«« :: 2010 Feb :: »»

# 2010 jan 28 (thu) 13:18 :: The iPad: nice, but not for me

So Apple released a new computer yesterday. It looks like something from some flying-car-personal-jetpack future. The interface is really slick and it's probably a dream to use. I'm sure a ton of people are going to get one, and it probably represents something as profound as the Apple ][, the Macintosh, and the iPod in terms of how people interact with computers. Steve Jobs is most definitely a genius.

But it's also locked down like the iPhone. You can only install the programs that Apple wants you to be able to install, and which you get through Apple's own app store. It also turns people into passive consumers of software and media instead of potential creators.

I don't like being treated like a child. I want to be the one who decides what software I can run, and what I can do, on gadgets that I purchase. I want to be able to run unauthorized programs that I've written myself if I want to. In other words, I want full control over my gadgets in case I feel like exercising it. I'll be taking a pass on this one unless they change it into a real general-purpose computer.

# 2010 jan 1 (fri) 10:11 :: blue moon

So once again we didn't make it to the Rose Parade even though we live only a couple blocks away from it. Too much fun last night ringing in the new year to raucous Polish dance music, talking into the morning, and staring at that beautiful argent blue moon shining down from the firmament.

# 2009 nov 20 (fri) 8:43 :: Wardriving (Foothill Transit)

Had an interesting experience while slogging through rush-hour traffic on the 10-East last night. I'd heard all the podcasts on my phone so I had my laptop on the passenger seat running the excellent MOC (console audio file player). I found myself driving next to one of those long articulated Foothill Transit buses and remembered hearing that they had free wifi. At a stopping point (this was rush hour) I checked the wireless networks list and sure enough there was foothill-1642. I got behind the bus and the next time traffic stopped I clicked and joined the network. I would have tried loading a page but traffic started moving again after that. Darn!!

# 2009 oct 11 (sun) 1:32 :: SliceHost -> Linode

If you have waaaay too much time on their hands and you're handy with traceroute you may have noticed that I've moved my personal sites from SliceHost to Linode. SliceHost has been great and I still host all my work sites there, but Linode has a couple new VPS features that I was interested in, particularly the ability to change your RAM or disk sizes independently of each other, plus the fact that they have servers in Fremont, CA which is closer than St. Louis, not that anybody notices that. Mainly it's because I get bored easily and wanted to try something new.

# 2009 sep 23 (wed) 9:39 :: Anarchitect

Just listened to FLOSS Weekly # 49 where they interviewed Peter Saint-Andre about Jabber/XMPP. He talks about being an "anarchitect" because he likes things really distributed.

# 2009 sep 3 (thu) 11:24 :: southern cali fires

The big news this past week has been The Fires, namely a huge fire north of Pasadena in the Angeles National Forest. Biggest in 100 years, they're saying. Our place is far enough away from any wilderness that it's not a problem for us, aside from bad air and ash all over our cars. It's made for several exciting evenings as we drove around watching the flames. We camped out for an hour south of JPL when the fires were close -- thankfully there wasn't any damage there. For awhile the fire was threatening regional TV and radio transmitters and the observatory on Mt. Wilson. The observatory webcam is currently offline (cable probably burnt or severed) and news is being reported from offsite, but it's looking okay for now. In addition to the smoke it's been really freakin' hot the last week. I can only imagine what it's been like for the firefighters (who totally rawk, I must say). But things are pretty much normal for us. If you're really interested in fire news, our local public radio station has an updates page.

# 2009 sep 2 (wed) 20:27 :: Kansai Time Out

Heard today the sad news that Kansai Time Out is publishing its final issue this month. n my previous life as a JET Programme English teacher in Nara prefecture, I carried a copy with me almost at all times. KTO wrote about local history, off-the-beaten-path places to visit, and all manner of things gaijin needed to know to get by in that strange land. Haven't read it in awhile (hard to find here in LA), but I still have a bunch of issues, and was sad to hear of its passing.

Shout-outs to the KTO crew for all those years of a great read! Happy trails to you all.

Readers' note: KTO is still selling the last couple years' back issues and the yen is right, so if you have fond memories of KTO, head on over there and Paypal an issue or two.

# 2009 aug 2 (sun) 19:18 :: R.I.P. iBrowse, we loved ya

Una and I had to get some work done this Sunday afternoon but didn't want to stay at home or go to either of our offices, so we packed up our laptops and headed off to iBrowse in Alhambra, one of our favorate coffee hangouts. We arrived to find it closed, and padlocks on the doors. A paper taped to the window held their epitaph. Closed as of May 31. 1996-2009. Another coffeehouse dead and gone.

I don't do it so much any more (something to do with being married, maybe?), but I used to spend many of my Friday and Saturday nights in my car, wandering around and exploring LA. I'd just pick a direction and go, following whatever streets seemed most interesting. I wanted to see what LA had to offer, get a sense for all the different areas and neighborhoods. I'd drive until I got tired, then break out my Thomas Guide, figure out where I was, and then head for home.

On one of these expeditions I was cruising through Alhambra and this cool sci-fi mural caught my eye, a picture of a War-of-the-Worlds tripod machine with a U.S.A.F. insignia on it. As I drove by I caught the mural on the opposite side, a 1950s movie hero and his babe, saying "We gotta get back to Earth". I had to stop and see what it was. I stopped in and ordered a macchiato.

The guy behind the counter looked at me and said, "Do you want the kind they serve you at Starbucks, or a REAL one?". I loved this place already. The walls were covered with edgy psychedelic art by local artists, and the place was filled with students, probably from Cal State LA or PCC. They charged for wireless (and had really clunky password system) but were generous with outlets for laptops. There were always a couple guys in the back doing whatever on the rental computers. They were open til 1 or 2am.

Una and I spent a lot of evenings and holidays lounging on the sofas and surfing or working on our laptops, ordering refills and more White Castle burgers or mini pizzas. The help were always quirky and sometimes even weird, but always good for some laughs and interesting conversation. The first time I took my EeePC there a guy came over and asked to see it; while he was looking it over he mentioned that he was a member of Cult of the Dead Cow. I was always running over to the counter to find out what was playing over the sound system. Una and I would talk about how cool it was to see the mixture of Asians and Latinos in the place, and Alhambra just seemed like a cool place to be.

But now it's over. I don't know exactly what happened to iBrowse, but I have my suspicions: Starbucks.

I hate Starbucks. My hatred started back in grad school when I lived in West LA near Culver City. I used to walk to this local coffee place two or three times a week, hauling my books and my laptop. I loved being able to study around other people instead of alone in my apartment. I loved that they had stand-up comedy and live music in the second room. I loved the newsstand on the side of the building, which at the time had a better selection than Borders in Westwood. I loved how in the late afternoon it was the hangout of what seemed like the neighborhood's Ethiopian population. The place was always packed, with a steady stream of people dropping in to tank up or buy beans.

Then Starbucks came. They put a Starbucks on Venice to the west, then another one to the east, and yet another one a block south in the Culver City downtown. One night while I was there with a friend a tough Mafia-hitman-looking guy came in, tore down the shelves of a bookcase across from the counter and stalked out. Seconds later a huge Cadillac with tinted windows swooped around the corner to pick him up. A month later my favorite coffee hangout was out of business. The newsstand closed a week or two later.

You can see this pattern all over. It seems like any place you find a cool local independant coffee place you'll find a Starbucks sitting prominently on the nearest expensive real estate. You saw this in Alhambra. You see it in Sierra Madre where you have to drive past one of those hated shops to get to Beantown. I'm typing this at Tenju Tea House at Rosemead and Las Tunas; tucked in the corner of the same strip mall nearby is Roadhouse Coffee. Starbucks sits in the most expensive spot, right on the corner.

This whole thing just burns me up. I love local businesses, run by individual people who have dreams and who want to make their own contribution to their neighborhood. Local coffeehouses are unique, decorated by the owners, usually with art by local folks, and they play music that they select themselves instead of whatever the corporate office dictates. Whenever I go to some place where all you see are chain stores with the same trademarks that you see everywhere plastered on every available surface, it makes me want to throw up, it makes me want to find some place with personality, like a place with a war-of-the-worlds tripod mural out front.

Starbucks partisans will complain that it's not Starbucks' fault, they're just supplying coffee to people who want it, et cetera, et cetera, blah blah blah. Unfortunately there's a degree of truth in that - people make decisions about where to go and lots of times they decide to go to Starbucks. And lots and lots of people want the same exact bland corporate coffee and logos. They want to know they can get the same exact coffee and sit in the same chair and look at the same poster in Los Angeles or Fresno or Wichita or Portland or Seattle. Why the frak would they want that??? It doesn't make sense to me. Why would you not want to experience something unique about the place where you find yourself? Just don't go there. Don't give them any of your money, don't support them in any way.

And don't let it stop there - go just a little bit out of your way and find a local coffee place that somebody built themselves and poured their personality and love into. That place where funky weird people don't have to feel out of place and where you might just get out of your comfort zone and discover something or someone cool and new. Keep local coffee alive!

iBrowse, we'll always have fond memories of you!

# 2009 jul 15 (wed) 16:40 :: Solved: wacky Django translation errors

I've been seeing some really weird behavior on a multilingual Django site I'm finishing up. Most of the text would be fine, but form labels and help_text would display in the wrong language. They would all be in Japanese, no matter what language you viewed, for example, or all Spanish. When I restarted Apache, the language would change (now they would be all Portguese). At first I thought it might be a problem with some middleware code I'm using to grok the language by inserting the 2-letter ISO language codes in the URL, but that turned out to be working correctly. Then I thought there might be a problem with the translation files, but they looked okay.

Turns out it was really simple. I spent some time on the Django internationalization page and discovered that you're supposed to use ugettext_lazy in your models and forms code instead of ugettext. Of course! Basically, the idea is that with the regular ugettext the translation is performed when the code is read, whereas with ugettext_lazy the translation happens when the text in the code is display. I don't fully understand what's going on underneath that Django hood, but I changed my code and the problem went away.:

from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

class MyThing(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(help_text=_('This is the help text'))

# 2009 may 11 (mon) 10:44 :: 12in G4 PowerBooks can't boot from external USB drives

Last year I partitioned the drive of my aging G4 PowerBook (12in Aluminum) and set it up as a dual-boot Ubuntu/OSX system. I've been pretty happy with this arrangement, but I haven't been using OS X much, really only to do some music with Ableton Live (no Linux version). So I decided to move OS X off onto an external drive and use the entire internal drive for Linux. My plan was to get a nice new Maxtor OneTouch 4 mini 500GB to act as the new backup drive for my Linux systems, and use the old Maxtor OneTouch 4 mini 120GB as the new external OS X drive.

After backing up both of the partitions, I was unable to boot into OS X from the external drive. I tried a bunch of things, starting with holding down the Option key to get that boot disk menu. I googled around and found a helpful discussion on the Ubuntu community site about someone else who is trying the same thing. This advice didn't work either. I got the following error:

$ ofpath /dev/sda1
/pci@f000000/ata-6@d/disk@0:4,\\ofpath: No such file or directory.

After googling around some more I found another posting about booting PowerPC Macs from external USB2 drives, this one from the OS X perspective. It was very helpful, but after reading it and booting my powerbook into openfirmware, it looks like it wasn't going to work.

Reading down the page and some more googling confirmed that the 12in Aluminum G4 PowerBooks can't boot off external USB drives.