amazon's wish list system has a "universal wish list button" feature now so you can add things from other websites. i wonder which silly web 2.0 startup they put out of business with this addition.

i've been using amazon's wish list for the past 6 years to add books that i hear about and plan on buying myself later. now i can add all those non-amazon things that i plan on wasting money on, like a supercharger for my exige.

so if you are feeling sad that my exige does not have a supercharger and is too slow at road america, now you can buy me one because it's so easily accessible from my amazon wishlist.

whenever carl hears a police car or an ambulance, he tries to howl and bark along with the siren. while sitting at my desk the other day, i heard a siren and saw carl pop his head up, so i started recording him howling at a police car.

while uploading the video and playing it, he heard himself howling and started doing it again, so i recorded carl howling at carl howling at a police car.

i received an e-mail asking me how i got started with openbsd, so i thought i'd write the answer here in case anyone else wanted to read it.

i started using openbsd in 1998 (version 2.3 or 2.4) to host a bbs that i was running. i chose openbsd because of its security record and because i was getting fed up with linux (slackware) at the time. i think the machine was a pentium 75 or something, and openbsd worked quite well on it. during the course of building the bbs, i had to install some 3rd party software, so i got interested in openbsd's ports system to make installation of that software cleaner. i submitted some ports to the ports@ mailing list and got them committed by other developers. i tested others' ports and supplied feedback where i could. i hadn't done much unix development back then, so writing simple makefiles for ports was an easy way to get involved.

i made a muxtape. it is mostly songs with words. i am not really sure why i picked these, but picking 12 songs out of my 4700 in ichoones is hard.

i will probably make another one with songs without words, and maybe one of old idm stuff.

i upgraded my iphone to the 2.0 firmware yesterday since the jailbreak was just made available. sadly, some of the apps i was used to don't work on 2.0 yet (sendpics, mcleaner, etc.) but one of the most annoying changes was that i couldn't easily disable the typing auto-correction with a tweak to the preference plist like i did with the 1.1.x firmware.

however, it seems if you just move the dictionary out of the way, it accomplishes the same thing:

i don't remember what prompted it, but i also bought a nokia n810 the other week. i bought a nokia 770 two years ago and it sucked, but now that it has a physical keyboard and gps, i figured i'd give it another try.

i found the casing to be a bit flimsy. when the keyboard was extended downward, the display wouldn't sit still and would kind of tilt one way or the other. the keyboard was not very easy to type on, but certainly easier than pecking at an on-screen keyboard like with the 770.

the webcam was pretty much useless due to the image quality being so poor. the overall operating system is still a bit sluggish. it's nice that it has a mozilla-based browser now, but it's also pretty slow on such a weak cpu.

i think it would make for a nice openbsd platform, though, maybe as a newer zaurus-type portable machine. i didn't find much use for it though and returned it for a refund.

i bought an hp 2133 mini-note a while ago. it's a "netbook" or whatever people are calling all of these new eee-pc-like machines. the size is similar to my libretto l5, which came out like 6 years ago (and mine is sitting in my closet with a broken keyboard) so i'm not sure why all these companies are suddenly making similarly sized machines.

the overall size is decent but, because this one has a 6-cell battery, it sticks up twice as tall in the back and makes it awkward to carry. the keyboard was very nice and big, and its keys and tactile reminded me of the keyboard on my old powerbook g4. the trackpad is pretty stupid, though, since its buttons are on the sides and not at the bottom. the trackpad itself seemed a bit unresponsive at times as well.

activerecord, your default and static :force => true setting has fucked me over for the last time.

module ActiveRecord
  class SchemaDumper
  private
    alias :original_table :table
    def table(table, stream)
      (d = self.send(:original_table, table, StringIO.new)).rewind
      stream.print d.read.gsub(/, :force => true/, "")
    end
  end
end

i don't understand why anyone would make a default option eat all of your database tables.

after some delays in getting a credit card processor hooked up to the signup system, corduroy is live.

"we" have been working pretty hard lately on corduroy, a web-based billing system for small businesses. the live demo site is available showing off its features and functionality and the signup system will be ready shortly to start taking subscriptions.

i started working on an acpi driver this evening to make my thinkpad x61 work better under openbsd. i just finished it and so far it matches on the IBM0068 acpi hid device, checks it for the appropriate version, enables the bluetooth device (which is required before the hardware toggle switch can power it on and let the ubt0 device show up), and sets up a callback to run whenever a special button (e.g., fn+f[1-9], brightness, thinklight, etc.) is pressed. i'm pretty sure it will work on most other thinkpads but i haven't tried it on my x40 yet.

for certain reasons, i've been looking at getting a tablet laptop. i bought a fujitsu lifebook p1610 tablet in december but found its screen and keyboard too small to use on a daily basis.

after using openbsd on one of my imacs for the past few months (and rarely using my thinkpad x40), i had gotten used to the extra screen real estate of the 1440x900 resolution. now that i'm back to using a laptop as my primary machine, i've been looking for something with a higher resolution (as well as more cpu power and ram) to replace the x40 as well as provide tablet functionality. the thinkpad x61 tablet satisfied those requirements while still staying relatively light and thin, so i bought one.

unfortunately it's not as openbsd compatible as i was expecting. i've updated my laptops page with the nerdy details.

a while back i wrote a half-assed growl-like notification system called "meow" that i could use on openbsd. i wrote a gaim plugin that used meow to notify me of new messages so i wouldn't have to keep switching back to the workspace it was in to see who was talking to me. but it was a perl plugin for gaim and i didn't remember how i got perl support working in the openbsd port. the port's maintainer didn't care to fix it and i could never get it working in any future releases. so without gaim notifications, i didn't really have much use for meow and it was scrapped.

i have a fluke linkrunner pro for sale on ebay. you should buy it (or at least bid on it to run up the price).

someone finally made a utility for the iphone to constantly alert you when you have unread sms messages. usually the iphone just vibrates and alerts once when you get a message and if you miss those, you usually never notice the message until much later. the continuous nagging was something i missed from my treo.

however, i didn't like that it vibrates every 15 seconds and that it will vibrate right after you get a message even if you haven't really "missed" it. since it's just a shell script that calls "sleep 15", it isn't really smart about what a missed message is. so i modified it to wait 60 seconds between alerts and only alert when an unread message is older than 60 seconds, so you have time to actually see the new message before being nagged about it.

i'm laying here in bed using my laptop and wanted to write some code, but the firefox bookmark for my development site was outdated (i switched from camping to rails the other week, so my local site moved from localhost:3301 to localhost:3000). rather than just change it, i decided to do something about synchronizing my bookmarks between my desktop and laptop.

i found google's and foxmarks' solutions but, while both were free, they required that i keep my data on their servers. while installing the foxmarks plugin, however, i noticed that you can easily change the server it synchronizes to and it can support https. so like any good programmer, i wrote my own backend so i could host my own bookmarks.