Archive for February, 2005
We’re planning to leave tomorrow morning for Honolulu! Maria has a week-long conference to attend, and poor Kai and I are being dragged along. But nature is conspiring against us:
- Last night Kai started up with this unearthly, horrible sounding cough. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into something nasty.
- Maria’s 24×7 morning sickness, which was supposed to stop in her third month, is still going strong in her 4th month. She was out of commission most of the weekend. But she’s been having “good days” on a more frequent basis recently, so let’s hope that trend continues.
- We’re supposed to get from 3″ - 10″ of snow (mixed with sleet) over the next 24 hours, and our flights are scheduled to leave within that time frame (very early tomorrow morning). Let’s hope the flights don’t get canceled. I say “flights” because I’m flying separately from Maria and Kai. Her flight was bought and paid for by the conference organizers, and she got a free companion ticket for Kai with her frequent flyer miles. When I bought my ticket, I couldn’t get on the same flight (I leave a couple hours earlier). With both of them in questionable health, I’m worried about how they’ll do on such a long flight.
As you can see, the odds are not in our favor right now…
Latest Honolulu forecast: Low: 67, High: 81, Mostly Sunny. Our hotel is a block and a half from the beach.
Please cross your fingers, break out your rabbit’s foot, pray, or anything else you think might help send us some luck over the next 24 hours.
So this is my first WordPress post. But if I did a good job matching it to my old Movable Type stylesheet, things should look pretty much the same (although I haven’t updated the templates for any of the pages besides the main page, so the archives, etc. are still a bit ugly).
Something I was looking forward to with WordPress was using it for managing all the pages on toppa.com. But I immediately ran into trouble when I discovered that, in order to do this, you have to install WordPress at the top of your web docs directory (which makes sense), and you can’t have the main page be named anything other than index.php. This was a potential show-stopper, since I’m not about to give up my uber-cool custom homepage for a same-as-everyone-else’s blog page.
I found a discussion thread on this, but the hidden option to change the filename they mentioned has been removed in the latest release of WordPress. It’s no longer a variable in the database, and they didn’t even have the decency to make it a variable in the code. Instead, the code alternates between hard-coded references to index.php, or it just assumes the default index file of the install directory. Lame.
But I like all the other aspects of WordPress enough that I decided it was worth a bit more investigation. First I thought of making a symlink, but I don’t have shell access to my site, and the FTP server is configured with a restricted set of SITE command options that doesn’t include symlink. So this is what I ended up with:
- My home page is at /index.html
- My blog page is at /index.php (fortunately the server is configured to give precedence to index.html)
- I added the following to my root .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^blog(.*) /index.php$1 [R=301,L]
Since WordPress builds all it’s dynamic pages by relying on arguments to index.php, this redirect won’t drop query string arguments. I just have to be careful not to create any directories that start with the word “blog.”
I have to thank Pat W for his comment on my post yesterday - he suggested I try WordPress and TextPattern. I’ve done a test installation of WordPress, and it’s a dream. I had been resisting checking out other blog applications, as I’ve become so familiar with Movable Type I didn’t want to have to learn a new system. But there’s no denying the superiority of WordPress: the installation was fast and easy, and after even just a quick run through the administrative interface, it’s obvious that the features for creating entries, theme management, etc. (even including overall site management), are superior.
I’ve realized the problem with Movable Type is that it’s based on a web programming paradigm that’s at least 8 years old, when a “dynamic” page was something you generally only saw after filling out a form, and you needed to stick with static pages whenever possible anyway, for the sake of conserving server resources (it’s the kind of stuff I used to teach in my CGI/Perl class in 2000). The web has moved beyond that, but only with the latest version of Movable Type does it seem that Six Apart has even started to catch on. What’s ironic is that the early success of Movable Type has allowed Six Apart to become a real company (now with at least 50 employees), but they’re clearly not keeping up with what the smaller competitors are doing. Instead they’ve let themselves be distracted with developing TypeKey, a project they would have known was doomed from the start if that had just asked somebody (not even Microsoft has the market leverage to get everyone to sign on to a central registration system - how many of you use Microsoft Passport?). A slightly out-of-date but still useful overview of Movable Type and its competitors is at the Unbounded blog entry Goodbye, Movable Type.
The time-consuming part of the transition will be migrating my stylesheets and templates away from the custom Movable Type tags and into PHP. But since PHP is the main language I program in now, it’ll ultimately be a good thing.
The blog probably will be quieter than usual this week as I’m in the midst of some upgrades to toppa.com. I’m installing Gallery for managing all the photos, and I’m configuring Movable Type to manage all my static pages (I’m already using Movable Type for this blog - you can also use it as a primitive content management system, as described by Brad Choate).
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I’ve been meaning to post this picture - I took it a few weeks ago when we had some bitter cold weather. This gargoyle is perched on the building across from my office, on the Penn campus. I grew up in RI, so I’m used to cold winters, but the winters here in Philly are actually tougher - not because it’s colder, but because it’s warmer. In RI, when it snows, it’s cold, and it’ll usually stay cold for a while afterwards. Then eventually they’ll be a relatively warm day, all the snow will melt, and life goes on. But here, the temperature tends to hover right around the freezing point. So you’ll get snow, then it’ll warm up and melt a bit, then it’ll cool off and freeze, then you’ll get a mix of rain and snow, then more ice, and so on. Living here I’ve come to know and dread the terms black ice and wintery mix.
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Kai will have a new brother or sister on or about August 19. This ultrasound picture was taken last week - the little bugger is currently about 2½" long. Kai is excited. He’s expressed his preference for a brother, and he always refers to it as “my baby.” For example, yesterday Kai volunteered to mop the kitchen floor (his latest thing is cleaning) and he said, “when my baby comes, I’m going to teach it how to mop.” But poor Kai has no idea what he’s in for: after the baby is born, he’s going to discover that he is not, in fact, the center of the universe. As with all older siblings though, I’m sure he’ll adjust.
Unfortunately, Maria has been having a terrible time. She’s had “morning sickness” 24/7 since Christmas. Her pregnancy with Kai was relatively easy, so she wasn’t expecting to feel this way. As she put it, “I feel hungry, nauseous, and bloated, all at the same time.” I consider the suffering many women go through during pregnancy as Exhibit A in the argument against Intelligent Design (that’s the 21st century marketing catch-phrase for Creationism). No compassionate higher power would deliberately intend the creation of life to be such a miserable experience. Anyway, Maria’s started to feel better over the past week, so hopefully that means she’s past the worst of it.
We’ve decided to not give a lot of thought to names until we find out whether it’s a boy or a girl (in 2 or 3 months). But if you have any names you’d like to nominate for consideration, please feel free to send them my way. We have one rule though: the first name must be a Japanese name. But the middle name can be anything, so if you’re not up on Japanese baby names, feel free to send a suggestion for a middle name.
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I’m slowly working through archiving my old files, and I came across this artwork done about 15 years ago (yikes!) by a friend in college. The “hotrod” line is a reference to the ‘68 Lincoln Continental I souped-up in my motorhead days.
It was drawn by Joe DeRisi. I lost touch with Joe after graduation, but I came across an article about him in Wired magazine a few years later. And then I ran into him at Stanford when Maria and I first moved back to CA. I just Googled him, and he’s moved on to some impressive things. There’s the DeRisi lab at UCSF, and he won a MacArthur fellowship last year.
This is my first post ever about a TV show, mainly because I don’t watch much TV (there are too many other things I’d rather do - or have to do…). But I’ve been making time for the new Battlestar Galactica series on the SciFi channel. Tonight they’re re-running all the episodes to date - watch ‘em! (I think there are 5). The show is impressive in every respect:
Good from the start: Unlike many other sci-fi series, the first season isn’t terrible. Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5 both had fairly lousy starts, but improved in subsequent seasons. Most other sci-fi series also had lousy starts, and then stayed lousy. With BG’s first episode, 33, the dramatic tension cuts like a knife, and I felt exhausted at the end - I was completely pulled in to the story.
Real actors: Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonell are the names I recognized right away in the credits. The other actors are proving to be top-notch as well. They made some interesting choices in choosing the actors: the lead characters among the young officers are all played by Beautiful People, while the elder leaders and the secondary characters are all played by more normal looking people. I guess they’re trying to strike a compromise between the gritty drama of the show and the innate preference we all have to watch people who look better than the rest of us.
Cool effects and music: the visual effects are almost Hollywood movie quality. The sound effects and music are generally used in a minimalist way, which is very effective at both adding to the tension in show, and also providing a heightened wallop on the occasions when they’re used more forcefully.
And, most importantly, the writing is excellent: the old 70s British sci-fi show Blake’s 7 is still one of my favorite series. The special effects were laughably bad, the acting was uneven at best, but the characters were good, and one in particular (Avon) was fascinating. That was enough to make me a fan. What’s impressed me with Battlestar Galactica is that, with just an opening movie and a handful of episodes, they’ve succeeded in creating distinctive and interesting characters out of almost everyone in the show’s large cast.
Starbuck: making the cigar-chomping character of the original series into a woman in the new series was a brilliant move. She’s my favorite character, and it’s unusual in sci-fi for a fan to say that about a female character. That’s because female characters in sci-fi tend towards the extremes of being either sophisticated and virtually non-sexual, or being sex objects with underdeveloped characters. Much of sci-fi writing seems stuck at a 12-year boy level when it comes to female characters, but that’s not the case here. While sci-fi these days does tip its hat to modern attitudes that allow for strong female characters that kick butt, my suspension of disbelief comes crashing down when such characters are played by toothpicks with hOOters in skin tight costumes (that’s just not who I’d want watching my back in fist fight). In contrast, the actress who plays Starbuck is buff and perhaps a bit hefty (but she does, of course, still meet the prime-time requirement of being cute). And in just a small number of episodes, the writers have already made her a complex and interesting character.
The show has gotten some negative feedback for gratuitous sex. At first I was thrown by the sexual content in the series - but it wasn’t gratuitous - it was simply there. I eventually realized that I just wasn’t used to a TV show treating sex as a normal part of life. The writers neither pretend it doesn’t exist, nor do these fetishize it. Executive Producer Ron Moore put it best in his response to the criticism:
We’re presenting adult human beings as adults, and their sexuality is a key part of their lives. Baltar’s sexual weaknesses, Sharon & Tyrol’s forbidden love affair, and Starbuck’s promiscuity are part of who and what they are. I think the only reason this gets the kind of attention it does is that we’re not used to seeing sex treated maturely in science fiction — nine times out of ten, any sex is either something to snigger at or to make fun of. Somehow it’s okay to fetishize sex by putting women in S&M leather “space” outfits or have Carrie Fisher run around in harem clothes (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but to portray two mature adults simply having sex is somehow controversial in sci-fi circles.
My blogging has been sparse recently because my usual blogging time has been taken over by my Personal Video Recorder (PVR) assembly project. A PVR is a do-it-yourself TiVo. The main advantage over TiVo is that you don’t have to pay anyone a monthly subscription fee. The disadvantage, especially if you want to use your PVR with a TV instead of a computer monitor, is that you’re dealing with bleeding edge technology. That means you’ll find lots of debates about the “right way” to configure the system and you’ll inevitably hit a few snags while setting things up. But if you’re a geek, that’s also what makes it fun. And besides, according to the New York Times, everybody’s doing it.
My friend and co-worker Chris wanted to build one too, so we decided to pool our expertise and save on shipping costs by buying our components together. We built our systems from scratch. Where things got tricky was deciding what to do for the TV tuner card, video card, and PVR software. We did lots of Googling and browsed through the SageTV forums to assess our options (the Build Your Own PVR site was also helpful). The only thing everyone agreed on is that you need a TV tuner card with hardware-based encoding, so that writing your favorite TV shows to files doesn’t slow your PC to a crawl.
Where folks disagreed was on how to get the best picture when decoding the files back to your screen. If you use an ordinary TV tuner card (like the Hauppauge PVR-150) with an ordinary video card, and run the output via S-video to your TV, the picture quality will, at best, be about the same as a VHS tape. I started with a configuration like that, and was disappointed with the results. Cartoons, with their limited use of color and detail, looked fine, but live action scenes, especially if they involved hard-to-digitize video elements like smoke, looked lousy.
There are two ways to a better picture. One is to go with a higher-end video card that’s designed for gaming (specifically, an ATI or NVIDIA card). Most of the folks in the forums who were watching on a TV instead of a computer monitor used the S-video out on these cards. Some of the new cards apparently have a component out as well. Some used a VGA-to-component adapter (but you have to be careful not to blow up your TV!).
The other approach is to go with the Hauppauge PVR-350, which is a tuner card that has a hardware-based decoder and S-video out built-in. This is supposed to give the best possible picture, but there’s a major drawback: it will only output data that was processed through the tuner. That is, you can’t use it as a substitute for a video card (e.g. it won’t show your Windows desktop). The big breakthrough for this card came last year when the SageTV folks figured out how to run their TV scheduling video overlays through it, so you could at least see that much through your TV.
I currently have the PVR-150, which I’m going to give to Chris (as he hasn’t bought his TV tuner card yet, and that’s the one he wants). I’m going to get the PVR-350. Since I don’t want to have a computer monitor sitting next to the TV, I’m also going to get an S-video selector box. My TV only has one S-video input, so I can use the selector box to switch between the output from the TV tuner card and the output from the video card. I’ll probably only need access to the desktop every once and a while, so it should work out fine.
My main motivation for doing all this was to provide time-shifting and commercial-removal for the shows Kai watches. SageTV is really cool: you can easily search the TV schedule for a show (say, Sesame Street) and then tell it to record every new instance (i.e. so it won’t record a re-run if you’ve already recorded it), and then you can tell it to keep, say, the 10 most recent episodes on the hard drive, and to just delete older ones. And I’ll finally be able to keep up with The Daily Show! I’m putting Kai to bed when it’s on at 7, and I’m asleep when it’s on at 11. Since The Daily Show seems to have more than your average number of commercials, I bet I can watch an entire episodes in 15 minutes after skipping them.
The other cool thing is that you can hook up your VCR to it, so you can transfer your videotapes to DVD. We have some infant videos of Kai I’d like to digitize! And I guess it’s the only way I’ll ever see the non-Special Edition of Star Wars on DVD…
