Whistling in the Dark

On Wednesday Dani and I went to go see Jonathan Coulton at World Cafe Live in Philly. I had never been to that venue before but it was nice. It’s big enough that it feels like a concert and not just a bar gig but small enough that it feels intimate. My only gripe about the place is that the food is over priced but that’s par for course.

I had never heard of the opening band, Paul and Storm, but they were good and funny. Dani and I have both become fans. One member, Paul, is a local boy so I hope to be able to catch more of their shows.

Jonathan was great, as expected. The set list can be found here. One of the best parts was when we caused him to lose it during Still Alive by waving our cell phones (I’m one of the amorphous blobs on the lower middle of that vid). My only regret is that I didn’t bring a real camera. The tickets said no cameras but I think we were the only ones to actually listen to it. I did get a picture of Jonathan and I after the show with my BlackBerry but it is painfully bad. Next time I’m at least bringing a pocket point and shoot. Jonathan really is a nice guy and I was honored to have had a chance to shake his hand, get his autograph, and that picture. I hope he comes back to Philly soon.

Thanks to my brother I now have a polarizing filter. I haven’t had a chance to play with it but I plan to very soon

My girlfriend and I were driving along this evening when we saw a vulture feeding on the side of the road. I have never seen one in real life and wanted to take some pictures of it so I pulled over as soon as I could safely, threw the car in park, and reached for my camera. I always take my camera with me because you never know if you’ll see something you want to shoot. I pulled out my camera and went to put a fresh memory card in when, hmm, isn’t the camera a little light? Yea, I had my camera, a couple of memory cards, even my tripod but forgot all my batteries sitting nice and charged in the charger. I wanted to offer myself to the vulture as a meal because I am obviously too stupid to live.

Lesson learned: Always, ALWAYS triple check that you have in fact brought your batteries. Just so this never can happen again I’m going to keep a set of plain old alkaline batteries (which hold a charge much longer than rechargeables) in my camera bag

I just haven’t had much to say as of late and what little I have had has been said on Jaiku. I do have a few things that could turn into posts bouncing around in the back of my mind. I just need to try to turn them into something postable.

Ars Technica has posted a great, easy to understand article on filesystems today.

As you can see by the badge on the right I use Jaiku. It’s a microblogging service, which means that you can post your thoughts in 140 character bits. There are other services like it, such as Twitter and Pownce, but I like Jaiku most because it has the best community.

That being said there are some things that are really starting to piss me off with Jaiku:

• Invite only: Ever since Jaiku was assimilated by the Borg  bought by Google they’ve switched from open to all to invite only. I know why they switched (It was starting to buckle under the load) but at the same time by not allowing everyone and anyone to sign up the other services are getting more popular while Jaiku is staying static.
• Mobile client: There’s an official client for Nokia S60 phones but everyone else is pretty much out of luck. While there is a client for the BlackBerry it is painfully bad and from what I understand it’s pretty much the same on other mobile platforms.
• API go boom: Most clients, desktop and mobile, connect to Jaiku through an API server. Unfortunately that server has been down far too much over the last few weeks so if I want to post something or check my friends posts and replies I’ve got to go to the web site.
• SMS posting: Jaiku has finally gotten a SMS short code (a phone number, such as 1234, that you can send text messages to) for the US. The problem is it doesn’t work with my carrier, T-Mobile. I don’t know who’s to blame for that. I just want the damned thing to work.
• Silence from on high: Back before Google bought them the Jaiku guys would pop in now and then and post about ideas and problems. Now a days they’re mostly silent.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Jaiku and am not about to jump ship but these problems are starting to get on my nerves.

Some day I’ll create a page with details for all the systems. Until then this will do

Someone on Jaiku asked why people blog. Before he asked I never really thought about why I do it. I know others do it to talk about their passions (computers, politics, religion, etc) but for my blog doesn’t have a theme like that. This blog mainly exists so I have a place to ramble, to put my thoughts down somewhere and allow my friends to keep up to date on my goings on. Some would say that a blog like this is all about ego-stroking, and I guess at one level that’s fair, but in truth I really don’t care if anyone reads this. My friends and the public in general are welcome to read what I write but it matters little to me if I get one hit a month or a thousand. That being said anyone reading this is welcome to stick around.

Dani and I went to the Flower Show for her birthday. I thought I’d be able to get some great pictures of all the pretty flowers and displays. Silly human.

I took over 200 shots. Out of those I have about 50 that don’t look like pure shit and even those are either blown out or grainy as hell. I simply don’t have the skill to shoot steadily in anything less than great light without either a tripod (no room with the crowds) or by dialing the ISO up to where the shots are more grain than subject. I’d like to blame the camera for having a noisy sensor at high ISO but I know most of the blame lays on my lack of skill.

Now that I’ve moved muad-dib.us over to Go Daddy I’ve been thinking of what to do with my home server (which used to host my domain). I’ve decided to turn it into a NAS as well as a development/play box for things that I’d eventually like to add to this site. I had been planning to upgrade the hardware sometime soonish anyway so I just need to change the required specs.

• CPU/Motherboard: Before I wanted a fast CPU to handle a ton of SQL queries without breaking a sweat but is not super important any more. Now the important thing will be a lot of SATA connectors and possibly 1000baseT networking (could be added via PCIe card)
• RAM: 2GB. It’s so cheap that it just makes sense. I could add more but I’m not sure it would be needed.
• Hard Drives: I’m going to want at very least 1TB of space (if not much more) in a RAID5 set up. Hardware RAID would be preferable but good RAID cards that work with Linux (or *BSD, I’m not married into using Linux) are very expensive so I’ll probably go with softraid (lvm2 or whatever *BSD uses).
• Case: Prettiness is not important but cooling and space are.
• Backup: Here’s the hard part. How the hell do you back up that much data without going broke? An extra set of drives that are rsynced over nightly? I know I’ll have RAID5 but that is not a back up. It’s times like this that I miss when you could back up a whole system onto CD.
• Switches: Right now my network is 100baseT. Because the wiring itself is CAT5e it should handle gigabit speeds. I just need to swap the switches out.