you’d think i’d have learned by now that staying up till all hours at night watching movies wouldn’t exactly make it easier to wake up in the morning.
<p>alas, i did it again. up till 2 last night watching <a href="http://www.donniedarko.com/">donnie darko</a>, which was excellent.</p>
<p>i only had the TV on because i was testing out a homemade coax to optical <a href="http://www.epanorama.net/documents/audio/spdif.html"><span class="caps">SPDIF</span></a> converter (you can do it with just a red <span class="caps">LED</span> and a 120 Ohm resistor). </p>
<p>on a related note, does anyone have any suggestions for a good linux compatible sound card with <span class="caps">SPDIF</span> (preferably optical) output? my old soundblaster 16 isn’t really cutting it anymore.</p>
we’re ordering a new rackmount server at work with failover gigabit ethernet, redundant RAID drives, vast expanses of RAM, etc. to replace the old desktop machine that’s currently doing our web serving.
<p>this means that in a couple weeks when we get the new server, things will get moved around. the rackmount replaces the old server. the old server replaces my desktop machine. my desktop machine turns into an automated network backup machine, etc. IP addresses will change. <span class="caps">DNS</span> entries will be updated. things will move around.</p>
<p>with all the upheaval, i see as good a time as any to upgrade things to <a href="http://perl.apache.org/">mod_perl</a>. i’ve been playing with mod_perl a lot lately and have got a copy of the thraxil engine on my home machine ported to mod_perl with some new features added and ready to go. for you end users, switching to mod_perl will mostly just mean a nice speed improvement. i’ve also vastly improved the caching model, changed things so urls will be more userfriendly (eg, diaries will be accessible through a url like http://thraxil.org/users/anders/diary rather than http://thraxil.org/diary.pl?user=anders), and <span class="caps">RSS</span> feeds are in the works.</p>
<p>i intend to minimize the effects of the server moves on thraxil but my priorities have to be with my employer’s systems. i don’t expect problems, but i just thought i’d warn everyone well in advance that there may be some turbulence in a couple weeks. your reward for putting up with the changes should be a speed improvement and some nifty new features.</p>
just noticed that there’s a new sushi restaurant across the street from my apartment. it looks small but classy. i’ll be very psyched if it’s good. i’ve already got my favorite mexican place, a decent ethiopian place and a punk bar all within a one block radius. i love new york. :)
<p>lani was up for the weekend. we had no plans and that was nice. met up with a bunch of people from work for one of gerard’s martini nights down in the west village friday night. saturday we picked up a sixpack and rented ‘Wham, Bam, Thank you Spaceman”, which we found in the ‘cult’ section of the video store. bizarre, low-budget 70’s sexploitation. confusing and amusing.</p>
the blogger crowd mostly seems to be concerned with how searches for their names don’t appear as prominently in the listings anymore. well, i personally couldn’t care where any of my stuff shows up in the search engines. but i have noticed and been concerned with a general decline in the quality of google’s results lately.
it’s hard to explain exactly what the changes are, but it seems that they’re not doing as good of a job of identifying the primary authoritative sites on a given subject anymore. random mailing list postings and stuff on big clearinghouse sites like rpmfind.net now seem to dominate the results.
it used to be that if i ever got an error i couldn’t figure out how to fix with some piece of linux software, all i had to do was copy and paste the error message into google and it would immediately bring up either some FAQ or post explaining how to fix it. that hasn’t been working as well lately.
so i hope that whatever problems google seems to be having are just temporary and they’ll get things working better in the near future. i’ve become pretty dependent on google and i’m always impressed with the features they add so i’d be disappointed if they lose sight of what should be their main focus.
last night i was bad and stayed up till 3am watching David Cronenberg’s scanners. don’t know how i’ve made it the last 21 years without seeing it. very cool, freaky sci-fi. it’s hard to tell with Cronenberg sometimes whether the acting in a scene is bad, or Cronenberg’s just trying to do something strange.
<p>i also finally watched Se7en a few nights ago. yet another movie that i’d somehow managed to never see. good, although the ending was a little anti-climactic.</p>
some people seem to have the ability to instantly transition from sleeping to awake and alert. as soon as their alarm clock goes off and their eyes open, they’re operating at 100% mental capacity.
i’m not one of those people. i believe that i truly should not be held accountable for anything i do or say within about 30 minutes of waking up. my mind just cannot go from sleep to awake in a short period of time.
when i was at <a href=”http://www.mssm.org/“>mssm</a>, we used to have fire drills in the dorms. sometime in late october or so, they thought it would be a good idea to have a 4am drill. being northern maine, 4am in late october means that it’s really cold and there’s a thin layer of ice on the ground. i didn’t actually become conscious until i was about 100 feed away from the dorm, standing in the parking lot, on the ice, in bare feet with no idea how i got there, what was going on, and why my feet were freezing. somehow my roommates had gotten me out of bed and directed me, zombie-like, out the door. naturally, all my classmates had been alert enough to grab some slippers or shoes so the next day, i was the only one with frostbitten feet.
that’s a pretty extreme example. most of the time, when my alarm goes off, i wake up in a semi-conscious state where i might be able to remember it later but i have no ability for rational thought. my brain seems to stay in that sort of dream-logic mode.
yesterday, when my alarm went off, i somehow “discovered” the snooze button. now, i’m a big fan of the snooze button; i’ve probably hit it 5 or 6 times a day, every workday for the last couple years. but yesterday, in my sleepy state, the discovery that “if i stick my arm out from under the covers and hit this button over here on the alarm clock, i get to sleep for another 10 minutes!”, was totally new to me and had all the perceived importance of discovering a practical method for cold fusion.
i’ve apparently been awakened numerous times by phone calls and managed to carry on groggy but somewhat intelligible conversations that i don’t remember any of later on.
my job allows me to keep pretty flexible hours and basically come in to work in the morning when i feel like it, but occasionally we have meetings scheduled early in the morning that i’m supposed to go to. of course, i’m notoriously bad at showing up on time for these (at other times, i can be annoyingly punctual). with my rational mind working, i know that if i have a 9am meeting, i need about an hour to take a shower, put in my contacts, get dressed, and walk to work so i <em>need</em> to get up at 8am to make it on time. of course, when 8am hits, this airtight logic falls apart and 4 or 5 snooze buttons later, i finally become alert enough to realize that i have a meeting in 15 minutes and i end up sprinting up amsterdam ave unshowered, wearing whatever clothes were within reach.
O’Reilly has released the entire text of the new book <a href=”http://books.mozdev.org/chapters/“>Creating Applications with Mozilla</a> online.
i’m pretty excited to see mozilla starting to turn into a real application platform. some of the projects at <a href=”http://www.mozdev.org/“>mozdev</a> and elsewhere show great promise. i’ve been playing around with the <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/“>mozilla calendar</a> a bit and i’m pretty impressed. it still crashes now and then and has plenty of bugs but is on the way to becoming a really decent calendar app.
since the vast majority of the programming i’ve done has been web-based stuff using html for the user interface, i’ve become very familiar and comfortable with using markup languages like html and xml along with display languages like css to design my interfaces. every once in a while when i decide to write a ‘regular’ GUI application, i have to struggle with the programmatic approach that various widget libraries (Tk, Gtk, qt, swing, etc) use for laying out the buttons and text boxes and such. html forms and user interface elements are very limited though and the stateless nature of http means that many standard desktop applications would be impossible or at least extremely difficult to develop as web applications.
so when mozilla started becoming usable and i first heard about <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xulref/“>XUL</a>, mozilla’s XML based user interface language, i was pretty excited. you can think of it as basically html expanded so you can actually use it to design interfaces for real honest-to-goodness GUI apps. this kind of thing sounds like a much shallower learning curve for me than other technologies.
because it runs on top of mozilla and mozilla runs on just about every platform, it promises to be very portable. what i’m really excited about is using XUL to write really nice interfaces for client applications that talk to a server via XML-RPC or SOAP.
the only things that bother me about XUL at this point are that from skimming through the book, it looks incredibly verbose. easier to learn isn’t that important if it requires writing 10 times more code. maybe i’m just a spoiled perl programmer, but i’m rather fond of concise code. also it uses javascript as the language for specifying the actual logic of the application. after years of pulling out hair over javascript’s idiosyncrasies and often bizarre syntax (eg, the ‘functions as classes’ object model) it’s just left a bad taste in my mouth. maybe some day someone will figure out a way to use python/perl/scheme/etc to script XUL instead of javascript.
anyway, i should probably go out and actually try writing a simple XUL app or two before i say too much about it. and if i decide that i don’t like XUL, i guess there’s always <a href=”http://sjbrown.geeky.net/metagame-sector/tutorial.html”>python with libglade</a>…
thanks to <a href=”http://perl.meetup.com/“>meetup.com</a>, i had dinner and some beers last night with <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=26179”>tilly</a> and <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=104919”>perrin</a>. talked about all kinds of perl and computer stuff. for the most part i was just happy that i could follow what they were talking about. hardware setups, webserver caching strategies and modules (perrin has done <a href=”http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/10/17/etoys.html”>lot of research on this</a>), features tilly wants to see in perl 6, the new economy, some general commisserating over being from up north (perrin is from freeport, maine and tilly’s from canada), the life and eventual death of various online communities, got some more background on tilly’s famous <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=153046”>break with perlmonks</a>, and all sorts of other geeky stuff. tilly’s wife even joined us for a little bit and was amazingly tolerant of the computer talk.