Today’s installment:

• everything will have a camera on it.
• everything will be connected to the internet.
• everything will have gigs of memory or more.
• everything will have a GPS receiver in it.
• everything will serve up targeted advertising based on location, personal history, and other gathered demographic data.
• everything will play your music and movies to you.
• everything will spontaneously reboot at least once a week.
• the job title “Systems/Gadget Immunologist” will be more prestigious than “Doctor.”
• nobody will brush their teeth or floss; instead they’ll squeeze another tube of plaque-scrubbing nanobots into their mouths once a month.
• people will network their home theaters, so they can recreate the experience of seeing a movie with other people.
• houses will be equipped with special systems to play your personal theme music for various activities. Only old folks will use the same theme song for activity_01.01 (getting up in the morning) and activity_07.47 (returning to the house).

Well, on Friday, a directory on the Snap Drive fileshare suddenly had no files in it. Then the directory itself vanished. Peculiar. Then in the Snap Drive’s system log, it started complaining about “broken spans.”

This was not good. But hey, it was a RAID drive, so I wasn’t that worried. Until I realized that the drive had been configured in so-called RAID-0, which is not really RAID at all, it’s just striping. Hence the reference to “spans.” Of course, in my confidence in the safety of RAID, I’d never bothered to back up the drive. Stupid, stupid. Now I’ll be spending upwards of $2-3k to try to recover some of the data, which could have been $50 worth of time and $100 worth of storage.

Lessons: Know the configuration before trusting the hardware. Make backups anyway. Don’t be stupid. sigh

OK, this is an esoteric one, but I’m happy to report there is a simple solution.

We migrated Stacy over to using Thunderbird (from Outlook Express) on her Mac to cut down on the spam. In the process, we upgraded her to OS X.
Strangely, while POP connections to our local QMail server are nearly instantaneous on the Windows machines, there would be a 30-40 second delay for her. It wasn’t a Thunderbird problem — we could replicate the problem by telnetting to port 110 — and only from the Mac OS X machines.

Karl finally succeeded in diagnosing the problem. QMail uses tcpserver to wrap connections. tcpserver, in turn, checks back via ident. The Mac OS machines don’t have identd running by default. By running tcpserver with the “-R” option (disabling the ident lookup), everything works brilliantly as it should.

So I was playing with the cool wp-mail mod by John Blade, and trying to moblog from my Treo 650 and Versamail. It works impressively.

But I’m never quite satisfied with any software — I wanted a few new features, and I wanted a fix for a weird VersaMail bug. So I added some features, and tweaked some code.

This version adds the following:

• Allow uploaded articles to specify status (e.g., draft, publish, static, private).
• Fixes a weird encoding issue introduced by VersaMail, which sends encoded images with a MIME type of “application/octet-stream”. Huh?
• Creates thumbnails of the uploaded images, and includes them as links to the actual images

Status Code
To specify status for an article, you use John’s subject syntax to specify a category, then follow it up with the code for the status:

• d – draft
• p – publish
• s – static
• P – private

So, for example, to upload an article as a draft into category 6 with a title “My Article”, you would use the subject:

[6d]My Article

If you’d wanted that to be immediately published instead of posted as a draft, you could just omit the “d” in the category specifier, or explicitly add a “p”.

If you don’t know which category you want, you can still use this status hack; assign the posting to category 1, and change it later from your admin console.

Thumbnails
This functionality depends on Thomas Boetell’s popular GD lib being installed. Many PHP installations come with it prebuilt; otherwise you’ll need to bug your ISP to add it (or rebuild your PHP if you run your own server).

By default, thumbnails are created with the maximum dimension of 100 pixels; that means the longest side of the thumbnail will be 100 pixels, regardless of the aspect ratio (if your original image is 640 x 480, the thumbnail will be 100 x 75, but if your original image was 480 x 640, your thumbnail will be 75 x 100). You can change this maximum dimension; simply edit line 49, and change
$thumb_max = 100;
to the value you prefer.

Download
I’m sending my changes to John, so he can incorporate them into whatever he’s doing with wp-mail. In the meantime, you can download ’em here. Simply expand the archive, and replace your wp-mail.php with the file from the archive.

wp-mail.tgz Oooooh! A single file in a tar archive!
wp-mail.zip For those of you who prefer zip format.

Interesting, interesting. Maybe it is, in fact, a hardware problem after all.

I installed the Palm software on a Windows 2000 machine at work, tried syncing using the same cable, and it fails in the very same way.

Next test:

Try with a different sync cable (once I figure out the appropriate place to order one).