Category Archives: Culture

Saying Goodbye

Posted on by

Transition is always interesting… I really like this office too. A little cold in the winter though. Come February, I see less windows in my future (the kind you look out of). ;-)

Roomba on the prowl

Posted on by

I find myself in a completely tiled apartment while also having acquired a Roomba 4210. No more constant dirt and pet hair… Though, if I were the iRobot developers, I would quickly add the following features to the low end Roomba…

  • RF remote, instead of the IR remote.
  • Find the dock without fail (use RF, signal strength, and other associated homing technologies).
  • A camera, why can’t I see what Roomba sees?
  • Remote control via mobile (especially WIFI, see: AR Drone).
  • I know the upper models have schedules, but why not the lower end… how about every day at 3am?
  • I’m sure newer models don’t have as many problems, but come on… the lower end shouldn’t get stuck so often on raised areas, underneath desks and dressers, and refuse to start on black carpets…

Google Buzz

Posted on by

I heard about Google Buzz on CBC Radio yesterday… came home and tried to connect but it wasn’t activated. What’s all this Buzz about? Today, while using Gmail, I noticed the icon for it, opened it up, and added some “connected sites”. I’ve already had two conversations about a picture of a turtle I took a few years back. Awesome.

Seems easier to use than Facebook too.

Sloppiness at 1and1

Posted on by

So I have been noticing issues with 1and1 again. Yesterday when trying to get into my hosting control panel at admin.1and1.com, I received a “HTTP Error 503 Service unavailable” error, and thought to myself… really, on the admin panel… really?

Today while checking out my own site, I noticed that all of the PHP files I tried browsing to returned “500 Internal Server Error” errors.

Now this has gone too far… so I called them up. At first the person I talked to explained that I needed to force PHP5 using a .htaccess file, and proceeded to tell me that they could make the change for me. Calmly, I responded by saying that I did not want a change, and that it had been working fine the way it was for months.

She put me on hold, and while I waited… it started working. She told me that the shared hosting server “had a glitch”.

Afterwards, I ssh’ed into my server. Look what I found:

(uiserver):uXXXXXXXX:~ > ls -al
total XX
-rw-r--r--  1 uXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX   16 Feb  3 14:06 info.php

I thought, “weird, I didn’t put that there”.

(uiserver):uXXXXXXXX:~ > cat info.php 
<? phpinfo(); ?>

Shame on you 1and1, for not cleaning up after yourself. Well, I guess you get what you pay for.

Twitter is over capacity

Posted on by

While trying to link Ping.fm to Twitter I saw this classy notice:

Twitter Over Capacity

That kind of reminds me when I used to try to call my brother in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan… the phone would beep this funny tone indicating that they were over capacity and the call could not go through.

Lego Car

Posted on by

My son often requests family time at the Lego set. A recent evening produced this surprisingly fast wired remote control car. The trick I have found with Technic Legos, is to set the gearing tight while building, and then loosen it up a bit before turning the power on… otherwise the motor gets bogged down by friction. Someday, I think I will have to look into Lego Mindstorms.

lego-car-profile.jpg
lego-car-gear-setup.jpg
lego-car-in-motion.jpg
lego-car-over-illuminated.jpg

ar·ma·men·tar·i·um

Posted on by

One definition of armamentarium is: The complete range of materials available or used for a task.

May my complete range of materials available to be used on a specific task, forever more, be vastly larger than it is now (lots of tools available). :-)

Or another way of looking at it could be… May my tasks be able to be completed successfully with an ever decreasing range of materials available to be used (simplification of the task).