Category: computing

I’m sure that if you pay attention to such things, you know that AOL laid a lot of people off today. I’ve been through several (I think this is my sixth or seventh, I can’t keep them straight now). They’re no fun, and it always feels like people have died when I hear they’ve been laid off. I still have a job. Most of my friends still have jobs, but some of them don’t. For those that don’t, I don’t know what that feels like and I hope I never do.

No one feels much like working right now, but I’m working anyway. Through my cold and running nose, I’m plugging along writing more Java, trying to make things speedy and happy and light. Inside, I don’t feel like any of those things. In fact, the worst part about this is that I’m afraid I’m not feeling much of anything. I’ve been through so many of these that it’s almost routine. The rumors start a week or so before they happen, then there’s quiet as people wait for that knock. There are constant IM’s asking if I know anything, and me asking the same. Then, it starts. People drop off Buddy Lists. IM’s start… “They got X who sits next to me. He’s crying,” and “I guess this is my last day… know anyone who’s hiring?” If they’re lucky, they get to send a good-bye e-mail that tries to sum up years of work, relationships and feelings in the fifteen minutes before their e-mail address is ::poof:: gone and they’re gone along with it. And here I sit, feeling guilty for still having a job, and trying not to think about the imminent re-orgs I know are coming. All the while, I keep working. I keep doing the same thing I’ve done since I got here, through a dozen re-orgs, a new position in a new groups and now a half-dozen layoffs. I’m all alone in my little office… typing.

I’ve been visiting the site for a few weeks for the pictures, but wow, the Amelie Effect just posted at a.lifeuncommon.org is just the coolest! It makes the colors really pop out in an image. Cool stuff. If you’ve got PhotoShop 7, definitely check it out. She has some other cool unsharpitating (yes, i made it up) actions you can hoark as well.

Remind me to tell you about The Brotherhood of the Wolf before I forget all about it. Work is rabid this week as I try to do everything in the world before we leave for Tucson on Saturday.

Apparently, I’m not as dumb as I thought I was. I’ve been working on this photo blog because keeping them all on Max’s page just isn’t working. I wanted an easy way to create Movable Type export files from PhotoShop exported web galleries. Sounds reasonale enough, right? Since I’m doing all this on my Powerbook, I figured I could do it with a shell script. I’ve been procrastinating since I didn’t really want to deal with it. Here’s where the dumbitude comes in. I went poking around the /usr/bin directory and… TA-DA!!! I see tclsh and the light goes on. Duh. I know Tcl. I know Tcl better than most . So, last night I do a quick and ugly script that rips JPG’s from a directory and creates the export file; worked like a charm. Tonight, I created a holding directory where I can put all the web galleries. The new script reads in the directories, uses the directory name as the category, then reads all the images in the images directory and creates the entries. Then, it copies the images and thumbnails into two separate directories to make them easier to copy and returns the export file (which I pipe to a new file which contains aaaa-aaaall the entries). Smooth, huh? You wanna see it? Well, OK, if you really wanna, here it is. I may clean it up and put sweet happy comments in it, but it works.

The network was down here at work for about half an hour. It’s amazing how connected I have to be in order to do my job. Everything I do here entails connecting to some external system, getting data, formatting it and then spitting it out somewhere else. When the connection is broken, there’s nothing to do but sit and wait.

Before the network went down, I installed Webmin on the uberBox (Dual-Xeon Linux Monster). I have to say that I’m extremely impressed with its features and ease-of-use. It was a cinch to install (rpm –install webmin*.rpm), run and connect to. The best part is the MySQL admin tool, because MySQL pretty much sucks when it comes to providing any usable admin interface. With MySQL up and running, a db created and users set up, my pal Al can go create cool Perl-based calendars and stuff without having to use AOLserver’s Tcl interface that we have set up for Postgres (he don’t like Tcl so much).

Yes, this is a geeky ramble, but what else am I going to do? The network’s down and I’m stuck here staring at code that has nothing to do.

While we wait, let’s talk about RedHat 8, shall we? Guys, what happened? RedHat 7.3 was the coolest, most stable Linux distro I’d ever had the pleasure to use (yes, even more stable than when I had YellowDog on my Powerbook. I had high hopes for 8.0. I’d heard great things from beta testers and the press. As soon as it was released, I hopped on an FTP mirror, downloaded and burned it and installed it. The installation went fine. Booting up went fine, and then the problems began. While it certainly is pretty, it’s really unstable for me. Even simple commands like ls take an inordinate amount of time on directories that don’t have a lot of files in them. The telnet server didn’t come pre-installed. There were other things missing that I can’t remember now. KDE won’t even start up. GNOME works, but it’s almost too pretty. It won’t work correctly when I choose the mouse I actually have (not a weird one either, a regular old PS/2 Intellimouse), and I had to switch back to the regular 2-button profile. No scroll wheel!! How will I get anything done?!!

Ok, enough of that. I apologize for this post. It would have been about the election, but I’m still too angry about all of it to talk about it here.

You know, if you have a Postgres database with over 500k records that you delete and reinsert on a weekly basis, that you should run vacuum and reindex on it frequently? See, I’m not a database administrator. I’m not even a system administrator, but I play one on TV.

Sometimes, I’m such a user. I don’t care how things work, just that they do. I’ve been happy with the way Postgres works up until now. I don’t have to mess with it, I just do my inserts, updates and deletes and it’s always just worked. Now, it’s not working like I need it to, and it’s bugging me. So, I’m doing the unthinkable and messing with configuration options, like the amount of memory used per select, and sort and that kind of thing (because I figured, hey, I’m selecting a ton of things at once and I have a ton of memory, so let’s use it instead of the hard drive!). We’ll see what happens.

So, someone’s build a beautiful photolog that’s pretty much exactly what I want to do but just haven’t had time to work on yet. Maybe this weekend… hahahahaha… sure.

Sigur Ros concert report should be up around lunchtime.

I just finished moving from the lovely flat Berkeley DB to MySQL for Movable Type. I’m not sure what that will buy me, but hey, it gave me something to do.

We’re going to a concert tomorrow night! Sigur Ros is playing downtown tomorrow night and Jen and I are taking the “kids” (Steve and Heather) while mom watches Max. It should be entertaining. A full report sometime on Tuesday.

I’ve been thinking about this big redesign I’m working on for this site, and I think black is going to make a big comeback. I used to be a huuuu-uuuuge fan of black pages, but I’ve been ignoring it for a couple years and I think it’s time to give it another shot. I’ll still keep black text on a white background, but I think blapck is the way to go… keep your eyes peeled for the new design (ok, don’t forget to blink, it may be a while).

You know, I love designers. They give me neat desktop wallpaper (my collection is the envy of everyone who sees it), great ideas and lots of funny rules to laugh at. I’ve now worked at AOL for seven and a half years and dealt with visual designers for almost four, and respect what they do. Most of their rules are valid, but they sure do make me laugh. I love the way Jeffrey Zeldman gets feisty about fonts and colors, and the folks at k10k fight about flash vs. html. Why am I talking about them? Well, because I realized I’m not one of them. I am good at what I’m good at, and it’s not what they’re good at. I am really good at interpretting designs into tight HTML and producing functionality (ewww, hate that word) from their requirements. But, I’m at a loss for actually designing things. I think if there were a category for “design critic”, I could be that. I can spot design flaws, but how to fix them is beyond me. I can offer suggestions, but that’s only because I have a good memory and remember how a good designer solved a similar problem in the past.

So, if you come here looking for design advice, you won’t get much. If you want to know how to build a really cool search box using left floated divs, I’m probably your guy.

It’s paint with mucous day at Chez Lawver! Max has had a cold for about 3 days, Jen for 2, and now me. We’re all irritable, unpleasant and chock-full of mucous in our various snot-containing body cavities. We’re tired… but achey enough that a nap doesn’t seem possible.

I was going to send myself something to work on while watching TV, but my machine crashed while trying to zip it all up and I didn’t get around to it. How stupid is that? Now, I’m trying to work on the big redesign of this site, but it’s not the same. At work, I have this challenge, and it’s driving me nuts. It came from people who I don’t think understand what it will take to get it done, and even if I do it, I’m not sure that they’ll get how monumental the accomplishment is. Will I tell you what it is? Probably, if I pull it off.

Did you know that almost no one still uses Netscape 4.x? Anyone who still does has (hopefully) come to the realization that no one cares about the three of them and that sites will look really goofy for them. This is very good news for me. No more compensatiing for old, evil browsers (I will explain the “evil” in a minute) that don’t understand the gorgeousness that is CSS1 and 2, divs, spans and other neat-o things. Why is Netscape 4.x evil? It wasn’t evil when it came out. It was great when it first came out. I used it religiously for years. That last word contains the evil: years. It didn’t keep up with Internet Exploiter. It was fat and happy and didn’t bother keeping up, and people just kept right on using it, and those of us who build sites (and I do mean sites, if I had to list all of the thousands of pages I’ve built over the years, I just couldn’t) had to compensate by building these ugly table layouts with spacer gifs and wacky background images. No longer!! I have shuffled off my regret for those poor people using 4.x. Get with the times! You have alternatives of many flavors. Use Netscape 7, Mozilla, Phoenix, Chimera, Opera… all of which do edible jobs of supporting CSS and neat-o clean pages (in some cases, better than IE).

Ok, sorry, that was another rant. I don’t know what’s gotten in to me. I just can’t help it.