Flutterby™! From 2000-09-01 to 2000-09-29

Rueters is reporting that a report prepared for the US Postmaster shows that US postal workers are no more susceptable to violence than anybody else in the US workforce. What got me was this quote from Joseph Califano, chairman of the U.S. Postal Service Commission on a Safe and Secure Workplace:

"'Going postal' is a myth, a bad rap causing unnecessary apprehension and fear among 900,000 postal workers," Califano said in a statement Thursday accompanying the report.



"This report should shatter the myth that postal workers are more violent than other workers and discourage the pejorative use of that expression."

Okay, Joe, if you believe that a myth can be shattered that easily there's this email tax you and I need to discuss.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

This was tuesdays sunset out the back of our camp. Some of us are back and trying to adapt back to "normal" life. I actually wrote diary notes in my palm as burning man happened for me so I might put them up here if Dan is ok with that. I also brought a camera this year and would be happy to share "most" of the 77 pictures I took while livin on da playa

[ related topics: Burning Man Interactive Drama Photography ]

757 and F117 in near miss incident, the interesting bit is that the U.S. military spent how many gazillions making the F117 undetectable, and yet "The Boeing 757 was flying at about 10,800 feet when its on-board radar equipment detected an approaching aircraft." Think about this as those morons in high places are trying to push breaking ABM treaties in favor of a system that's failed every time it's been tested.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

It seems kind of obvious in retrospect: Janesway builds a latex barrier into panties...

Bush campaign: he's not dyslexic. Given that Gail Sheehy was trying to give GW an "out" by saying this, I guess they're confirming what we thought: He's just dumber 'n a box of rocks.

[ related topics: Politics ]

CDC on nonoxynol-9 and HIV/AIDS prevention. Summary: N-9 bad.

I went to see Jesus' Son with Andrew and Nikki at the Bijou (Chattanooga) last night. Dan and I saw it when I was out visiting a couple months ago. We joked that there was no way it would ever show in Chattanooga. Surpise! I was much better the second time. I'm not sure why it seemed so uninteresting the first time - I think I just didn't quite get into the humor. It's a Drugstore Cowboy sort of movie - glorfying drugs and stupid people. Not that drugs or stupid people are inherently bad - they just don't mix well.

[ related topics: Religion Drugs Humor ]

Local Rant: Install Shield for Windows Installer probably doesn't interest anyone, and it's probably stuff I've said here before, and I really hope it's my last word on the topic because after one more installer I hope to avoid writing such apps for a while, but if anyone out there wanted to take the market for tools which manipulate the Windows Installer databases by storm, they could take a hint from it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Microsoft ]

Moodwatch Oh GOODY! I am thinking about sending the author an abusive letter <grin>

[ related topics: Web development ]

Ok well a couple of you asked for tales so the rest of you get to suffer. This is some of us executing the duck n cover in your car. There is a point after you get everything lashed down but the wind is too loud to talk in and the dust is too thick to see through that you run for cover. The weather reports said 70/mph gust but I don't think they got that bad. You can see everyone got pretty depressed. From left to right: Mistress Patricia, Nevin, Dan, Charlene, Me ...

[ related topics: Burning Man Photography Dan's Life ]

Whew. Back from Burning Man, some longer rants on the topic will be coming, I suppose this means I have to get the rant system back up and working so that Todd can post his experiences too. Overall a good experience. I know I said this last year, but next year I want to leave on Saturday, my excuse this year is that we had a newbie (Dylan), but he's pretty social and found his own way home anyway... The art was a mixed success, those who saw the sculpture and played with it said "Wow, totally way cool", but it was destroyed in an early storm. The shade structure I built for it stayed up and was appreciated when I went to check on it and saw people out there. The project I'm proudest of was mapping, in the next few days I hope to type in and clean up the data so that the clean-up crew has something to work from. And the "Flutterbike" quadricycle finally broke, but it gave me two good Burning Man trips and a lot of engineering experience. Thanks, Larry and later Todd for keeping y'all entertained during my absence.

[ related topics: Burning Man Web development ]

Okay, one more picture before Todd posts all his and I get my slides scanned (and tomorrow I'll get the notebooks from Todd and be able to input location data for a lot of this stuff and build a map). This one courtesy of that great couple at The Civilized Explorer of me with the eye-in-hand mask and Charlene on the flutterbike. Don't link to this image as-is, I'll probably move at least the link to a database archive with more info in a bit.

[ related topics: Web development Photography Dan's Life ]

Preliminary GPS data of art installations and similar info from Black Rock City, it'll become better cleaned up and there'll be more of it over time. If anyone else got similar data I'd love to integrate it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The office has DSL now, but due to various screw-ups PacBell didn't leave the modem. We bought a modem and stuffed it in a Windows box, but Todd hasn't yet set it up to masquerade, so I'm doing my morning surfing from that, but going to have to move back over to the 'net as fed through the Ricochet capillary to get work done. Therefore, a link to the map of the Burning Man body art to finish up my Black Rock City position information.

[ related topics: Burning Man Web development Microsoft ]

Via Camworld, The Death of WYSIWYG. I've been playing with some toys and concepts for richer markup and linking which would be best inserted in an editor, these guys might have some basis to work from...

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Web development ]

Damn this is a bizarre election. With Gore and Leiberman in the pro-censorship camp, and Bush's new campaign format promising socialized medicine: Bush also reiterated his commitment to compassionate government. "If someone can't help themselves, we will," he said, describing his plan to help seniors afford prescription drugs. "No one should suffer in a nation this prosperous." If ever it were clear that voting for a third party candidate would have no negative impacts, this election is it.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Politics ]

To give credit where credit is due: tom kunesh collected the eye in hand images that inspired my mask, and Barry Radun made a parody of tom's eye in hand pages.

In the latest Comes Naturally, David Steinberg talks about bad pornography.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

A diary of the Lifestyles 2000 swinger's convention, nothing extremely revelatory here, but I'm intrigued by what people find in different fringe social situations.

[ related topics: Web development ]

I spent Saturday up on the playa to document the Burning Man cleanup. The playa is way cleaner after a week this year than it was after 6 weeks last year. Of course there were a few assholes who burned couches, some people who left camps intact (everyone's kinda bemused about the folks who left a building, and by that I mean a plywood and 2x4 structure, 18" stud centers and everything, complete with detailed disassembly instructions...), and a few places with a lot of small litter. If you go, take some more magnets on sticks (I can't believe that after last year, the only one around was the one I donated), rakes for going through the dunes that form around trash concentrations, and lots o' trash bags. Dropped the film off to be developed and scanned today, and I'll be entering more locations for the map, I've got a client who needs a delivery Thursday morning, but hopefully fairly soon I'll have the map online, and I'll link that to the images.

[ related topics: Burning Man Interactive Drama ]

One of the advantages of long car drives is listening to radio. Last night on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me someone suggested that the Secret Service are going to assign Bush and Cheney new code names: "Major League" and "Big Time".

[ related topics: Politics ]

Preliminary Burning Man Notes is just some stuff I slapped up yesterday, not organized yet, but I wanted to get something down on pixels.

[ related topics: Burning Man Web development ]

Damn, I'm rapidly losing faith in this whole "fight monocultures" thing. I got the Debian 2.2 disks, and decided that upgrading my laptop while I did other stuff today would be fun. The upgrade wasn't bad, but it was a lot of hassle for a system that still uses Perl 5.005, glibc2.0, and PostgreSQL 6.something. Grumble grumble build the bloody thing myself from source grumble grumble. Somebody wanna remind me why I left Slackware?

[ related topics: Free Software ]

Mary Anne Mohanraj, one of the driving forces behind Clean Sheets has started a science fiction magazine called Strange Horizons, and will also be teaching an online class on writing and publishing sex stories through Freelance Success. The latter might get me off my butt and give a sympathetic critique group for some of the fiction I want to play with.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Layne Winebeck responds to David Steinberg's attempt to divide porn into good and bad.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Here's my awesome friend Kiki just after I helped her repair the firefall, just in time to get clobbered by the in coming wind storm. Sometimes I think she looks like a superhero or anime character. What do you think??

[ related topics: Burning Man Photography ]

Via Backup Brain, the wonderful and hilarious In Passing, a chronicle of conversations overheard.

Woohoo! Will & Grace gives Focus on Family their comeuppance on the whole "ex-gay" topic.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

The current Medley has some good links and musings on the intersections of technology and law, and how the internet is having trouble "treating censorship as damage and routing around it".

There's nothing in the Salon article A bug in the legal code? that observant readers haven't already figured out, but it's a good rundown of the flaws in Judge Kaplan's decisions about DeCSS.

[ related topics: Web development ]

If you're director of the CIA and slip up, no big deal. If you're an engineer working with similar (some might argue less immediately lethal) top secret information, you could spend 279 days in jail and get a criminal record, but at least Wen Ho Lee got a plea-bargain. Said US District Judge James Parker: "I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner in which you were held in custody by the executive branch"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development ]

Here is the gang Dan, Dylan & Charlene at the shrine setting up the sound lady. Eversince the exibit.... Dan's been wearing all black and ordering Fancy Coffee

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life ]

Via LarkFarm, the Salvador Dali Museum.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Some of the gang at Scotch Night has been buying Tivo(s) and blessing them with second drives and starting to hack them in other ways. I got curious and decided this is a very hackable device and must be played with. If any of you are also the "curious" types here is the tivo hacking primer to get you started.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

OK so I follow this Tivo Link from Camworld and read this guys rant about what tivo should be and have to snicker a little. An anonymous consulting company has been talking to Tivo about some projects and they actually want to put network connectivety into the box because of a deal with Viacom(Blockbuster) to download movies on demand. There are a few snags in the plan (piracy, digital watermark & bandwidth) but it may eventually happen. I'd pay the stupid $5 to have the movie download to my home. Come to think of it. I'd pay the $30 if they would let me own it...

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Interactive Drama Web development ]

This Link brought to you by the color Pumpkin

[ related topics: Web development ]

Aaaahhh. Nice relaxing day yesterday, spent most of it bouncing around the city looking for some clothing (for a friend, really(!)), after hitting some of the places on Haight and not finding what we were looking for we ended up at Stormy Leather, which didn't really match, but the good folks there said "Try Felicity's Fetiche, it's kind of a stripper's supply store." I think we need an excuse to go back, they had some of the right clothing, but the vibe there was kinda the same as the last time I was in an industrial gasses supply place, the folks behind the counter were clearly professionals and knew the details of their product. If you ever need stripping advice you could do a lot worse walking in there, explaining your situation, and letting them outfit you. After that, we ended up doing dinner at the always awesome Millenium, vegetarian that even the most die-hard carnivores seem to enjoy, went back towards Union Square where we wandered up Sutter, ducked into a gallery that really cool mesh sculptures that cast even cooler shadows (more forthcoming as I find more details on the artist), and then went to see Stomp. So it's not deep meaningful drama, but if you liked that Volkswagen ad where the music on the radio meshes with the stuff happening on the street, or grew up with those Muppets sketches where they layered a bunch of different sounds together, or even that great episode where Buddy Rich "played the theatre", Stomp is a very entertaining evening. A wonderful mesh of percussion, dance and found sound. I don't know how the various troupes are, but if they're half as good as the San Francisco group the traveling show is definitely worth an evening. Recommended.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music ]

So I haven't been watching the Olympics, partly on principle, partly 'cause most of the summer sports bore me, but listening to the swimming geeks on the Sunday morning hike this morning, it seems that NBC Sports is dedicated to making sure that nobody who actually knows anything about a sport cares about watching TV coverage (kinda like listening to Dick Button on ice skating...). C'mon folks, you have the knowledgeable commentators, ask 'em to say something informative, not just ramble about what we can see happening on the screen. (Hmmm... I meant to point that Olympics link to Olympics.org, but it ended up at Olympics.com. Read no meaning into the slip...)

[ related topics: Technology and Culture ]

A Salon profile on Tom Campbell is interesting, but doesn't get how coherent the guy sounds when he talks, or just how wacked out Feinstein is. So of course I don't give him a chance in hell in this election, but one can hope.

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

Anarchist's Cookbook author denounces his own book while the CIA and FBI claim to have found 6 CD Terrorist Handbook. I think there might be a tie-in here, but I'm not sure...

[ related topics: Web development Books Music ]

Via the Daily Illuminator, Ballard's team discovers civilization beneath Black Sea, he's trying to get permission to take samples to do some dating to check on theories that the flood myths may have come from a catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea about 5,500 years ago.

Via Scripting News, although Dave's take is different from mine: Oklahoma State University student busted for copyright infringement. I've got to admit that I'm with the RIAA on this one. Going after the search engines like Napster seems pretty shakey, going after the actual copyright infringers seems perfectly reasonable.

[ related topics: Politics Web development Dave Winer ]

Oh, this makes me feel secure: Microsoft, Japanese rev up Windows CE for cars. I guess the bright side is that it's not a joint venture with Ford and Firestone.

[ related topics: Web development Microsoft ]

Microsoft downplaying Office security hole. I would've let this go without notice except for this great comment by Microsoft's Scott Culp: "The user would need to take a series of deliberate steps that we believe would only occur as part of a social engineering attack". Wait, we're talking about a customer base that, en masse, has fallen for exploits that involve launching untrusted executables, not once, but over and over and over again.

[ related topics: Web development Microsoft ]

Via /., GE announces a fuel-cell system that'll power an average home, extracts hydrogen from natural gas or propane, then generates electricity from that, the waste heat can be used for hot water. Ship date late 2001.

[ related topics: Web development Cool Science ]

Via Thinkhole, I just ordered a DeCSS T-shirt.

Ok if you are unfamiliar with South Park this will not make much sense to you but my goofy site for the day is What Would Brian Boitano Do?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I'm linking to this only because it seems that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it: Dave Winer tries to explain his vision of peer-to-peer (with the annoyingly snarky "P2P" abbreviation), and comes up with something remarkably similar to the past 25 years of Un*x and TCP/IP. Now he's pushing his protocol framework or something similar over HTTP, but back when I was a wee lad people were scripting FTP clients and writing more specialized apps to talk to MUDs and Archie and similar, and I got into the whole real-time network thing way late. And of course Tim Berners-Lee started developing HTML and HTTP he assumed that people would have the appropriate servers running on their machines. The best steps we can take toward Dave's vision is having world settle on a GUI framework like Gtk or Tcl/Tk which has bindings from most of the major languages so that cross-platform application usability (beyond cross-platform development and portability) becomes a reality. It often seems that we don't really make any progress, we just put more layers of technical complexity in between the people trying to communicate with each other.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Web development Dave Winer ]

So as I've been spending my time in installer purgatory, while waiting for builds I've clicked a few of the 'blog ads that show up on the top of this page. Now I can understand if you tried to update your page for a week or three and gave up back in January, but if sometime in July or August you took the time to put up some nice "Sorry, didn't have the time, blog no longer updated" message why not also take the time to remove the advertising for it? I may have to impose a filter on the feed I'm getting from Weblogs.com, an update in the past week or I don't run the ad.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

Hmmmm... Need to put a conditional about asking for e-mail address into my CGI login management system for those modules which don't need it (none of the scripts that run Flutterby use that capability, and it's actually even a pain for me to go read it directly from the database when I'm curious about a poster's identity...).

Quick! before the ACLU shuts them down for trampeling on criminals rights(another rant for another time) go to Jail Cam and watch the drama unfold. The cameras have a fairly fast refresh and I have to admit it has that sick and twisted watching a train wreck, Survivor, Auto Racing kind of appeal...

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Web development Photography ]

Todays silly link is brought to you by the folks at ISKIP.COM

I think Jerry put something in the water supply or maybe these things happen in threes. Another Lesbian Breakup

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

Caught the latest installment of the Independent Film Festival in Chattanooga: Est-Ouest. Of course, like everything in Chattanooga, the film festival is far enough behind the times that the movie is available in the video stores. The movie features a young doctor returning to his home country, Russia, post-WWII, with his young French wife and child. The struggle begins before they even leave the ship - seeing a young man shot down while trying to reach his aging father. I don't want to ruin it for anyone, so I won't go into details. The net result is a powerful film that is best viewed with a companion of the prefered sex...

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Debra and Fred had a great little exchange, he complained about the treatment of robot monsters, and she pointed out just how groundbreaking this treatment was for the time. Well, I laughed, anyway.

[ related topics: Web development Weblogs ]

Via Need To Know, the Lego Mindstorms party optimizer, a CD jukebox with a camera to sense action on the dance floor and skip a track if no one's dancing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Music Photography ]

Via Swallowing Tacks, one of my mid-childhood fetishes was aviation. When I couldn't figure the resources for that I ended up discovering computers, which has served me well, but I still run across things that make me turn back into that wild-eyed twelve year old who could identify a gazillion different aircraft from the golden ages of aviation. Save A Connie is the website of the Airline History Museum at Kansas City, and they've restored the only flying Lockheed "Super G" Constellation, a Martin 404, and are working on restoring a Douglas DC-3. Also be sure to check out the radio controlled model of the Constellation, with a 22 foot wingspan and requiring two pilots to fly.

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

First post switchover test, I've created a new user, logged in and out as me, made comments, had all sorts of problems with sutpidities on my part regarding the difference between the AUTO_INCREMENT of MySQL and the sequences of PostgreSQL, but in the end I think we're mostly up and running, although there may still be some issues with timestamp fields that I need to figure out.

Al Gore, paraphrased: "Hey, parents are most of my votes, so rather than putting the blame squarely on them, where it belongs, I'm gonna pander, trample all over the first amendment, and blame the entertainment industries." Or excuse me, perhaps I should lay that one on breeders, 'cause parents, real parents, take an active interest in their children's upbringing and don't simply drop them off on the culture to raise.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Web development ]

Did I mention the Dust storms on the Playa? In this case our hero "McTool" is riding his bike around cleverly diguised as a NorthFace sherpa taking pictures during the storm. You can see from the perspective of the people that I am not very far from the man. This is a few seconds before a complete "white out"

[ related topics: Photography ]

Oh how I love Windows NT! And it loves me back! I just really wish it'd use lube...

[ related topics: Dan's Life Microsoft Personal Lubricant ]

This was my personal favorite exhibit at burning man but I think it was most other people's (that I talked to) as well. This bush is the actual size of a rose bush made of hand worked copper and blown glass. Those are photovoltaic cells within the leaves you are looking at. Each glass rose has several bulbs of different color. Durning the day the cells charge a battery(in the roots)and a sequencer causes the flowers to "bloom" different colors during the night. I can not convey the beauty of watching this. I never got to meet the artist god/goddess that created this but I want it.

[ related topics: Religion Burning Man Politics Photography ]

Fraud involved in smog check of Larry Ellison's car.

One of my other favorite pieces of Burning Man art was this sequence of cut-outs that coalesced when viewed from the hole in the first plane. The picture isn't aligned 'cause the hole was too small for the camera to see through, but the effect in person was very cool.

[ related topics: Burning Man Photography ]

Lots more pictures to come. I just don't want to ruin Dan's rep for having a fast loading site by puting too much up. This is Carl right after he and Dan resurected a bike from the corpses of 3 others. It was fun to watch them Hack on bike tech since it's something I am clueless about....

[ related topics: Photography Carl Coryell-Martin ]

Via Camworld, The Ideology of Ease asks how we push users beyond "ease of use", exploring issues that many of us have been screaming about for a while: "...the drive to make computers easy to use has made it possible to use a computer without knowing how to manipulate the files located on it. While this doesn't have a huge consequence for day-to-day computing in a single location, my experiences with NWE students make clear that the absence of generalized knowledge (in this case, file management) can be very disempowering. and Ultimately, the ideology of ease, perhaps because of the financial interests of those who benefit from it, is instrumental in the maintenance of a "digital divide" of computing into digital "haves" and "have nots." Because ease is structured as an end in itself, not as a means to an end, those who embrace ease may not be able to move past it -- insuring under-achievement. So when a programmer screams and hollers about a user interface change, they're probably just a little more foresightful than you, and are doing it for your own good. And when they cave and say "well, okay", that's akin to the parent in the grocery store buying a candy bar in response to a toddler's tantrum.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Web development User Interface ]

I can't believe that Eric didn't put this here himself: Jesus dress-up. And can I just point out that this is a total reaffirmation of my atheism, 'cause if there is a Christian god I am so going to hell for linking to this...

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Humor Web development ]

I had heard about this but now I have actually been infected by that dreaded Unix virus. It' very sneaky in that as soon as you figure it out it's too late. Subject: Unix Virus This virus works on the honor system: If you're running any variant of Unix or Linux, please forward this message to everyone you know, and delete a bunch of your files at random. Thank you for your cooperation.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama ]

Just to beat Todd to today's images (although his pictures are actually of stuff happening at Burning Man, mine are mostly documenting the cleanup): Whadda ya do with a bunch of drunk folks in a theme camp at Burning Man? Play Human Foozball, of course!

[ related topics: Burning Man Photography ]

Ya know those annoying spams you get about penny stocks being undervalued and going up? Some of them came from a New Jersey 14 year old who's repaying a quarter million in profits from such hyping. The SEC says no one's stepped forward claiming to be a victim, I guess publicly identifying yourself as that stupid would be too humiliating, even if it did involve moderate amounts of money.

[ related topics: New Economy ]

Hokay, fingers crossed that the whole switchover from MySQL to PostgreSQL worked. If you find CGI errors or corrupt data, email me (as webmaster) or leave a comment here (if that still works).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Okay, the switchover should be complete, I need to tune a few things because response time seems slower, but I think I've got all the AUTO_INCREMENT versus sequences stuff worked out. I might still have a few timestamp issues, though. Boy, I hope triggers is worth all the rest of this...

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

There's a certain sort of terror in this:

# cd /usr/src/kernel-xxx

# make config

# make dep

# make zlilo

# make modules

# make modules_install

# reboot

Of the "oh shit I hope the condom didn't break" sort...

Via Wisdom, a Wired article on the police presence at Burning Man. One of the big issues of this year's Burning Man was the increased police intervention. Drug arrests, health department interference, etc. One cop mentioned "enforcing community standards", I don't know what community this asshole was referring to, but it wasn't the one I was in.

[ related topics: Burning Man Web development ]

Behind the Curtain: a day in the life of webloggers, is up. my submission, an ordinary Sunday, is also available. It's interesting mainly as a learning experience...

[ related topics: Web development ]

What she said: Dori on Fray Day 4.

[ related topics: Web development ]

While searching for a decent domain name for my friend's Wordslam competitions, I came across this site: Vispo: Langu(im)age. There's alot to digest there but definitely worth a look. From one of his essays: 'Hopefully Web art will go well beyond flash and excellent design to perpetuating and deepening the spirit of cooperation and imaginative involvement with each other -- globally -- that sometimes feels like it is on the way.'

I guess we can take solace from it not being terribly common: IRS allows deduction for abducted children, that is if they're kidnapped by someone outside the family. I love the way the article ends, with a statistic that about 32,000 children are abducted annually, what they carefully omit is that only about 1,500 of those are stranger abductions.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Web development ]

I'm in the process of building our second production database server. The machine itself is a monster HP 6000r with six (6) 550Mhz Xeon CPUs, 1.25GB RAM and about 50GB+ of RAID5 diskspace. This is pretty close to the biggest PC money can buy. The Sybase license fees for the box will exceed $200K... Anyhow, being a production machine that needs to do one thing REALLY well, I am trying to take route of using readily available open source components and reconfiguring them to do what we need. To that end, I am using Red Hat 6.2 (with hand-selected packages) as my base. Sybase is pretty limited in the flavors of Linux it supports. Both Sybase and HP are quite comfortable with a Red Hat base... To that I've added the Bastille-Linux scripts - a definite must for a machine that is plugged strait into the internet by multiple OC3s. And now I'm trying to get the SGI ProPack 1.3 working the way I want. My problem is that Linux, with the 2.2 Kernel, doesn't like files bigger than 2GB. It also wants everything to write to disk via a file system. This means that Sybase has to use 2GB max files to store the data from the database. Larger databases need to be spread across multiple files. On other, more database friendly platforms, the OS supports "RAW disk IO" - letting applications write directly to unformatted partitions on the hard drive without a file system (and it's limitations) getting in the way. In order to get Linux to support this (at least the way Sybase wants it) is to install a couple kernel patches and rebuild. Those patches just happen to come with the SGI ProPack (along with a couple other goodies for high-performance database applications). So here I sit, waiting for my upteenth recompile of the kernel... Writing lots of posts to Flutterby. Letting the world know that people are really trying to use Linux for big, real-life applications. I know it might look like I'm having problems - but to achieve the same goal with HP/UX, Solaris (or may the deities continue to shine on me), Windows NT, would be considerably more difficult - or more likely - impossible. Granted I wouldn't be fighting these exact problems with another platform - here I at least have the weapons to fight well.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft ]

Marylaine writes about the human meaning of infrastructure.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

AAaaugh! I'm not normally a fan of professional licensing and certifications, it tends to let people with good test taking skills attempt to run networks, and in general I'm not much on the death penalty either, but a colleague's experience with people misinterpreting the "Entering a secure area of the site" dialog box that IE pops up leads me to believe that we should make use of computers by anyone not capable of breathing without a call to tech support a shooting offense.

In Thailand they're training monkeys to harvest fruit, I say give 'em a computer and let 'em participate in the global economy, they've gotta be smarter than some of these users...

If software testers worked for firearms manufacturers: "If trigger is pulled when gun is pointed at foot, toes disappear."

Via RasterWeb, getting your CueCat declawed which links to a page that looked like it had some cool hacking info but is being threatened by some clueless-git lawyers. Remember that $100 web appliance that suddenly got priced up and had some bizarre license attached to it? Seems like buying these things to make the sponsoring company lose money is a good idea. Update: Software available at http://blort.org/cuecat/ which I will be mirroring in case it should go away.

John Tesh's website company sues Vignette over StoryServer misrepresentation. I've been looking around at content management concepts and come to the conclusion that very few of the commercial products for publishing static sites are any better than a good Perl coder can whip up in a week.

[ related topics: Business Web development Content Management ]

Some Pictures from the 2000 Folsom Street Fair which I didn't go to 'cause it didn't seem like my fetishes and clothing styles would really let me participate, but it looks like it could be a fun time...

[ related topics: Web development ]

Todd subscribes to Wired, so as a break yesterday I hooked up his CueCat and scanned the ISBNs of all the books on my office shelf into one of my Linux boxes. I'm a little disappointed that it doesn't like my laptop, but it got on okay with one of the desktop machines and the cord was long enough that I could reach most of the bookshelves fairly easily. At some point we're gonna have to have a library app on a machine near the front door...

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Books ]

Some of you have heard me talk about the trials of my friend who was a total San Francisco militant 70s feminist coming to grips with the adolescence of her teenage sons. Although she made a fairly convincing case that she was the first customer of Good Vibrations she's also pretty squeemish about a lot of things, and is trying to reconcile the reactionary 70s attitudes against reality. Susannah Indigo, who has taken over the job of managing editor of Clean Sheets from Mary Anne Mohanraj, writes about taking the other tack and letting her son borrow from her porn stash in a Salon article titled Erotic Mama.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Tim O'Reilly talks about Dave Winer.

[ related topics: Dave Winer ]

Just came from the late showing of Chuck & Buck at the Independent Film Series. We saw the previews to this film at But I'm a Cheerleader. I won't go into the plot too much, but it definitely wasn't what I thought it was going to be about. I also kep thinking how much Chris Weitz, the actor who played Chuck, looks like Todd. Speaking of But I'm a Cheerleader. I just pre-ordered my copy on DVD from Amazon. Hopefully it will get here before Dan does so we can have a big coming-out party... Just kidding... I also ordered Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy for a classic look at art film. I'll let y'all know what it's like when it gets here.

[ related topics: Books ]

The new Clean Sheets has some interesting photographs by Mark Odley, none of which come off as particularly erotic to me, but a few of them made me laugh in the right ways. Also a well written review of red-head porn sites, the discussion of full-time fetishes is well worth a read.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Wow! Good day on the CMS List. Steve Yelvington had a great note on marketspeak versus product which started out: Here are some things I have learned from dealing with vendors. "We support" means "we heard about that stuff the other day, and if it makes you buy our stuff, we're all for it." "High performance" generally means "tried it in the lab with a single user and got some stuff to show up a couple of times." And Karl Fast gets my vote for quote of the week: One way of explaining this is that we tend to think of web pages as being descendants of the printed page in much the same way that children are descendants of their parents, but I think it's more like the relationship between humans and chimpanzees which are genetically similar in almost every way but clearly very different. Zeldman and Siegel take note!

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Children and growing up Quotes Interactive Drama Web development Content Management ]

Via Need To Know: nobscan.com exists to show scanned pictures of male genitalia in flaccid and humorous states. It is not a pornography site. Under current law, erect members cannot be shown in UK media (which includes web servers) - so we will not be featuring any pictures of pointy projectiles.

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Sexual Culture ]

WV is a library for converting Microsoft Word documents to other formats. Might be handy for people who need to make documents from the unwashed masses actually usable, like if you were implementing a web site content management system that needed input from Word users, for instance...

[ related topics: Content Management Microsoft ]

RU486 legal, anti-abortion crowd already starting misinformation campaigns

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Ok back to the eye candy fest(send complaints to blackhole@flutterby.com)

Isn't this a lovely building? Maybe a coat of paint and some new carpet? This is the view from Coyote Grits world headquarters. It sure would be a shame if any of that heavy equiptment got out of control. to be continued monday...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

If you're in the Bay Area, the October schedule for The Baltic is up.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development ]