The Adventures of Systems Boy!

Hello everyone! I'm back!

Things have been going extremely well at the new job and the new home, and they're finally settling down to a pace at which I find myself able to write. And, what with the new job and all, I've got about a jillion things to write about. But I've been holding off because I finally decided to move the site to my own hosting provider. Using Blogger for the past three years has been great, but there are certain limitations to the platform that I'm starting to feel, and certain advantages to self-hosting that I think I'm ready for.

So, the new site can be found at the exceptionally sensible URL:
http://systemsboy.com




The site is live and active, and all the content has been easily ported over to Wordpress, thanks to some terrific reader feedback. Though all the old content remains available on the new site, I will also maintain a complete (though unsearchable) archive of the old site (everything including and prior to this article) at:
http://systemsboy.com/bloggerarchive

You know. Just in case.

Finally, sometime in the near future (possibly by the end of the week), any Blogger URL on this site will redirect to the new front page. And, of course, following this article, all new content will be posted there as well.

Please feel free to let me know what you think of the new look in the comments, if you're so inclined. And do check back soon for new articles, which should start appearing very shortly.

Cheers!

Labels: TheBlog

I've attempted this post twice now, and it never seems to come out right. It's one of those future-of-the-blog type posts that everyone hates so much, but it's kind of a biggie. So here goes attempt number three.

MIA
Regular readers may have noticed the blight of posts lately (with the exception of the pre-programmed Anniversary post). Also, uncharacteristically, comments have gone unanswered. And the missing scripts and site banner have surely been a tip-off that something is amiss. Indeed.

The short version is that I am in the process of moving to a new home, and in the process of transitioning to a new job (which job was offered me on the anniversary of this site, ironically — Universe, you're a riot). As you can imagine, changing up these two things alone changes so many things that fall beneath them in the hierarchy of life. A blog is certainly no exception.

Earthlink Blows
To be a bit more specific — or as specific as I can at this point — the missing banner and downloads are due to my change of home address and subsequent ISP service transfer. Seems when I transferred my cable service to my new home, Earthlink started a whole new account in my name and unceremoniously rendered the entirety of my old account — including every file I'd stored on their FTP server over the past eight years — null and void. Yep. They deleted all my shit without so much as a phone call and charged me for the pleasure. Rat bastards! If I weren't already signed up and so damn frantic already, I'd drop them like a hot potato. Rest assured, I will do so when next I have a chance (as I did with Sprint — how you like me now, Sprint? Bitches!). Earthlink has just lost my 8+ years of business. Maybe not today; maybe not tomorrow; but soon, and for the rest of my life.

The Future
All of this in conjunction with my upcoming change of employ leaves the future of this blog very much in question. For one, without Earthlink, how will I handle the file archive? How will I handle every dead link on my now-three-year-old site? Would I continue to use Blogger for the site? Or should I start running my own site to mitigate such future transitions? Doing so would allow me to update all the broken links en masse fairly easily, but would be extra hassle, responsibility and downtime. Going forward, will I have issues with the new employer? Or maybe I won't. Will I finally be able to reveal my secret identity? What will I blog about? The fame! The fortune! It's downright dizzying!

Or should I just take this as an omen and throw in the towel?

Honestly, I'd like to not do that. And my friends and colleagues tell me that I "have to" keep blogging. So understand that I will be looking hard for ways to continue writing about systems in a public forum such as this. Understand that The Adventures of Systems Boy! is not planning on going away. (And if it ever does I'll post an explanation. This will never be one of those sites where the author just stops writing. I frickin' hate that. Just kill it, man! Jesus!) But please also understand that this transition will require a great deal of thought, planning and effort on my part, particularly if I switch hosts. It will take time. I may not write much for a while. Comments that don't require a response (and maybe even those that do) may go unanswered for some time. And there are likely to be some significant changes to the content of the site. (Suffice to say, the Macintosh platform plays a significantly smaller role at my new job. Linux, anyone? Anyone?)

In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions regarding a transition such as the one I'm describing, I'm all ears. Otherwise, please feel free to catch up on the past three years worth of posts. I will write more as soon as I'm able, and will update the site periodically as details about its future solidify. Please stay tuned. (God, I finally get what feed readers are good for!)

Okay, I think that covers everything.

Hope to see you all soon!

UPDATE:
The banner is back! Finally! That was bugging the hell out of me.

Labels: TheBlog

Today The Adventures of Systems Boy turns 3! I totally spaced last year's anniversary — so I was totally shocked to realize that it's been 3 years, not 2 that I've been doing this. But this year I'm catching it in time thanks in part to Blogger's new scheduling feature (currently in beta as of this writing, which writing is actually occurring a full two months in advance of the actual birthday and scheduled for publishing on said birthday). Blogger continues to add features I want, so I'm still here. And scheduling is one I've wanted for a while. Those Google folk, why they're downright prescient sometimes.

In any case, this year, for whatever reason, I've seen a general increase in comments, and most of those comments have been really great. It's quite gratifying to realize that there are more than a smattering of people who are actually interested in reading about and discussing this weird, wild Mac lab management niche, and who come here to do it. That makes me feel like a success in some small way.

Anyhoo, I don't want to toot my horn all day. Just wanted to say thanks to anyone who's reading, and especially to those who've contributed. It's appreciated!

And Happy Birthday to me!

Labels: TheBlog

I don't monitor my traffic, but I don't think I have a really heavy readership. Every now and then I have a minor hit, but for the most part we're pretty hardcore systems administration around here. It takes a very special kind of geek to follow exploits such as Tiger Lab Migration, Three Platforms, One Server or External Network Unification.

Truly special.

But all of a sudden I started getting comments on an old article from just over a year ago. Seems the Mac OS X 10.5.2 update causes a similar problem to one in the 10.4.9 update — network slowdowns due to bad delayed ack values, or some such — and MacFixit has linked to the old post. Neato! I feel popular!

Anyway... Hi, MacFixit folks!

Labels: Internet, TheBlog

I'm not sure why, but the concept of the WYSIWYG HTML editor has really taken a beating. The most recent comment I've heard comes from Shawn Blanc's review of MarsEdit, an offline blog editing product. Shawn says that:

"In all my experience with WYSIWYG editors I have found them a clumsy enemy of fine web typography."

This, apparently, is the major rationale for what seems to be the prevailing notion in the web development community that WYSIWYG HTML editors are an inherently bad idea. The logic seems to go something like: every time I edit my web page in a WYSIWYG editor, the experience is a bad one, therefore the concept of WYSIWYG HTML editors is flawed from the get-go; real designers only ever edit raw HTML. (Though I might point out that I have yet to see or read of a single example of a WYSIWYG editor creating terrible HTML code in a very long time, at least when it comes to fairly simple HTML pages, which most blog pages are. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Comments like the following also make it sound like if I'm not editing raw text, I'm just a big pansy-ass wuss:

"I suspect most of you are at least a bit HTML savvy and prefer the use of monospace type and a HTML editor anyway. But for those who are getting weak in the knees at the thought of having to type your own HTML relax."

Now, I'm not a web developer by any stretch of the imagination, but my experience with WYSIWYG editors — even web-based ones — has been largely positive. And, though I'm fairly comfortable looking at HTML code (and actually enjoy looking at other types of code), I never, ever want to edit it if I can at all avoid it. It's a completely unnecessary distraction from what I'm here to do: write. I'd much rather work on something that more closely resembles the finished product and not have it cluttered up with code. It's not that I'm scared of the code, it's that I'm annoyed by it.

For my personal web pages I have always used Dreamweaver. And while the user experience offered by that app is not always the most intuitive or Mac-like, it's always far preferable to me than using a text editor. For my blog pages — which are all formatted exactly the same way as per the Blogger style sheets I've set up — I use the Blogger-supplied online WYSIWYG editor. As much as I like the idea of working on my blog offline, I do not use MarsEdit or any other such client. And the reason is because of their lack of WYSIWYG.


John Gruber also supports the use of MarsEdit and its ilk:

"My best argument for using MarsEdit (or any desktop weblog editor) instead of a web-based interface is that it’s like using a desktop email client instead of webmail."

That's a great argument, except that it's a bit flawed: A desktop email client adds features and ease-of-use to the email experience. MarsEdit, on the other hand, removes a major feature that, for me anyway, greatly hinders ease-of use. It's far less aggravating to me to use a web-based WYSIWYG editor than it is to use a desktop-based code editor. To follow Gruber's analogy, using MarsEdit is like using a desktop mail client that only shows you the code in which your email is written. MarsEdit hinders ease-of-use by making me look at code when I really don't need to. All I need are some very simple markup commands and basic text editing. I really can't see any reason not to use WYSIWYG, particularly when it comes to editing blogs.

But this is not to completely disparage MarsEdit. That's not my intention at all. It sounds like a great product, really, and MarsEdit's author, Daniel Jalkut even acknowledges the need for WYSIWYG in his product and is planning it for a future release. Awesome. I may even buy and use MarsEdit when that day comes.

My point is that the WYSIWYG HTML editor is a great idea that someone needs to get on and do right. I believe its time has come. Over the past few years I've watched a series of HTML editors hit the market. The latest are either completely template-based — like Apple's iWeb, which lacks any ability to examine the code when it's necessary to do so, which is a big problem — or completely code-based — like, well, all the others. In between is a gaping chasm. The giant WYSIWYG hole. CSS editors, too, seem to be plagued by this lack of WYSIWYG. So I always find myself using Dreamweaver in the end, for lack of a better replacement. I suspect I'm not alone.

Again, I can't help wondering if there's a faulty rationale at work here. Do software authors think that, because their WYSIWYG editor experiences have been bad ones, the basic idea is also bad? Or entirely too difficult to build? Or unprofitable? Because I think that, in the same way that beautiful, affordable image editors are springing up to challenge Adobe's dominance with Photoshop, WYSIWYG HTML editors could have great appeal. I've been marginally on the lookout for one for years, and I write web pages only occasionally. And the best I've found, frankly, is Dreamweaver, which is good but not great, and very expensive.

Or is it possible that it's just machismo? (God, I hope not. Is there anything worse than macho geeks?) It is possible that developers think that WYSIWYG just isn't cool? That real web developers would scoff at such a product? Seriously, why is it that Coda, an absolutely beautiful app that does, like, everything under the sun, lacks the basic WYSIWYG found in all web-based editors? (Yes, I would totally buy Coda if it had WYSIWYG. Without a doubt.)

Guys, all I can say is, you're missing a big opportunity here.

Labels: Applications, Interface, Internet, TheBlog

Apologies if you've recently posted a comment on this blog, and had not heard back from me (I try to respond to all comments whenever I can). Seems that my Gmail account for receiving comment alerts began flagging them as spam. Seems the address for comment alerts was also not among my contacts. Seems odd to me, though, that two Google-made products would suddenly butt heads like that. Seems like they should know better.

Anyway, I'm back on track with comments again, and I've just posted a bunch of responses. So if you were looking for one, check for it. It should be there.

Labels: Internet, TheBlog

I still don't have time to write anything coherent. So, in lieu of — and as a tip of the hat to — my inability to do so, I give you this:
They didn't study

Via Scribd.

Oh my god that's hilarious.

Labels: Humor, Internet, TheBlog

Hello out there, oh loyal, faithful readers. All three of you.

Just wanted to pop in and say hi. It's been a solid month since I've posted anything, and that's pretty unusual. I've even stopped responding to comments, which is almost unheard of. Unfortunately it's been somewhat out of my control. Both work and life have been insanely busy. I'm not so much making excuses here as posting this so that anyone who might be reading this site knows that:
A) I am not dead (or even injured)
B) I am not planning on discontinuing the blog.

That said, I wanted to just take a moment and explain what's been going on. Our department is getting a face lift. Which is to say that we are completely remodeling our floor. Gut rehab: Power. A/C. Network cabling. Seriously. Everything is being completely redone. It's freaking fantastic. It's also a hell of a lot of work as I'm the one overseeing the entire transition, from a technological standpoint anyway, which, since this is a digital art program, represents a fairly large piece of the pie. So I'm exceptionally busy helping plan the new floor — from actual per-room computer placement, to the power needs and layout of the server room. Much of this is new to me, so I'm being educated quite rapidly and on the fly. And since this is a gut rehab, we'll have to clear off the floor at the end of the semester, so I'm planning that transition as well — from moving staff computers to another floor and setting them up with an ad-hoc LAN, to moving our entire DMZ to said floor along with the requisite internet pipes. It's not easy, and it's very much a concerted effort. Fortunately, everyone here has really pulled together, and we're actually making it happen somehow. And while I'm elated to finally be getting all this done (it's been a long time coming, believe me, and we desperately need it, if for the cabling and power problems alone — don't even get me started on the A/C!) I'm way too overwhelmed to write about any of it intelligently right now. Or much of anything else for that matter.

We have been forging ahead with our various long term projects, however. Most notably, I've started building and testing an authentication server for the external network. So far it's going exceedingly well, and it shouldn't be long before our external network has a single authentication source (hopefully this summer sometime). I've been taking notes, so expect a post sometime when things get back to normal. We've also recently bought and set up a firewall appliance which we're loving. It's now being used to properly host our internal and DMZ networks, and is really making our network management a thousand times easier and more sensible. We'll be using it for limited VPN as well, which will be sweet. Today a friend will be running a demo of Leopard in his class as well. These — along with all the goodies associated with the renovation — are all posts in the pipe. Just as soon as I get some time.

You know — if I may wax reflective for just a second — it's not even so much that I have no time to write. Clearly, I'm able to write this post. The real problem is that writing about technology takes a certain amount of brain power. No, not even brain power. Brain space is maybe more like it. With everything I'm dealing with, I've got plenty to write about, and even some time to write about it. What I'm missing is the time to actually process what I'm experiencing. And before I can write about it, I have to process it. It's not so much that I need time to write as that I need to time to think. And that I just don't have right now.

So that's what's been going on here. This can't all last forever, of course. And I'm sure I'll be posting regularly again soon. Until then, do check back from time to time. I'll try to post small bits of stuff as I can.

Okay then. Back to the trenches. This has been fun.

Labels: Lab, Rants, TheBlog

There are a couple more new and improved features of Google's Blogger Beta, which this blog now uses, that I just wanted to mention because they're really quite cool.

The first new feature is the "Search This Blog" feature. This has been around since I've been using Blogger, so it's not really new per se, but its implementation is. The search field can be found at the top of every page of every Blogger blog. In the past it used Google's Blog Search, which is both currently in beta, and currently seriously broken, which is big reason I've switched to Blogger Beta. But now it seems to use some kind of internal search magic. Now when you use it you're no longer transferred to a Google Blog Search page, but instead get the search results right from within the blog itself. This is brilliant and beautiful, and it's the way it should be.




The second very new feature (like, as of maybe last week) is a back-end deal, but it's incredibly useful to authors. In the Post Manger you get a list of all your posts, ordered by date. But now, for the first time, you have some options for viewing this list. Of particular interest to me is the ability to view posts by Label. Blogger has not only leveraged their new Label feature in the front-end, but very smartly in the back-end, and it's just one more pleasant surprise that's making my blogging life that much easier, and encouraging me to stick with the Blogger system.

I have to say, there's nothing quite as impressive as a beta that works significantly better than its stable counterpart. I've had no troubles and gobs of joy from this Blogger Beta. Of course, now that I've said that out loud I should expect everything on the site to go instantly and irretrievably wonky. But until then, my hat's off to the development team for Blogger Beta. You guys are kicking some serious ass. Thanks!

Labels: Internet, TheBlog

Well, as per an earlier article, I'm transitioning to the new Blogger, which is currently in beta. But it seems to be working fairly well for me. So far. I have to say the folks at Google have done a terrific job making this transition downright seamless. All I had to do to switch over was to provide my Google account info, and then pretty much press a button. The site was down for maybe two minutes. And then it wasn't. And it looked completely the same (except for one minor piece of text — the bullets in the sidebar got kinda screwy but were very easy to fix).

The absolute coolest new feature for me is called "Labels". Labels are really what most people call "tags" or "categories" and Google has them baked right into the system now. Prior to the new system, I was managing categories using Byzantine work-arounds that utilized Google's Blog Search — which is now thoroughly hosed — and managing series using the venerable del.icio.us social bookmarking system. That all ends today.

Okay, well not exactly right this moment. I still have to update all my posts to use the Label system, and this requires going into each post by hand, removing the old categories, and replacing them with Labels. Fortunately, while tedious, this process isn't too bad, and adding labels is another place where the new Blogger shines. Once New Blogger is aware of your Labels, it can auto-fill after you type the first few characters of any given Label. This is a real time-saver considering I've got 160 posts to update. In the end, though, I don't think it will take too long, and it offers me a single, unified system for both series and categories all in one fell swoop, so the initial investment in time will ultimately save me quite a bit of future time and effort. In the end, I'll have a much more efficient and well organized blog.

Oh, and did I mention? New Blogger is fast! Much faster than the old Blogger in every respect, but particularly with regards to publishing, which is instantaneous.

I've been pretty down on Google in the last two posts (don't know why I'm all over them lately). But I have to say, the new Blogger Beta, thus far anyway, kicks some serious ass. Way to go guys!

Okay... Back to work...

UPDATE:
It's done. The whole blog now uses Google Beta's Labels for both categories and series. So, if you're looking for all articles that deal with Mac OS X, just hit "Mac OS X" under the "Categories" pulldown on the right. And if you're looking for all articles in the "External Network Unification" series, select it from the "Series" pulldown. Just like before. The difference is that now, instead of being routed to del.icio.us or Google Blog Search, respectively, you get taken to the category or series section built right into this blog. Which is really how it should've worked all along. Sweet!

Labels: TheBlog

Google Blog Search is broken. Which means my Series are broken. In fact, I'd say Google searching in general has gotten noticeably worse lately. (Has anyone else noticed this?) I've gotten pretty accustomed to implicitly trusting that Google search results will give me an accurate picture of what's out there on the web, but lately my trust has waned. Search results seem generally inconsistent compared to what they once were. And this scares me a little. But the most troubling thing for me, at the moment, is the totally busted Blog Search.

When I first started using Blogger I had certain reservations. One of them was the lack of organizational tools. But overall I liked its simplicity, and I liked that it was associated with Google. And I was able to mitigate many of the organizational problems using a combination of del.icio.us bookmarks and Google's own Blog Search. In particular, my Series section is completely powered by Google Blog Search and is really just searching my blog for specific titles common to articles in a given series. Google Blog Search has been in beta since I started using it, and it remains so. A lot of my older posts never even got indexed in the beginning, but I expected that, over time, this would change. That the service would get gradually better and better, with more and more features, and with better accuracy. Instead it's apparently been left to linger. Worse, its accuracy has suddenly declined to the point where searching this blog for the term "Three Platforms One Server Part" in the post title yields only three articles. Out of twelve. And it's not like it's just getting the most recent ones. No, it gets issues 12, 10 and 4. WTF? This is not good.

So this puts me at a crossroads. This blog, maybe more than anything, is a place for me to organize and refer back to documentation of projects I'm working on. If I can't even see a group of articles grouped logically in a series — even when they have the exact same text string in all their titles and all live on one domain (which, I should point out, is owned by Google themselves), and with no other way to organize posts built in to the Blogger system, how good an organizational tool can this be, really? So I have some choices:

1. Quit Blogging.
2. Live with it, you know, just suck it up and deal.
3. Switch to another blogging system.
4. Wait for the new Blogger, currently in Beta.

Options 1 and 2 are the least likely. Though I haven't been blogging much lately, I still feel I have things to share. I just need to find the time. But I don't see much point without certain organizational features I've come to rely on. Option 3 is tempting. I've only been blogging for a bit over a year, and switching now would be less painful than in another year, and might offer other advantages. But it's still probably more effort than I have time to expend right now. So I'm thinking I'll go with option 4. Wait for the new Blogger. For now. The new Blogger system has no way to add series, but it does have internal tagging, and this could be used to much the same effect. So that would work, though it will be a pain to go back through all my posts and redo the tagging (though this or something like it will have to happen no matter what route I take). But it should, hopefully, be less painful than any of the other options. And, if it turns out not to be a viable solution, I can always move on to one of those other options after the fact.

So that's where I'm at with the state of the blog. Hopefully the new Blogger will come out of beta soon, and I can really get to the task of switching things over and seeing how it goes. In the meantime I'll be looking into other options as time permits. And I'll just have to live without Series for a while until I can get this all worked out.

Labels: TheBlog

I just read a terrific article entitled "The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature" by "feral information theorist" Thomas Scoville. In it, Scoville proposes that UNIX has a certain appeal to literary types because of its reliance on text rather than image, and that the GUI has really been successful because we live in an increasingly visually oriented culture.

This article got me thinking about a few things. The first is that I wonder if the reverse of his premise might also apply to my situation. Since the advent of the UNIX-based Mac OS, I've been forced to use the UNIX command-line. Perhaps not coincidentally, I've been writing more. I write this blog. I write more instructions for my users. And I've become a much better and faster typist (I can almost touch type now). I wonder if there is a relationship between my increasing reliance on and fondness of UNIX and the fact that I now write a great deal about technology. I wonder if it's possible that the former has influenced the latter. I wonder if learning UNIX has fundamentally changed my brain in some small but important ways. Is UNIX responsible for The Adventures of Systems Boy?

The second thing I got thinking about is the idea that, if Scoville's theory holds, visual artists would tend to be pretty lousy and generally uninterested in the command-line. This effects me in a number of ways. For one, I am a visual artist. I used to paint and now I make videos. But I've also always had a strong technical side to my personality and interests, though it took me quite some time to actually warm to UNIX. (I remember my first foreach loop. That was the defining moment for me, really, as there was no way to do anything like that in the GUI.) For two, many of my freelance clients are visual artists. Most of them are fairly clueless as to the intricacies of systems or network setups, which I guess is why they need me. And lastly, I work in an art school and am surrounded by would-be visual artists. I've often lamented the inability of many of my students to grasp fundamental technical concepts, and as I've grown more dependent upon UNIX, I've found it frustrating when trying to teach people basic command-line skills. Artists, by and large, just plain tend to suck at shell scripting. I've usually written this off as people just being generally uninterested in such arcane and sometimes difficult tools as UNIX (as I was myself, initially). But Scoville's theory suggests that visual artists in particular may be especially immune to the charms of the command-line. They just might not be wired for it. I'll have to factor this into my thinking the next time I want to throttle someone for making me describe for the umpteenth time the syntax of ls. It's just not their fault.

The last thing I got to thinking about was Mac OS X. The real beauty of Mac OS X, in my mind, has always been that it unites two distinctly different — both the visual and the linguistic — ways of thinking. Mac OS X employs a visually beautiful GUI over a UNIX foundation. It's the best of both worlds in one system, equally appealing to both the aesthetes and the geeks. This is truly remarkable, and goes one more step in explaining why it's my operating system of choice. For someone like me — a visual artist with strong technical leanings who works with a multitude of other artists — Mac OS X represents the ideal operating system. And whether people realize it or not, I think this has at least something to do with its broader appeal.

I also think I may just have made the perfect career choice when I took a job as a SysAdmin in an art school.

Labels: MacOSX, NIX, TheBlog

So I realized recently that the one year anniversary of this blog was coming, and as of today, May 29, 2006, TASB is one year old. It was exactly one year ago that I posted my first blog entry. Frankly I'm kind of surprised I'm still here.

I posted my first entry — and started the blog in general — out of frustration. Frustration with Tiger, partly, but also frustration with a lack of information on the web about the kinds of things I deal with in my professional and personal life with regards to computer systems. I think we're doing some interesting, and often quite challenging, things in our lab, and I needed a way to document them. A log of my thoughts and activities. TASB seemed like a good way to accomplish this in a way that was centrally located and accessible from all corners, with the added benefit of perhaps helping — or getting help from — other folks in a similar boat. I've tried (and been fairly successful, I think) to keep this blog focused on systems issues. This is a blog about systems from the perspective of a lab administrator. It's by and large, but not necessarily, Mac-centric as that is my platform of choice. It's opinionated and often long winded, and that's how I like it.

And I really do like it. I'm a bit shocked that I'm still writing, but it turns out that writing this blog has been extremely therapeutic for me. It's also been quite practical. It's a great way to keep a record of, think out loud about, and sometimes even get feedback on things I'm working on. There's something quite useful about putting things down on paper (or in pixels, as it were). It forces me to concretely articulate things that can often be quite abstract when simply left inside my brain. And that's useful. But more than anything, it turns out I just like writing. And particularly about systems. It's fun.

Another thing I realized just prior to this anniversary is that I have no backup for the blog. After a good deal of research I decided to stick with Blogger for the site. It does what I need it to do and keeps me from having to deal with the problems of self-publication so I can concentrate on what I'm here to do, which is to write. It does have limitations though, and the biggest for me, as I move forward, is the fact that the Blogger system has no method for archiving my content. If I did ever decide to host the blog myself, I imagine porting the content would be a big headache. But then, I guess probably anyone who changes blog engines at some point deals with this issue on some level or another. Fortunately, I was able to download every article on the site using a nice little donationware app called WebGrabber. And since doing so I've discovered the wonders of wget, which I'm now using to make periodic site archives.

Blogger also features something called BlogSend, which I'd never used until now. BlogSend is an easy way to archive (and, if necessary, repost) articles on your site. BlogSend will email any new article you publish to your address of choice, so everything is archived in your email account. And, should anything ever happen to screw up your blogger site itself, you can use BlogSend to repost your articles. Simply email them to the provided BlogSend address and they will be reposted. This is a great way to do automated, emergency backups, but it, obviously, doesn't preserve comments. Also, BlogSend only emails the first posting of an article, so if you decide to add or change an entry, you will not get emailed the changes. So I guess the occasional full-site download will still be necessary. Anyway, once again, Blogger (with some help from BlogSend, wget and cron) has proven perfectly adequate for my needs, so kudos to them.

In other blog news, in case you hadn't noticed, TASB has a new banner. It more or less coincides with the TASB one year anniversary, so think of it as a birthday makeover, though it came about a month early. I like it. It's simple, funny and to-the-point. And I think it's fairly unique.

Anyway, I hope someone out there occasionally finds this site as useful as I do, and that if anyone is reading they continue to do so.

And, if I may, Happy Birthday to The Adventures of Systems Boy!

Labels: TheBlog

Today sees a spate of short new posts. Generally I tend to write long, rambling posts, but there have been a number of things I've noticed of late on my system that I wanted to write about. Mostly just small Mac OS X observations, and a hint or two and a troubleshooting post as well. Nothing earth-shattering here, but hopefully some fun and/or informative stuff.

So read on, and enjoy!

And a couple other general blog notes:
I'll most likely not be posting over the holiday, or at least not much. Also, in the pipe is a comparison of two great application-launcher-type utilities — Quicksilver and Butler — inspired by the debate raging (okay, politely taking place) at this TUAW post. If you're a fan of either of these, curious about them, or love one and are curious about the other (which is the position I'm in), you'll want to keep your eyes peeled for the face-off. Wow, that sounded weird. You'll want to watch for the article.

Okay, kids. Happy holidays.

Labels: TheBlog

I'm pleased as punch. Happy as a clam. A kid in a candy store. A pig in shit. Seems The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) noticed my latest post on launchd and Lingon and linked to it.

For those of you unfamiliar with TUAW, it's a great blog about general Apple goings-on. It has numerous writers, is updated frequently, the articles are short and often helpful, and the writing is fun and friendly. I read it every day, and often post comments there. I'm flattered that someone over there has taken any notice of my site, and jazzed about any traffic it might generate. Let's face it, I'm an attention whore.

Anyway, thanks, guys!

Labels: TheBlog

...And we pay for it.

Sorry to do this, kids, but I get enough spam in my regular email accounts to really, really hate it and have a serious need to keep it down as much as possible. (Don't we all?) So I'm turning on Word Verification. It seems like the least intrusive method for curtailing the ever-rising collection of unwanted email in my inbox. If you're as annoyed by this as I am, find a spammer and tell them to fuck themselves, or, if you're so inclined, commit other acts of violence, verbal or otherwise, upon them.

Thanks for understanding.

-systemsboy

Labels: TheBlog

I just got a comment from someone named "TS." The comment was emailed to me via Blogger. I can't seem to find this comment in any of my recent posts, and I'm not about to go looking for it in the archives. This "TS" writes to tell me about how great my blog is, and how I can use it to make "extra cash." He talks about how he made $800, presumably on his blog, which he doesn't link to. And he gives me a link to follow that goes here:

FOLLOW LINK AT YOUR OWN RISK
http://www.makemoneyfast.us/survey1.html

Okay. This is a scam, right?

I'm still a bit green when it comes to blogging. Can I now expect to get hit with all sorts of spam in my comments from here on out? Or is this an isolated incident? Will it get worse over time? How do people deal with this sort of thing on Blogger? I'd really like to keep anonymous comments on, but I'll disable it if I have to.

Anyone know a better way?

UPDATE 1:
Ah! Just found the answers I need in Blogger's Help Section. For now I think I'll just wait and see how things go. If things get bad, though, I'll probably start using "Word Verification." Seems like an innocuous solution to the problem. Just a heads up.

Labels: TheBlog

It's been nice to finally have some free time this weekend to work on The Blog. There have been a lot of posts in the works that I've been neglecting, and some things I've wanted to fiddle with and maybe implement. Today I got to do just that.

A lot of my posts are part of a multi-post series. I've needed a way, beyond del.icio.us categories, to see all the articles in a given series. I can't find a way to cross reference anything on del.icio.us. So I've added a "-Series-" pulldown. It basically searches this blog based on keywords common to certain serial posts. It uses Google Blog Serach as it's search engine. As Google Blog Search takes some time to index stuff, the most recent posts in a given series won't be found immediately. Other than that, it works pretty well and will be quite useful to me. Hopefully to others as well.

UPDATE 1:
The good news about Google Blog Search: It apparently indexes very frequently, like at least daily. My last two posts, which were posted only yesterday, are already in the database today. Nice.

Labels: TheBlog

Oh great. Blogger, apparently, has switched their search engine to the newly released Google Blog Search. And while this service does look immensely cool, and I have little doubt the Google folks will make it so, right now it doesn't work right. From what I can tell, Google Blog Serach, which is currently in beta, only goes back so far in time, and not quite far enough that all my posts are searchable. It's a cool engine, and it allows me to search by blog URL and article title, but if I search, for instance, "Tiger Beefs" in the blog title at the URL for this blog, I get nothing. Yet I'm sure I have an article called just that.

So, fine. I understand that Google Blog Serach is in beta, and may not be doing everything it should be doing at this point. Is there some reason, then, that the Blogger folks decided to make our formerly very functional search engine run on the currently beta, non-fully-functional Google Blog Serach?

I don't know. All I know is, I hope they fix this soon.

UPDATE 1:
About Google Blog Search acknowledges this problem:
"Why aren't my oldest posts listed?

Since Blog Search indexes blogs by their site feeds, it will only include items that have been posted since it started indexing a given blog. For most blogs, that will be around June 2005, or the time at which you submitted your blog for inclusion. We are working on ways to include older posts as well."

This really sucks for me, since my site goes back to May, and because one of my most popular posts is from then. So now, people relying on Google to find anything on this blog from May are screwed, and my site traffic is likely to go down. (So if your looking for my "Disable Spotlight" script, it's here.)

UPDATE 2:
Using regular old Google's advanced search yields far more accurate, if less pretty, results when searching the blog URL by term.

UPDATE 3:
Jeff Harrell, of The Shape of Days, is kind of a Nazi, but I read his site anyway, for the great writing and the occasional interesting post on technology. Recently he had a great writeup about Google Blog Search and the whole idea of tagging blog entries. He's got me thinking again about blog categories. I use categories mainly to organize my site into general chunks that are probably mainly useful mostly to me, so I'll probably keep using them in the sort of general way I do. But his thesis is correct: Tags or categories are kind of irrelevant to anything text-based, as text already contains the information you'd add as a tag, and is so easily searchable. For instance, searching my blog for the term "tag" would, in theory, yield this article, and any other article containing the term. So tagging this article with a "tag" tag would be pointless, because the information is already there.

Now all we need is a good search engine.

Labels: Internet, TheBlog

Well, it's that time of year again. School is starting. Which leaves us quite busy in the lab, running around, making sure everything looks all purdy, making sure the network and the computers all work, and making sure new users are at least marginally oriented to our way of doing things. Unfortunately, this leaves me little time to post blog articles. In fact, in the short time I've been writing this very article, I've been interupted a grand total of some-odd umpteen times. Yes, it's true. Umpteen.

Anyway, all I really want to say is that I have posts in the pipe: More on the Tiger lab migration, more on antivirus issues, more on my Windows experience. They're coming. Soon. I promise. ('Cause I know you're all just waiting with bated breath.)

Until then, make like a McBLT: keep the hot side hot, and the cool side cool.

I can't believe I just wrote that.

Okay; got's to run.

systemsboy

Labels: Lab, TheBlog