Happy New Year

I start a new job in 2 days. I'm psyched.

File under general/ Sat Dec 31 20:35:08 CT 2005

Brewery Tour

My friend Saul sent a link to this movie about how beer is made. A very interesting tour of the Anchor Steam brewery in San Francisco.

On another note, Andy and I made a nice lager earlier this year that tasted amazingly like Anchor Steam beer. Don pointed out to me that we used a California yeast ... leave it to Don to i.d. the beer facts.

File under general/ Sun Dec 18 13:57:32 CT 2005

xooglers

A blog written by ex-Google employees. Kind of a 'behind the music' for the hippest tech company in the land.

File under general/ Thu Dec 8 10:43:30 CT 2005

Oh, the shame

Minneapolis is ranked ahead of St Paul in terms of literacy. On the up side, both cities are in the top 10, which makes Minnesota the only state nationwide with two cities in the top 10.

The rankings are interesting to me because they attempt to measure internet access, libraries, and newspaper circulation in separate categories. A place like Seattle ( ranked #1 overall) is first in internet access (well, duh!) but nowhere on the newspaper circulation list. A sign of the times...

File under general/ Thu Dec 8 10:15:03 CT 2005

Firefox and popups

My friend Bob passed along this note last week:

File under general/ Thu Dec 1 09:23:04 CT 2005

Web 2.0

Living in the midwest spares me from rubbing shoulders every day with the buzzword crazies on the coasts. But still, I like to keep tabs on what's new: I give thanks to the net for that.

Tim O'Reilly has a good summary article on the latest buzzphrase: Web 2.0. Ten years after I got my first email account and started using Netscape to surf the infant web, it's of historical interest to me to watch folks examining the industry (and themselves) and drawing out the threads.

File under general/ Wed Nov 30 13:28:11 CT 2005

Big Blue gives away Unicode libraries

IBM has graciously released a set of Unicode libraries under the X license (compatible with the GPL). I have just started playing with it, but the sentiment alone deserves some praise.

File under projects/ Mon Nov 28 14:01:40 CT 2005

Spam Hall of Shame

I've made it official with its own blog category: the Spam Hall of Shame is now open.

File under general/ Fri Nov 25 11:11:51 CT 2005

xmas crap

At long last, a completely honest spam this morning. Subject line: xmas crap.

File under spam hall of shame/ Fri Nov 25 10:45:55 CT 2005

Fan Letter

So you got drunk one night with your buddies and watched a horror movie and were reminded of how good that one actor is and how he's in so many of those slasher movies and just doesn't get the credit he deserves. And in your fit of intoxicated and scary enthusiasm you googled for his name and found an email address where you could pour out your fanly (manly) adoration.

Trouble is, that email address you found wasn't his. It belongs to a friend of mine who happens to share his name. And now your drunken love letter is laid bare to the world here in my spam hall of shame (though to spare you some of that deserved shame, I'll not publish your name or email address).



Dude. You rule hardcore.

File under spam hall of shame/ Fri Nov 18 10:10:33 CT 2005

ViewCVS for SVN repositories

At last. After some weeks of on-again off-again attempts at getting a web-based browser for my SVN repositories working, I finally hit the magic combination. Seems that the load path for Python was not including /usr/local/lib by default (despite it being set for the system) so I added a SetEnv directive to my httpd.conf and viola. [ link deleted since I'm not ready to actually reveal any code... ]

File under general/ Thu Nov 10 09:15:34 CT 2005

Usability

I'm a big fan of those people who work at making things easier to use. And since I've mentioned this site twice to folks, and since I've had to search for it twice now too, thought I should make it easier on myself and record it here. The Open Usability group lets you register your project for consultation with folks who care how things work (via the Minnesota Interactive site).

File under general/ Wed Nov 9 20:14:14 CT 2005

I'm a CGI

Found this funny little site via http://vvolonghi.blogspot.com/. Amusingly accurate in my case.


Which File Extension are You?

File under general/ Mon Nov 7 08:14:07 CT 2005

New Job

A little slow here recently, as I've taken a new job and with it, a new schedule. After five years, I've moved on to a new IT job. Five years is a long time to stay in one place, in this industry. The change is good.

File under general/ Tue Oct 4 08:10:18 CT 2005

Post-Rapture Radio

Russell Rathbun's book is funny, thoughtful and crazy ... in a good way. I was reminded of the off-balance depths of Douglas Coupland's best writing.

Full disclosure: Russell is a friend, and I was a member of his congregation for over seven years. Yes, most of the sermons in the book I've heard before. They actually come across better in print, or at least, in the context of the whole book. He's done a good job weaving these parts together.

I especially liked how dis-integrated/confused the identities of the character(s) got in the second half of the book. The levels of identity kept shifting on me: was it a typo? did he really mean Rathbun, not Lamblove?

That sense of keeping the reader (listener) off-balance is what I've always enjoyed about Russell's sermons: in the space that opens when I'm off-balance or caught thinking in a different direction, the shock of the twist, the unexpected feint, in his stories, is where I feel the wind move. Flannery O'Connor did that well (there's a nice allusion to her in the closing line of one story); so did Kierkegaard, Walker Percy -- other great writers to whom Russell is indebted and to whom he will be compared. He deserves the comparison.

File under books/ Sun Sep 11 20:14:25 CT 2005

AJAX

I'm no Javascript wizard by any means, but I find the latest AJAX apps (particularly Google Maps) too cool. Here's where it all gets defined.

File under projects/ Fri Aug 19 13:51:06 CT 2005

Puddle

My son and I went walking last night after a day of periodic rain. Most of the water had dried, but he found one puddle in the park, about the size of a salad plate. He worked that puddle: stomped it, splashed it, patted it with his hands, circled it, tapped it. That puddle just kept on. After about 5 minutes of solid puddle play, Ari seemed satisfied with the puddle's veracity and we moved on down the path.

File under general/ Fri Aug 19 06:22:23 CT 2005

Calendar paging

Added the feature to page from month to month using the calendar in the right column.

File under general/ Sat Aug 13 13:54:38 CT 2005

Xapian

Bill pointed me at Xapian as a potential direction for a better Swish-e. I like what I've seen so far. Xapian is a C++ library for probablistic information retrieval, supports UTF encoding, and provides lots of language bindings via SWIG. Nice. I'll post more as I play more.

File under projects/ Sat Aug 13 12:10:15 CT 2005

Blog spam

Too many spammers leaving their cruft via the comments. If you want to reach me, send mail to blog@peknet.com

File under general/ Sat Aug 13 08:08:38 CT 2005

Singular, like a fish

I'm sure this has happened to you before.

My friend quoted me back to myself the other day, referring to something I had apparently written many years ago. I said something was "singular, like a fish."

What the hell was I thinking? Fish aren't singular, are they? But I like the way that sounds, so I'll take credit for it. Even if I can't remember saying it.

File under general/ Fri Aug 12 07:49:12 CT 2005

Recommended to me

I've had the following books recommended to me by people I respect:

• Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner
• The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson
• anything by Dan Chaon
• 'The Circus in Winter' by Cathy Day (short story)

File under books/ Fri Jul 15 09:14:47 CT 2005

google blue

I was sick of google blue; a little CSS makeover today.

And I found this CSS cheatsheet.

File under projects/ Fri Jul 1 10:27:05 CT 2005

The Water-Method Man

Not as good as Owen Meany or A Widow for One Year but there are some very funny parts. I'd never really noticed before Irving's talent for slapstick. Some scenes are so visual, I feel like I'm in a Marx Brothers movie.

File under books/ Thu Jun 30 10:34:46 CT 2005

Blink

Overrated.

File under books/ Thu Jun 30 10:33:04 CT 2005

Best American Short Stories of 2004

We've been enjoying this series for quite some years now. Lorrie Moore picked this collection, and a very nice one it is. Stories I especially liked: "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie, "Intervention" by Jill McCorkle, and "All Saints Day" by Angela Pneuman.

File under books/ Thu Jun 30 09:02:40 CT 2005

Setting Free the Bears

John Irving's first novel feels a little green to me, but only in comparison to the brilliant work he's done since.

File under books/ Thu Jun 30 08:56:47 CT 2005

The Peknet Support Team

Apparently, I have help I never knew about. A whole team in fact. Got this spam this morning:



Insidious. Lots of unsuspecting folks will bite at that one, if it happens to come from a real ISP (which peknet is not). There was even a virus attached as a zip file. Do these people have anything better to do?

File under spam hall of shame/ Tue Jun 14 08:14:49 CT 2005

Backup is for Wimps

I always tell my clients to do a backup. Of course, none of them do. Until that day when their hard drive fails. It's not a question of if it fails, I tell them, but when. Usually it only takes that one staggering, painful experience to scar them into becoming Backup Believers. Usually.

Today one of the hard drives in my Linux server, which hosts this site, failed on me. It was the main root filesystem drive. It had been spinning nearly non-stop for over four years. That's decent, I think. The other drive that I bought at the same time is still going strong (at least, it is as of this minute).

Fortunately, I had a backup system in place, with redundant hard drives in the machine. I don't use a RAID (which I probably should), but instead rely on regular rsync backups from the main drives to a couple backup drives. I think I have 5 hard drives in that machine (yes, it gets warm).

Once I discovered the failed drive, I was back up in an hour. It should have taken less time, but I had never practiced the restore before, and there was a little trouble booting from the mirror. But I prevailed. Up and at 'em again. What a relief. Not what I expected to be doing today. What I expected to be doing was digging post holes in my backyard. Hard to say which I ended up preferring...

File under general/ Fri Jun 3 19:42:43 CT 2005

Star Wars

Saw episode III yesterday with my wife and our young friend. I feel the same kind of disappointment everyone seems to feel with these first 3 episodes of the long saga.

Sure, my formative years were shaped by the original trilogy. I was 5 when the first Star Wars came out. Saw it three times in one week in the theater during its re-release a few years later. My Lego adventures revolved around Luke and Han Solo.

The thing that helped make the first 3 so myth-like and epic was that I felt dropped into the middle of something much bigger than I was. There were many unexplained things just presented as part of the story: the robots escaping to the planet in the middle of a battle; a mysterious princess asking for help from an even more mysterious magical man in a hood; a simple farm boy told his father was someone special but killed by an evil lord; a quest; a rebellion; the Force. Nothing was explained; everything mattered.

In these latest three episodes, everything is explained, and nothing seems to matter. It's a tragic story, how one wounded man wounds everyone around him, and finally the whole universe. But we know it ends happily. Everything is explained; and so, nothing really matters. No mysteries are left lying about to confuse or mess the tidy universe of Lucas' making. All questions are answered in the end: how Anakin becomes Vader; what the Force is, exactly; how the Jedi die; even down to how Obi Wan can commune from beyond the grave.

Don't get me started on the dialogue. So wooden.

I realized that part of what made the first 3 so good was the chemistry between Han Solo and Leia. I'd go so far as to say that Harrison Ford made the first trilogy as good as it was. He had a great character and he played him really well, made him breathe. He wasn't a comic book caricature; Solo was a scoundrel, and a believable, lovable one.

I'll watch them all again; and I'll remind myself that it's a good story, a comic book story. I'm disappointed, like everyone else, because I wanted Star Wars to explain something more about the world, my world. Instead, it explained everything very tidily about its own world. I guess I shouldn't expect more. And because I do, that's why I'm disappointed.

File under general/ Thu Jun 2 20:54:00 CT 2005

Have a nice eternity.

Somehow this blog has become a spam hall of shame. I find my amusement where I can. And since this arrives unbidden, might as well enjoy it.



What I like is that "Repent" comes after "Accept him".

An eternity of torment would be clicking delete on all the spam I get...

File under spam hall of shame/ Mon May 23 14:34:56 CT 2005

I hereby nominate

this spam as the most entertaining one I've gotten yet. Sure, it's a total scam and a hoax, but the story telling is first-rate and the idiomatic English is very amusing. Look for this line: "the one that makes me to blubber and scuttle away from my dad's abode is the deposit certificate." Brilliant. Miss Jane Sandra, my hat is off to you. No doubt some sucker will fall for this and we'll read about it in the dailies some months from now. After all, it's hard to resist the damsel in distress, especially when she's waving $5M.

Continue reading ...

File under spam hall of shame/ Mon May 9 09:46:32 CT 2005

New features

Added some Blosxom plug-ins: the calendar on the right column, and the see more feature.

Continue reading ...

File under general/ Mon May 9 09:44:32 CT 2005

Lemur Project

Lemur Project is an information retrieval development library.

How to build Lemur 3.1 for OS X (10.3.9)

See http://www.lemurproject.org/phorum/read.php?11,840

The note about "copy Apple's config.guess from /sw" is ambiguous. What I did was create a shell script that does: and then make all the src modifications as indicated in the URL above.

Tip: this one-liner will updated the include paths in the src files: Spurious errors about '-static: no such option' from the g++ compiler can be ignored, or might try --disabled-shared option to configure.

File under general/ Tue Apr 26 07:48:33 CT 2005

Endian

I did not know this: From the perlfunc man page discussion of the pack() function.

Endian-ness is one of those esoteric (or not) computer subjects that makes the internet work (or not). Basically, do you (or more accurately, your computer) count from left-to-right, or right-to-left. Little endian is left-to-right (1234) and big-endian right-to-left (4321).

File under general/ Mon Mar 28 20:31:52 CT 2005

The Baroque Cycle

Just finished racing through Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, three novels set in the 17th century. As early modern European history was my undergrad major, and technology my current occupation, this series was a real treat (which can explain how I finished 3000 pages in 3 weeks).

Barbary Corsair pirates, the birth of the commodities markets, the debate over the origins of the calculus, defenestrations of all kinds. What a riot.

File under books/ Mon Mar 28 10:49:38 CT 2005

In Xanadu: A Quest

I liked William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain so much that I convinced my book club to try another of his travel books.

The short review: it's not as good as Mountain but still worth a read. This is his first book, for which he became (justifiably) famous while still an undergrad. It feels a little "green" compared to Mountain -- I'm chalking that up to Dalrymple's relative youth and it being his first book. I hear traces of what will become excellent writing 10 years later.

File under books/ Mon Mar 28 10:11:08 CT 2005

The Unconquerable World

Jonathan Schell's book was a Christmas gift a couple years ago. Took me some time to get through it. Not because it was poor writing (though it's not particularly lyrical) but because it's emotionally difficult to consider war when your country is mired in one.

I guess I should feel hopeful after reading it; maybe I'm too cynical, but I didn't feel it. Maybe I just need to listen to less NPR news and take more walks in the woods.

File under books/ Mon Mar 28 10:10:47 CT 2005

The Philosophical Programmer: Reflections on the Moth in the Machine

My friend Lori read this several years ago, when she was a programmer and I was not. I ran across it at the library and thought I could do with a little rumination on my current occupation.

Daniel Kohanski offers a nice historical overview of the computer, some thoughts on writing beautiful code, and best of all, some observations on how the rigid and unforgiving logic of computers is changing the way we (programmers) think. There's some good theology in there somewhere.

The most advanced work in computers today is in artificial intelligence, which is one way of saying, we're trying to make computers a little more forgiving and a little more fuzzy. Take your PC out for a few beers; that'll fuzzy it up.

My favorite excerpt:



Ain't it the truth.

File under books/ Mon Mar 28 10:08:29 CT 2005

Schiavo

Don't really care that much. Don't listen to the news anymore. But I know enough to know that this is brilliant commentary from Dork (via Tiny Revolution).

File under general/ Mon Mar 28 09:21:18 CT 2005

Library Jobs

An interesting take on the "myth of library employment shortage."

Here's the local listing for library jobs. I don't know the local graduation rate, but I would guess it's upwards of 30+ a year. You can do the math.

File under general/ Fri Mar 18 06:56:54 CT 2005

New Look

Yet again. I'm experimenting with more CSS and trying to make it a little easier to navigate.

File under general/ Wed Mar 16 13:23:45 CT 2005

Google

I use it. Don't you?

But at what cost?

We spent a lot of time discussing Google in my library class last fall. Google is ripe fodder for librarian anxiety, because at first glance, it poses the single biggest threat to the future of real, live, paid librarians. From the Google email site:



Sounds like a library mission statement, yes?

As a poet put it, in the information glut, poets are the ones who help discern knowledge from information. That's what librarians do too. And usually with a little less opaqueness than poets.

But if the powerful Google aims to do the same thing, how can mere mortal librarians stand in its mighty path? Do they need to? Librarians use Google all the time, as a tool to help find relevant and authoritative information for library users.

It's well known, however, that it is possible to buy and/or fool rankings in Google. And rank is the arbiter of authority, at least, to the casual user (ie., 95% of Google users).

So for now, librarians provide that vital service: helping weed what's relevant and authoritative from what's not. That's what librarians have always done. Can Google replace that function? Can a machine replace a human being?

That's a pretty stale question, I know. Perhaps a better point to make is that if we believe that a machine can replace a human being, then we will fail to fund things like libraries and librarians. If the popular mindset is that Google offers everything a librarian can, soon there won't be a library to go to.

File under general/ Wed Mar 16 08:10:56 CT 2005

Jack Handy

Got this great spam last week. Part of the lastest spam trend: non sequitor emails intended to elicit a reply -- just so the spammer will know they hit a real address. It's like TV: free entertainment delivered right to my screen.



Beautiful.

File under spam hall of shame/ Fri Mar 4 09:24:17 CT 2005

Weather != Climate

I was at the dentist this morning, and amid the smalltalk, the dentist made this off-hand comment that I hear so often from my fellow Minnesotans: I wouldn't mind more 40-degree days.

Around here, that's a very warm winter day.

Comments like that really bother me. They're symptomatic of our culture's myopia. I enjoy the occasional 40-degree day in February -- the annual February thaw is a holy thing -- but that's not the problem. The problem is when we have lots of 40-degree days in a winter. Winter after winter. Then it's not weather anymore; it's climate. And climate change, while perhaps unavoidable in the long run, is going to alter human life on this planet -- and not for the better.

File under general/ Fri Feb 18 12:45:23 CT 2005

Ebay spam

You might get this spam yourself, as I did this morning. A clever hoax purporting to be from Ebay asking you to verify your credit card information. Don't be fooled; this is a scam intended to steal your credit identity.

Of course, you could avoid credit cards altogether, as Bob Smith seems to suggest. I guess I suggest that too.

File under spam hall of shame/ Fri Feb 18 10:38:47 CT 2005

Franken for Senate!

I know, I know. He's just announced he's not running. But I woulda worked for him!

File under general/ Thu Feb 10 14:50:08 CT 2005

Spam

You've gotten it too, I know. But I must say, they just get more and more interesting.

Just this morning I got one with the subject line ==Best Online Pharmacy=== -- pure spam for sure. When I clicked on it to delete it, I got a glance at the body before it disappeared and I had to retrieve it from the trash. Incredible. It was like 100 of the most cliched hallmark-like one-liners you have ever heard, all run together in a long paragraph. Sure, there was a URL at the beginning to some jibberish site (which I subsequently traced back to China Telecom (is that a real company?) via whois) -- but the concept was really smart. Lots of random English phrases, real phrases, that should bypass all but the cruelest spam blockers (as it did mine).

A little excerpt for fun:



I kid you not. That's some great stuff. It's like spam magnetic refrigerator poetry.

Update: got another one, same content, but a better subject line: Phermacy you wish.

File under spam hall of shame/ Thu Feb 10 10:34:46 CT 2005

You'd think...

That nothing happens around here since there's no recent entry, right?

But of course, just the opposite is true. A late night tonight, upgrading some sw for work. Found a great new site today: workzoo. They use Swish-e to spider job sites from all over the US and make them searchable from one place. Very nice. And check out the cool map with geographic distribution of your search results. Tres cool.

File under general/ Tue Feb 8 23:17:05 CT 2005

Credit Cards = Lotus Flowers

I've been thinking a lot about Frank's Kansas book. Mostly I've been thinking that he did an excellent job of describing the situation, but wasn't as conclusive as I would have liked about the why of his thesis. Why do so many lower income Americans vote against their economic interests and vote Republican? Because of class, Frank argues. Because there persists in this country a class resentment against the 'educated Eastern elite' -- a kind of reverse snobbery that (to my ears) sounds vaguely anti-Semitic.

Continue reading "Credit Cards = Lotus Flowers" ...

File under books/ Thu Feb 3 10:48:22 CT 2005

Death, Taxes, the death of taxes, social security and death and ...

A very interesting cover story in this week's City Pages, an interview with a NYT journalist on his new book about taxes in America. Wow. This guy's got the stats to prove what we've suspected all along: big business has been legislating its own wealth.

I've been trying to follow the current Social Security debate, and this quote I found very provocative.



I'd love to hear from any economics-savvy folks out there on what you think about the validity of these claims.

File under general/ Fri Jan 28 08:00:31 CT 2005

The Cross and the Crescent

Richard Fletcher gives us a nice little summary of the formative years of Christian/Muslim interaction. And they weren't pretty. Or simple. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the current conflict between Christians and Muslims.

It's a sibling rivalry, similar in dynamic to the Jewish/Christian relationship. I particularly like Jon Levenson's book on the Jewish themes of this complicated rivalry. The most fascinating similarity is that Christians in the early years of Islam saw it as just another Christian sect -- in much the same way that Judaism saw early Christianity as a Jewish sect.

File under books/ Thu Jan 20 12:49:28 CT 2005

picts

Trying to be more fun to look at. I'm a Unix geek and don't immediately think of graphics as a good use of bandwidth, but if it makes the page more interesting to look at, I'll try anything once. :)

File under general/ Thu Jan 20 08:49:27 CT 2005

lisnews makes my little career decisions controversial...

the internet is such a strange and glorious place. where else could a little term paper and my decision to drop out of grad school stir up passions amongst a bunch of strangers.

seems my library search got picked up on lisnews.com and several folks decided to weigh in.

it's not about the money, silly. it's about my time, and with whom I spend it.



as Gillian Welch once sung it:

never minded working hard -- it's who I'm workin' for

File under books/ Thu Jan 20 08:43:29 CT 2005

What's the Matter with Kansas

The hot buzz book in lefty circles right now, Thomas Frank offers a provocative theory on why many American conservatives vote against their own economic interests. He re-frames the current political clash as a struggle between classes, over the rightful claim to who is the authentic American.

He doesn't spend enough time looking at the psyche of the American evangelical, who he caricatures accurately enough but doesn't understand internally. The rest of his book is spot on: entertaining, insightful, and I want to re-read it with a notebook in hand.

File under books/ Thu Jan 20 08:40:43 CT 2005

The Final Martyrs

I am a long-time fan of Shusaku Endo, the Japanese writer. I have read (I think) nearly all of his books available in English translation. I discovered this book of short stories during my recent adventure at the St Paul Public Library.

If you have read Silence or any of the other Endo novels, you might find this collection interesting. He used many of the short stories (and, to be accurate, personal essays) as exercises for working out many of the characters that appear in other novels.

If you read one Endo novel, I'd recommend Silence or Deep River.

If your tastes run more to nonfiction, I highly recommend his A Life of Jesus, one of the most thoughtful and moving retellings of the Christian story that I have read. Note: in The Final Martyrs is an essay talking about the experience of writing Life and he mentions that he re-wrote it, feeling very dis-satisfied with the original edition. I'd like to read both editions now, to see if I can understand his feelings.

File under books/ Thu Jan 20 08:40:34 CT 2005

In the Beginning

I finished Frank's Kansas much quicker than I expected (though it bears a more thorough re-read) and picked up Chaim Potok's novel from my in-laws' shelf. It got me thinking about the complicated feelings America has toward the Jews who live here and in Israel, and the horrific events of the Shoah.

On that thread, I highly recommend James Carroll's Constantine's Sword. I read it a couple summers ago and was all fired up to start a grad program in ancient Jewish studies...till my lack of ancient Hebrew finally got in my way. A piercing history of the Church and the Jews. There are lots of holes in his academic theories, but they are very interesting holes, and his case is very compelling.

File under books/ Thu Jan 20 08:35:17 CT 2005

supersize this!

watched this movie last night with my wife. wow. you'll have to drag me into mickey d's kicking and screaming from here on in. not that we go often, but those french fries... well. salty goodness.

the longer I live the more a marxist I become. it's all economics. everything. but more insidious is the creation of desire -- often through manufactured nostalgia.

more on the nostalgia bit later. Jean Sulivan has good ideas on that evil beast...

File under general/ Thu Jan 20 08:29:39 CT 2005