Category: tech

Talk about software, hardware, electronics, and a myriad of other sex-repellent topics.

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what can i do to get you into these eyes today?


Uneventful Monday, other than what’s in the paragraph below. This week is full of holes for me, effectively useless from a work standpoint. Monday and Tuesday morning shot with Lasik consultations, Wednesday gone to a day trip to Oregon, and Friday consumed by my eyes getting lasered. My only full day in the office being Thursday… not that I mind, but I just feel so disconnected from work lately. Sharaun’s out running errands, and I’m at home tending Keaton. After several circuits of the living room and hall in her dad’s arms, she’s now sleeping quietly in her swing – looking a little angel far from the screeching banshee I struggled with just 10min ago. My website is still acting up, no help from the hosting company as yet – which saddens me as they’ve been so responsive over the years. Today I either hit a run of good luck, or the server was acting as it used to – because my page loads were fast and enjoyable. But as I try to post tonight, I’m hampered by timeouts and slow-loads. Who knows folks, I may end up having to switch hosts out of this whole deal… something I’m not looking forward to at all. Well, I think that’s a sufficient expository paragraph, eh? Yes then, let’s move along shall we?

Went in for my 1st Lasik evaluation this morning (you can read that as yesterday, since I’m writing from the past). It was a loooong experience: a battery of exams with a bit of good old fashioned salesmanship thrown in. There are several options: lasers, better lasers, tear-duct protein plugs, higher-order aberration correction, power windows and ABS, etc. It was clear to me that the Lasik business is a very lucrative enterprise – so much so that your ability to wheel and deal is huge. I casually mentioned that I was getting evaluations at a couple other major surgery outfits here in town, and was immediately offered “their lowest price minus 10%” as price-matching. I’m fully confident that I won’t end up paying more than 80% of the original prices I was quoted once I’m done shopping around and pitting surgeons against each other for my business. Seems odd… bargain-hunting for elective surgery… but there are so many places that do it and it’s become such a competitive industry – it works to the consumer’s benefit. Either way, I’ve got my surgery scheduled for Friday morning – with the caveat that I can call in my lowest “shopped around” price and get 10% off that anytime prior to the procedure.

Goodnight.

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catching up


I apologize for my website of late, the performance is horrible. The page either loads incredibly slow, or times out altogether. I have no idea what’s causing this, but am fairly certain it’s nothing of my doing. I’ve been running the same pages with the same scripts for quite a while with decent performance… and all of the sudden things are gummed up. I’ve narrowed it down to any page which accesses one of my MySQL databases (as both this page and my gallery pages do), so it seems the problem lies there… somehow. I have noticed a sharp increase in the amount of spam comments the blog gets, up to about ~3000 per day now – and that might be the culprit. I wrote to my host’s tech support – but so far they’ve only offered me an upgrade package to a dedicated server (rather than the virtual slice of a server I now share with others). This sounds appealing to me, but also ticks me off… I should be able to expect my pages to work. For crap’s sake I only have a measly three databases and a handful of scripts that call them. So, dear reader, I’ll do what I can to fix the situation – but until then I apologize if your experience here is frustrating.

But, just to make it all the more frustrating – here’s a link to Keaton’s gallery, where I’ve uploaded some annotated snaps from our weekend in Oregon which you’ll read more about below. Oh yeah, today’s entry is mad disjointed… and I make no apologies, as it was written in fits over the last week, often for entries not posted (as the gaps in writing last week make evident).

Let’s get started with random paragraph #1.

The other night on TV 20/20 ran a story about a girl who had to have half of her brain removed, due to a rare brain disease that was causing her to have debilitating seizures. Yes, it was a storyline on a popular medical drama recently. Anyway, they showed video footage the girl’s family took when she was a baby – and cut to her parents saying how happy they were when she was born that they got a “healthy baby.” Yes, aren’t we all… it’s what we all hope for, a healthy child with ten fingers and ten toes. But, when this family’s little girl turned four – something went wrong. I think about that all the time, how things can look so normal and right for so long – and then, seemingly out of the blue, go so terribly wrong. I think about that with our daughter, how perfect she is, how healthy and happy and beautiful. Watching a show like that before Keaton tugged at my heartstrings, watching it now that I have Keaton – it full-on hooked my heartstrings up to the Concorde and took flight.

Continuing with random paragraph #2.

Showering at my folks’ place these past few days, I noticed that their guest bathroom is stocked with a bottle of “body wash” instead my preference a bar of soap. I never did get into the “body wash” thing, just doesn’t equate to a bar of soap to me… leaving my skin feeling all slimy when I draw my fingers across it, instead of the squeaky clean of soap that I like. Anyway, I picked up the body wash to check it out – and read the following off the back label:

We know how special your bath or shower time is…a place for you to be private, reborn, where creative thoughts visit.

Reborn? For me, my bath or shower time is more like a time for me to wash the stink off my ass, sweat off my balls, and grease off my face (although not necessarily in that order). Who are these people for whom bathing is a religious experience? Although, I guess, I can’t argue with the “creative thoughts” coming to visit part – as this whole bit was indeed inspired by a shower…

And, random paragraphs #3 and #4, written last week but never posted.

Why are large conference/meeting rooms always unable to cool themselves properly? It seems like every time I find myself congregated with a large group of folks in big conference room, I’m sweating balls. You’d think that engineers designing these big conference rooms for hotels and the like would take this into consideration and install cooling that could handle capacity. Ugh… now my face is greasy and I’m getting sleepy, thanks a lot hot conference room.

The trip to Oregon has been a huge success thus far. Keaton must have her dad’s genes because she traveled like a seasoned pro – making nary a peep and sleeping the entire time. Last night Sharaun and I slept with her lain betwixt us, which we’ve never done before – partly for fear of rolling over onto her mid-sleep. Well, we didn’t roll over onto her, and I really enjoyed the experience. It may sound dumb, but I loved waking up in the middle of the night and seeing her sleeping face just to my left, her little pink-clad arms flung up above her head just like dad does when he sleeps, her little chest rising and falling and making soft breathy sounds through her tiny nose. I want to describe it as “intimate,” but that sounds kinda pedo… so maybe I won’t.

Let’s end this mess just as randomly, shall we?

I’m so excited about the news that Thom Yorke is doing a solo record, I can’t wait to see what he does with his “spare time.” I certainly love the woodcut-esque flash animation on the frontpage of his solo-centric webpage – I the imagery there is in any way representative of the album’s vibe, I’m down. I’m also excited because the new Sufjan leaked… a full two months in advance of the album’s official release. I’ll write more about it once I’ve had the time to properly digest it.

Well, today (Monday) is the 1st of my two Lasik consultations, with surgery possible as early as this Friday. I’m so pumped folks, so pumped. Talk to you all later, Dave out.

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once more to the skies


Not much meat today, but I didn’t want to do one of those skip-two-days things again. We fly to Oregon tomorrow (we’re already gone as you read this), for a work/vacation thing (I work Wednesday through Friday, hang with the folks in the evenings and on the weekend). Keaton’s first flight, and we have to roll out of bed at the ungodly hour of 3am in order to get ready and catch out 6am flight. Wish us luck, OK?

Work’s got me in a rut… some recent goings-down there have shaken up my responsibilities and rendered a good part of the planning I’ve done over the last six months moot. Gave me occasion to sit aimless for a bit, without direction, wondering where and how to get back into things. I’m reluctant to go back and redo all my careful planning, as I’m somewhat concerned the dust hasn’t quite settled and it may all be for naught. I will admit, though, that a Tuesday with no direction and no solid deadlines was kinda nice…

Progress on ripping the very last remnants of my CD collection is moving along swiftly, thanks to the bootleg-wizard script I wrote to tag-up the resultant MP3s. I’m working through the Beatles at a breakneck clip, and excited about the prospect of finally getting down to zero physical CDs and an all-digital music library. Well, to be honest I do have plans to box up some of my original Beatles bootlegs and store them for safekeeping – as they’re rather rare and have a high sentimental value. But all the CD-R copies of stuff I traded for over the years is going right in the bin – trash.

Until Oregon, goodnight.

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firsts


A weekend of firsts: First night away from home with little Keaton; Keaton’s first camping trip; Keaton’s first time to the ocean; and Keaton’s first night slept entirely through (she’s been doing ~6hrs for about week, but Sunday night she went 11 hours – in a tent no less). Camping was good, but freezing – windy and in the low 50s / high 40s at night. We bundled Keaton tight, and she really seemed to enjoy being outside. Laying down in the tent must’ve seemed like a circus-colored light show to her, with the wind blowing the canvas walls in and out and the sunlight playing through the trees we were pitched under. I’ve posted the Keaton-specific pictures from the trip in a new gallery, and the more general camping-related pictures in another new gallery – go there or be square.

Speaking of galleries and pictures, I made some simple optimizations to my Coppermine gallery script (the machine behind my photo galleries). I’d had problems with slow loading and updating, and most annoyingly I was getting SQL “max_questions” exceeds errors (seems Coppermine is pretty liberal in the number of SQL SELECT statements it does, and my server limits me to 5000 per hour). I actually think it’s Google’s robot spidering the images that was constantly pushing me over the limit – but regardless of the culprit it was annoying to have the gallery go down for an hour at a time. I added a brilliant bit of randomization to the SQL user, so the gallery will run the SELECT statements with one of four different users each time, randomly. This way, I can effectively have 20000k queries per hour. What’s more, it seems to have greatly improved the speed of the galleries – maybe by deserializing all the queued SELECTs from a single user. Either way, it seemed to be working well over the weekend – but I did get a couple slow loads… we’ll see how it works under the “strain” of all my readers.

Tomorrow, Monday as I write, is gonna be a busy one. Unfortunately, I had to cancel this first of my two much-looked-forward to Lasik consultations… to schedule some last-minute meetings at work. Things were thrown into the air at work Friday, as some major shakeups went down. So much so that my planned travel this week is now up in the air, which is tough because I was using the trip to Oregon to get to my folks’ place for our Mother’s Day visit (Sharaun is meeting me there Wednesday). Now, however, I don’t even know if my work-related travel is still on – although the trip to the grandparents’ place still is, meaning I may have to find my own way there… which may or may not be on the same flight as Sharaun and Keaton. Not a big deal, it’s just that, me being anal, I like to know how I’m getting where I’m going – especially when it’s Keaton’s first plane trip. It’ll work out I suppose.

Three songs from the to-be-released new Radiohead album leaked in live form this weekend, from a recent Thom & Johnny outing – and they’ve got me salivating for this thing. Also, tickets for the show at Berkley’s Greek Theater (a short jaunt for me) go on sale next weekend… and I’m just dying to find a way to go. Too bad I’ll be out of town the day they go on sale, as I know I stand no chance online and the phones will be jammed. I’d love to see them again, any chance I can get really… maybe Sharaun and I can hire a babysitter… or I can take a night off and head over with someone of similarly excellent musical taste. Maybe… just maybe…

Blogging this week could get sparse, as we’ve got more firsts for Keaton which may end up taking precedence: first trip on a plane, first time meeting grandpa on dad’s side, and mom’s first qualifying mother’s day. Until tomorrow, take care out there in the real world… and we’ll do the same here at sounds familiar.

Goodnight.

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hey! all i have to type is ‘y’

Monday, and a hectic one at that. One of those stupid-busy days where you get a invitation at 8am to a 2hr meeting that starts at 8:30am – and every usable minute of time until 5pm is otherwise booked. A frustrating day where you can barely run one task to completion before getting derailed onto something else. And now I have only an early wakeup and flight to the Bay to look forward to… not much in the way of comfort. OK… OK… get ready for some boring crap, you can glaze right over if you don’t care about music and MP3s and whatnot, but you’re not gonna get much otherwise.

As I sat thinking this past Sunday night about my recent CD offload, my mind drifted back to the amount of work that’s stiff unfinished in my CD ripping project. Thus far, I’ve converted nearly 600 CDs to MP3 format, subsequently selling off the now “redundant” physical discs. However, I’ve got that many over again, slightly more actually, left to rip – consisting entirely of bootlegs (the majority being Beatles bootlegs). I chose to rip commercial CDs first because they are commonly available and their information can be located online, merged into most CD-ripping programs, and auto-added to the resultant MP3 files’ ID3 tags. This automated tagging process is great. Bootlegs, however, are by nature unauthorized recordings and therefore not commonly available – and they just don’t auto-tag nicely via CDDB or any other large online database. This leaves he who desires to rip his bootlegs to manually add ID3 tags to his bootlegs – a grueling, arduous process to which I was not looking forward. However, back to my Sunday night thinking…

I started thinking how great it would be if I could auto-import ID3 tag info from the great bootlegzone.com website. Bootlegzone contains album details for nearly every Beatles CD in existence, bootleg or not, as well many other artists. Too bad common MP3 tagging softwares can’t parse that database and grab information… or can they? The Godfather, a completely freeware MP3 tagging application, supports Delphi script add-ons which can be used to parse webpages and import information over already-ripped albums. Could I write a Godfather add-on that could parse bootlegzone.com pages and import the data onto ripped bootlegs? You bet I could, and did. Four hours of tinkering later, and I had a script that reads in bootlegzone.com pages and imports album title, artist, song titles, year, label, and even album artwork in JPG form. You have no idea how much time this will save me. Now I can just give a disc a placeholder title (for later ID) when I rip it, and run the resulting folder through the Godfather/bootlegzone script as post-processing – and all my files are tagged instantly. Sure beats entering song titles and information one-by-one off the back of the CD.

If you’re interested in my Godfather script to read in MP3 information from bootlegzone.com, you can always get the latest version by clicking this link. Note: Before you use this script, please read the 11/11/06 update below and make sure you grab the “automate.scl” file that solves a potential Windows-related filenaming problem.

A general update history for the script is as follows:

  • 5/2/06, Script complete; grabs artwork, track number, track name, album name, artist name, comments, year, and label information from bootlegzone.com disc pages.
  • 5/3/06, Fixed the script to remove the trailing periods after track numbers, tracks now tag-up in the preferred ‘0x’ format. 5/3/06, Fixed an issue where not all tracks were being grabbed (ambiguous string compare), and added some extra error handling to track string ops.
  • 5/4/06, Added “intelligent” support for ‘various artists’ albums. Script will compare album artist to each track artist, and determine if the album is of the ‘various artists’ type. If so, tracks will be named accordingly (i.e. artist_name – track_name).
  • 5/9/06, Fixed a bug in “intelligent” support for ‘various artists’ albums where a track could be skipped if no track artist was specified.
  • 5/14/06, Added support for medley-type tracks (track titles which are simply placeholders for multiple sub-titles). Track grabbing now comprehends sub-tracks of a single track, and combines them into a single track name string. Looking at adding a switch to turn this and the various artists feature off, in case that’s desired.
  • 5/23/06, Added a bit of code to strip underscores from track titles (bootlegzone’s automated entry system relies on underscores, but they do ugly things to TGF’s tag/file case matrix).
  • 11/11/06, Discovered and interesting issue with the script. If you use the bootlegzone.com grabbed ID3 info to rename the corresponding file under Windows, and the combination of the number of characters in the filename and its containing folder are greater than 256 (for NTFS filesystem) – you’ll get a completely unusable file. It’ll rename itself to be longer than 256, and then you won’t be able to rename or delete it. I fixed this bug by changing the “automate.scl” script that I run on the “post processing” after scraping the tag info from bootlegzone. So, here’s the important bit: If you’re going to be renaming files as well as ID3 tags – make sure and use the modified “automate.scl” to avoid the >256 character filename issue. You can download my modified “automate.scl” by clicking this link.
  • 03/12/07, Sadly, www.bootlegzone.com is dead. Unfortunately, all my work is now for naught. I hope that you got some use of the script while the great site that was bootlegzone was around. Thanks for the good years, tilleul.
  • 04/14/07, Bootlegzone has risen from the ashes, and my script is once again useful. Enjoy.
  • 06/01/07, Just a little helpful hint for basic Godfather configuration. I like to name my files with a “track# tracktitle” formatting – no dash, no artist name, no album name. Whatever your preference for filename (we’re not talking ID3 info here), I encourage you to incorporate the track number. This way, you’ll avoid “unable to rename file” errors when an album may contain two ore more versions of the same song (especially common with bootlegs). You can set your renaming mask preference in the “Use Variables” entry-box under The Godfather’s “Rename” tab. I know The Godfather can be overwhelming at first, but this should help avoid confusing errors.
  • 11/25/07, The script now grabs two additional pieces of BootlegZone track information: the “version” and “sub-version” strings (when available). This is a nice improvement, as you’ll get detailed information about the tracks, such as take-number, live venue, etc., embedded in the ID3 tag and filename. The version/sub-version information is appended to the track title string in parentheses. An example of the improved information this addition provides would be as illustrated below:

Previous naming scheme:

01 I Am The Walrus
02 I Am The Walrus

New naming scheme, with version/sub-version data included:
01 I Am The Walrus (Take 2, Overdub)
02 I Am The Walrus (TV, David Frost Show)

Grab the latest version from the link above to get these changes.

  • 06/17/08, Fixed a small bug in the medley track naming routine for the case when there are more than 10 sub-tracks in the medley.  Also refined the naming scheme to account for some bootlegzone medley naming irregularities.

Enjoy it!  Goodnight.

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and thus was slain the king of the weeds

Sunday
Great weekend. Took advantage of Saturday as a “comedown” day from the Germany trip – not that I truly needed it. Laid around the house and did nothing of significance. Well, I guess I did some stuff, just not significant stuff:

1) I uploaded some more pictures from the Germany trip – including snaps from the beer festival and our visit to Dachau concentration camp (the new pictures begin here, if you want to skip the older ones). Pat also posted his pictures, which are essentially the “raw” set from which I drew mine (we shared his camera), but with nicer captions. What a great trip, ranks up there as one of the best “working” trips I’ve had in a long while.

2) I redesigned the pharaohweb.com splash page, removing my music pages from the links (a bittersweet thing for me) and replacing it with the “media” page. I wanted to do another imagemap with rollovers, since I loved that cloudy/sunny thing I had before – but I think I may have been too ambitious, if I hate it too much I’ll take it down.

3) I spent a good deal of time working on a completely new layout for sounds familiar (one with fancy web 2.0 rounded corners). The stylesheet looks good, but there’s a few more finishing touches I have to make before it’s ready to go live. Occasionally, over the course of the week, you may get sneak previews as I work. But, don’t get too excited, it’s still going to be two-column and green.

4) I booked our two upcoming vacations to Oregon and Florida, so Keaton can meet her grandparents, extended family, and friends. With the miles earned a day earlier on my return flight from Germany, I had enough to comp the two tickets to Florida, and I combined a work-visit to Oregon for me with tickets for Sharaun to get that one on the cheap too. All told, ended up spending about ~$250 for both vacations.. not bad at all.

Yeah, Saturday wasn’t a total bust I suppose. Sunday, after we’d paid our respects to a jealous and avenging God, a God that takes vengeance and is filled with wrath, I decided to exact my own vengeance and wrath on the weeds in our backyard. Now, sometimes when I do things like pull weeds, kill bugs, mow the grass – anything that, to me, happens at a level I’m safely above – I like to pretend I’m a supreme being, lording over those who are unfortunate enough to be down at the level where my actions cause chaos. The ladybugs rent to pieces in the blades of my massive death machine; the green caterpillars left without their weed-foodsource lifeblood; the wasps kicking and seizing as my poison attacks their nervous system…

Whoa, let’s rope this back to the stuff about weeding. Anyway, here’s the proof – I’ve slain the weed kings and their court:

... and thus was slain the the king of the weeds ...

Tuesday this week (tomorrow, as you read this) I’m off on a quick jaunt over to Silicon Valley, doing the customer tour again. Not an overnighter, thankfully, but a long day with two flights, a rental car, and a presentation. Next week, I hit the skies again – with Pat again, no less – North Carolina on Wednesday, Oregon Thursday through Sunday. Sharaun and Keaton will meet me in Oregon Wednesday night, after Keaton’s first flight – a thing which Sharaun, unfortunately, has to do solo. I wish I could be there to lend a hand, but at least we’ll get to fly back together. I can’t wait until Keaton gets to meet her yet-unmet grandfathers – I want to see their reactions.

Before I go, I thought I’d drop this link that my dad sent me, as it’s pretty rich: Christians Against Hip Hop (possibly not safe for work). Good stuff.

Goodnight folks.

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all mod cons


Y’know, were I in the US and staying in this hotel room, I’d likely be complaining about it. It’s small, cramped, and very European-feeling to me. A tiny cot-like single bed, a shower like a vertical glass coffin, and nowhere to set down my bathroom kit aside from the toilet with the lid down. To be fair though, it’s got all mod cons – and I don’t really need much more than a small cot-like bed, or a shower that can accommodate me. So, rather than complain about it, I’ll instead dub it “quaint” and say it’s “practical.” It does suck though, that you’re allowed to smoke in the rooms – as the person next to me tends to fire up around 6am each morning, filling my room with the stuff. I actually didn’t think I was going to be able to post today, but, as it turns out, Pat and I got a reprieve from going to the customer this morning – only being required attendees after 3pm. That gave me back my morning, and is the reason you’re reading this now.

Sharaun’s making a solo trip to the baby-doctor with Keaton tomorrow, time for her two-month set of shots. I’m pretty bummed that I won’t be along with her for it, and I know she wishes I could be there too. Poor little Keaton, having to get pricked. Monday, as we were walking around Munich city center, my eyes couldn’t help but wander onto the babies being pushed around in prams – wearing little pink outfits enjoying the German sun in the shade of the Glockenspiel. Made me miss that little girl of mine – and I guess it’ll only get worse as she gets older. The next few weeks are pretty full as well, mostly one and two day travel, short jaunts within the confines of the great nation of America – but time away from home all the same. Pat and I will travel again to North Carolina and Oregon in a couple weeks, and I’ll be trekking over to the bay only three days after returning from Germany. But then it’s over, no more travel for a while – one hopes, at least.

Got the final tally for my CDs from the trade-in shop today: $1185. Forty-two of the discs were deemed “unacceptable” due to scratches (less than 10% of the batch), which I pretty much expected – they were likely ones that Sharaun had borrowed, she’s like a CD shredding machine. I actually expected more, but accounting for the bum discs I feel I made out OK. I still plan on putting the money towards Lasik – which I expect I’ll start shopping around for once I return to the States. I’ve heard about some “next gen” version of the surgery – but have also heard from those with experience that it comes with “next gen” prices – so we’ll see. Despite not having written about it in a while, my excitement at the prospect hasn’t waned – I’m still completely up for the whole thing. Just think, no more worries about not being able to see when I finally do get stranded on the desert island I keep talking about.

Seems like I made Thursday, now if I post Friday I may impress even myself. Until later, peace be with you, blog-people. Dave out.