bengt.org was accumulating roughly 1000 spam comments a day.  while they were queued for approval (and auto-deleted after 7 days), any actual comments would have been buried in the onslaught.  i intend to post more frequently, but touching doing so on moveable type was just a reminder of how janky my instance had become.

after 45 minutes of fiddling with captcha and openid plugins, i started looking for a cleaner solution.  i’ve been with moveable type since may of 2004, the pre-3.0 days, and upgraded several times, so bitrot had definately set in.  hack upon hack and left a fragile pile of php, perl, and really bad css.  any of the less elegant patches were non-starters, as they conflicted with my previous hacks.  i pretty quickly realized a clean install (app, database, themes, and plugins) was the only real solution… so, while i’m reinstalling, i might as well consider my options, right?  it’s possible sixapart has taken their eye off moveable type while they’ve “diversified” in vox, typepad, and blogs.com (not to mention the brief affair with livejournal).  whatever the cause, moveable type has flagged.

as i mentioned, my previous experience with wordpress was several years ago and the early versions left me underwhelmed.  somewhere in the interim, it’s become a full blown content management system, with a plugin and theme architecture that makes it pretty compelling.  i exported my posts and piloted a moveable type install on an unused domain (i own several that are typically just redirects to bengt.org, including the puke.net and monkeylove.org).  while some of my glee is clearly neophilism, i was very happy with what i found.

i was able to setup the blog, import my old moveable type posts, add some pretty workable anti-spam measures, find a canned theme i liked, modify it, and integrate my flickr photostream within an hour or so.  after another couple hours of fiddling with permalinks (including some fairly nasty mod_rewrite hackery) and kicking the tires, i was satisfied it’s a relationship i was willing to commit to.

i can’t lie down/sleep too soon after eating or drinking.  (see the life posts for a full description of why.  in short, i have a hiatal hernia and bad acid reflux.)  on vacation with not much else to do, i pulled the trigger last late night.  the most noticable effect is that rss readers refetched my last 10 posts.  a minor, but annoying side effect of differing rss schema.  i had figured out a way to avoid it, but not without propogating some of my foul moveable type hacks to wordpress, a sin to which i was unwilling to fall victim.

there are still a few things to figure out, especially before i move the misc. farm site over to it, but i’m quite pleased with the results, thus far.  after the honeymoon period has worn off, i’ll post a more objective comparison of the two platforms.

and where’s my flying car?

a lot of very talented developers put a lot of long hours to make this specific release happen. i have the privilege of working with many of them and am frequently impressed by their desire to ‘do the right thing.’ this is one of the reasons i love my job.

i’ve worked for microsoft for 7.5 years and had something to do with hotmail that entire time. i’ve seen many many talented people have a profound effect on the service we run. many (most, in fact) have moved on, inside or outside the company. some have gone back to school, some have moved north to redmond, some have left to work for other companies, and a fair number have left to pursue careers with our competitors.

it wouldn’t be right to congratulate the current product planning, customer support, business, marketing, dev, and ops teams on this major release and re-branding of hotmail without highlighting the incredible legacy left by their predecessors. there are hundreds of people who’ve worked on hotmail over the past 11+ years, most of them will go unrecognized. hotmail works, in part, because of a number of very wise decisions that were made many years ago.

congratulations to all of you who used to work on hotmail. any success we have is partly your doing.

it’s not as exciting as it might sound, but leaves me with the reminder of why i work where i do. i work with smart people who’re motivated to do the right thing. can’t beat that.

<< < Newer Showing: 1 – 20 of 2426 Older > >>

that’s a big number. color me impressed.

i recently rebuilt one of my home machines and just realized the clock was off. it was 2 minutes slow relative to my shortwave-mastered desk clock.

during this install, i’ve been making an effort to add to a setup script, such that i don’t have to try to remember how to resolve all the annoyances. this example is:

w32tm /config “/manualpeerlist:clock.sjc.he.net clock.isc.org” /syncfromflags:MANUAL /update
w32tm /resync

in other words: sync off ntp and to use a stratum 2 clock and a stratum 3 clock that are both very close to me, network-wise, then to sync.

i may post the whole damn script, when after i run across everything that annoys me in the default xp install.

purchasing it for home, i wasn’t particularly excited about any of the off-the-shelf offerings for tuners. none of them fit with my pc-centric entertainment. i vaguely remembered something about a company called “timetrax” that was doing pvr/tivo-style software for sirius and xm. i looked them up and found that they produce both software and hardware. so… i bought a full “kit” from them including everything needed.

their hardware is a small black box about 2 inches by 2 inches and maybe 1.5 inches tall. it is a usb device, powered by a 12vdc 2 amp wall-wart transformer with an 1/8 inch mini-phono audio out. the usb, audio, and power are on one side of the box with the opposing side housing a 14-pin block molex looking connector. it’s designed to plug into a car tuner, in place of the “sirius connect” adapter.

typically, one purchases a car tuner for use with a given (in-dash) head unit. sirius manufactures one tuner and adapters for jvc, kenwood, and alpine. the tuner and adapter mate at the 14 pin connector with metal flanges and screws to secure the two pieces together. timetrax takes the place of the adapter and presents a usb interface (actually, rs232 over usb) to their software. this allows them to change channels and pull information off the tuner, just like an in-dash car stereo does (artist/track info is displayed on most head units). pretty clever.

their software called “timetrax recast” works for both the sirius and xm flavors of their hardware. it presents a fairly simplistic ui with everything you’d expect from a radio (signal strength, channel info including chan. name and genre, artist, track title, “presets”, etc.). the software begins buffering a song when the track info changes and “records” an mp3 or wav either when you hit “record” or based on your white/black lists (“record this song anytime it’s on” or “record everything except this song”). id3 tags are stamped into the mp3 and the tracks are organized based on user-defined preferences for directory names and structure.

the hardware’s fine, though the plastic case isn’t secured to the tuner, at all. the software is complete and utter crap. it’s needlessly show and cumbersome, it hangs, and the recording mechanism creates big hierarchies of empty directories.

it is remarkably cool to stream music off the satellite to work via shoutcast at higher quality that sirius’ online stuff.

more about my impressions of the sirius service, itself, later. i’ve also discovered an excellent alternative to timetrax; again, more later. now? i have to do laundry.

i guess the fact that i’m really bothered by the statistical claim they are making (and the lack of visibility into sample size, et al.) goes to prove the point, more than vindicate me. so, without belaboring the point, i’m a nerd.

update: the site this referenced is long since gone. removed the busted img src. (12.02.2008, while upgrading to wordpress from moveable type.)

not too bad for just under 3 weeks.

playing with sharpreader (rss aggregator, recommended by aditya), i left on of the default feeds: wired news. the feed was showing a “URL error” with extended text showing a 404. “hmm.. someone hosed the xml.” hit http://www.wired.com/news_drop/netcenter/netcenter.rdf with a browser. yup, 404. up one level? 404. up another to /news_drop? 404. wow. up to the root? 404. maybe it’s a CDN’s fault. verified with the command line HEAD that ships with perl’s LWP.

> HEAD http://www.wired.com/

404 Not Found
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 15:50:42 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 15:50:42 GMT
Client-Peer: 209.202.221.21:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
P3P: CP=”IDC DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa CUSa PSAa IVAa CONo OUR IND UNI STA”

i’m sure there are people madly watching cnet news for a sidebar on the outage.