Cracking The Shell...

Test Entry with BlogDesk

swfields — 2007-12-19T08:48:42-08:00

This is a test entry using a new data entry tool called BlogDesk.

Yes, I'm still here

swfields — 2007-05-31T15:56:47-08:00

I have been swamped learning XHTML, CSS, AJAX, PHP, and MySQL. I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel though. I am past the learning curve and am now in a steady development plateau. I am also going on vacation next week so I hope to have some entries produced during the latter portion of the week. Stay tuned!

Nikon's universcale

swfields — 2007-04-06T11:08:37-08:00

I have been meaning to mention this site for a few days now.

The site universcale has a flash application that allows you to graphically compare item sizes. At the high end it explains the concept of light years and then using a standard sliding scale the user can go all the way down to a femtometer (which is the scale below picometer and is one quadrillionth of a meter).

As you progress though each scale, images are shown to give you something to compare against. The application also gives you some nuggets of information like: When comparing the same if a nanometer to everyday life, it says that if the Earth was one meter in diameter, a nanometer would be the width of a one yen coin or a little over 3/4 inch.

Even if you have just a passing interest in sizes, this site is a must see. Please go check it out. I'll bet you will be amazed.

Oh, and one more thing. It has a 'new age' soundtrack playing in the background. Luckily you can turn it off...

Thank You Movable Type!

swfields — 2007-04-05T08:48:52-08:00

I just received an Email from Movable Type touting their new Setup Wizard. I have been meaning to upgrade my blog to the most recent version, but tracking down all of the settings and remembering how I configured and transferred the information to the server was more than I could do without dedicating a significant block of time to the process. Also I wanted to back up the entries before the upgrade so that I could restore if the upgrade went south.

Hopefully, you will see a new face on this blog, and I will have some better control over trackback spam in the next couple of days!

I Feel Like A Kid Again!

swfields — 2007-04-03T15:28:00-08:00

We picked up Guitar Hero II for the XBox 360 today and I have been learning how to play the game. This game is an absolute blast! While I do not claim to be musically talented AT ALL, I do love the music and at times get completely wrapped up in the process of playing the guitar. Believe it or not, the best part is when I miss a note. I genuinely feel like I let the audience down.

This is a must have game...Highly recommended.

CD Players

swfields — 2007-04-02T07:48:31-08:00

Mark Cuban made some great points in his post yesterday. His statement: "I cant remember the last time I bought a CD Player of any kind, nor can i think of a reason why I would." made me think. I buy a lot of gear, gadgets, etc. but I too can not remember the last time I bought a CD player. In fact, I had to go out to the family room to see if I even had a CD player connected to the main entertainment system.

Surprisingly, I do. A Denon DCM-340 six disk changer. I'll bet it has been years since that thing has been turned on. I then started thinking back to the last time I played CDs. I remember recently, converting my CD collection from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis but I only used the CDs as source material and did not listen to them. I have purchased both SACD and DVD-Audio disks but they play on the Pioneer Elite DVD player. Maybe those count? Both cars have CD players but I just plug the iPod into them.

Ah hah! On RV trips, my wife and I listen to audio books on the CD player in the truck! I suppose I could download the books from Audible but I can not stand their subscription model.

Still, if CD players went away I would not miss them a bit.

Where Have I been?

swfields — 2007-04-01T16:02:04-08:00

I decided to stop writing blog entries after 90 days of, more or less, daily activity. I was noticing a trend that I wanted to change but thought that a 30 vacation would help as well.

The main trend that I had noticed was that the entries were starting to be done before going to bed and they were done quickly so that I could go to sleep. I was not preparing the entries and at times I was not even sure what I was going to write about when I started. I felt that I was short changing the experience.

During the 30 day reprieve I noticed a few things. First, I felt like I should be writing to the blog. What I mean is, that events would occur and I would think, I should put that in the blog or maybe that would make a good topic for a blog entry.

Second, I found myself wanting to refer back to a blog entry for some specifics on what I was doing and realized that there were no entries to look at. Third, I have found that doing daily blog entries keeps me more organized than when I don't write to the blog.

So what does this all mean?

I am going to start writing to the blog on a daily basis again. I am going to refrain from writing the blog entry at night before going to bed and I plan on writing smaller more frequent entries as well.

I also hope to improve my writing skills and decrease the time it takes to go from idea to finished product. I will do another evaluation in 90 days.

I'm Still Here...

swfields — 2007-03-31T23:12:03-08:00

I took the month of March off to re-evaluate my blogging beliefs. I also dabbled in Twitter, but that is another story. I will start writing entries to my blog tomorrow.

Smothered Pork Chops

swfields — 2007-02-26T23:38:03-08:00

For those who thought I missed the Saturday night cooking session, I postponed it until this evening. My wofe and I were out shopping Saturday morning and ended up going out to lunch around 1:00 PM. We ate at the Elephant Bar and had meals that carried us over into Sunday.

I decided that I would make Sunday night dinner instead.

When we got up Sunday we went into the garage to do some woodworking. My wife had asked that I make her a tuteur for the garden. We ended up spending the whole day in the garage and it was too late to make dinner.

I decided that I would make Monday night dinner instead.

After work today, I headed into the kitchen and made dinner. The meal was quite good. There was a little too much thyme though. I don't like it when I can pick out a particular spice. At that point it is too overwhelming. I also made mashed potatoes and corn to serve with it. Here is a picture of the meal:

Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom - Finished

swfields — 2007-02-26T23:25:51-08:00

What I nice book. It has been quite some time since I have read a science fiction book and I don't remember why I quit reading them. The fact that this book talked about social media made the book that much better.

I sure hope that the future does not depend of 'whuffie' or anything like it. I lead a predominately solitary existence with the exception of my immediate family and a few coworkers. I'm sure I would be hurtin' for whuffie.

I also licked the concept of living forever and making periodic backups and using restores to get past fatal mistakes in your life. Thinking through this concept would cause most people to change the way they live their lives.

Bottom line, I would very much recommend reading this book. It is quite short at only 69 pages and should not take too much time to read. Certainly time well spent.

WinRAR

swfields — 2007-02-26T13:46:08-08:00

After reading Jeff Atwood's Feb 23 post on his Coding Horror blog, I had to take a look at WinRAR.

I have been a big fan of Zip since the beginning; and I mean the beginning. Phil Katz wrote PKARC in assembler back in the mid eighties. When he came out with PKARC, I switched from ARC to PKARC and never looked back. He later renamed it to PKZIP (and PKUNZIP). Fast forward to the recent past and WinZip was born using the same compression technology. I never thought about considering something else.

Reading Jeff's entry got me thinking about the compression that I do today. I commonly compress files that are tens of gigabytes in size and move then around the network. I back these up on to other hard drives for archival purposes. When I saw the increased compression available with WinRAR, I downloaded the evaluation copy and tried it out.

I took a small backup I created on Friday. The file itself was 1,310,544KB. The file produced by WinZip was 1,002,247KB. I thought that the backup process itself compressed the data so there was little more that WinZip could do. Using WinRAR I ended up with a file size of 871,384KB.

That is a huge savings as far as I am concerned. I was going to try it on a 45GB file but after the savings I already saw, I am just going to go ahead and convert the processes over to WinRAR.

Thanks, Jeff!

I Have Completed All Oblivion Achievements!

swfields — 2007-02-23T23:55:02-08:00

Tonight I finished the main quest in Oblivion. I still have many minor side quests to do, but as of tonight there are no more achievements to get. First time I have ever completed everything asked of me in a game.

Apache is running

swfields — 2007-02-22T22:55:09-08:00

I worked on getting Apache running on whitney this evening and everything was going great until I hit an issue with the IP address of one of the clients.

I happen to be running a mix of static and dynamic IP addresses and one of the static IP addresses came on line when one of the dynamic addresses had already taken the address.

When I went to change it I hit another active address. I thought that this was odd so I went out to the router to look at what machines were connected and all it showed me was the MAC addresses.

One of the things that I knew I had to do was create a map of my local area network. I was pretty low on my list. How hard could it be to keep things separated? Oh well.

I started to use MS Word on a Windows machine to create boxes containing the information of each machine. I then thought that maybe Visio would be a better choice. I know it is installed somewhere. I then thought that there might be something on the Mac or maybe even Ubuntu.

I decided to just gather the information this evening and then I will create the presentation layer tomorrow. I determined that the information needed was machine name, MAC address, IP address, and machine makeup. I also migrated all machines to static addresses as well.

So; Apache is running. That is as far as I got...

Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom

swfields — 2007-02-21T22:30:14-08:00

I feel like I have missed a piece of pop culture. Over the last several months I have heard numerous mentions of the book mentioned in the blog title. It was written by Cory Doctorow.

The book has been released into the public domain via the Creative Commons license. Cory is a huge advocate of Creative Commons, the author of the very successful blog boingboing, and a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This book was his first book and it is classified as Science Fiction.

I will let you know how it is.

Satellite Radio Merger - Too little too late

swfields — 2007-02-20T22:50:38-08:00

It seems that the big news today is that Sirius and XM satellite radio companies will be merging in one $13B deal. While I don't have an opinion on whether the new company will be better or worse than the two existing companies, I think that the advantages that satellite radio technology brings the average user has been surpassed by bigger and better technologies.

I always thought that satellite radio brought two advancements to audio content delivery. The first was that you could receive the feed virtually anywhere. Don't discount the advantages of picking up a radio station while driving across the Great Basin. The second advancement was that you could receive specialized content. Nascar, MLB, NPR are examples of this. Little did they know then, but the satellite providers were satisfying the 'long tail' before it was in vogue.

Fast forward to today and both of these advancements are handled with newer technology and for less money. (Isn't that the way it always is?)

For the price of a head end unit for the satellite system and a one year subscription, a customer can purchase an iPod or any other MP3 player. The customer can preload the player with the music or information of their choice and take this with them on long trips. Most new cars come with, and all older cars can be outfitted with, an auxiliary jack for connecting the player to the existing car stereo system. This satisfies the majority of the first advancement I mentioned above.

What owning a player does not address is how current the content is on the player. This technology is still evolving. For those you are willing to pay for it, you can get cellular coverage on most major highways. With the cellular companies data plans, you can download current content that will rival anything that the satellite companies provide. Sadly, the costs for these data plans are quite high but are coming down and should drop substantially over the next year or two.

The second advancement is completely superseded by the Internet. There is no better place to find long tail content than on the Internet. There are millions of blogs with audio content, podcasts, and web sites that provide audio feeds. You can download these to your player and listen to your hearts content. There is no way that the satellite companies could keep up with the sheer volume of content available on the Internet.

This also brings up an advantage that the player brings to this issue. Video. Satellite companies are audio only. With technologies like PVRs, SlingBox, and other devices, your TV content can go with you on your trips. (Of course, you shouldn't be watching the player while driving...) This is also the huge bank of content from places like YouTube and Google Video. Most players have enough storage space that you can also download movies and play these for the kids. This also negates the need to purchase the DVD systems for the car as well.

Bottom line, while I'm sure the merger will boost the revenue of the new company in the short term, I suspect that the industry as a whole will fade away over the next five years or so.