MindlessCode.net

Yay, Fireworks last night to ring in 2007! It was a lot of fun and fairly uneventful except for the launching platform burning up and 2 fireworks falling on their sides and going off pointing right at us. Pictures (click to enlarge, of course):

Purple Rain Tipped Over	This thing spun around, launched itself into the air and came down right next to our Seed Drying Facility
Mortar-Style Shells Explode and Light up the Entire Sky

Special Burning Paper–After it burns almost to the end it will lift off, fly to the ceiling, and float back down. (More New Years Entertainment)

Year in Review: No. You don’t care and I don’t either. However, I will say this: All 3 fiddle camps I went to this year (Mt Shasta Camp, and O’Connor Camp, and Booher Camp) all totally rocked. I learned so much, but I also got to be with friends for an extended period of time. I swear, those two weeks of O’Connor and Booher camp were the best 2 weeks of my life. Two whole weeks of just being with friends–learning, jamming, eating, playing games, talking, staying up until 2AM–it was the best.

The rest of the year was good too–I got my GED, my learners permit, took Drivers Ed, learned a lot, spent too much time on the computer, the usual, you know. I’m way too tired (and sick too :-() to post anything longer, but I’d hate to not post anything at all on New Years. (Brian: It’s your fault I posted this, hope you enjoy it :-))

Onto 2007!

I recently had to export a photo gallery running Gallery 2 to Flickr. I guess Gallery 2 was pretty good, but it took A LOT of CPU power and my hosting account was disabled a few too many times because of it. So, I broke down, downloaded all of Gallery 2’s files off the website, setup the database, and started groking the code. Finally I got a very ugly script that sorta worked. phpFlickr saved me a lot of time! Thanks!

For the Googlebot, and people coming from Google who are interested: Go here

More Googlebot indexing: Firefox 2.0 Autopackage

We’ve been trying to get all our seed in over the past week. Rain threatened (and happened too) earlier this week which made stuff even more exciting.

More random pictures (click to enlarge):

Wow, that’s a lot of lettuce…	…to flip over by hand (it’s very dusty too)…
…and to thresh by hand with sticks.	…Of course, we have fun too. Laurie and Me taking a quick rest on the way over to unload the lettuce seed (in the blue tarp we’re laying on)
The Motley Seed Crew of 2006 at 5:04 PM (we’re actually a lot more tired than we look)	For some reason, you can never have too many dog pictures.

I’m not getting much work done other than seed work because I’m sooo tired when I get home… One more day this week, just 1 more day! Saturday is almost here. Actually, it is fun to “mutilate helpless little plants with clubs like some botanical serial killer”, as someone put it.

Man, this CD is awesome.

I had CYS “Camp” over the past 4 days. CYS is the local school orchestra for high school students…it’s a great program.

I guess I didn’t remember how much fun orchestra could be. Last year I was in a different (younger) orchestra, and I just didn’t seem to have much fun…I donno why. But CYS seems like it’s just going to be a blast. It’s just so much fun to play music with 65 other kids. The music is fun, the people are great, we actually sound fairly OK for only having practiced for 4 days…

Anyway, it was a blast. I can’t wait to start rehearsals in September. I met some new people, but really haven’t made any new friends yet. It seems fairly cliquish, but I just have to insert myself into a clique…or start the “outcasts clique.” Whatever, I’m sure I’ll meet some great people.

Oh, and here’s a question for all ye technical people: What do you do when some one’s email server (actually, and ISPs) won’t talk to you? I’m talking about the good folks over at c-zone. A while ago, I tried to send an email to someone@c-zone.net, and never got a reply. At first, I assumed they were just busy, but after 3 weeks, I began to wonder a bit. So, I sent an email to 14f16244dc0815420b307fce305fd241@c-zone.net to see if I would get a bounce message (14f16244dc0815420b307fce305fd241 is the md5 hash of some string, I forgot what…). The bounce never arrived. I tried from 2 email servers (gmail and wildgardenseed). This intrigued me a bit, so I used telnet to debug:

taj@moria:~$ telnet mail.c-zone.net 25
Trying 63.172.74.216...
Connected to mail.c-zone.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.c-zone.net ESMTP
MAIL FROM:<tajmorton@gmail.com>
250 ok
RCPT TO:<email-address@c-zone.net>
553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1)
QUIT
221 mail.c-zone.net
Connection closed by foreign host.
taj@moria:~$

Uhh..yeah. Looks like they’re using a mal-configured qmail setup. I think it’s weird that none of the techs have noticed it yet. Huh, we’re not receiving any email…I wonder why?

So, how do you contact these people? They’re support email is @c-zone.net is obviously of no value (since I can’t send email to that domain). I called them a few minutes ago, and got a slightly knowledgeable support person (after navigating a phone system that would hang up if you pressed the option number after the voice had stopped speaking), but they we’re of no help. He said “I’ll open a ticket if I get any more calls.” Ugg… Is there anybody who has c-zone.net as their ISP? If so, PLEASE, PLEASE, get ahold of them somehow… Call them, go to their office, whatever….send them a link to this post, send them the telnet session above, or something. This poor person I tried to email 3 weeks ago probably thinks I’m ignoring then. No, I’m not! Really!

Oh, technology.
Again, I’m up far to late. Night!

I think it’s nice people put pictures in their blogs…sooo…you’ve got to tolerate some photos from me today. Sorry!

Click to enlarge:

(12:30AM) Jamming the last night at Mark O’Connor Camp. I look tired, huh?	(2:13AM) Kayla, Me, and Kit (R-L) at the last night of Mark O’Connor camp
Mary, Bowie, and I rest in the shade of the 40°C (105°F) day.	Mary, Kit, Frank, and I (L-R) harvesting lettuce
Threshing Mustard using our “seed cleaning machines” (Frank, Kit, Mary, Laurie, and Me)

I pretty much dropped off the face of the Earth for 3 weeks. Sorry. I’ve been having way too much fun and now my life is going to suck for a few weeks because I’ll be bored. Oh well.

So, to recap…the week after Mt Shasta Camp I took my GED so I could get my drivers license and take classes at the local community college. I passed. Easily. It really scared me how easy it was. Especially after I read this:

The GED Tests are rigorous. Those who pass the Tests have outperformed 40 percent of traditional high school graduating seniors.

American Council on Education

That’s from the pamphlet I get with my GED certificate. Doesn’t that seem a bit scary to you? Anyway, it was boring, boring, boring, and easy, easy, easy. Anyway, 7½ hours of tests is boring. I think I already said that. Enough.

After that we headed off to San Diego, CA for the Mark O’Connor Strings Conference. The drive down was fairly, um, exciting. Instead of just taking I-5 all the way, we decided it would be a great idea to drive down the coast on 101 and 1. Heh, great idea. It was beautiful, but it was very slow. We also started burning up our brakes on one stretch of road which was fairly exciting. Being in the middle of nowhere, on a road with hairpin turns, with a 9% grade over 1 mile, at 7:30PM is interesting. We survived, though.

The next night we stopped near San Luis Obispo, CA and tried to find a place to stay the night. All the camp grounds where full, as well as most of the hotels/motels. We finally found a place that was charging $200/night. The room was probably worth about $50. I mean, when you pay $200, you don’t exactly expect to wake up and find the police forensic unit a few doors down.

We did made it to San Diego on time. The camp was pretty great! There where tons of great teachers, and lots of great people too…but for some reason it just didn’t have the same feel as the other camps. It felt more…formal. I did of course meet some great people and got to hang out with some people who I kinda knew but now really know.

So yeah, O’Connor camp was fun. On the last day (Friday), after staying up until 2:30 AM jamming and generally having a good time with friends, I went to bed for 3 hours and got up at 5:30 AM to go to the Booher Family Music Camp in Sisters, OR. I was awake until 4:00 PM navigating, then I just kind of fell asleep.

O’Connor Camp Freakin’ Rocked!

Then we got to Booher Camp. I have to say, I just love this camp. There were about 250 people there (vs ~180 at O’Connor camp), but it felt nothing like O’Connor camp. I don’t know why. It just felt a lot more close and friendly. Maybe it was the round tables, I don’t know. There’s something about being crammed around a table eating good food. It was certainly a lot better than the crappy cafeteria food and long rectangular tables at O’Connor camp.

Jamming the First Night at Booher Camp

I took guitar at Booher Camp…this was the first time I had any lessons on the guitar (after faking it for about 2.5 years). It was neat, guitar is a very cool instrument.

What is it that causes the nerds to collect into 1 place? Let me rephrase that: What is it that causes nerds to be driven into 1 place? (Hi Eli, Annie, and Christy! Nerds Rule!). We had our own nerd table where everybody would assemble and have nerdy and geeky conversations. Very fun.

I already went on and on about how great Mt. Shasta Camp was so I’ll spare you… It’s also almost midnight, so I really need to go to bed–and I still need to slog through 96 emails. Read the post right before this and you’ll see how awesome Shasta Camp was–it totally rocked.

I had such a great time at all 3 camps this year. I met lots of great nice people, learned so much I feel like my head is going to explode, had serious sleep deprivation for 2 weeks straight, and generally had a blast. Yay for fiddle camp! And now on to seed field work–somewhat fun, but it just doesn’t have the same feel to it, you know what I mean?

EDIT :: Oh nice, “Listening to” isn’t working. Deal with it.

I just got back from the Mount Shasta Music Camp in (guess where), Mt. Shasta, CA. It was just incredibly, totally, awesome!

The camp was organized and run by Tristan and Tashina Clarridge. There were 16 instructors and about 50 students… Instruments included fiddle, cello, guitar, mandolin, banjo, hammer dulcimer, and a few others as well. We had five ~1hr classes a day (4 fiddle + 1 vocal), then we would go hiking and/or swimming around Lake Siskiyou (sp?). I have to say, the area around Mount Shasta and Lake Siskiyou is just gorgeous. Oh, and the water is freezing sometimes (snow melt).

The jamming that went on after dinner was just incredible–you would just sit on the floor and hear this wonderful music being played at all hours of the night. It’s pretty amazing when you have fiddles, cellos, banjos, guitars, singers, and other just going at it. Wow. I wish I would have recorded some of it, but a) I probably would never have listened to it after the first few days, and b) I ran out of MiniDiscs to record on. I guess I could rant about my love/hate relationship with Sony’s Walkman MiniDisc recorder, but I’ll spare you. I will say this though: Sony, please, just make a decent recorder that it easy to operate when you’re running on 4 hours sleep. That’s all I want. Oh, and don’t make track markers mysteriously disappear–that just isn’t nice. Thank you.

Everyone at this camp is so friendly and nice…it’s just great. Somehow it amazes me how you are around all these musical geniuses and you are sitting next to them eating oatmeal and having a perfectly normal conversation about books/broken bones/school/math/whatever–not you’re not hearing about how cool the diminished 5^th in some song is. It’s just so incredibly cool.

For some reason, when I’m in crowds of people who I don’t know, I’m not really an outgoing person (although I try to be, it just doesn’t happen–I donno why). If you were one of the people who came up and introduced yourself to me and said hi when you saw me–it really made my day, I know that sounds really sad, but it’s true–thank you, and I love you. I really do like being around lots of people, but living out in the middle of nowhere, half an hour away from civilization, doesn’t really allow for it to happen very often. The people are definitely one of the reasons I love fiddle camps, along with everything else, of course…like learning cool new songs.

I learned about 20 new songs at camp–all sorts of different styles: Old Time, Texas Style, Bluegrass, Scottish, Jazz, Eastern European, and other stuff I can’t think of right now because I’m about to fall asleep at the computer.

Oh, and do check out Old School Freight Train, Crooked Still, and The Wild Band of Snee–these bands are just amazing. If I wasn’t so incredibly tired, I would list every teacher, their websites, and their CDs, but I just can’t right now, I’m sorry. Maybe later.

Photos should be up sometime, we’ll see… There may be some very incriminating ones of me crashed on the floor that just happen to also have a clock in the frame… I will make sure the clock is censored sanitized before allowing them onto your computer, so it may take some time.

A few of the many things I learned outside of class:

• Rope Swings: Never, never, ever, again. Every single time I go off of one I get water in my ear and I go deaf for several very long hours. I basically can’t hear anything, just a bunch of people mumbling–it tends makes conversation a little bit hard. And it hurts like hell. I guess really need to learn ASL.
• Staying up into 3:30 AM three nights in a row is definitely no sort of condition you should be in if you want to learn lots of new songs. Oh well, it was certainly worth it (and fun) to lay there and listen to people jamming. And besides, that’s why we make recordings of the songs, right?
• Ultimate Frisbee is awesome.

If you were at camp, then please leave a comment and say hi! Also, if you have some photos you want to share with everybody else from camp, please email them to me and I’ll put them up in the gallery! If you have a bunch of photos (or a slow internet connection) then you can mail them to me on a CD. Thanks!

This post is way too long for me to proofread right now. I tried and just couldn’t do it. Sorry for all the incoherent ramblings and typos.

One last thing–I have my GED test on Tuesday (3 hrs) and Thursday (2 hrs), then we’re taking off on Friday for two weeks to go to two more fiddle camps. Maybe I’ll see you at the camps…it’s kind of scary thought that people who actually know me in real life could be reading this…and that I might see them in a week or two. So, if I don’t reply to your emails, I’m not ignoring you, well–I guess I am ignoring you–but I’m gone and having a blast, so don’t take it personally. OK?

Now I need to go to bed before it’s midnight again. I just can’t take 5 nights of going to bed “the next day.”

Seen on a T-Shirt:

Geeks are people too

Oh, and what is this? According to this article, a geeks are:

Americans who use the Internet, have a home computer and own two or more high-tech gadgets.

Oh, come on.

Anyone have any geek “slogans” to stick on a T-Shirt? I’m thinking about making some…maybe.

All I can say is that AAA totally rocks. AAA is a local theatre group made up of a bunch of teens who do all sorts of amazing acting in a basement theatre (which is also amazing, but that’s a different story). I just went to see Wicked: The Musical a few hours ago…it was totally awesome. You guys totally rock(ed) my world! (Although if you actually read this, then I’m a little worried–but leave a comment and say hi!. :))

Yeah, yeah, so you all already know, but Google released Google Checkout today. It doesn’t exactly seem like a “PayPal” killer, in that it’s an easy way to move cash around. Instead, it’s a way for people to buy stuff without creating a million account/password pairs and sending out their credit card info to everyone. Very Cool Stuff. It’s got what looks like a decent web API, which I’ve been toying with. I’m not sure if I’ll make www.wildgardenseed.com use it yet… Maybe yes, maybe no. Probably yes, though.

It seems like it might require some serious osCommerce hacking, as Google Checkout isn’t just a way of paying…it’s more a way for users to keep track of their web orders, view info about them, etc, all in one place. This means that the merchent needs to send the order data to Checkout in the form of a base64 encoded XML file. This means that the user isn’t entering all their info into osC, which means the order never shows up in the osCommerce admin section. I guess with a lot of hacking, it could be made to show up, but it would be hard. So…I’m leaning toward just having the product show up in Google Checkout and manually dealing with it there. We’ll see…

Need new music? Go check out Jonathan Coulton. You’ve probably already heard of him–his song Code Monkey was posted up on Slashdot a few months ago. Anyway, go check his music out! Chiron Beta Prime, Till the Money Comes, Madelaine, When You Go, The Presidents, Furry Old Lobster, Curl, and That Spells DNA…check them out! And the other too, of course.

Sleeeppp…iissss…gettttiinng…meeeeeeeee.

Dammit, Google is always "stealing" "my" ideas! When you go to http://www.google.com, they must use some fancy AJAX scripting to suck the contents of your brain out through your fingertips and into a secret government database somewhere. And they get to take a look at it too.

Whatever, that probably looks really stupid.

But yes, I did have an idea very similar (almost exactly the same?) as Google’s Browser Sync Firefox extention a few months ago. Right down to encrypting/decrypting the info client-side. Let’s call my idea “OpenProfile” for now. My idea was to have a decentralized system where users are identified by their email address (e.g., tajmorton@gmail.com). The client would try to connect to gmail.com and log in with tajmorton. If it failed because Google wasn’t running an OpenProfile server, then the client would go and ask a centralized OpenProfile server who is responsible for providing service to tajmorton@gmail.com. The client would then connect to that server like normal.

Although this makes the system somewhat centralized, the entire network would not fall over if the centralized box went offline. It does encourage use of a universally unique identifier (no two people can have the same email address), which I think is really needed. It would be so nice to be able to go to any forum, blog, website (slashdot, digg, kuro5hin, etc), and webservice and not have to go through the same hassle of registering, choosing an username, filling out your email address, name, etc, etc, etc. [1]

OpenProfile wouldn’t just be for your Firefox profile. My idea was that many applications could store their configuration in your OpenProfile account, and you could go from computer to computer carrying around your config info. Apps that could use OpenProfile off the top of my head:

• Web Browsers (bookmarks, saved passwords, etc)
• Email clients (account info)
• IM Clients (account info)
• RSS Feed Readers?
• Newsgroup readers?

Obviously other apps, too. For some applications, carrying around settings without data wouldn’t make too much sense (word processors, for example). OpenProfile would be for people on the road who just want to check their email and chat with their friends, not those who want to write their thesis/book/code at a cyber cafe computer. I guess OpenProfile could end up being a whole remote file system, but network file systems are always so terribly slow (unless a genius designs them).

That’s my rambling nothingness for the night…

[1] I guess this is what OpenID is trying to achieve, however they chose a website URL instead of an email address to identify people. I don’t fully understand the logic behind this, but it seems a bit weird to me, as not everyone has webpages, and some people have more than 1. Also, adoption currently sits at ~2 (LiveJournal and Blogger, TMK).