<p> Edd Dumbill is a Debian guy, plus an O&#39;Reilly author, and has some amusing notes on <a href="http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/contents/2005/03/15-etech/read">what he would have done had he gone to ETech this year</a>.</p> <p> 42pants. Heh.</p>

<p> I guess first I should make the observation that I don&#39;t know who Elijah is other than <a href="http://www.gnome.org/~newren/">some random Gnome hacker</a>.</p> <p> However, the last couple of days in Gnome-land has involved huge, horrendous amounts of dumping on someone named Eugenia for saying some unconsidered and unkind things in the most public way possible. Lots and lots of dumping. I mean tons. It certainly seems like everyone on <a href="http://planet.gnome.org/">Planet Gnome</a> has made a comment, and though most of them have been minimally civil–no shouted obscenities, no ad hominiem attacks–I think it&#39;s fair to say most of them feel unfairly attacked.</p>

<p> Well, it&#39;s not that much of a reorg, really, other than to remove the ihp-140 from the laptop itself, and attach it to the micro-server, and use <a href="http://musicpd.org/">mpd</a> on that system for actually playing things.</p> <p> It&#39;s kinda fun, too, to be sitting downstairs, tweaking the playlist for what&#39;s going on upstairs.</p> <p> Interestingly, I also get <strong>much</strong> better sound out of the audio hardware on the micro-server than out of the audio hardware on the laptop. Less noise, especially during quiet passages. Now if only the processor weren&#39;t so dang slow for actually encoding to OGG, I&#39;d be all set–the DVD drive is plenty fast for ripping.</p>

<p> But who am I to resist?</p> <p> So, the rules are, underline places you&#39;ve lived, bold places you&#39;ve visited, italicize where you live now. I daresay that mine is not a too-typical liberal profile, seeing as how most of the places I&#39;ve lived in my life are &#34;Red States&#34;, including the place I currently live:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Alabama</em> / Alaska / <em>Arizona</em> / Arkansas / <em>California</em> / Colorado / <strong>Connecticut</strong> / Delaware / <em>Florida</em> / <em>Georgia</em> / Hawaii / Idaho / <strong>Illinois</strong> / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / <strong>Louisiana</strong> / Maine / <strong>Maryland</strong> / <em>Massachusetts</em> / <strong>Michigan</strong> / Minnesota / <strong>Mississippi</strong> / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / <strong>New Jersey</strong> / New Mexico / <strong>New York</strong> / North Carolina / North Dakota / <strong>Ohio</strong> / Oklahoma / Oregon / <strong>Pennsylvania</strong> / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / <strong>Tennessee</strong> / <strong>Texas</strong> / Utah / Vermont / <em>Virginia</em> / Washington / West Virginia / <strong>Wisconsin</strong> / Wyoming / <em>Washington D.C</em></p>

<p> Even more amusingly, Chet called me to make sure I knew–though I had, in fact, already heard part of it. Specifically, the bit about using graph theory to remodel the kitchen.</p> <p> Anyway, the story is <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4532247">here</a></p>

<p> Yeah, the person who found my site by searching for holly hunter unattractive. Dude, you&#39;re just <strong>wrong</strong>. Wrong I tell you!</p> <p> On the other hand, one on one sex chet video software is just funny.</p> <p> One last selection: elephants anatomy porn.</p> <p> <em>whimper</em>.</p>

<p> (which honesty forces me to note always sneaks up on me because it has somehow gotten lodged in my brain that it&#39;s the 21st, which is, as you can probably calculate, 8 days from now) <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/chet/">I link you to pictures on Flickr tagged with &#39;Chet&#39;</a>.</p> <p> Heh.</p>

<p> Inspired by my idea to link to pictures on <a href="http://flickr.com/">Flickr</a> tagged with &#34;Chet&#34;, I give you the first installment of &#34;Flickr Blogging&#34;.</p> <p> <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/palomino/">palomino</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/sugar/">sugar</a>, <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/torch/">torch</a></p> <p> Note: This may be safe for work. Or it may not–I&#39;m picking words out of thin air here, so there may be nothing but a big blank canvas.</p>

<p> which is an interesting bit in itself, Jakub Steiner drops a couple of links to some resources on writing (and, for that matter, why to write) functional specifications, <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html">one from Joel Spolsky</a> and <a href="http://www.mojofat.com/tutorial/">one much more elaborate one</a> that really leads you by the nose.</p> <p> This all seems especially germane to me right now since I&#39;m going through the throes of writing some specs for the great rewrite of <a href="http://antespam.com/">AnteSpam</a>.</p>

<p> This is apparently all over geek circles today, but I got it from <a href="http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/">Miguel</a>.</p> <p> Researchers in Israel have developed colorization techniques that are almost freakish in their ability to produce natural-looking results using an incredibly simple-seeming marking-up of the original image.</p> <p> Needless to say, <a href="http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yweiss/Colorization/">they have a web page devoted to it</a>.</p>

<p> So, I made myself sufficiently hungry writing about <a href="/2005/03/pho-cali-raleigh-nc.html">Pho Cali</a> that I was going to go there for lunch. But, I figured I&#39;d check with Anne to see if this was going to be an unforgivable transgression, and she suggested that I drive over to Chapel Hill and try <a href="http://triangle.citysearch.com/profile/41280615">Lime &amp; Basil</a>.</p> <p> I&#39;m happy to report that it&#39;s good. It&#39;s not as good at Pho Cali, but it is more than acceptable, and it&#39;s a whole lot closer. I don&#39;t know that we&#39;d sacrifice our weekend trips to Pho Cali to go there, but for during the week, it&#39;s a very reasonable alternative.</p>

<p> It&#39;s <a href="http://zilbo.com/articles/ajax_how.html">the hot new thing</a>, even cooler than <a href="http://www.rubyonrails.com/">Ruby on Rails</a>.</p>

<p> So, poking around the search stats, I notice searches for &#34;Pho Cali Raleigh&#34; landing here–and, indeed, I seem to be the fourth result in Google.</p> <p> So let me just state it here, unambiguously–I think Pho Cali is really, really good. It may not achieve the levels of excellence that, say, <a href="http://slanteddoor.com/">The Slanted Door</a> aspires to (and mostly achieves), but I&#39;d put it up against the one other Vietnamese place I know well and like–Saigon City, in San Mateo, CA–any day of the week.</p>

<p> Over the last few years, it has been a presumption that when I work on a project in Perl, I will use the standard Perl tools– <code class="verbatim">ExtUtils::MakeMaker</code> and, later, <code class="verbatim">Module::Build</code> –for managing the Perl library code I write.</p> <p> But yesterday, for the first time, I looked at extending <code class="verbatim">Module::Build</code> to do more than just the stock actions. And you know what, it was easy.</p> <p> Now the specific issue I was running up against was that I needed to insure that the database I was running my tests against was installed and clean. I had been using a Makefile, but that was a hack–for instance, I wasn&#39;t actually checking the presence of the database or anything, I was looking for a file I wrote when I created the database. I probably could have made make check for the actual database, but it&#39;s imperative, rather than procedural, style makes this kind of ugly.</p>

<p> I remember when it was first freed, late last summer–right about the time I was starting in DC–and it was the subject of much enthusiasm and lots of &#34;wow, this is just what we&#39;ve been waiting for&#34; posts.</p> <p> It would appear, though, that the bloom is off the rose, and <a href="http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2005/3/8/wasting_time_with_laszo">all we&#39;re left with are the thorns</a>.</p>

<p> Though I have to say that there&#39;s few, if any, sorts of dead animal flesh I find more satisfying than a good piece of well-cooked bacon. Especially this variety we used to be able to get in Miami, cured with Juniper.</p> <p> Still, if you are &#34;a person who supplements an otherwise normal diet with large amounts of pork&#34;, perhaps you should check out <a href="http://bacontarian.com/">the Bacontarian site</a></p> <p> For what it&#39;s worth, I&#39;m aquainted with one of the posters on the site–dug–although I&#39;m just mentioning this for the amusement factor. Of course, you never know–if I were given an opportunity to whore myself out, I might take it.</p>

<blockquote> <p>What&#39;s amazing is that Alley can look and behave so slovenly and yet remain so stylized, like a Pedro Almadovar diva demento written with the late Divine in mind.</p> </blockquote> <p> It never would have occured to me to link Almadovar and Divine, but it&#39;s just so <strong>right</strong>.</p>

<p> <a href="http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/">Miguel de Icaza</a>, apparently-never-sleeps mastermind behind <a href="http://gnome.org/">Gnome</a> and <a href="http://go-mono.com/">Mono</a>, <a href="http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2005/Mar-08.html">went to Turkey and Lebanon</a>.</p> <p> Yeah, <em>that</em> Lebanon. During the protests. And since Miguel is the sort of person who seems to be at home in any situation, he went and saw the protests. And talked to people. And took pictures.</p> <p> There&#39;s no deep analysis here, he just relates what the people he talked to told him. And, as encounters with people most often seem to be, it&#39;s interesting.</p>

<p> If you start on the <a href="http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/coolcube/">project page</a>, the garish, hideous, eye-burning truth will sneak up on you. Or you can go <a href="">straight to the pain</a>.</p>

<figure> <img src="../spring-is-coming.jpg" alt="../spring-is-coming.jpg" title="../spring-is-coming.jpg" /><figcaption> The view from our driveway up the street. </figcaption> </figure> <p> A couple of weeks ago, Anne cut back all the grasses on the patch of our lot up near the street. I&#39;m really just posting this picture in order to be able to make a comparison a few months from now–by say, September, this will be a veritable riot of vegetation.</p>

<p> John Goerzen points to <a href="http://techdatapros.com/asterisk/">an article about building your own linux-based PBX</a>. This isn&#39;t just some VOIP solution, either–that apparently wouldn&#39;t even cost you $20–but a full-fledged runs-over-POTS-lines system.</p> <p> Hmm. Maybe if I get that Micro-ATX Pentium-M motherboard that I&#39;ve been thinking about for my little server system, I could then shove the Mini-ITX motherboard back inits even smaller case and use that…</p>

<p> …insofar as she was born on Saturday (9:46pm, weighed 8lbs 5oz, 19.5 inches long, ever notice how easy it would be to mistake this for a fish someone caught?), but I didn&#39;t hear until now–and second-hand at that, I&#39;m hurt, I tell you, hurt!–that Chris and Aimee have actually decided on a name for their new arrival, Kayley Nicole.</p> <p> In fact, looking at <a href="/2004/11/no-rest-for-the-wicked.html">the last announcement</a>, two days versus three days doesn&#39;t make me seem especially tardy, at least not according to the miserable benchmark I&#39;ve established.</p>

<p> There is now an templating system implemented <a href="http://trimpath.com/project/wiki/JavaScriptTemplates">using client-side Javascript</a>.</p> <p> Normally this would be boring an tedious to contemplate, but, as Ian Holsman observes, combined with liberal use of XMLHttpRequest, this could be interesting.</p>

<p> Err, I&#39;ve already forgotten where I saw this link (that&#39;s sad), but there&#39;s <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0303-23.htm">a short piece on HST by George McGovern</a>.</p>

<p> SNL has sketches built around the premise. And, having lived in Germany for five years, I would tend to agree, though I would also add that they also allow nekkid people.</p> <p> Anyhoo, Jerry forwarded me this <a href="http://cowcotland.free.fr/modules/Forums/conneries/russes.mpeg">fairly absurd clip from some popular-music show</a>. Since Anne was home sick, and I had no idea what it might turn out to be, I viewed it without sound. I suspect it is better that way–less painful, but no less strange.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.ebaumsworld.com/supercoolpicillusion.html">An &#39;infinitely&#39; zoomable image</a></p>

<p> This is hardly a huge portion of my CDs, and it has heretofore been utterly neglected–and I&#39;ve figured out why: it&#39;s a real bitch to tag those tracks. The track names are all inordinately long, and no one on CDDB seems likely to have done it the way you want it, whatever way that might be.</p> <p> And then you have something like the disc I have by <a href="http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.asp?CTR=820258">Elaine Funaro</a> (not one of those listed) that is all her playing, but she&#39;s doing stuff by a number of different composers.</p>

<p> Apparently, the upper left corner of your page is <a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/3/prweb213516.htm">the best place to put your google ads</a>.</p>

<p> It was a grim joke during my time at the University of Alabama that we only ever got in the news for football and racism–because of our revolving door policy on coaches and such lovely incidents as parties at sorority houses involving girls in black-face respectively.</p> <p> Now it appears that UA&#39;s going to add another negative category: suppressing speech.</p> <p> So, the story would seem to be that some student decided to stick a confederate battle flag in his window. Whatever your feelings about the conflict of 1861-1865, whether you call it the Civil War or the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression–and I have to say that, over time I have come to believe that the third construction may not be that far from the truth, however much I am disgusted by what the South was fighting to preserve–you have to be an idiot to not realize that the flag has been appropriated by racist bigots as their symbol. To display it, whatever your motivation, is <strong>at least</strong> impolite.</p>

<p> OK, so the single best reason to analyze ones weblog access logs is not to find out how many people are hitting your site or any shit like that–although I have to admit to a certain bafflement at how many hits I get, even if you carve out bloglines.com&#39;s constant polling.</p> <p> No, the best reason to analyse ones access logs is to see the absolutely hilarious searches that people follow to your site. I&#39;ve mentioned &#34;milla jovovich naked&#34; before–I don&#39;t think the person using that got what they wanted, <a href="/2004/09/dinner-rush.html">since it was a result of me bashing Resident Evil</a>. Anne and I spent a few minutes a week or so ago lauging about some.</p>

<p> Though it pains me somewhat to say it, I cannot recommend this book.</p> <p> Let me first emphasise that it&#39;s not that there&#39;s probably not a lot of good information in it–there is. I have continually stumbled across interesting tidbits about how Perl 6 will do things.</p> <p> The problem is with that verb: <strong>stumbled</strong>. The book eschews a reference-book sort of setup, and in its own words:</p> <blockquote> <p>[…] I wrote this book in the style of a plain programming-language manual with basic concepts coming first and later chapters building on them.</p>

<p> A table-less, standards-compliant, three-column liquid page layout with masthead and footer? (yeah, I&#39;m kinda stealing Ugo&#39;s lead, too).</p> <p> <a href="http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/skidoo_too/index.html">Apparently so</a>.</p>

<p> Hum. <a href="http://ironicdesign.com/">Ironic Design</a> runs several machines. We&#39;ve got seven servers for servicing <a href="http://antespam.com/">AnteSpam</a>, plus three or four others doing miscellaneous duties, like hosting this blog.</p> <p> Anyway, having all this hardware that we pretty much keep going 24/7, and especially with the AnteSpam servers, which get driven hard (2 emails per second, which doesn&#39;t sounds like a lot until you consider that means 20x that in various database lookups and inserts (for logging) plus, oh yeah, actually running <a href="http://spamassassin.apache.org/)">SpamAssassin</a> means we have some fairly strong ideas about hardware.</p>

<p> Brad DeLong goes to Chez Panisse, <a href="http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000433.html">then has some fun with it</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>&#34;We went to Chez Panisse for lunch last week.&#34;<br> &#34;Ah! The rough life of a Berkeley professor.&#34;<br> &#34;The dish they were pushing was chicken-under-a-brick. But i told them my wife had made it just a couple of weeks ago.&#34;<br> &#34;Did you tell them that what I made was actually chicken-under-a-cast-iron-Le-Creuset-casserole weighted with three soup cans?&#34;<br> &#34;No.&#34;<br> &#34;That would have given them their opening. &#39;Well, sir, be assured that at this restaurant, our chicken-under-a-brick is made with real bricks…&#39;&#34;<br> &#34;Real bricks, made by hand by the artisan brickmakers of Sonoma County…&#34;<br> &#34;&#39;Sonoma County? You jest, sir! Alameda County. Those who lose big at the local Indian casinos must work off their debt by gathering dung and straw from Shattuck Avenue to hand-make adobe Mission bricks…&#39;&#34;</p>

<p> <a href="http://miscellaneousheathen.com/life/050224phoneshenanigans.html">Chet&#39;s recollection</a> of me screwing around with people who kept calling my number in error. It has a vague sense of familiarity, but, honestly, it might have been Patrick–simply taking reservations seemed a little subtle for me, I was much more the &#34;beat the phone against the wall&#34; sort of person at that point.</p> <p> I&#39;m much better now. Unless you&#39;re a telephone solicitor. Or a wrong number calling me too early in the morning.</p>

<p> So, it was a total impulse buy when I picked up the March/April issue of <a href="http://cooksillustrated.com/--Anne">Cook&#39;s Illustrated</a> and I had gotten my sister a subscription for Christmas a few years ago, and our friend Chapman had gotten us a cookbook by the same people a year or two ago, but I&#39;d never really looked hard at the magazine, and, well, the checkout line isn&#39;t the place to do it.</p> <p> However, we&#39;ve tried two recipes from it–one pasta dish (a spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, olives, capers, and pine nuts is actually <a href="http://www.cooksillustrated.com/article.asp?articleid=763&amp;amp;bdc=9156)">on the web</a>, which was judged excellent by us and the friends we had over, and their take on tortilla soup–and they&#39;ve both been incredibly tasty, and, even more amazing, <strong>easy</strong>. Their tortilla soup recipe is as good as any I&#39;ve ever had–although I&#39;ll admit that I don&#39;t live in, say, Houston–and it&#39;s structured in such a way that if you had three people to work on it simultaneously, you could be done in maybe 30 minutes from start to finish.</p>

<p> Oh, I don&#39;t know that I have all that much to say about The Eyre Affair. It&#39;s lighthearted escapism that has some fun with famous literature–the idea of a Shakespeare play being put on as if it were The Rocky Horror Picture Show is awfully amusing to think about, <em>especially</em> if the play in question is Richard III.</p> <p> As further proof–if &#39;twere needed–that nothing ever changes, there is a plotline that revolves around the fact that the Crimean war has been running continuously to &#34;present day&#34;–which is to say 1985–that has all sorts of weird echos in this time and place, even though the book was released in January, 2002, meaning it had to have been finished before September 11 and well before the whole subject of Iraq came up.</p>

<p> What more needs to be said than <a href="http://comicfacts.blogspot.com/?">Have at it</a></p>

<p> So, the Perl 6 implementation on top of Parrot continues to chug along. At least, I suppose it does–since Piers Cawley doesn&#39;t write his weekly summaries any more, I have no idea. I guess I need to subscribe to yet another mailing list.</p> <p> However, regardless of that, a &#34;competing&#34; implementation is being worked on. The weird, mildly disturbing part of it is that it&#39;s being <a href="http://www.pugscode.org/">implemented in Haskell</a>.</p> <p> Now I don&#39;t have anything against Haskell, <em>per se</em>–in fact, I considered learning it as a new language, although I ended up going with C#, which is a whole other story–but everything I&#39;ve seen about it suggests that it is, if not an anti-Perl sort of language, at least a very un-Perl sort of language. To use one to implement the other seems, masochistic.</p>

<p> From the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, <a href="http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/onTheRoad/home/index.shtml">with a stop for a photo at every mile marker</a>.</p> <p> It&#39;s a big, weird country out there.</p>

<p> Safe for work, but you must be familiar with things that are not safe for work <a href="http://profgoose.blogspot.com/2005/02/how-ironicalor-perhaps-this-belongs.html">for this picture to be as funny as possible</a>.</p>

<p> <a href="http://makezine.com/">Make</a> describes itself as:</p> <blockquote> <p>The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration.</p> </blockquote> <p> Sucker that I occasionally am, I suspect I shall subscribe–apparently the first issue will be subscription-only, with the second appearing on newsstands.</p>

<p> The new laptop is still supposed to ship out on March 09, so I&#39;m just crossing my fingers. However, I might have an idea what to do with it once it does die. <a href="http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~wing/wingie/tech/hdchime/hdchime.php">Windchimes!</a></p>

<p> It&#39;s a MIDI sequencer–really, it seems more of an interactive instrument to me–that <a href="http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/eceprojectsland/STUDENTPROJ/2002to2003/lil2/">uses six hamsters to control three channels of pitch and rhythm</a>.</p> <p> There are wav and mp3s of the output. I wonder if you could get the base MIDI files for use as a ringtone?</p>

<p> So, um, I took a week off, more or less, from any real, sensible, useful work to write my own blogging package.</p> <p> This choice, believe it or not, was not undertaken lightly. Well, that&#39;s not entirely true–the need to resolve the issues I&#39;d been having bit me in the ass one day, and I just couldn&#39;t concentrate on anything else until it was done. But I&#39;d been thinking about moving for a while, because there were issues with the software I had been using, but the software, <a href="http://blosxom.com/">Blosxom</a>, is basically dead.</p>

<p> Hunter&#39;s not dead, he&#39;s <a href="http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_02_20_fafblog_archive.html#110897122984416138">just going hunting</a></p>

<p> I bought a trio of Jonathon Carroll novels in a single volume, and just haven&#39;t made it to it yet, even though John Clute says they&#39;re spectacular.</p> <p> Sometimes these things happen. I&#39;ll probably try again in six months or a year and wonder what stopped me before.</p> <p> On the other hand, two posts in, and I find Jonathon Carroll&#39;s blog absolutely fascinating. For instance, the post on 2/9 (you have to go to the <a href="http://www.jonathancarroll.com/blog/2005_02.html">February page</a> and then scroll down).</p>

<blockquote> <p>&#34;A good woman is like a fine cheese,&#34; says me. &#34;Or a large hat. Or an aggrieved sasquatch. Or an elephant made outta trees an ropes an lotsa smaller elephants.&#34;</p> </blockquote> <p> <a href="http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_02_13_fafblog_archive.html#110841400293602113">What more do you need to know?</a></p>

<p> So, decided to cave in and get that grocery store discount card that makes Ben &amp; Jerry&#39;s a buck cheaper, but hate the fact that you&#39;ve just given them a window into your buying habits?</p> <p> Benjamin Mako Hill <a href="http://mako.yukidoke.org/copyrighteous/projects/20050208-00.html">has the answer</a>. He and some compatriots put together <a href="http://cardexchange.org/">cardexchange.org</a> so you can meet up with people and swap cards. Yeah, they&#39;ll still collect information, but it&#39;ll be kinda strange.</p>

<p> John&#39;s a Debian developer, and I keep up with his blog through the <a href="http://planet.debian.org/">Planet Debian</a> aggregator.</p> <p> I was very interested to read his <a href="http://changelog.complete.org/node/230">post on Amtrak funding</a>.</p> <p> I think having public transportation is a significant public good–one of the things I have liked most about the times I have lived in large cities (Boston, Miami, DC) is the ability to get to places without a car. That public transportation occasionally provides Chet with an opportunity to note, &#34;That woman had pierced nipples.&#34; (a fact I had not noticed in my still-somewhat-hung-over state) is just icing on the proverbial cake.</p>