School Governance. Will be attending the PNAIS Governance Conference in early November. Very interested to hear the mood of private school board members as the economy continues to struggle. And when you look at the demographics of this region, the potential market of students is flat or even shrinking a little over the next 10 years. And of course public schools are improving generally. I think we are in for greater levels of competition and greater questioning of the affordability and value of private education, which means we need to focus even more clearly on the quality of our product.

Top Home Network Sites. From Tong, a good list. I also like how Rob has posted his config, I need to do that.

Network Analyser. Haven’t used one of these since the heyday of the Network General Sniffer but I have the need – The Ethereal Network Analyzer

BCS. First rankings out – Bowl Championship Series - Full Rankings Chart.

OK how can Ohio State be considered to have the weakest schedule of the top 6 teams, but have the most points for quality wins? Makes no sense at all.

I guess it doesn’t really matter now…we just need to beat Penn State Saturday and trust that things will work out.

Winter Bike. Wow does this look fun – Winter X Bike - Winterize Your Ride! - new kit converts bikes for use on snow

Netstat -O. Just discovered the value of this command on XP. When you correlate the output with Task Manager PIDs, you can see exactly what processes have what net connections open. Very helpful!

X10 Halloween. Deep in the throes of getting all my x10 setup debugged for halloween. Man x10 just sucks. The gear is fragile, all kinds of mysterious communication problems, the software sucks. I hate it. But it is cheap and widely available.

I am close to dumping the gui software I use and just write some scripts. I see that there is Perl support available here. And a web interface on top of perl support at X10 Web Control.

Next year tho I may just pick up a few more dmx dimmers and do away with x10 altogether. I don’t see anything on the web abour perl/python interfaces to dmx tho.

Maybe next year I should be an early adopter of uPNP or some such crazy scheme.

Blosxom progress. OK I have now also fixed the scripts to deal with the differences between Win2k/IIS and Unix/Apache handling of path elements after the blosxom.cgi reference in the URL. I can find no way to make Win2k/IIS treat this as a path_info argument to a perl script, so i have changed the script to make “?topic=foo” work as the argument to get a specific content blog – e.g. www.theludwigs.com/halloween?topic=props. Which meant i had to patch up the links that blosxom creates for permalinks, etc. I am pretty sure archive viewing doesn’t work quite right yet tho i am not sure I care since I don’t have an archive for my halloween blog. Also haven’t looked at the RSS output yet.

Halloween Blog Architecture. I am toying around with blosxom for my halloween blog. i like the innate categorization in blosxom as the defining paradigm since my halloween blog is less about dated posts and more about categories of things. getting blosxom running on win2k is proving to be something of a chore. the base scripts have a lot of assumptions about file system naming and file system functionality that are just broken on iis and nt. I have fixed some of this in my trial blog – notably i have changed the blosxom scripts to eliminate their expectation of symbolic links (tho i would like to go back and add in windows shortcut functionality as a replacement). The permalinks are busted tho, as there are some differences in cgi handling in iis vs apache. So still tuning – if anyone has already solved the problem of blosxom on nt, please send me a note!

Wildseed/Kyocera partnership. Wildseed announces it’s first big partnership, launching their smartskin phone with Kyocera. Congrats wildseed…oh here’s some press coverage…RCR Wireless News…Kyocera to use Wildseed smart skin technology

Halloween Status. Got the big fogger system working this weekend – now I can flood our yard and the street and the neighbor’s yard with fog. All the big props in place. All power and DMX control cables in place. Next big work items – deployment of small props, deployment of x10 control for small electrics, testing of all the above.

Buckeyes. Nice win, but Seven-game warmup is over; next six outings will tell the tale

RSS Feeds. Dave recommends BlogStreet: Top 100 as a good source for RSS feeds. Also points to DMOZ as a source for readers.

Living in the City. Friday night – take John to friend’s house in Woodinville. Out to dinner with C in Bellevue. Up to Liz’s school for Volleyball match. Saturday morning – drop off Liz in U district at UW. Stop in Redmond for coffee and errands at Home Depot. Pick up John in Woodinville and take him back home to Bellevue. Back across the lake to UW to get Liz in the midst of the Huskies game traffic. Back to Bellevue, drop off Liz. The rest of us to downtown Seattle for some errands. Stop in Mercer Island on way there to get gas, on way back to pick up dinner.

Someday I will be glad to live in a smaller town again…

Good Trial. I’ve been trialing the Good software for the Blackberry 957. The RIM software has always been a little crufty – the todo list for instance is much worse than the Palm’s. So very interested in alternatives.

The pros of the Good software: Full over-the-air sync of all Outlook items (mail, contacts, calendar, todo, notes) is great. I love that. I use notes and todo list a lot, this is a huge boon to me. The homepage calendar view is nice, much more useful than calendar popup reminders. In-band mail addressing is nice – much more intuitive than popping out to the address book browser. Attachment viewing is a nice feature tho not as useful as I thought it would be. It still takes a lot of time to download attachments, and tables don’t come across well as they get unwound to fit on the small screen.

Cons: Performance is slower than the RIM software. I have a large address book (~2000 entries) and a fairly large calendar file. Searching the address book is slower than it was with the RIM software, paging thru the calendar is slower. The RIM software could keep up with my typing, the Good software cannot at times.

Battery life is a big concern. I used up 30% in one day running the Good software – I assume because of the increased radio traffic from all the ota syncing. With the RIM software I could go for a week between cradles without even thinking about it, and 2 weeks at least if I engaged in some modest power management (turn off the device at night). With Good I will have to think a lot more about power management.

The Calendar app is clearly not done. No week view. The month view doesn’t indicate if you have appointments on days, and hence is not useful. No creation of recurring appointments on the device. Agenda view is really really slow. The “jump” dialog is busted – the cursor is placed on the “Go” button by default, not on the date fields. And when you scroll the month field past year end, the year is not auto-incremented.

Addressing doesn’t search on first names. It is great that I can directly edit the “to” field and have it autocomplete names, but i am used to typing in first names and this doesn’t work. You have to type in last names – ugh.

Net/net, based on 3 days experience – I am still sticking with the Good software for now. Over the air sync is nice. But I can’t really enthusiastically recommend it yet. They need to improve performance, the calendar app, addressing, and battery life (I hope they can do over-the-air software upgrades!). Maybe the Good device is better on these fronts.