I think I’ve finished trashing bad music. My trash contains a little over 5GB of MP3 and OGG files. So long!

I’ve also been listening to a lot of my dad’s music lately- Del Shannon, Dion, The Drifters, Eddie Cochran, The Four Tops, The Cascades, and others. I try to imagine what the music meant to him, what it reminded him of, or if he identified with something in it. I’ll never know, but I expect he’d approve. Anyway, it’s pretty good stuff so I’m not complaining.

I think Don Henley was right- I should leave it all behind and sail to Lahaina. Maybe Hanalei would be better…

A couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to retool some of the NCGDAP data processing tools I wrote when I started at NC State in 2005. For awhile I’d been using subversion, but fell out of the habit. I was pretty confused to find that I had at least 4 versions of everything I’d written and no idea which was latest, which features I’d already incorporated, or (embarrassingly) what everything did. I’d clearly been shirking some system administration duties.

After some time spent with diff and a text editor, I was down to one version of each application. I also spent some time trying to make sure I didn’t have to do it all again. I sometimes work on my Thinkpad at home, at conferences, and on the bus, which eliminates keeping things solely on a network somewhere. Knowing that I sometimes forget which files have been modified, I wrote a bi-directional rsync over ssh process to sync my Thinkpad with my desktop and can run it from an icon on my Gnome panel.

I also wrote a nightly cron job to backup my work desktop to a network drive. The NCGDAP applications reside on the data processing server so I Samba mount that directory at boot. I installed and configured network-manager-vnc finally. It was ridiculously easy compared to vpnc, which never worked correctly. At home, I configured sshfs mounting of my work desktop from my home desktop so I never have to make a local copy of anything to work on it.

Last by not least, I finally got around to installing Cygwin on Brandi’s Windows XP laptop. Now, she can click an icon in her start menu that starts an rsync over ssh backup job to my desktop. She had been copying her My Documents directory and pasting it into her home directory on my machine using Samba, which took eons. I also added it to Windows Task Scheduler, which is utter crap compared to cron. After the first 8 hour run (~80 GB of music), it takes seconds and I don’t have to wonder about compliance.

Here are links to some of the things I wrote:

Cygwin rsync script, backup batch file to run Cygwin script, laptop sync bash script, sshfs mount script, sshfs umount script

For the record, I’m neither a programmer nor a system administrator. I’m just a librarian.

I’m not big into music.  I generally find it pretty annoying.  I realize that this isn’t a popular position, but it’s the truth.  I’d rather listen to just about anything on talk radio than music.  Anyway, we’ve been talking about how to deal with our massive CD collection and equally large, if less organized, digital music collection.  I’ve decided to start listening to Rhythmbox in shuffle mode and to discard anything I don’t like.  This is, of course, subject to mood, right?  No matter.

We’re digitizing the CDs or specific tracks that we like and are archiving the CDs in the attic for now.  I’ve got about 2GB of mp3s in my trash presently and have just started.   It’s amazing what I have.  Aphex Twins, Rammstein, Barbara Streisand, Kenny G., and other assorted crap.  I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned from this.  Although you can use streamtuner and streamripper to rip hours of Internet radio, you shouldn’t.  You end up with Kenny G.

What I keep, I’m hoping to generate metadata for with Picard and musicbrainz.  It seems all those kids on Napster didn’t use controlled vocabulary and authority files to describe their music.

My Japanese, such as it is, has always been girlish. I think I sound like what in Japanese? got it exactly right.  I learned Japanese from girls and little kids (Thanks Julian!) and I’m sure I sound like it.  I mean, after all, how interesting are Japanese guys to an 18 kid from small town Illinois?  Not very.  The little Japanese I remember, outside of Karate terminology, always gets odd looks from Japanese people partly, I suppose because I sound like an 18 year old girl.  The joys of youthful ignorance!

I posted some photos of our weekend at a friend’s cabin on the New River near Galax, Virginia. We invited a couple of friends, Heather and Andrew, and their dog Ellie. It was pretty awesome. We did some hiking at Grayson Highlands State Park on part of the Appalachian Trail. See the photos.

I just added a twitter widget to the sidebar of the blog.  I’ve been largely undecided about twitter, but have recently seen some great uses of it and have come around to see the handiness of the idea.  While in SoCal, I saw people using it to get together.  It went something like this:  Alice is bored at home on Friday night.  She looks at twitter and sees that Bob is out at wine bar with some mutual friends from work.  Alice can then call Bob or just show up.  I remember that in college people used to leave situational outgoing messages on their voice mail/answering machines.  They’d say things like, “Hey, we’re out at the High Dive tonight.  Hope to see you there.”

Additionally, I agree with Clive Thompson in How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense.  I think it gives one a real sense of the lives of friends.  I have friends I don’t see or talk to often, but it’s nice to have an easy means to keep up with them.  I find twitter has a much lower barrier to entry than blogging.  Check out my twitter, if you like.

I just spent a few days in Fort Worth visiting friends. I also discovered that having a salt water pool is pretty awesome. Here are some pictures.

Ok, so I suspect it’s hot everywhere. However, it’s really hot here. Here’s a screen capture of my Gnome weather applet.

104 °F! Luckily, though, the humidity has dropped from the high 90’s earlier this week.

I thought I’d upload a photo I took of our weather station in the office. My mobile (L6) has a lousy camera so apologies. What a difference, though, right?

I’ve moved my site, obviously. I didn’t have time to plan it, but scrambled last night to move all my content, fix all the broken stuff, and work on a redirect for the old site. I’m glad I used a lot of server side includes and tried to keep site-specific paths and url’s to a minimum. I put considerable thought and work into managing traffic redirection and search engine optimization. I’ll sketch it out.

I used a .htaccess rule to redirect all traffic to a single php page. Perhaps the most important function of this page is to return a ‘301: Moved Permanently’ HTTP status code to alert search engines that the intended page has moved. I did it with this line <?php header(”HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently”); ?> Also, I captured the requested URI and used it to build a new URI to the page in it’s new location. I used the new URI to build a meta refresh tag in the header and a link for the visitor to click if they don’t feel like waiting the 4 seconds to be redirected.

In the header I have this:

<?php

$newuri = ltrim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], “/~jtuttle/”);
echo “<meta http-equiv=\”refresh\” content=\”4;url=http://www.braggtown.com/$newuri\”>”;
?>
and in the body I have this:

<?php
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$newuri = ltrim($uri, “/~jtuttle/”);
echo “The page you were looking for should be at <a href=\”http://www.braggtown.com/$newuri\”>www.braggtown.com/$newuri</a>.”;
?>

I’m also keeping tracking of referrers to the page to request URI changes where I think it’s possible. I’ve submitted a new site map to Google, too. Nothing to do now but wait to see what happens. It’s not like this is a for-profit site so it’s really just an academic exercise. Using curl I can see the status code is working:

me@unix:~$ curl –head “http://www.prairienet.org/~jtuttle/stuff.php”
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:02:33 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) PHP/5.1.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Content-Type: text/html

I’ve been toying with the idea of populating my domain and hosting at home. Since I sold my Cobalt Qube I have one machine at home on which to host. It strikes me as a bad idea to host a development site on the system that is also the archive for all of my digital artifacts such as photos, college papers, and correspondence. Of course, I maintain a mostly up-to-date, off-site backup (who doesn’t?), but that doesn’t fully mitigate the inconvenience and possibly disastrous consequences (think keylogger) that might result from an exploited workstation. So, what to do? I could pay someone else for hosting. The pro’s are that it’s relatively inexpensive, there is some expectation of maintained up-time, and my data is not at-risk.

I’ve experimented with virtual machines including Kernel-based Virtual Machine for Linux and VMware Server.  The expectation with a virtual machine is that an exploit in Apache2 would be confined to the virtual server and would not allow access to external file space.  However, virtualization introduces more overhead and, due to increased complexity, increases the likelihood of failure.  That said, no one is paying me to maintain a certain amount of up-time.  I’ve also been thinking of implementing mod_chroot and mod_security, both of which are included in the Ubuntu software repositories.  I have no experience with either, but they seem to be a nice compromise between virtualization and running straight Apache.

The problem I foresee with  running Apache chroot is the difficulty running third-party software in conjunction with Apache.  I’ve been playing with django, dojo, and would like to explore some map applications like Minnesota Map Server.  I also want to work more with Python CGI.  That may make virtualization a simpler environment to configure than chroot.  I’m open to advice.