Daley Ponderings

So, what happens when you take a Handspring that died one day and wouldn't recover after various testing, and leave it in a box to take apart one day to see if it was anything obvious, but mostly forget about it for a year, and then pick it up and put batteries in it?  It starts working, of course.  I had tried every trick I knew about, hard resetting, leaving the batteries out for a week, taking out the expansion card, etc. without any luck.

So, I don't know what happened, nor how stable it currently is, but we had only made a backup to the local memory disk, and not to our hard drive, so we can at least get stuff off of it now. 

I had turned down some work the other day, and as I thought about it more, realized that I was ready to hire someone to work for me.  I talked to a dad at church, and he thought it was a good idea, and his son was interested as well.  It turns out that he has less programming experience than I thought, but his dad has been pushing for time that is spent learning basic stuff doesn't have to be paid, so that works out for me... (More)

I found a link to this application a while ago, but never took the time to check it out.  Fortunately, it stuck in the back of my mind that there was a handy application, although even handier that I had saved my bookmarks from an old computer, because I couldn't remember the name, and I couldn't find it with a fair bit of google searching.  So, I'll add this post, both to help future searchers, and also to say what a wonderful application it is.  I don't know python, but could figure it out enough to fix a login bug due to SourceForge changing their login page.  Since I found the bug, I assume that means no one else is using it, though the bug does only apply to new users, so maybe there are a bunch of current users. (More)

I just updated Usermin, and so wanted to make sure that my custom modules didn't break.  And in the process, poked around through my webalizer module, which shows the things that people type into search engines to end up at our blog as well as the number of hits for certain pages.  Some of them aren't surprising, but quite a few are interesting to see. (More)

It took some amount of work to get Linux up and running on my laptop, but I just got a new computer ($50 from Peter's workplace - let me or him know if you are interested, there might be some more left) and installed Linux in an hour two, including copying all the old data from the old computer.  There aren't any interesting notes for people following in the future, because everything worked, without any technical skills.  Hibernation, sound, UPS, display resolution, hot keys, all just worked.  Pretty nifty.  Linux might actually be getting to the point where non-technical end-users can install it, let alone use it on their desktops.

It seems to be the idea this year to release the April Fool's day jokes early, perhaps to give them more credibility, or maybe simply to join with the Australians.

I hadn't heard of the spaghetti tree joke before, but that is a pretty good one.  I showed Jonathan and Noah the picture, and they both said that couldn't happen, though Noah thought it was pretty funny.  Wikipedia also mentioned the left-handed whoppers and Taco Bell purchasing (and renaming) the Liberty Bell.

Perhaps Google's reason for releasing their joke early was due to the content of the joke. I thought the comment about it being old news was pretty good.

And famous people have it so rough.

For those of you with more time than I, you can read the top 100 jokes. I think its pretty funny when the TV and radio stations report stuff, and get more calls than for any of their regular news.

After a slightly hectic day yesterday, when I noticed some strange behavior on one of my servers, we released a new version of LifeType.  While I am not impressed that the bug existed in the first place, I think it is pretty neat that a development fixed was released within 4 hours of the bug being discovered, and an official release within 36 hours.  The last time we had a security issue, we released the fix in less than 24 hours, but it is harder on a Sunday.

The security issue itself wasn't all that interesting - we were checking a blacklist in a case-sensitive manner, and so filename.PHP was incorrectly allowed to be uploaded, and filename.php was correctly blocked. (More)

Copying the rest of you cool bloggers, I installed feedjit a while back.  I originally thought it wasn't going to be very useful, since I assumed that all of the international hits were the many search engines that like crawl the blog all day long, or worse, spammers trying to post comments.

But, as I looked into it more, they look to be valid individuals finding the blog via search engines, mostly on the technical posts, particularly on the Test Director post.  Humorously enough, I gave up on Test Director a long time ago - too much work to keep it running for what it gives you.  Perhaps I should erase the post to help people not waste their time on it, as my information is most likely out of date.  It is unfortunate that Mercury doesn't support their own product, and so people have to find places like my blog for technical support.  It probably needs to be open-sourced in order to get better support.

I am sure this will excite many of our normal readers, but I have finally (after four years) switched my laptop to Linux.  Now that I am using it everyday, it is much nicer to be in this environment, instead of having putty windows all over the place.  Perhaps if I had a better window manager for windows, I would have been alright, but anyway...

I have a Sony PCG-V505DC2 for those search engines to help other folks trying to figure out any issues with installing Linux, and Debian specifically.

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"Oh, why are we not more holy!", he would exclaim with loving insistence.  "Why do we not live in eternity, walk with God all the day long?  Why are we not all-devoted to God, breathing the whole spirit of missionaries?

"Alas, we are too much enthusiasts, looking for the end without faithfully using the means.  Do we rise at four or even five in the morning to be alone with God?  Do we fast once a week, once a month?  Do we even know the obligation or benefit of it?  Do we recommend the five o'clock hour for private prayer, at the close of the day?  Do we observe it?  Do we not find that 'any time' is no time?

"Oh let us stir up the gift of God that is in us.  Let us no more sleep as do others.  Let us take heed to the ministry that we have received in the Lord, that we fulfil it. 'Whatsoever thy findeth to do, do it with thy might.'"

-- John Wesley, as quoted in Hudson Taylor's biography, "In the Early Years". 

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather than an external machine. (More)

I hadn't ever thought of putting motors on an etch-a-sketch.

I found a nifty application (watch the youtube video for an idea of how it works) for playing around, and Jonathan and spent at least a couple hours today playing with it.  It simulates gravity, friction, inertia and things like that.  Jonathan enjoyed it and asked about it when we got home today.

Shortly after I posted the first analysis of my time, I realized that my hours per day calculation were kind of off, since I was counting 7 day weeks, and I basically never work on Sundays.  As I am redoing the calculations, I see that I must have been doing something strange to try get the days to line up correctly - ie. I restart the worklog in the middle of a day usually, and so I must have tried to move some hours to the previous month, rather than reporting the same day twice, but as far as I can tell, I can't do arithmetic correctly.  So, here are the revised numbers: 

November: 7.6 hours/day
December: 6.6 hours/day
January: 6.6 hours/day
February: 6.9 hours/day

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I finally decided to buy a wireless card for my laptop that uses the cell phone network, as opposed to plain wi-fi.  This will allow me to have more/better access when I am not in range of a wifi access point (say, hypothetically, if one were to travel to Middleburg, Virginia to a house that only has dial-up access), and it will probably be useful in other places too.

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