Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

BlogShares (what's the point?)

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I just got an e-mail from Blogshares telling me that I’d been given 50 shares of The Book of FSCK as Jonas empties his portfolio. This gives me a cash balance of \$1,106.43, and my portfolio totals \$152,415.64 with shares in four blogs (two of which are mine). The funny thing is, I really haven’t got the faintest clue what all that means.

I signed up for BlogShares a few months ago, when it first appeared on the weblog scene. At the time, I didn’t bother making any sort of announcement about it — I just added the BlogShares button to my site, figuring that I’d come back to it later and figure it all out. The thing is, since then, I’ve more or less just ignored it — I’ve stopped in a time or two and poked around at my statistics, but little to none of them ever made much sense to me. So, I just kept ignoring it.

End result? Not the foggiest! My share price seems to have been fairly stable, though my valuation has been bouncing up and down drastically. Why? Beats me. It’s all voodoo, as far as I can tell. Kirsten and D have both given me a bit of advice from time to time, but none of it ever really sunk into my head. Guess it’s a good thing I don’t try to play the real stock market, huh? ;)

Jonas seems to be pulling out due to the introduction of artefacts. What they are or what they do to the game, though, I can’t tell you, the explanation made just as much sense to me as the rest of this whole thing.

I guess for now, I’ll just keep ignoring it. It doesn’t seem to be helping or hurting me — it’s all funny money, anyway — and it gives me something to poke at when I’m bored.

Hm.

\<poke>

\<poke>

Nope. Still clueless.

Blogathon 2003

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After being prompted by D, I’ve signed up for Blogathon 2003. 24 hours of weblogging, raising money for charity (in my case, Amnesty International)! Of course, I won’t raise any money if I’m not sponsored…so won’t you be so kind as to sponsor me?

So what exactly is a “blogathon”?

First some terminology: “blog” is a shortened version of “weblog” which is a frequently updated personal website. Most blogs have date stamps on the entries, and consist of links and commentary.

Now, remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Or run for a dollar a mile? During the Blogathon, people update their websites every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. For this, they collect sponsorships. Pledges can be a flat donation, or a certain amount for every hour the blogger manages to stay awake.

So how exactly does this work?

Easy: you sign up to sponsor a blogger. On July 26th, watch your blogger go for 24 hours straight. When the event is over, you’ll receive an email asking you to donate directly to the charity for which your participant was blogging.

Now, to see if I can pull an all-nighter — I haven’t done that in years…

Declaration of Independence from OS 9

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Seeing as how I honestly can’t remember the last time I had to run a Classic (pre-OS X) application on my box, the Declaration of Indepence from OS 9 is right up my alley.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Classic and OSX are not created equal, that they are drastically different in so many ways, that among these are file sharing, system crashes, software compatibility, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, we should banish Classic from our computers.

(via Brent Simmons)

Red wine

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Regardless of how Apple corporate wants to portray its products, the Mac isn’t a machine for the masses any more than red wine is the preferred beverage at baseball games. To be honest, the masses don’t have the capability to appreciate the elegance and depth of this platform.

— Derrick Story

(via The Book of FSCK)

Streaming update

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Just a quick note that I’ve updated my ‘About DJ Wüdi’ page to replace the download links for my mixes with streaming audio links instead. Everything’s still there, just less chance of running afoul of rabid copyright lawyers (on the exceedingly rare chance that they should decide to pay any attention to my little corner of the ‘net).

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.