My Roomba had been on the fritz lately. When I powered it on it went forward a few inches and then started backing up in a tight circle. I figured it was a dirty sensor, but I cleaned everything I could see and had no luck.

My coworker Brandon pointed me to the Circle Dance website, which explains how a dirty internal sensor can cause just that problem. I've got an older Roomba, but the wheel assembly seemed the same. The site has great instructions and photos showing how one can fix the problem. They do, however, go through incredible contortions, including removing 10 screws and a hard to replace panel, just to remove a single screw.

Years back I wrote an IRC nick tracking script. It's served me well since then, but it has one major annoyance. When people changed their name slightly it would remember that name change, even though the old/new mapping didn't contain any real identity change information.

For example, when Gabe_ became Gabe it would display every message from him as <Gabe_(Gabe)>. That doesn't tell me anything interesting about who Gabe is.

Yesterday I got the warranty replacement machine for my (company's) Dell X300 laptop. Dell mailed me an X1, which seems a nice enough machine. It meets my firm criteria: under 3 lbs and thinner than an inch. If Apple would hit those numbers I'd be there in a second.

Unfortunately, it looks like getting Linux on to this thing is going to be a pain. Emperor Linux will sell an X1 with Linux pre-installed, but they want $450 to take the X1 I already "own" and put Linux on to it. If they're not able to simply mirror a debugged installation over, that says a lot about their volume. I value my time pretty highly, but $450 for a software install seems extreme.

My email server is configured such that email to ry4an-anything@ry4an.org gets correctly delivered to me. The dash and whatever is after it are retained but ignored completely.

When I give an email address to a company, say Northwest Airlines,I'll give them an email address that shows to whom it was given, say ry4an``-nwa``@ry4an.org. By doing this I'm able to check which companies are giving/selling/leaking my email address to spammers. Some of the leaks are surprising -- just a few weeks after giving out ry4an-philmont for the first time, giving it to the Boy Scouts, I started getting porn spam on it. When I called to let them know about the leak they assured me it was impossible.

Since this post I've upgraded my mailman installation to a newer version, which allows me to automatically reject messages from non-subscribers without having to resort to external scripting.

However, some of the mailing lists I run are subscribed to by a significant number of members who can't be counted on to post from the email address with which they subscribed, or indeed to even understand what that means. For those lists a policy that automatically rejects messages from non-members is just too draconion. Unfortunately, that means the few spam messages a day from non-members which make it past my filters but would normally be automatically rejected due to their non-member origins have be manually discarded so that I can approve the few non-member messages per month that really do belong on the list.

Last weekend Bridget, Joe, and I threw our annual Halloween party. It was well attended and everyone seemed to have a good time. It peaked around midnight with a good 50 people inside and out, which is about the same as last year.

This year we did a little more with the decor including the building of a coffin cut-out and a few corpses. The walls got covered with cheesy off the shelf decorations that drew more praise than anything else -- go figure.

I hacked the MonthCalendar macro for moin moin to include some javascript which includes a sidebar built from a RSS feed. The javascript and back-end Rebol were written by p3k.org. The RSS feed is produced from (a subset of) my links at del.icio.us. All in all a quick, easy addition, requiring just a little Python twiddling.

Wow, this post contains almost no nouns a normal person would recognize.

Comments

Hrm, the side bar stopped working because the http://p3k.org site hasn't been responding for at least 24 hours. I wonder if/when it will come back. If anyone notices it's returned let me know and I'll re-enable the side bar.

That sort of thing is exactly why I don't like relying on external web services be they flickr, gmail, del.icio.us, or whatever. I know in theory google and yahoo can keep those services running with 100% availability, and that they don't want the PR hit that elmininating them would cause, but still if you're not paying someone to store you're data you shouldn't expect it to still be there tomorrow.

Earlier this month some friends and I hiked across Isle Royale in lake Superior. Joe kept his GPS running and produced good track points in an odd export format from his Mac software called "Topo". I created a quick conversion script to produce this GPS format data which can be used with the GPS visualizer website to produce images like this:

A few months back Kate Bauer and I hosted a BBQ at her place. I wanted to try putting together a fruit and vodka infusion of the sort I'd previously seen at bars.

Kate bought a bunch of fresh fruit and I picked up the vodka (Svedka, the best vodka for the dollar, and damn near the best at any price). We used the same glass container from Pier One I purchased to house pickled eggs for my Moe the bartender Halloween costume a few years back. The infusion came out great, but we learned a few things along the way:

On Sunday Kate Bauer and I ran and participated in a double blind random taste test of the various shades of Coca-Cola. Into numbered glasses Kate poured the samples from bottles whose labels I'd replaced with lettered labels. The samples we included were:

• Coke
• Diet Coke
• Diet Coke with Splenda
• Coke C2 (already hard to find!)
• Coke Zero

Kate was 3 for 5 with only Coke and C2 transposed. I got only one of them right (everyone knows the gasoline flavor of Diet Coke). From this we can conclude that either Kate's got a much better palate than I do or that she drinks a lot of Coke when I'm not looking.