The Matterhorn

I’ve taken the liberty of beating David Ashley to the punch with Debian Etch irssi packages since I just upgraded my machine from Sarge and wanted to clear out as much as possible in the way of pending sysadmin taks in the wake of the warpath of updates and fixes as a result of the distribution upgrade. The Debian patches from 0.8.10 have apparently been committed to the upstream source tree, so these .debs are essentially what you’d get when you compile from source (with the Debian-proper prefixes and such, of course).

With the loose hopes that Google will connect this post to someone that wants them, here you go:

• irssi-dev_0.8.11-1etch1_i386.deb
• irssi-text_0.8.11-1etch1_i386.deb
• irssi_0.8.11-1etch1.diff.gz
• irssi_0.8.11-1etch1.dsc
• irssi_0.8.11-1etch1_i386.deb
• irssi_0.8.11-1etch1_source.build
• irssi_0.8.11-1etch1_source.changes

  http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/

It Just Works. It was $10, but it’s FAR better than anything else I’ve seen for less than that. Far better than anything I’ve seen that was more than a ten spot, too.

Just so we’re clear I did try the Sourceforge project remotecalendars at http://sourceforge.net/projects/remotecalendars but it just didn’t work with outlook 2007… and I’m impatient. Besides, this daveswebsite.com guy made such an elegant interface I was convinced immediately. I’ll definitely check his site for future tools.

I figure I’ll keep populating the blog with some brain candy. This is for Windows users, who can often find themselves in trouble when dealing with their mysterious DNS client.

If you’ve been testing out a new domain or subdomain and have somehow queried it (by ping, using a browser, or some other method) before it comes active on the master nameserver, your system’s DNS client will cache the “nope, no host by that name” response it gets until its default expiration time passes, which is usually five minutes. Even if you use nslookup to check the result, and it comes back favorably, the Windows DNS client will cache the NXDOMAIN answer and none of your applications will be able to access it. Assuming the host should be working at the current time, flushing your system’s DNS is a good step you can take towards checking for problems or saving that five minutes so you can continue work right away. To do so on Windows XP:

• close *all* web browser and e-mail clients.
• hit Start, Run…, and enter into the text field ipconfig /flushdns
• try your lookup again.

If after this attempt you’re still having problems, you’ve eliminated your workstation’s cache from the problem and can use nslookup or other tools to check your resolving DNS directly.

Another way around this, though usually not recommended, is to shut off the caching system entirely:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318803

Well, since I’d recently assembled a Wordpress site for a friend, I figured I ought to upgrade my installation as well since it was quite old. Interestingly enough there seems to be a rather robust spam protection plugin included that I’ve switched on. Hopefully it works well and I can turn off comment moderation!

PuTTY Tray is a version of the mighty PuTTY terminal emulator that includes some community patches and custom streamlining, overall introducing a few more “modern” features:

Try it out here!

Okay, now I’m upset.

As if I didn’t have enough other [audio] stuff I wanted to buy, I had to find out about this. Welcome to the new generation of the DJ performance. After speaking to some of my audiohead friends we came to the conclusion that the next Good Thing would involve a great hybrid mixer that allows you to connect whatever existing gear you had (turntables, cd decks, etc.) with your favorite DJ software (Traktor in my case), with your MIDI controllers abound for a crossfader, EQ knobs, and maybe jog wheels.

Well, take that and add a contained computer audio system, fully routable internal and external send/returns, optical in/out, internal and external MIDI in/out, and that’s about what you have pictured. This broke my mold for sure.

Basically, one could get a riggable mixer rack and mount this in it with a tight keyboard & touchscreen LCD behind it, connected to a rackmount case mounted in a lower bay of the rack with all the disk/CPU you could want. You might want to use hotswappable drives in a RAID array if you travel with it often so you don’t crash and burn when a disk fails. This PC could be loaded with Ableton Live, Traktor, and all the VST/DX/et al effects you could dream of. Given the number of tunes you could load onto a drive, combined with all of your personal edits and bootlegs, and all of your new compositions, you have one piece of work loaded into this box.

I want one. I might design something to the above specifications and try to market them. Done correctly I don’t see how anyone who depends on DJing to live would want anything but this.

In a fantasy life I would be bragging about when this will be shipping to my door. Unfortunately my current status suggests I start saving pennies, or become a mercenary.

I’m available for night jobs and weekend raids. Assignments requiring lethal force are not preferred, but will be considered for the short term. Fee is $25,000 per 24 hours with 40% paid in advance.

It’s inevitable that one will make mistakes while doing whatever it is they do for their job.

However, take situation A:

Harry America is working on Joe Customer’s old car. Harry needs to perform maintenance on Joe’s carburetor. While monkeying with the fuel jet, Harry drops the nut that holds the carburetor together down the manifold into the engine block. Harry is, for the most part, screwed. He really should have taken the carburetor off the manifold before working on it. Harry does, however, have possible retribution for the mistake, however ugly and time consuming it is.

…now, compare situation A to situation B:

Matt…err, we’ll call him Max. Max Henderson, the mighty IT administrator. Max is making adjustments to Joe Important’s database systems, where the database importantdb is chugging away, doing important things which Joe relies on 24 hours a day.

Max is given the charge to expand Joe’s empire and creates the database importantdb2:

create database importantdb2;

A few minutes later, it is concluded that importantdb2 should be somewhere else, not on the same system as importantdb.

So, Max removes importantdb2:

drop database importantdb;2

..whoops! Max was typing too fast and made a small error. It should have been:

drop database importantdb2;

The result of the misplaced semicolon instantly trashes Joe Important’s extremely valuable database. Weeping and gnashing of teeth occur. Max prepares for seppuku. Max is, without a doubt, completely and utterly screwed. He really should have been typing a bit more carefully. There is no chance for retribution.

…

I should have been a mechanic.

This place is a good one to statically bring up neat Firefox widgets I come across and use.

The latest one I’ve found to be invaluable is ‘Viamatic foXpose‘ which lets you hit the shortcut it makes in the bottom left of the frame or hit Ctrl Shift X, which brings up a navigation menu full of whatever tabs you have open in your particular browser window.

It’s pretty great. If you use Firefox, you should try it. If you don’t use the browser yet (v1.5 just recently released!), then try Firefox itself first.