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Technology
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Internet, Miscellaneous, Technology
Return of the move
Sorry for the recent silence, everyone. It wasn’t my intention to seemingly disappear for several weeks. As you might guess, it’s been entirely real life craziness keeping me hopping. There were several occasions were I actually planned to post something, only to get distracted and never get around to it.
Well, here’s some news definitely worth posting. I mentioned quite some time ago my plans to eventually move the blog from its current home—my Linux box Demeter sitting behind my cable modem—to somewhere a bit more stable. Not that Demeter herself is unstable, mind you, but the current hoops we have to jump through just to get the blog online have caused casualties to its usefulness, like killing commenting and making our RSS/Atom feeds go through odd channels. While my dynamic DNS service does an admirable job in getting the raw HTML to you guys, it’s not suitable for a long term solution.
The point is that it looks like the move is going to finally take place, only the final destination isn’t where I originally intended. I was planning to move to Keenspot on the back end, largely because I am already familiar with them and how their servers are set up. Of course, this also meant the blog would be loaded with ads to cover the bandwidth costs (unless, of course, you’re a Keenspot PREMIUM subscriber). Not something I’m particularly thrilled about, but I was viewing it as a necessary evil. (After all, it’s the ads (and PREMIUM) that currently keep GPF a float. Lately all our other revenue streams have been high and dry.)
Well, Chris Wright over at Help Desk managed to change my mind. He pointed me to his current web host, and after taking a cruise around their site and FAQ, I was hooked. I have a number of ambitious online plans in the works, all of which require some rather stringent and quirky software requirements. These guys seem to cater directly to online developers, meaning they’re a lot more likely to accommodate my unusual needs, and their prices are ridiculously beyond reasonable. (I’ve never seen a bandwidth plan as cheap as theirs.) So I’m going to move over to them, at least on a trial basis, to see how things go. If everything goes over well, expect to see some rather obnoxious plugging in the future.
So, what does this mean for you? Right now, not much. For the time being I’ve temporarily disabled sign-ups for commenting. Comments aren’t working right now anyway, and preventing anyone new from signing on should make moving the database easier. (Existing accounts should be intact once the move is complete.) The switch in the DNS should be largely transparent, so those of you who visit the site directly shouldn’t notice anything different (other than the odd nested frame set inserted by the dynamic DNS should be gone).
The real funky stuff will come with the feeds. By now, most of you should be using the “domain:port” URLs for RSS and Atom feeds. These bypass the dynamic DNS and go directly to the web server on the port it’s really running on, not being nested through the DNS’ frames. Unfortunately, there won’t be a graceful transition for the feeds, as I have no intention of running the web server on multiple ports after the move. (It’s technically possible, but probably a waste of resources.) So those of you reading the blog via the feeds might want to come by the site periodically and check in for updates, at least until we know the transition has successfully taken place. New feed URLs will be posted once the move is complete. (Of course, I ought to just go with FeedBurner and hide all this behind-the-scenes garbage, but I’m also lazy and I’d rather do things myself.)
So when is all this going to go down? I’m not quite sure yet. The new host has a waiting list as they allocate hardware dynamically based on demand. I’ve been told it should be “less than a week,” which could be anywhere form one to two days. Tack onto that a day or two for me to move the database and debug everything, and it could easily be a week or more before you’ll notice anything. As usual, though, you should be able to just pop in here anytime and get the latest, regardless of which host we’re currently on.
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Gadgets, Technology
Tech Lemmings, Part Deux
June 12th, 2007 (4 years, 11 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core DumpI mentioned in the last post a new toy that my wife and I bought each other recently for our anniversary. Well, I got a bit distracted (funny how they expect you to do actual work at your job) and didn’t get a chance to post about it again until now. But here it is. Following the technology lemming trend once again, we’ve added a new gadget to our arsenal: We’re now the proud(?) owners of a TiVo.
I guess we watch more television that we really should… or at least we used to. I think our TV is always on whenever somebody is home, if nothing else for background noise. Back before we moved from North Carolina (and before my art desk was moved from the living room to a dark secluded corner of the dungeon… I mean, basement), I’d often scan the channels for something interesting but safely ignorable to have on while I was at the art desk or on the couch doing the digital half of the strip. Nowadays, it’s still on almost ninety some percent of the time during the day, but it’s constantly tuned to Noggin. (I’ll give you three guesses why.) Needless to say, my wife and I have been craving entertainment where the target audience doesn’t consist primarily of drooling preschoolers, but the actual window of time where we can watch TV without the little guy around is pretty small. We have to take those opportunities when they come. And since I haven’t got a clue when we bought our last blank VHS video cassette (I think they’re all still packed up from the move, almost a year later), the old VCR hasn’t been getting a workout. (In fact, we’ve seriously discussed completely unhooking it, if it weren’t for the fact that we have a number of hand-me-down tapes especially for Ben.)
Like the cell phones, Palms, and the iPod, we’ve discussed getting a DVR for years but never got past the “we should really try it out” discussion phase. Naturally, being cheap, we first discussed getting DVR services from our cable company. One box on top of the TV, one bill in the mail. Simplicity is always good. I think if we were still in NC and still had Time Warner as our cable company we might have actually gone that route. However, our current cabler (who shall remain nameless in fear that I might accidentally promote them) has a completely useless website that contains absolutely no information beyond the generic non-local sales pitch. I couldn’t find anything about DVR services on their site, and not once did I see any kind of price guide. The only local information available was a channel guide and a service phone number. In fact, the only reason I know they offer DVR services is that my in-laws have it. At this point, their mediocre service is already annoying as it is (our cable modem is often hit-or-miss), and if it weren’t for the high-speed Internet services (I’m not a DSL fan), I’d almost be tempted to go with a satellite dish.
But I digress. Our cable’s website was a joke, so I couldn’t find anything useful to form a comparison with. TiVo, on the other hand, had a wealth of information on their site so I was well aware of all the goodies and pitfalls we’d be getting into before we even placed an order. Needless to say, you can guess who won. We bought their current low-end box and a pre-paid year of service and I watched the UPS site rather obsessively for the next week as the box slowly made its way from Texas to West Virginia. It took a day or so to finally get the time needed to set it up, but having already read all the details online I found setup was mostly a snap. I did have a few problems integrating it into our wireless network, but that ended up begin my fault. (I consistently kept picking the wrong networking option and couldn’t figure out why it couldn’t find our router.)
And now the mini-review. In general, it gets a hearty thumbs-up, maybe even two. (Fellow TiVo owners should get the mild pun.) It’s a cinch to use and very intuitive. I probably wouldn’t have even needed most of my online research, although some of the connection setup could have been daunting if I weren’t a closet A/V nut. Ours is a Series2 dual-tuner model, so we can record two programs at once or watch one channel live while another show is being recorded at the same time. You can even watch the beginning of a show while it’s still being recorded. And, of course, the “pause live TV” feature that is much touted has actually come in very handy. (I think my wife got to rewind and watch an episode of Scrubs while it was still airing and I was bathing Ben last night.) The Season Pass feature is handy, and now I can finally get caught up on all those episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise that I missed during its original run. I have yet to use the online scheduling feature, but I’ve used it to scan for programming. I’ve used the TiVoToGo feature to transfer at least one recorded show to Diana, our primary Windows desktop, but have not yet managed to do anything useful with that recording there. (More on that in a bit.)
And now, some negatives. Probably the freakiest thing is TiVo Suggestions. Users can rate programming they like or don’t like with the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons. TiVoservice then takes this information and processes it, coming up with suggestions of what they think you might like based on your ratings. These suggestions are displayed on a screen in the GUI so you can see upcoming programs that you may not have known were on the schedule. I have some mild privacy concerns about this, but they’re only minor. My TV watching habits aren’t like my bank records or e-mail, so I’m more willing to give up a small measure of privacy in exchange for some useful features. So far, the Suggestions menu list has actually grown pretty smart (after a few binge thumbing sessions to feed it some seed data), and if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t have time to watch all these suggestions I might have actually been tempted to record some of them myself. But what’s really spooky about it is when the TiVobox begins recording theses shows for me automatically, without my approval. Now I know there’s a setting to turn this “feature” off and Suggestion recordings are always flagged as being the first shows to be deleted if it needs more space (so I don’t lose my manually scheduled records to make room for Suggestions), so it’s not like it’s really that big of an imposition. However, turning the TV on in the morning to find several episodes of Star Trek and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron recorded on my DVR that I didn’t schedule is the slightest bit unnerving. Fortunately I was able to train it to stop recording Martha Stewart Living after a while. It started doing that after my wife scheduled a mass recording of Good Eats. I was immediately remind of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s song “Couch Potato”:
But I only watched “Will And Grace” one time one day
Wish I hadn’t ’cause TiVo now thinks I’m gayThe next gripe: content protection. You know, as a content creator myself, I can appreciate the desire and need for protecting one’s content from unauthorized reproduction. I’ve been in a constant battle with comic rippers and “inliners” for years who insert my comics into their websites and essentially cheat me out of desperately needed ad revenue. These tactics actually impact my bottom line and seeing as GPF has a very limited budget and thin profit margin it’s something I take very seriously. That said, I’m also very much in favor of consumer’s rights. I have no problem with my readers visiting my site, loading both the comic and the ad (so I get my 0.001¢ in revenue), then saving the comic to their hard drive as part of their personal collection. From there, you can do whatever you want with it… so long as you don’t post it online for others to see (thus taking traffic and ad revenue away from me) or otherwise sell or earn money from it. This content owner vs. consumer’s rights advocate battle is one I constantly wage with myself, and I’m always looking ways to enable you guys to enjoy my strip in new and inventive ways while still scraping up enough cash to buy my meager art supplies.
TiVoservice does allow you to copy content recorded on the TiVobox to your home computer. Sure enough, I copied one of my wife’s Good Eats episodes and it played just fine in Windows Media Player. The problem comes in, though, when I try to do just about anything else with it. What I really want to do is load it into my favorite video editing app and trim out the commercials (more as a space saving issue than anything else) then burn several episodes to a DVD. But TiVoToGo files are encrypted with a codec that prevents modification or conversion… without buying the appropriate extra software that keeps the DRM intact, of course. My video editing app can’t read these files and my current favorite video converter, FFmpeg, can’t read the codec to convert the file to something the editor can read. I have no intention pirating Good Eats and redistributing it illegally; quite to the contrary, I want to support Alton Brown and encourage him to create more entertaining content. I just want to archive content that I recorded on my personal recorder to a more permanent form (a DVD) so my wife can watch it later, say if she wants to make Alton’s famous chewy chocolate chip cookies. I did do some Googling and found an app that “frees” the raw MPEG-2 video from its DRM shell, but (a) I hate feeling like I’m doing something shady with a process that I feel is within my rights as a consumer to legally do and (b) I have yet to successfully convert the “freed” video into a format I can work with and edit. So it looks like I’m either going to have to pony up to buy TiVo Desktop Plus to convert my files to other formats (but still not edit them) or buy an upgraded version of my editor app that can actually read and edit MPEG-2 files. This makes for one annoyed customer.
Well, that’s probably enough blogging for today. I have no idea if you guys actually enjoy these little mini-review posts. With comments currently disabled, I’ve been feeling like I’m blogging into a black hole with no feedback lately. But I’ve at least found them somewhat interesting and thought you might like to hear from my experiences, especially if you’ve been considering similar purchases yourself. Of course, if you just come here for the obscenely cute baby pictures/stories, I apologize. I’ll have to start posting some more of those soon to counterbalance the geekiness.
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Gadgets, Personal, Technology
I am now a technology lemming
Last week was my birthday. I usually try to keep very quiet about it, and I don’t go advertising it on the GPF site as a way to drum up artificial congratulations from fans. I know it’s always annoyed me when other webcartoonists do that, expecting their readers to all sing in chorus and make them feel self important, so I expect it annoys others as well. Such cults of personality extend into the blogosphere and other similar user-generated realms, of course, but I know I saw it in the webcomicing world long before the term “blog” came into being. But I digress. I don’t do GPF to have tons of people become my personal cheerleaders and gush on and on about how much they think of me and my work; I do it for myself first and foremost, and it’s an added bonus if one or two (or several tens of thousands) of you enjoy it as well. It did kind of surprise me that nobody on the forum mentioned anything, given I know there are a few of you out there who are obsessive enough to keep track of such things, but I’d much rather have a low-key quiet birthday anyway.
And it was a nice birthday. It started off kind of lackluster, as I had a doctor’s appointment to have some blood work done and had to fast (only black coffee… no cream or sugar… blech), followed by Ben’s nine month checkup (which went very well). We ended up throwing a third doctor’s visit into the mix, as Randi the Wonder Kitty was throwing up (more than usual) and suffering from diarrhea (as if cat feces wasn’t unpleasant enough already). Still, she turned out to be doing just fine, and whatever was bothering her seemed to pass pretty quickly. After that, my wife took me out to finally see Spider-Man 3 (which I’ll agree with most critics that it wasn’t as good as the previous two) and have a nice dinner by ourselves. I received some nice gifts from all my family and nobody made a particularly big fuss about it, which is exactly what I wanted.
But I will tell you about the most interesting gift I received, which was “from” Ben. (Yes, I’m realistic know that a nine-month-old baby probably would have had extreme difficulty picking out and purchasing such an item over the Internet by himself, so I know he had help from Mommy.) I have finally plunged off the technological cliff with the rest of the lemmings and am now a proud owner of an iPod.
For some reason, I seem to resist some trends, even when they’re obviously techie. It was years after cell phones became hip and commonplace that I finally caved and signed up for one, and even now my current phone (my second) is rather spartan and utilitarian. No music or video, no Web access, not even a camera; it makes phone calls and that’s about it. The most useful secondary features it has are the contacts list (which is a watered down version of what’s in my LifeDrive) and the tip calculator (which is usually handier to get to than the one in the Palm). I had no immediate interest in MP3 players initially, preferring the permanence of CDs. Even once I started using PocketTunes on the LD, I have never purchased music online; I always ripped my existing CDs and encoded them myself. In fact, with the LD’s built-in 4GB drive plus any number of Secure Digital cards, I never felt the need for a dedicated MP3 player.
However, I now have some nice discounts with Apple through my current job, so I’ve toyed with the idea of adding some Apple products to our technology collection. While I’ve used my share of Apple ][s and Macs over the years (boy, does that first item date me), I've never owned an Apple product. I've eyed a MacBook a few times to make our little home network truly operating system agnostic. Still, I'm cheap and lazy, which does not make for a good combination for impulsive spending. I waffled back and forth in a similar fashion about purchasing a PDA before my wife broke down and bought my first Palm (a IIIc), and I'm now on my third. Sometimes it takes a good solid shove to get me moving in a give direction, and my wife is pretty good at that.
So now I'm the owner of a sleek, black, "fifth generation" 30GB iPod. (I understand the "video" part of the name was dropped at some point.) I've got to admit, this thing is pretty slick. There are some very good reasons why these things dominate the portable media market. I had always heard the interface was intuitive, but I didn't realize it was so ridiculously easy to use. I barely even looked at the instruction card (it's hard to call it a manual, when there's only a few fold out pages and very little actual information). I was using it almost right out of the box with no tutorials. It did take a day or two of on-again, off-again syncing to copy all my media onto it, but that was relatively easy to do. It imported my previously ripped CDs without (much of) a hitch and ripped the rest (new CDs I received for my birthday plus a few I never bothered to copy before) very quickly. I re-encoded some of my home videos of Ben into a compatible format and they look awesome on that tiny screen. It took a bit to figure out the podcast subscription setup, but once I got it down I was able to add the few podcasts I listen to with relative ease. The jury is still out on battery life as I haven't been able to listen to it too extensively yet, but it does seem to be holding up better than the LD for extended listening.
Some of the few caveats I've encountered, which are mostly personal irks than anything else and actually have little to do with the device itself:
- Charging takes place through a USB port. What the...? Who came up with that bright idea? Okay, yes, it can be a bit unwieldy lugging both a sync and charging cable around like I have to do with the LD, but I know there's been plenty of times I've had to charge the LD away from my laptop (or any computer for that matter). I've also set up iTunes in a rather custom way so that Apollo the ThinkPad runs the program but the actual files are stored on a shared drive off of Diana, our ThinkCentre desktop. (Diana has much, much more disk space.) What happens if I need to charge the iPod while I'm in San Diego in August, and Apollo can't access Diana's share drive? Will iTunes barf? Will my files on the iPod be lost, since my library can't be found? I don't know yet, and I'm dreading finding out. Fortunately, I used my sister's gift (a Best Buy gift card) plus some extra cash to get an outlet adapter so I can charge the iPod without a USB port. Why that doesn't come standard seems completely idiotic to me. (I suspect it's just another way for Apple (and it's army of third-party accessory makers) to get more money.)
- iTunes, at least for me, is a hog. I don't know if it's my setup (program on one machine, files on another) or just that Apple has trouble writing for other OSes than Mac OS, but iTunes seems to lock up or get really sluggish sometimes. I mean, it worked fairly well at ripping and organizing files internally and it did really well at ripping things, but it's annoying as can be when I'm actually trying to sign up for an iTunes Store account and it goes off into lah-lah land for five to ten minutes while I'm trying to enter a credit card number. (And why do I need to put a credit card on file when all I've done so far is download a free game demo? C'mon, Apple. I'd feel much safer if you asked me to enter it on each purchase, rather than trusting you to keep it on file. Yeah, it's more work for me, but I work in the computer industry and I know how sloppy computer security can be.)
- The iTunes help file is pretty useless. On the few times I've had to look something up, it's taken forever for find it in the help file or I've never found it and had to figure it out myself. Other forms of help are only available online. I understand that iTunes works as a largely online application with the whole integrated store, but what if I'm just charging/syncing without a wireless connection and I run into trouble? How is the Apple website going to help me then?
- Minor personal irk: iTunes by default organizes files by artist, then album, and there's no apparent way to change this. Yes, I found out too late that you can organize your files manually yourself, but I only found that setting after iTunes completely reshuffled my files every which way. While I'm sure artist-to-album makes sense for certain setups, it really trashes compilation albums. I ripped one Dr. Demento collection and ended up with dozens of artist folders, some with only a single song file in them. Now without iTunes it's impossible to find everything associated with that album again, which makes me wonder just how stable iTunes really is. The same thing happened with my Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, which put all the instrumental pieces under Danny Elfman but each song under the person singing the solos.
Now that I've vented, I thought I'd share a little humorous bit I thought up. Shortly after I had toyed with the iPod a while, an imaginary conversation popped into my head about what the LifeDrive and iPod would say to each other on their first meeting:
LifeDrive: So... you're the new guy, huh?
iPod: Yep! Hi, I'm an iPod! And you are...?
LD: A Palm LifeDrive.
iP: A... what?
LD: A LifeDrive. From Palm. You know, they make PDAs.
iP: Oh... one of the "old guard." Gotcha.
LD: "Old guard?" What's that supposed to mean?
iP: Heh... ah, c'mon. A PDA? Who uses those anymore? I mean, with cell phones doing all that PIM stuff...
LD: And playing MP3s...
[Uncomfortable silence]
LD: So… you play music. What else can you do?
iP: Oh, I can do much more than that! I do podcasts as well. That is, after all, where podcasts got their name.
LD: Jeff used me to listen to his music and podcasts all the time.
iP: I can do video too!
LD: Got about a hundred megs of baby videos right here on this SD card. And I saw the files he converted for you. They’re several megs bigger than the files he encoded for me.
iP: I can also play games!
LD: Been there, done that, bought the leather case with a belt clip. What else you got, kid?
iP: Uh…
LD: Got BlueTooth?
iP: Not… built-in…
LD: Wi-Fi?
iP: N…no…
LD: Voice recorder?
iP: As an $80 add-on accessory…
LD: Copious amounts of storage space?
iP: HA! Got you there, old man! 30GB right here. How much do you have?
LD: Er… built-in? Only 4GB.
iP: AH HA!
LD: But with SD expansion cards I have virtually limitless capacity!
iP: And just how many cards do you have?
LD: Well… um… if you add them all up…?
iP: Yeeeessssss…?
LD: Um… there’s the ones here in my case… add in these old ones in the briefcase… maybe count the ones with the old Tungsten C… so… approximately 3.84375 GB?
iP: Approximately?
LD: Well, some are less than a gig. And if you include the built-in hard drive, that brings me up to 7.84375 GB. But then, realistically, you have to subtract the drive space used for “memory” and that brings it down to…
iP: Never mind. I’m sorry I asked.
[More uncomfortable silence.]
iP: Well… at least you’re not a Windows Mobile device.
LD: Of course not. I’m from Palm. Although some might say my OS is becoming outdated, at least it’s not a watered down version of a piece of desktop bloatware. The only reason those guys have so much more memory and processing power is because they need it just to make the darn OS run. And I won’t even associate with those Treo 700w’s and 750′s. Traitors.
iP: Amen to that.
LD: Why do you say that? You got something against Microsoft?
iP: Well, duh. I’m from Apple.
LD: OH…. That… that says a lot right there.
iP: Yup.
[Still more uncomfortable silence.]
iP: I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
LD: Just keep your ear buds to yourself, kid, and you’ll get along here fine. Just wait ’til you meet Cell. He’s… special. If his antenna falls off, try not to notice.
iP: Um… right.
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Security, Technology, Webcomics
SIGGRAPH Key Signing Party?
As previously mentioned, I’m headed to SIGGRAPH in August. The pre-con report is now up on the GPF Shows & Cons site and, as usual, will become the core place for news and updates about my trip there. (I’ll probably end up mentioning the same stuff here as well, but that’s the official place to look.)
It occurred to me yesterday while I was writing up a News item for Monday that SIGGRAPH may–or may not–be a good place to hold a key signing party. For those unfamiliar with public-key cryptography, this is a gathering where PKC users can verify each other’s identities, prove you are who you say you are, and obtain signatures on your public key. This increases your perceived level of trust; the more signatures you have on your public key, the more people who say they have verified your identity and thus the more trustworthy your own signature becomes. This “web of trust” is the core to PKC; without it, anyone could create a key and say they’re somebody else and there wouldn’t be an easy way to prove otherwise.
I said it may be a good place for a key signing because there will be a lot of computer professionals there. It might not be a good place because most of those computer professionals are more involved with graphics than with cryptography (which is ironic because both require a great deal of mathematical knowledge). Thus, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find anyone there willing to sign my keys or not. My public key has a pitiful few number of signatures, mostly because I haven’t been able to meet face-to-face with like-minded cryptography nuts to add any. I’ve searched and searched and have yet to come up with anything in this vein officially or unofficially attached to SIGGRAPH.
So here’s a two-pronged appeal. First, if anyone does know of an official or unofficial key signing event somehow attached to SIGGRAPH or that might be going on in the area during that week, please let me know the details so I can somehow get involved. If there isn’t one going on, I’d love to see one organized. I’d consider organizing it myself if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not from San Diego and I don’t have a clue about where would be the best place to hold such an event, let alone how to get the word out. I’ve put my entry up on BigLumber’s San Diego listing in hopes that someone might see it, and at least one San Diego resident has expressed interest. If someone else might take the initiative to get things started, I’d be more than willing to promote it on the GPF site.
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Technology
Fun with Subversion
No, I’m not looking to overthrow any governments. I’m talking about Subversion, the revision control system that is a “compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community.” Most developers are familiar with the concept of source or revision control: the “official” version of the source code for a given project is (usually) kept in a central location, and components or modules are “checked out” by developers so they can be worked on. When the changes are complete, they are “committed” back to the revision control system where they are integrated into the official source. Most revision control systems have ways to manage or at least identify conflicts (i.e. two developers making changes to the same code at the same time), thus helping to keep everyone on the same page. They also give project managers a way to tag “milestones” so that if you need to roll back changes to a previous version, it’s relatively simple to back out the new code and restore the original.
I’ve worked with a number of revision control systems over the years, most notably Sablime, which I used rather extensively when I worked for IBM on the Lucent contract. (In looking up that link, I just discovered that Sablime is actually a Bell Labs product, a fact I never knew before. Bell Labs, of course, was spun off of AT&T and became Lucent Technologies, which is now Alcatel-Lucent. This would, of course, explain why Sablime was so prevalent there. And here I thought they were just being masochistic.) I also worked briefly with Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe… the key word being “briefly”, to which I would prepend the word “fortunately”. I am fond of neither of these systems, and wouldn’t personally recommend them. I have, of course, heard all kinds of extensive things about CVS, both good and bad, but have never really used it on a project.
When I got to ManTech, they had recently rolled out Subversion (or SVN) as their internal revision control, using TortoiseSVN as the front end. (Ours is a Microsoft .NET shop, and Tortoise makes using SVN as simple as a couple context menu choices in Windows Explorer.) SVN touts itself as a “replacement” for CVS, “improving” on its functionality and adding features that long-time CVS users have begged for. After using it now for a while, I’ve come to really enjoy working with SVN and Tortoise. It’s become so useful, in fact, that I installed in on Demeter (our Linux box) and use it for my own personal revision control. I’ve even come to use it for some rather unconventional things. Among its current tasks:
- Programming revision control, obviously. Almost all my personal development projects now exist in SVN, whether they’re .NET applications or UN*X scripts. I’ve seriously considered moving the entire GPF site (sans comics) into SVN to keep all my HTML straight across various systems.
- Keeping my creative writing documents in sync across multiple systems. Nowadays, I might have a word processor document where I keep story notes and rough scripts, but I might want to work on it in various locations. I used to keep a copy on my LifeDrive to work on, or just copy the files back and forth manually. Now I’ve put the documents into the repository and check them out to work on them, committing the changes when I’m done. When I go to another location, it’s just a matter of updating the local copy and I’m ready to continue.
- Keeping certain user settings in sync across multiple systems. I recently switched from using Trillian as my IM client to Pidgin, formerly known as GAIM. One of the problems I’ve had with both applications is the fact that I wanted to keep my settings in sync both at home and at work. Again, this used to be a manual ZIP-copy-unZIP process. So I created a Pidgin repository in SVN, check out my settings before I login, and then launch the program. When I’m done, I close the app, commit the changes back to the repository, and refresh the settings when I get to the other location. (Although I did find one irksome tweak with the Pidgin FAQ. What this FAQ fails to mention is that if you use the PURPLEHOME environment variable to move your settings to another location (say, an encrypted file system, which is what I do), it still appends a “.purple” directory under the path you specify. It took me a while to figure out why Pidgin kept forgetting my settings.)
I’m sure most of you could care less, but I thought this would be a neat little anecdote to share anyway. Plus, I haven’t posted in ages, so I wanted to get something up anyway. I’d say if you had any interesting revision control stories to share that you should post them in the comments, but since the comments still aren’t working, I guess it doesn’t matter.
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Baby Stuff, Technology
Baby’s first blog post
Not surprising given his parentage, Ben has taken an early interest in computers. If he’s awake in the mornings while I’m doing my morning Web surfing, I’ll often put Apollo the laptop next to me while holding him, so I can keep reading comics while he watches Baby Einstein. This often becomes a distraction for him, though, as he’d much rather see what Daddy is up to that’s undoubtedly more interesting than puppets. This usually turns into a wrestling match as he wants to play with Daddy’s toy, which is infinitely more cool than any of his.
Well, this morning I decided to give him a crack at the thing. After waiting for Apollo to boot (“Remember, Ben, this is a Windows box, so that takes a while….”), I opened a word processor, changed the font to something large and bright so it was easy to see that he was actually making it do things, and let him go to town. I had to intervene a couple times when he hit Control or Alt, and I deleted a good bit of the unnecessary whitespace (he was particularly fond of the large Enter key and had nine pages of carriage returns), but otherwise left it as it was and thought I’d go ahead and share.
So without further ado, I present baby’s first blog post:
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l———;p J;kj;lj;lkjjupoytouigry 8 7yj/
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. t vmb jku gNot a lot of substance, but he’s still getting the hang of this “language” thing. Still, it’s probably better than 90% of the blog posts out there anyway….
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Technology, Webcomics
SIGGRAPH 2007
Three posts is a single day… perforated bovine, what is this world coming to?
I’ve just found out that I’ll be going to SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego, CA, on August 5-9. SIGGRAPH, for those who don’t know, is one of the world’s largest conferences for “digital innovators, creative researchers, award-winning producers, provocative artists, energetic executives, and adventurous engineers.” It’s where to find the cutting edge in 3D modeling, computer animation, and digital art. I’m technically going for my day job and I definitely won’t be presenting or exhibiting anything, but I’m adding a reference on the GPF Shows & Cons page just in case any Faulties will be in attendance (or possibly just in the area) and want to organize an ad-hoc gathering. (After all, I’m only on the West Coast every so often.) As such, I’ll probably post updates as more information develops.
Of course, this pretty much cinches that I won’t be going to Comic-Con International this year. I had pretty much abandoned hope for most convention travel this year since the little guy is still under a year old, but there’s always a part of me that dreams of at least making it back to our big two stops, Comic-Con and Dragon*Con. Alas, Comic-Con is just two weeks before SIGGRAPH, and I’m not sure I’m up to hours and hours of air travel that close together. That also puts any hope for Dragon*Con on the rocks, as it’s a scant three weeks after SIGGRAPH. While I’ll be going to SIGGRAPH on the company’s dime, meaning finances aren’t the issue, spending that much time on the road so close together would be pretty rough on our little family right now.
As usual, though, keep you eyes on the Shows & Cons page for official convention notices. Since SIGGRAPH isn’t an official GPF stop, I’m not sure how much coverage it will get on the GPF site, but it should get a good bit of face time here.
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Internet, Miscellaneous, Technology
So… what happened?
Most of you are probably wondering what happened yesterday with the blog. For those who may not have seen it, folks visiting the site via a Web browser were being redirected to another site. I won’t post its URL, as I don’t particularly want to give them any more Googleshare, but it seemed to be some sort of portal site in a language I didn’t immediately recognize. Some of you have speculated that this might have had something to do with the impending move to Keenspot, or perhaps with Keenspot’s current DNS server problems. While I wish those were the case, unfortunately they weren’t.
It looks like it was a problem with my dynamic DNS service, DNS2Go. As previously stated, DNS2Go has an HTTP redirection service that lets me forward “www.jeffdarlington.com” on standard HTTP port 80 to the site’s real IP address at its real non-standard port. This is the component that seems to have failed. Going to www.jeffdarlington.com took you to the mysterious site; however, if you went to jeffdarlington.com:8081 (the site’s real port number), you got the blog. (The style sheet didn’t work, of course, because WordPress hard codes the domain name in all URLs, including to the style sheet. But the content itself was still available.)
I put in a support ticket last night with DNS2Go’s tech support and got the following response this morning:
It was something on our end and we have resolved that problem.
Not very descriptive, but accurate; the site is obviously now up. My guess? I think they were hacked, and they don’t want to admit it. Their own main domain was also down during this time, and all of my domains that used the redirection service in some fashion were affected. I haven’t had a chance to independently research this theory with the conference going on and all, but it seems a bit more suspicious to me than just a technical glitch.
Anyway, things are back to normal now. The move to Keenspot is currently slated for the weekend of April 20th, just in case anyone is interested in knowing.
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Internet, Miscellaneous
Movin’…
March 28th, 2007 (5 years, 1 month ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Comments OffJust a heads-up, gang. As previously mentioned, it looks like the blog is going to be moving. I’ve finally received the official go-ahead from the powers that be at Keenspot that they’re okay with the move. I’m not sure yet when it will officially happen, but seeing as I’ll be on a business trip next week, it might be a week or two. I’ll have to iron out the details with the Keen Tech Crew first.
So what does this mean for you? Well, if you read this blog via a Web browser, probably nothing. Just keep using the old
www.jeffdarlington.comdomain name and you shouldn’t notice any difference, just that one day the blog won’t have Keenspot ads and the next day it will. Isn’t the magic of DNS grand? (If the ads bother you, then I’ll go ahead and make the prerequisite plug for Keenspot PREMIUM, which removes those ads and puts a few extra bucks in my pocket at the same time.)If you’re checking for updates via one of the XML feeds like RSS or Atom, you might want to periodically peek in via a browser, especially if I seem even more silent than usual. (Yeah, I know, that’ll be hard to notice as my updates are somewhat sporadic. Sorry about that.) The reason I mention this is that the feed links currently bypass the dynamic DNS’ Web forwarding (i.e. the translation from the domain name on port 80 to the IP on the real port; check this post for the gory details). Unfortunately, when the site moves to Keen, that alternate port will no longer be available and the XML feed links will return back to port 80. To anyone currently using the feeds on the alternate port, the feed will appear to break. You’ll need to keep an eye on the feed URLs to notice when they update. I’ll look into ways to redirect them, but I doubt Keenspot will be willing to jump through those hoops just for me.
If you don’t read this blog, then… well… what are you doing here, then?
I’ll try and keep you apprised of things as often as I can. I plan to move as much data from one site to the other as possible, so hopefully those of you who have already signed up for commenting shouldn’t need to worry about signing up again. Thanks in advance for your patience.
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Gadgets, Security, Technology
Palm + WiFi + SSH + vi = geek2
Last night, I was working on one part of implementing the GPF update changes previously mentioned. Since I’ve been having some trouble getting a response from the Keen Tech Crew (who I assume have been as busy with real life things as I have), I decided to try and implement a backup plan in case they couldn’t get their part done by Monday. It’s all rather technical… but then you guys probably enjoy reading my technical ramblings from time to time. (Either that, or you ignore the Technology category altogether. Take your pick.) Unfortunately, it involves some intimate knowledge of Keenspot’s update mechanism, Autokeen, which most of you probably don’t have.
Long story short, Autokeen uses templates that are parsed by a massive Perl script that replaces certain “tags” with actual content. For example, the tag
***todays_comics***gets replaced with the necessary HTML to display any images or text that have been designated as “comic” files. This obviously includes the images for thedailyweekly strip, but it can also use text and even Flash. The GPF News is treated as a “comic” by Autokeen, even though it’s all text. Unfortunately, while there can be multiple “comics” under one account (for GPF, they include the main comic, the News, the Sketchbook, the High-Def archive, and a few others), the way these templates are used means that each “comic” is pretty much autonomous and self-contained. There are ways to get cross-comic content (like how I get the most recent News date and blurb automatically on the main and High-Def pages), but it’s definitely not trivial and it stretches Autokeen’s capabilities beyond their original intended functions. Autokeen is incredibly flexible, which is a credit to Darren Bleuel’s design, but you can tell when you’ve taken it places it’s never been before.Anyhoo, I was building a Perl script that would be run on a cron to do some of this cross-comic work for me, just in case my original pure-Autokeen design didn’t work as expected. I was connected to the GPF server via SSH, editing the file directly on the server via vi. I tested it pretty thoroughly and was happy with the results. By this point, it was getting late, Ben was already asleep in my wife’s arms, and we were both ready to go to bed. I shut down the laptop, we took Ben back to his crib, and while she brushed her teeth and performed other nighttime preparations, I climbed into bed.
It was then that I realized I had a fatal flaw in my code. (Nobody ever said inspiration was either punctual or convenient.) While it would successfully build some symbolic links on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I forgot to limit the code that removes the symbolic links on the other days of the week. Thus, every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday it would undo all the changes it made the days before. It was getting late and I had to get up early in the morning to head off to work. I didn’t have time to fire up the laptop again and I didn’t want to go into the office to log into one of those machines and leave my sweetie waiting up for me.
I grabbed my LifeDrive and fired up its WiFi connection. I have a small SSH client for Palm OS called pssh and used it to log into the GPF server. Now pssh is a wonderful little tool, but anyone who has used a PDA probably knows that entering text into one can sometimes be… challenging. Palm has used Graffiti for years, but it can sometimes be a pain when working with applications that are very sensitive to text input mistakes (such as, say, vi). I elected to use the on-screen keyboard instead, and only switched to Graffiti when I discovered the keyboard didn’t have a pipe symbol (required to do a boolean “or” condition). Switching back and forth between edit and command modes was <sarcasm>fun</sarcasm>, even though pssh includes a nice little “ESC” button on the screen for emulating the Escape key. Old hands at vi will know you can always hit ESC multiple times to ensure you’re no longer in edit mode and that you’re back in command mode, but it seems I left the volume on the Palm up pretty high from listening to MP3s earlier. The default “bell” was embarrassing loud, especially with a sleeping baby lying a few feet away.
It took some work, but I finally got the changes incorporated and saved and compiled the script. As soon as I logged off, I realized just out absurdly geeky the entire experience was. I probably could have done things faster if I had just walked into the office across the hall and fired up PuTTY, but instead I decided to do things the hard way: working on a tiny little battery-powered device, connecting wirelessly, and fumbling with awkward text input mechanisms to use what is arguably one of the most complex text editors to make what would have been a ten-second change anywhere else. For some reason I found that obscenely amusing. You could probably care less, I’m sure, but I thought I’d share anyway.
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Jeffrey T. Darlington is the creator of the popular online comic strip General Protection Fault. He is also the creator of a number of other inconsequential things, but seeing as they are inconsequential, he didn't think you should be bothered by mentioning them. More...
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