Author: Nick

Brave New Design

I’ve been toying with HTML5 and CSS3 in spare moments the last week or two and I’ve got a spanky new layout predicated on a modified workflow here at Black Fez Productions. Of course, now I want to break from WordPress and go with something more Java-like. Which, of course, means moving everything over to a server sitting in my basement. Which, of course, means the redesign and workflow remain on a test server and you don’t get to see it.

sic semper erat, et sic semper erit

Draft Day Approaches

Leaving for the city of mighty winds and broad shoulders for the 36th[?] annual CFCL baseball draft. It looks to be a hard year for the Beatniks as we are suffering under a penalty for releasing Denver’s most notorious wife beater, Jose Reyes. Still, there is baseball, comraderie, and crepes in my immediate future.

Screen shot of National Enquirer
Barbara and I have at least one thing in common.

And that, my friends, is why I am happier as a Beatnik. So from our headquarters in Eukennott, Iowa to your home, wherever that might be: Happy Baseball Season 2016.

Writing checks

Am I writing checks my body cannot cash? So far this season I’m committed to riding BRAN, the first two days of RAGBRAI, and—now that I’ve heard of it—I really want to do the Dubuque Gran Fondo.

Doing a gran fondo puts me on the edge of racing and a new/higher level of commitment to riding and training. This does dovetail somewhat with the de-bulk-ification I’ve been working on for the last 2+ months. 22 pounds so far, thanks for noticing 🙂. Still, man, getting myself to a level of fitness to tackle 73 miles of hilly terrain and not be embarrassed by my time will be a lot of work.

But…giant sausage!

The perfect golf club name

The “Some rich asshole” to “Some rich asshole” browser plugin makes this caption funnier than it should be:

Some rich asshole speaks about the results of the Michigan, Mississippi, and other GOP primaries at his rich asshole National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, March 8, 2016.

Heh. …his rich asshole National Golf Club…

Gentrified

This last weekend I was huddled in the basement instead of soaking in the abnormally warm weather. What started as a collection of minor annoyances with Sabayon’s Linux distro turned into a full-blown fit of pique. Yet another distro that drove me bats with frequent updates that broke nvidia drivers each time. Then some obscure process pulled the vboxusers group out from underneath my account so I couldn’t run my Win7 VM. That’s the box configured to VPN into work. Normally a great idea because it keeps my workstation mainly off the LAN at work. Sometimes it presents wrinkles and that makes supporting builds at 0600hrs difficult. Of course, it really wasn’t until Sunday evening that I even figured out why I was having VirtualBox issues.

And, really, rigo is not as hep as emerge.

So I pulled the training wheels off and went full-on Gentoo. Well, mostly Gentoo. I still outsourced my kernel configuration. This time I relied on the good folks over at Funtoo. The guy behind Funtoo used to be a lead at Gentoo but had philosophical differences I guess. All to the good for me because I love Gentoo while I had micromanaging my kernel and USE flags.

They’ve got a series of Stage 3 tarballs pre-rolled for architectures and processors. Along with the tarball comes a sensible collection of USE flags and kernel configurations. They also provide a collection of Portage overlays that greatly simplify USE flag management. You get all of the gains of highly-individualized, locally compiled code without quite as much of the headache.

The biggest sticking point, again, was futzing with X11 and nvidia drivers. However, I’m a bit more confident in things sticking this time around since Gentoo necessarily gets you closer to the update/upgrade process. I also discovered blacklisting in modprobe so now nouveau is hidden from view and should no longer rear its ugly, underperforming ass.

Another point of contention was that the Funtoo overlays were masking pulseaudio which doesn’t really make a whole heck of a lot of sense given everything is counting on that laying about and providing the interface to the audio hardware. Once that was fixed, though, I could emerge Firefox, Thunderbird, and Spotify. That gets me about 83% of the way to a functioning workstation. Of course, there was Eclipse, GVIM, VirtualBox, and the Calligra suite as well. There’s a few more things to iron out, a few minor annoyances to be righted, and then some customization of the theme (natch) that will make things feel like home again.

Oh, and I’m not 100% sure yet, but there’s a better than even chance that I trashed my entire media collection accidentally. So I’ll likely be starting from scratch again. Joy. Definitely need to get the record-from-soundcard thing working with Spotify again. Either that or dig out the giant box of CDs and rip them all over again. Yick…

So I spent a good part of this last weekend watching consoles scrolling compilation logs. There’s a lot of code that sits behind a functional operating system and windowing environment. Easily 10 hours and that’s with eight overclocked cores and 32GB of RAM.

Shortie Digits

My contribution to the continuing decline of political discourse in this country: Short Fingers. A Tumblr featuring manipulated[?] images of Donald Trump’s tiny hands.

It’s small. It’s petty. It’s a thing that has gotten under Trump’s skin since the heyday of Spy magazine. And, damn, if it isn’t funny.

Permanence

An interesting discussion on making the Web [more] permanent. Digital-to-physical publishing.

Ever since my work with EVIA Digital Archive I’ve been a fan of these sorts of concerns. So much so, I’ve been toying with ideas for making this blog have some degree of resiliency. It has existed in four and a half basic forms over the last fifteen (?!!!?!) years.

First it was a collection of static pages that I spent hours mucking with to set up archives and inter-page linking and “dynamic” site navigation. After tiring of that, and also learning of Blogger, I moved onto that platform. In the midst of grad school I began toying with ideas of permanence and syndication. Ultimately I developed a platform that used static files marked up in XML/RSS with a little Python to glue together the presentation. It was totes file-system intensive but maybe my most favorite implementation.

At the end of that process I decided to re-implement that platform into something more performant and also wrap the administration with a GUI. To make this happen I developed a rudimentary Python web framework for RESTful services. I made it most of the way there but got distracted by life for a few years. The blog was dormant during that time so I’m counting it as ‘a half’.

Finally the desire to publish online outweighed the desire to use a self-rolled CMS and I ported everything over to WordPress. While living in the WordPress framework is comfortable, easy even, it isn’t a close to the metal as I like to be. It’s also PHP, which I have little time for. Sure, it’s fine and in widespread use, but it is so far removed from the sorts of languages I employ on a day-to-day basis that it may as well be written in OOK.

So I’ve begun developing again. I think the advent of widespread browser support for XSL and CSS make this an incredible opportunity to create a web presence that consists of static artifacts tied together with just a modicum of dynamic glue. Artifacts will have URIs that point to “physical” instead of encoding a recipe for a page generator. The artifacts will be stand-alone objects. They will be tied together, however, with a thin veneer of dynamic navigation.

I’d love to return to RSS as the base markup language. That will be augmented with RDF/OWL markup for metadata. The metadata will either have sensible defaults or be primarily generated so as to minimize the busywork around publishing. Because that’s been the unbeatable opponent to maintaining this blog consistently. It’s easier to send crap out to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or what-have-you. But then there is no control and no permanence. So push-button publishing is a must.

At any rate, that’s kind of what I’ve been working on as a project that feeds my other project of creating a full-on ESM / SDLC environment at home. Killing my Facebook profile has been a further motivator to work on this.