Monkinetic Weblog

Mmmm, I got a sneak peek today at Conversant's new Weblog Plugin. This is going to be seriously cool, and I can't wait until it's released! Seth has been banging out some serious code, and this new weblog plugin is going to rock.

At the request of a friend, I wrote a new app today. It's a utility app, and will be released as shareware when it's finished. It should be ready for beta tomorrow, and will be announced here.

I was looking for Senate election results, when washingtonpost.com asked me for the usual bothersome personal information. I took my usual tack of entering, shall I say, humorous, data. Looks like wp.com will have none of it. Well, darn.

powerbook tags: "" tp_commentcount: "0" tp_favoritecount: "0" tp_urlid: 6a010534988cd3970b0120a5b35cda970c

Mmmm, 1 Gghz, SuperDrive, 64Mb ATI Radeon 9000 (link).

Mmmm, 1 Gghz, SuperDrive, 64Mb ATI Radeon 9000 (link).

Back in '93 or so, I was injured in a construction accident (12 penny nail to the knee) and had to have orthoscopic surgery. Before the surgery I was drugged up. I never thought about what happened after that until chatting with Clark Venable today. Clark is an anesthesiologist at Penn State, and I asked him if there had been an anesthesiologist present. He said yes, and pointed me to an instructional video (streaming QuickTime) describing the breathing tube they most likely used. Um, wow! They stuck that thing in me? Geez.

Oh yum. I'm installing Apple Remote Desktop on my home network tonight. Helping Jodi with technical issues will be much easier, and Jodi will be able to check her email from my computer when we're hanging out watching TV. Joy!

Brent just keeps crankin' 'em out...

[via Ranchero.com] ...links in the HTML view are displayed on mouse-over; a display glitch with the Bandwidth Stats window was fixed; and old-but-still-current items are no longer erroneously marked as unread. (See the change notes for more info.) (link)

I'm trying out this little app called Ogg Drop - It encodes CD music as Ogg Vorbis files (as opposed to MP3, which has a patent/license on it), and supposedly produces smaller and better quality tracks. As soon as it's done I'm going to restart, since I've installed Quicktime 6.0.2, and the Quicktime decoder ring, er, plugin for Ogg, which will let iTunes play Ogg files.

Well, I finished Neil Stephenson's Crytonomicon. It's a LONG book - 900 pages. It took me approximately 15 hours to read it - that's actual reading time, and it's an estimate since I generally read about 60 pages an hour, or a page a minute. That's not terribly fast (IMO) but it's pretty fast.

Jodi got sucked into Survivor this season. She usually records the second half or so, and tonight she recorded the whole thing. She's watching it now, I'm in the other room with the headphones on. -) Nothing against the show per se, but I just don't want to get sucked in too. Hehe.

Brent has released a new NetNewsWire beta.

This release supports ETag and Last-Modified headers, dramatically reducing bandwidth consumption for sites that support these headers. Other changes are listed on the change notes page. (link)

Something we're learning about this year in Arizona: Winter lawns. Apparently the only thing that can survive the Arizona summer is a particularly hearty strain of Bermuda grass, which goes dormant and brown once the weather cools off. So the practice here is, right about now, to plant a winter lawn of rye grass that stays nice and soft and green until about April, when the weather heats up fries it all. I'm researching winter lawns now; I mowed the lawn as short as possible the other day, and I'm about to go de-thatch and put down gypsum to treat the soil. Then we plant.

James Duncan Davidson (Author of tomcat and ant) on Enterprise Java Beans: > [via James Duncan Davidson ]Mike Clark was just muttering about EJBs and how they can lead you over the brink of complexity. And he asks: "Where did we go wrong?" (link) I've worked some with EJBs, and they are some of the most complex component code I've seen. Oy.

If you're a Cocoa geek, you should check out the CocoaProgrammers wiki. Add your name and info, let others know where you're at!

David McCusker gave me a plug yesterday:

And folks need to go visit Steve Ivy's resume and consider giving him some work. He's a bright guy with enough imagination that I figure you can give him new stuff to do without worry. (link) I usually hate to blow my own horn, but I am a bright guy, I've got a lot of experience, and I've got the imagination to know how it can be used. If you need web development or Mac OS X programming work done, please contact me.

I haven't tracked down why yet, but I think I've confirmed that software operating in active ftp mode (as opposed to passive ftp, in this case fink) is incompatible with the 802.11 implementation in the Linksysy WAP that I've got. Whenever I tried to download software with fink my wireless connection would start going up and down, then just down, until I reset the WAP. I reconfigured fink to use passive FTP and am now having no problems. I'm going to research this more a bit later and write it up here.

It would seem I'm not mistaken in my reports of problems with active FTP and my Linksys BEFW11S4 router. > Several people report the latest BEFW11S4 firmware is broken for Active mode. Here's a recent post: /forum/remark,411550.. (link)

Ad-hocracy: A group of people thrown together for a purpose.