Gartner ITXpo 2006

I’m back at Gartner’s ITXpo after liveblogging parts of it last year. I’ve decided this year to pseudo-live-blog—to take notes during the session and post them later. Pulling out a laptop during one of the keynotes last year just felt too weird. Blogger culture hasn’t totally permeated the IT universe, and I drew too many stares.

However, I did notice a blogger’s lounge is available on the show floor alongside all the media lounges. So maybe things are changing… albeit really slowly.

It will be interesting to see if this year’s official conference blog actually writes anything about any of the sessions, rather than the conference events.

I hate United.

I really really hate United.

I decided to postpone my flight to San Francisco for the Gartner ITXpo from last night, with the hassle over the basement and everything. I am now waiting at a gate at Logan for our flight to show up at the gate. It was supposed to have taken off 20 minutes ago.

Why is it late? Is it the weather? Is it a delayed crew? No. It’s late because it’s taken 45 minutes to tow it from a hangar to our gate. I’ve already missed my connecting flight.

I really, really hate United.

President Bail Organa

Just as well the West Wing is over. I’m not sure I believe Jimmy Smits as a president any more than I believe him as Princess Leia’s adoptive father.

Oh, hell. I’m too young to be that grouchy an old fart. I’ll miss the show.

I’m an idiot, of course

And anyone who knew anything about floods would have known, as I didn’t, that emptying the basement once wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference with how high the water table is right now. Neither of course did the French drain. I now feel a little better about having let it get clogged, knowing it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. (Yes, all the work I did earlier is for nought. Oh well. We’ll see where we are in the morning.)

Friday Random 10: Sixteen Hours edition

Something I neglected to mention in my post yesterday about this latest illness was the solid eight hours of sleep I got yesterday, on top of eight hours last night. Today I feel odd; rested and yet not.

I can’t wait to be done with this cold.

  1. Iron & Wine, “Evening on the Ground (Lilith’s Song)” (Woman King EP)
  2. Nine Inch Nails, “Get Down Make Love” (Sin)
  3. Choir of Trinity College, “Singt! Ihr lieben Christen all” (In Dulci Jubilo)
  4. Lascivious Biddies, “BiddyCast: Camp Conway”
  5. Peter Schickele, “Closing” (Two Pianos are Better Than One)
  6. The Clash, “Hateful” (London Calling)
  7. R.E.M., “Be Mine” (New Adventures in Hi-Fi)
  8. Bob Dylan, “Nashville Skyline Rag” (Nashville Skyline)
  9. Radiohead, “Palo Alto” (Airbag/How Am I Driving?)
  10. James Brown, “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved” (Funk Power 1970)

New (old) mix: Graduation Lieder

I posted a while back about an old college mix that I had posted at Art Of The Mix; at the time I thought I would be writing about more of these old mixes. Funny how time flies. But today I posted one of the pivotal mixes in my personal tape history. Graduation Lieder isn’t really mine; my cousin Greg put it together while he was working at a campus radio station and gave it to me as a high school graduation gift back in 1990.

I can’t think of too many better gifts than to be introduced to such a concentrated bundle of great music. The irony at this remove is how much the landscape was about to change. All the REM influenced college bands like the Connells, Drivin’n’Cryin’, and Camper van Beethoven, who dominated the first side of the mix were to disappear, buried under the one-two onslaught of early 90s dance music and the grunge avalanche (which Camper would ride out by transforming into Cracker). A lot of the other artists were to undergo some radical evolutions as well. Björk, Frank Black, and Ian McCulloch went solo, the former more successfully than the latter two. The Chilis went through enough evolutions to merit a separate post of their own. And whatever happened to Living Colour?

Anyway, a great artifact and something that I hope you’ll enjoy as well.

Okay, really: enough of this.

This is now the third time in two months (approximately) that I have been felled by a sinus cold. It’s taken residence in my throat too. I want my immune system to step up and do its job. Unlikely with the rain that we’re having right now, though: there’s no sunshine predicted for the next ten days. Fortunately I’ll be in San Francisco next week for the Gartner ITXpo—and they have sunshine.

Oh yeah: George, are you in town next week?

Google Trends, analyzed

Dave points to one of the announcements from Google Press Day today: Google Trends. The publicly facing application shows trending for search terms over several years, and compares it to the volume of news items that contain the search terms.

When I was working on online BI at Microsoft, we had an internal application very much like this that I helped launch for Microsoft.com search analysis. The bells and whistles were different but the display and the idea were the same: by looking at what people are searching for, you can gauge the popularity of a concept.

Dave fell into a trap that we discovered, too: neglecting to check synonyms when comparing the popularity of concepts. While RSS beats podcasting and blogs in the sample search Dave did, the term blog (singular) handily beats RSS and podcast.

So synonyms are obviously one issue. According to the About page, you can address this by grouping terms together, but I couldn’t make this work. Bug? Overall volume is another issue. Did you notice that the y-axis isn’t labeled?

But it’s still fun—particularly when you can take advantage of common names to tell a good joke. Hey ma, I’m bigger than Dave!

Kitchen beginnings

Is there such a thing as a slow, incremental kitchen renovation? Beats me, but Lisa and I are hypothesizing that, up to a point, it can be done, and we’re moving forward with a plan to do one.

The first part will be to take the outside wall of the kitchen, which until this weekend housed a stand-alone cabinet, and install a set of actual cabinetry there, complete with countertop. This will require some work, namely removing a built in ironing board (which is cute, but essentially useless to us) and a rudimentary chair rail molding, but should otherwise be straightforward–especially since we’re using Ikea’s modular Akurum system.

It’s the second step, where we rip out the rest of the old cabinets, install a dishwasher and an outside-venting hood, and move the stove—and maybe rip down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room—that will be the fun part. The theory about doing incremental changes kind of breaks down at that point.

So many decisions. At least with the Ikea system there are some constraints. We’ve already picked the cabinet bodies and doors, and will try out one of the counter surfaces on the first two cabinets we bought—at $50 for six feet of counter space, it’s a cheap enough experiment. But then the other questions come: what kind of dishwasher? What about the floor? Can we fix the sag in the floor that is ominously under the refrigerator?

As they say, stay tuned…

Trackback, you are dead to me.

I finally turned off trackback on this blog. For a while there have been certain posts that were trackback magnets, and I was dealing with those through a manual review process. In the last month, though, just about every post started to collect trackback spam within a day or so of being posted. The version of Manila that my host supports doesn’t really provide any mechanisms for managing Trackback spam—there is no notification mechanism and no facility for centrally reviewing pings. So it’s gone as of last night, and good riddance.

I’ll continue to send out pings when I post, but given my experience with Trackback I don’t know if anyone will be receiving them.

The Project goes RAID

I alluded a few days ago to the fact that the Project has been stalled for a while because of a lack of disk space. Well, things may be about to get a little kick start. I ordered a 500 GB drive and a miniStack case from Other World Computing. In fact, I like the look of the case so much, I ordered a second one to swap my existing 300 GB drive into, so I can stack the two together. And the multiple FireWire and USB hubs that it will provide will be manna; right now I have to swap the old drive from FireWire to USB when I want to sync my iPod because the FireWire port on the external drive isn’t powered.

And the RAID part? Well, I’m considering combining the two drives together so that they form a single logical disk. Mac OS X provides the capability to create three types of RAID arrays: mirrored, striped, and concatenated. I’m thinking concatenated. A lot of the commentary on this option says that it doesn’t make sense: none of the security of mirrored and none of the speed of striped. I think the commentary misses a point: sometimes it’s just awfully convenient to not have to worry about accessing two separate volumes, for instance when trying to share music across a network or manage a large volume of digital music. Plus having the ability to add additional disks to the array without blowing it is really helpful.

Of course, making the RAID array without wiping out the data on the drive is tricky. I’ve identified two ways to do it:

  1. Create a concatenated RAID array with just one disk—the new disk, copy everything from the old disk to it, then add the second disk to the array.
  2. Use the command line version of diskutil to turn the existing disk into a RAID array without destroying the data, then add the second disk. This option is riskier—I don’t know for sure if the command will destroy the data, but this post on AFP548.com, which gave me the idea in the first place, suggests it should work.

The drives should be here in a week, then we’ll give it the old college try.

It’s a Tivo world

We haven’t had access to a DVR since we got the HD TV, since Comcast doesn’t offer a cable box + HDTV DVR. In fact, we’ve hardly used the main TV setup since we got the HDTV. That’s about to change: we just picked up a Tivo + DVD burner combo from Circuit City, who were offering $150 rebates. The plan is to pass standard-def signals to the Tivo from the HD box and pass hi-def directly to the TV.

This plan meant that I had to free up some space in the stereo rack. That’s OK, though: last weekend when I replaced my old cheap Technics turntable with the Denon, I pulled out my 50-disc Sony CD changer. In addition to the fact that almost all my CDs have been ripped, and our DVD changer can play any that I still want to hold onto, the CD changer was the last piece of Sony tech in the rack, and I really want it gone.

I’m looking forward to hopping onto the Tivo bandwagon. One of the other frustrating things about the Comcast unit was the inability to get programs off of it. The DVD burner, plus the ability to network the Tivo, should open some new frontiers.

Oedipus, complex

Boston Globe: BSO brings full drama to ‘Oedipus’. The Globe generally liked our performance; Richard Dyer was kind enough to note that “the men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang with excellent intonation and driving rhythm”—and not to mention that we sang with scores, a first in recent memory for a non-Pops concert.

Behind the scenes, what happened? I can only say that when a work with a lengthy unfamiliar Latin text meets a conductor who doesn’t believe in singing from memory, something has to give. It actually helped: most of us were singing from memory anyway, but being able to check the scores periodically to confirm the words in some of the lengthier passages really helped.

And I still have the thing stuck in my brain, in spite of every single piece of music I’ve listened to in the last day.

(Oh, confidentially to Keith Powers at the Herald: you write really well. How on earth did you write the following two sentences together: “Dohnanyi’s conducting was precise and erudite. The orchestra sounded like it actually liked playing for the guy.” Is that the job of an editor at the Herald: to dumb down a review by inserting random sentences in dumb-guy talk?)