The geek is strong is this one
The website nerdsyndrome.com is down. Chris Dunphy must be moving into his new apartment across town, waiting for internet hookup. Damn. I just got the idea that I should have offered to host his website during the move. That would have totally been within my means. And it would have been a great way to make a new friend. Oh well, maybe next time…. We nerds have to stick together.
In surfing the Internet while sick at home, I came across a few good utilities for my Windows systems. I run Windows 98 (not Second Edition) at home on my laptop and Windows 2000 at work. I found a few of these utilities on the website Pricelessware.org, billed as offering “the best of the best in Freeware”. Here’s some of what I found:
This one’s a gem. Renaming a file in Windows is easy. Just point, right-click, and hit “m”. But to rename more than 10 files this way is just a pain. So this utility provides a way to rename files in a batch, and it does it in a clever way. When you choose a directory of files to rename, the names of the files are placed in a text window. You then can edit the text with the full search/replace and macro abilities of a text editor. (The lines are fixed in place, of course, because each line represents a different file.) Once you’ve finished editing, you can commit the changes to disk. This utility is particularly handy for managing a collection of mp3 files or image files.
DirKey provides hotkeys for your favourite directories that you can use when presented with File Open/Save dialogs. This eliminates one particular annoyance of Windows for me, that of Open/Save always being open to the wrong directory. Plus, simply in Explorer, DirKey’s hotkeys will let you jump to your favourite directories. So far, I’ve bookmarked C:\darren\, C:\download\, and C:\media\.
I use the web-based email site Oddpost.com and it always opens a new Internet Explorer window that isn’t properly aligned to my desktop. And I always have to maximize it after logging in. Now with AutoSizer, the window automatically gets maximized when it appears. One less thing for me to worry about.
Cacheman is a disk caching / paging management tool for Windows. It allows me to tweak some of the memory settings on my system. This is particularly important for my laptop, which is a Pentium 266 MHz with only 64 MB of RAM. Since it’s a laptop, there’s no hope for more memory. I hope to see some improvements in the speed of loading and switching between programs. I’m using the Freeware version of Cacheman for Windows 98, but there is also an XP version. The program comes with a Wizard which helps you decide what settings are important for you to change, and various profiles for different kinds of systems. I’m trying the “Low Memory System” profile.
So much has happened in the last few days, or even hours. It’s 4h12 in the morning, Saturday morning, and I just finished a very cool Friday night. Since being in the taxi on the way home, I’ve wanted to sit down and write a blog entry. I haven’t done that in a while.
I started the evening in the afternoon. After researching what needs to be done to get me a new passport, I headed over to Qiao Ying’s tea house. I spent the afternoon drinking tea and speaking Chinese with her and my friend Zhang Hua. Sometimes Qiao Ying gets in these moods where she refuses to speak English. So I played along and I didn’t speak English either. It’s really good for me, actually. It really helps. I went through three kinds of teas during my stay there, met a new friend of Qiao Ying’s, and then left to join Mandi for her farewell dinner. I didn’t have far to go, and traffic wasn’t bad, but there were no empty taxis. I waited, changed locations, and then waited some more. So I eventually took a bus.
It was a direct route that I needed to follow, just 2 or 3 km up the street. And the trusty Route 120 took me there. I met my friends at Ya Show market near San Li Tun Bar Street. Most everyone was late (like I was—even I was the second person there!) cause traffic was really bad. It ended up being a party of 18 and then some, and miraculously we managed to find a restaurant to house us. Even to pick a restaurant. I was impressed. It was a Xin Jiang Muslim restaurant. Very good food, roasted lamb and such. I had my first Budweiser beer that night. The restaurant ran out of the local beers, so that was all that was left. Damn expensive and not very good. (Sorry, he says to his friend Karen who works for Anheuser Busch.)
On the way to dinner, Joanne pointed out to me that my backpack was open. Did I leave it open from the tea house, all the way on the bus ride? Or did someone open it while I was walking or talking to Paul in front of Ya Show? Yikes! I didn’t find anything missing until later. My minidisc was still there as well as my USB sound card and Palm Wireless Keyboard. (Yes, my backpack is an arsenal of geek electronics. Go Darren!) It was only after dinner that I realized that my $300 Etymotic ER-4P earphones were missing. I’ll never see them again. The disappointing thing is that the new owner will have no idea the true value of their new prize. Damn. Back to el-cheapo $10 earbuds for a while. At least the Etymotics are well coated with a couple month’s worth of my ear wax. Hope the new owner doesn’t actually use them.
I skipped out on Mandi and drinks on San Li Tun at 22h30 after dinner cause I wasn’t in the mood. It’s really not my scene. Adam and the gang were going to be at The Big Easy a few kilometres away, so I decided to join them. I wasn’t feeling so hot, actually. Mostly just tired from being sick all week with the flu. But I found myself telling the taxi driver to go there, so I just went with the idea. The Big Easy was alright, but nothing too great. The band was swinging a bit so Adam and River danced, and I got one dance in with River. I would have liked to spend time chatting with Adam and River, but an impromptu business meeting between them and the owner cut our time short. The belly dancer gave a couple of performances, but I wasn’t impressed. I just couldn’t get into it. Besides, her hair was dirty and her costume (what little costume she was wearing) had big food stains all up the front. Pretty yucky.
But, during one of the belly dances, I looked up at the balcony and, to my surprise, saw my friend Cheng Lei there. So I immediately left my friends and went and said hello. This is the second time that she and I have met “by luck” in this area. The other time happened at Latinos, next door to The Big Easy, about a month and a half ago, just before I left Beijing. (And I never go to Latinos.) So we were quite happy and surprised to meet like this again. It made the whole evening worth it. Plus she smiles so nicely at me. We chatted for a while until Adam phoned me looking to see where I was. I literally had disappeared on the group without a trace, so they wanted to know where I was. I felt loved. So we came down and said hello to Adam, River, and John for a few minutes. Cheng Lei had friends over at Latinos, a Brazilian dance performance group that was in Beijing for the week, so she invited me to join her over there. I hesitated, but finally agreed. I have never felt comfortable at Latinos, especially since Latin dancing/music isn’t my thing.
But I’m so glad I went with her. Although Cheng Lei likes dancing (she’s a salsa teacher, even) she just wanted to watch the others dance. But when I told her that I wanted to dance with her, she invited me to dance Swing to the Latin music. I was surprised that it even worked, but I guess it can be done cause we did it. And it was fun. She made me feel so comfortable there that I had no problems being there, dancing my own way, and enjoying myself. We met up with her friend Julia, and after the Brazilians left, the two of them decided the music at Salsa Caribi would be better. So, back to San Li Tun, and I got to try out a new club. Since I never dance Salsa in Beijing, they’re all new to me.
Salsa Caribi seemed not too bad. An acquaintance, Mustafa, was there outside the club, so already I had a friendly face to welcome me. The two girls, Cheng Lei and Julia, took to the dance floor immediately, so I just waited at a table. I saw my friend Irene dancing there too, and eventually discovered that all of my friends of Irene were there: Karen, Maple, and Christine. Seeing them was a treat, especially Karen since I haven’t seen her in so long. She’s been busy with work-related travel for many months now.
I had the best time with Cheng Lei and Julia at Salsa Caribi. They were dancing pretty hard, and when I joined them, I started dancing hard too. We danced and danced and danced. Some of it was Swing (but not to Swing music). Some just disco, and lots of Latin. I started to figure out the arm thing, twisting you and your partner’s arms in and out of pretzel contortions. Lots of fun. We played with it a lot, sometimes doing the pretzel thing with all three of us holding hands.
A very sweet night. I’m really feeling blessed by the whole thing, how it all turned out. I’ve been dealing with a lot of internal struggles and realizations lately, stemming from events in and related to returning from Canada. (I can only post weblog stuff when I’m being outgoing and external, which is why my posts are as infrequent as they are.) So I think tonight’s events have corrected my thinking in various ways, helping me to keep on the correct path that I need to follow. It’s what I needed.
There’s a weblog that I like to read on a regular basis. It’s called Pork Tornado, and the guy, Dusty, is hilarious most of the time. Very dry humour.
But I’ve had lots of trouble connecting to the site, with the domain name system (DNS) unable to find the site all the time. I’ve tried from work, at home, and even from my computer in Canada. Sometimes I can load the site, sometimes I can’t. I honestly thought that their DNS entries were misconfigured and not refreshing themselves on the Internet properly. I wrote a Python script, even, to regularly look up the site’s DNS information to track the history of the intermittent problem. I had the script running on the above-mentioned three machines.
But just two days ago, I figured out the real problem: it was me all along. All this time I’ve been typing
http://porktornado.dairyland.com/
instead of
http://porktornado.diaryland.com/
Can you see the difference? Now try the links. The first one doesn’t work; the second one does. Now here’s my explanation.
I honestly thought that the site was related to dairies (cows) and it never crossed my mind that the key word was “diary” (writing in a journal). How dumb. Besides, the website is a bit cartoonish, so I just assumed “cows” again, cause cows are oftentimes drawn as cartoon characters. Furthermore, I had been really careful to spell “porktornado” correctly because it is a difficult word to type and I didn’t want to accidentally type “toronado”. There you have it.
Now that I’ve got it right, I really need to just make a bookmark of the dumb site.
We were lucky. Very lucky. Saturday morning (for me), I logged into madphilosopher.ca from my home in Beijing. Immediately, my friend Bruce, who was also logged in at the time, sent me a message saying that we had a serious problem: “The heads are banging.” I had to ask him what he meant by heads. I thought that perhaps he meant potheads were attacking the computer. Then without warning me, he rebooted the machine, which had the effect of booting me off. When I logged back in five minutes later, I was able to ask him what the problem was. The hard drive was making noise, a sign that it was about to die. Oh! So that’s what he meant by “the heads were banging.” (A little context goes a long way, in my book.)
The machine, madphilosopher.ca, is an old Pentium 100 running FreeBSD 4-STABLE. It’s been in the service of its current role for about three years now. Bruce added a second hard drive a few months ago to provide space for backup and archiving purposes. So it wasn’t clear in the present emergency whether the new or the old hard drive was about to die. (I suppose if he had a stethoscope handy, he could have determined the source of the noise.) Losing the old hard drive would have resulted in much downtime since it is the system drive. Losing the new drive would have wiped out backups, but the system could have carried on without it.
We make regular, automated backups of the system, but having fresh backups is prefered when you might have to rebuild the system. So Bruce and I spent the next two hours creating backups of various system and user files and transfering them off the machine before its impending doom. The noise kept coming and going, and that kept us even further in suspense.
We were communicating using a chat window running on the machine, but we agreed to meet on Yahoo chat in case the system went down and cut off our line of communication. That never happened. So after the backing up was done, Bruce went to watch the news on TV and I needed to leave the house and get on with my Saturday. I checked in with him much later to see what had happened with the hard drives. He was supposed to power down the machine and pull it apart to find the source of the noise. Well, it turned out not to be the hard drives at all. It was the CPU cooling fan dying a slow death. In an email, he said to me, “That was the closest I’ve come to witnessing a hard drive dying without it actually dying. We dodged a howitzer this time!”
I went to the Haidian Book City in Beijing today, looking for books on database theory. I’ve been going crazy all week with ideas inside my head about different databases that I need to create for work, and a few for fun. But I don’t know anything about databases—not their theory, implementation, what software solutions are out there, or even how to create and access a database.
Well, I found two textbooks on databases that I could read. 99% of the books here are in Chinese, but there are a few computer science series that are available in the original English. Fortunately, the topics match my interests quite well: software development, hardware, theoretical computer science, operating systems theory, and network programming.
So I ended up purchasing one database book: Database Principles, Programming, and Performance, 2nd Ed., by Patrick and Elizabeth O’Neil.
On other subjects, I picked up two O’Reilly titles: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone; and Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, edited by Andy Oram. The first contains essays on the Open Source movement by the original and the continuing innovators of the movement. The second describes the phenomenon of peer-to-peer networks (file sharing networks like Napster and KaZaa) and specific applications and implementations.
I got one famous book in software development theory and practice: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. I’ve needed to read this one for a long time, so now was a good time to buy it.
And finally, I bought one Chinese title. Can I read it? Not exactly, but I bought it for the pictures. It’s called Web Color Design, and as you can guess, it has many examples of colour schemes for website design, including colour charts and RGB values of the actual example web pages and photographs. So I can use it to get some ideas for sprucing up this website.
How much did this whole book shopping spree cost me? 156 RMB. That’s $24.88 CDN approximately. Not bad for two O’Reilly books, a text book, and a book that’s entirely done in full-colour glossy pages. I figure there’s got to be some benefit to living in China and suffering from the lack of a good bookstore.
Well, enough typing. Time to curl up by the fire (I wish!) and enjoy a good book. Or five of them!
I’ve read some interesting articles lately. The first two are a series on the key problem in the use of voting technology in the U.S. The author brings it all home for me—literally—by using Canada’s electoral system as an example. So now, the U.S. system finally makes sense to me; I now understand that it is totally senseless.
The third article is great. Really, these guys are nuts, but that’s why I read The Onion every week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Looking out my window one morning, I noticed these clouds. In particular, their movement was barely perceptible. So I decided it was time to try out my new digital camera. I set up my tripod, opened the window, took a meter reading, and set all the camera settings to manual. I then captured 38 frames, one every 15 seconds, for approximately 10 minutes. The camera came with software to create animations, which I have yet to try, but I just used ImageMagick’s convert(1) utility to piece the files into an animated gif. Click on the thumbnail on the left to see the animation (3.26 MB download).
I think the effect is very cool. I put a 0.15 second delay between each frame in the animation, so the animated motion is 100 times as fast as the real motion. This was the first time I’ve ever tried time-lapse photography. I will definitely try this again!
A few random thoughts today.
Well, it’s been a good week in Beijing. Some say it’s hot today, but I’m enjoying the lower humidity and the stiff breeze anyway. The temperature got up to 34°C today.
I used tinyurl.com today. If you have a really long URL like the following:
http://www.radioshack.ca/estore/Product.aspx?language=en- CA&product=4318419&category=Fashion+Phones&catalog=RadioS hack&MSCSProfile=D2A27242FE5C7054CA02D1C573F248CF5D43E4DF 9B60058E03FC75B25CB77ECD0748128B1913EEF7CF896688F99B42733 A3A0DF445DD3461B47DB2B700CF3649AAD611E4A17F54C7950DCC8E63 8CACF451D396D6F511702B5CAE7AE7C884980D98A72CC104AB5530130 7FFF0D88B66BC96BE06A665B71115C623BB365518D1404A3095D7C88F 31E8,
tinyurl.com will provide you with a permanent alias like this: http://tinyurl.com/j9z1. A lot shorter, isn’t it? So then I was able to include the shorter version in an email a lot easier than the long one. Oh, and did I mention it’s a free service? Check it out for yourself.
I had more things to write before I left work this evening, but I just got a phone call from Lily. She wants me to buy her supper tonight. Good thing I suggested it first. 🙂
I had a good laugh this morning over a single quote in this Usenet post entitled THANKS SONY indeed !!! grr. The article is a very good rant on Sony’s disregard for its customers. “If the company can’t trust the customer, then why should the customer trust the company?”
The poster, David W. Poole, Jr., ends the article with the following:
NetMD software? I could write far more on this, but I hope it’s sufficient to say that I’ve finally found a company that produces shittier software than Microsoft.
Now that’s funny! Needless to say, anyone interested in fair business practices should never buy anything from either Sony or Microsoft.