I woke up at 5AM this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. So I've been up reading Paul Auster's "Oracle Night". The story is good and convoluted, and Auster has an interesting pacing -- hurryhurryhurry for a while, then slowing down to an agonizing crawl, then back to the action. It reminds me of Haruki Murakami in a way.
I quote myself
So, a vanity Google blog search turned up this gem about how to stop people from stealing ideas from your blog:
''My suggestion: don't put any good idea on your blog. Have you noticed how nobody else puts anything interesting on their blogs? It's because of idea stealing. There's all kinds of idea thieves out there waiting to make millions and billions of dollars off your ideas the second you post them to your blog. That's why other bloggers just post about what kind of oatmeal they like and what Tori Amos song they just listened to. They leave out all the good stuff so the idea thieves don't take them to the cleaners.''
That's exactly what I'm doing! Cripes. On the subject, I had President's Choice Organic Granola for breakfast, and I am currently listening to #f by Tori Amos. Mood: nostalgic.
Geo, geo, geo! And I let the fish go
I'm trying to remember to keep in mind all the geo-tagging and geo-oriented sites and services I've seen lately. I'm into Plazes, and I'm also a fan of Geonames.org and of course OpenStreetMaps. The venerable geourl needs some love, I'm afraid.
I just caught up with Tagzania, too. Another good idea. I'm kind of sick of Google maps mashups -- they seem kind of fawning and sycophantic, leeching off our Information Overmasters -- but I like geo-data, and I like people making cool stuff with them.
I'm pretty hyped on Mapbuilder, too. Nice tool, and I hope it replaces the "mashup" meme soon.
P.S. Elizabeth Bishop, I'm sorry.
Trēo 650, Evolution, Ubuntu Dapper Drake
I got a Palm Trēo 650 (including macron!) from Telus recently in exchange for a long-term contract. I figured it was worth it -- they also knocked off some long-distance and roaming charges, which have been killing me over the last year.
I specifically chose the Trēo because I knew that Palm device support in Linux was well-established and that I'd be able to use the thing with my Evolution calendar, contacts, etc. Or so I thought. Turns out that the Trēo is part of a new wave of Palm devices that have a new on-the-wire protocol and aren't compatible with the old machines.
The big issue has been how many links there are in the chain between the Trēo and Evolution: the kernel device (visor), the /dev/ node manager udev, the pilot-link library and utils, gnome-pilot, and then Evolution. Changes in the hardware haven't rippled up to the application quite yet.
I've got to the point where gnome-pilot sees and identifies the device, but that's as far as I've got. There's some undefined symbol in the pilot-link library that gnome-pilot tries to load... bug #43623 explains it better than I can here.
Suffice it to say: getting this phone thing hooked up to my email thing is one of my main technology hassles right now. Then again, if it weren't this, it'd be something else.
Dang
Rebooting my main desktop computer (the kernel oopsed several times while I was playing with my Trēo, so I figured it made sense to give it a clean start), the BIOS gave out some scary message about my overclocking being unsuccessful (which I've seen before -- related to motherboard temperature, if I remember right), and then powered down. Nothing worked to bring it back up... which is kind of scary. The little power-indicator light on the motherboard is on, but the ATX power switch in the chassis seems to have no effect -- it definitely isn't starting the computer. No fans starting, no disks spinning up, nothing.
Dang. There's a shop nearby, so I guess I'll go see what they say. My guess is: new motherboard. Ech.
Un-dang!
I just got back from the shop (Micro Services Inc, 4662 av Papineau) and they were totally able to revive my computer. The power supply was shot -- still strong enough to drive the power-indicator LED, but not enough to actually boot the computer. So they replaced the power supply, and bingo bango bongo, things are workin' great now.
I've gotten too used to working on my own computer over the last 20 years -- I would have spent 2-3 days on this project, but going to a professional totally worked. Hooray for me!
All my friends are XHTML
So, despite the fact that this site doesn't actually validate as XHTML, I've added some links to make it work with the XHTML Friends Network. I ended up adding another macro to make the links work; it's $$xfn, and it takes a comma-separated list of relationships, and the rest of the macro as the text of the link. The code is here: http://evan.prodromou.name/pastebin/xfn-macro.scm .
I think at some point I'll assemble a whole suite of microformats markup for WiLiKi, since, hey, they're cool. I'm also pretty down with RDF/A, though, so we'll see what happens here.
Evan Almighty
Woohoo
I also managed to hack in an RSS feed that looks kind of bloggety.-