New website for my wife’s business

Posted on 2005-10-07 by Jim Vanderveen

I’m in the process of re-working my wife’s quilting website. (It’s so pathetic right now that I’m ashamed to link to it.) I originally hand-rolled some PHP and CSS for her. It got the job done, sort of, but I’ve never been very happy with it. After using WordPress here, I got the idea that it would do a much better job than my own pitiful code. So here’s how I set up WP as a content management system (rather than a blog server) for my wife’s site. This is my third WP install, and I’ve learned a few things from the first two iterations. I even managed to document my second installation which has been helpful this time, so I’m documenting even more thoroughly this time around.
Continue reading →

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Gönül’s European Bistro

Posted on 2005-10-07 by Jim Vanderveen

My wife and I had lunch today at Gönül’s on ‘J’ Street in midtown Sacramento. In a word: Awesome!

We ordered (and split) the artichoke ravioli and margarita (the pizza, not the drink), both for $8.95 on the lunch menu. I’m glad we arranged to split these, because they were both delicious although I’m not sure I could have finished either of them on their own. (Too much of a good thing, you know?) There were a bunch of entrees that sounded good on the menu, definitely some difficult choices ahead the next time we eat here.

The interior of this place was pretty striking. Very high ceilings (~15 feet), interesting curves, angles, lighting, upholstry and paint colors. Lots of art on the walls, much of it very attractive. The whole south side of the room made up of tall windows looking onto the patio tables and ‘J’ Street. (Perhaps not the most beautiful view at lunch time, but the natural light is very pleasant.)

We’ll definitely be back to sample more of this excellent food!

Gönül’s J Street Café
3839 ‘J’ Street
Sacramento, CA 95816
(916) 457-1155

Update 2006-03-31: I received an email alerting me that the blog software returns “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria” when searching for Gonul’s (without the umlauts). So I’ll try to be sure and include the ASCII spelling in all posts about this restaurant. I’ll also tag all posts with the keyword gonuls.

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DiskWarrior finally completed “step 5”

Posted on 2005-10-06 by Jim Vanderveen

Sometime Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, DiskWarrior finally completed “Step 5: Locating directory data…” which gives an elapsed time of 200-216 hours or almost 9 days! It’s currently working on “Step 6: Overlapped files detected: 146” which translates to quite a bit of manual effort for me. 🙁 Step 6 has been running for somewhere between 26-41 hours as of this post.

Lessons learned:

  1. Backups!
  2. Don’t trust Apple’s disk diagnostics. Run the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics from the DW CD before attempting recovery with DW!
  3. If the diagnostics indicate disk failure, don’t use DW. Try DataRescue instead. There’s no point running DW on failing hardware.
  4. Backups!

I’ll update this post as steps are finished.

Update 2005-10-06 23:58:27 UTC: It’s been on step 6 all day, now up to 186 overlapped files detected, sigh. I’m about to leave for the night. Hopefully tomorrow will be the day I get my data back…

Update 2005-10-10 15:48:55 UTC: It spent all weekend on step 6, now up to 675 overlapped files after more than 5 days. Ugh!

Update 2005-10-11 15:40:36 UTC: Step 6 has been running 6 days. Overlaped files detected: 807. And counting… 🙁

Update 2005-10-12 14:34:20 UTC: 7 days, 935 overlapped files. I am so screwed…

Update 2005-10-14 00:37:53 UTC: It’s now been almost 9 days since step 5 completed.
Step 6: Overlapped files detected: 1124
😥

Update 2005-10-17 15:26:00 UTC: 12 days on step 6 now, 1605 overlapped files. I’ve got a lot of time invested in this, but I’m starting to wonder if it’ll be worth it. (Of course, my co-workers have been telling me to bail on this process for quite a while now. Considering that I’ve been running DW for three weeks, they have some reason.)

Update 2005-10-24 17:23:46 UTC: Step 6 is on its 19th day, 2512 overlapped files. I’ve been running DiskWarrior for 4 weeks straight. I’m really missing my laptop (whimper). I’ll be crossing the 1-month boundary this week, and if it’s not done by then I’m giving up.

Update 2005-11-09 18:09:25 UTC: After more than five weeks (and 4586 overlapped files) on “Step 6,” I’m giving up.

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What happened to “Air America Radio” in Sacramento?

Posted on 2005-10-05 by Jim Vanderveen

My wife and I usually wake up to Air America Radio, broadcast in Sacramento by KSAC, Talk City 1240 AM. But on Monday, Oct 3, the clock-radio woke us up with music instead of Morning Sedition with Mark and Marc (Mark Riley and Marc Maron). I thought maybe the kids had been messing with radio, or maybe there were “technical difficulties” at the station. But today the same thing happened, so I started scouring the ‘net looking for answers.

First stop was Talk City 1240’s web site, which wasn’t encouraging. Their “On-Air Schedule” has all the previous Air America time slots listed as “To Be Announced.” They still have an Air America Radio logo on their banner, but none of the programming.

Next stop was Air America Radio’s web site. I searched for “Sacramento” on their station locator page, but the only station listed is KSAC 1240 AM.

I found a post by bonniesac which talks about Air America changing frequencies and moving to 1320 AM on 1 Nov 2005, but this doesn’t explain the absence of programming today. bonniesac is blogging on the Sacramento for Democracy site, which unfortunately doesn’t allow unregistered users to post comments. (Perhaps a pingback from this post will get through, but I’m not hopeful.)

There is another post, this time on the Morning Sedition blog, which also discusses the frequency change. It also has some theories on the lack of official information from both Talk City 1240 and Air America. (And again, this blog doesn’t allow unregistered users to comment. Closed blogs suck, but that’s a subject for another post.)

I haven’t found anything else yet, but this seems to explain what’s going on. I guess all us progressive/liberal types will have to get Air America programming via the Internet for the rest of October, before switching to the new station next month.

Andy let me know that the Sacramento Bee ran an article about this recently.

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Web tools for keeping tabs on Congress

Posted on 2005-09-30 by Jim Vanderveen

Want to know who your Representative is? Check out Project Vote Smart! Just enter your 9-digit ZIP code and you’ll get a whole list of both federal and state elected officials, each linked to an information page containing contact information (among lots of other things).

Looking for the most recent action on a bill in Crongress or the Senate? Go to THOMAS and enter the bill number, including the prefix letters. For example, to see House Resolution 3824, enter “hr3824″ in the Search Bill Text box. Be sure to check the button for searching by bill number instead of keyword. You can find the most recent status of the bill (e.g. sent to a committee, reported to the House, etc.) by following the “Bill Summary & Status file” link. For more information on THOMAS, see the THOMAS FAQ. Bloggers/netizens note:

How do I link a particular part of THOMAS to my own web site?
You can create a permanent link to a bill … by using UNIX GET or POST protocols… It is necessary to use these protocols because the URL addresses you see when you execute a search are temporary addresses…
— from the THOMAS FAQ

Be sure to check out the POST instructions in the link above. I used them to whip up the button below to show the bills that my so-called Representative, Dan Lungren, sponsored or cosponsored in this (the 109th) session of Congress:

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Sacramento “Go” club

Posted on 2005-09-28 by Jim Vanderveen

I was posting the next meeting of the Sacramento Go Club on the Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group, but this week for some reason Meetup’s software is giving me grief about the event’s URL. I’m guessing it’s barfing on the ‘~’ character in the URL, which is perfectly legal (and worked fine until a few days ago). I really want a URL for the event, so I’m posting it here. Thanks, Meetup. It’s not enough that you’re charging me to organize cool events, now I’ve got to do fake redirects to keep your damn site happy. 😛

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A Pending Ping Crisis?

Posted on 2005-09-28 by Jim Vanderveen

Kevin Burton frets about a potential “ping crisis”:

…in the long run it seems to be a big difficult (sic):
1. Everyone wants to spam you.
2. You’re not a consumer level service so you can’t run Ads to make money.
3. The more traffic you get the more your costs go up.
4. Scaling a system is difficult once you get to that volume.
5. All your pings need to be delivered fast (see #4).

Those are some interesting points to ponder. Point #1 is particularly troublesome, so let’s think about points 2-5 first. It seems to me that we’d do well to look at some other services for ideas and inspiration. The first one that comes to my mind is DNS. No ads on DNS, and not many fees are being charged for it. Perhaps we should come up with some sort of distributed model for handling blog pings? If we have a distributed service, no single server would have to bear the entire load, and we can probably avoid the traffic cost and scaling issues. But now about point #5 — Obviously pings need to be acknowledged very quickly, but do pings need to be delivered fast? Joseph’s ping service is based on a queueing model, which seems reasonable and more practical to me. What do I care if my posts are advertised “immediately” or I have to wait 5 minutes?

So now back to point #1, blocking spam. Do we need some sort of RBL? Open-source tools to identify spam? I really don’t know the answer to this. We need some input from people on the front lines about this topic.

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Still rebuilding my laptop disk

Posted on 2005-09-28 by Jim Vanderveen

In an earlier post/comment I started running DiskWarrior in an attempt to recover my laptop’s failed harddrive. Still running after 47 hours, but no sign of progress (or failure) yet…

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Testing new ping service

Posted on 2005-09-27 by Jim Vanderveen

Ping-o-Matic (the default pub-notification service in WordPress) is a great idea: You publish a new post, and WordPress notifies PoM, and PoM passes the update along to a whole bunch of update services. Very slick! But there are two problems with it:

  1. Single point of failure. If PoM is down (or busy or otherwise unavailable) when you click the Publish key, you’ll get to watch your browser spin in circles for a bit while it tries to contact PoM.
  2. Real-time pinging. If PoM is available when you Publish, it seems like it holds you connection while it notifies all the update services.

Joseph started discussing these problems with me the other day, and the delays I’ve sometimes noticed upon clicking the Publish button came to mind. Turns out that he had an idea for a streamlined notification service, which he’s now opened up for testing. I’ve installed the new service in place of PoM, and it seems to be a significant improvement. I’d like to collect some data comparing the new service to PoM, to get a more objective look at this.

Some things to note:

  • Joseph’s service could still be a single point of failure, assuming one were to replace PoM with this service in the Options/Writing/Update Services setting.
  • The basic idea of the new service is to respond to a blog’s update notification as fast as possible, then later to notify all the update services. The cost of this approach is a small delay (a few minutes) between publication and notification, but the quick response between clicking Publish and getting back to my blog admin page is worth it!
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