Month: November 2007

Mothman is married

I had a great weekend, hanging out in DC at my good friend Jim Heaney’s wedding. Jim, known to many as the Mothman, was a fellow Suspicious Cheeselord/housemate/Glee Club alum and remains a good friend. I had a fabulous time meeting Rebecca’s family and reconnecting with friends—Doyle, Vick, Cheeselords, it was good to see all of you again.

In particular, I received the welcome news that the next Cheeselords recording, of unrecorded works of Jean Mouton, will be coming out soon. Having heard the group on Saturday, I can only say that (perhaps fortunately) it’s a completely different sound than when I was there, and I can’t wait to hear how it goes.

And, yes, all survived the hike on Saturday morning. Definitely the only wedding I’ve ever been to where the groom requested a bachelor hike in lieu of a party. Despite my fears of dropping from cardiac arrest, I had a lot of fun. Jim and Rebecca, I can’t wait to hang out with you guys again soon; you throw a heckuva party.

Trying to use Disqus

I read with some interest that Dave Winer is experimenting with the comment service from Disqus on Scripting News. I turned comments completely off on my site one year ago today and really miss the interactivity. So I signed up for Disqus to see what I could get.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to make Disqus work with Manila. I use a hosted Manila site, so I can’t resort to back-end code to make the integration work, and there are two critical pieces that are missing for me to be able to implement Disqus:

  1. A unique page for each post. This is obviously not Disqus’s fault, but the version of Manila that I use has one page per day, not per post. So it’s not clear where the comment form should go.
  2. A way to modify the permalink URL. The generic Disqus instructions say to publish a version of the permalink URL followed by #disqus_thread. Unfortunately, I don’t appear to have access to a Manila macro that will do this—I get the permalink as a fully formed link.

So it looks like, unless the Disqus people come up with something, I have yet another reason to accelerate my move to another blog platform.

Except…hmmm, now I have an idea about how I might pull it off. Let’s see if I can make it work.

Installing Leopard on an 800 MHz G4 iMac

On the way down to Jim Heaney’s wedding, we stopped overnight at my inlaws’ place in Lakewood, NJ. They own one of the four Macs in the family, an 800 MHz G4 iMac (one of the Luxo Jr models). I had bought Leopard as a family pack with the intention of upgrading everyone, but I hit a surprising snag: Apple’s Leopard Installer actually enforces the 867 MHz minimum clock speed cited on the box specs! So for lack of 67 MHz, the disk won’t install.

Fortunately, there are a few workarounds. One is, if you happen to have another Mac handy, to boot the iMac in target disk mode and install the OS that way. The problem is that I don’t have my MacBook Pro with me, and I’m not sure if the iMac even supports booting into target disk mode.

The second, which I’m doing now, is to make a patched copy of the install DVD that disables the speed check. The linked article helpfully explains how to do the patch (and provides an example file) and even provides screenshots to show the process. I am currently making a read-write disk image from the install DVD and once I get a double-layer DVD to burn it to we’ll be able to move forward.

What are the risks? Well, I think the biggest risk is that some of the new Core Animation features will tax the processor and slow things down. So we’ll have to watch that. But being able to remote into my inlaws’ computer and help them will be worth it, as will the putatively improved iChat experience. And a quick check of comments of people who have done this hack suggests that any degradation of performance on an 800 MHz machine will be minimal, so in this case I think the risks are outweighed by the rewards.