philisha.net

I’ve held back commenting about Google Talk, but since it’s the one-week anniversary, I’ll point out that the Dreamhost blog has the best explanation of what’s going on in that regard.

I’ll hold back chastising those of you still on the ‘walled garden’ chat systems since Google hasn’t opened up interoperability on their Jabber servers yet.

Update: Conversations in the comments are easy to miss, so here we go.

Ben wrote: I wonder if Jabber made a bad move by using transports to connect to other services. It doesn’t help people who use jabber to get their friends on jabber… It’s possible that jabber’s transports (which don’t work that great) overshadowed the real advantage of being able to talk to any other jabber server.

Well, it sounds like the age-old question: GPL or BSD? Do we enforce the idea that other people should do things the right way? Or do we just do our own thing and allow other people to interact with it as they please?

I think you’re right in a sense—if Jabber became really successful because of Google, it would probably become more widespread if it didn’t allow for interoperability.

But in the end the point isn’t to get the most people to use your protocol. (Well, that might be the point for AOL or MSN, but they just don’t get it.) The point is to be able to facilitate communication in the best possible manner. That’s why I think the BSD-ish allow-anything-and-interoperate approach fits better here.

(Note that this is a hugely different domain from software, and these arguments have nothing to do with the GPL vs the BSD license, just a particular application of the philosophy behind each. With software licenses it’s not just about interoperability—protecting freedoms also comes into play.)

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I was looking back over my past postings…. I am pretty bad about writing stuff that is actually happening in my life. (I don’t even have a category for it.) It’s no wonder my family doesn’t read this much! In my defense I’ve been reading stuff from the sites I added to my sidebar now that it contains so many more links. Here’s a run-down on what’s been going on.

• I developed a web application for Paxtel which demos the ability to query your vehicles via an RF network. You can ask its speed and location, among other things, and it will alert you when (for instance) its RPMs go too high. It’s meant for insurance companies and rental agencies, but will also be marketed towards consumers later. The whole thing was developed in two weeks of part-time work with some help from André. Whether it scales or not is an open question, but Rails is definitely not the bottleneck.
• I listened to an unhealthy quantity of Blind Guardian music.
• Alisha and I went down to Vista to see some of her family.
• The folks from The Manor with whom I lived for several years are getting kicked out of the place by rising rent. It’s sad since the Manor has been a great place with a lot of memories, but I guess it’s time to move on.
• I upgraded my desktop to Breezy Badger, the latest from Ubuntu. It’s absolutely fantastic. I especially appreciate the latest Epiphany, which has gotten me addicted to mouse gestures. I find myself wishing they were ubiquitous.

(Wow, that’s enough content for several blog posts. I’m trying to restrain myself and be economical here, but I’m not quite done.)

There’s something hilarious about the concept of spontaneous generation. “Oh yes, we have definitely moved beyond the idea that dead meat brings maggots into existence. Such a primitive, unscientific concept! However, primordal soup can do it just fine!” Read the article; it’s great. The only science in the article is the disproving of “whether mice may be bred by putrefaction”, but that doesn’t stop naturalist philosophy from spouting wonderful sophisms:

Such scientists pointed out that the disproof of Aristotelian abiogenesis applied only to “known existing organisms”, not to unknown forms of life or proto-life which may have existed under the vastly different conditions of the early Earth.

Can you say double standard?

In closing, kittenwar.com.

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All the cool kids are doing it, so there: http://phil.hagelb.org. (Ok, ok, so I had to stretch the spelling…) Right now it’s just a redirect to here, but we’ll see.

(I spend my days here.)

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_why is at it again.

I’m not going to spoil the fun. Just take a look and try to figure out the riddle. (Hint: it requires Firefox, Grease Monkey, and editing a single file on your hard drive.)

On a less exciting note, I’ve been bumped down to the second page on a search for chunky bacon. (I used to be #6!)

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In the past year and a half, I’ve had the misfortune of using Windows several times. Four times I have used it for nontrivial tasks:

• Trying to get a Sony Audio recorder to download its files
• Playing Final Fantasy VII
• Running a program to interface with automotive telemetry devices
• Playing Myst: Masterpiece Edition

Not a single one of these tasks worked as anticipated. The Sony Audio device—well, you can read about that fiasco—let’s just say it got ugly, and it ended up running better through a Windows compatibility layer on GNU/Linux. Final Fantasy VII installed, but wouldn’t play beyond the first few screens. Again, a Playstation emulator worked better.

Luckily I was able to avoid using Windows for a while until recently. My latest project for work involved a program that is written only for Windows connecting to my app. Windows mysteriously refuses to open a connection, even though it will connect via telnet from Windows. So we refactor the program to work around the problem. Ugly, but it works.

Fourthly, I figure since I already have to deal with the associated shame of owning a Windows machine, I might as well take full advantage of it and use it for the one thing Windows has a reputation as actually being good at: games. I just bought the Myst 10th Anniversary edition DVD collection, and wanted to relive my memories while stretching my mind.

Keep in mind this is a fresh install of Windows. (No potential program conflicts with other wildcard third-party software.) I installed Myst with the Quicktime and DirectX programs it requires. It crashes every single time I go to a certain room.

Now, I’m thinking to myself that GNU/Linux isn’t perfect. I can’t say I’ve had a 100% success rate on all the stuff I’ve tried. But when you look at Windows…. it’s like the horse-and-buggy of computing. Thanks to the Mozilla Foundation, most of my experiences with Windows have been bearable, but every single time I travel outside the haven of Firefox, I hit trouble. And that’s not even taking virus/worm problems into account. (The TTL is so low, I’ve never had to worry, if you know what I mean.)

Hopefully now some of my sentiments are more understandable. I guess it works well enough for most people. Either that, or when it doesn’t work, people have just been conditioned to accept it. That would be kind of sad.

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Great, just what we need, another reason for confused users to spend more time in Word. It’s not that I’m against rich clients, but a lot of people make the mistake of loading up an entire office suite when all they need to do is jot down a little note.

Public Notice:
A word processor is a program that formats text and does layout. It is not the best way to create and edit plain text. Now granted, blogs may justify a bit more variety than plain text can offer, but running your entries through a text filter like Textile is a much more natural way to create rich text than moving your hands off the keyboard every few seconds to make formatting changes.

Plus, wordsucks. (I had to put that in to live up to certain explanations people have of me. Hardcore hackers use Emacs, because life is better when an integrated LISP interpreter is never more than two keystrokes away.)

Recently I’ve been working with calendars and realizing that using a personal calendar is the next inevitable step to getting my life more organized. My life is not going to get more organized until I start using a calendar.

Unfortunately, calendaring software is playing catch-up to other well-worn areas of software. If I wanted a calendar to use at one single computer I wouldn’t have a problem; great ones already exist for that. Unfortunately, most organizational software problems get more complicated when you realize everything needs to be accessible across the four computers you regularly use.

But lo!—a light exists on the horizon. Hula is totally going to rock. I just have to be patient while it is finished. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get to drool over the sweet stuff they’re doing. Thanks, Novell! Ya rock.

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See Bug #1.

Agile Web Development with Rails is fantastic; I’m just gobbling it up. It’s especially nice that now Rails is a major part of 2 of my 3 jobs. w00t!

I got another job, so I’m super-busy until the 26th.

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Happy second birthday, blog!

To celebrate this important milestone, let’s take a trip into the past.

First was Bahamut Lagoon, my site I had for a couple months in the summer of 2003. Think of it as being The Hobbit to Philisha.net’s LOTR: a prequel of a lighter nature. Unlike The Hobbit, it was mostly junk.

When the summer ended, The Beach of 1000 Shrunken Heads was launched. The launch of the Beach of 1000 Shrunken Heads included a simple theme with a banner depicting shrunken heads on a beach. Unfortunately this has been lost in the sands of time forever, and you just have to use your imagination. It was a work of art; I’m sorry to say that I lost it. I’ve let you down. I created this blog by just typing HTML straight into a text editor on Biola’s soon-to-be-retired academic server.

Some time in October, I switched to a new design, the banner of which is the earliest extant artifact of what is now Philisha.net. I also began a blog system that dynamically generated content from a database. This system, with heavy revisions, was used until June 2005.

In January of 2004, I purchased the domain name philisha.net and redid the site with CSS. This version actually still exists, and people find it via Google all the time. Mostly they find it by searching for Banana Phone. Later I added CSS themes for fire and water.

When I moved into The Manor I began to host the site off of my own server Penguinomicon instead of Biola’s academic server. To accompany this change I recreated the design of the site.

Nothing changed until I migrated to Typo last June. I played around with a cloud theme:

and a blaze theme:

before settling on the current Foliage theme.

Thus concludes this extended indulgence of my ego. I hope you have enjoyed these two years as much as I have. Unfortunately I won’t be having a party like I did at Philisha.net’s last birthday, so you’ll have to amuse yourselves by browsing the archives and post about your favorite Philisha.net moment.

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