May 2002 Archives

onion.perl.org; the primary perl.org server is going to move datacenter sometime early Thursday afternoon pacific time. The kind people at ValueClick are taking care of moving it really fast, so the downtime will hopefully be less than an hour, plus a bit of time to coordinate DNS updates. onion is hosting perl.org and cpan.org mail, most of the perl.org websites, nntp.perl.org and a bunch of other perl things.

In related news then I have been getting hardware from TicketMaster/CitySearch for the new perl.org infrastructure (as you can imagine then onion is getting a bit overloaded). Of course I managed to screw up the RedHat installation on the first box, and reboot the second box without sshd enabled. But if I don't do that too many more times then some of the services will start migrating shortly.

Some hours ago I bought a package of blackberries in the store. It's great. I think I will live of "plain" organic yoghurt with blackberries and banana for the rest of the week. Most of my trips to the store lately have been past midnight.

My downstairs neighbor says that Viridiana and I are a weird bunch. When did going to the store at 1.30 or doing garending in our pots late at night get weird? tsk tsk. More on the gardening story later.

The past week seemed to flow by without even noticing I was there. CitySearch launched v4 of the site; it's really cool.

perl.org will get new servers soon, yay. New hardware, new OS, new connectivity. The old connectivity is great too, but I will have better access to the new. The new hardware, when it all comes in, will allow us to host some of the perl mongers infrastructure and make it easier to implement a bunch of the goodies we have planned. (Like threading for nntp.perl.org). More on that later too.

Or really just for me... I got a new computer this week. All components came from newegg early in the week, and the case (which I of course had ordered somewhere far away; blah!) came Friday. It's really cool. An Athlon 1800 processor is much nicer than the 400MHz Celeron thing in the old box. Having a Maxtor 120GB IDE drive is not really nicer than the good 36GB scsi drive though; except for the size. The old box is swapping way too much and it is making some of my development projects quite a hassle, s having a gigabyte memory instead 384MB will be nice when I get things moved over.

So far the only real difference is that the screensavers are running a lot faster and that sound doesn't work. Looking at the Linux Kernel list it seems like it's a problem with the via82cxxx_audio driver. Blah. I tried patching the redhat kernel with the la pre whatever thing, but that failed horribly so now I am downloading a fresh copy of the source.

we went to home depot this sunday and bought a billion plants and pots. Then we repotted all my plants (16 I think was the count). The little plantage outside my windows are looking all neat again. Now I have try remembering to water them so they'll stay alive ...

How is this for an excuse for speaking non-sense; researches says that you can't speak and think at the same time.

The future of voice controlled computers

Shneiderman says researchers in his computer science lab discovered through controlled experiments that when you tell your computer to "page down" or "italicize that word" by speaking aloud, you're gobbling up precious chunks of memory -- leaving you with little brainpower to focus on the task at hand. It's easier to type or click a mouse while thinking about something else because hand-eye coordination uses a different part of the brain, the researchers concluded.

Yes yes, I do realize that holding a conversation is a different process than giving commands to a computer; but then that kinda ruins the joke.

(via ars technica)

Yesterday I went to University of California, San Diego with Viridiana. No silly, I am not the one considering going to study there. It was mostly fun; getting up at 6am and having 6 hours of driving in a day is no fun though. I took a bunch of photos that I hope someday I will get put up.

In related news then I noticed that my new camera has gotten a few dustmarks on the CCD. Suck! Now I have to decide on driving to Nikon in Torrance (twice), mailing my camera there or ordering sensor sweeps or whatever they are called.

I also still can't figure out if my 17-35mm lens or the camera needs some adjustment or what's going on. Too frequently I am not focusing right when I think I am.
Another possible explanation would be that I hit the autofocus switch on the camera when holding the camera (it's heavy with that lens!) and toggle it over on M. Because the lens is so quiet and fast at focusing I might not notice that it's not doing anything at all. As wide as the lens is, the depth of field is somehow too great for me to notice if I'm focused a few inches or feet away from where I want to focus. Hmpfr. Maybe a trip to Torrance to sort out if the lens (and camera) is okay would be worth it.

LA Times has an article today on cooking artichokes. Viridiana and I always wants to learn, so I have to remember to save it. Actually, I don't know if it's about something else, but I hope not. :-)

Dictionary.com/okay

OK is a quintessentially American term that has spread from English to many other languages. Its origin was the subject of scholarly debate for many years until Allen Walker Read showed that OK is based on a joke of sorts. OK is first recorded in 1839 but was probably in circulation before that date. During the 1830s there was a humoristic fashion in Boston newspapers to reduce a phrase to initials and supply an explanation in parentheses. Sometimes the abbreviations were misspelled to add to the humor. OK was used in March 1839 as an abbreviation for all correct, the joke being that neither the O nor the K was correct. Originally spelled with periods, this term outlived most similar abbreviations owing to its use in President Martin Van Buren's 1840 campaign for reelection. Because he was born in Kinderhook, New York, Van Buren was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and the abbreviation proved eminently suitable for political slogans.

update: Found a cool link at NPR with a longer story about it. Now I am trying to get myself to always write "all correct" when I would have written "ok". :-)

Swans' tale of murder and mayhem / Cygnets' wings clipped at Fine Arts Palace
There was incest, group sex, mutilation and serial killings at the Palace of Fine Arts Monday, and that was just in the water. (not quite what you think, I promise).

I bought my dad a Nikon Coolscan 4000 for christmas last year. He just scanned in some more photos from when I was a little boy. Even though I subscribe to the LA Times, it looks like I read the news paper more when I was two than I do now. tsk tsk.

Hmn, does anyone know of a good blog editor for Mac OS X? I have tried BlogApp, but it fails horribly on meeting ø in my name and it can't figure out to edit my old entries via MT's xml-rpc interface.

Lab-grown fish chunks could feed space travelers

"They said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn't go as far as tasting it," Benjaminson said in a statement.

... so, when are they going to grow a human? Have they no shame? Where's the reasonable limit? Does it matter?