reesesWeb

This is the HD STB/PVR that Comcast supplies.

Motorola DCT 6208 product page

Cost = $10/mo, or $3/mo for HD. (Not sure if the box is the same if you just get HD, or if it's the 6200) In Bethesda, MD.

Firewire output is output-only. Use VirtualDVHS on the Mac to record. Not sure about rumors that you can expand capacity with an external firewire diskpack if output-only limitation is true. Appears that most content is not 5c, so there aren't any recording problems right now.

MySQL Tutorial - Import or Export A Database

Digging out the orphan pages from the old blog, I came across this:

Interesting article on OpenTalk load balancing. Especially interesting is this quote:

Question from Len - which will distribute load better - a random round robin, or a sequential? Something for us to think about as he gets ready to run. The sequential distributed pretty evenly. There are some useful statistics available from the clients and servers - how long (aggregate) requests queued up, etc. Random round robin does worse, as the random assignment sometimes tosses "too much" load at a single server.

Inspired by the many "this is what I'm running on my Mac" posts, I felt compelled to sheep-up and add my own voice to the rumble.

• Path Finder

I just started using this based on an unremembered blog entry somewhere, but the big win for me is the "Drop Stack": rather than keep multiple finder windows open for copying, or having to drag a folder to the shelf for easy access, you can push files onto this stack, and then pop them off when you've navigated somewhere else. While the default intra-filesystem operation is "move", it appears only to copy between filesystems.

I was walking home last night, up Market Street, and I heard the following conversation:

"I need cable, because I can't have DSL, you know?"
"Yeah."
"I mean, cable is so much faster. It's not a T1, but it's fast."
"Yeah."
"It's so much faster than DSL. DSL is faster than dialup, but it's just another kind of dialup, you know?"
"Yeah."

This fell out of another project I'm working on. I needed to calculate a string edit distance for sets of strings, and I settled on Levenshtein because I'm lazy, and it was the only algorithm I knew and didn't have to learn. Funny how that works out. This is not at all optimised, and exhibits some of my lisp programming peculiarities, so be forewarned. Tested on XEmacs 21.4.

This is an elisp script that will remove duplicate lines from the selected region. Behavior can either mimic uniq on Unix or remove all duplicate lines from an unsorted file. Tested on both GNU Emacs 20.7.1 and XEmacs 21.4.

;;; uniq.el --- Remove duplicate lines

;; Copyright (C) 2003 Art Taylor

;; Filename: uniq.el
;; Author: Art Taylor 
;; Version: 1.0
;; Keywords: uniq, duplicates

;; [Commentary]
;;
;; Remove duplicate lines from a region.  uniq-region behaves in a
;; fashion similar to the Unix utility 'uniq', only removing a line

  

Prior to the release of QuickSilver, I was annoyed with the lack of a Windows "Start Menu" type facility under Mac OS X. I had converted from Windows, and I was used to having a lot of applications ready to launch. I don't like a cluttered Dock, so putting every single application there wasn't an option. Since I was new to the Mac, I was promiscuously trying just about every application that crossed my path, and I needed a more scalable solution.

This is an elisp script that will sort-of duplicate the functionality of sites such as http://www.changedetect.com, which suck. Don't use them. Use this script, and when you get sick of it in twenty minutes, write a real program, with real threading, and a real UI, and then give me a copy. Yes, I can hear you OmniWeb types laughing at the rest of us pathetic souls. Tested on XEmacs 21.4.

Addendum: It was suggested to me by one of the employees of the aforementioned service that I was off on a "mindless rant" regarding their suction, and was asked to give evidence. I went to the site to start a list, and was greeted with a MSSQL server error. I don't think I need to continue. :-)

Despite the fact that I hated my Treo 600 after a year of ownership, I bought a Treo 650 soon after its release. My three-day opinion is that I like it more than the 600, but I've made exactly one phone call, and that lasted as long as it took to say,"Hey. I'll meet you there. See you in five minutes."

I spent much of the Saturday after opening the box building a script to receive jpeg images as attachments via email, extracting the attachments, storing them on my server, and then uploading them to Flickr. I monkeyed with exim for SMTP auth and TLS, which is in that category of enjoyable activities called "wasting my life dorking with stupid Linux."

Note: if you're looking for a headset you can buy, I ended up buying this Logitech headset and have been reasonably happy with it.

At first, my expectations were not high. I had the only-ever-used-as-microphones iPod headphones nearby, and I was using the laptop's built in microphone. This microphone is really close to a fan, and a particularly noisy hard drive. Not a good experience. However, I didn't have a real headset around the apartment, so I thought about how I would improvise a suitable alternative.

Goodbye Tsugumi, by Banana Yoshimoto

I like all of Banana Yoshimoto's books except Amrita. They flow the same way for me as certain Ernest Hemingway and Charles Bukowski books. I seem to get absorbed more easily into books written in the first person, and in a more conversational style. Third-person writing seems too cold for me.

The AcomData External SATA Drive has the distinction of being the very first thing I have ever returned to a store. Ever. I've put up with a lot of expensive dreck just to avoid the inconvenience of gathering up my receipt and packaging, driving to the store, standing in line, and explaining to someone why I should get my money back. AcomData has given me reason to do this.

How did they manage to overcome my sloth?

The drive came with a PCI SATA card with an external connector. I thought this was a nice idea, because not everyone had external SATA or E-SATA connectivity, and for a desktop, the option was pop out one of the PCI slot covers to run the cable out from the motherboard, which isn't a smart idea, but one I was prepared to execute.

I'm fairly happy with the Garmin Nuvi 350. I haven't had one since my Garmin 45 that I got in 1995 (jeez!) back when I was working on marine navigation software. The reason I've done without is that we did cool stuff with GPS charting, and all of the handheld or portable units that offered similar functionality all came up very much wanting.

However, moving back to San Francisco coincided with automobile GPS kits becoming just good enough to tolerate their peccadillos while saving many hours navigating our way around the city.

Moving back to San Francisco and ordering a new Digital Cable/HD/PVR box from Comcast seems to be the easiest way to upgrade cable boxes. I had a 6208 in Bethesda for a couple years, and while better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, had its downsides.

Quickly, the good things about the Motorola DCT 6412 Phase III compared to the 6208.

• Dual-tuner is sweet, especially after using the single-tuner 6208 for a while. I used to have frequent programming conflicts, and now, only when I have to do "start a few minutes early," or "end a few minutes late," recordings to get around ABC's obnoxious anti-Tivo programming.

I bought this because I was shopping at Fry's after returning the AcomData SATA drive. I almost bought the 500 GB FW800 version of the One Touch II, but then I noticed that the 600 GB version of the new One Touch III Turbo was there, and if I was going to spend $150 more on the 500 GB single-spindle unit, why not spend $100 over that for the 600 GB two-spindle unit that would be faster? I.e., I'd spend $150 knowing I'd be unhappy not spending $250, but $250 was too much to blow on "yet another" external hard drive when my wife was with me.

It's adequate, but I have too many firewire drives now -- in all, three drives providing about 1TB of storage hanging off of my Powerbook. This stinks when the Mac decides it needs to stat all the mounted drives for some reason, and all three spin up, and I get to enjoy the spinning beach ball of death.

The performance, according to iozone, is comparable with the Maxtor One Touch II I used to benchmark USB 2.0 vs FW400 performance. I.e., good enough. The only arguably bad thing I've noticed about it (other than its ugly case) is that it doesn't power up on its own after a power outage. Yes, I failed to plug it into the UPS because I was lazy and didn't want to crawl under my desk. However, my laptop didn't notice the outage, I was not home for the outage, but a shell window I had left open was freaking out every time I tried to ls or cd.

Obviously, I'm playing around with a new blog engine. I wrote a couple scripts to migrate pages, check for references, migrate those pages, and then start deleting old pages. I may have missed some, and should probably go through them manually. It probably left much havoc in your RSS readers.

Which I may not do. After all, it's there, it's linkable, and I didn't bother importing my ancient Blogger blog either. Now that's a thought.

I was doing some dinking with iTunes today and I just happened to stumble over an album that I had ripped years ago. This was back in the early days of the CDDB, and apparently, CDDB data quality was not up to the fine (or at least debatable) quality of the Wikipedia.

I never listen to this album anyway (the version of La Marseillaise is truly awful, and that was the only reason I bought the CD in the first place) but it's amusing to find someone loved the french enough to have bought the CD, start transcribing the album, and run out of steam a third of the way through and start making song names up.

The problem with pre-announcing products while taking orders for them is that customers have a lot of time to think about why that purchase might be a bad idea. Such was the case with the MacBook Pro. I ordered one a while ago, then after a month of reading all of the warnings regarding Apple's likelihood of making a good CPU architecture shift right out of the gate (0% or "snowball in hell" was the general opinion, based primarily on 68k->PPC), I cancelled my order.