Philly Geek Awards 2012 On Vimeo


I attended the Philly Geek Awards two weeks ago and had a great time. (If you don’t blink, you can see me in the background sporting my kilt at a couple of moments in the video above.) I was there representing WordCamp Philly for Local Event of the Year (we didn’t win, alas).
If you get a chance, the animations used to introduce each award category are also well worth a watch.
All in all, it was a top-flight event and I am looking forward to the 2013 incarnation with excitement.

Tweet Fulfillment

There are days that I’m amazed by the Internet, and then there are days that it lives downup to my expectations. Take, for instance, a recent Tweet of mine in which I pondered

I was quickly answered by Stephane, who pointed out the wonderfully-implemented and -documented iPod Shuffle RAID0 array.
A few days thereafter, Slashdot posted a story detailing a semi-automatic 3.5″ floppy disk “gun”, a story whose comments section revealed a wonderful link to a gentleman who decided to create a RAID constructed entirely out of 3.5″ floppy drives.
While all that’s awesome, it’s still incomplete. Here’s where you come in, Internet. I want RAID arrays constructed out of

  1. Commodore tape decks
  2. Jazz/Zip Drives
  3. reel-to-reel drives
  4. 5.25″ floppy drives
  5. floor-standing “washer”-style hard drives
  6. ENIAC-style tubes

No bonus points will be awarded to those suggesting punch card RAID arrays for reasons I’ve made clear elsewhere. Now snap to it!

Just Call Me MacGyver: Systems Administrator


I’m working a bit late today as I had to schedule some downtime for a critical piece of hardware that needed to be powered down, lightly disassembled, have a part replaced and then powered back up. As I unscrewed the part to be replaced, I thought to myself “Boy, it’d sure stink if I dropped this case screw down into the bottom of the case, what with this rack-mounted system being without true rails and all and thus really hard to get into.” Bet you can guess what happened next.
Cursing my luck, I sprinted back to my desk, grabbed my flashlight and the closest thing to a mirror I had on hand — a Dell system recovery CD. Back to the rack I went and, using the CD as an adjunct periscope, I located and managed to fish out the screw, no fuss, no muss.
I’m so proud of me.

There’s Just No Accounting For Crazy. Or Masochistic. Or Masochistic-Crazy.

Glutton for punishment.
As I wended my way home last night, I was listening to this “week’s” FLOSS Weekly and just about had to pull my car to the side of the road, due to my sheer astonishment. Leo and Randal had a developer on who was promoting Seaside, a web development framework for Smalltalk (particularly the Squeak implementation). Smalltalk. Perhaps only you other CompSci folks out there will get just how insane a proposition developing for the web in Smalltalk truly is. No RDBMs. Everything’s an object, even, say, the number “5”.
Me, I’m of the opinion that I’d be happier being punched in the face. Repeatedly.
Then I’ll go develop a web framework for Ada. With all the business logic in COBOL. Oh, and I’ll host it on a 386 running Minix.

It Is Here, Thus I Shall Not Be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq5Es0Z9mdQ

Awww yeah. Our copies arrived at work this morning — this is my first official post from a newly-Leopardized Mac Pro. I’m about to give Bootcamp a spin and my Applications folder is near-pristine, so I’ve lots of work to do.
Onward, upward and Leopard.
W00t!