User:Woozle/2005/06

What Woozle was doing in June, 2005

2005-06-05

TEAC 4-track

Some 7-inch reel tapes I need to transcribe

More reel tapes to transcribe

12:40, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): Transcribing audio from ancient 4-track reel-to-reel tapes. Currently transcribing "TDK-001", possibly the first 7" rtr tape I recorded on. It's old enough that itdoesn't contain any serious attempts to record actual songs, although there are some pieces which I have plans for. It also contains a lot of bits which ended up in "Pineapple" and "Daydream of the Psychoanalyst", so may be helpful in recreating those with higher fidelity. Lots of noodling around on the piano, most of it too much like existing songs to be useful.

I was a little worried at first because one of the channels didn't seem to be there anymore except very faintly, and I was afraid maybe the tape had been left up against something magnetic and partly erased, maybe... but it turned out just to be a slightly-corroded switch in need of cleaning :-)

17:56, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): saving files and eating dinner
19:01, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): reading bedtime stories to kids
19:44, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): processing The Birthday Tape (1969-05-11)
20:55, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): bed

2005-06-06

06:55, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): added index to HyperMail program for hopefully-increased speed. Now some ordering and shipping. (Does anyone know how to make this thing display time as EDT instead of CDT??)
10:40, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): recovering from weed-whacking, which was necessary in order to be able to get far enough back in the woods to release a copperhead snake Harena found lurking under a tarpaulin. While doing the clearing, I came across a hole in the ground containing two tiny raccoons, both looking quite terrified.
10:47, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): going shopping and stuff and things.
15:38, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): back from all that. Actually was home for about 30 minutes somewhere in the middle, but not enough time to actually do anything. Read some of Vernor Vinge's Singularity article out loud to Harena, but had to go off to fetch Z before getting more than about 1/3 of the way through. Then we had to go to Costco for gas (still $1.959/gal) and stuff, during which I had this odd flash of Karen S. singing Peter Gabriel's "Steam". It's not really her kind of song, I don't think, but I think it'd be right in her vocal range... I can imagine it so vividly, but I don't know if there's any way to get the idea across.

Currently trying to get Bochs working again, as I think it might be helpful in working on the Mayhall install issue -- I want to have a clean install of Windows, dump the whole registry, then install FormTool, dump the registry again, and find out what changes. This should tell me what reg keys need to be set up in order for FT to work right.

Still pretty whacked from all the weed-whacking, though. And it is suddenly summer today, too (probably started a day or two ago but I wasn't outside any & didn't notice).

...and I've had "Cut the telephone line, the story's the same" running through my head all afternoon, after finally finding the song lyrics yesterday and having not heard the song for at least a decade and a half.

20:33, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): bed

2005-06-07

08:45, 7 Jun 2005 (CDT): spent about 2 hours trying to figure out what my priorities were for this morning. Briefly flirted with trying to tag and file the piles of loose inventory in the office, but this required more tags, which required finding the tag images, which I wasn't able to find. Found some folders which might have contained them, but they were all empty.

Ended up working on picking out useful bits of audio from TDK-001 to see if a moosical idea could be done.

12:22, 7 Jun 2005 (CDT): back from conference with Benjy's teacher, and some shopping. Resuming audio editing stuff even though I really should be working on Mayhall project.
19:59, 7 Jun 2005 (CDT): Just discovered another #&*^$ overdraft in my bank account. I thought I had plenty of margin, but there it is. From the fact that the overdraft charge ($68) just about equals the amount of negativity (68.36), it's probably a case of a credit card refund being debited before midnight (when they assess overdraft fees) and the sales in the same batch coming through after... (I so very hate my credit-card processing service, but each time I start to look into getting another one it always involves more steps which don't seem to get done.) And there will probably be more overdraft charges tonight, but I don't have enough in my other account to even try to cover this. It's times like this I really just feel like quitting business, but I seriously can't see myself earning an income any other way at this point. Everything else makes me crazy. (This just makes me depressed, and only sometimes.)

2005-06-08

07:21, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT): Shipping large in-stock order which arrived last night. It's not enough to cover the huge hole (-$180 or so) which is now in my bank account, and it probably won't arrive until early next week, but it will cover most of the gap. (And dammit, that should have been surplus.)
09:48, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT): Fixing minor error on vbz home page, processing yet another in-stock order which just arrived (do my customers have a sixth sense for when I need orders? Should I feel like George Bailey?), and going off to H's cognitive therapy, depositing borrowed $$ to fill the $$ gap, and mailing the other package -- yes, all at the same time.
11:54, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT): back from therapy. I've decided that various vbz improvements -- starting with the wiki -- need to be top priority at the moment. I want to be off that shared server before the next $70 charge comes in, about 2 months from now.
18:31, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT): seriously messing with the Apache config on this server, due to the fact that neither of the handy-dandy utilities (one web-based, one CLI) for managing domains seem to be able to deal with subdomains using different IP addresses. So I'm having to modify httpd.conf, which is difficult because of the security restrictions (FTP cannot connect as root).

2005-06-09

06:58, 9 Jun 2005 (CDT): Messing with Apache some more. My original attempt was partly successful -- http://img.vbz.net loads the correct file, but http://wiki.vbz.net loads the server's default page. So something's still not right.
evening, 9 Jun 2005 (CDT): Putting the finishing touches on a few select pieces of Linux documentation. I had to look up how to do a few things, and ended up creating pages about the groups abd groupadd commands and Linux user groups in general -- so I could include my own clarifications, questions, and examples as needed.

2005-06-10

07:11, 10 Jun 2005 (CDT): Shipping order which arrived yesterday (then back to the Apache tweakings). (And yes, I worked on the Apache tweakings pretty much all day, aside from shopping and kinderdeliverance.)

2005-06-11

09:05, 11 Jun 2005 (CDT): Still working on the Apache tweakings, but beginning to wonder if it's worthwhile...
evening: Gave up on trying to get wiki.vbz.net to work as a subwiki, and installed MediaWiki from scratch. Found that it had the same problem. Finally checked notes and figured out what the problem is... but decided to proceed with it as a separate wiki for now. Heavily documented the MediaWiki installation procedure.

2005-06-12

11:48, 12 Jun 2005 (CDT): Moving pages over to vbzwiki while also doing customizations and such to make the wiki more vbz-ish.

2005-06-13

10:12, 13 Jun 2005 (CDT): Most of the morning spent documenting various MediaWiki things while trying to figure out how to do the customizations I want. No visible progress yet, but at least I know how to edit the controlbar links that are already there. (Making new ones, or a separate box, is more of an issue.) Also shipped a few things. Now taking some time to watch a DS9 episode, and then lunch and grocery shopping.
evening: Copied all the existing vbz pages off the hypertwiki over to vbzwiki.

2005-06-14

06:59, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): Made some changes to HyperMail which should help the import to go faster. Note to self: indexing the main search field does make a difference. Currently, I guess I'm still trying to figure out how to add some nav links in the vbzwiki to point back to vbz.net.
07:37, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): Taking B & Z for a walk so H can get some sleep.
08:59, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): back. Attempting to offload pictures.
09:12, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): Processing pictures
12:44, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): H got up, and we promptly took B out for a promised trip to A.C. Moore to pick out his color of yarn (for what, we're not sure) and then out to Golden Corral to take advantage of the 99-cent kid special (where the kids kept going for more and more, and then dessert), and then to Costco for gas ($2.039/gal.), and then to Kroger for other stuff and then finally back here. Resuming the picture processing now.
18:46, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): Categorizing lots of stuff. Whoo. And cooking dinner (hamburgers). Whoo.

2005-06-15

06:59, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT): Ok, what *am* I doing right now? I guess I'm working up to trying again to insert more navlinks on the control bar at vbzwiki.
16:59, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT): I've been bad; I've spent more or less the whole day uploading and organizing Anna photos. So there's now a starter page for Anna stuff, and later I can reconstruct what was on the old hypertwins.org site. I've been saying for years that I was going to get that site updated... so that makes it not totally bad that I spent all day doing this, right...?
18:57, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT): Just checked the mail (while the kids were out swimming with Grandma Dorothy and hence there's no Benjamin to demand a letter to open, put inside the return envelope, and then demand that I mail for him) and the September issue of Analog has arrived. I read the editorial right away (saving the rest for later, as usual) and find that Stan Schmidt – whose editorials I've always really enjoyed, even more than Campbell's, in many ways – is agreeing with me about the current over-security situation we have here. He then goes on, however, to extend the point into a criticism of excessive exposure of one's personal life (and the personal lives of one's offspring, even) via the internet.

Now, I don't go to the extremes that he describes, but it did make me think a bit. I take more of a Transparent Society approach to self-exposure on the internet (although the book is not mentioned or alluded to, it seems most unlikely that Dr. Schmidt hasn't read it; he may be ignoring it in order to keep the argument simple, space being limited). Posting personal information online is my way of having a community, when the people I'd like to be in a community with don't live anywhere nearby. It's my way of getting my thoughts straight, because I can much better answer a question like "So, what are you doing these days?" by writing about it (and posting it on the great global bulletin board) than I can in person. My mind just doesn't work that way; I can't cough up a list.

I've even reached the point where too much privacy has begun to feel like more of a threat than too little. Which is worse, for example: if everyone knows a rumor about you, or if everyone has access to the entire story? There are certain subjects which I've tried to bring up in on the web and essentially been forced to take "off the air" because of the embarrassment expressed by certain family members. But nobody forced those family members to read about those subjects (the pages somehow came to the attention of someone who took it upon themselves to helpfully make sure said relatives were aware of them, thank you oh so much to that person), and not being able to discuss them freely has not made life easier. I would also feel happier if I could publish all the information at my disposal regarding the court case in which I'm currently involved, so that people who know I'm involved but who don't know the details could decide for themselves if I'm being a jerk -- but my lawyer has advised me to stick to the public documents at least until after the case is resolved, so that's what I'm doing.

It may be true that tomorrow's kids will be "softened up" to the point that they don't care if they're being monitored, but I suspect that the ever-increasing presence of monitoring will make them much more likely to be savvy about it – Junior should be taught that he has the right to monitor anyone who may be monitoring him, and to have access to whatever information they may be gathering about him, rather than to simply fear all monitoring. Therein lies the way to keep the watchers honest, and prevent individuals being harmed by misinformation (including misused true information).

21:00, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT): Made some notes on the MediaWiki code, pursuant to figuring out how to insert more navbar stuff, but now it's bedtime.

2005-06-16

06:39, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Documenting what happens in various MediaWiki files, starting with index.php and Article.php
11:24, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Clearly my mental mis-wiring is a bit different from that of this person; in order to gain an understanding of how a piece of code works, this is the kind of detailed mapping-out I have to do. Which is what I've been doing since the last entry, except for the part about mowing the weeds in the side yard and the shower after that and composing an email to the kids' grandparents to see if they can give me some dates when they could watch the kids so we can get down to Athens to do the paperwork review.
11:37, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Oh, and I should post this chat log of a converation with cutie4 (11 y.o. banned from villageirc for excessive bounciness, back when she was 10; she contacts us via AIM every now and then). The question is, do I brave the ph33rsome NeoPets? Or will they all wonder what I'm doing there if I have no actual interest in having an actual NeoPet? And do I really have time for more socializing, virtual though it would be?
13:30, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Shipped a couple of in-stock items. Back to looking at wiki sourcecode.
14:43, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): *snrk* mine offspring hath sent me a happy father's day letter-ish-kind-of-thing, which I am still struggling to comprehend. It arrived with 23 cents postage due. It includes at least one secret code message.

2005-06-17

06:41, 17 Jun 2005 (CDT): Trying to figure out how to compare all files in one set of directories with those in another (supposedly a complete backup). I've burned the same set to DVD twice, and each time it says there's a file it can't find (presumably in the copy, but it's not clear), and it was the same file both times, and it stopped comparing at 93% both times. What I need to know is (mainly) whether the other 7% of the files are ok, and (secondarily) what the file is -- k3b shows the name, but not the path. (And why, oh why, would a backup verify just stop after finding one mismatched file? It should continue the comparison and then show me a list of all mismatches.)

Also, got the "backlinks" navbox working on wiki.vbz.net last night, so today it's time to change the official "about" and "help" links on vbz.net -- though I may see if I can get the wiki links to be neater...

10:49, 17 Jun 2005 (CDT): KDiff3 seems to do a nice job of comparing directory trees. It can also do a merge -- haven't tried that yet, but it could save me a lot of trouble. But anyway... I did a comparison to the first backup DVD I made, and KDiff3 said it was hunky-dory. So that becomes my "B" copy. Then I ran a compare on the "A" copy, and it says there are 5 files different. Problem is I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to tell me which 5 files.

But now I have to go out, so it'll have to wait.

2005-06-18

06:50, 18 Jun 2005 (CDT): so far, just kind of puttering around and getting my bearings, the way I have to do most mornings. Checking email. Etc.
21:02, 18 Jun 2005 (CDT): Today has been one of those mish-mash kinds of days, wherein I find myself doing about a half-dozen things and could only tell you maybe one or two of them without sitting down and concentrating. Gaah, I need to do that file consolidation, now that the backup is finished burning, and it's past bedtime.

2005-06-19

07:00, 19 Jun 2005 (CDT): Unfortunately, kdiff3 doesn't seem to have an option to move files instead of copying them -- so after I finish this merge, I have to go back and delete the copy I won't be using. This is not a big problem, but it does introduce the possibility of accidentally deleting the wrong thing (which is part of what should be the program's job), and it also means that any files copied will be taking up more room temporarily.

Meanwhile, yesterday evening I got the rest of the vbz policy pages copied over (and protected, and indexed), so today I should be able to start setting up redirects. ...except I keep coming back to the idea that the "missing" (404 error) page could somehow be used to tidy up mediawiki URLs without having to resort to mod_rewrite. So I may end up working on that first.

20:08, 19 Jun 2005 (CDT): The 404 redirect thing should work. Right now I have it working to the point where you can type in http://wiki.vbz.net/arbitrary/web/page and the wiki software will create a page called "Arbitrary/web/page" and load it -- but it does it after redirecting you to the regular ugly-looking wiki-style URL, i.e. http://wiki.vbz.net/index.php/Arbitrary/web/page. So I need to figure out how to kill the redirect (attempt #1 resulted in a page with no title), since as it is now this is only slightly better than what I could do with .htaccess redirects.

Also, we took Josh off to Camp Royal today, courtesy of the ASNC. It's about an hour's drive each way, just past Pittsboro.

2005-06-20

06:57, 20 Jun 2005 (CDT): Z & B start at CFS Summer Camp today, and Josh is off at overnight camp until Friday, so for the first time in several weeks we'll be kid-free during the week. Woot. I'm torn between spending more time on the wiki redirection and just using it as-is, i.e. at least the links will work, and I can fix the implementation later -- except that fixing them may involve experimenting on the wiki software, which might make it stop working for short intervals. They may be short, but I hate to be doing that when it's live, and especially when first impressions are possibly being formed (because it would be linked from vbz.net for the first time). So I'll probably investigate a little more and see if it looks like a brick wall or not.

2005-06-21

06:51, 21 Jun 2005 (CDT): Didn't get to do much, yesterday, of what I said I was going to be doing, between the usual kid pickups plus the usual Monday morning shopping and then on top of that a tech support visit to Harena's mom (which, on the plus side, found a home for the desktop photocopier (offloaded by my parental unit a couple of months ago) which would have been absolutely heavenly to have back in the 1980s and maybe even 1990s but which is just not necessary enough in order to be worth the (always scarce) surface area it would take up, even if it might occasionally save time when we need a quick paper copy and don't want to keep a digital copy as well; generally I try to avoid paper where possible and keep everything on the hard drive these days, so if I need to refer to something I don't have to find the original) which turned out a little longer than usual.

I'm also heavily pondering setting up a wiki for gender issues. It would be pretty easy to set up, but (much like the neglected issuepedia) I'd really need to spend some time creating some content in order not to have wasted the time (and the $12 for the domain, if I wanted it to have one) getting it set up. And that extra time-needed makes it officially a side-track, if I were to do it. So I think I should wait at least until I've got this vbzwiki thing all nicely hooked into vbz.net.

So in theory, I get back to working on the "/index.php/" elimination now... although it will be time to take kids into camp in about 45 minutes.

09:13, 21 Jun 2005 (CDT): ...and then we did a bit of yardwork, because it's nice and cool this morning, and now we're going for a walk, because it's nice and cool this morning.

2005-06-22

14:32, 22 Jun 2005 (CDT): Got nice URLs working reasonably well this morning. There's still a minor glitch in that URLs with spaces in them cause an error, but this can be avoided. So I've redirected all the vbz /about and /help pages, and am (again) rebuilding the main catalog pages so they will have wiki links in them.

Also burning off more stuff onto DVD. Yes, I've managed to fill up a 250 GB hard drive in under six months.

2005-06-23

08:21, 23 Jun 2005 (CDT): Uploading rebuilt vbz pages, burning off more stuff, corresponding with Livia about home surveillance systems, bugging my lawyer to bug the defense lawyer about what date would be acceptable. And now I need to find an ancient home recording and digitize it.
Overview up to the point where the drive died: Migrating old vbz.net help/about pages to the new vbzwiki. Text of all pages has now been moved, and extra navigation links added to the wiki. I'm regenerating the main vbz.net pages with the new wiki links and redirecting the old pages to their new counterparts. In the meantime, I'm trying to do something about the wiki URLs, i.e. get rid of that /index.php/ thing. This can be done (it's documented) with an Apache directive, mod_rewrite, but that solution seems inelegant. I'm convinced that it can be done using the "page not found" page; this solves two problems at once.
20:45, 23 Jun 2005 (CDT): Reeling from sudden death of 60 GB Windows hard drive, just after moving about 5 GB of audio data over there (because the 20 GB was getting full). The main store data is backed up repeatedly on a Linux drive (same computer as the one I browse and email from), but the audio data represents many tens of hours of work and I would very much like to get it back if at all possible. So I'm looking for disk recovery software. I have SpinRite, but it's beyond that -- FDisk shows the partition, but dir returns "invalid media". Scandisk and chkdisk say the same thing. So something more advanced is needed, if anything can be recovered at all.

2005-06-24

06:24, 24 Jun 2005 (CDT): First, I'm going to try some Linux drive-recovery utilities I found last night. Failing that, I'll set the drive aside for later and throw in a spare 20 GB (which I also wanted to check in case it had some files I haven't been able to find since the move over to Linux). First this, which seems to be a collection of security and recovery tools in a bootable Linux distro with convenient menus but also doesn't seem to have been updated since 2004.

2005-06-25

07:00, 25 Jun 2005 (CDT): Fixing breakfast sandwiches for B&Z and reheated chicken for Josh. Then working on setting up a Windows machine, on two fronts: both the actual machine, and also a simulation using Qemu, which could be very useful for the Mayhall project as well (because I can test installations and instantly restore the system to the state it was in before the install by saving backups of the simulated hard drive).
08:25, 25 Jun 2005 (CDT): Hmm, all the VillageIRC servers seem to be having trouble. Ping returns just fine, but IRC connections kind of stall after checking ident, and web pages (e.g. sluggysquad.com) won't load. I'm going to go take a shower and see if anything has changed by the time that's done.
09:00, 25 Jun 2005 (CDT): yay, IRC is back. And my RSS feed is showing SluggySquad again, so the web server is back too.

2005-06-26

07:30, 26 Jun 2005 (CDT): Installing drivers for network card on Mokey. Ran disk defrags all day, then got video drivers working last night (I still had the CD out from last time... hmm...). Meanwhile, the simulated Windows machine (Snuffleupagus) I set up using Qemu (well, actually I originally set it up using Bochs, but then it mysteriously stopped working) is showing great promise -- everything is working except sound (which I probably won't want to bother with) and networking (which is rather important).

And then Benjy came downstairs and revealed that he had broken a plate, apparently not through any direct fault of his own; if there was any blame, it was just because the table was too messy -- he said he moved one thing, and that moved the plate and made it fall. I should probably take points off for letting the table get messy (it's on the points schedule), but for a number of reasons I don't think I will this time.

14:37, 26 Jun 2005 (CDT): Trying once again to find the registration code for Cool Edit Pro. I found it once before (June 4), but I'm looking where I remember looking then and it's not showing up. I have this vague memory that there was some search string I hit upon, and I said "d'oh!" when I thought of it... but "Syntrillium" only pulls up some related stuff, not the actual registration email.

2005-06-27

06:51, 27 Jun 2005 (CDT): I finally did find the Syntrillium email with the Cool Edit Pro registration info in it. Oddly enough, the clue was in a file which looked like a backup of a Vault file, but with no extension -- it was called "misc" -- and Vault wouldn't load it when I tried that. Vault files are mostly plaintext, though, and a text search for "Cool Edit Pro" found the reg info along with a note about the date and where I found the email -- and when I looked at the email on that date, I finally noticed the reg info. It was in about the 10th or 20th instance of "Syntrillium" in that email file, which is probably why I didn't see it.

So, today... I've got networking and sound going on Mokey, and Office 97 is installed, and the backed-up store data files are all back on disk, and a backup batch file set up (and this time, it backs up Vault data and itself). Tried to download the latest orders last night, and that gave trouble, so I may spend some time working on that before I can start processing them. And I need to reinstall Endicia (postage thingy) and PTC, and the modem driver so PTC will work :-P.

07:27, 27 Jun 2005 (CDT): Ok, time for kid-delivery and breakfast and groceries.
09:54, 27 Jun 2005 (CDT): Back from shopping. Still working on getting order downloads to work.

2005-06-28

15:17, 28 Jun 2005 (CDT): Well, today has largely gone rather *zoop*. On the bright side, I spent much of it actually processing orders again, which is good. Everything's working again as far as I can tell. I also spent too much time getting sidetracked into uploading photos (mostly the 2003 NC Zoo trip and the 2003 beach trip).

2005-06-29

21:29, 29 Jun 2005 (EDT): Today... uh, yeah, today I, uh, did stuff. I think. Well, ok, I shipped some in-stock orders. A couple more to go out to Italy tomorrow. Also rebuilt web pages. Also, a slight redesign idea for the store -- as it is now, when you click on a link to the supplier's web page, it takes you first to a pop-up which warns you you're about to leave the vbz site. I'm thinking that maybe it should go instead to the supplier's page on the wiki. This means creating a page for each supplier, but that's not a big deal. The only minor question then is whether this provides enough warning that you're about to leave the site. I'm thinking it does, but we'll see.

Right now, taking a break and transcribing some 45s. Should I compulsively scan the labels and upload them to the wiki? Sure, why not.

Oh, and I had a semi-brilliant idea for reducing the mess next to me on the couch -- it's what I'll call "half-filing". Instead of trying to put every scrap of paper where it ultimately belongs (which has proven to take too much time for me to keep up with it), I put related groups of things together in hanging folders in my portable file box. This should reduce the amount of time needed to sort through them later, I hope. In the meantime, I can actually find things which I know are in my "current pile", which has to be a good thing.

2005-06-30

21:41, 30 Jun 2005 (EDT): Today was a mess, although I did get the two Italy packages shipped. The mess was because the old hypertwiki started giving database errors yesterday evening, and I spent most of the morning trying to fix them. Unfortunately, it seems the mysql installation on the old server was kind of... messed-up. So I set up a new database on my account at TheRealms, and a mere 6 hours later (futzing with lost passwords and phpmyadmin refusing to let me in and other annoyances) we have a wiki again. It refuses to acknowledge the presence of the images I uploaded, but that shouldn't be a big deal to fix. I hope.

So I'm leaving that and other minor cleanup for tomorrow.

And hey, whaddayknow -- this server shows the time correctly.