July 2009

There were 56 posts published in July 2009 (this is page 4 of 6).

Dog as weather forecaster

Kelly and I were amused at our dog Rocket’s attempt to hide himself in our closet at bedtime last night. He’s usually banished to the den so that we aren’t kept awake by his snoring. Occasionally, he’ll park himself outside our door when he wants company but his sneaking into our closet was quite unusual. Four hours later, at 2:30 AM, thunder first rumbled outside. Like most dogs, Rocket is terrified of thunder.

Today I’m left wondering: did our dog somehow know about the thunderstorm long before it arrived? If so, how? Was it the drop in air pressure? If air pressure is the answer, why doesn’t he react similarly when fronts move through that don’t cause thunderstorms?

In other news, I’m thinking of selling my weather radio. 🙂

RTP: Rude Technology Park

I don’t know what it is, but I’m growing tired of the rude drivers I encounter every morning on my way to work in RTP. There’s so much tailgating, people cutting other people off, line cutting, and the rest that it raises my blood pressure. I don’t know if it’s too many Type-A personalities, too many people who bring their bad driving habits from (ahem) places they used to live, or too many just plain jerks but it’s really annoying. It’s definitely in sharp contrast to what I experienced when I was working downtown (or working in west Raleigh).

Hey, I’m happy with my job, too, but I’m not going to run everyone else off the road to get to it. Sheesh.

Revolutionary Rocker

dan_zanes2A few weeks ago, Netflix delivered Revolutionary Road to our DVD player. During the middle of this excellent film is a bar scene with a band. As the camera focused on the characters in the foreground, I noticed the guitarist in the background looked oddly familiar.

Then I suddenly knew who it was: musician Dan Zanes, his trademark spiky hair combed into a pompadour for the role. In real life, Zanes has perpetual bed-head at all times, so it was just as amusing to see him spike-less as it was to see him at all.

Raleigh will host the spiky-haired version of Dan Zanes when he plays Saturday at the N.C. Museum of Art in a rare show this far South. It should be a good time.

Journaling filesystems

I was geeking out a bit while I was cleaning this morning, thinking about how wonderful journaling filesystems are. My computers here at home occasionally lose power and crash, yet their filesystems almost always repair themselves.

Back in the Ancient History days, dropping power on a DOS and Windows 3.x box meant almost certain file corruption. That changed when Microsoft’s Windows 2000 added journaling to the NTFS v3.0 filesystem, and from that point on most every filesystem had a journal. (NTFS wasn’t the first journaling filesystem, but the first one for the masses. I believe the first was IBM’s JFS, released for AIX in 1990 and then for OS/2 Warp Server in April 1999.)

Now with improved manufacturing techniques and journaled filesystems, filesystems seem to last until the drive itself wears out. So now you whippersnappers know how good you’ve really got it!

More swarm streaming systems

I’ve discovered a few more swarm streamers for broadcasting multimedia to potentially millions of viewers: Coolstream, PPLive, and SopCast.

SopCast seems promising as it has a contributed Linux interface for the SopCast player, called (duh) sopcast-player. I’m still trying to figure out how to “broadcast” with this system, whether from Linux or Windows.

Coolstream looks interesting but not yet fully-baked. The website keeps insisting I log in, and none of the supposedly-active video streams appear to be working for me.

PPLive appears to have active users, but the channels using it as listed on the PPLive iKan site are all in Chinese. The other channel listing site, PP.tv, is also in Chinese. Clicking around seems promising but it’s hard to know what I’m looking at. And some of the clips seem to be blocked here.

There’s another service called TV Ants but the company’s website isn’t coming up for me. That is one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a channel with one of these groups. In order for any of this to work, you need to have at least one server to help seed the stream. If the company hosting your channel goes out of business then all of the channels that company hosts vanish as well.

Don’t piss off a musician

Flying to a gig, the band Sons of Maxwell were shocked to see their guitars being thrown around by United Airlines baggage handlers. When singer Dave Carroll’s guitar came back broken, United was apparently less than helpful in atoning for the mistake. That led the band to take their complaint to YouTube with a video and song called United Breaks Guitars

Catchy song, Sons of Maxwell! Bad, bad, PR move, United!

Update 11 Jul 2009: Taylor Guitars is having some fun with this, too! Also, check out Dave’s latest video statement.

Cheap Thoughts: Have a nice day

If you tell someone “have a nice day” and they do wind up having a nice day, do you get to take some sort of credit?

“Thanks for telling me to have a nice day, Chuck. I wouldn’t have thought about it if it wasn’t for you.”

“Hey, that’s what friends are for!”