Walology

Walter Smith — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 01:21:07 +0000

I’ve just joined LinkedIn because now “everyone” seems to be doing it. Which I guess is increasing their value quadratically, or at least by N log(N), depending on who you believe. Funny, now that I’m in a three-person company instead of a 70,000-person company, networking seems much more important!

Jackson Fish Market

Walter Smith — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:29:21 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that I’m helping to start a new company called Jackson Fish Market. The name is a bit odd, but it was the only remaining .com name in English, so we took it. (Just kidding.)

We are trying to be pretty transparent about the startup process on our blog, so go ahead and subscribe, and you can follow along as we learn.

A new chapter

Walter Smith — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 02:05:39 +0000

As close followers of my About Me page will have already noticed, I have left Microsoft. My departure is completely amicable. I was looking for a change of project, and in the process I realized what I really wanted was a bigger change than that. So I gave notice a few weeks ago and have been on vacation since then, thinking about what to do next.

One thing I need to do is write more blog posts. This is pathetic.

Aside from that, though, I will have another workplace soon. Stay tuned for more.

I’m confused, Bob

Walter Smith — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:36:44 +0000

Apparently Bob Dylan thinks these newfangled music player things suck, but he is also willing to advertise them. Or maybe he had to…major label contracts, you know.

You’re a programmer? You need Consolas

Walter Smith — Fri, 05 May 2006 00:08:07 +0000

Microsoft has released the Consolas font for users of Visual Studio 2005. As far as I’m concerned this is a must-have if you spend any time programming.

And now for an extra trick: how to use Consolas as your console window font on XP. Run this command to add Consolas as a valid console font:

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont " /v 00 /d Consolas

Then reboot, and choose Consolas in the console window preferences.

Goodbye Best Internet (uh, Verio)

Walter Smith — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 01:08:44 +0000

Executive summary:

I am about to shut off wsmith.best.vwh.net. Please fix links if you have any.

Long-winded nostalgic ramble:

More than ten years ago, I signed up for my first web hosting account. I went with a local ISP called Best Internet Communications, which occupied a retail storefront in Mountain View, California. I imagine that at the time there were very few other places in the world where it would make sense to open a retail storefront selling TCP/IP connectivity.

I picked Best because it was very geek-friendly and they provided BSD Unix shell access as part of their hosting plan. It was very handy to be able to telnet to shell.best.com and get a “second opinion” about whatever weirdness I was seeing from my desktop machine. (Even after they moved us all to shellx, an SGI machine running Irix. Weird Unix, but four processors, cool!)

The company was tiny, and it was easy to communicate with the people who actually got stuff done. Maybe too easy…I remember a lot of flaming between customers and employees on the internal usenet groups.

Anyway, when Internet access started to appeal to more than just geeks, Best hit the big time. They merged with Hiway, then were acquired by Verio. My (pathetic) website moved from http://www.best.com/~wsmith to http://wsmith.best.vwh.net. The geek-friendly nature was replaced with Giant Faceless Corporation. I kept paying my monthly fee because I’m incredibly lazy, even as the going rate for hosting dropped to about a tenth of what Verio is charging.

I’m happy to report that Google has finally noticed my redirect to this new, spiffier, readably-named site, so it’s finally time to cancel my Best–I mean Verio–account. If you have old links to my site, please fix them up.

You can take a virtual tour of the fabulous Best facilities courtesy of Matt Dillon.

For the geek-friendly ISP of today, try Speakeasy.

Garry’s Mod

Walter Smith — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 02:19:00 +0000

It’s been a long while since I looked at the HL2 mod scene. I guess that explains why Garry’s Mod got to version 9 before I heard of it. This is not technically a game, but it’s much more fun than any mod that is a game. I won’t try to describe it because that would just make you take longer to download it. Go get it. Don’t forget to press Q.

Challenger myth vs. reality

Walter Smith — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 18:54:59 +0000

As predicted by James Oberg in his fine article Seven myths about the Challenger shuttle disaster, the New York Times continues to propagate the myths in their homepage blurb at right—though they only had room to include two of them.

As Mr. Oberg says:

The flight, and the lost crewmembers, deserve proper recognition and authentic commemoration. Historians, reporters, and every citizen need to take the time this week to remember what really happened, and especially to make sure their memories are as close as humanly possible to what really did happen.

Retroactive Antarctica posts

Walter Smith — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 04:32:17 +0000

Turns out we didn’t write any trip reports from Antarctica because we were just too exhausted! Also, email from the ship was about $3 per kilobyte. However, my intention is to write retroactive diary entries based on our pictures and notes. So keep an eye on early January…

Update, 4 Mar 2007: OK, so we’re not making lots of progress on this.

Batch-editing JPEG headers

Walter Smith — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 04:26:28 +0000

I am going through the >3000 pictures we took in Antarctica, and noticed that some of them were way out of order. It turns out that one of the cameras’ clocks was set 12 hours off. Then I realized the other camera was set to Pacific time anyway, so really it was five hours off.

A few minutes of searching around later, I found jhead, a command-line JPEG header tool with a very convenient function:

jhead -ta+5:00 *.jpg

This adds five hours to the Date Taken of all the JPG files in a directory. Spiffy. A shout out to Matthias Wandel for making this free tool available. His pipe organ looks pretty neat too! There’s something about computer folks and pipe organs…