tbradshaw.net

For the longest time I’ve been pining for iTunes on Linux.  The reason?  I’ve been fighting linux media players time and time again to just be stable with my large music collection, while iTunes takes it without so much as a studder.

The music players that I’ve messed with the most are Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Muine, soI figured I would give a small review of them while I’m whining, and to be fair, I’m not reviewing them on two fronts.  First as a user, and now as a young developer looking to get involved.

The first was Muine.  After moving from XMMS and XMMS-like programs I hit the ground running with Muine due to it’s simple smooth interface.  I loved the “add album to playlist” feature and was lulled into a happy place by the auto-downloading of album art making that particular window as exciting as a shelf full of “real” CD’s (without the RIAA guilt).  Unfortunately that feature which had lulled me into happiness stopped working when some business with the Amazon developer key thingie got in the way of downloading album covers.  What at first looking like a really busy project that was going to be making my dreams come true in short order, turned out to go a bit stale almost right away.  I was saddened.

After a while I started to long for the library functionality that I enjoyed on my PowerBook.  This was entirely thanks to a recent set of downloads that brought me the collection of Billboard Top 100 songs from 1950 something until 2004.  Suddenly my signal to noise ratio when looking for something to listen to shot through the roof and I needed help finding my songs.  So I decided to give Rhythmbox a shot.  This is the “default” gnome go at an iTunes clone, and it has a lot of things going for it.  The Artist-Album browser at the top fo the window is devine and the over all experience seemed to be snappy.  That is… when it doesn’t crash.  What turned out to be a long standing theme with any media player I use in linux, is frequent crashes when trying to import my library.  For whatever reason there isn’t an open source music player/organizer on the planet that can load 15,000+ songs without crashing.

For a while I could build the library in short bursts with the Rhythmbox in the “stable” branch and then when completed go back to the “~x86″ branch for the increased functionality.  But there were a number of “small” behavioral things that were driving me nuts.  Two examples:

1. I’m feeling a little “80’s” today, so I flip to the “Billboard Top 100 of 1984″ in the browse album and see what there is to see.  Oh yeah!  Right there at number 44 is Huey Lewis & The News singing “The Heart of Rock & Roll”.  That was a good year for Huey if I remember, so I click on Huey Lewis & The News in the browse artist selection box to “drill down” and get the Huey Lewis hits from 1984.  But I can’t… because for some reason selecting something in the browse artist selection box “resets” the browse album selection box to “all” instead of keeping the setting.  Weird.
2. Most importantly, when adding new songs to the library, no progress meter is shown.  When a media player has a strong propensity to crash when loading songs… it really stinks to have no idea when/where/why it crashed.
3. This application is coded in GObject C… and I’m just not sure that I want to learn GObject C.  From a guy that adores Python, C feels like digging the chunnel with a spoon instead of a tunnel boring machine.

So I kept looking and came across Banshee.  First points for Banshee, it looks good.  Really good, sharp and clean with a more modern feel.  It wows me out of the gates with a slick progress meter for importing songs and the ability to asynchronously add songs to the queue to be imported at will.  Super work.   It still has it’s warts, however… it’s written in C# on Mono, which is something that I want to learn anyway… hmmm.  Anyway, the big bugs:

1. When importing new music, CPU usage shoots up to like 100% and lags anything that tries to say otherwise.  Totally impolite, like totally.
2. Still crashes frequently when importing music.
3. Filling my window with songs takes long time.  Say I’m on a playlist and then move back to the unfiltered main window… I can expect several seconds of hardcore “omg run!” from Banshee as it fills the window.
4. Typing “1984″ in the search box will get me the Billboard Top 100 of 1984, but typing “1984 huey” won’t give me anything.

The verdict?  I really need to stop being the needy quiet guy and start being a needy contributer.  I’ve joined the Banshee mailing list and I’m going to lurk for a little while and start to soak up the atmosphere.  Hopefully I can also get in contact with a Banshee developer with some experience for a touch of mentoring to get me started.  We shall see, I don’t know if anything will come of this.  But I do know that the best way to make sure the features that I care about most get attention is to be willing to put some of the work in myself, and I think I’m willing to do that.

Wow! I don’t know what exactly happened, but this morning my doorbell rang and I just had this feeling that my monitors were in. Sure enough, when I get to the front door Alex is signing for my two brand new Dell 1907FP monitors.

The impressive part? The scheduled delivery was anytime between the 14th and the 18th. Turns out that DHL doesn’t mind going just a litte bit faster than scheduled, and I think that’s awesome. This seems worth remembering, since I didn’t even pay for accellerated shipping or anything, I took the free 3-5 day shipping offer that was available to university students through Dell.

The monitors are hella sweet. I was nervous about them being a little different than the monitors that I have at work (which are 1901FPs) but it turns out that these monitors are better in pretty much every single way.

I’m a happy camper.

Quite often when talking with students (and even occationally faculty) regarding Python, a common notion expressed is how different Python is from Java and how “blah-blah-blah” is “harder” to do in Python.  Of course, by “harder” they mean “not exactly the same”, but whatever.

Well I keep stumbling upon this gem of a piece about the differences between Python and Java and I can’t help but think this is an omen that I need to share this information more.  So here it is, go read Python Is Not Java by Phillip J. Eby.

Soon after returning from Boston, Anthony sent me an email to ask if I would be interested in helping out with a scholarship drive for Leary. The plan is to get an endowment together so that there can be a Michael T. Leary scholarship at Providence College for students intending to pursue a degree in Computer Science.

I think his classmate Carl Cicchetti said it best when he wrote to me:

Thanks Travis. I look forward to working with you on this. Mike [might] not have liked the attention, but he deserves it.

More information can be found on www.mikeleary.com where I helped draft up a simple page to gather information about the scholarship online to those that are interested. If you’re a friend of Leary’s, consider helping out to the effort. I realize that this seems like an inherently local thing to the New England area, and to a certain degree it is, but it is a great effort to further the memory of Leary and your help means a lot to Leary’s family and friends.

Hopefully we’ll have more information soon on how to handle online donations towards the endowment.

I made another order for my computer and completely forgot to mention it when I mentioned buying new monitors, though admittedly this purchase is a lot less impressive (and a lot less expensive).

It seems that Microsoft has finally heard my plight regarding the lack of new natural keyboards and has released a brand new “split” keyboard design. And since I had already blew like $600 on new monitors, spotting $50 bucks for a new keyboard seemed pretty reasonable. It looks something like this:

Sorry for the crappy picture, that’s the best I could scrape up from the website and I don’t feel like taking a picture. I’ve only been using it for a little bit, so I’ll save the review type materials for after I’ve been using it for a little while.

Tonight I decided to scrap my Gentoo installation and give Ubuntu a shot. The reasons for moving away from Gentoo? Well, not much really. My Gentoo installation was getting a little nasty from me building all kinds of not-ready-for-packaging-yet type software and I just wanted something clean.

I’m not unhappy with Gentoo in any way, but I had heard so much about Ubuntu that my curiousity was just getting the best of me. I decided that it couldn’t really hurt, so I gave it a go. So far I’ve been very pleased, though in all fairness I’ve only been at it for a few hours now.

I’m excited to see what interesting tid-bits of knowledge the next few weeks will bring with a new distribution on my PC. I imagine that it will be all of the little things that will make the experience interesting. You know, like a Royale with Cheese.

Yeah, again… already.

The thing is that my constraints have drastically changed now that I added the projects.tbradshaw.net domain covered in wiki for handling my personal projects.  I no longer need to have a template that I can use for both Wordpress and everything else that’s going to be on my website.  I’m at the point now where “everything” on www.tbradshaw.net is exact a blog and a gallery (and the gallery is a little bit in limbo anyway).

So now I’m thinking that I want something a little more clean… and a little more Web 2.0 in feeling.  I really like the larger fonts and clean designs of some of the new web 2.0 stuff and I think I would be more at home with something along those lines instead of the “smaller text” style that I’m using now.

I don’t know exactly when I’ll have time to do that, but I have a feeling that I’ll make time one way or another.

It’s been a long time that I’ve been wrestling with my currently monitors.  My left monitor has been fritzing out to purple for quite some time and my right monitor has this tendency to just start violently shaking all the time.

I’ve been avoiding the problem partially through practice.  If I bend the end of the monitor cable just right I can get the color to stay, and the violent shaking (and sometimes screaming) are infrequent.  But today was the last straw.

My left monitor shot to purple at the slightest accidental tap of my desk, and when I tried to twist the monitor cable just so… the red channel snapped leaving me with a very sickly green monitor.  Coupled with my tax return and several elements of back pay, it was time to make things happen.

So I caved in and purchased a couple new monitors.  I don’t know if this really should be at the top of my purchasing priority list, but I know that it’s going to be a severe increase in my quality of life when I get rid of these frequent monitor induced headaches and extra frustration.

Hopefully in a week or two I’ll be the proud owner of two of these bad boys:

This monitor is about as close as I could find to the monitors that I have at work that were still pretty heavily discounted for university students.  The deal was sweet, less than $600 dollars for the pair of them.  When I first started looking at buying monitors, I thought that I was going to end up paying over $600 each for a decent set of Dell flat panels.

I’ll certainly be giving a quick review (or at least a brief celebration) when they come in.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve blogged, but I’m going to try and get back into the habit, and I’m starting with an “easy” one.

Initial Anxiety

This spring break I found myself returning to Boston for another week of St. Patrick’s Day festivities. Most significantly, this is my first St. Patrick’s Day without my good friend Leary here to share it with. This was something that gave me quite a bit of anxiety for returning to Boston. I’ve made a number of great friends during my visits to Leary’s place, but always had Leary around to hang out with while here.

My initial solution to this was to invite my roommate Dave to come with me. This was an easy fix, because if my friends from Boston were busy, I could always just go do the “first time tourist” stuff with Dave. I was even looking forward to doing some of that stuff again, since I don’t think I’ve done anything touristy in Boston for at least a few years.

Unfortunately Dave couldn’t get his finances together enough to afford the trip, so I found myself departing for Boston by myself, just like all of the years before.

The 12 Hours to Cambridge

One major difference this year was my inability to drive myself to the airport. Earlier in the year my Dad’s truck was repossessed, and I have given him my Jeep. I was also leaving in the middle of the week so I could take advantage of the hugely discounted fares for a Thursday morning departure, which completely ruled out rides from my friends (which I have taken advantage of on numerous occasions in the past.)

Some looking around found an airport shuttle that traveled along I-70 stopping in key towns on the way. Unfortunately the shuttle that left in time for me to make my flight departured 2:30am on Thursday morning. However, it was only $54 (one way) and it got me to the airport with plenty of time to spare. With the layover in Chicago it was 2:30pm (Eastern) before I landed in Boston.

A Touch of Homesick

Arriving in Boston was the beginning of a easy trip, with Patrick serving as an amazing host. We relaxed the first couple days enjoying drinks and getting ready for St. Patrick’s night.

It was on St. Patrick’s night that I found myself a little homesick. The vast majority of my friends in Cambridge that were around for St. Patrick’s day were working at The People’s Republik (my favorite bar in Cambridge, and the bar that is directly next door to Leary’s place.) This made the actual night of St. Patrick’s quite tame in comparison to previous years. Rather than drinking with Leary and enjoying the characters that frequent the “Peeps”, I found myself instead calmly enjoying drinks on a spot of the bar that I could see the TV and chatting it up with the girls now and then that would start conversation. Patrick offered a bit of a pub crawl for a bit with Neal and another friend, but I was feeling pretty mellow, so I passed.

It wasn’t a bad time by any stretch, but I couldn’t help but think of my friends back in Kansas and the roaring good time that was probably erupting in Aggieville. I made several text messages back to Lindsay for small chat, shot a few messages out to random Bunker friends, and even gave Lauren a call to say, “Happy Birthday”. I was nervous that the rest of the trip might be characterized by this mellow malaise. I was wrong however, it just turns out that I missed Leary a ton.

Things Lighten Up

Fortunately, the mellow nature faded as I help broom up the Peeps a little after the bar closed and then headed over to Robert’s house (the owner of the Peeps) to drink with Patrick, Robert’s son, a few Irish guys, and a few girls. It was a pretty funny time, with ridiculous statements from the visiting Irish and Patrick robbing the cradle as high points.

A Trip of Concerts

Things really started to get fun when Dani organized a group outing to see Chris’s band Campaign for Real Time play at a BC club. Dani, Ian, and I took a cab over to the venue with Nils and Jenn joining up later. C4[RT] played a good set that was fun and engaging, and I had a great time chatting with Ian and Dani before the show started. By the end of the night when we headed back to the Peep’s, there wasn’t any doubt that this was going to be a great trip.

Museum of Science

The one real “tourist-y” thing that I did this year was take a trip to the Museum of Science on the Charles River. They had a cool exhibit on Star Wars set up and Patrick had a friend that worked at the Museum that got us in at a highly discounted rate. Not only that, but she gave us a quick behind-the-scenes look at the live animals that the Museum has on site. A very fun trip.

Great People and Great Times

As per usual, my trip to Boston was much more about the great people that frequent the People’s Republik than it was about any particular place or activity. Every day and (long) night was measured not in hours, but in greetings from old friends I hadn’t seen in a year–but got to know even better–and new friends that I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time. From long stints at the People’s talking baseball, to chatting antipasto over a couple episodes of The Sopranos, to visiting the basement venue at The Middle East and catching The English Beat, each experience radiated with the unique character that only the friends I’ve met in Cambridge can supply. It’s a strange microcosm of close nit community in a city so vast it’s hard to imagine anything but strangers. It’s no surprise to me why Leary made these people his home and I count myself lucky that I’m a very small part of that group.

An Amazing Host

While all of the cast of characters in Boston/Cambridge I consider friends, the sole reason that returning to Cambridge–even without Leary–is so appealing is Patrick. One of Leary’s closest friends, Patrick and I have a lot in common (especially for a Boston Irish kid and a Kansas boy) and get along great. He extended his home and his hospitality to me all week and really made me feel welcome the entire time. Definitely “good peeps”.

Something to Come Back To

Without Leary, several times this year I’ve wrestled with the idea of ending my annual trips to Cambridge. I just wasn’t sure if I would still have a good time, if the bonds between Leary’s friends and I would still be as strong, if I would still be as welcome in that well knit community as I was before. Before I left for Boston I wondered if this would be my last trip.

After staying with Patrick and revisiting all of my friends in Cambridge, I now find myself with the opposite curiosity. I wonder if I could make it out more than once a year to visit everyone. It’s certainly enough fun to make it worth all the trouble in the world.

For the longest time, I just didn’t “get” the Wiki phenomenon. I knew that supposedly it was a simplified syntax for content creation and had something to do with simpler collaborative works… but I just didn’t see the real value of it.

However, with the recent move to using Trac for project management, I’ve been starting to get a lot of mileage out of the Wiki portion of the application and I’m really liking it! I see now the two huge benefits of using a Wiki, even though they should have been obvious from the beginning.

First, it’s fast and easy. I know I just said that above, but the implication is huge. It removes the demotivating barrier to updating content that is simply “this is going to take a bit”. It becomes so easy to modify a page, there’s just no reason not to.

Second, collaboration is easy. Once again I realize that I said that above, but the key is that it’s not just easy… it’s trivial to allow multiple people to edit the same document without much risk in losing content or progress (build in historical diffs are standard fair). No worries about shared SVN access, just live updates of whatever is needed.

This has been so amazingly productive, that I’ve realized that I really need to move all of my websites to this format. I still want to use WordPress for blogging, but all of my “project” pages should be in a wiki.

The only catch? Well, the traditional CamelCase for making wiki links is a little ugly, but most importantly the URIs for content generated by a wiki are also a little ugly. That is probably the most important part for me. When you generate a lot of content that isn’t updated often, sensible URIs are critical. I’m going to be looking over MoinMoin now to see if it contains the features that I’m wanting in my website. That is, the ability to include external pages and customizable URIs. We shall see.

I have been postponing purchasing tickets for Spring Break on the hope that Dave would be joining me. Unfortunately the funds didn’t pull through and so I’ll be making the trip to revel in the St. Patrick’s Day festivities in Boston solo again.

At first tonight I had a little scare, when my previous scheduled itinerary spiked over a hundred dollars. However, thanks to some itinerary adjustments I was able to get the round trip down to an acceptable rate (albeit at the price of some very early morning flights).

Without any further ado, here’s the flight plan:

• Outgoing - Thursday, March 16, 2006
  • United Airlines 772
    • Depart: 8:02am from Kansas City, MO (MCI)
    • Arrive: 9:29am in Chicago, IL (ORD)
  • United Airlines 532
    • Depart: 10:55am from Chicago, IL (ORD)
    • Arrive: 2:21pm in Boston, MA (BOS)
• Return - Thursday, March 23, 2006
  • United Airlines 533
    • Depart: 10:00am from Boston, MA (BOS)
    • Arrive: 11:44am in Chicago, IL (ORD)
  • United Airlines 5806 (United Express/Skywest)
    • Depart: 12:40am from Chicago, IL (ORD)
    • Arrive: 2:13pm in Kansas City, MO (MCI)

Not a bad layout overall. This will be the first time I haven’t tried to squeeze two weekends into the trip, but unfortunately it made a huge difference in my ticket price (over two hundred dollars!). So I’ll be returning early this year to have a final weekend in Manhattan. (Maybe I’ll get back in time for the Copus show, added bonus!)

I’m bummed that I’ll be taking the trip by myself, but really it was a bit of a security blanket now that Leary is gone. However, now that I’ve resolved to go anyway I’m excited. Especially to see my friends that I met through Leary all these years and spend some time in the People’s Republik on my laptop drinking Woo Woos.

Yesterday was a pretty proud moment for me when I typed in the purchasing information on Apple.com for an Apple Certified Refurbished 12-inch iBook G4 for my Mom.  The specifications on the laptop are nice.  It features a 1 GHz G4 processor, 256 megs of RAM, a 30 GB hard drive, the combo drive, and more.

Not only is this a nice laptop that is going to serve my Mom’s needs fantastically, this is also the first time that my mom has set aside a significant amount of money for a computer.  Also, this is the culmination of a recent trend that has my Mom “coming up to speed” technologically.  Of course, this is a delight for me, because this means it becomes that much easier to keep in touch with my Mom than it has ever been since I’ve moved out.

With most of my friends, I take for granted the ability to SMS (text message) them whenever I feel like it.  For a little over a year now, my Dad has been up to par with phone technology and I’ve been able to text message him as well.  Adding my mom to the mix just makes things even more satisfying.

Besides the communication angle though, there’s something else I’m feeling that’s kind of unexpected.  Since around middle school, I’ve been spending a large portion of my time at a computer.  The personal computer has evolved from half toy, half frustration machine into the modern day Swiss Army Knife.  The advantages of computers in everyday life is a very common difference between the most successful in our society and those trailing behind.  Today, nearly the whole of human knowledge has been posted online and indexed by Google.  Today, information relevent to day to day life that was previously unattainable by the average person is literally at every connected person’s fingertips.  In about six days, my Mom is going to have all of those tools and all of that information available to her as well.

Really, this purchase is an investment in a toolkit that easily make a significant improvement in quality of life.  It also is going to present a lot of common ground between my Mom and I that we can discuss as I help her best utilize that toolkit and get done whatever it is that she wants to get done.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Last night I found an interesting email in my gmail account. It seems that DreamHost had moved me from my usual server and put me on an “evaluation” server. Apparently I had been using too many CPU minutes on the shared server. And while this is certainly a very reasonable resource for DreamHost to be monitoring, I am kind of bummed that I didn’t get a warning message of some kind before I was moved. (Although, it’s certainly possible that I did get a warning message and missed it somehow…)

Step One: Make Some Guesses

So I’ve been moved to a “limbo” server and directed to a FAQ laying out exactly what’s going on. I’m certainly not looking to be any sort of troublemaker on the server, and to the best of my knowledge I don’t have anything running on my website/shell that would generate very much CPU time, but I immediately have some contenders.

My first guess (naturally) is the most recent addition to my website. I’ve installed two Trac instances for handling the Bunker Management System project and the Late-Night at Nichols: LAN Party project. They run in FastCGI mode using SQLite, so they were my first suspects.

My second suspect was the meeting monitoring software that I wrote for Mr. Plumb. Though that has been running “as-is” for a couple months now and I wouldn’t expect any change in CPU usage.

Step Two: Check the CPU Usage Logs

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to handle the situation immediately, because I needed to wait for a while for the resource consumption logs to be created for my user so that I could analyze what’s going on. But this morning when I hopped on to check things out, I was surprised by the results. The file at ~/logs/resources/bradshaw.sa.analyzed.0 had what I was looking for:

Process               CPU seconds      user   machine   count  average
php.cgi                 7415.0300   99.696%   30.896%    8961    0.827
scrape.py                 11.3800    0.153%    0.047%      53    0.215
calendar_copy.p            3.5800    0.048%    0.015%      79    0.045
trac.fcgi                  2.8200    0.038%    0.012%      13    0.217
trac.fcgi                  2.6100    0.035%    0.011%      33    0.079
notify.py                  1.9100    0.026%    0.008%      53    0.036
wget                       0.1200    0.002%    0.001%      13    0.009
bkms.fcgi                  0.0900    0.001%    0.000%      13    0.007
bash                       0.0400    0.001%    0.000%       1    0.040
scrape.py                  0.0200    0.000%    0.000%     159    0.000
sshd                       0.0200    0.000%    0.000%       1    0.020
ls                         0.0200    0.000%    0.000%       7    0.003
notify.py                  0.0100    0.000%    0.000%     159    0.000
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Total:                  7437.6500  100.000%   30.990%    9545
Average per day:        7437.6500    1 days
CPU percentage assumes 24000 cpu seconds per day total.

I emphasized the line that is clearly causing the issue with too much CPU usage. This isn’t exactly a solved case, however, only a great tip. First, this knocked out my original guesses of Mr. Plumb’s notifier, and the Trac installations. The lines for scrape.py and notify.py are the meeting notifier software, and summed they only come to 13.32 seconds. The trac.fcgi lines handle the Trac installations, and summed they come to 5.43 seconds. Much less than I expected!

But that problem line, the obvious over-user of precious cycles, is php.cgi. That doesn’t tell me a specific application, instead, that tells me that some php pages written to execute in CGI mode are using the large numbers of CPU cycles. Odd, I don’t have many of those.

Step 3: If we don’t know what the problem is by now, make new guesses.

Well, since my assumptions failed me, it was time to try and think of any php cgi pages that I have running that do anything significant. This was a little harder for me, because almost all (all?) of my personal projects run in Python, not PHP. So my list of possible culprits ended up being pretty short: WordPress, Gallery2, and PHP-Calendar.

But if I’ve already checked the CPU usage logs, how will I make any progress. I figured I had two options. First, the CPU Minutes FAQ on the DreamHost Wiki lays out the methodology to make all of ones PHP not run as CGI and move their usage into Apache instead. (Hopefully by process of elimination it would reveal the answer.)

Step 4: Check the web server logs

That’s a little much for me at this point, so I opted for option two: check the web server logs to see what part of the site is getting hit most. Here is where I found my golden goose.

4378
26.43%
Mar/ 4/06 12:45 AM
/ical/day.php


3316
22.93%
Mar/ 4/06 12:46 AM
/ical/week.php


3164
28.51%
Mar/ 4/06 12:46 AM
ical/month.php


950
2.34%
Mar/ 4/06 12:44 AM
/ical/print.php

Those are the top four lines of my Request Report. Bah! For some reason my PHP-Calendar installation is getting jackhammered like downtown Boston. Now to figure out why.

Checking the Host report shows this important line:

12259
74.07%
66.249.65.11

Jinkies! 74% of my traffic is requested by one IP address! But who the heck is it? My guesses were either myself, myself at work, or a search engine. Survey says?

[bradshaw@limbo-spunky3 resources] $ host 66.249.65.11
Name: crawl-66-249-65-11.googlebot.com
Address: 66.249.65.11

It’s Google. I’ve heard of this before. It turns out that virtually all calendaring applications have an infinite set of links that are easy for GoogleBots to follow. Turns out that my PHP-Calendar is a labyrinth for Google’s web crawler, and is probably a hog of CPU resources at the time.

Conclusion(ish) and Solution (probably)

Notice earlier I said “probably”. This is a classic case of correlation, and it’s very important to remember (in all facets of one’s life) correlation does not equal causation. But rationally I’m pretty sure that this is the problem.

So the solution? Well the correct solution is to actually have an appropriate robots.txt file to let Google know that my /ical folder really isn’t that interesting. However, I’m sort of lazy at the moment and haven’t been using that application effectively for a while now. So I just did a little chmod 000 ical and called it good.

Hopefully here shortly my CPU usage will come well under the 50 to 60 minutes that DreamHost allocates for their shared servers. If not, I might have to get a little more involved tracking down PHP applications that might be causing issues. But for now, I think it’s handled.

There have been multiple occations where I’ve wrestled with going AWOL on classes and/or work.  It’s an idiosyncracy I’ve longed to shed, but it keeps cropping back on me now and then.

Linked from Planet GNOME, I’ve just read a great advisory article on just that occurance.  I’m both relieved to hear that it’s a somewhat “common” problem and intrigued to hear some solid advice on the topic.

Recently I’ve been plagued with a series of telemarketing calls to my personal cellphone, none worse than a telemarketing call that I get every several days advertising “free government grants”.

The thing that makes these calls the most annoying are that they are just a recording!  I don’t know how this can possibly be legal, as I know I am within my rights to demand a telemarketer put me on their “do not call list” and stop receiving calls after a two or three week processing time.  In this case, there’s no one to complain to!

So today I had enough, and when I received this recording I clicked “1″ for more information and waited until I received an operator.  She asked my name, I responded politely with “Actually, I’m calling because I keep getting called on my personal cell phone with a telemarketing recording and I want…”

That’s as far as I got.  Because the operator said, “Oookay… click,” and hung up on me.  This is such bullshit.  Even when I get to the point that I can request to never be called again, they just hung up on me.  If I receive the call again this time I’m going to ask for the contact information for this company and contact legal council.  I have a free lawyer here on campus that could at least get me started, and since I know that telemarketing laws are well defined regarding fines, perhaps I could get legal council to just keep the penalty.  I don’t know for sure.

Either way, I’m annoyed enough to think it’s probably worth it to cause this disreputable company a little hassle.

For a long time I’ve been putting off the purchase of a new set of monitors.  While I’m certainly spoiled at work with my two Dell 1901FP flat panel monitors, I’ve just been scraping along at home with a couple of 17″ CRTs that I’ve had for many years now.

It’s been at least five years since I’ve had a new monitor and it’s been showing for several.  For quite some time my left monitor has been flickering as the green (of the red, green, blue signal) cuts out.  My right monitor’s picture shakes violently at times.  Both of these mannerisms are annoying, but I can live through them for the most part.

However, now my left monitor has picked up the most annoying of tendancies.  It emits a high pitched scream almost constantly.  I imagine what this would be like if a dog was trapped near a dog whisle.  It’s horrible.

I don’t have the money now to replace the monitor, but this has got to move up to one of my most important priorities before my head explodes.

In a startling turn of events, our meeting today regarding the roommate situation we actually came to a conclusion.  This was a rather stunning turn around from what I had expected.  It appears that one of our stalemated groups decided that they would rather pick the other guy than see the house come to an end.

I know that I personally was very difficult during this process, and I am moved and appreciative that the other guys felt that the keeping the house going was worth who, in their opinion, was the lesser candidate.  I still stand by my original opinions, but hope that I’ll also get to know the other candidate better and maybe bring him into the fold at a later date.

I still haven’t soaked it all in, but I think that it’s going to be hugely positive experience and I have renewed my dreams to keep this house going for as long as imaginable.  (And that’s a long ass time!)

I’m depressed, there’s no getting around it. It looks like it may be the end of The Bunker. We’ve been having a series of very solid meetings regarding the new roommate situation, and we’ve reached what appears to be a no-win situation.

We have four potentially returning roommates and two candidates to fill the final spot. Very unexpectedly, we have a situation where we ended up split with some of us not wanting to live with one of the roommates and some of us not wanting to live with the other. (This is quite different from a situation where some of us just like one person more, it seems that the two groups have an honest thumbs down on a roommate.) (This is intentionally vague, since the matter is not yet officially resolved. It would be in very poor taste for me to name or number at this point.)

It’s not a situation where there are big fights, or even anything to argue about at all. We have a group of four adults that have a legitmate disagreement of opinion on the future direction of the house and the viability of two candidates to fill the role of a Bunker roommate. The discussion has never been unfriendly, or disrespectful. In fact, I’ve enjoyed the maturity and thoughtfulness that all of my roommates have displayed regarding the matter.

It just seems undeniable that we’ve reached a no-win situation, and I wouldn’t ask any of my friends to “lose”. Although things are not completely forgone, and we are scheduled to meet again tomorrow night to continue our discussion. (We’ve been tabling the issue for 24 hour periods since Monday, where we reconvened from a one week recess.) But barring a complete change of opinion and direction (of which I can think of no rational explanation) from someone in the group, I think we may be dead in the water.

Shutting things down after this lease seems like the responsible and mature way to handle the situation. After all, with no acceptable candidates left and no time to continue to look, the only way that each of us can continue with our personal expectations would be to live seperate. But that rational knowledge of the clear and present “right decision” doesn’t change how much it hurts to think of this house being “over.” My roommates have been my best friends for years now. The times that we’ve had in this house have been absolutely legendary, by any collegiate standard. All of these thoughts make the ending of this era of The Bunker seem so premature and difficult to handle.

I really felt like we were ramping up for a return to greatness and–with a new longterm roommate coming in–a renewed viability. But an honest difference in opinion, instead, may very well sound the death toll. I have no idea how I will be able to concentrate on anything else now with this emotional burden. This is a type of pathetic that I’m not one to frequent, heh heh. Usually it would take some girl to make me this upset. This time it’s a house home.

One of our assignments in den325: Personal and Professional Development (PPD) is to complete a wardrobe checklist. A trivial assignment, not without some merit, but then they cross the line when at the bottom of the assignment they require a five item purchasing plan for improving one’s professional wardrobe.

They ask that one list the next five purchases, including the “type of item” (from the checklist above, no doubt), the “estimated cost” of the item, and the “planned date of purchase”. They also encourage the student to “incorporate this information into your personal plan for improvement due at the end of the semester”.

Well here’s the rub, what if I have no plans what-so-ever to improve my professional wardrobe. It needs to be done, no doubt, but I’ve got several more years of school and I don’t even have an adequate “casual” wardrobe for day-to-day activities. Do I lie on the homework assignment and just make up a plan? (This isn’t really a good solution for me, I hate lying and refuse to do it.) I don’t know. So I sent off an email to one of the TA’s that reads:

I have a question regarding the Wardobe Checklist.

At the bottom it presents a purchasing plan for the next 5 purchases
towards a professional wardrobe, including the type of item, cost, and
planned date of purchase. (With -8, -8, and -4 deductions assigned to
each.)

I have no plans to purchase any of these items in the forseeable
future. I’ll probably end up buying them when I “have” to for a
professional engagement or a funeral. Do I need to lie on the
homework assignment to get full credit? Should I assume that the
homework assignment is “for pretend”?

Or do poor, honest kids just get bad grades? (Mostly kidding.)

Travis Bradshaw

We’ll see what they say in response.

For quite some time I’ve been avoiding the Gmail craze. Not because I didn’t want to participate, no that’s not it at all. In fact, I’ve been relatively certain that Gmail was the best possible way to handle mail currently available to mortal man. So why the hesitation? Well way back when I decided to entire the modern internet community–start blogging and reading blogs, sharing photographs, etc–I had given a lot of thought to the different options out there.

At the time I was primarly considering Drupal versus Wordpress versus Blogger, but the points of contention were exactly the same as my current wrestling with mail providers. While the hosting and feature set of Blogger was(is?) superior to the host-it-yourself solutions of Drupal and Wordpress, I really liked the idea of owning my own data. It would be in a database that I would own, I would back up, I could translate or transfer (which came in handy when I switched from Drupal to Wordpress), that I would control. So I ruled out Blogger because I would lose that control, and I continued to choose between the host-it-yourself options.

With email I came to the same conclusion. I was never interested in a Gmail account because I already have my own web propery with tbradshaw.net and the mail hosting at Dreamhost is absolutely fantastic. I’ve been wrestling with the idea of trying Gmail for quite a while now (there’s actually a “Draft” blog post in WordPress right now called “Gmail Invite” where I never followed through) and last night I decided to take the plunge. I did it for a number of reasons:

• K-State’s email sucks. - After we moved our CIS department email to CNS we realized something very critical that we weren’t expecting. CNS’s email reliability hinged on the fact that hosting just ksu.edu was “easy”. The added complication of our email and especially (perhaps to the point of making CIS insignificant) oznet has mostly destroyed the quality of service from K-State.edu email. Even when it is working, it’s remarkably slow.
• Gmail’s Up-times Approach Infinity - Well, DreamHost’s uptimes are pretty fantastic too, but I have no idea “how many nines” Google pulls. I bet it’s a lot.
• Google has all the sweet toys. - One thing I really miss is not being able to check out all the sweet new toys from Google, a lot of which are starting to be tied together with the Gmail account.
• Gmail establishes Identity - Just as having tbradshaw.net does a lot to establish identity, so goes one’s Gmail address. I have already slumbered long enough to lose the possibility of getting tbradshaw, t.bradshaw, travis.bradshaw, travisbradshaw, or anything similar. ctb is invalid. c.travis.bradshaw is actually a pretty good identifier for me, even if it different than what I’ve been using previously. Starting now landed me c.travis.bradshaw for my Gmail identity.
• I can keep another copy. - With most/all forwarding mechanisms, I can also keep a copy on the IMAP server just like I have all this time. So while the privacy concerns with Google might be a small issue, in the general case I have nothing to lose.

And so that’s it. I’m now a Gmail participant and currently in the process of getting all of my previous k-state email onto gmail so I can really give that search functionality a ride.