Meta-Tab

Vertical Tabs

2011-12-15T03:43:00.000-05:00

There were a few key reasons for my wanting to move from Firefox to Google Chrome but the ONLY, I repeat ONLY, reason I finally gave up on Firefox and moved to Google Chrome was because there was at least some form of vertical tab sidebar option in Chrome, albeit crippled compared to tree-style-tabs.

That is... until now.

Chrome updated and now there is no possibility for this tab sidebar. And I for the life of me cannot understand why they are so fucking against having vertical sidebar tabs.

WHAT is the logical argument for it? WHAT?! If you sill live in the 90s and only keep one or a couple tabs open at all times and just love going forward and back and reloading pages, then yes, having a few tabs at the top is more efficient. But if you have a lot of tabs open it SAVES space to have a vertical tab bar. Why? because tabs are wider than high, so you can fit more tabs in the space and have them be readable before you need to resort to scrolling. On the top, you have to shorten the tabs to fit more in and have to use the scroll buttons sooner. To top that off, most screens these days are wide-screen so it's just a better use of screen real-estate; most web-pages are NOT wide screen so there is unused space unless you love to zoom or have gigantic fonts.

I think that because tabs started out on top and are therefore the norm, they are just being lazy pricks and don't want to rock the boat or put in the extra effort on behalf of the mass of us that use a lot of tabs and therefore NEED this vertical tabs on the side.

Maybe they think that we shouldn't have many tabs open ever. Or rather that we should go back to going forwards and backward ad nauseum. There are many useful and valid reasons to have a lot of tabs open. I'm not even talking 35 tabs of memory and resource gobbing youtube videos, I'm talking about normal use and even for work. Example. I often have to look up python modules and it is helpful for me to have a bunch of the ones I'm using open in their own tabs and at my fingertips and NOT have to constantly go forward and backward and search and research and load and reload. And when I'm doing a normal search I like to tab-open the links so I can compare pages and not have to back-button to the list of pages.

Come on!! WTF, man?

screen tricks

2011-10-12T11:33:00.000-04:00

GNU screen has been a staple tool for a few years now that I do most thing on remote machines. My main hangup with it is switching windows which I do a lot and requires multiple keypresses (C-a #). This can be alleviated some by splitting the screen (C-a S) so I don't have to switch as often. But that introduces yet another sequence of key strokes (C-a TAB). It's something I can only stomach on a larger screen since I hate terminals with too few lines.

It occurred to me today that I could open up to ssh sessions and have both joined to the same screen session, so that I could keep different windows open in each. Simply open the second terminal with "screen -x".

Another trick I discovered was to add the following to my bashrc.

if [ "$TERM" = "screen" ]; then
  screen_set_window_title () {
    local HPWD="$PWD"
    case $HPWD in
      $HOME) HPWD="~";;
      *) HPWD=`basename "$HPWD"`;;
    esac
    printf '\ek%s\e\\' "$HPWD"
  }
  PROMPT_COMMAND="screen_set_window_title; $PROMPT_COMMAND"
fi

And now my windows have a more sensible name; I do find myself constantly cycling through windows till I find the right screen in the right directory.

VPN, Win7, and not seeing the LAN computers

2011-10-12T02:59:00.001-04:00

Here's another one of those mystical computer problems that (at least) one wonderful genius found a solution to that defies explanation as to how he figgered it out.

Problem: I VPN in to work but for some reason cannot see what used to be called the "Network Neighborhood". Basically, if there's a file on the network that I need I can't click on the link to get to it.

Search: Turns out I can use the IP address in an explorer window to see the contents, but hell if I'm going to look up every IP address that I need. It logically leads to a lot of guesswork on the nets looking for a solution that involves network settings, DNS, configs, and even domains and workgroups. Most threads of which drop off without a satisfactory answer and an occasional "works for me"

Solution: Then I found this lonely page quite apart from the other threads in content and direction but which did the trick. How the hell are we supposed to know that something called TCP Auto-tuning would be the culprit?

solution copied here for future reference:

Disable TCP Auto-Tuning
1.Open elevated command prompt with administrator’s privileges.
2.Type the following command and press Enter:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled
Enable TCP Auto-Tuning
1.Open elevated command prompt with administrator’s privileges.
2.Type the following command and press Enter:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Browser woes

2011-09-06T02:36:00.000-04:00

I've given it as much chance as I could stand for it to somehow correct itself but at the end of the day I have to say that Firefox has failed me. FF has been my only main browser for what seems like as long as I can remember. The primary reason was that it was cross platform and for the longest time I used Linux at work and Windows on the home machines, so I could use the same browser and setup on both. But in recent years it has started to show its bloat. Maybe it was the cool add-ons I loaded, maybe not. One thing is for certain, it wasn't the speedy snappy browser of its youth. That can be forgiven but lately it's been doing something aweful on my main PC. It regularly and frequently just stalls there, whether I'm scrolling, moving the cursor, typing, anything, for several moments it would sit unresponsive, then catch up then do it again. I've recently updated to 5.x then 6.x and the problem never went away despite there being lots of "fixes". I have a habit of keeping a lot of tabs open and I've even gotten into the habit of paying special attention to close many AND to actually starting and restarting my browser in an attempt to free up resources. I ended up putting up with that for long enough, and the constant freezes were the last straw.

So lately I switched to using Chrome. I had it installed some time back but never used it as a primary browser like I intend to now. I gotta say, the snappiness and absence of stalls is refreshing. In fact, VERY REFRESHING. VERY! I'm reminded of an article that I can't remember the details of but it concerned people getting used to having to reboot Windows to solve problems, and expecting software to basically suck... all because that's the only experience many people can have. Can't really fault them for not having money to own multiple computers with different operating systems for comparison. Even I don't feel like I have the time to, say, migrate to working on a Mac when what I have works (most of the time).

Anyhow, Chrome is good. I'm going to keep using it for the time being. It's STILL missing a few things that I grew to depend on in FF, especially these add-ons: Downthemall, DWhelper, and TreeStyleTabs (and to some extent Google Toolbar). Nothing available for Chrome approaches the level of the FF versions. If either of them get their act together (what I want available in Chrome, or FF fixing their performance fiasco, though hopefully both), then I will re-evaluate. Until then, I'm going to be stuck doing most stuff in Chrome and certain things in Firefox. A bit of a sad state of affairs.

More reboot nonsense

2011-06-21T02:42:00.000-04:00

So yeh, I'm to blame for continuing to use the free Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer when there are so many other, probably better, certainly less bloated PDF viewers around. But it was convenient, been using it for over a decade, many sites that generate PDFs helpfully suggest you get it, and they're the creators of the format giving an extra false feeling of competence.

Anyways, it just gave me another notification that an update was ready so I let it update. After installing, it told me I have to reboot my computer for the changes to take effect. I'm sure it's got something to do with that accursed windows registry or something similar because for the life of me I can't think of a good solid reason for a PDF viewer to need a system restart. I know they're not the only software that requires a nonsensical system reboot. Why after how many versions of Windows do we still need to reboot when non-system/kernel/hardware changes are made?

Reboot-itis

2011-05-19T17:31:00.000-04:00

I almost popped a vein the other day with Windows 7 again. It drives me NUTS that it will auto-reboot (post-update) without your permission and no matter what you have running. In fact, I find that policy downright unprofessional. I know they think it's to "protect" the users and perhaps for the vast majority of them maybe there is some benefit; benefit as much to Microsoft as to the user. You see, if they step in as if they were you're IT department forcing you to do it their way for you're own good without choice and in the process manage to actually cut down on exploits and infections, then in the public eye Windows looks good even if they do it in a big brother fashion.

But at least have the decency to let us turn that bloody "feature" off with a simple option click. And I don't mean "Turn off auto-updates" because then you'll just be nagged. And I don't mean scour Google for registry hacks and third party software that sometimes does the trick but sometimes not. I mean an honest to goodness checkbox that says "don't reboot automatically until I say so". Not only do some of us not need it, but it actually interferes with us. My sis sometimes needs to work remotely from her main home machine when she's away and she's completely fucked if her machine decides to reboot and she's not around to turn it back on and run the proper software. Poor thing has had to call relatives to break into her home to turn it back on. And the answer should not be "oh she should install x, y, z, buy u, v, w and edit o, p, q to have l, m, n started upon boot and ...". She's not an IT professional. The simple answer is "Don't shutdown without my permission!", nag me about it later if you must.

While I'm at it... 20 years later and you still need to reboot for what feels like every little freaking thing. A driver here, a service there, registry setup change over yonder. What is it about the system that makes it impossible to just stop-service start-service restart-service and once identified to FIX IT?

(Granted, it's gotten a lot better and it's not always their fault)

Wireless hoops

2011-04-22T03:34:00.000-04:00

It's been so long since I scratch-installed Linux on my work-laptop that I had forgotten the pain in the arse it can be to get the wireless working. Not that the steps are necessarily hard nor that the howto's are that difficult to find; it's the frustration and anger when you try one recipe after the next that result in failure until magically something works.

I realise now how many problems I may potentially have avoided by putting Linux in a virtualbox on my personal laptop, where wireless is simply not an issue (all internet bridges to the ethernet port from the host). In fact there's something to be said for virtualbox essentially standardizing all the hardware such that they are not a consideration. I know it's been theorized and toyed with but I now think about how nice it could be if there were no real host (only a host shell that handles the hardware) and all OS's were in a virtual machine. The nearest I can figure for that would be an extremely stripped down Linux, but then Linux doesn't have the most complete set of problem-free device drivers in the first place doesn't it?

Anyhow, this time, the fix I have to remember can be found (among other places) here, with the key novel steps being:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --reinstall install bcmwl-kernel-source

Upper left corner

2011-04-22T03:08:00.000-04:00

I forget exactly when but at some point Ubuntu defaulted to having windows with the close/min/max buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right. For some historical reason they have always been on the upper right and it was taken for granted and people just got accustomed to expecting it there. Despite it being relatively easy to "fix" I did read some complaints on the choice. I was rather agnostic about the placement actually. In fact, since all menus are left justified (in my language anyways) it sorta makes sense to have the window menu buttons there as well.

Anyhow, today I just found a mildly compelling reason for me to prefer to keep those buttons on the upper left corner. I often enough connect my laptop to my monitor at work which is vastly bigger than my laptop screen, and in doing so I tend to enlarge and space out my windows. If I suspend and unsuspend to the smaller screen, the windows run off the page, BUT the top left corner almost always remains on the screen where I have access to these buttons but not if they were on the other side. It's a minor thing but custom and consistency is the only argument for keeping it on the upper right.

Python Logging

2011-04-18T18:16:00.001-04:00

I've been using the Python logging module for a couple of weeks now, and I want to like it because A) it's a standard module, B) it has some cool features like multiple handlers and hierarchy. But almost every time I use it I feel like I might as well just write my own logging module suitable for my purposes... because it seems like I have to do that anyways. The module just seems to require too much scaffolding and setup to use.

Here's what I mean. To do it properly you have to:

get a logger
set the verbosity level of the logger
create a file or steam handler
create a formatter (the default needs replacing)
add the formatter to the handler
add the handler to the logger
do this all again if you want to mirror to stderr AND to a file (which is why I started using logging in the first place)
put in code to shut down the logging (makes sure the streams get flushed) and for safety use the atexit module, meaning

import atexit
register the shutdown

add an exception hook so that we can log uncaught exceptions too

This is just a little too much for basic proper use, don't you think?

To be fair, there is a "simple" way to use logging which is to just use the logging module functions "BasicConfig()" and "debug|info|warning|error|etc()" functions without getting a logger for your module. But it doesn't give the behaviour I want and even they prefer you don't use it in this manner.

What I believe is missing is a set of helper-functions and/or sytactic sugar to handle common tasks.

let more things like Level and Handlers be put in the argument to getLogger
automatically wrap common things like a File-like object and filename string into a handler instead of having the need to explicitly make one.
an at-exit shutdown should be somewhat implicit (maybe an option to turn it off) as well as the option to trap other exceptions

And what I'd like to have for simple operation:

one line (minus "import") to get a logger for my module with any optional formatting and whatnot.
one line to configure the root logger with all options, that can deal with an array of logging destinations, that will auto-interpret formatting strings and destinations instead of needing to create sub-handlers and formatters, etc.

Here was my first crack at collapsing all that with two helper functions, but I hate having to add more functions to import for things that should have just been available (yes it's a bit ugly).

def add_to_logging(log,whereto=None,level=10,format="%(levelname)s: %(message)s",dateformat='%Y%m%d_%H%M%S'):
    ''' shortuct to attach a destination to an existing logging object
    logfile can be file or gzip or stream or None(meaning stderr) '''
    if whereto is None: whereto = sys.stderr
    if isinstance(whereto,(str,unicode)):
        fp = opener(whereto,'w')
    else:
        fp = whereto
    fh = logging.StreamHandler(fp)
    fh.setLevel(level)
    if format: 
        formatter = logging.Formatter(format,dateformat)
        fh.setFormatter(formatter)
    log.addHandler(fh)

def setupLogging(logname=None,rootname='',timestamp=False,consoleLevel=20):
    ''' shortcut to set up a dual stderr/logname LOGGING stream 
    default level for file is DEBUG, for console is INFO
    (set consoleLevel to 0 to turn off console)
    SEE PYTHON LOGGING DOCUMENTATION FOR LOGGING BEHAVIOR
    returns a logging object'''
    import atexit
    logger = logging.getLogger(rootname)
    logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
    dateformat='%Y%m%d_%H%M%S'
    # change the formatting if timestamp
    fmtstring = "%(levelname)s: %(message)s"
    if rootname is not None and rootname != '':
        fmtstring = "%(name)s:" + fmtstring
    if timestamp:
        fmtstring = "[%(asctime)s:%(name)s:%(lineno)s:%(levelname)s] %(message)s"
    # add a file if specified
    if logname:
        assert isinstance(logname,(str,unicode))
        #logging.basicConfig(filename=logname,format=fmtstring,dateformat=dateformat)
        add_to_logging(logger,logname,format=fmtstring,dateformat=dateformat)
    # add a console
    if consoleLevel!=0:
        add_to_logging(logger,sys.stderr,format=fmtstring,level=consoleLevel,dateformat=dateformat)

    # cleanup and exception handling
    atexit.register(logging.shutdown)
    # the following will capture exceptions to the logs as well
    sys.excepthook = lambda *x: logger.error('Uncaught Exception',exc_info=x)
    return(logger)

In the above "opener()" is a separate function I have that wraps opening a filename, file object, pipe, or what have you depending on the input and optionally with encoding. Sometimes I miss how easy that is dealt with in Perl.

Download Squad Fired!?

2011-04-12T21:03:00.002-04:00

WTF?! Did I miss something? I have a lot of feeds in my RSS reader but this would have been one of the guaranteed survivors were I forced to trim it down to the essentials. Aww man, that sucks. And not much of an explanation to go along with it. There's a gaping void in my feed list now. I valued it more than many of the other feeds they recommend as a replacement and that I even have on my feed list.

Addendum: Ok, looking deeper through the comments followed by a search, it seems AOL-Huffington Post shut them down. Again with the big media guys fracking up the good stuff. shakes fist in air

Emacs, you ugly nerd

2011-04-11T18:11:00.000-04:00

I once saw Emacs described as a "thermonuclear text processor" and I find that description fitting. Emacs is a beast. It has a really steep learning curve. But much the same way the *nix in general can have a steep learning curve, after you use it for a long enough time you grow to appreciate the raw power available over the other offerings. Some even take it up a level "Emacs IS my operating system". There are too many quirks with that for me to accept on that part though. I know I can run a shell terminal in Emacs but I never do, mostly because of how the environment seems to get screwed up just enough to turn me off.

Anyhow, I sometimes can't believe how utterly craptastic it is make Emacs look pretty by way of fonts and such. It's a freaking mess. And there is the invariable quirk with it as well. Thankfully the internet comes to the rescue. What I love most about the web coupled with a good search engine is that I often enough am able to find the workaround to a problem I'm having. Not easily some of the time but it puts a whole host of things within the realm of possibility. Most recently I wanted to correct the annoying issue of Emacs not using the default font when opening a new frame via C-x 5 2. Found the snippet of code I needed to add to my .emacs file almost immediately.

Only thing I really regret about using Emacs as much as I do is never having learned Lisp. It's always been on my someday list.

FF4

2011-04-11T15:14:00.000-04:00

I installed Firefox 4 partly because I simply wanted the speed improvements and partly because of newest-gadget-syndrome. I'm pleased to report that I am digging the loading speed improvement immensely. As for the better handling of memory, even with the feature where it will unload unvisited tabs after some time and it can be set to not load all tabs at startup, I find myself again running into the issue of FF taking up way to much memory and slowing to a crawl.

The fatal flaw with FF4 was that they didn't go far enough and just up and swallow the BarTab add-on, the first or second most critical addon in my FF arsenal. I was really dismayed that BarTab hadn't been updated to work with FF4 yet. I tried the tweaks and suggestions to get some of that functionality that's built-in to FF but it just doesn't hold water. I need the ability for tabs to explicitly be unloaded exposed, preferably with a rightclick menu and a menu item to "unload all other tabs". When FF gets slow, this has helped a lot with BarTab.

Thankfully, I just found a hack to get BarTab mostly working with FF4, and it must be treated as Beta. There's already the issue where tabs don't load automatically when clicking on them but pressing F5 is the just price I will pay to have the ability to unload tabs. We'll see though, maybe it will get too annoying.

On a side note, I get really annoyed in the discussions from people imposing their view that you should never have more than a few tabs open. There's merit to the notion that you shouldn't keep more tabs than you need open, but there are lots of times where I do need many open simply so that I do not have to constantly look for previously opened sites. Case in point, I have a bunch of tabs open to a set of Python modules and related info. I just need the page loaded once so I can click on the tab to look something up, I don't want to have to close it and load it up again when I need to look it up again.

Tramp at work

2011-04-10T05:15:00.000-04:00

One major change in workflow that I had to get used to with the company change a few years ago was doing most of my work and development through remote terminals. Try as I might to do at least some work on my local machine there was just no escaping that it was just more convenient to do my script writing and edits and tests on the remote machines. A shell is a shell so I can manage: windowless emacs and vim for editting, and screen sessions for stuff. But I hate the lag introduced working remotely, I hate not being able to exploit having remote drives mountable to my local machine, I hate not being able to exploit my local tools and environment. All of this could go away partly if they just enabled sshfs so that I could at least access some of the data for development purposes (much to much to xfer locally and there's policy against it). But alas, they are unwilling to enable it, even if there's no good reason. It's not like i would be able to access anything more than I could anyways.

So one thing I tried before was at least being able to use my local emacs editor to edit remote files with Tramp. I recall having to munge my commandline prompt to get it to work and that it was a little clunky and so I gave up. But I've tried recently tried it again and it went a lot more smoothly to my surprise. It even came with my latest Ubuntu installation (finally updated after a year+ of laziness) vs my downloading and installing it myself previously. So it was trivial to try again and I was pleasantly surprised. Saving and loading has the lag still but everything else gives me the snappiness of a local machine (save for when I have a network interruption). I guess I'm going to try this method out until I come up with a more satisfactory method of doing more work locally without all the constant syncing.

Unfortunately what got me thinking of this again was wanting to try another editor to edit Python. As much as I like (or rather am used to) emacs and vim, Python feels like it require a lot more editor support to do right and to overcome annoyances. So I've been wanting to move to an IDE so I'm testing out Eclipse and the remote access plugin, but so far I am thwarted by it's need to have SFTP enabled remotely or another server running remotely in order to work. Not having root there I just don't have the time or energy to work around trying to hammer that together. I'm bugged to no end that there is no easy facility for installing packages as a user without root.

No vertical screen split for J00

2011-04-09T04:26:00.001-04:00

I got quite happy when I learned there was a version of Gnu Screen that let you do vertical splits. I always have 2 screens side by side (emacs and shell) both distinct ssh sessions with distinct instances of screen. Had this worked it would have saved me some minor inconvenience since I'd only need to log in once and not have to select between the two detached screen sessions.

I said "had it worked". Actually it did work, but there is a side effect that is a deal breaker and it makes me really sad. The fatal flaw is that I mouse select for cut/paste a LOT and the selection does not respect the border between the vertical split. Yes, there is the keyboard option for cut/paste but that's insufficient.

I keep wanting to hate Python

2011-04-08T21:49:00.003-04:00

Just something I feel I have to say once in a while.

Dell XPS m1330, a most beautiful piece of shit

2011-04-08T04:54:00.001-04:00

I remember being quite excited upon receiving my m1330. It was a beautiful laptop. Very sleek and original. Relatively thin. Powerful enough to run my WoW (at the time) by sporting an NVidia card. I loved it. I stopped using my Alienware desktop monstrosity almost entirely. It was a bit pricey though, something like $1600 in '07/'08. Perhaps the only complaint I had was that it came with Vista.

It's sad though, the innards of that thing ended up being junk. I had to have it serviced every year. It overheated, the video would give out, the motherboard would break. I even forked out dough for the extended warranty just to get it fixed (2nd time it died was shortly after the previous warranty expired but they let me buy the extended). It was my main machine at the time, in particular since I had just moved and purged much of my wares, so I kept it serviced. And a part of me wanted it to be a nice working machine because I really did like it cosmetically and feel-wise.

But at last, it just wasn't cutting it. I'm not sure if it was the game upgrades or the vidcard or what, but WoW and other similar games became completely unplayable. It ran a bit clunky. It still had Vista on it just to run the games but when that stop it basically became a linux box. So a year ago, upon getting the Alienware m11x, a machine I also love (though I still think I prefer the m11x look and feel-wise), I gave it to my sister. Not much long after that, it started exhibiting more problems and basically quit on her. I took it back, loaded it up with linux to find that it kept crashing. I had good indication it was the hard drive so I bought another one. Installed it, spent more time putting Ubuntu on it, had it just about set up the way I liked and wouldn't you know.... it completely gives up the ghost. Won't power on or anything. Pisses me off that I had just spent more money on it again only to have it bricked.

I've read about bad experiences with Dell and their machines. It wasn't my experience for the most part, until now. My previous laptop was also a Dell and although it ended up with some issues here and there, it worked for a looong time, on the order of 8 years or so. And (having a warranty) I had fair service. But now I'm very disappointed, doubly so because they put together a machine that I really wanted to like and they ruined it with shoddy parts and internal design and a hefty price tag. Such is the life with gadgets I suppose. I did try and look up how much it would cost me to fix it and I decided that I'd rather spend the money on a new netbook than sink it into an aging machine. I did consider it though. If I could have found a new mobo for, say, $50-70 I would have justified it as a geek hobby.

As to whether or not I'll ever trust Dell again to buy from them... Well, I probably will. I mean, I already have with this Alienware but I'm HOPING that that subdivision of the company (acquired) has a higher standard and from what I read they mostly are. I did have to have it serviced but it was only a fan that stopped working causing overheat and shutdown. I'm getting good use out of it though and that's the important bit. Also, sometimes the price is hard to ignore, I have the discount deals through my company and I have a work-issued Dell as well that is a clunky beast but is still kicking with nary a problem (other than a dead battery) in 3.5 years.

I just wish it wasn't the m1330 that ended up being the lemon.

Autostart annoyance

2011-04-07T03:44:00.002-04:00

I find it ironic that Windows too often goes through this extra "security" step of asking you if you really want to do something even though you just tried to do it, but has no checks on programs that love to put themselves in the startup. The most annoying offender of all is the MS Live IM client by the way, but there are other programs that slow up my boot time by automatically installing in in the startup with no option to tell it not to do that.

vbox

2011-04-07T02:55:00.001-04:00

A couple years ago I was using vmWare to have linux running on my work laptop. It did it's job but for some reason felt just clunky enough to where I just ended up using putty terminals instead. They're light and quick even if a bit featureless and I got accustomed to running emacs without a mouse. vmWare was one of those things that I installed and didn't want to touch again because I recall it being a little confusing, particularly finding the right product. They had a bunch, they all required some kind of registration, it wasn't always clear to me which one I was to download. Eventually I just gave up. Not that it was bad, just that it wasn't something I needed to spend time on.

A year ago or so I saw some positive press on Virtualbox (prior to Sun being acquired by Oracle). I gave it a whirl (coinciding with my new laptop purchase). My impressions were quite positive. It seemed less complicated. Of course, the REAL reason I gave it a try was because the reports were that there was finally a VM that could run COMPIZ. Back when I had my own Gentoo workstation at the office, I grew addicted to Beryl/Compiz. It made work just a little more fun, and I'm also one of those people who's productivity is increased by multiple desktops. But if I'm gonna stare at a screen all day, why not make it cool too right? (and I get a little pleasure from the wow factor in other people who saw me at work)

Anyhow since then I've been using it more often. I normally work on remote servers because I have little choice (that's where the data is) but for development It really helps to do things locally, especially when I'm on the road with intermittent internet access, or when I know that the servers will be down, or when they're running really slow, etc. etc. Mostly though, I prefer having a full environment than just putty terminals.

So for months, I've been seeing this popup whenever I launch vbox that there is 4.0.4 out but I never made the upgrade. Upgrades terrify me because when it's important, something almost certainly will go wrong. But finally the mood struck me and I gave it a try. And it failed! It was start installing and then hang there doing nothing. Meanwhile, it uninstalled my old version. Horrors!!! Panic!!! Did a bunch of searches, tried several things, had to reboot countless times (primarily because installing vbox turns off the network, very annoying). After many hours of following what turned out to be the wrong post, I found another that simply stated you turn off DropBox. Boom! It worked quickly and cleanly. If I hadn't found that post I don't know what I would have done. I completely forgot about DropBox, it auto starts (another rant) and it interferes with the network changes. It's completely unrelated to vbox so I don't know how long it would have taken for me to make the connection. It never fails, something always goes wrong.

As I mentioned I have some trepidation about upgrading software but I figured that since the upgrade was already months old it might be safe, and what's more I finally got around to moving my home directory to it's own partition; making me a little more cavalier about making OS modifications now. I used to simply let the home directory exist along with the OS because with limited drive space I've been burned before about how big to make each partition. But that's less of a concern now so I finally got around to it. Need to do it on my other computers now tho. Now that I have it, I can finally play around with other linuxera with more impunity and vbox makes that a lot easier to do.

CD access

2011-04-07T02:16:00.000-04:00

I thought computer CD drives were ancient news, a solved problem, a triviality. I can't believe I downloaded (a rather cool) program that can't access my CD drive like everything else I have can. That program is foobar2000. I did a beyond token amount of web searches trying to get it to work, stopping short of downloading some other program (Nero) to help it do it's job. I just wanted to rip some songs to FLAC and was dumbfounded that the CD wouldn't access. I may try again.

Paying rent for my characters

2011-04-07T02:07:00.000-04:00

This is utterly ludicrous. I haven't played WoW in at least 4 months and before that only once in a long while. The did in fact log in in January to discover that my account was hacked and my main characters stripped of their possessions. In fact one was moved to another server. Must have been one of those free-transfer to empty server jobs as I don't imagine someone paying to move it. Terrible. But at least my characters were restored. But does that matter? I'm essentially paying $15/mo to keep my chars alive. I'm not going to have time to play for the foreseeable future due to new family and baby on the way. Alas, $15 is just under the threshold of too small to register as a significant dent in my lifestyle, unlike say cable, internet, mobile phone etc. Yet it is one of those things that is nickel-and-dime-ing me and of all the things I could eliminate to save a little here and there, this is an obvious candidate. And still, I just can't seem to get myself to close the account.

Do shell writers not care where they are?

2011-03-23T13:34:00.001-04:00

Bash has dirname and basename and there is the ever present $PWD; but has no built-in mechanism for determining what the absolute path name of a file or directory. I find this infuriating. Did someone think that people would never need to know? Did someone impose their view that absolute or full pathnames are evil and should never be used within a script?

Ok, I'm overstating the problem. There is the workaround of using "readlink -f" command but it was not obvious and I was only lucky to stumble across it recently. I had to have a separate script otherwise.

BarTap for Firefox

2010-02-11T18:09:00.001-05:00

Truth be told, one of the reasons I have recently gotten into the habit of suspending my laptops instead of shutting down completely is so that I don't have to suffer through reloading Firefox with the gazillion tabs I kept open but didn't want to close for one reason or other.

But finally this Firefox app just crossed my desk to solve that problem and I love it. It has shot to the top 3 of must haves, maybe tied with Tree-style tab. I agree with the comments to the app, it should have been included with Firefox by default.

Another sentimental loss

2009-02-09T23:12:00.003-05:00

The other day I de-activated my second oldest email account. It was my first Yahoo account, which actually was my very first webmail account. I've had it for 12 years, creating it when I did a stint in Munich as accessing my lab account (which remains my oldest existing account) that I used exclusively would have been very inconvenient. Webmail was sort of new at the time but the ability to access email from any browser anywhere made it compelling.

Well, back in its early days I was a little more promiscuous with its use (spam hadn't yet reached its peak). And it being that old, it made its way onto a LOT of spam lists. Eventually it was 99.99% spam, I could NOT find legit email on it easily. In fact, I learned some heartbreaking news of emails I missed for that very reason. It just got to the point where it was unusable due to the spam problem, and the Yahoo spam filter was loosing. I don't know why I kept it well past when I stopped using it. I simply don't. I even payed for the PoP access for years. Maybe because I had stuff attached to it, but that made no sense because I would never know. But now it's gone. Yet another part of the purge. It's just a bloody email account but for some reason I felt a little bit of loss. Now to get rid of the oldest account which is also nearly unusable... though I can see some small point in keeping it. I did try to get rid of it, but the sysadmin never removed it.

Contact merger

2009-02-09T23:00:00.003-05:00

I don't know when it happened but at long last, there finally exists a means of simply merging the many different contact listings for the same person (as people rotate email addresses and whatnot). It's a killer feature that I've always desired but have never seen in any contact manager I've used. I've posted to group boards on this topic before. This problem came to the forefront when using webmail accounts like Yahoo and Google that typically added contacts based on incoming or outgoing emails. Hence multiple contacts for the same person were created. Finally Google's contact manager has a way of merging the many versions into a single contact. The lack of that feature (and the fact that there were just so many contacts, most of which I don't need to have synced) caused me to manually create a small set of contacts using a different application. I now have some incentive to keep clean up my contact list in Google and perhaps even use their new Google Sync.

Floppy no more

2008-08-20T12:45:00.002-04:00

For better or worse, I am now floppy free. I have given away all of my Zip disks, I have destroyed all of my 3.5" disks, and at long last I've taken some scissors to my 5.25" disks. This is all part of the great purge for my upcoming cross-country move. I feel a little antsy about it, but in the end I think it was inevitable.

I had kept 3.5" disks for emergencies for quite a while and I admit that there were times (when dealing with legacy programs and such). And I also had some even older 5.25" floppy disks. Those things had some old Wordstar, dBase III, Wordperfect, Newsroom Pro, and other data from way back in the DOS days. At some point, my computers did not have 5.25" drives anymore and yet I still kept them thinking that someday I'd get that data off of them. That day never came, until recently. Over the years I had asked coworkers and friends if they had any old computers with that drive; no one did. I considered going to an old electronics shop or even Ebay to get one, but didn't for 2 reasons: 1) I didn't want to spend money just to transfer old data that might not even be readable anymore, and 2) for most of these years I didn't have a desktop to install it in in the first place; I was pure laptop for a good 10 years due to grad school and moving and such. I did eventually get a gaming desktop machine but never reconsidered getting a 5.25". I was all ready to just declare it lost when I stumbled across an old PC in my landlord's basement. I got his permission to cannibalize it but it turns out that I didn't really need to. I did try to take the drive out and put it in my desktop only to discover that I didn't have the right connector. But the old computer was already working and running Windows 95 I think and it booted. The drive wasn't actually attached in the computer but after swapping out the 3.5" drive with it and playing with the BIOS it actually worked. Now the transfer problem... no network on it and no CD-burner on it. Fortunately for me, my landord is a techy and he had retrofitted an old USB1 card into it. I panicked a bit when my first attempt using a jump drive failed due to compatibility. But eventually I tried out some other ones that did work and voila, I was able to get my 20 year old data off these obsolete disks. Not that I'll be able to do anything much with them but this is history and I'm sentimental.... and trying not to be. Hence when I finally got the data off... snip snip and into the trash. Actually, that felt quite good. Space is limited and I've been carrying these things around with me for 20 years.

iOMeGa!

2008-04-27T19:29:00.005-04:00

I've been digging through my shite recently and among other things found a box with my old Iomega Zip-100 drive in it. This thing is relatively ancient. I mean this is pre-USB. It connected to the computer via parallel port. In the box also was about a dozen zip disks. And what's more, there was stuff on it that I had absolutely no clue if I had backed up or transferred to any other hard-drives. What to do, what to do. I did NOT want install drivers on my Windows system which is polluted enough as it is. Well, my freshly minted Ubuntu install was up and the computer it was on had a parallel port, so why not? I began looking up info about these parallel port zip drives for use with Ubuntu. I recall a decade ago getting it to work with my Toshiba running Red Hat (I think it was 5) and having to do some insmod's and ppa's and using mtools and the like; basically I remember it requiring some work. After finding an appropriate page I hooked it up.

OMG! Without doing anything else, up pops the ZIP-100 icon on my desktop and a Nautilus window with the contents. I utterly did not expect that. That rocked. I mean, who uses parallel ports to attach devices these days, outside of perhaps a legacy printer much less a block device? It's not so much that I expected it to not work easily but even with Windows I expected having to download some drivers or installs or something. Way to go Ubuntu!

It's amusing to consider how my stack of zip disks and the reader fit can all fit on my keychain via a USB key now. Those things were destined to go the way of the floppy; in fact I think the floppy outlived them. I don't think I ever liked them but for a few years I must admit that they were indeed practical. In light of the MiniDisc, I still think zip disks should never have existed. But for now, I'm just stoked that practically no effort I got it connected and was able to move all of that data off. I now look forward to getting rid of the beasties. The fact that it worked so effortlessly almost made me want to keep it around for amusement. Almost. Now to figure out the most consciencious way to purge it from my possessions.

Hardy har har

2008-04-27T18:27:00.004-04:00

Ubuntu 8.04 a.k.a. Hardy Heron was released last week. I'd been waiting for it for a few weeks. I had decided to re-up my home Linux installation on my Alienware computer. But rather than installing the beta, I figured I'd just wait for the actual release. At long last it arrived to breath some life into my desktop computer. I've had a few days to play with it and if I was never convinced before, I now feel that:

Linux is absolutely ready for the desktop.

I mean, I've used 7.10 on and off and that was great too, but I never used it often enough and is for the following reason:

Linux may not be quite ready for the laptop.

That is why, in this case I installed it onto my desktop computer. Granted, I have not tried Hardy on any of my laptops but that will come in time.

But as far as desktop computers are concerned, I was thrilled. I've always been a little accepting of the fact that Linux always takes some tweaking to get working. Usually that means a bunch of web searches and manual installation and editing of configurations and such. For the desktop though, just about everything worked instantly and the only "hassle" was to get the multimedia up to snuff (not included by default for licensing, etc. reasons). But that's one thing that over the past few years has been wonderful, practically everything is available to install very easily. If I had to scratch install Windows, that would require a couple days of manually loading in all the software, dealing with all of the bloody registration notices that keep popping up over and over again when you do, all of the multiple "updates" to account for the difference between the CD version and the latest updates... well, everyone knows that Windows and all of the software isn't quite as quick as they suggest. In modern Linux distros, the package manager makes it as simple as clicking a bunch of check boxes and letting it go.

Early highlights for me:

Installation was largely unattended and quick.
Windows partition auto detected and available.
Compiz loaded cleanly (after NVidia drivers uploaded).
I was able to get my basic working environment setup very quickly thanks to package manager.
Some things like audio and such which were always a little flakey seemed to work out of the box.

er... not quite so effortless but not bad:

Had to do digging to allow network shares with Windows.
Multimedia of course.
Still puzzled why things like c/c++ development stuff isn't default, this is Linux afterall.
Downgrading Firefox3b to Firefox-2 for some reason required some digging to get right (hint: delete .mozilla from home directory). Sorry, but I need my Google toolbar.

Again, early stages but so far so good. I played around with some newer OSS software I haven't been able to play with in the work environment. I was able to download something via the bittorrent app and burn it to CD without any fuss. All in all, it was rather refreshing.

Fear of the upgrade

2008-04-19T03:27:00.004-04:00

There was a time when I would constantly upgrade to the latest version of software. I was a junky for new useless features. There was sometimes a secondary reason, like keeping certain file types up to date (due to the unfortunately still present but thankfully diminishing days of proprietary file formats). That changed as the years passed. I now find myself skeptical of upgrades. Oddly, the inevitable increase in bloat (both in size increase and speed decrease) is less the reason than the problems that invariably get introduced. It seems that these days an upgrade signifies an introduced incompatibility, instability, or worse.

Off the top of my head the first program that I purposefully abandoned upgrading (versus just didn't need to use anymore) was PaintShopPro, from back in the early 90s. It was freeware or shareware then. It was small, fast, and useful. Then at some point the upgrade was no longer free to get. It became around $30 and later $100. I kept the old free version around for many years and refused many upgrades. Eventually I abandoned it for other things, but I still remember liking it a lot. A copy may be lying around on a disk somewhere.

Another example is MusicMatch. It was one of the first decent mp3 ripper-players around. I was fond of it not as much because of its real quality (it was good but kind of clumsy in some ways), but rather because the owners did something absolutely right: free lifetime upgrades. Now that policy deserved my money. I despise being forced to buy essentially the same software over and over again every year or two. For every software purchase, there should be at least 2 free major upgrades or like 4 years of upgrades included. But lifetime? that was awesome. Then Yahoo bought it, but I remained pleased because at least they still honored the lifetime upgrade. I saw an end to that coming when they changed the name to Yahoo Jukebox. Eventually it was unrecognizable as MusicMatch. And eventually, I stopped installing it and even stopped using the old version. Why? because I upgraded once too often and it kept pestering me to upgrade, and then gave me a stern warning that my version's days were numbered due to an interface change (basically a forced connection with Yahoo Music that I didn't want). Oh well.

Apple software gets my goat because I'm convinced they purposely break something just to keep things more proprietary. e.g. every new version of iPod firmware seems to be designed to break other peoples attempts at using their product not in the "vision" of Apple. iTunes is similar, only every major update seems to cause my iTunes to stop working properly. My new rule is to wait two updates minimum before updating.

These are kind of trite examples. The major one is Windows. Now there's an important piece of software that they force you to re-buy every couple years whether you like it or not. My latest excursion, I got a laptop last year that had ONLY Vista as an option. Of course a month after I got it the backlash forced Dell to offer an XP version. I stuck with Vista though because I didn't want to buy another copy of XP and also I'm lazy. I admit that it has some added niceties, mostly trivial in my opinion, but DEAR LORD IS IT ANNOYING. It has never stopped pestering me for something or other whenever I boot. I'm always getting these damned bubbles popping up in the corner, especially annoying when I'm playing WoW. Every major piece of software wants to put crap in my taskbar and wants to poll for updates and yadda yadda. Windows of course is the second worse offender (first being McAfee), especially with its constant "are you sure", "do you want to allow this", etc. It drives me nuts. The real issue here though is stuff just doesn't work cleanly in it that worked fine on my XP box. Even stuff that's certified for Vista in some way encounters problems.

As if that wasn't bad enough, along comes SP1. After some pestering, I allowed the update. And wouldn't you know, iTunes won't run. I was getting a "iTunes has stopped working" message before even the window popped up. Dangit, I wanted to swap in some stuff onto my nano NOW. I spend a couple hours scouring the interwebs for some solution and even tried the ol' uninstall and reinstall. The searches were kind of scary with all the notes on how iTunes and Vista were problematic from the get-go; I felt lucky that I got it to work at all. It took me a while to get the right incantation of the Google search to get me to this link which at least one solid and tangible solution to try. I downloaded the noted patches but turns out I didn't need them. For the benefit of the search engines: the trick that worked was Control_Panel -> Programs_and_Features -> Quicktime -> Repair. It runs now and thankfully even though I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, my library info remained intact. A miracle I know. Sigh, I really wish I didn't HAVE to use iTunes... but it's the only iPod compatible program I'm aware of that supports the "resume playback where you left off" (or "save played position") feature that I need for audiobooks and podcasts. That's the critical deal-breaking feature.

Backing up to the upgrade subject, I do not sport this upgrade fear on Linux. Maybe it's because nearly everything I use on Linux is below version 3 with a non-trivial chunk of it below version 1. This basically means that most of it can still be a bit unpolished and upgrades are welcome. But there's also this sense that when it comes to open-source software, it really feels like the upgrades are needed somehow. Most updates really are bug fixes and often times optimizations. When new features are added, it's as if by committee it was decided that the new feature really was a good idea. Another related reason might be the tendency that when some piece of software gets old -- like versioning past 3 to 4 but often much sooner -- that by then something else similar but cooler comes out and people move to that even when it's in alpha. Yes, upgrading and changing and tweaking seem natural in the Linux world, but it works because you don't have to pay for each update and it's often not even required. Sigh... it always feels like I'm just on the cusp of going completely Linux, but for the durned expectation that everyone uses Windows and may only make drivers and software compatible with Linux as an afterthought, maybe.

Love Ruby, Hate Rails?

2008-02-11T10:25:00.000-05:00

Fairly recently I read a post (and listened to a podcast) decrying the Ruby on Rails community. A couple weeks ago I was talking to th dev crew of a company a buddy works at, and they seemed to wince when I mentioned that I do nearly all of my scripting now in Ruby. It became obvious quickly that it was because they had some bad experience with Rails. They obviously, as I've learned many people do, think that Ruby is synonymous with Rails and I find that unfortunate. I don't think my point came across that I use Ruby the scripting language, not Rails the framework. I've played with Rails but not enough to truly hate it. I remember liking it actually but then again I'm not a web developer and don't know what to complain about. I have little doubts that Zed is correct in his criticisms of Rails itself, not to mention the Rails community.

Still, I'm a little disheartened that that by all accounts the fate of Ruby is tied to Rails. Rails certainly did put Ruby on the radar (similarly to how Lua seems popular because of WoW) and that is a good thing, but the backlash could make it a bad thing. My only hope is that all that is wrong with Rails gets fixed in time. Well, I care less about Rails since I don't use it; I'm more concerned with the thriving of Ruby which has its own problems that I hope get fixed. I'd be sad if I were really forced to fully go back to Python or Perl.

Time decimation

2008-02-11T10:18:00.000-05:00

Alas, it has been over a year since my single post just over a year ago.

As it turns out, last year was just a mess overall and since no-one reads this it doesn't matter anyways. When I re-read my last post, on quitting WoW I had to laugh because a couple months ago I let some coworkers talk me into playing again. I'm doomed.

So I start up on yet another server from scratch but with some starting funds and get busy trying to catch up to my coworkers (still a long way to go). Just this weekend for no good reason I logged onto some of my previous servers noting that I still had characters from a year ago there. As I inspected them I realize that I didn't really know what I was doing back then. I hadn't even used any talent points. Well things tend to make more sense the second time around. Again for no good reason, I spent a little time cleaning some of those chars up knowing that they probably won't get much play time.

Ah well, enough of that. Let's see how long this lasts.

Time reclamation

2007-01-30T23:37:00.000-05:00

About a week ago, I finally did it. I canceled my subscription to WoW. I canceled it on the heals of the release of their expansion Burning Crusade. I didn't cancel because of the expansion; it looked really cool. I didn't cancel because I didn't like the game; I liked it a lot, it's well designed, fun, and beautiful. I didn't cancel because it was too hard or wasn't my thing; I have friends that play and the quest progression system is straight forward and fun. I didn't cancel it because it costs too much; $15 a month hasn't affected me all that much and is far from my most costly monthly subscription fees. I did it for 2 reasons, which ends up boiling down to 1 reason when I think about it. That reason is (drumroll)... I got too fucking burned out on EverCrack. I put years into that game, time I can't get back. I look back and it feels like such a waste. That retrospect as well as other things like not having used the time to accomplish other things that I said I'd do but never did has made me rethink my priorities. Now, having played EQ (esp. an EQ ranger) I have a total appreciation for WoW. If I had started off on WoW, it's even quite possible I would not have gotten burned out at all. But it didn't happen that way and now it's too late. I just don't make time to play. I'm afraid to play. I don't want to get re-addicted. Yes, it is possible to have short fun and WoW is conducive to hour-here hour-there play... but durnit, I need those hours now. I want those hours now. And with the goals that I'm trying to make for myself I can't afford to commit those hours to MMORPGs anymore. I really want to but I just can't. Lord help me.

As you can tell, I'm still in recovery.

Eye candy

2006-11-27T11:38:00.000-05:00

I retract my previous jest regarding being in with the IT guys. One of them hooked my workstation up with Beryl and I'm gushing like the geek I am. I remember seeing some vids/demos of it over this past year and I thought it was nifty... I never thought I'd actually play with it. A) I don't have root at work and B) my linux box at home is not that powerful.

But now I can. Yes it's completely useless, doesn't do anything that I actually need, and it's kind of distracting; I find myself playing more with the window manager than I am working at times. However, I think there's nothing wrong with eye candy, and I think no matter how much people harp on bloated overkill waste-of-cycles things, they internally know that style counts for something. I mean, just look at cars and cell phones and Apple products. "function over form"... yes, but not that's not to say that form doesn't count. As for me, anything to break the monotony of the screen I stare at all day is a plus.

Linux Layout

2006-11-08T13:22:00.000-05:00

Over the course of my life in the Unix/Unix-like world it's every so often occurred to me that there's just gotta be a better directory layout for the beast. 2 things about that: 1) it's messy with items belonging to the same program spread all over the place and mixed in with other applications making it hard to keep track of; and 2) the places programs want to install to are root-owned so adding new programs on my own as a non-root become more work, if not downright frustrating, to put it somewhere else.

WHY!!! is it standard operating procedure in the Linux community to assume that everyone has root?

Anyhow, one of the frustrating things is wanting to try out new packages and having to jump through hoops to get it to work in place without installing files into X different directories. I'd envisioned many times a system where applications were self contained in their own sub-directory tree that can be easily maintained and deleted if desired. There would of course be a convention for searching and sharing dependent libraries and items. I guess this is how it's done in the new OS-X world, good for them.

I recently read about a Linux distro that does exactly that: GoboLinux. It's nearly exactly what I was thinking of and I strongly suspect that it has occurred to the minds of a LOT of Unix/Linux users.

Reading the forums and talkbacks and comments though, it seems like there are a lot of people that are against the idea of re-organizing the Unix layout of /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/lib /opt /etc etc. etc. They seem to fall into 3 camps:

Too Windows like... dumbing it down for the n00bs... things of that nature
There are good reasons for the layout, aint-broke-don't-fix
Too set in our ways

Number 1 I dismiss outright... partly because I don't find it really true (being more Windows like) and partly because I think they just like being "in the know" of some esoteric stuff and want a barrier to entry.

Number 2 probably has some valid points but I don't fully buy it. They seem to think Unix was designed to be sensible. There were indeed decisions for the layout but by and large I'm convinced that it grew organically from a day when there were far far fewer applications and when memory and space and speed were at a premium. IMHO, there was really no long-term plan for this organization and this directory structure just doesn't scale well to the number of users and applications now. It's created a mess and all the work on packaging and dependency tracking were grafted on and only serve to obfuscate the basic underlying cause being this antiquated file tree.

Number 3 is probably why we're forever going to be stuck with complicated system management.

Thing of it is, there are already good examples to refute the reasons not to have an alternate organization scheme for applications and files. OS-X is one example it's a BSD based system. But there are other sub-examples in the typical Linux world. Rubygems comes to mind immediately. It's relatively simple (only 1 command organizes the whole thing), gracefully handles multiple versions of the same package, and casual inspection of the tree proves it to be fairly logical.

I may try out GoboLinux at some point, they even have a Live CD which I find impressive. They made a couple of design decisions that I find practical and interesting and possibly even better than what I was originally imagining. The linking of pertinent files to the old tree structure is sensible. I had imagined turning the includes, paths, and library finding features into more of a device such that any attempted access to /usr/local/lib/xxx.so would be handled by the system as a redirect, like the way web pages are. It was just a thought experiment. Links (and the possibly clever use of hiding) seems more practical. I just fear that dependence on the old tree structure will remain if one always assumes it's there.

But again there's the inertia problem. Not enough people would conform to the new layout. The spark of hope is that if developers would make their program installs well enough to easily allow installation to non-standard places, then this may become less and less of an issue. I'd certainly welcome a system where the organization is implicit and not reliant on a myriad of package handlers where there are as many as there are distributions.

A reason not to be good friends with the IT department

2006-10-12T18:49:00.000-04:00

I've been buddies with the current instatiation of my company IT department. It has been a good thing. Service is a hair better, I have an easier time getting upgrades (like a new flatscreen monitor) and I can more or less provide a little influence on the system and ask for some geeky things to be installed that aren't really important to the work grind.

Alas, today I finally found a reason not to be so buddy-buddy with them. I get an email and one of them installed World of Warcraft on my workstation, running under Gentoo Linux of course.

Must... resist...

Distro feel

2006-10-12T12:52:00.000-04:00

I finally allowed the IT guys at work to replace/upate my machine to the new regime. I have a Gentoo box sitting on my desk now. It's actually been ready for a couple of weeks but I had to make them wait because I couldn't afford the interruption in the meantime. At last I got my upgrade. Most of the folks in my group are very resistant to system updates and changes... some notoriously so. I can see their point of view, I just don't share it. And knowing that I'm very amenable to updates and changes despite the glitches that always appear, the IT folk had slated me as one of the earlier guinea pigs (though not the first). I'd been waiting for this update for quite some time actually. Newer software with newer features and at last I can use my USB flash. I also like that my machine seems more responsive all around (mostly due to newer machine with more memory but I suspect some of it is due to how Gentoo builds things).

One thing that kind of surprised me this time around, though, is that the feel of the Gentoo distro is not what I expected. True, I've only used it for a few days but it almost feels like I'm really just using a generic KDE box. Here's what I mean. When I was using RedHat it somehow felt like I was using RedHat. When I was using Debian it felt like I was using Debian. My home machine has Ubuntu and it definitely feels like I'm using Ubuntu. But right now, I don't have this strong feeling that I'm using Gentoo. Not that I feel like I'm using some other distro, but more that I'm just using some generic Linux with KDE. It's just a feeling and I'm sure it's more than just splash screens and extra icons here and there. It's a bit hard to define precisely and maybe it's largely subconscious. It's probably a good thing but is that not wierd?

Readme

2006-10-12T11:57:00.000-04:00

I'd been a Bloglines user for some time now, but the only things I used it for were for the smaller things like friend's blogs and things that didn't have a huge update frequency on the scale of, say, Digg or even Slashdot or Boingboing. For the bigger stuff that I checked daily, I went to the actual pages in sequence and at most kept a recent articles listing on my personalized Google page. I tested out readers and aggregators that ran locally on my machine but determined pretty quickly that it didn't serve my purposes because there wasn't a convenient way to sync between my home machine(s) and workstation. So Bloglines sufficed but the interface was just clumsy enough that I only used it for a "here's what's updated" list.

Then a week or so ago I found that Google Reader aggregator was updated and I started using it. I'm a huge fan of Gmail, one of the few, if not only, web apps that I prefer to use online rather than with a local program. I gave it a go and, true to form, I like the interface. I've moved just about everything I monitor to it and even deleted the overlapped items on my personal Google page. The main usage difference (other than the interface) I noticed between this and Bloglines is that with Bloglines, I would just see what was updated and click over to the actual site to read the articles. Something about the look and the missing images just made me not like to read within it. On the Goolge Reader, I am just as happy to read the full text (when available) within the reader and only click over to the site when I want to look at the whole article or when I care about the comments. It's not perfect of course, but very well done and I have now changed my viewing habits.

Of course now that everything's in more or less a single stream, I'm starting to feel my own version of the Digg effect. Up to hundreds and hundreds of new and unread items waiting for me to click through them. I'm sure I'll find a system to not get too overloaded, the layout and interface seems to allow for it a lot better than other aggregators I've tried.

One aggregator to rule them all.

Open formats reaffirmation

2006-08-28T21:19:00.000-04:00

I very nearly got burned by a proprietary format again. In my recent mission to collect, collate, and back up my data, I stumbled upon an old collection of .SNG files that I had long since thought I had lost (with sadness). These were recorded a DOS Midi sequencing program from back in the day, circa Windows 3.0's intro, when I was a bit more into music and had a Midi box to connect my digital piano to my computer. I used it to record and later transcribe some songs I learned and even managed once to capture some of my dad's old songs he knew from his more serious piano playing days (sadly, didn't record enough of them).

Well, I found these song files and discovered that they are completely obsolete, undocumented and unsupported. I started to sweat a little and spent a good solid night looking for something, someone, anyone(!), to convert them to normal Midi files. Nothing, nada, zip. I checked the Voyetra site the company that made the sequencer and thankfully they're still in business. Posted in their help/faq/support area was a notice that the format was completely unsupported... along with this note:

NOTE:
We understand that a lot of SPG users have created libraries over the years (some with thousands of SNG files) that they need to use in newer systems. These users had a good chance to purchase the discounted. Upgrades that we offered for almost a decade. Unfortunately, at this time "Digital Orchestrator Pro" is a Discontinued product that is no longer available.

I read that to mean "you didn't keep shelling out for our software so tuff shitz for J00". Incidentally I was using a program much older than the one they mentioned here. I was furious and almost fired off a little former customer "feedback". But instead I kept searching and finally found a solution to my problem which ended up being their solution. They basically said I had to install my old DOS program version of the program, get it up and running, load the SNG files in (one by one) and re-save them. WTF! I don't even know where that stuff is from 15 years ago and countless moves. Heck, it came on 5.25 inch floppies and I don't know anyone that has one of those drives anymore. They didn't even have a simple program available that would simply convert or extract the Midi track items out of their own file format. No, you had to use the full blown DOS program, get it working, load the file in, then export it within the program. This blows my mind. As some consolation though, they did at least provide a version of the program (Sequencer Plus Gold) for free on their FTP site, with no manuals.

So I downloaded it and went through the paces to get it installed. Get this, I had to find some 3.5 inch floppies to copy the disk images too because it would only install from disk. Luckily I keep some around and even luckier that I had the foresight to a 3.5 inch drive added to my new computer (combo drive with the little media card readers, pretty cool). Installation wasn't a problem, but getting it to run was a little tricky with the whole WinXP compatibility mode stuff. Eventually, and after some scares, it ran. I spent even more time figuring out how to work it (this was pre standard menu interface) and then correcting for the fact that it was a "newer" version of the program I used and I had to figure out a correction to some of the differences. (It did something special with track 1 and the output Midi files would be incomplete or just empty.) After figuring out the right tweaks to make to the imported songs files, I was finally able to save all the tracks individually to Midi. At last. They even play in Windows Media Player. Hallelujah.

I guess I should have had some kind of inkling back then that I should have taken some steps to future-proof my data. I've lost a lot over the years due to negligence. But back then, the stuff was still relatively new. I was young and foolish and still of the opinion that so long as I kept the data, I'd be in good shape. Hah. Hindsight 20-20. I know that i still have a bunch of Wordstar, Word Perfect, DBase III, and a slew of other stuff sitting in my collection waiting to be salvaged before it really gets too late. Sadly, it will have to wait, because they're all on 5.25 inch floppies. I'm sure I'll find one of these drives somewhere, right? I'm having a similar problem with my zip disks, though I'm less worried about that at the present moment.

Anyhow, the (obvious) lessons to be reaffirmed are:

Use open, documented formats, or at least industry standard ones.
Always migrate your data (ALL of it) to newer media.

Final notes for anyone who happened to have used Voyetra Sequencer Plus:

download their Sequencer Plus Gold (sp_gold.zip), unzip it and copy each disk image to a separate 3.5 floppy.
the floppies are labelled disks 1, 2, 3, and 4 but this is wrong, it should be "install" disks 1,2 and "driver" disks 1,2. take this into account when going through the install.
when installing, select just the sequencer option, not the midi equipment drivers.
on WinXP, I set the install and the programs to Windows 95 compatibility
When firing up the program, there would be a loading message and then it would just hang there. I thought the bloody thing was broken and did several re-installs... but once unintentionally I let the window sit there and some 15 minutes later or more it actually run.
experiment with how to work their menus, eventually you'll get the hang of it. basically to load: F for filemenu; M for mode (click until mode is SNG); highlight .sng file (best to move the .sng files to their song directory beforehand); L for load. To save: same except put it in MIDI mode and S for save. I used the default options when saving to .mid.
Prior to saving the songs, make sure you have no real song information in Track 1. Use "J" to "jump" the track to another number
For my files, I would delete all tracks but one, and save each track separately, but you not need to do this.

Firefox bound

2006-08-22T13:59:00.000-04:00

Ever have something nagging at you for the longest time and yet you do nothing about it and just try and deal with it. I do that all the time. I'd always been bugged that when entering web forms in a browser, namely Firefox, I didn't have my emacs-style keybindings for editing text. And yet, I did nothing about, not even something as trivial as doing a web search. I think there's a certain amount of learned helplessness in there somewhere. Well, now that I've set up my work Instiki, I will be doing more and more text entry into my browser than I used to and enough was enough.

Thank the maker! My solution was within a few keystrokes reach. As usual, I feel like an idiot for not looking this up ages ago.

Sadly, those keybindings don't seem to work in Blogger. Curses!

ADDENDUM:

Speaking of binding Firefox, I had an issue when I upgraded to 1.5 and Thunderbird as well. They didn't work together by default on my workstation. Now... there's a reason for this. The IT guys were so overworked that our workstations are way out of date. Not their fault really, there are other political reasons why our systems stay out of date. Anyhow, I ended up installing it locally in my home directory and using it there. When I clicked on a link in the email client, it would try and bring up epiphany, and when i clicked on an email address in the browser, nothing would happen. I did a web search and all the pages pointed to making sure the "Default Browser" was set properly. I changed it everywhere I could with the control panel(s) and such. None of it work. So I got stuck with doing the cut/paste method of following links and I was irritated for months. Fed up I finally cornered an IT guy for help and he was able to dig up a couple web pages that had the solution. Ugh! I did web searches but he used one or two different words in the search that I did not (nonobvious ones like "force") and was able to get the result whereas I was not. I applied the changes and voila, all fixed in a snap. What a difference a search makes. I feel like a n00b. In my defense, he had done that fix before so remembered what to look for, but still.

Oh, a solution can be found here and it didn't involve any system or window manager or desktop "Defaults".

Rails rocks

2006-08-22T10:50:00.000-04:00

I hadn't done much in the way of web stuff since the days I maintained some personal static research logs at my lab way back when. I wouldn't even count that as web stuff. Had a cursory knowledge of HTML by inspection, never learned Java, nor PHP, nor pretty much anything else. wget was my friend when I wanted or needed to do anything fancy. I did some digging, looked at some complicated-looking scripts, dabbled with a cgi script or two but not a lot. I'd always wanted to play around with it but never put much effort.

That sort of changed recently when I finally had some cause to investigate it for work related reasons. I'd been a scripting fiend for a decade and fell smitten with Ruby over a year ago. I'd been hearing about Rails (who hasn't) but only read enough to get an idea of what it was. Well, now I have dug a bit deeper, had time to play, and I have to say that it is way cool. Even without any formal or informal experience with other types of webdev platforms, I can already feel that I'd rather learn this than those others (save maybe Java but for different reasons). I was set up very quickly, ran though a neat tutorial, and marvelled at the relative ease and quickness with which I was able to get something working. I felt the excitement. I hadn't actually looked forward to getting home to play on my Linux box to play for a long time.

It didn't stop there, either. Before I knew it, I had Typo and Instiki installed in a snap. Those systems are just insanely cool, especially to a webdev n00b like me. I love that they come with their own servers ready to go via Webrick or tapping into Lighttpd. Instiki is now going to be a part of my work logs; it's just convenient to have a wiki where I can collect tips and results. As for home use, I don't really have much in the way of a web application or set of them, it's just to play around with. Next step, find out how to access my home Linux servers from outside. For some reason the port forwarding isn't doing the trick. I suspect my ISP is blocking those ports but I won't rule out my doing something wrong.

Labels at last

2006-08-18T11:26:00.000-04:00

So it looks like I may keep using Blogger afterall. I kept telling myself, "come on, they're not that stupid, what's the holdup?". At long last, Google has finally stepped up to the plate and updated Blogger (now Beta.Blogger of course) and one such valuable upgrade is the addition of labels. For the longest time, I'd been confounded by the lack of any significant features added to Blogger, most notably, the lack of categories or tags. The lack of that feature really makes a blog inaccessable. I mean, if you stumble upon someone's blog and happen to dig an article and want to learn more on what they have to say on the subject via categories, then manyally sifting through the archives is a miserable option. Even site search is a poor substitute. Categories give topics an identity in a way that keyword search cannot (at least currently). Further, a listing of categories gives the entire blog a kind of identity and at the very least hints as to whether other articles on the site would be of interest.

It's not that I think anyone would be interested in this blog, but even for personal use, down the road, it would be nice to at least peruse the different things I had to write about a given interest at the time. There are still tons of cool features that area available to the likes of Wordpress and Typepad and others but for now, the simple category listing is a what I was looking for. I don't necessarily think they display or handle their "labels" elegantly at the moment but I'm happy it's there.

The synchronicity here is that I'd only last week started playing around with my own web servers and webdev stuff on my home Linux box. Some work projects had me playing around with web-works and through that I became more interested in the whole web-development thing. I finally got around to playing with Ruby on Rails and subsequently Typo after reading about them for the past year or so. So far, I think they're fantastic. I'd been imagining setting up something more focused and porting it to a hosted site and such, I have a few ideas in mind, but for now I'm content with the minor dribblings that I have here on Blogger. Perhaps someday after (or if) I develop more webdev chops I'll make a more serious attempt.

Enough with the mp3

2006-08-03T12:42:00.000-04:00

MP3's by themselves don't really piss me off. They were an important piece of online history. What irritates me is that it's the de facto standard for all players, especially portable ones. It's a licensed beast and it's also old. There are newer, modern, and arguably better encoding formats out now that have the extra advantage of being royalty and license free. Ogg is probably the most popular of these formats right now, having the backing of the geek community to keep it going strong. Problem is, I can only play it back on my computer and I don't want to be tied to my computer to listen to music. The vast majority of portable players, boom boxes, car CD players and that ilk don't support it... but they do support MP3. I wish they would just switch or add Ogg. Most notably, Apple should have at least have included it in their iTunes/iPod. I mean, the freaking encoder would be free for them to include, so what the heck? The second iTunes supports Ogg is the second that others will start to follow suit and this whole MP3 format thing, which has admirably served it's purpose, can finally start to step aside and let a modern public format prevail.

Ok, I know, pipe dream. Companies are more interested in DRM than free public formats, and I know that they only grudgingly support MP3 because it is so wide spread. Feh!

Technorati Profile

Happy with the Linux distro choice

2006-08-03T12:09:00.000-04:00

These days I find myself rarely booting my Linux box (laptop) but when I do, I become more and more pleased with having picked Ubuntu. It is definitely the low maintenance distro that caused me to install and keep it in the first place. I'm still interested in Gentoo but until my office workstation uses it, I'm just as happy to not use it since it would require a lot more tinkering which at the moment I'm just not willing to do. I sit in front of Linux all day and with all of my other personal projects I just don't feel like booting up Linux at home unless I need to log in and such. That may and probably will change in the future, or at least I hope so. But for now, I'm pleased with Ubuntu and I think that so far it's the best distro that I've had at home.

What prompted this? I hadn't turned on my laptop in a month or so, and like clockwork, there was a new Ubuntu release. It updated without a hitch and I noticed that it did indeed correct some of the glitches that I had seen before. I later experimented with ripping a CD to mp3 to discover that it could not. Apparently, the philosophy of Ubuntu prevents the mp3 encoder from being installed by default due to the whole licensing BS. A little bit of due diligence and web searching through the forums and the solution was there in front of me. Install stated packages and voila it works. I read a lot of press about the helpfulness of the Ubuntu community and my experience so far has led me to agree.

Now, is it fully dumb-user friendly? No, I wouldn't say so. But for someone like me with a lot of *nix experience who at the moment doesn't want to take the time to tweak and tweak, it's as close as I've found.

OMG, a piece of spyware on MY machine...

2006-06-12T11:40:00.000-04:00

I've been smug. I didn't pay much attention to what's on my home Windows PC to the point where I didn't even take the basic precautionary steps for protecting one's PC that seem to be standard fare. I felt I didn't really have to. I mean, I don't execute programs emailed to me, I don't click on executable links, I don't install anything a web site asks me to (unless I independently grab said item from a trusted site, not the one they link, e.g. Flash updates and such). And I don't buy Sony CDs. For years I only booted up my PC at home to play Evercrack and then check email or web search for directions and such. Now, I still do those things but added iPod/iTunes to the regular usage list. Oh, I'm also on a re-newed mission to archive/scan/purge my collection of documents and other paper stuffs.

However over the weekend, a piece of spyware has been popping up unexpectedly. Never seen it on this new machine that I've had since late last year. Where did I get that? I pondered. Turns out it came over from my old machine when I transfered a bunch of stuff. Failing to effectively rid it on my own, I finally downloaded something sensable to scan/remove spyware: Ad-aware. Low and behold it notified me of several other things that I was unaware of. It was a sobering moment. Now I'm left with considering the possible virus-scanners out there, most of which I detest installing due to annoyingly bad experiences with Norton Anti-Virus (and even McAfee). Those programs, while good to have were very intrusive and always seemed to cause problems with programs I use, especially games. I just want a virus checker that I can run on my own when I feel I need to, not one that creates popups at the most inconvenient times, one that doesn't pester me every 5 minutes to update it, one that doesn't slow my bootup to a crawl, one that doesn't reside on my taskbar, one that doesn't always reside in memory unless I'm actively running it.

Relatedly, I hate that every single program that I install wants to put an auto-run or other memory-resident item on my taskbar, and put icons in a gazillion places.

Search defense

2006-05-23T18:19:00.000-04:00

A while back Google was taken to court over its scanning books for the purposes of search and indexing. They raised a lot of quasi-interesting but mostly bad arguments regarding copyright and control and such. From a social standpoint I think it would be a tremendous boon to have all works collectively indexed and searchable. I think there's a "public-good" argument similar to "immanent domain" that one could make. I recently read an article on Slate that contains one of the best analogies I've come across:

The idea that there is no tradeoff between authorial control and exposure is attractive. But it is also wrong. Individually, more control may always seem appealingÂwho wouldn't want more control? But collectively, it can be a disaster. Consider what it would mean, by analogy, if map-makers needed the permission of landowners to create maps. As a property owner, your point would be clear: How can you put my property on your map without my permission? Map-makers, we might say, are clearly exploiting property owners, for profit, when they publish an atlas. And as an individual property owner, you might want more control over how your property appears on a map, and whether it appears at all, as well as the right to demand payment.
But the law would be stupid to give property owners that right. Imagine how terrible maps would be if you had to negotiate with every landowner in the United States to publish the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Maps might still exist, but they'd be expensive and incomplete. Property owners might think they'd individually benefit, but collectively they would lose outÂa classic collective action problem. There just wouldn't really be maps in the sense we think of today.
The critical point is this: Just as maps do not compete with or replace property, neither do book searches replace books. Both are just tools for finding what is otherwise hard to find. And if we really want to have true, comprehensive book searches, we cannot require that every author's permission be individually sought out. The book search engines that emerge would be a shadow of the real thing, just as a negotiated map would be a lousy one. Studies suggest that millions of out-of-print books are of unclear copyright status, and Google estimates that relying solely on books provided by publishers and authors will yield only 20% of the books in existence. Not only might it be difficult to get permission. (At least with real property we know who the owners are.) But there are just too many books with owners who are hard or impossible to find"orphan works."
Each of those is a hole in the "map," and a shame.

But again, for every decision there's a good reason, and a real reason. Others have pointed out what I also think is the real reason: Dispite the high minded claims regarding author rights, copyrights, control, and intellectual property, publishers really just want a cut of the potential Ad-Sense revenue that Google will probably make. If it really comes down to a bare-knuckle legal-fight though, and if Google really wants to support the altruistic image that it purports, perhaps they can at some point come to an agreement not to connect advertisement to its book search, or perhaps to branch it off to a non-profit arm and promise to donate revenue above and beyond the project costs to libraries; I think the project is important enough to make happen dispite any greed factors.

The return to the console?

2006-05-18T17:33:00.000-04:00

I've been seeing a slew of articles on Nintendo's new Wii game console coming out over at digg and a few other places. I never read articles on console games much because at some point I realized that I would probably never buy a console game again. I didn't see the point to it.

They're dedicated single-purpose machines whereas my computer can play games and is useful for many other things.
They become obsolete every few years.
They're not THAT cheap.
I haven't been much of a game enthusiast since I was a kid.

The last time I considered a console was for the PS2 and because I was kind of interested in the Dance Dance Revolution thingy. I read some excitement of its addictiveness and use in exercise and health. But it was an idle consideration. The PS2 and the Xbox both had some interesting games, and I'd gotten some modest pressure from friends I had who owned them but I never took the interest I had too seriously.

The last console I owned was the Atari 5200 (date me alert). Well, I did have a Sega but that was given to me and I didn't use it. That 5200 was a let down. I was excited when I got it but with all the saving I did at that age to get it, it didn't last long; it basically tanked as a console and had some other problems with it. My brother and sister had newer consoles over the years so at least I got to play with theirs.

Anyhow, coming back to they Wii... I finally decided to look it up and see what the hoopla was about. I'm simultaneously impressed and skeptical, and this mostly stems from the unique controllers that have accelerometers in them. It may indeed lend itself to some innovative game play and I find myself interested a little more seriously on getting one when it finally comes out. I guess I'll come back to it when the time comes.

You complete me

2006-04-10T14:36:00.000-04:00

Being the lazy typist, like most programmers, I use command/file-name completion A LOT. I probably press "tab" more than I do "return". That works fine for the commands and for the file arguments.
However, there are a few command-line programs that are collected into toolkit style and operate on the form:

command subcommand subargs

It's sometimes a useful thing to do to wrap a bunch of little but related commands into a single command line, especially when the subcommands would otherwise share a bunch of code and procedures. Sadly, completion doesn't fill in choices for the secondary command; how can it? So one has to remember what choices there are and type the whole thing. This also applies to commands where the argument is another command, string, or filename that may not exist yet, as in makefiles.

But no more! Found another little *nix gem that's been in existence for who knows how long but lost on me because I never bothered reading the complete bash man page. I was alerted to it during my dig on Ruby Rake tips. Basically it concerns being able to write your own bash completion. Way cool!

In the makefile (and rakefile) example, it's very convenient to type "make [tab]" and get a list of possible targets of make. And in my toolkit example, I can type "command [tab]" and get a list of possible subcommands and a completion when it's unique. Very handy. It can save seconds at a time and has some good "wow" potential since I haven't seen anyone else in my group use this feature. I don't feel so bad that I missed this little time-saving gem all these years, but I wish I had known of it earlier.

Perl fondly

2006-04-07T13:29:00.000-04:00

I've read a many complaints about how Ruby took on too many Perl-isms. Actually, that's probably one of the bigger criticisms, and I completely disagree. In fact, I think Ruby is missing a few Perl-isms.

Some things about Perl that keep me coming back or I just appreciate.

THE BEST regex syntax, which basically was inherited from awk/sed and the like. I am puzzled that while Ruby smartly has "=~" they didn't include the substitution syntax form "s/.../.../g" which is so common, ingrained, and best of all, compact. WHY WHY WHY?!! I mean, Ruby can still keep the sub() and gsub() (so as not to munge in-place). This is why I still use Perl for all of my command-line hacks [perl -pe] instead of Ruby. BTW, Python's regexps suck balls.
Variables are easily identifiable because ALL variables begin with a $ or @ or %. Since Ruby is OO and has good data structures, only one symbol would be needed, say the $ (which means global in Ruby though). When I first learned Perl, the constantly having to type $, I admit, was kind of annoying. But I learned to appreciate it.
Because of the regex syntax and the "everything is a string" paradigm, it really is nice and convenient to quickly manipulate strings which is what I spend a good chunk of the time doing at work.

But generally, I've outgrown Perl for most of my scripting tasks; it's just not practical or convenient since the data structures are rather weak. I wish others in my group would follow suit.

Screen gems

2006-03-25T04:13:00.000-05:00

So there's this *nix tool called "screen" that I know has been around a long time and I've seen it before and in use... but never used myself. I never really felt like I had a compelling reason to use it until this week. Now I wish I had added it to my tools arsenal long ago. It's just really handy. It basically just lets you run multiple shell sessions in the same window, BUT with the ability to detach them and re-attach them elsewhere. Now that's handy. I can run some stuff at home, detach the screen and resume it at work with history and output text and all. The multi-session lets me have fewer ssh windows up as well. At the office I just use kterm which has tabs and I keep multiple (maybe too many) windows up. No real need for screen there. But when remotely logged in, it's just that useful.

Then I thought, back when I was doing a lot of remote work before on a previous Linux box, how come I never used it? I guess it's the nature of the work. Back in grad school (ugh, I keep saying that) I did actual developing on my laptop, which I would rsync back to my workstation. In this instance, I can't really do that since I'm not developing (much) and what I do requires running through many gigs of data that I don't, can't, and prefer not to download. So I'm forced to work remotely through ssh. The other thing is, these jobs can sometimes run for hours, of which I don't necessarily need to be connected to completion... or it gets to late and I want to resume the next day. Screen to the rescue, just detach and exit and then the next day re-attach and continue.

I don't know how I missed such a little gem. I'm such a noob.

Just in time Linux

2006-03-25T03:20:00.000-05:00

Fates have conspired in my favor for once in a minor way. Meaning... I'm really really glad that I got my home Linux box working last weekend. It turned out that all week long I was working long hours, like until 2am and such. The first day I sat in my cubicle all night, leaving only for breaks and dinner, but only because I didn't realize it was going to take that long so I kept staying a little longer and a little longer. Problem is, the stuff I was working on took a long time to run each step. Luckily, the web is a good time sink but doing it at the office that late seemed like a waste. The next day I saw it coming sooner because the compute servers were clogged with jobs from others in my group and it took half an hour to even get to mine (our job server is decrepit but we don't have the balls to change it). Screw you guys, I'm going home.

Fire up the Linux laptop, turn on the TV, grab some junk food. Ah, much better. Good thing I set my VPN up. Managed to catch up on some queued up shows including a Netflix DVD that I've had for months but was never in the mood to watch; all while monitoring my jobs, making adjustments, checking for errors, and taking the necessary time out to do some actual scripting. I was really really happy I had set this laptop up the previous weekend. I didn't want to go to work the next day, just work from home in front of the boob toob.

Ok, I could have done this anyways with my Winblows computer. I do have cygwin on it afterall, and cygwin is great. But it's more of a crutch and I resist using it too much. I think it has to do with the environment. Maybe it's because I'm used to working a certain way at work with Linux that I can't do completely on Windows. Little things like mouse focus, middle button, copy/paste, etc.; just the feel that I'm used to for that setting. Well there are a couple annoyances, I never figured out how to copy/paste in and out of cygwin windows reliably. Anyhow, I don't have an exact mirror distro and setup on the Linux box (different distro and a better one at that) but most of the basic use is there. It's all familiar and at my fingertips, man pages and all.

Only bad thing is I couldn't get the X forwarding to work. Works fine on my cygwin but won't accept my display on my laptop. It wasn't that important, it was all command line and text editting and thankfully emacs can run in that mode. X was always too slow and annoying remotely anyways but it was occasionally necessary. Correction, it was fine back in grad school when I had T1 in my room (oh how I missed it). On cable internet, there's just enough lag to get turned off, especially when it's just text stuff.

It also worked out that I ended up using Ubuntu instead of Gentoo because the packages are binary and install in a jiffy whereas Gentoo would have taken hours to get set up since it compiles from source. I could see myself getting frustrated knowing I had a lot of work to do but having to wait. There's still a big desire in me to try it out but this is good enough for now.

First day with Ubuntu

2006-03-20T12:03:00.000-05:00

The jury's still out but from what I can tell from a day's tinkering with Ubuntu I can sort of see why it's become so popular. It installed fairly cleanly and I was a little excited to see the login screen and get going rather quickly... and with the sound and screen and most things working. I remember having to do a lot of config file editting to get Redhat working on my old Toshiba (especially the video) and I had all kinds of problems with the sound. I remember moving over to the enlightenment system (still experimental back then) but Rasterman's esound stuff worked pretty well. Anyhow, the only setup problem I had was getting my wireless to work. My Linksys PC card wasn't set up for me. After some digging I finally found an excellent step-by-step guide that did the trick (wasn't about my particular card but close enough). After that was resolved, I could finally unchain my laptop to my switch and move it to the TV room.

Mental notes from a first day's playing with Ubuntu

Hey, sudo isn't so bad afterall! No need to keep a root terminal up. Menu'd items work after typing in the password. Fairly straight forward even if it means I'll eventually hate my password from all the typing.
The system really is more for the commoner... gcc and g++ not installed by default??!!? Now that's a first.
It defaults to Firefox 1.0.7, not 1.5. What's more is there seems to be a dependency on this version of Firefox. I had to do some trickery (found online) to get 1.5 installed and usable. That worries me.
The community seems nice and large, some fixes and tweaks were readily findable online.
Ugh, package managers. The dependency problems creep in. The package manager app I find quite good but there seems to be stuff missing. See below.

The first thing I did after getting the wireless set up was try and install Ruby. Fine. Go to package manager, select all Ruby related packages. Install. Uh... Interactive Ruby (irb) doesn't seem to be listed in the manager. WTF? Ok, download it from somewhere else. Dependency problems from hell. Look online, do a few more things, try some apt-getting. Nada. So I delete it all, all the Ruby related packaging, and just download the source. Looks like I'll be managing Ruby by myself. This is, incidentally, how I found out my normal compilers were missing.

Ok now for Openvpn and something else I can't recall right now. Package found, great! Uh, looks like the dependencies aren't quite there. I needed to get the -dev packages for some other things.

I admit, managing software manually from source is often the way to go but takes more time and effort grabbing the right things. So I can appreciate package managers for what they do right when they work right, which I guess is most of the time.

So far though, it hasn't been so bad. No matter what distro I use there's bound to be a lot of fixing and tweaking and such. So it's a good thing to start from a system where as much works as possible when one doesn't want to invest the time in starting more from scratch (though that can be its own reward at times) and Ubuntu seems to have a lot of the raw equipment setup stuff down fairly decently (my particular wireless card excepted of course).

I'll probably switch later.

Distro choice

2006-03-20T11:48:00.000-05:00

So with my new home Linux box, I was only strongly considering two distros. Gentoo and Ubuntu which from what I understand are at the opposite ends of the user spectrum; Gentoo being geared more towards the hands-on and Ubuntu more towards the commoner.

I wanted Gentoo because

I haven't managed my own box in some 8 years and was therefore very rusty with Linux innards. Quite a bit has changed/advanced. I wanted to get back into it.
I like the philosophy of Gentoo. I like the idea of optimizing performance for my machine.
Someday my office workstation is supposed to use Gentoo.
It has a strong following.

But

I know it's more time consuming in getting things setup.
It would take me quite a bit of digging to learn the ins and outs and details.
I just have too many other projects as it is.

Ubuntu was the other option, the fallback options. I was interested because

I read a lot of press on it. It seems to be the most popular new distro around.
It was easy to set up and use.
One of the IT guys tried it out and said it just works pretty cleanly out of the box. Very simple to set up. Sound works, CD works, etc. etc.
Seems like the low-maintenance solution

But

The feel-good global-tribe theme I find kind of creepy. The naming convention too.
No root? Everything is sudo. Now that's odd. Interesting.
Having been using Debian for the past many years I've grown disenchanted by it and things based on .deb packages. Same with .rpms and the Red Hat line.

Turns out Gentoo failed to install on the first couple attempts but Ubuntu started up almost perfectly. And there-in lies the deciding factor. I was just not willing to do too much tinkering to get things working and at 4-5am decided I would stick with what worked. I could always switch later. Or maybe I should just face facts that I've become a commoner.

Home Linux again

2006-03-20T11:15:00.000-05:00

I haven't had a working home installation of Linux since grad school. Back then it was an ancient Red Hat on my old Toshiba Satellite Pro. Came in really handy. I eventually put Winblows back on it near the end when I lost my home-T1 access but also because I wanted to use Illustrator to work on the graphics in my Diss and a couple other pieces of software. When I finally got a new laptop some 5-odd years ago, I tried several of the newer distributions on that old Toshiba. The install scripts always failed. I did a modicum of research and with the help of a company IT guy I got X to work, like for a day. Rebooting always crashed though. I gave up and gave the laptop away. It was way old anyways with a small drive, little memory, slow processor, small screen... only thing I truly liked about it was the keyboard keys.

So after getting a new computer last year I figured it was time to do it again but with my older Dell laptop. This time, I didn't want to put a lot of time into it, I have enough personal projects to keep me busy. I was going to use the first distro that worked, starting with Gentoo. I burned the latest install CD 2006.0. Tried both install scripts with a couple different configs including the defaults and it failed each time. Did a couple searches but decided that rather than fix it I moved on to Ubuntu which I was also curious about. It worked as advertised, with only a couple gotchas.

I've always wanted a ST:TNG console

2006-02-13T17:53:00.000-05:00

I've dreamed of an interface where I can move windows with my fingers, draw, type directly on the screen, have some amazing ways to edit, develop, and explore using a very large drafting table-type touch screen. I even went so far as to imagine the types of fingering would be involved to do some of those things. A lot of those dreams and practical ideas suddenly felt really mundane when I saw this excellent demo of just what I was imagining, only with way cooler effects. What they did to create a virtual desktop, map and image manipulation, and some very nifty application interfaces was very inspired. And I hadn't considered the addition of force measurements as yet another input control as they did. Very very cool.

I had wondered why there wasn't something like this out there in consumer land by now. It's such a much more natural interface than having to slide around a pointer on the screen via a mouse. Even the touch screens out there were very simple when I consider that they required only one touch point at a time. I hope that this thing gets commoditized because I want one.

Another video I saw that was kind of nifty was a real transformer robot. I wonder how long before a Veritech fighter can be made.

And the next letter will be...?

2006-02-09T17:43:00.000-05:00

I've witnessed the trends where a slew of companies, names, and products would nearly simultaneously begin with "x", "e", "@", and now "i". I can't say which is the worst offender though "i" is currently taking the cake because unlike "e" (email, ebusiness, ebay) it not only keeps its lowercase lettering but the letter after it is always capitalized (iPod, iTunes, iMac, iFinder, iHome, iBoom, iMotion... check out the name of this product). A close second would be "@" which isn't even a letter but at least it was short lived.

So what will be the next letter/symbol du jour?

While I'm at it, I think that "www" should be eliminated from any and all web addresses. It is a truly unfortunate those words that it stands for begin with the only English letter that is 3 syllables and therefore cumbersome to say, much less 3 times in a row. I think only the German speakers don't mind this since their pronunciation of "w" is "vay" (though they did compensate with "upsilon" for "y"). All basic atomic letters should be one syllable. I'd say numbers should be too but I there are good arguments for having them all be two syllables, but definitely not mixed (e.g. se ven, ze ro). But we can't do anything about the letters and numbers pronunciations that we've inherited. This "www" thing is though. And with the ubiquity of the web, it means nothing anymore.

Context ads

2006-02-08T17:47:00.000-05:00

I remember reading an article of how Amazon's context recommendations were proposing things like "Planet of the Apes" as "you might also be interested in" stuff for people looking up things related to Martin Luther King or Black History Month or something like that; creating a bit of a furor.

It occurs to me that stuff like this has to be happening all the time and I would be there's a site out there somewhere collecting it. I was just reading a Google groups post where a guy was suggesting using suspenders in place of belts for people with big bellies. The Google context ads on the side all concerned pregnancy. I'd post a link but the ads of course rotate in and out. On second read one had to do with pregnancy, one about babies, and one other regarding beanbags.

I wonder how many of these misapropos that can be deemed as offensive will pop up, how many will create a stir large enough for action to be taken, and how to handle it in freeform.

Fortunately, Google ads are (when used properly) unobtrusive and easily ignored, especially since they're all text and take up fairly little real estate. Boggles my mind how some people think it's not enough. I've seen pages where no less than 4 areas of the screen devoted to these ads, including between posts. Does this really help earn revenue that much?

Delete this

2006-01-23T12:13:00.000-05:00

I can only guess that the reason Google did not make a delete button (you had to go to the dropdown menu) was that they didn't really want you to delete anything. Now... why wouldn't they want you to delete anything? I have no freaking clue and I have no intention of digging through their literature in an effort to understand such an inane idea. There are just emails that are not worth saving. Maybe they figured so long as it was archived and out of the way then it wouldn't matter if it was there or not. That's kind of how I (used to) treat all of the accumulated items I have at home. File it and forget about it. The only advantage Gmail has is that the search is very good, whereas with my files, it is not. Still... clutter is clutter. The lack of a delete button was a big complaint by nearly every Gmail user I imagine and for such a simple thing to fix I'm astounded at their lack of response to it. But now it's there thankfully.

In slightly related news, I've finally started getting spam on my Gmail account. It took more than half a year for the spam to start and for that I'm both thankful and impressed. Well there was some spam there already but that was my fault due to some web purchases and signups but those were sensible, controlable, identifiable, and filterable. Now the typical maddening garbage is starting to trickle in. There's no escape.

Meta meta

2006-01-19T17:14:00.000-05:00

I feel like I'm getting bogged down with layers and layers of meta programming. I have programs that do things. Then I have scripts that run the programs that do things. Then I have scripts that run the scripts that run the programs that do things with different options. Then there are scripts to manage the myriad options and parameters. And just as that gets complicated I have to work with yet another wrapping of the scripts to manage the plethora of things to make sure the stuff has what it needs and runs correctly because by this layer it gets really confusing for all involved. But this new layer is every bit as confusing as every other layer.

I guess that's the history of programming.

So programs started out with machine code, 1's and 0's. Then came assembly which replaced the 1's and 0's with mnemonics for the instructions. Then came the mid and higher level languages which replaced the mnemonics with nicer and cleaner and more readable and one needn't know all of the individual steps to do some task. Then came the even higher level scripting languages to manage and glue together all of the various programs written in the higher level languages. And with it came systems of keeping tracks of arguments and parameters. Command line options and GUI's were made. And still more. Another layer after another to abstract and abstract until noone knows what goes on underneath. It's a bit of a maintainability nightmare all for the sake of making things more accessible. Ah well, there's a certain pleasure to it that goes with the pain.

Loading please wait...

2006-01-12T18:46:00.000-05:00

There are a couple of sites that I find I would probably use more, but dang they're slow. MySpace and Friendster are a couple of places that I have accounts. Once in a while the fit strikes me to do some people browsing, mostly through link following of friend's friends and such. Those fits get cut short frequently because the bloody pages are so polluted with cruft and busy with ads and markers and such that it gives me a headache. I think the data lookup is slow to begin with but when you top it off with all the flash and wierdness it grinds to a crawl. I applaud their popularity and am impressed with the whole social networking concept but I wish they had more elegant page designs, including layout and content, not just loading efficiency. Another offender in my book was Ain't It Cool News but at least they got rid of that infernal font-size system, where more popular stories were displayed in increasing font sizes. Was an eyesore.

That's something I grew to appreciate the likes of Google which since its inception has generally had minimalist and cleanly layed out pages. The simple and efficient text-only adds are also a breath of fresh air compared to the days when most pages had rows and rows of huge long banner adds and one had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to see the content, or worse, a link to the real content. But it seems to me that they also cared about speed. Their web-mail client is remarkable in not only its concept and user interface but sheer usability due to its speed. Until recently Yahoo mail was more of a burden to use for email, something I would only use in emergencies. I guess I've grown much more appreciative of the user viewing experience: elegant and attractive pages that load quickly.

Another page that I frequent but find frustrating is Lifehacker. It does have a simple and clean presentation. But for the life of me when it loads I get an eye-ache. I'm not sure if it's just my Firefox installations or not but it loads slow and with the few ads popping around the screen as things get filled in, and even afterwards. It's the page instability upon loading that is more the issue. They also keep relatively few posts on the same page and furthermore when you click next and previous links, a third of the posts or more are often the same posts as the original page, causing me to have to click next/prev more often and thus experiencing the loading page instability all the more. I hope someone there fixes that eventually, I do like that site a lot.

Wish it away

2006-01-06T09:47:00.000-05:00

I love those little clever pop-culture references, when I get them which I like to think I usually do. Some clever game designers put in a feature where misbehaving avatars are "wished into the cornfield" in reference to the Twilight Zone ep.

Zeitgeist

2006-01-04T16:57:00.000-05:00

The axiom of the age: If it's not on the internet then it doesn't exist.
The problem of the age: How to search and find what you are looking for when it does exist.

Yahoo, I just left but I may be back

2005-12-14T23:04:00.000-05:00

I remember the days when Yahoo! was basically a public bookmark list by some clever fellows at Stanford. They'd come a long way quickly, even when portals were en vogue and everyone's least favorite uncle was creating their own portals, I still managed to stay fairly faithful to Yahoo. That of course changed in recent years, most recently with the rise of Google and the plethora of social networking sites. I'll be honest and say that in my opinion Yahoo remained kind of bloated and stagnant from a user experience point of view most of that time; though during a lot of that time they were still on top in my book, but more in the "lesser amongst the evils" kind of way. They've been on the prowl this year. Acquiring Flickr and now del.icio.us almost seems like an act of desparation. Something like "we need to be cool fast, let's buy the cool stuff and claim it as our own." I guess that's common and fortunately they're nowhere near as atrocious about it as... some other big monopolistic companies.

My take is that it took some serious ingenuity and competition to get them off their arses. That's a good thing. Whereas before they were not happy with their place but still didn't truly experiment and encourage imagination, now they see that that is the key: making stuff that's cool and works good. So I finally move my email over to their new beta email client and I have to say I'm impressed. It looks and works pretty much like what most email clients (e.g. Thunderbird) have evolved into, except through a web interface. I like it. Good for them. I hated having to page through my emails 26 at a time, and with abysmal threading and search features. They even upped their storage quota to 2Gig (direct response to Gmail) which was something I used to have to pay for. Actually I'm still annoyed that I still have to pay for POP3 access, spam filtering, etc... something that's free on at least one other free amazingly popular email service. If this had come along, oh, about half a year or a year ago, I would have been even more pleased. Sadly, it's just a liiiiiittle bit too late. I really dig the Googlemail interface. Yes it has bugs and all the features I want aren't there but I consider the basic label+conversation+search paradigm the wave of the future and the way I want to handle my email from now on. Sadly, their interface is also just a web interface and not the way my normal machine clients work so I'm kind of stuck doing things the old way with my work email and such. Ah well, maybe someday.

I'm glad to see Yahoo getting aggressive. Although I may not fully embrace their new direction, especially in the presense of some serious competition, it's still good for Joe Consumer.

A Ruby in the rough

2005-11-30T18:53:00.000-05:00

I've noticed in the past few months more articles in the nerd channels about Ruby (mostly in regards to RAILS which I don't use). I'm sure it's simply selective attention on my part because I really love Ruby, more fervently than I did Perl when I first started using it some 10 years ago.

Ruby is a scripting language and I've been using it nigh unto a year now. It is currently my favorite scripting language and it was so practically from the first day I started playing with it. You can find plenty of advocacy, zealotry, demogoguery, and fanatacism in the usual places online; I'm sure even more if you can read and understand Japanese. Fortunately for me I did not see or read any of that online bantering about how "my scripting language can beat up yours" when I decided to play with it, only enough about it to give it a try.

Two things sold me on it immediately:

Nice data structures
The presense of "=~"

I'd been a Perl die-hard for years, was forced to use Python for work reasons, learned to really appreciate Python for what it was, and then cursed both for not having what I liked and needed to have in each. Perl makes for great quick-and-dirty guerrilla-warfare scripting but became clumsy for larger projects. Python was systematic, clean, and good for such larger projects, mostly due to its data structures, but it really dropped the ball when it chose not to add that little simple piece of syntactic sugar ("=~") to handle regular expressions. I deal with lots of text data but even if I didn't I do consider regular expression tools a basic necessity to life on the command line. And using regular expressions in Python just blows! There are other annoyances in each but those are currently of primary importance to me and my trade.

Enter Ruby, which upon first encounter appears to have the best of both worlds. Oh joy! I got busy with it immediately. It also had an interactive mode like Python, something Perl really needed. With a bit more experience, I discovered and began to appreciate some of its other and even novel features:

Truly object oriented in presentation (even the number 1 acts like an object) which adds a kind of consistency.
Interesting use of code blocks (I didn't like lambda's in Python, does anyone?).
Ease with which to extend even basic classes and objects.

With more use I found myself rethinking my former ways of coding a task (e.g. I found myself considering even simple things more often in terms of iterators). There are also things I find truly elegent (e.g. using code blocks for initializing).

The unfortunate aspects:

It's still rather new (outside Japan) and so the community and support is rather smaller than Perl and Python.
The syntax and keyword naming is a mite unfortunate and takes some getting used to. But at least it doesn't strongly rely on syntactically significant white spaces like Python.
It has automatic variables. You don't have to use them, and I don't mind them, but it freaks some people out. It does mean you can run cool stuff on the command line like Perl though.
It's yet another scripting language, and there will be some inertia to overcome, especially in the staunch work environment.
I miss Python's use of named and initialized arguments. This is almost a deal-breaker. Grrr... nothing's perfect it seems. Fortunately, that might change in the future for Ruby, and there are hacks to simulate it now but they are just hacks. I don't like the hacks though.
At present there only a relative few books on Ruby in English. Fortunately the first one out is a great one, on par with the Camel book in my opinion.

Currently I'm the only one at my office that uses Ruby. It will probably stay that way due to the inertia problem. But I decided to continue writing and infesting the company research code with it until someday they all seccumb to my will and see the light.

Comment first, code second

2005-11-30T18:20:00.000-05:00

Read this article on commenting. Kind of skimmed it actually. It did make me think about it though. I was going to post a comment on how I do it but I saw a comment from someone else that does it like I do.

Basically, I try and comment BEFORE I code. It solidifies what I'm about to code, its purpose and method. If implementing an algorithm it often helps to explain the steps in words, or even in pseudocode. I've seen people site papers or web resources as well which is acceptable. It also helps to note the limitations, what needs to happen before and after, the overall use of the code snippet and what-not. I find that doing this also helps me to code better. The steps are more clear and potential problems and bugs tend to get avoided when you see a description of the algorithm layed out in laymans terms.

Like most people I often work with other people's code. I get frustrated a lot at the lack of comments or the poor description. I've also done evil in the past, writing code myself that was uncommented, I try not to do that anymore. The bigger the system, the more the need for good comments. I understand that often in the throws of coding marathons, such sensibilities fall to the way-side. This is probably why there are auto-documentation systems out there. I'm convinced that there are people out there who think that this is actual documentation and they don't need to enter their own. In my experience, these do almost nothing to help me understand what I'm looking at. I would not miss it if they disappeared. Granted, sometimes it does help to automatically insert comments in places that need it (functions and such) as mere placeholders and to take stock of higher level stuff. But all in all, comments should be made as the code is written if at all possible.

The infamous Python indentation

2005-11-22T17:20:00.000-05:00

I don't care how good it looks, how clean it appears, how visually aesthetic to the reader it becomes... having the proper indentation as part of the Python syntax is just an annoyingly bad idea. I use emacs for most coding but occasionally use vi(m) for quick fixes, especially when I'm running from another terminal or someone else's machine. They are not always configured equally so that they produce different indentation lengths. It's just an annoyance but it occurs often enough to make me groan. I've read people defending this type of syntactically significant white space by claiming that all editors worth their weight can be configured to do the right thing and the clean listing is worth the "slight" inconvenience. I think it's wrong to dictate a certain level of editor in order to properly and easily edit code. I should be able to use whatever I want without having to configure it, even a DOS editor. But here's a short list of how it inconveniences my edits:

When developing, I often disable chunks of code with an "if (0)" or "if (false)". Because there's no end-of-block keyword (indentations mark it) I can't do this in Python. I have to resort to highlighting the entire section and re-indenting it en masse. Or i have to highlight it all and comment it out. Again, this requires an editor with the correct macros. But it is still more work than the simple if(true|false) I can use with most other languages.
Python's lack of block end keywords makes it easy to unintentionally nest blocks. Ever have consecutive if-statements and the second if auto-indents under the first one instead of at the same level? This is a common gotcha when I'm editting and replacing a line of code.
In emacs I often use tab to auto-indent/clean-up code. Lack of block end keywords means the indentation is not unique. It also means that you cannot have a beautifier program.
It's dangerous to cut and paste code from one section to the other, or off of web pages or other programs because the indent may be different (and difficult to clean up) or it may be at the wrong level.
Using Python interactively from the command line becomes a pain too since you have to keep track of indents for every line.

I sympathise with the desire to produce consistent, pleasant, and hence more maintainable code. I think enforcing it this way created more annoyances than it meant to solve. A simple beautify program often does the trick when you want the script cleaned up after a lot of cut/paste/reorganization.

YAML

2005-11-16T14:25:00.000-05:00

YAML once meant "Yet Another Markup Language" and now means "YAML Aint Markup Language" but I would prefer it to mean "What do you get when you breed a Yack and a Camel". It's a data serialization format that (and this is the important part) is human readable text. It was brought to my attention a year ago by a coworker and I had since hacked it in to our system to better handle log file parsing. I completely agreed it to be the right idea. It has made my log file parsing much less stressful and more consistent. It just sucks that the online community for it is still... lacking. Some of the main YAML sites seem grossly out of date and nearly empty.

My recent frustration is dealing with incomplete implementations in the different scripting languages. I'm currently parsing Python generated YAML streams with Ruby. They seem to conform to different versions of the specification; most notoriously for me right now is how they each treat boolean values. My Python implementation wants to turn "+" and "-" into true/false (I had since hacked that out). Ruby wants to turn strings like "true/false", "yes/no", "Y/N", and even "on/off" into boolean true/false. This is causing all sorts of minor annoyances since I'm dealing with text that will have this as literal strings and not as code for boolean values. I in fact think that having the YAML spec interpreting strings as booleans is just a bad idea with perhaps some exception. Auto-interpretation of data is a touchy subject and you're bound to upset someone no matter which way you go. I'd prefer the "everything's a string" method, since that would at least guarantee consistency. But for now I just hack in fixes for my own purposes. I may submit a patch someday. I'd feel safer using the format if I had a sense of more active development however.

Ruby seems to be the only safe-haven for YAML at the moment. They seem to be trying to turn it into a Pickling or Marshalling replacement though. That's not really what I want out of YAML. It's just a really good way to display nested list and hash structures in a clean, pleasant, and consistent way. Anything more may make it too complicated to be portable and general purpose. I'd still rather use it than write my own though, since I don't really have the time.

Simp[l]y Delicious

2005-11-15T17:42:00.000-05:00

I like using the social bookmarking system. It allows me to easily access boomarks from anywhere. More importantly it's a more powerful and flexible system than the bookmarks built into my browser because labels are more versatile than folders (Google knows this) and with most browsers you can only organize by folders. It also allows me to be more shameless about the number of things I can bookmark without becoming overburdened with organizing the links. It also lets me search through topics other people have marked with the same kinds of labels. There are other features related to this of course.

I started off with del.icio.us which is still the most popular. Then a number of other ones popped up. I started using simpy because it had some more features. Then I ended up coming back to del.icio.us, and for nearly the same reason people stuck with VHS over Betamax, Atari 2600 over Intellivision, and to some degree Microsoft over Apple. There are plenty of examples of sad cases where the superior bows to the popular. With del.icio.us however, it made more sense to favor the popular because it's a social web concept whereby the better service was the one with the most participants.

Why again?

2005-11-15T17:17:00.000-05:00

I'm not a hardcore programmer and only a mild computing aficionado but it is part of my trade. As I sit at my desk I often stumble across or realize things that wrinkle my brow and are sometimes worth a quick note. I mean, as long as I'm not working I might as well look like I'm doing something by writing on things I use in relation to work. Right? So why not meta-tab over to my browser, log in, and make a quick blurb about it?