Sunday was my Dad’s birthday party (his birthday is tomorrow).  In addition to his present, I brought him a 17″ LCD monitor I’m not using anymore, and I got his McAfee AntiVirus updated.  Now, if I could just find a way to get him off dial-up.

Amy got me a pedometer, and I’m going to try to get more walks in.  The part of the Illinois Prairie Path that I like isn’t lit, so I guess waking after midnight isn’t a good idea.  I’ve thought about getting up early and getting a mile or two in before work, but I’m really not a morning person.  I guess I’ll figure out something.  Anyway, I signed up for an account at mapmywalk.com and set a goal for 20 miles in the next 30 days.  I think I can squeeze that in.

I shudder to think what would have happened if their <blackface> tag became part of the HTML standard.

Seriously, blackface?  Was Al Jolson the project manager behind this?

One part (about 58 minutes in) really stood out to me, as it ties into my post on developers getting “religion”:

That’s why I like that word “responsible”. “What is the responsible thing to do in this moment?” That is a wonderful, wonderful question to ask. “How would I do this if this was my money?” Boy, that’ll focus the mind on documentation.

Listen to Test Driven Development, Patterns and Extreme Programming at IT Conversations.

Some subject lines from my spam box the other day.  I don’t know why I felt like sharing them.  Hell, I don’t know why I was reading the subject lines in my spam box in the first place:

• Nude Couple’s Feud Ends at Waffle House
• Go to the disco and let your love stick glow!
• subject 9815712
• I Will Not Zap The Mosquito

When someone registers on a site and you want their address, it’s good practice to have a “state/province” selector.  Building that requires you to have a list of states somewhere, usually in your database, and usually in a table called “state”.

So, I whipped up a little site called statetable.com, which generates the SQL script you need to create that table.  It can also include Canadian provinces, US territories, and even US Minor Outlying Islands (atolls & reefs nobody really gives a damn about).  Don’t want SQL?  It’ll spit out a CSV file you can open in Excel, OpenOffice.org Calc, Numbers, etc.

Ok, I needed to clear off the hard drive (flash memory, technically) and install an operating system.  I could have grabbed the recovery disk and reinstalled the stock operating system, an outdated version of Xandros Linux which Asus customized for the machine.  But as long as I had this tabula rasa in front of me, why not try out a full-blown, modern Linux distro on there?  After some reading, I chose Ubuntu-eee.

At its core, the EeePC 701 sports an Intel Celeron CPU and an integrated Intel video chip.  So, pretty much any PC operating system will install on it.  But, the screen resolution is 800×480, while most Linux distros assume at least an 800×600 display these days, causing the bottoms of windows to get cut off.  Second, the wireless card uses an Atheros chipset, which isn’t always recognized right away.  Lastly, people worry about the limited number of writes a flash cell can endure before it fails, so there are tweaks to minimize writes.

I burned Ubuntu-eee to a CD and installed it, a pretty painless process.  As soon as the fresh install booted, it told me there were software updates available, and I dutifully installed them to make my laptop as functional and secure as possible.

That was a mistake — an updated wifi driver left me unable to connect to anything.  Son of a…

I googled around and found the “Ricey script“.  It’s a shell script for Ubuntu on EeePCs that downloads a patched version of the Atheros wifi driver, installs an overclocking script (bumping the CPU up to its rated 900MHz), fixes sound, adds handlers for the hotkeys (fn+1,  fn+2, etc.) and takes care of a nasty problem where the thing just wont shut off.  It’s a great script, provided free by a member of the community, and it fixed all of my problems.

But…why was it necessary?  Aside from the overclocking, all it does is fix driver and ACPI issues.  Why did an update cripple my system like that in the first place?  Sure, I’ve had that problem with other operating systems, and I know Apple isn’t immune to this kind of problem.  But in this case, the fixes were already out there, and have been for a while.  Why weren’t they included in the distro, either Ubuntu-eee or Ubuntu itself?  Why did I have to find the fix on a message board?  Asus didn’t have these kind of problems with their stock distro!  They managed to break their custom program launcher, but I never had any system-crippling driver issues like this.

Overall, Ubuntu-eee is great.  I used to love how the stock OS booted in 30 seconds and let me get right to work.  After experiencing Ubuntu-eee, I don’t know if I can go back, and I can live with a 65-second boot.  I’m a little put off by my experience getting it running, though.  Linux on the desktop?  Not when I have to download & run a shell script just to get it going.

Friday night we went to Chronicles of Who where we watched The Pirate Planet, then headed over to Pompeii with the rest of the group for late dinner/very early breakfast. The Pirate Planet is part of the Key to Time story arc, and was written by the one & only Douglas Adams. Think “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” meets Doctor Who, complete with speedboats dressed up to be “aircars”. The episode was hilarious, even when it wasn’t intended to be, but it was still Doctor Who at its finest, with sci-fi suspense and a surprise ending.

Saturday: Cats and Bats

We’re scheduled to clean Cat Guardians the first Saturday of every month, so that’s where we were all morning.  Then, a quick stop at Panda Express before heading over to Pet Supplies Plus to stock up on litter for the shelter and food for our cats.

We finally saw The Dark Knight Saturday night.  It was good, but I’m not sure it lived up to the hype.  Visually, it was great, don’t get me wrong.  Maybe I’m just getting too old & sentimental, but I don’t like seeing Batman as that much of an anti-hero.

Afterwards, we came home for some drinks and passed out halfway through a Deep Space Nine episode.

Sunday: Caulk.  Yay.

Today was a “putter around the house” day.  I had a nice, relaxing soak in the tub, surfed the web for way too long, and re-caulked the tub.  We just finished dinner, then we’re heading over to A La Mode here in Lombard for dessert.

I don’t know what to say about Son of Godzilla. Maybe the fact that I was doing work stuff that night distracted me too much, but I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t feel anything toward the humans, and started wishing one of the giant praying mantises would eat them so they’d go away. The scenes with Minilla (the aforementioned “Son”) were cute, as was Minilla himself. But those little scenes of Godzilla playing daddy were more suited to a short-form YouTube video than a full-fledged movie.

“Cute” is the main thing it has going for it. The producers must have agreed, and they spared us the emo tension of Teenage Son of Godzilla. “You don’t understand me! You don’t remember what it’s like to be my age! Can I borrow the car?”

I’m not a Toho fanboy, so I don’t know how this film is accepted in terms of canonicity and all that. All I can say is that I’m happy the DVR is on the fritz and I missed about 20 minutes of the film. I think that 20 minutes was just about the humans anyway. Seriously, who watches giant monster movies for the humans? Maybe it would have been better as an MST3k episode, but after their experience with Volume 10 of the DVD box sets, I’m sure the gang is steering clear of Toho properties for their new shows.

Speaking of the DVR, it looks like the latest release of the software for our DirecTV DVR has all sorts of bugs: crashes, scrambled pictures, issues with HDMI, screensavers that wont turn off — how did this pass QA, and when is it going to be fixed? And, why do I pay $80/month for this? Actually, if I could get more TV legally in HD on the Internet, I’d probably just ditch the dish altogether.

It was fun, but the heat was really getting to me toward the end.  I wish we brought our camera, but there’s a few shots of the area on Flickr.