Matthew Botos

I’ve had my kitten Meadow for just about five weeks, though it already feels like she’s always been a part of my family. People have always told me cats are great company, and now I definitely agree.

It’s fun to have someone else around, even when she is getting into trouble. My place definitely looks a little more lived in: cat toys and other things she’s taken an interest in lying around, dirt pawed out of the plants, and grains of litter kicked around the bathroom. (I did pick up a good tip on the plants: put a layer of small stones over the dirt. Looks a little more elegant, too.)

I’ve had to get a bit better about defending my food; we’re still working on the concepts of “people food” vs “cat food”. But she more than makes up for the trails, by making a nice nest out of my lap while I’m on the couch or in front of the computer. (I’m one secret volcano away from becoming a Bond villian!)

I recently updated my Greasemonkey script Digg Top 10 Direct at Userscripts.org to use the Digg API, and was pleased with how simple it was. One of the reasons is that its a RESTful service, which when you put the technobabble aside, means that everything works the same way a webpage does. You want to read data, you get it like a webpage; you want to write data, you post it like a web form.

I work with a lot of systems engineers and architects who will literally talk for days about Service Oriented Architecture and SOAP vs REST and get nothing done. Meanwhile, it took me less than an hour to start using the Digg API in the above script, and only an afternoon to do a much more complicated integration with the del.icio.us API for a bookmarking tool at work. When your customer cares more about working software than hot air, is it any wonder REST is pulling ahead?

(I take no credit for the clever title.)

I demo’d the Haro Mary SS tonight, a rigid steel single speed bike with 29″ wheels. The big wheels seem to be a growing trend, so I wanted to check them out as a ponder the purchase of a replacement singlespeed for my aluminum 26″ Trek 7000 single speed conversion.

The bike definitely feels bigger; you sit taller with a longer cockpit (the frame size was also a little bigger than my other bikes). Bikesport had already swapped out the swept-back On-One Mary handlebars since few people liked them. The tires were big 2.3 inchers for a bit of shock absorption; another growing trend is to go tubeless. All this adds up to a rather heavy single speed bike at 27.5 pounds, versus 24.5 pounds for my current sprung single speed.

On the trail, the added weight wasn’t noticable. The bike did feel “bigger”, and the 29er tires roll over the big logs and log piles with ease. It was the smaller stuff that began to wear me out without front suspension; I don’t think I’m ready to go back to a totally rigid bike. The disc brakes, though mechanical, were quite adequete,  affirming my previous experience with a mechanical disk loaner on my usually hydraulic Trek Fuel full suspension. No complaints about the drive train, aside from the constant clicking from the rear hub when freewheeling.

Overall, it’s a solid bike for $900, as it should be; though for the money it’s not a compelling replacement for my current cheaper, lighter, cushier single speed. 29er bikes are a fun change though, and worth trying out if you have the chance.

For as disciplined as I am about investing, there’s one beginning rule I’ve always ignored: buy what you know. I came across this a long time ago, and the theory went that you should buy some stock in the companies whose products you use and have some connection to, making it more likely that you’ll take an interest in the news and performance of your investment.

Instead, I’ve opted for a broadly diversified portfolio of index and sector funds. The only single company stock I own is in my employer, which has actually beat the market a good number of the years I’ve been there.

That changed today, though - I bought stock in two companies who I believe in  and have been a longtime customer. They’re innovators, first movers who offer a superior product that I believe will outlive their cheaper imitators. My new picks? Tivo and Netflix.

Google just introduced embedded maps, so now you can explore my Travel Map from right here!

View Larger Map

Today’s public service message: Clean your hydration pack.

The author of this tutorial gets bonus points for not only employing extra bike parts to clean it, but for complete instructions like these:

Once the cable comes out the other end, suppress your urge to hurl as you see what you’ve been drinking recently.

I was definitely taken aback by the muck that came out of mine, which should make the next ride much tastier!

I’ve been seeing the Mac’s “spinning beach ball of death” (as Merle coined the animated busy icon) a lot lately. My MacBook is about a year old, and upgrading the 1 GB RAM seemed like the answer.

Watching the Activity Monitor and reading some web pages on the subject led me a bit astray: my memory was mostly in use, though a good chuck was blue “inactive” memory, where OS X stores extra data instead of having to go back to the disk. In practice, switching between a few big tasks (growing Firefox session, Picasa running under CrossOver emulation) was overusing it.

A Macworld article on Upgrading RAM finally filled in the missing piece: watching the page in/out counter for pages being written out to disk. Mine was ticking off at a good clip, which sealed the case for upgrading to 2 GB of RAM. It was easy enough to install, and I’ve yet to encounter the beach ball after 5 days of regular use. In fact, my “inactive” memory has swelled to 1.2 GB, leaving about 150 MB truly free. Not bad for under $100.

The pedals on my full-suspension bike broke in an all too familiar way last weekend, so I sprung for an upgrade instead of fixing them again. To try something different, I got four-sided Eggbeater pedals - the minimalist C version for my singlespeed and the platform-wrapped Candy C for my full suspension. And since cleats quickly become welded to muddy shoes, I got new shoes to go with them.

I’m not a big gram counter, but the weight savings is impressive over my old pedals:

• Old mid-range Shimano SPDs 397-425 grams
• Eggbeater C 294g
• Eggbeater Candy C 308g

100 grams isn’t so impressive as the fact that it’s a 25% reduction! The titanium Eggbeater 4Ti are even more impressive at only 167g.

The real test, of course, is in how they ride. It was an easy transition from loose SPDs to the Eggbeaters, which were a little easier to get into with four sides instead of two. I didn’t always get an audible click, but they engaged and disengaged consistently. The psychological boost of new parts helps, too - I turned in a faster ride than usual!

My meager contribution tonight to the world of open source documentation:

Gallery2:How do I Make Backups of My Database - Gallery Codex

1. Corrected an error in their example
2. Added a command sequence to dump, compress, encode, and email a database

Throw the latter in a cron job, and you no longer have to worry about doing manual backups (This is also one of those times when having shell access to your webhost rocks!)

While I often look at the monthly web stats, it’s even more interesting to look at them long-term. Crunching them for the first six months of 2007 reveals:

• 90% of traffic is for photos, most coming from image search engines
• The most popular queries are for photos:

• 276	macbook unboxing
  180	korean war memorial
  166	soldier field
  143	jokes
  124	lehua flower

• Popular photo albums were the Shore, Telluride, and MacBook Unboxing
• The MySpace crowd still hasn’t removed their now-blocked hotlinked images (Site Statistics and MySpace)
• Averaged 4100 hits per day
• Transferred over 11 GB total