truk rambles

It is now pretty easy to pick out our house from space.

My mom tipped me off to this. The satellite imagery in Google Maps for my neighborhood was updated sometime in the past few weeks. For the longest time, we only had images from 2004, and now, they appear to be updated to early-2007.

Slightly before that time, I had to do some roof repairs on a flat area of my roof. I had a bit of extra tar when I was through, so I put it to use to beam some goodwill to space. I was hoping that the various satellites would pick it up, and now, finally, my favorite mapping site has caught up. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we had our roof redone a year or so after this image was made, so our next roof pic is likely to be more boring.

Click here to check it out on Google Maps

Sometimes, I just love working with Red Hat, PHP, and MySQL.

I was setting up a new Linux server today, and I noticed the error in phpMyAdmin, a popular web-based application that uses PHP to allow a user to administer MySQL databases. I’ve been using phpMyAdmin for a long time, and the more recent versions of MySQL have been released with a Unicode character set (UTF-8), which is actually a good thing, since it can handle storing data from many more languages and language sets. However, phpMyAdmin was barking about a problem with my default Apache+PHP setup on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 server:

The mbstring PHP extension was not found and you seem to be using a multibyte charset. Without the mbstring extension phpMyAdmin is unable to split strings correctly and it may result in unexpected results.

I did some research in what was involved to enable the mbstring PHP extension, and it was looking like so much work I was just going to leave it, but finally, I turned up the easy answer: Simply install the php-mbstring package. With an up2date subscription, it is easy:

up2date -i php-mbstring

Finally, bounce Apache, and the error message went away. Wow, easier than I thought…

I just discovered a relatively fun, if someone disturbing, computer game that struck a chord in me. Published by Ambrosia Software and developed by Introversion, the game DEFCON has an interesting catchphrase: “Everybody dies.” And they are aren’t kidding.

From the splash screen to the beautifully rendered game pieces and playing area, the attention to detail lets you know that you are in for a treat. Basically, the idea behind the game is to simulate the 1983 film WarGames, which features a teenager that accidentally breaks into a top-secret, US military warfare simulation computer looking for a unreleased videogame to play. In the movie, the computer almost causes World War III. However, in DEFCON, World War III happens every game; you can’t stop it.

You begin at DEFCON 5, where you can place your pieces, including air bases, radar stations, missile silos, battleships, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines, throughout your territory. Placement, as well as the missions you assign to each piece, are critical to winning the game, as you have less control over movement as the game goes along. As in WarGames, the computer moves you from DEFCON level to DEFCON level, rather swiftly getting to DEFCON 1, which means nuclear weapons are cleared for launch.

If you launch your ICBMs and bombers too early without destroying the defenses of the other side, you will likely not hit the enemy silos, meaning that your cities are vulnerable. However, if you wait too long to launch a crushing blow, most of you missiles will be destroyed in their silos. As in a real Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) scenario, the game is nothing more than a somewhat complicated game of Chicken, with millions of lives at stake. Well, virtual lives. But this game evokes more than the standard level of engagement when you see your hometown erupt in white light and the casualty number glows below it. “Memphis: 1.1 Million Dead.” Yikes. I guess I shouldn’t have launched my full attack so soon, eh? Sorry about that, pals…

DEFCON brought up memories of hours spent playing a Mac game called Strategic Conquest in the early-1990s. Much like DEFCON, Strategic Conquest didn’t show you what the enemy was doing until it was usually too late to stop it, and both games have nukes. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two, though, is that I always played StratCon with the idea of trying to avoid nukes and wipe out the other sides using conventional weapons. In DEFCON, nukes are the point. The unimaginable actually happens in every game. You can’t win if you don’t nuke. And if you don’t nuke, you’ll get nuked. Everybody dies, indeed.

DEFCON has a limited demo mode that will let you play the full game but only with non-human players or as an observer of other games happening simultaneously on the Internet. Unlocking the full game is only $25, but you don’t need to buy it to really enjoy some human vs. computer action, which is really more in the spirit of WarGames.

Perhaps the only way to win at DEFCON, as was pointed out by the computer in WarGames, “is not to play.” But with a such an elegant yet simple game that can easily prove addictive, choosing not to play is harder than you think.

After more than a year-and-a-half of work, the Crossroads to Freedom digital archive launch event took place last night. Kath and I have assisted with the project, overseen by the Office of External Programs at Rhodes College, since 2005, and we enjoyed visiting with many of the people at the launch event that contributed their stories and primary source materials (such as letters, certificates, and awards) to the archive.

The archive features images, letters, flyers, books, and video interviews related to the civil rights struggle in Memphis and the surrounding area. It utilizes Fedora server software to store and preserve the datastreams and metadata and a custom-built front-end to provide the access and interactivity for visitors. The archive was largely built through the efforts of Rhodes students, who conducted the interviews, put together the TEI files, digitized and processed the video, scanned the images, and entered the descriptive metadata.

Crossroads to Freedom is an attempt to foster a community discussion about the history of civil rights in Memphis and throughout the Mid-South. Several prominent individuals and groups, including Judge Russell Sugarman and the Hill Foundation, contributed significant papers and historical background to help frame the discussion.

The launch event featured inspiring speakers and a wonderful buffet spread (including sugery fudge cubes – yum!), but probably more important, a major part of the program required feedback from the attendees about how to how to increase community participation in the repository. Ideas were submitted by all, and these ideas will be gradually incorporated into strengthening and building upon the Crossroads to Freedom framework.

Congratulations to everyone who worked to make the Crossroads to Freedom launch event a success!

I guess the future will decide if I have committed “privacy suicide” or made a wise decision, but I’ve moved my main email address to GMail, using Google Apps to host the MX record for the domain. So far, so good, but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

My primary reason for switching from my relatively trustworthy and reliable hosting provider DreamHost to Google Apps was spam; DreamHost just couldn’t keep up with the growing spam volumes, and I knew from using GMail with other accounts that it generated few false positives and only missed a spam message every now and then. DreamHost was really struggling, and as spam volume continues to grow at about 10% per month, if 20% of those are sneaking through, pretty soon your Inbox is just full of spam, not to mention that your spam box is loaded to the point where you can’t even try to recover false positives. Google must be providing some advanced blacklisting of spammers, because the amount of spam that even makes it to my spam box has really fallen off. I’m guessing that Google is just refusing connections from known blacklisted IPs to even prevent having to classify the spam as spam.

There have been some benefits that I didn’t intend, however. At first, the lack of folders to organize my email really threw me, but then I realized that I really didn’t need to classify my email in that old way anymore. By tagging the email as I read it and with the advanced searching capability available in GMail, I could more easily find a message than ever before. This is a good thing, as I imported all of my existing email in to GMail, which took several days, as GMail will only import about 200 messages an hour. I tagged all of my imported mail and marked it as read, and I was immediately struck with how much easier it was to perform deep searches of my existing email.

As a side note, if anyone out there is planning to import their existing email to GMail but can’t really figure out the best way to do it, this is what I did. I created a temp IMAP account on DreamHost for another domain that I own. I then uploaded all of my email to that temp IMAP account, putting it in folders. Then, I set GMail to make a POP connection to the temp IMAP account on DreamHost (which also does POP, of course) and started moving email from each IMAP folder into the Inbox on DreamHost temp account, marking the messages as Unread in the IMAP Inbox. I could load as many as 2000 at a time in the Dreamhost IMAP Inbox, and GMail would just grab them 200 at a time. I set it up so that GMail would immediately file them in All Mail rather than the Gmail Inbox upon import, and I simply went into the GMail All Mail area once a day and did some quick tagging, marking them as Read as I went. This method took some time but worked perfectly, and now I have email back to 1998 in my All Mail, with more than 7000 Gmail “conversations” represented. (Each “conversation” in GMail can be comprised of many different email messages related to a particular exchange between two or more people.)

That brings me to another big plus in GMail: I can instantly see everything related to a particular “conversation” in one list. A lot of people don’t quote the email they are replying to, and with GMail conversations, you can still see what you wrote them on the same page as what they are saying about it. Very, very useful.

There are lots of other good reasons to move to GMail and Google Apps if you have your own domain name. The ability to chat using your own domain’s email addresses is a big one, as is the ability to share a common calendar with co-workers and exchange documents. Google Docs and Spreadsheet are in an early form right now, but they are already useful for simple tasks.

Of course, I’m aware that Google has all of my old email data, but I also realize that, unless I can make use of these old messages, why even hold onto them. I don’t necessarily believe that Google can resist being “evil” forever, but for now, email is a pleasure again rather than a chore. And that is good enough for me, for now.