A retrospective of all the old, whacky projects. Without doubt, these won’t be the last..
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Words and pictures from Silicon Valley by Chris Gulker
From the monthly archives:
A retrospective of all the old, whacky projects. Without doubt, these won’t be the last..
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First error from WordPress:
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /…/wp-includes/wp-db.php:102) in /…/wp-admin/post.php on line 122
The post showed up OK, but subsequent efforts to edit it resulted in it going to the Drafts folder. Hope this isn’t a harbinger of bad things to come..
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Computers have a funny way of proliferating around here. A couple of times, I’ve gone on pruning missions through the gulker.com CPUs, only to have the processor count slowly creep back upward. A couple years ago, we gave away some beige PowerMacs and moved the remainder, including our first web server (a might 66-MHz Apple Workgroup Server 6150) to a rack in the garage.
Then we began giving away or moving G3s and G4s and a couple of bare-bones Linux boxes. For a while we ran our very own home ‘supercomputer‘ that made it into the top 3% of the SETI@home project.
Now, looking around The Core, we see a dual-G5, liquid cooled PowerMac, a single-processor G5, a G4 mini, an Intel Core-Duo mini, an AMD 64 machine running Linux and a PowerMac Cube, along with attendant cables, printers, scanners web cams, KVM console etc.
These machines all have jobs: main household work station with 23″ screen (both Linda and I work from home some times), secondary workstation (17″ inch screen), Paperless Project scanning workstation, Linux experiment, Mac OS X Server with DNS et al. and utility machine (DNS, webcam deprecated Radio blogging server), but it’s getting a little cluttered here at Gulker World Headquarters.
But it’s clear we could collapse a these tasks into many fewer machines. Next project will be to re-hack The Core, maybe starting from scratch. What sort of services should the modern home network offer?
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My first php ‘hack’: here’s Neil Stephenson’s classic In the Kingdom of Mao Bell, from (the old) Wired. Linked from this post, but not in the Pages sidebar. Note the amusing URL… from now on, there will be lots of hidden pages…
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I read both, almost every day, and it’s hard to imagine two more disparate media types. Yet, today, the two reference each other. WSJ lists Boing Boing in a blog et al. ‘who’s who‘, and Boing Boing links back. Wondering where Bart Nagel took this pic of the Boing Boing bloggers… new media moguls tend to be geographically dispersed…
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Think we’ve mastered the post tools, including the neat photo linking options, after a week of being ‘live.’ Trying to figure out if we can use the page feature to create pages that don’t show up in the sidebar (hmmm, may be a php hack for that). We have the backup plugin working, apparently successfully, but we still can’t get the RSS feed redirects working as documented. I’ve aslo started using Summary again to parse the server logs, the better to keep an eye on things like My Space photo hijackers. Still going nuts trying to figure out the redirecty behaviors…
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The local oak woodland, seen above in Portola Valley, has taken on its high summer look, helped a bit by an interesting sky. Photo taken witha Leica Digilux II set to B&W mode.

Los Trancos road and surrounding hills, Portola Valley. Leica Digilux II set to B&W mode. Been awhile since we posted any pix…
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Colleague Joel Ingulsrud is quoted at length in eWeek on the topic of portable home directories on Mac OS X. Basically, all of a users’ files and apps are on a server, and the user can log in from any machine and their email, book marks and files are just there. You can even do this with a laptop that goes off line – the server re-syncs with the laptop the next time it connects.
From the article, it sounds like Joel got PHD to work on his home LAN. I tried it on gulker.com’s LAN with Mac OS X server 10.4 and found it very buggy, not to mention very difficult to configure. Indeed, I decided to switch to inexpensive networked hard drives and tools like FireFox’s Google browser sync and .Mac to get a less richly-featured system, but one that is more robust and much easier to maintain. Whatever happened to AppleShare, the server for the rest of us….?
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Just realized that all the faxes, sitting on the 6-year-old G4 Cube that serves as fax machine, DNS and (formerly) Radio server are PDFs that can be dropped into the Paperless Project queue. So, voila, done. Again, kip was good at identifying a tag that I created for one PDF in the OCR text of subsequent faxs, and auto applying same. Next up are the PDFs of HR stuff et al. that I made on the Lanier scanner at work and emailed home for record-keeping. Paperless, and kip, now contains a substantial record of my affairs in 2006, so I just did a test run of ChronoSync to back all this stuff up. Worked perfectly on its first outing…
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Screenshot shows a paper document scanned to PDF, as it appears in Adobe Acrobat 7 (right) and after input into kip (left). 3 documents (out of about 100) have also showed up as black rectangles in kip. Where’s the bug report page…?
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