Phew!

Didn’t even break sendmail.

Apache had some directive syntax changes, and experimentally enabling mod_dav generated repeatable crashes. But on the whole, painless.

Tomorrow I believe I’ll tackle the miscellaneous other upgrades.

I’m not feelin’ it today, I gots to admit.

Need to move a bunch of crap around in my office, but I also have a raft of server upgrades due – I started to work on it at noon, but the software kept getting checksum errors when I’d download it. So finally, by the time I had what I needed, there was not gonna be enough time to wrap the upgrades before dinner.

The major piece is a system upgrade to bellerophon, which, according to MacinTouch is likely to break PHP and sendmail at least, and possibly more – some of the problems seen outside these kinds of apps are a bit unsettling as well, involving inabilities to go online – although via modem primarily.

Therefore, I REALLY want a clean 8-hour block ready to fix things.

I wonder, should I dry-run on my desktop box first? Mebbe.

…

I am kinda putting off a review of Coloring Outside the Lines, by Aimee Cooper. It’s a memoir of time spent in the nascent streetpunk scene in L. A. around 1980, and I really enjoyed the book.

A full review is forthcoming, but I’m also looking to try to place a piece so I’m sort of dawdling in this venue.

Lowdown: if you’re an ex-punk or currently are, or if you have an abiding interest in subcultural histories, go pick it up. It’s pretty good. Kinda raw, but enjoyable. I have no actual idea how it might play to someone who wasn’t on the inside.

Good points: namedropping is strictly limited, and focuses on the stupidity of namedropping, or at least the futility of celebrity. In fact, music is not at all what the book is about. It’s about one of the ways that young people come together to define themselves when the traditional structures made available by society don’t operate as intended.

At least one other reader of the book complains that the narrative is about no-one famous, and that these people apparently interact with the music scene in a peripheral way. Well, yeah, but that’s why I thought it was interesting. I mean, somone else already wrote those books, and I’m not interested.

Would I enjoy memoir of a hippy house on Polk Street in 1968? Maybe. On the other hand, it might really irritate me.

OK, so I just got off the phone with my buddy Matt in New Orleans. He wanted to pick my brain about personal, semi-pro web hosting, especially for a non-technical, creative user such as he.

His budget is likely to come down to about ten bucks a month – the semi-pro needs come in for him in the context of online storage. 10mb for him isn’t gonna do it for him under any circumstances. He needs a good 50mb, I think, and might well need more.

His hosting needs are actually kind of similar to mine, except that I doubt he’ll need more than one domain. As I see it, his needs are:

1. A template-based, but customizable, publishing tool for his primary web presence. I’m almost certain that Movable Type is the way to go for him on this.
2. A browser-based file-upload photo publishing engine. Gallery would work perfectly, I think; if he’s a Mac user it’s possible these two needs may be addressable via .Mac.
3. A no-brainer mp3 server. Again, I think Andromeda, which I use, fits his needs perfectly.
4. The ability to work directly on the files at the system level. I think plain old ftp will work here perfectly.
5. Stats. This is the least crucial aspect of the package, and also the easiest to find out on the web for free.
6. NO BANNERS. I didn’t discuss this with him, but I’m sure of it.

So, if he’s a Mac user, .Mac pretty much is right up his alley, with the possible exception of his MP3 needs (which I don’t think he’s thought about deeply yet, but he’s a musician and a photographer, so…).

.Mac’s arbitrary bandwidth limits also make me disinclined to point him in that direction.

Finally, as I recall, real storage space (50mb and up) is reasonably standard with paid hosting plans. Some enhanced functionality was also being offered as is the case with Bravenet.

So: here’s the question. Has anyone put one and one and one together yet to provide all of this stuff in a straight-up, zero-user-configuration-time hosting service? Say, one that also provides as check-off options, oh, the option of wiki-ness, or live-journal-style buddypages?

What’s the state of personal webhosting, post napster and in the middle of the blog revolution, blogosphere? Tell me what’s crazappy and where the shizit izzz!

Wired News: Mac Lovers Fight to Glimpse ‘Woz’ includes the entertaining phrase. “One overweight show visitor berated harried event staffers while snacking on a parfait…” and a few other vignettes of the picturesque from the center of the Mac-user’s universe this week, MacWorld San Franciso.

Sadly, was unable to perform the ritual slacking in favor of listening to the keynote and such this week, as Tuesday was my first fully-functional day at DangerIsland.

I checked out Safari, and it does OK by me, except, of course, this site. Which crashes said browser. I must admit, when I heard “new Mac-only browser from Apple,” my thought was not “Great!”, but rather, “Oh SHIT!”, followed rapidly by an inchoate joke about CyberDog.

(Why is “inchoate” spelled that way and not “inchaote”, by reference to chaos?)

The new laptops, however, pretty much make up for any skepticism I have about subscription service baloney or my creeping dread about a new round of browser wars.

I LIKEY both the small and the big. But the money ain’t here right now. I’ll wait.

On the other hand, Viv’s old tangerine iBook needs a new power socket. I’m mulling the possibility of getting an iceBook for her, while I get that socket replaced and/or move the tangerine machine on eBay or something. Even with the bad socket, I’m thinking maybe $400 in credit on trade or $600 on ebay.

In other news, the iCal update appears to have undermined my Word install. If you see Steve Jobs, please tell him: Microsoft’s Mac Office suite is a GOOD THING. Please do not harm it, mmmkay?

test to see if I’ve enabled the scheduled publication feature.

This feature is a php-based hack from scriptygoddess.com, found here.

Theoretically, it allows the publisher to set an entry to a date/time, and it won’t appear until that date and time – something observant readers of this site will understand my interest in.

Now if this works, perhaps I’ll debug the server-side plugins that stoped working when I upgraded to MT 2.51…

On the other hand, if it fails, perhaps you’ll get to see an entire week’s publication schedule presented all at once.

very oddly, when I hit “Save” in the MT UI, these URLS appeared in the “URLs to ping” field:

http://www.hipmonkey.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/46
http://www.hipmonkey.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/293

which kind of spooks me. Also, they keep appearing even if I delete them, which makes me suspect there’s a problem with my database.

Ya know what sucks?

Hard drive failure. It sucks.

Especially when you realize the failure stemmed from a problem you neglected to fix the last time you had a big systems failure, intending to take a break from hardware troubleshooting for a couple of days… when instead you just forgot.

That’s what sucks.

Just so you know.

Also I seem to be at the center of a wave of hardware failure – I sure hope I don’t suddenly have the semi-mythological SNAFU field the way some folks do. My buddy Sean regularly experiences watches dying, computer problems, and so forth, and I have literally seen him touch a computer at the moment it freezes.

As a graphic designer, it’s made him very well-behaved with respect to backups.

I’ve had inexplicable instability in the firewire chain on my main box, which currently has two drives unmountable, who knows why; there’s nothing wrong with them, I suspect, since no change has occurred to them physically or from a software perspective; as usual, I suspect the latest system update, but must research it.

Most annoyingly, our Apex AD-1600 DVD player died as we switched disks while watching the extended edition DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring on Xmas just before heading out to see The Two Towers. Fortunately, we were able to play the remainder on my G4 tower – the first time in the three or so years I’ve owned it that I’ve even inserted a DVD into the machine’s DVD-ROM drive.

A few minutes of googling revealed that the very inexpensive Apex players are very prone to hardware failure, and when they go, you’re SOL. So it appears I should have spent a few more bucks for it, but it was hard to resist on Amazon – under $50 with free shipping, as I recall.

Oh well.

Viv says she never reads this because I’m “always talking about computers.” Alas.

Oh! Just to keep things interesting, yesterday afternoon, a few minutes after the drive failed on Bellerophon, I got a call to be go-to guy for a Mac and OSX Server-based hosting farm that’s co-lo’d at Digital Forest way the heck in the northern part of the city. It’s a part-time 1099 gig, but after speaking to the interested party on the phone, it sounds like the kind of thing I could do, and he and I got along on the phone.

(Yes, I’m aware of the irony here – as I told the gentleman on the phone, I should have recognized the drive failure as a harbinger of his call.)

Of course, this brings the matter of the driver’s license back to the front burner, something I’m sure Viv will be pleased about.

Lastly, Bellerophon will probably be up and down this week, since I’m clearly in need of actually completing my backup protocols; please bear with me!

You may have noted that Bellerophon was down for a considerable period yesterday. Copying a corrupt file caused a system freeze that required a three-finger salute. The stalled copy caused file system errors that also prevented several attempts at backups of the web-served file-system.

Naturally, I’d just deleted the desktop-side backups I made during the system rebuild. Now, I sound like Goldstein!

Yes, a meaningful backup solution is inbound. Sigh.

Rebooting into os9 and running TechTool successfully rebuilt the messed up catalog files – but not without the heart-stopping spectacle of a hard system freeze while TTP was rebuilding the directory files. Thankfully, no further system damage appeared to result.

Who wants a drink?

(UPDATE: this is clearly the result of one too many mojitos. I’ve cleaned up the spelling errors but left the rum-bred leaps of logic alone, as well as the run-on sentences. A translation may be appended.)

My first is in art history, and I flatter myself with the notion that my serious assault upon the degree – the first time I was aware of directing my intellect upon a subject with a specific polemic and ideological goal – was predicated upon the idea that art functions as a machine which conveys the ideology of those who pay for it.

Thus, the high-period Athenians celebrate their rule and triumph, persuasively, (may I hasten to say, dear masters, as you prepare our just assault upon the unutterable tyrant and virtual demagogue, he uttered as he bowed and scraped), by the frieze of the Parthenon as do the Maya and Aztec and Mongol with grand and celebratory pyramidal formatia of heads and skulls, so vastly different than that of our egalitarian and demos-placating manner.

However, art, as always, appeals to the viewer to carry them past the troubling details of the thirty-thousand slaughtered to dedicate the new temple and such like trifles (distractions from the analytical task of fitting architectural part or mural) to the economic power structure expressed thereby.

And, thus, I think, I have a subject that marries my obsession to commerce, commerce to technology, and art to the souk. How is the ideal of “usability” constructed, academically?

There’s lots of easy pickins – the pro and anti-Uncle Jakob battles which have raged over the ground of simple graphic and advertising design for the past decade (largely, may I state, to the detriment of art AND commerce and to the benefit of a high priesthood which, it appears, wishes to keep computer interfaces ugly at all costs – after all if beauty is not measurable, then it must cost us in untold, indeed, immeasurable use hours).

I could pick at this corpse for years. But that’s the problem; it looks predetermined to me in two ways.

One, art is immeasurable, because it’s always intended to bring new things to the social contract, things that may be rejected or adopted.

Two, common ideograms often reinforce common ideologies, but successful ideologies always allow for innovation in both ideology and ideogram; thus successful user-interface metering will forever remain difficult.

Two, every phenomenological event is measurable. Each mouse click or page load represents a data point that can be analyzed. Thus, within certain constraints, human behavior in regard to computer data displays can be measured and predicted. Which, you may be shocked to hear, I regard as a good thing.

I mean, you clicked something to be able to read this, right?

But.

So I need to think about this, but that’s about right. You can improve predictable behavior by imposing constraints on elements of interface presentation but on a regular basis disruptive interfaces will dramatically affect the efficacy of pre-extant interfaces and elements.

You all got that out there? Make it pretty but derivative and efficient to get reasonably wealthy. Make it wildly original and exquisitely efficient to become more wealthy than Croesus. Make it stultifyingly derivative and in some cases deeply counterintuitive to not get fired. Be a complete hippy goofball otherwise if you think you can get away with it.

In fact, send me money to attend your user interface conference, and I’ll make a completely valid, totally kook-bred presentation about something. With luck, we’ll all grow wealthy from explaining to SoCal widget kings that were once insulted by Jim Morrison why exactly it us that the Lizard King pocket umbrella was not produced in sufficiently large numbers to satisfy extant Romanian demand.

Why?

(UPDATE: While I doubt I can explain the Lizard King pocket umbrella curiosity directly preceding, this stream-of-mumblery means I see some sort of grad-school thing that allows me to exert art-history chops on computer user interface design as a possible degree path. I think. Also, the post appears to adhere to the “thinking out loud” direction mentioned just previous.

My favorite evidence of the drinkie-winkie? The interesting counting math in the middle of the post. One! Two! Two!)

I rebuilt the mailserver on bellerophon today. It sent out a bunch of ‘failed delivery’ messages based on comments made since I got the sever back up on its feet.

Do not be alarmed.

The screen shot was sent in by Pinax, of Goliard Dream. Interestingly, it’s clear that according to my logging software, Pinax was NOT the actual 10,000th visitor.

That honor goes to an anonymous person who arrived via Google while, yes, it’s true, looking for info on “The Fruit Detective,” a story that appeared in the New Yorker a ways back that I enjoyed reading enough to blog, and which is easily the most visited page on the site.

They stayed for a total of four seconds before figuring out that this was not their beautiful house.

Fortunately, my vague wording actually requested a screenshot, which Pinax was so kind as to send in, in order to qualify for the prizes!

Incedentally, this may solve the great multiple qualifiers mystery that’s long bedeviled one of my less-technical friends.

Pinax already telegraphed an interest in comics, but let’s get a clarification in the comments, shall we?

To review, three prizes were offered, one of whch was to be selected by the winner:

• Duplicates of comics in my files
• Computer junk
• Dot-com gimcracks

Weigh in!