Joe Maller: Site Notes Archive - April 2002

April 30, 2002

"...we will be able to render movies like Final Fantasy, Shrek and Toy Story in real time on a PC next year."

-- Dave Kirk, chief scientist at Nvidia.

RCN's domain name servers have not propagated yet, neither have the ones at w3.org. Most others seem to have updated.

About a third of the DNS servers I've been checking have propagated in the past hour. I have to get up early, hopefully it'll be 95% by morning.

The site is now hosted by Liquid Web. Amazing deal, ugly web site, extensive server access and configuration tools, spotty tech support and poor people skills. Good thing it works well enough that I don't need to talk to them. I'm happy to have a bunch of socially-challenged über geeks manning the machines, they tend to really know what they're doing. So far the site seems much faster.

April 29, 2002

Happy Birthday Ben!

When Voices Rise..., Errol Williams' feature-length documentary about the end of segregation in Bermuda won the Audience Choice Award at it's premiere showing during the 2002 Bermuda International Film Festival.

The film was edited byChris Campbell who sent me an incredible letter telling me how Joe's Filters helped out.

Sunday was a Unix day, which might seem impressive except that I really don't know what I'm doing. Had I known what I'm doing, duplicating one remote directory (this web site, all several hundred megs of it) into another remote directory (a new server) would take about five minutes. Instead it took me about 20 hours. But I learned a lot.

wget
The server I was pulling from did not have rsync installed and would not let me connect via SSH (secure shell). I could telnet, but that didn't help me. Since rsync was out of the question, I found wget, which is often used to mirror sites via ftp. One thing I couldn't get to work was to copy directly from the old server to the new one, so I decided to download the whole site to my hard drive and then sync it up to the new server.

I don't have the developer tools installed yet, but thankfully Apple has a pre-compiled package available from the OS X web site: Wget 1.8.1

Wget is very easy to use. The only stumbling block I had was the need to point to my www directory explicitly, wget wouldn't follow the symlink (before last night, I didn't know what a symlink was. They're basically aliases). I found the explicit path by getting info on a file from the server using Fetch. Once I had the path correct, wget worked perfectly with the following command:

wget -m --passive-ftp ftp://[user]:[password]@[host][explicit path to root directory]/

The commands at the beginning tell wget to mirror (m) and to use passive FTP (--passive-ftp).

rsync
I first learned about rsync while looking for an open source (free) disk mirroring solution for a file server. At the time, rsync didn't support OS X's HFS+ filesystem so icons and creator codes weren't duplicated. Since then macosxlabs.org has developed RsyncX which I hope to try out soon.

I used rsync for two different things. First, I wanted to back up the site I just downloaded by burning it to a CD. OS X doesn't seem to be able to create a disk image from a folder lke OS 9 could do, and the one shareware application which claimed that ability kept returning errors. I ended up creating a blank CD-master disk image with Disk Copy, then using rsync to duplicate the downloaded folder to the disk image. This is the command I used:

rsync -vr [source path, w/o trailing slash] [disk image path]

The -vr command tells rsync to be "verbose" (v) while duplicating and to recursively copy all directories (r).

The other use for rsync was to mirror my local site onto the new remote server.

rsync -vtrp -e ssh [local path]/ [user]@host:[remote directory]/

The additional commands tell rsync to preserve the original file times (t) and permissions (p).

A trailing slash on the source path tells rsync copy the files from that directory into the target directory. If there is no trailing slash, the directory itself will be copied and created if necessary.

The following examples use a fictional file system which contains:

sourceDir/
      a.file
      b.file

destinationDir/
      1.file
      2.file

These two simplified examples demostrate the effect of the trailing slash:

rsync /sourceDir /destinationDir/
would copy the directory sourceDir into destinationDir resulting in:

destinationDir/
      1.file
      2.file
      sourceDir/
            a.file
            b.file

rsync /sourceDir/ /destinationDir/
would sync the contents of sourceDir into destinationDir resulting in:

destinationDir/
      1.file
      2.file
      a.file
      b.file

My last stumbling block was specifying the target directory correctly. All the examples I could find had the target starting with a slash, but when I tried that, it bounced up to the root of the server (not my local root folder) because I'm uploading to a directory before switching my domain over. Once I realized that the "mkdir...permission denied (1)" error was a result of trying to create a directory outside of my personal space rsync worked perfectly. After several hours of searching for answers of course.

I didn't find any one resource which answered all my questions, but the following sites are good places to start. Otherwise, Google is your friend.

• The man pages at rsync. samba.org are a lot easier to read than the ones in the terminal.
• Rsync tutorial

Board Stiff! "New York's Most Fabulous New Gaming Club", is an informal, gay-friendly social group centered around new and interesting board games. My friend Dale Sorenson co-founded the group last month, their next meeting is May 1.

April 28, 2002

This morning I got a bunch of hits from what appears to be a deleted post in the religion forums on Leo Lahav's Hobbes college student community network. Considering the context, I'm really curious as to what it was.

April 25, 2002

Tonight I'll be on the DV Guys Radio Show talking about Joe's Filters, FXScript and Final Cut Pro.

April 23, 2002

DNS and Server update - I'm still dealing with Network Solutions headaches and trying to transfer joemaller.com to Dotster. This has nothing to do with the recent downtime other than a really unfortunate tendency to overlap with severe server problems. New web space is waiting to go and I've also registered joesfilters.com as a backup in case this all happens again.

April 21, 2002

Since Thursday I've received 26 emails from Network Solutions confirming my attempts to change my contact information. It's still not changed.

Monumental incompetence.

I'm moving my domains as soon as this is all straightened out. Dotster has been wonderful and transferring several of my other domains has been entirely painless.

April 16, 2002

While researching somethings related to Internet Radio I came across this incredible list of Public Radio Webcasts at current.org

April 15, 2002

George Scriban's blogaritaville has two pieces showing how the RIAA's self-mutilating practices have undermined the legitimate sales of music. An excellent chart accompanies this entry about CD price-fixing since 1996. Additionally he cites evidence and a quote from the president of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers about how the RIAA's elimination of alternate recording formats such as the CD single has pushed potential customers to online trading.

Jesse Burgheimer of Down10.com rewrote one of my JavaScript Bookmarklets and and uploaded it to filepile.
[this is good]

April 10, 2002

DV.com, companion website to the printed magazine recently redesigned. In doing so, they broke every single incoming link to anything they've ever put online.

I noticed this while working on an article about what it means for video to be "Broadcast Legal". Who knows if anything is still even there, I couldn't find an article title I linked through and the useless search results were prefaced by a warning that "Most content now requires free membership ". Content? I can't find any. I haven't registered yet, and I doubt I will. Thankfully the Google cache contained most all of the content from the pages I can no longer directly link to. I'm not the only one pissed at this, Trish and Chris Meyer also seem quite annoyed (read the comment at the top, most every link on the page is broken).

Online publishers need to make a commitment to leaving content where it is otherwise they can not be considered a reference source. To a certain extent, any site requiring registration can not be a reference source, including the New York Times. It's trivial stupidity like this which makes it harder and harder to learn anything and completely undermines the potential of the Web as a resource for knowledge.

I'm glad I run my own site.

Links to DV.com were intentionally omitted.

April 9, 2002

Toast : Toaster : Awesome.

(via Jerry Kindall)

I guess I'm in a Do-It-Yourself kind of mood...

ReadyMade Magazine, $14 for a year subscription in the US. Based solely on the strength of the current Table of Contents, I signed up. I hope it doesn't suck.

(It doesn't hurt that the magazine's name sort of comes from an art history referencing Beck song and this month contains an article by David Berman of the Silver Jews. Besides, I've paid more than $14 for one crappy architecture magazine.) found on the never-sucking Dog Door of Death

The Niles Monorail - People who seem otherwise completely ordinary sometimes do the most extraordinary things. Kim Pedersen built a monorail in his backyard.

(this has been linked all over the place, including metafilter, but I missed it until Bruce emailed the link)

April 5, 2002

Matthew Bielich kicks ass. (quicktime, 6.6mb, more info)

April 3, 2002

My webcam is back up, now looking out over the East Village from nine stories up.

Where the hell have I been?

Well, for starters, Lila Zoe Maller was born March 19 at 3:30am. She and Michelle both doing great. We're in a new apartment, having moved in one week before Lila was born. My temporary desk is still only partially set up and I still haven't found all of my reference books. On top of that, my office is under construction. We've had a steady stream of guests, which has been wonderful, but I feel like I haven't gotten any work accomplished in a month.

The trick to getting settled in and back to work after a move has something to do with not having a baby.

I'm also behind on my email, since Lila was born I've received over 600 pieces of spam. More and more seems to be evading my spam filters through various misspellings and obnoxious address harvesting letters. I'm doing my best to catch up, if I haven't replied to your letter, please don't think I'm ignoring you, there's a mountain of crap to sort through.

A few observations about baby stuff:

• The diaper Genie is a brilliant hack. I have a pretty clear image in my head of the garage invention that preceded it. My proverbial hat is off to whoever it was who thought this up.
• Baby socks are just insanely cute. Folding them almost makes me giggle. However considering how much laundry we need to do these days, the thrill will likely wear off soon.
• Babies grow fast. It's only been 2 weeks, but Lila is already substantially larger than when we brought her home.
• Music for Airports is apparently also music for babies.

Notes and Archive thanks to Blogger Someday I'll build my own.