November 2005 Archives

Was visiting my mom and dad yesterday. My brother was in town, flashing pictures of his baby (which I apparently do not have permission to publish on the Internet), and so it was a chance for the family to get together for a cozy meal. At Mongolian Grill. OK, the 'Grill' was a bit of a last minute thing, and it was my parents' first time there, so the learning curve was a little high, but we all enjoyed it. Nothing really worth blogging about.

What was worth blogging about was the discovery of an X-tian fish on my mom's car when I pulled into the driveway. I'm beginning to think she's rebelling against my (lack of) faith.

My dad told me not to stir anything up, citing that she found religion later in life, and now wants to get in on some of the stuff she may have missed when she was younger. I pointed out that the idea of the Darwin fish was to dilute the meaning of the X-tian fish, which it has done admirably. Dad said that maybe her fish was an attempt to dilute my fish, specifically. I begged to differ.

All the same, I remembered how my father did a more than adequate job of sheltering us from religion when we were growing up, so I was indebted to him. No mention of the fish came out, except these cewl pictures.

Just finished up Coupland's "Hey Nostradamus!". A clever story with an innovative narrative style. However, the initial premise is a little hard to believe, so it took me a while to get into it seriously. Not that a high school massacre couldn't happen in Canada, but it seems to be such a remote tragedy that perhaps Coupland is banking on our growing and collaborative sense of doom -- that comes from watching too many American television news channels. I like to think that I don't subscribe to Michael Moore's idyllic vision of Canada, but let's just say I'm optimistic about the Canadian people -- that we at least try to rise above the horrors we hear about so often from south of the border. We are more skeptical about our society, and how our media portrays it. We seem to know that the American media is as insanely right-wing as our own media is left-wing. We make it a point to pick on Conservatives and Republicans, although we know that our own thoughs and policies can run conservative. We (at times) seem vehemently anti-American, though we basically all stand for the same things -- liberal Canadians identify with at least half of the American population.

I think Coupland's latched on to that -- the sense of a "oneness" of our two countries. We derive most of our modern culture from the same sources, and, aside from some minor, almost imperceptible idiosyncrasies, Americans and Canadians in the same room would be indistinguishable from each other. I think that's why he makes the Canadian character in "Generation X" the crazy, chaotic one -- it's almost the opposite of how most Canadians would have it, if they were writing the story.

Well, I couldn't really get this to work. Oh, it worked fine if all the circumstances were right, but for what I wanted it to do, the plugin's not yet ready. After running a few tests with the MTGoogleMaps plugin, I've determined two main problems.

The first problem is with getting the plugin code to render properly when some text (such as an address) is inserted somewhere in the blog post. My thinking is that if I want to show a map, I'll put in an address, and a map will render somewhere in the posting. If I don't put an address in, there is no map (and there is no big blank space where a map would render). So I was trying to find a way to place it within the <MTEntryIfExtended> tags. The problem is getting around the Catch-22 of Movable Type -- that the <MTEntryIfExtended> tag relies on the existence on the <MTEntryMore> string, which only exists if something is placed in the extended entry field. The MTGoogleMaps plugin dynamically looks in a field (i.e. in the extended field) for an address, so it would be using the contents of the <MTEntryMore> to help it render the map. At one point, all my posts were trying to render a map, but only one had anything that could be dynamically generated by the plugin.

If I don't put anything in the extended field, then no problem.

So I tried hardcoding the address into the MTGoogleMaps code, and using "foo" in the extended entry field. This worked fine for a quick functionality test, and I figured I could work out the details later, as long as the plugin worked as expected.

Which brings me to the second big problem in functionality, and it was a little bit of a problem with the MTGoogleMaps code, and more than a little to do with the way it translates addresses into coordinates. MTGoogleMaps uses Geocoder.us to translate the addresses into map coordinates. It does this via an RPC post to Geocoder's website, but their database is a little sketchy, and doesn't have many large American cities in it. For example, the sample address provided with the MTGoogleMaps works fine:

http://rpc.geocoder.us/service/rest?address=123 Main St. New York, NY 10001

But it won't render any Canadian addresses -- making the whole thing useless for us bloggers north of the border. In fact, instead of a map, I get a big blank spot on my page, and this showing up in my page source:

...
map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(/var/www/htdocs/blogzucker/index.html, ), 4);
...

Canadian cities are one thing, but it needs to be able to at least render US cities properly. Sure, Main St. New York is fine, but some addresses in San Francisco won't render any better than Canadian ones. I just get a "couldn't find this address! sorry" message from the Geocoder.us website.

Which is where the MTGoogleMaps code is hitting a wall. It's not responding very gracefully to the literal text string of "couldn't find this address! sorry".

I thought for a second that I might be able to use Geocoder.ca instead, but it uses an entirely different syntax in its API, and doesn't even return a string value when you send a call -- you just get their main page with the address form pre-populated. The other geocoding sites all use their own syntax, so unless I'm going to rewrite the way the plugin parses responses and sends queries, I can call it quits for now.

I sent my feedback to Nick, the plugin's author, and he's adding in some simple error checking that will catch any "couldn't find this address! sorry" errors from Geocoder.us. He's also going to check out some international geocoding searches, but I don't expect Canada to be on the top of anyone's list.

It will be neat if I can get this to work with my main blog. My plan was to put maps in whenever I'm posting from away, sort of a travel blog with maps.

Last night I was running around the office with my camera, snapping up pictures of the new place. Here's a few:

The rad new dev lounge. Still need some posters on the walls to make it seem more homey:

We did a nice cabling job in the server room, and spent extra money to find some 1' cables:

The lunch room is now bigger than a telephone booth. I hated to have to shove over so that someone could use the phone:

The cubicles look exactly the same, only now there's 4 workstations in a pod instead of 2:

Chilling at 1842 this morning. Literally chilling -- it's -10 outside, and there are whiteout conditions on King St. I parked on Princess, beside the Jane Bond, and couldn't even see King St. from my car. I'll upload a picture in a little while. Guess I'd better finish up with the vapour barrier in the studio loft. I may also need a bigger heater.

Really enjoying this high-speed internet in 1842. I've made some tweaks to the NetBook, so I can now post MissingLinks entries from this browser. The IE browser on this device is pretty crappy, and isn't able to do a lot of simple things, such as right-click on an image, or reload a page properly, or even copy a link embedded in a page. But it does, at least, support JavaScript, etc., so can get some things to work if I play around a bit.

Went to Classic Indian last night for some Veggie Madras and some Cauliflower Manchoorian (sic). Then did a little cosmic bowling at Frederick Lanes. Heh. I still don't understand how listening to loud Bon Jovi and Britney Spears under a blacklight is anyone's definition of "cosmic". I'll have to come back when I'm stoned; maybe it will make sense then.

Hey, way to go Sony! Not only did you implement a faulty and easily circumvented anti-piracy mechanism on CDs with the weak pretense of supporting artists' rights, but you stole open-sourced (GPL) code to do it. *And* it infects users' machines with a virus! Whooo! Keep up the good work!

I'm at the Tim Hortons at Davenport and Northfield. I've got a Maple Dip and a medium black coffee. Reading through a discarded copy of "The Record", or whatever's left of it, which includes the classifieds, the business section, and the local news, plus some advertising insert. There's nothing interesting in any of them, unless you're looking for a Mac PowerPC G3 for $225. Thought I'd try a couple of different coffee places around town for a change, though I seem to remember why I don't usually hang out at Timmies in the morning. Had something to do with the huge lineups, and the door opening and closing constantly, letting the cold air in. Currently, the lineup stands at 15 people, all of them looking for some of that liquid gold that's available here. I'm not normally one to sing the praises of the coffee at these places, but it's so ubiquitous, so familiar. It's where you go if you want a cup of coffee. Lowercase "c" coffee, of course.

People keep looking at me strangely, too, so I'm going to put the NetBook away and start reading (I know, I know... who reads at a Tim Hortons?).

Waiting for a DRAC on a Chinese server to refresh itself so I can get at the hard drive configuration utility and rebuild a RAID0 array. These things are pretty amazing -- they allow you to mount a local CDROM or floppy as if they were physically on the machine itself, which means I don't have to fly to China to reboot a machine periodically (actually, it might be fun to do that at least once, if the company was paying for it). Yes, amazing ... if you can get past the agonizing latency of the remote console. You can literally tap a key, then go get coffee -- from the far end of the building, and return before it will have registered.

Needless to say, I'm surfing the web right now, catching up on the other blogs I read from time to time. Here's a neat survey from newhumanist.org.uk I found on Anne's Anti-Quackery & Science Blog

Haymaker

You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.

You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.

Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

R and I were buying booze for a friend's birthday over the weekend, and we came up with a bit of an epiphany with respect to derogatory racial/cultural stereotypes: I wandered into the scotch section, and stood transfixed for a number of minutes, intent on buying a new bottle of scotch (incidentally, there's a Johnny Walker "Green" Label now). I kept wanting to buy a bottle of 15yr old or better, but kept lamenting over how much more affordable the 10yr old scotches were. R watched for a few minutes, and patiently listened to my plight, about how 10yr old scotch tasted terrible, but that the 18yr old Glenfiddich was probably delicious -- a veritable nectar of the gods. R then giggled to herself and speculated that true Scotsmen probably never tasted good scotch because they (Scotsmen) are inherently cheap thrifty. Really, they should sell fine scotch in smaller bottles, so that the true Scotsmen can get some. They'll try it out, and complain a bit about how little you get for your money. They'll drink about half of it, then add a little water, and maybe serve it to their friends.

This came up again this morning, when she saw the big block of Black Diamond cheese in the fridge. I pointed out that I bought it last night, figuring we'd been buying so many small blocks of good cheese -- that I should buy a big block of cheap cheese to help make the good stuff last longer. This really got her laughing.

Thinking of doing some more serious writing again; this happens once or twice a year, and normally I do nothing about it, except perhaps watching a movie or something. It doesn't help that the movie I chose to watch was "Barton Fink". Or perhaps it did help a little. Writing from the soul just doesn't seem to be a popular theme in modern literature -- maybe in Canadian literature, but I'm trying to be serious here. OK ... it's true: I'm never serious about anything. People say that's one of my charms.

Anyway, when the urge to write hits me, I often try scribbling some notes down on any available piece of paper, or the nearest NetBook within my reach. I've never gone very far with anything, though I've written about 10 short stories since high school, a couple of chapters for a novel, half a screenplay, and one or two single-act plays (if you can call them that). Now, I've gotten it in my head that I can write an actual novel. Don't worry ... it will pass soon enough, and I'll be back to doing things with computers in no time.

But strangely, it wasn't due to my DSL connection. My OpenBSD server's network interface became foobarred, and I ended up rebooting the darn thing just to get it back online. Everything seems OK now.

Spent the day mucking around on insulating the overhead door (I'm trying not to use the word "garage" in reference to my studio project -- thinking positively). My main problem was I wanted to use up the leftover Roxul mineral wool, and cover it up with foil-coated bubble wrap and metal tape. Unfortunately, mineral wool is really heavy, and so is the bubble wrap, so needless to say, when I opened the door up, all the insulation fell out. I decided to use some exterior carpet tape and some pop-rivets, and the thing's holding quite well now. Still looks a little spacey, what with the metallic bubble wrap ... but hey. The loft ceiling will also be covered with a foil-covered vapour barrier, and eventually, so will the walls. I think the whole thing's going to look like a good Star Trek set. Actually, the foil has a great side-effect of letting more light into the loft, so it's quite nice up there right now. There's only a few more spots left without insulation, and I'll get them covered up in the next couple of days or so, and then we're done -- all insulated for the winter.

OK, so this may not solve the problem with carbon monoxide emissions, and while it may not solve the world's fuel problems, this is probably the coolest looking scooter I've ever seen. It is also better for the environment than the Maxima, no doubt, and certainly costs less to drive (at least in the non-winter months).

You can get them at http://www.tngscooters.com, but I haven't yet found any place in Canada that sells them. These guys apparently make great affordable scooters that don't look like Vespas. Now that I'm starting to see more and more Vespas on the city streets, I keep thinking that they, like the Smart Cars, are the latest cool thing. It's just that Vespas look so silly sometimes. At least with the Baja scooters, I can feel a little more macho -- a little more Mad Max -- without having to move to a motorcyle. Then it's a whole different lifestyle; I have to buy different clothes, and get a new license, etc.

Figured I'd follow the trend in making the site a little more grown up (this despite having a blog with weird links in it). I also worked a bit on integrating the scode security stuff into the comment posting mechanism. Kinda flakey, it was. Now it should be a bit better.

It's still not quite yet where I want it to be, and I still have to do all my static pages (which look crazy with the new stylesheet in place -- yikes!!). The whole thing will be a little while yet.

I've been testing out Movable Type 3.2's new StyleCatcher plugin, which allows you to change styles at the drop of a hat. Sounds like an interesting prospect, but I've previously half embedded the styles in the web page itself, and half used a stylesheet (I know, my bad), and the results with StyleCatcher are horrible. So I'm trying out some new page templates, and they seem to work well with the new stylesheet. I may leave this for a couple of days, tweaking it and refining it, until I've got something I like. It's a bit more grown-up looking, and a bit less garish than my previous page -- that's why I hesitate so. I enjoyed the previous garishness. Made it seem more fun.

I don't know. I do like the new colours a little better, and putting my car in the banner is still pretty immature of me. What do you think?

I don't usually post cartoons, but thought this one might be appropriate, what with the debate over ID heating up, and the recent Kansas decision to allow "criticisms of evolution" to be discussed in their schools. One thing was that the key ID guy, Michael Behe, redefined the definition of "theory" to include just about any pseudo-science, like astrology.

I figured it was time to take the plunge. I bought MovableType 3.2, and got it installed on my webserver. I kind of feels nice to be using software that I paid for (or, more specifically, it feels nice to finally have software worth buying). I buy software all the time, but I never quite feel that it's worth the money being paid (read: Win-dows). The new MT also has a better integration with most of the new plugins available, and it's more robust with respect to stylesheets, et cetera. I'm currently looking at this Google Maps plugin for MT, known as MTGoogleMaps, or something equally descriptive. I'll be testing it over the next little while, and see if I can come up with a way to make it work with my blog.

This upgrade is also a good excuse to get me to fix some of the bad stylesheet stuff on my site, and to update its look a bit. Rounded corners are all the rage, these days.

I no good writing the morning.

(sigh) I feel like I'm not able to do any writing this morning -- neither physically capable of typing on this little NetBook, nor mentally capable at stringing two words together. I was desperately needing coffee (and, as usual, didn't feel like making any at home), so I drove over to 1842 for a double espresso (yesterday morning, I was reading at Starbucks ... I got to use my Starbucks gift card for the first time). The noise caused by the cat rubbing her plastic headcone on the wall kept waking me up last night. At least my pager wasn't going off every 15 minutes.

It's raining a whole lot this morning. The view from the window shows a drenched Princess St., with a small river flowing downhill towards King. I think I just saw some lightning behind the heavy clouds. My car is parked just in front of Zen Gardens, the vegetarian Asian restaurant. The restaurant fronts onto King St., but it's got a bright jade-coloured side entrance on Princess. I never see anyone in the windows of the side entrance, but in the previous restaurant incarnation, that room was a jazz lounge of some sort. Zen's got some good food, and they recently changed their menus -- prices went up a little, and you can no longer get sushi there.

It occurs to me, as the rain picks up again, that I haven't had to wash my car all summer. It could do with a vacuum, though. Also, I want to get the dent in the back fixed up, and clean off the residue of that Linux bumper sticker that fell off earlier this year. The car's got a leaky gasket at the back of the engine, but no oil's dripped out yet. That's going to cost a lot when it finally breaks. There's a lot that needs fixing on the car, but there's a lot that's already been done to it. One of the most useful things I've ever bought for the car was the Thule roof rack. I may not get my bike on it very often, but I've used the rack for moving plywood, doors, windows, and construction waste for the garage. It's a necessity if you want to take a canoe up to Algonquin, and I even helped move a friend's couch with it. I think my next car will be a truck. Something good on gas, but with a lot of storage. Maybe a hybrid pickup, or something. Hrmmm. Maybe not.

Spent the better part of my entire weekend at work. My company's moved their entire operation to another location. It began Thursday evening, and I was pretty much involved from day one in the planning stage. We took turns in the server room, since everyone had a different specialty; one would work on the routers and smart hubs, one would work on the firewall, one would run the cables, and one would setup the workstations and coordinate with the contractors. I did a little of everything, including pulling spent power supplies out of dead servers and digging replacements out of the moving crates. I was thinking of getting a few pictures up of the new server room. It's still a little messy, and a bit of a cabling nightmare -- we bought 25' cables, thinking that we'd need the extra length to run across the room and up the rack, but we had a good 5-10 extra feet per cable, resulting in several large bundles. We used a lot of velcro to keep the beast in check.

I'm probably going to head into work a little earlier today just to put out a few fires. Overall, I clocked about 23 hours. That includes an emergency page from my Dreaded Customer's servers on Saturday morning.

Got a server outage this morning, so I've been up since 5:30. There's not much I can do remotely, so I'm kind of just making sure that everyone who needs to be notified is notified.

Taking pictures of the cat while I'm sitting here. She's doing fine -- a little itchy, perhaps, but fine, nonetheless. Her eye is looking better (the flash has got her squinting), and the stitches don't look infected at all.

Hey, the cat's OK! Pretty routine surgery, or so they say. She came out of it a little groggy, but otherwise unharmed, and with a big red tangle of stitches under her eye. She looks great. R can't look at her for long without getting all woozy, but I think everything's great.

One thing though. I had a weird dream about sitting on an idling bus forever, and woke up to see China sitting on my chest, with the megaphone of a collar pointed right at my face.

Originally uploaded by Zuckervati.

I was up a little early this morning. Had to take China (the white cat who lives with me) to the vet for some cat plastic surgery. Her nose was a little too big, and if she wants to get anywhere in the modeling business, she's got to have a cute little nose, like those cats on the toilet paper ads. Actually, it was her left eye we were concerned about; she got into a fight with the other cat (Athena, the black one), and got a cut on her eyelid, which caused the eyelashes to bend inward to her cornea. It was getting regularly infected, and we were worried about the cornea getting scratched, so eventually I called the vet to arrange a little operation where they take a small chunk of skin out from below the eye. It makes the eye a little wider, so it should address the eyelash problem,and it should help even out her overall appearance -- the left eye has always been a little smaller since she was a kitten. She'd had a few eye infections in years previous, so this may actually help in the future. Also, it's kind of neat to say your cat's getting plastic surgery. If all goes well, we'll pick her up this afternoon, and she gets to wear a lampshade on her head for a couple of days.

Halloween Costume 2005
Originally uploaded by Zuckervati.

This was my Halloween costume this year at the corporate Halloween pot-luck.
No one got the reference.

Sitting at 1842 this morning, reading yesterday's copy of The Record, the insipid Kitchener newspaper, and I find an article dedicated to Mike Pegg, of Google Maps Mania fame. (sigh) I knew he was going to achieve temporary fame from his blogging endeavour, but I figured it would be short-lived -- the typical lifespan of a niche website. I'm not envious of his success, per se, just a little surprised to see him popping up in worldwide media. He's had articles in the New York Times, the Motley Fool, and he's been on a Reuters news feed for a little while now. He's just about to start some television interviews -- all because he blogs about something that people are maniacally interested in. He's an adaptive blogger -- one who picks a popular topic and starts blogging about it. There's nothing wrong with this, and if it's a topic you enjoy, then hey -- you're set. If you're establishing a business plan, then blogging about something that people are maniacally interested in -- well, it's a great idea!

I'm really not envious of his success. I've seen the number of daily hits on his website (once I watched as the number of hits reached over a thousand in an hour!). I know I wouldn't want that kind of fame. I know my webserver probably couldn't handle it. I'm also not envious of the way he picks his topics -- I'm much more interested in my way of doing things with the Missing Links page, and couldn't bring myself to list only very directed links to, say, Cronenburg film news, or Intel chip technology (neither of which is currently enrapturing the world-wide media, of course). How about George Lucas films, or iPod technology? Yup, couldn't do it. And I'm certainly not envious of his appearance in "Teh Record(sic)". I know I can get in there simply by stripping and running into the street. Yes, that 's more my style.

I think it's that I know him personally, and up until I met him, the blogging thing was kind of my thing. Oh, sure, it wasn't my exclusive domain, and I'm well aware that all my friends blog as well. I've never wanted to become a world-wide celebrity, but it was my big goal in life to become a *local* celebrity -- that, and to take a bullet for someone. I think that was my most recent revision of "My Big Goal in Life." I've always wanted to give some kind of outer meaning to my existence, through my art, my words, my thoughts, or even simply by being able to go into a restaurant and say "the usual, please," and having someone bring a plate of two over-medium eggs, brown toast, and some fried tomatoes, with a cup of black coffee. Or in 1842, a double espresso.

Ah well, I'm beginning to sound like a teen blogger again. I hope Mike does really well. I'm happy for him.

Eating dinner at the Tango Coffee Bistro in Stratford. I'm in town because of a long-delayed dentist appointment. He gave me a good going-over tonight, after 3 scheduling changes. R keeps jazzing me about going to the dentist alone, because up until today, I've gone to the dentist with K (my Ex). Hey, we both have the same dentist, and he's way the hell out in Stratford. Figured we'd save on gas by continuing to go at the same time, even though we're no longer a couple. It's no big deal. Anyway, R jokes that it's because I'm afraid of my dentist, and can't go alone. Heh. What nonsense... I mean, I may have referred to him as "the Butcher" in the past, but it's not that bad.

The Tango Bistro looks like it's trying too hard to be kitschy. There's wacky designs all over the place, and instructional dancing footprints going up the wall and onto the ceiling. By contrast, most Starbucks coffee houses seem like mortuaries. Also, they don't know how to make a panini sandwich here. I don't know who told them to put raw carrot slices (thick ones too) into a panini sandwich, but I think I hurt my teeth -- just after coming from "the Butcher". The panini came with a bowl of creamy potato soup. It's salty and delicious, but there's no texture to it ... it's a little too creamy. I was expecting big (or even little) chunks of potato in it. It came with a nice couple of bread pieces. They're too small to call "slices", and are little more than crusts, really, but they're also tasty. I'm drinking a Creemore Springs. It seems to go with the meal. Some kind of upbeat "new country" tune is playing. I was thinking it was more like what you'd call bluegrass, but it's bordering on the kind of jazzy fluff you'd hear introducing a cooking show on the Food Network. It's really bugging me.

I was hoping to get in to Balzac's for a coffee, and may yet. There's nothing there for eating, save sweet desserts. I might get something to go with a nice strong Balzac's espresso cup -- best coffee ever. Really.