Tag Archives: geek

High-Maintenance?

In addition to getting back to a more regular flow at work today, I had some blog-slash-site-related bid’niss I wanted to take of– namely, figure out what was going wrong that I couldn’t access my email from work (was it a problem with my server, my connection at work, my ISP, my god, WHAT???), and also runs some tests on my various WordPress plugins, with a goal of migrating to WP 2.7 (the newest version) sooner than later.

In the course of these efforts, I discovered a few things that it turns out I was excessively concerned with a couple items:

  1. The email problem was very simple– the extension I’ve been using in Firefox to check the mail is broken.  I can just check it with something else instead.
  2. The two plugins that are holding me back from the upgrade have not updated yet.  One of them probably won’t for a while.  But I should try to remember: the site will let me know when they do (!!).
  3. I briefly threw myself into a hissy when tried to subscribe to my podcast again using Songbird.  It doesn’t really work in Songbird.  However, right after I spent the time downloading and installing iTunes on my machine at work, I was reminded that I already tested iTunes as an option in a virtual machine at home, so I could, for the love of God, CALM DOWN ABOUT THE PODCAST PLUGIN ALREADY.

Anything you’re way too wound up about today?

Busted Stuff

Kinda funny that it was just last week when I wrote about how satisfied I’ve been with WordPress this year, then over the last couple days, I’ve been frustrated with upgrading to version 2.7.

I should clarify: the software itself works great.  The issues that I’m having are strictly related to plugins that I’m using.  I suppose certain compatibility and seamless upgrading are the trade-offs you have to make when you start using a lot of 3rd-party extensions.  I was willing to roll with the upgrade and let one of my less oft-used plugins remain broken until it’s updated, but I’ve discovered I actually have 2 ((twitter tools and the DB backup plugin)) that aren’t working quite right, so I rolled back to WordPress 2.6.5 for now ((This new footnote plugin I installed seems to work fine, though.)).  Not that it matters much to you, Dear Reader, as everything appears exactly the same on your end.  (But the blog is sort of for my notes, too.)

At work, I was supposed to have a “day off” from seeing students today, but one of my colleagues called in, so I’m filling the gap.  Might prevent me from getting the newest podcast (which we recorded over the weekend) up this afternoon, as I’d intended.  I definitely need to do that today, though, since the rest of my evenings are booked up this week.  Dave invited me to an event at EAA on Wednesday night, and Thursday is our office holiday party.

Time to get some working done…

Satisfactory

Not a bad Saturday, even if the rest of it goes to hell.

It’s a rare thing for me to set some goals of wrestling with technology and actually manage to knock them all out in less than a day.  When I got up this morning, I wanted to fix some busted plugins on the blog, maybe upgrade to WordPress 2.7, get my desktop machine with a freshly installed copy of Ubuntu 8.10 fully rokkin with all my favorite software, and also make that second display work just like anyone could expect on Windows.

Finished everything by about noon and still had plenty of time to do some prep for this evening’s podcast, AND create an “album cover” for the Last 80’s Rewind show.

Carry on, and make good on your Saturday…

Swallow It

In case anyone was curious, I thought I would offer an update on the issues I was having recently with a mandated switch to web-based mail at work.  To sum up: it means I have to give up Thunderbird as my mail client, and also choose a new RSS delivery system.  I ended up going with the Netvibes option after I discovered an easy way to import an .opml file that had feed information.

As I play around with netvibes a little more, I’m coming to realize that it really is a powerful and flexible system for aggregating syndicated web content.  I was previously using the bare minimum of options, and just checking out a few of the other possibilities helped me to think through still MORE content I could move to this page (beyond my RSS feeds).

If I discover anything exceptionally fantastical or noteworthy, I’ll probably let you know (even if you haven’t asked, because that’s what blogging is about).

Just In Case You Missed It and Other Holiday Items

Howdy.  Got a lot of good “workin” done for a change today, so I have to be quick on the bloggeration front.

Wanted to put a post out here to make anyone digesting soloshootsfirst via RSS that there is news on my New Year’s Eve plans, and a special page on the site dedicated to it.  Some of the plans are still in flux, but there definitely WILL be a party, in a specific place (or two), at [a] specific time(s), and this is one of my favorite things: really easy for visitors to the site to post comments on the page for all to see in relation to the party.  So if you have thoughts, ideas, or feedback, feel free.

That’s the last mention I’ll have of the party in the blog itself until the day gets much much closer…

In case you are looking for some gift suggestions for me during the holiday season (and it’s just a coincidence that this is brought up after the birthday shindig), there’s a page for that, too.  I will be updating it periodically if I get other ideas, so it may be worth checking more than once.

What else ya got?  Schrubbe pointed me to a post yesterday about how Caprica is getting the green light on the SciFi channel.  Seems like there’s some potential there.  But mostly it makes me think about how season 4b of BSG is going to be starting on January 16.  Who wants to have a catch-up watch party in advance?  After the new year, maybe?

OK, half an hour to go; better do something…

Eat It

I find myself in a quandry as my place of employment changes over to a completely web-based email and calendaring system.  For about 4 or 5 years now, I have used my email client (either Outlook or Thunderbird) as my RSS aggregator as well.  I’ve been quite happy with this setup, because I like having browser windows open for Internetting, not really for mail, or word processing, or all the other crazy crap that seems to only be in “the cloud” these days.  In my mind, the beauty of RSS was that is could take the Internet and deliver it to me like mail.

One other issue that I have to admit has started to crop up in Thunderbird is that, since I read feeds in a few different places, I end up with repeats of “new” content, or subscriptions that are out of sync.  So, even though I could probably just stick with Thunderbird and use it only as a feed reader (and I might), I am entertaining other options.  Here are a few of the things that I’d like:

  • I want a reader that I don’t have to pay much attention to. I’m gathering the feeds because I want my cage rattled when there’s something to read.  Even if I’ve gathered a number of feeds in one spot (to avoid traveling to all those sites), it’s still not worth it to me if I have to actively go and look at that page.  So, I need a fairly concrete and active alert system.
  • Which items are new should be completely obvious. This might seem like a “duh” request, but I note it largely due to the RSS functionality built in to Firefox, which, while simple to use, doesn’t have a very intuitive display scheme, and it doesn’t notify you when there are new items.
  • Syncing all my subscriptions would be nice. But it’s not necessarily required.

Soooo, the options that are immediately clear to me are the following (do you know any others?):

  • stick with Thunderbird
  • use the live bookmarks feature in Firefox exclusively
  • pull all my feeds into my netvibes page
  • start using Google Reader
  • download a completely different RSS client (fat chance)

There must be options that I’m overlooking, or things I’m not thinking of, so if you have a comment, by all means feel free to share…

A Little Geekage

If you gave up on Heroes at some point last year, let me be the first to say that I am Jack’s total lack of surprise.  I’d also like to be the first to say you should come back and have another look.  The third season has seen the introduction of more new characters, and substantial revisions of a few others.  As opposed to season two, however, this one doesn’t seem to have just been vomited up on a page and produced immediately.  They’ve done much better work giving characters a more solid foundation or offering plausible reasons for their actions.

That, and there’s some bad MFs out there this year, let me tell you.  Stories are coming into focus a little more slowly this year than last, but I don’t think that’s a negative at all.  As of today, you can get back to episode #3 on hulu, and up to the current week (#8) on NBC.com.  And there are, errrm–ways– to see #1 and #2 elsewhere on the ‘tubes.  You just need to know where to look…

My Netflix viewing has also gone hopelessly geek in the last couple weeks– I watched Firefly and then Serenity, and I’m following that up this week with the new Hulk movie and a few other sci-fi flicks.  Sometimes it’s just nice to get back to your roots…

A Non-Technical Reference for How Torrents Work

Someone mentioned to me recently that they don’t know how to use bit torrents.  When there is a common and pervasive computer technology out there that we can’t really get a grip on, asking to have it explained can make you feel like an idiot.  For the wikipedia version of what bit torrent(s) is/are, please follow this handy link.  For a shorter, less detailed explanation, continue reading.

The principle at work is this: if you download a file from one place, you can only download it as fast as that place can upload it.  If it’s a file that a lot of people want, that place is going to need a whole ton of bandwidth.  However, if a bunch of people already have a copy of the file, you could really spread out that ‘upstream’ burden by taking a little bit from this guy, and little from this other guy, etc.  For really popular torrents, you have the potential to maximize your download speed without putting a heavy strain on any one uploader.

So when you download a .torrent file, what the hell is it? Again, without too much detail, this is a file that tells your computer who to connect to to get the content that you want.  For example, I downloaded a torrent of a Slackware linux distribution last week.  The torrent file was tiny, so it only took a second to download.  By opening it with a bit torrent client, I was able to connect to others that already have the file I needed, and I downloaded it in no time.

What do you need to use torrents? Like I said, you need a client in order to open a torrent file and download what you want.  This is really simple to think about if you equate it to POP3 (not web-based) email– if someone sends you a message, that message only exists in a file on a server unless you have a client program (like Outlook) that knows how to retrieve it.  So, you need a BitTorrent client in order to open those torrents.  On Windows and Mac, I think the easiest one to get and use is from BitTorrent dot com.  My Ubuntu system uses a client called Transmission by default.  Either way, it’s going to do the same thing: download by tracking to a torrent.

How long is this going to take? The speed that you get when downloading a torrent is going to vary based on how many people are uploading (or “seeding”) the file in question.  So depending on that, and the size of your file, it could take minutes or hours or days.

Where does the file go once it’s downloaded? This is going to depend on the settings in your bittorrent client.  Personally, I like things to be dropped right on my face, so I have my set up to put all torrent downloads on the Desktop.  But it’s something you might need to adjust with your individual software…

And this is illegal, right? It’s absolutely not.  Sharing files via torrent is actually (subjectively speaking) the most efficient way to disceminate data over the web– why download something a million times from one location and clog up one corner of the Internet when you could spread the traffic around?  Granted, there is a lot of illegal content being shared via torrent (copies of movies, TV, music, and pirated software), but there’s also a lot being shared that’s 100% on the up-and-up.

Hope this was a little bit helpful.  It’s definitely NOT an exhaustive or comprehensive discussion of how torrents work, but this should be enough to get you started.  Enjoy!

Choking on My Googles

Hey, in case you were looking for something fun to do with your gmail account, try this:

  1. Forward your Gmail address to your more oft-used POP3 account
  2. Don’t logically think through how mail servers behave
  3. Set your Gmail account to check the POP3 mail from THE SAME ACCOUNT YOU’RE FORWARDING TO.
  4. Watch the mail pour in with the feedback loop you just created!!

In all seriousness, though, is anyone out there using Google Apps (formerly ‘Google Apps for your domain)?  Anything good or bad to say about that?

Weekend Update: Special Monday-Mid-Morning-Bocko Edition Without Any Political Commentary

Well that’s a mouthful.

Weekend flew by for me– Friday night, Michelle and I went over to The House On Dousman for Justin’s birthday observation.  It was a nice time; Marcia & Todd made an unexpected appearance, so it was cool to talk with them for the first time since they got hitched.  There were libations aplenty, and Michelle made cake.  We couldn’t stay really late, because she had to get up early to judge a cheer competition.

On Saturday, I had some plans to work on a little computer biz at my house, but I got an call from the Poquettes who needed backup on a short babysitting gig– Kilian and Harper had some overlapping zoo classes, so I met up with them there and watched Abe for an hour or so.  He’s a very low-maintenence baby; took him about 20 minutes to fall asleep, then I just milled around the zoo for a while until Amanda called to say Harper’s class was done.  The zoo trip worked to my advantage, as I was able to miss the majority of the Badgers’ drubbing at the hands of Iowa.

Later in the evening on Saturday, we met up with Michelle’s friend Amisha and her (relatively new) financee, Ajay.  I hadn’t met him before.  We had a good time at Vox on Prospect, where the atmosphere is pretty smokey, but also quiet enough to talk.  They also have movies going in the background all the time there.  For me, it’s a good way to keep time at the bar without looking at your watch: “We’ve been here for Princess Bride and half of Team America? Shit, it’s gotta be pretty late…”

On Sunday, I got around to working on some of that computer stuff and did laundry.  I was pretty happy to note that I was just about able to migrate my home server over to a new machine without having to call Joe every five minutes with questions.  There are a couple things that are still left to do, but I was glad to have been able to install the new system, import all the old user accounts & various server settings without incident.

I wanted to head over to Grandma’s house to help out with yard work, but I ran out of time.  Now it looks like it’s going to rain the rest of today, but it’s supposed to be nice on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Maybe by Wednesday, the leaves would be dry enough over there and I could give it another shot.