Julian C. Dunn

Meredith & I went to Nuit Blanche in Toronto over the weekend and came across Science & Sons‘ installation on the grounds of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health on Queen Street West. They welded together a series of trumpet horns with mouthpieces into which you could plug iPod earphones. I knew this looked familiar, so I visited their website – to discover that they are the ones responsible for the Phonofones exhibited this year at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (TOAE)!

For those who weren’t able to attend TOAE this year, Science and Sons have crafted iPod “phonographs” out of ceramic, into which one can plug earbud headphones. Thus, by using solely passive amplification, the output of one’s iPod can be boosted to up to 55 dB. Phonograph horn technology is, thusly, born again.

Right now the Phonofones, starting at CAD $450, are slightly beyond our budget, although they would definitely make a fascinating and practical conversation piece (no pun intended). I’m hoping that Science & Sons can reach some sort of licensing deal with a manufacturer to produce them on a larger scale.

WordPress 2.2.3 was released a little while ago, and I finally thought I should say something about the upgrade process as documented. Can anyone think of a reason why I can’t just download the tarball and diff the contents against the previous version’s tarball, and then run the upgrade.php? That’s certainly what I’ve been doing so far, and have not had any problems. This way I also don’t need to “watch out” for dangling objects in my wp-content directory, since that stuff will get ignored by the patch file. I only wish the WordPress authors could issue a patch file so that I don’t need to do this myself (and it would be nice if the authors could also tar up each distribution from a directory named wordpress-x.y.z instead of just wordpress)

In other news, I decided to fly to Dallas, TX this year to attend the LISA conference, sponsored by the USENIX Association. It’s my first time going to LISA, mostly because of the expense of doing so. Fortunately, this year I have some Air Canada Aeroplan points to use, so my airfare is essentially free (except for the $131.02 in taxes that I have to pay), but registration is still costing me around $700 and the hotel will be $875. All in all, I expect to spend just short of $2,000 on the conference. Sadly, my employer doesn’t have a policy around paying for conferences. They only reimburse for training programs, and even those need to be approved via a lengthy bureaucratic process. Hopefully my manager and I will, at some point, manage to convince the HR folks that the best “training” you can give an IT person is to keep them up to date with new developments in the relevant field, rather than sending them on meaningless courses.

Highpoint has finally updated their Linux Open Source Driver for the RR174x series of SATA RAID adapters. I’m hoping that this will resolve the inability to compile the driver under newer versions of the Linux kernel, such as for the updates that have been issued for Fedora 7. However, my Linux box at home is currently turned off, since I’m on vacation. I won’t have a chance to test it until I get back, but I thought other users of this hardware might be interested!

Before I left on vacation, I was using one of CBC‘s cast-off Power Macintoshes (grey G4 tower with 256 MB of RAM) as a build box for creating a MacPorts port of the AMANDA backup system. I tarred up the Portfile and associated patches and have them available – if anyone using a Mac wants to help me test them while I’m away from my regular computer, please drop me a line via the comments and I’ll send it to you!