Well, it’s been a relatively busy week, both at work and just stuff in general. Gaby and I did chat and we’re in agreement with the car being sold. I need to clean it and list it.
I’ve also taken some test rides of the replacement vehicle, a enduro-type motorcycle. I’ve tried the BMW R1200 GS, R1200GS Adventure, and the Buell Ulysses. I tried to get a test ride on the Suzuki V-Strom 1000 and 650 but the dealership wasn’t really willing to do it unless I was close to buying. Really, you expect folks to shell out $8k-$10k on a bike without riding it… shit.
Anyhow, the Buell is a bit loud and shaky (unless you rev it up), but the seating is comfortable, and the handling is marginal. I really don’t like the kickstand and footpeg placements on any of the years (I test rode an ‘06 and sat on the ‘07 which is exactly like the ‘08). The price is sorta okay, but once again, the two they had were last and last-last years models. They’d have to cut a heavy deal for me to pick one up.
The V-Strom is nice, while not the prettiest bike. It’s big, but unlike the Buell and BMW, I have no problem with the crotch to floor distance when standing. These guys at Cycles USA didn’t allow for a test drive. Liek the Buell, it has adjustable suspension, but it requires getting off the bike and changing it. I’m also not jiggy with the chain drive, as Buell had the belt and the BMW is shaft driven.
So, even barring the price tag, I’m going to probably go with the BMW. It’s big and chunky, but it’s a looker. I won’t, as well, be getting any speeding tickets, as it’s a slow bike. It’s an awesomely precise bike despite it’s size, easily doing doughnuts at low speed without feeling I’m going to tip while up on the pegs. I have to get the car sold, but the model isn’t hitting the dealer until October. I will hope that’s enough time to unload the car and have the money available.
I’m also still trying to convince Gaby that her trip with her mom and aunt would best be done with them in a rental car (or her car — but it’s almost 10k miles of driving as it currently stands) and me on the bike… I’m also hating to say, it’s really the only way I’m willing to do the trip… the car (and I’ve done the x-country trip a number of times) is boooooring. So, we’ll see… but wish me luck.
Tags: adventure, BMW, Buell, commuting, motorcycle, Suzuki, V-Strom, vacation
Well, Gaby an I had been hemming an hawing for a while about the merits of having two cars. The increased maintenance, insurance, and we have a full garage with a motorcycle, a scooter, three bicycles, and we’re “illegally” parking the spare car that isn’t in our driveway in the visitor spot in the development. We had considered trading both in for a slightly larger car, but I felt it was unfair for me to just give up mine, and Gaby’s was old enough that it wasn’t worth a whole hell of a a lot (even with 100k miles on mine, it’s still worth twice as hers.
So, as the equitable decision, and to tie into another hobby of mine, we’re looking at an all-weather motorcycle to replace it. In this case, it would still fit into the garage, provided I get rid of some crap, and it would allow me the mobility required when she has the car in any weather conditions. While I dread trying to think of two wheels in snow, it’s not like I haven’t done it… just didn’t like it with street wheels on the Triumph. In an exchange, it’s a bit more fuel efficient than the current cars and when calculated into commuting, it’ll pay the difference in trade-in versus overage cost in about a year. I’m kind of excited, but would need to sell my car before anything moves along, and hopefully, in a few years, when the car companies get their act together, we’ll get another car to replace hers, something like a diesel MINI Traveller or Audi A3… heck even if VW gets their shit together…
Well, I stole this line from Don Crowdis… but, I’ve been embroiled in a 3.5 week Odyssey at work… hopefully it’ll wind down. During that time I’ve managed to neglect some things (no, not personal hygiene), but hopefully I can get some of them back on track. I did fix a database issue with SoundtrackNet and what Dan considered his “click tracking” slowing things down. Indexing the tables fixed it. I’m also trying to get some service monitoring up and running, then after that, some more fixes to e-mail. Hopefully with that said and done, I can turn back to getting stats automated again (were they ever).
In response to the fun that is Dan Kaminsky’s discovered flaw, I’ve switched everything over to OpenDNS. I have yet to look at the stats page, but I was hoping to use the stats pulled from the SMTP servers (for extremely high lookup requests) as an unofficial RBL list creator. I can also plug those baddies into the IDS and firewall rules too.
I got to go to a “few” concerts of recent, but have a ton planned for August and September.. there’s just so many people touring. The last one on the schedule I think will be my favorite, which is Randy Newman. I had to pass last time due to a friends wedding overseas, so I know I am NOT going to miss this one. Even his new album has been getting rave reviews. I blame my dad for introducing me to him when putting “Political Science” on our “Road Trip” tape for our summer excursions in the car back in the 80’s.
Well, if you recognize the acronym, you’ll see it’s that big productivity buzzword… getting things done. For me, I’d like to subscribe to the notion, but realize, somehow, I’m not the person to actually get into it, even if I try. I’m not sure if it’s due to my own personality, my mood, or generally, my environment. I have a TON of things to get done, but I over subscribe my time with with other projects an activities, although I’m pretty sure I should cut back on both. SoundtrackNet is suffering a bit, namely noticable through the low ad revenues, but that could also be a little bit due to the slow movie season and the general economic state nowadays. I’d like to put more time into it, but it’s tough trying to slip in maintaining the household, work, and then just trying to unwind at the end of a week. I know I have a ton of reviews I need to get cracking through… some of which I should just sit down and do (maybe tomorrow). I’ve got business paperwork to complete… it’s sitting here… just begging to get done. I have the tail end of a few projects and the begginings of others scattered about, fromt he DVD digitizing to the start of digitizing paper work (clutter reduction effort). I need to stop TiVO-ing movies, although, they’d go a bit towards being able to complete other reviews, as I now have the movies available for viewing.
Work’s been keeping me busy, although some things are requiring more effort than others, disproportionally to the value I see in them. Hopefully just some plugging and chugging will get them completed, although the motivation factor was way low last week. Also due to an NPR story, I’m also considering a household inventory project, namely to have a, well, inventory of all the crap in the house. I have a lot of crap, so it’s probably nessesary, in many cases (some of you are aware of possible others).
Stuck having to carry the weight of most of the household activities pretty much kills my motivation, single or married, I’m not sure if anything has changed or would change. Granted, when I was single, I didn’t have to generate food on a schedule, nor be nagged about other things that could wait… god I miss those days. Hopefully today, now Sunday, I can make some progress on my things after some catch-up sleep, but I’m sure, you-know-who will nag about something or other…
We should have the roofers by tomorrow, wether and time permitting, so there’s another $900 out of pocket… plus I have another expense getitng the front of the hosue taken care of… why is it always me having to think and do things for people… arrgh, one of those times I wished I was one of those Internet start-up darlings with a mil or two int he pocket to do what I thought was a “good idea at the time” that I keep reading about in Tech Crunch’s Deadpool. I’d make even a mil run for two years… I’m frugal… plus, If I can run our business on $500 a month, minus some other amenities, I think that infusion would go for a long time.
Sorry for the rambling… time for bed and a clearer mind… cheers.
Tags: , expenses, Internet, SoundtrackNet
While I wrote a MetBlog post this morning detailing a noise ordinance being passed to limit protests in D.C., I see this from one of of the organizations I support, the EFF, noting Archive.org’s run in with the U.S. Government over National Security Letters (NSL). I find this a little scary, and close to home (I own the archive.net domain, and have had it for over a decade, and used to get mail for Mr. Kahle and others at the Internet Archive, way back when). I always found TIA as a very useful resource, and, had, at one time, planned on donating my domain to them to support their effort (the archive.com domain has changed hands a number of times, first as a domain for a backup and tape manufacturer, now, I dunno). WAIS, which predated the web was develoepd by Kahle, and designed to help spider and collect information on the Internet much before anybody was aware of it’s existence (back pre-1995 days). It’s a shame that our rights as citezens are constantl eroded by a government that uses the laws on it books (written by cronies, for cronies, and enforced by cronies) for their own selfish needs. I guess this is why I’m quite apathetic about the elections coming up, figuring that there is nobody out there that reflects the intellect and required knowledge of what it is to be in a democracy (and it’s leader) that stands for election as president. I truly would have probably quit my job and worked pro-bono for Russ Feingold if he ever decided to run… this is a guy who has his shit together, and for the last decade plus, really knew what he was talkign about regarding technology and civil rights… If one of these goofballs pick him for VP, I’ll be forced to support them, but, Russ himself is an excellent example of the kind of folsk we really need running this country rather than the fuck ups who now have bankrupted our treasury, morals, and good standing with the worl community.
What to do?!
Tags: ACLU, asshats, EFF, Internet Archive, Kahle, NSL, Politics
Just in case anybody is following this blog, we’ll be at Pizza Paradiso (Georgetown) at 5pm tonight for happy hour, and then struggle to find a good bar to watch the Penguins playoff game tonight.
Tags: beer, Friends, happy hour, Penguins, Pizaa Paradiso
Usually, this begins with “when I’m wrong about something”… but today it’s a bit more innocuous.
I’ve been catching bits and pieces of “Casino Royale” on HD recently. And while I’ve seen the film already and own it on DVD, I realize this now takes the place as my SECOND favorite Bond film. With all the recent reports in the news about the trouble the recent production has been having in Italy (”A Quantum of Solace”) and realizing, much how I belived the series should have been from the start, which is following one continous storyline to make it interesting… I find myself REALLY loking forward to the new film. I think it’s really a first for the genre, and I’m not sure for films in general (I’m sure there are a few short series out there that have extended the narrative in this way).
As most folks who know me will know, I will fiercely defend my choice for nuber one, which is “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”… mainly beginning with… “it follows the book the closest”. I know Fleming kicked the bucket before the film was made ,and feel after that time, the films actually kind of sucked. I did like the ferocity Dalton brought to the series and the look that Brosnan did. I never liked Roger Moore, no matter how many excuses people make. Connery was good, but inconsistent, and definitely didn’t have the Hoagy Charmichael look that Fleming originally designed for the charachter (trust me folks, I researched it when I was younger… Brosnan and Lazenby are the closest).
Anyhow, I just felt I needed to admit that something I was set in stone about (meaning I didn’t have a second favorite bond film… although “Tomorrow Never Dies” did come close) now exists. No don’t get me on about Bond girls…
BTW, the new Apple TV freakin rocks… but I had to hack it.. it just sa there and said “hack me”. Now with 6 TB of online storage at home, and 3 TB of movies and shows and 500GB of music, I have a useful head unit.
Tags: Apple, Gadgets, James Bond, Movies
So… as you know, besides the day job, and doing SoundtrackNet stuff (yes, I have a queue of things I’m going to be trudging through for the rest of the night now)… I’m also doing some website hosting under the guise of SoundtrackNet. One of them happens to be Ryan Keaveney’s “Music for a Darkened People”, which is Danny Elfman’s site (unofficially).
He put in a request to “blog-igfy” it, and since I needed to start managing my blog (see and read here), I heard from a co-worker that there is WordPress MU (multiple-user) which could get me to the end of: 1) centralized management, and 2) a platform to offer some more services to people. Always up for a challenge, I decided that would be Saturday.. it’s now Sunday evening… you get the gist.
What became of this was the fact that plugins and theme management work differently on a multi-user setup than the regular Word Press… oh, yay. One of the things I REALLY wanted to take care of was the CAPTCHA piece for spam and registrations (to eventually have things self-maintain and be a little harder for dorks to post). Well, this required a fair bit of hacking since we host on OS X 10.5.x and Apple fond it in their right minds to NOT include a lot of useful bit’s like GD and T1Fonts support in their PHP (as well as mySQL too). I’ve hacked before to get mySQL to work with PHP Apache2 and the good ole OS. Now, it was getting GD to work… on a PPC (not i386) Mac. Prolly easier on the i386, not so on the PPC.
So, for you lovely readers out there, here’s a few config tips.
One, osx.tpicdesk.com is your friend, since this and DarwinPorts config files and one post on the Apple Support forums helped iron out the crap involved.
So, in short, follow the bouncing ball:
1) download the source packages for fontconfig, freetype, GD, jpeg, libpng, openssl, t1lib, and PHP. I also added Suhosin as well, so grab that too, it’ll be worth it in a later tutorial on securing PHP.
2) build and install fontconfig w/o the docs
3) build freetype, but after a day of this, I found that the base configure for freetype causes bad things in the OS. so the following config string is to be used:
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 CFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -bind_at_load" ./configure --with-fsspec=no --with-fsref=no --with-quickdraw-toolbox=no --with-quickdraw-carbon=no
yes, that’s QuickDraw folks… it breaks things.. BADLY
4) build your jpeg and png libraries so they are installed in /usr/local, pretty simple, I don’t think I threw and odd config flags there.
5) build GD… this does seemingly detect JIS Japanese fonts and the XPM libraires, but when they get jiggered into the PHP module, they get lost, but I don’t really care… I’m not Japanese, nor do I want XPM capabilities right now. Here’s the config string:
./configure --with-freetype=/usr/local --with-fontconfig=/usr/local --with-png=/usr/local --with-jpeg=/usr/local
6) Now you’re ready for PHP. Grab it, uncompress it, and.. I should note, this is for Leopard (10.5.x Server), and then apply the Suhosin patch per instructions (this is for 5.2.5 of PHP as it stands). Once you run the patch command on the PHP source, run this config string:
./configure --disable-dependency-tracking --enable-bcmath --enable-calendar --enable-cli --enable-dba --enable-dbx --enable-exif --enable-filepro --enable-ftp --enable-mbregex --enable-mbstring --enable-soap --enable-sockets --enable-suhosin --enable-trans-sid --enable-wddx --infodir=/usr/share/info --mandir=/usr/share/man --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/private/etc --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-curl=/usr --with-freetype-dir=/usr/local --with-gd=/usr/local --with-iodbc=/usr --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-kerberos=/usr --with-ldap=/usr --with-mysql-sock=/var/mysql --with-mysql=/usr --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config --with-openssl=/usr --with-png-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-xml --with-xmlrpc --with-xsl=/usr --with-zlib-dir=/usr --without-pdo-sqlite --without-pear --without-sqlite --with-t1lib=/usr/local/lib --enable-gd-native-ttf --enable-gd-jis-conv --enable-gd-imgstrttf --with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6
It’ll complain about some unrecognized config flags, but it recognized them. Now sit back, type “make”, then “make test”, the watch for any odd stuff, and finally, “make install”. Now, I should remind you, it would have been good to back things up!
7) Finally, for you PPC people that get symbol errors because OS X assumes you’re running and compiling for multiple architectures, you can force the stupidity to end (at least until Apple updates apache2) by also issuing these commands to slim down the httpd universal binary:
cd /usr/sbin cp httpd httpd.ub rm httpd lipo -thin ppc7400 httpd.ub -output httpd.ppc lipo -info httpd.ppc (should report : "Non-fat file: httpd.ppc is architecture: ppc7400" - NOTE: this is for a G5) ln -s httpd.ppc httpd apachectl configtest (check to see if it throws errors, if not then...) apachectl graceful
Profit…
So that’s it for the PHP and GD wizardry… I’m still mucking about with WorPress, as I found that there are some sloppily coded plugins I’ll need to hack for my own sake (back-end things), but it’s running if you’re able to read this post…
Cheers…
Tags: Apache, Apple, hacking, PHP, SoundtrackNet
Well, while my ears are recovering from an atom-smashing event at the 9:30 Club last night, where one of my favorite bands, The English Beat, brought the house down and started a mild case of tinnitus in ears. I had a LOT of fun, and was taken back to my teen-hood as one of the first few bands I kind of discovered on my own (the Talking Heads being the first). I had always wondered if a band from the 80s would have some unique staying power, and would still sound as good as they did back then (even through some line-up changes), but Dave Wakeling and company did not disappoint. If you ever get a chance to see them live, please do, they’re worth the price of admission (their opening acts, IMHO, were so-so, which were RX Bandits and Kinky). On the bright side ™, the Superman box set from Film Score Monthly also showed up on Friday, and feel that this was a worthy birthday gift to myself (I bought one signed copy) and the other editions for SoundtrackNet will show up soon. I’m supposed to get a review out soon for the CDs, so that will be by “job” in the evenings, barring Tuesday evening, where I will be celebrating at Birreria Paradiso in Georgetown during Happy Hour (5-7pm EST). Stop by and enjoy, I’ll be downstairs consuming a good portion of my 33 years (at that point) in good belgian and other ales. Cheers.
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