Jade's weblog Archive

If you're into music and you live in Portland, Oregon, consider joining DJ Dorian's mailing list. Dorian is my favorite DJ in Portland, and he now has a mailing list where he announces his gigs:

to join the list, send an empty email to dj-dorian-subscribe@rubick.com

Freaky Chakra is one of my favorite electronic musicians, and he has a new CD out. I'm going to check it out. Hmmm, I wonder if it's available on iTunes? Anyway, check out the link above, and you can listen to samples from the CD.

You can get it ten or more years after eating infected beef. And now a case has been reported in the US. A chronology of the spread of mad cow disease is available.

My friend Stanley sent me this information:

''Muscle meat from the cow was sent from the Centralia slaughterhouse to two Northwest plants that process beef. One is Interstate Meats of Federal Way, Wash. Officials identified the other as Willamette Meats.''

I have NOT found this in any national or international media reports, but I heard Washington State Governor Gary Locke mention on a regional news report this morning on Northwest Public Radio that they are NOT sure where the muscle meat went. He assured the public that brains, spinal cord, and other nervous system tissue from the subject cow were NOT put into the food supply.

I believe that it is possible to stream NWPR live, but I don't think that archives are available online.

This report from The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon, USA) gives more revealing information (also on the front page).

And, look at this from the King County Journal (Seattle area): ''after the cow was slaughtered, it was deboned at Midway Meats in Chehalis. From there, the meat -- though no contaminated spinal or brain tissue -- was sent to two other plants in the region, identified by the USDA as Willamette and Interstate Meat. Midway Meats appeared to be operating at full blast late Tuesday afternoon, with workers loading meat into trucks, and fresh blood running out of the slaughterhouse into a drain.''

A sanitized version of Gov. Locke's statement and more general info on BSE are available.

Personally, I am appalled that they would proceed with the slaughter and meat processing of a cow which prompted enough suspicion to warrant sending tissue specifically for a BSE test. What certainty is there that no risky neurological tissue was included in the meat sent to distributors?

The cow was apparently a ''retired'' dairy cow from a farm near Mabton, Washington, in the Yakima Valley; which is less than 100 miles from my home.

Thanks for sending me all, Stanley!

We decided to try and fix the SID display on our '99 Saab 9-3. Two sites have descriptions of how to fix the Saab SID problem, although one description of how to fix the Saab SID problem is for the 9-5. Both seem helpful, but in retrospect, the second more accurately describes what we needed to have done on our early model 99 Saab 9-3.

The first problem we ran into was we weren't sure how to remove the SID from the display. We opened the cup holder, and gently rocked it side to side by using a small screwdriver (covered with a paper towel) to rock our the left hand side. It slid out pretty easily.

Next, our SID unit doesn't have four screws, like the above Saab SID fix posting. The screws also require six-pronged screwdrivers. The screw is 10 units wide (probably mm?)

Then, as the instructions say, you press down on the four plastic tabs with a screwdriver to slide back the black plastic back of the unit. However, what the instructions don't explain well (the second one has a picture of this), is that you actually have to pry open the doorway in between the connector and the plastic base, and completely remove the doorway. Otherwise, the connector will get in the way, and you won't be able to remove the darker black plastic from the base of the SID.

The next part was easier than I thought it would be. I only had to remove 1 screw from the center of the circuit board to slide out the circuit board + display from the black plastic container.

I then turned the unit upside down, and removed the two screws next to the white ribbon. I then took the unit apart, just like the second set of instructions said. The part that was difficult was making sure to unplug the two circuit boards from each other. The second set of instructions is good here. I then pressed on the end of the ribbon, like the second set of instructions said, and put in a strip of high-density foam. It was 3/16 " thick, 3/8 " wide, and 17' long, Foam Tape.

Then I put everything back together, slid it back in, and turned on the car. It seems to be better, although not perfect. Apparently, it might be even better in a couple of hours. I'll see!

A clever blogger used a technique called Google bombing to show how Bush is a miserable failure (and even perhaps a liar).

It's pretty easy to do. Just put this code into your website:

<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html">Miserable Failure</a>

This got a bit of media coverage as well.

I finally figured this out:

To learn the status of all the packages installed on a Debian system, execute the command
dpkg --list

This prints out a one-line summary for each package, giving a 2-letter status symbol (explained in the header), the package name, the version which is installed, and a brief description.

To learn the status of packages whose names match the string any pattern beginning with "foo" by executing the command:
dpkg --list 'foo*'

To get a more verbose report for a particular package, execute the command:
dpkg --status packagename

This is the thing about installing Debian on newer computers. It sucks getting the drivers.

Anyway, I installed Debian, rebooted, and of course it didn't recognize the network card. That happens a lot. Oh well, I first of all tried to figure out which network card was in the PowerEdge 400SC. It turns out it's an Intel e100.

So I found the source code for the driver. It's at:

http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Detail_Desc.asp?agr=Y&Inst=Yes&ProductID=998&DwnldID=2896

The problem is that after you download it (on another computer), and burn it to CD or floppy, get it over to the server, and copy it to /root or something, and untar it, and make install, and it first tells you...

Linux kernel source not found

This is because we don't have the kernel headers. Oh well, I can get around that. I apt-get install kernel-headers-2.4.18 and they are there now. It gets them from the CD. This seems to put a file in /usr/src that is kernel-headers-2.4.18.bz2

Now we try to make install, and we get,

Linux kernel source not found

If we look at the make file, it looks like the problem is that it can't find the kernel headers. I'm not sure what the best thing to do now is, but I try this:

bunzip2 kernel-headers-2.4.18.gz2
tar -xf kernel-headers-2.4.18.tar

If you try it again, you get the same problem. Oh, yeah, it's because we have kernel-2.4.8-bf24 as our kernel. Hmmm, so I try this:

ln -s kernel-headers-2.4.18 kernel-headers-2.4.18-bf24

Now when I try to make install, I get...

Linux kernel source not configured - missing version.h

Any ideas?

This seems like an interesting posting.

I was getting an error that looked like this: NSStreamSocketSSLErrorDomain whenever I tried to connect to my courier-imap mail server. The problem seems to be with self-signed certificates. Anyway, this link may guide us to the answer.

I have no idea of how to take advantage of this, but this looks interesting:

http://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/bug?bug%5fnumber=1099

Can it be used for double substitution in OpenACS templates? I have no idea?

A cancelled concert caused a riot in Montreal this evening, only blocks from our hotel. Apparently, these punk fans were upset because some of the band members were not allowed into the country by Canadian customs.

We're okay, but we talked with some people who saw it, and we saw it on Montreal TV news. The news was in French, so we couldn't make out much, but cars were overturned and on fire, and the windows of shops in the area were broken. We initially thought it was a bomb, but it wasn't! Apparently 19 cars were demolished!

I'm glad to hear that nobody was hurt. Several of the rioters were arrested.

Cars overturned, burned after punk concert cancelled in Montreal (has excellent picture and most detailed description)

Montreal police deny slow response to riot

Frustrated punk fans riot in Montreal (Washington Times)

video of rioting

Montrealers riot after punk concert cancelled.

Violence flares in Montreal after concert cancelled

Concert-goers riot after show canceled

If the Canadians won't let you into their country, you must really be awful!

I've added my undergraduate thesis to the essays portion of rubick.com. This paper describes the various forms of group communication on the internet, and their advantages and disadvantages. Deduces some principles to follow for building community-based websites and group communication mediums.

I've added in an essays section on this website, and my first entry, my Master's thesis. I think it's fairly interesting reading if you're interested in next-generation interfaces or design. I describe some techniques that take advantage of both your hands, some new, and some old, and evaluate their effectiveness.

Less than three hours after his birth, we have some pictures of my new nephew, Tony Haugh Rubick. More to follow!

We now have some preliminary pictures of our wedding available. The professional pictures are not yet done, but we may put some of them up later.

If you have any digital pictures of our wedding, please let us know. It is pretty easy to upload a bunch of them if you have a fast internet connection. If you have a slow internet connection but have a nice picture or two you'd like to send us, please do! We'd love to share it with everyone else!

Thank you all for making our wedding so special. It was a tremendous feeling to be surrounded by such great people on our wedding day.

I had a project for a while where I was planning on writing my ideal digital DJ solution. I abandoned the project eventually, however, because I thought the learning curve associated with becoming an audio programmer was not worth my time. I put up this page in the hope someone else will steal my ideas and write a kick-ass DJ program, and then feel so thankful for my ideas that they'll give me a lifelong license to their software. Will it happen?

For OpenACS, I always wondered why someone would want to use a db_list. Here is an example, from a bug fix by Lars Pinds:

The problem was that the code said:

db_foreach select_forums { select forum_id from ... } {
    notification::request::new ...
}

which caused the db_foreach and the notification::request::new to use different database handles, which happens to mean they'll not be part of the same transaction. Hence this caused a deadlock.

I serialized the two db-calls to say

foreach forum_id [db_list select_forums {}] {
    notification::request::new ...
}

so that the db_list call returns before the foreach loop starts, causing the two to use the same transaction (or, rather, the inner call uses the active transaction).

Today, I wed.

Notes on using list-builder, which is an improvement on ad_table.

I've written up documentation on how to move an OpenACS instance to another physical server. This might also be useful if you want to move your CVS repository.

This documentation shows how to use the tree_sortkey function to do hierarchical queries in OpenACS on Postgres.

I've been doing some work on the CR document. It is still not very good, but there isn't a lot of documentation out there right now, and I need to write this documentation in order to figure it out myself.

Enjoy the new pictures!

We've updated the wedding page, adding a picture, and our gift registry.

I've added in a lot of new pages on OpenACS, and updated a couple others.

I've added in an aquarium page. In it, I'll list information on the ins and outs of maintaining a planted aquarium. It is very basic right now, but I'll gradually add to it, and make it into a useful resource.

I've set up a section of the web site for Cody. Take a look!

I've added in some documents on the project management software for OpenACS that I am working on, in collaboration with other developers around the world.

Kate has been working hard on the wedding page, which has a lot of information especially for out of town visitors. It shows hotels to stay at, and links to other information that might be helpful as you visit Portland.

The Amoeba Project has been officially unveiled. Get together every other week with some friends and "instead of just bitching about the worlds problems, make a difference!"

If you look in the photo album, I've added some pictures of my 10 gallon planted aquarium. I entered it recently in a contest, so I'm crossing my fingers.

When I was going to graduate school in Toronto, I became a voracious reader. I also wrote short reviews of all the books I read. Yesterday, I updated those to be in this online database, so you can peruse them if you like. I'm not sure why someone would want to peruse them -- really, Amazon is a better source of information for book reviews. I keep this list as much for myself as for anyone else. But you're welcome to browse by clicking on Bookshelf, here or the permanent link on the main page.

I finished setting up the Rubick.com website this morning. It runs on top of OpenACS (http://openacs.org).

I've set up a photo album, showing pictures from my March trip to Phoenix, to see my Uncle Bobby. Hope you enjoy the pictures!