The Raccoon Blog

The Lacuna Expanse

2010-09-30T07:28:00.006-05:00

The Lacuna Expanse

A guy I know has got a team of people together to develop a new web-based MMOG called The Lacuna Expanse. He describes it as a mix of Sim City and Masters of Orion. It's got a whole array of things to do like developing your colony, venturing off-planet to explore, and engaging in trade, espionage, and war.

The game has been in beta, but I just started playing last week and I'm really enjoying it so far. On top of it generally being a cool game, it's got an open API with which anyone can write their own clients (they currently have the browser client, and an iPhone client on the way) or other tools (you could automate the tasks of resource gathering and storage, etc). They're launching publicly next Monday, but you can get in now and start playing. This means you'll have a leg up on everyone else ;)

The game is free to play, but you can purchase something called "Essentia" (the in-game currency) which can give you a leg up on your development or can be used in trade with other players. If anyone's interested, let me know and I can send you an invite (using an invite code will place you in roughly the same area of the universe as me).

Check out some screen shots below:

Happy Holidays

2008-12-15T11:00:00.003-06:00

We just finished up our company holiday card and people have been having a lot of fun with it. It's a Flash-based Snowman creator that lets you create snowmen in a variety of scenes where you can dress them up like paper dolls, add props and greetings, and then save the image to send to friends.

Anyone interested should check out the Hoffman York Snowman Maker.

Here's a few I've seen come through recently...

p.s. I hate Blogger.

Wikipedia Needs a Redesign?

2008-11-05T09:52:00.006-06:00

Brooke shared a blog post in Google Reader and asked for my thoughts, this is what I shared back to her.

In response to Brooke.

It would be hard for me to disagree more with this post, and here's why...

"Languages more important than search on the front page." -- What an amazingly Anglo-centric way of thinking. Believe it or not, the wikipedia is not an "english language site". There is an English wikipedia and there are wikipedias in numerous other languages. Every article in the wikipedia provides links to the other language versions where that article exists. For the article on "English Wikipedia" there were companion articles in 41 other languages. FORTY ONE! If you are an english speaker/reader, "your" wikipedia lives at en.wikipedia.org. If you're a french speaker, "your" wikipedia lives at fr.wikipedia.org. The domain wikipedia.org is a landing page which provides links to the most popular/active languages of wikipedia. English is by far the "busiest", but to treat English as an assumed universal default sounds like a policy that our soon to be gone administration would enact. It would be arrogance, plain and simple. When the author says "I can't speak for everyone", it's about the only thing that I see them getting right. Before one can begin to search, one needs to know what language one is searching in.

moving along...

"Tiny navigation tabs at the top of the page — that don’t even act as tabs." -- I'm not sure which wikipedia the author was using, but when I go to wikipedia and click on the edit tab, the edit tab is active (joined to the main document) and behaves in a tab-like manner. Whatever extra functionality the author was expecting, I can't imagine, and they've certainly not articulated. This point is pure B.S. Go try it your self and see.

next...

"Tiny search box hidden in the sidebar." -- This person must be a speech writer or something. Hidden? Yes, hidden in plain site is the search bar that I use regularly. Could it be bigger? I suppose. Does it need to be? I can't imagine why. Would I be able to more effectively search with a larger search box? Doubtful. Will some users not like it just the way it is? Obviously. Is that a reason to make some arbitrary change to it? Hardly. I'm not a UX expert, but this seems like a pretty empty gripe.

next...

"Too many links in the sidebar, rendering it useless." -- This makes a quantitative valuation and that absolutely fails to quantify what an acceptable number of links would be. Not only that, but it's not just "too many links", it is, in the authors estimation "useless". The author apparently doesn't use random article (clearly this person has never been bored and needed a way to kill time) among other sidebar links. News flash: just because you don't find a link useful, doesn't mean it's not useful to someone else. This post has slowly been shifting from American/Anglo-centric, to simply Me-centric.

next...

"Confusing icons in the article editor." -- Here's how I read this: "This doesn't look like Microsoft Word". That's true, and I hardly see the point. I would guess that 90% of all wikipedia edits are purely related to copy or link updating/correcting/adding. They are not formatting operations. When you do need to do formatting, you can do it in the document using wikipedia's fairly straightforward (at least for the "simple" things) markup, or highlight things and click buttons. The button icons are not pretty, but they're hardly "confusing". Bold looks like a bold face "B", italics looks like an italicized "I", etc. For those that might seem "confusing", as the author even mentions, there are title tags on the links which will give you mouse over tool tip info; you know, like in Microsoft Office? I could _maybe_ see griping about wikipedia's markup syntax, but complaining about tools that clearly (at least to me) take the guesswork out of applying the basic formatting and markup seems like a real stretch.

and finally...

"No hierarchy of elements." -- I'm not really sure what the author is driving at here. This sounds to me like somebody who's been drinking too much of the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid. Wikipedia essentially mirrors an encyclopedia. It has several pages, it has sections, and sub-sections, and sub-sub-sections. As near as I can tell, wikipedia's documents/data are structured in a perfectly logical way. If this is such an issue, why does the author say, "[...]Wikipedia’s design is just how basic it is, without a clear hierarchy to guide your attention to the more important elements. There needs to be better grouping of items[...]", but not actually enumerate what elements are at issue and what items need to be grouped in what manner? My guess? Because the author doesn't really know.

Everything the author derides and take issue with seems to be fairly subjective and there's essentially no solution provide, just a list of empty bitches. Wikipedia, to my way of thinking, is like Craigslist. Neither site is very pretty (Craigslist even moreso), but they are both incredibly useful. The notion that a site can be fixed via design assumes that people visit sites because they're pretty, and that clearly is not the case. People go to websites for meaningful, interesting content, and both of those sites (CL and Wiki) have got that in spades. Designers go to websites because they're pretty. Web 2.0 interfaces are often about polishing turds to a high gloss finish so people don't notice that you don't actually do or provide anything of value. That said, I will continue reading, and enjoying wikipedia content in it's plain old wrapper, and the original author can resume their apparent career as a turd polisher.”

WTF Google?

2008-10-07T18:16:00.004-05:00

I'm working on some Google Maps API stuff and was reading up on the MarkerManager in the OFFICIAL Google Maps API blog and clicked on a demo link for a particular mapping technique. It was supposed to be hosted on google.com, but it was missing. I looked at the URL, suspecting that they'd made a typo--but honestly, who types URLs--and it looked OK. I navigated back in my browser and noticed that below the link there was an update note that had been added relating to changes to the API, open sourcing, etc. and that the link was no longer valid.

So lemme get this straight. They took the time to add a note about the link being bad, but didn't.. you know, just remove the offending link, or at least style it as text-decoration: line-through. Put a note after the link that says it's now B.S. so people can read that when they get back to the originating page from the dead link you sent them too, that makes a ton of sense. It's like they're actively supporting link rot; WTF?

Moving right along, I clicked through to the new link to the updated API stuff and navigated the SVN repository to a new sample file which I clicked on and it showed a map with 4 markers on different continents and when a particular marker's location wasn't visible, it showed a small version of the marker along with a chevron shaped pointer showing the direction you would travel in to find the marker. It was clever, and precisely not the thing I was looking for. I looked at the address bar and noticed that now, instead of sending me to dead links, the Google Maps API blog team was simply sending me to the wrong links.

I really dislike when I can't get information, I especially dislike it when I'm given misinformation, be it through incompetence (as I suspect in this case) or genuine malice (as in the case of our Republican VP candidate).

How I Choose Software

2008-10-02T15:19:00.002-05:00

This afternoon I'm trying to take some changes I've been testing local for a really gross IE6 PNG transparency hack/fix and integrate them into a client website where I have to make it all fit with the site's CMS templates.

To make the change, I figured I ought to diff the current code against my new changes and I didn't have a diff installed. In the past, I've used whatever the in-house preferred diff software was, but seeing as how prior to my arrival development at the current job was done in a fairly loose manner we didn't have a standard... well, anything really. So, I decided to find something good, but wasn't really sure where to start.

I started by looking up "diff" in Wikipedia. The article talked about its being a "file comparison" tool, which is apparently the proper name, though they're all "diffs" to me. Anyway, Wikipedia tends to have companion articles for things like categories of software that are named "Comparison of X" where X is the software in question. Anyway, the Comparison of File Comparison Tools (what a great name) article is a big table of features, names, licenses, platforms, etc and allows sorting by any column so I sorted on license and started scanning through all of the GPL applications and checked out the articles on a few.

Ultimately I settled on WinMerge due to features like shell integration and integration with TortoiseSVN--which I'm slowly getting people here to start using. It's a Windows only app, and that's a bit of a turn off, but it was certainly nice to be able to turn to the Wikipedia for a side by side comparison of the tools from a 30,000 foot view.

The Dream

2008-08-08T23:55:00.014-05:00

It's 5 minutes until midnight on 8-8-08 as I begin writing this. I just woke up. The weather is surprisingly cool (60F) for August; it's nice. I haven't blogged in a while, I sort of decided it wasn't really my thing, and Blogger being such a P.O.S. hasn't made me very eager to use it frequently.

Anyway, The Dream.

I had The Dream this evening. For those who are not xkcd readers who commit every strip to memory, The Dream--as I'm calling it--is a profoundly revelatory dream relating to functional programming. xkcd #224 deals with the author's eye-opening experience with Lisp, mine happened to be with Scheme.

I used to just like this particular strip because of how it presented Perl as the glue that actually holds it all together, now I've got a whole new appreciation. This particular comic is both funny and deep.

Around 2006/2007, I started to get a bit more serious about programming and wanted to break out of much of the lameness that writing the same sort of .NET code for financial transactions at work was bringing on. I decided, based on a lot of the reading I'd been doing, that I needed to give functional programming a go. I never went past my sophomore year at UW-Madison, and subsequently wasn't exposed to functional programming, assuming it's even part of the curiculum, and had been largely locked into the imperative procedural and object oriented programming paradigms, with a bit of the "a ha" that comes from getting your head properly wrapped around SQL.

Anyway, moving into 2008 I acquired a copy of Guy Steele's Common Lisp the Language, which introduced some interesting stuff, but wasn't really framed correctly for a novice trying to learn the language. I've subsequently found out that it's generally accepted that CLtL is more a book targeted at implementors of Common Lisp. I read that book here and there, for a while, but given the nature of it, my interest faded a bit.

Enter: Peter Siebel's Practical Common Lisp. This book is available for free online, and I read the first 3 chapters there. I so enjoyed how practical (surprise, surprise) the book made Lisp seem, and how it dove right in to writing code (which made it fun), as opposed to swamping you with mathematical theory (which is interesting, but not so much "fun"), that I ordered a copy. I got setup with a SLIME environment and spent a while working through some of the chapters in the book. It was fun, but slowly, I started having some questions, and found I was not getting some fundamentals really "in" my head, and as a result, that project went a bit by the wayside.

I tinkered a bit with Haskell a while back, and it looks neat, and I may explore it more later, but again, I didn't really stick with it. Then, a few weeks ago I was reading about The Little Schemer, which I'd heard of but never really explored. I have a friend who related some of his painful go with Scheme when he was in college and as a result of that, I never had the motivation to check the language out. I recently came across The Little Schemer on Google Books, where it had a few chapters available, and I started reading. I was immediately grabbed by the book's writing style, which was formatted mainly as two columns of question/answer Socratic dialog. The book approached the language, and the ideas of programming, from a somewhat abstract direction I hadn't previously seen. There wasn't a focus on the heavy duty use of the language, or of the history which lead to the language's creation, or even an acknowledgment that what you were reading was a programming "How To". The book just presents the theory of some of the basic building blocks of Scheme (car, cdr, cons, etc) in a simple, whimsical way, and begins giving examples of using those blocks to manipulate lists. You're learning to program without realizing it; it feels like game or a puzzle. Before you know what's happening, you've got a vague notion of S-expressions, and subsequently, atoms, lists, and how you can use them. You're still not doing anything meaningful, but at least for me, there's a sense of something powerful.

Suffice it to say, it's a good book, and I'm currently only 25 pages in.

Anyway, back to The Dream.

I was reading some of The Little Schemer on the porch today after work while drinking a lightly hopped adult beverage and was getting tired. I went upstairs and ended up laying down on the bed. Sometime before 9pm, I fell asleep.

The next thing I knew, I woke up, and had had this bizarre, epiphanous dream. Much like the xkcd comic, the whole tree like, nested lists of Scheme had suddenly clicked and it was as though they made perfect sense and as a result, made the whole world make a bit more sense. It was an experience on par with the sort of eye-opening effects one might get from a strong psychoactive drug. I actually laid in bed in the dark for a bit, trying to process everything from the dream. Slowly waking up and making sense of of it was an ongoing surreal experience. This was as close as I feel I've ever come to anything approaching a religious or spiritual experience. It was really that intense. I'd try to relate the substance of the dream, but it lacked any real narrative, and my putting it into words would likely water it down and fail to convey what it actually said.

There've been a few times in my life--the bulk of which I've now been programming and/or learning to program--that I've had a new understanding that really shifted my perspective. Offhand, I'd say those previously were:

1. First learning programming with GW/QuickBasic and seeing the power of code emerge (sometime around 1990, OMG a loop!?).
2. Taking a data structures class in 1997 (my freshman year in college).
3. Starting to learn Perl in 1997.
4. Beginning to really grok regular expressions (sometime in the early-mid 2000s).

Now, there's a 5th item on that list:

5. Reading The Little Schemer, and beginning to see the elegant simplicity of functional programming.

I've only now been acquainted with Scheme and The Little Schemer for about a week--and I've not yet written a single line of code!--but they've already got a familiarity and affinity for me that's taken years to build with other languages/books, like Perl and Programming Perl.

Progress status: keeping the user in the loop

2008-05-22T09:53:00.002-05:00

I was in-office in Milwaukee yesterday and that means my work laptop gets its weekly reboot. This morning when I sat down to work there was a pending update to Adobe CS3 so I figured I'd kick it off while I drank a cup of coffee. I came back and the updater was still running and indicated it was about 25% complete. I fired up IE to check my e-mail and the Adobe updater complained about IE running, so I killed IE and decided to start the day working from my personal Ubuntu laptop.

After about 20 minutes I VNCed to the work laptop and the progress bar looked the same. I walked over to the machine and sat down. I watched for a minute as the progress bar would make incremental steps forward, and then, as it made incremental steps backward!

I've seen this before, these confused progress bars that seemingly move forward and back as though rewinding time. I've seen the reverse progress bar used by uninstallers which makes some sort of metaphorical sense, but is still, in my opinion, an abuse of a reasonably well understood widget. As I watched, I saw that there were patches being applied to several different parts of CS3 (Flash, Dreamweaver, etc) but there was one lone progress bar.

This made me think of a number of applications I've written that had long running processes that made it easy to let the user keep tabs on their progress and I gotta say, maybe I'm the odd one, but I generally include a ton of information expressed in different ways so I (or whoever is using the software) has a concrete sense of "where we're at".

In a document archiving application I wrote when I worked at Greystone one part of the application could take a large (100+ pages) PDF and strip the individual pages out as TIFFs for processing and later storage. The source PDFs resided on a network drive, and the TIFFs were ultimately stored there as well. Between network overhead and processing, a PDF could take a minute to process on a user's desktop. Not an eternity, but long enough that you want to know that the application hasn't hung. So, when the user was processing a PDF, an always-on-top floating progress bar appeared. The progress bar was small and innocuous but still included some useful information like: percentage complete, pages processed, total pages, pages per second, time elapsed, and estimated time remaining.

Now, I'm sure there are those who would say that's overkill, and in part redundant since most of the values are easily derived from one another, but you know what: it gave a lot of useful information in different formats and it was dead simple to implement. Never did I wonder how far along the process was. Never did I wonder if it had frozen. At a glance I knew exactly what was happening and when I might expect it to be done.

The bottom line is: generally speaking, you can easily determine the progress of your application and meaningfully report that to the user. The Adobe updater is now going on 40 minutes of run time and I still have no clue as to when it might complete.

I would propose a few guidelines as to how we as developers should report status to users:

Show a numerical percentage (possibly including one or more decimal places of precision for really long running stuff) along with the graphical bar.
Express things in terms of items (items being: pages, kilobytes, whatever-is-relevant-to-you-application, etc) complete and a moving average of items/second.
Show the elapsed time and an estimate of time remaining.
For processes that are actually composed of separate tasks, have either new, clearly labeled progress bars for each step, or two separate task, and overall process, progress bars.
Don't make the progress bar move in reverse; ever.

To me, these things just seem obvious, and it's the kind of stuff I've added to programs going back to my early days of hacking QBasic. It's fairly easy to do for most processes, and the payoff to the user can be huge. If I see my updater says it's going to take an hour, I'll go grab lunch, if it says 45 seconds to complete, I'll probably stick around. The computer ought to be working for me, not the other way around.

zombies, Zombies, ZOMBIES!!!

2008-05-13T12:02:00.007-05:00

My boss Jim and I were chatting on the phone earlier and got on the topic of zombie games and I mentioned a few I'd played recently that I thought were both cool and a cool use of Flash. This was originally drafted as an e-mail to some coworkers, but I decided to adapt it for yon blog as well.

The Last Stand
http://armorgames.com/play/269/the-last-stand
Basically, you're one of a few survivors who must spend your days (12 hours to allocate) rebuilding your fortifications, searching for other survivors, and gathering weapons for the night where you must defend against the zombie onslaught. Silly fast shooting game play, but I enjoyed it. it's beatable; and in a relatively short period of time too. The zombie animations are simple but effective.

The Last Stand 2
http://armorgames.com/play/1443/the-last-stand-2
Maybe the first game should be retroactively renamed to "The Second To Last Stand". Anyway, same basic game play but they've added some new stuff: tougher faster zombies, zombies with weapons, booby traps you can set for zombies, moving from town to town to your ultimate destination, a port city where an evacuation will take place... if you get there in time. They made it tougher and more involved, but added enough new fun stuff to make it compelling.

Sonny
http://armorgames.com/play/505/sonny
Hands down this is the dumbest name for either a zombie or a video game, but lets ignore that. You (as Sonny) are on a boat where most of the crew and passengers (yourself included) have become zombies. Inexplicably, you're still lucid and want to help eliminate the zombie threat which you're clearly apart of. Anyway, the zombie angle is sort of secondary and unimportant because you ultimately end up fighting ghosts and rock golems and the like. This is a pretty well balanced and fleshed out combat-centric RPG with a pretty nifty spell/armor/weapon system, a mostly coherent narrative and some funny dialog. You can easily lose a few hours in this without getting too far; I've yet to beat it.

Fscking Windows

2008-05-09T15:31:00.003-05:00

So, as some of you probably know, I use Linux exclusively at home for my personal stuff. My primary laptop is running Ubuntu 7.10 and my work laptop runs Windows XP. Right now they're sitting side by side, but it's a hassle to shift chairs to work on one or the other so I tend to VNC into the XP machine when I have some Windows specific work to do.

When my XP laptop is in its docking station it's running with a desktop resolution of 1024x768. When it's undocked it uses 1280x1024 (or something along those lines). I generally like to keep it at 1024x768 since that's the native resolution on my Linux laptop and running a VNC session full screened is nice.

Today I connected via VNC to do some work and the larger virtual desktop was a bit annoying so I decided to set the resolution for undocked mode to 1024x768. I made the change over VNC and figured I'd have to reconnect since AFAIK VNC doesn't recalibrate when you change resolutions. As expected, I made the switch and the VNC session dropped. I went to reconnect and couldn't. I looked over at XP and saw that the resolution change didn't just drop the session, it crashed the VNC service. Not that it matters terribly, but this was using the UltraVNC service on XP and using krdc on the Ubuntu machine. I was a bit dismayed, but totally unsurprised at how it had hosed itself so I clicked the "Don't Send" option to dismiss the service crash error and the machine instantly dumped core and rebooted.

Christ, how I love that in this day and age the most widely deployed version of Windows can shit itself so thoroughly after a simple non-critical service crashes. Bill Gates is sitting on a fat pile of money--which he thankfully gives a chunk of to charitable causes--and the rest of the world is losing time, money, and productivity and all the while paying for the privilege of running his horse shit operating system(s).

Fsck Windows.

Multi-Touch

2008-05-09T09:07:00.003-05:00

I'm sure most people saw Jeff Han's demo of a sweet multi-touch display given at the TED Conference back in 2006. That was neat for sure, and this isn't super ground breaking, but apparently he started up a company, Perceptive Pixel, and they've got a new demo video that's similar, but consists of a big wall mounted screen, improved software, and two people interacting with the same interface. I have some memory of when having mousing skills were considered pretty spiffy, soon job listings will require "2 years multi-touch display experience".

Wikipedia Vandalism

2008-05-03T13:33:00.004-05:00

Two recent news pieces I read came to a somewhat humorous head today. I read one story earlier this week about Hans Reiser (creator of ReiserFS) being convicted of murdering his wife. I also read about the development of the to be released EXT4 file system. Then, after reading about EXT4 I pulled up the wikipedia page on a comparison of file systems and was scanning the comparison chart and noticed an addition. Check the highlighted items.

Wedge Technique

2008-05-02T19:48:00.001-05:00

I've got a guest blog post up over at Exit Creative about the aforementioned game, Magic Pen.

Contextually Appropriate Advertising

2008-05-02T07:38:00.003-05:00

I've been playing a lot of different Flash games lately (especially some of the excellent ones over at Armor Games), and many of them tend to have teasers for other games (some free, some not) while the game you're going to play loads. Ok, no big deal. Lately I've been seeing a number of ads for what appears to be a werewolf game called Bite Fight. When I'm playing the zombie attack survival shooter The Last Stand, fine. Zombies, Werewolves, that's similar territory. Today however, I think it's placement seemed a bit off when I went to try Magic Pen.

Joel on Smart and Funny

2008-05-01T08:36:00.009-05:00

Joel Spolosky, author of the Joel on Software blog and co-founder of Fog Creek Software is a bright guy. He's one of the few bloggers who writes in the technical/programming realm, but generally doesn't delve too deeply into the minutiae of programming (I don't know that I've ever seen code snippits in his blog). What makes Joel's writing great is that he's almost always spot on in his technical analysis, makes the topic fairly accessible to the lay reader, and is generally pretty humorous along the way. This means he's in a position to effectively communicate and persuade management types (not always an easy feat) yet still get kudos and right-ons from the in-the-trenches code monkeys of the world.

A while back Joel had a wonderful (if not a bit lengthy) post (read it if you have time) on the difficulty of developing web sites for the mix of largely incompatible web browsers out there using a humorous Martian Headset metaphor, which challenged the conventional wisdom of Postel’s robustness principle (essentially: "be strict in what you send and tolerant in what you accept.") as applied to HTML/CSS/etc standards. Stated on its own, the robustness principle seems sound, however, as applied to the browser and web development world we've seen where it leaves us: a series of inelegant hacks that attempt to create pages that render the same in all browsers. Sometimes these hacks even work! Joel nailed this issue on the head--which I hadn't really seen done elsewhere--and did so in what I thought was a really funny way.

Joel's most recent post that I read this morning, addressing so-called "Architecture Astronauts", was also funny, and right on. He talks about Microsoft's (and other companies') apparent obsession with sinking lots of R&D money into creating solutions for problems that don't actually exist; specifically: file synchronization.

One of the points he made in the post was the underlying developer motivation to write this sort software. Even if you recognize that there's no pressing need for a particular piece of software or added functionality, you may still feel compelled to create it because, as he describes it...

"[...]this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out."

I have personally experienced this exact sentiment.

"Hey, I know there's not any real demand for a [insert-novel-implementation] of [insert-algorithm] in [insert-esoteric-language], but that'd be a lot of fun to do."

I've done it; I've thought it, and in some cases followed through. The big difference is that I'm an individual who, despite being employed for the last few years a software developer, still does a lot of personal development work as a means to learn new languages or technologies, and to keep my brain moderately sharp when I'm bogged down in writing lots of trivial, largely boiler-plate, coding for my job. I'm not trying to sell my clever and unneeded application to the masses.

There is value for the individual in doing this sort of work as a means to self-improvement or self-actualization, but as a commercial software vendor, try to find something that people actually want, or need, or might at least pay you for.

Goodnight Sweet Prince

2008-04-30T15:25:00.002-05:00

Gjallarhorn is offline. After about 7 years of near constant service as my primary desktop computer, then my desktop/web server, and in its later years as a dedicated file server, he's been retired. Gjallarhorn actually hosted the first incarnation(s) (check out all the 'X's in those usernames!) of www.MadHC.com as well as the first domain I bought, www.FamousMortimer.com, back around 2001-02. As I'd blogged about a while back, I built a new file server to replace Gjallarhorn and, after migrating everything over to the new system and giving a few weeks overlap time to make sure there were no issues with the transition, I decided to take Gjallarhorn down today.

Gjallarhorn started life as a lab computer at MATC that I acquired during one of their upgrade sales back around 2001. I remember agonizing at the time over the (if I remember right) $300 it was going to cost me for the then snappy PIII 500Mhz machine. I had a PII 350Mhz, Irminsul, that I'd gotten just prior to my sophomore year in college and it was heavily taxed as a web server, general use computer, and development machine and the acquisition of what was to become Gjallarhorn seemed justified. For those who know me now and know of the countless computers and bins of spare parts I keep in the basement, it probably sounds like just another computer, but this was the first time I moved beyond having one computer and I had some trouble rationalizing it, despite my keen interest in computing.

At any rate, I got Gjallarhorn, and with few exceptions that computer worked wonderfully for many years. It got a hard drive upgrade when it took on the role of file server, but has been largely left untouched. When I powered it down this afternoon and added it to another stack of dusty beige boxen, it seemed a little sad. There wasn't really anything wrong with it, and it's lack of redundant storage wasn't really it's fault, but it had been phased out in my grand scheme to build a half-assed data center in my basement.

The power supply fan on Gjallarhorn had some bearings that were getting old and it's a bit quieter down by the rack now that it's gone. Gjallarhorn's replacement, Mimisbrunnir, makes no squeaky noises, just the constant whoosh of air moving through it's bank of four high RPM fans, and it somehow seems like it has less personality.

Anyway, that's the news today around the city. If you're at the house, stop down and pat Gjallarhorn on his dusty back plate, I'm sure he'd appreciate it.

Green Thumb

2008-04-28T13:28:00.003-05:00

If you're wondering, I haven't got one. A green thumb that is. Many of my friends wander around my nicely landscaped yard (thanks to the former owners, the Van Ee's) and point out this delightful plant or this rare wildflower that by law I'm apparently not allowed to kill, were I so inclined. I usually just think the flowers look nice.

I don't know plants. Not in any meaningful way at least. I mean, I can identify a few flowers, and having been an "arborist" for a few years I can identify several trees species and potential problems with them, but I'm not a plant guy.

My father is, among other things, a botanist. As in, has a degree in botany (among other things). He actively operated (among other things) a nursery business nights and weekends for most of my childhood. He enjoyed cultivating everything from garden vegetables to the (now loathed by me) Dirca palustris (a.k.a Leatherwood) and throughout my youth tried to instill in me a love of things that grow in soil; it didn't take. In what is somewhat common amongst sons, I rejected anything he enjoyed and/or tried to foist on to me. Whatever, no big deal, they're just plants.

But now I sit here, 29, a homeowner, a somewhat excitable but introverted geek who happened his way into a home with a well put together set of perennials; and I like it. I take at least one walk a day around the (albeit tiny) yard and inspect everything that's emerging from the soil, sending up shoots, and blooming. I smile and study them like a proud father. It seems bizarre to me when I stop and think about it.

As with every niche hobby or business, you get the die-hards who congregate and fraternize with the other equally devoted adherents and my father was no different. I remember taking afternoon trips for haircuts and stop at Cross Nurseries in Lakeville, MN. It was usually entertaining only insofar as I could run around in their green houses which were surprisingly warm and humid even in the middle of winter; the plants I couldn't have cared less about. More so than Cross' though, what stands out in my mind were our family visits to Savory's Gardens. My mom and dad were friends with Bob Savory, the proprietor, and his wife Arlene, and their son Denny, who I believe now handles the business. The landscaping of their house was, as I recall, amazing, even as a kid. I think it was a combination of the lush leafy hostas, the slope of the property, the small foot paths, and sort-of terraced planters that gave it a feel that I would, in retrospect, compare to the imagined exterior of Bag End. As a kid, it was awesome, to wander amongst the gardens catching bugs and playing on the varied terrain. In the evenings, we'd usually go into the house and my mom, Arlene, and I would often play board games while Bob and my dad talked plants, or whatever. I love my grandmother very much, but I always thought of Arlene Savory as sort of a grandmother as well; she was always very kind.

So again, here I sit, not really old, but often bitter, and disagreeable, occasionally thinking back to the fun I had as a kid in that one particular setting that captured part of my fathers love of plants, and I'm somewhat sad and nostalgic. I go out everyday and look at my hostas, and have taken to reading a bit online about them. I'm slowly becoming a "plant guy". I pulled up the Savory Gardens website to see what was there and noticed on the front page, a variety of Hosta they'd developed there (Savory Gardens have apparently introduced many tens of varieties of hostas to the world over the years) called 'Arlene Mae Savory'. I think I may get one to put into my own yard.

Hardy Heron

2008-04-28T07:41:00.005-05:00

New Ubunut LTS release

Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" dropped last week, but I've as of yet not upgraded the few machines I've been meaning to. xkcd ran a humorous comic today joking about the "helpfulness" of the newest installment.

I--like several million other people--have anxiously awaited the release of the next Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu versions over the last few years and looking back, I have to say, I'm extremely impressed with both the polish the distro has and the consistency of the releases. With their 6 month release cycle, and the current rate of improvement, we will be seeing widespread Linux on the desktop sooner rather than later. Canonical Ltd. (the "parent" company of Ubuntu) has contributed a lot in the realm of desktop Linux, and that contribution will be felt throughout all of Linux (destkop, server, embedded, etc). Having gotten my start with Linux running (and even then dated) Red Hat 5 on a old scrounged Pentium I 90Mhz back in 2000, the difference is night and day. Granted, back then, there was a lot of room to improve the desktop compared to the offerings from Microsoft and Apple, but that ground has been made up, and then some, by a largely volunteer effort that operates on budgets which are probably several orders of magnitude less than that of the previously mentioned vendors.

HTML::Mason

I had some time to dig a bit more into my Mason book and have been really pleased with what I'm seeing. Initially, I viewed Mason as sort of Perl answer to PHP's syntax--that is to say, the power of Perl intermingled in HTML, without the completely brain damaged garbage of PHP--but it's more than just a slick way to stick blocks of Perl into HTML. In fact, despite it's HTML:: namespace, Mason can really be embedded into almost any text type document and be used to generate content. The design of Mason shows a clear attention to future use and growth. It really appears to be well designed, and I'm excited to get using it beyond just the tiny introductory examples I've read.

Common Lisp

My goal this winter was to learn, or at least get a good jump on learning, Common Lisp. To that end I ordered a copy of Guy L. Steele's Common LISP: The Language. That book had a lot of information, but I think its better suited to an implementor trying to create their own Common Lisp interpreter/compiler. During my reading on Lisp, and functional programming in general, I came across some reviews, and ultimately a full free online copy of the phenomenal Practical Common Lisp by Peter Siebel. Just reading the first few chapters online, I could tell this was a book for someone who wanted to 1) do away with all of the deep theory and formality, and 2) jump in and start writing some code that does something meaningful--as opposed to doing something academic like proving something mathematically. The book was excellent, current, and had some good online references. I immediately ordered a copy and have been very pleased with the book. At the time I got it though, I was nearing my breaking point at my previous employer and my motivation to code, or read about programming in my off hours was at a recent low, so the book ended up sitting. It's been floating around the living room for a few months but with my new job and the way that Mason has been piquing my curiosity, I've been thinking I ought to pick it back up. Maybe that'll happen in the coming months, we'll see.

Blogger

Being an utterly useless piece of crap that, unfortunately, bears the Google brand, Blogger is really starting to annoy me. My personal frustration (like getting all of the body text in this post to be the same size of Verdana) and Clay's high praise of WordPress has me thinking it may be time to make a switch.

Did I mention that the view displayed using the "Preview" option bears no resemblance to the final published text? Yeah, Blogger's awesome like that.

Absinthe

2008-04-21T09:03:00.003-05:00

I have returned, victorious! After a few days hiatus from posting, whilst slaying colossi, I figured it's time to get back into yon blogosphere.

Sunny Days

The weather in Madison this weekend was phenomenal. Highlights include: the farmer's market (largest in the country [thanks for the trivia Alisha]) where I bought some artisinal cheeses and we got more herbs for the garden, brunch at the Sunprint Cafe (how have I never gone after 10+ years in Madison?), a trip to Menards for project supplies (a new cedar raised planter bed, and a new BBQ handle), building and installing the planter/handle, grilling out with friends, observing the ever blooming yard, running a bunch of errands with Jenna, and enjoying the weather.

All in all, it was a pretty great couple of days. The weather even has me thinking about pulling the boat out of storage, although the thought of doing repairs or paying for them is less than exciting.

At any rate, Spring is out in full force, and Summer will be upon us soon.

So, what else is new in the world of me, your favorite blogger? Hmm... how about some technology updates?

theraccoonbear city infrastructure

The new file server is running like a dream, it's nice to have all of th media accessible again, and on a redundant storage device to boot. The media PC has been running without incident in its new home in the stereo cabinet, and the 11th season of Good Eats is almost all downloaded now, huzzah!

Mason and the Fear Therein

On the work related front, my copy of O'Reilly's Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason arrived and I had some time to start digging into that. What I'm seeing so far is looking good. There's something of a "healthy" skepticism of Open Source tools/products where I'm working now, and I'm working to change that attitude. As someone who has spent the last ~5 years of their professional career working primarily in a Microsoft environment using the .NET languages, and then spent time at home building open/Linux infrastructure, I think I've got a decent perspective on the issue. Marketing rhetoric aside, from a technology standpoint, I like some of the things Microsoft has done. The .NET framework is really fun to work in; there's a lot of handy stuff already built-in for you. In that regard, it's similar to Java, especially when you compare it with C#. That said, it's expensive (relatively speaking), and has some accessibility issues. The defacto .NET IDE, Visual Studio, is costly for a professional licensed version. There are alternatives, like #develop, which I absolutely love and am in awe of the developers of, but there are some shortcomings there. #develop only has a Windows.Forms designer. No easy Wed.Forms means no easy ASP.NET. That functionality is fine, the developers of #develop never intended for it to be a full replacement for Visual Studio. Looking deeper into .NET though, there are other costs. If you're using .NET as your development framework that means you're, almost by default, using MS SQL Server as your back end. To get current .NET applications running, it's almost certainly going to be in a MS Windows environment. So at this point, we're looking at at least: a Visual Studio license, a SQL Server license, presumably a Windows Server 200x license for the DB to run on, and one or more XP/Vista desktop licenses for the users of the applications. It adds up quickly, and though I've spent a lot of time using all of these technologies and writing lots of .NET code, it can be prohibitive for a recreational user like myself, who's interested in staying on the safe side of the copyright/licensing laws. Believe me, I'm aware of the alternatives like MonoDevelop (a #develop port to GTK#) and Mono (a stunning, open source reimplementation of the .NET framework) on Linux, and I use them at home myself, but the barrier there is often harder for a business to hurdle than the financial one. Companies are often willing to spend many thousands of dollars on a product with a MS emblem on it, instead of investing the time in learning about the (often superior) free/open alternatives.

Can a company design and deploy a robust, scalable infrastructure built on free/open technology? Yes, absolutely, it's been done over and over in the past, but, there is a reluctance to go that path. The cloud of FUD that Microsoft and others build around Linux and other open technologies is a tough one to dispel (Open Source Clerics tend to be unable to cast high level Dispell FUD due in part to their typically low Charisma) on the shoestring budgets (if there's even a budget at all!) that most Open Source projects work on.

But I digress, my point was that I got my book on Perl's HTML::Mason module. Perl, which is really the granddaddy of dynamic web languages--which is easily my favorite language (although as I learn more Lisp, I see a great deal of appeal there too)--has been used in countless websites and the Mason framework has had some especially compelling success stories. As to its stability and its robust, and scalable nature, have you ever heard of a little website called amazon.com? Oh you have? It's built using Mason.

My goal is to hopefully open the eyes of my employer to the virtues of open technologies.

More Open Goodness

Though I'm not terribly familiar with Google Analytics, Clay has mentioned it on more than a few occasions. This weekend I came across an Open Source analytics package in one of the reddit feeds I get. It's called Piwik, and though I haven't explored it yet, It seems like something that might be worth keeping and eye on.

I Shall Contact You By Post

Diesel (aka Snoop Doggett) and I have been tossing around the idea of setting up a mail server and I threw Sendmail into the hat as an option. It is basically the MTA for Linux bought as I've read, and experienced first hand, it can be something of a nightmare to setup properly. Another reddit post this weekend pointed me to an article at Linux.com on sSMTP, a more bare bones MTA that can serve as a simple option to sendmail when you don't have super complex configuration requirements. It's probably something we should look into.

...

Some of you are probably scratching your head and saying, "Absinthe?" Well, I needed a subject for this post and the first thing I saw was an Absinthe poster in my kitchen. Maybe I'll wax nostalgic about that outlawed quasi-hallucinogen in the future.

Street View Hits Madison

2008-04-15T11:56:00.004-05:00

A while back I was playing around with Google Maps' Street View. while I was locating the Hoffman York MKE office and also checked out my parents' house since all of the Minneapolis area had been covered by then. I was a little disappointed that Madison hadn't yet gotten the treatment but as I was (somewhat vainly) searching for a fish monger today, I noticed that Madison now had Street View available. I promptly navigated to theraccoonbear city to see what they'd captured.

Based on the fact that my rubbish boat is in the street and the bloom of the yard, this had to be sometime last summer. I'm sure I'll be poking around to see what and who else Street View picked up while they toured the town.

For those who are really interested/stalkerish, here's all of my past Madison residences.

1998 - Witte Hall - 615 W. Johnson St.
1999 - "The Cave" - 422 W. Johnson St.
2000 - $290/mo. - 415 W. Wilson St.
2001 - Victoria - 415 W. Gilman St.
2002 - 3rd Floor - 931 E. Gorham St.
2003 - "MadHC House" - 1148 Jenifer St.
2004-06 - "The Owl Sanctuary" - 637 E. Johnson St.
2006-present - "theraccoonbear city" - 2731 Moland St

Curiously, I've never lived on a North/South running street in Madison.

Update: I was a little surprised to see State St. covered. I wonder if they got the OK from the cops or if they just chanced the drive.

Sketch Comedy

2008-04-11T12:37:00.003-05:00

I don't have the time to look through them all today, but a list of the "50 Best Comedy Sketches" has been posted at nerve.com. The first page of results looks to be pretty good, and most have embedded videos so you can check them out.

Unknown Pleasures

2008-04-11T10:36:00.003-05:00

Today Sonja sent me a link to the trailer for the 2007 film about Ian Curtis, Control.

It's black and white and looks like it could be pretty good.

Open Source "Pirates"

2008-04-10T07:47:00.004-05:00

I was reading Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror this morning and was really surprised. Jeff is probably one of my favorite technology bloggers out there and his was one of the first blogs I subscribed to after Joel Spolsky's Joel On Software. Generally speaking, I agree with many of Jeff's opinions, but in today's post a few lines really irked me.

"It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

Going back to my post last night, I think this sort of thinking is typical of the environment that the big proprietary vendors have created. The notion that Open Source and its adherents exists simply because of a desire to avoid paying for something is ridiculous.

I will admit, in my younger years, I pirated software. All kinds of software. Some of it because I had a genuine need (or perceived need) for it, and some just because I wanted to check it out. At the time, I was young and broke. I don't mean that as a justification for why I pirated software, but it was my main motivation. I've got a steady income now, I can afford to buy software for myself, and very occasionally I will buy closed/proprietary software, but for the most part, I've opted to use F/OSS alternatives. Is this because I'm part of some "cult of no-pay", or is it because I fundamentally agree with the principles of free and open source?

To casually toss aside the open source development community and the users of that software with a snide remark like this shows to me both a lack of sensitivity and a fundamental misunderstanding of what open source is about.

The Open Source Imperative

2008-04-09T21:45:00.004-05:00

Thus far the posts here have either been indulgent/geeky (server installation) or boring (yard work), but the main impetus for this blog was to write about software, the philosoph(y|ies) surrounding software development, and the ethics therein. This is a post that'll actually deal with that. It's a bit geeky, but don't worry, there's a clear, real world message here that those of you who don't jones for a BASH prompt can appreciate.

Microsoft, and many of the other big proprietary software houses, spew a lot of rhetoric about F/OSS in an attempt to dissuade consumers, but even more so, businesses, from deploying free and open source software. The irony of much of it is that it's fairly easily reducible to various logical fallacies. That doesn't stop them from going on about TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and creating hippy commune analogies. Anyway, the main point is that Microsoft and other vendors are running smear campaigns when they're not pretending to join the ranks themselves.

One thing that differentiates the open source communities from big proprietary vendors is often their disclosure. Big software companies want to sell you on buying their software. They spend a lot of money convincing you to do so. With the exception of some large projects (like Mozilla Firefox), most open source projects don't have much in the way of advertising capital. Even still, many of these projects have managed to become huge players in the global marketplace. The big software companies produce programs with bugs and security issues (most all of us have experienced 10+ years of Microsoft Windows by now), but so do open source applications. So what's the difference? Most open source projects will be 100% up-front about this. Sometimes it takes years to get proprietary software vendors to admit their problems.

Today in one of my news feeds I came across a story about a recently discovered vulnerability in Slashcode, a news CMS used for a number of sites like Slashdot and Perlmonks. This is a piece of software that has a pretty large impact on the internet. Unlike some vendors who would issue a dismissive press release or "no comment" on any real or perceived vulnerabilities in their code, the Slashcode team made a release on the front page of their site letting users know that not only was there a vulnerability found, but that a patch already existed for it.

This is a huge part of why I switched to a largely open source desktop/server environment a few years back. There is such integrity within the open source community. People are up front about their code (if it's a buggy but workable hack, they'll tell you), they're not ashamed to admit that they're "wrong" or that they made a mistake, and they pull together to get things fixed.

Worth further reading:

WACOM

2008-04-08T17:12:00.005-05:00

Over the weekend while we were enjoying some beer and the nice weather on the porch, I was sketching a dragon head. I did one the other day while I was in the Milwaukee Office doing a phone meeting. That one was ok, but this one turned out much better. I like the shape of the snout on this one a bit more.

Anyway, Jenna convinced me to scan it and try drawing on it with her WACOM tablet. It was immediately recognized under Ubuntu Linux and I set to work colorizing the scanned drawing in the GIMP. It was a bit odd at first, I'm used to seeing my drawings "update" immediately beneath my pen, but I slowly got settled in. Anyway, I present to you my first WACOM work:

God Damned USB

2008-04-08T14:08:00.004-05:00

So, after talking for a year or more about setting up a proper file server at the house, I finally made some movements on that a few weeks ago when I saw some cheap hard drives on-line. If I were really doing this "right" I'd be looking at server grade SCSI drives or some high-bandwidth SATA. Unfortunately, as with most things I own, I've scrounged them up when other people no longer wanted them. And although I have a decent server grade Dell PowerEdge, a SCSI RAID controller, and several drives that someone was kind enough to give me when their employer retired the box, the SCSI drives were not large enough to accommodate all of the media I wanted to store. This did however let me use one of the rackmount 2U servers I got before leaving CPM back in 2006. The machine is nothing super by today's standards, but most people do not have a dual processor RAID-1 file server in their house. Of course most people also don't have a full height rack to put it in either, but as you know if you're reading this, I'm not most people.

Anyway, the drives came about a week and a half ago and over the weekend, I figured I'd make preparations for the server install. The rack that I'd gotten prior to moving into the house in 2006 at the UW-SWAP Shop was (I believe) just used for some light telephony equipment and cable patch panels so it only had full rails on the front. There was a secondary rail inside the rack, but it just had some cable bundling hooks on it. Seeing as how everything server grade is stupid expensive (even structural crap like rack rails) and I didn't feel like machining one out of angle iron, I opted for the "simple" solution of splitting my spare rail into two, so I could have full depth rack mounted items that are heavy and need rear support in at least half of the rack. A cut with the trusty Harbor Freight cut-off saw and a few holes drilled and cleaned and I had two half-height rails. I bolted in the rails and made the adjustments to the rackmount drawer slides for the case and got them installed. In the process I tried to put out my eye with an errant zip-tie that I'd failed to trim. I failed to put out my eye, instead I opted for scratching the cornea. I spent the next two days with my eyes closed most of the time and constant tearing from the injured eye. Despite all of that, I finished putting the rails and slides into the rack and, somewhat surprisingly, smoothly slid the server into place. (You'd almost think someone designed this crap to fit together!?)

Prior to getting the case installed, I had to put my new 2x500GB PATA drives in. There are probably technophiles and serious system admins who are cringing as they imagine doing a RAID setup with COTS PATA drives in 2008. You know what... suffer; I'm a cheap bastard and these were like $99/piece! Anyway, despite my extensive collection of lovely gray IDE ribbon cables, I find out that due to the layout of the case and it's massive fan bank in the center, I don't have any cables that will reach from the IDE headers on the MoBo to the slide out drive cages at the front of the case, so I'm stuck with using the split-and-zip-tied cables of appropriate length that're already installed. That's all fine and dandy, except the spacing between the master/slave plugs on the cables is such that each drive on a channel must be physically over/under the other. OK, fine...except I also have a CD-ROM drive on one channel that I know I'll need during installation, at the very least. So I sat and debated with myself. My original plan was to have each of the two 500GB RAID drives on separate channels (for reasons that are obvious to those who understand how the I/O works, and somewhat difficult to explain for those who don't), to have one "system" drive (the 80GB Barracuda that was in the case when I got it) share a channel with a RAID drive, and have the CD-ROM share a channel with the other RAID drive. This is about as optimal as it could be without switching drive technologies or adding an additional IDE controller card. Unfortunately, this was not going to happen with what I currently had on hand.

Aside: Now, there was a period of time where I would slap literally anything into a case to get it going. I've suspend case fans in mid-air using wire from dejacketed CAT-5, used a claw hammer to rend a case into a shape that would allow me to close it with an inappropriate PSU installed, and used pieces of PBR (yes, as in Pabst Blue Ribbon) cases to construct "ducts" inside the computer to more efficiently dump heat.

I was bound and determined that my new "serious" file server was not going to be an advertisement for Miller Brewing, so I decided I would make a compromise. Although this was a file server and it ought to be a piece of "performance" equipment, the demands that I and my roommate(s) could put on it were not going to be very high. What I really wanted, and the reason I did RAID-1, was redundancy; at least for the stored data. So what I opted for was: the two RAID drives sharing the primary IDE channel as master/slave and the CD-ROM occupying the second IDE channel by itself. The 80GB drive that was in the case when I got it entered the Realm of Forgotten Magnetic Storage Devices (also known as the heavy blue Rubbermaid tub). I don't know that it'll ever be heard from again, and my bending/straightening one of the pins for the data cable during removal probably won't help that cause. At any rate, I got the drives in the case closed, and as previously detailed: mounted in the rack. No ocular damage occurred during this part of the process.

Once in the rack, I set out to partition the drive(s) and get Linux installed. I opted for Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" with the plan of upgrading to 8.04 "Hardy Heron" at the end of April since it's one of the LTS (Long Term Support) releases (until 2013; on the server anyway). It took me a while to figure out that the graphical LiveCD Server installer does not have partitioning support for RAID built-in. The text based Alternative Desktop installer does however. Wow, that's an odd decision. Additionally, the Server installer would not recognize my hand configured (via mdadm) RAID setup, so I was forced to do a "desktop" install. Once all of that was sorted out, I partitioned the drives (I ended up with two RAID-1 arrays, a small one using ReiserFS for / and a larger [~470GB] ReiserFS for /raid), installed Ubuntu, and let the system sit for two hours while the RAID setup synced to nothing--having two IDE channels would've probably helped here.

Once that was done, all I had to do was copy all of my backed up media off of my external HDD and I was set with the file server. 8 hours of copying videos/MP3s later and I have a ~1/3 full ~500GB RAID-1 file server. I setup Samba so Windows/Mac users could easily access it as well.

To put the finishing touches on the newly reinvented network here, I needed to rebuild my hobbled media PC. I think having it wedged into a cubby with zero airflow did bad things to it. I'm pretty sure the bad things affected the HDD and not the CPU, but we'll see what happens over time. Anyway, I had to hunt down a modestly priced graphics card to put in this computer since I wanted to do away with the analog d-sub VGA output. The must haves for the card were: cheap (ideally under $50), DVI out, and low-profile (to fit in the case). I was also hoping it'd use an nvidia chipset since they've always played nicer with the F/OSS community and as a result have better driver support. Well, I got lucky and found a card with all of these things for about $25 on eBay. I also ordered a cheap, 2m long DVI-to-HDMI cable so I could finally send a digital signal to this HDTV I bought. Well, yesterday I got the cable in the mail, which was the last item I needed to get the computer setup. I did the Ubuntu install, apt-get (apt-got?) my updates and the extra (non-GPL) video codec stuff I needed and it's all running pretty sweetly now.

Now... for those who've endured this tediously long and somewhat tech heavy masturbatory post about the trials and tribulations of theraccoonbear city Data Center, I was going to show some even more boring pictures I took of the new server and the new media PC hooked up to the 52" screen. I snapped a few pics and then sat down to copy the pictures off of my camera and lo and behold, for all of my geekery and all of my hording of equipment, I cannot find an appropriate USB cable to get the pictures off the camera. Why oh why does USB need like 4 different plug form factors!? Christ on a crutch!