The Blog of Jason "Jayce" Olshefsky

This year I decided I’d begin the process of replacing the Macintosh PowerBook G3 Firewire that just turned 10 years old yesterday. I had upgraded it to the maximum 2GB RAM and it’s still a fine machine. It’s just showing its age with sheer speed, particularly with browsing websites to find information about events and bands. So last month I ordered a Mac Mini (mid-2010) — that’s apparently the clumsy official name, by the way — and started working with it. Well, having started from OS 8.1 on the PowerBook and as far back as System 7 on the LC III I had out of college, a huge portion of the software I have runs, as they say now, “in the Classic environment.” OS X 10.3.9 suported Classic, largely because it ran on PowerPC hardware.

Well the Mac Mini has Intel chips and would never boot up any of the Classic systems. As such, support for it was dropped a few OS X releases ago. I figured I’d give the emulator SheepShaver a go — it professes to run nearly all software in Classic with the caveat that it apparently crashes a lot. I succeeded in getting it to boot up a Classic session (and ran comparable to the Powerbook) but it would not run FileMaker Pro. That’s the software package that I use a lot. So big bummer there. I really don’t want to buy the latest version because it’s rather expensive and I’d prefer to go with something open-source and with a little more staying power (such as MySQL which seems to have a big enough head of steam that it’ll be around for a while.)

The dilemma was how to continue to do work; the solution is a mess. I keep the PowerBook running most of the time specifically to have access to FileMaker Pro 5 and Quicken Deluxe ’98 (only the name is not Y2K compliant). I wrote an AppleScript that does two things. First, when one of several scripts I wrote for FileMaker Pro request opening a website, it sends the request to the Mac Mini and opens it there. Second, and more terrifying, is that it synchronizes the clipboard between the two machines, so if I copy the name of a book in FileMaker Pro, it’s available on the Mac Mini clipboard so I can search Amazon, and if I copy a Google Maps link, it’s available on the PowerBook and in FileMaker Pro.

I decided that I’d start migrating to something new, and it looks like that time is now. I don’t intend on making JayceLand look or work any different (just as when I integrated the WordPress blog), but I might shoot for bring it up-to-date in terms of, say, 2005 or so. I have long considered making the whole website web-only rather than the hodge-podge I have had for the last 10 years or so. And up until now, it would have violated the one rule I have about JayceLand: it should be the least amount of work for me. But man, this whole AppleScripted FileMaker Pro’d PowerPC-Classic-OS X-Intel thing is quite a hassle.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I did away with Google ads on my blog pages and the Amazon advertising on the archive. I really only make money from the ads on the Fat Burning Soup Diet Results page that I made back in 1996. It apparently attracts people who like to click on ads, occasionally buying stuff, so pretty much all the ads will live there. That, and a few friends [well, as best I can tell, just Jan] click through the Amazon link to buy stuff.

I’m not trying to be a cult follower by mentioning this again, but this stems directly from Chris Guillebeau‘s book, The Art of Nonconformity: 279 Days to Overnight Success. He mentions that novice Internet users believe that you have approved all links on your page — and the majority of the readership is novice Internet users. This is a kind of perfect storm disaster: it sends your readers off your site, and with good odds that it will be an unpleasant experience which they attribute to you giving bad advice. I have been cautious to place ads, but I had confidence that Google would provide good ads.  However, their ads have been at best mediocre and at worst irrelevant.

I’ll continue to link to Amazon when I mention book titles because I think that — despite the commercial purpose of the site (and their occasionally very questionable business practices) — Amazon is a good resource for reviews and information about a media title. Not to mention, I get a cut if anyone buys a copy … although so far, I don’t think anyone has actually purchased a linked book or movie.

So hopefully JayceLand will be a better experience — especially for those who are not reading the comments in the style sheets. [Hint: nobody wins on that quip for there is nothing interesting in the style sheets, and the vast majority of users have no idea what I'm talking about anyway.]

As best I can remember and as best I can tell, the first official meeting at O’Bagelo’s (165 State St.) happened on January 16, 1999.  So now it’s ten years later to the day and, despite not stopping by this weekend, I’m still basically going every week.  It used to be a hub of activity for all my college friends to catch up on the week.  As the years passed, though, friends moved away, or they just stopped coming.  In the interim, I started writing up events for this crazy website and have pretty much kept with it every week.  Looking back, it sure seems like a lot of work.

So I went ahead and upgraded WordPress to the [at present] most-recent version of 2.6.3. It actually went pretty painlessly and I’m excited that there’s a new widget for tag clouds (I had been running 2.3.1 that I installed almost exactly a year ago). If you’re on the main JayceLand page, then you’ll have to go to the blog home page to see them. Even the plugins still work, and the theme I tweaked seems to function okay too (although I’m now using the built-in sidebar instead of a custom one).

I didn’t like the performance of Digg so I went ahead and took out the Digg badges from the JayceLand home page blog entries although I left the customized ones in the sidebar. You can still find the badges present on the blog pages, though since they integrated better into WordPress.

I also removed all but a text-link for the Amazon.com advertising. So in all, things should be just a little faster.

As you may have already noticed, I took one more step to modernizing this site: I added buttons to go to digg. It’s a way to share site rankings between people so someone else can find something they want. I set it up to have links off the JayceLand home page and associated archives as well as to individual blog entries with the deliciously vanilla digg IT.

For now I’m not sure of the ramifications of digg aside from bragging rights when that “1 digg” I entered becomes 2 — meaning that at least one other person clicked the button. If this works out, I don’t think it should be too hard to additionally include things like del.icio.us.

Of course, a major rebuild of the whole site is in order — that’s why the digg links are positioned so poorly on the JayceLand home page. Although I like the idea of maintaining compatibility to the dark ages of Netscape 3 and such, I also have a rule that the site maintenance should be easy: this ancient compatibility is starting to get in the way. And besides, even I can’t get my Mac SE to successfully access anything on the Internet anyway: neither MacWeb 2.0 nor NCSA Mosaic beta work anymore.

In related news, I added a more harsh Amazon.com advertisement to the right sidebar of the home page. I personally have the scripting for that feature blocked (using NoScript), but it seems pretty neat to be able to see the most recent “hot” deals. Then again, it’s not like I really make any money that way so I wonder if it annoys people too much.

I just noticed the other day that the JayceLand Archive was not working right. It would show only the last two weeks (March 20 and March 13) but then stopped and didn’t show any until November of last year. I thought it had to do with there being no entries on March 6.

Here’s what really happened:

The archive is just a bunch of files named according to the date. To automatically generate the “new” part of the archive, the software makes a note of the most recently published date (i.e. the most recent Thursday before today). It scans through the blog entries in reverse-chronological order and assembles a list of the short descriptions until it gets to an entry that’s older than the week it’s working on. If there’s a file for the Thursday it’s on, it displays the link and list of short descriptions as seen in the archive, subtracts 7 days from its marker, and starts accumulating the next list of short descriptions; repeat until there’s no more blog entries.

The devil is in the details and, like all annoying computer bugs, it’s to do with an incorrect assumption on the part of the programmer (me). When I calculate the most recent Thursday’s date, I set the time portion of the day to midnight — dates are represented by the number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1970. Then, when I need to go back a week, I just subtract 7 * 86,400 (the number of seconds in one day).

Did you get the bug yet?

The incorrect assumption is that all days are 24 hours. There are two that are not: the days when we change in and out of Daylight Saving Time. So March 9 was 23 hours. When my “Thursday” marker passed that Sunday, it was not “Thursday at midnight” but rather “Wednesday at 11 p.m.” Since there were no files marked with a Wednesday date, no lines were displayed. At least until it got past November 4, 2007 when we had a 25-hour day and the marker was back to Thursdays again, allowing it to correctly show the entry for November 1, 2007 (when I started the blog).

I gotta say that programming is pretty weird sometimes.

I figured I’d try doing some regular blogging instead of the essays I was used to. The idea is to make it easier for me — what usually happens is I get to Wednesday night and start hammering away at trying to write something coherent. I think it might be easier to dump my thoughts into a blog and let the chronology sort it out.

So, at the advice of my friend Mike, I’m trying to use WordPress. Right now I have it set up to just insert blog entries into the old JayceLand page in place of an introductory essay, but I think I’ll soon be changing the site over to more of a WordPress-centric design.

The other thing I did was to quit the titles. Now it’s just the start-date of the events calendar. When I first started, I was using movie sequel numbers to match the update number, but they petered out around 9 or so. Then there were various common things like 39 being the width of a twin bed in inches. But that soon ran dry as well. Most of the recent titles have been in reference to events that happened that many years ago. But searching for an event, birth, or death that definitively occurred in a particular year before 1550 or so is getting to be a royal pain. So, I figured I’d give up on it.

Basically, this should all be easier for me. For you reading the site, well, I think there may be more blog entries (with categories) and I suppose there’s feeds, permalinks, and comments and other such technology. Of course, the titles go the way of the dodo and there will no longer be a proper essay — so no longer neatly joining the events of the past week together.