My microdrive in my Palm LifeDrive is dead. Actually it died a while ago, I just haven't had time to even contemplate what to do with it.

I could pay $150 for a fix/replacement from Palm.

OR.....

I could pay $75 for a CF card and run this really cool hack to replace the microdrive with compact flash. Of course, the hack requires imaging the original drive and then copying the image to the CF card. Hard to do when your drive has made terrible sounds and then quit. But *then* there's another hack which lets you reinstall to a blank microdrive.

Seems to me I should be able to install the CF card via hack#1 and then partition & install via hack#2... if it fails, I end up with a useless hulk that I probably can't send back to Palm even if I wanted to.

If it succeeds, I get a lighter, faster Palm that has no disk heads to crash...

What do you think? Doable?

Hack #1: http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Howto_replace_microdrive_with_compactflash_in_LifeDrive
Hack #2: http://trac.hackndev.com/projects/palmld/wiki/ReinstallingPalmOS

I'm going to Europe this fall, to speak at a conference! Cool, huh? I'm going to stay for an extra week after, and soak up some culture.

The reason why I can go, is that the company hosting the conference is paying for my airfare & hotel, so it isn't a burden on my company, who just couldn't justify the expense otherwise.

Turns out, I have two system-wide upgrade certificates that I could use to fly to London & back first class. I *really* want to use these certificates, this is a perfect opportunity since I'm flying alone, and dammit, I earned those babies.

BUT -- the SSW certificates don't apply to economy fares. Only to the 2nd tier of seat prices. So in order for me to use my upgrade certificates, I have to buy a more expensive ticket -- which means that this very nice company which has been generous to allow me to speak would end up paying more than it has to. Technically, the more-expensive ticket might be within their allocated travel budget -- but just because I have the budget, doesn't mean it's ethical to use it all if I don't have to.

Or else I pay the difference. I think that would be certainly more fair. But the difference is $600 CAD each way.

Meh, who am I kidding, I'm screwed. I think I'll be flying economy and letting my so-called upgrade certificates burn a whole in their fancy-but-useless folder.

I'd rather not have even gotten them. All they are is a fancy form of up-sell.

Can I be Heather Armstrong when I grow up? I grinned for an hour after reading this...

Dooce is my HERO

Different server, same web hosting company:

$ uptime
  13:16:43 up 1 day, 23:52, 9 users, load average: 949.54, 1004.56, 988.20

I think this one will be tough to beat :)

Pix

Remember the guy who dumped the propane bottle into the campfire and blew it up?

Well he was back at it this July long weekend. This time, the adults appear to have gotten completely wasted on various substances including but most definitely not limited to mushrooms and alcohol, just in time for the fireworks display.

I didn't even go next-door. I couldn't bear to see the mayhem. But I was treated to squeals of consternation and fear and various obviously dangerous looking flashes through the trees as several of the larger fireworks started out upright, and then proceeded to fall over and randomly spray the entire area with pyrotechnics. That whole thing on the instructions about securing the firework in something like sand -- psssht, who needs that?

Later they had the idea of jamming the firework into a tree so it wouldn't spray the crowd -- except in their intoxicated stupor, they jammed the firework in upside down, and sent everything bouncing across the lawn instead... ... and I'm sure they got their 7-year-old kids to throw the spent fireworks into the campfire. That's just par for the course.

Unbelievable. And people wonder why fireworks are illegal in so many places...

I will try not to belabour this, but I need to put it down.

I recently attended a conference, one of the favorites of my year. I've been attending forever and ever. Last year, one of the speakers was (gasp) female. She is an analyst, smart and pretty and matter-of-fact. She gave a fantastic presentation that didn't mince words, and received a lot of praise for both her content and her style.

This year I went back, expecting to see more. After all, she was now established, had even more experience and a greater body of work behind her. I can honestly say that I was really excited to see what she would do.

But I was disappointed. All the other analysts took the spotlight multiple times, but her one time to speak was foreshortened into non-existence because she was in the last spot and everyone else had taken her time. The rest of her presentations were taken out prior to the start of the conference because several proposed speakers that looked unavailable suddenly panned out at the last minute.

I was and am strangely upset. It is a stupid, unreasonable thing to care about. But I care a lot. When it happens to you, you can never really be sure that it wasn't just because you weren't right or good enough somehow. But I *know* this girl was good enough. She should have been prominently placed, but instead the organizers buried that ability and presence, apparently taking the slides she developed for her presos and distributing them to other speakers.

I'm sure that there's no patriarchal conspiracy here. Chances are, the same thing has happened to other analysts through the years. In fact, I doubt that many others noticed or cared. Except maybe the analyst herself - it's hard to know.

Here is the thing. It isn't about her deserving it. She deserved it then and still does, and her papers will still be just as great and the people around her all understand how brilliant she is. It is about owning it. It was about claiming it and holding it up for all to see and about declaring it to the world as a confirmation and a challenge to all comers. I wanted to see her not just do the work, but to do it in full acceptance and acknowledgement of her mastery.

What a loser I am. Stupid goofy hero-worshipping, living-in-my-head loser. There are lots of women around me who deserve praise. I just want to see someone in my field stand up and ask for their due. Talk about a pipe dream.

</vent>

Is there such a thing as BSD-licensing for dummies? Because I'd buy it.

I get that this is the license template. Now WTF do I do with it?

Do I put it in a single file in the root of my project? Do I have to add it (or something else) as a header for every file? Is there anything else that has to be done? I know assignment of copyright is a bitch, both retroactively and for future contributors, and I also have work to do on getting proof that code from one of my original contributors isn't entailed in any way -- but for now -- all I want to do is get the current moment's worth of code licensed and legal. Should that be so fricking difficult? It is impossible to find documentation that just says what to do and doesn't wax into philosophy. I don't give a rat's ass about the philosophy at this point. I don't care about proving anything down the line. I just want to know what text I have to add to what files in order to have a thing that is a BSD-licensed thing.

I need to go kick something.

I love it when a plan comes together :)

Turns out I was right to worry. So -- there are 3 kinds of partitioning schemes for a disk, when you go to partition, you have to know to click on "options" and then you'll see the three types:

• Guid Partition table -- this one lets you boot an Intel Mac off of the partition. This, oddly, was not the default.
• Apple Partition Map -- lets you boot a PPC Mac.
• Master Boot Record -- lets you boot dos/windows. This was the default.

When you use the "bless" command, information gets written into the HFS volume header -- which explains how a totally different machine could know that there was a boot partition on the drive.

As soon as I used a GUID partition table and reran rsync, everything looked great -- and I could tell it worked, by going to System Preferences->Startup disk -- my blessed partition now shows up as a bootable partition.

So all's well that ends well...

Cheers,

Pix

It's sunny - I'm at home listening to music on my stereo, with the back door open and a madras curry bubbling in the crockpot on the other side of the kitchen counter. I'm fixing bugs, staring down the inimitable gullet of C14N xml canonicalization, and smelling the lilacs in bloom.

Life is good. Very good. BTW the geeks in the crowd might find it funny that I ended up shelling out for a copy of Vista business - given that there is a high likelihood that I will be using my Vista VM to demonstrate Windows-only stuff to large numbers of people at some point, flagrantly violating the Vista EULA is probably not the brightest move.

As a result, I get to install and use an OS that is bloated with a whole bunch of crap I don't need and which takes extra resources for no good reason. Oh and which costs more. Swell. And MS employees wonder where all the hostility comes from...

Pix

[eggnog]$ uptime
  09:13:22 up 29 days, 1:44, 3 users, load average: 116.15, 94.25, 63.14
[eggnog]$

Seems that it's been 29 days since I last posted uptime for my server :) 10 bucks says they reboot - and here I almost made it a month with no reboots. Best of all, the support site is down too so I can't even whine to the sys-admins.

I'm pretty sure 116 is an all-time worst score for any box I've ever seen...

Hope this isn't too stupid a question:

I've run an rsync backup of my Mac to an external drive, and now I'm trying to prove to myself that my backup is capable of being externally booted in the case of disaster.

I reboot holding down the option key, and I select my external drive as the boot drive -- then the machine comes up and looks identical, regardless of which drive I boot from.

How do I know that it worked? df shows that both disks are mounted, but I don't see my external drive mounted as root -- isn't that bad? /etc/fstab is empty. All the files in /var/log look similar no matter what boot disk is specified, I don't see any kind of error. I don't know how exactly the OS finds the bootable partition that I ran the "bless" command on -- and what happens if I put multiple backups on the drive and therefore there are multiple "CoreServices" directories blessed?

I'm vewy confused... I need to get my OSX book back from my dogwalker dammit...

If you happen to have been here done that and can point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it :)

Pix

I finally bought my *perfect* laptop. With this laptop, I can merge my professional and personal interests, with reasonable performance and all the features.

My code has to run on a Mac, on Linux, and on Windows. I need up to all three different combinations of those operating systems to talk to each other, depending on what I'm working on.

Of course, having all those machines in one makes for a nasty software price tag :(

So I've got a Mac host system (macbook pro w/ 2gb memory), which I hope to dual-boot with Vista via boot camp, plus Ubuntu desktop and server virtual machines.

The Mac stuff is easy -- you pay a crapload for the hardware, but from a software perspective, it's easy. No fuss no muss.

The open source stuff is even better -- it installs brilliantly and just works - all of my email/browser/IM needs are met, and all of the heavy LAMP lifting is taken care of.

And then there is Windows. What an effing mess. Honestly. I never worry about this on the business side - whatever, it is just a cost of doing business. But as a personal user, it's a different story. My minimum requirements are for a licenced OS that can run .NET 3.0. An extra nice-to-have is word-processing/spreadsheet/presentation software, on some OS. Plus Visio. The number of permutations of those two things is hefty. And expensive. And worst of all, it seems horribly easy to make decisions that result in you actually paying a whole bunch of $$ and either being illegal or inoperative.

I ended up buying Vista home basic, OEM version. $109 plus tax. It seemed like all I needed, and I'm willing to take the hits on support and portability that an OEM version entails. And then I get home and happen to run across an article that says I can't use that environment for virtualization. If I install it with boot camp, and then access that via VmWare fusion, is that against the Eula? Technically it is on a physical partition. Is that enough to be legal? Who knows, I couldn't keep track of the 50,000 ways I can break the law with this stuff if I tried. Bottom line is - I've spent that $$ now, and I can't get it back, so I will make it work if I can. If I had the ability to trade it back in for something that I was absolutely sure wouldn't break the rules I would, but I'm sure as hell not going to throw that $100 bucks away and pay more to the people that are tying me up in bureaucracy in the first place. I may still have to do that -- I need a virtualized PC environment, so if I try it and it fails, back to the wallet I will go, for several hundred dollars more.

And then there's office. I won't bore you with the rant on that one, you've all heard it before. I love MS office 2007, I think it is an amazing tool, but for the $1000 (once you include visio) it would take for me to run that tool on my home computer in an equivalent capacity to what I do at work... I don't know. It isn't that I can't afford it -- it's that the ridiculous price is enough to override the joy I feel in the quality of the tool. If I could buy the OEM version there, that would be great -- but they have this OPK licensing thing that means that a OEM license is different from a volume license is different from a retail license. And if you buy an OEM license and you don't have a computer with pre-installed Office software, but you don't realize that's a requirement, or if you buy Office 2007 Small Business OEM but the actual preinstalled version is different -- well you are yet again in the situation where you have spent $$ and have nothing to show for it.

Oh well, I'll just think of this as an opportunity to yet again visit the world of open source office alternatives, I hear there have been great advancements. At the same time, I'll have to keep my fingers crossed that when VMware finally publishes a cost for their Mac Fusion product, it isn't a criminal amount.

I have sticker shock. Big-time. But I'm sure it will fade quickly, and I'll be left with a pretty great system. Thank god for what open source stuff there is, if I had to contemplate virtualizing an MS server environmnent at home, I think I would keel over and die on the spot...

Have you all been watching the Zooomr disaster ballooning into the atmosphere for the last two weeks? Two weeks down. Two weeks! Professionally, I can be nothing but horrified.

Here's a bit of the story: http://scobleizer.com/2007/06/01/hanging-out-in-the-zoho-data-center/

I like that the community has supported these guys -- but for the love of PETE, this is why companies whose business depend on production availability do things like create process around migration, worry about redundancy in hardware, figure out scalability. These guys' nicely written beautiful software can only take them so far, and then they needed to take into consideration the massive GOBS and GOBS of data they were storing.

A two week downtime. I can't get my head around that. I'm trying to imagine the scenes in the boardroom if I had actually managed one of my migrations such that we had a 1 day downtime, let alone 2 weeks....

Did they think that IT is just a big $$ suck? And if they didn't, and my guess is they were trying to do this on the cheap, did it ever occur to them that the cost of NOT shelling out for the right hardware and personnel to keep their site running 24/7 might be much much higher? That maybe this is why all those other suckers might have way higher bills in this area?

Yeesh. Part of me feels sorry for them, and part of me is horrified that investors are actually paying these guys, they obviously had their head in the sand about a few things, I wonder what the accounting is like...

Our office is a little full these days. For those of you familiar with the consulting biz, that is a bad thing - we've got lots of people on the bench.

In order to help combat the space situation, I've moved a desk to the front entryway and am sitting there -- and some of my coworkers are having a very rough time adjusting to the fact that I'm sitting in the "receptionist's spot".

Personally, I am more than happy to sit here. It's much more quiet & private than sitting in most other places, there is a phone drop and a network drop & power -- what more can anyone want?

But for whatever reason, the placement of this desk and the fact that I'm sitting in it seems to trigger no end of psychological issues for the rest of the office. Some of them can't stop laughing every time they walk by, some of them can't decide whether or not it's necessary to stop & chat whenever they need to go to the bathroom, others just sort of start with surprise every time they open the door and I'm there.

I'm quite sure the jokes about my needing a short skirt & high heels, and the faxing/photocopying jokes will all die down, but wow talk about some interesting insight into office status, and into female work stereotypes.

Heh, I've been told by several very knowledgeable people that if my concerns over intellectual property are the worst thing I have to worry about in this world, life is very good.

So I'm just going to try and raise my general IQ around this area, in a nice casual kind of way. I can't help it, I feel anxiety when there are areas of any project that are obscured from my knowledge, to me it always represents an unknown risk, and I'm hard-wired to respond to that.

In other news, life rocks. It really does. I'm doing work that I love and that I think is making a difference, and the opportunities for the future are as good as I can make them, so here's hoping I make them FANTASTIC...