Daniel E. Markle's Blog

Wandering around the Bloomsburg Fair this year, I was (mostly) jokingly looking for model train cars. A vendor under the grandstand was selling these collectible HO gauge train cars. This is one of 200 that were made, and number 10 in the series according to a certificate provided with the car.

Quotes like "if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" are well known from Carl Sagan, but delivered like this take on a different beat.



A hilarious yet thought provoking mix, with lots of 1980's retro style.

I have an extensive media library in iTunes, and am very picky about everything having album art. Having family that plays in the Greenwood Community Band, and liking classical/band music, I have quite a few albums from them. Being a small band, the album artwork tends to be extremely basic, which drives me crazy since I listen to these frequently. Fortunately I have photography of the band at various venues and had some free time today to make some artwork for them.

Apple lingered about 6 hours today before posting its special event online, and now their servers are so saturated downloads are proceeding at under 10KB/s. It took what may be the foremost media technology company in the world 6 hours to post an event, a company that produces software designed to allow extremely fast editing and production of video.

Even with all the technology available to them their servers cannot handle the demand to get the event to my Apple TV in a timely manner. This is the clearest obstacle to the Apple TV replacing other media, the network it connects to simply isn't ready yet.

Working for a small company, our projects tend to be small. Processes and programs are best documented as tasks are first done and over time as improvements are made. Trying to document everything up front is a waste of time, as the requirements change throughout. Waiting until the end, the documentation is never completed as some other urgent project comes along. Humans are frighteningly perishable and can get hit by a bus/meteor/disease at any time.

Some people waste their lives hating others instead of improving their own lives, placing blame for their own failures on others. It is human nature to need someone to blame sometimes to vent frustration, but once this basic need is filled, one needs to let it go. Life is too short to spend it on things like revenge that don't make any difference in the end. Such activities are often likely to end up causing more harm to oneself than the intended target.

Often such feelings are based on a misunderstanding of the whole situation; angry people rarely look at problems rationally, become paranoid, and take things out of context. I have had this happen to me personally a couple times over the years. Advice such as this is often given and rarely heeded; indeed one may need to experience both sides before really understanding it, and some are so focused on hate they can't let it go even with experience.

There are a lot of very good reasons to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle. Here's another one to add to the list.

Some crazed automobile driver may pull out a gun and shoot a bicycle rider in the head. He later justified his action; he was frustrated the rider was on a busy street obstructing traffic, so he apparently decided to take matters into his own hands. Thankfully wearing a helmet saved the rider's life from this lunatic.

While camping at French Creek State Park last weekend we encountered an ice cream location called Scoupe DeVille.

A short drive from the park, they dip Nelson's Ice Cream, locally made in Royersford, PA, as well as soft serve and various burger and fry type items. With a 50's theme inside including seating and an old fuel pump from the era, it has a fun atmosphere as well as delicious ice cream.

Every programmer I know has played Dungeons and Dragons at some point. The C++ Lands Map is a beautiful merging of the two worlds. There are some amusing comments on the map at boing boing too.

I would love to have a poster print of this on some good quality parchment-like stock. Perhaps the author will do a commercial printing of it in the future.

This delicious sandwich, called the Caitlin, is filled with corned beef, cole slaw, swiss cheese, and dressing on grilled rye bread. Available at the 3rd Street Deli across from Capitol Park in downtown Harrisburg, I have had a couple of these and enjoyed every tasty bite. Their sloppy joe is another favorite. Not the sweet variety most places have, this one has a more spicy flavor.

As the chef there once told me "breakfast is best"; I recommend their western omelets as well as the two eggs, home fries, and corn beef hash combination.

They are only open for breakfast and lunch, but if you find yourself downtown looking for a good hometown deli atmosphere and food, I recommend giving them a try.

For approximately the next eight weeks, Pepsi and Mountain Dew are available with sugar. Labeled as Mountain Dew and Pepsi 'throwback' (a reference to a marketing term used for football products), they are a refreshing return to what soda tasted like before the HFCS craze hit the soda industry in the mid 1980's.

I find the Mountain Dew throwback to have a more citrus-y taste with a lighter feel and less syrupy aftertaste. Pepsi throwback reminds me of what I liked about Coke, with a sharper cola flavor and again lacking a syrupy aftertaste. After drinking these more tasty products, I believe many consumers will find why so many are choosing to drink sugar-based products. Fortunately Boylan's, Jones, and other bottlers will continue to provide other flavor choices with sugar for consumers finding the switch back to HFCS in a few weeks intolerable.

When setting up Maildir in Debian 5.0, getting the generic mail applications working correctly can be tricky.

• Install the 'mailutils' package, not the bsd mailx package.


• Do not touch the mailutils /etc/mail.rc file; there are some promising looking variables here like mailbox-type but these do not do what is desired. When the MAIL environment variable is set correctly mailutils will automatically detect the maildir box type.


• Do not touch /etc/login.defs; the promising looking lines in here are deprecated.


• Edit files in /etc/pam.d, changing the pam_mail.so lines as shown (assuming ~/Maildir as the selected location):
  
  
  
  • login: default login shells
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir standard
    
  
  
  • su: set up for proper MAIL when using su; nopen does not show 'new mail' message
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir nopen
    
  
  
  • sshd: set up MAIL properly when logging in with ssh; this line probably has a noenv by default which needs removed to set this properly
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir standard
    

I wish Sun would fix this issue with empty fields in their online ordering system. Receiving a letter like this isn't exactly a confidence booster.

PostgreSQL has improved its checking for proper locale handling in version 8.3. Due to inconsistencies caused by changing defaults in past versions of Debian, some database clusters contain UTF8 and LATIN1 databases in the same cluster. This can cause problems when trying to restore from a pgdump file with errors similar to:

ERROR: encoding LATIN1 does not match server's locale en_US.UTF-8
DETAIL: The server's LC_CTYPE setting requires encoding UTF8.

Van Wagner is now on iTunes as DRM-free iTunes Plus selections. Only "Be a Tree" and "Shikellamy" are available so far.

His music is not the type of music that typically engages me the most, but as I say in my iTunes review of "Be a Tree":

Beautiful strings and well written lyrics bring the history of Pennsylvania in days past to life. Living in the state and experiencing the people and their stories, Van Wagner brings a fun and interesting perspective on everything from superstition, factory work, coal mining, and back woods philosophy to this album.

I consider this a decent capsule summary of his music in general; some albums focus more on history, others more on the atmosphere of life.

My favorite album by Van Wagner is "Climbing to the Top," but it is not available on iTunes yet.