Posts in the Personal Category

Nick Finck just pointed me at his latest Flickr contribution—a screenshot of a site that ripped off the design of Digital Web.  I immediately tagged it “piratedsites” in honor of the late, great pirated-sites.com, figuring that doing so had to be a widespread practice.  In fact, no: only one other Flickr image had that tag, and it was a Zeldman original, and it was not a screenshot.

So I hereby propose that anyone who posts a site design ripoff shot on Flickr or a blog tag it “piratedsites”.  The original site may be gone, but the idea can absolutely be reborn using the social tools we already have.  Technorati, for example, would start pulling together screenshots and blog posts using that tag—and there you go.  Or someone could use the Flickr and Technorati APIs to create their own site dedicated to just this sort of thing.  Heck, it might even be a way to get the actual pirated-sites.com back on the air in its original form!

Out the scurvy dogs!  Arrrr!

• Avast! was published on Thursday, May 17th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Web categories.
• There have been twenty-three replies.

Just so you know, assuming you care, the reset stylesheet is probably going to get a touch-up and possibly its own URL.  I made some edits here and there in the last couple of days, and almost without exception every single one was wrong.  Like, deeply technically wrong.  So I’ve stopped messing with it in hopes of not utterly ruining it.

I’m generally not one to pin my shortcomings on external factors, but in this case, I have to believe that the (over-the-counter) cold medication I’ve been taking has affected me far more than previously suspected.  I’ve been fighting an upper-respiratory soreness and cough for most of the week.  Cold meds don’t usually mess me up too much, but it would seem that taking it over an extended period has a cumulative effect.  The other night, I had a semi-feverish and disturbing dream about being afflicted with semi-feverish and disturbing dreams, and what’s creepier, the fact that I was marginally (but not fully) aware that I was dreaming the whole thing while within the dream within the dream seemed utterly normal at the time.

Also, I’m starting to get surges of light-headedness whenever I turn my head while in motion.  It’s kind of interesting.  Though not necessarily in a good way.  It also makes driving more challenging.  Scared yet?  Shouldn’t I be?

Anyway, the point being that I’m putting my thinking on hold until I get off the goofballs.  That means any further changes to the resets will have to wait, as will a mostly-completed post about form element weirdness.  The way I’m going right now, I’d probably start calling them “from elements” and then that would morph into “frum elements”, and it would make total sense to me that markup elements can be Orthodox.  And then I’d make ill-advised jokes about ways to put browsers into Sabbath mode, or something.

I probably shouldn’t even be writing this post.  If for no other reason than I’m committing a typographical error about once every three words, which ought to be a big red flag.  And it’s not like I keep up a regular blogging schedule anyway.  Still, it seems like the right thing to do.  Probably the best argument against it right now.

Nice weather we’re having, though.

• Wacked Out on Goofballs was published on Friday, May 4th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been twenty-one replies.

After discovering that I couldn’t use my Airport Express as a wireless bridge (because my Netgear router doesn’t support WDS), I hauled my DSL modem and the router into the recreation room to see if I could get onto XBox Live at all.  As it turned out, the answer was “yes”, so the MR814v2 is at least partly Live compatible.  Cool!  Unfortunately, I needed to return the modem and router to the second floor, and that still left me without a convenient way to get the 360 onto the internet.  Uncool.

And then it hit me: Internet Sharing in OS X!  I could use my PowerBook as a bridge by sharing its Airport connection over an Ethernet cable.  Yes!

Only it wasn’t quite that simple.  The 360 steadfastly refused to obtain an IP address.  So far as I could tell, it wasn’t picking up a DHCP lease from the Mac (the error codes the XBox returns are utterly cryptic numbers, unsurprisingly).  I thought that was going to be the end of it until I noticed the “Edit Settings” button at the bottom of the XBox’s network testing screen.  Lo and behold: a place to manually configure my XBox’s network settings.

So I dug into the Mac’s NetInfo Manager utility (it’s in the “Utilities” folder inside the “Applications” folder) to get all the necessary subnet information, which I found under config->dhcp->subnets->192.168.2.  Here’s what it showed me:

So with that information in hand, I manually set the XBox 360’s networking information as follows.

Property	Value
IP address	192.168.2.254
Subnet mask	255.255.255.0
Gateway	192.168.2.1
Primary DNS Server	192.168.2.1
Secondary DNS Server	0.0.0.0

Once I’d done all that, the networking test passed.  I was online and on Live.

I haven’t tested this setup in multiplayer yet, but I was able to set up an account, get my gamertag, and download a number of demos without any trouble (except for it taking a long while to grab several GB of data, but that’s life at ~300KB/s).  The one potential problem I’ve seen is that the NAT test shows a result of “Moderate”, which the help files claim could result in connection problems or loss of voice chat.  (Addendum: I’ve tested voice chat and it’s a bit fuzzy, but it works.  Of course, maybe it’s fuzzy for everyone.  I dunno!)

On the subject of specific values, I picked the address 192.168.2.254 for no particular reason; obviously, anything in the allowed range would have been fine.  I might I go back and change it at some point.  Or not.  My point is that it’s not like it had to end in 254 or anything.  Similarly, the 0.0.0.0 for the secondary DNS server was just me not changing the default.  I suppose I could have set it to match the primary, but I don’t see what difference that would really make.

The morning after figuring all this out, I came across How To: Using your Mac as a NAT router—which, if I’d known about it, might have saved me a good deal of time.  The author ran into many of the same issues I did, and came to most of the same answers.  The interesting thing is that he set up his 360 to use the “base” router, not the Mac, which didn’t work for me.  I had to use the 192.168.2.* subnet; I couldn’t get out to the ‘root’ 192.168.1.*.  (I use that instead of 192.168.0.*.  Why?  Why not?)

So if you’re looking to put an XBox 360 online but don’t want to shell out for a wifi adapter or run a bunch of cable, your OS X laptop can easily serve as a wireless bridge.  I imagine any laptop running a modern OS is capable of the same thing.

Of course, I don’t regard this as a permanent solution.  If I decide I like Live gaming enough to do it frequently, I’ll probably spring for a dedicated wireless adapter for the XBox, or else relocate the modem and Netgear router to the rec room permanently and buy a wireless adapter for my desktop machine.  If I decide Live gaming is okay but not something I do very often, then I’ll just keep using the laptop as a bridge and save a little money.

• XBox Live via a Mac Laptop was published on Thursday, April 26th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been twenty-one replies.

This morning, the local NPR station devoted an hour to the psychological effects of a campus shooting.  Four years ago, there was a shooting on the Case campus in which one person died, so they had members of the Case counseling staff talk about how they helped affected people cope on and with that day.

The first caller I heard on the program did exactly what I knew someone was going to do: he said that the tragedy would have been much more limited in scope if others had been armed, if students and faculty and ordinary citizens routinely carried concealed weapons.  The very next caller, inevitably, put forth the view that stricter gun controls would prevent such tragedies from ever happening.

In both cases, the host cut the calls short, saying that the goal was to talk about the psychological effects of campus shootings, not start a debate on gun control.  But that’s exactly what was happening.  Those people were trying to mitigate their personal sense of horror by focusing on ways to fix some underlying problem, to prevent such things from ever happening again.  They were trying to make the unthinkable thinkable.

It’s understandable.  We’re a results-oriented, can-do-focused society.  And by locking our attention on what we fervently believe to be solutions, we can shut out the grief that we feel for strangers miles and miles away, ignore the horror and anger that wells inside us.

So far as I know, nobody I know has even a tenuous connection to the events in Virginia.  But all I can think of is the parents, children, spouses, and relatives who will never see their loved ones again.  In my throat, I feel a faint shadow of the freezing, nauseating grip of despair and anguish they are experiencing.  Behind my eyes, there is an echo of the ache of tears that will not come because shock has stopped them cold.  In my guts, there is a small tear that mimics the gaping, ragged void that must be felt by a parent whose child is suddenly dead.

These dead are not my dead… but they are all our dead.

Some other day, perhaps, it will be a time to think about and discuss ways to fix whatever problems lead to or permit such horrors.  Perhaps.  Today I mourn those who died and the death of all their hopes and plans.  I grieve for those left behind to cope with a shattering new reality.  It is not what we’re taught to do, but it is the most human thing any of us can do.  We forget that too easily.

It is no solution, but for me, this is not a day for solutions.  It’s a day of sorrow.

• Sound of a Gun was published on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been nineteen replies.

Over the weekend, I reworked meyerweb’s sidebar a bit.  One of the changes is the addition of a section called “Identity Archipelago“, which links to various bit of my online identity and makes use of XFN‘s me value.  I’ve been meaning to do this ever since co-presenting a poster on how me could be used to accomplish identity consolidation, and hey, I’m only thirty months late.

I ran into an interesting dilemma as I assembled the links, though.  Should I link to the Wikipedia entry about me, and if so, does it really merit a me marker?  I’m not so sure.  Yes, the page is about me, but it isn’t something I created, nor is it something I control.  Thanks to the open nature of Wikipedia, it could be altered to state that I’m a paste-eating pederast with pretensions to the Pakistani presidency.  It would be kind of embarrassing to link to something like that, let alone proclaim in a machine-parseable way that the information on the other side of the link represented me in some way.

While I’ve never stated a Wikipedia policy, as others have, I’ve privately maintained a hands-off policy.  Even though I’d like to replace the picture with a better one and flesh out some details of my career, and on occasion have wanted to correct some inaccuracies, I’ve refrained from doing so.  I’m not going to proclaim that I’ll never ever edit my own entry, because if libel (alliterative or otherwise) shows up and I’m the first to notice, I’ll at least roll the page back.  But in general, I’m keeping my hands off.

Nevertheless, it is arguably a piece of my online identity.  Not linking to it feels like a glaring omission—or am I just trying to rationalize an egocentric desire to show off?  I don’t think that I am, but then I’m hardly a neutral party.

So what’s your perspective?  Is a Wikipedia entry created and edited by others properly a part of my archipelago, or is it simply a nearby island?

• A Question of Identity was published on Monday, April 16th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Microformats and Personal categories.
• There have been five replies.

Thanks to the faintly odd generosity of a colleague—I won’t name names, but let’s just say the URL of the gentleman in question rhymes with “fairgag”—I find myself with a yearlong XBox Live subscription.  One interesting wrinkle in this scenario is that I don’t really have any multiplayer games besides Halo 2, but that isn’t really the biggest issue.  No, the real problem is that the XBox 360 is two floors away from the DSL router, with no possible cable routes that don’t involve winding about a hundred feet of CAT-5 around stairwell bannisters and across public walls.

Now, I do have 802.11b wifi in the house, so I could buy the official wifi adapter.  What I’m wondering, though, is if I could plug the XBox into my Airport Express‘ Ethernet port (or the USB port) and get it onto the network that way.  I Googled a bit but didn’t turn up anything relevant, and poking around the administration utility’s configuration pages didn’t seem to help.  Anyone know if there’s a way to make this happen?

Of course, I have no idea if my Netgear MR814v2 router is even XBox Live compatible, but one thing at a time, I guess.

• XBox Live via an Airport Express? was published on Sunday, April 15th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been sixteen replies.

Wow.

Just wow.

I’m back home and I still can’t believe how amazing An Event Apart Boston was for me and everyone with whom I talked.  I knew going in it was a great lineup of speakers covering great topics.  I knew that we had a completely kick-ass staff in place, and amazing volunteers to help us out.  I knew that we’d have great support from the venue.

I knew all that, and I was still overwhelmed and ecstatic at how things went.  At least on one level.  On another, thanks to the aforementioned kick-ass staff, things went so smoothly that I almost felt like I was a speaker at someone else’s conference.  I had so little to worry about that it was sometimes hard to remember that this was all happening because Jeffrey and I, over breakfast at Las Manitas in Austin, decided to take a chance and put on a show.  In a way, I had to prod myself just a little to remember to feel pride in what we’d accomplished.

What required no effort to feel was a deep sense of humility and awe that so many people had come to support what we did.  Over five hundred folks gathered in Boston, drawn by the same love of the web and pride in Doing Things Right that drives us.  I see the attendees at AEA as the craftsmen and women of the web.  Sure, there are shops mass-producing sites, the way a factory churns out cheap clocks.  That’s fine if you just want something to put on your nightstand.  But if you want an elegant, finely tuned work of art that you’d hang in a prominent place, a clock that is as much a point of pride as a timepiece—you find a craftsman.  And that’s who came to Boston.  That’s who comes to An Event Apart.

What amazed me even more was the overwhelming wave of positive feedback that we got.  Marci, our event manager, told me that in 25 years of event planning, she’s never seen attendees so happy.  So many people came up to me and Jeffrey and Marci just to say, “Thank you so much for doing this”.  They were thanking us, which seems entirely backwards.  I did thank each of them for coming to the event, but let me state it here for anyone I didn’t get to thank in person.  Thank you so much for coming to AEA and showing that you know creating the web is much more than churning out code, and that you take pride in being a craftsman.  Thank you for making the show so amazing.  Without you, it couldn’t have happened at all.

Now I’m looking forward to AEA Seattle twice as much as before, and I thought I was already maxed out on anticipation.

Again: wow.  Thank you, one and all.

• After Boston was published on Friday, March 30th, 2007.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Projects categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

• One of Those Weeks was published on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Rants categories.
• There have been twenty-three replies.