30 April 2008

Topozone transmorgifies into a less-useful thing

One of my favorite sites on the web was TopoZone dot Com but now I have learned that they have changed their business model completely -- now they want $50 a year for me to use the site. I have no problem paying for something that is useful but I am struggling to see how a subscription would be money well spent.

I am mostly interested in NH maps. When I tried out the "new" Trails dot Com (which purchased TopoZone), the sample NH trail map that I ended up turned out to be content from a book that I already own...

I am fairly certain that everything that Trails dot Com would give me for my subscription would also be easily obtained from the books and maps that I already own. I think that a lot of potential customers will make similar conclusions.

Thus, I think that Trails dot Com made a mistake, and that they are in for a pretty rough ride.

Oh, by the way, if you are looking for a good NH topo map, I think that the ones from Map Adventures are very very nice.

26 April 2008

Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill

AutoGuitarHero

23 April 2008

Notes on accessing Subversion repositories via a custom SSH tunnel

I just spent a little while lost in the weeds as I was updating my server to support my custom svn+ssh setup. Here are my notes, just to help others along. I am trying to keep things simple, so I am running svnserve. I am also running sshd on a non-standard port -- this fact perhaps contributed to the way that I set all of this up. I want my setup to be simple to use on a day-to-day basis.

1. Suppose we have two machines, CLIENT and SERVER.

2. On CLIENT, generate a new ssh-key (KEY) and load it via ssh-agent.

3. I assume that on SERVER you have created a "subversion" user and created the repository in /home/subversion/repo .

4. On CLIENT, in your $HOME/.subversion/config file add the following to the [tunnels] stanza:


custssh = ssh -p your-port-number -l subversion \
-i /your/home/directory/.ssh/id_your_new_KEY


5: On SERVER add your new key to the ~subversion/.ssh/authorized_keys file, but add it in a special way:


command="svnserve --root=/home/subversion
--tunnel-user=your-loginid
--tunnel",no-port-forwarding,\
no-agent-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty ssh-dsa #$#$#$#$#key-stuff-goes-here-lBB you@somedomain.org


Tip: to prevent you from going off into the weeds, I strongly suggest that you familiarize yourself with the format of this file and ensure that no stray characters end up in this file...

6. And now you can access your Subversion repository like so:


svn co svn+custssh://SERVER/repo/trunk/top-secret-project


This is a very handy way to have things setup.

22 April 2008

Happy Earth Day!

We get our milk delivered to us, the old fashioned way, in glass jars via a milkman. The milk comes from Sherman Farm and gets delivered by Catamount Farm. Honestly, it is a little more expensive, but we really enjoy the overall experience. There is nothing better than a cold glass of milk from a glass jar!

Anyways, our milk arrived today, and along with the delivery itself, we got a sticker that read:

Did you know? By recycling glass milk bottles, Catamount Farm customers have helped save an estimated 40,000lbs of plastic over the past 6 years!

It is Earth Day, and we find this to be very very cool.

16 April 2008

All I need is a programmer

This excellent blog posting reminds me of the time that one of the executives at $DAYJOB referred to programmers as "monkeys". It was clear to me at the time that he was simultaneously trying to express that we were all interchangeable and somehow he was trying to motivate us too.

His comment was actually wonderfully honest; in ten seconds I learned exactly what he thought of us and our work.

13 April 2008

The Human Footprint

We just got done watching The Human Footprint on TV. It was pretty interesting. The sheer magnitude of stuff that each of us consumes in a lifetime is pretty staggering.

We thought that some of the numbers cited by the show were probably accurate, but for other numbers and figures we were a little bit confused. For example, the show tells us that the average American consumes around 563 cans of soda per year Yow! That's a huge amount, and significantly more than an order-of-magnitude more than what we consume.

The show was a little bit monotonous at times, but overall, it was a good reminder that anything we can do to reduce, reuse, or recycle is a very good thing. Actually, it is more than a "good thing" because if everybody on the planet consumed the way the average American does, we'd need four planet Earths for all of the resources that would be consumed. Clearly, this level of consumption isn't sustainable.

09 April 2008

Get up, boy! I'm not done with you yet...

Yay! Gary Roberts is back. He scored two goals tonight.

On nearly the last occasion we saw Roberts (age 41), he took Ben Eager (age 23) to task because of a cheap elbow Eager had thrown to one of Robert's teammates. So, Roberts decided to teach Eager a lesson:



My favorite part of the fight was when Eager was just about to fall down and Roberts pulled him back up, almost as if he was saying "I'm not done with you quite yet!".

As for Eager, after getting beat up by a man that could have been his father, his team traded him soon after.

It's so nice to see a middle-aged man like Roberts be such a good....educator.

01 April 2008

Startup Life and Death -- April Fools

I have an odd story about April Fools jokes...or lack thereof.

One April 1st, I got to work at the startup that I was working at, did my usual morning ritual of checking the builds and answering my morning email. Then I decided to troll the Interweb to see what amusing new IETF RFC had come out that day.

Right at that moment our CEO called for an all-hands meeting, so I went to the meeting. The CEO came in and said "sorry, we're going out of business". I kept on waiting for him to scream "April Fools!" but he never did -- he was completely serious. The company's board decided to go out of business the night before.

I spent the rest of the day packing my boxes and drinking beer that one of our field techs obtained from the local brewery. Eventually somebody in management came by and told us we really had to be leaving and somebody chimed in "whaddaya going to do -- fire us?". To be clear, this was said in jest -- most of the people left in the company at this point got along just fine. It was just an unfortunate situation. We'd all been through so much together and now it was ending for good.

I never did get to see any April Fools jokes that day. It's not like the day itself brings me down -- I've long since gotten over that place. I guess the day was just an odd reminder that there is never a dull moment in high-tech.