Rand Wacker

So this is just a cross-link, but I really like what Mitch Kapor had to say about the upcoming Google IPO:

Mitch Kapor’s Weblog: The Google IPO

What I hope even more is that their bold moves will stimulate a whole series of debates about the ways in which venture capital and Wall St. do and don’t work to promote the development of technology, like Google’s, which genuinely serves people’s needs.

Basejet, Inc. - Launch into the Wireless future Today

I created a new Travel page similar to the Technology page that I’ve had for a while.

What’s useful about these pages is that I use a combination of Moveable Type categories to automatically generate right-hand side archive lists of Pointers, Destinations, and Ideas.

I’ve noticed recently that my blog shows up quite often in some pretty varied web searches. I’d like to think this is because I’m putting up some useful content, and I guess I’ve got a pretty solid PageRank. I gotta say it’s pretty cool to type a random phrase into that little text box and see your site pop up as the second or third result in Google.

I also realized on our trip to LA last weekend that I’ve got a larger audience than I ever expected. We were at a reception in Alexis’s home town for post-wedding greetings and I had numerous people whom I had never met before come up to ask, “what does ‘blog’ mean?” I guess Alexis’s parents had given out my URL to people who asked what we were up to on our honeymoon so they could follow along.

I’m thinking that I should consider participating in Google’s AdSense program to offer some unobtrusive targeted ads to people who might come across my site looking for “t-mobile t610 bluetooth gprs osx”, “bad rss”, or even “osx x11 emacs”. I can’t find a lot of information hooking it up to Moveable Type though, anyone seen a simple pointer for it? Perhaps tonight I’ll setup AWStats to get a better idea of exactly what people are coming to see…

Update: AWStats installed and configured.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a couple of Western Digital 2000JB drives at Fry’s for about $80 after rebate (200GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB cache). I already encased one into an external housing for various purposes. The second I set aside for putting in my home firewall/server machine, which I’m rebuilding out of my old DEC/Compaq dual-PII/233 desktop workstation; getting rid of the old P90, switching from FreeBSD to Debian Linux, trying to clean some old cruft up in general.

After cleaning out a few colonies of dust bunnies from the case and installing the new drives, I booted from CD and installed Debian woody. Created an ext3 filesystem across the entire big drive, mounted it, and started copying 60 gigs of MP3s over…only to realize that the total space on the drive was 137GB.

Numerous web searches revealed that there is an IDE limitation where older drives used 28-bit(!?!) addressing. It appeared that I might have to buy a new motherboard, an Ultra133 IDE controller, or possibly write off the last 63 gigs of space. Due to my desire not to spend much money on this project I think number three was my preferred option, but I there was some hope in more recent Linux kernels that had support for the new 48-bit(!?!) addressing standard for REALLY BIG IDE DRIVES.

Yay, it works! Turns out that Debian woody ships with kernel 2.4.18, and the patches didn’t go in until 2.4.19. I installed an SMP 2.4.26 image from backports.org, rebooted, and it recognized the full drive capacity right off the bat.

So, in short, don’t run out and buy new hardware if you can’t fully read your new drive. It might just take a simple kernel upgrade.

The best show on TV. On IFC.

This is about the only thing Tivo records anymore that I make a point of watching; except of course for the occasional new “Inside the Actors Studio”.

Jon Favreau invites four random celebrities to fine dinner for an evening of drinking, eating, and conversation, then they just let the tape roll. Its the best kind of reality show, a real show about theater instead of a theatrical show portraying reality.

Usually the best stories come, of course, from some of the older guests. My favorites though are the numerous directors who will come on and tell crazy stories about the stories behind the stories. Peter Bogdanovich reminiscing about Orson Welles, Peter Berg’s hilarious story about getting held up in the jungles of Brazil while scouting for “The Rundown”, or Burt Reynold talking about re-visiting the river from Deliverance with Ned Beatty and stopping for lunch at “Sodomy Creek.” It’s great conversation, and fantastic entertainment. Highly highly recommended. If you don’t get IFC, Bravo I think still does “IFC Fridays” where you can occasionally pick up a new episode on the free channel preview.

Powerbook…still out of commission…argh. It came back from it’s second repair and exhibited pretty much the same problems as before; couldn’t even make it through install. When I hook up my disaster drive through Firewire it will run just fine. In fact, it seems a bit faster, but that’s probably because I haven’t loaded it down with tons of extra crap.

Spent a while on the phone with an AppleCare product specialist today, describing the full chain of events that I’d written down. Yippee, it’s heading back to Texas whenever the box arrives. In the mean time at least it looks like I can use it somewhat reliably with the external drive. I think I’ll end up setting this environment up as nicely as my usual environment, and have little motivation to do a full install on the repaired laptop except for the portability.

Well, at least I’ve got ecto re-installed for better blogging.

I was just going to make this a link on the side over there but then I read through this entire article and thought it was pretty good:

Google files for unusual $2.7 billion IPO | CNET News.com

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin are making some very strong demands with this offering, and they seem determined to do things their way. I guess if they own 30% of the company, they have that right. One passage I thought that was interesting:

Another flourish involves the company’s allegiance to its geeky roots: The amount of the $2.7 billion offering contains an inside joke for math-minded. The exact offering, $2,718,281,828, is the product of “e” and $1 billion, where “e” is the base of the natural logarithm–a logarithm especially useful in calculus–and equals 2.718281828….

This reminds me of what my friend who works there once said about some of the geeky tendancies in the source code:

Boredcast Message from soda!xxxxx (ttyCM) at 13:23 …

in a loop i udnerstand using

ThinkGeek :: Affiliate Program

I had no idea how dependant I’d become on my Mac until I was without it for more than a week. I can get day-to-day email done using X on my Linux desktop, and I can run Windows under VMware when I have to access an Office file. But I can’t be really productive without things like OmniGraffle and the interface that JUST MAKES SENSE. So, since we don’t really have any spare Macs around the office and Alexis would kill me if I took over her machine for nefarious work purposes, I had to think of something a little more workable.

Last week I got a good-quality Western Digital 200GB hard drive from Fry’s (for like eighty bucks!), then I ordered a USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure from DigiSuperStore.com to put it in. Right now I’m installing Panther across the whole drive and a few of the can’t-live-without applications that I need. I’ll use the disk as a backup target when I (finally) get my Powerbook back so that if something goes wrong again I’ll be able to boot the disk off of any old Mac, restore from the latest backup, and continue working as before…without disturbing whomever is kind enough to loan me their machine (right now I’m borrowing a five year old G3 iMac from one of my co-workers.

Hopefully the plan works well. At least I’ll have a massive disk to organize some of my data, and create offline backups of important items. One hint I noticed though was that since I installed on a very barebones iMac the OS didn’t have drivers for more modern parts in the iBook/PowerBook line like Airport cards. I’m sure there’s something I could have done to upgrade the drivers, but since I had little invested I just decided to re-install the disk connected to my wife’s iBook.

Big external firewire drives are useful, let’s hope this plan works.