Not Dead

Hello out there, oh loyal, faithful readers. All three of you.

Just wanted to pop in and say hi. It's been a solid month since I've posted anything, and that's pretty unusual. I've even stopped responding to comments, which is almost unheard of. Unfortunately it's been somewhat out of my control. Both work and life have been insanely busy. I'm not so much making excuses here as posting this so that anyone who might be reading this site knows that:
A) I am not dead (or even injured)
B) I am not planning on discontinuing the blog.

That said, I wanted to just take a moment and explain what's been going on. Our department is getting a face lift. Which is to say that we are completely remodeling our floor. Gut rehab: Power. A/C. Network cabling. Seriously. Everything is being completely redone. It's freaking fantastic. It's also a hell of a lot of work as I'm the one overseeing the entire transition, from a technological standpoint anyway, which, since this is a digital art program, represents a fairly large piece of the pie. So I'm exceptionally busy helping plan the new floor — from actual per-room computer placement, to the power needs and layout of the server room. Much of this is new to me, so I'm being educated quite rapidly and on the fly. And since this is a gut rehab, we'll have to clear off the floor at the end of the semester, so I'm planning that transition as well — from moving staff computers to another floor and setting them up with an ad-hoc LAN, to moving our entire DMZ to said floor along with the requisite internet pipes. It's not easy, and it's very much a concerted effort. Fortunately, everyone here has really pulled together, and we're actually making it happen somehow. And while I'm elated to finally be getting all this done (it's been a long time coming, believe me, and we desperately need it, if for the cabling and power problems alone — don't even get me started on the A/C!) I'm way too overwhelmed to write about any of it intelligently right now. Or much of anything else for that matter.

We have been forging ahead with our various long term projects, however. Most notably, I've started building and testing an authentication server for the external network. So far it's going exceedingly well, and it shouldn't be long before our external network has a single authentication source (hopefully this summer sometime). I've been taking notes, so expect a post sometime when things get back to normal. We've also recently bought and set up a firewall appliance which we're loving. It's now being used to properly host our internal and DMZ networks, and is really making our network management a thousand times easier and more sensible. We'll be using it for limited VPN as well, which will be sweet. Today a friend will be running a demo of Leopard in his class as well. These — along with all the goodies associated with the renovation — are all posts in the pipe. Just as soon as I get some time.

You know — if I may wax reflective for just a second — it's not even so much that I have no time to write. Clearly, I'm able to write this post. The real problem is that writing about technology takes a certain amount of brain power. No, not even brain power. Brain space is maybe more like it. With everything I'm dealing with, I've got plenty to write about, and even some time to write about it. What I'm missing is the time to actually process what I'm experiencing. And before I can write about it, I have to process it. It's not so much that I need time to write as that I need to time to think. And that I just don't have right now.

So that's what's been going on here. This can't all last forever, of course. And I'm sure I'll be posting regularly again soon. Until then, do check back from time to time. I'll try to post small bits of stuff as I can.

Okay then. Back to the trenches. This has been fun.

More Blogger Beta Coolness

There are a couple more new and improved features of Google's Blogger Beta, which this blog now uses, that I just wanted to mention because they're really quite cool.

The first new feature is the "Search This Blog" feature. This has been around since I've been using Blogger, so it's not really new per se, but its implementation is. The search field can be found at the top of every page of every Blogger blog. In the past it used Google's Blog Search, which is both currently in beta, and currently seriously broken, which is big reason I've switched to Blogger Beta. But now it seems to use some kind of internal search magic. Now when you use it you're no longer transferred to a Google Blog Search page, but instead get the search results right from within the blog itself. This is brilliant and beautiful, and it's the way it should be.

Blogger: Search This Blog
(click image for larger view)

The second very new feature (like, as of maybe last week) is a back-end deal, but it's incredibly useful to authors. In the Post Manger you get a list of all your posts, ordered by date. But now, for the first time, you have some options for viewing this list. Of particular interest to me is the ability to view posts by Label. Blogger has not only leveraged their new Label feature in the front-end, but very smartly in the back-end, and it's just one more pleasant surprise that's making my blogging life that much easier, and encouraging me to stick with the Blogger system.

I have to say, there's nothing quite as impressive as a beta that works significantly better than its stable counterpart. I've had no troubles and gobs of joy from this Blogger Beta. Of course, now that I've said that out loud I should expect everything on the site to go instantly and irretrievably wonky. But until then, my hat's off to the development team for Blogger Beta. You guys are kicking some serious ass. Thanks!

Meet the New Blog; Same as the Old Blog

Well, as per an earlier article, I'm transitioning to the new Blogger, which is currently in beta. But it seems to be working fairly well for me. So far. I have to say the folks at Google have done a terrific job making this transition downright seamless. All I had to do to switch over was to provide my Google account info, and then pretty much press a button. The site was down for maybe two minutes. And then it wasn't. And it looked completely the same (except for one minor piece of text — the bullets in the sidebar got kinda screwy but were very easy to fix).

The absolute coolest new feature for me is called "Labels". Labels are really what most people call "tags" or "categories" and Google has them baked right into the system now. Prior to the new system, I was managing categories using Byzantine work-arounds that utilized Google's Blog Search — which is now thoroughly hosed — and managing series using the venerable del.icio.us social bookmarking system. That all ends today.

Okay, well not exactly right this moment. I still have to update all my posts to use the Label system, and this requires going into each post by hand, removing the old categories, and replacing them with Labels. Fortunately, while tedious, this process isn't too bad, and adding labels is another place where the new Blogger shines. Once New Blogger is aware of your Labels, it can auto-fill after you type the first few characters of any given Label. This is a real time-saver considering I've got 160 posts to update. In the end, though, I don't think it will take too long, and it offers me a single, unified system for both series and categories all in one fell swoop, so the initial investment in time will ultimately save me quite a bit of future time and effort. In the end, I'll have a much more efficient and well organized blog.

Oh, and did I mention? New Blogger is fast! Much faster than the old Blogger in every respect, but particularly with regards to publishing, which is instantaneous.

I've been pretty down on Google in the last two posts (don't know why I'm all over them lately). But I have to say, the new Blogger Beta, thus far anyway, kicks some serious ass. Way to go guys!

Okay... Back to work...

UPDATE:
It's done. The whole blog now uses Google Beta's Labels for both categories and series. So, if you're looking for all articles that deal with Mac OS X, just hit "Mac OS X" under the "Categories" pulldown on the right. And if you're looking for all articles in the "External Network Unification" series, select it from the "Series" pulldown. Just like before. The difference is that now, instead of being routed to del.icio.us or Google Blog Search, respectively, you get taken to the category or series section built right into this blog. Which is really how it should've worked all along. Sweet!

Google Blog Search is Broken

Google Blog Search is broken. Which means my Series are broken. In fact, I'd say Google searching in general has gotten noticeably worse lately. (Has anyone else noticed this?) I've gotten pretty accustomed to implicitly trusting that Google search results will give me an accurate picture of what's out there on the web, but lately my trust has waned. Search results seem generally inconsistent compared to what they once were. And this scares me a little. But the most troubling thing for me, at the moment, is the totally busted Blog Search.

When I first started using Blogger I had certain reservations. One of them was the lack of organizational tools. But overall I liked its simplicity, and I liked that it was associated with Google. And I was able to mitigate many of the organizational problems using a combination of del.icio.us bookmarks and Google's own Blog Search. In particular, my Series section is completely powered by Google Blog Search and is really just searching my blog for specific titles common to articles in a given series. Google Blog Search has been in beta since I started using it, and it remains so. A lot of my older posts never even got indexed in the beginning, but I expected that, over time, this would change. That the service would get gradually better and better, with more and more features, and with better accuracy. Instead it's apparently been left to linger. Worse, its accuracy has suddenly declined to the point where searching this blog for the term "Three Platforms One Server Part" in the post title yields only three articles. Out of twelve. And it's not like it's just getting the most recent ones. No, it gets issues 12, 10 and 4. WTF? This is not good.

So this puts me at a crossroads. This blog, maybe more than anything, is a place for me to organize and refer back to documentation of projects I'm working on. If I can't even see a group of articles grouped logically in a series — even when they have the exact same text string in all their titles and all live on one domain (which, I should point out, is owned by Google themselves), and with no other way to organize posts built in to the Blogger system, how good an organizational tool can this be, really? So I have some choices:

1. Quit Blogging.
2. Live with it, you know, just suck it up and deal.
3. Switch to another blogging system.
4. Wait for the new Blogger, currently in Beta.

Options 1 and 2 are the least likely. Though I haven't been blogging much lately, I still feel I have things to share. I just need to find the time. But I don't see much point without certain organizational features I've come to rely on. Option 3 is tempting. I've only been blogging for a bit over a year, and switching now would be less painful than in another year, and might offer other advantages. But it's still probably more effort than I have time to expend right now. So I'm thinking I'll go with option 4. Wait for the new Blogger. For now. The new Blogger system has no way to add series, but it does have internal tagging, and this could be used to much the same effect. So that would work, though it will be a pain to go back through all my posts and redo the tagging (though this or something like it will have to happen no matter what route I take). But it should, hopefully, be less painful than any of the other options. And, if it turns out not to be a viable solution, I can always move on to one of those other options after the fact.

So that's where I'm at with the state of the blog. Hopefully the new Blogger will come out of beta soon, and I can really get to the task of switching things over and seeing how it goes. In the meantime I'll be looking into other options as time permits. And I'll just have to live without Series for a while until I can get this all worked out.

UNIX as Literature or: Why Visual Artists Suck at Shell Scripting

I just read a terrific article entitled "The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature" by "feral information theorist" Thomas Scoville. In it, Scoville proposes that UNIX has a certain appeal to literary types because of its reliance on text rather than image, and that the GUI has really been successful because we live in an increasingly visually oriented culture.

This article got me thinking about a few things. The first is that I wonder if the reverse of his premise might also apply to my situation. Since the advent of the UNIX-based Mac OS, I've been forced to use the UNIX command-line. Perhaps not coincidentally, I've been writing more. I write this blog. I write more instructions for my users. And I've become a much better and faster typist (I can almost touch type now). I wonder if there is a relationship between my increasing reliance on and fondness of UNIX and the fact that I now write a great deal about technology. I wonder if it's possible that the former has influenced the latter. I wonder if learning UNIX has fundamentally changed my brain in some small but important ways. Is UNIX responsible for The Adventures of Systems Boy?

The second thing I got thinking about is the idea that, if Scoville's theory holds, visual artists would tend to be pretty lousy and generally uninterested in the command-line. This effects me in a number of ways. For one, I am a visual artist. I used to paint and now I make videos. But I've also always had a strong technical side to my personality and interests, though it took me quite some time to actually warm to UNIX. (I remember my first foreach loop. That was the defining moment for me, really, as there was no way to do anything like that in the GUI.) For two, many of my freelance clients are visual artists. Most of them are fairly clueless as to the intricacies of systems or network setups, which I guess is why they need me. And lastly, I work in an art school and am surrounded by would-be visual artists. I've often lamented the inability of many of my students to grasp fundamental technical concepts, and as I've grown more dependent upon UNIX, I've found it frustrating when trying to teach people basic command-line skills. Artists, by and large, just plain tend to suck at shell scripting. I've usually written this off as people just being generally uninterested in such arcane and sometimes difficult tools as UNIX (as I was myself, initially). But Scoville's theory suggests that visual artists in particular may be especially immune to the charms of the command-line. They just might not be wired for it. I'll have to factor this into my thinking the next time I want to throttle someone for making me describe for the umpteenth time the syntax of ls. It's just not their fault.

The last thing I got to thinking about was Mac OS X. The real beauty of Mac OS X, in my mind, has always been that it unites two distinctly different — both the visual and the linguistic — ways of thinking. Mac OS X employs a visually beautiful GUI over a UNIX foundation. It's the best of both worlds in one system, equally appealing to both the aesthetes and the geeks. This is truly remarkable, and goes one more step in explaining why it's my operating system of choice. For someone like me — a visual artist with strong technical leanings who works with a multitude of other artists — Mac OS X represents the ideal operating system. And whether people realize it or not, I think this has at least something to do with its broader appeal.

I also think I may just have made the perfect career choice when I took a job as a SysAdmin in an art school.