Last week I noticed Michael Buffington had posted some of his old blog entries from 1998, one of them linked to my site. It turns out that Michael also wrote me that day and I still had his letter and my responses. Taken together and in context, the letters form an interesting history of what we were both thinking and doing back then.

Update: Michael’s response

I didn’t realize until today that the DV-L discussion list was back. DV-L was a huge part of the DV revolution, I remember reading it back in ’97 or ’98 when I was struggling to use a 180Mhz Mac 8500 for DV. The list was a fascinating mix of people using and making tools, a lot of today’s DV products were influenced by discussions on this list.

I walked by Michael Eisner in Aspen tonight, I wish I’d said something. “Excuse me Mr. Eisner? I just wanted to tell you that you’re on the wrong side of the future. Trying to outlaw content is going to fail one way or another. There’s way more money to be made in all the various uses of digital media than there is in paying congress to try and outlaw those uses. “

A few hours later I remembered Free The Mouse. If I was 17 again I probably would have screamed that from a block away. And then thought I was a badass rebel for doing so.

There is free wireless in the Denver International Airport (crazy masonic conspiracy stuff too).

After reading Using XML on A List Apart, I’ve decided that web browsers are not quite ready for the XML ideas I wanted to use for the Joe’s Filters documentation pages. So much for write once publish everywhere. It’s going to be a while before it does what I was imagining, but I guess I’ll take a crack at XHTML.

yep, regular expressions are just plain cool.

I noticed (to my horror) that Google didn’t seem to be indexing my archives since changing to the PHP query model back on July 2. A quick bit of poking around in the Apache documentation and mod_rewrite turns out to be the solution. I’m now masking my PHP queries as static page URLs. Old permalinks still work, but now Google should be finding a lot more to index around here.

In case anyone is wondering, I added the following line to my web root’s .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^archive/(.*) /notes/notes_archive.php?a=$1

That matches anything after “archive” (and stores it in $1) then plops it onto the end of the existing PHP query. Adding a [R] to the end of that would send the altered URL back to the client, omitting the [R] masks the url.

That was much easier than I was expecting.

Damn, it happened again. All my Stickies are gone. The Powerbook needed to be force-restarted (finicky projector hosed the display) and when it came back, the Stickies file was overwritten with the defaults. This happened once before after some other hardware related force-restart.

Stickies stores its data in a hidden database file in each user’s Library folder. The path to the file is:

/Users/ Your user folder name /Library/.StickiesDatabase

View the contents by typing pico .StickiesDatabase from the Users/username/Library directory

I was thinking about creating an application to back up the original file at regular intervals, but then I had a different idea.

I moved the .StickiesDatabase file to a different location with the mv command, then made a symlink named “.StickiesDatabase” (symlink is the unix name for an alias) and pointed it at the moved file. Stickies seems to work fine and followed the link to the moved file. Now if Stickies crashes and overwrites the file, will it overwrite the alias or the original?

The commands I used were:

mv .StickiesDatabase newstickiesbackup
which moved the original file, and

ln -s newstickiesbackup .StickiesDatabase
which created the symlink.

It’s probably a good idea to back up the file anyway, but I’m going to give this a try. Maybe I’ll even force a few restarts later.