Me, Jodi, and a friend of ours went to the “official” opening of Piebar tonight. I’m a huge fan of another of Bob Amick’s ventures, the aptly named successor to One: Midtown Kitchen, called Two: Urban Licks (mmm lambchop popsicles and that killer skyline view).

What a great space, and yes, it does have some funky space-ship style lighting, and if you are a true design snob, you will sneer at the interior decor, but dang, what a cool building and outdoor space (it would have been hard to mess it up). As far as the food, well the pizzas…errr…pies were definitely out there. Our shrimp, grits, pineapple, coffee pizza was actually not that bad, but the duck, mole, chili, queso fresco pizza was better.

Here’s a good writeup from the AJC. Consider this my restaraunt review. Now back to the regularly scheduled geekiness.

We’ve migrated our “super-stealth-mode” project’s backend from mysql to postgresql. The reasons: because mysql doesn’t have support for functions or views, or real live table locking (well somewhat, InnoDB and mysql 5.0+) — and the license is somewhat better (free no strings-attached). It will be easier for development in the short-run and long-run, having worked with several, ahem, Oracle databases — I hope.

And the real reason: peer pressure. My buddy Ola said: “MySQL is the VB of Databases.” Owch.

It’s just so darn easy to develop with .NET. The Visual Studio IDE just keeps getting better, and gosh, Microsoft even went to the trouble to make their crappy source control system (Visual Source Safe 6.0 which came out years and years ago) work amazing with Visual Studio. BUT, why-oh-why does it have to go and change all the file permissions on my xml settings files to read-only rightbefore they get built into the PocketPC ARM specific CAB to be deployed on the device?

After spending all morning debugging a new:

Exception that broke the entire mobile-app. I realized quickly that Visual Studio and/or SourceSafe was making all my .xml settings files read-only.

I added some code in all the right places to do a quick:

Fixed.

It’s official. I’ve always despised radio. It’s just one of those businesses you know has stayed around because of some kind of deep entrenchment into lots of people’s pockets. The technology is dated — very dated, and the FCC (at least here in the US) mandates almost everything, except for what music is played — that is decided by who pays the most:

Sony Agrees to $10M ‘Payola’ Settlement

So here’s the alternative. You’ve got music, right? Your friends have music too, huh? Let’s create lots of radio stations from ourselves, and then time-shift them to allow playing on all kinds of devices (in your car, at home, jogging, etc.). Let’s make it seemless, and easy, and more importantly, easy to pay all those involved in producing (the artists, maybe?)

Here’s how I setup my radio station that streams all my music at home over a shoutcast server setup…. Read on….

(more…)

Thanks to Lionel of CarHacks(.org) for the excellent write-up on CNET Car Tech:

Show Us Yours: Car: DIY Jeep Cherokee dash mod

I’m happy for the coverage, but feel that there are so many other great dash-modders out there from which I was inspired and have helped. Check my links on the seebq.com Car Computer Project page for more info!

Linux definitely has a little ways to go before it becomes main-stream Desktop ready: just search slashdot.org to see tons of articles on this exact topic.

One of my beefs, and it has everything to do with cooperation between hardware vendors and the linux community at large, is lack of support for basic wireless functions. Maybe some of the bleeding edge versions of these drivers have more support, but the orinoco (orinoco_pci, hermes) drivers stock with any modern distro (correct me if I’m wrong) lack good software for control that isn’t totally cryptic.

OK, the moral of my post is that here’s how I setup wireless networking on my laptop.

At home, I have no wireless security (yeah, yeah, neither do the other 5 networks in my vicinity, including my condo’s free service) that network the powerbook, my linux mythtv video/audio server, and my linux notebook, so I have configured the ifup script for eth1 (the wireless card) to bring up my home network.

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 contains:

so a quick:

brings me up. But if I’m at a coffee-shop with a wireless-key (mock-security), here is the shell script that brings me up:

I am pretty sure the newer versions of the orinico driver support scanning (read down a few entries to my post on the linux kernel fixes including patches to the orinoco drivers), but I can’t seem to get it to work. Even iwpriv shows my card only supports a few commands like card_reset. Anyone know of a good way to see wireless networks in the vicinity that doesn’t involve me typing:

Comments, suggestions?

Some updates on the “it” thing, link-tagging. Yahoo rolled out it’s MyWeb2.0 at the end of June, which allows users to “tag” sites, thus creating a “people” search engine. It is similiar to del.icio.us, but revolves around the social network for 360. Also in the news, the notion of tag-spamming, and the invetible techno-meme of the week/day (or is it hourly now?), spag.

Links:
A Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 vs. del.icio.us Review , done very well.
Caterina Fake (of Flikr-dom) fights back against the skeptics.

I’m guessing it’s because firefox updates are installed in their own directories:

/usr/lib/firefox-1.0.4

that my java plug-in didn’t work. Or maybe it never did work in the first place.

After downloading the java installation, you must create a symbolic link to the plugin binary object it installs.

Now, if I could only remember which side the link goes in the ‘ln’ command:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_04/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.4/plugins/

linking to the /usr/java/jre1.4.0_04/plugin/i386/ns7-gcc29/ binary object (I’m guessing this one was compiled with the gcc 2.9 libraries?) caused firefox to not even start!

Also found answered here on the FireFox Help: Firefox FAQ

I really tried. Honestly. I think I’m just getting old. So I never really got into podcasting, and for some reason never saw this whole super-trend coming. Wait, let me try and understand it. It’s like I make an mp3, right. And then I make an XML file, that actually lists the mp3 and a description, and now, I’ve got a friggin’ podcast!

This one will last as long as the AudioBlog. My Favorite.

I even tried the whole del.icio.us + podcasting. Still don’t get it.

I’d also like to share my disdain for all these wierd new techno-memes that don’t make sense. First, you don’t need an iPod to do podcasting, and lots of AJAX implementations (buzzword of the last few months) don’t even use XML (which is what the X is for).

I am getting old.

I love it — a kernel update comes down from the Fedora group, and in the change logs they write:

* Thu Jun 23 2005 Dave Jones 
- Make orinoco driver suck less.
(Scanning/roaming/ethtool support).

What an awesome description for a kernel update! You’d never see that on a formalized, strict, standardized development process. That’s why I love linux. The informality of it all!