Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at July 30th, 2004

I’ve often been curious about the statistics for my blog. Thanks to Michael Hall, I now know.

Despite my fears, it turns out that not everyone is running Mozilla on Freebsd and happens to have the exact same ip address as I do. In fact, some people appear to arrive at my site as a result of search engines. This is kind of cool for a number of reasons. One of them is that it allows me to swipe a page out of Nate’s book and do a blog entry commenting on search keyphrases.

millenium park grand rapids:The most popular way to find my blog despite the fact that I’ve only one entry that even touches on Millenium Park and the closest I come to the top is three pages in.
san chez bistro: Again, only one entry on my part, but a very good restaurant.
i have a scream remix: I can’t imagine why people would still be looking for this or why my blog (of the thousands that commented on it) gets any hits on this topic at all.

And then there are the wierd ones:
faking international marriage in canada
rotting fish sauce
2004 email address of directors of power supply in spain

The people looking for tech support who got me instead:
install gnome 2.6 online
outlook sending multiple copies of the same email
freebsd deinstall gnome

And finally:
calvin college blog: I actually went to Hope College, Calvin’s rival. Not that that really matters.

Posted by Jim at July 28th, 2004

Much of the time I find the little bundled additions to stuff I buy to be unnecessary junk. Every so often, however, I’m sucked in by something I find kind of cool.

SBC appears to outsource it’s entire user experience (email, news home page, etc…) to Yahoo. Yahoo, in turn, provides piles of bundled useless junk in addition to their email service. One exception to this seems to be Launchcast.

Launchcast is Yahoo’s music service. I ignored it when it looked like I’d have to pay to use it, but since the full service comes free as part of Yahoo I decided to check it out.

I’ve often thought that the ideal music service for the internet would allow the listener to make a list of their favorite artists, albums, and so on and then the music service would actually play those albums. Plus it would ideally put in artists that other people with similar tastes also like.

That appears to be what Lauchcast does.

For those of you who would actually like to listen in on my musical choices, feel free. Much to my annoyance, it requires a player capable of taking windows media files, but one can’t have everything.

Posted by Jim at July 27th, 2004

I, like many children who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, experienced the wonder of chicken pox. In my case, it meant that I would miss marching in the Tulip Time parade yet again (as would happen every year from Kindergarten through 4th grade).

I’m not sure when it happened, but, sometime between now and then, doctors developed a vaccine against chicken pox. Noting that my kids had been vaccinated against it, I was slightly disappointed (but not very) that chicken pox had moved from being a rite of passage for kids to being yet another mythical disease (to kids anyway) like measles, mumps and rubella.

I needn’t have troubled myself.

Like a number of kids at their daycare, Abby and Rebecca both have chicken pox. Thanks to the vaccination, they barely have any actual marks, and I’m told that it’s likely to be much milder and shorter.

Nonetheless, Kristen and I will be spending some er… quantity time with our kids–who are showing few if any signs of illness. Outside of a few red bumps, they have every bit of their normal energy and make no effort to itch themselves.

With any luck, they’ll get better soon.

Posted by Jim at July 25th, 2004

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’m finally getting around to putting all my old files on my new computer.

The reality, of course, is that I’m actually attempting to integrate files from not one, but actually two toasted computers. The most recent computer experienced at least one electrical surge, but that computer was actually a replacement for the first computer I built myself (out of parts from various sources).

As a result, I had two computers worth of email to integrate into one mail account (with email back to 1995 as it turns out). This is relatively easy except for one thing: I wanted some of my deleted messages back.

Back when I was running the first computer (233mhz, 64MB ram, 3 gig hard drive), I was involved in an online role-playing game via a mailing list. I deleted the messages immediately after reading and responding to them because I didn’t want stuff from a mailing list to take up space on my hard drive when I could easily look it up online.

Trouble is, it’s not online anymore.

The thing is, Netscape 4.7 did not actually delete your email. It just coded it as deleted and thereafter did not display it in your mail reader. Thus, if you’re the sort of person who has the patience to open up the “Trash” text file, open it up in an editor, and look through the codes, you can change the code from deleted to viewable.

For better or for worse, I am exactly that sort of person.

Here (for what it’s worth) is how to do it:

If you look through the message headers, you’ll find one that’s called “X-Mozilla-Status:”. A status that ends with the number 9 seems to indicate deletion. I saw a number of 8009’s, 8019’s, and even an 0009.

If you search and replace with “X-Mozilla-Status: 8001″ you’ll find that all your old deleted messages mysteriously appear, allowing you to find all the messages you ever wanted.

As an added bonus (?) you also get to look at 4 year old porn spam.

By the way (to those of you who might want to try this), I take no responsibility for the files you may accidently ruin in the process of following my advice.

UPDATE: 800b and 801b are also deletion codes.

Posted by Jim at July 16th, 2004

I’ve always had mixed feeling about what I think of as the “Christian Culture Industry.” You probably know what I’m talking about: Christian rock, Christian books, Christian trinkets.

To the extent that these things can be used by Christians to deepen their experience of God, I’m all for them.

What makes my feelings mixed is the idea of Christianity mediated through commercially produced objects which have less connection to God than they do to somebody’s profit margin.

It’s therefore inevitable that I find Channel 54 (of the TCT network) rather bizarre. As networks go, it can sometimes be painfully low budget–most of the time I flip through the channels, it appears to be coming from the same set. Denominationally speaking, it seems that there are a lot of people coming out of the Holiness tradition. As for the political perspective… well… let’s just say that Pat Robertson appears in their news broadcasts.

A great example of what I find strange about it:
My wife recently allowed our children to watch a “Veggie Tales” video. When it ended, she flipped through the channels, stopping in shock and disbelief at channel 54. “Jim,” she said, “you have to come down here.”

I walked downstairs to find that some guy was singing on the instantly recognizable channel 54 set. What was he singing? Painfully Christianized tv theme songs.

“Baptist! I’m a Baptist!” to the tune of the Flinstones. Also, a song about how all Christians were part of the family of God to the tune of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song. As I walked upstairs, I could here him singing something (my mind effectively repulsed exactly what) to the tune of the theme to Bonanza.

While I’m all for using the media to attract people to Christianity, I’m not convinced that that’s the likely effect of his efforts.

Posted by Jim at July 14th, 2004

I’ve recently moved all the files off of old hard drives to my new computer, allowing me to get at files I haven’t seen in quite some time.

One such file is a short animation of me decapitating Ed with my katana. It was mostly done by Ed and illustrates the sort of thing that happens when you have two people, a computer, a katana, a webcam, and, far, far too much time on your hands.

Also, for those of you who are wondering, we did get the idea from “Highlander.”

Update: You can view the animation here. It’s in the “Public Files” folder. Trying to place it directly on this page didn’t work as Yahoo changes the name of where it places the file.

Posted by Jim at July 13th, 2004

Lately one of my bosses (the Exec. Director of ACCESS), asked me about Linux. What I found interesting about this is that this particular boss has a bias toward Microsoft, admires Bill Gates and generally has the not unusual perspective that if you can’t get support for the software from a company, you probably shouldn’t depend on it.

To a degree, he’s right about the support thing. Unfortunately, you don’t really get much in the line of support from Microsoft when you buy software the way we do. We go through Techsoup an organization that helps technology companies to donate software to non-profits.

This is pretty cool, but tech support isn’t part of the bargain. When we have a problem with Microsoft products, I don’t have Microsoft techs to ask, I end up using Microsoft’s knowlege base or asking a question via usenet. With FreeBSD (an open source OS like Linux), I end up checking the handbook or asking someone via usenet.

There’s little practical difference for a small non-profit.

I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some sort of change in the public’s attitude toward Microsoft going on though. On Monday, I explained to the boss mentioned earlier the current problems with Microsoft’s browser (mostly its vulnerabilities) and that the Department of Homeland Securty as well as CERT recommended people consider changing browsers.

He told me to go ahead. I’ve now installed Mozilla Firefox on every computer in ACCESS. Strangely, I wasn’t the first person in my office to bring it up. GRACE’s accountant/finance manager read about Internet Explorer’s problems in the newspaper and requested an alternative browser without any prompting on my part.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this interest in Firefox/Mozilla/open source in general lasts or fades.

Posted by Jim at July 12th, 2004

Finally got the toasted XP Box fixed/replaced.

Since then I’ve been installing the programs that I need. This takes more time than you might think. Among other things it involves downloading various programming languages and IDE’s, preferred mp3 players/cdrippers, and migrating email over.

Migrating email is a massive pain. Why? I’ve had two boxes die in the last two years. One of them was 5 years old and had a crummy motherboard. The other was pretty new. In both cases I’d made no backup of my files (stupid, yes), but I did keep the hard drives.

Today I moved everything over. I’ve yet to mess with the email as that involves moving a mixture of Netscape 4.x and mozilla stuff over into Firebird/Thunderbird. I anticipate a certain amount of frustration in the process.

In any case, here’s an observation:

If after many hours of configuration, you look at the monitor and find that the windows are wobbling, you do not necessarily need to worry about monitor problems.

It may just be your eyes.

Posted by Jim at July 8th, 2004

Not that anyone asked, but Gaim kicks butt.

Thanks to Ed who first mentioned it and Topher who reminded me of it’s existence, I am currently logged in to four different instant messaging services (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, and Jabber). When you consider that no instant messaging service includes an official FreeBSD client, this is a good thing.

Especially good when you consider that couple weeks ago now, Yahoo cut off third party users from using their service, meaning that people could no longer log into Yahoo through Gaim, Trillian or a host of other applications. A few days later, the people at Gaim had a fix.

Too cool.

It is (in case you’re wondering) available for several versions of Linux as well as Windows. I don’t know if they have a version for OS X, but they do have the source code available. Someone’s probably got a version for the Mac.

Posted by Jim at July 4th, 2004

It turns out that toddlers will eat Thai food. It just has to be the right kind.

Today’s lunch included cod, red Thai curry, coconut milk, green beans and rice noodles. I did not quite follow the recipe exactly. The bean sprouts that were supposed to be part of it had been in our refrigerator a bit too long and Kristen didn’t want to deal with them. So, I threw them out.

I also put in less than half the required amount of red curry (4 teaspoons as opposed to 3 tablespoons). It still burned. Not unbearably, but the taste definitely stayed in one’s mouth.

Nonetheless, Abby (3) and Rebecca (2) still ate the stuff. I’m thinking that the primary reason was that they both really like noodles a lot because they don’t have any great fondness (or hatred for) fish. It also can’t be the green beans because those were completely ignored.

To my shock, Rebecca actually picked up her plate and tried to drink the sauce. The sauce (composed of fish stock, coconut milk, nampla and the curry) was the single most spicy part of the curry.

She showed no sign that she was drinking anything that was at all spicy. It’ll be interesting to see what she eats as an adult.