Chuggnutt!

Month: August 2003

  • Back Online

    Yep, back from our excellent adventures in camping. It was a good weekend, sunny and hot, the nights not too cold. I was a little nervous about how the kids would do sleeping in the tent this year, but for nothing: they slept better than the adults did.

    The campground itself was a bit primitive—no plumbing. Restroom facilities were outhouses, and the only water was from an old-fashioned pump. I didn’t mind so much, but others did. Next year’s family reunion will be held somewhere slightly more modern. But overall, Cold Springs Campground is a nice rustic little campground, and we had a great time.

    The Beach Boys concert on Sunday was cool, too, even though we were dead tired from camping. Free drinks, cigars, steak dinner. VIP indeed. The only drawback was that only the serving areas were tented; all the tables were right out in the hot hot hot sun and we all sat roasting for awhile before some of us figured out we could sit out behind the main tent in the shade and the breeze to cool off before the concert actually started. After that, it was a perfect evening.

  • PHP Cruise Clarification

    Back on the 11th I blogged about the PHP Cruise and quoted the price for 2 as $1199.99 plus $819.99. I wanted to clarify that I was talking about the Full Suite pricing, which is the most expensive (and would also be the nicest for traveling with my wife). Marco from php|architect commented to point out the better deal price of $799.99, for the Inside Cabin fare. Details here. He’s absolutely right; re-reading my entry made it sound like it was more expensive that it is. So get on it! $800 is a pretty good price for a cruise in the Bahamas.

  • Offline

    I’m going offline this weekend, starting today at noon. We’re going to the annual family reunion, and camping out at Cold Springs Campground just outside of Sisters. And then Sunday when we get back, we have the Beach Boys concert. Full weekend. I may be back online Sunday night. Maybe.

  • Air Time

    More on the California governor race. In order to be fair, federal rules dictate that all candidates have to have equal air time on television, and since there’s a huge disparity between the screen time someone like, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger has and someone like, say, Larry Flynt has, cable TV networks have made the decision to pull Arnold’s movies. There’s a story about it here.

    As you might imagine, I have several thoughts on this.

    First of all, nationwide cable TV networks are pulling Arnold’s movies? Seems unfair to punish the rest of the nation for the consequences of California’s governor race. I wonder how long it will take for some litigation-happy idiot outside of California to try to sue the SciFi Channel for this.

    But then, wouldn’t it be much more amusing (and California-like) if instead of pulling Arnold’s movies, they gave equal amounts of screen time to the other candidates? Then there would be nothing on California TV except candidates… imagine the horror:

    • Hours and hours of Diff’rent Strokes for Gary Coleman;
    • For Larry Flynt, there’d either have to be a Hustler Channel (is there one already?), or just show The People vs. Larry Flynt over and over again—though no doubt some Californians would vote for him thinking they were electing Woody Harrelson;
    • Arianna Huffington would be on the air flaming all the other candidates and progressively moving closer to a “gang audit” (in the immortal words of Dennis Miller) by various government agencies;
    • Porn. Courtesy of Mary Carey. This might not be so horrible.

    If you’re interested, the certified list of candidates is here (PDF). All 135 of them.

  • Google Calculator

    Here’s an interesting tidbit: Google now has a built-in calculator. This is a cool feature to be sure, but AlltheWeb has been doing this for a while now (as an undocumented feature), since at least April 14, 2003. Try it and see.

  • PHP Cruise

    Here’s a first: php|architect is organizing a PHP cruise. I’d heard of the geek cruises before, but I certainly never expected to see one exclusively for PHP. Interesting and slightly off-kilter at the same time.

    Prices put it out of my reach, however. $1199.99 plus $819.99 is just more than I could afford. It might be fun, though…

  • Comments are now on

    Okay, I’ve enabled user comments and I’m crossing my fingers. You should now be able to post comments to entries, starting with this very entry, if you’re so inclined. Hopefully nothing major will break! :)

  • Garage Salin’

    Very tired tonight. We had a garage sale today—or more accurately, my wife had a garage sale, I had to work. Only I spent the night before doing heavy lifting to get things ready for it, and spent a good portion of tonight doing heavy lifting again to bring the big stuff back indoors. (And it goes outside again tomorrow.)

    The big things? A queen bed set, with headboard. A dishwasher. A lawnmower.

    Very tired.

  • About RSS

    Warning: technical entry. Feel free to skip if you’re so inclined. Today I’m talking about RSS.

    RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s essentially a format for delivering data and content in an XML (read: structured) format. What kind of content? Well, any kind, really. Right now, the types of content you’ll most likely see RSS being used for are weblog entries and news stories (although some might argue that those are essentially the same thing). The important thing is that if you follow the appropriate standards and set up your RSS file accordingly, then any program designed to read/parse/process RSS can deal with it.

    The most striking thing I discovered when setting up the RSS feed for my site was how easy RSS is. I was literally able to build the RSS template file and write the code to parse content from my database into it in less than one day. And you know what? It worked the first time. Yes, it’s that simple. It really is. Dave Winer keeps hammering this point. He’s right on.

    In the last few months I’ve been getting more and more into the world of weblogs and the technologies behind them and the more I read, the more potential uses I see for RSS.

    For example:

    • Setting up an RSS channel on The Brew Site that lists all the recently added or updated breweries.
    • Setting up another RSS channel on my own site here for the free ebooks page—listing all the available ebooks, or newly added ones.
    • eBay. RSS channels by category, or even custom RSS feeds based on keyword parameters.

    Want more examples? Check out Tim Bray’s excellent suggestions.

    So, RSS is an XML file, and it’s really easy and intuitive to set up and use; what’s to prevent me (or anyone else) from setting up my own XML file with my own format and set of “standard” fields and metadata? Well, nothing, really—that’s the beautiful thing about XML. However, were I to set up my own XML data delivery format, who would use it? And how would they use it, much less find out about it? I’d have to generate a critical mass of interest to get people to view it, to write programs to parse it, to support it. Personally, I don’t have that kind of time (or mindshare) to devote to it, though it could be done. (It is being done, in fact. Check out this site to find out more about an alternative format to RSS a bunch of developers are, er, developing.)

    Speaking for myself, though, why bother? RSS is already here; it’s dead-simple; it’s widely deployed; it’s extendable; it’s being used. I can write software to produce RSS feeds from all manner of content and know that it can be parsed and utilized by other software that can (and will) do very cool things with my content that I might never think up.

    Goddamn, that’s cool.

  • From the Trenches

    My day at work was certainly a tech support nightmare. Get this: as soon as I walk in, I’m told the server is down. Thinking (hoping) they meant the connection to the internet is down, I clarified the issue.

    Nope. The server. Damn.

    This is the main file/print server that everyone in the office uses to store their work on. Excel, Word, Publisher, QuickBooks, you name it, it’s there. Plus, it houses the intranet I developed (and the MySQL database that backs it), Microsoft Mail server (which thankfully no one much uses anymore), and the Intuit Master Builder server software the company relies on.

    (I know, I know, words of caution about putting all your eggs in one basket, I know.)

    There had been a power outage the night before, and now the server was completely dead, no power at all; but the server had been plugged into a UPS, which was still on and working. Odd. Tried plugging it into several other outlets, nothing. Tried a different power cord, nothing. At this point I deduce it’s the power supply, and that’s hopeful because if that’s all it is, nothing’s lost except some productivity time.

    Unfortunately, I don’t have a spare, so I have to wait til the local computer store (who originally built the server, so we have an account with them) opens at 9am to get one. Luckily, I get through to someone in the store at about 8:40 when I’m calling to leave a message, and they’re sending the tech right over with a new power supply.

    And guess what? I was right—the power supply died, and everything else was intact and fine. We got the server up and running again by 9:10 tops.

    Talk about sweating bullets. Even though we had a full backup of everything important made the night before, there’s still nothing quite like that head-pounding, sweat-behind-the-eyeballs, bowel-clenching feeling that you get when something like this happens.