Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Alive again

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There was some unintended downtime here last night through mid-day today — unfortunately, I don’t really know much more than that. In the midst of browsing around last night, I lost my connection, and nothing I could do had much of an effect. My DSL modem appeared to be working, but my machine insisted that there was no Internet to be found.

I called Speakeasy and opened a service ticket with them. They couldn’t figure out what the situation was, so they passed it on to Covad (the next company upstream).

Here’s the gory details from the service ticket:

Customer is sync no surf, no E2E ping. Checked TCP/IP settings on multiple computers. Isolated 1 PC, powercycled, checked cables to no avail. CFI, DSL light show sync but cannot E2E ping. Some traffic incrementing on line. Please reset DSLAM card, thanks!

Upstream Cells Received from CPE: 764 ( 130271135 )
Downstream Cells Transmitted to CPE: 140 ( 97056973 )
ATM HEC Errors: 0 ( 53 )
Upstream Line Errors: 5 ( 2063 )
Downstream Line Errors: 0 ( 624 )
Training Starts: 1 ( 10 )
Time Since Snapshot Counters Reset: 8 Min. 57 Sec.

What all that means, I’m not entirely sure of, but at some point during the day, things kicked in again. I’m not sure when, as I wasn’t checking in on a regular basis, but I did get a response from my webserver at about 7pm. From the response on the service ticket, though, Covad looks a bit confused themselves as to what the issue was…

Status changed from NEW to OPEN-Pending Partner Testing
DSLAM Trunk Status: OK
Technology: DMT8-2
Card Status: OK
Port Status: Up
Actual Port Rates: 1536 kbps Downstream / 768 kbps Upstream
Margin: 20.0 dB Downstream / 9.5 dB Upstream
the dslam shows the loop up with no errors

ATM pinging the backhaul was successfull
ATM pinging the cpe and it failed
I reprovisioned and that didn’t help
The dslam, transport and backhaul switch show increments of 1 to 2 cells at a time
I put the z-link in a loop back and the atm ping passed
At this point this looks like a cpe issue
Please have the end user power cycle and try again if still unable to surf then we need to RMA the end user anew KIT. Thank you

Ah, well. All’s well that ends well, and everything appears to be back up and running.

Thankfully

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I finally got a new digital camera last week…. It’s pretty nice. I wish I could download pictures to my PC. Thankfully, I have a Mac now. (I hated when annoying people said things like that before I had a Mac. ;)

— Evan Williams, Back Behind the Lens

Drool

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Everyone else on the ‘net has reported this already, but hey, I’ve got visitors — I’m allowed to be a bit slow.

Steve Jobs announced the usual slew of goodies during his WWDC keynote speech. To sum up:

  • A ‘sneak preview’ of Panther, the next major update to Mac OS X, due to be released before the end of the year. Some parts look brilliant (Exposé), some I’m not sold on yet (the new Finder).
  • Safari updates to v1.0. All the previous Safari goodness, plus it finally renders Kirsten’s site correctly. Yay!
  • iChat becomes iChat AV, with audio and video conferencing in addition to text chat. Looks nifty, I just don’t have a camera for my mac.
  • Good thing Apple also introduced the iSight camera! Again, looks nifty, but I don’t have the \$150 to drop on that at the moment.
  • PowerMac G5: God, I need more money. 1.6Ghz G5 at the low end, 1.8Ghz G5 for the midrange, and dual 2.0Ghz G5 for the high end.

Peace

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“Aydan,” spoke Niagat, “I would serve Heraak; I would see an end to war; I would be one of your warmasters.”

“Would you kill to achieve this, Nigat?”

“I would kill.”

“Would you kill Heraak to achieve this?”

“Kill Heraak, my master?” Niagat paused and considered the question. “If I cannot have both, I would see Heraak dead to see an end to war.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“And, Aydan, I would do the killing.”

“And now, would you die to achieve this?”

“I would risk death as does any warrior.”

“Again, Niagat, that is not my question. If an end to war can only be purchased at the certain cost of your own life, would you die by your own hand to achieve peace?”

Niagat studied upon the thing that Aydan asked. “I am willing to take the gamble of battle. In this gamble there is the chance of seeing my goal. But my certain death, and by my own hand, there would be no chance of seeing my goal. No. I would not take my own life for this. That would be foolish. Have I passed your test?”

“You have failed, Niagat. Your goal is not peace; your goal is to live in peace. Return when your goal is peace alone and you hold a willing knife at your own throat to achieve it. That is the price of a warmaster’s blade.”

— The Enemy Papers, by Barry Longyear

Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver

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The newest book from one of my favorite modern authors, Neal Stephenson, is now available for pre-order at Amazon: Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle.

In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.

Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind — and yet knows that his genius is dwarfed by that of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. He rejects the arcane tradition of alchemy, even as it is giving birth to new ways of understanding the world.

Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London street urchin and is now a reckless wanderer in search of great fortune. The intrepid exploits of Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe.

Eliza is a young woman whose ingenuity is all that keeps her alive after being set adrift from the Turkish harem in which she has been imprisoned since she was a child.

Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between, this magnificent historical epic brings to vivid life a time like no other, and establishes its author as one of the preeminent talents of our own age.

(via Atrios)

UserSpace early beta

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Phil was kind enough to include me as part of his beta testing team for UserSpace, his followup blog client to EspressoBlog, so I’ve been posting most of my posts tonight from UserSpace.

First impressions: quite good! For one reason or another, all of the prior standalone applications I’ve used to post to my weblog have had just enough quirks or annoyances to keep me using the standard MT interface most of the time. Phil actually came closest to what I was looking for with EspressoBlog, and it was the prior reigning champion…but UserSpace has it beat hands down.

UserSpace is fast, organizes the various elements and options available for weblog posts well, and handles all the various little goodies that I like to have available (multiple weblog support, primary and extended entry, excerpt, and even keyword fields, multiple category selection, menus for text formatting and comments — any goodie that you have available within the standard MT interface is in UserSpace). I can even set upload directories individually for any uploaded files. Nicely done!

That said, of course, I’ve stumbled across a couple small bugs (though that’s why they call these ‘betas’, right?). None of them deal-breakers, but worth mentioning.

There’s no indication that UserSpace is doing anything when posting an entry or uploading a file. Some small progress bar or spinning flower (or whatever the OS X dingbat for “I’m thinking, leave me alone” is) would be handy, just so we know that something is going on.

For some reason, I can’t upload files (though this may well be something odd on my end, and not within UserSpace). When I try, I get the following error:

XML-RPC Fault

Fault code: 0
Fault message: Application failed during request deserialization: Can’t locate MIME/Base64.pm in [\@INC]{.citation cites=”INC”} ([\@INC]{.citation cites=”INC”} contains: /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/lib /System/Library/Perl/darwin /System/Library/Perl /Library/Perl/darwin /Library/Perl /Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl/darwin /Network/Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl .) at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib/XMLRPC/Lite.pm line 278.

I ran into some wierdness with categories that seemed to fix itself. I had a couple posts that originally showed up on my main page without categories assigned, but when I put the next post up, the categories mysteriously appeared.

The last thing I ran into actually amused me. After posting the ‘Dean calls for Bush accountability‘ post, I realized that I’d mucked up the link. Easy to fix, as UserSpace has the ability to edit past posts. I jumped in, fixed the goof, and saved the edited post.

Imagine my surprise when after saving the post, it showed up with the ‘Hunting Wabbits’ text formatting option — suddenly Elmer Fudd had posessed my weblog! ;) Apparently, if you don’t specifically choose a text formatting plugin, UserSpace defaults to the standard ‘Convert Line Breaks’ plugin when first submitting a post. Upon editing a post, however, as there is no text formatting option specifically chosen, it defaults to the first item in the menu — which in my case, let Elmer Fudd run rampant. Again, it was an easy fix (just choose the correct text formatting option, and re-save), but it gave me a good laugh when I saw what had happened.

All in all, though, I’m quite happy with where UserSpace is, even in its ‘early beta’ stage.

No help at all

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I got this error message from MS Word today:

Word corrupted table error

Of course, the document has multiple tables embedded in it, and Word isn’t kind enough to tell me which table has become corrupted. I guess I’m just supposed to guess?

Poems for Laila

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I wanted to do two things with this post — test a new feature for the site, and promote one of my favorite bands, Poems for Laila.

I discovered PfL when I was in Germany in the summer of 1991. I saw a display stand advertising the release of their second album, and gave it a listen. What I heard was enough to peak my interest, so I bought their first two albums — ‘Another Poem for the 20th Century’ and ‘La Fillete Triste’ — on the spot.

Unfortunately, I bought them on cassette tape, and over the next few years, I listened to them enough to wear them out. Thanks to the magic of the ‘net, though, a few months ago I was lucky enough to track down not just the two albums I used to own, but three more. Eventually I’ll order as many as their albums as I can, but as they’re not available here in the states, for now I’ll just have to live with the .mp3s I downloaded (one of the very few times I’ve actively searched music out on the file trading networks).

In the meantime, though, you can browse through my PfL catalog, and listen to just what has captured my interest for so long. It’s a little difficult to narrow down just a few ‘recommended tracks’, but here’s a few good ones from the two albums I know the best:

  • From ‘Another Poem for the 20th Century’:
    • Intro to the Morning After
    • The Morning After
    • Lewd
  • From ‘La Fillete Triste’:
    • Round Round Round (The Gentleman’s Fear)
    • Willy Poor Boy
    • I Hold A Prince

Enjoy!

Heroes

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Except in the life of a hero, the whole world is meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what’s possible. That’s the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.

— John Gardner, Grendel

Alexandar Diego Soli

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And so I learned this strange theology of Alexandar Diego Soli: It was known that the first Lord Cantor, the great Georg Cantor, with an ingenious proof array had demonstrated that the infinity of integers — what he called aleph null — is embedded within the higher infinity of real numbers. And he had proved that that infinity is embedded within the infinites of the higher alephs, a whole hierarchy of infinities, an infinity of infinities. The Simoom cantors believed that as it is with numbers, so it is with the hierarchies of the gods. Truly, as Alexandar had taught his son, Leopold, if a god existed, who or what had created him (or her)? If there is a higher god, call him god^2^, there must be a god^3^ and a god^4^, and so on. There is an aleph million and an aleph centillion, but there is no final, no highest infinity, and therefore there is no God. No, there could be no true God, and so there could be no true creation. The logic was as harsh and merciless as Alexandar of Simoom himself: If there is no true creation then there is no true reality. If nothing is real, then man is not real; man in some fundamental sense does not exist. Reality is all a dream, and worse, it is less than a dream because even a dream must have a dreamer to dream it. To assert otherwise is nonsense. And so to assert the existence of the self is therefore a sin, the worst of sins; therefore it is better to cut out one’s tongue than to speak the word “I.”

— Mallory, in Neverness, by David Zindell