Mike O’Connor

Complete geek heaven.  Great band.  Great Rube Goldberg device.  4 videos describing the collaboration they put together. Must see, if you're a geek.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/

This is a piece by Jeff Lange in Volume One, Number Three of "Spread the WORT" -- the newsletter of WORT-FM (Madison, WI) just as it was going on the air in 1975.  I've always loved this description of the consensus decision-making process we used to run the station.  All due apologies to Pogo...

The big deal?  The sentence that really catches it for me is "we ad WORT don wanna tred up on the wee miroridy vuponts, so we jus wade undill eberyone am finely agreed."  Still works for me today, some 35 years later.  Thanks Jeff!

Here's my translation, since many of you aren't native-English speakers and might find this pretty tough to read in Jeff's native Pogo-style language.  Apologies to Jeff for any mistranslations.

Yes, it's a curious fact, that nobody is ever able to quite explain, how decisions get made at this particular radio station.  But they do.  This is a grievous hard and ticklesum thing for newcomers to digest.  Take, for example, the familiar caller who, in a fever pitch of excitement, has phoned up the station with his or her (or "it's" for that matter) idea for a program.   Rnnng.  He (let's just say it's a "he") says "My dog can bark heavy metal rock n'roll -- can he have 5 hours on Tuesday nights?"   Well, the person at the station (say it is a person) says "Isn't that the same thing as what's on WBRK every night?"  The caller replies "Yes, but my dog barks badder!"  Then that, says the person, is a question for the Program Committee.

The best thing then is if the caller hangs up, thinking all is well for the Program Committee will do its duty.  But if the caller says "Oh, what's the Program Committee?" then the person has to explain: The Program Committee are all the people that come to the Program Committee Meeting.  You can come.  So can your mother.  It's Friday at 8pm.  No, they never vote on anything.  Voting is against the rules.  So is parliamentary procedure. They just talk about things until everyone is agreed, and that is consensus -- the highest form of unanimity.

Then the caller says "oh."

Then the person at the radio station should continue: "Yes, it's a curious fact, but it seems to work.  So far, at least.  We at WORT don't want to tread on the wee minority viewpoints, so we just wait until everyone is finally agreed.  Nope, it's never failed yet...  which just goes to prove: you can make some of the decisions all of the time, and all of the decisions some of the time..."

Then the caller says, "can you put me through to the general manager?"

"No, there isn't a general manager.  Would you like to talk to Sarah-Gene?"

"She the owner?"

"Nope.  She's just another volunteer."

I did a nice geek project over the weekend -- repairing the weather-stations here at the farm.  We've had a couple stations (one on the ridge, one in the valley) for a couple years.  I had this lash-up gizmo put together with a couple of machines, each talking to one weather station and then trading data, to come up with a single (crummy) web site.  In short, a kludge.  The whole thing died when I pulled the plug on one machine and upgraded the other to Vista.  The weather stations still worked just fine, but they couldn't share their weather goodness with the rest of you...

Until this weekend.  I finally got off my rusty-dusty and figured out a whole buncha stuff to get them back on the net.  Here's their new web site:

www.APrairieHaven.com/Weather

Write that down.  Now you can look over my shoulder and see what kind of weather we've got.  Mostly we're interested in two things.  How is the weather?  And, how does the weather down here in the valley differ from the weather up on top of the ridge?  Now we've got a nice little site to find those things out.

There are some cool tricks in that site.  The best one is that whole thing is generated from one PC using Davis WeatherLink software to talk to two weather stations at the same time (multiple loggers and multiple weather stations on the same PC).  The trick there is to set up WeatherLink, copy the whole Weatherlink program directory and then run two instances of the program at the same time.  Weirdly, it works.  No shared DLLs.  What luck.

... that really do a good job of summarizing the security situation and the dilemmas it poses.

Leading off with Michele Neylon's post which explains his reasons for skipping this meeting and the need for thoughtful discussion (comments are really good on all these posts by the way)

http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2010/02/13/personal-reflections-on-icann-nairobi/

Maria Farrel posts a very balanced/detailed note about the situation here (Rod Beckstrom, ICANN CEO, posted in the comments)

http://crookedtimber.org/2010/02/12/14645/

Kieren McCarthy (until recently the ICANN staff person responsible for remote participation) posted a followup here -- which really does a great job of turning lemons into lemonade in my view by saying that this may be the event that really pushes the remote-participation capability to new levels

http://kierenmccarthy.com/2010/02/12/why-icann-nairobi-may-be-a-blessing-in-disguise/

Nick Ashton-Hart (current ICANN staff person in charge of remote participation) posted this in the comments to Michele's post;

"Thanks Michele for your thoughtful and balanced post. I, too, would like to echo the call that people respect each other's choices about attending or not attending the meeting. I think that characterising the choices of others in negative terms doesn't really benefit anyone.

We are working very hard internally on remote participation for this meeting; I'm the overall coordinator of the effort. I think everyone will find that things RP-related at Nairobi take quite a leap forward from previous meetings.

You will find that when the schedule is posted on the 15th, detailed information on remote participation for all sessions is published along with the session information. More details will follow shortly thereafter too."

I'm still on the fence -- read those posts for the reasons why I'm still leaning towards going.  But we'll see...

This just in from The Onion News Network

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/new_law_would_ban_marriages?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

Thanks for the tip Wayne!

I'm thinking another fold-out business card may be required;

Volunteer
Vice Chair of Finance and Operations (of the)
Commercial and Business Users Constituency (which is part of the)
Generic Name Supporting Organization (which is in turn part of the)
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Can you see why ICANN has a bafflegab problem?

I'm quite excited about this one -- it's got lots of tasty issues and it's the ops and finance stuff that I love to do. 

I had another fold-out business card job back in the early '90's.  That fold-out business card read;

Temporary Interim Acting Assistant Associate
Vice President (supervising)
Administrative Information Systems
Business Operations
Quality Management
Operations Improvement (for the)
University of Minnesota

or...  Vice President of Stuff that is Busted.  This new gig is a lot less complicated than that one was.

Here are links to his first State of the Union speech and the Q&A portion of his remarks to the House Republicans two days later.  The real deal instead of the sound bites.  Hey, this guy's still got it for me.  Just sayin'...

State of the Union

Q&A - Republican Caucus

Ah bafflegab. A word steeped in tradition. This word was invented in the early '50's by a fella named Milton A. Smith -- who received an award for inventing it. At the awards ceremony, he was asked to define it. here's his response;

"Multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies."

You can read the whole article i stole this from here -- http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-baf1.htm

Hm.  Cold day today.  Nothing much to do.  But I do own a tape measure just like the ones these guys are using...

I know.  I should have upgraded MySQL long ago.  But I didn't realize how easy it was, so I put it off until... now.   The latest version of Wordpress (Wordpress 2.9) doesn't work on really old versions of MySQL like my ancient 4.0.27.  Further complicating things is the need to cut blogs and sites over one at a time so's to be a little prudent about all this.  "Big bang" upgrades seems to result in just that for me -- a big bang and then lots of screaming.

I figured out a pretty tidy way to do this, with tips from Garrick VanBuren and Natn Johnston.  Rather than go into lots of detail about what didn't work, here's what did work.  This little recipe is mostly for me, since I'm not going to do all these at once and I'll likely forget some critical bits if I don't write them down.

Ingredient 1 -- multiple instances on MySQL on the same box

This way, I can move the sites over one at a time rather than crashing them over all at once (and most likely breaking things)

• Download the non-installer distribution of mySQL 5.1
• Unzip it into a new directory
• Set up the "my.ini" or "my.cnf" file (depending on whether you have a Windows server or a non-Windows server) to point at a new port -- I used 3307,  one larger than the standard 3306 that's the mySQL default
• run the new instance from the command line (paying special attention to specifying the correct ini/cnf file) until things are running right.  Here's an example for the command-line;

  • in-the-new-mysql-bin-directory> mysqld --defaults-file="c:\program files\mysql\mysql server 5.1\my.ini" --console

• Get yer daemon running -- on Windows that means setting it up as a service, again making sure to point at the port-3307 version of the ini/cnf file

Ingredient 2 -- loading up the new version of the database

• Create a new empty database (in the new instance of mySQL) with the same name as your existing blog's database, let's call it "YourBlogDatabase" in this writup -- I did this with MySQL Control Panel but there are lots of ways to do this, including the command line
• Create a new user (again, with the same username and password as your existing blog, eg YourSQLPassword and YourSQLUserName), also in the new instance of mySQL
• Dump the existing database (from your old instance of mySQL) -- use mysqldump from the command line of the /bin/ directory of the old instance to do this.  Here's an example;

  • in the old-mysql/bin directory> mysqldump -uYourMySQLUserName -pYourMySQLPassword YourBlogDatabase > YourBlogDatabaseDumpFile.sql

  • Note -- the username and password syntax is purposely without spaces
  • Note -- pay attention to directories and paths here.  I did all this from the command line and moving between the /bin/ directory of the mySQL instances.  I didn't set up path variables because I wanted to be very sure of which versions of programs I was using at any given time.
• Reload the blog database (in the new instance of mySQL) -- shift back to the new mySQL's /bin/ directory so you're sure to be using the right version of the command.  Here's an example;

  • in the new-mysql/bin directory> mysql -uYourMySQLUserName -pYourMySQLPassword YourBlogDatabase < YourBlogDatabaseDumpFile.sql

  • Note -- really use the mysql command here, not mysqldump.
  • Note -- I found that sometimes I had to specify the port to get this to work right.   "--port=3307" on the end of the command did the trick
  • Note -- be prepared to wait for a little while for this to complete if your database is big.  I'm in hour 5 of a big reload as I type this.
  • Note -- if you're nervous and want to monitor progress, use MySQL Control Panel to watch the tables grow by disconnecting and reconnecting to the database in the control panel and opening up the tables.  See?  They're getting bigger.  All is well, you just have to wait.

Ingredient 3 -- new Wordpress Code and new wp-config.php file

After all, this is an upgrade, right?  I was extra-conservative this time through.  Normally, I just dump the new Wordpress files right on top of the old ones and it all works fine.  This time, I made backup copies of the directories just in case things needed to be rolled back.  Here are the steps I went through.

• Make a copy of the blog/Wordpress directory and files
• Copy the new Wordpress 2.9 files on top of the existing directory (not the backup)
• Replace the old leftover wp-config.php file with a newly created one that's got all the same info as your old one except:
  • Change the hostname to point at the port of the new mySQL server -- here's an example where I'm pointing at port 3307;

  • define('DB_HOST', 'localhost:3307');

  • Comment out the 'DB_CHARSET' line -- that avoids the "funny characters in my blog" problem that sometimes arises during this process.  Here's how it looks if you comment it out (alternatively, you could just delete it);

  • /* define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8'); */

Try it out!

After all, what could go wrong??   Go to the wp-admin page of your blog.  If things are according to plan, Wordpress will want to upgrade the database.  Once that's done, things should be working normally, except you're on the new version of Wordpress.

What if it breaks?

Oh well, so who's perfect.  Replace the new Wordpress files directory with your old files (I'd rename both directories -- so you've still got new stuff to play with, but your blog's running again).  With your old files back in place, your old blog should reappear since it's now using the old files and the old wp-config file is pointing at the old database.  Then, sit down and figure out what went wrong.

Hi all,

Here we are again on the couch. 2nd year at the condo at 1666 Coffman St. and my goodness the miles that have been traveled since the last time this picture was taken a year ago. Note the boys short-hair fashion that seems to prevail.

Robert and Richard both graduated from college this year! Into the worst job-market in living memory! What luck! Both of them spent the summer adventuring before settling in to the workaday world.

Richard (middle right) spent his summer paddling down the Mississippi to New Orleans with his buddy Phil Middleton. An amazing saga that took just over 2 months. A link to their blog is included on the List O’Links (see below). He’s studying to be an EMT in NOLA and hopes to start working at it in January.

Robert returned to India for the summer, working for the New India Express online unit based in Chennai (formerly Madras). He had a great experience and learned the definition of “hot weather” while he was there. He’s back in town, working as a reporter for KFAI radio (see List O’Links for some of his reports)

Marcie has started a web site that collects photos of insect life-cycles from citizen scientists and continues to blog about all the restoration stuff that’s going on at the farm. She’s also converting part of the grounds at our condo to prairie meadow, helped by several co-conspirators (see List O’Links for all of this).

I did a lot of volunteer policy-wonk stuff this year. The biggest piece involved the MN Ultra High Speed Broadband Task Force – I worked really hard and did several blogs about that stuff (yep, List O’Links). I didn’t make it to any ICANN meetings, but did lotsa working-group work over the wire.

Here's the List O'Links if you want to learn more...

Richard

• Paddling the Mississippi to New Orleans -- Click HERE.

Robert

• Reporting on predatory lending by bailed-out banks -- Click HERE
• Reporting on Ramsey County being sued for not treating prisoners with tuberculosis -- Click HERE
• Robert's blog -- Click HERE

Marcie

• The new Bug Lifecycles page -- Click HERE
• The prairie-meadow project at the condo -- Click HERE
• Marcie's blog about the farm -- Click HERE

Mike

• Blog about the high-speed broadband taskforce -- Click HERE
• Mike's regular blog and home-page -- Click HERE

And, for those of you who are still reading, here's a copy of the photo we used on the card this year.

Happy Holidays!

Click HERE for a graphic developed by Brian Solis and JESS3 called "The Conversation  -- the art of listening, learning and sharing."  Sorry guys, I'm not trying to steal your Google love, it's just that all the places I found your picture made it so small I couldn't read it.

This is a great 2009 snapshot of a bunch of different platforms that are out there to conduct that Conversation.  It'll be interesting to check back in a few years and see how the landscape has changed.

We bought Jon Seltzer's old (early '60's) boat and beat the crap out of it up on the St Croix river when we had the cabin.  It wound up spending 10 years in the garage, gently guilt-tripping me and asking to be restored.  I finally realized that I a) didn't have the time and b) didn't have the skills to fix it up and we teamed up with Jim at Imperial Boat Repair to get the job done right.

Several things are going on here.  We married the old 40 hp Yamaha that used to push our pontoon boat with the Whaler this time around.  I decided that meant we needed a new transom, partly because I was worried that the old '60's transom would just fall off the boat with the bigger motor and partly because this is a long-shaft motor and the transom needed to be higher in order for things to work right.

All of the interior wood was shot, so I ran off to Teh Internets and bought new wood that Jim installed (abandoning my long-procrastinated original plan of refinishing the old wood).

Then there was the job of Getting The Goo Off The Boat.  You can see from the "before" pictures that I took a half-hearted run at washing that stuff off in a few places, but none of the stuff I used really worked worth a darn.  Jim and his gang acid-washed the boat and presto! it's nifty.

Meanwhile the motor went off to Jim's favorite mechanic (pictured below) and got the once-over, since it hadn't been run in 10 years and wasn't put away very carefully.  Then Jim and the gang rerigged all the wiring and controls, threw in a bilge pump and a depth-sounder, rewired/repaired the trailer and today Marcie and I dropped by to pick it up.  These pictures tell the story.

Pretty nifty huh??  I think we'll wait 'til Monday to put it in the Mississippi (down by Alma, Wi) to avoid the weekend-boater crazies.  Then we'll see how fast an old 13 foot Boston Whaler goes with a 40 on it.  I'm sure it'll be fast enough for me.  I'll add an update and some more pictures after the maiden voyage.

Nice river scum!

Old transom - pretty rotten, pretty nasty

Mike's lame attempt at cleaning

Note the out-of-whack trailer

Detail of new transom, under construction

New transom

Rewiring the trailer

Jim (left) and Steve fixing the trailer

Cleaning carbs on the motor

Poor motor -- lotsa gunk!

Check out the new tonneau top!

Steve and Jim in front of the boat they repaired. Way to go!

Back home. Big difference!

New transom, and trailer straps

New console, steering, switches, depth-gauge (on top, behind steering wheel). Nice rigging, eh?

Transom's not so nasty now. See that gas tank under the front seat?

New gas tank, under front seat

Detail of the new bilge pump. Never had one before.

Another transom shot

I love this transom

OK, so here's a dead-simple idea.  Shorten your own dang URLs instead of letting the URL-shorteners steal your Google-love.

Step 1 -- get yourself an abbreviated version of your domain name.

This site is my old standby blog.  A dumping ground for all the ideas that can't find a home on one of my other sites.  It used to have the HAVEN.com domain-name but I lucked out and sold that name a few years ago so now it's on the HAVEN2.com name.  Not bad, six letters, pretty short.  But shorter is better.  So I just ran off and got HVN2.com and loaded it on the server so it points to the same site as HAVEN2.com.

Step 2 -- load up the "non-WWW" version of your new shorter domain-name

Egad!  Another 4 letters wasted if you have to put that on your URL!  Make sure that your site answers to the shorter version as well as the "www." version of your spiffy short domain name.

Step 3 -- Wordpress users -- use the "ugly" version of your links

Here's a great post from SheepTech that describes how your WordPress blog is already providing you with a darn short URL.  Click HERE to read his article.  In short, your WordPress blog creates a short "ugly" URL in addition to whatever "pretty" URL you've specified.  So you can save a bunch of characters by using that ugly URL.  The format looks like this (using the URL for this post);

http://hvn2.com/?p=209

That's pretty darn short!  Way shorter than the "normal" URL for this post, which is;

http://www.haven2.com/index.php/archives/shortening-my-own-urls

It's not quite as short as the URL-shorteners, but the nice thing is that it's MINE.