n8 foo

The Thanksgiving holiday is always one of my favorites. Whether it's going back home to see family or just cooking at home, the food is good and the time off is always very nice. This year, Tracy and I decided to stay in, cook up some grub and relax. It was a good thing too, I was feeling a little ill last week (round two of the office disease) and I had the holidays to get over it. As I type this now, I am just now feeling that I might be over it tomorrow. We'll see when I wake up, heh. As you can see from the pics, we had a variety of food. Shown here is onions and celery (start of the stuffing), bread, sweet potatoes and brussel sprouts. Tracy cooked everything but the sweet potatoes, that's my specialty. One note...Betty Crocker is on Crocker Crack. It says clealy in the instructions that you should cook the potatoes first. Then peel. That is complete insanity. I knew better than to do that last year, but I did it anyway because that's what Betty instructed. Ended up with a big soggy messy pile of potatoes that burned my hands as the skin fell off. It's much better and faster to peel the potatoes first, then cut them up, then cook them. My results this year were vastly superior. WTF does Betty know anyway. We rounded out the weekend by watching some visions of our fiery nuclear deaths courtesy of ABC. You may remember the 1983 movie "The Day After". Pretty realistic vision of humanity's future after a nuclear exchange with the USSR. With 1983 special effects of course. They couldn't get mushroom cloud footage from the Government so they made do with injecting ink into vegetable oil. Anyway, worth a watch if you have never seen it. More info here. I also spent quite a bit of time tonight writing a barebones photo gallery in PHP. As much as I don't like the PHP language out of principle, it is excellent for writing quick and dirty web apps. I have a few web apps lined up to write and I figured a good way to get back into PHP would be to write something simple. I'll post the code later when it's a little more polished. For now you just have to find a harder path to break into my web server. ;)

Before reading this, just go to eBay and buy one now. You'll get a jump on the rest of the people that continue reading for another 30 seconds.

Anyway. So, while building my new desk last weekend, I took it upon myself to clean up my old keyboard. It's my daily workhorse and has been for 12 years now. Hrmm. That's unusually long for electronics. Doing the math on that piqued my curiosity and I did a little bit of research...

It's an old generic PC-AT model based on an IBM model M...similar to the ones that came with the original IBM PC-AT computers. I've had it forever...I bought it in 1994 from a ham radio swap meet in Tennessee. For $1. Yes, one dollar. It was used when I bought it, I guessed it was a couple years old. But it was exactly what I was looking for at the time...."one of those keyboards that felt like the old typewriters in high school typing class that had a good click to it". I cleaned it up and have been using it ever since. It's got an awesome tactile response and the audio feedback is superb. It sounds like an Uzi when I'm in 'the zone'. It's heavy and feels great to use. I took it apart, washed it and put it back together, good as new. They don't make keyboards like that anymore.

I had never really put much thought into why I liked it so much until I did the research above. Which made me question how old it actually is. So I looked up the FCC ID on the bottom of the thing. Turns out it was made in 1986 by Chicony Electronics Co Ltd, in Taipei, Taiwan. It was imported into the US by N. Kokenias of the Electro Service Corp in San Mateo, CA.

Wait a sec?! This thing is over 20 years old? How has it lasted this long? Why do I like it so much? Why do new keyboard suck so much? A few Google searches later I discovered that I am not the only one that knows the powers of this type of keyboard. Check this out: http://www.clickykeyboards.com/ Some excerpts:

IBM model M keyboard - a hardware device designed and based on IBM mechanical typewriter design, said by some to be the best example of keyboard design, engineering and construction. Each key has an individual micro-switch which uses a buckling spring mechanism to transform human force into an electrical signal.

Buckling spring key-switch keyboards are technically superior because they provide visual , tactile and auditory feedback. Rapid typing occurs as a result of one finger completing a key stroke, while another finger is preparing the subsequent key sequence, and other fingers are preparing to convert the user’s thoughts into action. Each key has an individual weight to it, and experienced typists can apply sufficient, but not extra, force to achieve their goal.

Many computer professionals, prefer to use the one true standard of computer keyboards. Designed by American mechanical engineers, in contrast to new-age designers and focus-group marketing "experts". Many vintage IBM keyboard enthusiasts have purchased one IBM model M keyboard and have been using the same one keyboard for decades.

WOW. Well, that settles it. Now I know why I have always hated every other PC keyboard in existence. My Mac keyboards are nice, especially the laptop models, but still no where near the feel and response of this old IBM model M clone. So, rush out and try to find one on eBay before all the nerds that know about The One Keyboard snatch them up. More keyboard elitism like mine can be found here: http://www.dansdata.com/clicky2.htm

So, this weekend I built myself a new computer/office desk. Check it out in my flickr set - "new desk"



Costs & Materials

• 1 custom made 8 ft marble-look kitchen counter top from home depot: $140
• 1 end cap set (included with table)
  
• 2 black legal size filing cabinets: $120 (each)
• 1 bottle Elmers Wood glue $5

Tools

• Router
• circular saw
  
• Iron (for the end caps)
• Hammer & Nails (nails came with the table!)
• Knife
• 409 (Cleaner)
  

Total outlay

• $385
• 5 weeks gathering materials and waiting for a weekend to work on it (3 weeks waiting for countertop to arrive)
• 4 hours of actual work
• 1 splinter, removed with knife

Process was easy. Ordered the desk from Home Depot and bought the filing cabinets. When the desk arrived, I put it up on makeshift sawhorses and cut straight edges on it with the circular saw. I probably cut a half inch off of each end. Then I added the edge supports and ironed on the end caps. Used the router to make the end caps flush and to smooth the harsh edges all over the countertop. Used the 409 to clean off the adhesive that was spattered all over it. Installed extra support underneath and ploped it on top of the filing cabinets. I didn't anchor it because I want to use the extra inch of play to slide the desk back and forth for easier cable management in the rear. And as you can see from the pics, it turned out stunning. It looks like I have an expensive marble desktop. And the black filing cabinets make it look industrial.

All at about 1/3 the cost of anything from Office Depot and a *lot* nicer. /me thinks should post to Make.

Guess that I was quoted in 3 more articles. Same quote, different paper. Cool, that had more reach than I thought! :)

"Second Life, a virtual world, has a booming population, economy"

http://www.paramuspost.com/article.php/20061103090214491

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/11/03/2045885.htm

http://tccitizen.com/entertainment/second-life-a-virtual-world-has-a-booming-population-economy.html

I haven't touched SL since the article. But the recent grey goo attacks had me wanting to log in again. ;)

The Dilbert Blog: Aging Brains: To compensate for my inevitable mental decline I am already doing triage on entire categories of my memory. Anything I don’t need will be purged to make room for new stuff. I already got rid of the category I call “who wore what.” If I see you in the gym wearing a full chicken outfit I will remember that as “saw you working out.”

Man, I can so relate to that.

So I am sick today...my body is fighting a war with some virus that has been floating around the office this week. My mental capacity is fully half of normal, or at least that's what it feels like. But it's Friday so I guess that nobody has noticed yet. ;)

Highly recommend the Airborne for when you start to feel the slightest bit sick. It really does work, has kept me from getting ill many times over the past 4-5 years. I don't get Flu shots, don't believe in them. I'd rather let my body build up the immunities naturally. I get a little bit sick every year...back when I took the Flu shot, I would get *really* sick every other year when the Flu shot was for the wrong strain and I had no immunity built up.

Speaking of the Flu, this is a great present for any medical/nurse types.

All my geek friends know that I am a graph addict. I manage about 100 Linux servers that have every single mildly interesting property graphed 6 ways from Tuesday. I'd graph how often I go to the can if it wasn't such a manual process to record it. (FOR NOW!!) Personally, I rarely use MRTG anymore and have ditched it in favor of RRDTool...except for network gear. MRTG was designed for that and is still a good application in that respect.

Anyway, as part of an ongoing series (har) on core UNIX tools (sed, awk, grep etc) I present a small shell script that will smooth out spikes on your MRTG graphs. Run it from the directory that contains your MRTG log files. To edit the threshold cap, change the number in red.


#! /bin/sh

LIST=`ls *.log`
mkdir -p old/
cp *.log old/
for i in $LIST
do awk '!(NF==5 && ($4+$5) > 1000000)' old/$i > $i
done

Download here: http://www.mybrainhurts.com/software/smooth_mrtg.txt

P.S. Thanks to Jason for the del.icio.us link that inspired me to be more interesting by blogging daily.

My La Fonera is neato. But there were a few critical details left out of the install docs for us Mac Users.

• Everything more advanced than 'plug it in' references the User Manual on the CD. The CD is useless. It's got no files on it other than the Quick Install Guide (QIG.pdf) that you already have in printed form. To find the user manual, go here: FON: and click on: "Activate it when it arrives. More" It will launch a flash app that lets you download the user manual. Or you can click here: http://www.fon.com/manuals/M2100_1_01.pdf
  
  
• Default WPA settings don't work on a MacBook. You must log onto the router's admin console and change this. Plug the router into your mac via the included ethernet cable. Surf to http://192.168.10.1 in your web browser. Log in. The user is 'root' and the password is the WPA key for the private SSID/MySpaces. If you just opened it, it should be the S/N on the bottom of the device.
  
  Now clik on 'Private WiFi' and change the Authentication from 'WPA/WPA2-Mixed' to 'WPA2'.
  

Your MacBook will now connect. I assume this is not just a MacBook thing, but a Mac thing. Why wouldn't they document this? It's a huge pain for a Mac user trying to figure it out. Hopefully google searches will find this and other Mac users will learn from my efforts.

P.S. Works great now!

If my atomic clock only displayed milliseconds....

I made some mods to all my zone files just now (changed name servers) and needed to update all the serials as well. The name server change was easy enough:

# sed -i 's/from/to/g' db.*

But changing the serial is a little tricker. A serial number is in the form YYYYMMDDNN where NN is the update number for that day. So today would be 2006111100. This is the forumla:

# sed -i 's/200[0-9]\{7\}/2006111104/g' db.*

This says to replace any text starting with 200 and followed by 7 digits with 2006111104 . I should add this to the sed one liners page: http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt
BTW, my high school web page is now on my servers.

List of good things that happened to me today:

1. My La Fonera arrived. Very cool, if you're not familiar with FON, check it out. It's a community wireless project funded by Google, Skype and Sequoia (whoah). It only cost me $8, but I got in early...it's still cheap at $30.


2. For whatever reason, when I opened my Mac this morning, it didn't turn on. Screen black, no worky. I did all the appropriate troubleshooting, apple support site, FastEddy consult, the whole bit. Dead. So I called our corp Apple rep and told him to expect me with Macbook in tow after lunch. When I got back from lunch, it was sitting there, on. Heh. I think the power management chip was hungover and got it's s**t together when it heard the call. Anyway, the elated feeling I had when it came back more than counteracted the horrible feeling I had when it didn't boot. And I can continue my 15 year stretch without a failed Mac. ;)


3. Firefox 2.0 did a session restore and recovered all the tabs I had up on the screen from the hours of research that I had done the night before when I last closed my Mac.


4. John threw a one in a million shot: He was bouncing this ball off the door, went high and it bounced off the wall, the ceiling and the top of the door, coming to rest on top of the door. Now we're going to see how long we can keep it up there.


5. Had pizza for lunch on company dime.


6. Took home an entire Oggi's pizza.


7. Had pizza for dinner.

Overall, a nice Friday. :)

I only now learned about this. But that's because I guess I am old now, I find out about the latest catchphrase after they're already tired. Still, I laughed my ass off when I was reading that and came across this:

Image:In your macaroni.jpg - Encyclopedia Dramatica

IMG_4953.JPG. Tracy and I made some pretty cool pumpkins this halloween. I made a time lapse of our pumpkin creators and put it up on vMix:

Pumpking Timelapse


For the record, my pumpkin was titled "Angry Robot" and Tracy's was titled "Makes Nathan Sneeze".

Lots of A-Holes cutting me off...pretty sure that the reason the traffic was insane getting out of Del Mar was because everybody was rushing home to vote. I voted! Line was long, took about 40 minutes to vote.

Problem: Most modern Digital Cameras do not actually rotate an image based on the orientation, they just set a flag in the EXIF headers. Most software (including iPhoto and Preview on the Mac) will display the image properly by rotating it on load. But uploading to online based services means you have an image with the wrong orientation. The ones that plauge me are Flickr, Wikipedia, Gallery2 and vMix Slide.

Solution: jhead + jpegtran. jhead will read the EXIF headers, detect the oritentation and then call jpegtran to do a *lossless* rotation on the image, saving the proper EXIF headers back to the file. What does that mean? It means you will have a file that is properly oriented for display on your editing software and for uploading to online services.

jhead: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/
jpegtran: http://sylvana.net/jpegcrop/

There are jhead binaries for linux, mac, windows. To install jpegtran on OS X I used the Fink software package. On Linux I used yum.

To automatically detect and rotate to the proper orientation, run this on the command line (OS X Terminal):

# jhead -autorot *

Easy and fast. I ran this on all the images I have taken with my new digicams, it only took a few minutes to run thru a few thousand photos.