Yesterday was this blog's ninth anniversary. I started out using Blogger, but Blogger was configured to FTP the files to my desktop computer, a NeXT machine which also acted as a server on the Internet. (We had no firewalls at all in those days. Every computer was literally a peer on the Internet). . This was before Google bought Blogger. Later on I moved the blog, called Monolith Daily, to Blosxom (pronounced like blossom) software which ran off of my desktop computer at workBloxom provided for blog entries as simple text files.
Later down the road, as I left behind hosting my own services on the Internet, I moved Bloxom back to Blogger. This time it was fully hosted on Blogger with none of my own machines involved.
The name Monolith Daily came from the fact that my desktop computer's name was Monolith, taken from the main character of the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. The Next computer was a flat, black slab, so it sort of looked the part.
Here's the very first post on the blog.
Mon 16 Sep 2002
This is the first entry. This is just a blog to check out and experiment with the template and other such stuff.
I don't plan to keep it---it should be deleted soon.
00:29
This is the first post of substance. Initially most of the blog consisted of snippets about work activity at the time. The blog itself was mainly aimed at folks at work.
Wed 18 Sep 2002
Today, I printed out the PeopleSoft copy of the config file for the Emulex card driver. I am comparing it to the document that Chip left of me that recommends settings in the config file. For example, it has a column with my software listed. There are some differences between the PS version and the recommendation in the document. I'll come back at some point and list them.
Once I have the lpfc.conf configured correctly, I'll either try the disks, drvconfig, etc., plan.
Tomorrow the plan is to be able to see the LUNs, install Veritas Volume Manager and File System. Then build the filesystems. I also need to remember to copy the binaries and support files over from the current.
23:51
The first non-work-related entry I could find is this one. Morph a celebrity was a web site that let you distort images of celebrities, apparently it's not around any more, at least at that site.
Fri 27 Sep 2002
Okay, for hours of fun try this: Morph-a-celebrity.
21:40
This is the next non-work related post, slightly more substantial.
Fri 04 Oct 2002
Astronomy and Distance
I will be making some presentations to fifth graders at Magill Elementary on Thursday 10 Oct so I'll be out some that day but working the rest of the time.
A Micro Essay: Thinking some about that presentation has me thinking that humans like to boil all measurements (of anything, any physical quantity) down to one of three things: distance, time or a quantity (just a number). Distance seems to be our favorite. Almost everything we measure we eventually do with some sort of ``meter'' which is just some needle or indicator moving a distance.
In these latter digital days, our meters read out numbers (ultimately integers, even if we pretend there's a decimal point in there). I've heard over the years that we really don't comprehend numbers larger than seven to 10. So, when numbers get really large (1000, million, billion), guess what we are interested in then? Not the actual number, but the magnitude of the number, i.e., how many digits it has. But the number of digits is just the answer to the question, how long is the number?, which is back to length again.
We sometimes count the digits (by using a logarithmic scale) but, for most of our experience, those quantities fit nicely back into our zero to 10 range.
13:07
It was Sat 2006-06-24 when I moved the blog from Blosxom and back to Blogger and Blogspot. Here's the last entry from the Blosxom version.
Sat 24 Jun 2006
Moved Blogging
I've moved my blogging to… http://monolith149daily.blogspot.com/
…at least for now. This is an experiment of sorts. I'm sort of caught in transition on blogging at the moment and I haven't quite decided what to do. So, for now, I've gone back to Blogger and Blogspot.
I'm working on a more long-term solution (permanent would be the wrong word) for the next edition of my public blogging.
My main motivation is to move my blog to another site. A secondary motivation is that Blosxom is getting slower due to dynamically generating the views. There are a lot of files now since each posting is a file.
I can generate static pages but then the searching feature (which is really useful, at least to me) doesn't work for those pages.
My current idea is to generate a static copy of this version Monolith Daily to this posting and put it up on a site that is linked such that Google can crawl and index it. Maybe that's the way to handle blogs. After some point, freeze them and publish them as a final, static archive of some type. A set of HTML pages perhaps.
I've also changed the look and feel. I really like the old look of Monolith Daily but thought I'd try something new.
I have to say, though, I really, really like Blosxom and miss using it!
13:43
It continued here.