Dave Bullock / eecue : Programmer | Photographer | Admin | Human

The RIAA has proven that the only way the music industry can survive is through suing its customers. In the case of the minuscule drum'n'bass music industry, it can only survive by suing its only customers, and the only customers drum'n'bass producers have are DJs.

The logical conclusion is to sue the DJs so that the drum'n'bass artists can get a slice of the fat pie that the djs are brining in through their highly lucrative mix tape / cd sales. i mean can you name a single dnb dj who isn't totally rich from exploiting the drum'n'bass producers they feature on their mixtapes? if it wasn't for the damn djs out there ruining the market the drum'n'bass producers would be selling thousands, nay millions of pressings of vinyl to your average jungle joe. 

The Plame leak case opened up a can of worms that our country may never be able to control. Allowing the court to force reporters to reveal their sources in a case where the leaking of the actual information was a traitorous act may have been the right thing to do in that case, but the administration is going to use that as a reason to do the same thing, this time in their defense. In the current probes the whistle-blowers were doing our country a favor by letting the public know that Bush was spying on the American people without warrants and that they were running torture gulags throughout Europe. Hopefully the probes will go nowhere and the real crime committed by Bush and Co. will be their downfall.

The following statement can be attributed to ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero:

"President Bush broke the law and lied to the American people when he unilaterally authorized secret wiretaps of U.S. citizens. But rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistleblowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law."

Although I am Jewish, my family has always celebrated both Chanukkah and Christmas, some times we only did Christmas. This year I am doing both, and I had a wonderful time with both my family and Penelope's family. On Christmas eve we went to my mom's house in Woodland Hills and had some Chanukkah ham, it was one of those special Kosher hams. Then on Christmas morning we went to Penelope's brother's house for breakfast and to open presents. After that we headed over to her Grandma's house to meet some of her cousins from Texas, and finally we went to my Aunt Jan and Uncle Van's house in Villa park, a city that is famous in Orange county for having neither churches nor bars. We both had a really great time and it was a great holiday.  

Yesterday I went and bought the New Furby which just came out in October this year. The new Furby is a pretty darn advanced toy for only $30, if you haven't seen one before they are basically armless Mogwais with beaks. New Furbys are powered by the Sensory Inc's RSC-4128 which is a multi-purpose microprocessor that does everything from voice recognition to text-to-speach to IO to DTMF output. After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I was pretty sure that the Furby would be quite the hackable robot, so I decided to take a look inside and see what hacking would entail.

WARNING : If you take apart Furby it will never be the same once you put it back together, unless you are really good with a sewing needle.

I started by removing the feet which are fastened to Furby with a triangular security screw. The Boxer 62 piece security bit set that I bought at Fry's a few years back contained a triangular bit that was just slightly too large to fit the Furby foot screws, so I filed it down a tad and in it went. After taking off the feet, the clawed under-feet were exposed which were surrounded with little fur booties that just slid off with a little tug. Once I removed the under-feet I could see how the fur was attached to the skeleton.

The fur is glued on in 2 places, which i cut with a sharp knife. The fur also has plastic tabs that go into the base of Furby, which can be pulled out with a little effort. Once you have the base of the fur free from Furby you will have to open up the back of his little fur suit, this back is lightly sewn with just a few stitches and opens easily once you free the first stitch, almost like it was made to come open easily.

After you have opened the back of the suit you can slide it over his head, you will have to snip the small threads at the tips of his ears to get it off over his head, don't snip the big white threads that loop through the plastic ear guides, this is used to track the location of the ears. You will also have to snip the thread on the tip of his mohawk support and the thread wrapped around his eyebrow mover.

Then comes the tricky part and that is the last screw that holds the plastic eye and mouth guides onto the center of the face, at first I tried just pushing a screwdriver right between his eyes and turning but I couldn't get a hold of the screw. Next I tried just twisting the whole thing, but this seemed like it was going to mess up the eyelashes. Finally I just pulled hard on it and it the plastic flexed and popped off the screw. Now Furby is hairless and looks like a cyborg version of Mr. Potato head, sans-bucket of parts.

Furby's shell is closed by 6 screws and once they are removed you can open it up and see the goodies inside. After his shell is open, you will have to unwind the zig-zagging red and black wires, which I think are some kind of antenna to allow the Furby to communicate with its brethren. After you have released and unwound the wires you will need to cut the microphone, as there is no way to get it out of the shell without cutting it. Once you cut the wires in the middle, you will need to strip off the insulation so that the mic can pass through the grommet. The grommet has two sides, to get it out first pry out the outer grommet from the front of the shell and then push on the leads to drive the mic forward and out of the shell. You can then pull out the the rear grommet and use them together to protect the mic although it isn't really necessary.

After pulling the mic, I stripped the cut leads and removed the old leads from the motherboard, then I soldered the mic back on to the mic traces on the motherboard. I suppose this was the first actual hack. I then screwed back on the under-feet, stood Furby up, and switched it on. He worked fine and responded to my request to tell a joke.

I then removed the silicone mouth which was fastened by two screws to the face, once it was free from the face i had to clip two little silicone loops that attached to the beak and tongue, this will probably prevent the Furby from ever working the same again, although I suppose gluing would be possible.

The next step was to take a look at the motherboard. The motherboard is fastened to Furby with two screws, once you pull it off you will have to remove several snap in connectors, but to really get a good look at it I had to snip the feeding switch leads. Cutting the feeding switch wires was actually a good thing, because it makes feeding Furby much easier (just short the wires together). Here are pictures of the motherboard, the ROM/RAM daughter card and the transistor daughter card. The epoxy blob in the center of the MB is the RSC-4128, I am not yet sure what the other blob is.

The coolest thing I saw once I opened up Furby was that the board designers were nice enough to leave nice large pads for the RSC-4128 diagnostic interface, which hopefully should allow programming of the Furby. I am not sure, but I think the diagnostic port is a serial interface. I have ordered the development kit from Sensory Inc, and I'm sure this will help answer some of my questions. If I do end up being able to alter the programming / data on the Furby here are some things I plan on doing:

• Give Furby a more colorful vocabulary
• Teach Furby some tasteless jokes
• Change Furby's voice tone to be less cute and more evil
• Give Furby a funny accent and maybe a lisp and a twitch
• Hook up some of the unused I/O ports to control other things (the chips has 24 I/O ports with 10mA outputs)
• Expand Furby's memory
• Utilize the voice recording function of the RSC-4128
• Make Furby a voice controlled DTMF dialer
• Utilize the MIDI synth contained in the RSC-4128

Here is what I plan on doing even if I can change the code or data:

• Add nicer switches to the make the Skeletal Furby easier to
• Pet
• Feed
• Tickle
• Turn off
• LEDs that light up when Furby moves
• Volume control for the speaker
• Put the Furby head on a Robosapien body

Here are some relevant links:

• New Furby Hack photo gallery
• Sensory Inc Furby Press Release
• Sensory Inc RSC-4x Family Info
• RSC-4128 Data Sheet (497k PDF)
• Sensory Inc Dev Kit Order Form
• First Gen Furby Hack Site
• First Gen Furby Autopsy
 

So I am a sucker for robots and the new Furby looks pretty damn cool, so I ordered one, hey it only cost me $30. The new Furny has an off switch, and we all know you should never trust a robot without an off switch. It also responds to voice commands and has a whole bunch more motors and movement than the old Furby.

The furby also has 6 times more memory (512k) than its predecessor. It is powered by a Sensory RSC-4128 chip which is a "single-chip solution providing all hearing, talking and CPU functions". The Furby uses Sensory’s Quick Text to Speaker Independent™ (Quick T2SI) recognition technology, which sounds like it will make hacking a very interesting possibility as it uses text instead of audio files for its speach, there is also a plethora of developer info on the Sensory Inc website, and you can download an IDE.

I am also going to try and get a dev kit. Did I mention it has an off switch? As soon as I get it I will be removing its fur and taking pictures of the process. I will also see what kind if IR fun I can have with it.

After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I can see this is going to be a totally hackable robot.  

I read this piece over on Curbed LA about how Urban Pacific Builders is lagging on the completion of the Security Building Lofts, and I wanted to comment on the post, but alas there is no place to leave comments on Curbed LA and no link to email the author / editor. So here is what I was going to post on their site: I will say one thing for the Security Building Lofts, after they removed the wooden piss soaked sidewalk protection, turned on the street lights and posted security guards around the building the obvious crime on the corner has really decreased, and it doesn't reek of urine anymore.

UPDATE: I sent an email to their general account: la@curbed.com. 

Penelope and I watched The Producers tonight, which today was nominated for 4 golden globe awards and was hilarious. Here is the review I wrote. 

Microsoft, who I personally don't care for too much, has once again proven itself to be the last in line at the pop stand. First of all they are partnering with MTV to create an online music store / subscription service called Urge, which will offer 2 million songs, but which won't work on iPods or Macintosh computers. The only snag for M$ is that iPods make up 75% of the portable music player market share, so they have engineered their own obsolescence before even releasing the service to the public.

Next they are partnering with MCI to provide VOIP support in their instant messenger program allowing you to make calls from your PC to landlines and cell phones. Gee nobody has thought of this before, oh wait there is Vonage (which I use and it rocks) and Skype, who have both been doing this for years, and of course Yahoo is about to beat them to market with the integration of their messenger and voice calling.

And finally M$ issued a patch for IE that fixes a "critical" security flaw, one so critical that it took them several weeks to issue a patch, during which time exploit code was released to the public. I'm glad I run OS X.

Actually there is one more thing, it looks like the new Russian government funded TV station Russia Today, is back on the air today after being down due to hacking:

Margarita Simonyan, the channel's editor in chief, said, "There was an attempted invasion of the computer system from outside, which gave rise to viruses, which in turn led to a breakdown in transmission. We apologise to the audience but the channel had to cease broadcasting until the technical malfunctions are mended."

Sounds like bad Microsoft jujus to me, but man are people really running TV station on Windows? Does this seem like a bad idea to anybody but me? 

So I am normally not a big fan of anything Microsoft, but the new Bird's Eye View in the Windows Local Live app is pretty cool. I did have to view it in Firefox as it doesn't work in Safari (big surprise) but the view of my building is pretty cool... there is even some kind of movie production going on in the parking lot next door. [Thanks for the tip Eric] 

I just finished watching the latest episode of the Boondocks and it was hilarious. I especially liked the voice acting of Samuel Jackson playing a white guy with cornrows and quoting the briefcase recovery scene in Pulp Fiction. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".  

Randomly in my flickr Los Angeles tag feed I came across this fellow Santa Paul who is one of the many local Santa figures. I especially enjoyed this photo of him on the set of Star Trek from his flickr account. 

Jump on your bike every second Thursday and join us on our art gallery tour through the skewed streets of Downtown LA. We begin our ride at 5:00pm at the Downtown Art Gallery on 1611 S.Hope St. There is a free parking lot next to the gallery if you are unable to ride or take public transit from your location. We will leave the Downtown Art Gallery between 5:30 and 5:45 and make our way to all the galleries that take part in the Downtown Art Walk (except MOCA Grand and the Library.) Here is a google pedometer map of the route we will be taking and here is a map of the actual art walk[pdf]. Don't forget to bring a lock and of course your bike.

UPDATE!! I registered a domain and built a quick website for the Downtown Art Ride. I will be adding more info soon along with a great map that Eric Richardson created at his new job. 

UPDATE RideArc Still happens, you can read more about it here: RideARc

Google is now paying $1 for ever person that an Adsense user refers to sign up for Firefox with a google toolbar. Explorer Destroyer has some code (which isn't totally XHTML strict, but you can fix that by adding a couple <p> tags as well as adding a blank src="" and alt="" to the image tags) that will allow you to alert IE users that their browser is muy malo and they should switch. Just say no to IE! 

Hey celia I hope you have earplugs! There is a rave tonight at the Alex! I'm so totally there... replete with a drum'n'bass room!  

So I finally got around to setting up cacti/snmp on my servers. Here is what I did:

1. Installed cacti on the main monitoring server which we'll call slappy. I used the FreeBSD port of cacti. Slappy already had php/mysql/apache installed.
2. Added a user snmp to slappy and then I generated keys using ssh-keygen for each of the servers that slappy would be monitoring.
3. On each of the servers that slappy would be monitoring I installed net-snmp from the ports tree and configured it to run over tcp on 127.0.0.1 and then I added a user snmp with a nologin shell and without password authentication as I will just be using snmp to create a tunnel to the snmpd process that will be running on localhost.
4. Back on slappy I su'ed to the snmp user and created a shell script that would set up the tunnels to each of the servers using a command like this: ssh -i ~/.ssh/keys/hostname -f -N -L 16101:127.0.0.1:161 hostname and then added the script as a cronjob.
5. Finally I added all the servers to cacti using the basic built-in net-snmp support as well as a couple of qmail and mysql scripts.

So I now have a nice collection of graphs for traffic / disk space / processor, memory and mysql load.  

On Thanksgiving I was listening to As It Happens on the CBC via KPCC and I heard a report about the nasty benzene spill in China. The reporter who was an English teacher living in China said that there was some panic about the water supply being turned off due to the spill and also that there was an earthquake predicted [real audio stream @ 11:25 and 12:14] "The government gave a warning that an earthquake would occur" and "People were sleeping in tents outside". The I just read today that there was a big quake in China. I found it very interesting that the Chinese government predicts earthquakes and tells the people about it, and that is turns out to be true. Very interesting. 

Yesterday Penelope and I went to the gym and instead of using one of the various machines to get our cardio workout, we decided to try Racquetball. We borrowed some racquets and a couple of balls and hit the court. When we were locked into the court we realized that we had no idea how to play the game we had decided to play, so we just hit the ball against the walls and tried to rally as much as we could. It turned out to be great fun and we decided to get ourselves some racquets and figure out the rules. When I got home I found a page with the basic rules of the game which made sense once I read them a few times. The next step was to look on craigslist for some racquets, of which I found 2 for $20 and I just got back from picking them up. They are in great condition, are nice racquets and I am looking forward to playing a game with Penelope tomorrow. 

Penelope and I went to Frying Fish today to have some rotating mechanized sushi, but the conveyor was broken, oh my! No big deal though, the sushi was still great although we did have to order it all from the chef instead of just picking various items off of the conveyor. 

A few years back I visited japan, where I picked up a ultra light and thin sharp mebius laptop with a 30gb hd, 512mb ram and a 750mhz piii. It has been sitting in a bag since then as I am mostly a mac / unix user and I have only used it a couple of times to do some random PC stuff. The other day I noticed that PC-BSD had reached its 1.0 mark and today I decided to download it and check it out. The first run through of the install didn't work, but I tweaked some BIOS settings and it booted right up. PCBSD is really easy to install and has a nice GUI installer that anybody can use. Everything works great and I now have FreeBSD running on my Mebius laptop! I threw in a wireless card and everything worked as it should and I now have a nice little portable computer for tasks around the house when I don't want to sit in front of my desk. I set up OpenVPN and got that working in the simple mode after a little bit of toying around. Cool deal. 

So I finally got myself some DSL... it has been a few years. Recently I have used a "borrowed" wireless connection, Verizon EVDO, and a cable modem and now I am back on with the nice low-latency DSL. I have a 6mb/768k connection from Speakeasy and so far it rocks, although due to some line noise I don't get the full 6, more like 4.8 or so. Last night I set up the server that is supposed to be my mythTV system as a firewall because for some reason the other 2 systems I had wouldn't POST, I think it has something to do with the power outages we had a few months ago, but they were old systems anyhow, and I have bid on a couple old cheap systems on ebay that will work just fine for the job. I set up the firewall using pf on FreeBSD, with a separate interface for the wireless bridge (which is a bridge to nowhere if you don't connect to the VPN). Everything is working great and I finally have my Vonage box active again, yay. 

Penelope and I had planned on going backpacking this weekend on Catalina Island this weekend, but when we got there the town of Avalon was so beautiful we just decided to get a hotel room and hang out. The other problem was that the route I had planned ended up being on a paved road and our campground was a bit further then we wanted to hike in one day with heavy packs, plus I was midway through a cold, which I have just now kicked.

We checked in to the Hotel Villa Portofino, a hotel right across the main drag from the water, dropped off out bags and hit the bar. We had a few drinks and then we decided to rent a golf cart and take it around Avalon, which despite sounding cheesy was actually quite fun. After the golf cart ride we bought some tickets to see Harry Potter in the Casino which isn't actually a gambling hall, the italian word casino actually meant a place of entertainment, back when the building was built by Mr Wrigley.

The Casino is amazingly beautiful and before the movie we were treated to 45 minutes of organ music on a really grand organ, a type of which only 3 exist in the world today. The bass and acoustics of the theatre are really amazing and we really enjoyed both the organ show and the movie.

The next day we hiked over to the botanical gardens and the Wrigley monument and then we headed back in to town to take part in tour of the casino which was really interesting. I took a whole bunch of photos of the whole trip and I will be uploading them soon once I am a bit less busy. 

MIT has unveiled their super cool hand cranked $100 laptop at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia. I know they are supposed to be for developing nations, but I want one, or two... actually can I buy 1 for me and 3 for underprivileged children? That would be cool. 

Over the past couple of months I have posted only a very small handful of photos on my website. There are a couple of reason for this. First of all I had some disk problems with my server and lost a whole bunch of photos from the site... I didn't really lose the actual photos, I will just have to upload them again. The next problem is that I have had somewhat spotty connectivity at my loft, but this will be remedied on the 16th when Speakeasy installs my 6M/786k DSL, Yay! And finally I have been completely rewriting the code the runs my site, to make it better, faster and easier to use. I am very close to being done with the rewrite and once I am I will start the transition from the current slacker based system to the new dynamony system. Once I upgrade I have something like 10 gigs of photos to sort through and upload.  

Here are the posts I have made over at blogging.la in the past week or two:

• Midnight Ridazz
• Downtown ArtRide
• Fun Crap You Can Do!
• No on 73 Campaign for Teen Safety Election Night Party
• Nix the First Six!

A couple of days ago I decided that I really wanted to actually make it to all the galleries on the Downtown Art Walk, but since I only had a limited amount of time that I can spend traipsing about I decided to make the rounds by bike. I posted up about this on blogging.la and Eric Richardson showed interest in the whole idea and decided to come with me. During the day Thursday I was very busy, but luckily Eric had time to plan a route and print out some maps. Using his route I was able to hit every single gallery on the Art Walk and take pictures in those that allowed it (which was almost everywhere). The only 2 spots I didn't hit were MOCA on Grand and the LAPL. I have set up a mailing list for the ArtRide, which I will be doing every month with the Art Walk. If you are interested you can sign up to the list here.  

CNN is reporting that both NJ and VA have elected Democrats to be their next governors. Let's see what happens with the mayoral elections in NYC and Boston. I don't see things getting any better for the wingnuts any time soon. 

Now that money is involved it will only be a short amount of time before RFIDs are blown wide open as the next huge security problem. All you have to do is excite the card with the right radio freqs and pick up the response and you're in. Record it, replay it and you have pwn3d the money.  

I had a blast at the monthly SCI-Arc ride and I wrote about it here on b.la. 

The new relatively-low-priced-for-a-10"-truss-dobsonian Meade LightBridge makes me really want to upgrade my sad little 3" refractor. The truss breaks down so you can fit it in your car trunk. And you can pre-order it for around $649 for the standard edition or $750 for the deluxe one and for another $99 your can get a collection of Super Plossl lenses and a 2x Barlow lens. 

Next Thursday the 10th of November is the Downtown LA Art Walk. I will not miss it again (hopefully).  

I did some research about how to best train for fixed gear riding and I found this great page giving some exercises that you can do to strengthen you legs for the rigors of coaster-less travel. I also researched spinning and found out that spinning bikes are fixed gear stationary cycles so they are perfect for fixie training. So today at gym, Penelope and I spun for 20 minutes doing the Arc Drills, it was a good workout and afterwards I did my resistance training which is always fun. Working out really makes my days better. 

So I just spent about 15 minutes writing the first few paragraphs of my first ever novel. You can read what I have so far here on my nanowrimo page. I will be writing every day and posting up what I have, be warned the copy has not been edited yet. Thanks to Robert Daeley for inspiring me to do this! 

I finished watching the entire Densha Otoko series in the last couple of days and I really enjoyed it, although at some times it was definitely cheesy and overly dramatic. The show was based on a real story of an anime obsessed nerd (otaku) who's chivalry, albeit with shaking knees, saves a woman on a train from a drunken old pervert. She thanks him and asks for his address which he gives her and then he turns to a highly popular japanese message board for advice on what to do. The ensuing 10 episodes follow the young nerd as he is transformed from a geek rife with Ota reek, into a dashing and bumbling hero who wins the heart and hand of a "normal" woman.

About half way through the series he decides to part with his Otaku ways and become a "normal" person, which I thought didn't quite give a healthy message to people (you must have no personal identity!), but towards the end he realizes that he will always be an Otaku and hopes that his love will accept him for who he is, which she does.

I especially like the parts when he is conversing on the BBS in which he interacts with hundreds of people throughout japan and abroad including one of my favorite jp tv personalities Nasubi.

The show gives an interesting look into how the japanese public feel about nerdy people and how they are really shunned by society. It is interesting how nerds are treated differently in the US and how nerds have become somewhat cool in the last 10 years here. Here is a link to the bittorrent of the series (complete with english subtitles) if you are interested in checking it out. I guess there is also a movie out there somewhere which I'll have to check out as well. 

This weekend I left BitTorrent running downloading the japanese television show Densha Otoko which I have written about before here. I was hoping it would have english subtitles, which it does. I will be reviewing the episodes as I find time to watch them. =] 

I was wasting some time watching trailers over on the apple trailer site and the remake of Mel Brooks The Producers looks hilarious and brilliant, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Therman and Will Ferrel. Ferrel plays the crazy Hitler loving playwright who pens the centerpiece of the movie, a play called Springtime for Hitler. I can't wait for this one to come out.

Another movie that looks pretty good, and also starring Will Ferrel (or his voice anyway) is Curious George, which involves everybody's favorite monkey and a huge dose of curiosity induced hijinx. 

I can tell Green LA girl is right on the verge of buying a bike. I will give her some more motivation here: Yesterday I bought Penelope a vintage Schwin girls road bike from the '60s or '70s for a whopping $15. I don't know if she is going to like it or not due to the rust that covers most all of the components, but the frame is pretty much rust free so we have a good place to start! In the next couple of days I am going to take Penelope and the bike down to the Bicycle Kitchen and start converting it into a fixed speed lean mean road machine. Eventually I will send Penelope on her own to Bitchen, which is the girls only night that BK does, but I want to help her with the first few steps.

I think Penelope is going to kick my ass because I also bought another bike via ebay for $36 although this one is an antique single speed. I am not sure if it is legit as the seller has no feedback, but we'll see... I'm going to pick it up in person.

In other news I just noticed that BK has a blog called the Bici Blog.  

Last night I went to Club Respect, but for some reason I also brought my bike and as soon as I got there I really just wanted to ride it home and see Penelope so I hopped on and rode the 6 miles home. Here is the route I took. It had some good uphill but nothing to serious. Fun Stuff 

So the other night I mentioned that Penelope and I went to IKEA and picked up some home furnishing items of which included a floor lamp. The lamp we bought is made primarily of brushed stainless steel with a frosted glass globe shade. The lamp contains a 35 Watt halogen lamp and a set of 4 computer controlled LEDs that fade through most of the visible spectrum and can be locked on one color. I think it would be pretty cool to mod this thing to light a certain color via 802.11. I can't seem to find the lamp which is also available as a desk lamp on ikea's website.

Update I found the manual for the LED Lamp an it is called the MÅNSKEN. 

Last month my site had over 100,000 visits from over 22,000 different people and a total of over 1.2 million hits. You can run an add that runs right over there to the right of this text for $20 a week. Click here to buy an add. 

Sony made this commercial in SF using 250,000 superballs and they used no CG at all! That's right they really did this: 

So for a few years I have been running a combination of Qmail, Courier-IMAP and Vmailmgr to allow for multiple virtual domains with many users without having to add each user to the system. I was doing some upgrading last night and I found out that the fine folks over at Courier have changed they way their authdaemon system works so that it is now incompatible with vmailmgr. Here is what they have to say about it:

I can only see the following minuses from losing the non-daemonized configuration. I believe the minuses are greatly outranked by the pluses.

There are some third party configuration libraries that only work in a non-daemonized configuration. I'm aware of one such library, vmailmgr. Unless it's been updated to work in daemonized mode, it will no longer work.

Great! So I just had to downgrade my upgrade of courier-imap. I am going to change my whole system soon and stop using vmailmgr and possible even qmail too. We'll see what happens.  

So I sent photos of my fixie to fixed gear gallery and they posted them up along with my write up. When I woke up this morning I had a couple of emails asking me questions:

On Oct 25, 2005, at 11:07 AM, Pax wrote:

i have the same frame, but dont know how to get the shift lever mounts off. any help? also, what ratio?

Ok let me see if I can remember how I did this.

1. unscrew the levers.
2. I think I pried up the little plastic ring with my finger nail and then just turned it. One side is fixed and one side is like a nut.
3. After you remove one side the other will just come out after you jiggle it a little.

Ratio:

• Chainring: 42 teeth
• Cog: 14 teeth
• 78.8 gear inches

On Oct 25, 2005, at 10:46 AM, Claes Axang wrote:

I saw you bike at fixedgeargallery.com (very nice by the way) and read that you had used a half link. I am currently building on a old reynold's 531 road frame with horizontal drop-outs so that shouldn't cause any problems but I have been thinking aboout converting my old kona kilauea mountainbike to my everyday fixie. The kona has more or less vertical dropouts so I have been told that the only way to go is the white industries ENO hub but I don't feel that I want to spend that much money on a hub so maybe the half link solution could be the thing for me. How do you construct a half link and if you would have time some day could you send me a picture of what it looks like? Any help would much appreciated.

The thing about the half link is that it may or may not work. You really have to try to know, you might not even need a half link depending on your bike's geometry. The half link just allows you to shorten the chain by half a link. It looks like a short link in a chain, but instead of a pin it has a screw and a flat square nut. It cost me $10 from the bicycle kitchen, I'm sure you could find one online. Sheldon Brown has a shot of a half link here on is great website. 

I forgot to mention it, but my lovely and radiantly beautiful fiance Penelope just got a new job at an upscale fine dining establishment on the top floor of a skyscraper in Downtown LA. She has worked for the same restaurant for 6 years and although she is very sad to go, it just didn't make sense for her to commute to Long Beach every day. Her new job pays almost triple what her old one did and her coworkers are much closer to her age if not older, the opposite of what they were at the old job. She doesn't plan to work at a restaurant forever, she has a degree in public health education, and has been accepted to nursing school which she will attend in about a year. Good job baby! 

Oh things are starting to get good in the Plamegate scandal. So what exactly did you know and when did you know it Mr. President? 

I wrote about my secret to building IKEA furniture that will last here and MAV's crack experience here onb.la. 

Check out the write up here on b.la. Check out the photos here.

Update I went for my first short ride on Sunday to go buy a mini kryptonite lock. It was a hoot although I almost crashed into the back of a line of cars, thinking I could slow down fast enough by backpedalling. I swerved and went around and everything turned out ok. 

Ok so today I went and picked up 2 bikes from a nice fellow in West Covina named Amer who's bikes had been sitting in his garage for at least 10 years. He wanted $200 for the Cannondale and $80 for the KHS and I talked him down to $174 for both of them. I think I got a pretty good deal and I really like the Cannondale, but it may or may not be the best conversion bike because of the near vertical rear dropouts.

After picking up the bikes and buying some spokes, lights, a helmet and a pump at a bike shop Eagle Rock called Discount Cycles I headed over to the Bicycle Kitchen for my 7:00 wheel building class. Bicycle Kitchen is completely and totally awesome and the people who work there are really cool and down to earth. They taught me step by step how to build a wheel and I built 2 in about 4 hours.

I am really happy with my work although the front wheel still needs a bit of truing. I took a few breaks from tweaking spokes and nipples to take off all the parts from the Cannondale that I won't be needing anymore like the derailers, the rear brakes, all the cabling except for the front break and the old rusty chain. I also bought all the other parts I will need to finish the rebuild. I have scheduled rack time tomorrow and I will hopefully have a rideable bike some time in the afternoon. I'll take some photos of the finished product.  

Ok so I really want a bike. I used have a mountain bike and I rode all the time in High School. I now live in the city and I don't think I need a mountain bike at all any more and I really want to build my own fixed gear street bike. I know there is some sort of bike workshop thing in LA, but I can't seem to find a link to info about it. Anybody have any suggestions on where to begin? Comment here or email bike [at] eecue [dot] com. =]

UpdateEric Richardson sent me an email and reminded me that I was looking for the Bicycle Kitchen. I also found thesegreatsites that have a wealth of info about fixed gear bikes.

Update 2 Ok so I just got off the phone with Brian from Bicycle Kitchen and there is room in the wheel building class tomorrow and they even have rims and hubs I can buy for my fixed gear project bike... I just have to pick up 72 291mm spokes and I will be set to go! Oh yeah and I'll need to get a bike too, but finding and old junky 10 speed shouldn't be a problem. Cool. 

So as you can see over to the right of this post I have my first blogad. It seems pretty relevant as I live in a loft and write about loft living several times a week. It's funny because if you look at my stats on the blogads website it only shows that I get 1700 hits a week (mostly because the counter has only been on there for a couple of days) but in reality I get about 5000 visits DAILY from 2000 different sites... I assume about half of those are RSS or search engines that don't load the blogad code, but it will be interesting so see how many I get at the end of one week according to blogads.  

Here are some photos of one of the bricks there were thrown from the roof of the Alexandria Hotel the other night. I know they're not that great, but hey I have programming to do! I have about a 1387 photos to sort through from the last few months as I have been busy writing the new version of the software that powers this site. I wanted to wait till it was done before adding any more photos, but oh well! 

I just swapped out the two failing 80gb drives that were in this server for 2 brand new 160gb drives. It took about 3 hours to transfer the data and now everything appears to be up and running ok. The second drive will be a daily backup of the main drive. In the next few days I will also be upgrading the database server. Enjoy!

[It's a good thing the server is back up because while it was down, 44 spam emails were waiting for me!] 

You can now buy advertising on this site by following the link at the right. The prices are very reasonable and the site gets about 5000 unique visitors a day. 

I have been using a RIM Blackberry 7100t for the past couple of months and I like it, but what I really want is a Treo. I have grown fond of the excellent messaging capabilities of the Blackberry and it is good news to hear that RIM and Palm have struck a deal to use the BB email client on the Palm. Cool Deal! 

I posted about some events including respect tonight over on blogging.la. 

As anyone who lives in Los Angeles knows, trees are terrible awful things that we as a city have the G-d given right duty to cut down, smash up, tear out and burn down. And if I may say so, it is about fucking time that our city hall has taken the great initiative to reduce the horrid oxygen producing scourge that are trees which have scarred the great park of Griffith for so many years. Not only has the park experience been lessened over the years by the unchecked breeding of these rooted vermin, but a dearth of pavement has prevented both the young and old from feeling the great comfort only tarmac can bring to the human stride...

Read the rest here on blogging.la. 

So I've lost a large portion of my photos from this site. I still have them in a backup somewhere and hopefully I have a backup of the actual files from this site... I will work on finding that backup but be warned that the whole section may come down and I may have to reload them all from my desktop. Joy.  

Just got this from the ACLU: 

I'm not sure if you will be able to stomach the language and brute humor on this website but to me the Rude Pundit is fucking hilarious.  

Do I hear a country song a brewin'? 

So as you may or may not know, I have been recoding slacker from scratch. Slacker is the software that, along with phpreactor, powers all my sites including this one and junglescene. The whole thing is written in procedural php and the new rewrite which I have named dynamony, is completely object oriented. So far I have rewritten nearly every component of the backend system: the db abstraction class; the "slacker" base class which is a class that allows one to add/edit/update/delete from a database and provides the forms to do so along with limiting, sorting, searching by words or date; the blog class; the album class in which i used a much better tree algorithm that avoids the memory/processor intensive recursion i had used in the past; the ACL class; using Pear::Log for all error and debug logging; a comment class; a category class; a frontend controller system that loads requested classes after checking the ACLs; the signup class; image output class; the login/logout classes; the image class; the gallery remote class; the xml_rpc class; the dynamony class which allows me to create new classes within the web application instead of through a separate website; and today I created the forum class where I have seen my greatest decrease in load time nearly 10x faster than how the forums currently load (i tested it with several hundred thousand posts from junglescene.com)

The whole thing is really going to be leaps and bounds better than what I have now and going over my old code is really embarrassing. The amount of reused code was insane and made upkeep nearly impossible for one site let alone the dozens of sites that slacker powers. So far all the data is completely separated from the html/xml/csv that it will parsed using... I just use arrays of data and print_r() as my current output method which works great for prototyping. I have decided to completely program the backend before I even start any of the output classes. One important thing to me is to create rewrite rules and functions that will take the old links to content and forward them to the new content as not to break the thousands of links out there... It's a big project but once it is all done it will make my life so much easier.  

Here are the posts I have made this week over on b.la:

• Second Annual Grand Ave Festival This Saturday
• Help The South Central Farmers
• Embarrassing Architecture

You can read more about our wedding plans over on Penelope's blog. She has been posting even more than I have! 

One of the artists on my roster is running in the Honolulu AIDS marathon and needs your support... Here is the email he sent me: 

The other day in my post about reality show deaths I mentioned the Japanese TV personality Nasubi who was basically kidnapped and locked in a room for a year without any clothes, money or food with his only means of survival being giveaway forms. Well I wanted to know what he was up to now so I emailed Ed Jacob who runs the site that had the Nasubi info on it and he told me he was in a Japanese TV Drama called Densha Otoko which actually sounds pretty cool. The show is about a shut in nerd from the Akihabara District of Tokyo who saves a woman on a train from being accosted by a drunk and in return she takes down his address, which is a first for the man who has never had a girlfriend his whole life. The story actually happened in real life and the otaku, Tsuyoshi Yamada, didn't know what to do so he posts his quandary to a huge internet discussion board and millions of people follow his courtship of the woman. It is actually pretty touching in a nerdy kind of way. Nasubi just has a cameo appearance in the show which is also a movie. I may have to download a few episodes and check it out. 

Here is the info I have posting to different dnb message boards today: 

I am sad because after reading about Organic Express on this cool and environmentally conscious LA blog, I rushed over to the Organic Express website and tried to sign up, but lo and behold they don't deliver to my area.

UPDATE: So I heard back from a Organic Express rep and they totally copped out saying they only deliver to residential neighborhoods and we all know that nobody lives downtown: