general news Articles


Resurrecting old posts

Seemingly appropriate for the week after Easter, I've gone through some old draft posts and decided to publish them. A couple that were mostly ready and I decided to push out: Slathering Xcode Variants Test without building and SPM And one that I did a bunch of additional work and …

Static pages-18 months on

In 2018, I wrote about the move to convert Gaige's Pages to a static generation model. I followed this up in mid-December of that year describing the drop in processing and response time. After 18 months of running the site (and Cartographica's Blog as well) on Pelican, I wanted to …

Follow-up on static pages

At the beginning of the month, I wrote about the move to convert Gaige's Pages to a static generation model. Today I'm following up with some performance graphs. There's absolutely nothing surprising here, but it's good to see nonetheless that things work as they should. Look to the right of …

Gaige's Pages moves to static generation

Gaige's Pages has been through a lot of changes over the last 15 years, since I did the first major revamp of the site. At that time, I was converting from a statically generated site that I was manually creating (with a little help from DreamWeaver) to Geeklog, a venerable …

The Age of Deception

Occasionally, in the vast expanse of the internet there are gems from people I know and respect. I'm not going to summarize, because the entire article, The Age of Deception , is worth reading by itself. Thanks, ssh.

New server, new design

Hi folks. We're back on the air with a new server and a new design. Hopefully this less noisy design is a bit more palatable. Any links to the old site will cease to function today, but there weren't many anyway (according to Google Webmaster Tools), but we have preserved …

Flash, ubiquitous mediocrity

So with all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over Adobe Flash in the last few days, I just wanted to make sure I got this little tidbit in. When it comes to user experience, Adobe just doesn't understand. Their "platform" of flash brings a mediocrity born of …

First media rant of the year

That didn't take too long. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has a column coming out tomorrow (which I won't link to because of my theory that this is all about the flame bait and web hits). The article basically states that Glenn Beck is more admired than The Pope …

Pogue on an author's view of DRM for books

David Pogue (NY Times) has written a blog entry about his experience as an author selling an ebook with no DRM... and it wasn't the end of the world, or even his career as an author. With the nook and a possible Apple tablet coming to contend with the Kindle …


AT&T's complaining about iPhone users

I'm an iPhone user... my wife (Hi, Carol!) is an iPhone user, and I even have an iPhone set up for development purposes that doesn't get used for anything else (despite the fact that we pay for it monthly). I also have an AT&T Data card, for use when …

Timing a UPS

In line with my BackUPS/SmartUPS story earlier today, I wanted to say a little something about how I "watched" it. First, I am very pleased with my KILL-A-WATT for figuring out the real load (not needing to trust the meter on the UPS, which was reasonably accurate), so I …

SmartUPS not equal BackUPS

This is one of those "should have figured that out myself" problems, but I figure I will warn anyone who might be in my shoes.... Check the specifications carefully before investing in an APC UPS. Not that I'm going to suggest going with another manufacturer, just that I'm going to …

Replacing old and busted music

In the process of moving, I had occasion to find my CD collection (yes, intellectual property fans, I have every single CD that I used to load my iPod with). I decided that it was time to replace the nasty 128kbps CBR MP3 encoded with the zing encoder using a …

Andy Grove lays out electricity initiative

Andy Grove (venerable former CEO and Chairman of Intel), has published a proposal for energy change in the US that's quite a bit different from what most people are calling for, but makes some real sense. The article (from Portfolio.com via Wired) calls for a move to electrify transport …

Bad network card takes out Dublin radar, we were there

This past week, Carol & I were in Ireland for the OpenStreetMap State of The Map conference (small, but interesting). However, not everyone who was supposed to be there showed up. Apparently, Thales (large French aerospace company that makes Magellan GPS devices) had put in a €100M ATC system in Dublin …

Politics meets XKCD

Some of you may already know about XKCD, an online comic strip that is drawn 3 times a week with stick figures and alternating deep, obscure, or inane subjects. In this election year, it should be no surprise that somebody decided to run a campaign using XKCD-style stick figures. It's …

Generation X Lament

The Grand Junction Free Press has an opinion piece today called "Where have all the X-es gone?" written by Marjorie Asturias-Lochlaer (apparently a staffer at the paper, since I can't find any national credentials). Although definitely a lament, and not quite a screed, I'm thinking that the minority status of …