Jordan and I went canoeing on the Bushkill River on Mother's Day as part of an effort to get Jordan, Luke and our friends Jess and Dylan's two-year-old twins used to the idea of being in a boat. We started off putting all four kids in the boat, and then Sue and Jess dragged them up and down the bank for a while (exceedingly cold work, given that it was only about 70 degrees out, and the water was far colder). Once the little kids had had their full of the water, I took Jordie out in the (slightly) deeper water. The water was about two feet deep in this picture, giving us just enough clearance to go paddling.

The dent you see in the side of the canoe is not from me; rather it's a legacy of a disastrous family canoeing trip on the Delaware River when I was a kid that ended with said canoe colliding with a rather rock after our first encounter with rapids.

I've made a few tweaks to Nuketown's information gathering capabilities, updating a newer verison of the Google Analytics module for Drupal that includes the ability to track downloads and monitor Drupal search terms. I've also added the FeedBurner module and redirected the primary feed and the podcast feed to FeedBurner.

The upgrades should be transparent to everyone; the old feeds automatically forward to the new FeedBurner ones, so no one should have to resubscribe to anything (or so say my tests with iTunes and the Radio Active feed earlier today).

The ultimate goal here is to get a better grip on download numbers for Radio Active. Analog, Dreamhost's stat crunching program, tells me that Nuketown averages about 8,500 MP3 download requests a month. That seems crazy high to me, and I have no way of knowing how many of those requests failed, and how many successfully completed.

It did raise my curiosity however.

Thus, the new FeedBurner and Google Analytics modules, both of which should tell me more about what's really going on. I've also changed Nuketown's access.log from a 3-day log to a 30-day one, and with all three tools at my disposal I should be able to get a better idea of what Radio Active's audience really is.

I spent a couple of days messing around with Darwin Streaming Server, the open source port of Apple's Quicktime Streaming Server. Here's what I learned from my poking and prodding of Darwin installed on a Redhat Linux box:

1. Darwin streams over port 7070 by default. There's an option to have it stream over :80, but since Apache also uses :80 to serve web pages the two servers will conflict if you're planning on running them on the same box.
2. Darwin will stream .mov and .mp4 files, but the movies must be hinted. I'm not sure how one goes about hinting an .mp4 file; I assume you can add such hints via Final Cut Pro.
3. Darwin will not stream individual MP3s, but it will stream MP3s as part of a playlist. The Quicktime Streaming Server under Mac OS Server may appear to stream individual files, but in reality it just pretends to do that by by creating playlists for each individual file. You could do the same with DSS, but it's cumbersome via the web interface; it's likely something you'd want to script. On a related note, there is "muse" add-on for Icecast (another open source streaming server) but it has the same playlist limitation; there's no streaming of individual files outside of a play list.

It's Primary Day in Pennsylvania, that long anticipated Democratic political apocalypse. Obama's got chalk slogans at the college, while Ron Paul activists have papered College Hill with signs. We got three phone calls from the Democrats yesterday reminding us to vote, and our house has been hit by both Obama and Clinton volunteers, neither of whom stayed to talk, instead choosing to slip fliers into our door. I blame the dogs, though they never scared off the Mormon missionaries...

As for me ... being the independent minded guy I am (and registered Libertarian to boot) I don't get to vote in either primary, so I'll just sit back and watch the spectacle.

As more geeks begin contemplating middle age, it seems more of us are also thinking of doing something about our expanding waistlines. The hosts of the GutCheckCast are looking to do exactly that.

In episode #0, Doug Rapson (Geek Acres) and Zach Ricks (Geek Survival Guide) layout their goals for this project: each wants to get fit, lose weight, and use their new weekly netcast (and the combined willpower of the Podosphere and Twitterati) to do it. They also talk about their current exercise regimes -- Doug's lunch time walks and Dance Dance Revolution, Zach's Couch to 5K experiment -- and their hopes to lose weight without doing a radical overhaul of their diets.

I wish them the best of luck; getting fit's a hard thing to do, but I think both of them are up to the challenge. I've already fought my own weight-loss battles (chronicled here on Nuketown) and I'm planning on fighting another skirmish this spring in an attempt to get my own weight back under 200. I'm looking to these guys for inspiration, and plan on giving them some in return.

I got to spend too much time the last two days fighting the good fight while trying to update and redeploy a Firefox extension that creates a toolbar of popular links for the college where I work. Firefox toolbar are nifty creatures, but they can be finicky.

To start, in order to even offer one on your web site, and to have it be downloadable as more than a page of digital vomit, you need to make sure your server's configured to serve the Firefox extention document type, as documented in Mozilla's "Extension Packaging" instructions.

I'm giving a brownbag presentation on what's new on the Web at work tomorrow, looking at the best of what's come out since this time last year. What follows are the rough draft of my notes. I've persnally used about half of these sites; the rest were suggested by the Tribe on Twitter. I'm still looking for suggestions, so if you have any, please feel free to post a comment.

I've been spending a little too much time lately deleting spam user accounts from Nuketown. These are accounts that you, gentle reader, never see; they're created by spambots hellbent on promoting all manner of products, and I kill them before they can stick their spammy little necks out into the sunlight.

However, it was a manual process and, depending on how many I got on a given day, a time consuming one as well. So I've decided to deploy Drupal's Captcha module, and configured it demand answers to math-based questions as part of the account creation process.

Only new users will see the captcha; returning visitors won't have to answer the question to log in. It's also protecting the "contact us" form; anonymous users will have to answer the question, registered users will not.

Now to see if it actually stops the spammers...

"How many Harry Potter movies are there?" Jordan asks me from the back seat of the Wrangler as we drive around Easton. The question isn't surprising; she's just watched Chronicles of Narnia and has decided she's ready to watch the first Harry Potter movie.

"Well, there are seven books," I said, "but there are going to be eight movies, because they're splitting the last book into two films."

There's a pause, then Jordan says "Eight minus two is six."

This seems like a non-sequitur to me. Granted, she's doing math at preschool, but why that particular equation, and why now? I mean, I'd expect eight minus one equals seven, given the conversation, but why two?

Content’s been a little light around Nuketown lately, between the holidays, being crazy business at work, and the three seasons of Stargate: Atlantis that my friend Cory lent me. This has create a pent of demand in the writing portion of my brain, which is screaming for more work. To that end, I’ll be endeavoring to get back to a daily schedule on Nuketown, writing at least one new post a day throughout April.

It’ll be a mix of blogging, reviews, essays and podcasts – in short, everything you expect, just more arriving more frequently. I’m hoping that combined with the new and improved comment system, it’ll help liven things up around here a bit.