Black Coffee (Deprecated)

Death to Audio Movie Spam

So the other day I was complaining about movie ads spontaneously playing on my pc.

Well, I had an epiphany tonight -- I thought of a new google keyword to describe the problem: 'audio spam'.

This quickly led me to a long threaded forum discussion on exactly the problem I was having.

Turns out that AOL IM is forcing these stupid ads at me. There were several solutions:

Get rid of AOL IM
I would, except how would I keep in touch with all my cherished Arsdigita Alumni?

Switch to another IM Clien that supports AIM
Ugh. More gross software.

Run a patch from an .ru domain that promised to strip out the behavior
Have you seen the goatse man?

Delete some suspect files from the filesystem and ViewMedia from the applications
Further reading suggested the AOL would heal itself and replace these files

Block the servers feeding the spam
This was the tidiest idea i'd seen, and that's what I did, adding the following addresses to my HOSTS file

127.0.0.1 ar.atwola.com
127.0.0.1 ads.web.aol.com
127.0.0.1 VTOT.proxy.aol.com
127.0.0.1 ads.aol.com

For good order's sake, I ran "ipconfig /flushdns" so that the blocking would start immedaitely.

For the record, I am running AOL IM Version 5.2.3292 on WinXP Professional.

Adding those four addresses to my HOSTS files completely cured the problem with AOL IM movie audio spam.

Slashdot really ought to just go and fuck themselves

In the days before Sharp NewsReader, killing time meant hitting reload on a few of my Favorites Menu, like CNN and Slashdot -- sites that were regularly posting new content.

But not now.

With Sharp, as I encounter interesting, low-frequency blogs, I just toss them into the subscription list. Once an hour, Sharp polls them, and highlights new blog items to me. It's a great way to cover blogs that unpdate on a slothful schedule but which are otherwise interesting.

So this morning, I noticed some new articles in the Slashdot feed:

• Your Headline Reader Has Been Banned.
• You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes
• In 72 Hours, Your Ban Will be Lifted
• Do Not Bother Contacting Us for 72 Hours

So I think, "what the hell is this?" and then find a link in one of these warning feeds.

Well, I'll tell you that their algorithm must be fucked up.

My newsreader is only tuned to check slashdot once per hour. Usually when I flip over to Sharp, I hit manual refresh. I might do that six times in a day? So the 24 regular checks + 6 manual checks = 30, which is less than 48, the sworn limit-per-day.

Or perhaps they're stupid, and they really do check "have you pinged me within the last 30 minutes?" whenever I make a fresh ping. What sense does it make that, in one day, I cannot hit reload at 12:30 and then again at 12:35 and then not again until the next day?

The whole thing is ridicuolous anyway.. So they are concerned about me hammering them with page requests from a NewsReader, but they don't seem to care about a regular web page reload. Have you ever checked out the RSS feed from Slashdot? It's awful! The text is often almost truncated before it's managed to mention both the subject and predicate.

Anonymous Coward writes "The sky will fall next.... Betanews is carrying a story about Phoenix ditching the trusty old BIOS and moving to 'Trusted ...

trystanu writes "If Microsoft Built Cars, occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason; you'd accept this, restart and drive on -- at ...

thedj_sd writes "As the true slashdot reader you just love ascii art of course. You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your ...

These worthless feeds are tiny compared to the slashdot web page anyway.

Furthermore, if they think I am going to waste a lot of time tracking down my ISP administrator and working out proxy issues between them, slashdot, and myself, they are sorely mistaken.

These guys have always been pricks anyway, as 31die experienced, they're haughty and aloof when you send in any remark about bugs/feature-requests, regardless of how good or simple the idea is.

But now that I can get enough content from many small interesting blogs, I'm not beholden to these jagoffs anyway. After all, it is generally a second-rate collection of second-rate comments. Plus, fleshbotand boingboing are much more interesting anyway.

Fuck You, Slashdot.

=========

Update:

ahahah I am pleased to see that I am not the only one who feels this way about Slashdot.

Resizing MoveableType Comment Windows

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Eldridge [mailto:31die@Graphics.Stanford.EDU] 
> Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2003 7:55 PM
> To: Nils Blutig
> Subject: fun project
> 
> 
> 
> The next time you have 5 free minutes, how about grepping through the
> MT sources and fixing the comment window so it isn't an unresizable
> piece of shit?
> 
> 

Well, it really wasn't fun, and it took me twenty minutes to do, but we've all hated this problem since almost the day I installed MoveableType.

So I finally sorted it out. Two steps:

Make the windows resizable

function OpenComments (c) {
   window.open(c,
                   'comments',
                   'width=800,height=800,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,status=yes');
}

Add the "resizable=yes" instruction, and change the dimensions from 480x480 to 800x800.

Do the same thing for the "OpenTrackbacks" function too. It will be found adjacent to the OpenComments function definition.

You'll find these two functions in a couple different templates in your filesystem and database. I'd change the default-templates to these parameters too, so that new blogs will start out correct.

Give the inputs reasonable dimensions

But also, you'll need to edit the three Comment Templates (Listing, Preview, and Eror) and the Individual Archive Template, changing/adding sizes to the URL, Email, and Comments elements

<label for="email" >Email Address:</label><br />
<input id="email" name="email" size=40 /><br /><br />

<label for="url">URL:</label><br />

<input id="url" name="url" size=40/><br /><br />

<label for="text">Comments:</label><br />

<textarea id="text" name="text" rows="25" cols="90"></textarea><br /><br /> 

Then of course rebuild everything. This should make your comments and trackbacks much more presentable, and 31die more happy.

==

I suppose the next thing would be to figure out a [code] tag for embedding source code (including html) in blog items without having to replace all the brackets, etc.

Movie Spam Spyware HELP!

So a couple weeks ago I was sitting here at my PC and the speakers suddenly started playing a ten or fifteen second movie ad. The fidelity was quite poor, so I couldn't really make anything out but "Paul Walker."

I had about twenty IE windows open, so I figured it was an embedded ad in one of those sites that had thwarted the Google Popup Blocker.

The thing is, days later the same ad played again. I scrambled to triangulate what web page it was coming from, but I failed. It was too quick.

And then again, but this time, I only had two or three pages open. One was my own site, and the other was something safe, like moveabletype.org or whatever. In the brief playing window, I also scanned the Task Manager but saw nothing obvious.

So what the hell is going on? My next idea was that I had some spyware/adware on my PC. I ran AdAware with an updated database. IT found nothing but tracking cookies.

I talked to the fellow who wrote Sharp NewsReader, the only software I've recently installed, and we couldn't figure out any obvious way people were somehow injecting this ad through RSS feeds or the preview pane. All the sites I subscribe to are relatively innocuous anyway.

So basically I have no idea what the hell is doing this. It just played again, and now after hearing it five or six times, I understood a bit more of it. I think it is an ad for some stupid [ A group of archaeological students become trapped in the past when they go there to retrieve their professor. The group must survive in 14th century France long enough to be rescued.] movie called "TimeLine" starring "Paul Walker".

That the organism playing this dumb ad is so furtive it is really annoying. I picked through my installation of QuickTime, but it wasn't clear that had any mode for "unrequested movie blurbs." I threw away Winamp 4/Pro a long time ago, so I just have the old, dependable, staid Winamp3. Otherwise, unless Microsoft Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger is doing this {and I cannot see where}, I'm totally lost.

Help!

Moveable Type Open Relay!

Sharing the alarm that MT features a serious security flaw.

I just shut the fucking thing off.... There was some debate about the various fixes working or not; I don't need the functionality and I don't need to have karavshin.org put into an ip blacklist.

Movable Type's strange interface

I wrote up a little summary/diary/blog entry for each day of my recent trip to Idaho. I did them all as plain text inside emacs, with the thought that from there I could email them to whoever, etc. I ended up posting them to black-coffee, which turned out to be needlessly painful. Why?

Well, I did a simple cut & paste of my text file into the "new entry" widget, and MT demonstrated a complete and total lack of understanding of newlines. The "obvious" interpretation (at least to me) is that a single newline doesn't mean anything, and a double newline (visible as a blank line in the entry) should mean a paragraph break. Maybe this is just my own bias -- this is the way LaTeX operates, and it is very very convenient. In any case, MT never takes this interpretation.

There is a tempting option on the new entry widget labeled "Text Formatting" which can be set to "None" or "Convert Line Breaks". These do different things, but neither of them does the right thing. I figured I might be able to select "None" (assuming it means "MT will not screw with your formatting") and then insert the breaks in the correct places by myself. Nope. It seemed like MT turned every newline into a double newline when I select "None". Perhaps "None" means something else in web-parlance.

So the first step is to laboriously delete every line break that I don't intend to have in the input, otherwise the entries won't wrap correctly when somebody resizes the window. I kept double line breaks between paragraphs, because it is the only way I can see them. This probably will result in some strange formatting in the final published version.

The next step is to hit the preview button and see if things have turned out right. But for some reason the preview window doesn't look like the rest of the site (perhaps Mike's error?) and I can't resize the width of the text to see if there will be any wrapping bugs.

The worst bug I saw is that MT doesn't understand links that span a line break, and the resulting display is atrocious -- you end up seeing the inside of the href, along with the linked test, etc. Removing the confusing line break of course fixes the problem. Anyway, I'm not sure why they chose to take such a determinedly non-HTML approach to formatting. I think the HTML standard is basically "all whitespace is equal, and a single whitespace is the same as a million." Clearly MT does not follow that concept at all. Seems like a needless irritation, but maybe for most users it is the most natural and intuitive interface?

Day 1 -- Monday, November 10, 2003

This week, karavshin.org is pleased to present a a five-part trip report from very special Guest DJ -- 31die from Atherton California

Got to Fernley, the first toilet-town past Reno (another toilet-town) and got lunch at about 2:30pm. Get out the map and try to figure out what to do -- I'd been on I-80 up to that point, and it was light traffic, but still not that interesting.

Spot a road heading north out of Fernley that has a dirt road turnoff that heads to Winnemucca, the next major town (6000 people) up I-80. Looks like a good adventure, although the day is getting short.

Take up off NV-447 to get to the dirt road. Two-lane highway (or whatever you call 1 lane in each direction) and 70mph speed limit. At one point I was up around 110mph and the car was happily continuing to accelerate. Not so ram-rod straight and great visibility, so I chickened out at that point.

Get to what must be the turn off and realize it about 10 yards past. Back up and make the turn, and who should be coming up 447 at me? A county deputy/sheriff/? in his 4WD patrol.

He pulls off with me and really just wants to shoot the shit, offer advice, etc. He cautioned me that even though I have a 4WD car, the road is pretty rough, the quality of the grading gets substantially worse once I get to the next county, etc. Apparently a friend of his took his new Chevy pickup truck out on this road -- a 96 mile run to Winnemucca -- and managed to get two flats. So I'm a little apprehensive, but I've driven an hour and a half north on 447 to try
this out, and there is virtually nothing else out here.

(I'm sitting in the lobby of a Best Western in Winnemucca, and one of those "start your morning" shows aimed at the functionally retarded is on. It is driving me nuts.)

So we continue to chit-chat. The town I just passed, "Empire", is a tiny speck of a town. It has a one pump generic gas station which was closed at 4pm. The only reason the town exists is the gypsum board (Sheetrock) plant. Apparently until 7 or 8 years ago, the gas station/mini-mart was a company store! The sheriff said "Yeah, welcome to the twilight zone." He went to say the town up the street (Gerlach) is 200 people and has a gas station, a motel and a restaurant, both owned by Bruno, and two bars. I kept my opinions to myself, but the Sheriff elaborated, "Yeah, 200 people and two bars. Tells you something." We chit chatted a bit about my car, a Subaru WRX wagon, which the deputy was quite fond of. He said he's always been a truck guy, but now he's thinking about buying an STi. I didn't discuss my speed runs on 447, I figured he might not be as entertained as I was.

Burning Man is held somewhere around Gerlach out on the playa. I saw a billboard on the way up 447, and on the road to Winnemucca I passed a sign intended for traffic going the other way.

So the sun is going down quickly, and I head off on the Winnemucca track. Very driveable, in any car at all. It certainly was corrugated. Probably not as rough as the roads in Death Valley, and comfortable enough at 30 or 35mph. The sun was pretty much completely gone at 5:30pm, and I'm flying along this track in the night. Pretty fun trip. I got to the far end at maybe 7:30pm -- 2.5 or 3 hours total travel time.

I start poking through Winnemucca at the mandated 25mph, paying very close attention to my speed. Settle on staying at the Best Western, because I figure the places advertising a $25/night room are probably going to give me about what you'd expect for $25/night. Come back out to the car, and the left rear tire looks really soft. Drive next door to a gas station and check it -- 10psi. I put more air in and I can hear it leaking back out of the tire.

So of course I'm thinking I hit a rock and screwed up a tire, shades of Australia. And of course the deputy had cautioned me about exactly this.

Bring the car back to the hotel parking lot, put the jack under the left rear, and forget about it for the night.

Get up in the morning and change the tire, and it looks like the tire actually has a nail in it, which certainly isn't the failure I expected. Go up the street to ...

(Now some 55 year old man on the inane morning show is carrying on about what the amazing success of some 23 year old crooner he obviously knows nothing about. How demeaning for everyone involved.)

... Big O Tires and they find two small nails in the tire. I have no idea where I would have picked those up. I guess just bad luck, and complete coincidence that I happened to be driving offroad which was much more likely to cause damage. I was doing my best to be friendly with the clerk, but I continually got the dead eyes. I don't think he was irritated with me -- as far as I could tell he was just completely and utterly humorless.

Got the tire fixed for $10, and it looks like they did exactly what you'd expect for $10 -- pulled the nails, drove in a nylon+glue plug, and were done with it. I don't think the tire ever left the rim. Whatever, when I get back to the real world I'll take it to a place I trust and have it looked at by people who know what they are doing. At least I didn't have to buy a $200 tire in this town -- particularly since they very likely wouldn't have it in stock and then I'd have to
figure out a compromise, etc.

(Now the puke-worthy crooner is giving us a broadway musical-style swelling performance of some shitty love song. My immediate thought is to pick up the television and throw it into the roaring fire in the fireplace of this needlessly hot lobby.)

Onward and upward. I'm in Nevada now, probably hit Idaho today, but I haven't examined the maps enough to figure out what I want to do yet.

Day 2 -- Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Took whatever road north out of Winnemucca, heading into the Humbolt Toiyabe National Forest. I think I noticed this the day before as well, but in any case DeLorme atlas books are very bad about recognizing non-paved roads. The bold red or light red line can mean a paved or unpaved road. I don't know why, because they have a separate symbol for unpaved roads. Maybe that is specific to unimproved roads -- roads cut by jeep and never graded? Or maybe it is because they are reusing US Census data, which was never particularly concerned with the utmost accuracy in road classifications.

Kind of an annoying surprise to discover that the road suddenly disappears. In general I was looking for dirt road exploration, but I'd like to know when I'm going to get it and when I'm not.

Anyway, hit "Paradise Valley" (not in a valley to speak of, and didn't strike me as paradise) and
the road turned to a graded and graveled road.

I wonder if spreading gravel on the road makes it wear better? It certainly makes it 10x more miserable to drive than just a bare dirt road.

Took the "Solid Silver Mine" turnoff and wandered back 5 miles or so on a jeep track. Pretty entertaining. Nothing the car wasn't up to. I'm guessing you could make it the whole way in a 2wd car, but maybe not. Got to the end and took a nice hike around.

(... IBM has put the "Fn" key in the traditional spot for the left "Ctrl" key. Absolutely infuriating. I might use the Fn key once or twice after turning the computer on, but I use the Ctrl key continually ...)

While I was standing at the car and taking a break after my hike a couple of other vehicles came driving along -- a Chevy Z71 and a Grand Cherokee. Doesn't matter one way or the other, but I did like it more when I was the only one out there. On the drive out I was breaking ice in puddles, etc.

Backtracked to the main (gravel) road and headed north into the Humboldt Toiyabe National Forest proper. A lot of twisty hillclimbing, and no other cars at all. Not a single solitary one. Started gaining elevation and getting snow on the road. Kept gaining elevation and the snow kept getting deeper. Next thing I know there's probably about 4 inches of snow on the road, and it is pretty slippery and wiggly. Had a fun drive back down the mountain and out of the park. Probably not the smartest thing I ever did -- the tires are all-season or whatever (no snow tire type lugs, etc.) and I didn't have any chains.

On the way out I passed a quite high peak and it looked like there was an antenna on top of it. Get out the binoculars and look, and sure enough there is an antenna -- it looked liked a cellular tower! I can't imagine why it was there. It's a state (national?) forest with unimproved roads, and it needs cellular coverage? And given how much are a cell site covers wouldn't you need more than one for it to be of much use? Perhaps it was just a repeater funnelling in phone service for one of the several outposts within the forest.

I was going to take FR531 (the FR prefix denotes a forest road), but it looked like it would be a long drive to civilization that way. DeLorme was marking the road as being one grade lower than the gravel road I was already on, so I figured a possible 150 miles of that could turn out to be a really regrettable mistake.

Headed out to 95N and followed that pretty much all the way to Boise, where I picked up 84E. Stopped at a Best Western on the west side of town and they didn't have any single rooms. I didn't have the DeLorme atlas for Idaho, so I asked the clerk/desk person where there was a Border or Barnes and Noble and got directions.

Got back out onto 84E and stayed on it at the 184 split -- 184 is some local spur. (That is a numbering convention -- just like 80 & 280 in San Francisco). Realize later this means that I can't get off at the right exit for the bookstore. Make a mental note to thank the clerk for useless directions.

Get off at the last Boise exit and head to another Best Western. Seemed like quite a nice place and got a room. Head back out the door to go get some dinner at the adjacent Perkins. Walking up to the place I can see a guy with white hair in a bristle cut who looks to be about 45 years old, sitting next to his wife, girlfriend, whatever. The two of them are in a booth and both sitting on the same side of the table, so they're already irritating. They got about 100x more irritating when they started kissing. After the first kiss I figured "Okay, that is a 'Boy, we enjoyed our Perkins' meals, now let's get the hell out of here' peck." I was so wrong. The kissing continued ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Certainly the first time I was a party to necking in a Perkins, and I certainly hope it is the last.

Got a salad with dinner which turned the whole meal into 10% too much food. Annoying, because I would have really liked to have had a dessert. In hindsight I should have had a salad and a dessert and skipped the entree. Get the check and ask the waitress for directions to the Barnes & Noble, which I'm now a few miles past. She's not really sure how to get there, but the hostess who just walked back in knows.

Anyway, get my directions and drive off and get the atlas. Encounter the uber-mall. Thing must have gone on for 2 miles. Just store after store after store. Probably quite thrilling if you find the endless tedium of a mall exciting. Come back to the hotel and try to get online, but the ethernet jack in the room is dead. Oh well.

Day 3 -- Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Get cleaned up and go downstairs. For some reason a 35 or 40 year old woman has decided that her workout attire is what she should wearing to get the free breakfast in the lobby. She was quite nice looking, but strange having a woman in a sport bra and a T-back tanktop wandering around in the lobby.

Head out and grab some groceries for the day and the come back to check out. Earlier I had seen a sign in the lobby "No one under 21 admitted by Idaho law" or something like that. I got the impression it meant you couldn't get a room if you were under 21, as some sort of ridiculous "we don't want kids fucking" or something like that. I can't imagine what else the sign would have meant -- the place wasn't a bar or whatever. Anyway, I forgot to ask the clerk about it.

I did ask if they have a business center or whatever so I could use a computer. Nope, they don't. Strange omission. Apparently I can *buy* internet access in the room. I didn't inquire as to the price -- I'm sure it would be annoying. It can't be a reasonable charge, or it would have just been free.

Head north out of the hotel on 21 and go up into the Boise National Forest. Bits of snow on the road here and there and I continually debated about stopping to buy some chains as cheap insurance, but ultimately never did. I was looking to take Forest Road 582, another dirt road, out of Lowman. I made it about 5 miles up the road before the ridge of ice/snow in the middle of the road got about 6 inches or so high and the car was continually scraping off the highest points. Along the way I passed a couple of guys in a high-clearance pickup truck who stared at me like I was an alien, and thoughtfully decided that it made more sense for me to move off the traveled part of the road and let them by, instead of the other way around. I decided between the lack of chains and the lack of clearance and the lack of traction I had better turn back.

Got back on 21N and headed north/east. Paused to look at some hot springs right off the road. I've been told there are more natural hot springs in Idaho than in all the rest of North America combined. Kind of interesting. While I was sitting there eating lunch some guy came roaring up in his Cherokee, hopped out with his towel and marched off to the springs. I left without investigating whether the dirtball went in au naturel or not.

Headed further east and got off to hike the Jackson Peak Trail. A nice slippery mud road up to the trail head. Get out and wander over to the sign-in box. Blank sheet for the day, so I make my entry. Start hiking off for a 4 mile climb to the highest point in the park. The sign at the foot of the trail warns about bears in the park, how not to irritate them, etc. I'm a little apprehensive, but whatever.

Turned out to be quite a climb. It was quite exciting because I could see from the snow on the trail that nobody had been through before me, and I knew the snow was several days old. I saw a lot of animal tracks -- deer I would guess. Although the animal shit I saw was green and quite big -- not like deer scat I don't think.

Got quite high up with a great view, but was starting to feel whipped, and I had no real idea of how much further it was to the end of the trail. I tried to get the GPS to confess, but it would only give me the straight-line distance to my waypoint at the car, or the "back along your track" distance. So I knew I was .56 miles from the car if I could fly, and 91 miles from the Best Western should I drive back the way I came.

Decided to turn around and risk being close to the end. Cleared out the track memory before starting down, so when I got to the bottom I had an along-the-track distance to my turnaround point -- 1.6 miles. I think the trail was 4 miles one way (a sign for the trail at the hot springs stop gave the distance, the sign at the trail head for some reason didn't). Anyway, I guess I made the right choice.

UPDATE: checking MapSource (shudder) I see that I was maybe a quarter of the way to the top of the trail. The mapsource approximation to the trail is really crude however. If I measure out the distance on I walked on the trail as shown by them it is only 1 mile. If I measure out the full path length shown by mapsource it is 4 miles, so assuming a consistent error, it would have been about a 6 mile hike, one way. A twelve mile hike starting at 1pm on the northern (shaded) side of the mountain with the sun setting at 4:30pm sounds destined to be trouble.

On the way out I noticed a sign at the bottom of the trail that says you're allowed to walk, bike or motorbike the trail! Given the narrow track, steep grade and tight turns on the trail I don't know how you'd really manage any kind of vehicle, and passing hikers would certainly be interesting.

Continued to head north/east on 21. Hit Route 75 and went north/east out of the park. Passed a little place that I probably should have stayed at for the night. Would have been neat to stay out there in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, kept going to 93 and headed south. Took 20/26E to get to Idaho Falls, a town of 50,000 which would presumably have good accommodations.

Along the way I passed INEL (also known as INEEL -- Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Lab -- I'm not sure where the second E disappears to sometimes) and Argonne West. I'm not sure what is going on out there. As I passed Argonne West there was an open gate visible on each side of the road. I don't know when they shut it -- could be because of snow, or because of nuclear emergency...

UPDATE: returning the next day I saw that there signs all along the highway for miles warning that the land beyond them was owned/operated/controlled/whatever by the DOE and explaining what the penalties were for entering, etc.

Got to Idaho Falls and got a room at the Red Lion Hotel "On The Falls". Strange place. It's an 8 story hotel in a town that has nothing but available space. It's just a couple blocks from I-15, so maybe the idea was to make it the most visible obvious thing for travelers.

The building is octagonal (or maybe even more sides). Elevators up the middle, and rooms around the perimeter. I have a nice triangular room. Makes incredibly bad use of space. I would say the room is more than average square feet -- maybe by 50%. The TV is in a hutch up against the wall, and too far away from the bed to see, again thanks to the silly triangular room.

Now I'm transferring tracks & waypoints out of the Garmin. It's going to take 4 minutes. Why? It's being done at 9600baud. Why? Because I had no say in the matter. Maybe, and I think this is a long shot, they do the transfer at 9600baud because if they did it faster the GPS would have to stop providing regular GPS functionality during the transfer. But I think that is giving them far too much credit. The thing is so ridiculously slow at every opportunity it makes me wonder if the programmers ever actually used the product. Hahahah I just noticed that this progress meter has the same "compute integer percent complete and then extrapolate ETC" bug as downloading maps to the GPS. Nice to see they at least reused their shitty code.

WHAT. THE. HELL. Just downloaded some tracks. Yesterday's track? 709 points. Today's "ACTIVE LOG" track from 3pm to Idaho Falls? 2839 points. I'm guessing that saving the track data on the GPS compresses it. Hmmm. I can confirm this by telling the GPS to save the active track log, clear the active log, then download again. Redownload and the newly saved track log is ... 733 points. SHIT. Worst fears confirmed. They compress the track log on the GPS when you save it. Idiotic. Damn them.

So I need to have the thing plugged into precog at all times so that I can log high resolution data? This is making me nuts.

Day 4 -- Thursday, November 13, 2003

Let's see... spent the night at the Red Lion 8-story octagonal motel in Idaho Falls. On the way out of town realized that the hotel is really too far from I-15 to act as good advertising for itself. Perhaps the investors thought Idaho Falls would be the next Chicago and they'd make an investment in the future by putting up the first (and now last) midrise in town?

Sat in the parking lot for a while and tried to decide what to do. Ultimately settled on going back out on 20N/26W to visit the first nuclear reactor to produce a usable quantity of electricity, and then head on to Craters of the Moon National Monument.

About 20 miles out of town I saw a marker for Hell's Half Acre Lava Hike so I pulled off to give it a look. It's an enormous lava field (If I recall correctly, about 10 miles wide and 20 miles long) and a 1/2 mile loop has been laid out through it. I figure that sounds likes an interesting thing to do, so I grab a jacket and head off. A secondary sign at the trail head explains that there are blue-topped poles marking the loop, and red-topped poles marking the 4.5 mile path to the lave source. That sounds much more interesting and ambitious, so I go back to the car and grab my hiking boots, a bottle of water, etc. and head off. It's probably 25F out or something like that, but there isn't any wind to speak of and it's pleasant enough. I figure if it turns out to be a 3 hour hike that it could be quite enjoyable.

About 5 minutes in I've figured out a few things:

• more than 50% of the path is over very rough and broken ground
• the hardened lava has left cracks that are anywhere between foot-swallowing size and man-eating size. The man eaters are, without exaggeration, often a foot wide and 10 feet deep. And you're coming across them every 20 feet.
• the blue-topped poles are extremely weathered, and in the gray light of the overcast morning nearly impossible to see
• I'm lucky if I'm averaging 1.5 miles an hour

I got to the extremal point on the loop and see the first of the red-topped poles. I start to head off in that direction and it takes a lot of picking and maneuvering about to get to it. At this point I've barely started the long hike, it is clearly going to take a long time, I'm out there completely alone in a field of ankle twisters and man eaters, and of course it starts to snow. So now the nice shiny surface of the pahoehoe lava will be slippery to boot. So, in what is now becoming an unfortunately familiar refrain, I decided the smart thing to do was to turn around and hike out before things got ugly.

Got back on 20/26 and continued N/W. Turns out the nuclear reactor is "closed for the season". It's free to the public from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and closed the rest of the year. Perhaps outside of the summer seaon the number of visitors is so piddly it doesn't make sense to keep it open?

Get back on the highway and continued to Craters of the Moon. Passed through a few more fly-speck towns. A handful of places are selling "Atomic Hamburgers", "Atomic Pickles" and the like. Got to Arco and they've got a big sign over the chamber of commerce (?) saying Arco: First City in the World Lit by Atomic Power. From there it was a pretty quick drive on to the park.

Craters of the Moon billed itself as "The strangest 75 square miles in the world" or some equally silly quote from a long ago explorer. I was pretty underwhelmed by it. All of the lava was interesting (Pahoehoe -- smooth, and Aa --rough) but there was too little geological information for my taste. There was a very annoying walking loop (the Devil's Orchard) through one area which almost exclusively consisted of signs talking pollution/conservation/precious jewel/stewardship aspects of national parks. I probably agreed with 100% of what they had to say, but I didn't come there to be sermonized at, and they're preaching to the converted anyway.

In a rather strange oversight they'd have these walking loops with no indication whatsoever as to the correct direction to take the loop. I took the first loop counter-clockwise only to discover I was reading the signs in the reverse order from what they intended. So I took the next loop clockwise only to discover that once again I was going the wrong way around the loop.

The place was almost completely deserted. Probably didn't help that it was 20F out and flurrying. Took an interesting walk out to some caves that formed when the lava cools and hardens on the outside and continues to flow on the inside, eventually leaving a lava shell around an empty tube. To my surprise, all of the caves were "wild" -- the park service hadn't done anything to light them, make them safe, accessible or anything else really. The path would end at a cave and you'd be staring at a hole in the lava and a series of 18 inch or bigger boulders to scramble down and over to get inside, and once inside you'd presumably find more of the same.

Given my aversion to caves, the fact that I was the only one there, my choice of a meager penlight as a light source, and the nice layer of snow starting to cover everything, I opted against exploring any of the caves. Probably would be pretty neat to somebody who was so inclined.

On the way out I stopped at the visitor's center to see if they had anything interesting. A very meager showing -- a little display showing the animals that live in the lava fields and how they survive, and little else. A sign somewhere in the parkhad promised information about how people used to survive here, but I couldn't find any such information. I'm not sure why they'd try to survive here -- why bother? It's not such a big area that they'd even have to go across it, they could just go around.

There was a little bit of equipment showing the air quality, etc. in the park, as part of their neverending preaching. It mentioned that if the ozone concentration was 10ppm that corresponded to a softball sized volume inside the room. I thought the more interesting statistic was that meant the room could hold 100,000 softballs, which sounds like a very big number. I guess if you think of it as 50 softballs on a side , it actually sounds like too small a number. It was a proper sized room -- I wasn't standing in the handicapped stall in the men's room.

From there I got back on the highway and I guess didn't really stop until I hit Ely on I-80 in Nevada. Actually, that's not right. I pulled off the road in Twin Falls, Idaho and sat in a mall parking lot reading for a while. Traffic had gotten heavy and fog had rolled in. I wasn't enjoying getting bullied by every moron in an F150 who thinks 50mph is the right speed for 250 feet of visibility.

One interesting thing I noticed throughout Idaho is that the people are for sure outdoors crazy. Or at least they love to go hunting, which is kind of the same thing. You could up in a town of 1,000 people and they wouldn't have a car dealership or a place you could get a decent meal, but they'd have an ATV store and 3 gun shops.

I was constantly seeing pickup trucks that either had an ATV loaded in the bed, or were pulling a trailer with a couple of ATVs on it. The most interesting one I saw was a pickup with a gooseneck (5th wheel) camper trailer. There was a platform mounted over the cab of the truck, and up there was perched an ATV. It wasn't at all clear to me how it got up there. It didn't look like the platform was articulated and could be folded down to the ground, like something off a car carrier. I guess there must be a multi-piece ramp assembly stashed somewhere.

Got to Ely, where Mike and Ling and I had stayed before, and decided to stay at the Ramada "Copper Queen", because it allegedly had cheap rates and was of average quality. Checked in and of course the rate isn't what was advertised ($65 instead of $38) but in no mood to go run around and try to find something cheaper. The Ramada is spread over two buildings -- a hotel with gambling machines, where the office is located, and a motel across the street. I took a room in the motel because it was cheaper, and I certainly didn't care about gambling.

I'm quite sure that's the same building Mike, Ling and I stayed in before, but this time it was quite horrible. I could hear every truck going by on the road, all of which were using their engine brakes to maximum effect. In fact, I could quite plainly hear the guy in the next room, who from the racket he was making was probably dying from tuberculosis. Feeling like a tool, I called up the desk and told them the room was too loud and so forth. Without giving me any grief they moved me across the street to the hotel, which was a lot quieter. The motel had single pane windows (pretty dumb, given the highway noise and the weather) and the hotel had double pane windows I think, which probably made a big difference.

Wandered over to the hotel "restaurant"(picture a snack bar at a swimming pool) which was billed as "the" place for pasta in Ely. I assume they meant it as praise for the restaurant, and not as criticism of Ely. I wasn't able to convince myself that anything on the menu wouldn't suck, so I went back to my room and read and skipped dinner.

Day 5 -- Friday, November 14, 2003

There seems to be an unwritten rule -- every trip has to have a day that sucks. In fact, maybe it's more like "1 out of every 5 days on a trip will be annoying, and there is a guaranteed 1 day minimum on any trip of 3 days or longer". Day 5 was definitely it.

I was getting pretty bored of driving, and extremely tired of staying in hotels and not having anything nice to eat. I scanned around on the maps and couldn't convince myself there was anything I really cared to see, so I took off on 6W with the intention of going home. To this point I still hadn't bought any chains for the car. On day 3 in Idaho I probably could have used them for about an hour or so, but the road was deserted and I was able to get by without them. But now I'm looking at clouds in the sky and the very real possibility of ending up on a highway with other traffic, driving with chains on.

Any curiousity I had about driving with chains was completely quenched by the absolute certainty that driving with them in traffic would suck more miserably than I could even imagine.

Made pretty good progress on 6. It was a long way to go and boring, but traffic was very light. Kept hitting fog on the windward sides of the mountains I was crossing, but it was certainly passable. Passed a few points I remembered Mike and Ling and I stopping at a couple years prior. I zipped past the turn off for Rachel -- I was hardly curious enough to take a long detour to see the Little Al'e Inn or to hunt down Art Bell in his hidden desert compound.

Sometime in mid to late morning I made it to Tonopah, also known as the "Home of the Stealth Bomber". Why is that you ask? Because the town decided it was. Nellis AFB is somewhere south of Tonopah and in all likelihood the Stealth flew over Tonopah on multiple occassions. That, in a nutshell, sums up Tonopah.

From there headed west on 6 and then picked up 95N which ends up in Fallon, another dump of a desert town. Another 5 miles of 25mph speed limits, assholes in hopped up trucks that are all the kings of their miniscule domains, and ignorant cops looking to harass outsiders. After what seemed like forever, made it out of there and onto 80W. Things were moving along quite nicely for a while until I hit the big blinking sign: "SNOWING OVER DONNER PASS. CARRY CHAINS."

I was already tired and irritable and just grinding out the miles trying to get home, and suddenly things took a very definite turn for the very definite worse. I debated about stopping to buy chains, but figured "Fuck it, maybe I'll get lucky." -- assuming I could always buy chains at some horrible markup if and when I truly needed them.

For a while it was just rainy and visibility was shitty. There was the usual quota of assholes who wouldn't turn their lights on because it was still daytime -- limited visibility and the fact that everybody else had their lights on be damned. They provided something to worry about, when I wasn't worrying about the assholes who were keeping a stern eye on the speed limit sign -- "It says 65mph -- that means I can go 65mph, so watch out, I'm coming the hell through!" Apparently the laws of physics don't apply to them -- either that or they have perfect foresight and know exactly where and when they'll have to use their brakes.

Made it to Auburn, a town 20 miles east of Sacramento and got off the highway. I parked in a grocery store parking lot and read more of "52 Pickup", an Elmore Leonard novel. It was raining pretty hard and continually, so I was in no rush to get back on 80W. A few exits before Auburn I saw that 80E had been funnelled down to 1 lane and the cops were forcing people off at a particular exit. I don't know if that means they had closed 80E or were just having everybody put chains on or what. In any case I'm probably very lucky that I didn't hit the Donner Pass an hour later than I did.

Grabbed a sandwich at Togo's and finished off my book, then got back on 80W at about 6:30pm. Shortly thereafter made it to Sacramento and the I-5 junction. Somebody should take the engineer who designed the interchange and beat him to death with a "lane ends, merge left" sign. 80W goes from 3 lanes down to 2 with little warning, and then 3 lanes come in from I-5 on the left. The highway is now 5 lanes across, which should be okay. Except the right lane is an exit-only lane, and of course some traffic from the 5 needs to take that exit and has to cross all lanes of traffic to get there. And then the road necks down from 4 lanes to 3 lanes. I hit the start of the backup at 7:15pm. I was finally past it at 7:45pm. Fortunately the rain has abated somewhat, so it wasn't as bad as it could be.

Get clear of Sacramento and the traffic starts to spread out some. There's still the usual minority of assholes driving like it's Saturday afternoon at Daytona, but things are going okay. Outside Vallejo I change lanes to pass somebody and have just shifted into my new lane when I realize that a Taurus wagon has just whipped around the car that I'm now in front of, and for no apparent reason, is changing into my lane and intends to occupy the same space as me. I whip the wheel and shift over a lane and I'm incoherent with rage. Get my wits about me and I'm hitting the horn, flashing my brights, etc. As far as I can tell, the asshole who almost hit me had absolutely no idea that anything even happened. Absolutely infuriating. It's nice that I can come back from a trip and be reminded almost instantly of things that I hate about the bay area.

I guess the rest of the drive passed without incident. I was almost involved in a 70mph collision in moderate to heavy traffic, and I narrowly avoided having to cross the Donner Pass in heavy snow, or even worse having 80 get closed before I got across. Altogether a really shitty day, but it could have been a lot worse.

Actually, in Tonopah I debated about trying to get home without taking 80. There are some other roads across the Sierras, and I find just about anything preferrable to driving on freeways in the Bay Area. But the map was showing 11,000 foot summits along with roads, and I figured, probably correctly, that it was guaranteed I'd have trouble with snow, road closures, etc. and it would make for a very long last day.

I need a new GPS...

Spoiled Vista

Over two years ago I bought a Garmin Etrex Vista. It was the sexiest new model of handheld GPS, and promised to be good for hiking and adventure exploring. From day one, I have found it to be astonishingly unreliable (screen problems, shutting itself off, clickStick malfunctioning, condensation). Its software is quite mediocre, especially MapSource.

I am getting ready for a driving trip to Laos in a few weeks, and I need to have a GPS. I just turned on my Vista and the screen looks like a big UPC bar code. DOA. I'll send it back to Garmin for the second time I suppose, but at this point I'm writing it off as a $300 bad trip.

So what should I buy?

How I use a GPS

I've used the GPS mostly for 4wd adventure trips and bicycle trips. I guess I've used it for 4wd trips more, because the Vista loves to silently turn itself off during rough mountain bike rides, and furthermore works very, very poorly in the heavy jungle canopy of Southeast Asia. (I live in Singapore)

I use the GPS to document our trip (keeping the tracks, trying to set waypoints) as much as I use it for navigation. I never found that the Garmin had particularly good set of functionality for this. Yes, it sets waypoints, and yes it records tracks, but then, it also does things like arbitrarily compressing tracks. Furthermore, its "Worldmap" isn't very good in Southeast Asia. It's not even that good in Outback Australia.

I can imagine that some of the more GIS-centric systems make documenting a trip, route easier and more robust.

I can also imagine that other units could work better under canopies. After all, the Vista has no external antenna jack.

I've never used the Vista's altimeter (nor it's HALO and HAHO parachuting functionality...) so the feature set isn't actually that huge:

1) good reception
2) waypoint and track recording
3) compass
4) navigation to/from waypoints and tracks
5) better or alternative basemap options
6) small enough form factor that can be hand carried if necessary

What should I buy?

I'd be willing to consider even non-consumer grade GPS's, like Trimbles and Leicas, but I am not sure how well they'd serve my six criteria, and they're really expensive.

The Trimbles I looked at were the Trimble Recon, essentially a PDA for which you must buy a Pathfinder GPS antenna, and the GeoXT and GeoXM handhelds. Are there older model Trimbles that I might find second hand that would have enough functionality, and maybe not cost $4000USD?

The Leica also produces a high-end handheld GPS system, the GS20 Professional Data Mapper, which, like the Trimbles, is a $4800USD toy.

Any other ideas? Used units? Other brands? I'm feeling pretty dismal if I am going to have to buy yet another Garmin or Magellan (I can't imagine they're going to be any different or better than Garmin).

Stupid MT Templates, Stupid IE

I'm always runnign into tedious template issues where MoveableType doesn't render nicely inside IE. It's fucking ridicuolous, one, that IE seems to have the worst CSS rendering engine ever, and two, that the MT community can't build some robust default templates that work around all of IE's and others' idiocies.

Anyway, all these forums and help sites don't spell it out like it needs to be spelled out.

You have this 'peekaboo bug problem' ? Your text isn't rendering in IE 6.0?

OK

go to yourstyles-site.css...

#container {
		background:#FFF;
		border:1px solid #FFF;		
		}

		line-height: 1.2em;

#container {
		background:#FFF;
		border:1px solid #FFF;		
		line-height: 1.2em;
		}

Then rebuild your site; It should work.

GHOSTGUM

S 23.53574 E 134.38259

View this waypont as a map

This entry auto-generated by gp-it.pl v0.02

GPS-It! Documenting trips with blogs

I laid out my case for integrating GPS, Cameras, and Blogs into a tighter package better for travel blogging. The first project to come from that is one to convert GPS waypoints into blog items. I've actually written a very primitive script to do just that. Now it's time for some planning.

HIGH LEVEL RUBBISH
====================

The basic tool is to save waypoints from a GPS to a file and then process that file, breaking up each waypoint into its own article inside a desginated blog.

OziExplorer Waypoint Processing
I hate Garmin and especially their lousy, proprietary software. They really suck. Therefore, I am not even going to worry about processing their stupid .mps track and waypoint files. Fuck them. People should find alternatives to Garmin.

Intead, I will focus on processing OziExplorer format files. While OziExplorer is sort of weird, it works and is semi-open.

Turning Waypoint Data into a Useful Article

There's not that much useful telemetry in a waypoint. Generally you'll just find a short, unfriendly tag name along with latitude and longitude (in decimal degree format). Possibly you'll get the date the waypoint was set, an altitude, and a description, but don't count on these being useful fields.

So what to do with this telemetry you've turned into a blog?
1) Make it a geourl anchor so that other geosearches can return this waypoint
2) Make it downloadable as a gps waypoint file so that others can use this waypoint in their own gps
3) Convert it into a small map inside the blog so that readers can see the area we're referring to.

.pl versus XMLRPC

Presently the code is just a perl script sitting on the same server as MoveableType. I execute the script from an ssh command line and it directly calls the MoveableType APIs.

This is an easy way to do it at first. There's no need for gross web-based interaces, or for learning XMLRPC.

In the long-term, though, it's not the best solution. Why?
1) It only works with the MoveableType API library. Forget Blogger, LiveJournal, or any of the others
2) It requires direct, root access to the server to execute the scripts on the data (which also is local)

What might be better solutions?

1) Local client that talks to the blog server via an XMLRPC interface.

You'd have a little program, gp-it.exe, that sat on any machine you wanted, would take the waypoint data and process it locally into XMLRPC instructions for the web server. Thus you never have to have direct access to the blog's server. That makes it safer, tidier, and allows you to post GPS-blogs to any blogging software that supports the XMLRPC interface.

2) A GPS-Blog pane in the administrative interface of MoveableType

Via the admin interface, you'd upload the waypoint information, configure the output, and process it. The advantage is that you don't need some local client software. (makes it easier to use internet cafes, for instance) It also provides a safer, tidier interface to the server. But like the existing perl-script option, it restricts you to working only with the MoveableType API.

TO-DO LISTS
=========

1) Check on making the blog auto-ping the GeoUrl add page. Check with joshua-geourl@burri.to

2) Link to MapQuest as a short-term inline map alternative. [Done, but not inline... opens to external window]

3) Find something inline map alternatives, like IndyJunior

4) Auto-generate "download this waypoint" files

5) Prevent waypoint/blogitem duplication

6) More robust processing regexps. incl strippping out date and altitude.

7) good subroutines for converting lat/long formats and tdatetime formats.

8) Give it a destination category.

Travel Blogging Technology

ONE DECADE IN TRAVEL BLOGGING
==================================

Since I started travelling in college I have always wanted to record as much as I could. Why? Firstly, so I can recall and savour the details of these trips years later. They're one of the high points of life. Secondly, I want to be able to share the experiences with others.

Mute Testimony: Captionless Photo Album
In the early nineties, hiking around Big Bend National Park, it meant a handful of photographs, and, as I remember, some clumsily-shot compass bearings. The compass bearings are long lost. The photographs mutely sealed up in a photo album. It's a not-very-useful record, frankly. I remember key highlights of the trip (a lot of boulder rolling, drinking from algae-green arroyos, and prickly pear thorns), but I certainly forget lots of details. And that's me! On their own, anyone else looking at the trip record sees it sees a bunch of semi-incomprehensible photos.

Personal Papers: Photos and a Notebook
Those trips led to bigger trips, including a month-long climbing trip through Kyrgyzstan. This was an expedition to savour, and I did my best -- shot lots of film and diligently recorded a daily log. This record is substantially better, of course, having a written record. The log is comforting, but more theoretical than practical. It's a small notebook filled with my scrawl which even I find incomprehensible at times. To be honest, I don't think I've ever re-read that notebook in the five years since I was there. As for mapping, I have a poorly-xeroxed map of southwestern Kyrgyzstan, and could tell you I was in the Karavshin valley, but beyond that, have no other authoritative record of our route beside memory.

High-tech But Totally Local: GPS and a Laptop
In 2000 and 2001, I was living in Berkeley. Now I had some high-tech toys, including a laptop and a (shitty) gps, and high-tech friends. We took three different trips out to the western deserts: BLM wasteland in Nevada, Death Valley in California, and cactus country in Arizona. Things went even better here... Lots of photographs, gps tracks, video, and daily log updates on my laptop. I turned the whole collectioin of information into a pretty cool looking photo album. It's almost a website-on-paper. It's got photographs, ephemera, notated maps, and written content. But then, of course, you can only enjoy it if you are sitting in my living room drinking a cup of coffee. Plus, generating it took an enormous amount of work and came months later. (oh, and there was a movie...)

Vicarious Log: Blogger
So now it's 2002. I am back in Singapore working, and Mrs. Blutig is travelling. Of course I'd rather be travelling too, but someone has got to pay the bills. So the deal was, she'd could go everywhere she wanted, but she had to keep a log so that I could vicariously enjoy the trip as well. Thus blogger came into our life. At various times over the last two years Ling (and sometimes me) has been everywhere from Tibet, to India, to Laos, and Norway. The result is pretty decent. I guess my biggest complaint would be that there are not a lot of photos online to go along with the prose. I am pleased with how timely the logs went online (almost realtime) to be shared with everyone else, though.

Promise, But Awful Integration: GPS and MoveableType
So after all these different experiements, it was time for another big trip -- two weeks through the Outback. I set out to make this the best-documented trip yet.

What was different on this trip? I installed Zempt on my laptop. This way, theoretically, any five of us could blog at any point during the trip. As well, two of us had our (shitty) gps's with us, so we'd be recording positions every step of the way.

In theory, the plan was great. In practice, it worked only half as well as I'd hoped.

The whole GPS data-recording system is shabby. Garmin is rubbish -- the hardware is flaky and the software is atrocious. Furthermore, interfacing it with my laptop to record our trip is pretty clumsy. Lastly, taking that recorded data and converting it into something useful to anyone else is tons of work.

The chronic photo problem was also unavoidable -- it is a significant challenge to get 50 rolls of 35mm slide film online three months later.

Even Zempt, the offline blog writer, wasn't perfect. I wound up writing a lot of blogs inside Microsoft Word document, where they languish to this day, waiting for editing, hyperlinking, proofreading, and uploading.

The trip was fun, we recorded more data and experience than ever, but I am still very dissatisfied with how I was able to convert it into a vicarious travel log for others.

THE BEAUTIFUL FUTURE OF TRAVEL BLOGGING
=========================================

So on the next big trip I take, what are the keys to making a better trip report?

Record and publish the details when they happen, or very soon after
You forget trip details at a frightening pace. Within days its hard to recall fine points, within a few weeks, you've lost 20% for good, and a month later, you have difficulty with half the details. The small things are what give your articles color. If you can't recall the small things, the article is bland and dead.

As well, even your recorded data begins to decay. Data gets lost, information mis-interpreted, and peculiarties of the information are overlooked.

So to retain as much detail and accuracy as possible, on a daily basis you need to:

..write your blog items
..dump your gps data
..take your photos
..upload the blog entries

Automatically convert the GPS data into formats immediately useful to others

My GPS can puke out all its data to my laptop. Depending on what software I use, I'll have either a mostly-useless proprietary format (MapSource) or a slightly-less-useless open format (OziExplorer). But still, I'm still left with a big raw data file. It's miles away from being helpful to the blog entry I'm writing. Worse, it's infeasible to process this data manually 'from the field.' After all, I'm on an expedition. Time is precious. It's likely that data won't be touched for weeks, if ever.

I want each blog item I write to automatically include a thumbnail map of the area where I wrote the blog item and links to maps of the day's significant waypoints as described in my blog. Maps are pictures that give the article more context for the reader. Waypoints are anchors that allow others to discover the article by its geolocation. (imagine Google searches for the coordinates of an abandoned mine or scenic vista returning my article on the same, nameless place)

Make it easier to get photos online to supplement blog entries.
I made a big investment in my 35mm camera system (EOS 1v, etc), so I am not moving to digital any time soon. I'm never going to get those pictures uploaded concurrently with the blog article. However, I can imagine a system where I had a digital camera, that along with the regular EXIF metadata, recorded the GPS location too. Then as I am writing the article, not only are appropriate maps being uploaded, but photos taken in that area are also included.

THE KLUDGY FUTURE OF TRAVEL BLOGGING
=====================================

That was the beautiful future... What about the meantime? I'm stuck with reality -- MoveableType (good!), mapping software (spotty), and a gps (shitty).

My practical goal is to write little scripts and hacks to get me some of the functionality I described above. I'm concentrating on the GPS side of things since I don't use a digital camera (yet). I can have the most impact fastest with the geoLocationstuff -- integrating blog items and waypoints. I've already written a prototype to turn a GPS dump into a a series of blog articles. I'll describe that in a future blog entry.

I don't really know what this means

But the logo looks sort of cool.

Lima Site 85

I'm taking a vacation to Laos next month. It was sort of the default destination because I couldn't think of anything more compelling.

On Monday I met up with my friend Derek, a well-travelled friend who's spent the last few years guiding tours around Indochina -- Myanamar, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. We discussed interesting things to do in Laos that would be off the normal SE Asian backpacker tour circuit.

The most interesting idea by far was a short expedition to an infamous landmark of the Secret War in Laos during the late 1960's: Phou Pha Thi, a mile high karst mountain in Northeast Laos, or as it was known to the top secret military and CIA officers who worked there, Lima Site 85.

For six months it bristled with secret radar used to ground-direct bombing raids on Hanoi, less than two hundred miles away. (the Vietnamese border is less than forty miles away). As expected, the North Vietnamese quickly moved to destroy the base. No other expectations held, however -- the Hmong, Thai, and Americans stationed there were never expected to hold the base, but the evacuation/abandonment orders were not issued in time. PAVN commandos scaled the "unclimable" walls, and in concert with artillery strikes, killed many of the technicians working there. Some managed to escape. Something like eleven men were never found (including presidential candidate Howard Dean's brother *this is not an endorsement of Howard Dean*).

To this day recriminations echo... forgotten MIAs, finger-pointing, and coverups.

Stepping clear of all that, it's got a mysterious, dramatic, adventurous element to it. I've got to think it would be a thrill to figure our way up from Vientiane to the top of this karst mountain amongst what little wreckage remains and look a bearing to Vietnam. Not more than thirty-five years ago this was an extremely secret military operation, the scene of a fierce battle, and the object of severe distress at the highest levels of North Vietnam and the United States. It would be similar to my kids visiting the cave systems of Tora Bora in 2030.

So now, starting with a crude map drawn by hand in a Thai coffee-shop over Singha beer, and my copy of Timothy Castle's meticuosly researched, "One Day Too Long" I need to figure out the logistics of getting to this place.

UPDATE Nov 17, 2003

My friend Steve sent me an article clarifying that status of Howard Dean's brother. Turns out he was a tourist, arrested by the Pathet Lao in 1974, and at some point executed by them or the Vietnamese. For unspecified reasons he is officially regarded as a Prisoner-of-War.

Its Sentience Grows

Google Crawling IRC?

Integrating GPS and MoveableType

The problem

So yesterday I spent some time aggregating all my saved track and waypoint files from our trip to the Outback in August.

One problem with waypoints is that they're space-constrained. Thus I have lots of terse titles, "ROKAMP" (Rock Camp?) "MARYVGAT2" (Second Maryville gate?).

Another problem is that by the time I go back and try to do something with this information, three months has passed and names/places that made perfect sense to me then have melted away and I can't remember what I was thinking.

The first problem is structural, but the second problem could be helped with the collective memory of the four other folks on the trip.

The idea

People can jog others' memory. Maps can jog others' memories.

What would be a cool format for this? A blog, of course.

What I want is some software that processes each row of a waypoint file. It then calls the appropriate MoveableType/BloggerAPI and generates a blog item for each of those rows.

Waypoints from different trips/days/routes could be given their own category. It could play with the publishing date to control the ordering of the waypoints so that consecutive waypoints are displayed consecutively in the blog. The blog item would have the same title as the waypoint. The other information (GPS coordinates, elevation, etc) are stored in the body of the blog.

Since comments are "on", people can browse the waypoints and add what they remember to that waypoint. Before long, you have a fleshed out waypoint report.

It would be cool to somehow integrate a map (generated from OziExplorer) into all of this but that would be a considerably larger challenge.

===
UPDATE (November 10th)

In searching for some example code to implement this project, I found a guy who wrote a clever system for submitting blog items via his handphone/camera combo.

Wish he had an email address on his site...my perl-generated blog items seem to have some subtle (?) problems with them.

What I could really use would be some hints on debugging MT-related applications in perl. Hell... I can't even find a proper error log.

===
UPDATE (November 15th)

Being able to easily convert GPS Waypoints into blog items allows easier collaborative mapping.

News Aggregation

I started reading more blogs lately. Now my IE F)avorites menu is getting mangy (Version 6.0...and it still is such a primitive tool).

Roger is always bragging about his Ranchero NetNewsWire to syndicate blog feeds. Unfortunately it's MAC-only software.

Six months ago I tried out Amphetadesk, but I didn't like it. It's functional, but isn't very nice to look at and there wasn't much you could configure without hacking their PERL/HTML hybrid templates.

Today I dug around for alternatives.

NewsGator
Having "Gator" in the name immediately alarmed me, but I realized it was more like 'gator as in aggregator.

Sounds nice to have an outlook-style viewing environment. Amphetadesk is nothing but a local server that you browse to in IE.

However, it talks about "Free Trials", so I didn't even bother. No interest in CrippledWare.

New Version of AmphetaDesk
Practically the same thing I tried six months ago. No thanks.

SharpReader
Home page was almost as terse as ZOE, though not as aloof. Didn't work at when I first downloaded it, and almost didn't try to debug it. Checked and found that it requires the latest version (1.1) of the .NET framework. Then it worked.

Turns out SharpReader is teriffic. It works just like I want it to. A left pane of folders full of blog feeds, a top pane of blog items in the currently selected feed, and a lower window with the body of the blog.

Recommended.

The coolest thing I've seen in months, maybe years

Check out this video of a French Gymnast/Lunatic/Spiderman, David Belle, as he runs around grubby urban landscapes jumping off roofs and between buildings. Forget all the freestyle-extreme-jackass stuff.... this guy will jump off a 30' building and do a complicated diver flip/spin/sault to land on a concrete deck.

They call this new sport 'Le Parkour'. The best videos show David Belle, definitely the seminal monster of the community, while the other videos have more "normal" guys, mostly jumping over railings and other quaint things.

BBC ran a decent article summarizing the sport.

This definitely blows away my old favorite video

Hypocritical Singapore

This article appeared in the November 7th 2003 Singapore Straits Times.

Cop jailed, career over because of oral sex

A POLICE sergeant has been jailed for two years and faces the sack after he was found guilty of having oral sex with a 16-year-old.

She was above the age of consent and agreed to perform the act, but Annis Abdullah, 27, of the Police Coast Guard, landed in court because oral sex is against the law.

The girl made a police report after the incident.

The court heard that they got to know each other through an Internet chatroom in March last year, met and kept in touch.

On April 23 last year, she met him at the Jurong Entertainment Centre and he drove her to Chinese Garden Road where they engaged in heavy petting in the car.

When he asked if she wanted to have sex, she said no. She agreed to perform oral sex on him, but a week later she made a police report.

Lawyer Ismail Hamid pleaded for leniency, saying Annis did not force the teenager to perform oral sex.

He was a first-time offender, the sole breadwinner for his family and engaged to be married.

But Deputy Public Prosecutor Tan Wee Soon told the court earlier that as a law enforcer, Annis should have known better than to 'engage in carnal intercourse against the order of nature' with the girl.

District judge Wong Keen Onn agreed, and jailed him for two years yesterday.

He told Annis that as a serving police officer, he should have known what was right and wrong and his behaviour ought to have been exemplary.

A police spokesman said last night: 'We have no place for ill-disciplined officers. We are taking disciplinary action with the view to terminating the services of the errant officer.'

Lawyers contacted yesterday said it was not common for cases of consensual oral sex to land up in court.

But veteran criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan explained: 'The act by itself is an offence. It is not a question of consent or no consent. Even between consenting people, it is an offence.'

Technically, he said, a woman who performs the act can also be charged with helping to commit a crime, but he was not aware of any such case.

Criminal lawyer Sarbrinder Singh said: 'Cases of oral sex being brought to court are not common, simply because the nature of the act is such that it is almost always consensual.'

The maximum punishment for the offence is life imprisonment.

Homosexual activity between consenting adults is still illegal in Singapore. Colonial sodomy laws are not exactly a proud inheritance (some say they were meant to keep British troops in line), so it is odd that, amid much tradition that is proudly preserved, these antiquated laws remain on the statute books. Until recently, the government justified the criminal status of homosexual activity by citing so-called Asian values of Singaporean society. Imagine the fizz, then, in the republic's media and especially the gay community, when Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong told TIME last month that the government has been quietly tolerating gays in the civil service for a while now.

It wasn't exactly a celebration of diversity as envisioned in the government-sponsored Remaking Singapore report that followed Goh's interview. Nor was it quite the stuff of the open society that the government is seeking to foster. But it did reflect realities that visitors have been slowly uncovering: Singapore is actually becoming a hell of place to party with people of every race and sexuality, and despite images to the contrary, it does not need much more loosening up to remain high on, if not top of, the Asian league of fun cities.

In the wake of last weekend's bigger-than-ever Nation party, organized by Singapore's leading gay and lesbian website, Fridae.com, another truth is evident: the gay scene—indisputably one of the drivers of the city's cosmopolitan nightlife—has finally arrived, with or without the laws. It had been evolving in the past few years alongside— and often in combination with—Singapore's alternative youth culture (with which it shares DJs, venues, fashion and a lot else besides). When Goh proclaimed that "in time, the population will understand that some people are born that way … but they are like you and me," he seemed to these groups to be talking from some kind of social space capsule, viewing Earth at a fantastic distance—because Singapore has been changing quicker, in terms of social attitudes, than anyone presumed. Despite the laws or perceived familial disapproval, the republic's gay life is more open than that of most other cities in Asia, even Hong Kong.

On a walk down Tanjong Pagar in Chinatown on Friday or Saturday night, the gay (or straight) visitor will be impressed by the vivacity of the area: a clutch of discos, bars and restaurants, with guys and gals in their hundreds wandering from one rowdy place to another, often arm in arm (although kissing in public seems to still be taboo, even in gay venues). Gay life is not confined to a pink ghetto, though. There's a lively disco at Centro, opposite the venerable Fullerton hotel, that stages a gay event on Sunday nights just a short walk from the High Court. On the same night, the nearby Embassy Club, part of the new Esplanade concert hall complex, hosts another.

Goh, of course, is aware that the government's core support comes from the grass roots: families in government housing estates who would view radical changes in family and marriage patterns as alarming, and where a gay child could expect to be tolerated at best or disinherited at worst. For these reasons, the government wants to move slowly.

Yet a quick visit to Centro one Sunday reveals very few outcasts. Instead, there's a rather sweet, high school dance atmosphere, with gays at one end of the floor and other alternatives at the opposite, and some mixture of them in between. In Singapore, years of discreetly living with anti-gay laws have created a mix of attitudes that might confuse the gay tourist used to firmer lines being drawn between gay and straight nightlife. Beautiful young girls in short dresses are dancing to techno with their boyfriends at the Water Bar disco in Chinatown on a Saturday night, right next to a group of funky gay Asians, while a more mature Caucasian in black is doing Mick Jagger imitations with a tall, brush-cut young Chinese in baggy jeans. But wander over to Taboo, the must-go, packed-out gay disco on Tanjong Pagar, and you will find a bevy of gay teenagers from every race bopping on a podium in the corner and half the room full of guys with their T shirts off. It's not really a cruising joint. It's just part of the gay scene's confidence in the face of the criminal code.

Singapore is not an entirely liberated city—yet. The city's gays—mostly diligent, discreet workers and students—were relieved by Goh's recent announcement and by the generally supportive readers' letters published in the Straits Times (even if there were some hardened homosexuality-is-a-sin exceptions). But the token coming-out story that the newspaper also printed revealed just how many gays were still in closets, even if they do risk a visit to the clubs on weekends. It is also notable that the new gay theater piece, Existence, to be presented next month by the Fun Stage, portrays the love of two young Singaporean men for each other as doomed. Its author Benny Lim, a 23-year-old local undergraduate, says, "Being accepted by mainstream society doesn't mean that all the problems faced by homosexuals will go away." A general homophobic backlash from elements of the Christian community is also in progress.

One thing, however, is sure: attitudes toward gays are changing fast. Goh's assurance that the republic will not be hosting gay parades was calculated p.r., designed to appease conservatives worried about an influx of gay tourists. But it was also a disingenuous statement if the Nation party was anything to go by. That party may not have been a Sydney Mardi Gras with a Gay Men's Chorus and dykes on bikes—and it may not have been officially backed—but it was a three-day fest of international proportions, held on Sentosa island. Its cheeky centerpiece was a riotous party at the island's Musical Fountain, timed for Aug. 9, Singapore's National Day.

Gays are just as proud of Singapore as its other citizens, and National Day saw them and their foreign guests delightedly celebrating the diversity that is now apparent in the republic. So far, so good. But remember: until the less progressive elements in Singapore get used to it, you'd best stay mum. In fact, you'd better not tell Mum at all.

Nils Blutig's Prepared Public Statement

It is with great sadness that I contemplate my future without the Gucci Group. Despite intensive efforts, Tom [Ford], Dominic [De Sole] and myself were unable to agree to terms with Pinault-Printemps-Redoute group.

For the past thirteen years, this company has been my life. It is my, Tom [Ford], and Dominic's [De Sole] distinct pleasure and pride to have been able to convert a small and troubled company into a world class luxury powerhouse.

We depart leaving nothing but love and best wishes for Gucci.

xxoo

Quicksilver II

Another great passage from Quicksilver:

"What's troubling you, then? I daresay you are the brooding-est fellow I have ever seen."

"These chairs."

"Did I hear you correctly, sir?"

"Look at them," Gomer Bolstrood said, in a voice hollow with despair. "Those who bult this estate had no shortage of money, of that you can be sure--but the furniture! It is either stupid and primitive, like this ogre's throne I'm seated on, or else--like yours--raked together out of kindling, with about as much structural integrity as a faggot. I could make better chairs in an afternoon, drunk, given a shrub and a jackknife.

Sourcing MINI ITX Components

I want to build a Mini ITX computer, running Linux, to drive a few small projects based on the Motion Project.

Mini ITX components are not available in Singapore. I need to get my parts from abroad. Several of the online stores are UK-based companies. In addition to the UK being expensive, these stupid sites only accept credit card payments for orders shipped to UK, or perhaps Australia and the USA, otherwise, you must use PayPal. Fuck that.

So I need to find a parts supplier in the USA.

Motherboard Via EPIA 800
Comes with choice of two processors, VIA Eden™ ESP 5000 processor, or a VIA C3™ E-Series processor (EBGA package). Since I'll be doing realtime video signal processing, and probably MPEG compression. I need the E-Series processor, which is 800mhz. The fanless Eden is quiet, but too slow.

This board should cost $103 +/- $5.

Components
The via board requires few extra peripherals, just some memory, a cd drive, and harddrive.

I keep reading that memory is the most finicky part of these systems. Need to get good, compatible memory for it. 256 -> 512 MB should be sufficient.

Most Mini-ITX cases require slim laptop-style hard drives and cd-roms. A 40GB drive and a read-only CD-Rom should be sufficient.

Keyboard, monitor, etc. I'll just pick up locally.

Cases
Cases are part of the sex appeal of these tiny systems. Lots of minimalist, sleek cases are available, and there is a community of people building these systems in bizarre constructions: teddy-bear-guts, ammunition boxes, etc.

Decisions
So I'm looking around at parts, pricing things up, and find an American supplier, Logic Supply, in Boston that looks decent. Ordering the parts and having them sent here shouldn't be too difficult.

But then I start thinking of two likely failure scenarios: 1) I get faulty memory 2) A connector or cable is forgotten. Then I'm stuck again. So how?

What a about purchasing a complete system that's been burnt-in? For a premium (?) I'll guarantee that 1) the memory works 2) no cables or connectors were forgotten.

So how much of a premium is there?

Turns out Logic Supply sells exactly what I spec'd out...

This mini-ITX system is based on the Morex 2677 case and includes your choice of memory (RAM), hard-disc drive and CD-ROM/DVD ROM options. The basic model has the VIA EPIA 800 motherboard, 128Mb DDR RAM and 40Gb Seagate Barracuda HDD.

Mini-ITX System with Morex 2677 and VIA EPIA $285
   - Hard Disk 60 GB Seagate Barracuda +$10
   - - Motherboard EPIA 800 +$5
   - - Memory 256 MB RAM +$25
   - - CD / DVD Drive Slimline CD-ROM +$53
   - - Keyboard / Mouse (Not included)
   - - Build and test +$35

Total $413

How about pricing up the components by themselves?

Harddrive
3.5" Seagate Barracuda 60 GB Hard Drive $75.50
Hmmm.... but look, the 3.5" Seagate Barracuda 40 GB Hard Drive costs $71.95, which is only $3.55 more, not $10. $6.45 screwage factor.

Memory
I presume what I am getting is PC2100 DDR memory CL2 256 MB which, at $54, is $22 more than the PC2100 DDR memory 128 MB. The system upgrade cost $25, so $3 screwage factor

CD Rom
Finally... no screwage factor for a component. The Mitsumi SR2441 Slimline CD-ROM costs $53 as a part and as an upgrade.

Motherboard
The VIA EPIA 800 Mini-ITX Motherboard is 109.95$ with the C3 E-Series 800mhz processor. Ok.

Case
I'm getting a very garden-variety case, the Morex 2677 mini-ITX case which they sell individually at $75.

So if I just bought these parts and assembled it myself, the price would be $367, $46 dollars less. Ok, so I'm getting "ripped off" by $11. I can sort of assuage myself by saying, "well, $46 to spare myself the woe of bad memory or missing part isn't too bad."

It doesn't seem a big enough convenience fee for me to get upset.

For my first experiement with Mini-ITX, I'll pay it. Next time, when we build a production computer for our desert race vehicle, I'll custom build it myself, giving more consideration to parts. This time I just want something quick and tidy.

Conclusion
It's not over-and-done-with. Of course their site is also retarded for international purchases. I'll have to contact them directly and find out the arrangments. If they're real asses, and make things difficult, maybe I'll take the hand-assemble route afterall, and source my own parts. I only really need to get the case and motherboard ex-Singapore. Memory and drives are surely available here.

====

Update November 3...

Dear Michael,

The main reasons we don't ship internationally are fraud protection
and the work involved in export declarations. Unfortunately we
can't make exceptions to our shipping policies. The only option is
to ship it to a US address.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Roland Groeneveld
Logic Supply

Very lame and disappointing response from Logic Suppl