. neptune:/ dave$ stat -x ~ File: "/Users/dave" Size: 1292 FileType: Directory Mode: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 501/ dave) Gid: ( 501/ dave) Device: 14,2 Inode: 474787 Links: 38 Access: Sat Mar 10 15:32:11 2007 Modify: Sat Mar 10 14:26:33 2007 Change: Sat Mar 10 14:26:33 2007 Another fun one is the find command. I learned that you can find a file based on it's iNode number. Look at this: neptune:~ dave$ find / -inum 1337 /Applications/Utilities/Installer.app/Contents/PlugIns/Introduction.bundle/Contents/Resources/zh_TW.lproj/Default.rtf So now I know what file has iNode number 1337. There's tons more I'm learning, but I guess I have to know it all inside and out if I'm going to write my own version of it by May 7th :P

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BLOGGERID: 2279078180952089358 -------- TITLE: omgwtfspam?! AUTHOR: david DATE: 2/21/2007 09:29:00 AM ----- BODY: I got a friendly letter in my yahoo! inbox that went something like this:
The account with the username 'stilldavid', is running out of disk space. Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota. You have currently used 80.22% of your disk space.

Now I had a hunch that this wasn't simply due to the huge number of files I keep for this blog, so I investigated. As it turned out, most of the used-up space was living in my email inbox - but not where I thought. A coupe years ago (that's like forever in internet time), when I set up my most recent host, I configured a "catch-all" email address for stilldavid.com that I told myself I'd check all the time yadda yadda... long story short, it never happened, I stopped checking it after about 15 seconds. Until now. Upon my investigating, I rediscovered this inbox, and checked it. There were over eleven THOUSAND messages waiting for me, and guess what. They weren't all for me. That's right, I had somewhere on the order of 11,000 spam messages that had never been checked just sitting on my server waiting for ... someone to delete them I guess. But this is where it gets interesting. My server won't let me delete messages until they have been downloaded off the server in a "successful pop3 session". Needless to say, a "successful" session is a session which successfully retrieves all email off the server. All 11,000 messages. So I set up Mail (yay for apple naming conventions!) for the account, configured it to delete messages after download, pressed the get mail button, and waited. About 20 minutes later, I had recieved all the mail off the account, and they had cleared out my inbox for the next 3 years of spam catching. Okay, now the worrisome part. I started deleting the message in bulk out of the mail account, but also skimmed the subject lines to watch the trends in spam (Only a geek would get jollies from that) and the exponential increase in volume from 2004-2007. Here's what I saw in some of the more recent messages: spam filled inbox I'm getting a whole lot of mailer daemon messages, which leads me to believe that someone is remailing spam from my server. I don't take the blame, but I shift it to my host, because remailing should be impossible (or really difficult) with a properly configured server. That, and I don't have any mail-related scripts on my server at all, so there's nothing that I conrol that can be easily exploited. *sigh* Time to investigate further...

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BLOGGERID: 275793485151474510 -------- TITLE: nerdery + jeopardy = nerdardy? AUTHOR: david DATE: 2/15/2007 11:01:00 PM ----- BODY: Nearly 2 weeks ago, Nerdery honorary guest Mandy debuted the Nerdery version of the popular syndicated game show, Jeopardy. It consisted of a powerpoint presentation hooked up to a LCD TV with contestants yelling out when they wanted to answer a question. The following week brought another game with a similar buzz-in system. But those days are over. Introducing... The Nerdardy Buzzer System 0.9b! It consists of a few bucks of radio shack parts thrown together with a Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller linked via cat5 to home-made buttons housed in PVC pipe. Ghetto? Yes. Hacked? Yes. Utterly useless outside of this house? Probably. Completely awesome? Definitely. I will post code, written in PBASIC of course, as it is finalized and debugged during live gameplay tomorrow. Read on for pics. The plug-in panel at the top of the unit for buttons Wires! Note the 4 LEDs on the front to see who buzzed in first, as well as the BS2 microcontroller that provides what little brains this device has. Aren't serial ports on the side of homebrew projects just cool? I think so. It also doubles as a working computer interface for easy re-programming. One of the hacked-together buttons. Radio Shack SPST button: $.99; 4" PVC pipe: $.55; PVC Cap: $.21; Kicking your roommates ass at Jeopardy: Priceless :) As you might guess, this is still a WIP, but it should see it's first real usage tomorrow. Maybe I'll take a video and youtube it or something. Oh, to live at the nerdery. Our forum passed 1500 posts today. It was started on December 19th. Oh, the nerdery is more than just a house, it's a way of life. With lots of beer.

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BLOGGERID: 4627889810378930774 -------- TITLE: apple whore AUTHOR: david DATE: 1/11/2007 02:46:00 PM ----- BODY: Yeah, it's true, I'm in love with the iPhone and it's not even out for a few months to come. But what makes me an apple whore the most? I'm at macworld. Right now. I'm in the Microsoft ™ "Blogger Lounge" on my MBP even as I type. Anyway, would love to go browse more booths, so here's a few pics to hold you over (because I know you're on the edge of your seat already: apple whore people crowding around to see this: straight blingin

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BLOGGERID: 9102925610500623788 -------- TITLE: pandora and Tim Westergren AUTHOR: david DATE: 12/14/2006 10:31:00 PM ----- BODY: Tim Westergren of Pandora fame visited Chico this evening for a semi-round table discussion of the product, it's future, and music in general. As it turns out, Tim is a very nice, down-to-earth guy with a real passion for music and the Music Genome Project he started in 1999. It was great to sit down with the 30 or so other people who showed up and openly discuss what we liked and disliked about Pandora and converse with Tim. Here's a pic of 3/5 of teh nerdery with Tim: Tim Westergreen and teh nerdery That's me next to Tim in the beanie. We got some sweet swag (hats, shirts, buttons...) for free as well. I quickly cut up the shirt to make a new screen protector for my MacBook Pro. It looks something like this: Pandora Shirt Anyway, more thoughts on this later...

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BLOGGERID: 6733900211736876676 -------- TITLE: christmas is coming... AUTHOR: david DATE: 12/11/2006 11:05:00 AM ----- BODY: ... and if you have a spare $16 grand, get me one of these: SR20 UAV Electric Helicopter System

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BLOGGERID: 6609849701257812472 -------- TITLE: flash 8 frustrations AUTHOR: david DATE: 11/30/2006 08:44:00 PM ----- BODY: This just saved my life. It's amazing how much 15 lines of code just solved hours of me banging my head against the wall. For those of you who know anything about flash, the above is a workaround for scope problems when importing XML or LoadVars from within an actionscript class. <3 whoever wrote that.

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BLOGGERID: 7272284542533986925 -------- TITLE: wii-tacular? AUTHOR: david DATE: 11/19/2006 10:00:00 PM ----- BODY: My roommate spent the night at Toys-R-Us a couple weeks ago to get one of ten pre-orders for the Wii. Well, this morning he cashed in on his wait and picked it up. I've been out all day, but I've finally gotten back to be able to play on it a bit. From what I see, it's pretty slick. The controllers are a bit awkward at first, just like everyone else says, but quite simple to use and get used to after a few games of tennis. Here's a cameraphone-snapshot of Lauren playing on it: wii! It has a little SD card slot in it which we used to watch a wii-generated slideshow of our party last night set to Beck's "Hell Yes"; it was pretty cool. I think the worst part about him getting a wii (other than, of course, it's not a ps3) are all the Wii-words. Wii have been going on all Wiikend with these wiitarded jokes - it's getting wiidiculous around here. Honestwii, I'm going crazy just knowing the game industwii has embraced a product with such a siwwi name. Anyway, I'm historwii. ***EDIT*** I just found out Arlen named it "teh nerderwii". Will the madness ever wiiduce?

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BLOGGERID: 7995854856454840470 -------- TITLE: chicowiki AUTHOR: david DATE: 11/14/2006 07:27:00 PM ----- BODY: I am starting to get really excited about the chicowiki. I'm probably putting way too much time that should otherwise be devoted to schoolwork into it, but I truly believe it will be worth it. Currently I'm testing out two different wiki backends to start modding to my liking:

  • MoinMoin a la Sycamore - which would be really cool because it's being developed by the kind folks over at daviswiki. It's already tailored to our needs (sort of), but it's also written in python.
  • MediaWiki - which you will recognize from Wikipedia. Upside is that it's got a ridiculous amount of support and a massive user base thanks to wikipedia. Also, it's written in PHP, which I know quite well so features would be a snap to add. Downsides are it's super bulky with lots of features that a small community would not be able to utilize right off the bat.
  • Others? - I've been poking around wikipedia looking for other alternatives, but it seems like it's going to be one of the above.
I've got copies of both running on various servers, and am trying to make an educated, forward-thinking decision about which to use, because if all goes well, this will be around for quite a while. The next biggie is hosting. I have a mondo-account over at (mt) which could host a MediaWiki install, but not a Sycamore install, and it's a bit slow anyway. I also don't want to be tied to a shared-server setup and have to worry about eating too much CPU time, etc... This begs for a dedicated server. I would rather not lease one from a place like serverbeach or 1and1 because they tend to be overpriced and still leave me with that bad "shared environment" feeling in my mouth. So chicowiki is officially in the market for a 1U rackmount server to be hosted at a datacenter somewhere... somewhere. I have a couple leads on the hardware, which is most likely going to wind up being a used dual P3 1.2 Ghz HP with a couple gigs of ECC RAM, but it's still got nowhere to live. I have looked into local (Chico) ISPs which were all way overpriced, but I know a guy from working at Shasta.com in Redding who says that he can colo for ~$70 per month with a 512k connection. 512k? I guess it can always be upgraded if it's not a fat enough pipe. Phew, just a few of the things I'm thinking about for this project. I'm excited!

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