I’ve taken the link to the Wudicam off the page for now. I’m now running Mac OS X 10.0 about 95% of the time on this machine, and there aren’t drivers for the iRez KritterCam for OS X just yet. I can still turn the cam on if I really want/need to by booting into OS 9, but these days about the only time I do boot into OS 9 is when I want to watch a DVD on this machine…and if I’m watching a movie, I’m not likely to have the cam on. So…until drivers get released…no cam. Ah, well. Y’all will just have to satisfy your voyeuristic urges somewhere else for now. ;)
Tech
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
Relaxation, upgrades – and furrets!
Well, ended up having a very nice weekend. I’m afraid I did oversleep on Saturday — I was supposed to be at work at Suncoast at 10am, and didn’t wake up until sometime after noon — but they were kind enough to understand why. Not only did they let me take the rest of the day off, but they hadn’t scheduled me for Sunday…and they’ll be sure not to schedule me before 1pm on Saturdays from now on, so I’ll be able to get sleep after DJ’ing on Friday nights! Rock on.
I ended up spending most of the weekend working with my computers. I’ve been running this webserver off the Public Beta of Mac OS X since the beta was released, and Saturday was (finally) the official release date of the full retail version of OS X. Ran down to the local CompUSA and picked it up, came home, and installed it first on my main work machine. Everything went smoothly there, so I bit the bullet, backed up the website, and upgraded the webserver.
Luckly, everything went smoothly there, too — for the most part. There have been some under-the-hood changes between the Public Beta and the Retail release that took me by surprise and required some tweaking to get the webserver up and running correctly again (for the tech geeks out there, the Apache webserver, which had been named apache under the PB, is now named the standard httpd again, the various configuration files have been moved and renamed, and the logfile directory is moved), but I was able to find and tweak everything relatively quickly. I was able to bring the webserver down, completely reformat it, install OS X, put the website back, and find all the changes to get the website back up and running correctly in a grand total of three hours — I don’t think that’s too bad at all.
Then, since I was upgrading things anyway, I checked and found a new version of the software I use for my Messageboard/Guestbook, and got that installed and configured. Unfortunately, the new version doesn’t read the threads from the previous version, so things are looking a little sparse in there…but that’s a relatively minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.
The final big news for the weekend — furrets! :) Miranda had two ferrets that, unfortunately, she isn’t able to give as much attention as she’d like anymore, as she just had a beautiful little girl three months ago. Babies being the wonderful, but admittedly time-consuming creatures they are, she needed to find a good home for her ferrets. I gave it some thought, and figured that I could do that…besides, this way, she can have visitation rights whenever she wants. So, the newest additions to the family here at the apartment are Niko and Ash (otherwise lovingly known as Nikkerbokker and Assmaster). This should be a lot of fun — while my family has almost always had pets (usually cats), I realized a bit ago that I’d never had pets of my own — they’ve always either been my mom’s or my brother’s — so, for the first time, I’ve got little ones of my own. All sorts of cool.
However, it’s now Monday morning, and time to go jump in the shower and get back to the normal workaday week. Off and running like a herd of turtles….
Drugs are bad
Wintel users often start when they’re young and ‘experimenting,’ because it seems like a cheap and readily available high. Unfortunately, it’s just the first hit that’s free; before he knows it, your average Wintel user has spiralled into an insidious pattern of expensive aggravation, lost time, and severely declining fashion sense. Just say no, kids!
Cam improvements
I’m up a bit later than I should be, but it’s all well and good (right), as I stumbled across some JavaScript code that’s allowed me to improve the Wudicam page a bit.
Previously, I was using a ‘refresh’ meta-tag that forced the entire page to refresh every 30 seconds — a fairly ridiculous waste of bandwidth, but I didn’t know any better when I put everything together. While surfing around tonight, however, I found a simple little JavaScript that now updates the image only, without needing to refresh the entire page, every five seconds (much better than the previous 30 second refresh), and will only do so if there is actually a new picture to post. So, less unecessary data being thrown across the ‘net, and a much faster refresh time on the cam picture.
Back online
We’re back!
Sorry ’bout the recent downtime over the past couple of days…problems with the cable modem. In any case, everything’s resolved now, and things are looking good.
The cam is back
One of the side benefits to the new ‘puter is that as I’ve decided to stick mostly to OS 9 on this box, leaving OS X to be my webserver on the iMac for now, it allows me to resurrect some features of this site that had been on hold for a while. The most notorious of these — the Wudi-cam! Well, it’s back folks…for better or for worse, it’s there. No gaurantees on how often it’ll be up or down, though — guess you’ll just have to check to find out if I’m broadcasting, huh?
At the moment, I’m using free software that only allows me to do incremental updates — the picture will update every 10 seconds, and the page will refresh every 30. I hope to eventually get software that will allow me to do streaming video, but until then, this will work.
New ‘puter!
This just rocks — I’ve added a new ‘puter to my stable here at home. One of the guys at work was selling his off for a good price, so it came home with me today.
Now the iMac that was playing a dual role as my main work machine and webserver (which occasionally caused the server to go down when I needed to do certain things on that machine) has been designated as just the webserver, and the new machine is my workhorse box.
For the curious, the new box is a 350 MHz blue and white Power Macintosh G3, with 128 MB memory, DVD player, 22.3 GB of storage spread across three drives (1 ATA/IDE, 2 SCSI), and dual 17″ monitors, one running off an IMS Twin Turbo card, the other running off an ATI Rage 128. Quite the step up…and I’m cheezing like mad. Time to play!
Just a quick test of Lynx
I’m just experimenting a bit here. One of my little quirks when designing websites is to try to make sure that I always make them Lynx compatible. Lynx is a purely text-based web browser, back from the early days of the web, when content was considered much more important than flashy graphics, Flash animation, or any of the other doodads that have taken over the web today. Anyway, while checking my page with Lynx today, I thought I’d see if it was possible for me to not just view it, but update the postings via Lynx — and if this post appears, then it would seem to work. Pretty nifty….
Kind of amusing how a Mac-junkie like me still loves being able to do things through a command line and a text-based terminal from time to time…guess I’m showing my age as a ‘net old-timer or something. :)
A little too obvious?
Okay, so Micro$oft unveiled the beta of the next iteration of Windows — Windows XP — at an event yesterday. Funny thing is, this time Micro$oft’s brainwashing wasn’t enough to hide the fact even from their own minions that, as usual, they seem to be following in the footsteps of Apple.
This is so sad. They’re just lamely trying to copy Steve Jobs’ Apple presentation — right down to the guy having a black shirt and black pants…. It’s almost like Windows ME 2. Or as Apple might call it, Windows Me Too.
— anonymous Windows tester, while watching the webcast of the unveiling of Windows XP
Quicker archiving, twins, frustration
Seeing as how I’m actually starting to update this thing on a more regular basis — and given my tendency for loquaciousness — I figured I’d drop the archiving settings down to weekly, instead of every two weeks, so that this page didn’t just keep scrolling on and on and on and on and on…. I also removed the link to the old hand-generated archive pages (from before I started using this software to automate the updating process), since it’s all really old stuff, and it’s easier for me to just stay with the automatically generated archive pages.
Even though I picked it up a couple of weeks ago, I just got around to watching Dead Ringers last night. Wow…what an incredibly fascinating film. David Cronenberg almost never fails to dissapoint me — he’s got an incredibly twisted mind and excels at putting his ideas on screen — and the one time he has (Crash, which I never even made it all the way through) I’m now starting to consider renting and giving another try. Anyway, the combination of Cronenberg and Jeremy Irons‘ absolutely mindbending performance as a pair of identical twins in Dead Ringers was absolutely mesmerizing. The fact that Irons could play two such identical people and put just enough subtle differences into the performances that it was always clear which was which was absolutely incredible to watch…he just proves yet again why he’s on my list of favorite actors.
In other news…well, not much. E-mailed my resume over to the temp agency, so all I can do now is ‘hurry up and wait.’ Spent most of last night here at home being frustrated with life in general…I’m so burnt out on just about everything here in town, especially with all this drama with TimeFrame, that I’m looking forward more and more to the day that I can just pack up and leave. Ah, well…some days I do better than others.
Now, I’ve got to go jump in the shower and head off to work at Suncoast, selling movies for a few hours. Fun fun fun….