Barry Smith once drew the incredibly awesome Angst Technologies webcomic. He went on hiatus for a while, but has restarted his artwork.

I highly recommend reading through the archives - the current strip is on InkTank.com. He's thoughtfully linked the older strips into archives.

Ya'll can finally see the origin of the IT Ninjas.

Josh is playing bass, and I can well say he sounds a lot better than I do.

I remember listening to RP via my iPhone, and since we had Cat's Bose Sounddock on the shelf, I figured I just had to whip up a connection and dock the phone.

I ran up Safari on the phone, navigated to Radio Paradise, and lo, there was a link to a Radio Paradise iPhone app! For free!

In a blink I had it downloaded and running on my iPhone. The app gives basic functionality, showing the current track and allowing easy music control.

Score another one for the awesome Radio Paradise.

While I'm fairly happy with clipper running Ubuntu 8.10 as my working desktop machine, I realize that clipper is getting a little long in the tooth (I have not worn the keycaps off, but there's a distinct 'looseness' in the keyboard). It's now 4+ years old, and while it's 'working', it might be time to consider an upgrade.

The macs tempt me. After setting up mom with her macbook, I had a better feel for the mac mobile experience. The latest line of macbooks has enough power in a non-bulky configuration that I can do all my development and serious work on them without making compromises.

I stopped by the Apple store to try out the new macbook touchpad (as I'm not a fan of touchpads in general), and I have to say I was impressed. The 'glass' touchpad implements multitouch in a good way (one finger for 'single click', two fingers for 'right click'). I'd still miss the 'nipple' pointing device in the middle of the keyboard, but I think I'd be okay.

The last thing motivating me is the need to run some business software. I'll be taking over more of Stonekeep's finances, so I need to run Quicken / Quickbooks. While Intuit has done the right thing and put Quicken / Quickbooks online (though with our account with DCU, much of our banking can be done remotely anyway), having native commercial apps available, plus all the wonderful opensource / free apps - is a huge draw.

A properly kitted out laptop from Apple (250gig HD, 4gig RAM, Macbook 2.4Ghz) runs $1800-ish. This would be my machine for another 3-4 years at least - the price is reasonable, though a little daunting.

But then I look at other things that would bring me - like Time Capsule. Brilliant.

It would mean abandoning Linux as a desktop. A moral dilemma to be sure.

Ever since I got my iPhone, I've been considering setting up an ebook reader, but never got around to it. Recently I found the Classics app, a reader for the iPhone that is set up to provide a series of 'classic' books for the iPhone.

The reader app is quite good, and very easy to navigate (and pretty to look at). What I've been enjoying the most though is that the books that are available are, as the name implies, all 'classics' - books I should have read, but never got around to.

I finished reading 'Flatland', and now I'm about halfway through 'Robinson Crusoe'. As always, it's convenient having books with me at all times. I suspect when i'm done with these books, I'll look at another reader app for other books, but for now, Classics makes it so I have at least 15 books with me at all times.

Your cpu does not support long mode

Because homeport is a community cluster, I couldn't just go to the CTO and requisition up another couple servers. One of our community members coughed up a little cash, thereby setting a budget, and I was off. After much ebaying and craigslisting, I came home with a pair of Penguin Computing Relion 130 1U servers. These were pulled out of a computation cluster, and were missing some small parts (one had no fans in it, and between the two of them they only had 2 40gig drives), but the price was right, the CPU oomph was good (dual Xeon 2gig CPUs), and the budget allowed for further upgrades.

Last week I got the final parts and did the assembly last weekend. 'ketch' here is the first machine assembled and loaded, and so far things are going fine. I moved the 2 40gig drives into this machine, and set up RAID-1 mirroring. 'ketch' will be an application server, taking the load off 'boomer' (which is only an AMD Sempron 2400+). The real kicker load wise was that I'm now deploying Tomcat based applications, and boomer just can't handle big Java footprints and still manage 20-30 users comfortably.

'ketch' will stay here until configuration is done. I still have to build 'dock', which is an identical machine, except for a pair of 500gig drives that, once mirrored, will act as homeport's NFS and MySQL server, further unloading boomer. We have dozens of Drupal sites running now, and the MySQL traffic is pretty hefty.

I haven't made the final decision on directory services. There's more and more pressure to just knuckle under and use NIS, certainly the easiest and best-known mechanism for replicating user information around a cluster, though I still hold out hope of a central LDAP based authentication / authorization system.

I hope to have 'dock' configured in the next week or two, and once they're both ready, they'll be shipped off to our colo facility for installation, bringing our homeport-specific server count to 4 (6 if you count 2 other machines that we share services with).

Pretty durned cool.

Just fix the damned bug already.

(NB - yes, that bug is only 6 months old. It is a merge from several other bugs reporting the exact same thing, see )

Grow Tower is now up for your Grow pleasure. My best while tinkering this morning is 14, but already the animations make me want to try for higher.

The site is TVtropes.org, and is a vast collection of 'tropes' found not just in television, but in comics, manga, and film.

A trope, according to the home page:

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.

The site has a horrific amount of information on it, in wiki form, though they are careful to state they are NOT wikipedia ("We're a buttload more informal...").

Some choice bits.

Regarding the 'BerserkButton' trope:

Marty McFly from the Back To The Future films: "Nobody... calls me... chicken!" This is a rare instance in which getting over the Berserk Button is part of the Character Development, or where the Berserk Button is even treated as a bad thing to have.

And, in the 'BarSlide' trope:

In Hudson Hawk, when Eddie orders a cappucino, the bartender slides it down the bar to him.

And it goes on and on and on.

I love the internet.

My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -6.68

My Culture War Stance
Score: -6.67

Political Spectrum Quiz

I'm a little surprised at the strong libertarian side of things, as I consider myself a socialist. Some of the questions were... tricky in that I could have answered them in a certain way depending on the next statement. For example, "Do you support the death penalty if the crime is heinous enough" - I have to answer yes, but that is only under the assumption the legal system can be considered infallible. I have to answer the question as it's stated, so had to say "Yes, I agree, strongly."

At the top right now is AirShare from Avatron. It's a simple app that starts up on the iPhone and sets up an active WebDAV enabled HTTP server. With some tools under windows, mac, or linux, you can mount that DAV as a filesystem, and voila, you have your own portable wireless data repository.

Admittedly, what I really do is play a lot of games on the phone. So, here's a quicky list of some of my favorites:

• Dr. Awesome!
  This game plays much like the old arcade game 'Qix', but has a wonderful comic bent to it. Presentation and gameplay are excellent, music track is enjoyable, and the steadily increasing difficulty isn't too hard to deal with, though I agree with some commenters that after a certain point, it's nigh on impossible to win the levels.
• Tap Defense
  In the 'Tower Defense' model, this game fleshes out the premise with a mildly interesting storyline (Demons are escaping from hell, you're trying to keep them from getting into Heaven). It took me about 4 weeks to complete the game on all three levels (easy, medium, and hard). And on the Hard level, I had to go to the net to get some hints. Each full game can take 30 minutes to an hour to complete.
• Jewel Quest 2
  This is an oldie but a goodie. It's been around for ages from I-Play in various forms, but the iPhone version is a good clean port of it. Very long storylines, steadily increasing difficulty. Took about 3 weeks to complete the game end to end.
• Galcon
  Galcon is a realtime strategy game for the iPhone that's faster paced than most RTS games, but still keeps the tactics element alive. It borrows many ideas from some old skool strategy games I played in college. The higher levels are hard to win, though you can play network play against other 'live' players anywhere on the net.

The potential for the iPhone to be a powerful gaming platform I feel is only just being realized. More and more high resolution excellent games are coming out, and the phone handles them with great aplomb. I'm looking forward to finding more.