May 2004

Upgrade Miles

May 20, 2004

I got around to doing the upgrade to the latest version of Drupal tonight. The main site hasn't been upgraded yet but it will be in the next couple of days. The database and site on my Powerbook are upgraded and it looks nice. It took a few minutes to get the old themes out of the way and to re-work the .htaccess file to make the rewrite work properly. Ironically I was thinking of starting anew with a simpler theme and keeping it simpler. The default theme with the new Drupal does this nicely.

So this was an upgrade that was "assisted" by United Airlines. Having an extra two hours to wait for the flight tonight gave me plenty of time to work out the kinks. Not that it made me happy per se. But it gave some time to work out the kinks.

Things to come

May 20, 2004

MacNN: Apple Creates New iPod Division, Shuffles Execs - Is this a sign of things to come? Could it have to do with the dispute with Apple Music? Is Apple Computer going to get out of the "music" business by spinning off the iPod and iTunes Music store into a subsidiary? Only time will tell but it would seem like a possible solution in the making.

Drupal request

May 20, 2004

Recently I've been working through what I'd like to see in a blogging tool. I'm very happy with Drupal and it is and excellent choice for those left wanting by Movable Type's recent change in pricing. There is a posting on the Drupal site about making the move from MT to Drupal.

Colorado ICC Report Released

May 19, 2004

I have been debating whether to comment on the Indepent Investigative Commission report on the University of Colorado's Athletic Recruitment Practices. The Final Report was issued yesterday. I was debating until I began reading. There are countless disturbing findings. One, however, stands out immediately

"Tharp was heard on more than one occasion saying that coaches had to maintain a façade of “plausible deniability� – a term commonly understood to mean a purposeful lack of documentation or witnesses who could confirm that those in authority had necessary information – with respect to allegations of partying by recruits and hosts. The implication of what one former Athletic Department employee called a “don't ask, don't tell� policy is that Athletic Department leaders did not want to know, because if they didn't know, they could assert that there was no problem.

Negative blogs

May 19, 2004

Dave Winer posted a comment today about misinformation he's read recently in blogs. The comments he mentions are comments about himself. Somewhat understandably he doesn't link to them as this would take more traffic to them. However this lack of linking means the other users of the internet are not aware where these sites are. Instead we are left to do our own searching of blogs to find them and link to them. Doesnt' that break the whole concept of blogging? As Dave says, and all should know, the information you get on blogs is not 100 percent accurate.

Sex Ed

May 19, 2004

In a truth is stranger than fiction story Ananova reports today that a German 30-year-old woman and her 36-year-old husband were told to try having sex as a cure for their infertility. Purportedly the couple, married for eight years, went to a fertility clinic to find out why they could not conceive.

Bravo UserLand

May 17, 2004

Dave Winer posted this announcement today. Here is my prediction.... Sales of Manilla and Radio will go up.

Why would the sales go up when the core is going to be given away? For a history I look back at my own history with UserLand's products. I had read a little about Frontier and was quick to start using Clay Basket. Later in 1996 I started using Frontier and quickly fell in love. But it was far more than a product. In those days Frontier was a freeware product (not open source) and there was an active community supporting it. Frontier had a wonderfully logical methodology of editing scripts (outlines) and was extremely powerful after a few quick scratches of the surface. Then came the dark days... with a need to be paid a fair amount for a software package Frontier became a non-freeware product. I completely understand the need for the development to be paid for and do not take issue with the decision. It had, however, unfortunate consequences in terms of the community. At the same time the community became more tightly focused around the brilliant minds at UserLand and in the eyes of an average user withered and changed.

Smarty Jones

May 15, 2004



Preakness Notebook has a great picture of Smarty Jones. I really like the picture because it portrays the horse as a fun-loving comic figure. Smarty Jones' owners and trainers are hopeful that he will go on to become the only undefeated Preakness winner since Seattle Slew in 1977 and looking further ahead possibly the next Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978.

Search engines and judges

May 14, 2004

Jeff Beard has a good article about issues related to judicial use of search engines. The Cnet article which Beard cites has several examples of how Google has appeared in many cases where judges have done outside research on issues and citations of Google in opinions and the courtroom.

This is just one area where the increasing use of search engines will intersect with the law. When I was going through the interview process for my current job someone from my new employer did a google search on my name and visited this site. Similarly when I was on the other side of the table interviewing a candidate recently they had conducted a similar search and also arrived at this site. What many non-system administrator types may not know is that when they do this I get a record of the exact terms they used to search for the information. It does not take a great deal of imagination to reach a hypothetical situation where someone does a search on my name and combines it with a term I deem to be discriminatory leading to my deciding the reason I didn't get a job had to do with some such search.

Problem with Airport Extreme Base Station

May 13, 2004

I just posted over on Apple's boards but the theme seems to be constant. There is a problem with the Airport Extreme Base Station and version 5.4 of the Firmware. The problem manifests itself as the Base Station loosing its internet connection every 24 hours. The problem lies in having the base station setup to use the network time protocols for syncing its clock. The clock on the base station really doesn't matter unless you want the dates to show up correctly in logs (and you have remote logging turned on) so there are probably only a handful of people who will encounter this problem. The workaround is to have the base station not report in the correct time and to set the log file to "mark" the log instead.

below is an excerpt of the log file. The times by the way are UTC, not the local time zone, so people will see the problem occurring at different times ranging from about 8am to Noon in the continental US.

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