|

I’ve fin­ished read­ing How to Lose Your Altruism How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the review is up. Also upgraded to Wordpress 2.7, although since I’m using my own cus­tom theme the changes will be all on the backend.

I attempted to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my Macbook, which failed pretty spec­tac­u­larly. The prob­lem is that I still want OS X to be acces­si­ble because all my stuff is there¹, but the Solaris installer’s fdisk doesn’t han­dle the GUID par­ti­tion table that MacOS X/rEFIt requires. There used to be hackarounds in 2008.05 (which is what all the “installer howto”-style blog posts were writ­ten for), but those paths were closed in 2008.11. Specifically, in 2008.05 the installer used to have a remount­able root par­ti­tion and exe­cutes fdisk using path-aware meth­ods (i.e. “sys­tem()”). In the new installer, the root par­ti­tion can­not be remounted read-write, and the installer calls fdisk using an absolute path (i.e. using “exec()”), so you can’t use the hacky over­rides to make it not over­write OS X’s par­ti­tion table.

After a dozen times around the block using var­i­ous online-suggested meth­ods, I couldn’t jus­tify not being able to use my lap­top any longer and just re-installed OS X, then put Ubuntu 8.10 on, which I’m using pretty much exclu­sively now.

1. Yes, I’m a prag­matic freedom-hating douchebag… or was, so long as OS X worked bet­ter than I could rea­son­ably expect out of a Linux sys­tem. It hasn’t really been up to my angry stan­dards for a while, so fuck it.

I’ve updated the blog theme, and I’m just enough of a pre­ten­tious bas­tard to talk about it.

Two years ago, I took a pho­to­graph of the “back forty” behind my apart­ment build­ing. The build­ing itself was stuck at the edge of civ­i­liza­tion, at the end of a small cul-de-sac hang­ing off a street which divided the pseudo-suburb of DeKalb, IL from the farm­land which sur­rounds it. I’ve one of that series of shots as my desk­top wall­pa­per for a while now, some­thing I stopped last week.

The image itself seemed fit­ting for my exist­ing blog title (Homage To Icarus), and I’ve always wanted to use it as a back­ground spread for this blog. Along the way, I decided to re-implement the blog as a soft­ware project, stored com­pletely in sub­ver­sion, using ven­dor branches of Wordpress, built in Zend 6 (Eclipse + some pro­pri­etary PHP stuff that I don’t actu­ally use for this).

The theme itself was based on a thought I’d had a long time ago about the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Namely, the utter shame­lesness and pro­pa­ganda of it. As back­ground, the United States makes it’s friends look bet­ter, and it’s ene­mies look worse than they really are. There’s more than just an ele­ment of car­toon­ish silli­ness every time some bas­tard or other is des­ig­nated “The Next Hitler” by an spokesper­son for the Executive Branch. Every gov­ern­ment does it to their for­eign rivals, and the extrem­ists in one’s own coun­try are also like­wise attacked.

What arche­typal Western gov­ern­ments typ­i­cally do not do is call other mem­bers of the gov­ern­ment “trai­tors,” schem­ing to sell Our Country down the river to who­ever the bad guy is this time around. In this regard, what the 2004 elec­tion reminded me of most was read­ing George Orwell’s descrip­tions of polit­i­cal life in the 1930s; the faux nation­al­ism that dis­be­lieved all of Stalin’s crimes (on the part of the left) and invented hor­rors by the anti-fascist resis­tance (on the part of the right). It’s sim­ply depress­ing to look at the garbage that peo­ple are expected to believe about their polit­i­cal ene­mies: Reds Crucify Nuns, Kerry con­spires to sell out U.S. with Jane Fonda dur­ing Paris Peace Talks, and this is work­ing right up to today, Barack Obama a secret Muslim, per­son­ally respon­si­ble for the cap­i­tal cri­sis.

So I started type­set­ting this web­site like a book printed in the 1930s. The header was set in a fat serif type, like the chap­ter title of a flour­ish­ing book — as opposed to one that would sim­ply print the chap­ter title in bold upper­case and waste a half a page. I dithered about that, added and removed other graph­i­cal ele­ments like the sidebar.

And this week­end I had time to sim­ply sit down and work on the site. Given then exi­gent cir­cum­stances (i.e. the implo­sion of the econ­omy), I started googling for “1930s,” and ended up see­ing some adver­tise­ments and page lay­outs from Popular Mechanix, the obvi­ous pre­cur­sor. At that point the right answer pre­sented itself: don’t model this on a book from the 1930s, model it on the other side, a mag­a­zine adver­tise­ment. The rest was sim­ply a mat­ter of fin­ish­ing the implementation.

So far as future work, what I’d like to do is retract the side­bar into a tab, and I’m think­ing about the use of drop shad­ows and gra­di­ents to give a dis­tor­tion effect when it slides out… We’ll see .

And hope­fully the last one, as it appears floated images break the LJ theme I’m using.

Some ran­dom thoughts to com­mem­o­rate the blog retitling/redesign:

Primitivism is Bullshit

It may be inescapable at this point, all chances for decent evo­lu­tion hav­ing been squan­dered on jet-into-building porn, but going back to pil­ing mud is bull­shit, I don’t care how egal­i­tar­ian the mud-piling com­mune is. This thought, wrung dry, is the inspi­ra­tion for the reti­tling. The new feel is retro, I think, like 1998 or sumpin’.

Justice is not Vengeance!

I have a prob­lem with the McNews, battle-o-the-sexes, class-analysis bereft ver­sion of fem­i­nism. The ver­sion that says that sex­ism will truly be dead when women can exploit men with the same verac­ity that men exploit women today, aka “when women are equally rep­re­sented among CEOs then every­thing will be OK.” I’ve noticed it’s often the ver­sion of “fem­i­nism” that wishes to inflict fash­ion mag­a­zines, pink shirts, body-image para­noia, and objec­ti­fi­ca­tion on men, or at least would set­tle for it as some form of pay­back for every media image from June Cleaver to Jenna Jameson.

So I splurged on a new UPS Saturday, an APC Back-UPS RS 1500—hope­fully it’ll work, it’s been charg­ing so-far, and hope­fully the con­troller soft­ware works under Ubuntu. I have an UPS already, but it’s under­pow­ered for my sys­tem. So when the guy next door turns on his (fire-code vio­lat­ing) microwave, it flux­u­ates the power just enough to kick in the bat­tery, which promptly trips it’s cir­cuit breaker (effec­tively tog­gling the power to my machine). Bigger, bad­der UPS it is.

I’ve also updated my blog tem­plate in honor of Wordpress 2.0. The tem­plate uses JavaScript menus and tables-for-layout, but I don’t really care about niceties in web design any­more. If every­one used a recent copy of Firefox or Safari, I would ditch tables in favor of doing all the lay­out in CSS and JavaScript, leav­ing a clean, pressed, cell-phone friendly blog in it’s place, but a full third of the peo­ple view­ing this site (includ­ing most employ­ers, sadly enough) use IE, so the more I do in CSS and JavaScript, the more “work, damn you” moments I cre­ate for myself.

IE, BTW, is the devil. Not a min­ion, not a hench­fiend, the full-on devil him­self. I’m going to tweak the tem­plate to show a link to GetFirefox​.com if you aren’t using a Mozilla browser.

On the work front, I fig­ured out how to do a incre­men­tal progress-bar using JavaScript and PHP, so a ten-minute val­i­da­tion of 30,000 records in a MySQL data­base doesn’t look like it’s crashed your browser or hung. The way, BTW, is to write two classes, a JavaScript one which actu­ally han­dles adding the images to the win­dow and updates them, etc. and a PHP class to han­dle cal­cu­lat­ing what to do, and then writes out JavaScript to update the progress-bar image (ugli­est part was actu­ally get­ting PHP to flush it’s buffers).

It works well, in spite of it’s sta­tus as a sick hack. The val­i­da­tion results are stored in another table in the data­base, so the items lists and edit­ing pages can dis­play a “this record has issues” icon. Yes, yes, the solu­tion is to prop­erly val­i­date input, blah-blah-blah. If I was rewrit­ing the sys­tem, that’s what I’d do, but the soft­ware didn’t for a long time (and still doesn’t, in a grad­u­ally dwin­dling set of cases), and many of our cus­tomers have loads of data they’re drag­ging in from a vari­ety of pro­pri­etary Access night­mares. So pro­vid­ing a “here’s a list of things to fix” page when get­ting a new cus­tomer going with the sys­tem is really use­ful — as is mark­ing all the bro­ken items as such when­ever they appear in the system.

Oh, and I missed the release of FUSA 2.13.4 (in time to get in with the GNOME 2.13.4 release) by a half-hour. I’ll choose to blame biol­ogy — in that the woman who lives across the hall wran­gled me into giv­ing her a ride to the bus sta­tion about an hour before the release was due. Yeah, I’m a sucker like that.

And now it’s off to my 4 hours of sleep, hop­ing that I can wake myself early enough to get into the office and find out what’s wrong with the CVS server. Sigh.…