Kurt McKee

Last weekend a friend gave me a 20" LCD monitor, saying simply that it didn't work, but that I could have it.

That evening I disassembled it and discovered that it had five blown capacitors. No problem! I ordered the replacement capacitors from digikey.com, and tonight I soldered them in. The monitor works like champ, now! Sadly, this means that I'm finally saying goodbye to my old 19" CRT, the amazing Sony CPD-G410R. It's served me faithfully (and bowed my desk) for almost a decade now.

Side note: there's a bizarre anomaly I wasn't able to identify: a bright patch of yellow in the upper-left corner that is literally sitting on top of, or behind, the display. There's obvious parallax with this thing, and it's "cut" at a perfect right angle. Online forums claim it's tape, but after disassembling five layers into the monitor, I decided to cut my losses lest I damage it through incompetence. One of these days maybe I'll get up the gumption to dismantle it enough to fix it.

...and when I opened the power supply I discovered a large hunk of clay stuck to the side, right next to the fan. Taking a screwdriver, I chiseled at the blob. It split in two, revealing the inside to be hollow, and out tumbled - I counted them all - 15 spider corpses.

It's disturbing that these proud spiders had to huddle in fear in a pueblo until they died.

Last week my boss gave me a PC he had received with a bad motherboard. There are some blown capacitors, he said, but maybe you can use some of the other parts. I decided immediately to use it as a learning experience: it was time to learn how to replace capacitors!

I ordered the replacement capacitors from digikey.com, and as soon as they arrived I soldered them in. I plugged in the PC and heard a piercing, high-pitched whine from the power supply, which told me there was a third blown capacitor - awesome - but a quick switch with a known-good power supply demonstrated that my soldering job had worked.

Today, feeling very empowered, I grabbed every old, broken motherboard I could find and checked for bad capacitors. There are about a dozen capacitors now in the mail, destined to fix two PCs and a power supply and gain me a lot more practice.

I have been lying awake for over an hour, and it finally occurred to me that I could drink something strong to help get my brain to stop thinking. I went to the cabinet and discovered that someone has locked up every bottle of alcohol in the house, and didn't tell anybody where the key is. We've had a number of people come help us move furniture out and clean the house recently, so I know that someone outside of the family found the key and took it upon themselves to do this.

It reminds me of a story my dad told me a number of years ago regarding a friend or relative that came to visit when he and mom were first married. She happened to discover a bottle of very, very expensive wine that he had been given as present...and proceeded to dump the entire bottle down the sink while he was out of the room. Needless to say, Dad was absolutely livid when - after having acted in guilty secret - the person came to him and self-righteously announced what she had done.

Teetotalers that foist their personal beliefs on others suck.

UPDATE - Fixed the final sentence to more accurately reflect what I meant.

UPDATE - Oh, and it turns out that my brothers locked up the alcohol as a joke, thinking I would notice immediately. In actuality it took so long for me to notice that they were both out-of-state and had forgotten about it entirely!

While I had at first thought that urlnorm would be a generalized URI normalization tool, it's become apparent to me that I have no interest in dealing with specialized schemes (such as irc, goim, or even mailto). Really all I want is a bit of software that can deconstruct HTTP and HTTPS URLs, normalize those parts, and put the whole thing back together. Furthermore, I want it to be able to handle a URL typed in by a user without a scheme prepended. Browser address bars handle this like champions, and it's important to have this functionality in the context of typing your favorite website's URL into a feed reader and getting back a feed to subscribe to.

That's urlnorm's primary purpose, but there's a secondary purpose that's as-yet unrealized: a simple way to strip out crud that's attached to URLs for marketing and tracking purposes. Feedburner is a service that does this, as do many, many other services, and it drives me bonkers to see people link to things with all of those additional tracking bits still attached!

So it's nice to have that figured out. I hope to have a release ready soon.

On Friday morning I configured some hardware at one client site, and was pleased when the process took significantly less time than I had expected. Unfortunately, I arrived at a client site that afternoon, feeling invincible, and brisked through brimming with greetings and casual compliments. After a short while I realized that I was acting like a guy I knew in college.

His name was Chris, and I couldn't stand him. He knew everyone, everyone knew him, he was friendly and funny, but he was absolutely the most disingenuous person I've ever met. I remember when I first put my finger on why I disliked him: I was seated with a group of people at the cafeteria, and as most of the group was getting ready to head out, Chris walked in. Greeting, one-liner, one-two shoulder massage, slap on the back, noncommittal deflection, big smile, and point at a guy he should totally hang out with real soon as he walks away to do the same thing at another table.

After he walked away, the rest of the group broke away, leaving me and a girl named Tiffany briefly alone at the table. Tiffany shook her head and said You know, as nice as Chris is, I just can't stand him. If he asked me how I was and I said "Dying of cancer," he wouldn't hear it at all. He'd already be on to the next person in line. He doesn't care at all. And that was Chris.

When I realized I was acting like that on Friday, I was disgusted with myself. I know I sometimes use the mannerisms I just caricatured above, but I do it on purpose and doggone it, I usually hear and remember what the person said to me. Friday, however, I was feeling really good about myself and for some reason it manifested as disinterested glad-handing. I wasn't listening to anyone, I was just intrusively greeting people like I was fulfilling a quota.

...Nobody was dying of cancer, but still.

For a long time I've loved having the Link Widgets extension for Firefox installed; it has very powerful navigational tools that look at the webpage content and determine what the "Next" and "Previous" pages are, relative to the current page. (As an example, if I'm viewing a comic from May 23, the May 22nd and May 24th comics are the previous and next pages, respectively.) If the webpage doesn't provide explicit semantic links to adjacent pages in the HTML, Link Widgets will look through the webpage for links with words like "next", "back", and "previous". And if it doesn't find anything like that, it will actually look at the URL and guess that a number like "23" (following my May 23rd comic example) can be decremented and incremented for the previous and next URLs!

However, while reading The Adventures of Tintin - Breaking Free I was struck by the extraordinary difficulty of fidgeting with my mouse to click "next" (either the in-page link or the Link Widgets toolbar button). Then, after reading the entire thing, I accidentally pressed Ctrl+, instead of Ctrl+L and was surprised that the previous page loaded instead of the focus jumping to the address bar.

Lo-and-behold, Link Widgets supports keyboard shortcuts for going forward or backward in a sequence of webpages: Ctrl+, and Ctrl+. (the mnemonic being the left and right angle brackets also on those keys). There's absolutely no documentation of this feature, so I wanted to share not just that this great extension exists, but that it has convenient keyboard shortcuts for people like me who prefer to lean back in a chair with a keyboard instead of hunching over the desk with a mouse.

Bonus: I no longer need the Link Widgets toolbar visible, since with these two keyboard shortcuts and the Alt+up shortcut I already knew about, I have all the functionality at my fingertips that I want from the extension!

While at Chipotle with Eric, who was wearing a bright red shirt with a giant bat emblazoned across the front:

Jesse the cashier: I'll give you your meal for free if you give me your shirt.
Eric: But...I'm kind of using it right now.
Jesse: I know, it's just that I'm obsessed with bat shirts right now.
Kurt: Aw yeah, this girl is completely bat shirt loco!

Last weekend I started coding up a URL normalizer. The idea is that it will be able to take a URL and change it to its canonical form, so that http://KURTMCKEE.ORG:80 will become http://kurtmckee.org/. Most of that time was spent coding up some proof-of-concept functions. This weekend I added IP address conversion math to accommodate all of the degenerate forms that IP addresses could potentially take. I also kicked out some unit tests and figured it was time to push the code to github. Check it out.

This isn't a release announcement; the software is sketchy at best right now, and won't function properly. The only thing it can competently do right now is manipulate IP addresses! However, my vision is ultimately to have a tool that might could rip out query variables that add visit tracking cruft to the URL, such as those added by Feedburner.

I've been fairly dissatisfied with my personal life of late (actually, that's been true for months, but I had a brief glimmer of sunshine for the past two or three weeks that has, at its end, highlighted the problem). I rarely turn my computer on, and I never do any programming. I rarely even play video games anymore, and blogging? Fuhgeddaboudit.

When I figure out what's been derailing my personal life, there's going to be a reckoning.