KVET.CH

Collapsing a dozen weblog posts into one:

TV

I love TV. It is something of a guilty pleasure since I’m told in not so many words that I’m not supposed to like it, but I do. I’m advocating for Californication because it’s one of my favorite shows ever. I’m waiting for new 30 Rock (which fills the gaping void Arrested Development left) and like Fringe and am eager to watch the Office. I’m also watching all of Eureka. I’m up to season three now. No spoilers plz. Dexter looks great this season

Places

One of my favorite places to eat used to be Restaurant Oak but it has new management and the first thing they did was put in a plasma screen TV above the bar and start playing music Casey Kasem introduced the nation to. Now it has been renamed "Nero’s Restaurant Oak" and I have no idea who Nero is, but I think it may be the guy that drives the big Escalade that sits where the bicycles and compacts used to park. The familiar staff I’ve known for years now has vanished and with them went my incentive to go there.

It’s a shame because they have the best Heuvos Rancheros in the city, in my opinion. The search for New Eggs and Beans is on. PS: Nick’s on Broadway makes a terrible heuvos rancheros. Horrible! Everything else there is solid, however.

I eat at or pick up from Cuban Revolution at least once a week, and I like having them nearby. They’re good.  I go across town to Garden Grille now and then, but other than that am without a home base eattery.

Things

I caved and got an iPhone once the SDK was out. I’ve really enjoyed the device, and the T-Mobile G1 android device is looking very appealing too. MobileMe is still kicking me in the balls every day, and I will tell you that the new BlackBerry devices aren’t that appealing since they still don’t do IMAP email properly! So stupid! But the iPhone can’t do MMS, which is probably a bigger omission. I’m using my iPhone on T-Mobile, which has been really sucking lately in my neighborhood (Olneyville) but I don’t know why. Verizon is worse. My on-call Verizon phone doesn’t work at all indoors so I have to remember to forward calls to my personal line or the Skype line. GG, Verizon.

You may find it interesting that my employer doesn’t provide any outside access with Outlook Web Access without the use of a token for a one-time-password. This means I can’t use my iPhone or anything else to get my appointments unless I also want to carry a BlackBerry or Treolol or I need to resort to extraordinary measures to get my meeting reminders onto my mobile phone. MobileMe doesn’t do it because Apple stupidly doesn’t sync the Exchange calendar to the MobileMe servers, it just lets my employer snoop on my personal calendars. Thanks for being so helpful, Apple. Really. At least contact sync works. Usually. I have to leave Entourage running on my G5 at the office so that it can get my work calendar into iCal, which can then publish to MobileMe and then that gets onto my iPhone over the air. Usually. Except when MobileMe shits itself.

I bought an HP TX2500 tablet running Vista. OpenBSD is a pipe dream on it I’m afraid (based on what I’ve read on the listservs), and Linux is apparently a problem because of bugs in the thermal controls. So it’s still running Vista which is okay since it lets me use Evernote with a tablet PC and start to use that and so far I dig it. It isn’t anywhere near as good as DEVONthink, but at least it runs on Windows and Mac OS X and has a nice iPhone component too that works very well. So, I’m liking Evernote too. But be careful what you sync to their servers and don’t forget to set some of your notebooks to local-only if you work with sensitive data. I was going to get a MacBook but Apple puts shitty video in them and the tablet has ATI graphics. So my home machines that are mine are the jumbotron iMac, the HP, and a dual ppc Fedora linux machine. At one time I had over a dozen machines active and running all the time doing different things, so this is easily the most streamlined I’ve ever been. Thanks to rsync.net’s SVN service my machines are all constantly in-step with each other.

I’m still carrying index cards, but I’ve moved all my project management stuff into Tracks GTD. Tracks has improved enough that the mobile component is quite usable. N810 tablet users still have problems though due to Tracks spitting out pages that microb wants to treat as a broken RSS feed. Weird! (There is a bug open on this in Trac, and I’ve been adding debugging info as I can).

JD got a Drobo, but I’m still using the ReadyNAS NV+. My ReadyNAS had a bad power supply a while back and I got a replacement in two days from whomever owns them now without incident, which was nice. We have moved to the Xserve G5 server at hellyeah! networks now (you’re using it now!) and it’s been a dream come true, though Google still has broken Federation to our XMPP (jabber) IM service. I’ve tried to talk to people at Google about this, but I get nowhere. Help.

Health

I’m not smoking but I still want to now and then. I’ve sneaked a couple here and there and they taste like ass and leave me thankful I quit, but I still have some lurking trigger points that make me want to do it. I don’t know exactly what to do about that, but it seems to happen when I want to feel rebelious. I think that is the reason a lot of people smoke in general, which is often simplified to saying people smoke "because its cool". But if I’m feeling shit on, I’ll want to smoke.

I lost some weight then gained some back. I have taken the bicycle out to the office a few times now and need to do more of it but I’ve lost some traction and need to gain ground again. Last time I rode in I had a hard time on two of the hills that didn’t give me such a problem last time. This could be because I’m being sloppy or because I was carrying more weight, not sure yet. Work laptop is a Thinkpad T61 widescreen boat anchor which isn’t helping matters.

Fam & Home

Liz is teaching this year at RIC and shopping for PhD programs. She’s presenting a paper at the MLA Boston conference soon about one of her favorite TV shows, LOST. It’s about objects in LOST and how they’re used, and if you’re going to MLA Boston, you should go cheer loudly when she takes the stage. My sister Mandy got married last summer, and it was fun to go to Iowa for a bit and participate in the madness. Every time I go to a proper^{H^H}H^{H^H}Htraditional wedding I remember why we ran off to Vegas. I was pretty scarse at home for a while with some projects at work monopolizing my brain and time but that is getting better again.

Eric is sailing his home from Philly towards the south again, and I didn’t make the time to go down there for a day or two.  This is truly more evidence that I’m lazy and a terrible friend. 

WoW

Yes, I still play WoW though these days I’m using Recruit-a-Friend to recruit myself and dual-box a Paladin and a Priest. I dinged level 36 in under 2 days /played which is really fast for me and I’m not doing it right yet. I’m getting things down as I go which has been fun. My Gnome lock is pretty much retired though I’m dusting him off for Thursday night with WK in Tempest Keep again. I’m pretty disappointed that I couldn’t get that toon into Black Temple because I’d love to gone there with my WK friends, but I can do that elsewhere so it isn’t a total loss for me.

I’d rather play with the people in We Know and we’ll see what happens with the new expansion and everything. My plan right now is to build a 10-man group for breaking content two evenings a week and then do the 25-man versions with everyone once or twice a week as long as other people are ready for it. With the changes to Paladins I haven’t decided if I’m going to go straight DPS/support in Wrath or if I’ll continue gearing for Protection. Healing is for hippies.

So

That’s the short version of what I like and what I’m doing. It’s been about a year and this is in no small part due to some Serious Business in my life over the last 16 months but fret not, all is right with the world.

So we recently upgraded hardware at hellyeah.com to a new Xserve, which has been a vast improvement performance-wise.

But mail, dns, and IM falls under my area of expertise but I’m not able to reach my gmail XMPP/jabber contacts anymore.  We have server-to-server federation working to a few other sites without problem or incident (heya jabber.org, IETF, ecotroph et al) but for some reason gmail.com contacts are incommunicado.  

I’ve tried to delete and re-add contacts to request authentication, but they don’t seem to get it (surely they’re not all giving me the finger on purpose!)

We get messages in /var/log/system.log (`messages`):

Aug 11 13:39:28 autobahn jabberd/resolver¹⁸⁰⁷⁶: [gmail.com] resolved to [209.85.171.83:5269] (60 seconds to live)
Aug 11 13:39:28 autobahn jabberd/resolver¹⁸⁰⁷⁶: [gmail.com] resolved to [64.233.161.83:5269] (60 seconds to live)
Aug 11 13:39:28 autobahn jabberd/resolver¹⁸⁰⁷⁶: [gmail.com] resolved to [64.233.171.83:5269] (60 seconds to live)

I’ve been trying to reach someone on the Gmail Federation team but haven’t had much luck.  I’m getting lookups to gmail XMPP servers but they’re just not accepting the conversation.  Any ideas?

Now that the Drobo has Firewire 800, for those that have asked me about the ReadyNAS NV+ (which I own) and the Drobo (which I do not), I would recommend you buy the Drobo over the ReadyNAS.

Too many options in Drobo-space to recommend the ReadyNAS NV+ over the Drobo anymore, in particular that addition of FireWire 800.  

Sorry for the downtime.  I hit a snag while upgrading to Typo 5.0.4 from 4.x.

While the kind folks in #typo@freenode were helpful of course, the real problem to overcome was my mismatch on versions of rails, ruby, and gem.  Compounding this is that I keep my personally-tended ruby bits in /opt/local, and sometimes things grab Apple’s stuff by mistake.

So, we’re back on the air with more things incoming soon, I promise.  

The first trick is to realize that you’re not giving up anything.

A colleague of mine recently quit smoking “cold turkey” with no anxiety, no weight gain or any constant desire to smoke. I was pretty sure he was insane or making it up, since any attempts I had made to quit were with patches and anger and constant fits of urges to light up.

He suggested I read The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr.

Honestly I was on the fence about quitting. I liked smoking, rather, I was certain that I liked the ritual of it, the act of smoking. I always thought I found it so relaxing and soothing and really felt comforted by cigarettes.

I started reading the book not even knowing if I wanted to quit, I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out I wasn’t really that happy smoking, and decided I would be better off without it. The book isn’t chapter upon chapter of scolding or photographs of chest x-rays or anything – far from it.

If you’re a smoker, I think you should read this book and see if you want to continue with it.

I try very hard to avoid any political nonsense here because I figure people are mostly interested in lifehacks, mobile technology, Mac OS X, and the ways I use Getting Things Done.

So if you are not interested in my thoughts on this whole “Pimping out Chelsea” fiasco, don’t follow the jump.

First of all, it is awesome that Nokia has brought us Nokia Media Transfer, which is made to sync S60 smartphones with iTunes and iPhoto. I love it.

It will even re-encode video for playback on the handset if you want, which is pretty fun (though I keep most of my video in non-iTunes-appreciated formats) and works pretty well.

But when working with music, it will frequently fail to sync over everything it should, or does so in such a way that the playlists don’t work. The files don’t all appear to get transfered and I don’t really know why. It drives me nuts when I think I have a playlist moved over and then only a couple of songs made it. Alas!

This is still beta-level software and works well enough most of the time. I have 6GB of available storage on my N95 and tell Nokia Media Transfer to use 3GB or so for music and such—I guess more testing and fiddling is in order. I need to find out why it doesn’t move everything over it should. I am also having a hard time finding out where it is logging things, if it even does. Surely it has to be dropping trails around my computer somewhere!

I have been looking for something like this for a long time now. I can’t seem to find anything that does this, and this would be a great opportunity for a developer.

What I want (and what many enterprises need), is a daemon/service on Windows systems that ideally would disable the WiFi connection when plugged in to a wired Ethernet connection. Why is this such a big deal?

Windows XP will continue to announce and allow Ad Hoc connections if you use the SSID of the last access point a Windows host connected to. You can freely associate to Windows systems that /have/ used wireless, even if they currently are not connected to a wireless network.

I’ve been working with wireless IDS/IPS products lately and rogue access points are a big deal to enterprise network managers. Even worse are the hundreds of “valid” devices that can effectively be converted into rogue access points without the users’ knowledge.

Very troubling and a hard problem to solve. Anyone have a fix for this issue?