Tech

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

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?

Still here?

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Been kind of quiet around here lately. No major reasons for that, really, but a few minor ones.

I’ve been wanting to revamp my photoblog for a while now, but it had been one of those “back burner” projects. I finally decided it was time to get started, and — rather than do my coding from scratch, as I normally do — I went out looking for a decent pre-made template to use. Unfortunately, I don’t think that that’s going to work. I started work on setting everything up, but all I’ve succeeded in doing so far is making my photoblog all sorts of screwy. The template I found, while a decent look, is designed for smaller photos than I’ve been posting (so I’d have to resize everything I’ve uploaded so far), uses very different posting conventions (so I’ll have to fix my previously uploaded photos), and — the two most damning issues — will not work for portrait photographs (landscape only), and is a heavily table-based layout (rather than CSS-based). Ick. So, I need to start over with that project.

Another project I’ve got going on is fixing up all my past entries in this weblog to work better with the related entries hack I put in last week. In order for it to calculate which entries are related to a given post, the most important fields are the ‘Excerpt’ and the ‘Keywords’. Well, as I’ve wasn’t using some of MT’s features when I started this weblog, only about half of my posts have excerpts, and I just started using the keywords field. So, I’m working my way backwards through over two years of posts, adding in the missing information. It’ll be good when it’s done, but it’s a long, slow process.

Lastly, when I’ve been taking some time to scan through my newsreader, there just hasn’t been anything much that’s really catching my eye enough to post about. All the political stuff starts to sound the same after a while, the technical weblogs I read have been focusing more on issues that I don’t deal with very much, and the mac world is more or less on hold until WWDC at the end of this month.

So, things are a little slow for the moment. I’m sure they’ll pick back up in a bit — I go through times like this every so often. Just a bit ‘OB’d’ (overblogged), I think. ;)

In the meantime, I’ve started yet another project (because I need another one…), and will be resurrecting my long-dead quotebook by posting a quote a day to the ‘quotes’ category of this weblog. Until any more substantial content shows up, enjoy those!

Apple woos indie labels for iTMS

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After the iTunes Music Store opened, there were two recurring comments from much of the Mac world: why was it US only, and what about independent labels? It’s commonly accepted that the intricacies of international copyright law are most likely what’s restricting the iTMS to the US for now, but aside from a few rumors, the question of whether the store would open up to more than just the major labels was still unanswered.

Yesterday, however, Apple hosted a special invitation only event for independent and smaller music labels, giving them information on how they could join with the iTMS. A representative from CDBaby was at the event, and has posted an extremely interesting rundown of Apple’s offer to indy labels, mixed in with a lot of information about the iTMS system.

Interesting reading, even just for the peeks into how Apple is handling all the behind-the-scenes details of the iTMS. From what I can see, I think this is just going to keep getting better and better.

Related entries

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I’m experimenting with Adam Kalsey’s Related Entried Revisited MovableType modification. It uses a MySQL database query to create a list of entries that should be somewhat similar to each entry, and lists them in the right hand sidebar of each entry’s individual listing page.

Just glancing through what it comes up with, it seems to be grabbing an interesting mix. Some posts I’ve been fairly impressed with what it comes up with, others have seemed fairly random. I’ll leave it in for a bit to see what I think of it.

Don't talk and drive

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Update: This was originally a post ranting about people driving and talking on cell phones at the same time.

Unfortunately, I seem to be running into a problem where, due to a bug either in Safari, in MovableType, or the combination of the two, sometimes when editing a comment (for instance, deleting a duplicate), the text of the comment gets put in the body field of the post being edited. If you don’t see this before saving the post, the post is wiped out, and replaced with the text of the comment.

Grr.

Ah, well. Guess I just need to pay more attention next time. I just wish I knew who to send the bug report to…

Newly Digital (Back in the Day, redux)

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Adam Kalsey has started a project he calls Newly Digital — a collection of stories about when people first discovered computers, got online, and so on.

In that vein, I’m updating and reposting my “Back in the Day” post from roughly a year ago, to contribute to the project. Enjoy!

The first computers I can remember playing with were the Apple II‘s that my elementary school had. Before long our friends the Burns had one of their own that I got to play with, while my babysitter picked up a Commodore 64 that gave me my first look at the BASIC programming language.

Eventually, my family got our first computer — an Osborne 1. This was a beast of a machine. 64k of RAM, a Z-80 CPU, two 5.25″ floppy drives, and a 5″ monochrome 80×40 greenscreen, all packed into a case the size of a suitcase that weighed about 30 pounds. The keyboard could be snapped up against the face of the computer, allowing it to be carried around — one of the first, if not the very first, “portable” computers! It ran CP/M (a precursor to MS-DOS) — aside from fiddling with the machines at school or at my friends’ houses, my first real command-line experience! There was a 300 baud modem available for the Osborne 1 computer, however my family didn’t get one until years later (when those of our friends who had also had Osborne 1 computers were giving them to us as they upgraded, allowing me to cannibalize parts from two machines to keep one running).

I first got online sometime in 1990, with the first computer I bought myself — an Apple Macintosh Classic with no hard drive (the computer booted System 6.0.7 off one 3.5″ floppy, and I kept MS Word version 4 on a second floppy, along with all the papers I typed that year), 1 Mb of RAM — and a 2400 baud modem. Suddenly an entire new world opened up to me. After a brief but nearly disasterous flirtation with America Online at a time when the only way to dial in to AOL from Anchorage, Alaska was to call long distance, I discovered the more affordable world of local BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems).

I spent many hours over the next few years exploring the BBS’s around Anchorage, from Ak Mac (where most of my time was devoted) to Forest Through the Trees, Roaring Lion, and many others that I can’t remember the names of at the moment. I found some of my first online friends, many of whom I conversed with for months without ever meeting — and many that I never did meet. Most of the Mac-based boards used the Hermes BBS software, which shared its look and feel with whatever the most popular PC-based software was, so virtually all the boards acted the same, allowing me to quickly move from one to the other. After springing the $300 for an external 100Mb hard drive (how would I ever fill up all that space?!?) I downloaded my first ‘warez’ (bootlegged software), at least one of which had a trojan horse that wiped out about half my hard drive. I discovered the joys — and occasional horrors — of free pornography. I found amazing amounts of shareware and freeware, some useful, some useless. It was all amazing, fun, and so much more than I’d found before. In short — I was hooked.

After I graduated from high school in 1991, I had a short-lived stint attending UAA (the University of Alaska, Anchorage). One of the perks of being a student was an e-mail account on the university’s VAX computer system. In order to access your e-mail, you could either use one of the computers in the university’s computer lab, or you could dial into their system via modem. Logging in via modem gave you access to your shell account, at which point you could use the pine e-mail program. However, I soon learned that the university’s computer was linked to other computers via the still-growing Internet!

I thought BBS’s were a new world — this Internet thing was even better! Suddenly I was diving into ftp prompts and pulling files to my computer from computers across the globe. Usenet readers introduced me to BBS-style discussions with people chiming in from all over the world, instead of just all over town. I could jump into IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and have real-time conversations with people in other countries. The gopher protocol was essentially a precursor to the World Wide Web, textual information pages linked to each other by subject. I was fascinated — more information than I had dreamed of was at my fingertips.

By the time I left UAA and lost my student account, the ‘net had started to show up on the radar of public consciousness, but still at a very low level — it was still fairly limited to the ‘geek set.’ That was enough, however, to have convinced some of the local BBS systems to set up primitive (but state of the art at the time) internet links: once a day, generally at some early hour, they would dial into a special node on the ‘net and download a certain set of information, which the BBS users could then access locally. It was slow, time-delayed, and somewhat kludgy, but it worked, and it allowed us to have working e-mail addresses. It wasn’t what I’d had while at the university, but it was certainly better than nothing.

Within a few years, though, the ‘net suddenly exploded across public consciousness with the advent and popularization of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, you didn’t have to do everything on the ‘net through a command line — first using NCSA Mosaic, and later that upstart Netscape Navigator you could point and click your way through all that information — and some of the pages even had graphics on them! It was simplistic by today’s standards, but at the time it was revolutionary, and I joined in that revolution sometime in 1995 with my first homepage.

Since then, there’s been no turning back. My computers have been upgraded from that little Mac Classic to a Performa 600/IIvx, from that to a PowerMac 6100, then on to a 6500, through an original Revision A iMac, and now consisting of a Blue and White G3, a custom-built PC (the first Windows-based PC I ever owned), and currently a Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5, and currently a 27″ iMac, and now a 27″ Retina 5K iMac, and now an M1 Mac mini desktop and M2 MacBook Air. My website has grown as well over the years, passing through several intermediate designs to its current incarnation hosted off my G3 through the UN*X-flavored goodness of Mac OS X.

To quote Jerry Garcia, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I’m only looking forward to seeing where it takes me from here.