May 1, 2008 at 8:21 pm · Filed under miscellany, Uncategorized
… and it makes me feel like I have laryngitis.
I had a near miss at a failblog-worthy photo when I happened upon the following scene in an airport last week:
The title of the book isn’t really visible in the hastily-taken cell phone camera shot, but it’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Seriously.
Twitter seems to be back now.
March 26, 2008 at 8:47 pm · Filed under arduino, tech
I’ve been playing with Arduino boards in my limited spare time over the past few months. It’s a fun way to spend quality hands-on geek time that is clearly distinct (at least to me) from my day job. Plus, I’m able to start actually instantiating some of the ubiquitious computing / distributed sensor ideas that have been floating around in my head.
I’ve been working on a simple wireless light, temp, and motion sensor. Light was a trivial CDS photocell connected to the analog port of the arduino. My first attempt at temp is using the Dallas Semiconductor DS-18B20 digital one-wire sensor, which is pretty slick for $4.25.
There was some good sample code on the main arduino site, but I spent a small bit of time to flesh it out more completely, adding the ability to configure sensor resolution and extracting the temp value from the returned data. Code is here, if this is interesting or useful to you.
September 23, 2007 at 7:29 am · Filed under business, art, miscellany
September 7, 2007 at 9:26 pm · Filed under business, art
I was going through an old pile of paper in my office recently and encountered a set of note cards I’d accumulated years ago, back in the very small, scrappy, it-definitely-might-not-make-it startup stage. Most of the cards contained miscellaneous reminders, todos, or ideas I thought worthy of further exploration.
A few of the cards, though, had the record of an idiom mixing game my colleagues and I played back in the day (I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with strongly multi-disciplinary and linguistically inclined geeks).
At its basic level, the game produced comprehensible phrases that amusingly combined two familiar idioms, such as “there are other fish to skin”, or “there are other cats in the sea”.
These are good for a chuckle, but not fundamentally anything more than language slapstick. Some combined idioms of similar intent in ways that made more vibrant images than did the originals, such as
“that opens up a whole new can of monkeys”
(A “can of worms” is one thing, but monkeys make everything funnier.) Rather than just “getting ducks in a row” or having things “fall in line”, we had
“all the ducks are falling in line”
Other are amusing but confusing, and almost seem as if they mean something, at least until you actually think about them. Example:
“Happier than a clam in pigsh*t”
The pinnacle of our mixed idiom game, though, were those hard to find combinations whose meanings were a novel blend of the original idioms. Most of these tended to mockingly riff on various elements of commonly accepted corporate-speak.
“I’m just putting them on the table as I see them”
for example, takes the casual (if sometimes cowardly) innocence of the defensive verbal communication standby “I’m just calling them as I see them” with the trite business-ese of “putting something on the table” to create an all-new description of an impetuous laziness thrust upon others.
Better still, in my opinion, is the lighthearted cynical foreshadowing of:
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”
But my favorite, by far, is a sadly apt commentary on organizational politics gone awry:
“I dropped the ball in your court”
Have more? Oh yes you do … comment away!
September 7, 2007 at 9:26 pm · Filed under miscellany
Apologies for the few weeks with no index page … I obviously typo’d something on the command line a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to G for pointing it out.
All is well now.
July 21, 2007 at 5:59 am · Filed under art
I’ve been listenening to Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar all week. It’s great: fresh (ok, if you follow new music with lower latency than do I, as it’s a year old), somewhat novel, and both lyrically and musically interesting for multiple listenings.One song in particular has sunk its aural fangs into my brain. Scenic World is haunting in its brevity, like there’s nothing more to say on the topic than is said in these two stanzas (which constitute all of the lyrics of the song - no need to repeat anything here):
the lights go on
the lights go off
when things don’t feel right
i lie down like a tired dog
licking his wounds in the shadewhen i feel alive
i try to imagine a careless life
a scenic world where the sunsets are all
breathtaking
I think Amy is probably going crazy listening to it, though she’s doing a good job hiding that. Ben, on the other hand, loves it — while he and I were in the car together earlier in the week he offered (unprovoked): “this is a very beautiful song, daddy”.
July 18, 2007 at 7:56 pm · Filed under kids, miscellany
I just realized that the blog post I just made is the second in a row that doesn’t do much more than link to dumbrella artists. I have done things in the last month other than read web comics. Really. Actually, it’s been a very busy month, which is at least part of why there hasn’t been much here. The rest of why is largely twitter, the micro-bloggy nature of which seems to have received the bulk of my “I should tell someone about that” urge.
I’ll write more here soon. In the meantime, enjoy this hilarious picture of Nora, with costuming by Ben and photography by Amy (of course). I love my family.
July 18, 2007 at 7:38 pm · Filed under art
I like these drawings. I wish there were an RSS feed.
June 25, 2007 at 8:43 pm · Filed under culture war
The second frame of today’s overcompensating is particularly hilarious.
(Now, if the feedback loop between the internets and the culture works, we sit back and wait for this page to get some content.)
June 10, 2007 at 12:45 pm · Filed under tech
Thanks to Amy and JB’s motivational dissing of our old (and oft-broken) mythtv installation, I set out last weekend to rebuild the setup, which involves a backend system in the basement and a frontend in the TV room driven by an xbox that can retrieve recorded video from the myth system downstairs.
I had a very easy time getting current myth (0.20) installed on a SuSE 10.2 box with a Hauppauge PVR-350 last weekend, and as I’ve come to expect in 4+ years of myth use, 0.20 is noticeably better than 0.18. Since the xbox scripts that interface with myth are version-specific, I needed to update them too. and this was enough motivation for me to go ahead and get a modern XBMC install.
It’s all working now, and it seems pretty cool.
I’ll spare you the particulars, but there were 2 non-obvious problems I encountered along the way, the corresponding solutions to which I thought I’d leave here where google can find them:
problem #1: database connection errors from the xbmcmythtv script. This was puzzling as I’d verified that the host-level packet filters on the server running mysqld were allowing traffic, I was seeing successful TCP connections, and I had verified from a different machine on the network could connect to the target db using the username+password I had configured xmbcmythtv to use. Since the xbox has relatively few other diagnostic capabilities, I used
etherealwireshark to watch more closely, and found a mysql auth error being sent back by the server that read:Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL clientsolution #1: use pre-mysql-4.1 style password encoding on the server. With the specific error string (unhelpfully obscured by the xbmc script), google quickly found this note in the MySQL reference manual.
problem #2: script says “caching subtitles” when I try to play a recorded show, then appears to hang for a while before returning to the program listing. This one was quite a head-scratcher for a while, since I wasn’t trying to do anything with subtitles, I couldn’t find any caching options that seemed related, and there was no other indication of something that might be failing (permissions, etc.). What’s more, this problem was coming up after I was successfully getting the list of recorded programs, which meant the xbox was successfully talking to the backend server (mysql, smb, and the myth backend process are all on the same box).
I found some threads on various xbox fora that described very similar problems, but none with solutions that were even potentially relevant.
solution #2: use IPs in the xbmcmythtv config. I had been using the FQDN of my backend box in both the db and general paths config screens of xbmcmythtv. The xbox is configured to use an internal DNS server that is authoritative for the domain in question, and to remove all doubt that DNS was actually working, the DB connection and connection to the mythtv backend worked fine (as evidenced by my ability to retrieve the program listing).
While desperately searching for clues on the “caching subtitles” problem, I found a mention in some random “common problems” document that emphasized that unqualified hostnames (i.e. missing the full domain) in the xmbcmythtv config would not work. I was already using FQDNs, but on a lark I tried replacing the FQDN with the IP of the backend server in the SMB path part of the config, and sure enough, that did the trick.
Apologies for what was certainly a very boring post for, well, anybody who came here except via a search for one of the aforementioned problems. For those of you who did get here looking for answers, I hope this helped.