My head hurts, but it’s alright now… I can stop banging it against my desk!

See, I use SSH a lot. All day long. I connect to many different remote machines. Life is good. Except for one thing. At home I like my network, and I can stay connected to remote machines for days and weeks on end. At the office this is unpossible. Connections that sit idle for more than a few minutes get killed.

Oh sure, I tried to search for ssh, keepalive, timeout, and idle, all to no avail. It seems you can set things on the server to fix this, but not the client. Or so I thought!

See this Mac OS X Hint on router timeouts during ssh sessions. Specifically the comment by bill_mcgonigle on Thu, Jun 17 ‘04 at 08:41PM. A quick trip to the OpenSSH site for a newer version of OpenSSH and the addition of a ~/.ssh/config file with ServerAliveInterval 60 it in and all seems well with the world…

Thanks Mac OS X Hints and bill_mcgonigle!

Congratulations to Dawn and Drew for taking the next (big) step with DNDS. See Drew’s post: fulltime podcaster.

Remember kids: Podcasting, it’s the wave of the future!

Ok, since I had to talk about IM clients, Bill had to mention Adium to me, as others have, and I figured it was time to take a look.

So far I’m really liking Adium. There are a few things I think Fire does better, but I’m willing to give Adium a try, especially since I can use more than one account per service, which was my biggest complaint with Fire.

(Oh, they’re both GPL‘d as well, which is a big plus.)

Ok, Google Talk is new. Thanks goodness they went with XMPP (aka Jabber)! Windows only client? Lame… Other clients? Good… Fire not supporting more than one account per service? Lame… (I really should try some other clients…)

Oh, phil wilson points out a current shortcoming in that Google does not connect to the wider Jabber network. Google, please fix this ASAP! (Supposedly they are working on it.)

What other talk is going on? I finally got around to installing Gizmo Project, and it’s very nice. It hope it kills that proprietary fubar known as Skype. Die Skype, die! We want open protocols and standards. One Gizmo gotcha: I was able to use my existing SIPphone accoung with Gizmo, but I only found this out by guessing. Gizmo folks, you really should make this more apparent. I guess the Gizmo application replaces the Xten SIP client.

Oh, my Jabber user id has been on the contact page for a long time now, but if you want to try to message me while I test Google Talk, try raster plus the rest of a gmail address…

Enough talking, I’ll shut up now…

I did a phone interview with the Journal/Sentinel last week about videoblogging. This is the result: JS Online: Podcasts are so last year

(Sorry if you have to register to read it, when will old media learn to bug me not…)

Aaron from theVoiz.com posted a video of his interview. If I get around to it, I might post the audio from my interview.

And don’t forget to visit tinkernet!

(Update: I’ve been told a photo of me is on the front page of the newspaper as well. Yikes…)

For some odd reason, Rob from podCast 411 thought interviewing me would be a good idea…

If for some strange reason, you think he may have been right, see, I mean hear, the interview here.

I guess there was a tornado in Wisconsin last week. I missed it, and luckily, it missed me…

I was pretty much offline, or too involved in my own projects to hear about it, and since I don’t generally watch the news, or local TV stations, I was clueless. This is actually one of the things that sometimes bothers me about being so in control of the media I consume. I mean, a major disaster happens in the state I live in (granted, not real close to where I live) and I don’t know about it for days. Obviously if it was big enough news, I’d probably hear it, but still… It’s strange.

On the same front, I’ve noticed that when people say “Have you seen that commercial where…” very often I haven’t, as most of the television I am watching is pre-recorded, and I’m skipping the commercials. (Plus I tend to watch Cartoon Network and IFC more than anything else.)

Is this something we need to worry about in the brave new world of We Are The Media?

On a “citizen’s journalism” note, is this bit from a news story on the tornado:

A witness captured the Stoughton tornado on his camera phone.

Hooray for that. I wonder if it made it to Flickr or mefeedia though…

Of course, true to the Wisconsin spirit, it takes more than a little weather to put a damper on things:

The tornado tore the roof off the country club, said the club’s executive chef, Lenny Peaslee. As the storm approached, golfers started coming off the course, and about 40 people huddled in the basement and waited, he said.

“We were … hiding behind the bar,” Peaslee said. “We had beer, anyway.”

We wish you well in these troubled times, citizens of Stoughton Wisconsin…

“So, two syndication formats walk into a bar…”

No really… The RSS Version 3 Homepage. Hmm, checking calendar… Not April 1st… Didn’t we already do RSS 3.0? I think that now makes 10 different versions of RSS. Sounds good to me!

I think Matt summed it up well:

heh. Good luck with that.

I had to file this under syndication+humor… sigh…

I got a letter from my auto insurance company about the renewal of my policy. I was a bit worried because it did not reflect the policy changes I’ve been making (trying to make) in the last few months. When I called them, they explained that the letter may have been printed before the policy changes were made. How far in advanced do they print those things? Don’t they want to send you accurate and up-to-date data?

So, I wasn’t too worried since the whole reason they sent the letter was to confirm all of this, but then they asked if my employer was The Corporation, which worried me a bit since I left The Corporation five years ago. They did have the correct work phone number though. They then asked about the home address I had about seven years ago, when I first started the policy, even though they sent the letter to my last address, not my most current.

I’m going to try my best to avoid any sort of auto mishap, because I get the feeling if anything happens, my auto insurance company will somehow not be able to verify I even exist.

Lesson for the day: Data maintenace is hard.

Hmmm, I had considered going with the title “A few days late and 8 million short…”

Sorry, what I meant to say is, congrats to Adam for the one year anniversary of The Daily Source Code…

The “few days late” is reference to Audio Experiment #1, which was the first RasterWeb! Audio from 2004-08-18. Less than two weeks after that, renko was released…

As for the “8 million” that’s um, a reference to how many podcasts there are now, just one year later.

(You’re welcome.)

What’s the old saying, "Every program expands until it can read mail"?

I guess the same thing goes for hardware too nowadays: PSP going to get an email client (among other things)?

(My Nokia phone also does email, but really, to do email right, I obviously need to get a PSP!)

What’s the old saying “Let the Wiki win…”? (Or something like that…)

As mentioned in Weblog versus Wiki I was contemplating using MediaWiki for a project and good gosh was the install easy! It was almost too easy… You know, one of those “that’s it?” type installs you read about on weblogs…

Configuring took just a little bit of time… I wanted clean urls and to restrict editing to registered users. It took more time to find that info than it did to edit LocalSettings.php to do the right thing…

I still like UseModWiki for what it does, but so far MediaWiki is pretty damn nice…

Welcom back D-Money… Welcome back…

I have a dilemma, I want to set up a site that can accept input from a community. My choices, as I see them, are to set up a weblog (I would choose WordPress) or a wiki (most likely MediaWiki.)

My problem is that, while I think a wiki is more suited to the site I am creating, I worry that people will be afraid of contributing and editing pages. The potential users might be people who are unfamiliar with a wiki, and not quite sure how it works. Even in organizations where I’ve deployed wikis, people are often hesitant to add or modify things.

On the other hand, a weblog might be suitable because people would just have a simple comment box to fill in if they wanted to say something. Then again, saying something, or just responding to what posts the few authors might write, is a far cry from the openness of a wiki to those willing to contribute…

I’ve done plenty of WordPress installs, but while I’ve used plenty of MediaWiki sites out there, I’ve not set up my own yet. I don’t want familiarity of tools to limit me here though.

Hmmm, I’ll think about it for a bit, but any feedback on this is much appreciated…

Another day, another aggregator that does video… PenguinTV runs on Linux, and I haven’t even tried it yet, but I figured it was worth a mention since yesterday I said that video on the web will completely explode in 2005.

So now besides FireANT, iTunes, I/ON, and DTV we have PenguinTV for the Linux crowd… (Crap, did I forget mefeedia?)

Half of those clients are open-source and the rest are “freeware” (free as in beer, not free as in speech.)

So, any guesses as to how long until another video aggregator is announced?