AirTran/GoGo Inflight internet on the airplane

I’m on a plane! AirTran has in-flight WiFi. $13 for 24 hours of access. Not a bad deal for WiFi, and AirTran is surprisingly nice too. Here’s the stats.

According to http://speedtest.cfl.rr.com I get 2480kbps downstream, 291kbps up. This is enough that I can stream Colbert Report on Hulu.

The airplane wifi is letting me SSH, use IRC, all IM networks, and full web access. IP is 12.130.117.56, proxied through 172.19.134.2:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE14)

Ping latency to google.com is consistently between 150-153 ms. Traceroute yields nothing, maybe it is blocked. Not a problem for me.

Of course, through all these miracles (37k feet in the air, Mach 0.785/514 mph), accessing twitter.com is still inconsistent.

RSS Feed, side 2

New Point of Order: Ignore previous Point of Order.

You don’t need to update RSS anything. There’s a plugin that handles everything for WordPress forwarding to Feedburner.

I think the moral here is to ask Google before you do anything. [edit: Turns out I had an email in my inbox from Greg telling me that this plugin existed. So, new moral here: “ask Greg before you do anything.”]

RSS Feed

Point of order: At Greg‘s suggestion, I’ve started using Feedburner for my RSS. You should update your RSS readers with the new URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MrRosenblattTheBlog

Orlando commuting.

Apparently the local schools have made some changes to their hours. High schoolers go at 9am, elementary school at 7am. It’s had a noticeable effect on traffic in the mornings, in a way that is opposite of good.

I made a list of things that I would rather do than my morning commute, but realized it was too obscene and grotesque to be posted on the internet.

Instead, I drew a picture of the various routes I could take for my morning commute. I sincerely hope you enjoy it. You can try and let me know what you think about it, but I’ll probably be stuck in traffic.

New Theme

My blog has a new theme. Classic Tim flavor, new box.

This might affect you if you were subscribed to an RSS feed. I think the themes have their own RSS URL structure. But, if you were subscribed to http://www.timrosenblatt.com/blog/, then you should be okay. Of course, if you were subscribed to the old one, you wouldn’t be seeing this anyways.

Drums!

I’ve been practicing my drums lately. I’m better now, more than before.

Before I start the links, here’s an article I found discussing how serious drummers can be more physically fit than top athletes. So um, I’m not making noise, I’m exercising! 😀

There’s some links that I wanted to have handy, and I figured I’d share them on here so that others could see them.

Dr Beat Metronome — I’ve heard that Dr Beat are the best. This one seems nicely priced, and has lots of good features. I’ll probably order it soon, since the metronome on my iPhone just isn’t good enough anymore.

Playing with a metronome

Drum Practice Cheat Sheet — lots of good info in here. If I ran throught his full practice schedule consistently, I’d be really good.

MySpace + OpenID. Can OpenID have blinking text and bad HTML?

MySpace announced they’ll be creating OpenIDs for their users. Although, it’s not full support for OpenID — users can only use their MySpace logins for other sites, but not for signing into MySpace. I’m not sure why they do this, I doubt it’s for any technical or spam-prevention reasons. It seems like a business decision, one that might change in the future.

This might be the tipping point for OpenID. Average MySpace users might not know what OpenID is, but when sites start saying “Sign in with your MySpace account,” people might start noticing. Granted, this might make phishing for MySpace accounts easier, but that was already as easy as catching fish in the frozen food section at the grocery store. 😀

A monkey wrench in monkey patching.

If you’re involved in the process of writing code on any real level, you should be a reader of Coding Horror. It’s written by a guy named Jeff Atwood, and he’s definitely got something going on between his ears.

There’s a good post from a few days ago talking about “monkey patching” which brings up some good points. A lot of code gets modified in this way, and while it makes for some really clean code at times, I can understand a maintainer of a large system to freak out when they can’t find a piece of code that they know is running. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like Flash. It’s a great language, it’s even good for teaching people OO concepts. But code can be hidden anywhere, and given that a lot of Flash pieces are made by people who are designers first and coders second, they tend to get code stuffed away in obscure places. This makes modifying it killer.

Another example of a great article is the one right after the monkey patching — it’s about normalizing databases and performance issues. This is an article with direct real world implications. If you work with databases, this post is straightforward and simple truth.

Definitely get this blog in your RSS reader. I’ve got it.

Gorbachov: The Music Video

This Gorbachov music video is insane. There’s some Russian history going on, and some metal, and some hot girls with Twinkies. This video is bizzare, but totally awesome.

Thanks to Corey for the link.

Ever done IT?

If you’ve ever worked in IT, watch The Website Is Down. It’s one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while. If it’s not funny to you, you’ve never worked in IT.