November 2005 Archives

it has now been several weekends back, but i grabbed some photos of the event from barry’s flickr site. click the image to the side to see all of them.

i have no plan on going into too much detail on this post as since the event has gotten older, the interest in writing this has kind of died. the only reason i never wrote anything prior to tonight is that i have been extremely busy with work and haven’t felt like doing much when i have come home in the evenings.

the camping took place in rocky springs, ms; a place i knew nothing about prior to going there, but apparently, rocky springs is a real ghost town. not a ghost town in the sense that there have been hauntings, but a ghost town in the sense that the town is no longer populated due to weather conditions, bad crops, and disease back in the late 1800’s. we went down on a friday just for the night, planning to come back the following day. we had 2 massive tents that turned out to be too much for the amount of people who decided to stay. some simply didn’t want to put up with 30 degree weather. oh well, their loss. to speed things along. we hiked to an old church, that is still used today, through the woods in the middle of the night. we had some fun trying to frighten the people that stayed when we returned. we ate, slept, and woke. park ranger bugged us around 9am, and we returned around 1pm to civilization (not that we were far from it anyway).

well, there you have it. somewhat short and to the point.

Evening at Adler http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000713.html

October 21, 2005 marked the day of the drunkenbatman hosted event, evening at adler.

i have linked to the drunkenblog in the past on several occasions, and as i have mentioned before, this site is for geeks and people interested in the inner depths of the mac community, so this suggestion is out there for anyone interested in what some of the top indie mac developers out there have to say about various topics.

evening at adler was an event that was hosted by db, but was basically a discussion on anything and everything mac related at the adler planetarium in chicago, il. i guess it is best described by db himself in the following text: On October 21st in the year of ‘05, ten top Mac developers (primarily indies) from around the USA were invited to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL for an evening of conversation around a broad range of topics: Making a living writing for the Mac, software patents, competing with Apple, digital rights management (DRM), software activation, bugs, Ajax, unit testing, building communities, the x86 transition, and much much more… This was recorded, and the video and audio are now online.

there may be very few of my already few readers that would be interested and willing to watch or listen to the discussion that took place, but if you are, i highly recommend it. be forewarned, the video is about 2.5 hours long, so think of steve jobs’ keynote speeches times 3. check it out. EAA

i just found out today that i have a couple more readers than i thought i had that just don’t make comments. in finding this out, i have seen an issue that i have not wanted to face, but may actually try to solve over the next month or so. i just saw my site in internet explorer again after not seeing it in ie for quite sometime. needless to say, it is hideous.

for all the mac users that look at the site, you will not have a problem with safari, firefox, or pretty much any other browser out there for the mac, but windows users (the majority) do not have the same benefit from their primary browser, ie. in order to see the site as i have intended, you will need to download and install firefox. i would recommend this anyway for security purposes, but since internet explorer doesn’t show some proper css and all png’s with alpha transparencies, you will have issues with this site as it is will shows up as very ugly.

i will try to remedy this as much as possible over the course of the next month or so, but i can’t make any promises. my main recommendation is to switch to Firefox, but it kills me to know that some people are looking at the website in a completely different form (and therefore thinking that i have no design talent whatsoever).

since i don’t have any meetings scheduled this morning, i figured i would write about the happenings of the weekend, as the previous post about the upcoming weekend didn’t exactly go to plan. here goes.

as planned i did eat Vietnamese food after work on Friday with some friends, and we did go to one of my friend’s apartments, but it was not until we reached my house for the movie that things took a turn.

earlier in the night, before going to the apartment, i had started boiling some peanuts. before jumping to conclusions, allow me to explain my thought process on this one. i had boiled peanuts several times for these movie nights and all had gone well without ever having to add more water to the pot. boiling peanuts takes about 4 hours, and since i figured the times i had boiled them while i was in the house went without incident, it would do no harm to leave for a little bit while they boiled. well, to ensure all would be well, i put a little extra water in the pot than i have done in the past, just in case.

now, upon getting to the house (with about 10 people following me) i smelt something that was ever so slightly out of place, and when i got out of the car, i heard the smoke detector in the house going off. opening the door, i saw smoke as thick as fog. immediately, smoke started pouring out into my carport and i charged inside to where the pot of peanuts was. i didn’t see any fire, but a lot of smoke was seeping out of the sides of the lid. getting the pot outside, i then opened the lid just to be engulfed with smoke.

the next 15 minutes or so had me charging into the house opening windows and turning on fans, then running outside coughing just to run back in and do it all over again. i should also say that the smoke had filled the entire house, not just the room. the smoke had gone all the way back into all of the bedrooms and closets. it took about 30 minutes to get all the smoke out of the house, but that was just the beginning. since that night, i have been trying to get rid of the smell as best i can as well as washing all the linens and clothes in the house. the smell has improved, but not as much as it needs to. it is still very noticeable. another aspect that i noticed just the other night was that once all the smoke was either gone or settled, it left behind a soot on anything with a hard top. over the next couple of days, i plan on going through the house wiping everything down, but i dread the countless blinds that have soot on them.

Other than stupidity, I think that what caused all the water to boil out faster than before was the level I left the stove at. I didn’t look closely, but I believe I may have left it on too high, and the pot simply got too hot.

well , continuing on, three doors down was a no go. my cousin wasn’t able to get the tickets, so we were left at the house watching “kingdom of heaven” (which turned out to be an excellent movie).

finishing it off, Sunday was spent washing, drying, washing, drying, cleaning, washing, drying, cleaning, etc (you get the point).

to the disappointment of my brother, there will be no downtime this weekend, which means i was able to fix my machine last night. yes, this also means i will not be forced to buy a new computer.

now, how i went about fixing the thing. last night i decided to start backing up all of my stuff in preparation for the weekend when i realized something. At the time, i was using carbon copy cloner (whose site is currently down for some reason) to do a complete backup of my boot drive when i remembered a trick that was used back in the mac os 10.3 days. The trick involved getting an os x install on a case-sensitive hfs+ filesystem. since it was not yet an option for formatting at the time, it was discovered that you could install os x on a drive, use ccc to back up the drive on another drive, reformat the original drive as a case-sensitive hfs+ filesystem using the command line, then use ccc to copy everything back over to the newly formatted drive.

the way that i figured it, i could use the same method, but in reverse. this would be my way of getting my boot drive back to regular hfs+. so i used the above method, but instead reformatted the drive to regular hfs+ so that i could give diskwarrior a shot. i had a feeling that this process may solve the problem anyway and sure enough, it worked (the whole process took about an hour and a half). i did however run diskwarrior to be on the safe side figuring it may find some issues anyway. it did, and i got everything repaired.

making sure it worked, i tested out some of the quirkiness that i had been seeing. safari no longer bombs out on the pages that it was doing so on, and everything appears to be perfectly stable again. i even used isquint to encode a folder full of shows overnight since this was the app that caused the stress that lead to the last kernel panic. this morning, no kernel panic, and isquint had completed its job. all looks well, but the last quirky thing i need to test out is a video chat with my father. i was able to do a video chat with my brother without an issue, but it would fail with my father even though my brother and father could video chat with each other. i will test that one out over the next few days. hopefully all will go well.

although i probably went into way too much detail, i know that at least my brother would be interested in knowing what i had done to solve the problem, so if for no other reason, i wrote all this for him and myself. also, you never know when a simple google search may bring someone here and help them out.

for all 5 of you.

the site will be taken down sometime this weekend for possibly an entire day. i do not know what part of the weekend, but I have some work to do on the computer. i have been having some serious issues with my computer recently that can only be described as quirky. safari blows up from time to time when it shouldn’t, the computer suffers a kernel panic when under a lot of stress when it shouldn’t, and other little quirky things that are just making me mad.

going through a few system utility checks it appears something is royally screwed up with the b-tree catalog file to the point that the apple disk utility program can’t repair it. usually this is no big deal as diskwarrior should be able to properly rebuild it, but i made a mistake when i first installed tiger; i chose the case-sensitive HFS+ file system. diskwarrior doesn’t work with this format and therefore won’t even look at the volume. i also turned to techtool pro to see if there was anything the file structure repair could do just to see it bomb out as well.

long story short, my only option right now is to reformat and re-install and re-configure everything. for me, this is about a 4-5 hour ordeal if i have a straight 4-5 hours to work on it. i need to get apache back up and running along with mysql, phpmyadmin, and all the basic stuff. however, this time i will not choose a case-sensitive file system as i need diskwarrior to work simply because i know diskwarrior would have been able to fix this problem. unfortunately, i do not have time to wait until alsoft updates it to make it compatible with case-sensitive file systems.

if you try to visit this weekend and you get a no hit on the site, wait a day or two. it’ll be back up. until then, i believe survival without icedtrip.net will not be a problem.

the weekend is almost upon us and although just a couple days ago I really didn’t have any plans, last night changed that.

first, we plan to continue our way through the “nightmare on elm street” series leading into part 5 of the series. looks like we may have more people this Friday night than have shown up in the past. about 5-6 people have been coming for the past 4, and it looks like we very well may have 10 or so this time around. looks like i may have to boil some peanuts this time like i did for the first 2. Friday will first begin at Saigon (a Vietnamese restaurant here in town), then to a friends apartment for some fun and games, later ending at my place for the movie.

second comes Saturday. although my day may consist of yard work, i will be going to a concert Saturday night. last night my cousin, trey, called me up asking if i wanted to go to the three doors down concert on Saturday because he had gotten some tickets. now, i am not a big fan of three doors down, but i do enjoy their music from time to time so i agreed to go. it will most likely be packed out since the band is originally from the coast.

and to finish the weekend off, more yard work on Sunday.

at least this beats the past couple of weekends painting, but now that the painting is done, my kitchen, breakfast area, and den look 150% better.