Ramble On

So much for syncing NetNewsWire with NewsGator Online.

NNW clearly got the short end of the stick with this one. Sync’ing with NGO is what you’d expect it should be. NGO holds the master updated list, and the clients sync against that. That’s all fine and dandy.

However, NGO seems to be random in its downloads. Which is incredibly irritating. There’s no schedule associated with a feed. No indication of when it will be pulled again. And with my list of feeds, just watching it over the last 4 hours gives me zero indication of when a feed will be pulled again.

Unfortunately. I care about getting updated information for some of my feeds. And NewsGator doesn’t update when I want it. And that doesn’t cut it.

(I’d like to make a comment about it being a gigantic ASP application, but I won’t. Whoops).

I briefly tried reBlog. I did like it. Well, besides the fact that it’s not working with php5 correctly - which is what I have on the computer I tried it on. I like the idea of a web-based aggregator, like IMAP (with sieve) - it would be pretty useful given how I’m coming to read most of my news (in spurts - at odd times, only briefly throughout the day most days - and way too much on a few days)

Unfortunately, I’ve gotten really, really, really used to the groups model of reading syndication feeds. I have 185 feeds in 34 groups, of which I mentally assign varying importance levels. A few friends plus coworkers plus the eXtension wikis/blogs gets top billing. Macintosh and Gadgets next. PHP, Sports, and techies that talk politics almost never. With reBlog, it’d just be a river, and the one or two branches I really care about in the river would get lost in the rapids of some of the feeds. I may end up moving to reBlog - running a few copies of it at different URLs that I’d check at different times.

It very much does seem that we should have a reBlog installed for eXtension in some way. The idea of multiple people checking an reBlog aggregator, and then marking certain items out of Extension system feeds, or Extension-related sites, for republishing into a feed (or into a wordpress blog) seems really, really intriguing (why aren’t we doing that yet?)

So until today, my synchronization method to keep NetNewsWire in sync between my home computer and office computer was to symlink ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire to a NetNewsWire directory on my 2nd Generation iPod that I only use as a portable 10GB HDD.

Which, by the way, is starting to make noise, so maybe what’s coming now is fortuitious.

I started using my free Newsgator subscription that comes with being a registered user of NetNewsWire in 2.1b32 of the aggregator. So I’ll give that a go. I think it will work out, but it annoys me that some subscriptions won’t update immediately. I think for the eXtension feeds, I’ll end up putting those in reblog or something. But I digress.

I started this before I left work today and managed to leave my iPod connected at work instead of bringing it home. So I didn’t have my iPod with me. Since I logged out at work - the iPod volume was unmounted at logout.

Never fear, we have command line administration: Step one - diskutil list to get the disk device. Step two, run diskutil mountDisk /dev/diskdevice. Step Three cd /Volumes/NameOfVolumeIWant, get the data. Step four diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskdevice.

Yay for command line tools. and SSH

Ignore these. They are just my own private little joke. Publicly recorded to remind myself that it can get bad when the System Administrator is the anal one about communication. But I’ve always been that way (you’d think that’d I’d learn to write better, but alas, that’s not the case).

But anyway, onto my private little joke:

eXtension is A natural extension of the growth of national collaborative
eXtension is A value-added
eXtension is A place where agreements and standards

What?!? should be your natural reaction - it was mine too.

I rarely, if ever, print. But I just printed the 436 page VMWare Administrator’s manual (double-sided).

And all the fixed-width fonts are screwed up.

For example, where the document has:

machine.id = “RedHat62VM 148.30.16.24"

it comes out:

!!!!!!"!!!&!&!'"!!!!!!!!&!!!!!!!!!!!!!&

Sigh. This is my karma for printing something.

So it should have been a warning instead of an error. But Sam Ruby took the software and fixed that.

But the New Internet Jerry Springer episode list is starting to shape up:

Matthew Mullenweg: The Feed Validator is Dead To Me

The latest in their line of enlightened changes is that the author of the Well-formed Web spec has changed the capitializition of the wfw:commentRSS element at some unknown point to lowercase Rss. This arbitrary decision has been codified by the validator, which now reports the millions and millions of feeds that use the previously correct capitialization as invalid. Confusion ensues.

If the previous paragraph makes your eyes glaze over, congratulations, you’re normal.

Well, probably. But if correcting the FeedValidator to match the specification gets you annoyed like this, then your software philosophy is sloppy. Specifications matter. Checking against the specifications matter. Your software has to match the spec. And when it doesn’t - you fix your software. You don’t complain bitterly about the people pointing out that your software doesn’t match the specification.

(however- what the heck is up with all these server side validators not letting people add almost valid feeds to their subscription list - or at least pointing out the trivial little change and asking if you want to add it anyway, knowing it might break later. I really shudder at something outright breaking based on a Yes or No from a third party web tool That seems worse to me than any of this other debate about the specs).

as mentioned previously I’ve gone to Atom 1.0, using Ben de Groot’s replacement wp-atom.php

Additionally the “/feed” URL by default is Atom 1.0 and not RSS2.

So now that I’ve signed up for Flickr for Two More Years.

I really need to start using it more.

As usual, bureacratic lack of thinking is not limited to Tuttle. As the third-grader that wrote Apple can attest.

At least Apple apologized. Corporations do that when they think the stock price will tank. Government organizations rarely do that though.

(p.s. this is what happens when you let process, and not thinking and humanity run the show. )

To heck with being an outfielder. I think I’m actually the Designated Jerk.

One of the real problem I have is that I’m like the little kid that spoke out about the Emperor having no clothes. If there are current issues or upcoming issues or if there are things that don’t fit into the bigger picture. I will point them out. The problem, of course, is that if you play that role, you are destined to annoy the living hell out of, not necessarily the Emperor, but definitely the Emperor’s court who have been outright lying about the Emperor being naked the whole time. Which is fine, I don’t really think there’s much room for the outright liars in the first place.

(Please note, for those playing along with the home game “Emperor” is a metaphor for any given issue in a work team, not an individual. The Emperor’s Court are typically the team members or outside customers that prop the issue up, and the rest of the team and customers are the citizens just ignoring the naked Emperor).

Of course, the REAL problem is that I’m too stupid to stop at “The Emperor is not wearing any clothes” . Nooooooooooo. What I always seem to do is the following:

out loud “The Emperor is not wearing any clothes”
to the court: “How did you let that fellow out without clothes? Are you stupid?!?”
to the public: “Can’t y’all see that man is not wearing any clothes? Are you blind?!?”
out loud: “Gah, I hope that he really doesn’t go get any polyester. I think cotton is better”
parting shot at the Emperor: “Yo, by the way, your butt is dimpled”

which of course results in:

the court (He called us stupid?!?): That butt comment was uncalled for!
the public (He called us blind?!?): I can’t believe you said that about polyester!
the emperor (He said what about my butt?): I’m wearing cotton already!

Meanwhile, I’m banned from the kingdom along with that Peter fellow on the hill with the Wolf. And the Emperor stays naked. Or starts wearing polyester leisure suits.

This week was one of the worst I’ve had in my job. And I brought it on myself. Because I didn’t take the plank out of my stupid, dimpled butt self’s blind eye. And along the way, shut up about the cotton too.

Hi I’m Say Hey Jay, Designated Jerk.

So we just got all excited.

A tractor trailer showed up at the loading dock.

We thought it was the APC UPS’s we’ve been waiting close to 2 months to get through the purchasing/ordering process.

Nope.

It was a shipment of hula hoops. For some camp (probably 4-H).

False Alarm. We return you to your regularly scheduled blog reading.

What he said

I’ve worn way too many computing hats to be good at much at any of it. So I mostly focus on systems architecture (of which about the only thing I’m really any good at is heads-down troubleshooting, code, systems, networks, whatever). I’m certainly not a developer, but I’ve written more perl, c, shell, and php than I ever should have been allowed to.

But you know, when it came to putting up a web site for mine and Amy’s wedding. I kind of freaked a little. I didn’t want to code anything. I could have hand-rolled html, but hand-rolling even 5 or 6 pages, especially 5 or 6 page of valid XHTML and CSS is not really all that fun. And copy-editing HTML pages, even a simple div’d out arrangement is a setup for syntax errors. Not to mention every time you make a little change you have to upload everything again.

I tried out iWeb, Sandvox, and RapidWeaver — and while nice little applications, and light-years beyond the last one of these simple wysiwyg editors I used (Netscape Composer for those playing along with the home game) — they really aren’t very flexible. I couldn’t coax the design she wanted out of them. (just changing background colors is quite the challenge).

So I banged my head against the wall a while, but ended up going with wordpress. And it worked out. I liberated a wordpress theme (Yay for open source licensing!) that was something close to what it needed to be, and I played with the CSS, and I played with the .php files - and I finally managed to get something:

that worked.

We could edit online rather simply, each with our own update account. Wordpress has static pages (and there’s always that blog thing if we wanted it). And it worked. You can’t even really tell it’s Wordpress. Of course it’s complete overkill for 8 pages of text. But it made it easy. I only had to modify and troubleshoot, not create.

It was easy. But only because all this stuff was licensed in a way that I could do derivative works and make it look like I (she ) wanted.

I hadn’t posted this yet, because, well, it really wasn’t germane to whatever boot camp and other silliness I’ve been complaining about.

But I asked Rogers Cadenhead about his continued work with the RSS Board and he answered. I really liked the answer.

And it’s probably time to switch this site to have an Atom 1.0 feed, if not from wordpress themselves, (no, I’m not sure I understand either) - then from Ben de Groot. Invalid or not. it’s time to put my own blog where my mouth is (and the tentative-for-now eXtension blogs too).

(and the Mediawiki sites, but that’s another issue).

(p.s. no, I haven’t done it yet, and knowing me it’ll be a few weeks before I do, so much for coding the talk, or whatever)

So after years of doing this IT thing, my email has evolved into probably the single most important communication tool I have. I’m not much of a phone person, and while I’m using IM more and more, I still do most of my communication in email. And it also serves as my knowledge base and to-do list. For better, but mostly for worse.

So I’m exceedingly sensitive to email problems. Email problems (and limitations) with the IMAP service at NCSU was one of the driving factors in bringing up my own mail server in the College of Engineering when I managed it - and the storage and flexibility of having my own mail server is why I still run my own today (which has gone down for an unacceptable 4 hours this month, don’t let me get started on the cyrus db’s).

On a personal level, I’ve been keeping my personal email separate from work for many years now, even though my work policies at the university are (thankfully) perfectly amenable to using it for personal mail - I’ve just kept it separate. This started when I was first with site5 for hosting and used an @rambleon.org email address - and after I gave up hosting for a while - I started using my .Mac account.

.Mac was theoretically great. I paid $100/year for the privilege of not doing ad-supported email. And I got .Mac sync for my work and personal macs to boot, + a personal AIM account, plus a podunk web page. The email was (is) the important thing.

The .Mac sync is decent. The personal IM, eh. The podunk web page, not very useful (not when you do real, or pseudo-real hosting elsewhere). But I liked thinking I had an email service from a reputable company that because I was paying for it, would stay up and being reliable. Stay up yes, reliable in terms of “available” — yes.

But .Mac and major third-party providers seem to be having some kind of personality conflict. I know that .Mac and RoadRunner have gotten ornery with each other previously - causing email delays of hours (and annoying me to no end, as sometimes that significantly impacted plans for the evening when I hadn’t gotten friend’s email until late). But it had been relegated to RoadRunner until more recently. And more recently, I’ve seen delays with Yahoo! and Earthlink, in addition to RoadRunner. Including one instance where email never actually got to me. I’m not sure what to do about it. .Mac HAS NO SUPPORT ADDRESS. No help address that I can find to ask them to check it out, to look at the mail logs, and tell me whether it’s a .Mac problem, or the sending providers are being jerks (not that I really care, both need to get over it). They have “forums” - but those have been a mixed bag, Apple monitors them, because they’ll shutdown and censor threads (or have before) - but I don’t know that they use them for troubleshooting individual issues.

So now, I’ve joined the Gmail club (yeah, I know, welcome to 2005) And it’s a nice email interface, a little different, but nice. I still like my desktop client better (and I know I can POP Gmail, but I really like server-side mail now). And maybe that will be better behaved with all the services. Some of my co-workers use it religiously (James even sends his work mail there, because Gmail’s spam filters are better than Spam Assassin’s). So it should be good enough for my dozen or so personal emails a week.

There jury is out on whether I’ll keep .Mac - but $100 is a little much for sync services. I might keep it for the sync and personal IM and as a secondary mail store. Maybe even to see what Apple actually does with it down the line. But as long as the email issues persist, there’s no way I can trust it with my personal email delivery anymore.

I’m sure Apple absolutely loves this press…

so just for the record, because most people don’t really know how to read/take what I write or say when I’m in tongue-in-cheek mode (as evidenced in the past with interacting with folks on campus):

From: jason.young@extension.org
Subject: Re: [packmug] Windows and iPod
Date: April 5, 2006 8:38:33 PM EDT
To: packmug@lists.ncsu.edu

Oh, just in case - because I got in trouble for this before

My last note was a terribly tongue-in-cheek response (except for the whole
IE and Dante part :-p) about the whole boot camp thing. Dual-boot is
overrated, I think, because one side or the other DOES most often get
neglected - but for those with intel macs it might be cool and actually
work well for you - so try it out! Let the PackMUG know how it goes!

Jason

But I’m still in agreement with Ted Leung

As illustrated by my responses to our campus PackMUG mailing list:

| Hey,
| I’m new to PackMUG, and relatively new to Mac.

Hi! welcome to the PackMUG!

[obligatoryWarning]
Every last thing that follows, and anything that anyone responds to you on this subject is going to be complete conjecture and opinion. Don’t let anyone even begin to tell you otherwise.
[/obligatoryWarning]

| Judging from the emails,
| I’d say most of you know much more about computers and most certainly know
| much more about Mac than I do, so what I’m about to ask may seem like a dumb
| question.

There are no dumb questions. Only questions that lead to completely moronic answers.

| This morning, I received the email about Apple’s Boot Camp
| software that would allow XP to run on a Mac.

Sigh. Yes. And it’s going to be any IT staff member’s worst nightmare come true. Except maybepossibly for the IT staff member themselves.

Dual-booting is terrible. It’s always been terrible. It will always be terrible. Apple tends to make the terrible palatable - but it doesn’t make it any less terrible. And I’m sure BootCamp will be much easier than the terrible boot loader/setup that Windows has, and a fair sight better than Lilo/Grub/BootLoaderWrittenByRandomScandavianLinuxGeek on Linux. But it’s still going to be terrible.

It’s hard enough for any one of us to keep one Operating System maintained, let alone two. Especially when you have to restart the whole system to get to the other one. Every time, let me repeat, EVERY time somebody has the bright idea that they want a dual-boot system, and they get it, one or the other operating system gets neglected. It never fails. Even the most pedantic — and I’m pretty pedantic, so I know of what I speak — manages to to neglect one or the other OS in a dual boot system.

What you really, really, really want is Virtualization You want to launch a little program, and volia! there’s your Windows OS and it’s programs and things - to run Solidworks and Games etc. This is like VirtualPC - but better, much, much, much better, because something doesn’t have to intercept the processor calls and translate them to something that was meant to run on a totally different processor. You still have to maintain two operating systems, but thankfully you don’t have to completely shutdown one to get to the other.

p.s. please note that Boot Camp is only for Intel-based Macs (– this sentence is not conjecture and opinion, but hard fast truth)

| I’ve always been a Windows
| user, but something compelled to buy a Mac laptop two years ago before I
| started school here at State, and now, I would never in my life dream of
| owning another Windows machine.

I think I hear harps playing and Angels singing.

| I become extremely frustrated anytime I
| have to use one, but I’m an engineer and would love to be able to run
| SolidWorks on my computer (it’s not available for Mac). I would also love
| to be able to buy video games and play them whenever they are released. I
| am still waiting for Civilization IV. So, my question is, if XP was to be
| installed on a Mac, would the Mac be bombarded by 3000 viruses and spyware
| programs every hour of the day?

I’m not sure that 3000 is a high enough number.

The answer of of course is Yes, absolutely. - but that’s mostly just to be very scary and dissuade you for trying to dual-boot anything.

So, if you have an Intel Mac, and if you install boot camp, and if you go buy Windows XP, and if you install Windows XP on your Intel Mac to be used with boot camp to dual-boot the thing - and you use boot camp to start into Windows XP - then you better have antivirus and anti-spyware software running on the Windows XP install. You also should employ safe internet practices. And never, ever, never, ever, never run Internet Explorer. It’s terrible, and horrible, and wretched, and the source of all that is wrong with Windows. (okay, that’s not really true, there’s plenty of other stuff wrong with Windows, and it’s probably only terrible and wretched, not horrible). But as long as you don’t use IE, and keep your antivirus and anti-spyware software updated, and “be safe on the internet” - then no, you won’t be bombarded by 3000 viruses and spyware programs. Just like any other Windows machine.

But when you aren’t booted up into Windows XP - you have nothing to worry about, well, you have less to worry about. Only, you have a big gigantic worry if you’ve forgotten about that Windows XP install, and haven’t shutdown the Macintosh and started up in Windows XP in a few weeks. Then you have a few weeks outdated XP operating system, and few weeks outdated antivirus and a few weeks outdated antispyware. As long as the first thing that you do is update things and don’t go visit any internet sites, and hope there’s not some network-based XP exploit out, then you should be fine. But you just have to keep that XP install updated.

If you run IE, though, there’s no hope for you. There’s a special level of Dante’s Inferno reserved for IE users.

| I haven’t had a single virus since I
| switched systems two years ago, and wouldn’t want to revert to such horrible
| times. If having Windows means viruses and spyware again, I’ll continue to
| walk to the computer lab to use SolidWorks, and I’ll continue to wait for
| video games because it’s not worth it.
| Also, I heard a rumor, from what I thought was a valid source, that
| Apple would be releasing a new generation of iPod or a completely new
| contraption for their 30th anniversary. I heard the entire front of the new
| iPod would be a video screen and the new “click wheel” would be a
| touch-activated, touch-screen mechanism. I’ve been waiting with bated
| breath, and the anniversary has come and gone and still no whisper from
| Apple of a new iPod. Do any of you know anything? Were these claims
| substantial or someone’s iPod fantansies?

With Apple, everything is a fantasy until it’s not. I’m sure there will be something. But no one, unless they are an Apple employee on that project itself can tell you the truth. And if they do tell you Apple apparently does bad things to them. Far worse than if you use Internet Explorer.

They did, however, spill the beans on the Reality Distortion Field on April 1.

—–

Pretty much says it all for me. My opinion of boot camp.

BootCamp is not it. We want VMWare for MacIntel. Dual-booting is so 1990’s. One or the other OS is going to be neglected, and be ripe for security problems, etc.

I want my friendly Macintosh OS and run the few Windows applications I have to run. Which usually seem to turn out to be platform-specific Java from VMWare, Dell, and Cisco.

[Update]. p.s. Apple, this is going to be any IT staff person’s worst nightmare come true. Exceptmaybepossibly for the IT staff person themselves personally for their own system. Get on with the virtualization already.

I read this CNet article from Linux World about the OLPC project with great interest. There’s lots of little tidbits in it about the bloatedness of Linux and Windows, and Microsoft dissing the project, even when they are working on CE versions that could work with the OLPC specs - and a very interesting prognostication about mesh networks that I personally think is right on the money.

The quote that I found most interesting:

Once children have the laptops, they’ll teach themselves, he predicted, making teacher training beside the point. “Teachers teach the kids? Give me a break,” he said. “Give any kid an electronic game and the first thing they do is throw away the manual and the second thing they do is use it.”

I would absolutely love to find a way to encourage the adults (nee, the teachers and the faculty) to do that.

In theory, I’m on vacation today. What that mostly means is that I’m hanging out with some pals to watch baseball opening day after noon today. So I end up doing work all morning. Well, Wake County, NC is getting rocked by thunderstorms today (though nothing like the severity that midwest experienced last night). I emailed James and asked him to call me if the power goes out on the servers (they are on UPS’s but I don’t have them monitored, and they are not in buildings with generators, which is just overkill for now).

So… after sending a rather benign:

If ncsu loses power and something of ours goes down - let me know.
Cell == ###-###-####. I’m at home until noon - but my friend doesn’t have
wireless - so I won’t be on the network after noon until this evening.

and then he responds:

I will not test the outlets with my tongue. No. Absolutely not.

Best LOL of the day.

All I could say was that paperclips would be fine, I was laughing so hard.