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Stuff + nonsense. Updated daily. So far. Pretty much. Overwrought by Scott Knaster.
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Friday, March 28, 2003
Wacky San Francisco
Everybody knows San Francisco is weird -- just ask your mom -- but this article in The Wave Magazine lists a few of the more bizarre yet obscure attractions in everybody's favorite city. Favorites include the Defenestration Building, the world's weirdest sushi joint, and Dave Eggers' independent pirate supply store. Have fun!
Thursday, March 27, 2003
This is not a headline
This is not a post.
Wednesday, March 26, 2003
Radiohead alert
There's a new Radiohead record coming out in June. Woohoo! Time to (a) preorder it, and (b) prelisten to it.
The hack must go on
MacHack is a supercool conference for mostly Mac programmers. At MacHack, the keynote starts at midnight and goes most of the night, every attendee is encouraged to create a hack and enter it in the Hack Contest, and there's other weird geek wackiness. The nerdy cameraderie is unsurpassed. This year, in a stunningly shortsighted move, Apple decided to move its Worldwide Developer Conference to the day after MacHack. The good folks who run MacHack have decided not to succumb to this threat and are going on with the show. Even though the conference bills itself as being for advanced programmers, beginners can learn from the great people and sessions. If you like to mess around with programming, whether on a Mac or not, or you would like to start, you should consider going to MacHack. There really is no other conference like it.
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Struck out
Major League Baseball has a cool new service this year: super-quality live video streams of some games. It's not free, of course. But I gladly pay $15 every year to get streamed radio broadcasts of every single game, and I would pay for TV of some games, too. But I won't. That's because of the standard insanely stupid blackout rules that every major sport enforces. Check it out:Local Market Restrictions: Clicking on a live MLB.TV link will perform and trigger a number of checks to make sure that you are located outside of the local Major League Baseball team's home telecast market and outside of Japan, as the scheduled live webcasts of each MLB team's games will be blacked out in its home telecast market and in Japan. In addition, at present, due to the national exclusivity of ESPN and FOX, there will be no games available during Saturday day (as of June 1, 2003 and continuing for remaining Saturdays until 7:00 PM EST during the regular season), Sunday night (for games that begin after 5:00 PM EST) and Wednesday night (for games that begin after 5:00 PM EST). Due to these blackout restrictions, you may be required to log in to each webcast (both for free and subscription fee webcasts) with a valid major credit card for address verification. In such a case, a temporary $1.00 authorization hold will be placed on your credit card, which will subsequently expire. You will not incur a charge for this authorization hold. The MLB.com Website Terms of Use governs your use of the MLB.TV service. Programming is subject to availability and change. If you attempt to circumvent or circumvent any blackout restriction: your subscription will be subject to immediate termination and a charge of one hundred dollars ($100) for early termination; you may be subject to legal action; and MLBAM reserves the right to report such misconduct to appropriate law enforcement authorities. If you have any questions or problems, or feel that you may have been gated in error, please call the toll-free MLB.com Customer Service Hotline at 1-866-800-1275.Yaaaah! In simple English, this means two things: 1. If you're a Giants fan in the SF Bay area, you can't watch the Giants. Or the A's. Ever. Home or away, sold out or not, whether they're on TV or not. Why? Because Fox Sports Bay Area and KTVU paid big bucks for the right to show games, and they'll be damned if you, a mere fan, are going to get to watch games at your office just because you want to. (This is true no matter what your local team is, of course. I just picked the Giants/A's as an example.) 2. If you try to get clever and watch your team anyway, Emperor Bud will fine you $100 and then call the cops on you. 3. On Saturday afternoon and Wednesday night, no games for anybody. Must watch Fox or ESPN. 4. When you read the above paragraph, your head will explode, and therefore you won't be able to subscribe. Now that's fan-friendly! A clever solution might be to figure out a way to funnel some of the $$$ from streaming over the the TV networks that hold the rights. But wait -- this is baseball. They don't do smart stuff like that.
I haven't been there for them
I've never seen an episode of Friends. I'm not an anti-TV snob, but I don't watch many network series, and I pretty much never just turn on the TV and stare at something at random. But I really love the theme song, I'll Be There For You. Hmm, maybe if I watched Friends all the time, I would have become numb to the song.
Monday, March 24, 2003
Pictures = 1000 words
Here you can find actual U.S. government pictures from the scary-bad Ready site, with alternate interpretations.
Sunday, March 23, 2003
More adventures in AirPort building
The next stage in my new 802.11 network was adding a second AirPort Extreme Base Station with wireless bridging (Apple calls this wireless distribution system, or WDS, a most un-Apple-like name). I did this to enliven a couple of dead spots that have too many walls between them and the main base station. Problems and glitches cost me a couple of troubleshooting hours. Here are the main problems I ran into and the solutions:When you add the second base station, it seems to pick up some of the first base station's settings by default. In my case, this included turning on NAT/DHCP on the second base, which is NOT what you want. This resulted in both base stations ending up with 10.0.1.1 and the endless confoozion you get when two devices have the same IP. Once I changed this, wireless bridging worked great, except... My Dell Latitude with a Cisco Aironet 340 card couldn't connect. A quick search in Apple's Knowledge Base found the answer: many non-Apple 802.11b cards require the "compatibility mode 802.11b only" setting in the base station. That's an easy change once you know about. It let my Dell play on the network again.
So what did I learn from this exercise?The feature in the AirPort Admin Utility that creates bridges is very un-Mac-like and could be even better. It's easy to get confused as you're choosing different settings for different base stations. You have to locate and enter the 12-digit hex MAC addresses of both base stations, choose the same password, channel, and network name in two different places, and remember to turn off NAT for the second base. If you fail to do any of these things, it won't work, and you won't know why -- in fact, you won't even be sure for awhile whether it's working or not. You should be able to simply select the two (or more) base stations, say "create bridged network", fill out a dialog asking relevent questions like which is the main station, and you're done. Windows XP has a network bridging feature that basically works like this right now. The part of the manual that tells you how to create a wireless bridge is incomplete: it doesn't say to use the same network name or to turn off NAT. If you follow the instructions in the manual, your network won't work. The person who wrote it clearly never actually created a wireless bridge -- I'm guessing the feature wasn't working when the manual was written. After I fixed everything, I found a knowledge base article that lists all the steps you need, including the crucial ones the manual leaves out. I hope Apple manages to update the manual soon. My dead spots are dead and I'm now living the wireless dream all over my house. That's really nice!
