Photo of the day.
Early morning parking lot. Southeast Calgary.
Friday, January 31, 2003
Sigh.
It must be the weekend. I'm hankering for an ample glass of Australian Cabernet Shiraz and a mighty bowl of low fat preztels. The Perl install can wait until tomorrow.
Roadside assistance.
Steve Comrie, of pseudodictionary fame, kindly emailed me a hint regarding yesterday's CPAN installation issue. Based on the error message I posted, he suggested that I install the File::Spec module, seeing that it's a prerequisite module to have in place prior to CPAN attempting to update itself. It was apparent, at least to Steve, that CPAN didn't get around to installing one of the modules it obviously needed on order to install itself. Glancing at some of the CPAN blurbage scrolling across the telnet window, I noted that one of the features provided by the newer versions of CPAN is the ability to check for module dependencies prior to its own installation. You gotta love progress. I proceeded to get File::Spec cooking and then retried installing the base CPAN module. Gosh golly it worked. Like a freaking charm, it did. Thanks Steve.
But... have you noticed how there's always a but?
When I finally got to the point of installing DB_File, things were looking good. The install was going along swimmingly until the final make test. Apparently, the DB_File module requires Perl version 5.004_05 or later. My Qube is running Perl 5.004_04. Doesn't that just frost your muffin? Of course, nowhere in the Movable Type requirements does it mention this particular module dependency. It simply states MT requires at least Perl 5.004_04, which I've got in spades. I guess I need to figure out how to update Perl now. Onward.
Thursday, January 30, 2003
On the make (file).
In preparing to install the DB_File module for use with Movable Type, CPAN prompted me to look into grabbing the latest version of itself before proceeding. Sounded like a plan to me.
cpan> install Bundle::CPAN
Things seemed to be humming along delightfully until the dreaded checksum. For whatever reason, CPAN can't locate the module it just downloaded via Net::FTP and then run a checksum test against it.
Running make for G/GA/GAAS/MD5-2.02.tar.gz
Fetching with Net::FTP:
sources/authors/id/G/GA/GAAS/MD5-2.02.tar.gz
CPAN: MD5 loaded ok
Fetching with Net::FTP:
sources/authors/id/G/GA/GAAS/CHECKSUMS
sources/authors/id/G/GA/GAAS/MD5-2.02.tar.gz: No such file or directory
Use of uninitialized value at -e line 2326.
Checksum mismatch for distribution file. Please investigate.
Fug.
I guess it's time to hop into vi and snurf around the CPAN config file. Maybe the directory paths I specified rather haphazardly during the initial run are all cattywumpus. I'll specify thebuild_dir,cpan_homeandkeep_source_wherevalues to all be absolute paths to the server root and then see what happens.
Bingo.
Sweet mother of perl, the bundle installation process seem to go on forever. And everything was looking dandy until the final module. The one module which probably needs to be up to date and installed along side all the others. The actual CPAN module.
CPAN.pm: Going to build A/AN/ANDK/CPAN-1.63.tar.gz
Can't locate File/Spec.pm in @INC at lib/CPAN/FirstTime.pm line 19.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at lib/CPAN/FirstTime.pm line 19.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at Makefile.PL line 6.
Running make test
Make had some problems, maybe interrupted? Won't test
Running make install
Make had some problems, maybe interrupted? Won't install
Nuts. Now what?
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Hang on tight... we're going in.
What I'd really like to do is install Movable Type on my Cobalt Qube. As much as appreciate Blogger to handle the bulk of my blogging chores, there are times when I wish I had more flexibility. Flexibility and comments. Flexibility, comments, and a valid RSS feed. But that's it. The Qube is a Linux box. Movable Type uses Perl. You'd think it this would be a no brainer. Yet, I shook my head and muttered to myself...
"It can't be done. I don't want to risk conking out the web-based administration tools by installing stuff that convolutes the system. Remember, I've still got to take care of the 900 Newted Community accounts on that box."
There was a sigh and a virtual wave of a hand in my general direction, at once dismissing my concerns and offering encouragement. "You just can't run MySQL on a MIPS-based Qube," I added.
Well, actually you can, but it's really messy.
Victor replied, "My new MT setup on chuma.org doesn't use MySQL. Just Perl and DB_File. MT was designed to use this in order to be able to install it with just FTP access and appropriate CGI access. It's really not hard, once all of the necessary Perl modules are installed and there aren't too many."
Well, that's a different ball of wax. It almost sounds like something I can tackle on my own. "So, do those extra modules just slide into /usr/bin along-side perl?", I impishly inquired. "Is it that simple? Something tells me no..." As you may be able to tell, I know just enough about Linux to be dangerous. But not enough to save my server from complete destruction.
Victor explained, "Not into /usr/bin, but usually into /usr/lib/perl or one of its look-alikes such as /usr/local/lib/perl. Installing extra Perl modules is easy. You can do it more than one way, of course, in the spirit of Perl. You can first download the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) module, and then invoke it to get a shell-like interface to installing and managing installed Perl modules. Once you install CPAN the manual way, at a command line you just have to:
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
and then, at the CPAN prompt:
cpan> install Foo::Bar
"CPAN will automatically fetch the module's tarball from the nearest mirror, and resolve dependencies by upgrading or installing other modules it depends on. Very nifty."
Very nifty indeed, I thought. But let's not get to far ahead of ourselves here. First I need to locate my Perl directory. Bingo! /usr/lib/perl5. Oh, and look... CPAN is already installed."
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Sep 10 1999 CPAN
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 115082 Oct 20 1998 CPAN.pm
Forget that manual install silliness. It looks like I'm cruising now and feeling brave. Let's just go ahead a run CPAN and see what happens.
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
We have to reconfigure CPAN.pm due to following uninitialized parameters:
cpan_home, keep_source_where, build_dir, build_cache, index_expire, gzip, tar, unzip, make, pager, makepl_arg, make_arg, make_install_arg, urllist, inhibit_startup_message, ftp_proxy, http_proxy, no_proxy
/usr/lib/perl5/CPAN/Config.pm initialized.
The CPAN module needs a directory of its own to cache important index files and maybe keep a temporary mirror of CPAN files. This may be a site-wide directory or a personal directory.
First of all, I'd like to create this directory. Where?
CPAN build and cache directory? [/root/.cpan]
Yeah, ok. That's sounds good. Just keep asking me questions, you friendly critter. And I'll obligingly answer them. With little help from a second telnet session in order to help me remember where all the external programs like gzip and tar and make are hiding.
commit: wrote /usr/lib/perl5/CPAN/Config.pm
cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.3102)
ReadLine support suppressed
cpan>
"Well, how about that...", I exclaimed. And the server is still running too. Next, we'll attempt to install the DB_File module and the whole can of Movable Type worms. Hold on to your Silly Putty, kids. The ride may get a bit bumpy.
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Here's looking up your old address.
WhatIsMyIP.com is too good and too simple a thing not to share. And as far as really usable ideas go, TinyURL.com is running a very close second. Marvelous. Bloody marvelous.
Photo of the day.
Early morning parking lot. Southeast Calgary.
Monday, January 27, 2003
Food tastes better when it's not up your nose.
Reports confirm that mom ate a sandwich today. And a bowl of soup. All by herself. It was a one-handed effort mind you, but definitely self-propelled. And it was real, honest to goodness sandwich and soup, not that brownish, liquified sandwich and soup substitute that's been flowing her through small-bore nasal feeding tube since the middle of December. Egg salad, apparently. This is so cool.
Balancing act.
You write about what's within your current frame of reference. You relate observations regarding daily experiences, sensations, thoughts and peeves. Sometimes those observations get trapped rumbling down a single lane. It can be an interesting lane, a comfortable lane, but nonetheless an unwavering lane with no foreseeable exit ramps. I think my posts have been smelling a bit too Newton lately. Please don?t misread that statement. I like Newtons. A lot. But the balance is missing. The menu needs a change. Maybe I need to rethink my approach, my angle, my list of daily weblog consumables. Or maybe not. I've certainly gone through this before. I've dealt with days filled with not much other than lousy interface design. I've experienced the rut of dealing with an asinine employer. Sometimes I couldn't find anything other than browser dot revisions to spit and sputter about. More than once, I've wandered endlessly around stretches of absolutely nothing in particular. Perhaps this isn't anything to get lathered up about. By typing out loud - just like this - I'm poking at the sides of the box with my handy pointed stick. That's the amazing thing about your current frame of reference. It's easily influenced. By pretty much anything.
More Newtons obviously means more weblogs.
I'm getting a sense that folks who become first time Newton owners take to their new PDAs like fish take to water. Or should that be like a stylus to screen? You see, it's also apparent they want to tell the world about their adventures in the land of the unsupported hand-held device. Earlier this month, I listed a hefty load of newcomers and stalwarts in the field of Newton-related bloggage. It seems that the bus is still making stops and picking up passengers. Michael D'Haem took the digital reportage plunge after purchasing a used MessagePad 2100 on eBay. His new venture is the aptly titled Newt Blog. No confusion there. Likewise, Andrew Diller is providing bidirectional, cross-platform coverage through a pair of weblogs, namely The Syncing Macintosh and The Syncing Newton. Come on people, there's still a passle of previously loved MessagePads available over at J&K Sales. What's holding you back?
Friday, January 24, 2003
A funny thing happened on the way to the forum.
Earlier this month, it came to my attention that email notices being sent from the Newted Community Forums were arriving with goofed-up date headers. I had never noticed the problem myself, probably because my primary email client determined the message sent date using a different header field. At any rate, these notices were showing up at the bottom of a lot of people's inboxes, rather than at the top, causing a fair bit of confusion in the process. Ever on the prowl to fix silly little things like this, I ended up tracking the behavior back to a Y2K bug that exists in cranky old versions of the Ultimate Bulletin Board scripts. Cranky old versions like the one that came with the Cobalt Qube when I bought it a couple of years ago. At that time, the patch for the problem was freely available. Now it isn't. Alas, the license information for this particular copy of UBB is long gone and there's no way of downloading an update from the Infopop site without a valid license number. So I took the plunge and bought a new license for the current version of UBB.Classic. Not only will this fix the kerflunky date problem, but I'm looking forward to some enhanced forum functionality and other groovy Perl scriptiness. That being said, I'll mention that I'm currently running the Newted Community site as a public service and paying for this software upgrade out of my own pocket. I really don't mind, but it would be nice if I could recoup a bit of the cost from the community it serves. If you'd like to help offset my cost of this software - which will end up being around $200US - feel free to contribute something as a Newted Community Donation via PayPal. All philanthropic gestures will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Thursday, January 23, 2003
.elgooG
I'm not sure where I was when this clever little time-waster was launched last year, or how I missed the meme first time around. But gosh golly kids, am I ever enjoying Google Mirror right now. Yes, I suppose I should get back to work, shouldn't I?
Now that's craptastic!
Between cleaning up cat vomit and mixing up large batches of papier-mâché for his own private use, Howie managed to get his site nominated in this years Bloggies. He's as befuggled by the peer recognition as any of us, but ain't complaining. If you'd like to see him win some cruddy little statuette, or whatever the heck they give out for these things, go click the radio-button for his site in the Best Merchandise of a Weblog category. If you think that "... blog and journal awards are total web scourge, and you get enough unwanted puke in your life as it is ..." like Rachel does, then forget I even mentioned it. Howie, for whatever obscure reason might be out there, you probably deserve it. As a congratulatory gesture for being chosen out of thousands, I'll buy the sushi next time.
[ Update ] It turns out that the above "web scourge" quote should not have been attributed to the Rachel that Howie and I both worked with, but instead some other Rachel whom I've never met but apparently lives in New Brunswick. My apologies for the confusion.
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Photo of the day.
Detail of glass block window. Foothills Medical Centre, Calgary.
Some of my best friends are stock photographs.
Familiar faces keep staring back at me from my browser. Why look, isn't that Sheldon pushing gooey hair care products? What about Mr Sixto propping up that equipment rack over on the Quantum support site? And then of course, there's Marla, Marla, Marla. Wired seems to think they've latched onto something akin to an Ellen Feiss for the Linux world, but all of us ex-EyeWire employees know her true identity. And yes, she is a Mac user.
Hey. Well, I... hmmm.
This is how my mom is beginning to talk to us. Stringing a few small words together in order to place a thought. To be a part of the conversation. These kinds of short phrases are coming easier and easier every day. The words that follow are the ones getting stuck somewhere between her being able to retrieve the information and her voice being able to communicate them. Mom's long term memory is solid, and her face lights up when old friends or her grand kids come to visit. She even began correcting a visiting friend about apparent inaccuracies in his recounting of a particular family they grew up with. According to my dad, she blurted out a firm "...now just a minute..." in the middle of the story. And every single part of her beamed when my daughter gave her a kiss on the forehead this past weekend. The look on her face showed more of my mom's personality than I think I've seen in months - even prior to the aneurism. Right now though, she can't remember who came to visit her the day before. In other news, the tracheotomy scar is healing nicely (as nicely as a tracheotomy scar can heal I suppose), the physio sessions are going well, her hairdresser is coming in to tame her mop this afternoon, and I found out that my dad read all of my weblog postings about mom. He printed out a copy so he can show them to her when she's a bit more cognizant of the situation. Looking back on some of those posts, I can tell I was writing them more for my own benefit than anyone else. I'm glad that my dad thinks that they're worth sharing. Especially with my mom. It's a good thing I checked my spelling. She's bound to give me heck about things like that.
Sunday, January 19, 2003
Clock watcher.
Say you were a Unix user. One of the most common tools you would be familiar with would be cron. Cron being about as command line as you can get. Say you were a Mac OS X user. Except for a minority of us, you'd probably be more familiar with the GUI on top of the Unix, than the Unix itself, right? Therefore we can probably surmise that two of the more mutually exclusive computing terms one could put together could be cron and GUI. Not any more. Enter CronniX. One more slice of software heaven helping make OS X less Unix-y and more GUI for the masses.
Underpromise and overdeliver.
Those two words have been treated like a mantra by me and my fellow worker bees for years. My good friend Brad repeated the phrase "Underpromise and overdeliver..." at staff meetings, company overviews, off-site strategy get-togethers and the like. We all believed in it. We still do. I've always understood it to be a pledge to someone you are providing a service to. It basically means that you will promise to do something for that person, but not so much as to risk failing at the task. You'll also give that person much more than they ever expected in the end, because you didn't cover the world with sugary frosting to begin with. Underpromise. Overdeliver. Simple, common-sense business behaviour that keeps everybody happy and satisfied. It's a concept and a belief that all of us who now work at Veer still strive to uphold and evangelize. With that in mind, it was pointed out to me this week that underpromise.com was available as a domain name of the week, but overdeliver.com was unfortunately taken. However, if you're looking for a matching pair of domains, perhaps overpromise.com and underdeliver.com would better suit your needs. They certainly fit the professional personality of many companies currently in business.
Showing off for all the world to see.
It's been more than a couple of months since the Newtons Around The World gallery was updated, but I finally got my furry butt in gear to do it. The gallery is now sporting over 60 assorted images of - you guessed it - Newtons around the world. Who would of thought? Please give up a repetitive smack of the clappers to John Charlton, Paul Filmer, Victor Rehorst, and Peter Fraser for submitting pictures this time around. Oh, and I suppose I could mention that I have a couple of new shots in there as well. For you folks lacking in patience, the new images start on page four. And don't forget to send in your own submissions. I know there is still a ton of you closet green-bleeders out there. The images don't have to be new ones. Go through your archives and dig out those shots from that visit to Uncle Ned's pig farm a few years ago. Remember how the swine couldn't hold a stylus to save their bacon? Or how about some more pictures from those beer-drenched user group meetings we keep hearing about, hmm? Come on, you know you want to.
Friday, January 17, 2003
Photo of the day.
Angular building at sunrise. 11th Street Southeast, Calgary.
Thursday, January 16, 2003
Mo' hack? Mottek.
The indubitable Eckhart Koppen, developer of impossible software wonders, has started a new weblog dedicated to hacking the Newton. Mottek means "hammer" in a certain German dialect and loosely refers to the Hammer debugger used in developing for the ARM processor found in Newton devices. So what's Eckhart got up his sleeve? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. Anything coming out of same workshop that brought an RSS newsfeed reader, a Blowfish-based encryption utility, and a MP3 player to the Newton platform has got my undivided attention.
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
It works better if you give it a kick.
If you happened to notice that this site (or any of the others I happen to host out of the rack beside the washing machine in my basement) was a bit tardy serving pages over the past few days, you weren't alone. It seems that my ADSL modem had decided to throttle down on the outbound stream of bits, leaving the inbound calls alone. This explains why requests were answered promptly, but the goods were often delivered late or not at all. The issue was confirmed through a few FTP trials where several hundred thousand bytes of data were routinely uploaded without issue, but couldn't be downloaded from the very same machine. Further support of the reason the "A" in ADSL stands for "asymmetric" and not "ass-hauling". Fortunately, the situation was corrected with nothing more than a yank of the power from said modem. Everyone is feeling much better now, thank you. I wish something as simple as cycling the power would make me perk up...
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Gee, that's a crisp superstar.
How can you tell when someone's been hanging around other designers, thumbing through reams of stock photography books and browsing thousands of online search results to find nothing but perfect full-page images for some project? When it comes time to post the available domain name of the week and it turns out to be killerheroes.com - that's how you can tell.
Who's the guy in the snazzy pants?
You can personally thank my dear friend Rob for this picture. He's the young pup in the foreground whose pants you fortunately can't see. I imagine you've already deduced who's wearing the stripes centre stage. I'm not sure who the heck the other guy is. Golly, weren't the early seventies a wonderful time for children's wear? Couldn't you just scream?
Bungle in the jungle.
I was beginning to wonder how long it would take for someone to start skinning the Safari browser. I need wait no more. Waterfall Software has released the first version of their SafariMasks navigation button replacement utility. The funniest part of this whole thing is not the fact that people want to continuously tinker with everything that Apple churns out of their software labs, we all do it. Who hasn't toyed with the idea of scraping off all that cheesy brushed metal garnish from their iApps? Come on, admit it. No, the funniest part is the disclaimer at the bottom of the Waterfall Software home page which reads: "Our website navigation does not work correctly in Safari." I guess I should cut Dustin MacDonald, the proprietor of Waterfall, a little bit of slack. Being only 14 years old, he probably has more important things on his mind than making sure his site is standards compliant. Here's a tip. Ease back a bit on those <font> tags Dustin, they'll end up eating you from the inside out.
Hailing a faster iCab?
Apparently the new 2.9 preview version of iCab is much faster due to changes in the cache management and other internalities. While this may not seem too exciting on the surface, the iCab news page hints at these changes laying the groundwork for even more significant revisions to the code for version 3.0, including "better CSS support" and "integration of Mac OS X". Although with the continuing (and more timely) improvements being made to Chimera and now Safari, it seems that iCab is becoming less and less relevant as an Mac browser alternative. Onward to 3.0, and I suppose we'll see what shakes out.
Monday, January 13, 2003
And the winner is...
Did I mention that my Newton web server won its category in the annual Newtie Awards? I didn't think so. I even took it upon myself to design some cute little web buttons to go along with this years festivities. Oh, it's a joy just to be nominated. I hope it doesn't all go to my head. Shucks.
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Of course it'll fit in there.
The ladies of the house use my seven year old Power Macintosh 8500. It's not a bad machine, just an older, crankier one. In fact, it's been a veritable workhorse since it arrived along with my cable modem back in December of 1995. It's been upgraded with not quite a quarter megabyte of RAM, a 233mhz daughterboard salvaged from a 9600 has been stuffed inside, and it's been outfitted with a dandy multi-port USB card. However, the poor thing also been limping along on its single 2GB hard drive since the sounds of hardware failure tour this past summer. I've yet to wedge larger replacement drive into the ample beige chassis, but I took it upon myself to at least update the operating system to something released within the last three years and get the applications into some semblance of order. The easiest part of the task was doing the backup prior to wiping and reformatting the drive. Ever since I got the beastly Iomega network attached storage drive up and at 'em, I've been automating the backups across all of the boxes in the household. At least in theory I've been automating the backups. Sometimes the reality of practical computer interaction rears its ugly, deformed head and certain things get missed. Or forgotten. Or deleted. Or... well, you get the idea. However, having a nasty half terabyte of online storage at your beck and call makes worrying about where to put everything a bit less of an issue. Needless to say, the 8500 is happier now. The files are much more backed up than they used to be. And I get a kick out of telling people I have a half terabyte of online storage humming in a rack down in the basement. What a geek.
Thursday, January 09, 2003
Photo of the day.
Lettering on stairwell door. 5th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
Two cool tools.
Hot on the heels of Apple's new browser, good old Waferbaby slapped together a quick little hack that will convert your Chimera bookmarks to a format that Safari can digest easily. And on a slightly belated note, my other geeky Australian friend Toby Thain released his Windows icon (ICO) file format plug-in for Photoshop the day after Christmas. In what might seem like a awfully strange, yet delightful coincidence, Safari supports favicon.ico files. Now isn't that handy?
Safari so far.
Playing with Safari? You might be interested in following along on Dave Hyatt's Surfin' Safari weblog. Dave is a member of the Safari development team at Apple and has been offering updates on bug fixes as well as responses to comments regarding Safari posted on other high profile weblogs such as Meyerweb and diveintomark. Some comments are fair, other have been pointedly skewed. Dave takes them all in stride and offers reasonable commentary and timely updates on the development process, something you rarely see come out of Apple. Make it part of your complete browser testing day. Via Applescript Info
Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Coudalized.
"If a client ask[s] for a logo with swirly thing, tell them that it's been done to death." Even though it hasn't been updated in ages and several of the featured companies have either rebranded, managed to grab a clue, or simply dissipated into the ethereal mist, the spiral logo critique still merits a mention over at Coudal Partners. Thanks for stoking the old referrer log, Jim. And say, if you ever need a substitute single for a round of Photoshop Tennis, give me a dingle.
Monday, January 06, 2003
I see you, not in ICU.
My mom was moved out of the intensive care unit a couple of days ago. I wasn't sure we were going to see that happen for quite a while yet. Amazingly enough, it happened. When I visited her this afternoon, I also discovered that she is no longer constantly monitored for things like heart capacity, overall fluid levels, or even blood pressure. In fact, the only data being displayed on the equipment in the room are her pulse and her temperature. And they're as normal as mine numbers. Moistened, oxygen-rich air is still supplementing the room air, but it's no longer pumped past her tracheal opening because they've stopped it up. Corked, as my dad says. Instead, the oxygen is passing through a small, insignificant nasal tube. Someone mentioned that they may be getting ready to remove the tracheal tube altogether. Along with the reduced medical attention and some minor physio, she's becoming more alert and expressive. I can sense frustration when she scrunches her face up and turns her head away. I can see the discomfort when she pulls at the blankets with her one movable arm and then twists her body the entire length of the bed. She always despised sleeping on her back. Now that's her only choice. And sometimes, just sometimes, she smiles. That's when I see a slight twinkle in her tired eyes that reminds me that all of my mom is still in there somewhere.
Green blogging.
You're not going to believe this. In fact, I scarcely believe it myself. I just composed and formatted this weblog entry in the Notepad on my Newton and then posted it directly through Blogger using a native blogging client. How the heck did I manage this? Using a little something called nBlog, that's how. The mastermind behind all this handheld software loveliness is the mighty Adam Tow, a Newton programmer from the grand old days when the platform was still being developed. Adam has always remained a fan of the mighty green digital brick and has recently come storming back to the fold with a headful of ideas and the means to see them through. If you're still hanging on to a MessagePad running Newton OS 2.1 and have it tricked out to connect to the internet, you can download the latest preview versions of nBlog, nHTML (a fully customizable HTML tool palette reminiscent of the animal found in BBEdit), and the XML-RPC shared library from Adam's weblog. Even if you don't own a Newton (you poor souls), you may want to read through the information anyway, as it certainly shows how platform agnostic the XML-RPC messaging protocol and the Blogger API really are. There's also a discussion forum available for all the post-installation and debugging chit chat.
Sunday, January 05, 2003
Photo of the day.
Walking the dog. Near Carburn Park, Calgary.
Thursday, January 02, 2003
I'm telling you, they're not dead yet.
Some people give me the gears when I tell them I play MP3s and listen to streams on my Newton using Mad Max. Some simply shake their heads. Others spit and shuffle and then move on. For those of you who can actually fathom the reasons I enjoy using old technology to do new things, there's this little gem called MpegDec. If you're playing MP3s on your Newton, you sure as hell may as well play them on your 68K Mac as well, right? Right. And while your at it, maybe it's time to consider loading NetBSD on those old Mac II boxes piled in the basement. Vintage hardware clustering, anyone?
Looking better.
My mom is starting to resemble my mom again. At least from the outside. She's off the ventilator and on small amounts of supplemental oxygen, so basically she's breathing unassisted. The next step from this point is breathing "room air". The tubes and various other snaking paraphernalia have been removed from her mouth. Thanks in part to an uneventful tracheotomy performed last night, whatever translucent delivery mechanisms still need to remain have been moved to where there is less chance of damaging her voice box. That means through the opening in her trachea and via a small feeding tube in her nose. As an aside, the "food" the hospital has draining into my mom is manufactured by Nestlé and looks like a slightly off-colour egg nog. Positively festive. Mom's hair has been growing, so she's currently sporting quite the comb over across the side of her head where the 25 staples had previously been employed. She was asleep when I visited today, and that's pretty much what she does lately. But at least she's looking better. It makes a big difference to have her look more like a mom, and less like a patient.
Photo of the day.
Flamingos viewed through condensation. Calgary Zoo.
The new news is Newton news.
After the demise of Ben Truesdale's beloved Newton Connections, it wasn't clear where the attitude and evangelism was going to come from. Fortunately, the past year has produced a plethora of brand-spanking new Newton-related weblogs. For example, John Swaine's Wafflings, Daniel Padilla's Newton Dose, and the most recent contender, The Big Fig Newton. There's also longtime Apple developer John Anderson speaking his mind over at A Few Screws Left Over, whilst sprinkling a fair dibble of Newtonesque content amidst the bits. Pay particular attention to his posts regarding his nifty Mac OS X to Newton data synchronization utility NewtSync. These are just the newcomers. Lest we forget the stalwart hunters and gatherers such as This Old Newt's Newton News, Andree Dettmer's indominable Newton Does It, Darius Zendeh's Newton Enlightenment and of course, there's my very own Newted Community News. I'd also like to add a pointer to Victor Rehorst's recently relaunched WikiWikiNewt, home of the soon to be extremely useful NewtonNewbieGuide. Hell, there's even a new forum over at MacAddict dedicated to nothing but our little green friends. What is the world coming to? Newton, baby. That's what.
