Glen Campbell (Archive)

Specifically, what’s happening with the web server? I was curious, so I fetched the headers from Twitter during its scheduled downtime tonight. And, boy, this is the most bizarre thing I’ve seen in quite a while:

[Maturin:~] curl -I http://twitter.com/
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Sun, 01 Aug 2010 06:46:21 GMT
Server: hi
Status: 500 Internal Server Error
X-Transaction: 1280645180-68145-10683
X-Transaction: 1280645180-68145-10683
Last-Modified: Sun, 01 Aug 2010 06:46:20 GMT
Last-Modified: Sun, 01 Aug 2010 06:46:20 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 3339
Content-Length: 3339
Pragma: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
X-Revision: DEV
X-Revision: DEV
Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT
Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0
Set-Cookie: k=71.92.250.150.1280645177242888; path=/; expires=Sun, 08-Aug-10 06:46:17 GMT; domain=.twitter.com
Set-Cookie: guest_id=128064518059134212; path=/; expires=Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:46:20 GMT
Set-Cookie: auth_token=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: param_q=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: param_page=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: param_status=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: param_in_reply_to_status_id=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: param_in_reply_to=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: param_source=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: param_user=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: param_id=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: dispatch_action=; path=/; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: _twitter_sess=BAh7CDoPY3JlYXRlZF9hdGwrCLCsZiwqAToHaWQiJWI2MmRlN2QxMmM4MGM5%250AMzFlYWZlMzc1NDBhZThmZmNkIgpmbGFzaElDOidBY3Rpb25Db250cm9sbGVy%250AOjpGbGFzaDo6Rmxhc2hIYXNoewAGOgpAdXNlZHsA--7636f5a633a890bc270255e9449bf0b600d7ff72; domain=.twitter.com; path=/
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close

What’s up with all those duplicated headers? And what does Server: hi mean?

I’ve now been using these headphones for more than a week and, quite frankly, it’s pretty upsetting. A few years ago, I paid more than $300.00 for a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones, and I’m seriously thinking of throwing them away.

Don’t get me wrong: the Bose headphones aren’t terrible. But the bass is so amplified, so overwhelming, that the impression I get from them after hearing the Urbanears is that everything sounds muddy. The Bose have the advantage of noise cancellation, which actually works very well if there are repetitive, droning sounds (like a window fan, and air conditioner, or airplane engines). And the Bose are extraordinarily comfortable; I could wear those for hours and never get tired of the feel. The Urbanears have a tendency to pinch my ears after an hour or so, and the material of the cushioning is more like vinyl than leather so that my ears get sticky and sweaty after a bit.

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This afternoon, I came home to find a package from Sweden waiting for me. It was a pair of Urbanears “Plattan” headphones that I had ordered a few weeks ago.

Urbanears is an upstart headphone company; they say that

Urbanears is a collective out of Scandinavia, motivated by a common interest in global relationships and shared involvement in the relevance of the living brand. Urbanears promotes a deeper connection to color, form and people while providing the freedom to transcend individuality and unify the sound experience.

High ideals, certainly, and they’re certainly eye-catching, but how do they sound?

I’ll have to admit that my very first impression wasn’t good. I had been listening to my $349 Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones at work, and my initial impression was that the sound was very flat with the Urbanears. After flipping between several songs on my favorite playlist, I soon decided that these weren’t flat; the Bose headphones were indeed very muddy, with artificially-enhanced bass and poor quality high tones.

Having spent some time in a recording studio, the best analogy I can make is that these sound like a set of highly-balanced studio monitors, with an extremely flat response. I can hear high notes better with these than I ever had with the Bose. The clarity is amazing, at least to my aging ears.

I don’t think these are for everyone. If you live for the thump of the artificially-enhanced bass lines in some music, you probably won’t like these. If you like classical, jazz, or more complex music, you’ll probably appreciate the clarity.

This is just my initial impression, so I hope to report back in a few weeks to see how they stand up to repeated use.

I recently upgraded my web server to PHP 5.3 and learned, much to my shock and horror, that many of the regular expression functions I had been using for years are now deprecated. Specifically, the POSIX regular expressions are deprecated in favor of the PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression) library.

Here is the link to the PHP page explaining the differences. It will involve a fair amount of work, but the updates should be mostly straightforward.

In the future, it should make life easier, actually, because I now no longer have to remember different syntaxes for different expressions (delimited vs. undelimited, for example).

Note: some minor corrections based on comments.

Robert Scoble hits the nail on the head when he says that, “On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone.” He was responding to Louis Gray’s post on how he switched from iPhone to Android.

It amuses me to hear the ongoing debates about call quality on AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint, etc. My personal experience is, of course, nearly irrelevant (since my personal experience may have little to do with how you or someone else experiences it), but I’ve been with AT&T for 10 years now and cannot yet find a reason to change.

I live in a house in the hills east of the Santa Clara Valley. The nearest cell towers (of any variety) are over 3 miles away. I get one bar of signal strength no matter which carrier I use. When I had an Amazon Kindle (which uses SprintVerizon for its “Whispernet” service), I often had difficulties downloading books to it. Recently, I’ve installed an AT&T 3G Microcell in my home, and I now get 5 barsstars. Likewise, at work, there is an AT&T repeater. In addition, since AT&T is a partner of Yahoo!, we get a substantial employee discount on service. So, you see, I have a huge number of incentives to stick with AT&T. In addition to that, however, is the fact that I’ve almost never had connectivity problems; I suppose that, if I lived in downtown San Francisco where I competed with tens of thousands of other users, I might have problems, but I don’t.

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Do you remember dial-up Internet access? It was terrible, especially if you were on a laptop: connect the phone card, start the dialer, wait, enter your ID and password, wait some more, and then, finally, you’re on.

Broadband did away with all that. While ISPs insist on selling broadband as if the only important factor is the speed, the real killer feature is the fact that it’s always available. Especially in these days of ubiquitous WiFi and 3G internet access, all you have to do is open the lid of your laptop, pick up your phone, or start a web browser to be instantly connected to the rest of the world via the Internet. Having foolproof (relatively), immediate, “always on” access to the Internet is what really fostered the information revolution.

Tablet computers have been around for at least a decade, and arguably somewhat longer. Yet the Apple iPad managed to come on the scene and sell a million or more units in its first month of availability, launching it immediately into the stellar heights of technology fame. Why is that?

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At the suggestion of many, I’ve setup a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page to help promote the On Garner Road podcast as well as to engage better with listeners and participants. Right now, both accounts are being fed (via TwitterFeed to get all the latest posts as soon as they become available. In addition, the Twitter account is following all of the podcast’s guests; that will hopefully push some engagement there way.

So far, it’s all been done on a shoestring (i.e., non-existent) budget. I’m not taking out ads, I’m not paying for promotion; I’m just trying to build a listenable podcast and an engaging website for people to interact with.

Much to my surprise, the podcast has actually garnered a respectable amount of attention—the site, for example, is getting much more traffic than this one, for example. I’m filled with ideas for growing it and getting some more people to tell their stories on the podcast.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to make them via @OnGarnerRoad or the Facebook fan page.