Saturday, May 30, 2009
Attempted and failed to use Remote Desktop in Ubuntu and Screen Sharing in OS X to connect to the new laptop we're setting up for Sam. The Mac couldn't see the Ubuntu machine even though they were both on the same network, even though I used the named address and the IP address specified by Ubuntu in the Remote Desktop configuration. Turned off Remote Desktop on the Ubuntu machine. Resolved yesterday's mailing list problem. Somehow the moderation flag for the spa's email address was turned on. Once I turned that off and resent the message to the mailing list it delivered successfully. In the mailing list software called Mailman I find it really hard to remember where the settings are that determine who can send a message to the list. It's in "Privacy options..." under "Sender filters." If anyone out there is designing mailing list software, the label I was looking for was "Who may send" or "Who can send" or "Sending permissions" or "Permitted to send" or something like that. Lunch by myself at Pizzeria Delfina (415-437-6800, 3611 18th Street, San Francisco, California, 94110, USA). For years while driving through the Castro on our way to the Mission we've seen over and over again crowds of people waiting outside Delfina and Pizzeria Delfina, and so finally I decided to taste what many thought was a worthwhile wait. This is classy-casual pizza suitable for date night or parents visiting from out of town or most pizza occasions that don't involve all-night studying sessions. A fresh lemonade and margherita pizza ran me about $20 after tip—pricy for pizza, but it's really a different experience than, say, Escape from New York pizza only a few blocks away, and it's worth trying at least once even if you think you can't afford it. The day wasn't especially cold, but when I decided to eat outside and being the first of the day to do so the waitron offered to turn on the heat lamp, and I never say no to that. Before my $10.50 pizza arrived, I ordered a lemonade. The lemonade arrived along with a plate of dried sage, freshly grated cheese, and chili flakes. I also received a collection of very long, very thin parmesan-dusted breadsticks—delicious. The pizza dough is thin and crisp and a little salty, all of which I liked. Portions of the bubbly crust were burnt black, but that didn't bother me. One pizza to a person is very filling; I had no room for dessert but ordering a cannoli to go was tempting. The waitron called me "love" as in "Thanks, love!" and this can be charming or mockworthy (as the table next to me found) depending on your mood. It feels out of place to me—this is San Francisco, not London, but perhaps the waitron was from someplace else and the term of endearment is genuine. One of the tines on my fork was slightly bent, but it didn't bother me; just a little weird for a place that's supposed to be classy. (At these prices, I expect strict attention to detail.) Everything else was pretty much perfect. While I ate, one car on the street rear-ended another, but I didn't see it happen, and I couldn't see much of the result from where I sat. Home. Nap. Dinner at home with Patrick: ravioli with garden vegetable marinara sauce. Watched Live Free or Die Hard (2007) on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Like all the Die Hard films, it's all about the action. It would be absurd to say that the earlier films were more believable but this one sort of stepped over that line of believability for me. A lot about the use of computers in this film is laughable, even for people who don't know what computers can and cannot do. So don't go into it thinking that Hollywood has finally made a film involving believable computer hacking scenes—that'll probably never happen. But even many of the stunts are over the top to the point of being silly and ridiculous that we're laughing at the filmmakers rather than laughing at the film itself or with the characters enjoying a humorous moment. For a lot of the stunts you have to wonder who dreamed this up and convinced others that audiences would find it plausible even for an action hero like McClane. I've had it on my to do list for weeks to sign up with Boxee and finally did it tonight. Over the past few days I've been setting up Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on a Dell Inspiron 700m. The work is all done—it was really only a few hours all together. The laptop is Patrick's old laptop and we're letting Sam have it since he needs a new computer. I thought it too tedious for anyone to deal with Windows on this old hardware, even if it would be XP (i.e., not Vista). Ubuntu 9.04 is quite impressive and I found the installation to be a mostly positive experience with a few problem areas. There are some applications that I would have expected to be installed by default but weren't. They are Adobe Flash and Sun Java. I downloaded 4 different installers from Adobe's site and one or two installers from Sun's site and double-clicking each one failed in one way or another. Various blogs told of possible solutions which I tried but they also failed. I eventually got both to install successfully using command lines. The other big problem I encountered was that Ubuntu cannot be configured out of the box for a dialup connection. There isn't even anything in Network Connections that says dialup is not supported. (Ubuntu people: put an icon there for dialup and if and when someone double-clicks it a dialog should tell them what to do.) The workaround is to find in the online help or on the web the instructions for manually installing some additional software and then there you go it's fine. It took me a while to figure out, which means that normal people will probably have a hard time or not figure it out on their own. My Time Machine backup has been running continuously for over a day, and Spotlight has also been indexing for over a day. Erased my Time Machine backup. Spotlight stopped indexing immediately. Restarted the Time Machine backup anew. I originally signed up with Boxee using a generic, throwaway username and it wasn't until after I had logged in that I fully realized how much it's tied in with social networking applications and other applications. If you're on Boxee, add me. Spent several hours migrating some domains to Bluehost. Configured email accounts and forwarders. Installed Drupal for Patrick's website. Found simplescripts to work very well. After installing Drupal, to set up cron jobs you must use the Bluehost cpanel—crontab is not available at the command line in SSH. Bluehost's tools are very powerful and pretty easy to use. Very happy with them still. Tweaked CrashPlan configuration. I've been continuing to enjoy using RSIGuard and will stop using TimeOut. RSIGuard is superior in a number of ways over both TimeOut and Workrave. RSIGuard includes video of real, normal-looking office workers instead of the animations in Workrave with the woman with offensively large breasts. RSIGuard seems to have a larger number of exercises—the increased variety makes the task of exercising less monotonous. RSIGuard includes the AutoClick feature which neither TimeOut nor Workrave has. I'm still getting used to AutoClick. Sometimes double-clicks don't do anything, and sometimes you want to move the mouse to a location and right-click but AutoClick will automatically left-click, causing the undesired action to occur. Example: wanting to right-click a hyperlink in a web browser. My current workaround is to mouse very close to the link but not touching it, let AutoClick click, then move onto the link (which doesn't invoke AutoClick because of the short distance) and then press the numeric keypad period which invokes the right-click. However, this requires more precise mousing and it can be argued that that requires stricter muscle movements in the hand which can cause RSI. There is probably a different way to resolve this—I just haven't found it yet.—several minutes later...—Ah, here it is. You can assign a keyboard shortcut so that RSIGuard skips the next click when you press it. I've assigned this to numeric keypad 0. Discovered a password management problem with boxee.tv. Tweaked CrashPlan and Time Machine to both exclude the hidden folder in Documents called Microsoft User Data—this was 152 MB that I did not need backed up. Late meal: turkey sandwich, mango juice.