Mile Zero

June 28, 2010

I woke up this morning to hear that Robert Byrd had died, and that I needed to fix the timeline we had made of his life. As I logged into the VPN, the screen went oddly pink and blue, like Doom's old Hall of Mirrors effect if you cheated your way out of a valid sector. Then it went black, and then it refused to boot to anything but an external monitor in Psychedelic Snow VGA Mode. The video card, it would seem, is fried. Luckily, I'm just barely within the three-year extended service plan (good until August!), so Lenovo is sending a box and will fix it for no extra cost. But I'll be without hardware for probably three to five days.

I've been on a vaguely weekly schedule here for a while now, so I figure going quite for another week won't shock anyone too much. I had planned, starting today or tomorrow, to write my one-year look back at b-boying, but it looks like that will have to wait. I'll also have to hold off on playing through more of Planescape: Torment, which is too bad since it was just starting to get pretty good, and I'm looking forward to rambling a little on its relationship with death and meta-gaming when I get a chance. And finally, I hope I've gotten the database bugs straightened out on NPR's client now, because it'll be a lot harder to debug and fix them on my lunch hour at work. Still, it's not all bad: forced breaks like this are no doubt good for my tendonitis, and maybe it'll give me some extra incentive to drill footwork for Crafty Bastards if the heat lets up. Here's to a productive week, and a speedy return of my soon-to-be-repaired Thinkpad.

December 28, 2009

Happy holidays! Between festivities and the blizzard, it's been almost two weeks since I wrote here, but posting has been slow for several months anyway. The main reason is that I've been increasingly busy at CQ as the new Multimedia Team Leader since the end of November. As such, I'm responsible for directing the team's choice of technology, projects, and long-term strategy. It's a nice step forward for me professionally, but it eats up a lot of time and mindshare that might have normally gone into blogging.

I don't believe, as many journalism-watchers do, that print is dead. On the contrary, I think it's possible to argue that print retains an audience capable of supporting newspapers, just not at the same elevated level of profit that was once routine for the industry. But as someone who self-identifies as a "new media" journalist, my primary focus is the organizational transition toward a print-online hybrid journalism, with the eventual goal of moving entirely online as print inevitably becomes untenable. The Multimedia Team Leader is an opportunity for me to more directly play a role in that process, one that I'm sure will prove both frustrating and exciting in turn.

As for Mile Zero, rather than beating myself up over the frequency of updates, I'm going to a more relaxed schedule--slightly meatier posts once or twice a week, hopefully. I'm also going to try tweaking the subject matter a bit--I feel like it's gotten a bit review-ish lately, and that's not a place I really want to be. Anyway, pardon the digression, and thanks for reading. Here's to 2010!

December 2, 2009

Gone to San Francisco. Back next week.

September 29, 2009

When I only had 30 entries on Blosxom, this blog ran great. Over the last five years, however, I've written almost 2,000 posts, and the original Perl script has started to bog down a bit. Adding an plugin to cache the filesystem helped some, but it still takes a little more than 2 seconds to render the page. I think it has something to do with the Perl interpreter--there's some discussion online about how Blosxom doesn't like running under Apache's mod_perl, or something like that. As far as I'm concerned, Apache is a practical joke played on DYI-types by malicious shell coders, so I can't really be bothered to find out.

Long story short, last night I rewrote Blosxom as a PHP script. That sounds really hardcore, until you realize that A) it's only 16KB to begin with, and B) I took out all the features I don't use, like static rendering and complete plugin support (mine only supports entry and document processing plugins). It's running now at index.php instead of the old index.cgi, and I've redirected the domain default. I'll be leaving the old Perl script in place so that legacy links will continue to function, but anything that didn't specify an index script should now benefit from the speed boost.

If you're reading this via Google Reader, you probably don't need to do anything--Google doesn't care how slow my server is. On other RSS readers, you may notice a faster refresh and more accurate post times by switching to the new feed. And if you read via the actual page (or link to it) at the .cgi URL, you'll notice a real difference by switching to the new URL--it's about an order of magnitude faster, going from ~3 seconds to ~300ms in my tests, even without optimizations.

August 25, 2009

The worst ways people found Mile Zero this month:

• time gentlemen please zombie cow torrent: Listen, it's a five-dollar game. You should be ashamed.
• benefits of working at the world bank experience for those who have worked there: Hey, a serious query! As an American, for me the benefits were twofold: they paid well, and the institution is relatively diverse, which I found fascinating. You get to meet a lot of new and interesting people. On the other hand, you will become acquainted with a lot of very tedious tax paperwork.
• jerry jenkins writing ability: Nope.
• assume that your system is being dos attacked right now. what are the various steps that you will take to counter the attack?: Well, first I'd laugh. Then I'd cry. Then I would call someone who knew what they were doing.
• precious you ever conceived of: It puts the lotion in the basket...
• critique: Literally the entire search term. Zen, really.
• baltar graphic groovebox: Gives you a basic beat, then betrays you to the Cylons.
• animal crossing rooms: Not actually about the game. They're trying to train their pets to go from one side of the house to another.
• how much does it cost to fix line six delay switch?: In my case, it's $50 for the pedal, $2 for gas to drive to the closest authorized repair shop, and $400 to buy a different pedal when the DL-4 breaks again.

Better luck next month, Internet.

April 13, 2009

Last week, I got a phone call from someone who had worked for one of the outlets where I've been published. Their name was listed in my copy of the article at thomaswilburn.net, and they asked if I could take it out in the interests of trimming their online presence a bit--I guess they didn't want to be associated with the publication anymore. I can certainly sympathize with that feeling, and was more than happy to help.

It was an interesting coincidence, though, because I've been thinking more about my own Internet shadow lately. I write here, and maintain a portfolio elsewhere, under my real name. This has advantages, and it also has disadvantages. At the very least, it can be surprising: the now-unnamed correspondent was able to contact me at my (unlisted) work number because I list my current place of employment on the portfolio (and also likely because I don't provide an e-mail address there, which I should probably fix). Like it or not, I can be easily located online, which ties my realspace identity to all the writing I've done here. And while I consider that a net positive (pardon the pun), it should still give any reasonable person pause.

Or to put it another way, when I meet someone who says "Oh, I've read your stuff," my first impulse shouldn't be to wonder if I've advocated a coup or something similarly inflammatory lately.

The obvious solution is to try not to write stupid posts, and I'm working on that (it's one reason that I suspect entries here have become both less lengthier and less frequent). But at the same time, over the last week or two, I've gone back through the archives here and spiked quite a few entries. They're not permanently deleted, but they are unpublished. A post may have been spiked for any number of reasons, including:

• It wasn't very well-written.
• I don't agree with what I wrote there anymore.
• It didn't contribute any interesting content to the blog (delay/maintenance notices, joke posts, now-invalid links, etc).
• It may contradict the policies of my full-time employer (most of the politics category is gone for this reason).

In my experience, this is an unpopular action for a blogger to take, and I'm not entirely comfortable with it myself. That said, I believe it's necessary and prudent. While it's a nice idea for the "arc" of the blog to follow my viewpoints and development as a writer and a person, the fact is that very few people will ever read it that way. More likely, any entry needs to be something that I can support professionally, regardless of the publication date, since it may be encountered without context or supporting posts.

It should also be stressed that this is hardly the first time my archives have been reshuffled and restructured, although it is the first time it has happened intentionally. Over a period of four years, the process of changing hosts, tweaking Blosxom and its plugins, and server outages means that any website will undergo some level of "memory loss," and Mile Zero is no different. This time, it's simply editorially-directed--and for most of the cuts, I suspect, the posts won't be missed.

In any case, while I've already conducted this surgery on the archives, I'm announcing it here in the interests of full disclosure. If something you found valuable has been pulled, or you believe that a particular post should have been retained, please feel free to send me a note via the mail link on the right, and we'll see if we can work something out.

April 6, 2009

Although I reserve the right to change plans at any time, both writing and commenting will probably be thin this week. I'm trying cut down on the amount of extra typing at the moment, as well as temporarily giving up use of the XBox and my musical equipment, since I've been feeling the twinges that herald the return of repetitive stress injury. As a writer, coder, bassist, and gamer, RSI is something that I've come to know fairly well. And after working with sufferers in a data-input center, I have no desire to aggravate my symptoms. I'd urge anyone here who suspects that they might be in a similar situation to be very, very careful: you only get one set of hands, after all.

Like I said, at the moment my recovery strategy consists of avoiding activities which aggravate my joints whenever possible. I also habitually use a trackball at work, which I find is slightly easier on my wrists, and I'm trying to take advantage of Vista's voice command app to do my computing at home. Feel free to suggest other helpful measures in the comments.

Update: Hands and wrists still hurting. Picked up an ergonomic mouse, made a doctor's appointment on Thursday, still trying to stay away from keyboards/basses/video games, but unable to avoid work at this time. Actually kind of enjoying the lack of blogging, although that won't last.

January 29, 2009

In which I read through the least-common search phrases for this site, extract the noise from the signal, and then gripe about it.

• herpes triangle clarendon: This is the best suburb nickname ever. "Doing anything this weekend?" "Oh, you know. Just heading out to the Herpes Triangle, see what I catch."
• new invention of computer: Also "new invention of computer in 2008," because surprisingly the initial query was a little too general.
• there s this movie about these little gigo soldiers against this monster toy: Aliens? Lord of the Rings? ...Mansquito?
• gay movie if you re still interested in this job you should drop by my agence tomorrow.: I swear, people, I do not make these things up. There's probably a Mansquito 2 joke in there somewhere, though.
• blackberry pin exchange myers-briggs: That probably makes you an extravert. But that's just an intuitive feeling I've got, and could be too judgemental.
• weirdo to trigger the subjunctive in french: An Onion headline waiting to happen.
• tom friedman painted silver dead rabbit sugar cube: Try to imagine the circumstances that led to this being typed into a search engine. Either Matt Taibbi's off his meds again, it's the worst Eyes Wide Shut deleted scene ever, or some newspaper research intern is getting way overzealous while writing obituaries.

True fact: the top search phrase (not individual keyword, but actual phrase) for MileZero.org is "music"--just the single word, all by itself. This strikes me as a terrific act of faith. I can only imagine the disappointment of the 325 people who typed that into Google and ended up here as a result.

January 15, 2009

Four years ago, when I converted a spare domain into this blog, I started putting posts on technology into the random/tech directory (since it runs on Blosxom, which builds this page from the UNIX file system, that means that these posts are in a "tech" subcategory under the "random" top-level category). In retrospect, this was not a good idea. I've written a fair amount in that subfolder, to the point where it's not really random anymore. Today I moved it out to a top-level category of its own.

A category-based system on a blog with any kind of topical range has serious flaws. For example, there are a fair number of posts under the "bank" directory (for World Bank) about technology in development, and these could probably be better posted under "tech." But at the time when I wrote them, I didn't have that category, so I put them where they're best suited. And since the heirarchical system can't "share" posts between categories, I can't really cross-post them--especially since, if the URLs for permalinks were category based (and most of mine are), those links will break when the URL changes.

If I used a tag-based system, that wouldn't be a problem. Everything would live in a big database soup, and moving things around would be as simple as adding an additional tag--if I hadn't already done so. Indeed, people like Clay Shirky often use this as a reason for why tag-based systems are superior to heirarchies, because you don't have to perfectly plan out your ontology, and because it becomes responsive to your subject matter instead of the reverse.

I understand that reasoning, but I was kind of counting on a system that dictated my categories--they're mine, after all, so I can't really complain about the imposition. I find that when I use tags for personal categorization I tend to use them in silly ways. I can't take them seriously. And I had hoped, frankly, that this wouldn't be a tech blog: putting "tech" under "random" was meant to keep me honest. It didn't work, but I still think it was worth a shot.

Actually moving the posts to their new place is pretty easy, but now anything linking to /random/tech is broken. There are three ways to deal with this. I could write a script that would go through and correct the links. I might do that, but it's not high on my list of priorities, for obvious reasons. I could leave the posts where they are, in which case browsing by category (something I do much more often than I link to myself) would remain unintuitive. Or I could just break the system (links by date, which until very recently was the default for my RSS feed, will continue to work correctly).

I'm going to do the latter. First, because I've already been through a server change that probably destroyed half of my date-based URLs, and second, because I just don't really care that much. Honestly, I don't think it matters. A permalink and a good category is a wonderful thing. But 99% of the time, if I'm looking for a specific post either here or elsewhere, I use an third-party search engine to get there anyway. The benefits of categories or tagging are, I suspect, more for the writer than the reader.

If nothing else, think of it this way: Have you ever wished the Internet could forget? I certainly have. So I'm giving the Web a little bit of forgetfulness, limited to my tiny patch of it. Every link's an adventure, and possibly a problem-solving challenge!

December 15, 2008

Last week was busy--almost too busy. Here's what I was doing, since I obviously wasn't writing here:

• My portfolio site hadn't been updated since I joined CQ, a little more than a year ago, so I took the time this weekend to get it caught up. There are three main changes. First, I added a multimedia section (between "code" and "audio," which seemed appropriate) to contain a lot of the projects I've been doing for CQ. I haven't gotten them all in yet, but it's a start. Second, I changed the non-prose sections to use Blosxom flavors instead of static pages, so they can be changed dynamically. Finally, I played with the CSS so that it's a bit more attractive. The page still remains very simple, but it looks a bit more "designed" now, like I meant it to be that way instead of just being lazy.
• Today the Treasury will release its annual Financial Report of the US Government. It's expected that this report, just as in 2007, will predict that the government's national debt situation is unsustainable, and needs to be fixed. Working with our graphic staff and the editor of CQ Budget Tracker, I put together a multimedia package that complements the editor's story on the debt. You can browse the package here. It includes a video introduction to the package, a podcast explainer of the problem, a reprint of the current budget numbers in both text and graphic form, and a short sidebar on the history of the national debt. Although this took up most of Thursday and Friday, plus some editing on Saturday, I think it turned out very well.
• I also updated the numbers on the CQ vote studies, so that we now have final 2008 numbers for the House and Senate. Unfortunately, these are embargoed for the public until next week, but they're pretty wonky anyway, and practically speaking nothing has changed since the last set.
• Volunteer service has never been a strong point of mine, but I began adapting what I've learned at CQ and the Bank about multimedia presentation to some training materials for the non-profit where Belle works, and I'll be donating some time to them over the next few months. I think it'll be a fun shift in topic for me.
• I played the open mike at Stacy's coffee shop again with a friend. The open mike itself is going through a dry period, so I've been playing there all this month, doing my part to keep it alive. This Wednesday, I'll be there again, this time for the pretentious solo project. I consider open mikes to be really important places for forming musical community, as opposed to spectacles. Unfortunately, in January and February, I won't be able to make it. Hopefully it'll come through the holiday season still kicking.
• While Belle borrowed the Kindle, I got back to reading paper--I always have a backlog of books that aren't available electronically. This week, I've been working my way through The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, as recommended by China Mieville in the middle of his fine article on the Freedom Ship. The authors basically recast the Atlantic's history of piracy, insurrection, and rioting from 1600-1800 as a story of politically-aware class struggle, tracing a direct line of revolutionary thought from the movement for unfenced commons in England to the Caribbean pirates who fought the merchant classes to the Founding Fathers (who ultimately betrayed and diluted the democratic, egalitarian ideals that had inspired them). It's a fascinating book, if a bit dry.
• If it's not too cold, while waiting for the bus, I'm still trying to finish Final Fantasy Tactics A2, in the hope of being able to play Disgaea DS before the end of 2010. Like its predecessors, FFTA2 is not really so much about tactics, but more about grinding and picking the right party members. But even so, it's oddly captivating.
• And finally, I completed my holiday shopping. The highlight of this was buying a garden plant for a relative, only to realize a few days later that I had left it in the box and (more importantly) that you can't really wrap a living gift until the 25th. Needless to say, that one went out early.

Future - Present - Past