Pick One
There’s no sense in the weather being 34 degrees with rain. Either snow, or be warm. I don’t care which one you pick, but this “almost” weather sucks.
Happy Birthday Holly!
Happy birthday to my beautiful bride. She’s my best friend, a wonderful wife, and an incredible mother, all rolled into one.
Thanks for growing another year older with me!
This Is No Good, And I Know Why. A Mouse Has Cut The Wire, Goodbye!
The joys of home ownership (motto: “What will break today?”) continue. Today’s lucky contestant is . . . [drum roll] . . . the phone!
Last night, our security system started beeping. When we checked it out, we saw that the “trouble” light was on. The only time I’ve seen that was when we’d lost phone service, so we checked the phones. Sure enough, they were out. We called Sprint and reported the problem, and they said they’d send someone out this morning.
So around 8:30 the doorbell rings, and it’s the Sprint tech. He said that the problem isn’t with the Sprint wiring, it’s in my house. He takes me around to the junction box to show me. Sure enough, the phone wire running from the junction box into the siding is dry-rotted all to hell. It was shorting the lines, causing our problems. The Sprint tech cut away the dry-rotted section, but that has the side effect of really killing all the phones inside the house.
He said that Sprint could come out and repair the inside wiring for $100/hr, plus a $35 trip charge. However, he was also very nice by explaining what I’d need to do to repair the line myself, even giving me 10’ of phone line and a handful of connector clips. Very cool. But now I’m going to end up crawling under the house either tonight or tomorrow morning to try to patch the wire under the floor (which is presumably not dry-rotted) back into the junction box. I just need to make sure I remember which color wire goes where….
A side note to the story – Holly was expecting a group of people from her mom’s club playgroup to come over to the house for the first time this morning. Of course, since nobody has been here before, she sent them all directions and said “Call our home phone if you have questions.” Our home phone which is no longer working. Ooops.
I managed to work around the problem, though. A phone junction box has a “test jack” in it. Normally that’s the connection that links the phone company wiring coming out of the ground into your home wiring. But you can unplug the line from the jack and find a standard phone plug that bypasses your home wires and goes directly into the phone network. So I took our cordless phone’s base station, put it on our side porch, plugged the power into one of the outside sockets, and ran a phone line into that test jack. Viola – one working phone on our home number. And, it turns out, Holly did get a call from one of the moms, so it’s good that the phone was working.
I may not be “handy,” but I can make do in a pinch.
Feed The Need
I finally got tired of waiting for XML::Atom to get to the point to where it could either generate valid Atom feeds, or document what hoops you needed to jump through to generate said feeds (previous rants: here and here), so I decided to do something about it.
The result is XML::Atom::SimpleFeed – an easy way to generate basic Atom feeds through Perl. It doesn’t have a massive object-oriented modular structure, it doesn’t have the power of a fleet of XML parsers under the hood. What it does is generate valid Atom 0.3 easily. Which, hopefully, is all some people want to do.
I set it up running on the ISCABBS feed page and, after shaking out a few bugs with the XML encoding, it seems to be working well. And there are only four public methods to worry about. You initialize the feed with title, date, etc., add entries in a loop, then print or save the feed. And it validates.
We’ll see if anyone out there actually uses the module or not, but it was fun to write. And I’m already making use of it, which I guess is something of a victory in and of itself.
Game Off
In a move that surprised absolutely nobody, the NHL today cancelled the 2004-2005 season due to the labor dispute.
The last twitches before rigor mortis that we saw over the past few days were just that – instinctive nerve actions from a dead body. Now the commish says they go back to square 1 – all current offers are off the table.
This whole mess has been marked by idiocy on both sides, but the players should take the brunt of the blame for this crap. They’re getting paid far more than they’re worth for a sport that barely cracks the conciousness of most sports fans. They like to think of themselves as part of the “four major sports,” but truth be told they’re probably down in like 8th or 9th place, behind NASCAR, golf, hell, throw the WNBA in there. The sport does not pull in enough money to justify the salaries the players were demanding.
To be sure, the owners should be able to show some restraint in signing marginal talent to big-money deals. But with the current economic system, you have a handful of huge-money teams that can afford $80M payrolls, and everyone else is forced to make do with half that. And with the screwed up salary arbitration system, if the Rangers offer a chump $10M/year, every other guy with similiar numbers is going to get handed a figure near that in arbitration, which blows the teams budgets out of the water.
And that’s why the players are fucking idiots. The concept of the salary cap has proven successful for leagues like the NFL and NBA, allowing stability for both owners and players, and it has allowed both leagues to grow well. But the NHLPA staked out a position from the start saying “NO! We’ll see the league fall apart before we even consider the mere possibility of a salary cap.” That is, of course, until a few days ago, when they said “Ok, we’ll take a salary cap set at this level.”
Well, fuck you, NHLPA. If you were prepared to take a salary cap on Sunday, you should have been prepared to take one six months ago. At that point, you could have spent time, you know, negotiating and finding a fair deal, instead of pouting in the corner because the league wouldn’t do things your way. You’re a bunch of fucktards, and this season is on your heads.
What does the future hold? Well, with no deadline, both sides can go pout for a while longer, since there’s a good six months before the 2005-2006 season is scheduled. Bettman said in the press conference that the 05-06 season “will happen,” so whether that means replacement players, collective bargaining impasse and imposition of new rules, a dissolved and re-established league, or something else remains to be seen.
The fact remains that this sucks. If you see your favorite NHL player bagging groceries at Food Lion, thank them for me. This is, after all, what they wanted.
Save The Drama For Your Mama
The drama continues. Just a few hours after the NHL made a final, no-negotiation, take-it-or-leave-it, this-is-it, absolutely final offer of a $42.5M salary cap, saying that if this offer was rejected, the season would be cancelled Wednesday at a 1pm press conference, the NHLPA counteroffered with a $49M cap.
I guess they didn’t buy into the take-it-or-leave-it part. Now it remains to be seen if there is, in fact, room for negotiation, or if the bullet that puts the NHL out of its misery will have a $6.5M price tag attached to it.
Tune in tomorrow, same puck-time, same puck-station.
Sigh.
Learn Me Good
Based one some prodding and encouragement from Effendi over at ISCABBS, I’ve submitted three proposals to teach at OSCON 2005 in Portland, OR. As someone who’s never taught before and doesn’t have any “name recognition” in the community, I doubt I get picked for any of them, but hey, it didn’t cost anything to apply.
The three tutorials and abstracts are:
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Building GUIs with Perl/Tk (Perl track, 3 hour tutorial)
Abstract: Perl is a great language for building command-line tools, but sometimes you need something to point and click at. Fortunately, the Perl/Tk GUI toolkit provides a way to build quick, functional, and cross-platform graphical interfaces. This talk will serve as an introduction to Perl/Tk widgets, geometry management, and applications.
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Weird Things People Are Doing With RSS (Emerging Technology track, 45 minute session)
Abstract: RSS has gained its fame from syndication of blogs and news sites. But people are continuing to push the technology, with some interesting results. Find out how people are using RSS to do some unexpected things out in the world. (Topics for this one would include things like podcasting, the ISCABBS RSS feeds, the national weather service weather feeds, subversion log feeds, things like that).
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Introduction to Content Syndication with XML::RSS (Perl track, 45 minute session)
Abstract: Orange XML buttons are popping up all over the web. What do they mean? It means that people are using RSS to syndicate their web content, providing readers a great way to keep up with your site. This session will cover the basics of content syndication, both generating feeds and consuming them, using Perl’s XML::RSS module as a platform.
We’ll see how it goes!
Dos Dedos
One of the new features Apple introduced with its new Powerbook revisions is the “two finger scroll” feature. As Apple says:
Scrolling through web pages or large documents on a trackpad can challenge even the most nimble fingers. That’s why every PowerBook G4 features a new trackpad with scrolling capability. Just drag two fingers over the trackpad to scroll vertically and horizontally or pan around any active window. Change this feature to suit your needs: Customize your trackpad settings or turn off scrolling completely via System Preferences.
Pretty neat feature, but who wants to buy a new Powerbook just for that? Well, apparently, Apple has been building laptops with the ability to use this feature for a while, it’s just not enabled for the older hardware. However, a pointed from Dan Birchall over at ISCABBS reveals that some guys based out of Germany went into the Darwin source code and found a way to poke at the kernel driver to enable the two-finger scrolling on older, but capable hardware.
To see if your system is up to the task, run: ioreg -l | grep “W Enhanced Trackpad”
If that comes back with something like ‘“W Enhanced Trackpad” = 1’, you’re in business. Go to the website, download one of the binary kernel drivers (or build your own from the Xcode source project they supply, and load it up. I just did it for my iBook G4 (October 2003 model) and it’s working well. You don’t get the preference pane to adjust the settings like in the new systems, but that’s probably coming soon.
Great work, Daniel “razzfazz” Becker – you’ve earned your hacker stripes.
