Pretty awesome geek decorations here. Bacon suncatchers, caffeine molecules done in stained glass. The holiday season is coming up, so now you can shop for that nerd in your life.
Assembled using the Tiffany copper foil method. Solder finish is polished black patina. Comes with ring attached, ready for hanging. Measures approx. 3.5" (9.5cm) long and 1" (2.5cm) wide.
I dunno. I put this video up in protest. I think this makes him look kind of badass and cool.
Now, if only we could get the original cast from the 1951 film to watch it.
Or rather, Everything Is A Remix. A cool video showing many of the influences of The Matrix.
Everything Is A Remix: THE MATRIX from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.
The silent killer lurks in the shade of the computer desk, waiting patiently for its prey.
It's a little quantum experiment I've been working on.
In August, we experienced the magic that is Alinea in Chicago. Thanks to someone on YouTube, you can see what the final dessert looked like during preparation.
I recently received a couple of boxes of PX 70 Color Shade from The Impossible Project's online store. They've recently started making instant film for Polaroid cameras, and are redoing the entire formula from scratch (or something like that).
This PX 70 is their first attempt at making a colour film, and I've made some comparisons against some expired 600 film I had sitting at the back of the fridge.
In each case, the expired 600 film was shot with a Polaroid Sun 600 LMS in outdoor conditions. The PX 70 is film designed for an SX-70 Land camera, and that's what I used, in mixed indoor/outdoor situations.
The image on the left is the expired 600 film, the right is the PX 70 Color Shade film.
They've got a ways to go yet, but there is indeed colour in the pictures; a very vintage-looking washed colour. Impossible Project stated very clearly that this is an experimental film, and it's very light sensitive, especially within the first few hours of being exposed. So, I took care and ejected the images straight into the film box, where they stayed overnight.
Honestly, I'm more impressed with the performance of the so-called expired 600 film. The outdoor pictures look awesome.
Some other notes: A blue caustic paste leaked out of two of the pictures. I've had this happen before with regular Polaroid film, so I just cleaned it up.
The images of the images were taken from my BlackBerry Bold 9700.
... apparently. Well, this is good news. I'm a big fan of Cory.
The house looks nice - Uploaded by Zuckervati.
Yikes. A little up-close and personal, no? Google Street View now has
maps of 15 cities in Canada, and KW is one of them.
Why, yes, Vigilant Assassination is my middle name.
Tech dudes - Uploaded by Zuckervati.
These are some geeks I know in the high-tech KW-Cambridge triangle. We're getting drunk at a tech party.
Was just testing an old Flickr blog update mechanism I set up a couple of years back. Still working. I took the picture with my new Blackberry device to replace the old, worn-out 8800.
Oh, it was a great device: lasted forever on a battery charge, and I must have dropped it a dozen times. But it was time to upgrade, and why not get something everyone is talking about. Sure the reviews are not all good (in fact, I had a hard time trying to find any really good reviews), but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
So far, the touchscreen just takes a bit of getting used to, and with the updated firmware, most of the software problems are minimized. The camera is really nice (3.2MP) and supports geotagging. Throw in a 4GB micro-SD card, and you can watch movies or take a billion pictures.
Hopefully I'll be able to blog with some little snippets and images from wherever I am.
Tim's Coffee on Friday - Uploaded by Zuckervati.
The lateness of this post is likely a little misleading. We finally got the server problems sorted out last week, and I took a 5 day mini-vacation in Montreal (actually 4 days, and I kind of screwed around on Tuesday). Apparently my MySQL-foo is pretty spot-on, and I was able to restore 10 jigabytes of data to to a backup server from our backup server. We're now rebuilding the failed DB server, which looks more and more as if its LSI Logic RAID card simply reset at some point, causing a massive RAID failure. Luckily, we do nightly backups.
However, the version of mysqldump had a bug in it, whereby it exported the system database, information_schema, along with our own db. This system database can't be imported, so the whole restore process kept failing. The only solution was to edit the db backup (which was, as I said, 10 jigabytes, making it impossible to open in a conventional editor), so we used a line editor to remove the first x lines of the backup. This worked, but it then took about 8-10 hours to re-import the data and only after upgrading the MySQL server and other required packages.
So, the server was offline for a total of 3 business days, and two of those days were spent trying to recover the server without destroying the data onboard. Turns out our time was better spent finding a new (if temporary) home for the data.
Montreal was fun.
I'm sitting at home, cup of coffee in hand, working on a Sunday. I've recently been having problems (a lot of them) with one of our servers. Three big problems, really...
There was a programming glitch, which set about 90% of our licenses to expire on the first of January, a bone-headed move which neither I, nor anyone else realized would cause big problems on New Year's Eve. So, with 2 hours sleep, and a wicked headache, I worked feverishly to restore licenses to most of my customers, hopefully without them even noticing. Many of them noticed.
Within 2 days of the first event, we had one of our domain names expire. This was not my fault, as our domain names are now maintained by another department -- a department, which, when questioned, said that all domains were properly re-registered. Cool. Not my fault, except that in order to resolve the aforementioned server, one needed this particular domain. So, now with about two dozen or so customers trying to relicense their systems, and no access to my server, more bad things happened. After the other department admitted that they had not, in fact, re-registered the domain, it fell back on us to get it registered using someone's personal credit card.
Now, a week later, this same server's gone dark. I'm attempting a remote reboot of it, but I'm not overly optimistic about it.
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Create your own Brock Samson license to kill