New Template - Very techy Way too techy - don't read if you are looking for cats. I put some pictures of Gracie on the cat blog. (Hover over the "other sites" link above and click on the cat blog.)
Damn - it's not working in IE - I have to try to fix it. I wrote a simple javascript an css menu at work for one of my projects and I applied it to some of my blogs. You can see it by hovering over the menu links under the heading above. It drops down a bunch of links and makes the blog more readable in that there is no longer any right hand column. The webring code is screwy, but I am going to drop the webring. It was a good idea, but the coders at webring put a DIV aroundd the code that screws up any css based design. I am going to start up my technical blog again, but I am not going to do it with posts. I will just hand craft topics when I get around to it. I can't keep up with the blogs that I have. |
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29 March 2008
Earth Hour and My Wood Stove |
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28 March 2008
Rudy Rucker on POD Publishing I have always thought that publishing your own book was a last resort. I have never gone the final mile to POD and self publishing on any of my collections because it would be admitting defeat. I felt that finding an audience without the distribution channels of a large publishing house would be impossible and I would never sell more than a few dozen books.
I may be wrong about POD (publish on demand). I regularly read Rudy Rucker's blog and I think of him as one the writers on my Top Ten Science Fiction Writers list that I have yet to compile. It turns out that his Wares books are doing well and he can get them reprinted at a big house, his other books are more problematic. This is downright silly. He is a good writer and an excellent read. I have half a dozen books of his on my shelves and I have even paid for some his stories and lectures on tape. It seems outrageous that Rudy Rucker would have to go the POD route, but Rudy writes: "I’ve been thinking about options for making some of my out of print novels available again. There’s still some hope I can get a mainstream publisher to reissue the four books in my Ware series, but my other out of print books are more problematic. I’m thinking of Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere in particular, and maybe eventually The Secret of Life, which is available only in ebook form."The blog entry lists many of his options eBooks, LuLu, Lighting Source and Amazon BookSurge and Kindle. It would be cool if SamsDotPublishing.com could get Rudy to let them handle some of his books. J has published his books on Kindle and using Lighting Source and probably LuLu. Tyree pushes the SamsDot books relentlessly at the conventions and the editors at SamsDot are all just plain nice people. (I lurk on their discussion board.) If Rudy Rucker can't get his books, and he has a name, then what chance is there for the rest of us. It looks like POD is not the last resort that I thought it was, but perhaps the only resort, even if you are writing Pro quality stuff. It is time to start really working on my Indian Publishing Scheme. Rudy’s Blog |
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26 March 2008
Java - the Kiss of Death - Error 500 I am beginning to despise Java and all of its incredibly complex implementations.
Here is a screen dump from My-Cast.com weather. My-Cast is a nice service that sends you weather alerts an I check it each morning for the weekend outlook. The site has maybe 6 or 7 Java JSP pages. Today I got a 500 dump - not even a custom error message from the amateurish coders on the site. My question is why would you use an EJB on a website with only a few pages? Why would you choose a slow top-heavy technology like Java to do a simple thing like display a couple of records from a database? You use Java for large enterprise applications where you have teams of coders who need to create tools and integrate them. You don't use it for lightweight "select and spit" web pages. I could have done the entire My-Cast site in a PHP in an afternoon. I have been saying this for a while and it makes me no friends. Just remember YouTube is entirely coded in PHP. If YouTube were coded in Java, it would crashed and burned years ago or else the hardware resource costs, along with the salaries of a large staff of programmers would have made it too expensive to run. Digg, one of the most popular sites on the nets uses PHP running on a handful of servers. If you care to be techy today, read this about Java and PHP. It has links to some of the battles in the flame war between the Java and PHP camps.  |
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25 March 2008
Asimov on Global Warming - 1989 This is why Science Fiction writers should make all of the big decisions. I'm not in 100% agreement with everything, but I have total respect for his reasoning. He makes more sense than anyone speaking out today.
Notice, he speaks without notes as far as I can tell. More of this talk |
Ada Lovelace Painting bought on eBay Someone bought an original painting of Ada Lovelace on eBay. Ada was the daughter of George Gordon Lord Byron, the English romantic poet. She was a mathematician (unusual for a woman at that time) and she was purportedly the lover of Charles Babbage who designed a steam powered difference engine. Babbage's machine, although never completed was a real modern computer in every way, capable of programming, loops, branches, input and output. Ada, supposedly wrote the first ever computer programs. She is the first hacker.Up to this time, there were few known original paintings of Ada and the modern representations of her are all copies of copies from copies in books and magazines of the time. Many working versions of the Babbage difference engine have been built and there are several good emulator programs on the web. At the time, the steel that was available to Babbage and his mechanic was too soft and they had problems with the machine jamming all the time. The design was good, but the stress on the rods and gears was too much for the brass and steel of the time. I think that good steel was available, but it was probably too difficult to work. Probably the tolerances on the gear trains which had virtual lengths of miles, might have contributed to the problems. Babbage produced small working models of parts of his engine, but the complete one was not completed before he went bankrupt. Legend has it that Ada and Charles used the parts of the engine to calculate the odds at horse racing. Ada sold her jewels to bet heavily on several races. Unfortunately, races at the time (as is true now) had little to with mathematics and much to do with behind the scenes manipulation of races, horses and payouts. They lost everything. "Ada Lovelace, formally known as Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace is credited with creating the world’s first computer program for the Babbage steam-powered calculating engine. The United States military named their Ada programming language after her and her portrait is used in some Microsoft hologram stickers." |
Peter S. Beagle
Peter S. Beagle sends out a newsletter from time to time. Among other things there is a new audio book of The Last Unicorn. The picture is Peter's cat: Finn, the RAVEN office wondercat, has different-colored eyes. Turns out they glow in the dark differently, too...spooky! |
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20 March 2008
13 Great Ghost Movies on Squidoo Please click on the link below and vote for your favorite ghost story.
This is a Squidoo lens. My Squidoo lense actually makes a few cents. I am even thinking of writing a few more. I need some hits to keep it in the top 10% on Squidoo. The page has started to slip a little lately. You can make a lens on any subject. It has to be about 1000 words. Lists are best because people tend to click on "Top 22 Bread Recipes" or "Top 10 reasons NOT to quit smoking". Politics is hot and opinions matter more than facts. I have to write a couple of more. On the internet everything is about "Shelf Space" the more of your stuff that you have out there, the more money you make. Squidoo.com actually seems to work. You can even create links to Amazon with your own Affiliate ID - I've had two sales, totaling about a dollar in March, so far. Erica, I expect you to compose a "10 ways to Keep a Cat off your Keyboard". John B. I expect you to write "The Top 20 Reasons why the Neocons will (probably) Fail". eJim, I expect you to write up "The 10 worst games in the History of the Edmonton Oilers". J, I expect you will need to do very little research for "The 10 Worst Jobs in Denver". Let me know when you write them and I will link to your lenses here. 13 Great Ghost Movies on Squidoo |
Cost of Commuting - or not Telecommuting I have been adding up the costs of commuting. I have to pay for parking in White Plains, NY. I have to pay tolls on the TZ Bridge. I have to pay for 30 miles worth of gas every day. I have to pay $1 a cup for weak coffee. I have to pay for wear and tear on the truck. I can't work in my underwear so I have to pay for clothes.
Adding this up and adjusting for before Tax income, it comes to about $9,000 a year that I contribute towards this job. Much of that, except for parking and tolls, I would pay on most any job, but it is a strong argument for finding a work at home job. Homemade Starbucks costs about 35¢ cup. CraigsList has a telecommute check box when you do job searches. At one time I found a Telecommute job search engine, but a search now just finds work-at-home scam sites. I am going to add the CraigsList NY telecommute job search to my morning start-up web group. I think that working at home would be a good thing for the cats. They get tired of just Erica every day. Also, I could go to the Friday Garage Sales, as long as I got my work done. Sources of real telecommute jobs and freelance gigs. Craigslist.org - Real jobs, but there is no checking so watch out for scams. Don't send anyone money! WWWAC.org Mailing List. (much lower volume than it used to be, but still 4 or 5 good jobs a month.) Guru.com - I've never got a gig from here due to competition with India and Eastern Europe, but I still keep trying. eLance.com - like Guru. I see lots of good gigs, especially writing gigs, but the competition is fierce. Watch out for the websites that have work at home or telecommute in the domain name. It looks like they are mostly from the same scam. Years ago, I bookmarked the Monster List of Freelance Job Sites. This is still a good site to check out, but it seems that there is way too much information here. |
Are We Facing End Of Futurism?With the death of Arthur C. Clarke, we have lost a great writerThis blogger speculates that there are no great writers speculating, really speculating, about the future. There's plenty of SF set in some future world, but not much of it is innovative. For instance, I just finished reading 11 books in the Honor Harrington series and they are just simple short term extrapolations on what is here and now projected to some future where everything has evolved a bit, but nothing much has changed. They are decent reads, but full of padding. each book could have been a few chapters in a tightly written novel, rather than a fat 500 page novel. The future, as I have said many times, is Revolutionary, not Evolutionary. Extrapolation is a waste of time. Spec Fic writers have to consider the unanticipated in order to write good science fiction. Fiction that is merely extrapolative is merely space opera. Any one who believes that tomorrow can be predicted by the conditions in the present is either stupid or a Republican. Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein, under John W. Campbell, Jr.'s guidance produced an extraordinary variety of possible futures, very few of them like the present. With the movement towards Mundane SF and Slipstream, this kind of story is rare. Some of it that you do find, like Rudy Rucker's current novel, are a hard read and not the kind of romantic word candy that undereducated, TV fed, readers prefer anymore. Rucker, along with Bruce Sterling and a few others might be considered The Futurists - Next Generation, but they don't have broad appeal or readership. I hesitated to add my thoughts on the passing of Clarke. As J pointed out, his short stories were better than his novels. I have a worn out copy of Tales From the White Hart somewhere and it is the inspiration for my own series of Tales from the Silver Streak. I had to read Childhood's End in High School and I found it tame compared to some of the other stuff that I was reading, so for a long time a pigeon-holed Clarke as a light weight. It wasn't until ten years later that I found the short stories and I raised my opinion of him. 2001, a Space Odyssey is a great movie, but not so much a novel as a series of speculative episodes strung together on a theme. It is not typical of his short stories and I think the Rama novels were attempts at recreation of the vast themes of the movie. I also wonder how much of the last novels were written by others under the Clarke brand, much the way James Michener had a staff of writers that he would manage, polishing their work, and presenting it as his own. It is interesting that the link above goes to a Croatian website and blogger. I browsed his blog and the guy is smart and a good read. His point about the end of futurism is well taken and I thought it was the right approach to the death of the last of the great futurists from the golden age of SF. Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and Sturgeon sold their first stories to Campbell in the Summer of 1939. I think that The Summer of '39 might make an interesting title for an essay or even a short story. |
Free Flash Memory from IBM Click on the link below and leave your contact info at IBM and they will send you a 512MB USB flash drive. These are darn useful little guys. I use them to transfer data from machine to machine. I keep the Work In Progress of a couple of short stories on one in case I get the urge to write. You can also keep your Firefox bookmarks on it. I have put some music on one to listen to at work. Like I say, darn useful - and FREE!
IBM: Reduce energy costs. Maximize greenness. |
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15 March 2008
DNS Advantage DNS is how the internet converts your human name like CTHREEPO.COM to its machine internet address like 74.208.84.221. When I'm hooked to the cable modem and want to look at this blog, the browser asks the internet for the address based on its name.
It's like looking up in a phone book to get my phone number. First my computer checks its own stored DNS for the number and then it checks to see if the router knows the number. If the router doesn't know, the router checks the cable company's DNS, and if those servers don't know they check their own primary DNS servers, and so on until it gets all the way to the Internic. The company DNSAdvantage.com has a free DNS server that you can use instead of your router and ISP. It is generally faster. I set it up today because my machine was sluggish. The speed increase is noticeable. Their DNS servers really are fast, but I wonder why they are free. I am concerned that there seems to be no economic model that will justify offering a free service like this. I'll watch it for a while, and if this speed keeps up and there is no downtime, I will change over my other machines. |
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14 March 2008
If Celebs Moved to Oklahoma This will make you all feel a little better.
I spent a week in Oklahoma City once. There was nothing there. It was just a bunch of buildings and lots of trailer parks on very flat land. There was no flavor or style to the place to distinguish it from anywhere else in central USA. I could not find a place that sold Oklahoma Steaks and no restaurants had a local beer. There was no sense of place at all. These Photoshopped celeb pics are funny, but kind of sad, really. This is America. Coming from a small town where things happened and important people lived, I am on the outside of the mainstream. The Olsen Twins:  |
Talk Like A Physicist Today is Einstein's birthday.It is also the birthday of a sub-genius dude that we all know. In celebration, today is "talk like a physicist day". I prefer to celebrate "talk like a computer programmer/harmonica player/SF writer/cat confuser day". How do I celebrate “Talk Like A Physicist Day”? (I honestly forgot about today until I read the talk like a physicist post on Uncertainty Principles and I saw the date.) |
Nyack Daily Snapshot I started using the new Beta version of Google Alerts to notify me when a blog or news article appears for a keyword. I intend to renew my harmonica blogs and maybe find some more interesting content here than I've had for a while.The picture on the left is from a blog that has a daily image of my home town, Nyack (one of the key words that I set alerts for). I lived on Catherine Street in Nyack in the middle 1950s and behind the house was a creek that ran under all of the shops on Main Street for about 1/2 a mile. The creek runs underground through these large tunnels all the way to the Hudson River. Much later I saw the engineering drawings for these tunnels and they were signed by Peter Lawrence Graham, my Grandfather, who was the Rockland County Engineer back in the early 1900s. When I was about 5 years old, I went all the way down and back with some older boys who had a flashlight. It was very dark and very scary. If you get a chance click on Nyack Daily Snapshot. I know all the places that are in the blog and I even recognize some of the people. |
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10 March 2008
Li'l Abner Comics.com has been running the classic Li'l Abner strip for several years. I have made these 1950s Li'l Abners part of my morning for a couple of years now. It is great art, great story telling, and great social satire. Comics.com's license ended with the 1955 series of the strip (right in the middle of a crisis). The strip was hung up in limbo for a few weeks and now they've started over.Li'l Abner is now appearing in strips from 1934, when the comic first started. Li'l Abner, Daisy Mae and Ma and Pa Yokum all look very different. By the time they get back to 1955 I will have forgotten all of the plots so I can enjoy them again as much as the first time. My Dad would send me to the corner store every Sunday morning with one dollar to buy The Sunday Daily News, The Herald Tribune, six hard rolls, and a pack of King Size Kents. I had to bring back the right change. I remember reading Li'l Abner then, but it was over my head. I liked Dick Tracey and Pogo.
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05 March 2008
Email Woes History of my email accounts:
Way back around 1993, I wrote a book for Byte Magazine with Nick Anus. Nick dropped the project so I had no further contact with the publishers, and Craig Menefee finished it. I don't know if Nick ever got any of the piles of stuff that I wrote into the book before he quit, but when it was published my name was still on the cover. I never got a copy of the book. I kept my advance, in spite of threatening calls from McGraw-Hill. McGraw Hill gave me a free AOL account and it stayed free for about 5 years. When the bookkeeping caught up with me I paid for the account. I still have this ID and still receive tons of spam there. 15 years is a long time to have an email account. I ran the BillSite.com web server on a machine in my office at Lockheed for several years in the mid 90s and I was keith@billsite.com. I used the email extensively and you can still find it in message archives. BillSite was an early version of PayPal.com, but the emphasis was for automatic bill paying online. It could do everything that PayPal did, but it never took off. I spent a lot of time with my buddy Phil getting the site to work, but it all went away eventually. I still want to get the billsite domain back, just to see if I get any mail, but it's a good domain name and I'm not likely to get it, even if the current owner lets it expire. Around the same time that HotMail started, Ziff Davis started a site called ZDNet and it had a free email solution. It was run by OneBox.com. When ZDNet dropped it's email offering, My account was transferred to OneBox.com and I was promised free email access for life. About two years later OneBox told me to pay for the account or not get mail. I have been using OneBox for important business email for about twelve years now and I felt it was more secure because I paid for the service. I have since switched most of my email to GMail.com, which I love. I still use the AOL account for money things, because I feel it is the most stable of my email accounts. All of my newer accounts do not use OneBox. This morning I tried to log into OneBox to get my mail and the site claims my account is suspended. They are not answering their phone. I have a feeling that I had better start getting my ducks in a row. I still have a few accounts where the primary contact is my onebox email. I have to identify these and try to transfer them to gmail or aol. This may be difficult because sometimes they send you a confirming email. I just checked and I have about ten really major accounts that still use onebox. |
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03 March 2008
Speculations: No Longer For Writers Who Want To Be Read Speculations was one of the best places for market news, rumors and information. It had the problem that the person running it refused to place ads on the site, never required registration, and refused to ever moderate a thread. As a result there was widespread abuse. Spam was rampant. Messages lived forever, even weird flames, and there were instances of people fraudulently using the names of others.
The simple thing to do was to admit that the original policies, formulated in the late 1990s, were wrong and switch to a more modern approach to threaded conversations. Instead of admitting their errors and fixing the site, they closed it down. They didn't even leave the huge base of discussion and information in place. I will miss the site and I regret that it was only dumb stubbornness that killed it. Speculations: No Longer For Writers Who Want To Be Read |
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02 March 2008
Help P&E Predators & Editors has been a forum for those wishing to discuss the "Sharks in the Water" and it has been very vocal in denouncing the scam artists who prey on frustrated writers. They are being sued and are having trouble paying the rent. This, of course, is the purpose of the lawsuit. I would like to believe that any case against someone who chooses to stand up for the rights of others would never be upheld in an honest forum.
Anyway, scroll down to the button below and give a dollar or ten to the P&E fund. If you have a blog, then paste this code into one of your posts. (If you view source on this post, I have put comments where you need to cut the code to past into your HTML.) Help Defend P&EUnfortunately, there are those who do not like P&E or its editor because we give out information that they would prefer remain hidden from writers. Usually, they slink away, but not this time. P&E is being sued and we are asking for donations to mount a legal defense in court. Please click on the link below and give if you can to help protect P&E so it can continue to defend writers as it has for the past eleven years. Thank you. Other sites are welcome to copy the code for our donation button and place it on their pages with an appeal on behalf of P&E. |
Trenton Computer Festival I've gone to TCM a couple of dozen times. Whenever I see this the notification email I think of H. Stanley Smith. Stan was a great guy and lots of fun to talk to. As Mike in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" would have said - he was a "not dumb" person. Stan died a couple of years ago and going to Trenton will not be the same without him.
I've pretty much forgotten the disasters from previous years and I will go to this one if it doesn't rain. Trenton Computer Festival: "Created in 1976 by Sol Libes of the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey and Allen Katz, professor of electrical/computer engineering at the College, the current festival has stayed true to its origins as an annual educational event. Personal computing fans can be sure to find plenty of bargains on new and used hardware and software, numerous talks, forums, tutorials, user group sessions, national exhibitors demonstrating their newest products, and much more..."I told my Web Design class that if they ever use the or the That someone will come to their house and strangle them. The TCM page uses both! |
It rained today, but we went to seven garage sales. Near one I found this piece of folk art. There were hundreds of plastic forks with a few knives and spoons stuck into the mud at the side of the road. What is the significance? I don't know. Sometimes I don't get art.