Wootopia.net

A bundle of appetites

Stitched together by memories

Fed by sensation

Unspooling through time

I went and visited my family this weekend, and took some pictures. I’ve put them in the Easter 2008 gallery. Happy Easter!

Early July, 2003 found me a victim of “downsizing,” or for the even more cowardly, “rightsizing.” Losing my job just in time for my birthday didn’t sit well with me, but at the same time, I had seen it coming. I’d been sending out resumes, but the economy of 2003 was such that young Computer Scientists with a small amount of IT experience weren’t exactly in short supply, and I didn’t get a single callback.

However bummed I might have been, I hadn’t lost my sense of adventure. Talking about my plight with a friend of mine who had graduated just that spring, we decided that if the business world wasn’t beating a path to our doors, we’d beat our own path to it. So, with a handshake and a sense of optimism, Clever Bison Computers was formed.

In retrospect, we were fairly clueless. While we were fine technologists, and dedicated to working hard, we didn’t have a good grasp of running a business. Someday I’ll probably write a long, introspective post about what I learned from the whole affair, but that day isn’t today – I’m here to talk about web development!

As the more experienced programmer of the pair, the development of our website became my priority. I knew the web development I had been doing just a few months prior would be inadequate for the task, so I fished my friends for suggestions, and ended up buying a couple of O’Reilly books on PHP and web development and an SQL manual. After spending a week uploading the contents of the book to my head, I got to work.

I found an online storefront called OSCommerce that was open source and seemed to provide a lot of functionality that we needed. Of course, the code was messy, and while I had a fine background in theoretical computer science, the practice of web development was a field of which I had a tenuous grasp at best.

The months went on and I tweaked things and added features, and it certainly occupied me well enough. In the end, however, we just weren’t doing enough business to make Clever Bison Computers worth our time, so we agreed to keep it as a side business while we both pursued other, hopefully remunerative, interests.

I just can’t win…

So I’ve been working on a consulting project, and I’ve been having a great deal of difficulty getting the hosting server to work with CakePHP, the framework I’m trying to use. After spending a week trying to get it working, along with many factually incorrect but utterly unhelpful exchanges with their tech support, I’ve essentially given up on hosting the project with them, and I’m pursuing other options.

Of course, the reason for this is that while fighting with the hosting company is great fun, the client doubtless expects actually progress on the project. So, I downloaded my files from the nigh-useless hosting server, installed XAMPP, which is a “double-click-to-install-and-you-have-a-complete-server-environment” application so I could see the results of the code I was grinding away at, and got back to the business of writing code. Several frustrating yet productive hours later, I decided to call it quits around midnight.

While saying my goodnights, my attention is drawn to something odd. What is that fizzing noise? Why is it bright and orange behind my computer?! WHAT’S THAT SMELL!?!?! And at that point, my development computer goes dark.

Dead power supply – it shorted and burnt, so far as I can tell. I *could* RMA it, IF I could get access to an “invoice number” (whatever that is) and I’m willing to fax them details, get an RMA number, ship it to them, have them decide if they’ll honor the warranty, and then have them ship it back.

Or I can just drop $150 on a new power supply. Which I’ve done, and when it gets here we’ll see if the power supply simply discovered the joy of cooking itself, or if it took other pieces of hardware along for the ride.

If I ever incorporate, I think I’ll register “Flaming Web Development, Inc”

Life’s been fairly quiet recently. Started a new web development consulting project, have been bowling regularly, and watching the 2008 Presidential campaign with interest. I’ll probably throw some cat pics into the photo section soon. I’m actually running low on photos to post, since I’m not much of a shutterbug.

I’ve been watching with interest the conflict between Anonymous and the Church of Scientology. Not because I care deeply about either group, mind, but simply because I think we’re seeing something new here, or at least, seeing something fairly new in sharp relief - the rise of the internet-enabled, decentralized pressure group. Flash mobs and online petitions are nothing new, but the size and organization of this one is interesting. The challenge is to see if an essentially anarchic internet movement can sustain itself over the coming weeks and months. Is their passion to defeat a well-funded, well-organized opponent going to be enough to keep them together?

I bet this would make a great sociology project for someone…

Long ago, before the web - so we’re talking ancient history, the 1980s, here - young adults amused themselves by using modems to dial into BBS systems and interact with each other electronically. Most everything was text based, and because of the limitations of the technology, everything was kept small and simple.

There would be message boards, informational text files, program downloads, and BBS games. These BBS games were simple affairs, but they presaged the MUDs of the 90s and the MMORPGS of our current decade. One of my friends, pining for the old days, set up an internet-aware (instead of modem based) BBS a few years back, and a small group of us played around on it for a while.

A few weeks ago, pining for the elder days, I poked my friend Alius and got him to dust off the server and get it running again. It’s once again humming along, and he’s told me I’m free to advertise it far & wide. So, if you’re interested in getting a taste of the (somewhat) elder days of computing, fire up your favorite telnet client and connect to aliusweb.dyndns.org, and have fun! Tell him Woot sent you!

So I’ve put some pictures I took last spring up in the Picture Gallery, so I can stare longingly at flowers and ducks and babbling brooks.

I’m in Baltimore, attending a conference on Academic Computing. I was out for dinner, and as I came back, I had an experience that mystified me for a good thirty seconds. I’m walking in the door, just as another gentleman is walking in, and the doorman greets the other guy with a “Welcome to our hotel, sir” and me with a “Welcome back, sir.” I saw the doorman on the way out, and for a good twenty seconds I was surprised he remembered me. I didn’t think I was that memorable.

And then it occurred to me that the other guy had luggage, and I didn’t, so that I was already checked in was probably the obvious assumption for the doorman to make. Damn, for a moment I felt special…

More pics of my nephew have been uploaded.