As Imperceptibly as Grief
With summer seeming to quickly fade into autumn this year, I though perhaps I should offer up the soapbox today to my friend Emily — Emily Dickinson, that is.
AS imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,—
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.
And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.
The Big Thing that Was Ignored
After all the hubbub had settled down over WWDC '06 itself and, especially, the alleged lack of anything “really exciting” being announced by Apple, I stumbled across something that seems to have been mostly ignored that is very exciting: iCal Server. One of Apple's major server offering weaknesses has been the lack of a groupware solution. While Mac OS X Server comes with most everything else you might want in a SMB server package, it offers nothing analogous to the full Exchange package. OpenDirectory does provide directory services using OpenLDAP and Samba, and Apple has also long included Postfix for e-mail serving — but the lack of a server counterpart to iCal has always seemed odd to me.
While not much of a deal was made of it, Apple released a number of FOSS projects at WWDC, not the least of which was Darwin Calendar Server, a python based calendar server which will be included with the next Mac OS X Server as “iCal Server”. This is much like the arrangement by which Darwin Streaming Server is known at QuickTime Streaming Server when included with the OS.
Why is this big news? To my knowledge no FOSS calendaring server has claimed Microsoft Outlook compatibility thus far. I could be wrong, but to my knowledge, such servers, as FOSS versions of older proprietary products, have been stripped of that function, necessitating the purchase of a module from the donator of the code to achieve Outlook support. Support for Apple's own iCal has been even shakier for most of these projects (though Apple claims in a case study that is no longer the case for the Zimba Collaboration Suite). Now, I'm not sure exactly how Apple has this all worked out, but if you can truly get Outlook's calendaring to work with this FOSS project, it will prove a giant boon to system administrators looking for a completely Open Source groupware solution, when assembled with the rest of the Mac OS X Server middleware stack.
Apple also released its launchd startup manager (which, let me tell you, is far faster than any other *nix launching system I've seen and dramatically reduced Mac OS X's boot time when it made its debut in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger), the latest Bonjour (f.k.a. “Rendezvous”) zero-conf implementation and the “infamous” x86 version of the Darwin kernel code. While Apple continues to keep its crown jewels closed, it still seems to be creating a very decent portfolio of in-house created FOSS projects. Moreover, while Darwin Calendar Server is not yet cross-platform, I suspect it will be in the future, just as Darwin Streaming Server is.
In other words, this is big news for everyone who desires FOSS server components, not just Apple users.
The Beginning of the End
Of my time at Lindenwood, that is. Today was the first day of the last semester of my time at Lindenwood University. Having fulfilled all of the general requirements for graduation, as well as my religion major, last semester, this semester's primary purpose is to complete two courses for my English major, American Lit II and History of the English Language. Since I knew I was going to have at least one course spill over into this semester, last fall I picked up a philosophy minor, which meshes well enough into the religion major that I only needed to take three extra courses beyond the electives I had previously chosen in religion. One of those I took last fall, the remaining two I'm taking this fall — Aristotelean Logic and Medieval Philosophy.
Aristotelean Logic is an independent study my philosophy professor came up with as a substitute for normal logic. He thought I might especially enjoy this. In addition, because that left me with a light load, I'm doing another independent study with him just for fun: “Calvin and Aquinas.”
More on the courses themselves in the near future.
What I Need to Do to My Bug
With this guy's additions to his Volkswagen, I could get back and forth to where I need to go a lot faster. What do you think? Should I go ahead and add one to my Beetle?
Oh, and just imagine how well this would work as a solution for quieting those annoying drivers that always have that THUD-THUD-THUD of an overactive bass disturbing everyone sitting around them in traffic. A quick flip of a switch and I'd have their attention and their car might have a nice, blackish discoloration on it too.
DNS Woes Fixed
Well, I called Charter today and had the DNS issue elevated to level 2 support. After doing that, apparently they got right on the issue — I am able to access my sites via my Charter's DNS again. Although using Level 3's DNS servers on my home computer worked OK, I'm glad to be back on Charter's DNS, which seems to provide a bit snappier response.
Note: I think there was some confusion by those who read my last post. The problem was not one with my server or its DNS — those were operating normally the whole time down at the Planet's NOC in Dallas, Texas. The problem had to do with the DNS service that comes with my Charter High Speed cable internet access for my home. Charter's service would not refer my computer to the authoritative name server for the sites I host (my company's DNS). I have no idea why Charter's DNS would fail to work specifically on my site (most likely it also impacted other servers that I am not aware of), but that's apparently what happened.
DNS Woes
I've been quiet today because Charter's DNS has developed a peculiar problem: it fails to resolve the sites of just one server (so far as I can tell): mine. I can access every site I normally do except those I host and provide DNS services too. The server is up and running (confirmed via remote access I have to another computer, my server monitoring tools, as well as the help of Ed and others). While I could access the server via IP, I didn't feel like changing all of my programs so that they'd do the same for what I hope is a short outage.
Right now, I'm back thanks to a suggestion to try using the DNS servers 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 in lieu of Charter's ones that are normally fed to my computer via DHCP, and using those servers I can again access my sites.
It's a revolting development to be the only one unable to access your own site!
Burning Batteries
It seems that Apple announced a massive battery recall while I was out of town. This recall, related to the largest ever electronics recall Dell made concerning batteries a short time ago, is caused by defects in the Sony produced batteries used in various laptops over the past three years. While I've not noticed any of the issues that have been ascribed to these problems, my PowerBook has one of those batteries, according to the recall information.
Sometimes getting involved in a recall is just an issue of frustration, but I'm rather happy about it, actually. My battery still works great, but is showing a bit of age after running for almost two and a half years. That this will result in me getting a new battery is really a treat.
Whirlwind 36 Hours
Years ago, my family would go down to the Ozarks every fall around the beginning of September. After my grandparents died, however, that tradition sort of went by the wayside as other things came up. Last week, my mother suggested perhaps we should try to fit in a trip before my classes started back up on August 28. We watched the weather, and when yesterday looked rather promising, we set off on the 250 or so mile trek down to Table Rock Lake for a day. It was a fun time and also a nice test to see how the Beetle did on the highway. It started out the trip with only 600 miles on the trip gage and came back with nearly 1,200.
I'll post more tomorrow, hopefully.
Monday Madness on Tuesday: Money and Other Things
1. Would you shave your head for any amount of money? If yes, how much?
I'm not sure. I'd really dislike shaving my head, although it wouldn't be really what I'd call suffering. A few thousand, maybe?
2. What “whacky” thing might you do for a large sum of money?
Run around while holding scissors? I don't know. The person offering the large sum of money has to do the hard work of thinking of the ridiculous thing I am suppose to do.
3. What do you think is a “large sum of money?”
Depends on the context. If someone comes up to me and says they earned a “large sum of money” this year at their job, I would expect the number to have six digits. If someone said it was “my lucky day” and they were going to give me a “large sum of money” I would expect that would be a five digit number. If buying a computer costs a “large sum of money,” I would be thinking above $2,000, but likely under $3,500. If dinner was going to cost me a “large sum of money,” I'd expect the price to be between $18-$25/person.
4. Do you watch “reality” tv shows?
No.
5. If so, which do you watch and in what order do you prefer them? If not, are there any you may consider watching?
If I was going to watch one, I might watch one of the talent-focused ones or the “Amazing Race,” which I always hear very good things about.
6. Which reality show have you thought about participating in? Why?
None. If I had a talent worth entering, I might consider one of the talent related shows. I would not consider doing “Survivor,” “Fear Factor” or anything like it.
7. Share one thing you would like to do in life but have not yet done….. think about why you haven't done it and share if you wish.
Sheesh, there are a lot of things. I'd like to learn to play an instrument. I have not done it because it simply requires such a large time commitment.
Disabling Comments
For the first time in asisaid's four and a half year run I have been forced to disable comments on a post. It seems that blogspammers, which previously have either been unsuccessful with my spam filter or ignored me altogether, really liked this one post — I had to delete three spams in three days. Hence, I closed the comments on that post.
I hope it is an isolated incident.
