My new address: http://ahpook.vox.com/ I'll probably keep this site to put up links to stuff that is hosted here , and obviously if Vox decides to kick everybody off and recycle the electrons (as their EULA reserves them the right to do) I'll pick back up where I left off. But otherwise, head over there for bloggy goodness.

Note: this was a reponse to my sister-in-law Ida's question about the state of the Mac world. Figure I'll post it since I spent a pretty long time writing it and it might help others...

Hi Ida - Yes I got both Jen and me new Macs. I am super happy with mine (I got the MacBook Pro laptop) and Jen is slightly less happy with her Mac Mini but I have been able to address most of her problems the past couple days so it's working out a bit better. She was really used to Windows and the "out of the box" stuff on the Mac did not work as well as the programs she was used to so we had to go get some add on software to make her life easier.

The big question these days for mac buyers is whether you want a PowerPC or Intel chip in it. This is a somewhat geeky issue but it bears directly on your questions so bear with me for a moment. Macs traditionally had chips made by IBM called PowerPC as their CPU (central processing unit -- what makes the whole thing go). You will see this on the different machine specs as "G4" or "G5" - these are successive generations of PowerPC chip and generally higher = faster and more expensive. The latest PowerPC macs are G5s at around 2 Gigahertz (there are no 3 Gig macs so that spec from your computer guy won't translate directly). In January however, Apple announced that from now on it'd be making new Macs with Intel chips in them instead of PowerPC. On the specs for various machines these have names like "Core 1.5Ghz" and "Core Duo 1.8Ghz" -- hah hah, Apple Core get it? Again, no 3ghz systems but for various reasons they don't need to be that fast to be enjoyable.

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Good to know I'm not totally insane. At least, not in this regard. I've been sort of obessesed with the idea that we ought to be running our datacenter equipment off 208v circuits rather than good ol' 110. A catastrophic HVAC failure in our datacenter left temperatures way too hot (see temp graph after the jump!) focused my attention on the tremendous amount of heat our dual-opteron compute farm pumps out.

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We got a pretty nice Panasonic DV camera a few weeks ago, but I just got around to figuring out how to pull the video off it on and onto the computer. It took a $25 1394 cable (thanks Frys!) and 'yum install kino' (thanks, Dag!) but here's the first result... 2.1 mb of Grandpére and Gunnar walking along together.

walking.avi - Right click, Save as... If you don't have the DivX codec installed you can get it here
Here's another, three weeks later and now G is walking unassisted! walking2.avi

Here's a network diagram to go along with my post to sguil-users. The facts of the diagram are true, only the IP addresses have been removed to protect the innocent. Click the thumbnail for a larger version.

Comment spam sucks. It's unfortunate that somehow the comment spam gets the spammers any measurable amount of success, PageRank or otherwise, because it gives them a reason to continue to do it. And comments are otherwise quite useful things. Last week I read a bunch of philisophical treatises on the merits and drawbacks of Movable Type's proposed solution to comment spam, known as TypeKey -- see this post at the MovableBlog for a cogent summary of the issues -- but despite the soul-searching and gnashing of teeth it really does seem to raise the bar enough to prevent most of the commentspam without being unduly burdensome for legitimate commenters. I've gone ahead and set it up here at explosive.net, and figured I would post for posterity the steps I went through to get it working.

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Here's hexogen's config for doing multihoming via 'ip rule'. This came about as described in the LARTC, but it's about to go away (we're cancelling the XO SDSL) so I figured I'd document it here for posterity.

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After my music collection bloated past a certain point, maybe back at about 40 gigs (it's now 70+) XMMS really got to be a drag. I had two modes of operation: either queueing up an album at a time via the commandline, or navigating around a big playlist I built with 'find . -name "*.mp3" | sort'. Neither made me very happy, but all the alternatives I've tried made me even unhappier.

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