The CPiA driver has turned out to be quite stable. I'm going to have to find the time to move the webcam into a more intersting location sometime soon. I've decided the best location is probably the game room, where we can be seen playing Robotron 2084 or some other vintage arcade game from the 80's (back when they still knew how to make good arcade games instead those games they have now that are mostly just cartoons of people kicking each other in the head).

2000 May 2 (Tue), 19:44 WooHoo! I'm number one on the Seti@HOME Team Slashdot stats again. Another 15 minutes of fame... Even though there are only a few boxes left here running the Seti@HOME software, I still check in on my stats every once in a while. Most of the people on Team Slashdot gave up long ago and I've been slowly moving up through the ranks. But I'm still falling farther behind all the time in the overall stats. I got as high 300th or so back when we had dozens of machines working on it but as more of the machines here went back to doing real work I've fallen to about 900th. Looks like Team Slashdot has fallen quite a ways in the Club stats too - they used to be number one.

A friend emailed me a link to Vigor today. Wow! now vi users can have an annoying Microsoft-like talking paperclip hopping around their Linux desktop. I don't even use vi, so I found it particularly helpful when it offered messages such as "Are you sure you want to move the cursor left?". And if you try to kill it, the response is "Are you sure you don't want to close the Vigor assistant? Ok/Cancel". Now, if they could just add a feature that would generate the BSOD randomly, I wouldn't need Windows at all anymore.

2000 May 5 (Fri), 12:52 Today marks the 1st anniversary of my on-line news postings. I posted the first of these more-or-less daily news updates on May 5, 1999. That's a lot of old news to read. Since I hacked some syndication code into newslog in early March, these news entries have been echoed to Advogato as well. I expected most of the embedded links in my old entries would have gone bad by now but a suprising number of them still work. Now, let's see if I can keep it up for another year.

I had an interesting experience Wednesday. I got picked to be in a focus group doing some marketing research for Verio. If you've been following my exciting news regularly, you may remember that we've had T1 downtime problems, DNS support problems, dupicate billing problems, and even dial-up problems with Verio in the past. When I got called to take part in a Verio focus group, I figured it would be a great chance to tell them what I thought of them. Turned out that of 10 people in the focus group, all but one had come with a similar history of catastrophically bad service and a similar desire to tell everyone what they thought. Almost everyone there had been a customer of Onramp.net prior to the Verio buyout and without exception we all rated Onramp as one the best ISPs we'd every used and Verio as the worst. I don't know if they found out anything useful from us be we enjoyed getting paid to sit around sharing Verio horror stories for couple of hours.

And I'm sure everyone would like to hear about my latest car repairs. ;-) As I pulled out of the driveway yesterday morning, my muffler broke loose on one side and started dragging behind the car making horrible scraping sounds. It had apparently become so rusted that the mounting hardware broke. This is the Midas lifetime warranty muffler that I got to the replace the rusted-out Acura muffler I bought sometime back to replace the rusted-out free replacement muffler installed by the Acura dealer to replace the rusted-out factory muffler. Well, I figured with my lifetime warranty and Midas just down the street, it would be no big deal. So, I drove a couple of blocks with the completely unmuffled engine sounding like an Indy race car (combined with the lovely sound of metal scraping on asphault). When I got to Midas, I learned that while the muffler itself has a lifetime warranty, I have to pay for labor, mounting hardware, a large assortment of exhaust pipes, and a variety of other stuff totaling about $200. And to make things worse, I had to wait in a room filled with nothing but Sports Illustrated magazines and a TV showing an old episode of Knight Rider. Fun...

2000 May 9 (Tue), 23:32 I'm back in town again after a short trip to San Antonio to do some on-site work for a client. I can always use a few more frequently flyer miles...

Susan and I managed to get to the Dallas Museum of Art this weekend without incident (the last time we tried, my car self-destructed before we could get there). The exhibit we saw was entitled Degas to Picasso, Painters, Sculpters, and The Camera. It was a collection of paintings and sculptures by Degas, Gauguin, Mucha, Rodin, Picasso, and assorted other turn-of-the-century artists along with photographs taken by them or their assistants. The idea was to show how the new technology of photography influenced their work. In some cases the artists took immediate advantage of the technology by, for example, photographing models as studies for paintings. Others collected photographs of ancient artifacts and imitated the style or form in their own art. Oddly a few claimed publicly that photography had no place in art (even more oddly, after their death, large numbers of photographs were found in their studios and it turned out they were using them secretly in much the same way other artists were). In many cases photographs were displayed beside the paintings they had influenced.

Overall it was interesting but less so than some exhibits. And, as usual, the Dallas Museum of Art did a terrible job of lighting the works - in most cases you could only view a piece by standing between the light source and the work, thus casting a shadow on whatever you were trying to look at. If you haven't seen it yet, you missed your last chance as the exhibit ended on May 7th and Dallas was the last stop in the US.

2000 May 15 (Mon), 13:15 I've managed to get a few minutes of free time today so I'd better post some news while I've got the chance. The last week has mostly been taken up with work on a couple of big projects we've got going on simultaneously so there hasn't been too much of interest to report. The only really amusing event occured this weekend when Susan and I decided it was time to begin our weekly lap swimming for the summer at the Northlake college pool.

After we'd been doing laps for about 15 minutes, a fire alarm went off. The lifeguards insisted that everyone leave the pool and wait outside the enclosed pool area. This seems rather odd to me. The entire structure is made from cement, concrete, bricks, and filled with water - how likely is a fire? Okay, maybe a towel or the clip board with the sign-in sheet might catch fire but that's not too life-threatening. In fact, the only thing nearby that could possibly burn is the college itself. And if the college was on a fire, what better place to escape than a large body of water?

In any case, we were all herded out of the pool area and had to stand beside the nearby buildings (the ones that seemed more likely to burn than a pool). A local police car showed up within minutes and police rushed to the scene ready protect everyone from danger by filling out paper work. No one had actually seen any smoke or fire and the general concensus was that some kids had pulled the fire alarm as a joke when they were leaving the pool area. The police were apparently authorized to fill out reports stating that the pool was not on fire but could not actually tell us if a non-burning pool was safe for humans to enter - only the fire departement could determine such things.

After waiting a while longer, we heard the fire truck coming. The street layout at Northlake college is a bit circuitous and there are not always enough signs to figure out how to get where you want to go. As a result, we watched the fire truck drive around in the distance and take wrong turns for several minutes and then vanish around the other side of the campus. We could still hear the siren about 5 minutes later when the police finished their paper work and decided to move on. All this time the alarm was still sounding since no one seemed to have the key to turn it off. The lifegaurds eventually got tired of waiting for the lost firetruck and allowed us to get back in the water. We did laps accompanied by the quadrophonic sound of four 90db fire alarms (one at each corner of the pool) for another 10 minutes before the fire truck finally arrived and turned off the alarm.

2000 May 16 (Tue), 15:14 Most of the people I know have been unscathed by the viruses that have been in the news lately as they primarily exploit the poor security of the Windows operating system. It seems odd to watch so many large corporations complain about how much damage they've suffered from each new virus and yet continue to use the Microsoft products that support their propogation. Maybe they'll get a clue someday. In the meantime, I got a good laugh from an email I received yesterday - I think this is the first Unix "virus" I've ever seen:

>Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 18:21:37 -0500
>From: Jim Brown
>To: R. Steven Rainwater
>Subject: [Fwd: FW: Unix virus notice]
>
> YOU HAVE NOW RECEIVED THE UNIX VIRUS
>
>   This virus works on the honor system:
>
>   If you're running a variant of unix or linux, please forward
>   this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your
>   files at random.
>
> ---------

2000 May 18 (Thu), 19:12 There's a nice little article on technocrat.net today about the dangers of standardizing a company on Microsoft software. It's definitely worth reading and perhaps sending to any corporate sysadmin types that you know (even if the author is one of those people who prefers the non-existent word virii to the correct viruses.)

2000 May 23 (Tue), 17:04 I've been keeping busy today writing Perl code as usual. This weekend Susan and I attended the last regular concert of the season at the Dallas Symphony. It was a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 8. The 8th requires a lot of performers and, in addition to the usual Symphony and Chorus performers, there were quite a few additional performers present including several well known soloists. An extension to the stage and choral terrace had to be constructed to make room for everone. This is apparently the first time Mahler's 8th has been done in Dallas and the performance was recorded by Delos for release on CD. While Mahler isn't my favorite composer, it was definitely an enjoyable evening.

I managed to avoid going to the office all weekend and, other than swimming laps at the pool and going to the symphony, didn't really do too much.

I spent a little time today hacking on newslog. I may release a new version soon.

2000 May 24 (Wed), 12:45 Roger just called to say he saw Karl Lunt's new book, Build Your Own Robot, at the book store. Despite the title, it's more of a collection of his old Nut & Volts Magazine columns than some sort of guide to building your own robot. I haven't bought my copy yet but I'm sure it'll have some interesting stuff in it for anyone interested in robotics or generally hacking on microcontrollers and electronics.

The market seems to be down again today. Red Hat stock hit a new 52 week low today. It's getting harder every day to resist buying a few shares.

2000 May 29 (Mon), 16:38 I've got a weblog/portal project coming up and have been looking at what's out there as far as software. Nothing seems to be available that does everything I want. Slash doesn't appear to be very configurable - every site I look at that uses it looks exactly like slashdot. Slash also requires the use of MySQL while I'd prefer to use only free software like PostgreSQL for this project. Scoop looks much easier to use and modify and, while it also requires MySQL, it appears to use DBI so it should be possible to adapt it to PostgreSQL without too much trouble. Both Scoop and Slash use Perl which is good. Squishdot, being Python-based, is right out. There's also mod_virgule, which has a number of advantages such as being written in C, having a cool trust metric system and XML support but it also lacks a few features I want. I've had a mod_virgule test system running for a while and I'll probably set up scoop this week for comparison. Being Perl-based, it may be faster to hack a trust metric and PostgreSQL support into Scoop. Hmmm...

Sunday, Susan and I spent the afternoon at the Dallas Artfest 2000. It was not as interesting as previous years but it was still worthwhile. Lots of strange art and music.

I've been pondering Irish names lately. Erin is going to be having her second boy soon and wants a good Irish name for him. I think they're leaning toward Rory at the moment. I've suggested a couple of nice ones like Vortimax and Elkmar but I think they're more in the market for a name like Kevin or Colin. Turlough is a good one too (it always makes me think of the Fifth Doctor's rather unpredictable companion).