LookIt

On not ripping off

It's amazing what a few days of thought will do for you. John Gruber completely nails the "Dashboard ripped of Konfabulator" meme. As in, "nails the coffin shut". Dashboard grows on ideas from many people over the past 25 years, and Konfabulator isn't all that novel.

I'm even more glad that I am paying for that content.

How to be terrorized

If you have ever lived in or near Boston, this should make you laugh and cry. They are going to stop the commuter trains and the freeway during the Democratic convention. Boy, that'll make the people happy that their city spent so much money trying to get the convention to come there. And I'm sure the press coverage will be so positive about what a nice town it is, except that the locals all hate the convention...

That Paul Hoffman

I get mail on a monthly basis saying something to the effect of "Hey, Paul, it's been a long time; remember me from FroggleBort?" and I realize that they mean some other Paul Hoffman. It turns out that "Paul" is a very popular surname to go with "Hoffman". We Paul Hoffmans usually end up saying hi to each other over email; once, I met another Paul Hoffman in my kitchen.

For the record, I am all of these Paul Hoffmans. And a few others, of course.

This time, don't assume anything

Go (mp3, 4 meg), from a recent Indigo Girls concert; lyrics are here. If you have teenagers, let them hear it.

What Hollywood movies teach us

From the Riverfront Twin theater marquee near my lab:

RAISING HELEN
SAVED
TROY

Another era passes

The "father or ASCII", Bob Bemer, has died. In addition to his wife, he is survived by five children; two stepchildren and many grandchildren, and dozens of characters, some of them unprintable.

Why nerds are sometimes unpopular

This has me written all over it...

Still have Gmail invites for folks I know

...or people who make me think I know them. Heck, if you have a blog that is more active than mine, that counts too.

See it next year

So, it might be a bit lame to review a play that you can't see until next year, but I'm still buzzing from yesterday's performance. Every year, the Mount Madonna School puts on the Ramayana, the classic and epic Indian story about devotion, karma, duty, and strength. Oddly, I've never gone, but I fixed that yesterday. Short summary: everyone in the Monterey bay area should see this at least once in their lives.

How to make it sound silly: it's a school play about morality, and it costs $25 for tickets. Some of the actors are in first grade. It's a story that nearly no one in the US has read, much less heard of.

What it really is: one of the best-produced plays you will see outside of professional theater. The costumes are more elaborate than most "real" productions. The wide variety of musical styles (from traditional Indian to funk) fit together with the story. The little kids playing the forest creatures in one scene are awwww-inspiring. The high school kids in the main roles are incredibly talented, with some amazing singing voices. They actually cover the epic in a bit less than four hours with a reasonable sense of pace and importance. The kids really do learn useful moral values while prepping for the play.

It's only one weekend a year, but if you live in the 831 area code (and possibly in 408) and like good theater, remember to look out for the production next year around this time.

Trivial questions asked on blogs

I want to know the same thing Eric wants to know: Can I get that burrito delivered?. C'mon this is important stuff for the citizens of Greater Blogville.

Nice Ray Charles obit

...at Body and Soul.

Gmail invites

Google is getting more generous. If you want to be an early Gmail user, and we know each other at all, let me know.

Desktop Fedora is still not there

My perception of Linux desktop has been that it is slow on normal PCs and kind of clunky-feeling. I hadn't done any checking on that recently, so I bought a copy of Fedora Core 2 from CheapBytes and loaded it on a recent-ish PC that has 96 meg of RAM.

Ugh. Well, the installation went fine, and the initial update for patched software started to go well. But the system seemed slow and I could hear the hard drive being accessed for many minutes after nothing should have been happening, so I opened up the system monitor app and saw a bunch of sporadic apps launching. I chalked it up to the update being applied in the background, which is a really bad thing: don't do system-intensive things behind the user's back, at least without saying once "I'm going to do this for a while; I'll tell you when I'm done".

I installed the basic desktop distribution, then it turned out I needed the compiler for something I was doing. Finding the "add software" function was easy, as was picking the additional packages I needed. The system prompted me to insert Disk 2 from the install set, which I did. I even let the disk spin up for about 10 seconds before clicking OK. But the installer said "Can't find the disk." So I tried again, and failed again. I exited the installer, ejected the disk, and tried it all again. And failed. (During this iteration, the system monitor app crashed; at least it told me politely.) So I exited the installer, inserted the disk so that it appeared on the desktop, and tried again. Success! Well, until it needed Disk 1. You guessed it: I would read it. I am now left with a partially-installed upgrade.

Next, I tried some web browsing and file management, and it is really clear that the system is really slow. Before I had loaded Fedora, the box was running XP Home. Fedora felt really sluggish, while XP Home felt fine (not zippy, just fine). Maybe I need more than 96 meg to make Fedora feel fine, but I'm not sure why. By this time, the earlier install was done (I could tell from the re-launched system monitor), and the system wasn't swapping. It just felt really slow.

I'll try again in a year or two.

Return to Los Angeles, 24 years later

If you remember the band X, you might like to know they're still around. From a live show in Austin, TX on 11/15/02, feel free to thrash to this (mp3, 3 meg).

Wardriving works

I'm staying in a cheap hotel that looks like it has exorbitant local call rates (they don't give the rates, but it's clear they aren't free), so I decided to drive around looking for some free connectivity on my way to dinner. Picked a busy residential street, and the first time I stopped I found three open access points, and no closed ones. If you are the one who owns the Linksys router I'm using, you bothered to put your name as the ID, but you didn't put on a password. If you did it out of generosity, thanks! If you did it out of ignorance, at least you have similar neighbors. It looks like you aren't using much of your bandwidth right now anyway, so I feel OK about grabbing mail and even posting to the blog...

Update: after dinner, I wanted to check mail again, so I went to a different part of the same neighborhood. Same results: three (differently-named) open access points, no closed ones. Thanks to someone else for the quick hit of bandwidth...