jason thurber's blog

This Blog links to this story on the BBC’s website. It’s an interesting read.

This article starts out good and just gets better.

Dear Sirs:

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed, goddamned fashion of shutting your goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happended again today.

Haven’t you a telephone?

Ys
Samuel L. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)
A letter to the gas company; February 12, 1891

Found it here.

I enjoyed this Editorial. I sort of wish it wasn’t about Macs (the religious aspect clouds the underlying content), but there you are.

These may be _really_ old, but I saw it for the first time this morning (via this Review):

-Sun made toasters…
The toast would burn often, but you could get a really good cuppa Java.

-Does DEC still make toasters?…
They made good toasters in the ’80s, didn’t they? – More of the same

Nothing like geek “humor” on a Saturday morning.

New Stephenson Book (for the uninitiated he’s the guy who wrote Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon)

From Doc Searls:

I’ve signed so many nondisclosure agreements in my life that I’m surprised my reflection still appears in mirrors.

Most of those agreements were required by a corporate paranoia about competitors – or anybody – “stealing” an idea. In most cases, however, there was no real cause for fear, because everybody qualified to steal the idea was 1) too busy trying working on their own ideas, and 2) possessed by the belief that their own ideas are, prima facie, better than everybody else’s ideas.

I used Fink (install linux packages on OSX) to install Subversion (a CVS improvement/alternative) on the 12in PowerBook on Wednesday. The process went quite smoothly, particularly when you consider that this is the only install/compile I’ve ever seen where the compile took 4 hours. In my experience something that takes 4 hours to compile doesn’t usually finish, but at the end of all that time I had a handful of subversion binaries that work on OS X. (Now, I’ve written 3000 line PL/SQL procedures that ran for 24 hours, but that’s a whole different ball game. My stored procs were simply free of any hint of optimization while I think Fink’s approach to creative de-optimization was to compile everything in the world… the darwin kernel, itself, do a bit of seti, encode some mp3’s, then compile svn 😉 … then discard 9.9/10th’s of it… but it did work, so I’m really not complaining.)

As an aside, Subversion may have jumped the gun a bit in shutting down their cvs repository while still requiring that you get an svn binary in order to bootstrap and get latest… bit of a chicken and the egg problem that could have been avoided by putting an old source tree on cvs? I say this only because it looks like they specifically shut down their cvs repository a few releases ago. I don’t know the whole story, but it looks like the client-side of the binaries totals to a grand 2mb zipped. That’s a lot of Fink compiling for a little app…

This afternoon I was back at the Fink site reading their docs to see if Fink was a simple method for creating OSX installers (I’ll save you the trouble, it’s not) and found this email exchange between the Fink and OpenOSX project owners. Some highlights:

Well, what you did can be roughly compared to downloading RedHat Linux from their ftp site, making some minor modifications (say, new boot disks and a streamlined installer), and then selling the result on CDs without mentioning RedHat in any way.

>Fink doesn’t install XDarwin or X-Windows for you, our product does.

Look again. Fink _can_ install XFree86 for you, even the months-old
version you’ve used. (So much for assumptions.)

Anyway, I thought it was a good read.

Reminds me of some of the fun Alex has been having recently.

After losing about 2 1/2 paragraphs of blog as a result of a badly timed Command-Q this afternoon I decided to follow Alex’s advice and author my blogs in Tasks. That involved a bit of installation-type fun on the PowerBook, but it’s all working now.

Save works so now I just click the blog button and…

Bought the D-Link “AirPlus Xtreme” Wireless Broadband Router from Fry’s (aka Outpost.com) last night for $99 (which becomes $79 after $20 mail-in rebate). This is an excellent price when you consider that the Airport Extreme base station from Apple costs around $250. The D-Link doesn’t offer as many features as the Airport (I’m thinking of a Printer connection, AppleTalk and built-in Modem), but if all you’re looking for is 802.11g this is definitely the way to go. D-Link is also the only manufacturer (other than Apple, obviously) to specifically support Macs (claims Windows, Mac and Linux compatibility on the box) they even sell this thing in the Apple retail stores.

Setup took all of 5 minutes and was accomplished via my 12in Powerbook over Airport. Pretty slick. I then copied a 700mb movie from my desktop to my laptop which took about 6 minutes. Not blindingly fast, but MUCH better than the old 802.11b Linksys box. Biggest positives: great intra-network connection speed and ease of setup. Biggest negative: doesn’t look as cool as the Airport Extreme Base Station and supposedly has trouble with some of the Dell internal wireless cards (sorry Scott).

Before I left for NZ I planned to sell my iPod and miss the price drop resulting from the new ones. Sadly I waited to long and must know the pain of selling too late…

I placed an ad on craigslist.org, we’ll see how it goes. There is some really funny stuff out there. I particularly liked this jewel (someone had already responded):

YOU:
-now are holding an OBSOLETE iPod music player in your hand because today the new iPod came out and the file format has switched from MP3 to AAC (mac only) to be compatible with the new Apple Music Store and the new iTunes 4.
-have an iPod that is at least 10gb harddrive and it must be a touch-wheel or scroll-wheel model from before April 18, 2003 without a dock connector or it’s from after April 18,2003. (I’m using a software update, must be correct model type)
-recognize that your iPod is pretty much worthless at this point so you need to unload it. Sorry to say it, trust me I just moved, I feel your pain. I had to sell my old iMac for $30. (sniff) I loved that thing. And even if you don’t view your beloved iPod as worthless, you…
-are going to buy the new iPod, maybe you already have, because you’re a super-cool hipster who must keep up with the progress of technology.
…a bit further down…
NOTE: sorry but I’m really not looking to pay more than $50 for either of these items; in fact I’d prefer less than that. You must recognize that it’s very tough to unload old equipment and be thankful to get even that much. Don’t mean to insult you, but trust me this market sucks and it’s near-impossible to get what an item’s really worth.

Hope this guy emails me, he seems cool.

It’s Sunday, in a few hours I’ll head to the airport, spend 14hrs on a plane and it will… still be _Sunday_. Seems wrong somehow. Finishing up the last minute shopping, then it’s time to return the rental car and settle down for some quality “seat time” with our friends at Air Newzealand. Here’s hoping I haven’t totally destroyed myself for left-hand drive.

Vacation?
A quick rundown: Started in Auckland, went to the Bay of Islands (4 hrs to the north). Stayed at an excellent B&B for 2 days, spent a day sailing on a 60-something foot sailboat. Drove down to Waitomo (8hrs south… ouch), beginning to feel quite worn out from all this vacat’ing. Stayed at a farmstay for one night (very nice, got to do a bit of rally-style driving at night on 12+ km’s on gravel road :). Went to the glowworm caves at Waitomo (which was surprisingly cool). Drove to some volcanic park, it was raining so we flipped a U-turn and drove to Taupo Lake (very much like NZ’s answer to Lake Tahoe) where we’ve been for the last 2 days (now that’s more like a vacation). I’ve got something like 1.3gb of photos (and most of them are pretty good, not all pictures of bathroom-humour-type signs, which is something of a departure for me). We’re heading back to Auckland this morning to meet up with our travelling companions. We’ll try and hit the Auckland Zoo before we leave and see a real Kiwi (the bird, not the fruit, we saw the fruit at Pak n’ Save yesterday). Then it’s back on the plane to the land of left-hand drive…

Well, 13hrs of quality seat time later we’re in New Zealand. Unlike SF which was raining and overcast when I left it’s rainy, humid and overcast here. Plus they drive on the “wrong” side which, compounded by the rain and jetlag, has turned me into exactly the sort of driver I love to make fun of in the states? Well, isn’t that why we travel anyway, to give other cultures the opportunity to feel superior?

Seriously, from the point we left the ground in LAX everyone has been really (perhaps even suspiciously?) nice (a bit difficult to parse at times, but still nice). The customs agent in Auckland actually said “Good on ya’ mate” to me (after telling me which line to get into) which made my morning.

We grabbed showers in the hotel room of the couple we’re meeting here and went out for the requisite “American abroad” experience in the 21st century. That’s right, Starbucks! It tasted just like home… We then ate Kebabs (pronounced Kee-baabs, no ka or bob in the word over here) and saw Johnny English (the new Bond movie spoof) which was just the right speed for today. As an aside: it is my deeply held belief that the first day in a _totally wrong_ timezone should be taken as easily as possible, if at all.

Not a bad start the jet-lag is unnoticable (perhaps this can be attributed to my unusually low/normal when I left the states after a week+ of working WAY too many hours) and I haven’t wrecked the rental car yet. Oh well, there’s plenty of time left in the trip.

More Photo.net goodness:

When shopping decisions are easy, it’s because there’s a clear distinction. Like Goldilocks, we can see that one’s too this, one’s too that, and one’s just right. However, when shopping decisions get harder and harder, it’s usually because all the choices are getting closer and closer together, and one choice doesn’t jump out as being clearly better than the others. This should make shopping decisions less important. Or so I’d think.

Strangely, though, what this makes people do is buckle down and work harder and harder to reach their conclusions Ñ and then it makes them doubly partisan and belligerent about the rightness of their choice. What’s the point here? Ego? Arguing for the sake of argument?

For Pete’s sake. Here’s the question: You’re considering three competing cameras. They’re all decent. Which one should you buy? And here’s the right answer: one of ’em.

From Photo.net:

I’ve bought a 10D. I think it’s the first really usable Canon EOS DSLR and the price $1500, while still high, is low enough to make the move. Think of it this way. If you bought a new D30 two years ago and wanted to sell it today, you’d lose maybe $2300. If you bought a new D60 last year and wanted to sell it now, you’ve lost around $1100. With the 10D I don’t know what it will be worth in a year’s time (that depends on what else Canon introduce), but I doubt you could lose more than $500. $500 is 50 rolls of film.

In case you were looking for a reason

Found this. If you haven’t read the Cluetrain Manifesto then you should skim it before reading the Gluetrain Manifesto. Some highlights:

In the course of my new job I’ve been learning a lot more about XSLT (and related XML technologies). This quote really sums up what it’s been like:

… the learning curve for XSLT is quite high, and deciphering it can be a challenge for newcomers. In fact, creating, deciphering, and modifying complex XSLT examples can test the mettle of even the best application developers. To exacerbate this problem, familiar design, development, debugging, profiling, and testing tools used to aid the creation of robust code cannot be used with XSLT. – Source Article

Apparently what I’ve been experiencing is “mettle testing”.

From John Robb’s Radio Weblog (thanks Scott).

A war for liberation requires that we arm, train, and support freedom fighters in Iraq. We haven’t even tried to do that. We didn’t even start serious talks with the Iraqi National Congress until last week. The Kurds have languished in silent obscurity until recently. The propoganda we sent into Iraq doesn’t (as far as I have seen) incite people to revolt. Clearly, the US military didn’t want to deal with armed freedom fighters in the post Saddam military protectorate. We didn’t want their participation. Our inaction means that a popular revolt won’t happen. It can’t happen. This portion of the US strategy is clearly schizophrenic. We want popular support, but we don’t really want it because it can get out of hand. – Source Blog

This guy is worth reading!