Disqus - Latest Comments for Phil Crissman

Re: A new way to get in Club140 (Scripting News)

Phil Crissman — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:07:47 -0000

Of course, if I start beginning messages with '@davewiner ', that only leaves 129 characters to write with. ;)

Re: Mike Arrington told me... (Scripting News)

Phil Crissman — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:00:45 -0000

I've been using it for a few weeks now on Mac, Windows & Linux. Have had no problems, and actually fixed several issues I was having with FF2.

Greasemonkey was my must-have extension, but I was able to find an updated version in the Greasemonkey-dev forums that works with FF3.

Re: Hello, World

Phil Crissman — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:37:56 -0000

comment, comment

Re: Five Things

Phil Crissman — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 15:42:45 -0000

thanks!

Sorry the comments took so long to get working... aie.

Re: The French are revolting

Phil Crissman — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 08:37:37 -0000

Thanks!

12 days is a long time to keep rioting, so I'm sure we'll hear more about this. Seems a bit crazy.

Re: Blindside — The Great Depression

Phil Crissman — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:53:05 -0000

Gee... thanks, I think. ;-)

I know what you're remembering... Coldplay. I still can't stand them; it's a personal thing.

Re: C++ Problem

Phil Crissman — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:06:07 -0000

Hm. I hope it wasn't wordpress that lost half your comment...

At any rate, I had already figured it out before I posted, at least, I figured out the first part.

I can't read the rest of your comment, but I'm not sure that's the reason. In C++ (I'm guessing you know this) strlen is going to return the length of the string, but the array is actually going to be one character longer, where it stores the terminating null character. So length might be 16, but the array would be of length 17.

The solution was to initialize newString with `char newString[length + 1];'

What was really interesting to me was that the incorrect version would compile... and run... and would work fine UNLESS the string was a multiple of 16; then it would return random ascii characters.

So, I did find the solution already... it's just that strange behavior for strings of 16, 32, ... that confuses me. I thought it was an interesting problem, though not necessarily any practical applications... other than just to know what's going on under the hood.

Re: C++ Problem

Phil Crissman — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 10:32:26 -0000

Interesting; I wondered if it would really be worth it, after all, to try and figure that part (strings whose length had 16 as a factor); maybe I'll stop pondering it and get on with my life.

Now I'm pondering a more interesting problem... Sudoku. It's a little challenging, but I think it would make a good final project for the class...

Re: K2

Phil Crissman — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 12:56:53 -0000

I think that line of the comments might still require a page refresh, since I see that it is working now. Of course, the whole idea of AJAX is not to need page refreshes... but I have a feeling that the Ajaxicity (?) does not handle that particular line (yet, at least... k2 is still technically beta software).

Re: Gnome 2.12 on Gentoo

Phil Crissman — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:22:45 -0000

Verdict: everything has worked almost perfectly. The only problem had was the one noted in this post, with gnome-system-monitor.

I was a bit surprised, as I remember upgrading to Gnome 2.8 a little early and having all sorts of problems; when 2.10 came out, I waited until it became stable before upgrading.

2.12 has gone without any major issues; you may want to scan the forums to see if anyone else has had problems, but I'd say it's pretty much a stable upgrade.

Re: Startup ideas…

Phil Crissman — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:29:31 -0000

I have seen at least one imitator of the million dollar homepage, but instead of $1 per pixel they only wanted $0.35. That would make it only a $350,000 homepage, which is still not too bad. ;-)

If I stumble upon the top 10 ways to make money online, I'll be sure to post a link.

Re: Some things you can’t say in WordPress

Phil Crissman — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 14:39:10 -0000

Thanks for the reply, Jim. Yeah, apparently it is a wider problem with WordPress... I posted it mostly to add to the few other posts I found about it. If it's a bug, it should be fixed; if it's by design (blocking executable commands for security purposes) then there should be a list of words so that it isn't just a shock when you're told you have an error... ;-)

Re: On being a good tech

Phil Crissman — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:41:17 -0000

Listening -- I think that's a great observation.

I suppose I could try to argue that listening is part of communication, but I certainly didn't make that explicit. ;-) That being the case, thanks! I completely agree; listening is a necessity.

Excellent comment, thanks for visiting!

Re: New stylesheet

Phil Crissman — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 14:47:52 -0000

Re: The subtitle changes... I don't know which one was up there when you commented, you'll have to remind me.

I don't know, I was just trying to come up with something new. I finally settled on something that's more or less just descriptive of the content (I guess). ;-)

Re: New stylesheet

Phil Crissman — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 15:46:28 -0000

Oh, I forgot to reply about the multiple blogs. This is the one that is more a devotional/blog. I have a couple ideas for others, but I don't know if I have time...

Re: Movies 2.0 and 10 tips to better blogging

Phil Crissman — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 18:02:04 -0000

I figured as much. Both posts were a lot of fun, though; I guess I'll have to check back in again over there for "no-sarcasm" day. ;-)

Re: Creating Software-Friendly Users

Phil Crissman — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:11:09 -0000

w00t!

Great comment. I agree, people who are comfortable with computers generally got that way by being willing to screw up, and then proceeding to do so, liberally.

Getting the user to have that willingness to just try something is probably the biggest hurdle to this approach, but since the alternative is to continue to just do everything for the user... it needs to be done.

Thanks for the comment, John!

Re: Bypassing Windows XP Security

Phil Crissman — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:15:10 -0000

Re: Access to console... I was actually thinking something like that, as well; I guess I forgot to write that. But yeah, hopefully most "hackers" don't have the luxury of being able to sit down at your computer and just try stuff.

Re: Linux CD ...Yup, good point... though writing to NTFS with Linux (if that's something you wanted to do) is emphasized as being "at your own risk."

Re: Everybody, meet Paul

Phil Crissman — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 17:00:32 -0000

Yeah, I've been noticing links to your blog for awhile now; I went on the K2 forums at flickr not too long ago and saw your name over there. I thought, Wow, this guy is everywhere..

I almost laughed out loud when I saw the Slashdot byline.

I think it's great; you say you found what people like and focused on that -- the funny thing is, not everyone can do that. Anyways, thanks for dropping by.

Re: Latte Art

Phil Crissman — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 02:53:23 -0000

Pretty cool, indeed. There's something about the inherent fragility of the art -- the fact that someone is probably about to drink it -- that makes it all the more fascinating that someone would put so much practice/effort into this.

Re: Some AdSense calculations

Phil Crissman — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:09:50 -0000

Hm. Yeah, me too.

Something tells me that this isn't how I'm going to be paying the bills... ;-)

Re: Yahoo continues to buy users

Phil Crissman — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:12:58 -0000

They're definitely smart, though. They bought two sites that I know I'm going to keep using, so they've effectively purchased themselves a customer. I'm not sure they got a good deal. ;-)

This may be old news, but I see they've bought Konfabulator also.

Re: Some AdSense calculations

Phil Crissman — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:15:42 -0000

I agree, Joel.

...Makes you think that maybe we should all quit blogging and get into the advertising business.

BTW, thanks for stopping by, Joel, good to hear from you again!

Re: Yahoo continues to buy users

Phil Crissman — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:47:51 -0000

Hm. I'm not sure that this is really what Yahoo wants... now they have a bunch of new users, many of who hate them and resent the fact that they are now using Yahoo products.

It's sort of funny, actually. :D

Re: Torvalds: ‘Use KDE’ - OSNews.com

Phil Crissman — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:49:42 -0000

Yes! The default theme needs a big update. That is almost always one of the first things I change.

I like Red Hat's icons, myself -- they are simple, not so weird that they're distracting, and they look very sharp.

Fortunately, in Gentoo, this is as simple as running "emerge redhat-artwork" and then changing your theme preferences once it's installed. I think the Red Hat art is available in apt, as well (though there are certainly other nice icon sets, as well.)

Re: Communicating a sense of importance

Phil Crissman — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:53:02 -0000

Thanks, Luke!

Re: New Gmail features

Phil Crissman — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 23:29:29 -0000

I agree; with every new feature it keeps getting better.

Thanks for stopping by!

Re: Yahoo continues to buy users

Phil Crissman — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 02:46:36 -0000

The main attraction of del.icio.us is having all your bookmarks available even if you aren't at your own PC... brilliant.

Thanks for stopping by, Buddy!

Re: A quote from Iraq

Phil Crissman — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:13:24 -0000

It would certainly seem that way.

At the same time, I don't think it's a lost cause -- many in Iraq seem very happy and excited to have a say in their own government (such as the woman quoted above). It's a huge step for Iraq, and that whole part of the world; it's a shame that we don't hear more positive reports in the media. sigh.

Re: There’s no excuse for bad web design

Phil Crissman — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:24:45 -0000

The truth hurts. :-)

They have a tough job, and are trying to get a lot of different things done -- but I would think that a good web page design would be one of the first ones you'd try to nail, before going on to other things.

I have nothing but respect for all the hard work they put into it, but the site is just unattractive and non user-friendly in a big way. Oh well, they'll take care of it... I hope. ;-)

Re: Time Management for System Administrators

Phil Crissman — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 11:03:14 -0000

Hi, Matt! Thanks for stopping by.

Now that I've read some of this, I already like it even more. If you like Allen's GTD, you'll definitely dig this book; it's very similiar approach, but deals with issues which are particular to sysadmin-type occupations (ie, constant interruptions, etc).

Re: A Few Reflections on Ubuntu

Phil Crissman — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 15:04:00 -0000

Sorry, no immediate suggestions... Gentoo has actually been, generally speaking, the best performing distro I've ever used. It isn't "hard" to install (the documentation rocks) but it does take awhile due to the "compile (almost) everything from source" methodology.

I hear good things about Arch linux, and it is a pretty quick install -- perhaps look through their forums to see if your wireless adapter is supported.

Thanks for visiting!

Re: …then we blew up the tree

Phil Crissman — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:45:12 -0000

I believe that one of my friends had a camera... I will have to ask him. Hopefully I can post some, if he took any.

Re: A Few Reflections on Ubuntu

Phil Crissman — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 14:10:31 -0000

I've had no segfault trouble for awhile... I'm not sure what would have fixed it, though, so that's not too comforting, yet.

The crashing seemed to occur when I was using and OpenGL screensaver -- since I stopped using one, it hasn't crashed. That's a little disappointing, though, as there is no reason that using an OpenGL screensaver should cause your machine to crash...

It's been working well since I wrote the above post (so, for about 2-3 days now), so I'll give it another chance and see how it does.

Re: Ubuntu Update

Phil Crissman — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 09:27:09 -0000

Nvidia is my drug of choice for 3d graphics; usually their drivers are very good, although they occasionally have had conflict with certain kernel versions.

The main issue is that there was no problem whatsoever with OpenGL screensavers under Gentoo, on the same machine; so theoretically, it should work just fine.

I'm considering the possibility that some of the packages I installed to use wine and World of Warcraft are not certified stable by the Ubuntu devs, therefore making it My Own Darn Fault if things don't work. If/when I find a solution, I'll be sure to post what worked.

Re: It’s JIF, darn it

Phil Crissman — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 09:27:46 -0000

Hm. I guess it made sense to me mostly because, like I mentioned, I actually heard the "jif" pronounciation first.

Giraffe, yes. How about giblets? Geriatrics? Gestsalt? Gestate? Gerald? (if we could use names) Germs? Gel? Generate? Gentle? Gem? Gist? Giant? Gerbil? Gymnasium? ;-)

I will admit to not considering if all those words would be considered "native" English. And I readily concede that an argument can be made for a hard "g".

I used to say Linux wrong, too. I think that "Line-ux" seems more natural, at first, to English speakers, just like we call Linus from Peanuts, "Line-us" with a long "i".

Re: The Worm Ouroboros

Phil Crissman — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 22:34:33 -0000

You're welcome. I used to see it in used bookstores, but it's getting hard to find. It's nice that it's available, even if just for download.

Re: Upgraded and restyled

Phil Crissman — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 09:41:28 -0000

No problem; it's a combination of the adsense-deluxe plugin, and some marginal additions to the sidebar.php file.

That would be a good topic; you can probably figure it out, but I'll write a post about how that works later today.

Thanks for dropping by!

Re: Ubuntu is on the way out

Phil Crissman — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 08:54:51 -0000

I suppose you're right; it's actually the Firefly disc -- I watched the first episode on Amy's mac, and was going to continue watching on my PC.

If it's as simple as installing a package, I'll give it a go. Clearly, I was a little frustrated at the time of writing... ;-)

Re: Firefly

Phil Crissman — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 08:58:58 -0000

I've still only seen the first episode, and already I'd agree. It's a great show. I did see your post, too -- the only reason I didn't comment at the time was that I hadn't seen and of the series yet.

I half wish I had paid heed to the "buzz" about it ahead of time, and seen the series before seeing "Serenity" (the movie) -- but, oh well.

Re: Ubuntu is on the way out

Phil Crissman — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 11:42:51 -0000

I'll check it out... I'm getting very picky, though. I'm going to continue to use Linux, but I'd really like to minimize the amount of troubleshooting I need to do. EasyUbuntu sounds good, though I'm a little concerned that if you make something too easy, you take away some control.

So yes, I'm wanting to have my cake and eat it too... but I think Linux should have reached the point where this is doable. :D

Thanks for the link!

Re: Ubuntu is on the way out

Phil Crissman — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:57:56 -0000

Ah, yes. That does ring a bell, now that you mention it.

I'm still undecided; the problem of my PC crashing with OpenGL screensavers running is also a factor; not that an OpenGL screensaver is critical, but there's no reason it shouldn't work. Shouldn't be a hardware issue, either, as it's always worked before (*cough-gentoo-cough*)...

Ah, we'll see. I've no time to install another OS tonight. :-)

Re: Reddit and Blogniscient

Phil Crissman — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 21:00:31 -0000

Thanks for stopping by!

Yes, I did see TailRank, but I saw it after I made this post, so it didn't make it inside. Sorry! It looks worth a bookmark, though.

No worries about lost productivity; I try to get important things done before I start surfing the web...

Re: Get your blog linked!

Phil Crissman — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 08:46:24 -0000

Sure, I'll give you a link.

...You do realize this post is from last year, though? ;-) How about that, a year later, and this post finally gets a response. How could I not give you a link.

Have fun.

Re: Compiling OpenOffice 2.0

Phil Crissman — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:48:12 -0000

That is a good point; possibly I'll do that next upgrade.

At the time I chose to compile it because I wasn't going to be around for a good long while anyways, I think I was about to go to work or something.

At the moment my main desktop doesn't even have Gentoo on it, any more (sigh... all that compiling, all wasted) -- I'm using Ubuntu, but I've pretty much decided to scrap that and test Arch Linux. If Arch doesn't seem to quite fit the bill, I think I'm going to go back to Gentoo -- it's like an old friend. If I quit doing so many unstable (~x86) things, it will probably hold together a little better. ;-)

Re: Round Corners in Firefox

Phil Crissman — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:13:24 -0000

Cool.

I seem to recall having read about it (it being in CSS 3.0, I mean), but I guess I didn't realize that Firefox had actually implemented it. In any case, It's certainly handy.

Re: U of M Orientation Day

Phil Crissman — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 09:46:53 -0000

Long day.

I learned that if you want to take less than 13 credits, you actually need to officially request permission.

It should work out okay, though. I'm not sure how well my plan to take all evening classes is going to go, but we'll see.

Re: Get your blog linked!

Phil Crissman — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 18:16:46 -0000

Thanks for the link Andy. I'll add a link to you; I look forward to reading the blog.

Re: Iran threatens to raise oil prices

Phil Crissman — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 04:56:55 -0000

The whole environmental question is a big one, and not one I'm prepared to casually wave away. On the other hand, most "environmentalists" carry a lot of socio-political baggage along with their point of view, much of which has nothing to do with the environment per se, so I would not put myself in (or anywhere near) that camp either.

It's only going to get more complex, it seems. Recent studies seem to show that at least some of the basic assumptions on which Kyoto was based may be incorrect... they'll be arguing about it for a long time to come. ;-)

In the meantime... I think it's awfully inconsistent for the loyal opposition to rail against the government for dependence on mid-east oil, but to agressively oppose the obtaining and refining of our own oil. Even if someone perfected Cold Fusion yesterday, it would take a long time to move away from internal combustion. Drill in ANWR, already. It's a good idea.

Re: Working too hard could kill

Phil Crissman — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 17:05:24 -0000

Yes, reinstalling is definitely the easy way out. Unfortunately, it will frequently not solve the problem. Doing things right is definitely the harder way, but will almost always add more value in the long run.

Thanks for dropping by! I appreciate the comments.

Re: Ma.gnolia, and The Buzz™.

Phil Crissman — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 01:47:49 -0000

I have seen the name (at Paul Stamatiou's site, I think), but I confess I haven't checked it out yet; I'll certainly take a look at it!

Thanks for stopping by!

Re: WoW Customer Service

Phil Crissman — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 09:14:56 -0000

Heh, thanks ubertech.

I probably spend only a few hours a week on WoW, and it's pretty much the only game I play on the PC. Most of my gaming, when I have time, is now on an XBox, so it's certainly conceivable that I could pick up either of the games you mention, sometime.

It is a small world; I have a friend who used to work at EA in Vancouver, BC, but that was a long time ago -- I don't know where he is now.

Later!

Re: Jugga Jigga Wugga

Phil Crissman — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:36:00 -0000

Death Metal is all about the jigga juggas, I've always thought.

Re: How to Do What You Love

Phil Crissman — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:59:32 -0000

It's been awhile since I used blogger... You should find plenty of information if you just go to blogger's main page, and look for "how-to"s or faqs; most likely, you'll just need to add a link to your template.

Re: The Knight

Phil Crissman — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 08:54:48 -0000

I've still not ever made it through Donaldson's books. I think I was turned off by how completely unlikeable Covenant was at the beginning; I have friends who attempted to persuade me to continue reading, but somehow I was sidetracked and never got back into the books.

I started reading Jordan near the beginning, too. I followed up to about book five, and then didn't read any for years. A couple years ago, I decided to get caught up, and started reading from the beginning again. The only problem was, about in the middle of the third book, I realized, I could not care less what happens to these characters. So, I haven't picked it up since.

I really like Orson Scott Card's non-fiction writing (mostly political commentary), but I've yet to read his fiction. I guess I'll have to amend that soon...

Tolkien is great, I just skipped over him because everyone has probably become familiar with him. Check out Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories for something... completely different.

Re: Another Online Sudoku Puzzle site

Phil Crissman — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:56:51 -0000

Features on a Sudoku site aren't really important to me; I would rather print the puzzles out and do them on paper.

I'm always interested to see a new source of puzzles, though.

Re: A Coder’s Guide To Coffee

Phil Crissman — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:53:49 -0000

Drink less coffee?

This is a radical idea. I'll have to ponder it. ;-)

Unfortunately, in my workplace, most people are not fond of strong coffee, and for good reason... the prepackaged coffee we get here is not really that good normally, let alone if you make it too strong.

A great tip; thanks!

Re: Jedi Reddit

Phil Crissman — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:56:33 -0000

Ah, James Earl Jones. That would make this a reference to the original Star Wars trilogy, the one with an interesting plot and characters. Great!

Congratulations on the hiring of your new Jedi!

Re: Emacs and MIT-Scheme

Phil Crissman — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 11:11:42 -0000

That's a good point; my only problem was, I couldn't find very much documentation about where emacs would be looking for the executables. The actual solution makes perfect sense, of course -- just put them anywhere in the $PATH -- but I guess that was too simple. ;-)

Cool tip about scheme48; I have that installed on my machine as well. I might try it, since mit-scheme was crashing due to segfaults of some kind (but that might have something to do with my installing the testing version instead of the the stable version... hmm)

Re: seenonslashdot

Phil Crissman — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 11:48:59 -0000

Sounds interesting. I'll try to add some comments; there have been a lot of times I've seen something interesting in a /. comment, not bookmarked, and then... well, unless you're really interested in searching, it's lost...

I'll definitely check back again to see how things are going.

Re: Simple Recursion

Phil Crissman — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:51:59 -0000

Good point; I was thinking something similar as soon as I finished writing.

There are some cases where recursion is necessary (factorials come to mind), but I suppose that if there is a way to do it without recursion, it will almost always be quicker (especially for large numbers, like you pointed out).

Re: Get your blog linked!

Phil Crissman — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:51:27 -0000

Thanks for stopping by Hazim!

This post is over a year old, and I'm no longer putting links on the front page for everyone who stops by. However, Google will index the link in the comment just as well. ;-)

Malaysia was my favorite pavilion when I went to the world's fair in Vancouver in 1986; I don't know why I still remember that. But anyway, take care.

Re: leve1, dot-Communities, and related thoughts

Phil Crissman — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:52:34 -0000

There's always room for one more. ;-)

Keep it up, leve1 looks great.

Re: A Brief tutorial on the Lambda Calculus, functional programming, and LISP

Phil Crissman — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 11:31:01 -0000

Cool link; I like it.

Or are you referring to the JavaScript error I'm having right now? ;-) It only seems to come up in IE, I'm looking for it now...

Edit: Can't find my ie JavaScript error; I didn't actually change any JavaScript, so now I'm wondering if this error has always been present. Hm.

Re: A Brief tutorial on the Lambda Calculus, functional programming, and LISP

Phil Crissman — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:37:32 -0000

That's more or less what I figured. It just happened that I saw the link at the same time I was troubleshooting a Javascript error on the page. Weird.

A lot of smart programmers seem quite fanatical about Lisp and functional programming, so it's interesting to get into the language (the Scheme dialect, at least) and learn a bit more about it.

Re: ‘Stanford On ITunes’

Phil Crissman — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:11:29 -0000

!

Great tip; I was totally unaware of that program. Thanks!

Re: Using nano and mit-scheme

Phil Crissman — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:39:00 -0000

I do like that idea, being able to see the code and run it at once; I could accomplish that by opening two xterm windows, but doing both in emacs does seem a little more elegant.

Re: “Why We Stood”

Phil Crissman — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 01:50:27 -0000

You are quite correct; I was too lazy to look that information up. Thanks for the legal lesson.

I tend to leave the legal wranglings to those for whom that is their area of expertise. For instance, I found Hugh Hewitt's interview with Univeristy of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein (self-described as a liberal) very interesting.

Professor Sunstein goes into more detail about the various questions that could be raised on the U. of Chicago Law School blog.

In my extremely inexpert opinion it seems that you are reaching quite far in calling Gonzales' argument fallacious as "a plain fact."

But I'm just a CompSci student, and I don't figure you'll even bother to check this reply, let alone be swayed by Professor Sunstein. (Or Hugh Hewitt himself, for that matter... but I suppose you'd just throw away any of his arguments as being too "partisan.")

What I should have stated in the original post was that regardless of the case, I see the students standing and turning their backs on Gonzales as, well, rude -- not only rude, but intentionally so. I don't see it as an act of "protest" or as a political statement, just as an immature prank.

There are only so many hours in a day, and I have no intention of embarrassing myself by pretending to learn law, when there are many more qualified people commenting on the legal specifics.

Re: “Quotations,” quotations

Phil Crissman — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 14:06:21 -0000

My favorite quotations site is WIST (for "Wish I'd Said That"). He has over 4,000 quotations, it's well organized, and I really like almost all of what he's chosen.

Not sure if I can help much more than that. Thanks for stopping by!

Re: Google at work on desktop Linux

Phil Crissman — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:18:15 -0000

Good points, all. Quite true. It was more wishful thinking on my part; you know, big company linux == linux everywhere, or something.

Re: Top Ten Secrets to Making More Money

Phil Crissman — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:01:26 -0000

I have seen reference to that, but I've never used it, either.

The closest comparison I can think of is the one I made to inline methods in Java, though a functional programming guru would probably want to skin me alive for making that comparison. ;-)

ESR said something about part of the value of learning Lisp being the "light" that goes on when you "get it." I'm not sure that I completely "get it" yet, but I'm beginning to see what he might have meant. Scheme/Lisp is interesting in a different way than the "normal" languages I'm familiar with, and so far seems well worth the effort to get into.

Re: Microsoft is doing what, now?

Phil Crissman — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 22:34:00 -0000

Yeah, I'm not one to suggest that Macs will "take over the world" -- but there are a lot of people who have been either switching or talking about switching, many of whom would not have even considered it only a year or two ago.

Yep... they (Google) did take a big hit. That probably means it's a good time to buy, since I would think it's going to go back up....

Re: Yes, we said Frontpage

Phil Crissman — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 08:02:31 -0000

It's the </p> tag... Both of them in that block are "closing" XHTML tags. The first one, in line 28, should be <p>

I almost didn't see it, too. I guess the same thing happened to the MS proofreader... except in their case, it winds up making their ad rather amusing. ;-)

Re: How NOT To Do A Videogame Commercial

Phil Crissman — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 08:04:13 -0000

It is pretty bad, eh?

To be honest, it almost makes me want to find an old NES and a copy of Zelda. I must be in the target demographic...

Re: Yes, we said Frontpage

Phil Crissman — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 09:53:23 -0000

It's an animated gif (stupid things...) but it should become fairly static after a few seconds. Hm. Oh well, that stinks.

It shouldn't be adblocked, because it's just a gif, and the image displayed is actually hosted here... At any rate, it amounts to a silly code error in an MS ad which is inadvertently ironic (given that it's an ad for "cleaner code" in FrontPage), not worth worrying about, I suppose.

Re: When is a procedure not a procedure?

Phil Crissman — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:07:45 -0000

That's interesting; so basically, you're just inserting a function definition with no name? I take it that it's implicit that the nameless function only takes one argument. At any rate, it's cool to see how essentially the same thing would work in Perl.

Re: Microsoft is doing what, now?

Phil Crissman — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:12:47 -0000

The newsbit I saw about Visual Studio, you mean? I honestly don't remember. ;-) It might have been a new feature, or a new beta version of something, I don't recall.

I mostly remember the thought occuring to me that if it were any other new shiny beta etc software, I would probably be interested, but since it was Microsoft, I wasn't... then I asked myself, Is this just because I don't "like" Microsoft? The post followed from there...

Re: Channel4.com - IT Crowd

Phil Crissman — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 11:52:34 -0000

I think I've seen some torrent links (I forgot to check last night, d'oh), but if you know any other download sources, by all means, shoot me an email. Thanks!

Re: Krugle: a search engine for source code

Phil Crissman — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 21:22:33 -0000

I did not, in fact, know that. Of course, I had never actually looked for a source code search engine before.

I appreciate the tip, though. It looks interesting.

Re: The Ma.gnolia Beta

Phil Crissman — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 14:32:42 -0000

Not a bad idea. Let me know when you launch!

Many or most of the new "web 2.0" sites are indeed pretty lame. It has seemed to me, so far, that the ideas implementing the simplest concepts (save-your-bookmarks, read-your-news-headlines, save-your-photos) have been the best.

Maybe it's just an extension of the "do one thing, and do it well" paradigm of UNIX programming.

Re: Languages for the Web

Phil Crissman — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 09:02:49 -0000

Good points to consider. I think I'm going to continue experimenting a little with both, just to see how it goes. If the differences are interesting enough, I suppose that could warrant a post or two... ;-)

Re: MS Antispyware flags Symantec AV as spyware

Phil Crissman — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 11:48:12 -0000

Well... I'm pretty sure it was an accident. ;-)

...but the fact that "accidents" like this could happen somehow doesn't make me feel any better about it.

Re: del.icio.us versus Ma.gnolia

Phil Crissman — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 09:56:59 -0000

Thanks for the thoughtful replies; I'm glad you could see that my leaning toward del.icio.us at the end was not meant to put down ma.gnolia, they're both great products.

@David: I must have missed the "snap bookmarklet"; I'll have to look for that. That sounds like a great idea; even not adding tags. I do think guessing some tags, even if it's just an "I feel lucky" sort of thing, would be nice.

@Todd: my "waiting for Google to buy them" line was mostly in jest. It would have made more sense to say "Yahoo" (since they've been doing all the buying recently) but they already have del.icio.us....

I'm glad a few folks enjoyed the feature-comparison list; it's by no means exhaustive or scientific, and some of it's just silly, but it was fun to write. ;-)

Re: Tweaking the CSS

Phil Crissman — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 10:07:10 -0000

Cool; go for it! I look forward to seeing it; it's a nice color combo. I've seen a few other cool sites with a similar general color-scheme recently (Godbit comes to mind, though it's much nicer than mine), I think it must be just a cool combo, or something. I believe the guy on Godbit.com mentioned being inspired by old command-line interfaces with the green text on a black screen.

Like I said, I still want to tweak it a bit... there are some elements that aren't as readable as I'd like. Also, I'd like to leave links close to the "standard" colors (blue for links, purple for visited links) but I'll need to tweak the exact colors so the contrast is decent.

Re: brrreeeport

Phil Crissman — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:54:47 -0000

Frabjous would have been a much cooler word to use. What the heck is "brrreeeport" anyways?

Re: Acquired by Oracle

Phil Crissman — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 14:19:20 -0000

That's pretty cool. Congrats to your friend, sounds like a great deal!

So far they sound like a great company; I'll miss working at the church here, but it will also be a cool opportunity to move up. There are a lot of things I'll be able to learn at Oracle that I wouldn't be able to in a smaller environment.

So, yep. Looking forward to it.

Re: Languages for the Web

Phil Crissman — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:39:31 -0000

Thanks for your thoughts; I'd really like to know more about both languages, so I imagine I'd benefit no matter which I choose.

Unfortunately, given all the different irons I have in the fire, doing web development with either language is going to be a back-burner item for a while.

Ultimately, the best thing for me to do would probably be to

a) stop continually reinstalling Linux and just pick a distro, and

b) pick a language and start coding.

;-)

Re: I think I’m going to test Fedora. Again.

Phil Crissman — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 11:50:47 -0000

You know, I did try it once about a year ago. I should give the newest version a shot, it was pretty interesting.

Somehow, though, I don't know if I will stick with an RPM based system. I really need to find a good system and then just not change it for a long, long time.

Maybe plain debian might be a good choice....

Re: In Search of the Perfect Linux

Phil Crissman — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 07:45:20 -0000

I'd really like to settle on one distro - Debian is one I'm considering strongly, as well. We'll see.

But yes, I'm growing tired of rebuilding my computer... it's time to just pick a distro. ;-)

Re: del.icio.us versus Ma.gnolia

Phil Crissman — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:48:48 -0000

Nice. Way to go!

Re: The IT Crowd - Yesterday’s Jam

Phil Crissman — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 01:04:35 -0000

Glad to hear it. They're great.

Good to hear from you all the way in China; I've been checking in on your blog once in awhile, it sounds like it's going great. Be blessed!

Re: Actually Useful web software

Phil Crissman — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:29:53 -0000

Hmm. Sounds nifty. I'll take a look!

Re: The IT Crowd?

Phil Crissman — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 19:31:02 -0000

Exactly; hopefully it will pick back up. I'd like to see that; the characters are pretty cool, and the first 3 episodes were pretty funny. Oh well.

Now, a really geeky comedy would be awesome, but I suppose the powers that be think that the target market would be too small... I like to think it would still be successful, but who knows?

Re: Effectiveness

Phil Crissman — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 23:00:41 -0000

I don't mind at all; I don't know if it's all that great, but thanks!

Re: External Hard Drives: Just make your own

Phil Crissman — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 18:13:37 -0000

Ah, I did not have the foresight to take pics as I went; I can probably make a pic of the finished product, though. Good idea.

Re: Good Night and Good Riddance

Phil Crissman — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:26:37 -0000

My viewpoint is to some extent an outsider's as well, being from Canada.

I don't think that I know enough about the actual events to either concur or differ with your impression -- that is definitely how it is most often portrayed. While it would be a bit of a cop-out for me to accuse contemporary historians of a liberal bias, it's not impossible, either.

The main thing that's interesting is that we (our general societal viewpoint) attack McCarthy the person -- he was a drunk, he was a grand-stander, he was too theatrical, etc, etc -- rather than his actual ideas. That practice smells of misdirection, of a sort.

Another thing to consider; what if someone, today, were to submit that there were Al Qaeda sympathizers/collaborators in government? If this were considered credible, would this breed a "witch-hunt" atmosphere? Yes, possibly. Would it be justified? Again, if the charges were true -- possibly it would be. I'm not intending that to be a complete defense of McCarthy, just something to think about.

I'm not an authority on the McCarthy era by any means; really what annoys me is what would seem to be deliberate revisionism for the purpose of making a political point -- which is what I see in the aforementioned movie.

That's quite enough out of me, though. ;-)

Re: Pens and lefthandedness

Phil Crissman — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 01:10:40 -0000

Hey, now that's what I like to hear. Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.

Re: The Gentoo Installer

Phil Crissman — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 08:49:06 -0000

The "non-GUI" installation works a lot better in my experience. However, I've also started using something else -- Suse 10.0, in my case.

Suse is pretty slick, I have to say, although you do need to hunt down all the codecs to play music or videos, since most of them are not included due to patent/copyright issues....

Re: Frequency of posting and traffic

Phil Crissman — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:20:34 -0000

I'm generally using Google analytics to track activity, and I don't believe that it counts RSS hits, no.

I think you're probably right -- many people probably are visiting only after a post -- so increased hits due to more frequent posting probably does not actually mean more readers -- just more visits.

Good point. I think I'll try my experiment anyways (assuming I can find the time to do all this hypothetical extra posting!) just to see the stats... ;-)

Re: 10 steps to a better IT support process

Phil Crissman — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 21:50:03 -0000

The Great Firewall of China, eh? Blogspot is blocked?

Wow.

Re: The mystery of a cancelled Firefly

Phil Crissman — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 11:47:38 -0000

D'oh. I'm a retard. 8-\

Changing...

Re: The mystery of a cancelled Firefly

Phil Crissman — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 09:46:57 -0000

Great list; I also have heard no rumors (yet) of a continuation of the TV show, but it would be great.

Mostly I'm mystified by how CSI:Miami is still on the air but Firefly is not (I honestly have no clue if they syndicate CSI in the UK, but if they don't, I assure you you are missing nothing). ;-)

Re: 5 things techs do that normal users don’t

Phil Crissman — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:00:32 -0000

That's right. You almost have to break things. Of course, you do want to minimize the breakage... ;-)

I sort of chuckle now when I remember the first time I decided to reinstall Windows at home... this was long before I had got into Linux, and was probably the first hardcore piece of PC maintenance I had done, other than install the occasional bit of software. I paused for what seemed like an eternity at that last screen, the one that says something like "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO OVERWRITE YOUR HARD DRIVE AND DESTROY EVERYTHING THAT IS CURRENTLY ON IT?" (When I read it, it seemed like it was yelling at me).

If I remember correct, I chickened out the first time I got to that point. Then I figured, "What the heck?" and went ahead and reinstalled Windows a few days later. Once that was done it was like, "Gee. That was easy."

Of course, I did forget to back up any of my data... ;-) Like you say, you almost have to break stuff in order to learn.

Re: Ghost for Linux?

Phil Crissman — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 07:35:52 -0000

Excellent; I'll look for those!

Re: 10 reasons Windows on Mac is good for Linux.

Phil Crissman — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 21:47:13 -0000

Good points, both.

I was also disappointed in the registration part... try the link from this
Newsforge article, it seems to give access to the whole article.

Re: Matisyahu - Youth

Phil Crissman — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 12:11:10 -0000

Yes, it is a surprisingly good fit... Hasidism and reggae, I mean. Possibly because reggae already has roots and ties to faith, although Rastafarianism is pretty far removed from either Judaism or Christianity... still, it works very well.

I was listening to "Live at Stubbs" on the way in to work, it's excellent as well.

Re: On The Perils of Java Schools

Phil Crissman — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 15:07:14 -0000

You did. It's lunch time! ;-)

Re: Behold Thy Graphics!! Presenting Thy Dungeonman 3

Phil Crissman — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 20:55:58 -0000

Stuck? Have you talked to the hag? It's a little challenging, but not so much so.

Re: Good, free, FTP backup clients?

Phil Crissman — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 16:46:08 -0000

It sounds interesting, and I'll take a look. However, the price requirement (free) is out of my hands -- my job is to look for a free client ;-). Best wishes with your software efforts! Entrepreneurs make the world go round.

Thanks for stopping by!

Re: “The Linux Threat”

Phil Crissman — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:33:19 -0000

I'm with you. I think this is a joke. A pretty clever one, but come on: "developed in Finland as a means of circumventing valuable copyrights and patents owned by an American company called SCO Group"? That's pure farce, and quite well done, I think.

I guess I'm a little annoyed that they're making fun of Republicans by implying they think this way... ;-) but I'll get over it.

Re: Good, free, FTP backup clients?

Phil Crissman — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 09:26:28 -0000

Hmm. That is an interesting suggestion. I will look into it; my only reservation is that I would like the user to have some easy method of selecting which files should be backed-up -- a gui of some kind would be nice.

I read your recent posts about UIs, and while I think I agree, I'm not sure I can sell a solution with no GUI to the powers that be.

I fully intend to look at it, though, it sounds like a good possibility.

Re: Behold Thy Graphics!! Presenting Thy Dungeonman 3

Phil Crissman — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 13:05:31 -0000

No, probably the real truth is that I spent far to much time on games just like this, when they were "cutting edge". Oh yes. I am that old. ;-)

Re: Typepad down?

Phil Crissman — Tue, 02 May 2006 20:23:59 -0000

It looks like you are back up... I just visited your site (nice site; I'll certainly visit it again).

Guess it was a short outage. ;-)

Thanks for stopping by!

Re: Typepad down?

Phil Crissman — Tue, 02 May 2006 20:52:18 -0000

That's the nature of using machines, unfortunately. They have problems... Glad to see it's back up. Mostly, at least; there are a few pages I still can't reach.

Re: Typepad down?

Phil Crissman — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:30:23 -0000

Yes; my hosting has been pretty reliable as well. There has been a little downtime (not much, I don't think), but I am getting a great deal, and the guy running the server is a friend of mine... it's always been fixed asap. Can't ask for much more than that. :-)

Re: Good, free, FTP backup clients?

Phil Crissman — Wed, 03 May 2006 12:16:18 -0000

You did submit it; it was held in moderation because there was more than one link, and I didn't notice it until today. Whups!

Yes, I've seen that one. Like you said, I would need the paid version, which won't work in this situation; I would need about 1200 licenses, and it's not for a non-profit. ;)

Thanks for the link though, I appreciate it.

Re: Looking out for Customer Number One

Phil Crissman — Thu, 04 May 2006 16:20:43 -0000

Urgh -- not exactly what I had in mind, though I understand the parallel. ;-)

I think some of Ayn Rand's thoughts on Capitalism and economics are quite good -- her thoughts on metaphysics, not so much. I used to be quite taken with Ayn's books, and I've probably read almost all of them (albeit a long, long time ago). In many areas, I think she takes her version of rationalism a bit too far (particularly in the flat denial of anything remotely spiritual or supernatural).

The post was intended to more of a realist comment than an egoist one... but I think you made a perceptive comparison. I'll have to think about that.

Re: Putting out fires

Phil Crissman — Fri, 12 May 2006 17:10:10 -0000

Hey, Andy; thanks for stopping by.

I don't think the Peruvian can be replaced by a few miniature firemen... but you should check with him on that. :-)

I'd be happy to stop by and comment; I'll take a look later tonight.

Re: The Customer is Always Right, where “right” is predefined by the support department

Phil Crissman — Sun, 14 May 2006 14:19:06 -0000

That's a great point; every time I've worked in a customer service environment, I've seen the same thing. When a call/issue gets escalated to a manager, invariably the manager will give the customer what they are asking for.

Like you say, it just makes sense to empower the front-line associate to do what needs to be done.

Thanks for the comment!

Re: Object Oriented Tech Support

Phil Crissman — Mon, 15 May 2006 13:56:00 -0000

Sure it made sense; thanks!

Of course, one of the main reasons that OO concepts can apply to many "real world" processes is that OO was specifically designed to model "real world" systems in software development. As a comp-sci major and a full-time tech support jockey, I have a foot in both worlds, and I guess I just thought it would be interesting to try to apply OO concepts to what I do every day. Glad you enjoyed it.

Later!

Re: Letter from Iranian president to George Bush: the Lileks translation

Phil Crissman — Mon, 15 May 2006 16:25:43 -0000

James Lileks is a writer/blogger/humorist; a conservative one, at that. He has a column in the MPLS Star Tribune. He's a funny guy.

I found this particular link from Hugh Hewitt, though; Hewitt is a Lileks fan.

Re: Working on the Linux marketing module

Phil Crissman — Wed, 17 May 2006 09:22:46 -0000

Great points, all, and especially that last point.

Playing media of types out of the box is a must for a Consumer-targeted OS.

Now the question is: how much of this is a problem caused by needing to pay license fees for proprietary codecs... and how much is self-created by the GPL for not allowing the inclusion of code which is "not Free enough"? I may be off-base, but that's something I've been wondering ever since Kororaa got slapped for violating the GPL by including a script to install the nvidia kernel module automatically.

Re: What if managers had to do tech support?

Phil Crissman — Fri, 19 May 2006 12:40:59 -0000

ClarkConnect sounds interesting. I don't know that I'm a Linux Guru -- but I guess I know my way around. I imagine you won't need to use the command line much, on that machine, so you should be okay! If you really want to learn Linux, I would just suggest picking an old, unused PC and installing a few different versions of Linux on it. It's not that hard... ;-) Have fun.

If you don't have a "spare" PC, another way to learn is cygwin -- it emulates a Linux command shell on a Windows computer, and provides a lot of Linux programs and utilities that you can run and use on a Windows machine. It's a good way to start learning the linux command line...again, if that's something you want to do. It can come in handy, though.

Thanks for stopping by!

Re: Snap

Phil Crissman — Mon, 22 May 2006 11:27:41 -0000

That's odd. I'm using it in Firefox (on... Windows *ducks* -- well, I'm at work!) and it's working all right.

Do you have any extensions that turn off Javascript, maybe? I'm stumped...

Re: Ubuntu Linux 6.06

Phil Crissman — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 07:29:47 -0000

Is it... jangly?

Re: Slashdot’s new design online

Phil Crissman — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:09:58 -0000

I must be getting lazy in my old age :) -- I find myself bumping up the size on most webpages (CTRL- ) before settling back to read them.

From a design standpoint I still prefer smaller fonts (e.g., this site) -- but for reading, I find I like to be able to lean back about two and a half feet from the screen and still be able to read comfortably, especially if I'm reading longer articles.

Color contrast is important, as well; I didn't notice that myself, I'll have to check for it.

Re: GNU nano

Phil Crissman — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 06:57:22 -0000

@mrben: I hear you; once you learn it, you can just get things done. I've just never learned more than the very basics of vi(m), myself. I can see that it would be useful, but there's always been something else I wanted to spend more time on... and nano is so perfectly simple that I've rarely needed much more in an editor.

@fermi: Hola! Thanks for dropping by.

Re: Google Browser Sync

Phil Crissman — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 09:27:07 -0000

Good tip, thanks! That's foxmarks, for the lazy.

edit: Thanks to mrben for the input, as well -- the comment was in moderation due to the link, and I wasn't checking the moderation queue often enough, it seems. ;)

Re: GNU nano

Phil Crissman — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:55:54 -0000

*sigh* Yes, I have this nagging feeling that you are right... :(

Someday soon I may just do that... but then I would need to make a choice between Vim or emacs... decisions, decisions.

Re: Malkin on Westboro Baptist

Phil Crissman — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 07:25:07 -0000

I had forgotten about ShipofFools... Yeah, I am able to laugh at some of the things on both those sites, I don't take myself that seriously. ;)

Re: A focus as razor sharp as a baseball bat…

Phil Crissman — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 10:09:22 -0000

Exactly; I think blogging with intent to be famous (or whatever passes as famous in the blogosphere -- my wife has no idea who Robert Scoble is, for example) would become work, rather than fun, and would require far too much concern over what "the People" want, etc, and well... to reiterate, it just wouldn't be enjoyable.

It is probably possible to blog about whatever you want and still find a large audience, but in that case I think the key is to really be yourself -- which is really what we're talking about anyways, by not arbitrarily censoring one's self from religious topics.

Hey... if you're writing for free, it sure as heck better be enjoyable. ;)

Re: Gliffy: Visio killer?

Phil Crissman — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 20:42:28 -0000

Thanks for the recommendations; both of those pieces of software look interesting.

They seem to serve a little different goal than gliffy, which also has the advantage (possibly drawback, depending on your point of view) of being web-based; but they both seem pretty cool.

Re: Back from Canada

Phil Crissman — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 10:48:15 -0000

Thanks!

All is indeed well. It is not only well, it is awesome. I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to visit Vancouver without wanting to move there. :)

We'll see...

Re: Word In Action

Phil Crissman — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 09:50:34 -0000

I think they are not using a CMS... I took a quick look at the page source and there are no obvious signs of one (though I could be wrong). There are comparitively few pages, so it might have all been coded by hand (and with Flash, of course).

I didn't mention the Flash aspect of it; I am still a little ambivalent about use of Flash. On the one hand I agree that it is ubiquitous and designers can generally assume that they can use it willy nilly wherever they like... On the other hand, building the whole UI with it is a little damaging if any one or two users does not have it...

Aside from that open question, I think it's a great site.

Re: The Difference Between Riding the Bus in Minneapolis and Vancouver

Phil Crissman — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 16:03:26 -0000

I would concur, on both counts. Who ever heard of "duck, duck, grey-duck?" Except Minnesotans, of course. Who are great people, as you said.

:)

Re: Counting Infinities

Phil Crissman — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 08:18:09 -0000

I would say that Cantor demonstrated that our inuitive notion of infinity is wrong, and that this is hardly trivial, at least from the point of view of mathematicians. But that's just me.

Re: Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Phil Crissman — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:43:47 -0000

What? Oh my goodness.

Thanks for the tip, mhdfyeuas! Don't know where I'd be without the helpful help of the interweb helpers.

What? It's not called the "interweb," you say....?

Re: First Impressions of Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10

Phil Crissman — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:37:47 -0000

Yes; I'm quite impressed. I want to keep it on my system, but I'm a little hesitant. I'm prone to changing Linux distros a couple times a year, and part of me is reluctant to pay the $50 bucks when I'm not sure I'm going to keep it. I'm partial to just hanging onto it, though, so we'll see.

I saw that you work on NetWare -- is that using a Linux kernel now, or is NetWare still NetWare? I thought I remembered a rumor, way back when Novell first announced it was embracing Linux, that a Linux kernel would be an option for NetWare... I suppose that just answered my own question. :-)

Re: A Scanner Darkly

Phil Crissman — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 14:16:49 -0000

Well, I wound up seeing it Saturday night (sorry John ;-) )... it's not really one I would recommend, after all. Look for a review soon.

Re: 50 NFB Films

Phil Crissman — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 17:52:00 -0000

Nice; glad you enjoyed it. Some of them are pretty funny... others look like thinly disguised Politically Correct fables, but hey... that's Canada, I guess. Anyways, they're pretty entertaining. :-)

Re: Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Phil Crissman — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:17:04 -0000

For starters, it's amazing that you would find a Pacific Northwest Tree octopus in the Amazon basin, which must be over 5,000 miles away from its natural habitat... the Pacific Northwest. I guess nature is always surprising us!

I can't really answer your question, but I think you might want to investigate the home page linked above a little more carefully; maybe you can buy a bumper sticker or car magnet, which seem to be commonly used to save whales, the unborn, motorcycles, and our troops.

You might also enjoy the parent site, zapatopi.net, where there is much more information; for example, did you know that Belgium does not exist? I had no idea.

Thanks for your concern (though you sound a little sarcastic -- are you feeling okay?); tree-octopus huggers everywhere are, no doubt, grateful.

(Also, just between you and me, I think that snipes might not be real.)

Re: First Impressions of Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10

Phil Crissman — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:03:24 -0000

Cool info... thanks for looking into that... sounds pretty cool.

Sorry the comment took so long to post... I have WordPress set to flag any comment with a hyperlink in it, to avoid spam comments. Apparently I don't check the "Awaiting moderation" queue often enough. ;-)

Re: Good math, bad math

Phil Crissman — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:37:19 -0000

er, yeah. Well, there was that, too, unfortunately.

Re: The OQO

Phil Crissman — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 09:08:29 -0000

Very nice! Thanks.

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

Phil Crissman — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 15:16:46 -0000

Great; glad to hear that it worked so well, or at least, was clear enough to adapt to your system. Thanks for the feedback! :-)

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

Phil Crissman — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 09:33:28 -0000

Not sure, Loknar; what error are you getting?

Also, I would bet that there are Ubuntu-specific tips in some of the the Ubuntu forums -- do those help?

Keep at it, and keep having fun.

Re: Lenovo/Suse Laptop

Phil Crissman — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:33:54 -0000

:-(

Oh well.

Re: Lenovo/Suse Laptop

Phil Crissman — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 08:48:46 -0000

re: legal DVD players: That's great to hear!

I think I was going solely from a message on Novell's site; there is a point when attempting to install a DVD player on SLED 10 I was given a message which was something like "See [url] for more information" and the page in question basically said that Novell couldn't include a DVD player, or have one to be installed through Yast, because there was no legal player/codecs available.

It's possible that their message was either out-of-date, or was U.S.-centric. Thanks for the clarification.

Re: Scripture in Song

Phil Crissman — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 08:51:02 -0000

Sounds interesting; I'll look for it.

A midwestern band called Waterdeep had an album a few years back which was more or less scripture set to music; it was quite popular ("Enter the Worship Circle" was the title, I think) but it wasn't quite the same.

Re: “Open Source” vs. “Free”, and why people still don’t get it

Phil Crissman — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 19:07:45 -0000

Well, other than a couple ads. :) So, I see you're in America. Welcome back!

Re: Scripture in Song

Phil Crissman — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 23:03:57 -0000

Cool! You might try Amazon for songbooks, I think there are a few sellers who have a couple copies. Hope you find them!

Re: “Open Source” vs. “Free”, and why people still don’t get it

Phil Crissman — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:59:16 -0000

No doubt; that's the biggest problem. For those who actually do want to use the term(s) to indicate what they are supposed to be referring to, usage like that in the above quoted article just clouds the whole thing up.

Yay for journalism. :-)

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

Phil Crissman — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 22:41:44 -0000

Hi, DD; you shouldn't be looking in /opt/share/gnome/themes, but I'm going to guess that you meant to type /opt/share/gnome-screensaver/themes... ;-)

Probably the reason you see .desktop files is that they are supposed to be .desktop files. That's what the migrate script does; it transforms the xml files into desktop files. The key is: does it work when you open gnome-screensaver? Are the screensavers not listed?

Let me know; I'm not running SLED anymore, but if I can help I certainly will... happy hacking.

Re: Yet more on Gentoo 2006.1

Phil Crissman — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 15:04:56 -0000

Grrr....

I would argue, but your're probably right. :)

The problem is, I would really like it to be true. I'd like to have a base so stable that I could tweak to my heart's content and then simply "undo" anything that didn't work. For example, I'm hesitant to install Xgl on the new Gentoo system -- after all it might break. ;-)

The real problem is being a student, and also possibly needing to work from home occasionally. It would be prudent for me to have a system that is reliable.

All that being said, when I woke up this morning, I saw that xscreensaver had crashed the system (okay, I'm guessing by accusing xscreensaver of being the culprit; but the system was crashed, and a pretty stillshot of an openGL screensaver was all that remained....) . :( sigh

Re: Easier said than done, or the failed experiment so far

Phil Crissman — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:32:20 -0000

Thanks for the replies, very much.

I imagine I won't stop blogging for too long... I expect I'll at least post something intermittently, even if I do that a longer break.... Much like my perrennial Linux tweaking, I probably won't be able to help it. ;-)

Ubertech, What you mention about ministry being too personal to share really resonates... I'm not sure if I want that to be the case, but some times it seems like it is... Thanks for the kcm.org suggestion, I will check it out.

Re: Scripture in Song

Phil Crissman — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 11:22:28 -0000

Elvino; if you feel it's okay, please let me know if I could get a copy of some of those mp3s. If the albums are unavailable, I hardly think it could be viewed as stealing... :-)

Re: Is your Linux ready?

Phil Crissman — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:20:12 -0000

I think you have a good point, and I think I'd agree.

Not to keep pushing Suse (because I don't really favor any one distro over another, and I'm just as likely to abandon Suse for another distro in a few months... or days), but it sounds like this is something in their favor right now. Apparently, you can get SLED 10 or SLES 10 pre-installed on various pieces of hardware, and supported. Probable vendors include Lenovo, IBM, maybe Dell... Now, I have a feeling these are not necessarily options you'll find listed on their websites, but are available if a company engages the appropriate salesforce.

That's not perfect, but it's a start.

Re: Email Inbox management: The Offline Inbox

Phil Crissman — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:24:24 -0000

Heh... no problems. Glad you took it as a joke. ;-) Yep, Windows is a decent solution for many computer needs; nuff said. (EDIT: for those in the dark, this was the Window jab)

Interesting; I'll have to ask Buddy about that. There's just something about an empty inbox that makes the day seem less stressful...

Thanks for the compliment on the design. The blog uses WordPress, which depends on PHP and MySQL. It's hosted elsewhere -- I mess around with my systems too much to try to host it myself. I'd have, like, 40% downtime or something.

Thanks for dropping by; talk to you later.

Re: They’re Taking the hobbits to Isengard

Phil Crissman — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 17:58:20 -0000

Annoying? Yes it does... that's probably part of its charm. ;-)

Hey, it's good to hear from you! How are you? I took a look at your MySpace, your son is indeed a cutie.

Try to keep in touch, eh? Later!

Re: Configuring Graphics on Ubuntu, Part 1

Phil Crissman — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:38:59 -0000

@ John: Nice catch. That's worth a look-see.

@ mrben: Yes, the conflict between free and nonfree (or open and proprietary, or whatever the terms of the week are ;-) ) has probably been a larger barrier than anyone would like. Unless someone reverse-engineered some really excellent drivers (which may not even be totally legal in some cases...), we're basically waiting for either: (1) vendors (ie, nvidia & others) to open source their drivers, or (2) the GPL to become more accepting of closed source/nonfree binaries.

I don't think I'll be placing a large bet on any of those options just yet. Unfortunately, that probably means a really slick Linux desktop will always involve post-installation workarounds for the forseeable future...

Re: Scripture in Song

Phil Crissman — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:21:52 -0000

Nope -- I've not gotten ahold of anything yet, as far as mp3 files go.

You might have some luck finding songbooks on Amazon; I found Scripture in Song volumes 1 & 2, used, in good condition.

Thanks for the tip; I'm still trying to track the music down, somehow.

Re: Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby

Phil Crissman — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 08:12:25 -0000

Valid points; the only reason I can think of is the same reason my computer science professor advised us to study Python: "When a language appears, and programmers are very interested in that language, and many of them start using it -- and there is no corporate push behind it -- we should be interested in what it is about that language that is making them want to use it."

Of course, she was actually talking about Python, and she was speaking in terms of Computer Science, where you are interested in programming languages just because. ;-)

As far as utility, well, you could probably choose Python, Perl, or Ruby, and still manage to get everything done that you wanted to...

Re: Monday Morning Linux News Roundup

Phil Crissman — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 18:01:41 -0000

Truly, I was a little surprised. Supporting Ubuntu makes sense to people like you and me, but what would make sense to you and me isn't always what huge corporations actually do. A conservative prediction probably would have been that they would stick closer to distros which are viewed as "commercial" -- ie, Red Hat & Novell.

And while this is cool news, in all honesty, I expect IBM to push a little harder on Suse and or Red Hat over Ubuntu. That doesn't mean I prefer that, but it's what I would expect.

Re: Wordpress MU; for hosting (massively) multiple blogs

Phil Crissman — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 08:07:27 -0000

Sounds like that would be the perfect way to test it out. I look forward to reading about how that goes, if you decide to use it.

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

Phil Crissman — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:46:03 -0000

Good tip!

Yes, lack of settings is a problem in gnome-screensaver -- it's an omission that I don't really understand, but for whatever reason that's how it is for now. A "preview" feature like xscreensaver had would be nice, too; maybe that's coming in a future version. ;-)

Re: Working yourself out of a job

Phil Crissman — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:05:09 -0000

Right, well... that's true. There are certain things that will always be necessary.

In your environment, your best bet in this area is probably to make the FAQ/help pages as robust and complete as possible -- of course, that won't help if the individual's problem is that they can't get online.... ;-)

Re: What Not To Do in Tech Support

Phil Crissman — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 09:17:12 -0000

Oh yes, we love that. ;-) It gives us something to pretend to fix.

The best part of the clip is where Jamie Foxx repeats the user ID incorrectly and Fallon (Nick Burns) pretends not to notice because that's not where the script is supposed to go... nice save. And yes, I guess I'm a nerd to have noticed that...

Re: The Yet Smaller Shuffle

Phil Crissman — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 10:59:52 -0000

Yes... very nice designs. The vendor lock-in stinks, but it will be interesting to follow Jon Johansen's new venture (DVD Jon has broken the iTunes DRM and is basing a company around his workaround... IANAL, but some out there are (again) predicting imminent legal crucifixion...).

Also, I believe you can overwrite iPod firmware to do a variety of things... a co-worker of mine has his iPod hacked so it plays ogg files... ;-)

Re: Edgy Issues

Phil Crissman — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 07:48:28 -0000

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeell... I did the GUI updater; it was the first thing I saw, and I thought, hey, that looks easy.

The problems are all solved, now; I had to apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-2.6.17-10-386 in order for nvidia to work. Then I had to edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf-custom to start the Xgl server properly -- so part of my problem might have been having unsupported software (Xgl) there.

I tried a bunch of other things, but as near as I can tell, those are the ones that actually fixed it. :-)

Re: Vote!

Phil Crissman — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 12:42:54 -0000

I'm checking that out, mrben, but I have to tell you -- I think a lot of the hype around this sort of thing is primarily FUD; someone can accuse me of being partisan here, but I'm not going to try to argue that point -- the show does point out that there are people on both sides of the political aisle who are suspicious of the software. However, just saying that a particular piece of software is potientially hackable or exploitable is not news -- I've yet to hear of a large piece of software that has not had holes.

Perhaps we need to get Theo de Raadt to oversee the project? ;)

I have a hard time envisioning a system that would please everyone. The only thing that would possibly be foolproof might be an Open Source voting software (so that anyone could agree that the software itself was "fair"), and then some sort of process to ensure that this software was actually being used. Even then, you would get a lot of FUD by people who don't understand software saying that an OSS solution is not secure either...

Re: Passport to Nowheres

Phil Crissman — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:31:38 -0000

heh. nice.

I didn't really bother go into detail, but I remember being annoyed a few years back when there was something or other I wanted to do online which required a login with a MS passport... this was at a I time when I was far more anti-Microsoft than I am today, so I felt positively unclean as I signed up for the thing.

Evidently, the scars are with me still. ;-)

Re: Scripture in Song

Phil Crissman — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:30:23 -0000

Thanks for the comment, David! That's cool news, and I'm looking forward to the new recording... any chance of the old one's being re-released as well? ;)

Either way, that sounds great to me. I'll be checking your site for updates.

Re: So, What Do You Think?

Phil Crissman — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:24:28 -0000

Thanks for taking the time to comment, all (if you read but haven't commented read, please feel free to add something...). Thanks also for the support.

@Brian... yeah, it is pretty easy to get side-tracked with the idea of becoming a "successful" blog (whatever that means... lots of traffic and AdSense revenue, I suppose; not that there's anything wrong with that!).

Well, that's 3 votes for "Don't change." Suits me, since I suppose I've been just writing whatever seems natural anyways.

Thanks again for reading... :D

Re: “Christian” vs. “Christ-Follower”

Phil Crissman — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 10:35:34 -0000

The video I linked is one of the better ones; there are 4 altogether (at least, on YouTube). I like the first two a little more than the last two.

I think any Christian will agree with the main point of the videos -- that being, Christianity doesn't consist of your bumper stickers, what you wear to church, or even the music you listen to; it's about what you believe. If that's the main point, and I think it is, then I like it.

Unfortunately, there is a wee bit of "humbler-than-thou"-ness tossed into them somehow; I'm not sure if that's the right way to put it, but there's a few things about them I just don't dig.

And... "...clever gimmick on a beat-up Geo Metro"? Surely you meant a "shiny new BMW, Cadillac, or Mercedes"... O ye of little faith. ;-) (I am totally just kidding... Ha. Ahem.)

Re: “Christian” vs. “Christ-Follower”

Phil Crissman — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 10:47:40 -0000

I think that's a valid point -- I've thought about reposting our email comments to the blog, but I hadn't got around to asking you if you'd mind.

Like I've said a few times, I like the main message of the ads: that your Christianity is about what you believe and how that affects your life; not necessarily how you dress, what bumper stickers you have, or what you listen to on your iPod.

But I think your point is a valid one, and worth pointing out. For the intended audience, these are certainly intended to be more reminder of what's really important, and also to be conversation starters for discussions just like this one... in which case, they're doing a great job, IMHO.

Re: Grumbling about Gravatars

Phil Crissman — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 10:26:17 -0000

Well, as far as them operating properly, I don't think there have been problems... at least, not many. For which, again, many congratulations are due to those responsible for Gravatar.

However, there seems to be no way to change an avatar at the moment... ah well. It will be up soon enough.

Re: On Leaving A Church

Phil Crissman — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 07:30:57 -0000

That's a valid point; I had thought of that as well. If one is being deliberately contentious, that's clearly different. I do think the Berean pattern of checking whether the things preached "were so" remains a good one to follow.

You can disagree without being rebellious. In our case, we kept this to ourselves as long as possible, and even as we left, tried to do so amiably to the best of our ability.

The church we attended was and is still a good church... perhaps sometime later in the week I'll find some time to write about some of the specific issues that prompted the move.

On the other hand, I don't want to make it sound like this one issue was the sole reason we felt we needed to leave; it was a big reason, though.

Re: On Leaving A Church

Phil Crissman — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 12:43:16 -0000

Well... I don't know. I get what you're saying, and I don't claim to know everything, so that's possible.

...And I'm not trying to say there's something wrong with the church; it's a good place. But there's a few things that have come to the forefront that I really don't agree with. So it's either attempt to ignore these (tried that), or move on.

It might surprise you, but I don't actually believe that absolutely everything that happens on earth is because God willed it -- that would mean that it's God's will for people to be sick and suffer, for people to starve in the third world, and so forth and so on... and I don't think that's true. That's a whole other topic though, and a pretty big one, at that. Maybe some other time...

See you round Christmas!

Re: Blizzard closes my unused World of Warcraft account for being “exploitative”

Phil Crissman — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 23:06:25 -0000

It sure seems there's been a lot of this sort of thing going around; I can understand WoW wanting to eliminate account abuse, but if they're getting a lot of false positives, they are hopefully looking into that.

For myself, I've had no time to play anymore, so I haven't even bothered to try to reopen my account. ;-) For the foreseeable future, I'll just leave it closed.

Re: On Leaving A Church

Phil Crissman — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 22:31:51 -0000

Thanks, Shiz. Yes, that is one thing that I am happy about; I know we aren't bitter at all. I can say that with confidence because it's just the truth; there's no personality conflict, no offense, we aren't hurt -- it was simply a well-considered decision based on irreconcilable doctrinal differences. Which is a long winded way to say, we didn't agree, we felt it was an important issue, so we elected to leave. :-)

Thanks again; talk to you soon.

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

Phil Crissman — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 19:36:13 -0000

Good tip Maarten; thanks for commenting. :)

Re: Tweak ubuntu

Phil Crissman — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 08:49:06 -0000

Interesting. So far, I had only just perused it, and I was wondering about a few of the "tweaks" myself. I don't often make radical changes to settings like this, but it looked like it was worth a read... if it were accurate.

Thanks for pointing that out; I'll definitely dig deeper before actually trying any of these. ;)

Re: Scripture in Song

Phil Crissman — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:22:17 -0000

For Christmas my mom just sent me (among other things) some old cassettes -- she had both volumes of "Prepare Ye The Way". These were the ones I remembered listening to, so it was a cool gift.

I think it's great that so many people are still interested in their music, though it's still rather funny to me that this post has become the most commented upon post I've ever written. ;-)

Re: How To Pronounce “vi”

Phil Crissman — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:13:48 -0000

Stong words. ;-)

I don't think you'll ever need to make that choice, though: I have yet to see a Linux distro which did not have vi/m by default. (Excepting those such as Gentoo where you need to install everything from scratch; even on gentoo or vanilla debian, vim is only one line away (be it apt-get or emerge) from installation..)

But, yes, vim is, indeed, very cool. I have begun to see the light. I think it was a combination of seeing ":sh" and just scanning some more ed and ex commands that expanded my view of vim.

Re: On Liberal Arts Education

Phil Crissman — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 22:06:06 -0000

That's probably a true statement. My main problem is the assumptions behind statements like that. Conventional academic wisdom is that we "should" learn about these things, but we won't unless we are forced; therefore, let's make it a regimen.

I'm not saying there is no value in learning Shakespeare, history, philosophy, sociology. I'm suggesting that we ask the question why should we compel people to learn them? It's generally accepted that we will somehow be better, more well-rounded people if we do. Again, I'm not arguing that: I'm saying that again, we ask, "Why?"

What it comes down to is that Academia has decided that we will not be "educated" to their satisfaction unless I am exposed to a certain gauntlet of study. However, when you turn on your television or start your car, do you care if the engineer who designed those things has read MacBeth? When we watch the surgeon perform a delicate operation on our loved ones, does it matter to us whether or not that surgeon has studied the history of southeast Asia?

Again, I'm not saying there is no place for the Liberal Arts in education... I just think that we are force-fed too much of it, and we should be allowed to decide for ourselves whether to study some of these things or not.

I could be wrong, but that's what I'm thinking now, at least. :)

Re: Apple - iPhone

Phil Crissman — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:11:54 -0000

Andy & William: thanks for the comments. You both have good points; and sure, I may be (in part) "falling for the hype." ;-)

I guess my main thoughts/reasoning as I wrote it were:
<ul>
<li>I don't really expect everyone who currently uses Windows to embrace Vista. I could be wrong -- I usually am, when it comes to these sorts of predictions. I keep trying anyways.</li>
<li>Let's just say people did begin to embrace the iPhone -- I can imagine them eventually wanting the personal computer which complements it, ie, a Macintosh.</li>
</ul>
I should reply more... maybe later. ;-) Thanks again for contributing to the discussion.

Andy: didn't have much to say about the OS bloat post. I like eye candy. In fact, I'd suggest that my current Linux desktop out-blings Vista, or at least keeps up to speed nicely. Although, my Linux-centric thinking would lead me to say that the visual effects on the desktop have very little to do with OS design; that's just the GUI. ;-)

Re: Blizzard closes my unused World of Warcraft account for being “exploitative”

Phil Crissman — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 09:38:41 -0000

Well... thanks for the support. ;-)

Yeah, personally I just found I didn't have time for the game, so chances are that I will not renew my account.

At the same time, while it is possible that my account was compromised while I wasn't using it, my inclination is still that whatever method Blizzard is using to detect abuse/exploitation is turning up false positives. For me it's a moot point -- if someone were really wanting to continue playing it could become annoying.

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

Phil Crissman — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 09:28:39 -0000

Very good; yes, these sort of steps will vary from system to system, depending on where things are saved by default. Thanks for posting your steps in case someone needs them. :)

Re: Rails, and Groovy

Phil Crissman — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:41:07 -0000

Like I said... Groovy is now definitely on my list of technologies to investigate, but it's going to have to wait a bit... my evenings for the foreseeable future are going to be spent writing use-cases, drawing UML on napkins, writing Java programs and determining the computational complexity of the algorithms... oh yes, and giving myself a crash course in Ruby on Rails. :-)

Thanks to both of you for stopping by the site and commenting. Hopefully I'll get to check into Groovy before too long, and have something more to say about it.

Re: Rails, and Groovy

Phil Crissman — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 08:45:47 -0000

Wagh! Too many programming languages! Too many frameworks!

But yes... I'd love to have a chance to dip my toes into the existing Python frameworks as well. It will probably be awhile, though. :)

Re: 100 person flash mob randomly chasing people

Phil Crissman — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:39:22 -0000

I think the last one, where everybody ducks, looks like the most fun.

Show it to Fred, see if you can organize a SF outing... ;)

Re: Code Generation: The Real Lesson of Rails

Phil Crissman — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 12:17:57 -0000

Thanks, John. I'm looking forward to discovering more about Rails as I go.

I'm actually just using it (so far) for a project in a Software Design class I'm taking. The class is emphasizing agile, iterative design processes, so Rails seems particularly well-suited. I'm sure as I dig in, I'll find a whole lot of new stuff.

My only concern is how much of the application I may have working -- since the class is just one semester long, it is focusing on what would be the first three iterations in a typical Unified Process software project. In other words, it's expected that we'll only have about 20% of the application coded by the end of the semester.

If things keep going the way they are, I may have too much application coded at the end of the semester. ;)

Re: Kottke Komments

Phil Crissman — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:14:13 -0000

That's a great idea! That shouldn't really be too hard... hmm. :)

Thanks for stopping by.

Re: Oops… that’s not an IP address

Phil Crissman — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:07:24 -0000

@Gapp: good thought, but I don't buy it. They could have used a private network range, for example, anything between 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255, and would not have had to worry about it being someone's "real" IP address. I guess technically, it would be several hundred thousand "real" IP addresses, but none of them available from the internet, per se. In fact, using a private IP would have been almost the only way to make it realistic; a computer on either a corporate/gov't network, or even at home behind a router, would almost certainly have an address in the private IP range...

Hey, if we're going to be geeks, we might as well call it like it is... ;)

@mrben: Not sure; this is my first season watching 24 -- I don't catch a lot of TV and I've been kind of daunted at the prospect of catching up on 5 seasons of episodes. I caught the beginning of this season, though, and I have to admit I'm hooked. I guess I'll have to add the various 24 seasons to my netflix queue... :)

Re: Wash Your Hands!

Phil Crissman — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:03:46 -0000

Hmm. I hadn't thought much about the anti-bacterial soap/super-bacteria concern.

I think I'd still be happier to see people washing (rinsing?) their hands, even if they are eschewing the anti-bacterial soap; especially if said people are later going to be preparing food, or offering to shake hands with someone. I am an advocate of the washing of the hands after (ahem) the doing of the business. :)

Re: Why Windows Wins | Linux Magazine

Phil Crissman — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 08:40:21 -0000

I suppose you're right; for me, I'd say the scale was what made it seem worth commenting on. I don't necessarily think that earlier versions required quite as much of an upgrade on the hardware side. XP was capable of running on a PII with 128MB of RAM -- admittedly, performance would suffer, but if you had a PIII or equivalent and 256MB , you could probably have upgraded and be perfectly happy.

So, yes, it's certainly not a "new" tactic -- just a little bigger upgrade requirement.

Re: Blizzard closes my unused World of Warcraft account for being “exploitative”

Phil Crissman — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 18:39:53 -0000

Since I'm not currently playing, a law suit is not something I have any interest in, personally. Even if I were playing, Blizzard responded that they would reopen my account immediately if I wanted, so I don't think I'd have grounds for a suit to begin with.

Just between us, given the breadth, depth, and general legal vagueness of the average EULA, I doubt that charge against Blizzard would make it through court; I have a feeling they are within their rights to close accounts if they believe they are compromised -- even if their belief turns out to be erroneous. Good luck with that, though. :-)

Re: Blizzard closes my unused World of Warcraft account for being “exploitative”

Phil Crissman — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 13:37:22 -0000

@Nick: now that would stink. Hope you hear from them soon... good luck.

Re: Looking for a project

Phil Crissman — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:00:58 -0000

(For the confused, Andy is referring to a comment I made to his post here)

While part of me would like to say unequivocally that "Linux is the better OS", that's not actually what I'm saying, and the answer to "which OS is better" is going to be dependent on the answers to Who is going to use it? and What will they need to do with it?

For me, it's "better" because it does everything I need it to do, I'm used to it and therefore can get more done, quicker -- and not least of all, the "free" price tag doesn't hurt either. ;-)

My current favorite distro has become Ubuntu Linux; it's nice because it's ideal for beginners or advanced users.

Re: Nvidia Card Upgrade

Phil Crissman — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:34:43 -0000

There are a few ways to get the drivers; at the time I wrote this I was using Gentoo Linux, and the drivers were in testing in portage (Gentoo's software packaging system). I'm currently using Ubuntu Linux, and the drivers are also in the package management system; I just had to search for nvidia, and also needed to load a restricted-modules package for my architecture (restricted just in the sense that they are non-GPL).

Otherwise, you can always get the drivers from Nvidia's site; they offer a Linux version. It is actually not too difficult to install their version, and IIRC they provide a README that is fairly informative. Using this method (most methods, actually) you would also need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use the nvidia driver, once it is installed.

This can be a bit of a learning process the first few times you have to do it, but it can be done; nvidia cards a quite common, so if you keep searching you should find the solution you need. Have fun. :)

Re: Looking for a project

Phil Crissman — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:16:20 -0000

Sorry for what? ;-) No worries here; have fun, see you sometime later, I hope. Cheers.

Re: Blizzard closes my unused World of Warcraft account for being “exploitative”

Phil Crissman — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 09:44:56 -0000

I'd agree w/Andy -- I expect those who are still playing will be able to have their accounts reinstated without much trouble.

For my part, Blizzard was quite prompt and sent me the information to re-open my account right away after I questioned them; but since I wasn't playing anymore by that time, I didn't ever bother to do that. Hopefully everyone who is wanting to get back into the game doesn't have any trouble. :)

Re: Blizzard closes my unused World of Warcraft account for being “exploitative”

Phil Crissman — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:43:57 -0000

That sounds pretty bad -- if they keep that sort of thing up it's sure to hurt them, so hopefully they'll fix it. Hopefully?

Re: Some more tweaking

Phil Crissman — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 07:20:49 -0000

Yes, I do the same. ;-) Nothing wrong with that.

I do visit a fair number of sites anyways, though -- I don't know why but often if I see an interesting post in the rss feed, I'll go visit the site to read it... even though I could just read it in the feed reader. Old habits, I guess.

Re: On Intuitive User Interfaces

Phil Crissman — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 10:03:32 -0000

Right -- and of course, it depends on your audience. If your audience consists of people who are very familiar with vi, then using vi-like key binding would be intuitive. I'm reminded of the first time I tried playing Moria (Rogue/Hack/Net-hack descendant) -- it had an option for Rogue-like key binding, which were of course h, j, k, and l for moving left, down, up, right.... In other words, straight out of vi. I remember thinking how that didn't seem to make any sense at all -- but to a user of vi, it would have been quite natural.

In a similar way, for better or worse I've come to "expect" that CTRL-C, CTRL-X, and CTRL-V will copy, cut, and paste in GUI apps... if I try that in a new application, and it works, I'll "feel" as if that app is intuitive... even though there is nothing "intuitive" about CTRL-V being used to paste things.

I think you're right about there being a trade-off, too. Both vi and emacs allow you to be incredibly productive... if you've put in a significant amount of time to learn to use them. If you have an application that will only do one thing you can afford to have a big red button in the center of it labeled "Do the thing!" -- for anything more complex, you're not going to be able to have a clearly labeled button for every possible task (or combination of tasks).

"Intuitiveness" and how we perceive it is a fascinating topic, especially since almost everything in computing that we call "intuitive" really isn't -- we've just learned that it works that way. I think a lot of what we call "intuitive" is just "consistent with out previous experience" -- but then again, maybe that's what "intuitive" means, in a sense... hmm.

Re: Blizzard closes my unused World of Warcraft account for being “exploitative”

Phil Crissman — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:28:02 -0000

It sounds like this thread could grow indefinitely, so I'm going to close comments -- thanks to everyone who stopped to make a comment, and I hope everyone's account issues are resolved asap. Have fun...

Re: Free vs Free: Firefox and Iceweasel

Phil Crissman — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 09:11:04 -0000

Valid points; my research was limited. I suppose I thought the continued complications around keeping things "free" were more interesting... I did read the wikipedia Iceweasel page, so my understanding of the core issues was based on whatever I gleaned from that article.

Re: Hoodwink.d; the underground web

Phil Crissman — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:22:51 -0000

There's really nothing to "install"...

Part of what makes hoodwinkd interesting is that you have to be able to figure it out to get into it. ;-) However, there are (or were, at least) sites out there with instructions, you may want to keep Googling for it.

A couple tips:
- There is a file on windows & linux &c called "hosts". Maybe look for some information on that. You might see something that looks familiar to part of the hoodwinkd information booth.
- If you're behind a corporate firewall, it may just Not Work; don't bang your head against the wall, try it somewhere without a firewall.

Another note: Hoodwinkd is not necessarily a secret clan of underground hackers doing and discussing things of amazing intricacy and import. Then again maybe it is. There are relatively few members and there is relatively little traffic of discussion, so it really isn't as though you're missing a world of vibrant color and illumination. On the other hand, if you just think it's interesting (which I do, and is a good enough reason to want to check it out), keep looking for the way in. Have fun!

Re: Why The Command Line Still Rules

Phil Crissman — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:12:13 -0000

Sigh...

Yes. Once again, I must agree... my example highlight a bug in a GUI rather than a specific reason the command line actually, in fact, rules.

However, in my defense, I was writing this with the present state of desktop Linux in mind... in which case buggy GUIs, much as I hate to admit it, are still a fact of life. To really express that, I should have written the post differently -- I think what I was really thinking is that, in this case, had I not known to use the command line, I would have been stuck.

With pipes/redirection/scripting and other features, the command line has abilities that not only shouldn't be put into a GUI, but can't be... You're right though, my example did not demonstrate that.

Re: Who Is Making Poverty History?

Phil Crissman — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:20:08 -0000

@mrBen: I want to disagree with you... at least in the assertion that poverty in the third world was "caused" by the west. I'd like to know a little more about the loans in question before I go off blustering about like a know-it-all, though, so I'll see what I can find. I don't expect to become an expert on global economics overnight, though. ;-)

The other problem is that there is very real disagreement among schools of economic thought as to what the "cause" of poverty is; neither side is "stupid," they just disagree. Advocates of Keynes and Galbraith are going to disagree with advocates of Hayek, Milton Friedman, or Thomas Sowell; all those men are brilliant, they just happen to disagree on some very fundamental economic issues. I have a feeling that you and I, on the economic issue at least, are coming from similarly varying perspectives... it's possible that we just won't agree on this particular issue.

Also, you are quite correct; "The ONE campaign" is merely the US arm of the "Make Poverty History Campaign". I had a feeling that it could not possibly be focused on the US alone, but for the purposes of this post, I hadn't looked into that.

Echoing what Brian Glass said and linked back to, I have to say that I do agree that if all we do is debt relief, and no other changes are made in governments, I have my doubts how much real effect this would have on extreme poverty worldwide.

@Andrew: You're probably right. I'd be tempted to say that both are necessary, especially considering that there are probably many who would be willing to go overseas to serve for a short time, but who can't afford to. Even if workers from the west can pay their own way to get there, whatever organization(s) they work with will certainly need funding... That being said, it's a very good point.

Re: Who Is Making Poverty History?

Phil Crissman — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 14:55:46 -0000

I get what you're saying, and sure -- there's a lot of people in perpetual debt in the US, too. And Canada... and probably in any place where it's allowed.

I'm going to have to put it off till tomorrow, but I'll read the debt-relief articles, certainly. I can understand how getting out of debt is a necessary hurdle before certain things can "get better" -- for a person as well as a nation. I'm not completely convinced what the solution is, so I'll reserve further comment; in general, though, I would favor private giving over government giving. If a government chooses to forgive, delay, or eschew interest on some or all of a nation's debt, that may be fine also. I think there are economic ramifications to some of this that I'm not qualified to comment on.

Thanks for your reply, too. It is a distinct pleasure to know people with whom one can disagree without getting into an argument... :)

Re: Moving to Mac

Phil Crissman — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:21:04 -0000

@mrBen ... sigh. Yes, the mac keyboard shortcuts are annoying as heck; I'll get used to them, but.... oh well.

As far as the proprietary OS... I need to be totally honest, but Open Source and Free Software is not a moral issue for me. I could not care less if someone decides not to open their source code. In some sense, I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by cutting off a great community of open source developers, but if someone wants to keep their software closed, I think that's their prerogative.

I don't consider myself anti-microsoft, except in the vague, generic sense that almost every person who has ever touched a computer has a gripe against Microsoft. ;-)

I'm in favor of getting things done. And like I said in my post -- due to the way that I run Linux, always the latest versions, upgrading various things all the time -- I tend to break Linux a lot. I'm tired of it. Sure, I could use a distro like RHEL4 that uses an older kernel, and older version of Gnome, an older version of everything, all in favor of a more "stable" system... but I don't really want to. Ubuntu is good -- very good -- but I still have a lot of issues that I'm frankly sick and tired of troubleshooting. I troubleshoot PCs for a living. I don't always want to come home and do more of it.

Gentoo is the best system I've ever used, but talk about time-intensive... This past weekend I installed it, working on it off-and-on it took about 3-4 days to get into X ... with compositing and Beryl, of course. I still need to fix fonts so they look nice, and I haven't even installed things like OpenOffice on it yet. Or CUPS. Or... I don't even know what else. Running Gentoo is great, but it's like having a part-time job that you don't get paid for.

I've no intention of ceasing to use Linux. I just want a system that can stay up and running, that I can leave my schoolwork and other important development work on, without it needing to be rebuilt all the time. Honestly, if someone has a "moral" problem with OS X from a "Free Software" standpoint, that's not my concern. ;-)

On OS X I still have /bin/bash, which was pretty much my favorite feature of Linux anyways... the other being the desktop environment. I'm happy to say (like I said in the original post) that I actually think Gnome Beryl (or a different WM, if one prefers... xfce4 is nice) is better than OS X from a GUI standpoint. (Now the Mac people will hate me, but it's true.)

So, yes. I "switched," but I don't really feel like I switched. I just added a new PC that still has bash and happens to be an Apple. It also took 10 minutes to set up. And beyond that, as soon as I grab a cheap KVM, I expect to continue using Linux as much or more than I use OS X.

@Brian... I don't know yet. I want to, but I went as cheap as possible; I got the bare bones minimum mac Mini. Only a 60GB hd, and only 512MB of RAM. Who am I kidding? I'll probably install Linux on it at some point... but since I have a whole box dedicated to Linux and I'll have them both on a KVM, I don't know if I'll really need to, other than out of curiosity.

Re: Moving to Mac

Phil Crissman — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 10:51:33 -0000

That is true; I am a compulsive tweaker.

And you're right; when I have a system that I'm satisfied with, I can (and have) cruised along with Linux for months at a time. Inevitably, a new version of Gnome comes out, or Beryl comes out, or... etc... ;-)

I still need to find a cheap KVM that supports USB... as soon as I have that, I'll be using both PCs.

In retrospect, I would change my statement that I've "moved to" Mac to be that I have "added a Mac" to the other computers I use... The Mac will just be the system that I trust for boring things (schoolwork, etc) that I don't want to be moving all the time.

The word "trust" there is loaded; I trust Linux as well. It's me who keeps breaking it.

Here's to breaking things! As the captain said... I aim to misbehave...

Re: Moving to Mac

Phil Crissman — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 23:23:18 -0000

A good idea -- but I do only have the one monitor. That would be an interesting option, though -- I'll have to remember to test that software if I have the chance.

Re: The “51% of World’s largest economies are corporations” Myth

Phil Crissman — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 22:54:01 -0000

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not an economist, just some guy writing on the internet. So the preceding should probably be seen more as my personal reaction to the article, rather than an attempt at an air-tight intellectual rebuttal. So I think if you're looking to be "convinced," you're probably in the wrong place. ;-)

Now, if you don't see how a corporation and a national economy aren't analogous, I'm not exactly sure what to say. A corporation is a business which exists to make a profit, has employees who work to further this effort. Employees are not "citizens" -- while a nation could have varying rates of unemployed citizens, a corporation has no "unemployed" employees -- such people would simply no longer be there. A corporation does not have an internal economy -- a nation does. A nation has a currency, varying levels of government and infrastructure, laws, police, prisons, programs, universities, and host of things that are simply not found in a corporation. The very idea of a corporation that had a prison in which it put people who broke it's "laws" is antithetical to the way we think of corporations. In a company if you "break the law" (are not doing what you're supposed to) -- you lose your job. That's an oversimplification, but more or less accurate.

Even when countries have explicitly tried to model their structure after that of a corporation -- Mussolini's Italy might be a reasonable example -- the differences seem pretty clear to me. The sort of policies which seem reasonable and commonplace in a company, when applied to a state, create a dictatorship. (That has nothing to do with the economics of the article except possibly to point out the huge gulf between a company and a nation: when your company tells you what to do while you're at work, that is normal (they pay you to do it) -- when your nation dictates what you do (with all your time, all the time), we generally call that totalitarianism.)

From an economic standpoint, as I see it, the bottom line is that corporations exist within national and multi-national economies. Without corporations, the GDP of most (almost all?) of these nations would shrink to close to zero -- whether people think it's good or bad, business and capitalism still drive and create nearly all the wealth that the world uses. A corporations revenue is part of a nations GDP -- you just can't take it and sit it on its own next to a countries GDP and compare the two.

Of course, you could compare them in a purely monetary sense. You could say that XYZ corporation had more revenue last year than the GDP of Norway, but... so what? What exactly does that prove? XYZ corporation is not sitting on that money. They payed a substantial portion of that revenue to their employees, who went on to spend that money within whatever nation they reside, adding to the economic activity of that nation. They pay a substantial amount in taxes. Corporations generally have huge operating expenses, which again usually goes to some other business within the nations where they operate, contributing to the GDP of that nation or nations.

There's just too much interdependence between corporations, other corporations, and the nations within which they operate, to make a one-for-one comparison of corporate revenues to national GDPs.

Again, all the above is just thoughts off the top of my head; I'm not an economist, and these aren't intended to be bulletproof arguments. Just one geek's perspective.

Thanks again for stopping by, and forgive my wordiness -- I do tend to ramble on at times. ;-)

Re: Habits

Phil Crissman — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 21:40:17 -0000

What you say is true -- which is basically what I wrote in the next post; I looked at the vim website and found "Cream" -- from the little I read, Cream is simply Vim with all the latest patches.

However... part of what I like about Vim is the modes, and maybe I missed it, but in Gvim -- at least on Windows -- I've not yet seen how to escape "insert" mode (have I looked? not really). So I'd sort of prefer to run Vim in a terminal.

Of course, I was only out at the coffee shop for an hour, so I'm back home and no longer tied to my Windows laptop. The laptop also has Ubuntu on it, but ndiswrapper (curses!) is not working. I may have to put Gentoo back on the laptop, under which ndiswrapper always seemed to work fine...

Re: Habits

Phil Crissman — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:36:19 -0000

Riiiight. ;) That was the problem... Escape was not doing anything. Vim loses 90% of its features if you're stuck in insert mode. I'll have to break down and (gasp) read the documentation.

Of course, I really won't end up using it too often; when I use vim on Linux or Mac OS it's always in a terminal where it behaves as one would expect. I'm about to install it at work, though, where I do use Windows, so I'll be checking out the documentation pretty quick here.

UPDATE:
Urg. Found it... in Cream, at any rate (not sure if this holds true for the vanilla Windows version of Vim) you need to tell it that you want to be in "expert mode" in order to get to toggle between insert mode and command mode.

It even warns you when you try to turn it on...

Expert mode uses the Esc and Ctrl+[ keys to toggle out of normal
Cream behavior to Vim style:
* Normal mode (insertmode turned off)
* Visual mode (selectmode turned off)

Unless you are an experienced Vim user, you are advised not to proceed.

Continue?

I would never have tagged myself a Vim expert, but I the whole reason I started using Vim was to learn to take advantage of the powerful editing features. I'm not about to let myself unlearn the habits I'm already forming. ;-)

Re: The Truth About Lisp

Phil Crissman — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:51:34 -0000

Hey, cool. Wordpress is a great product; it's so well done that in many ways it almost doesn't matter what language it's programmed in, except for the fact that the relative ubiquity of PHP makes it pretty easy to install almost anywhere.

If you start using Linux, let me know. Ubuntu 7.04 comes out in a couple days, I think; that wouldn't be a bad distribution to start with. ;-)

Have fun!

Re: The Truth About Lisp

Phil Crissman — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:24:53 -0000

No worries; I fixed my link to your site.

My email is on the "About" page... ;)

Re: SoulFu

Phil Crissman — Tue, 01 May 2007 10:16:36 -0000

@mrBen: Yes, I think it must be.

I still haven't gotten around to downloading it because I don't have a handy Windows PC at home... well, I do have a Dell laptop in a corner with Windows on a partition, but I haven't used it much, and it doesn't have much in the way of a graphics card... SoulFu doesn't look too 3D intensive, though, so maybe I'll try it there.

I suppose we could lobby for the Mac & Linux versions of the game to come quicker, but since he has already stated he is working on them, I imagine they will be there when they get there...

Re: International Talk Like Bob Dylan Day

Phil Crissman — Sat, 05 May 2007 11:23:54 -0000

I think I'd like to hear someone do Bob Dylan songs, in a Yoda voice and syntax. "Blowing in the wind, the answer is, my friend." Now that, I can get behind.

Re: International Talk Like Bob Dylan Day

Phil Crissman — Tue, 08 May 2007 09:12:22 -0000

Thanks Daniel; this is just a slightly modified version of the WordPress theme "balance", made by some fine gentlemen who run a site called thoughtmechanics; it can be found here.

I used this theme briefly awhile back... was recently toying with the idea of changing themes again, and dropped this one on to see if I still liked it. WordPress users are certainly spoiled when it comes to the availability of stunning out-of-the-box themes...

Re: Jesus vs. Christians

Phil Crissman — Tue, 08 May 2007 15:27:22 -0000

Yeah; I agree.

Fortunately, there's something any one of us can do about it, at least in a small way; be the Christians who aren't "crazy, out-of-touch, psycho," etc... :-)

Re: Jesus vs. Christians

Phil Crissman — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:24:41 -0000

That would be very interesting; I think you'd get a little different result in my hometown (Vancouver/Surrey, BC, Canada) as well. It's amazing how places which have so much in common (comparatively speaking) are also so different culturally. The UK would be the more differentiated, but even Canada, which is so close, would have a discernibly different result.

Re: On Not Answering Questions, and Georgia Lee

Phil Crissman — Sun, 13 May 2007 21:11:24 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Simon; the book by Fiddes sounds interesting, I'll have to look for it.

It's a tough thing, to admit uncertainty, especially in certain circles of the church that I've been used to hanging out in. There's certain things about which we ought to be certain, but not to the point of being obnoxious or having no empathy... maybe that's the difficult part.

Also, if we have a pat answer for everything, it's very easy to ignore the tough, messy questions, and to avoid rolling up the sleeves, as you say.

Grace & Peace!

Re: Hi, I’m Ruby

Phil Crissman — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:51:06 -0000

Not sure if they'll do that one... number 3 of 4 is on the site today, and it's PHP again. ;)

They also made a point to stress that they're just doing these for fun not to start language and framework wars; and fun they are.

Re: Blue Like Jazz

Phil Crissman — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:42:50 -0000

I started reading my brother-in-law's copy in Vancouver last week, but I left it there; guess I'll have to get my own, or borrow it from the Creek's library.

Re: Sanctuary

Phil Crissman — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:13:53 -0000

Anything that resulted in "more Firefly" would sound good to me. From the last I heard, that is (unfortunately) not likely.

Even if "Sanctuary" is not superlative, I'm hoping it will do well enough to encourage more like this. I'm at the PC more than I'm in front of a television, anyways.

Re: wis.dm

Phil Crissman — Thu, 31 May 2007 14:24:34 -0000

Yeah. I don't know... I guess some people like it.

Maybe I'm just short-sighted. In the early nineties, I thought Windows would flop. So, I don't have a great track record at predicting what technology will succeed... all the same, wis.dm just isn't that interesting an app, to me.

Re: Hello world!

Phil Crissman — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 09:29:26 -0000

Yeah. Figures. Rather than mess with databases, I just did the semi-standard "export" to create a monstrous xml file full of post & comment information, and have been attempting to import it. If the file is under 7m (and it is), this is supposed to work fine... however, the server is reporting that it's running out of memory. :(

Ah well. I'll figure something out.

Re: Pros and Cons of Starting Over

Phil Crissman — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:22:58 -0000

Yes, it's that idea, keeping indexed URLs active, that most motivates me to find a solution. I was banking on importing an xml file in order to do the import, but that seemingly simple operation has so far run into problems.

I'm still in Washington DC, and will be for a few more days... maybe when I get home I'll see what can be done.

Re: Mahalo

Phil Crissman — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 18:03:45 -0000

Mahalo!

Re: Apple Releases Safari 3 for Mac… and Windows

Phil Crissman — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:25:01 -0000

Yeah... while it is "public beta," in the few short hours I ran it at work yesterday it did exhibit some bugs.

"As good as Firefox/Opera" is pretty subjective, dependent on what you want to do... I would like to hope Apple finds a niche on Windows. If nothing else, maybe people who've only used IE will try it, realize that there are other browsers in the world, and try Firefox as well...

For myself, I use Firefox regardless of platform; I don't even use Safari on its native Mac OS. It's not that "Safari's bad," but that I simply prefer Firefox, and all the plug-ins and features that make it more or less irreplaceable.

Re: Microlinks, Rails, TextMate, subversion

Phil Crissman — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:11:03 -0000

I'm going to let any interested parties start testing it as soon as I have something usable running; it will be (in the grand tradition of web startups) verrry beta, which on the plus side means I hope to be adding new features and improving it as it goes...

Speaking of Linkpot -- great idea! the second time I tried to use it I had no issues, it's a cool tool.

Re: Nero 3 For Linux

Phil Crissman — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 12:59:39 -0000

Does anyone pay for CD burning software? Good question!

Just off the top of my head, then, I'm thinking -- maybe?

Yes, you have the people who bought and installed their own burner and just use the software that shipped with it -- which is often Nero, IIRC. So on that front, the hardware manufacturer is buying the CD burning software and just bundling it with the drive. In that case, the message would need to be sent to the hardware manufacturer that their customers are interested in having the Linux version of the software included with the drive.

A lot of people, maybe more, get their CD burner when they buy their computer, and the software they get is whatever is bundled with the PC (at least, I know that Dell and HP almost always include something like this). Again, someone's buying the software, and again, it's not the end-user, it's the hardware company. If Desktop Linux as an option became standard, I can see how Nero's Linux product, or something like it, might well be pre-installed.

All that to say -- I see your point. Most end-users don't go out and buy CD burning software. I think maybe a few do, but... yeah. So... um, hooray for Linux?

Bottom line, on which I think we can all agree, it is not a bad thing to see vendors port their desktop software to Linux.

Re: Nero 3 For Linux

Phil Crissman — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 08:48:22 -0000

Yes... also true.

I sort of reason it like this: in this particular case, Nero seems to be among the first doing this -- not the first, by any means, but it's still by no means "common" for commercial vendors to port their desktop applications to Linux.

Being that they're stepping out to do this, I'm going to do them the favor of assuming that they realize that most end-users don't buy burning software off the shelf. I imagine they are well aware that the lion's share of their business comes from hardware vendors, and that the minority of it, even for Windows, comes from retail. That being the likely case, I would hope they going in aware of the fact that they won't sell a million copies of Nero Linux 3 to end-users, and that they're prepared to wait it out while desktop Linux grows in popularity and viability...

I would hope that's their attitude, at least -- I think that would serve them best.

Re: The Case Against Rails

Phil Crissman — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:08:01 -0000

I am looking forward to trying it; soon, I think. Maybe?

Re: Twitter

Phil Crissman — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 07:21:33 -0000

It's adding value for someone, because it's sure getting a lot of use; I don't think it's entirely narcissistic use, either. I mean, I don't imagine that anyone needs to know what I'm doing 24-7. And if that is truly all it amounts to, I can't imagine myself continuing to use it.

But I thought I'd take a closer look at it before I dismissed it... I guess we'll see.

Re: Twitter

Phil Crissman — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 08:57:14 -0000

Another thought on the success of twitter, thus far. I don't think it's so much because of the value of knowing exactly what a few of your peers are doing -- I think it's the illusion of proximity that's created.

If a group of people are hanging out in a living room, there is a sense of community even if they are not all doing the same thing; a few might be playing cards, a few might be on a console video game, someone might be reading or web-surfing. But everyone's in the same room -- you can look around and see everyone in a split second.

Twitter, and related apps, seem to do this for the web. It negates the barries created by the huge distances that separate us, because someone can glance at a feed and see what Scoble, or their former work associate, or their co-developer in another country, are up to. It's sort of a virtual version of glancing around the living room to see where everyone's at.

Not saying this is exactly what's going on, or even that it's especially profound -- but I think it's more this than just being able to follow the minutae of people's lives. If it were really just about that -- well, as you said, "no-one is that interesting", and then people would have just stopped using it.

Just some ruminations, that's all.

Re: Twitter

Phil Crissman — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:59:29 -0000

Hi Gregg; well, I have Trompe le Monde, Doolittle, and Surfer Rosa in my iTunes. I think it was something from Doolittle on at the time...

Re: Linkpot

Phil Crissman — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 08:54:42 -0000

Cool plans; combining words really does accomplish some instant longevity, great idea.

The "temporary link" idea is great, too... for this sort of service, I can't think of too many cases where a service like linkpot or tinyurl would be used for links which are intended to be used in perpetuity.

Re: Moving, Therefore Cleaning

Phil Crissman — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:00:41 -0000

Yep... it's very surreal. It's a horrible accident, but I'm already dreading the continued news coverage of the event -- if only because they keep repeating the same few facts and statistics ad nauseum.

I was in my calculus class that night, and as we watched the live footage during a class break, my instructor simply said, "There are some engineers in really big trouble right now." Of course, it looks to be somewhat more complicated than that, and it's highly unlikely that the calculations of any single person led to that night's disaster....

But like hundreds of thousands of others, in normal circumstances we took that bridge pretty much every weekday, usually right about that time.

Re: You Know, There Is A Lot Of Cool Stuff At w3.org

Phil Crissman — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:27:13 -0000

I'd agree, w3schools does have a good set of tutorials and examples. I don't usually go straight there, but they have a lot of Google leverage, so chances are if you search for anything (X)HTML or CSS related, you'll wind up with them in the top ten...

Re: River Tam, courtesy of xckd

Phil Crissman — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:11:03 -0000

Not yet... I am a very bad fan. :-( I have the episodes and the regular Serenity DVD.... I'll have to take a look for that ce at some point. Does it have enough extras to make it worthwhile?

Right now, we're moving, so the belt is tightened as far as entertainment items... But if it's worth it, it will definitely find a place on The List.

Re: River Tam, courtesy of xckd

Phil Crissman — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:53:30 -0000

Hmm. That is a good incentive. Of course, it's also possible that his new (house|car|etc) payment is very much tied up in the amount of sales of the DVD... ;-)

The CE does sound worth checking out, though.

Re: Jabber Client: MomentIM

Phil Crissman — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:09:44 -0000

Not unless you need to send broadcast messages, i.e., send a message to multiple contacts. I believe there is a pidgin plugin for that, but it requires an explicit recompile allowing it, as it's viewed as potentially abusive (spamIM!). MomentIM has this built in (as do some other Jabber clients, IIRC).

If you use the client at work, where you may want to tell all your co-workers "I'm going to lunch/upstairs/fix a PC", it can be a very handy feature... otherwise, I'm using Pidgin myself. Adium on the Mac.

Re: Andy Blitz Visits A Call Center In India (Conan O’Brien Show)

Phil Crissman — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:51:15 -0000

I liked his line when he successfully helped someone on the phone: "I AM YOUR COLLEAGUE!"

Re: Scoble: Ballmer still doesn’t get social networking

Phil Crissman — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 10:06:27 -0000

Well... from where I sit, one main reason _is_ just that: everyone else is. But I don't mean in the sense of, "everyone is wearing plaid knickers this year, so I will to." I think the services have value because of the people who are on them. (This does create a bit of a catch-22 for anyone wanting to start such a community, but that's one of those challenges all the present networks have had to overcome as well).

Scoble uses the example of eBay; eBay would be worthless if it didn't have a large community of people buying and selling items. Likewise Facebook/LinkedIn/et al. would be worthless if you have no friends or associates using it; but if you do, then there is value.

I'm definitely not suggesting there's much value in the proliferation of Silly Applications (Zombies? Werewolves? Pirates and Ninjas? Oh my) on Facebook, but I think it's function as a way to connect and stay in touch with people is potentially very valuable. MySpace; I do have one, but I've pretty much abandoned myspace.

Twitter is a different sort of thing, but I think there's value to be found there, as well, in the conversation -- but I've probably written enough about Twitter for awhile. ;-)

I'm definitely not saying that "everyone" must (or even should) have an account on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Virb, Bebo, etc, etc, etc -- not at all. But I think for those communities where one has connections, or could potentially create connections... to me, that has value. And that is what (I think) Scoble is saying that Ballmer's not getting.

From the overly-long-comment department... thanks!

Re: Chris Brogan: Why bother with social media?

Phil Crissman — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:10:23 -0000

Fair question: Yes, read the whole thing. It dovetailed somewhat with some comments I had been musing on earlier re: why Twitter/social networking had value.

I'm agreeing with Chris that it does have value.

The reason I left it at that and didn't add anything was that I'd already said my bit on the subject, and mostly just wanted to link to his post, as I thought it was relevant.

Just glanced at Mobasoft (which looks sharp, btw) -- I'm not saying everyone needs to be on every networking site out there, not at all. Just that there may be value to be found in some of them. If you don't find value... don't use them! :D

Thanks for stopping by.

Re: New IT Crowd

Phil Crissman — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:21:12 -0000

I did like it, but I noticed that any tech-related humor was basically exhausted in the first couple episodes of the first season.

I want to believe that there's a niche where a really geeky IT-show could find a large audience, but apparently networks aren't seeing it.

Check out ./shutdown for a lower budget alternative -- very geeky, quite funny.

Re: New Theme

Phil Crissman — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:28:06 -0000

Thanks! I was thinking about some of the margins, too. They'll have to be tweaked a little.

Re: Thoughts on the twitter experiment

Phil Crissman — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:31:41 -0000

Added people by hand. More or less randomly... like I mentioned, though, having done that I've made some contacts that I probably would never have made otherwise.

Even online, I'm something of a wallflower or an introvert... so adding 1400+ people over just a couple days was pretty different. I'm somewhat surprised at the results.

Re: New Theme

Phil Crissman — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:56:31 -0000

Thanks, I liked the idea, have wanted to do something like it for a long time. Unfortunately, it breaks in Safari. If the window is wide enough, it's fine, but it should degrade a little more gracefully than it does. I'll possibly try to fix the safari issues this weekend.

Moving to some colors other than old school html defaults is on the agenda, too. ;-)

Re: Thoughts on the twitter experiment

Phil Crissman — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 01:42:17 -0000

Heh... originally, that was the thought, to see what that conversation would look like. You're absolutely right, I didn't even really consider that. I just figured I'd start adding people and see what happened.

All the same, for some of the other reasons given above, I'm glad I decided to go ahead and just start adding that extra few hundred people. ;-)

Re: The problem with Twitter’s bugginess

Phil Crissman — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:11:33 -0000

Sounds interesting; have fun creating it, I look forward to hearing more about it when you create it. :-)

Re: OpenID Is For the User, Not the Developer

Phil Crissman — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:46:22 -0000

Thanks Thomas; I do know "what" Django is, though I have been putting off the act of actually trying to use it.

I'm neck deep in learning the Rails framework, and since I do want to finish (do you ever "finish" learning something? hmm) that, I'll have to put Django on hold just a bit longer. It is definitely something I want to look into.

Re: AdBlock: Why An Advertising Based Business Model May Not Scale Toward the Future

Phil Crissman — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:11:03 -0000

Of course, I know what you're saying; I do the same thing, I have ads on this site. And personally, I don't enable Adblock on most computers I use.

This post was mostly inspired by what I saw as the ridiculous "whyfirefoxisblocked" site.

People have suggested (reasonably enough) that there is an unspoken contract that your visitors view the ads in return for the content you provide. I believe that's incorrect; just because I decide to show ads doesn't bind my visitors to an understanding that they need to view them, let alone click on them.

I think the answer is a move toward more tasteful, minimal ads; the sort of ads that made Google Adsense popular in the first place. The Deck is another great example, one of the best that I know of.

The only way I can see to keep more and more people from blocking ads is to create ads that people don't care to block. Otherwise, I think the internet will eventually go the way that Tivo is taking television -- people will skip the ads.

(Of course -- this could take awhile. Right now, to recall the Tivo example, relatively few viewers are using this, and the vast majority of TV watchers have to ignore ads while they broadcast. ;-) )

Re: AdBlock: Why An Advertising Based Business Model May Not Scale Toward the Future

Phil Crissman — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:38:06 -0000

I'm loving this discussion.

@Zhasper... I can see your friend's point; we may indeed be overestimating the intelligence of the majority. That said... there could come a day when a browser has adblocking (in some form) enabled by default, in which case the only decision a user would need to make would be to use that browser.

To mrBen & all; I'd echo agreement that people block ads b/c they've seen too many obnoxious ones (slap the sumo? Shoot the little elf? Please.). Minimalist, tasteful, or even (gasp) entertaining ads (viral videos, for example) are definitely the only way I see advertising on the web thriving in the future.

And I think it will thrive.

@mrBen pop-up ads the "biggest evil in the world today"? Well... I hate them too, but... I think I'll take that as creative hyperbole. ;-)

Re: I Like Dreamhost

Phil Crissman — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:22:00 -0000

Rails is doable on MediaTemple... but it's a bit more involved, and I found I was always forgetting the steps and searching for them in the FAQs over and over. You may have better luck. Tip: when you find the page you want in the FAQs, bookmark it! ;-)

Re: No One Is Going To Steal Your Idea

Phil Crissman — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:30:21 -0000

Thanks for commenting, Mike. I'm hoping that at least one of those ideas will be profitable, but I guess I'll need to finish creating one or more of them and see what happens.

I started writing a lot more about the Aiken quote, but it grew into a whole new post, which will be up soon... thanks!

Re: More On Ideas And Competition

Phil Crissman — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:51:51 -0000

I think you're correct about Google/MS being a different situation. It's extremely different. I guess my only point was that no one, no matter how huge, is immune to competition.

The MS/IBM deal was a combination on some prescient foresight on Microsoft's part, and a lack of the same from IBM. Alternately, it could be viewed as a really underhanded move by MS -- depends on whether or not we're talking about msdos or os/2-windows. Either way, I agree -- completely different situation.

Only common denominator; no one is immune.

That said, IBM having changed their main focus to services and consulting really seems to be working out well.

Re: Hoodwink.d Is An Underground Mumblers Club. Maybe it’s an anti-social social network? Perhaps this title is Too Long?

Phil Crissman — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:52:24 -0000

*shh* ;)

I think the most interesting thing about it is that it's almost the opposite of a start up. It's not monetized, it's not advertised, it's not easy, it's not intuitive, it's not easily accessible, it's just a "because it's there" sort of idea. I like it.

Re: Flock? Flock!

Phil Crissman — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:16:52 -0000

Hi Evan; Akismet marked you as spam, so this took awhile to get posted. I don't actually check the Spam page very often.

I doubt my opinion will be very influential in the world at large -- but I'll certainly take a look at the 1.0 beta. I do appreciate how much work this all takes, and don't want to knock what you all are doing. But so far, Flock just isn't for me. As I said, I'll give the new version a chance.

Thanks for stopping by!

Re: You May Want To Aim Your New Web 2.0 Startup At… The Enterprise

Phil Crissman — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 11:39:42 -0000

Yeah... the sales process is an entirely different story. I don't know if we'll ever see a "Sales 2.0"; prospecting and pitching may never go away.

But yes -- that's absolutely a great point. With the traditional enterprise sales process, if you can convince an executive (who may not even use the software), then you're sold, whether the software is actually good & usable or not.

I think the only way around that is to a) make software that is more usable, and b) take the time to do the research that proves that greater usability saves time and money (ie, shorter training time, fewer support calls, etc.).

Re: Giving Flock 1.0 Another Chance

Phil Crissman — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:16:05 -0000

Like I said in that tweet, me as well. Not at all a fan of their UI, and from what I've seen so far, there aren't many (any?) other themes available. Ah well; I'll see if some of the snazzy social networking features offset this.

Re: Giving Flock 1.0 Another Chance

Phil Crissman — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:30:21 -0000

Hi Mr. Ben... Probably not. I'm going to stick out my 2 week trial, but I do use some social networking (twitter, linkedin, del.icio.us, facebook, and blogging in general) and I'm still not sold on it. I have a strong feeling I'll be switching back to Firefox after the trial. :)

Re: Some Twittering With Ruby And Shoes

Phil Crissman — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:27:39 -0000

@_why Yep, I am on the Shoes list. I almost asked the question about the password edit_line to the list(I assumed it wouldn't be online), but I decided to search anyways, and lo and behold! Found it online.

@Garrick, good to know -- thanks!

Re: Some Twittering With Ruby And Shoes

Phil Crissman — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:30:08 -0000

@SP... you're exactly right, it was a dependency issue, not a twitter4r issue. I had the same error with different gem, different dependency... I'm assuming that's fixed now, too.

Thanks! This will be very much a side project, and probably some industrious person with more time on their hands will beat me to it, b/c it may take me awhile to finish, but... oh well. It's fun.

Re: The Paradox Of LinkedIn At Work

Phil Crissman — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:18:32 -0000

Well, yes, I think it has. And of course, everyone is open to a better opportunity, provided it's good enough.

LinkedIn just makes incredibly transparent something that might normally hardly be discussed... at least, probably not with your direct supervisors.

Re: Some Twittering With Ruby And Shoes

Phil Crissman — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:07:23 -0000

Platypus looks cool, but I think cross-platform is going to be the holy grail.

That said, thanks for the link to Platypus; I hadn't seen it before, and it certainly looks like its worth checking out.

Re: The Paradox Of LinkedIn At Work

Phil Crissman — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:10:40 -0000

Management always wants to think that. ;-)

And really, at any company worth working for, they should think that; just like the best salespeople only sell products they really believe in, etc, etc.

Of course, in the real world... yeah, sometimes that's delusional.

Re: Can the Del.icio.us Preview Become Reality Any Sooner?

Phil Crissman — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:32:03 -0000

I'd really really love to see more people start using del.icio.us network feature, as well. Seeing everyone's bookmarks all at once, that's one of the most appealing social networks I can imagine.

However, this feature seems tragically underused. Perhaps it just hasn't reached a tipping point? It's a social network that isn't quite social-networky enough? I don't know.

I can't boycott del.icio.us, though. I'd have nowhere to put my bookmarks.

Yes, ma.gnolia, I know you're there; I thought I told you things just wouldn't work out! It's not you. It's me. Bye.

Thanks for stopping by, Julia! Here's to hoping Yahoo's del.icio.us engineers finish up soon.

Re: Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver

Phil Crissman — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:17:09 -0000

Well; keep in mind that the original how-to was tested on Suse, and it was from over a year ago.

However, the error you post makes it sound like you have html in your script; that's not going to work.

Unfortunately, you'll probably need to take a look at the script; maybe post it on linuxquestions.org, or the fedora forums, see if anyone can see what's wrong. Because, there should be no !DOCTYPE or dtd definition in a shell script.

Good luck!

Re: Destroy The Web 2.0 Look

Phil Crissman — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:50:19 -0000

Back to the drawing board! ;-)

Re: Triggit

Phil Crissman — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:52:04 -0000

Hey, Zach! Thanks for stopping by.

Well, I'm not sure what it would take for me to use a tool like this; I'm pretty attached to building my html on my own. Maybe I'm odd that way, but I like to have control over all that.

Like I said, I'll try it, and I'll be sure to keep my eye on it even if I don't use it now. As you add features, who knows; maybe you'll win me over. For now... I don't know.

But like I said... I do have to applaud the software itself. You've built a slick tool. Best of luck!

Re: Triggit

Phil Crissman — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:31:24 -0000

Yes, my guess was that I'm probably not your target demographic. ;-)

Re: Destroy The Web 2.0 Look

Phil Crissman — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:28:50 -0000

You're right; I probably wouldn't have known that for months, thanks. :)

Re: On Flock: Observations After Using Flock As Primary Browser for 2 Weeks

Phil Crissman — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:09:50 -0000

Yes... Flock is heavily geared toward the Social Networking power user. If I do use some of those things (Twitter, etc) and still don't find it useful, I'd say that someone who doesn't use social networking much at all would find Flock simply has a lot features they don't need.

I'm looking forward to FF 3; that sounds like it should be next on the list to try out. :D

Re: The Metaweb

Phil Crissman — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 19:47:04 -0000

You're right; it could be just as you say. But, I'd like to think it would be something more interesting.

Per your note about banning -- since by leaving a note on a meta-type layer, you aren't actually accessing the site that you're commenting on, they would not be able to ban individual commentators. They'd have to (somehow) ban Shiftspace (or whatever other service) altogether.

I'd hope that if the meta-layer over these sites is adding value -- ie, is a conversation, not just "XYZ sucks" -- then banning the meta-layer would be held in somewhat low esteem.

But what do I know? I thought Windows would flop. Also, I think a tipping point for the metaweb or meta-layer I describe here could be several years away. For now, there's not a lot of people there but a few early adopters, alpha geeks, and bleeding edge experimenters.

Re: The Metaweb

Phil Crissman — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 01:33:35 -0000

Hey, thanks to you both for commenting. Since I'm interested in this sort of thing generally, I'm very interested in what Shiftspace is doing. Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll get a chance to dig a little deeper into what you've been building.

I like the openness; I think that will be an important component of anything that would attempt to build a metaweb. Not simply an API, but an open platform.

I've some more thoughts on the whole topic, but it's getting late. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing what happens with Shiftspace .

Re: The Metaweb

Phil Crissman — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:42:48 -0000

One thing that prevents it from being a free-for-all graffiti layer: when you give it a try in FF2, you'll see that you can pick and choose which "shifts" you see posted over any web page. In other words, you can pretty easily ignore trolls and vandals within Shiftspace.

Yeah, I had noticed that greasemonkey doesn't work with FF3 yet, which is why I'm not using it yet. Soon. :)

Re: Can We Unify Our Feed Formats?

Phil Crissman — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:21:30 -0000

Good points, Garrick. That's one of the reasons I think there won't be any real push to try to unify the format of feeds; it's not hard just to support the all the current formats.

I probably just liked the idea of using YAML, and let that snowball into this post.

@mrBen... yeah, I'd agree. And for those reasons, I've no plan to attempt to create a new standard.

Re: New Habit: Subscribing To The Blogs Of People I Follow On Twitter

Phil Crissman — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 18:05:35 -0000

Cool; thanks for stopping by!

I'm following so many people now it'll take awhile, but I'm assuming it will be worthwhile. :-)

Re: Reciproc8: A Framework For Reciprocal Linking

Phil Crissman — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:31:13 -0000

Hm. Maybe you're right. Except I was hoping to avoid the ugly circa-1996 graphics and animated gifs that I would normally associate with the term "webrings"...

Re: What’s Wrong With Whitespace?

Phil Crissman — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:37:21 -0000

Exactly. I also tend to indent code religiously regardless of the language I'm using. I'm even finicky about html that way; it just makes things easier to find, parse, etc.

Re: A (Possibly Permanent) Change Of URL

Phil Crissman — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:13:54 -0000

For what it's worth, even if I *do* stick with the new URL, I plan to leave this blog here. For posterity, and all that.

As for change... what can I say? I thrive on chaos.

Re: How I Got To Startup School

Phil Crissman — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:17:18 -0000

Man, you don't need to apologize. I totally understand. It's tight here, too, which is why I almost didn't go... :)

Yeah, I think it's worked out well, hopefully will be an educational (albeit short) trip.

Thanks!

Re: The EEE PC

Phil Crissman — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:24:38 -0000

According to Gizmodo, you could run Vista on it... just not very well. ;-)

But anyways... yeah. Realistically, I think it would still need to have a little more RAM for me to want one. Also, I think I'd want to use one for a couple days before deciding to own one. It's cool that it's that small, but I'm not sure how I'd really like using/typing/web surfing on a laptop that tiny.

All the same, a very cool little machine.

Re: The EEE PC

Phil Crissman — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 02:17:51 -0000

@mrben ahhh, Xandros. It's very customized... and it is interesting, but not usable if you actually want to have, you know... a terminal. It's possible there's a way to enable that, though I didn't see it when I looking...

@Trisha, I agree, 512 really is still enough for most tasks; if 1GB were available, though, I think I'd go for that instead.

Also, if you're considering moving to Ubuntu as a main OS, check out Linux Mint also. Mint basically is Ubuntu, made even more user friendly, and enabling quite a few handy features by default.

Re: The EEE PC

Phil Crissman — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:54:22 -0000

That's good to know... yes, sadly, I was looking for an actual icon, program, or option to open a terminal. But still... I think the first thing I would do is load Ubuntu (eeeUbuntu, as the case may be) on the little thing instead of its default. :-)

Re: Detecting Palindromes With Python, Revisited

Phil Crissman — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:48:56 -0000

Nice; I was assuming there was a better way to do that. Thanks for the tip! Apparently, I need a regex refresher.

Re: Frameworks Are Like Sonnets

Phil Crissman — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:23:31 -0000

@martin Well what do you know. That would explain the traffic spike.

Re: Frameworks Are Like Sonnets

Phil Crissman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:58:29 -0000

Yes, a better analogy might have been that, say, frameworks are to programming in general as poetic forms (such as a sonnet or haiku) are to poetry in general. Maybe.

@ro; I know the analogy is a stretch, but keep in mind, I was talking to my mom, who neither knows about nor cares about the details which would make the analogy perfect. She was just curious what this "Ruby on Rails" was that I was using.

For what it is -- a non-technical explanation of a framework -- I still think the analogy works pretty well. As a perfect one-to-one analogy... no, of course not. ;-)

While I'm thinking about it, camping seems more like the haiku of frameworks...

EDIT: apologies to those whose comments only just appeared now. For some reason akismet wanted to call them spam...

Re: Frameworks Are Like Sonnets

Phil Crissman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:59:54 -0000

Ro, I'm with you, don't disagree with your points at all.

Like I said, though, I just wasn't aiming for that level direct analogy with the original comparison.

Re: On IT Support Stereotypes

Phil Crissman — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:07:05 -0000

Sounds like a very cool topic; open source tech support has the additional challenge of being more or less voluntary, rather than paid positions.

In some ways it would seem that the passion which drives individuals to contribute for free would help to keep support civil and kind, but in practice I expect you have some of the same problems... since the only time you interact with your users is when they are complaining, and possibly are causing their own problems by Not Having Read the [Free] Manual, it would still be quite easy to gradually get a skewed perspective of your users.

Re: Twitter off the Rails? And, so what?

Phil Crissman — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:37:24 -0000

That's a good point, but...

My understanding is that 37Signals is currently running most apps off Rails Edge, which anyone else could do also; see David's tweet about this.

I think it would defeat the whole purpose of some of the benefits of using Rails if they were using a "different" version. Now, their servers and perhaps many plugins may well be finely tuned and customized, but their version of Rails itself is certainly the same as you or I could use.

Obviously I can't "know" that, but that is what David said, and I can't imagine any possible benefit to changing only their version, and not Rails Edge (the development version) itself.

Re: Twitter off the Rails? And, so what?

Phil Crissman — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:29:32 -0000

@dhh, exactly. It would seem to me to defeat the whole purpose if you were using a "custom" version. Especially all the handy features that come from rails being distributed as a gem, and being able to automatically update it, etc, etc. Running a unique fork would invalidate a lot of benefits.

Thanks for stopping by!

Re: Conditionals in Io

Phil Crissman — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:33:00 -0000

I'd have to play with it a little more. Also, as I consider my use of the word "intuitive", I suppose I'd need to expand that to "intuitive in a way that I hadn't considered previously", which could be open to the interpretation that it isn't really that intuitive after all. Or, that it's intuitive after you know how it works, which is a bit of a tautology itself.

Then again, it's always possible that I simply fell for the lure of something new and shiny... it's not as though that's never happened. ;-)

But from a cursory look, I do like Io, it's quite interesting. What would I use it for? I've no idea, at this point. But not everything needs to be completely utilitarian...

Re: Blizzard closes my unused World of Warcraft account for being “exploitative”

Phil Crissman — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:06:27 -0000

Strange. I almost think it has to be a bug or a false positive on the part of Blizzard's exploit detection. Even assuming someone cracked a given user's password, are they also paying to reactivate it? How is an inactive account exploiting anything?

The annoying thing is that I've tried a few times to re-activate my account, and they keep wanting me to fax them (FAX!) a copy of my driver's license (I guess to prove that I'm me?). I don't have a fax machine; so I've procrastinated for about a year now.

I'm probably better off. :)

Re: Wednesday Where?

Phil Crissman — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:41:36 -0000

Er, Drive. Viking Drive.

Re: Off to Mexico!

Phil Crissman — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:15:07 -0000

Hey, we just got back from Mexico, too. Other coast, though (Cabo San Lucas). However, our honeymoon 6 years ago was near Tulum (Playa), and we did visit there. It's a cool place.

Re: Why Microsoft Buying Yahoo COULD Rock

Phil Crissman — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:34:03 -0000

I still can't see how Microsoft acquiring Yahoo would be good for anyone... except maybe Microsoft.

But, in the case that the acquisition actually happens... hopefully, I could be wrong.

Re: Why Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword (and how Kathy is blogging better than you are)

Phil Crissman — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:13:43 -0000

Great points about Kathy's blogging style. It's a step beyond what your garden-variety blogger is doing, and very effective.

Not only that, but she can write. I've been in the "hate the web 2.0 buzzword" camp for awhile now, and hers is the first post having me seriously reconsider that position. Not to say I'm stubborn, but I'm not necessarily easily persuaded, either... ;-)

Regarding emphasis (italics, bold text, etc) within a post... you'll have to find what works best for you, I think. Standard copy writing wisdom is to eschew emphasis as much as possible, in the hope that the text speaks for itself. Blogging is not completely synonymous with copy writing, however, and it certainly works for Kathy.

Re: Do I read all Twitters?

Phil Crissman — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:18:46 -0000

Heh... I should have known better than to think my little blog post would stay invisible.

I did notice, after the fact, that I could have just looked at "with_friends" ... I was (am?) still pretty new to Twitter.

Though I decided it was a bit silly to keep following people more or less indiscriminately, a side effect of my experiment was that I more or less immersed myself in a large community of twitterers in a very short amount of time, and "met" a lot of interesting folks. While I'm not still trying to add anyone's whole list (chose yours simply because it was so huge), I've found no one I would want to un-follow. If anything, I'd like to follow more people, and the process has been a great way to see the real value in apps like Twitter.

Thanks for answering the question. ;-)

Re: http://blog.inc.com/archives/2005/02/bush_with_small.html

Phil Crissman — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 04:57:32 -0000

Do the above commentators actually believe that small business would be better off with Kerry in office? Or that Kerry, who is a lot more "filthy rich" than GWB, is somehow immune to his own "special interests"? Please! Don't insult my intelligence.

Have you even read the President's Small Business Agenda, linked directly from the homepage of the Small Business Administration website? Yes, I realize that any official White House document will only highlight the "good things" that are being done, but there are a whole lot of good things to highlight, in my opinion.

President's Small Business Agenda