Grab bag: Why yes, I’d like to be skiing right now, thanks.

Media wiring project: data cabling

For those that have not been following my structured wiring project (and hard to blame you: it’s been going on since late 2004), here are the highlights to date:

  1. Moved into a 1941 house with no inside telephone wiring and put a temporary fix in place.
  2. Installed a Leviton structured wiring box in our basement and mounted a telephone switching block, a cable T, and punchdowns for Cat 5 wiring.
  3. Ran Cat 5, phone, and coax into the first and second floor bedrooms while the walls were open for our air conditioning project.
  4. Ran all the phone and coax in the house into the structured wiring box
  5. Hook up the new outlets in the kitchen

The major step left incomplete after all this activity was the data wiring. I haven’t had to do a lot of data cabling in the house thanks to 802.11. But with three to four laptops, a TiVO, a Wii, speakers, and a printer all on the same hub, it’s occured to me that lighting up the data jacks that I installed in steps 3 and 5 might be a worthwhile endeavor.

So last weekend I got my wiring tools out, opened up the box, and took a look. I saw my punchdown block but couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to work. But I finally realized that the punchdown block simply provided physical termination for the wire alongside a jack into which the actual data service could be plugged. So I needed to do three things: terminate the two Cat-5 runs from the bedrooms into the punchdown block; buy and install a hub to light up the punchdown block; and extend the short run from the kitchen to the block so I could light it up as well.

It turned out to be really easy. The Cat-5 runs were color coded to the colors on the block, so I simply lined up the wires (blue & white, solid blue, orange & white, solid orange, green & white, solid green, brown & white, solid brown) and used the punchdown tool to knock them into the block. Then I used a crimping tool that I bought back in 2005 to make Ethernet patch cables from some spare Cat-5, and connected the block to the hub. I saved the short run for the weekend; I’ll probably move the long cable I had to the data block, and splice the short one and run it into the voice block.

That leaves one very important step: getting a data feed from the WAN (our ISP) into the hub. I have a plan for that, and it happens this weekend. And it involves a new contractor and a new drop to the house. And I’m very excited about it. Stay tuned!

Preparing for the deluge

It’s a perfect storm today: I have family commitments at home, significant redesign of our customer dashboard and our entire portal due tomorrow, a software release that begins at 9 PM tonight… and six to twelve inches of snow due starting late tomorrow morning, with up to 1 to 2 inches of snow per hour.

I think tomorrow will be a good day to work from home.

Grab bag: IE security update and other fixes

Grab bag: IE security flaw

Cougar bait!

Failed iPhone restart? Restart it again

My iPhone hung this morning while I was trying to delete a message in my Gmail account. I sighed and did a restart (hold the top sleep switch and the home button down at the same time). And it came up… with a screen that told me (in graphics) to plug the iPhone into iTunes.

I was concerned I had bricked the phone, but it seemed to still be functioning: I could make emergency calls, and I even got a notice that I had received a text message.

I normally sync the iPhone at home, so I figured I’d be without it all day long. Then I checked my Twitter replies, and my old friend Andrew Bartelt suggested that I simply try rebooting/resetting the phone again. Forehead now sore from whacking myself upside the head, I now again have a working iPhone.

Google Chrome 1.0 (.154.36)

Well, that was fast. Google Chrome went from new to 1.0 in about 100 days:

chrome1dot0

But is it ready? And why so soon?

chromepngbug

I expected Google to add more features over time, since the merely architectural improvements of the browser didn’t seem to meet the critical differentiator threshold to justify launching a new browser. But that didn’t really happen. And in fact, Google seems to be launching Chrome with some rough edges intact. Check out this snippet of the WordPress 2.7 login screen (right).See those black edges around the box? That’s a rendering bug in Chrome’s version of WebKit. (The black corners aren’t there in Safari.)

So: Google is rushing a new browser that they “accidentally” leaked just 100 days ago, a browser that has significant speed but demonstrable rendering flaws, into an already crowded market. Why? And why launch two days after previewing the Google Native Code plug-in, a web technology that seems a far more significant leap forward?

My guess: they’re scared of having their thunder stolen, maybe by Firefox. The new Mozilla JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey, appears to be running neck-and-neck with Google’s V8. And when the major feature in your browser is speed, you don’t want to risk being merely as good as your better established competitor. So maybe releasing Chrome ahead of Firefox 3.1 (which still has no release date, and at least one more beta to go) was simply a defensive move to make sure they aren’t competitively dead before they launch.

WordPress 2.7 First Impressions

I just did the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 on my server and am getting to know it. My first impressions:

  1. The upgrade was smoother this time, perhaps because I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even have to clear cookies to make it work.
  2. The admin interface, which is the major focus of this release, UI wise, is going to take some getting used to. It’s busier than the old interface, which is rarely good. And I’ve already published my criticism of the left hand navigation. The good news is that for the most part it’s getting out of my way and letting me write.
  3. The posting interface is more cluttered too. I never had to bother about the autosave notices before, because they stayed out of the way and were discreet in white text against a dark background. The autosave notices now are very visible when they happen, and pretty distracting. And after the last interface the new screens seem a little washed out (I’m using the blue color scheme).
  4. It took me a few seconds to figure out that the “Edit” link in the Posts module would take me to a list of all my posts–that used to be the Manage Posts link. I understand the reason for the change, but Edit isn’t the first thing I think about when I’m searching through my old posts, my most frequent reason for visiting that part of the admin interface.

The only plugin issue I had was with Simple Tags. On the reboot a notice advised me that I should use “Simple Tagging” by the same author instead. This doesn’t appear to have been correct; all I needed to do was upgrade Simple Tags.

Grab bag: Security and meltdowns

The crack in the world

Three things entwine for me this morning: the beginning of the Christmas season, the 100th birthday of Olivier Messiaen, and the crack in the wall of Old South Church.

I spent Monday night and Tuesday morning in rehearsals for the upcoming Boston Pops holiday concerts at Symphony Hall (my performance schedule: 12/12 4 PM and 8 PM; 12/14 7 PM; 12/20 11 AM and 3 PM; 12/23 8 PM; 12/27 8 PM), marinating in the secular version of the holiday. It’s always a colorful but thin broth: reindeer and snowmen, with the occasional “Hallelujah Chorus” bobbing by to provide sustinance. This season we add a new arrangement of music from “Polar Express,” the culmination of which is a pop ballad exhorting us to “believe.” In what, it’s not quite clear: the train? Santa Claus?

Last week, a crack was found in the wall of Old South Church, a long standing Boston institution that is quite clear about what it believes and is growing as it continues to celebrate the inclusion of all God’s children, not just the straight ones, in God’s kingdom. The crack, potentially a disaster for the church, has been made an opportunity for reflection on the potential for cracks in any institution or relationship and for thanksgiving for the wisdom of the church’s leadership in ensuring that the MBTA and their contractor, not the church’s insurance, must pay in the event of damage. And yet, there it stands, an irrefutable proof of movements deep below that may at any moment cause a fundamental shift in our world.

That shift, that crack in time, is what pulses through the best of Messiaen’s work, his pieces for solo organ (Le banquet céleste, Apparition de l’église éternelle, L’Ascension, La Nativité du Seigneur, Livre du Saint Sacrement) and a solitary choral motet O sacrum convivium! For Messiaen Christmas is something entirely different: a meditation, an epiphany, on a fundamental shift in the world. Hearing Messiaen in a candlelit sanctuary awaiting an 11 PM Christmas Eve service, the apparition of the eternal church sinking into my blood and bones as the organ opened the doors to the miracle: a transformation out of history that continues to transform us two thousand years later.

(Update: As always, Nancy Taylor’s sermon the Sunday after the discovery of the crack is insightful, and echoes some of my own thoughts in a more coherent manner.)