Blogules, 9 December 2003

The calendar over there to the left (if you’re looking at the front page) has been looking a bit lonely this month. At first, that was a consequence of MT using the current month every time the front page is rebuilt, which in turn happens every time someone posts a comment. Post an article on the last day of the month, get a comment after midnight, your full calendar disappears.

But that’s only an excuse for a couple of days, until you realize that your intrepid columnist (web-author? publisher? blogger? whatever) has just been busy/lazy. So there you go — all I can say is “my bad.”

As usual in times I’ve been lazy, there’s a backlog of small stuff that I can fashion into a semi-respectable post. So on with the show!

• Coming soon, I promise, will be a report from the 2003 Army-Navy Game and a commentary on the Richmond RiverDogs hockey game I attended a few weeks ago. I may also hit an education story out of Maryland that both Gerritt and his brother commented on last month, but that’s less certain.
• I’ve made a small change to my blogroll. Tim of Rink Blog made a spectacular exit from hockey blogging, angry (and in many ways justifiably so) at what the National Hockey League has become during Gary Bettman’s tenure as commissioner. I wish Tim well, but with his exit, I’ve added Backcountry Conservative to the roll in his place. BC is run by fellow Fanblogs.com contributor Jeff Quinton, who was kind enough to link to BTN — so I’ll return the favor. Jeff posts on, among other things, conservative politics, Clemson sports, and Georgetown basketball.
• Recent discovery: my iBook’s battery life has dropped like a rock. I’m getting about 2.5 hours using WiFi and the screen on full brightness — I used to be able to pull 4 hours out of that. This may settle the question on whether the iBook goes to Europe (oh, yeah, I’m heading for London and Dublin) all on its own. If I can’t watch a couple of DVDs on the plane without plugging it in (and carrying the extra power brick the airplane power ports would require), it may not be worth the hassle.
• Speaking of Europe, I’ve asked Matt to guest-write the BTN Insight Bowl report, as I will be taking off for Gatwick about the time the Hokies and Bears kick it off in Phoenix.
• The steel tariffs have been lifted. Given the political uproar, it was probably the best thing to do. The idea of giving in to European political manipulation (and oh, how they’re crowing about it) irritates me, but such is life.

More soon.

Blackout Quick Hitter

Most of you are probably aware that power went out over much of the Northeast U.S. and Southern Ontario Thursday afternoon into the evening.

CNN.com is getting hammered. I’m consulting the Washington Post and watching Fox News for updates.

If you’re curious about a specific location, though, I have a suggestion: try college and university sites. Most of them are hosted onsite at their school, and while many schools do have their own power plants, their connections out probably aren’t heavily redundant. Here are a few I’m using:

• Columbia University: NYC
• University of Toronto
• University at Buffalo (NY)
• University of Michigan: Ann Arbor (suburban Detroit)
• Cornell University: Ithaca, NY
• University at Albany (NY)
• Yale University (New Haven, CT)
• University of Dayton (OH)
• Case Western Reserve University: Cleveland, OH
• Mercyhurst College: Erie, PA
• University of Ottawa (Ontario, Canada)

Note that these sites will probably take a little while to get back online once local power is restored, because boxen will need to be restarted, requiring people to go back into the office, etc. But if they’re up, that’s a reasonably good indicator that the lights are back on locally.

Meanwhile, for historical perspective, check George Mason University’s Blackout Project, centered on the 1965 Great Northeast Blackout.

Read More »

Attack of the Ghouls

Since sometime this morning, my website has been under attack by people searching for p1ctur3s 0f k0b3 bry@nt’s all3g3d v1ct1m. The reason for this is that Google, Yahoo, and AOL have all picked up my site as the #3-#6 result on a search for a phrase like the one I l33ted up above.

The word “p1ctur3” (well, its properly spelled variant) was in the leader of one of my Montreal articles. The rest of the words are in the article before this one. But the search engines can’t tell the difference — and so a relatively innocent blog like mine is getting mixed up in one of the more disturbing sides of the Kobe story. Personally, I’d just like the ghouls to go away. The idea of searching for pictures of a v1ct1m of s3xual a55ault is very wrong.

Read More »

A New Hope (er, Home)

You may notice a few changes here at BTN, most obviously at the end of each post, where we now have a much more full-featured control panel rather than just the “Comments” link. The explanation for this change is that I’ve finally moved off my custom-built blog system to the wonder that is Movable Type, and with that to a new web host, PHPWebHosting.com.

Read More »

Quick Hits, 5 June

Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Work’s been getting busier, and I spent much of last weekend on a totally extracurricular coding project. The fruit of that project, though, is that once again you can AIM hawkeye5Cell to send me a (free) text message on my cell phone. AOL and SunCom don’t have their act together yet on the real AIM forwarding service to GSM phones, so I wrote a Java client using a couple of third-party libraries for the AOL and SMTP interfaces. Eventually I will release this app to the public, but I need to:

• debug re-connecting after a connection drops
• move configuration options from hard-coded Strings into an XML file
• figure out how to properly build a standalone JAR file using Ant — I’ve got web-apps down, but basic JARs not so much
• resolve licensing dilemmas, which may require me to rewrite the SMTP library so the whole app can be GPL’d, in line with Jaimlib

A few column thoughts have crossed my mind over the last week, but I don’t think any qualified for a full column on their own. Judge for yourself, though.

Read More »