i used this handy tip to make mutt look in mac os' address book for contacts. moving mutt to my powerbook was definitely a good move.

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i played around with jabberd this evening and setup a jabber server for superblock.net. i needed to make a port of the mu-conference to do group chats but everything is running smoothly now.

google hasn't opened their xmpp access to google talk yet so i can't test interoperability with other servers. if anyone reading this has a jabber/xmpp account, could you try to send me a message at jcs@superblock.net?

greetings from the lovely ramada inn in wherever the hell i am for the audi chicago autobahn country club track event.

it was hell getting here to joliet from work at ~16:00 on friday. the registration, tech inspection, and driver's meeting was at a holiday inn convention center so we had a small conference room for the >100 people to fit into.

i got my registration information and for some reason we switched to color-based rungroups which is kind of confusing because you forget what the other colors are (white and blue are instructors, green is advanced, and yellow, orange, and red are intermediate and beginners) so when another group is out you can't easily figure out how many groups are left until you go again (as opposed to me being in rungroup 3 and knowing rungroup 5 is out).

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had my last ortho appointment today, no more invisalign. they cemented a permanent retainer behind my top front four teeth like i have behind my bottom ones and gave me my full removable retainer for the top teeth.

then as they were finishing they said i have to get my wisdom teeth removed and gave me a referral to an oral surgeon. i called them and have to go in on the 24th for an evaluation.

can you spot the problem with this system? look closely. i'll give you a few minutes.

ppp on mac os over the razr on cingular's network:

1. download and extract MotorolaGPRS2004-05.sit from ross barkman's page
2. copy "Motorola GPRS CID1" from above archive to /Library/Modem Scripts/
3. system preferences -> network
4. create a new location (like "mobile")
5. show "network port configurations", only enable "bluetooth"
6. ppp tab:
   • service provider: cingular
   • account name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
   • password: CINGULAR1
   • phone number: wap.cingular
   • ppp options -> uncheck all advanced options
7. tcp/ip tab -> auto configure using ppp
8. bluetooth modem tab -> select "Motorola GPRS CID1", uncheck both options

and there you go.

i thought more about getting the treo 650 but the $549.99 price from sprint is just too much. i looked at what i do with my treo 600 and came to the conclusion that i don't really need a full pda phone anyway, i just need one that can maintain a calendar to alert me of appointments and sync with my computer. aside from prodiag, i don't use any palm-specific applications so i don't really care what operating system the phone uses (as long as it's not windows). a camera is nice, but the treo 600 has probably the worst camera on any phone so i'm sure anything else would be an upgrade so i don't really care what its specs are.

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i bought ipartition and since bootcd doesn't work with tiger yet (i have been working with the author beta testing a new version though), i used sma's mac to connect to my powerbook over firewire (booted to firewire target mode) and repartition the drive to delete the empty openbsd partition and enlarge the mac os one to fill the drive.

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i've switched from using mutt on my server to using it on the powerbook with imap over ssl so that i can handle attachments better. i was tired of having to scp files back and forth or bounce messages to some other mailbox that i check with a windows machine just to be able to work with a stupid file attachment.

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finally looked at the brakes on the 190e; the pads have about half of their material left on all four corners and the rotors look fine.

not surprisingly, the lugs were way over-torqued. stupid dealer. i snapped a 3/8" extension in two pieces, then snapped my breaker bar in two just trying to get the lugs loose. i finally broke them loose with the tire iron from my r32 with a 3' extension over it.

the replacement hoses for the 190e finally arrived yesterday. i swapped them both out in about a half hour, it was very easy. no more leaks. well, fluid anyway. the exhaust is still leaking somewhere and it smells and sounds terrible. i plan to look at it more closely this weekend to find out where it's leaking from as well as check all of the brakes to see what needs to be replaced.

i've found some catalytic converters online for as low as ~$350 and a new full cat-back on ebay for $199.

i called aamco to schedule a transmission flush but their machine is on the fritz until the end of the week.

so i paid $50 for the breather hose and trans cooler hose, i'm looking at around $75-$100 for the trans flush, maybe $50 for new brake pads all around (or another $175 for 4 new rotors if needed) and $200-$650 for the cat/exhaust depending on what needs to be replaced.

i got tired of dealing with darwinports on here and i realized that netbsd's pkgsrc works on mac os. it has a bootstrap function to build the pkg* tools, a bsd make, and i can update the tree with cvs; everything i was looking for.

pkgsrc has a lot of conditionalizing in it compared to openbsd's ports tree, obviously because it's being used on many platforms other than netbsd. for example, a bunch of the core ports like openssl have m4 code that detects whether the base system already has a usable version of that package. so a port can simply depend on the openssl port and if the base system already has openssl, the port of it will not be built and everything else will just pretend like an openssl port was already installed. on mac os it does this for openssl and maybe some others, but for some reason it won't use the built-in readline, perl, or python.

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i still haven't installed openbsd on this powerbook and i don't really plan to. i didn't even realize that there is no pcmcia slot on this machine until sma asked me about it and since the broadcom airport extreme card doesn't work under openbsd, i'd have no usable wireless (short of using a silly usb adapter). guess i'm leaving openbsd-on-laptops for good. c'est la vie!

now i need to acquire a partition resizing program to get that unused 6gb back in mac os.

i added ical support to my cal php script. so now it reads the palm pdb datebook and can spit out ical data that i subscribe to in the ical app in mac os. since that palm pdb file comes from my treo when i do a network hotsync, it is an overly complicated way of getting calendar events from my treo to my powerbook (treo -> hotsync to server -> copied to web space -> accessed via ical -> script converts pdb to ical format -> updated in ical). kind of ironic considering my phone is two inches away from my laptop but to get data from one to the other it has to go through the internet and translated into different formats and mediums.

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my new 12" powerbook arrived yesterday. i've been wanting to switch (back) to a powerbook for a while to have working nice-ities such as bluetooth, firewire, imovie, automator, etc. the 15" powerbook i had before was too big for me to carry around everywhere, so i figured a 12" would be somewhat comparable to my x40.

the first thing i did when it arrived was repartition it to make a 6gb partition for openbsd and reinstall mac os on the large partition. i played around in mac os and got everything setup, but when i tried to install openbsd in its partition, the disklabel was occupying the entire drive space (even though the openbsd partition was only 6gb in fdisk) and it decided to format the entire drive. by the time i realized what it was doing it had already screwed everything up.

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feature request for any website that processes online orders: provide rss feeds for the status of an order.

for a large or expensive order, such as a laptop, the order may move through various states such as verification, processing, manufacturing, quality control, shipping, and completed. i don't need an e-mail every time it changes, but it would be useful to stick the feed url in bloglines or something and monitor its progress without having to visit that company's website, remember the order number, and remember what state it was in before versus what it is now.

i've already had to write an html-to-rss interface to oqo's site for this purpose, and had to do so again today for apple.

speaking of rss, why don't fedex or ups provide native rss feeds for package tracking? bloglines has nice interfaces to both sites, but why don't either of them provide these lightweight interfaces natively?

this afternoon i finally got around to looking at the oil leak in the 190e. i put the car up on a jack stand (although i can easily see under the car with it being so high, unlike my other cars) and could immediately see oil dripping out from the plastic belly tray. i took it off and the pool of oil it was carrying spilled out.

the leak was coming from a spring-covered hose that i initially thought was an oil return line going into the oil pan, but after reviewing the pictures and thinking about it, i realized it wouldn't have an oil return line because there's no turbo or any auxiliary system using oil. i traced the line and it ran from the radiator to the oil pan where it was only clamped down on, and then ran back up somewhere else.

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my new hawk hp+ rear brake pads for the r32 came yesterday. i tossed them on after work and went out for a drive to bed them in. i could immediately notice a different in the amount of friction generated by them. the car seems to squat down on hard braking more than dive forward, as it did before. they are an aggressive street pad suitable for club racing, so they will complement the hawk ht-10 front pads i run on the track very nicely and provide much more balanced braking than with the oem rear pads i was running. i have a feeling the tires are not going to cope very well, however...

oh yeah, and the oqo is sold and gone.

more google maps fun: map of openbsd developers

not totally accurate with respect to the project because the xglobe markers file isn't always updated when new developers are added, but it has a good number of us on there.

i recently finished reading silence on the wire at the recommendation of frank. the book was very interesting and made me re-evaluate the design of systems and applications i've implemented. after each chapter, i found myself thinking not specifically about what i had just read, but about a related idea that the text had sparked in my mind. i highly recommend reading it if you're into software or system design.

let's see, what is new...

i bought a 92 mercedes-benz 190e as a second car to keep the miles down on my r32. it has a lot of problems which i seem to discover every day i drive it. yesterday while cleaning the throttle body to try to fix a sticking throttle, i noticed it leaking massive amounts of oil onto my garage floor, in addition to some thick clear fluid that looks like clean brake fluid. excellent.

in tonight's episode, joshua gets his car stuck on a hydraulic lift...

yesterday dave said he was going to take his car to... a car dealership that shall remain nameless... to replace an o2 sensor in his m3. he has access to their shop for the work that he does there and since it was a sunday, the shop would be empty, so i tagged along with my car to install the b&m shifter i've been waiting forever to do.

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my oqo is for sale on ebay.