A great article on one of my old joys of computing: Interactive Fiction. Zork, Hitchhickers Guide to the Galaxy, Deadline, Advent. The article is a great summary of the history of IF, the current boom in new IF and four full interviews wtih current IF authors.
Remember, beware of the GRUE.
Dead computer.
Rebuild Software.
Corrupt Hard Drive.
Rebuld Software.
Domain Registration Expired.
Computers Suck.
Well, Apple shipped iTunes for Windows. Apple's attitude is wonderful. How many other firms would put a headline like this on thier home page?
Microsoft Internet Explorer is Crap
It has been a few weeks since I bashed Microsoft.
I have finally started designing my web sites with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a way to provide web pages with much greater layout control. You can almost create pages as complex as you could in a desktop publishing program such as QuarkXPress. CSS is an internet standard. It has been around for years. And is widely supported by all of the web browsers versions that have been released for the last 3 or 4 years.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows is a total piece of shit. It supports CSS, but not the official standard. NOOOO. The rat bastards and Microsoft have created a series of Internet Explorer for Windows versions that all support different versions of Microsoft's very non-standard crap CSS implementation. Yes, Microsoft knows how to properly support CSS. Their version of Internet Explorer for Macintosh has done so for about five years.
Microsoft is not evil. They are very successful marketers, and monopoly builders. And they are often very poor programmers, and do not play well with others.
Advice to my Windows using friends. Use Netscape Mozilla for a web browser. It is highly standards compliant and very fast. Oh, and NO annoying popup windows will bother you while you browse the web.
Sometimes I wonder if Jobs doesn't really think this way.
MS is not to blame for everything
After ligtly hammering on Microsoft, I read this report of a nuclear reactor being hit by the Slammer worm. Okay, the plant has been offline for a year an a half, but still this is bad.
Now I don't blame Microsoft for this. Windows is NOT a ultra secure platform. Sure it should be more secure than it is, but Windows is a general purpose OS and by its nature not designed to run a nulcear power plant. When you need software to run such critical computers, you need to do two things: 1) Don't allow any connections to the Internet. ZERO, NONE, ZILCH, NULL. 2) Use a special purprose OS. Some of the very high end Unixes might qualify: AIX, HP/UX, OpenBSD, and some of the real-time/embedded OS's might qualify: OS/9, QNX.
Okay, this story is no doubt over blown. The system in question was appearently for monitoring, not controling. Still it sounds like this would have been a very bad situation if the Plant had be online.
But what the heck. While another worm is chewing through gaping MS security holes, I say this tag line on slashdot.org:
One World, One Web, One Program - Microsoft ad Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer - Adolf Hitler
Fair? No.
Funny? Yes.
But we could also bring Tolkien into this:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Useful Macintosh Key sequences
Magical Macintosh Key Sequences. You know I am always amazed the Windows still uses stupid Alt-Numeric Keypad sequences to produce foriegn letters and digbats.
rsync wget crontab is all comming together
Coooooooooool!
Demonstrating Support for The Bill of Rights.
I ran into Eric Niederkruger at our favorite coffee house Higher Grounds, we discussed the gjActive project for about an hour. Then Eric said that he was heading over to a demonstration by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. I decided to join him. About 15 of us spent the lunch hour standing along side walk of North Avenue next to Mesa College. This is one of the highest traffic areas in Grand Junction. We had 10 placards for each of the amendments that make up our Bill of Rights. I got the hold the Second Admendment - the Right to Bear Arms.
During the hour, I suspect that we waved our placards at nearly a 1000 vehicles. Not one of the people who passed us expressed any hostility. Perhaps 90% of them showed total apathy, but 10% who expressed positive support were very enthusiastic.
While I stood there a young man on a bicycle came by, asked if we were protesting against the War in Iraq. I explained that we are only making a statement in support of the Bill of Rights. He said that the is from Hungry and is traveling around America this year. He has had a hard time understanding the real world practice of American Democracy. Why aren't more people active?
Oh, and thanks to Jimmy Mayfield for the nice picture! By the way, Jimmy sent along this WMD 404 link.
Implementing a SSH keychain under Mac OS X
I have been spending quite a bit of time developing a better infrastructure to maintain my websites. Specifically my new blog system. For my none techie friends this will not be interesting, but I finally figured out how to get SSH to log into a remote server using stored keys and passphrases so that I can avoid having to enter a password everytime. Even though I am not using a password, the actually security is increased.
My first problem was that after creating the RSA/DSA keys and installing them on my server, SSH still required a password. After many hours of research on Google, I discovered the problem wsa that the file permissions were too permisive on remote users home directory. Strange considering this was a default setting . . .
Next I wanted to make use of the key_agent feature of SSH to facilitate automatic logining, and I found this very cool program via Mac OS X Hints.com called keychain that helps with key session management.
After much nashing of teeth and pulling of hair, I got the keychain to work. The current version of the keychain software has evolved beyond what was descibed in an article at IBM's developer works. keychain is now smart enough to work with different shells automatically.
The keychain program no longer makes the ~/.ssh-agent file to cache the keys, instead there is a ~/.keychain folder that includes files for use by different shell programs. I use tcsh as my shell so I added these lines to my .tcshrc file:
/usr/bin/keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/.ssh/id_dsa ~/.ssh/identity source ~/.keychain/YOURHOSTNAME-csh
where YOURHOSTNAME will naturaly be what every is your systems name.
Now auto login joy
I know many of my friends feel very let down by the inconsistent nature of my blog entries of late.
My new pyBlosxom web software is coming along very nicely. The server side software is working nearly perfectly, and now I am focusing on improving the workflow to make it very easy to write stories and update the site.
Right now I am testing my rsync setup to automatically update the web server with my new blog entries with a minimal of fuss.
Well, the big move was finally made. I am now using pyBlosxom to run this blog. I have been working on this on and off since last Feburary. The transisition has been and will continue be a little rocky. Most notable, is the fact that blog entries have been less frequent in the past week.
Alas, I still have to deal with problems with how the blog entries are dated. Until I have this resolved, you may see some blog entries that are a bit out of order and have the wrong dates. I know what I have to do, but it will take a little while to fix this.
But I have every expectation that this transistion will be worth it:
This is going to be very cool.
Well the new site design is nearly done and the conversion to pyBlosxom has gone smoothly. Several new features like the category listing on located on the right have been added. Still allot of design tweaks to do.
The two big items are determining the best way to keep dates of articles in sync, and too spend some more time thinking about my new catagories which are currently rather haphazard.
What is up with my blog software?
In the mid 1980's I read an article in Scientific American about a computer program that analysed a given text and created an output based on the style and content of the original. What this means is that if I feed the program the complete Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the resulting output will look, sound and feel like ACD wrote it. However, it will not make much sense:
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So last night I found a little program called Travesty to generate such text. Now the scary part. Running Travesty against my own writing. Specifically my blog. The resulting text sounds like me quite foaming at the mouth mad, and even includes the web links and pictures:
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Hmm, actually that sounds just about as coherent as I normally do.... Maybe monkeys could really write my blog, if not Hamlet.
Freya's internal DVD/CDR drive died, and I had to ship her back to Apple. About three weeks ago, Apple had overnighted me a return box but I waited until I could spare Freya before sending her in.
Last Friday afternoon, I packed Freya in the return box and call Airborne Express for a pickup. Apple had Freya back to me by Tuesday afternoon.
The goddess of the Valkyries is back!
Hmm, after a very long stretch of stable computing, my PowerBook has had two crashes in the last three days. The first crash I had was a "core dump" which is a very low level system crash. This is something that is very bad (but which my Windows systems do fairly regularly where they are know as Blue Screens of Death). The other crash was a loss of my user session, which from a user perspective, is just as bad, but technically is not as deeply rooted. Prior to this, I think that it has been something like a year and a half since I had any incidents like this under Mac OS 10.x.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is a computer that is always running and never shutdown, and it is a notebook computer that I carry everywhere, and a wide variety of devices hook up to it and removed, and it moves between several networks. Normally without any problems.
But now that a problem or two has appeared, I am not happy.
John Gilmore is struggling
to radio dramas via the internet, Jana may only have any messages occur
during the started getting some ideas are Fractal Yes, I know is that
Jerry Moorman memesphere. (Soon for Google Gods. Toby did a technical support
PG in the now warm soil! SAD: While the import. I assume that when pressed
with best actor nomination. This is a complex find and return strings.
It maybe possible for an act to be both Good
and Evil are separate distinction is very bad influenced by "bowling".
As impressed with their own money. Folks are definitely would have
gone with me in the UUUS