July 2003 Archives

I'm sure libgtop itself doesn't really need all these dependencies, but sheez.

[root@george ask]# fink install libgtop
Information about 2686 packages read in 1 seconds.

The following package will be installed or updated:
 libgtop
The following 13 additional packages will be installed:
 audiofile audiofile-bin docbook-dsssl-nwalsh esound esound-shlibs
 gnome-libs-dev gtk-doc imlib libgtop-shlibs openjade opensp3 opensp3-shlibs
 orbit-dev
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 

audiofile? esound? docbook-dsssl-nwalsh?! I just wanted my program to be able to lookup memory usage.

One of the fun and interesting things about Southern California is the amazing diversity. We have people from all over the world, of all sizes and belief systems. I read somewhere that the Los Angeles school district has students speaking more than 200 different languages. I think that was even without counting many dialects.

In West Hollywood the police cars have rainbow colors. The russians are living next to the jewish neighborhood. There are a lot of senior citizens. And next to them are the gays. Small houses in the part where my (tiny and rent controlled) apartment is routinely go for $750,000 or more.

Anyway, that's not the amusing thing I wanted to tell. This is the only place I know where there are more billboards with scantily clad men than women. Luckily for me there are plenty of scantily clad women in this town as well -- lots of eye candy for everyone.

And I mean everyone.

v: I put gas on the car on the way home. Across the street there's a club where a bunch of girls were going in, only wearing bikini tops, very short skirts and tall boots.
a: [enjoying the thought] uuh, and that's bad how?
v: I think they were men.

Update: It's raining! Incredible. It's July! Water is pouring from the sky. I don't know when that last happened. February? March? Oh, I think it stopped again already. Building a city in the middle of the desert is really not that smart.

The OSCON 2003 movie, The Truth Behind The Curtain is now available online. It has been slightly updated from the version we showed before the last keynote in Portland. We also added an explanation of the jokes. The jokes are so internal that even I had to get some of them explained; so don't feel bad if you want to read along while watching. It's seven minutes, and 50-60MB in the highest quality. (The finished DV file is about 1.6GB, a bit too big to make available :-) )

Nathan has been uploading other goodies as well and more is being added every few days, so go and check it out.

I'm sure you remember the nifty Honda ad that was going the rounds a while ago.

Some people made an absolutely awesome parody. Much too cool. According to a comment on Johns weblog it's actually a commercial for something, and not just a parody.

Just about recovered from OSCON today. Compressing the movie again again, it's now in v1.5. I'll probably put it on the perl.org server tomorrow. I'm considering setting up BitTorrent files for the movies as well. Would that be useful? Photos will follow in the next few weeks. I need to catch up on a bunch of other things first.

Suggestion for next year: No speakers lounge. The speakers lounge was just way too nice and remote. It was much too easy to get comfortable away from the "crowds" and only meet up with the usual suspects. Having more general lounge area would be nice. Meeting other people is 95% of the fun.

Postal mail from Apple today. The powerbook is installing on the firewire drive now. Shiny.

Ponie was announced Tuesday evening (use.perl) and we just opened up the new Perl site (use.perl). Yay. General laughter when we typed in the url as http://www.perl.org/index.php (no, it's not really PHP driven. We use Combust (Template Toolkit, POD, mod_perl, etc etc).

OSCON very fun.

Larry's announcement tonight at the state of the onion will be very exciting.

Portland is very green and very pretty. Being in Los Angeles for too long made me forget about all those pretty trees outside the desert.

The wireless network sucks. Wired network in the speakers lounge works.

Hydra works much better than I imagined.

I think the Apple market share is +50% here. At the table I'm sitting at now there are 8 ibooks and powerbooks and no peecees.

Taking off to Portland later pretty soon now. Viridiana will drive me to the airport. It's very nice of her. :^)

Usually when I go somewhere I bring a bunch of DVDs I don't get to watch anyway. This time I'm using DVD backup (OS X only) to store them on the powerbook (for the flight if I can't work or take a nap) and on the firewire drive I'm bringing.

I got a Firewire 800 (and 400 and USB 2) enclosure from Wiebetech a few days ago. It's really well made and faster than I had hoped. Viridiana even commented that it looks nice. They included not only all the cables you can possibly need to hook it up, but also MacDrive 5 so I can keep it HFS+ formatted and still hook it up to Viridianas win2000 box. Very cool.

As you might know, then my camera is unreasonably large. So far I've used a small Domke F3x bag, which just about not quite comfortably fit the 17-35mm lens, a smaller lens or the DV camera and the flash. After getting another lens I finally decided to try a bigger bag, so I got the Domke F4AF. Domke bags rock.

Now the really cool part. The bag is not that big, but the tiny powerbook still just fits in it. And yes, it even fits with the D1x, three lenses (a tiny, a small and a big one), DV camera, flash, extra battery, powerbook charger and some random accessories. Yes, it's pretty full but it works. Yay.

~6 hours of the new powerbook. Like Jonas I really like it.

1024x768 isn't worse than the Pismo. The screen is really pretty. While it doesn't have DVI out, it's driving a 17" crt in whatever resolution just fine. I need an external keyboard for that or my neck will be permanently twisted 20 degrees.

Bluetooth without the USB dongle rocks. In particular because I can't find my USB dongle anymore.

867Mhz with laptop drive isn't as speedy as the dual 1.4Ghz, but about five billion times faster than the pismo.

It's tiny.

It gets really warm.

The powersupply is neat and seems more robust than the yo-yo version from the old 'book (not that it says much).

It's spectacularly boring to install all the usual software. Fink helps a little bit for the unixy stuff, but not quite enough.

The keyboard is nice, it seems like the keys are travelling deeper.

It's pretty.

That is all.

Janus and Astrid started a weblog about their upcoming (outcoming?) baby. It's in Danish, so probably only marginally fun unless you read that.

Jon Orwant has a weblog about his and Robin's brand new baby Amelia Grace Orwant. At 4:24pm, we became very scared parents of a blue, unbreathing girl.... How's that for a teaser?

Very clever and amusing: Cannot find Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's even more fun if you search for "Weapons of Mass Destruction" on Google and press "I'm feeling lucky" (via boingboing and Jonas)

Toshiba made a 17" laptop now, and it goes for only ~$2100. The catch? It's almost 2 inches thick and weighs 10 pounds. Oh, and I don't think that's counting the 1.4 pound battery! I don't know what their excuse is, but it's not going to be good enough.

(via ArsTechnica)

Using an old 15" monitor I found in the closet now. It's tiny. I'm sure modern PDAs have better resolution. Actually, the monitor wasn't in the closet. But there's another one in there. And five old computers. Five! I think that's what Viridiana is talking about when she says I have too many computers. Which I don't. I only have what's most necessary. A FreeBSD box, a Linux box, the G4, Pismo powerbook (soon to enter the closet; I ordered a 12" Powerbook today, yay).

Anyway, that's not why I can't breathe. I can't breathe because it's about two million degrees in here. The G4 is bordering on don't touch me hot. I added more fans to the Linux box some months ago so it seems to be doing ok. The FreeBSD box is a 4Mhz Celeron, so it doesn't make much heat.

I made an appointment to get a haircut tomorrow. The first since sometime last year. It just barely doesn't go past my lips when I try to put it in my mouth, so no report on taste.

In other news

Hixie of Mozilla fame now works at Opera. That's a little bit funny.

David Hyatt (ex-Mozilla, now Safari fame) disabled comments on his site becuase people are rude.

Tim O'Reilly thinks All Software Should Be Network Aware - hear hear!

Chromatic read Slashdot and it wasn't pretty. So sad.

20 questions against AI (via Matt).

Dave Winer tells Aaron I'm going to bite back, so watch out Aaron. Really. He said that. And yes, Aaron was reasonable. Winer is such a nut.

Metamark is up to ~150k url expansions (that'd be when you click on a short url).

Since some days ago I have a livejournal so Jeff can read my ramblings (on his request; he must be crazy!). Yes, I am just mirroring what I have here, so if you clicked on the link and feel like you wasted your time I am sorry.

Must. Get. Back. To. Work.

When I left ValueClick they let me buy the 21" Sony monitor I had there since the very early days for a very good price (for me, that is). Yesterday the picture starting shaking a bit like when a cell phone is ringing too close to the monitor. Or when you turn on a CRT right next to another. Except it doesn't stop after a second or two.

It was getting worse and worse through the morning today, to the point where I starting getting seasick. How uncool. I was planning to get a new monitor when Apple comes out with their next generation LCDs (and then get the 23" when it doesn't cost $2000).

I have a ~15" CRT, but it's tiny. With Expose it might be semi managable, but I doubt it.

So off to New Monitor Land. I can't make myself spring for a 20" Apple Display. $1300 is just too much. $2000 for the 23" ... Not sure it's *that* pretty. What's with the giant frame?

Dell is having 15% off some of their LCD until tomorrow. The 19" (~$635 + tax) looks nice.

Holidays suck. No delivery for anything this friday and I have much too much to do to not work anyway. Gah.

Update I ordered the Dell thing; it's supposed to be here when I get back from OSCON.