The new digs

Welcome to the new craigsteffen.net!

Ok...well, so far, it's just like the old craigsteffen.net but with less functionality (a lot of the pages are missing).

So what's happened:
I got a new server at vps.net, which is neat. It's virtual web hosting with full virtual machines with full Linux OS distributions that you can log into and install and modify packages and stuff, including full ssh access. You also have control panel access through vps.net to be able to shut down, start up, reboot, hard boot and even re-install your virtual machine image through their GUI.

Starting Saturday through Sunday afternoon, I moved the DNS settings over so that craigsteffen.net the domain name points to the new host. It would have been faster but something went wrong. It's probably related to the fact that I've owned that hostname for like 9 years, and my domain registrar, Domainmonger, has upgraded their software at least once during that time, and in all that time the configuration for craigsteffen.net remained largely unchanged. When I used their web form to change the configuration, something broke. I'd like to thank them here that in an exchange that took only 3 e-mail messages each direction, they realized there was indeed a problem, passed it of to an expert, and had it fixed within a couple of hours of realizing the real problem on a Sunday afternoon. For a low-priority web site, I consider that excellent. And they're cheap! $17/year per domain.

So as of last night, the DNS was correct and propogating. I got the incoming e-mail all set up as well, so that was working last night before I went to bed. I don't have the outgoing mail set up yet, but that's not critical at the moment. I put up a plain text front page explaining that things were in transition and to be patient.

I also, I think mostly have my old blog back up on the site. That was easy, because even though I compose on blogger, I've always hosted my blog site itself on my own web host.

And I think that I've mostly configured blogger to upload to the new site properly, and sorted out the directory permissions. If this entry posts then we're most of the way there. However, for a long time I've been toying with getting newer/better blogging software, which I was going to get to REAL SOON NOW as soon as I had better web hosting. Well, I have the better hosting now, so it's time for me to graduate to real blogging software.

I'd always thought that I'd use slashcode, the system that slashdot uses for their news site. However, I went to look at the slashcode site and they seem to have branched it, and I'm not sure the branch is mature enough that I want to fool with it. Slashcode is heavily database-based, and rests on perl, so I was never sure how I'd get along with it. However, that seems not be be a problem since I probably not going to use it.

Doing searches last night, I ran across a couple of pages that have a feature comparison grid of blogging software:
the Blog Software Breakdown on asymptomatic.net, which is useful but mostly based in 2004.

Even better than that, I found the weblogmatrix site.

It's interesting to look through these and see what the range of features are. I wanted to have something that's free, and that I can separate out categories of posts, so that people who are just interested in our cats and our personal life don't have to read long detailed posts about carburetors or computers or electronics, or vice versa. I discovered there are web tools that aren't database-based, and some that are based on php rather than on perl (I like php and all my old web site stuff is written in it).

I ran across blogging software that I'm going to check out, called "Pivot". It's a dynamic site too. It stores data in flat files and is based on php. It has categorization for blogging, and hooks for photo uploading. And it imports from blogger. So I'm going to try it out. Don't know when. We shall see.

I'm glad I took the time over break to do this transition, when I can concentrate on it and get things right the first time.

That's all from here. I hope everyone is having a good holiday!

new setup

New...and yet just the same as before...just with a new IP address.

Test post.

Last post

Ok, last post from the old hosting company. Restarting DNS propogation. See you on the other side at the new hosting provider, vps.net.

no packages

no packages today. No toys yet. Bother.

It scares the willies out of me, hold tight

Ok, I've begun making the changes that will move craigsteffen.net over to a new host. Most of the changes are straightforward; however, the first change, which shouldn't have operation changed anything, caused blogger to not be able to ftp to my web site, so I couldn't make a blog post.

The old setup is fraught with problems, the new setup is simple and straightforward, so really I don't care why the hybrid setup doesn't work. At this point I'm going to proceed ahead full steam and sort out the new setup once DNS has propogated.

WHAT THAT MEANS: It's likely that this will be the last blog post I make with craigsteffen.net at its current host, since apparently I doesn't work mid-transition. SO...there will most likely be no posts here until everything has propogated, which will take a day or two. Tune back in on Monday or Tuesday and everything should be fine.

For updates in the mean time, just look at the right side bar at my twitter feed. , or directly at my twitter update page. I'll post news there.

Wish me luck!

test post

new test post...argh...

torpedoes are in the water

I bought the domain craigsteffen.net when I saw Wil Wheaton had wilwheaton.net. A lot of the site has remain unchanged since that time, although I've certainly added content.

I really outgrew my old hosting site a couple of years ago, but I've failed to make the move until now. I just changed the DNS authority definition of craigsteffen.net. If I did it right, nothing as far as how the web site looks will change at all for the moment. If I screwed it up, then the site will disappear for a couple of days.

Anyway, for like the 7 people who read this blog, hopefully the next week will be slightly interesting.

The hope is that over the next weeks and months I'll able to set up stuff on my web site that I've been wanting to do for years.

So stay tuned.

home away from home (and speaking of antenna apertures)

Let me be the first to say that this blog post is about me liking my new car and liking taking photos of things that light up. I am terribly easily amused.

I very much enjoy driving, always have. I very much like getting into the mental zone of a car trip. So being behind the wheel of a car that like is a very meditative experience.

Now my original thought about these photos was to take photos in my "happy place", but that's not really quite true. I'm not the sort of person who really needs an escape, per se. I like my life, I like my job, I like my car. But since I do work at home, mostly, sometimes it's nice to get out and go for a drive. I guess perhaps a better analogy is that my car is my home away from home.

The other part of it all is that I like gadgets. I like things that light up. When we were designing a device back in my physics days, it was a very important design consideration that devices have as many lights as possible. Not PURELY for eye candy reasons, but also because if you become familiar with the pattern of lights that a device makes when it's working correctly, it's very easy to see when the pattern isn't right and there's something wrong.

Farther than just gadgets, I like instrument panels. When I look at for-sale ads for airplanes, the instrument panel is what I tend to gauge (har!) the ad by. That's purely a personal affectation, and I'm assured by the serious airplane people that I know that I'm missing the point, but I really do like instrument panels.

My vintage beetle's instrument panel is very simple. Large speedometer, in the middle is a fuel gauge, and two warning lights. It also has a brake system warning light off in the middle of the dash board. The New Beetle's gauge cluster is designed to have all of the funtionality of a modern car's warning system, but with a style that throws back to the original Beetle's single-gauge style.

Enough with the yakking; on with the pictures.

Here's my home away from home:



Here's a detailed view of the instrument panel during the day



and at night with the groovy blue instrument lights that turn on with the headlights



Earlier this fall, I was on a deadline and so working late in the evening. I took a break from work, went and got drive-through supper, and sat in the parking lot listening to the Colts beat up on the Titans on the Sirius radio






The duality of the simple/complex design is illustrated here, in two photos I took yesterday. First, the panel in daylight with nothing on except the odometer



and then with the key turned on and most of the warning lights in test mode



[By the way, in case anyone from VW ever reads this: there are dozens are warning lights in this cluster. Since the daytime running lights are on ALL THE TIME and are the most likely thing on the car to burn out, and since they're also the low beam headlights are also REQUIRED to be functioning for driving at night, why don't you make an indicator to denote that one of them has burned out. Could you do that please? Thanks.]

Finally, the real actual reason that I was inspired to write this post specifically this week. The last time I was driving on assignment, I happened to have my aviation GPS in the car with me, but for some reason not the external antenna. Well, on a whim, I decided to see if it worked with just the standard swivel antenna. As it turns out, the GPS sees enough of the sky sitting on my leg like this that it can keep a position lock and be useful.




Whaddya know? (The green arrow indicates the GPS. The red arrow near the top points out the speedometer, to make the point that I am actuall driving when I took this photo with my cell phone.)

Colts 13-0; hope that's not the last good news

Am I missing something? What statistical wisdom is it that I'm missing?

A pre-made video package on the NBC pre-game show for tonights game laid it out, and the answer pretty much was that if you rest your players for the past few games of the season, you lose your first game of the playoffs. If you play through the end of the season, you do well in the playoffs.

The Tony Dungee (former Colts coach and now a commentator) and the head of the Colts organization (via satellite link) both said that "oh yes, you need to not play the starters so that they don't get hurt".

WTF? Did they watch the video bit? Did they watch the same games I did for the last four seasons? If you leave your starters mostly out of the games for a month, they GET RUSTY and PLAY BADLY and LOSE their first playoff game. Why is that so damned hard to understand?

I really don't care about a 16-0 record...well, not THAT much. But really, I'm getting sick of the Colts playing really well, resting their starters until their first playoff game, and then getting wacked because some desperate team who's been playing hard for the last month takes them out of the playoffs because they want the game worse.

Argh. I hope that's not the effective end of the season.

Ares rocket: first report card

[Sorry; had work stuff and then Thanksgiving travel and now I'm finishing up a paper. Busy. Hopefully blogging more now.]

The Ares I-X rocket prototype team had their 30-day post-launch briefing today. Apparently they're mostly just getting the raw data reconstructed. The basic status is that the launch went very well. They have telemetry data for most of the flight. The status report from the meeting is linked from the Ares I-X status page on nasa.gov.

The briefing wasn't on NASA TV, but it was streamed live on the internet. The team will have 60 and 90 days post-launch briefings as well. If you're into that sort of thing, you can keep track of it via the Ares I-X twitter account.