Tech, music, sports, and other stuff.
Hey, I made a small revision to my Greasemonkey script that makes it smarter about handling time (particularly AM/PM).
It's updated here and updated on Userscripts, where I'm up to like 566 installs! I'm a hit! Or something. And I'm like the 4th link in Google if you search for "google calendar evite!"
If you've got Greasemonkey, install your Evite to Google Calendar script right from here.
Through the wonder of the internets, I was able to check out a few of the new fall TV shows via my TiVo. Yay! New TV!
So, then I actually watched them. And new TV didn't seem so new anymore.
Let's start with the worst. "Journeyman" stars the dude from "Rome". Not the really cool dude, but the other one. The less cool one. He plays a journalist (ha, "journ"alist ... "journ"eyman ... ha) in San Francisco who has a British accent that just sort of peeks out every now and then. It's only mildly annoying. It's slightly more annoying when he randomly starts going back in time. It becomes apparent, fairly quickly, that the show will be about him adjusting to the new time he's in and then setting some prior wrong right.
Yep, exactly like "Quantum Leap." Except not nearly as good. The one good bit was that they resolved the marital strife his time traveling caused right off the bat. But, otherwise, this looks like a show that'll make it through half the season before they have to rewrite it and have it take a massive twist because it's just boring.
"Bionic Woman" reminded me a lot of another show. What was the name of it? Oh yeah ... "The Bionic Woman." Except this one tried to be all futuristic and clever. It had one decent fight scene with the villian (Starbuck from "Battlestar Galactica", which is an infinitely better show, as far as I can tell), but like everything else in this show, it was rushed and pretty much pure exposition. You'd think a dorky sci-fi action show would be right up my alley, but I fell asleep twice trying to get through this. The best part is how the main character flips out after becoming bionic, hates everyone involved, but within 10 minutes is fully using her new powers and fighting the bad guys. I guess they wanted to get right into the bionic powers rather than dealing with the potentially interesting story of her struggling to deal with her new powers.
Whatever. I probably won't watch this. It looks like it'll be a worse version of the new Terminator show. Which I haven't seen yet.
Finally, there were two kinda good shows.
"Life" is not about Eddie Murphy being in jail. No, this version is about a cop who was wrongfully accused of a murder and spends 12 years in jail before being freed. Part of his settlement for wrongful imprisonment (besides a bunch of money) is to be put back on the force as a detective. It all stems from him living his zen-like existence and wanting to make a difference ... or is it. Muhahahaha.
Actually, the zen aspect of the main character, and how it affects his perspective and approach to police work is kind of fun and reminds me a good bit of "Raines," a show from last season that I like a lot (about a detective who talks to ghosts in his head). So even if the show didn't have a secondary element, it'd still be worth watching. But there's a nice reveal at the end of the pilot that puts a slightly new spin on the main character (is he as zen-like as he seems) and adds a hopefully nice serialized story to the proceedings. I'll be watching.
Finally, there's "Chuck." Or, as it's also known, "Jake 3.0." It's about a guy who works for the Geek Squad at Best Buy ... umm, I mean the Nerd Herd at Buy More. He's a dork, he's droll, he's Seth Cohen. Hey, wouldn't you know, this the new show by the guy who invented Seth Cohen. Surprise! Chuck gets an email from an old associate and BAM, he knows a bunch of spy stuff he shouldn't. The NSA and CIA send operatives to capture or kill him. They all work together to save stuff.
Ok, so it's a bit derivative of the previously mentioned Jake 2.0 crossed with The O.C. And, given the subject material and the plot, it's a bit lacking in the energy department. That being said, it was really fun. It's obvious that this could be a good, even great show, once it finds its footing a bit. They had to cover a lot of ground in the opening episode, so it's not too surprising that it was a bit uneven. It looks like it'll be worth watching for the first season and a half before it turns crappy like The O.C.
My company is at the beginning of a what will end up being a fairly long, exhaustive migration process. Probably on the order of 12-16 months, migrating web sites from a set of servers on one side of the country to a set of servers on the other side. It's not your typical forklift migration (where you actually move the servers and plug them in at their new home); instead, it's literally moving files, mail, DNS, etc. to a new platform.
It's pretty daunting, pretty complicated, and can occasionally be pretty cool.
On the flip side, it's now 2:55AM Eastern in Boston (where I started my day), but I'm in Phoenix where it's actually only 11:55PM. That's a sign that maybe things didn't go quite as smoothly as one would have hoped.
The step we're on is a step where we take over DNS for folks. It's always somewhat difficult, because we'll get a big list of domains and have to figure out whose record (our nameserver's or the other nameserver's) is the "real" record. It's not generally too tough to figure it out (you can judge by the SOA of the records) and the number of domains is usually short of 100k, so as long as you're accurate to within 1-2%, it's not too bad. That's 1000 guys who might break, which is pretty easy to handle with a good support team and some quick script fixes.
Let me take a step back. The process is actually that our nameservers need to become the authoritative nameservers for the domains we're moving. This allows us to later change their DNS to point to their new home, and it all kinda works. We have to get the domains, merge them into our nameservers, become authoritative, and then fix what breaks.
We did that yesterday. Except it wasn't 100k domains. It was 1.2 million. And the domains weren't coming from a single, well-maintained nameserver. They domains came from three, somewhat munged together nameservers. There were internal conflicts, conflicts with our servers, missing zones. A host of issues. We thought we'd worked most of them out and gotten the problems down to, at most, 4-5k domains. That's a lot, but in reality, it's less than 0.5% of the total domains.
"Pretty good," you say.
"Not quite," I say.
For you see, there weren't just three nameservers. There were five. So there's a couple thousand domains we missed. And we also missed some of the conflicts (either by omission or by grabbing the wrong data). In the end, it was closer to 12k domains that were wonky.
That's still only 1%. Damn good, given all of the variables.
Except 12000 broken domains leads to a whole lot of phone calls and emails. And some angry customers. And some tired folks staying up to fix things that they weren't responsible for breaking. And one tired folk--me--staying up because he feels guilty for only being 99% good enough.
DNS is a fickle beast. Thankfully, it's pretty quickly fixable. Once we'd identified some global problems, we could fix them rapidly and put big chunks of the broken domains back in working order.
I often argue with people who think the "Chinese Market" is a valid business plan. You know, the folks who say "hey, if we can just get our product in front of 100 million people, and get 1% of those people to buy, we'll be rich!" Except, of course, it doesn't really work that way. It's hard to get a product in front of that many people who would be interested in buying, and it's hard to get 1% of any audience to buy anything.
Well, not in business plans, at least. It does work that way in technical issues. If you've got a huge enough base of users, the smallest mistakes can have a big impact on your company and team. In these cases, sometimes being 99% accurate isn't good enough.
Here's a graphical representation:
You see, with 100k domains, you never quite reach screwed. It's manageable.
With 1.2 million domains, you're pretty much totally screwed.
For a while now, I've been looking for a good way to sync the calendar on my Macbook to Google Calendar to my Outlook at work. It'd be nice to be able to know what my next day at work looks like in Outlook, then to have my Calendar sync'd down to my laptop so that I can see and adjust things while offline, then sync it all back to the master calendar in Google Calendar.
It shouldn't be that tough, but so far, it has proven elusive. I've tried some of the free tools that are around to sync iCal with Google Calendar and Outlook with Google Calendar, but they've all proved a bit wonky.
Finally, Scoble mentioned that Plaxo had it's new beta that would do all of the syncing through a nifty web application. So, I headed over to Plaxo.com and tried it out. It seems pretty straight-forward. You add "sync points", which are places that Plaxo will sync your data to. I added Google Calendar, my Mac, and my work Outlook. The latter two required the installation of some software. Nothing too difficult. A couple of config tweaks later and I saw my work calendar in my Google Calendar and sync'd down to my Mac.
Perfect!
Except, over the following few days, I would constantly get duplicate calendars, lose the original calendar, get duplicate entries, continually have to tell Outlook which calendars I really wanted, which it would ignore and keep syncing other ones.
It became a royal mess.
So, I decided to uninstall things, get back to square one, and at least retain my Google Calendar the way it was. Except Plaxo ate my two calendars (because they no longer existed in Outlook ... lesson: kill your sync points before killing your calendars). That kinda pissed me off. Thankfully, my Mac still had my calendar, so I was able to dump the ICS entries and upload them to Google (import of ICS files is a nice feature of Google Calendar, by the way!). I lost my music calendar, but it was mostly older stuff at this point, so I started that one over.
Plaxo just didn't work for me, though it seems like it could be useful if they work the kinks out. It didn't sync to Google Calendar fast enough, which was always a bit annoying. The apps for the Mac and PC were kind of clunky, but they worked ok. But borking the calendar syncing was just a bit too much to deal with at this point.
So, I'm back to just subscribing to my Google Calendar feeds through iCal. I'm going to try gSync for about the 4th time and hope that the final release version is finally good enough to maybe think about using full time.
It'd be cool if Google solved this problem themselves (maybe opening up the GCal API), but I'm not holding my breath.
I'd noticed a couple of problems with my Evite to Google Calendar script, so when I got an Evite today, I took some time to figure out how to fix it. I fixed everything I could find, and made the script a bit more robust at handling future Evite changes. So, if you've been having problems, give it another shot and hopefully it'll work for you now.
Install Evite to Google Calendar Greasemonkey Script v1.3
You can also install it from UserScripts, like 387 other people.
Almost exactly one month ago (maybe closer to five weeks), I started feeling just a little ill. Back pain and general overall soreness, just enough to make me feel uncomfortable. About a week after the pain started, I added a ~101 degree fever to the mix. It's Memorial Day weekend, and I'm laying on my couch trying to figure out what's going on and if I need to hit the hospital. I'm pounding ibuprofen like they're candy (and I'm not big on taking any sort of medicine), just trying to keep the fever down and the back pain from causing me to want to punch walls.
After about 3 days of the fever, I got into the urgent care clinic to see a doctor who did some quick work, ran a couple of tests and diagnosed me with a kidney infection. It explained all of my symptoms. So, he prescribed some antibiotics and sent me on my way. Things seemed to work. Within a few days (all of which I spent at home, as I was unable to head into the office), my fever was generally gone, I had almost no back pain, and generally felt ok.
Except for a sore throat. My throat started to feel, for lack of a more scientific term, "icky" pretty much as I finished the antibiotic run. It started to swell, and I could see the trademark white spots that indicate strep throat.
Perfect.
So, on a follow-up visit, my doctor checked my throat. Could be strep, but it seemed unlikely. Could be thrush, my body's reaction to the antibiotics. Or, very unlikely, it could be mono.
Mono would explain everything, but I hadn't been tired and the symptoms had come serially, not at the same time. It would, at least, be an odd case of mono.
A day later I found out it was an odd case of mono.
So, for another 8 days or so, I dealt with the sore throat. There's nothing they could prescribe. I probably took somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 ibuprofen and two full bottles of NyQuil/Tylenol stuff (to soothe my throat and keep a cough down) over that week or so.
Finally, I had a few days of being tired, sleeping 10 hours of night and waking up wanting to sleep some more. But, I was able to rejoin normal life -- playing a little softball, going out a few times, even taking in a concert (Dear Leader, yay!).
So, that's why I've been MIA from my wonderful blog. I've been getting my ass kicked by mono. But, given all the research I've done, I've held my own. Most mono cases seem to be a bit more ass-kicking than mine was, and generally last a bit longer. It's been just about a month, maybe a week longer, from start to finish. I'd say, at this point, I'm at almost 100%. The last two days have seen the last remnants of my cough go away, and I've been able to exercise and even run without feeling too bad. Later this week, I'll have an ultrasound to make sure my spleen is normal size. If it is, I'm good. If not, well, who knows. I'm betting that I'm given the all clear.
Hopefully, I'll settle back into a more regular writing schedule. Being sick, combined with work, combined with some other "real life" stuff has taken up some time that I'd normally devote to blogging. But, hopefully I'll get energized to write again and be a bit more prolific. I've got some interesting work stuff, some tech stuff, and hopefully some music stuff to write about.
In the meantime, here's my mea culpa for having been MIA. Won't happen again. Promise.
Around Wednesday I started feeling sore -- an achy back and neck. It got progessively worse (from handleable to requiring a few Advil every couple of hours) until Saturday when I had a fever, headache, and even worse back pain. It was a fantastic way to start a long weekend.
So, given that I was going to be spending a majority of my time on the couch or in bed, most of it was going to be consuming a bunch of the media that had been collecting over the past few weeks. 10 or 12 podcasts, 3 Netflix DVDs, and a whole bunch of season finales on my DVR (Heroes, Lost, Veronica Mars). With work and the generally nicer weather, a variety of things have been building up across my network.
It's an odd feeling to be anxious about the things building up on your "convenience" devices (DVRs, iPods, DVDs-by-mail). The whole point of these tools is to make life more convenient (which they do!), but the downside is that from time to time, when you've been really enjoying the convenience, you get to a point where you're not sure how you're going to get through all of the media you've saved up. It's an oddly daunting feeling.
It's the downside (if you can call it that) of the "digital-content-at-your-convenience-era". Media overload.
After spending a whole bunch of time on the couch, I've made it through most of the TV on my DVR. I've still got 7 or 8 hours of podcasts to get through, but I'll make up that time at work (just one of the benefits of working at a computer). Hopefully, I'll get through one more DVD, too, which would make this little bout with what seems to be the flu about as successful as it could be (minus the night sweats, fever, and inability to sleep).
Thanks to the GigaOM/NewTeeVee folks, I snagged myself a copy of Joost and started playing with it. First, for those who don't know, Joost is basically TV over the internet. They've got a big peer-to-peer network setup (the guys behind Joost stared Kazaa), and your client lets you basically flip through channels and pick out shows to watch on demand.
It's very much like the on demand video you might get through your cable company. Except the quality is crappier, the selection is crappier, and the delivery is crappier. Otherwise, it's just like your local cable on demand.
That's probably too harsh an assessment of Joost, which is very much in a beta/technology preview mode right now. They're signing up new content providers on a near-weekly basis, so the content will likely get better very quickly. I just don't imagine that I'll ever have a major use for Joost, except as an occasional time-killer.
For example, if I'm at home, I've got a 46" HDTV hooked up to Comcast cable and an HD DVR. If I'm lying on the couch, I can inevitably find something on the DVR or on live to watch, particularly if its in HD. If I'm really bored, I've got Netflix, as well as Comcast OnDemand (where I can stream HD movies, if so desired).
If I really can't find anything to watch, I've got Netflix "Watch Now" which streams at better quality than Joost. And, for that matter, has a much better selection.
The other advantage all of these other mediums/models have over Joost? No commercials. Granted, I'm paying up front for them, but (unless I'm stealing someone's wireless) I'm paying for the network connection that Joost is coming over too. If I really wanted to cut my bills, I could drop everything but Netflix, and probably still have more to watch, at higher quality, on my HDTV, than Joost can offer right now.
Putting another bullet into Joost is the fact that the major networks are offering a bunch of their shows online in pretty decent quality video, with minimal commercials. I've watched the entire runs of Raines and Andy Barker, P.I. on NBC.com. The quality is not noticeably different than Joost's quality and it's through a web browser, rather than a specialized client.
Now, I'd argue that Joost is dead today, but isn't dead for the future. If they can beef up the network delivery to deliver even near DVD quality video, that'd be a nice step up. Taking it one step further, if they could make deals with the major content providers to deliver the shows I'm interested in, then you could even make the argument that it might start to encroach on cable's on demand services. If they can deliver live (or near-live) sporting events, so that I could watch the Sox or Celtics from a hotel room far away, that would be probably the killer app for this technology. Or, if a show like Scrubs got cancelled, but lived on in a Joost delivery mechanism, that'd also go a long way towards helping Joost make it's mark.
For now, Joost is a second rate on demand service, with a bit of a wonky interface and a crappy selection of content.
(I didn't touch on some of the community type features that Joost offers because I don't really care about them. Why would I want to chat with random people watching the same show? Rarely, for me at least, is TV an interactive endeavor.)
Today I have turned Old -1. But, so far, so good. All body parts still in place. Some really sweet birthday wishes from my friends.
I guess next year, when I turn Old, it's kind of a bigger deal.
I got my first Evite in a while, and I noticed that my little Greasemonkey script wasn't working for it. That lead me to go back and check out the entry at Userscripts and find out that people were getting bit by the fact I had to hard code the timezone info, which isn't very friendly.
So, I opened it up again and hacked around and fixed both bugs. Took me about 30 minutes, and got my mind off of recent events.
Evite2GoogleCal at Userscripts
Now with:
Be the 191st person to install it!