I'm getting old

Last night I went to a concert. Two excellent, undiscovered Utah bands were playing, Allred and Rated Hero. We're talking about high-quality musicians in a crappy venue for $5. What could be better?

...

OK, I'll tell you, in a roundabout way. Rock concerts are infamously loud. I guess we're supposed to like having our ears blasted out or something. A while ago, I decided that while I would persist in going to rock concerts, I also valued my hearing. The device that would reconcile these two conflicting agendas was ear plugs. With little bits of foam rubber jammed into my ears, I'm able to actually hear what I'm listening to. The harsh edge created by too much volume is removed, and when the show is over, I can still hear. Beautiful!

But here's the thing: last night, the five-buck venue's system couldn't handle the load. They cranked it up so loud that the speakers themselves distorted the sound into an unrecognizable mishmash of static and noise. Ear plugs may have reduced the volume to a listenable level, but they couldn't fix the distorted output.That's right: I paid $5 to listen to music that I couldn't even really hear that well because it was cranked up too loud.

So, what could be better? Turn that racket down, ya durn whippersnappers! Come back here with my false teeth!

Anyway, it was still a great show, distortion and all. I just long for a day when rock culture will allow bands to take it down a couple notches, to where we can listen and enjoy with our naked ears. That day may not be too far off; I've noticed that most bands also value their hearing, and wear earplugs too. But the kicker, the true irony, and the biggest sign that the days of insane volume are numbered, is a sign that is popping up at the counters of venues in at least two states. It reads, "Earplugs: $0.50".

My Psuedonym Ambigram

Yeah, so, I haven't posted many ambigrams yet. That's mostly because they're tucked away on a CD somewhere in Freehand 8 format. I need to get around to sorting through them and converting them to Illustrator (I never did buy Freehand for OS X, and now that Adobe's killed it, I've switched to Illustrator); hopefully that goes well.

In the mean time, here's one I did of my psuedonym so I could have an avatar in forums and stuff.

Logo, please!

So, I want to put a silly logo in the header of this page. It looks like this:



I couldn't find a way to upload images for use in the template. Let's hope they let me place this one where I want it...

Wikipedia Watchlist RSS Feed

Over the summer, I became a Wikipedista to some extent, mostly because I found their pages on Nicaraguan subjects pretty lacking. Since I'm an RSS junkie, one of the deficiencies of the MediaWiki software that was immediately apparent to me was that there was no way to get your watchlist as an RSS feed.

Now that I'm back in school there are so many things vying for my attention that I've mostly kicked the habit. Fortunately, while I was still active, I wrote a script that fetches my watchlist and returns it as an RSS feed, which can be passed in to NetNewsWire through a script subscription.

It's based on a PHP script that I found here. The original was localized to the French Wikipedia, and, it turns out, didn't work at all for the English one without some serious modifications to the parsing code. It also needed to be placed on a web server, which is less than convenient for most people. PHP has the ability to run as a command-line SAPI, so that problem was easily solved.

It's been up on my user page for months, and I have no idea if anyone uses it. It's been great for me, though. I can keep up with developments on the articles I care about without having to remember to check my (infrequently updated) watchlist. Enjoy.

The Case of the Missing Trailing Slash and the Nefarious Port 16080

I recently had to deal with a very oddball problem at work. We are running a web server with Mac OS X Server, which we recently upgraded to version 10.4. After the upgrade, everything seemed to be working fine...mostly. Except for one thing.

If you were to type, in your browser, www.website.com/resource/, you would get to the desired resource just fine. Note that I have bolded the trailing slash, mostly because I can't bold it in the next example because it won't be there.

if, on the other hand, you typed www.website.com/resource (no trailing slash), which is actually the far more common behavior, the URL would be transformed into www.website.com:16080/resource, and the browser would stall waiting for a server that was never going to fill the request.

Thoroughly stumped, I turned to Google. It seems this is a problem that others have had as well, which is a relief to me because it means I'm sailing in charted waters. Everyone said that turing off the Web Performance Cache fixed the problem. So, I tried it; I went into server admin, edited my virtual host, and unchecked the "Web Performance Cache" checkbox. Lo and behold...the problem persisted.

More Googling revealed the nature of the cache. It is a feature specific to Mac OS X. When it is enabled, a caching daemon runs and sits between Aoache and the outside world. It is the cache process that serves all of your pages, fetching them as necessary from Aoache and serving them from its in-memory cache if they are available. Ok, that's kind of neat. I also learned that the cache process communicates with the server process over port 16080. Port 16080...the same port as shows up with every trailing slash...it's gotta be the performance cache...what gives?

I wanted to see if my turning off of the cache was actually taking in the OS. Googling to discover the process name (it's webperfcache), I came across this document that explains that the process would be running as long as the cache is enabled in at least one virtual host. I checked, and the process was indeed still running. We had multiple virtual hosts, so I checked the others, and sure enough, the cache was still on. I disabled those too, and *POOF*! Our server functioned properly again.

Case closed!

That's a tip, kids - don't write it down

Filed under "Education."

"I hate this teacher," muttered the person sitting next to me, "he writes too fast!" I glanced over to see that my classmate (who also happened to be a roommate) was indeed furiously reproducing everything that the professor wrote on the board. I leaned over and asked him if he was at least following the lecture. "How can I," he replied, "when it's all I can do just to keep up?"

This was not a class on humanities, or history, or government. This was general college chemistry. My friend was hitting a wall that I see a lot of my classmates hitting in technical classes; that is, that it's very hard to take notes. In these circumstances, I follow three guidelines that help a lot (not that they'll work for everybody, but they should certainly be better than nothing).

Guideline #1: don't take notes. Listen to what the professor is saying, understand the concepts he's conveying. If you try to write it all down, you'll just lose the thread of the discussion. In technical classes, everything you need to know is in the text. And, you'll have homework that you have to do anyway before you fully grasp what's going on. So don't sweat it; don't take notes.

There's more to it, though, because sometimes it can be beneficial to take some notes. That brings us to Guideline #2: never write down anything you don't understand. If you don't understand it when the teacher says it (or writes it on the board), just putting it on paper is not going to help. It will actually hurt your chances of understanding other things, since your attention will be distracted by writing.

Guideline #3 is a corollary to #2, and that is: don't copy. Never write anything down that's not in your own words. You'll find that the act of translating concepts for transcription cements your understanding. It also helps ensure your notes are more concise (so you spend less time writing). And, if you follow Guideline 3, you'll automatically follow #2 as well.

I should emphasize again that this only works in technical classes, where the aim is to communicate difficult concepts more than facts. If you find yourself stuck in a history class, then by all means bring a laptop and pound away.

So, in summary:

1. Don't take notes
2. If you must, then write down only what you understand
3. Don't just transcribe; translate instead.

FlexLog

In my last post, I heaped praise upon FlexTime. I was going to anyway, but the main reason I did it right now is because I wanted to post about this thing I've written. I (unimaginatively) call it FlexLog. It's a collection of AppleScript scripts which log your usage of FlexTime. So, now I can keep a record of when I've done stretches and how long I've spent on them, which information is useful to me in managing my time.

Heck, sometimes it's just interesting to know these things. So, I offer it to you for download, for free. I'm calling it a beta release, because it hasn't received any testing beyond just on my local machine, and there may well be bugs. However, as of now I know of no issues with it. If you find one, do please let me know.

It uses an Excel spreadsheet to keep the log, so you'll need Excel, too.

Download FlexLog Beta 1

FlexTime

File this under "Good stuff you may not have heard of."

FlexTime is a general-purpose timer for Mac OS X. Who needs a timer? I didn't think I did either until I found this.

I was once given a stretch routine by a chiropractor to help my back and neck. It really does help, but it's hard to stay dedicated and do it with frequency. Also, each stretch calls for 20 seconds, and it can be hard to count out the time on my own.

Enter FlexTime, nearly a year later. I set up a routine that repeats automatically, with 5 seconds to transition between stretches and 20 to hold them. At the beginning of each cue, my computer beeps at me.

It works great as a game timer, too. I once used it to time a game of Rummikub. In that game, everyone is allowed only 2 minutes per turn. I set flextime up to speak text at 30-second intervals, reminding people of how much time they had left. It was great.

But that's not all you can do with FlexTime. You can tie scripts to it, and use it to control other applications. You can bind remote controls to it to control it remotely. You can customize the behavior of cues through scripting. And on and on.

I'm not affiliated with Red Sweater Software (the company that makes it), I just like the program. So go give it a try, eh?

Thank You

In keeping with my previous post, I'll post for you an Ambigram. It spells "Thank you" in a loop. It also exhibits off-center rotational symmetry, so you can read "Thank you" no matter which direction you read around the circle.

Ambigrams

You may not have heard of the term. An Ambigram is a letterform that exhibits some form of symmetry, be it rotational, reflectional, etc. There are some that occur naturally (such as MOM - turn it upside-down, and it becomes WOW), but most you have to twist and shape until the cooperate. I've been making them on and off for several years, and I intend to post several to this blog. Fair warning.

I credit Scott Kim with getting me started on these things (even though he has no idea what he's done. :). His book, Inversions, is a treasure trove and a wonder. Thoroughly worth the $10 it cost me to buy a copy.

Don't Eat the Blog

"Me don't know art, but me know what me like: FOOD!"
-Cookie Monster

Every blog has to start somewhere, with a first post. Since you're reading, let me tell you why I wanted a blog, and what I plan to do with it.

I've resisted blogging for years now. For one, I'm a Chemical Engineering student with two jobs, and I don't need the additional drain on my time. Still, I find myself wanting to share things with the world at large; this might be hubris, but I'll let the world decide if it's interested in what I have to say.

I promise not to talk about my cat. For one thing, I don't have one--I'm allergic, and I don't really like them anyway. I will only post here if I genuinely think that what I have to say will be interesting, useful, or entertaining to people other than myself.

I plan to blog about Energy, Chemistry, Education, Ambigrams, Computers and Programming, Web Development, Religion, and more. (See, I said "and more," so when I post on random stuff you can't be all like, "Hey, what the heck!")

This party's just getting started...