wiredfool

I’m attracted to shiny whirry things, especially when they have blinkenlights too. So I’m really tryingn to figure out if I have any use for really cheap scsi drives. 18 gig, 10k rpm, $15. Cheap enough to go for a 10 pack. The rub is that they are SCA connectors (read enterprise class), so finding a chassis to put them in is probably significantly more expensive than the drives themselves.

And that 10k rpm scsi drives are not known to be quiet, power efficient, cool or otherwise compatible with home datacenter use, especially when one is threatening to use 10 of them. But it would be really cool to have a big honkin drive array to play^H^H^H^H experiment with.

Sort of mole, sort of spanish rice.

• One sweet onion, diced
• 2 fresh Thai Dragon peppers, chopped
• 1 block tofu, 1/2″ chunks
• 2 tsp cumin – ground
• some cumin seeds (1/2tsp?)
• 2 small cans stewed tomatoes
• 1 cup arborio rice
• 1 cup basmati rice
• 1 fresh ancho pepper
• 4 cups water
• 1 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder
• handful semisweet chocolate chips
• Salt, lime juice to taste.

Saute onion in olive oil, make somewhat soft. Add Thai dragons, tofu and cumin. Saute for a little while more without burning anything.

Add tomatoes, water, rice, and ancho. Simmer covered for a while, keep stirring every so often. Add the chocolate after 10 minutes or so. Salt and lime to give a little non-pepper bite to it.

This will end up as a spanish rice with just a hint of mole in it. The thai dragons are pretty hot, and stand up pretty well to being added early. Somehow I managed to make balanced flavors, instead of any one component dominating.

Of course with a whole plant of thai dragons, I think we’ll have that dominating flavor soon.

I spent yesterday working on the equivalent of reorganizing my sock drawer, in this case, reconciling two (legal) 10 gig mp3 collections on my laptop and linux machine to one 16 gig collection.

The tracks have been ripped with at least two programs (iTunes/cdparanoia) and 4 different naming conventions. Each platform had songs ripped to filenames that the other couldn’t understand — either by length or character set issues. Some of the albums had been copied from one to the other, and had metadata corrected on the new platform. Generally multidisk sets, just to helpfully use more space. And to top it off, I didn’t have enough spare space on any single drive to hold the entire possible 20 gig combination of the two, and I didn’t want to touch up filenames or merge by hand.

So to sum it up, I have duplicate files with different names and (slightly) different contents, and the ones that are most likely to be like that are part of the collections that take up the most space. And I don’t want to do any of it by hand.

So after playing with perl to make a bunch of consistent, safely named soft links on each platform, md5summing both archives, and transferring the files that didn’t have matching checksums, I wound up within 200 megs of filling the target, while only transferring an extra gig or so. And realizing that duplicate checking manually might have been faster.

I think there’s one other learning point here, and that’s that automated processes are no match for bad metadata.

Sometimes when I’m driving, my inner teenager shows through.

I’m sitting in traffic, just kinda waiting for the cars in front to clear. Then at a slight curve in the road, the road opens up and I can power through the curve on the gas. A little bit of later acceleration, a little bit of exhaust noise, a little more wind in the hair.

It’s times like this when I want a ‘stupid fast’ button on the console, right between the hazzard and headlight button. A button that causes that my inline 4 to sound and act something like an unmuffled V8 for a few seconds. Chirp the tires, get a little sideways, get pressed back into the seat. One time while thinking this last week, I heard the brrrrap of a lightly muffled V8 accelerating as an AC Cobra took off the other direction. Yep, that’s about what I had in mind.

While the teenage me would understand the car and the desire for a V8, he would recoil in horror at most of the music in the cd changer: several types of accordion, bluegrass, gypsy jazz, swing.

They gave a monsters of accordion tour and didn’t invite Accordion Guy. Ah well, maybe next year.

Danel Ari, Probably singing about an octopus.

Jason, with Accordion.

Jason, with 6 string Accordion.

I missed getting any pictures of Aaron Seeman – I think because he was moving to fast to photograph while playing Dead Kennedy songs done at 200 bpm.

All pictures were shot with availiable light from the back of the audience, telling me that I need a camera that has better low light performance. Maybe something that is more sensitive then ASA100. Either that or I need to be in the front row.

I think I’m done.

It’s designed for standards compliant browsers, there’s a hack for .png transparency in IE5.5 and 6, and there are apache redirects for older browsers that certain family members use.

My apache config file is using the following rules for checking older useragents that I know mangle the css:

# Rules to redirect IE3,4 & Netscape 4.x to the printer friendly template.
# Assume that there's a search arg.
    RewriteCond         %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}      Mozilla/4\.[567] [OR]
    RewriteCond         %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}      "MSIE [34]\."
    RewriteRule         ^(.*)$                  $1&print-friendly=true [NE]
#
# If there's no ?, then I need to switch the & to a ?
    RewriteCond         %{REQUEST_URI}                  [^?]
    RewriteRule         ^(.*)\&print-friendly=true$     $1?print-friendly=true [NE]

The hack for transparency is used in the logo at the top, and looks something like this: (this would be a plain image tag if not for IE/windows. grrrr.)

<span  
  style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader
  (src='http:\//static.wiredfool.com/wflogoTransWhite.png',
  sizingMethod='scale'); position: absolute; right: 0px; bottom: 0px; 
  display:block; width:340px; height:54px;">
    <a href='/' class='logo'>
      <img src="http:\//static.wiredfool.com/wflogoTransWhite.png" 
         width="340" height="54" align='right' border='0' 
         alt="wiredfool" 
         style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0)">
   </a>
</span>

The current image really doesn’t need 8 bit transparency for the background that I have behind it, since I really could have done a normal image antialiased to that color. But now I can change the color/image in the style sheet and make the browser do all of the antialiasing work for me.

So the browser compatibility matrix looks like:

Me: As Designed
Wife\@work: Uses PNG Hack, but ok.
Mom: Redirects to Print template.
Sister: Redirects to Print template.
XP Using Friends: Uses PNG Hack
People using good browsers: As Designed
Luddites: Accessible
Google: Accessible

The theme is loaded – rapidly making changes to fix that which didn’t work quite right.

IE is going to be sub optimal, because I’m using png. Safari/Mozilla are nice. Older OmniWeb is questionable but readable.

Netscape 4.x? Good question. IE 4.5/5.x Mac? Another good question.

And it validated last night. But not right now. Update: it validates. Had some paragraph and div tags inside spans. Inline’s can’t contain block level elts. Makes sense.

It would actually help if IE6 just wouldn’t support png. That way they wouldn’t get a grey ‘transparency background’ on the logo and the fade. A bit of googling shows a possible solution, but it’s ugly. Solution is from http://www.alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/discuss/6/#ala-1841 . I told you it’s ugly. now to see if it works. Looks like I need to have more absolute and relative positioning directives included to make the image line up where it’s supposed to be.

Now I’ve figured out how to hide the css from at least NS4.x and msie 3.x and 4.01. I need to find a 4.5 browser to test on rather than emailing screen shots around. This page http://www.w3development.de/css/hide_css_from_browsers/import/ is useful, but slightly wrong. IE 4.01/3 actually read the import from the first test, @import url (“…”); but not if a screen selector is added: @import url (“…”) screen;. So item #1 should not include the Mac IE, and item #3 should.

Great, and hiding the css from IE on the mac hides it from ie/windows. oh well. I’m done with exploiting browser bugs to hide css. I’m going to use apache to rewrite old css mangling browsers to the print template. Leave everyone else to cope with the standards.

The Matrix:

• Looks fine in lynx. In fact, better than it ever did before.
• Looks fine in Mozilla.
• Looks fine in Safari.
• IE 3.0/mac is hosed, with all the images centered on top of one another. With css hiding, it’s just a plain page. Good.
• IE 4.01/mac is hosed without css hiding, works with it.
• IE 4.5/mac is hosed. No text, just a blue bar.
• IE 5.0/os9 is hosed, no text, just the sidebar.
• IE 5.2/OSX is good.
• IE 6/win misplaces the logo image, but it’s not too bad. Kind of artful in a way. Either that or it misplaces the background under the image.
• NS 4 gets a plain page. Good.

I’ve done a short writeup of our experiences on STP this year.