August 2005

Terminal Widget

August 11, 2005

Needing to do a little system administration from the road I stopped in the local Apple Store. Unfortunately they've decided to lock up the terminal application in a password protected archive. That is one place Widget Term comes in handy.... Download it and viola even a machine without terminal now has a terminal.

RL1

August 10, 2005

I finally finished my Readiness Level (RL) progression on Tuesday night. I was RL3 when I finished school and am now RL1. This means that I have been evaluated and found to have at least the minimal skills required to participate in Unit missions without an instructor in the aircraft. I will now be able to fly any missions with any pilot-in-command. The best thing about being RL1 is that, for the very first time since I started flight school, I can finally fly without being evaluated and graded. I hope that flying will now be fun.

I am not having very much fun at work when I am not flying. We got two new warrants but I am still treated like a WOJ. "Take out the trash, Woj." or "Fill the fridge, Woj" are still common refrains. At least I get to enlist the help of the new guys.

The new guys, Pete and Dave are both prior service so they have a lot more army time than me. Pete is a former Navy Seal and Dave is a former Army Ranger. Definately a little more military than a former trial lawyer. I think that makes it a little bit easier for them to fit in even though they are new pilots.

Although I dont have an exact date, I know that we are getting very close to deployment. The company is busy taking care of last minute details such as packing equipment and issuing new gear. There is very little flying going on.

I have heard a rumor that we will have internet connections in our living quarters when we get to Iraq. I hope that is true so that I can stay in touch with all of you.

Google news in ATOM and RSS

August 9, 2005

Dave Winer takes a look at Google News support for Atom and RSS feeds of their categories and reaches a different conclusion than I do. I've greedily subscribed to the Google News feeds and dropped several others. The problem is that with popular stories where the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post and everybody else covers the same story it ends up in my aggregator many times.

There are places where I'd like to see the individual feeds from different sources and compare them. But as a part of my stable of information consumption having Google concatenate several stories about a topic into a single post is a huge help. This is not to say I'll give up reading the feeds from some of these other great publications all together. Rather, in my scan of the up-to-the-minute happenings around the world and what matters most in my corner of it the Google News Feeds are a huge help. More editors!

Fast forward

August 8, 2005

Fast forward a few years....

KANSAS CITY (January, 4, 2020) - Made-4-U foods today introduced its new line of ready-to-eat meals. Unlike traditional TV dinners and even "diet" meals Made 4 You's Arsithin™ ready-to-eat meals are guaranteed to help you lose weight.

Jacob Jones, president and CEO of Made-4-U foods says "It's a fantastic new technique." Jones took the homeopathic approach to a whole new level. "If a little bit is good for you then a whole lot must be great," Jones said. By increasing the chemical content Made-4-U has perfected the taste vs. weight loss balance. After years of research Made-4-U found that arsenic, the same ingredient in cigarettes that keeps smokers thin, is effective in many forms of food, especially those high in tomato paste content.

Another reason for plain text pages

August 8, 2005

Looking through Google's AdSense alternate ad specs gives yet another reason for yesterday's plain text node type. It also brings clarity to a portion of the need. The output needs to be served up, unfettered, but needs to include the ability to do PHP in generating the output. In the case of AdSense it would allow for various ads to replace the public service ads on a Drupal site if the author so desired.

Which brings me to the next item. For some reason Google has decided this page deserves only public service ads. Well not really but when accessing www.addingunderstanding.com it only gets public service ads. Go to addingunderstanding.com instead and the regular ads appear. Odd.

Drupal robots.txt

August 6, 2005

The end of the post has my current robots.txt for the standard installation of the Drupal content management system. It borrows heavily from many places including this thread on the Drupal website.

That same thread has a discussion about whether a robots.txt should be distributed with Drupal. I'm not a huge proponent one way or the other. What I want instead and will likely have to be a combination of things, is a plaintext module that provides nodes as plain text without themes or anything fancy. This will allow the authors of independent Drupal sites on the same server to each have a distinct robots.txt as well as other files. An additional possible use is the publication of a comment spam blacklist. This plain-text list would be parsed and comments with the words in the list deleted at a semi-regular interval.

As the thought has evolved I now would think the way to do it is a special node type. The "plain-jane" node type will simply regurgitate what it is fed, verbatim. Then with URL aliasing it can be robots.txt or any other file one prefers.

Cnet blog skips the facts

August 5, 2005

A blog post by John Borland at C|Net's Apple Blog goes light on the facts to try and take a swipe at Apple.

The post, incorrectly, states that Apple defines blogs as "A weblog: blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers."

There are just two problems with this. First it's the Oxford American Dictionary not Apple who comes up with the definitions. Second it's not a definition but an example given of how the word can be used.

But why let the facts get in the way of a false story.

Cowboy faker

August 4, 2005

The amazing tales of Richard Fipps continue to unfold. In the coming week we'll have a lot more to say about the so-called cowboy who faked a charitable ride this summer and took advantage of several people's good will in the process.

Please feel free to comment if you have information about Fipps or Richard Handy. If you would prefer your comment not be posted indicate that in the body of the comment and if you wouldn't mind talking to a member of the team investigating these tales and documenting the truth.

LexisNexis adds RSS feeds

August 3, 2005

LexisNexis now has RSS feeds. Unlike the West Group (WestLaw) feeds these feeds are canned instead of the custom queries available in West's products.

One fraud or two?

August 3, 2005

That Richard Fipps made up the tale of his ride from Mexico to Canada earlier this year has been well established. Along with neighbor's accounts of Fipps at his Las Vegas home during the supposed trip the Las Vegas Sun reported last week that the owner of the stable where Fipps' horses are stabled stated they hadn't been gone for more than a long weekend during the ride.

Three years ago Fipps also claimed to have made an epic trip. Much of the documentation of that trip has disappeared from the web but The Cullman Times has an article from the following summer with extensive quotes from Fipps.

When he reached Colorado, Fipps had decided to rest a couple of days and enter a rodeo. He ended up winning the rodeo and staying for a week.

He helped a local rancher push cattle. He helped a patrol officer herd escaped cattle off a road.

When he neared Grand Junction, Colo., Fipps experienced the only scary part of the trip.

"I had packed for four days and told my rig to go on ahead of me, I'd meet it in Grand Junction," he said, planning to ride across some mountains.

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