Mini-ITX Boards

Posted on 19 October, 2003 by steevithak

I’ve been catching up on my ToDo list the last couple of weeks. Most of it was boring work-related stuff. But among the fun things, I finally got the review of VIA Technologies Mini-ITX board posted on robots.net. The board will now pass on to the DPRG where it will hopefully end up in a robot or be put to some other equally creative use. I liked it so much, I think we may buy a couple of Mini-ITX boxes to try out as Linux servers at NCC. If nothing else, they make a lot less noise than our new Dell 1750 does.

I also managed to put a few more fixes and patches into my fork of the mod_virgule code and released a new version today. The libxml2 patch has been in place since the last release and has working pretty well. I added some minor cosmetic fixes today to make the XML output nicely formatted again. I also incorporated a patch from James Henstridge that add RSS link elements for diaries.

To get away from the computer for a while this afternoon, we went to an exhibit of Martha E. Simkins paintings at the Irving Arts Center.

Rain and Music

Posted on 17 April, 2002 by steevithak

Yesterday afternoon there was a huge thunderstorm that brought along quite a bit of hail. I decided to hang around the office to make sure all the servers made it through the storm. We took to a couple of small power hits, neither outage lasted over 5 minutes, and the UPS’ saved the day again. (732 days uptime on our main server and counting…)

Susan left early in an attempt to get home before the storm hit but didn’t make it. Her car took a pounding from the hail but suprisingly there was no visible damage this morning. On the other hand, she inadvertently hit some pretty high water on one of the roads and this morning her car was acting like it had water in the gas tank. We dropped it off at the Acura dealer and are waiting for news. Luckily for me, my RSX was safely tucked away in the covered parking at our office the whole time. :-)

Meanwhile, I’ve been plugging away in my spare time on the mod_virgule merging project. Gary has a done a great job of getting things rolling again and I look forward to the day when my own version of the code is completely merged back in and I can run robots.net on the main codebase.

The only other event of interest that’s happened lately is that Susan and I went to see a performance of the Dallas Symphony on the 13th. The guest performers were violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and cellist Lynn Harrell. We also went to hear a couple of smaller works performed by just the two guest artists and Andrew Litton on piano on the 14th.

Living Life and Writing About It

Posted on 29 March, 2002 by steevithak

Life and Stories

Yikes, I’ve let too much time slip past since my last entry again! Seems like when I’m doing things worth writing about I get too busy to write. And when I have time to write it’s because I’m not out doing anything worth writing about. Didn’t Sartre say something along those lines? (one quick Google search later):

For the most trivial event to become an adventure, all you have to do is start telling about it. This is what deceives people: a man is always a teller of stories, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything which happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if it were a story he was telling. But you have to choose: live or tell…While you live, nothing happens…but when you tell about life, everything changes.
–Jean-Paul Sartre ,Nausea, 1938

That about sums it up. When I’m busy living, there’s nothing new here on my home page. One has to wonder what Sartre would have thought of weblogs.

mod_virgule

Having spent some time hacking on mod_virgule, I’d have to agree with Raph’s comment about scalability issues. I don’t see any reason the trust metric algorithms themselves couldn’t be scaled up to a site the size of Slashdot if needed. Any slowness on Advogato is just due to file I/O from the particular XML setup. And now that mod_virgule is seeing active development again, I’m sure any performance issues with the XML will be addressed before long.

Photography

I’ve been spending the weekends lately playing with some new lenses I picked up on eBay. After a bit of practice, I’ve managed to get some decent shots of a variety of birds. One of these days I’m going to get around to putting some photo galleries up here on my web site. My latest toys are a set of extension tubes for macrophotography. With spring on the way, I’ll probably be out trying to get some interesting shots of insects and the like. Getting the extension tubes proved to be my one bad experience in more than a year of buying and selling on eBay. I was a little hesitant to bid at first due to some negative comments the seller had (speaking of trust metrics – eBay badly needs a real trust metric system!). Anyway, I bid and won the tubes, sent a check (which was immediately deposited), and then heard nothing for weeks. I emailed the guy to find out what the hold up was and got an email saying the item had “just been shipped priority mail”. After another week I started getting various random excuse ranging from family problems to lost passwords. Eventually, he stopped replying to my email altogether. Then the guy’s eBay account was mysteriously closed. I contacted some other people who had bought stuff from him and discovered they too had paid but not received anything.

At this point I contacted eBay and they recommended filing a mail fraud complaint. They also provided the phone number the seller had given for his eBay account. I called the number only to find it belonged to a relative of the seller. They gave me another number and told me in somewhat more colorful language that they had nothing to do with the guy and didn’t think very highly of him. So I called the number they gave me, talked to someone who claimed to be the daughter of the seller, and was promised that I would be contacted shortly. I explained that this was my last effort and that if nothing happened, I would probably follow eBay’s recommendation of pursuing a fraud complaint. Four days later a package arrived with my extension tubes. In the future I’ll probably follow my instinct more closely and hopefully avoid sellers like this one.

Snow and Spam

Posted on 13 February, 2002 by steevithak

I better post this while I’m thinking about it. The last couple of weeks have been way too busy. After a slow December, business really picked up in January and based on the number of new proposals we’ve been cranking out, it hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down yet. Anyway, what’s happened in the last couple of weeks that’s worth telling you about? Hmmm…

I sent a mod_virgule patch to Raph a week or so ago that fixes the duplicate article problem which has been plaguing Advogato. Don’t know if he applied it or not but I’ve been using it on robots.net for a while and haven’t had any dupicate posts.

It actually snowed here in Dallas about a week ago. Real snow like we haven’t had in years. Unfortunately, it was typical Texas weather – 60F one day, heavy snow and 30F the next, and back in the 60s again after that. So most of the snow was gone within 48 hours. But I managed to shoot a few nice photos of it before it melted.

In the never-ending fight to block spam, I’ve finally found a suitable replacement for ORBS. After the demise of ORBS, a whole pile of ORBS clones sprang up and I’ve tried a lot of them. Most had tiny databases, bad data, got too many false positives, or were otherwise unsatisfactory. ORDB, however, has turned out to be the best of the bunch; as good or better than the original. Now, if I could just figure out how to pronounce the name! In addition to ORDB, we’re using SPEWS, the Spamhaus Block List, and our own private block list. We usually block 500-600 spams per day with the current setup (about 90%).

Deep Ellum Arts Festival 2001

Posted on 9 April, 2001 by steevithak

Last week was another busy week. Lots of Perl and a smaller amount of C programming. More progress on robots.net. The robomenu is now working. The robomenu is a database of robots with photos and descriptions. I’ve only managed to get about half the records into the database (they were originally static pages) but it is online and seems to be holding up okay so far. I’m using PostgreSQL as the database and a Perl DBI program to generate a set of static pages every night. I’m still working on the interface that will allow users to submit new robots but that should online within a week or so.

On Saturday Susan and I got to see Dmitry Sitkovetsky as guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony. He conducted the DSO in four pieces of Chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. The Shostakovich piece was a transcription for Chamber Orchestra of the String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110 and was particularly good. We tried unsuccessfully to find a CD of the piece Sunday. We’ll probably have to order it on Amazon or catch a used one on eBay sometime.

We spent a while at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival on Sunday. Lots of live music including a group from Central America playing some sort of traditional folk music with lots of curious instruments. There were some Celtic bands, some Jazz groups, and quite a selection of local rock groups – like Baby Jane Hudson and Eden Automatic. The weather was great for a day outside and most of the people had brought their dogs. I think we saw at least one of every possible kind of dog while we were there. It was an Art festival so there was quite a bit to see in the Arts and Crafts department as well, though the weirdest aspect of the whole thing was a collection of Art Cars from all over. There was a Van covered in bright orange stucko, a car decked out to look like the yellow submarine, and several cars that I guess you’d call debris cars. One was covered with plastic toys like Godzillas, Boba Fetts, and Mr T dolls. Another was completely covered by sea shells with a variety of rubber octopi and other sea creatures attached. One had a back seat uplostered in one and five dollar bills and an outside covered with quarters, nickels, dimes, and an assortment of jewlery. Weird stuff.

Ducks, Peas, and Web Sites

Posted on 1 April, 2001 by steevithak

Susan and I took some time off today and didn’t do any work. After a late breakfast we walked down to the park and fed some bread to the ducks and turtles. There’s quite an assortment of ducks this year including the usual white park ducks (well, I call ’em park ducks but I think they’re really Pekin Ducks), Mallards, Muscovies, Northern Shoveler, American Widgeons, and Coots. It was warm enough that some of the turtles are begining to show themselves – mostly Red Eared Sliders. There were some assorted other things around like Egrets and Cormorants but they don’t eat bread so they just ignored us.

Afterwards we practiced our Tai Chi in the park – something I’ve never done before. We’re both able to get most of the way through the first sixteen positions though it gets a little tricky after the second set of brush-knees.

I’ve finished reading Jules Verne’s The Floating Island to Susan and now we’ve moved on to The Monk in the Garden by Robin Marantz Henig. It tells the story of Gregor Mendel and his experiments cross-breeding peas which allowed him to discover the principals of inheritance. So far the book is moderately interesting but the author feels if you can’t find enough facts to fill in the whole story, you should just make up something that sounds good so that the story flows along like a novel. So periodically, she will insert a paragraph or two of ridiculous speculation on what Mendel might have thought about or what he might have said to someone. Usually the made-up parts are about as historically believable as the dialog on the Hercules or Zena TV shows. Fortunately those portions of the book are infrequent and small enough they can be easily skipped.

Mozilla. 0.8.1 is out. My advice is to stick with 0.8. The new release is far less stable than 0.8 and is crashing several times a day (in fact it’s less stable the Netscape!). Also, it’s full of bugs that weren’t in 0.8. Yes, I’ve filed bugzilla reports on them, so I’m allowed to complain. :-) Hopefully they’ll get things back on track with the 0.9 release next month.

Meanwhile, robots.net is keeping me busy. Lots of Perl coding as well as lots of bugs fixes and changes to mod_virgule. One things that keeps amazing me about most of the web portal software like mod_virgule and slash and scoop is how primitive and slow they seem compared to the multi-user BBS software we used to have. It takes a fast Pentium II or III to do what your average BBS software could do back in the ’80s on a 20Mhz 80286. Mod_virgule seems a little better than the others (and has Raph’s cool trust metrics stuff – that’s something that does work better than what we had back in the good old days). I ran several of the old BBS packages for years and they were much more versatile in general. I’ll probably get all the features I need for robots.net hacked together out of mod_virgule and lots of Perl code but I think when I’m done I may just have to write an Apache module of my own that takes the best of modern web software and adds in the best features BBS software.