Embracing Chaos

Google recently launched some major improvements to their online document-editing suite.  The spreadsheets are faster and more powerful.  But IMHO the most interesting change is an update to the word-processor (originally known as Writely) which allows for real-time collaboration.  Now the text documents act like the spreadsheets do. You can see [...]

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It took a long time, but EmbracingChaos has finally escaped form Typepad.  About a year ago (just before the end of the previous billing cycle) I started trying to move this blog to blogger.  I like Google’s pace of development and wanted to hop on the blogger train and get automatic upgrades for everything they [...]

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I recently blogged about my efforts to move from TypePad to Blogger. My friend Brian pointed out that Google just announced a set of tools to convert to or from popular blog export formats, including MovableType which uses the same file formats as my TypePad. The converters are open source, distributed under the Apache license, so you can download the code and run them on your local machine. Or, if your blog isn’t too big, you can run the code hosted on AppEngine by going to http://movabletype2blogger.appspot.com/ http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/ http://livejournal2blogger.appspot.com/ Well I tried this with my blog, and the resulting file…

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For a while now I’ve wanted to move this blog from Typepad to something else like Blogger. I keep finding more reasons to do this as Blogger improves and Typepad stagnates. Some reasons include: Better WYSIWYG editing in Blogger. (I can’t change any font characteristics in Typepad without going into raw HTML. Ugh.) Typepad’s lack of support for Chrome, Google’s awesome new browser The awkward and limiting way Typepad assigns human-readable URLs to posts Blogger is free, while Typepad costs >$100 per year Cool new features being added to Blogger like Followers Adding new features in Typepad is a p.i.t.a….

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For everybody who has been waiting with baited breath to hear whether or not the repair of the RAID array worked or not, it did. It took several days, but since we were away on vacation seeing my dad receive the Fleming Medal from the American Geophysical Union, the waiting was pretty easy. To convince myself that the repair was successful, I unplugged one of the previously functional drives, and saw that all my files were still there when the array was running just on the new drive and the other previous drive. I recommend this to anybody who thinks…

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A while back, lightning scrambled one of the disks in my home RAID 5 array. I figured out how to recover it. And I got the critical data off. Here I describe the steps I took to add a new drive and get it working with the old RAID array. I share this with the net in hopes it will make it easier for somebody else who has to go through this process themselves, and selfishly as notes for me to refer to. It’s a testament to the power of EVMS and a warning to anybody who thinks it might…

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Last week I went to a different kind of Dork Bot meeting here in Seattle called the Catastrophic Cacophony Workshop. It was a maker-style event where we broke up into teams of people and in 90 minutes had to build a robotic musical instrument out of one supplied motor and whatever other parts we could scrounge together. Our team started with the basic idea of a repetitive percussive instrument with multiple hammers hitting multiple objects. So we constructed a platform to hold the motor and used tennis rackets to make a rotating frame that held a series of arms that…

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I love my Toyota Prius. I’m very grateful to Google for giving me a financial incentive to buy a brand new car which does everything I want. It’s totally big and practical, it’s very high-tech, it both supports and projects my values, etc. I could sing its virtues for pages. But for now, I want to share some non-obvious things about it in a series I’m calling “Stupid Prius Tricks.” (With a tip of a hat to David Letterman.) Several of these articles (like this one) are complaints, but this must be taken in the context that overall I love…

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A couple weeks ago, Dan Kaminsky found a flaw in DNS. Without getting into details, this flaw enables a malicious attacker to fool your web browser into connecting to the wrong computer to get your web pages. So when you type www.facebook.com into your browser, you might actually go to Joe Hacker’s site, even though your browser says http://www.facebook.com/ in its address bar just like it should. Dan, being a “good guy”, tried to keep the details of this hack quiet for long enough for network operators to patch their systems and close the loophole. He wanted everybody running a…

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The EVMS RAID 5 array in my linux fileserver crashed recently due to a lightning storm, and I thought I’d lost everything. But with some luck and intuition I was able to recover all my files. I’ll tell you how I did it, so hopefully others who run into similar problems can recover their data too. But first, a little background. Last week Seattle had some crazy electrical storms. In recent years’ storms, my block has done better than most with respect to power failures making me think we’re either lucky or in a particularly robust section of the grid….

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