Monkinetic Weblog

Wow. Garth Kidd has a hacked-together process worthy of Rube Goldberg that lets him record his ramblings to mp3, and have them posted to his weblog. Wow. Coooool.

Wow, it's been a long time... the old Frontier community list ScriptMeridian is coming back to life. Yay!

I wanted to get Python 2.2 on my Mac OS X box... so I installed Fink, which is a package management system for Darwin. The process is pretty easy - pick your components, Fink tells you what the dependencies are, and it downloads and installs it all for you. Not a surprise to most linux users, but this is new to me on Mac OS X.

Linus Torvalds (if you care about this post you'll know who he is) has finally started using BitKeeper, which according to my conversation with Wes was explicitly designed to his specifications as a source-control tool. He has historically avoided any sort of source-control (eg CVS), which is really ironic if you think about it [/.]

I've spent most of the morning checking in changes to my application here at work. I've found a pretty good process that helps me makes sure that the comments that go into CVS represent what has changed in the code.

• Use CVL to identify changed files.
• Open the file in FileMerge to see the differences between versions.
• I have an OmniOutliner document for tracking change notes.
• I go through the diff in FileMerge, and put my comments in the outline under the filename.
• When done, I paste the comments from OmniOutliner into the comments field when checking in the code.

Well, I am officially IM-less at work for the foreseeable future (and probably slightly beyond that). Our network guys are very security conscious and I don't fault them for it. The AIM protocol has been closed on the firewall.

So, I'm back to email, which in true internet fashion, seems so... slow. ;-)

In the evenings from home, however, I'll be on AIM, and probably[#p2p](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/p2p)-hackers as well. monkinetic or redmonk.

Literally. My truck just sucked a grand out of my pocket by way of a bunch of emissions and fuel system repairs. Sigh.

OMG! In a round about way I was just given a NeXTStation Mono Turbo by a co-worker!!! I have always wanted some of NeXT's black hardware, and this will have a hallowed place in my office.

Hmm. What will I name it?

Doc Searls said "And if nothing else works, unplug your cable modem for an hour or two. It's a piss-on-a-spark plug solution, but it works."

Well, we unplugged the cable modem last night, and the linksys just to be sure, and plugged it all back in 12 hours later. Sure enough, I got online first time, and have had no hiccups yet (knock on wood). Thanks Doc!

As The Apple Turns comments on reports that High Schoolers in Henrico County VA were caught using their new iBooks to download porn:

"if history has shown us anything, it's that if you give a teenager any technology more advanced than a rubber band and one of those little plastic things that holds the bread bag closed, said teenager, regardless of IQ or innate technical ability, will suddenly turn into MacGyver and find some way to use that technology to look at pictures of naked people."

Sad but FUNNY.

While chatting with our in-house designer (and Baron Banner) we got onto the topic of our respective design backgrounds and consequently our ability to identify fonts in various ads, etc.

This got me thinking about my old habit of trawling through the old type foundries looking for cool fonts. My favs have always been from Emigre and FontFont. FontFont sells the font that the German gov't adopted for their highway signage back in '96 or so...

Doc Searls has been through some of the same connection hell that we have with Cox.Net. He's still upbeat about it, while we're pretty frustrated. I'm going to try some of his sugggestions, however, and try to remain calm. We've been mostly off-line for almost 10 days now.

Check out Ditherati for a daily dose of inflated-hi-tech-ego-bubble-bursting. Their 3 weapons are wit, sarcasm, cynicism, and a near-invulerability to hype. Wait... their FOUR weapons are... oh nevermind.

Dave says:"When Sam Ruby talks about unwashed masses using IDEs, I know he doesn't get it. But get this, he said it on a weblog, in public, on the record. So he's on the path to enlightenment."

For some reason Dave, from this link on down on todays' Scripting News, there are no permalinks on the entries. I'm not logged on as "me" right now so I can't email you. What happened?

Hey nullgel, get a load of this:

The Amazing Lego DAT Tape Changer

Your Blue Room has an awesome, if somewhat technical, article about the visual production of U2's Elevation tour.

Jodi and I saw the show in DC at the Metro center, and I can vividly recall each effect discussed in the article. As all good shows go, I didn't think much about the lighting during the show, but am amazed now to see what goes into it all.[via u2log - congrats on the bloggie!]

CVS question: when doing a checkout for the purpose of building a project on a testing platform, is it preferred to do a checkout, and ignore the CVS files that come along, or an explicit export to get only the source?

I think for testing purposed (we'll run this a lot more than deployment) checkout will work - I'd rather not have to be limited to a particular tag or date, I only want the most recent. But I'm open to solutions to this problem.

My buddy Hans has an RSS feed now on his site. Check him out - he's updating more these days, and thinks before posting.

Dave writes: "We're going to make Web services work for Web developers. That means getting rid of arcane stuff that makes sense only to C programmers. "

Well, I understand where Dave is coming from, but I have to argue that without C and its practitioners of arcana, the "web" in "web services" would not exist. The xml parser in Frontier's web services support would be 100 times slower. Google - don't tell me that's not a web service! ;-) - would not exist.

Dave, you're not being fair to people who use those languages. I totally appreciate what you're doing in the scripting world. Seeing web services brought to the masses through your involvement in XML-RPC is a huge deal. We all talk about web services being about inclusive: don't lock out or insult those developers who choose to use .NET or whatever.

I mean, who cares that there are six extra lines in that script? How many lines is a common web service? 5? 100? 1000? If a developer wants to write those 6 lines (which are probably generated for him) why can't he? Is it just because it offends your aesthetic?