${me:-whatever}

In no order.

I'm a colossal sell-out. I own an iPhone. Trust me that no amount of hassle you might send my way will be greater than the amount of hassle I send my own way about it. I love having a real browser and some fun games all in my phone. I don't love the massively inconsistent UI (well I sorta do because it gives me FUEL for my FIRE!) the crashiness, the slowness, the lack of multi-tasking and the leakiness. But most of all I don't love that I was stupid enough to buy right before the next gen hardware comes out with stuff you might expect a phone this old to have.

The App Store is a bad joke. It's impossible to browse in any meaningful way. It asks you for a password, but doesn't explain *what* password it's asking you for. I'm sure mac-droids "just know" but I didn't. You have to have a credit-card-backed account to download free apps. You can't make that account via a web page and you must install the second worst software on the planet, iTunes (MS Word, you're still king!) to create the account. Why would they let you create it on your phone with a web browser when they can infect your PC too? For me this meant finding a windows install to put iTunes on. Thank god iTunes installs quicktime! I love that quicktime!

Anyway, blah blah blah. I feel like a failure and a sell-out. Apple you still suck.

Why not the G1? Apple holds the multi-touch patent! Thanks! Also inertia. I've been an at&t customer for a long time and I'm shockingly lazy. T-Mobile didn't really help themselves though. I spent 45 minutes in their store waiting to talk to one of their customer service monkeys. They thought it was a better use of their time to help people who came in after me and whose questions largely revolved around nickel & dime stuff like pre-paid phones. Maybe that's where they make their real money? Anyway, I tried to use it and it seemed clunky, but it also wasn't on a network, so it was hard to gauge. The whole experience played on my spectacular laziness though, so I ended up sticking with what I had provider-wise.

Switched back to Debian for about 10 minutes at work. Couldn't make the fonts look anything but horrible, so I switched back to Ubuntu which made me sad. Still can't get a font that looks this good. Maybe it's my white-on-black requirement like Happy suggested?

Steve Yegge has announced that he's going to quit blogging. More sadness. I hope it's a joke or that he changes his mind. He's easily my favorite blogger by a very very large margin.

I bought a Flip Ultra HD 8G and think it's pretty cool! It's an HD video camera that's about the size of a pack of cigarettes and costs about 200 bucks. Pretty fun. Their website sucks so they don't get a link, but you know how to use a search engine.

Hey speaking of, has Google lost its edge or what? Seems like the last two months most of my searches have spam at the top. I'm getting way more spam in my inbox in my slower-than-ever google apps account too. What gives, Google?

After months of struggling with the very-crashy and 90s-web-design of MediaTomb, I found PS3MediaServer and it's impressive. My favorite feature so far is the ability to rip DVD ISOs and play them on my PS3 over wireless with little quality loss. It's the very first Java app that I've ever had a positive experience with.

I'm really really digging writing stuff in Ruby. I've finally started to get object-oriented programming and while I don't see it as a panacea, it does make some things way easier.

While I love writing stuff in Ruby, I don't yet love running stuff that's Ruby. When you want to run a Ruby web app, and to a lesser extent when you're writing Ruby, it seems like the documentation is written assuming you already know how to do it. This isn't an uncommon problem with documentation. When writing documentation it's difficult to think of the things you might not know, but Ruby (and Git) documentation seems especially bad about this. Maybe it's just that those are the two things I've been trying to learn lately.

As if you're still reading. Ha!

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Thanks spammers. I got tired of deleting wordpress users created by spammers twice a day, so now no one can register. If you want an account for posting comments about what an idiot I am, email me and I'll turn it on long enough for you to get your account.

Urge to blog, falling.

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I'm sincerely grateful that you're into my blog. Could you fetch my feed slightly less often? I really don't update every 30 minutes.

kthxbye!

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I make blogging too hard. I always think I have to be writing something important and that's just untrue. So here's a small collection of thoughts since I last blogged.

Yaketystats 2.1 is out. I feel like we're floundering exposure-wise. I really think we have the best product out there, but no one seems to care. We've talked about writing an article for a Linux mag and doing an OSCON presentation, so maybe that'll help.

Firefox in Ubuntu has been driving me crazy for the last several months. My work machine is an 4CPU 8G atom-smasher and FF is still crazy slow. Like you'd laugh and ask "how is that possible?" slow. I don't have many extensions, and it seems like my box should be able to handle tons of extensions, but I regularly find myself waiting several seconds for a new tab to be usable and I'm always waiting for text boxes to catch up to my typing. It sucks.

I'm also really frustrated with Ubuntu in general. Coming from Debian where in-place upgrades are the norm, it's really weird and sad to read that reinstalling come upgrade time is the norm in Ubuntu culture. Sure you can upgrade in place, but it's fraught with peril and things often don't work right. For instance, I finally got my laptop wireless working in 8.04, but it didn't survive the upgrade to 8.10 and I can't make it work at all now, so I'm living in Vista. Don't get me started on Vista.

There are a lot of cultural things about Ubuntu that just rub me the wrong way. I guess I'm getting old. As much as they do to make it all work together and feel cohesive, to me it feels very tenuous and fragile. If NetworkManager (for example) doesn't work for you, well sorry, you're just fucked because that's the Ubuntu way to do it and you'll be swimming upstream the rest of your Ubuntu-life if you try to do it another way. PulseAudio is another example of this.

BTW, when did "for example" cease to mean anything? It's like banner-ad blindness; people don't even hear it anymore and immediately start arguing the details of your example ignoring the point you were trying to make by using the example. It's one thing to say "Well, I see the point you're trying to make, but I don't think your example supports your point and here's why," but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about "Oh, since you brought up X, let's argue about that now and I'll completely ignore any point you were trying to make when you brought X up."

I started twittering but I don't expect it to last. Having not grown up with Twitter, it seems like they make finding your friends overly difficult. Searching by invite/email address? Really?

I recently bought a Greg Bailey Custom guitar. The guitar used as his horrid background image, in fact. It plays and sounds great. It's the second aluminum instrument I own and is very very different than my Travis Bean. Maybe I'll put some experiments with my new ElectroHarmonix Hog on youtube sometime. The Hog is an extremely fun device.

I wish I could find an acoustic that's as nice as my Travis Bean. I've got a $2k Taylor. After a few years it's not holding up very well and my initial annoyances with it are only magnified now. I got really lucky in that I have a friend who owned a Bean enabling me to find out how fantastic they are. I lack friends with kickass acoustic guitars (vintage or otherwise) so it's hard to even know what's out there and what I'd like. Acoustic guitar shops are usually far too uptight for me. It's almost as if you're supposed to buy the guitars w/o playing them.

I'm reading Steve Pinker's The Blank Slate and enjoying it very much. It's one of those books that really makes you examine yourself and your dogma. In some ways, though, it's a bit of a motivation killer. I have enough problems with motivation/feeling like part of the machine/etc without feeling like my identity isn't even cohesive. :)

I guess that's as good a thought as any to leave on. UNTIL NEXT TIME!

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• So yea… new blog
• News You Can Lose
• Whatever happened to 100%?

A lot like real excrement, it's a lot harder to give shit away than it is to make it!

It's hard to believe just how much work we put into being ready to give this software away. You see, when you write something for yourself --and remember that YaketyStats has been in use for 3 years or more in one form or another by my work-- you can make all kinds of assumptions about the environment and you don't have to document anything because if you have a question, you just ask a co-worker.

However when you give it away, first you have to yank out all of those assumptions. That takes a very long time because it's a hard thing to think about. Confirmation bias ain't just about new information, bubsie. While you're tearing out assumptions, you're making new bugs. You're fixing old bugs that didn't really matter to you, but would probably matter to others. Your bug fixes make new bugs. You start to have confidence issues about anyone wanting your crappy code anyway.

You have to make a website, and like all of the rest of this, it's way harder than you'd think. You can go with the siloed antiques you know (Mediawiki and Bugzilla) or you can try something new on a platform you're uneasy with (Jira/Redmine) and then there's all of the time you spend vacillating in between. Don't forget the time it takes to set it all up and tear it all down, to learn about the new platforms... you get the idea.

Once you pick your website stack, it's time to document your every little thing about your project. You get to document how to install it, how to use it, why it does all the crazy crap that makes sense to your environment and possibly no one else's. You word it, you re-word it. You wonder if you're still making assumptions. You are making assumptions. You re-write it again. You re-organize it. The new organization is better, but you need to re-write some if it to fit the new organization.

Oh, and the whole time you're doing all of this you're wondering to yourself if you're throwing a party which no one will attend.

Then the release date you thought for sure you'd make comes and goes and you make a ton of last minute changes. You drop your "announcements only" WordPress install in favor of using the semi-crappy News feature of Redmine. You re-organize all of the documentation again. Then you try to write a "press release" and ZOMG BBQ lemme tell ya -- writing press releases is something that I am in no way equipped to do. So then you enlist the help of others. These others are much more tuned to writing this sort of copy, but they don't really know your software or why it's cool and different. You're grateful in any case. This is the best that the blind leading the people who don't know where we're going can come up with:

Athens, GA (Oct. 14, 2008)

We're happy to announce the WORLD-WIDE release of YaketyStats, a new tool for gathering and graphing statistics about your UNIX/Linux systems.

It has an intuitive, AJAX-powered web interface for graphing data. Graphs are built on the fly, can contain stats from multiple systems and include "Google Maps"-like dragging.

YaketyStats is easy to install, maintain, and extend and is free Open Source software licensed under the GPLv2. YaketyStats supports Firefox and is built on Perl, PHP, and RRDtool.

If you're tired of having to micro-manage your existing stats system or you don't have one, you should check out the YaketyStats website and demo video at yaketystats.org

I'll pretend it's tomorrow and publish this now.

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• A couple of things that are sort of about Linux

How many times a week do you type /etc/init.d/blah start and then you realize you're on HP-UX and it's /sbin/init.d/blah Forget it.

# Turn on extended globbing and programmable completion
shopt -s extglob progcomp

export MYOS=$(uname -s)

if [[ "${MYOS}" = "Linux" || "${MYOS}" = "SunOS" ]] ; then
    INITDIR='/etc/init.d';
else
    INITDIR='/sbin/init.d';
fi
export INITDIR;

function RCCT () {.
    if [[ -z "${2}" ]] ; then.
        ls $INITDIR;
    elif [[ "${1}" = "Start" ]] ; then
        cd / && $INITDIR/${2} start ; cd -;
    elif [[ "${1}" = "Restart" ]] ; then
        cd / && $INITDIR/${2} restart ; cd -;
    elif [[ "${1}" = "Stop" ]] ; then
        cd / && $INITDIR/${2} stop ; cd -;
    elif [[ "${1}" = "Reload" ]] ; then
        cd / && $INITDIR/${2} reload ; cd -;
    else
        echo "Something bad happened.";
    fi
}   

function _myservices() {
    local cur
    cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    COMPREPLY=( $( builtin echo $INITDIR/!(*.rpmsave|*.rpmorig|*.dpkg-old|*~|functions)) )
    COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W '${COMPREPLY[@]#@($INITDIR)/}' -- $cur) )
}

function Start () { RCCT ${FUNCNAME} ${*} ; };
function Restart () { RCCT ${FUNCNAME} ${*} ; };
function Reload () { RCCT ${FUNCNAME} ${*} ; };
function Stop () { RCCT ${FUNCNAME} ${*} ; };
complete -F _myservices Start Restart Reload Stop

You might be thinking that RCCT is pretty ugly and it is, but it's complete-able, so it all shakes out. It also starts and stops services with / as the working directory which is a good idea if you're dealing with Solaris or HP-UX.

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• Bash & Screen
• Be yourself, even when you’re root
• Bash SSH Happiness

So as I'm sure you'll imagine I'm not big on blog memes or chain letters, but I thought of one that might be fun, so I thought I'd give it a shot especially since my blogging has dwindled a bit lately.

So the meme is Today's Hell, the idea being that you describe a situation that could be considered a repeating Groundhog's Day-style hell-dimension. It doesn't have to be the worst thing ever, just something funny or annoying that you want to vent about. If you're one of the 4 people who reads my blog, make one up yourself and pingback/trackback me!

Today's Hell: I'm stuck at a busy traffic light behind two morons on their cell phones in their McCain-stickered Escalades who are too scared/stupid/not paying attention enough to turn left at the same time. Every track on my CDs and every station on the radio is playing "What a Fool Believes" by Michael McDonald or the Doobie Brothers or whatever the hell. A strong waft of patchouli suddenly floods the car and suddenly I remember that I have HR-mandated sensitivity training once I get to work.

Your turn.

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This is the coolest interwebs ad I've ever seen. It'll take you no time to watch it. Have a look.

Edit: Uh, I guess they took it down. :( The anti-quality war rages on!

Edit again!: It's back.

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If you use multiple computers, you have to check out DropBox. It hooks into your file-manager (Linux, Windows, Mac) and gives you a special folder that's synced to all of your machines as well as being accessible via the web (both authenticated and a "Public" folder.) If you're even mildly interested they have a great demo video on the link above.

If you have your own web hosting, I saw a great tip on the Planet GNOME feed for setting up a URL that's easier to remember than the one DropBox gives you.

If you're running Linux, it's also possible to use DropBox with no file-manager or GUI of any kind. (Also seen on Planet GNOME.)

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I do my best to leave politics out of my discussions with others, but I have to say that Ed found the perfect video. I've never been a big J. Stewart fan, but this is pretty great stuff.

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• So yea… new blog
• sheesh
• Top Ten TED Talks