The Edge of Reason

A carabiner for the water bottle.

A smaller water bottle.

Eyedrops.  And possibly nasal spray.

Better goggles.

A bike w/fat tires.

A windbreaker.

Air mattress.

I run a couple of mailing lists using Dan Bernstein’s ezmlm.  Nothing too fancy (well, one is, but that’s for another day), and generally quite low volume.  A message that should have gotten passed through hit one of these lists the other day and got bounced up for moderation.  I don’t know for certain, but it looks pretty likely that whatever hash Berstein uses to create the subscriber database changed when I move to a 64-bit machine.  So, if you change from a 32-bit cpu to a 64-bit one, and your ezmlm list starts acting funny, try resubscribing some of the entries and see if they land in the same file or not.

I wanted to teach myself about xml and pals.  I wanted to be able to quickly create web pages from iTunes playlists.  These events more or less coincided.  You can find the results here.  Never mind the tech speak.  If you can download files, you can use what I wrote.

Yes, the Internet is a wonderful place.  Stephen Phillips created this great site to teach people about the rhythmic elements of Salsa music.  For free!  How cool is that?

If you’re looking for a a simple tool to replace sendmail on *nix systems, you might try mini_sendmail by Jef Poskanzer.  (Jef has written a number of excellent free software packages.)   So far this has been the best solution I’ve found to the problem of sending mail via PHP’s mail() function without requiring a bunch of unpleasant baggage.

PHP Notice:  iconv() [<a href='function.iconv'>function.iconv</a>]: Wrong charset, conversion from `ISO-8859-1′ to `UTF-8′ is not allowed

I had a problem with Apache giving this error.  I found many posts from people with the same problem, but never a solution.  I happened to stumble on the problem with my set up recently.  I didn’t have the gconv modules installed properly.  If you have this problem, check for a directory named gconv with files like ISO8859-1.so in it.

I’m guessing the Web has caused an enormous surge in the use of English by non-native speakers, yet, ironically, at the same time has contributed to a certain decay in the proper use of certain words and grammar in general.  Some people announce, seemingly with great pride, that they don’t care about grammar or spelling.  What I have grown to appreciate, though, is that grammar and spelling really do convey useful information.   This is why I will argue that “y’all” is actually a useful addition.  Without it, contemporary English has no pronoun to distinguish second person singular references from plural ones.  So all y’all that like to look down on “y’all”, can suck on that.

Ok, yes, the world almost certainly doesn’t need another blurb on this, but I don’t have one handy, so I’m making my own.  Here you go, a list of the abuses of the English language commonly promulgated by computer users.

#1) Lose versus loose.  While it’s true, I could loose my wallet or my keys or whatever, more likely I lost them.  Lost being the past tense of _lose_.

#2) There is no #2.

I learned to program because of United Airlines.  Yup, that’s right.  Not because I worked for them or anything like that.  In fact, this happened long before the Web, personal computers, any of this fun stuff that has so transformed our daily lives (mine perhaps more than others).  United probably had programmers writing in COBOL or something horrid like that, which I have never (thankfully) touched.

No, I learned to program because United used to have a little contest on flights to Hawaii.  They took guesses on when the plane would reach the halfway mark to Oahu.  I think they still do, but back when the incident-that-led-to-a-life-of-hackery occurred, they used to award prizes.  Remember the day companies would do little stuff like that?  Even though it cost them a few bucks?  You know, when life was a little more human?

So on some trip back, I tried my hand at calculating a guess.  I remember the pilot saying something about how you had to adjust for temperature.  Something about extra time for every degree below -54F.  Which doesn’t make much sense (yes, it will affect the drag, but if they tell you the airspeed then…?).  And what do you know, I won.  I’m not sure what this says about me: I remember the prize, but I couldn’t tell you where I was flying from for the life of me.  The prize was this nifty little kit full of Old Spice products.  I think there was some cologne and a tiny bar of soap.  All packed up in a little box.  Too cool.

I think this was when I was in seventh grade.  Not sure, but that seems right.  So I was probably around twelve or thirteen.  I liked my little Old Spice kit.  Old Spice will always hold a special place in my heart (if not actually on my body).  I don’t know when my dad bought the calculator, or when I first started playing with it, or how/when I found out you could _program_ it.  I can’t say I did it to win another prize (since, after all, it was unlikely I would have the calculator with me on the next flight).  But I became fascinated with programming the little beast to figure out the flight time for me (including adjusting for the air temperature the way the pilot said I should).

I have little formal training as a programmer.  I’m what you might call the old-school hacker type.  I’ve always done it because it interests me.  But who knows what would have happened if United hadn’t given out those prizes oh-so long ago.  I might not be running my own server, or writing this blog.  (Believe it or not, I’ve been running a web server for, um, ah, I forget.  Let’s just say I built my first GNU/Linux box sometime in 1994.  Thanks for the help, David.)

I’m not really a big believer in blogging.  Something you might guess from comparing the date of this writing with the aforementioned milestones.  But I keep coming up with tidbits of things that I think might help someone, somewhere in the world.  So, I’ll try to write some of them down.   And maybe some other stuff too.