Rants and Revelations

After going all weekend without my new laptop, I called up MacShack for a progress report. According to them, the replacement part (the hinge/clutch) is back-ordered and Apple hasn’t gotten back to him on whether there is adjustment that they could do themselves. So before I could even suggest it he suggested that I come and claim the Powerbook until they can get the part in.

In other news, as predicted, Apple immediately came out with a new bump to the Powerbook. That’s the only reason I got a good price on it, after all. Nothing that I can’t live without - a 1.67GHz processor instead of 1.5GHz (a whole 11%) and a 100G drive instead of an 80G. I kind of like the idea of that fancy two finger track pad thing, and the acceleratometer that senses when you’re dropping the Powerbook and parks the drives sound cool. But I’d rather have a few bucks in my pocket instead.

No, not that one. My brand new Powerbook’s screen hinge is loose. If I try to prop it on my knees in bed, it flops closed. However, I read this forum post that Apple will replace the hinge under warranty. I phoned the AppleCare line, and they suggested that if I take it to my local Apple Authorized repair center that they’d be able to fix it there or send it back if they can’t. So I did, and they said they’d have to order the hinge/clutch assembly and I probably won’t get it back until Tuesday at the earliest.

Even worse is that I’d just finished wiping and restoring my old Powerbook to give it to Laura.

I guess there goes my plan to do some billable hours on it this weekend.

Vicki’s mom died last night. Vicki had already made arrangments to fly out to Chicago today because she knew her mom had taken a turn for the worse and might not have long. Turns out it wasn’t even that long.

This sucks.

I was just reading an article about how AOL pulling out of Usenet will spell the end of Usenet. Well, I’m a fairly old-timer on Usenet - the first post of mine that Google Groups archives is from 1989, but I know for a fact that I was posting in 1987 or 1988 at the latest. I’d only *just* missed the Great Renaming, but the net was still full of the fall-out from it at the time. And yes, I’m such an old-timer that I say “the net” when I mean Usenet, and use terms like “the Internet” and “the web” to mean what other people mean when they say “the net”.

Usenet has been my neighbourhood for 17 years, and it’s gone downhill significantly in that time. And there is a reason why those of us from the old days refer to the current date as 4166 September 1993.

I spend most of my Usenet time these days in a small hierarchy that is only distributed to other people who agree to play by the rules, and who agree to pull the plug on anybody else who doesn’t play by the rules. It’s a small community, close knit, literate, smart. No spam, no binaries, no porn, (some erotica), just pure wonderful text written by real live people. We’re not all friends with each other - as a matter of fact, some of the participants absolutely hate each other. But that’s ok. We don’t have to all agree with each other, as long as we behave like adults. It’s like Usenet was before AOL. No, I’m not going to tell you where it is or invite you in. Sorry.

I see the departure of AOL as the most hopeful thing that has happened to Usenet in 12 years. Maybe some day those of you who aren’t old-timers will get a chance to see what Usenet was and what it could yet be again.

Think of this as the last week of the September that Never Ended.

Why is it that when you post to show off your new icons, you almost always use “GIP” in the subject? I’m guessing it’s an acronym, and the “I” probably stands for Icon?

One of the headlines in today’s Slashdot:

Your Rights Online: US ISP Terminates Iranian News Website

My first thought: “You’re not missing anything, the whole site was pure shite”.

Ba-da-dum.

Ok, it helps me not obsess over the two fucking annoying SUV drivers (but I repeat myself) who double teamed me when I tried to get into a parking space this morning. You know, if every SUV driver were to vanish from the face of the earth, I don’t think we’d miss them. (Steve Cherry doesn’t count, he drives a mini-SUV (an CRX or Rav4 or Suziki or something of that nature).)

As well as my on-again, off-again progress with wrestling with spherical trig, last night I also got a whopper of a headache. I don’t think I’ve ever had one worse - I’ve had a couple that were just as bad, so I knew it probably wasn’t an aneurism or something. But I just wanted to curl up and die. I took four ipuprophen and a tylenol, and put a cold wet washcloth on my head and lay down with all the lights off. After an hour or two, I felt better enough to get out of my clothes and into bed, but 18 hours later I still have a bit of a hang-over from it.

I spent the whole weekend trying to get some DAFIF boundary and special use airspace data into my waypoint generators. It’s something I promised Kevin from Flight Master a while back.

Well, it turns out not to be all that easy. Part of the problem is simplifying the data from the formats that DAFIF provides it into something that I can put into a relational database and then spit out in a format that Flight Master can use. But the problems I spent most of the weekend on are doing spherical trig. The DAFIF data defines arcs two ways - either as the center point, radius, direction and the start and end bearings, or as the center point, radius, direction, and the start and end points. Flight Master wants just the former, so I have to detect the second case, and use one of the formulas in Ed Williams’ Aviation Formulary to find the bearings, with a little help from "use Math::Trig;". A couple of places, the DAFIF data gives both definitions, which is useful to test my implementation. So that problem was solved.

Now comes the other problem - the one that I spent most of Sunday on and still haven’t solved: How to find the actual geographic extents of circles and arcs. For circles I can go back to the Aviation Formulary and project from the center the radius at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees. I’m sure there are wierd cases near the poles where that doesn’t give the actual extremes, but to hell with it, this is as close as I’m going to get. BTW: This is where the intrepid hero discovers that perl’s “%” operator only works on integers, and after kicking himself over the wierd results for a while writes his own “mod” function.

But discovering the geographic extents of an arc is harder. I still haven’t licked it - I think I’m going to have to look at the arc’s start and end bearings and directions to determine if it does through any of the 0, 90, 180 or 270 degree bearings and project them as I did for the circle, otherwise use the end points. Doesn’t sound so hard, does it? And it probably isn’t.

The next challenge will come when I try and produce a geographic index, either using grid buckets (Kevin’s choice) or quadtrees (my choice). To do either of those is going to require proper data structures, and nested data structures, and doing this sort of thing in perl is … sub-optimal. I’d much rather use a language that has proper data structures - even a “struct” declaration in C would suffice. But my web host doesn’t have Java, and I don’t know python yet, and I don’t particularly want to delve into the mysteries of doing ODBC in C or C++, so I’m probably stuck with perl.

Wish me luck.

Because I’m such a geek, I almost always have a “tail -F” of various logs going by. That includes the procmail logs of most of the people with accounts on this system - I don’t consider that a privacy violation because all I see is subject lines, and it helps me make sure their spam filters are working well.
Continue reading ‘How not to recruit’ »

This guy is either really really clueless, or has… nah, he’s just really really clueless:

Rent A Coder - Build me money making website please

Description:
I would like someone to build me a good website that will make me around $1000 a week or more. The website should be useful and not have any popups. I would like you to design the whole entire website. The content as well. Would like the website to have a lot of traffic as well.

Thanks to Baz for the link.

My new 17″ PowerBook arrived today. Vicki knew I couldn’t wait, so she phoned me while the FedEx guy was still there and I rushed home to get it. It’s the most beautiful piece of computing hardware I’ve ever seen in my life.

Apple has put the coolest feature ever in it, because the beauty of their OS. After I’d decided to order it, I was making mental notes of what to do to transfer everything I need off the old one onto this one. But a friend clued me in: I didn’t need to bother. Instead, when I booted it up, it asked me if I was upgrading from a previous computer. I clicked “Yes”, and it said to connect a firewire cable betwen the two computers. I did, and then it said to boot the old computer with the “T” key held down. It took me three tries, because the first two times I did a “Restart” from the menu - when I took Rob’s advice and powered it down and then booted with the “T” key, I got the Firewire logo on the screen on the old Powerbook, and the new Powerbook recognized it. It showed me all the user accounts and gave me the choice to transfer any and all of them, settings, applications, and “other files”. I chose them all, and went to lunch. When I came back, the transfer was done, and it’s amazing - even the files are arranged the same way on my desktop.

I’ve tried a few of the most important applications and they work fine - Quickbooks has all my account information, Photoshop Elements works, Firefox complains that it can’t reach my home pages (no network connection here at work). A couple of problems - PostgresSQL seems to be installed but not started up (and I can’t remember the PostgresSQL password), jikes isn’t installed at all (although fink is, amazingly enough), the kernel module that maps the caps lock to control doesn’t load, and X11 doesn’t start. Shouldn’t take long to fix those things up.

All I can say is SWEEEEEET. I’ll probably put some pictures of it up on my picture gallery soon.

At work they force us to use a web proxy. One of the things they do with this web proxy is block access to “inappropriate” web sites. Kind of embarassing when somebody sends you a URL and you paste it into your browser only to find that it’s blocked with the category “Adult Content” - especially since your manager gets a report of blocked sites you attempted to visit. Recently, I’d hit a bunch of sites that are blocked with the category “Music”, and an explanation that they’re blocking music sites because streaming and downloading music is taking too much bandwidth. Ok, I was actually looking for lyrics for songs I’m listening to on my iPod, but ok, not a big problem. (Usually now I remember to use the Google cache to look them up instead.)

At least it wasn’t a problem until I came back from lunch and hit “Refresh all tabs” on my browser, only to find that The Register is blocked as a “Music” site. WTF? Then somebody sent me a link to a story in The Guardian, and it’s blocked as a “Music site”. Putting two and two together, I tested and found that the other “The Register” link still works, and it appears that every .co.uk site is blocked.

The “access denied” message says you can get it unblocked if you can produce a business case why you need it unblocked. Hard to make a business case for The Register or The Guardian. But I discovered another site that’s blocked - our own company’s UK division. Hmmmm.

Taking a page here from Tina Marie’s blog, I present #1 in my rules of life:

It doesn’t matter how many fun and interesting people you’ve worked with and for in the past, if you write a bunch of reminiscences about past job experiences, the only person who will find your blog and email you about it is the guy you called a dick.

Oh, and Mike? While your reasons for choosing Microsoft products were probably more valid than I gave you credit for in that blog entry, and I’m really really sorry you’ve got leukemia, I still think in many ways you were a dick. Maybe I should have mentioned some of your redeeming qualities, but hey, this was about me, not about you. I liked you as a person for the most part, but it was your management style and skills that made me think of you as a dick. As for your Quake skills - the consensus over in developer row was that we should change your model to a pup tent with a fire in front of it.

In the good news, my new Powerbook just got scanned at the FedEx facility in Harrisburg PA! This is going to be better than watching my last Powerbook go through FedEx faciliites in Asia.

Email recieved a few minutes ago:

Dear Apple customer,

Part Number: M8853LL/A
Product Name: APP for PowerBook (w/ or w/o display) - Enrollment Kit
Estimated time to ship: 1-2 business days

Ok, leaving aside questions about why they can ship a PowerBook the same business day, but take 1-2 days to ship a piece of paper, I can’t wait. My poor old battered but beautifully decorated 15″ PowerBook is giving me problems keeping the charger making connection, plus it’s just too damn slow.

Now I have to figure out how to transfer all the music I bought from ITMS on the old laptop to the new one.

At least once I have a replacement in hand, I can re-epoxy the replaced hinge and not be tempted to open it up before it’s had a good two days to cure.

I don’t care what sort of GUI I’m programming, it seems that I spend a good 90% of my time figuring out what combination of things I’m doing is causing the program not to act like it should. Today is a case in point.
Continue reading ‘GUI programming is going to kill me’ »