MindlessCode.net

You probably already knew that, but I’ve been rereading Programming PHP while laying in bed being tired and sick :(. Nice reading material, I know, but I’m a geek, so go figure. I get to implement a photo gallery into osCommerce, fun! Maybe more fun than printing by drawing on a canvas–just maybe. So that’s my random, pointless post of the day–sorry.

Oh, and Happy Birthday Mary (hmm, that capitalization doesn’t look right at all)

“Interesting” search strings for wildgardenseed.com/Taj/blog, number of hits in (parens). In no order at all:

1. decrypt fiddler on the roof (2)
2. why did edward kasner need the word googol (1)
3. nickel creek and jail (1)
4. hmmm (3)
5. friday the 13th wav die and die (1)
6. pictures of hurxthal (1) — What is that from? Does anyone actually know my middle name?
7. “how to talk to a liberal” (1)
8. sqlite constant corrupter (1)
9. sanity promotional code (1) — WTF?

And that’s just for February.

…especially flute players.

Heh, I wonder if I’ll get flamed for that. We’ve been copying music for our orchestra. 5 pieces of music, average of 4.3 pages/piece, 40 copies of each piece. While erasing marks on the original music to copy (written by people who had used the music before. I was erasing stuff like “Higher C#”, “Practice”, and “Count!”), I came across this on the 3^rd measure of of a piece in the 2^nd flute part:

Let’s count, shall we?

And later on, on the second page:

Look, Think, Count

Needless to say, I did not erase it–I love comments like that. Then again, I can be a real smart alec, so *shrug*.

Ugg, I’m sick, so if I’m not answering your email it’s because I’m laying in bed trying not to swallow because my throat is killing me. Well, I’ll get over it.

I’m sitting here waiting for a 263MB document to print, it’s taking forever.

We went to a house concert last night, Joe Craven was the performer. Totally awesome! He played music on lots of “interesting” instruments that he built, including a trash can, a petrol can that was turned into a fretted bass, a 3 string “candolin” made out of a can of hominy, as well as “normal” instruments like the fiddle and mandolin. And don’t forget all the other crazy “instruments”, such as the toothpick cans (with toothpicks inside), tea caddies, angle food cake pan, and other random things. Truly amazing, I wonder if there’s anything that he couldn’t make music on. Wow!

OK, got that over with, now onto the title of this post. Web Services isn’t exactly the right term, but it’s close. By web services, I really mean email, blogging tools, image hosting, etc. OK, so email isn’t exactly a web service, but webmail is all the rage now, so I threw it in.

The question/conflict in my mind is:

Is it better to run your own webservice for yourself, or let someone else (who knows what they’re doing) run it for you?

Example: Wordpress is a nice piece of blogging software, but with Blogger everything “just works” and it “maintains itself.”

Sure, Wordpress works great, but look at Blogger–you just need to register and you’re automatically given a pretty interface to write in and a pretty interface that shows your posts/thoughts/random rantings. And for free. And you don’t need to worry about your MySQL this and PHP that. And you don’t need to know what this weird FTP thing is. And it just works, all the time. You don’t need to worry about your web host getting broken into, or renewing your domain and hosting, etc.

On the other hand: When you use Blogger, you are basically at the mercy of Google. They could say “we’re taking Blogger offline as of NOW” and take all your posts with them. You now are totally out of luck, you have no way to get your posts back (well, not true, you could use IA, but that’s a hack).

Or look at GMail:
Why do most people use it? I can hardly say that it’s because of the >1GB of storage. You can get that from Yahoo, Hotmail (IRCC), and other webmail providers. GMail wasn’t even the first. But everybody thinks GMail is cool and awesome. I’m guessing that’s because of the interface and features. Let’s admit it, the interface is nice. Labels and conversations are very cool and useful, (I can’t go back to Thunderbird now, conversations are a necessity of life for me now), and the fact that I can access my email from practically anywhere with the same UI is great too.

Of course, if Google were to come out tomorrow and say “Pay us $10/month or we’ll delete all your mail mail and lock you out”, I would be very unhappy. I would probably pay $10 for the first month, download my email via POP, and go back to IMAP. Now, I don’t think it’s very likely that this would happen, but it is possible.

The other side of the coin: Buy hosting and have your own email address accessable through POP/IMAP and probably some crummy Webmail interface. Of course, your email is now in your hands. You are responsible for maintaining your DNS records, making sure that your SMTP server isn’t rejecting mail, and paying your bills to keep all this running. You can, of course, pay someone else to do this for you, but you still need to make sure it’s working. The person you are paying doesn’t really care when your email isn’t working, they don’t notice right away when you start getting no email. You do, so you tell them to fix it, and they do. It is still your responsibility. With something like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, they have people who are paid to detect when something is wrong–I wouldn’t be suprized if they have someone watching the log files for suspicious activity, i.e., no email being sent or received.

What happens if you let your domain expire and someone buys it? Or what if your website goes down because it got broken into? Or the server goes down? How will people get ahold of you? How will your hosting company get ahold of you? I think that is is vital to have an email address that you do not control.

Anyway, I think the Blogger argument if different that the GMail one, but similar. If I could get the GMail interface on my domain with the mail stored in files/DBs that I control, then I would do that. I would probably have a gmail account @gmail.com too, but I would use the one I controlled as my main email. Would you?

In summary, I think it’s kind of scary that I have to run my own “web services”, and that I could do something really stupid like rm -rf *, or forget to pay my hosting bill, or let my domain name expire. On the other hand, it’s also kind of scary that I’m relying on someone like Google or Yahoo to now drop the ball and leave me in a lurch. But they know what they’re doing, right? They pay people to now do stupid things, right?

Whatever–this is a lame post, but you’re probably really tired of “I hacked on QuickI last night” and “The seed catalog still isn’t done” posts, I am too.

If someone wants to write an open source Gmail, please do, that would be great–save me from the big evil Google monster. Heh, um, yeah. I’d need to get my own dedicated machine then, that’d be, umm, expensive.

Now I get to write a photo gallery extention for www.wildgardenseed.com, what fun! osCommerce, MySQL, and PHP, here I come!

OK, so I’m mad at my Neuros II. Well, not really mad, just a bit disappointed in it. I initially bought it as a recording device for recording songs I learned at music camp and at lessons. Unfortunetly, it has this bloody 6 second delay after hitting the record button, as well as a ~5 second bootup time. So, it takes between 10 and 15 seconds to actually get ready to record a song. It works for private lessons, but in a group setting “Hey, could you wait 15 seconds while I get ready to record” doesn’t really go over to well. Yes, it’s annoying.

So, I’m looking into getting a new recorder. I absolutly refuse to buy either a Sony Walkman MiniDisc Recorder or an iPod–just because, don’t ask why–you can probably guess. I’ve heard some good things about irivers (no caps, donno), so poked around their site this afternoon and left some questions on the forum. We’ll see.

Basically, does anyone have suggestions for a recoder that would have:
Required Features:

• Linux Support
• OGG Support
• Recording without delay
• More that 5GB of storage. My current music collection is currently around 3.3GB. A HDD based device is probably the only way to go.
• Acceptable battery life

Nice Features:

• Tag editing of recordings–so that I can enter the names of songs I record.
• Track Markers. Sony MiniDisc users know what I’m talking about. Basically, while you are recording something, you can press a button, and the MiniDisc inserts a track marker, which splits the file up into individual tracks when it is done recording.
• Easy to use, or at least somewhat easy to use…

Any ideas, recommendations, non-recommendations? Leave a comment–thanks!

Quite frankly, I’ve been bored over the past 3 days. My computer is solely a Windows XP beast at the moment, and that makes it hard to do anything other that mess with the seed catalog. Also, I haven’t really been doing that much work on the catalog, mostly my brother has been doing the computer stuff, I guess he wants to do it all–but I want to do some stuff too. Whatever. So basically I’ve been laying around, reading, and playing guitar all day, and then staying up until 10:30PM or 11:30PM hacking on QuickI.

In a house with 6 laptops and 2 towers, you would think that there would be enough computers for anybody to do whatever they want to on any computer. Oh I wish that were true. Here are the stats of our laptops:
Charon: 255MHz, 32MB RAM
Peanut: 300MHz 128MB RAM
Lime: 450MHz, 256MB RAM
Turnip: 750MHz, 384MB RAM
Darkstar: 750MHz, 384MB RAM
Moria: 2GHz, 512MB

Those first two are the ones that are not being used for the catalog. The Peanut (a Compaq Armada 7400) was the first laptop I had. This Sunday, I replaced its 10GB with my 80GB and booted it up. Its BIOS must be shot, because the date is set to November 1, 1999 every time I boot up. This forces all the partitions on my HDD to be checked every time I turn it on. It also crashes all the time (about ever 30 min–I suspect RAM or the CPU). Also, I forgot how slooow 300MHz w/ 128MB RAM was–it is slow, especially when compiling.

Anyway, we’re almost done–here’s what the cover looks like:

/me hurries back to Linux

I wanted to make a blog post, but couldn’t think of a good title, because I have no clue what to write…I still don’t.

Let’s start with the weather; It has been beautiful spring weather. For the past 2 weeks, it has been ~13°C (55°F), the sun has been out, no rain–just beautiful. This is following about 4 weeks of very heavy rain, so I may be slightly biased, but it is nice. Not that I don’t like the rain, I do! Changes are nice every now and then, though.

Anyway, what have I been doing? Not outside in the sun, no–inside, with the blinds down, in my nice dark hole (aka, the kitchen table). We bought an HP OfficeJet Pro K550 because a) our old HP Deskjet 932C was dieing, and b) the Deskjet didn’t “print pictures too pretty.” We have the K550 dtwn–not sure what the dt stands for, but wn stans for “Wireless/Wifi network”. Yes, we have a wireless printer, it’s very sweet. We could have gotten a wired one and saved about $20, or we could have gotten one with no networking and used our Netport (a device from Intel that has a 10Mbit ethernet port and a parallel (LPT) port) and saved about $60. But wireless was a good deal, given that we currently have one free port on our wireless router. Yeah, we have a crappy IPv4 router with 4 LAN ports and 1 WAN port, plus an antenna. Whatever.

This printer is sold as being Linux compatible (yes, I check, I’ve been burned before). Not trusting the people who want my money to always tell the whole truth, I checked LinuxPrinting.org (an awesome site, by the way), and the printer is reported as “Working Perfectly”. Great, I say–piece of cake! The first sign of trouble was that there was no mention of this printer on the CUPS drivers list where you select the driver for your printer. “No problem,” I thought, “Just download the PPD from LinuxPrinting.org and copy it into /usr/share/ppd. I did that, restarted CUPS, and the driver appeared–yay! So, I printed a test page, network activity occurred, the printer picked up a piece of paper and printed:

* Unable to open the initial device, quitting


*sigh* A few more pieces of paper, a little digging through the CUPS debug log, and a little Googling gave me a few hints. GhostScript didn’t like the OfficeJet K550, and was giving that cheery little message. I headed on over to the hpijs project page (HP’s drivers page for their inkjet printers). After reading some obscure ChangeLog, I found that support for my printer was only available in hpijs-2.1.8 and above–Slackware ships with version 1.7 (yes, even slackware-current). Heading on over to the SF download page, I discovered that hpijs is no longer distributed (last available version is 2.1.6), and is instead contained in hplip package, which is used for HPs Mopiers, or whatever they’re called–a printer, scanner, copier, fax machine, whatever all in one box. Turned out that LinuxPackages.net had a hplip package of “sufficiant versionage” (is that even close to a real word?). I used the one for Slackware 10.2, version 0.97p2, I beleive. I downloaded it, uninstalled the hpijs package, installed hplip and its dependecy net-snmp, re-downloaded the PPD from LinuxPrinting.org, restarted cups, readded my printer, and I was good to go! Yay!

EDIT :: You need to install the netsnmp package too.

Boy, I bet that was an exciting read. I really just posted it so that people who have the same problem might get an idea about what to try.

Back to the weather. I was outside a few minutes ago, it was warm! (Getting tired of those <em> tags yet? So am I.) Amazingly warm for the 2^nd week of February. It actually felt a little bit like August. Or maybe it didn’t, but it reminded me of August, which means it reminded me of all sorts of great things–Booher Camp, Willamette Valley Fiddle Contest, harvesting seed (oh yeah, that was reeally great, *sigh*). The Gaston fiddle contest has worn off me and I am missing my fiddle friends again. Oh well, the first fiddle camp isn’t until July, I guess I’ve got to wait a while…

On the QuickI front, it looks like I’m back to manually drawing on canvas again for printing. QTextDocument just doesn’t give me enough control. For example, I cannot set the border of a table (cell) to be exactly what I want. It’s like <table border=”1″> vs <table style=”border: .5em;”>. QTextDocument uses the HTML table border approach, using some sort of set widths that TrollTech came up with. 1 just is too big to make stuff pretty. Maybe I’ll try a simple sketch/mockup if I’m not too tired after I post this.

No, I did not “fix” the timestamp to say exactly 11:30 last night–it just happened.

I just updated the Wild Garden Seed website to contain the 2006 catalog. Net increase of products: 5. Probably something like 10 new intros, and 5 dropped products, but I forget. Whatever.

I got an email from TrustCommerce, our credit card gateway provider–e.g., the guys who sit between us and our merchent account and take money. Heh, basically, when someone enters their credit card number into our website, TrustCommerce verifies that the info is correct and lets the order proceed (that’s what we pay them for, anyway, but this morning they were telling a customer that we didn’t take cards that started with the first 4 digits they had on their card. It was a MasterCard, which we do take. I ran the card through manually, and it worked fine).

Anyway, I got an email from them yesterday:

Valued Client -
In accordance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards of Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, Please be advised of the following:

Effective February 14, TrustCommerce will initiate a new password security feature that will require Vault passwords to be changed every 90-days. This card association mandate applies to all Members, merchants, and service providers that store, process or transmit cardholder data.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, however we are required to enforce this policy on behalf of the card association.

First, they didn’t exactly make me happy by calling it “a new password security feature”.

Basically, instead of using the 1 strong (very!) password which protects the interface now, I need to change it to a new password every three months. Or they lock our account and we can’t accept cards. Ugg, another thing for my TODO list.

Now, what is the rational behind forcing people to change their password every 90 days (or 30 days, as it is in some places). From how I see it, it can’t possibly make your account any more secure–in fact, it probably makes your account less secure (people writing down their passwords, making them simple words, etc).

I guess the idea is that if evildude cracks your password, he only can mess around with your account for 90 days or whatever before he’s locked out. Not that that makes any sense. If someone gets access to your account; a) They’re likely to do all the damage they can right away, and b) they can change your password to lock you out. Great!

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to live in a world where I don’t get to set the password rules. *sigh*

Woah, it’s 11:30PM, maybe I should GOTO bed (laugh, it’s a joke, I don’t actually use GOTO).

Did anyone think the article I linked to yesterday was a hoax? Yeah, I do to. Seems like your brain would melt down if it cooks an egg in 3 minutes, which it doesn’t

Yeah, we did our first mockup of the cover today with Photoshop. It’s a nautilus again, and it does look pretty cool. Photoshop is being slooow on my 512MB RAM system.

How to cook an egg using 2 cell phones — freaky:

Cooking time: This very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.

I always knew cell phones were scary!

Anyway, my laptop just got a brain tranplant this morning. I swapped my 80GB for my (now) blank 40GB. 40GB for doing the Wild Garden Seed catalog. So I’m visiting the dark side (XP) for about 2 weeks while I fight XP and InDesign/Photoshop. Fun!