Due to the recent critical information concerning the identity of Deep Throat, my previously scheduled coverage of our trip to California has been delayed. I really want to get to this, both so I can write about it while it’s fresh and because I want to finally write my “Pirates of the Caribbean” essay – It’s Walt’s last word, his valediction, and the news wasn’t good. Lucky for us, it’s a great work of art as well as a kooky summer thrill.

In miscellaneous other news, I just heard from Eric White, who has several pages of Walking Ruins videos online, and I will be heading into a major server upgrade soon.

The server upgrade will entail changing the Wallstreet’s “T-board”, a two-part component which is responsible for getting charge power to the battery, and swapping the current 10-gig internal drive for a 40-gig drive while mounting the 10-gig in an expansion-bay case.

Once I have that under control I’ll get to learn about the wild and woolly world of OSX drive duplication utilities via hard experience. An unfortunate characteristic of OSX is that GUI-level copies of mounted volumes may not duplicate all the dtat on the volume, a consequence of unix-style user management and permissions, and inversely, tarring volumes may not preserve old-style Mac metadata.

Thus, backup under OSX has remained an evolving practice.

I may or may not temporarily migrate my site content to my desktop machine (Socrates; the Wallstreet server is Bellerophon) and employ it to serve the material in the meantime – I don’t recall how far out of synch the two configurations are, but I doubt, for example, my gallery server at pix.whybark.com or the extended features of Movable Type will be enabled on Socrates.

(I saw that Ben and Mena, Movable Type’s developers, were asking for beta testers on mySQL integration, which I look forward to with anticipation!)

I believe my first stop for volume duplication will be Carbon Copy Cloner, discussed here on Mac OS X Hints. There was a roundup on backup for OSX on TidBITS recently, but their site search is down at the moment so no cite here.

Ah, 100% randomized image and slogan goodness just above.

BUT

It looks like the page build futzes a bit from time to time.

AND

I learned a new smiley today:

m/

It’s your standard-issue heavy-metal hand signal, the horns. RAWK ON DOODZ.

No big thoughts to share today, but I did set up guestbooks for both modock.whybark.com and tussinup.whybark.com today. They use a slightly reworked version of Thorsten Schmidt’s PHP Guestbook.

Unfortunately, the default config lacked a datestamp, so I might throw on my overalls and start monkeying with the carbs and jets. But it was taxing enough adding the appropriate UI elements. I guess If I really get down and dirty with it I should make it easier to add the UI stuff too.

Yes, yes, I’ll eventually set one up for here too – but I gotta have a clearer picture of my eventual UI goal for this site first.

Those of you who speak techie will probably already have heard of wiki, a relatively recent innovation web-publishing technology. Those of you who do not, bear with me for a moment – I think you’ll be intrigued.

Wiki is a way of publishing content on the web which both simplifies the process – similar to the way a blogging app does – and makes the published content immediately available for annotation or editing by anyone in the audience.

A wiki author may chose to activate or design levels of access, naturally. However, it’s not been common yet to create layered editing privileges among wiki users. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki is the site of the original team that developed wiki.

As is the case with all things computerly, early adopters of this publishing approach tended to be computer progammers and their ilk; wiki is obviously immediately attractive in a distributed collaborative environment, such as an open-source software development project. It’s looking like wiki will become the standard way of creating process and progress documentation for such projects.

My friend Chris Dent is one of many creators of wiki variations, which emulate the fundamental features of wiki but which add to or alter that feature set in intriguing, creative ways. Chris’s implementation of wiki is called warp, and its’ distinct functionality is that where wiki enables you to edit content or add a link to a new page, Chris’s system primarily asks you to contribute definitions of individual words within the warp space.

Once you’ve added a definition, every appearance of that word in the warp database links to that definition.

Here’s Chris’ original warp, SLISWarp; and here is the public warp he offers to the world, GlobalWarp. Chris has kindly set up a wiki for a projcet I keep meaning to do, which is essentially wikiwarping Jason Webley’s lyrics. I’ll get there eventually.

Other people in the world are also doing cool things with wiki. Here’s the inevitable collaborative encyclopedia project: http://www.wikipedia.com/, the Know-How Wiki, and the Flash Coders Wiki.

I suspect that we’ll see the addition of XML-based data-portal hooks to wiki-hosting environments soon, such that the wiki administrator could set their wiki to automagically adopt the linksets generated by, for example, Chris’ warps, or the wikipedia. My buddy Adam thinks that there’s a possible industry in wikihosting. He may be right.

I think that in order for wikis to move to the next stage of popular adoption, several hurdles must be cleared.

1. simplification of installation; provision of support for installation
2. the addition of security and authorial privilege layers
3. base-wide linking of terms a la Warp while retaining page and topic linking a la Wiki
4. a visible commercial success built around Wiki-style interactive authoring
5. XML data-pass as mentioned above

Start your thinking caps!

Hey kids! It’s the guts of the computer that serves these pages!

These shots were taken as I removed the screen I’d just installed to remove the tiny-but-powerful magnet which activates sleep mode when the lid is closed.

The box is an Apple Wallstreet 233Mhz G3 Powerbook I scored on ebay last year for about $200 – it had no screen, and was pretty stripped (it still has what I believe to be a bad charge board, so the battery it came with won’t charge up at all). This is the oldest Mac that Apple rates for use with OSX. In reality you can get OSX to run on any Power Mac, given infinite patience and infinite knowledge of BSD haxen. This means you could set up a 6100 with it, something I’d recommend only for the masochistic among us.

Masochistic is surely the word to describe the rigamarole I went through getting the headless ‘book to do what I needed: I upgraded the HD to 10 gigs, maxed out the ram, and finally learned that you can actually install OSX to an outboard powerbook when booted in SCSI Target Disk mode and hooked up to another machine – Apple thoughfully disabled outboard video support of the OSX installer disc so even if you hook the ‘book up to a monitor it won’t pump any bits out when booted from the install disc.

Anyway.

I saw a screen on ebay for under a hundred dollars that was only for Wallstreets (the G3 series of Powerbooks, especially the ’98 Wallstreets and the series right after them is actually worth more in parts than whole, so you can pick up anything you need), and I grabbed it. Now, bellerophon has a head. Will I be able to resist using it as an actual laptop? I think so. It makes such a kick-ass server.

I bring you the COMPLETE RUN of the now-legendary ‘zine “TUSSIN UP”, in memory of my pal and the zine’s publisher Steve Millen.

EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS to Kate Matthew of San Francisco for sending along the missing issues. They should be headed back to her via US Mail as you read this.

Be aware that this ‘zine is probably not the sort of thing to proudly show around the office.

In a note to Ken concerning Tussin Up and Steve, I noted some things of interest:

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Fumetti are photo-based comic strips. Readers of the National Lampoon in the seventies will recall the form from there.

Here is a cautionary tale concerning the inherent dangers of John Barleycorn.

Here are some other comix I’ve done, in the more conventional pen-and-ink manner: comix.whybark.com

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Well, following the lead of Ken Goldstein and Eric Sinclair, I’m setting up a wee blog site. Ken and Eric’s sites are accessible via the links section.

I hope shortly, once I have a grasp of the capacity of this blog app, (the perl-based Movable Type) to provide blog-hosting for at the least my family.

To kick things off, here are three recent short essays.

There are other recent project links to be observed in the “Links” section of this page as well. I assume most of my initial visitors will have already heard about them. When updates to these projects occur, I’ll note it here.