RiffTrax Live in SD

The RiffTrax guys will be doing a live event during the San Diego con this year, riffing on Plan 9 From Outer Space, at the Balboa Theater. This would likely be quite fun, though it’s on Saturday night, and there’s going to be a lot of other stuff happening on Saturday night. Of course, since this is a ticketed, off-site, event, this might be a good way to escape the craziness of the convention center for a little while.

WSJ.com – Opinion: The Digital Future of Books

Interesting article about the relationship between our devices and our attention spans. The author quotes Jeff Bezos, who hopes the “Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention.” I guess we shouldn’t expect a Twitter client to be built into the Kindle any time soon!

oops – follow-up

Well, my domain did fall off the internet for a couple of days. It’s back now. I need to remember to renew the domain early next time. That’ll be May 2010.

I’ve got a cold right now, so I’m not feeling real lucid. I took today off, and I might wind up taking tomorrow off too. I just feel really bad. Hopefully, a couple of days of rest (and Stargate SG-1 DVD watching) will help.

summer stuff

Is it time to start thinking about summer concerts yet? I just took at look at the Central Park SummerStage and River To River pages. Someone mentioned to me today that Sonic Youth are playing on July 4th as part of River to River. That sounds good, but will probably be pretty crowded. I see Vampire Weekend on the SummerStage schedule on June 14, and Junot Diaz doing a reading on July 17. I’m curious as to how a reading would work at the SummerStage venue. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of space that would work well for something like that. It might be interesting to go to, if only to see if it works.

oops

Wow, I’m not sure if my domain is still going to be mine tomorrow! I just checked my Yahoo mail account, and saw an e-mail notification that it expires today, 5-11-08. I don’t actually check my Yahoo mail account that often, since it mostly just seems to be a spam attractor. I do use my Yahoo address on my DNS account, since I didn’t want my gmail address out there for everyone to see. E-mail address harvesting from DNS info has become enough of a problem, I guess, that you can usually give your domain registrar a different e-mail address for them to use for billing e-mails, rather than just using the one listed in your DNS contact info. And I think are ways to have your DNS contact info completely private now too. So, I guess I should look into that, so I don’t miss the renewal e-mails I should be getting in May 2010. That’s assuming the two-year renewal I just put in for goes through, and I get to keep my domain name!

XP SP 3 – remote admin changes

Here’s an article that talks about Changes to Remote Administration in Windows Server 2008. It turns out that XP SP 3 moves you to RDC 6.1, so the /console switch to mstsc.exe doesn’t work anymore. You need to use /admin. And the “remote desktops” tool in the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack hasn’t been updated for this. So, the tool I’ve been using to remote into all my servers doesn’t work right anymore! I’ve worked around this by creating individual .rdp files for each of my servers, and putting them in one directory, but that was a bit of a pain. There’s been some talk about this issue here, since it affects the freeware Terminals tool also. I’m just posting about this, as it’s something to watch out for if you’re applying SP3 to a machine.

text editors

There’s a poll on Lifehacker about text editors. Their top six are Notepad++, Emacs, UltraEdit, TextMate, Vim, and TextPad. I do use TextMate on my Mac, so I agree with that call. It’s a nice editor. I *wish* I was proficient with Emacs, just because it would probably come in handy occasionally, and just generally seems like something I should know. I’m amazed that people still use vi/vim. I had to use vi a bit back in college, and never liked it. Under Windows, I have to admit that I’m still using Multi-Edit, which doesn’t seem to be a popular choice these days. I’ve been using Multi-Edit 9, which dates back to 1999. I kept putting off upgrades, since ME 9 did everything I really needed to do. At some point, I realized that I needed an editor with Unicode support, so I installed PSPad. I like PSPad, but not enough to switch over from Multi-Edit, except for those occasional Unicode files.

After poking around on the internet a bit today, I decided to finally upgrade to the most current version of Multi-Edit. It seems like ME is still behind the times a bit. The current version is called “Multi-Edit 2006”, and the most recent revision was posted in October 2007. It mostly works in Vista, but there are a couple of problems, mostly with macro recording, from what I can tell by looking at their support forums. And they’ve got some support for Unicode now, but it doesn’t look like it’s really full support.

I’m not sure if sticking with Multi-Edit is the right choice in the long run. UltraEdit might be a better choice; they seem to have been updating their product a bit more regularly. They appear to have full Unicode support and Vista compatibility.

Only a true geek could spend so much time worrying about text editors!