September 2002 Archives

Last week my hands and shoulders were starting to really act up on me again. The pain. I will spare you the details of my emotions when work all day with pain and discomfort in what feels like my whole body.

Tuesday I dragged myself to yoga class at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of Los Angeles. Actually, that's not quite true. Viridiana dragged me there. Look how messed up that is. I only go when I'm in pain, and even then I don't quite go. I really shold.

We did lots of backbends, working the back and the shoulders. My back is completely painfree still and my shoulders are still sore from the class. In the class there were some things I couldn't do handstand at all because my shoulders were too tense. It feels like it's the wrists (I can't bend them very much), but it's really my shoulders. The body is so complicated.

Anyway, it was really great. You should go. Preferably before you get in pain. You will some day really fast. One day everything will be fine; two days later it'll all be very different - and not for the better. What won't go so quickly, is getting it to go away.

If you are in Göteborg, then go and take classes at Göteborgs Yoga Centrum. That's my moms yoga place of ~15 years! She has been teaching yoga for about 30 years. Think of that next time you think you have lots of experience in your choosen career.

iyengar-yoga.com has a directory of Iyengar Yoga teachers around the world.

At home on my "primary" computer I use a Happy Hacking Keyboard. It's great. No caps lock. Meta key. No numerical keyboard to put your mouse further away.
With some help from RemapCapsLock on Wiki I made my other Linux box (with a regular keyboard) have the left Control key on CapsLock; the right Control key on the left Control key and nothing on the right Control key. Yay.

Put the following in a file and run xmodmap filename.

clear Lock
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keysym Control_R = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Control_L
keycode 0x7e = Control_R
add Control = Control_R

You are not still using sourceforge, are you? If you have any hopes that they are anything but yet another business giving away a free service, then see this:

Selling Microsoft VisualStudio on the "open source development platform". Nice touch. Click on the image for the original screenshot.

This Monkey Switch Ad is too funny. Huge smile on my face. :-) (local mirror)

It was the winner of a competition MacRumors had set up.

(Via Nathan)

This is really old news, but I just saw it (via Dave Cross who works for the plaintiff of the case).

BiblioTechsued an American spammer who had used one of their domain names in his spam. Now (or really since the case ended two years ago :-) ) he is banned from sending spam and he has to pay $1000 to any future "victims". They also made him pay their legal costs. Very cool. He had offered a settlement earlier, but BiblioTech refused as he didn't promise to never send spam again. I don't know what kind of legal advice BiblioTech is getting, but I wish more companies would get it. ("go for it;it will make the world a better place on some scale!")

BiblioTech also made a page about the case.

(Via Dave Cross)

Yesterday Viridiana came to my place and dragged me out to look at the sky. It was beautiful. Odd colors and light. Obviously we wondered what it was. Today Jim explains it. (It was a rocket from the Vandenburg air force base). Very neat. It was a bit too blurred out when I saw it, and there was too much street light to make a good photo, so I am happy to have found the photo from NASA via Jim. Thanks. :-)

Jeremy writes about people who ignore basic language rules

I entirely agree with him. Writing "how r u 2day." is the best way to make me shift my attention and respect away from you really fast.

Another pet peeve: I have only been speaking English on a regular basis for a bit more than three years, and even I can grok the difference between "you are" and "your".

As mjd wrote on clpm and said in the YAPC movie: "You are a stupid asshole. Shut the fuck up."

Wow.

Some days ago my OS X installation blew up. My keyboard and trackpad stopped working (I could tell you why, but I would have to kill you). Using an USB mouse, ssh to the powerbook and OSXvnc got pretty old pretty fast, so I finally gave in and reinstalled Jaguar.

Dreadful, huh?

Well, I thought it would be. But nope. I just put in the CDs, choose to "archive and install" and now my PowerBook is back running 10.2 again. It seems like all the important settings has been preserved. The dock is the same, all my files are there, my desktop is still cluttered. Even "recent items" contains the same old items ...

Awesome! I should start reinstalling every so often for no other reason than it being so easy... Yay. Thanks Apple. :-) I could almost forgive you the misery that is the REALLY FUCKING CRAPPY G3 Pismo power supplies (yes, another one broke for me in the last few days; I have lost count of which number that is).

If you've been in Los Angeles for long enough to read this sentence, chances are you've spent more time stuck in traffic than you would care to consider. That annoying fact of Southern California life is only going to become more annoying and more of a factor with time, which is the point of "Car Trek," tonight's edition of "By the Year 2000" at 7:30 on KCET (Channel 28) [which] also looks at the phenomena of "carcooning" in which drivers turn their autos into virtual cocoons with all the amenities of home and the office. —Phil Rosenthal, "L.A. Life: Television," Los Angeles Daily News, October 18, 1989

(via Jonathan Peterson)

The Oracle of Google can answer multiple choice questions amazingly well ... Who is the author of Perl?, What family lives next door to the Simpsons?.

As the author points out on the about page; this thing would be really useful in a "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire" type con. =)

It seems like ATTWS will offer a service that'll tell you where your friends (or children or spouse or whatever) are ... I haven't seen it announced, but from their "Explanation of Rates and Charges.

"Find Friends service will only locate a compatible mobile device with mMode service that (1) has granted you permission, (2) is turned on, (3) is registered on the AT&T Wireless GSM/GPRS network, and (4) has not activated Be Invisible. Location services only provide the location for the most recent cell site the device has contacted. The distance from cell site to device will vary. Other terms and conditions that apply to Find Friends are available at www.attwireless.com/mMode/friends/terms."

(the /mMode/friends/ pages just redirect to the front page).
update: hmn, they seem to have had it for some months. I can't find a reference to it on their pages though....

Your privacy is safe with us. Safe for us anyway, we can do anything we'd like

Two other interesting thing from that page is that they seem to have changed their return policy from 30 to 15 days and they have this snippet about your privacy when you use GPRS.

Our systems will assign you a unique subscriber ID in addition to your phone number. Third parties will have access to your subscriber ID, zip code and your phone model when you browse their web sites. The way third parties handle your subscriber ID and zip code, your usage information and any information you voluntarily provide is governed by their policies.

"unique subscriber ID" ?! What happened to "per site cookies"? They seem A LOT friendlier. Is the zip code where you are or where your home is? It seems rather pointless (and even less privacy friendly!) if it's not your current location.

Oh well, still at 2-3 cents per kilobyte I'm not expecting to use GPRS much anyway....

From Jim: Dan Bricklin has written a great piece dissecting the stats on album sales declines and pointing how file-sharing may not be the cause. (act surprised.)

I only read the first quarter or so, but this is really good stuff. I wonder if the people at RIAA are a bunch of stupid ignorant morons or if they know all this stuff, but just ignore it while fighting themselves to death my making it harder and harder for people to find new music. Hmn, I guess that means they are a bunch of stupid ignorant morons either case. Tough for them!

As David Bowie said a while ago in New York Times (David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur, free registration required, yak yak yak):

“I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. [....] it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

I'm not sure it'll be that bad for the artists though. If they only get a dollar or two per sold album now, then that's not more than people will be more than willing to pay. Add a few bucks for the distribution cost and it's still a lot better than the $13-$17 they are making us pay now!

The recording industry is going bye bye even faster than the telecon industry is.

Rael is plagued by MSIE instability on Mac OS X. I use a recent nightly build of Chimera as my default browser. 0.4 has some issues with plugins (or with QuickTime anyway) on 10.2, but the 0.5 builds are working great. Fast too! Mozilla is ugly. MSIE is slow and unstable. Opera (on OS X) doesn't render too many pages. OmniWeb and iCab are not keeping up. Chimera rocks.

I have used ChimeraKnight to do the updating. It also makes a backup of the old Navigator and shows the recent change log. Very neato AppleScript Studio application. (With a bad name though...)

I am thinking about getting a new Mac. Not any good reason for it though. I'll try to wait it out for one of the new iBooks rumored for next spring. No new PowerBook next month if new models come out. No. I said no! Stop thinking about it. Don't do it. I said don't do it. No. No, it's a really bad idea. Don't. Geez. Stop it! No, not even if it has an even cooler monitor. Or a superdrive. What would you use it for anyway?

The iBook will maybe get a 933MHz -> 1GHz processor and the grapevine is talking about a widescreen monitor for the top model and a 13" for the small one (instead of 12.1").

Actually, I really want the iBook, not a TiBook. The small size is very appealing. I just want it to be a bit faster so it'll feel like a real upgrade from my 500MHz Pismo (it's working really well after adding 1GB memory).

Update: Now the rumors say that there'll be no new hardware in the near future. Suck!

I hate color markup of my source code. I hate the color output of `ls`. It's not that I am some fanatic, craving back to the pre-web days. It's not that I go around telling people, in a bitter voice "life was better when virtual desktops were in 80x25 using the 'screen' tool!"

No, it's more related to running my 21 inch monitor in 1024x768. I want to be able to see what I am doing. The color stuff makes it @#$# impossibly to see. Too bright cyan colors. And odd greens. It's great to get cues as to what type of files are in the directory when you do an ls; but not at the expense of being able to read the filename.

Maybe it's helpful to color code HTML markup; but for perl code I prefer to keep the markup in the indention; and for ls output I'm just fine with seeing the filenames and knowing what type of file it is.

But don't despair, it's easy to fix ...

I never had a chance to try the rain dance, but someone else must have, because wow, it is raining! Just a little bit. And it's still pretty warm (almost 30° celcius). Water from the sky! The end is near! The clouds are crying! Thor is passing by!

Now I know when it last rained again; it's *right now*. :-D

Update: Hmn, it sounds like it's about over already. It only lasted like 10 minutes. Dang.

Update 2: Maybe not, it's still dripping a little bit outside. So nice. I am sitting by the window enjoying the sound of water and the humid smell of cold water hitting the grass and the street.

Kasia configured her Movable Type installation to run under mod_perl.

I've done that too since I installed the 2.0 beta I got Ben to give me ("I get beta; you get patches?"). :-) Yes, it rocks. If Kasia had followed the detailed documentation for properly configuring Movable Type under mod_perl she wouldn't have trouble with having to move anything. It would also have been faster than using Apache::PerlRun. :-)

On my endless "to do list is to make Movable Type run the templates dynamically instead of doing the site rebuild thing...

(via Chrillesen)

Jim Winstead makes me feel guilty for just having bought a pile of stuff from Amazon. He references an article in L.A. Times about how hollywood and the technology companies are teaming up to destroy the public domain.

Sometimes I am optimistic and believe in the strength of the geeks around the world to keep things available for us on reasonable terms. Sometimes I hope that the rest of the world won't jump on it and it'll keep us sane over here too.

But sometimes I really worry. Imagine when your grandchildren will say "tell us the story again about when you owned the movies you buy and had them on those ... uh .. disks. Could you really just play them for free? Did independent artists really do their own distribution.".

But then I remember that David Bowie said that he thinks copyright is dead (very soon). Or maybe he said that the record companies will die very soon; I forget which. I hope he is right. It will be an interesting time. :-)

Somewhat related Mark Pilgrim has an entry about new 'entertainment' PCs.

In July New York Times ran the story What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie (by Gary Taubes), about how the low fat diet maybe isn't such a good idea and how the Atkins diet is great. (The Atkins diet is all protein; lots of meat, a little vegetables and no fruit - many doctors say that's it's not just unhealthy but even dangerous).

Washington Post offers another story, a Experts Declare Story Low on Saturated Facts. Many sources that Taubes talked to too tells that he just ignored them because what they said because it didn't fit his idea. Or they were surprised about his conclusions from what they told him.

I went to bed late last night, but woke up an hour ago anyway. First I thought "not enough sleep. want more sleep", but quickly I realized that it was not going to work. The air is thick from heat.

The Yahoo Weather says it'll just be up to 30°. It would be nice if it was that cool, because it is 36° celcius now (that's 97° for you Americans). Too Hot! I better go and water my poor plants outside.

We've had a week or so with cooler weather. Clouds and everything. It was nice. "Clouds, clouds, please come back now!"

Anyone know a good rain dance?