Truer Words - A Journal

Happy New Year, One and All

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 16:22:11 GMT

2006 was a good year for me and mine, in many ways.

To all of my family near and far, to my ecclesia here and worldwide, to all of my friends new and old, close or distant:

Happy
New Year!

Hoping 2007 will be even better, for all of us...

Almost The Ultimate in Geek Home Appliances

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:24:26 GMT

Steve Ivy comes back from the brink of defunctitude with a post about -- of all things -- a vaccuum cleaner. They bought a Dyson! Yes, I'm a tiny bit jealous. Our aging Hoover sucks in the way that his new Dyson does not.

This vaccuum SUCKS. And I mean that in the best possible way. It's pretty quiet, the thing is engineered to the hilt (execpt for one removable peice that I'm still scratching my head over - "why is that removable?") and it handled pretty much everything I threw at it, including the two cat-hair covered IKEA Poäng armchairs that Jake and Lucy sleep on all day long.

Before I was done vaccuuming the house, I had to empty the bin several times from all the dust, dirt, and cat-hair the Dyson sucked out of my recently-vaccuumed carpets. It also does bare floors better than a broom, and (using the included low-reach tool) gets under furniture with a mere 2.5″ of clearance.

Yes, I'm hyperventilating over a vaccuum cleaner, it's that good. And heck, it's a toy that both a geek and a house-wife can love!

I told him I'd rather have a Dynson Sphere than the vaccuum. Wasn't sure if he'd get the reference (sorry for doubting your geekiness, Steve). He got it, and said I could 'make do' with the Dyson Ball.

I knew about the ball, I've seen the ad. If they had called it the Dyson Sphere, though, every geek on the planet would have sold one of their arms to buy one. What were they thinking!? :-)

Numa Numa: Is that Steve Ivy?!?

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:26:31 GMT

Anybody else think the first "flashed photo" in the original version of the Numa Numa Dance looks oddly like Steve Ivy in a light blue shirt? Hmm.

I love that little movie! The, uh, "dancer" is hilarious (and not untalented at lip sync), and the music is great. Anybody know the name of the band?

Steve's Chain Gang for Processing Log Files

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 19:00:20 GMT

Steve Ivy has created and documented a Linux-based log-file processing system for use with Conversant sites.

The short version:

Conversant mails his log files to him over night
cron tells fetchmail to retrieve the messages with the logfile attachments
Procmail sorts the mail (he receives log files for more than one site)
A python script pulls the attachment out of the email
cron runs analog to process the log files

Nice job, Steve!

My own system is much simpler, but not so automated. (I'm not that worried about my stats most of the time, except on recent posts like last night's mostly ignore essay on software.) My regular mail client downloads the log-email with all my other email, then I select them and run a script to extract the log files to separate folders for each site. If I feel like looking at the stats for any of the sites I run Analog manually, though lately I haven't been bothering (the logs will be there later if I ever need to take a look).

Steve's Magic Calendar, With Channels

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 10:27:48 GMT

Steve's rolled out a modified version of his new weblog calendar, now on his live weblog, and it looks very good.

I'm quite pleased with the fact that his weblog channels all take advantage of his new features without him having to do any extra work. In fact, when I mentioned it to him, he didn't even know because he hadn't checked!

This really is a very cool way to do weblogs. Not even close to done yet, but it's clearly usable... maybe I'll try to finish a few things in it this weekend and then call it soup. The missing stuff can be added later... (Or maybe not. I have more important work to do.)

Steve's New Weblog Calendar

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 12 Mar 2003 10:50:25 GMT

Steve Ivy was playing with Conversant's new weblog plugin's very flexible calendars, and came up with a completely different, very usable approach.

Greg has had some things to say about weblog calendars too, but so far he hasn't said anything about Steve's idea. (No pressure, Greg. ;-))

It's not perfect (what is?) but it's a good alternative and he's still working on it. I don't think the traditional calendar is a requirement, lots of weblogs/journals don't offer any calendar at all.

Linkable Transcript of Colin Powell's Presentation

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 20:36:05 GMT

Steve Ivy said he thought it would be a good idea for someone to post a transcript of Colin Powell's Presentation on Iraq to the Security Council with links for every paragraph so that it could be discussed and debated online. Everyone would have the same source. Without the paragraph-level anchors, the debates would be full of references like, "scroll down to the 53rd paragraph...".

I suggested he do it himself... so he did! Very cool! Now there's a fully linkable, indexed transcription of Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council on the U.S. case against Iraq. I hope people use it. They don't have to do the debating *on* Steve's site, of course, but it'll be a handy resource!

(If nothing else, at least Steve can use it for his own comments on the presentation.)