wiredfool

I’ve been listening to roots music lately. For some reason, the “O Brother, Where Art Thou” soundtrack has been running through my head.

So I’ve been playing that, and The Dead’s Blues for Allah (with Franklin’s Tower) I’m not sure what gets to me about that song, but goes straight to my brain and stays there for hours at a time.

***Flamenco!

Remember the Omar concert last week? Well, there are mp3s of some songs off the coming album up on his website.

I’d recommend one or two of them, but they’re all good. Amorosa is one of my favorites when done in concert, it always seems to be teasing me with domething just beyond my reach. Some of the tracks seem to hint at his other songs, some evoke Santana, others Tito Puente.

Rainbows is also on that page. Funky. The first time I heard it, the bass line went completely through me, grabbed me and spun me around. But then, they had a few more amps and speakers at that show than I do at home.

I really like the fact that he has player listings for windows, mac and linux. It’s nice to see the alternative computing platforms supported. By the way, I think Omar gets it. He’s got high quality mp3s on his site, of complete songs, off an album that’s going to come out soon. It’s a tease. Followed by me purchasing the album as soon as I see it. Hell, I already go to almost all his shows in Seattle.

What would be really cool would be soundboard copies of his shows, maybe only for attendees, maybe for everyone. Each show would be about 100 megs, so the hosting bill might be pretty high if it was done from a centralized arrangement. But it would tide me over between shows…

***Reading Material

By now, all the bloggers have seen the case of the poor guy who was kicked off two flights for reading “Hayduke Lives!” and later had his Harry Potter book examined for 20 minutes by National Guard troops. I have some more suggestions for dangerous reading material. Phillip K. Dick in particular.

Ubik -There is the clear and present danger that the plane may regress to a 1930’s era biplane on the way to your destination. Of course, it’s up for great philosophical discussion whether or not the plane actually exists and if the passengers are alive.

Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said – There is the danger that the entire plane may blink in and out of some poor sod’s bad trip.

Any PKD short story collection – Causality violations are very dangerous when aboard aircraft. So are conspiracies where everything is out to get you.

***iPod Killer App

iPod + digital camera w/ firewire + long vacation. Since laptops and vacations don’t mix, I bought $100 worth of compact flash to support the pictures that I took on my recent trip to Cozumel. If my camera had a firewire port and the iPod had been out, I would have gotten one of those instead. 5 gigs is a lot more than 4x better than 64 megs of flash.

My next camera will probably have firewire. Hopefully airport too. Can you imagine a digital camera in your hand shooting directly to an iPod in your backpack? Look Ma, no wires! Wirelessfool, here I come!

***Schrodinger’s Server

I have a test server that only crashes when I’m not looking at it. When I’m hammering on it, trying to make it crash, it’s fine. When I leave it alone in the corner of the office, it’s fine. When I go home for dinner, it croaks. Sometimes.

***Mp3s

I finally properly set up my mp3 server again after its meltdown 6 months ago (“Flakey Hardware Resolution”). Or rather, I set up the ID3/ m3u system so that my radio userland player can use the 15 cds that I’ve added since march. It’s amazing how a little new music can make a day change its pace. So I’ve been listening to the barenaked ladies. Fun music, with hooks that you wouldn’t believe.

What you might not believe that I hadn’t heard Stunt (from 1998) before this month. It’s so easy to hear without listening, or as I used to say: ‘It’s subliminal if you’re not paying attention’.

I keep asking questions about OSX for capabilities that I want to see. So, the iFAQ. Unfortunately, since they’re my questions, I don’t have answers yet.

• IPSEC? I know that it’s in the darwin source tree, but it is not enabled by default. It would be really nice to be able to use it for transport level security out of the box.
• Cocoa looks cool. Is there an xml-rpc library that’s easily accessible? There could be some interesting uses for this…
• I’d like to change keyboard layouts. I remember in System 6&7 having resources that I could mess with in resedit to change the behavior of keyboards. In particular, I’d like to map the capslock key on the standard usb keyboard to control. I have one ADB keyboard with this configuration, and I really like it. I also remember from resource hacking that the capslock key was the one key that was different from all the others.
• I’d also like emacs shortcut keys in as many places as possible. I seem to remember reading about a hack like this somewhere.
• And I’d like drivers for a kritter-cam

*** Update 3/4/2002.

Well, no ipsec yet, no ipv6, and no kritter cam yet. But, there’s a page of keyboard hacks including caps lock – control remapping and messing with the keyboard dictionary mapping files.

There is a cocoa xmlrpc library, but I’m having trouble building it.

3/6 isn’t that bad, overall.

*** Update 5/2002

Ipsec will be in 10.2, jaguar. I’m anxiously awaiting that release, as it is supposed to get much faster as well.

You know when there’s a line of traffic backed up so that you can’t get across the intersection? So drivers will wait until they can get across to enter the intersection. This is apparently the cue for someone to make a right on red and block the intersection.

Yesterday on the way home this happened twice. On the same street (Denny). At consecutitive intersections (Westlake and Dexter). I would post the license plate numbers but my camera was in the trunk.

At least they aren’t just sailing through on a red light. I’ve nearly been hit a couple of times in the last 3 weeks by people going through 5 or 10 second old red lights.

***Handwriting

Sometimes when I’m writing, I look down and recognize the handwriting as not my own. Sometimes it’s my sister’s, sometimes it looks like my mom or dad’s. Either it’s genetic or my handwriting has gotten mare variable than it used to be.

Then again, I’m starting to see fonts as handwriting. IM windows look wrong if the font is not what I’m used to seeing from that person. I find it hard to IM when I’m not writing in 10 point New York, black on white background.

***iPod.

I want one. This is pure toy envy. It’s only a little bigger than my cell phone. I just wish it came in graphite. or ti. And I’d like a microphone jack.

Last night Omar played an early show at the Tractor, emphasizing his flamenco and acoustic styles. He was joined by Mario Butkovich on guitar and his long time percussionst Arturo Rodriguez.

I’ve heard his acoustic flamenco before but I was still stunned by how good it sounded. It was fiery, fast, and soulful. When Arturo played, it didn’t look like his hands were going fast enough for the music that was coming out. It’s too bad that it’s another month and a half before they come back to town. But they may have a new album by then, so the wait will be worth it.

Saw Iron Monkey last night. What a great way to spend a couple of hours. Amazing fight scenes, clear moral lessons, and the good guys win. Yeah it’s a formula, but it’s a fun formula.

I’ll ignore the violations of Newton’s law and most of the other laws of physics. I’ll ignore that there always seems to be one more undamaged piece of bamboo to break.

***Open Source Software

I’m really liking OSX and Open Source Software. Today, I downloaded two software packages as source that aren’t included in any of the various ports collections. Neither compiled out of the box. One quick pass through bugzilla for the first yielded a patch that worked. A quick google search, and two pages later I had the solution for the other one, involving building with a different switch and more include directories. Had these been non source distributions, I doubt that it could have been done at all.

That’s very profound Jimmy, but what’s it mean?

It means that I spent saturday fooling around with computers. What else could it mean.

Been playing with writing a jabber client library in frontier. It can converse, send and recieve presence, and make new users. So far.

Of course, to send a message, I manually run a script…

Eric,

I get:

Sorry! There was an error: Can't compile this script because of a syntax error.

When I tell it to ‘index now’.

I’ve tried disabling/enabling the plugin, as well as a clean install.

Clark

This doesn’t work.

local {
  	strIn ; \// Wrong!.
  	bytes = 0}
try {
    msg(tcp.statusStream(adrConn^.stream, @bytes));
 	  tcp.readStreamBytes(adrConn^.stream, bytes, 10, @strIn);}

If you have to pass in the address of a string (at least to the tcp verbs), you need to give it a value. It can’t just be a nil name.

local {
	strIn =""; \// Right!
	bytes = 0;}