Fri, 25 Jan 2008

I Think John Spinach

If you know why the title of this post is funny, you too may like "Less talk, more spinach.".

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Wed, 23 Jan 2008

Tell them lies

Asks Laurence Harris, "What kind of company charges people $1500 to sit them in a room and tell them lies?"

Apple.

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Mon, 14 Jan 2008

Unix permissions

"Unix permissions are weird sometimes, like a $100 television tube that protects a 50 cent fuse by blowing first."

-- Jerry Yeager.

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Sat, 12 Jan 2008

Ronald patch

I saw this on the Dovecot mailing list:

Mr. McDonald,

I haven't investigated too deeply but I presume your patch requires a  
bit of modification to apply to roundcubemail-0.1-rc2.

BTW, my kids just LOVE your burgers!

B. Bodger

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Fri, 11 Jan 2008

GUIs with PyGTK and Glade

Today I had to write a simple GUI program on a deadline, so I thought I would try Glade and PyGTK.

Wow, that was easy. I read through a straightforward LinuxJournal article and now I feel fairly comfortable with this for single-window applications. The thing I'm not really sure of is how to change the window the program displays, but maybe one day I will. (-:

Update: There's a GLADE to Python code generator called Kefir that looks nice too.

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Need a drink

As I got on the BART to ride back home from Oakland today, I felt something that I'd heard about but had never felt before:

I need a drink.

I thought for another minute, and dreamed of a tall glass of some tasty cider. I felt extremely worn, and had just had what felt like a failed conversation after a meeting that, itself, left me feeling tired.

I've chosen to drink [alcoholic drinks] before, but never felt like using drinking as a tool to fix something that felt wrong. I've chosen to drink when I've felt tired, but those times (that time?) I didn't also feel unhappy at the time - just tired.

I remembered that only a couple of years ago the fact that drinking would change my mood was a scary thought, and in a moment realized, "This feeling right now now - this is what I was afraid of." I didn't feel afraid of it or even apprehensive about it while it was happening, though. "I guess I'll find a nice cider on the way home," I decided, my inner teenage voice notwithstanding.

Brain-fried, I sat through a BART ride that started with me going the wrong way. I got to my destination station, and there I found a water fountain. After only a few sips of water, I suddenly felt much less tired. Certainly enough that I no longer felt the "need" to drink anymore.

I didn't quite feel happy, though. But then I passed a cute girl on the walk home from BART; and she passed me, joined her two friends, and said to one, "How do you make that sound like a spray paint can?"

Then I heard what felt like the most joyfully whimsical sound in the world. I'm chuckling now thinking of it, and I laughed then. The girl in turn was pleased, and I heard her say as much.

After all that, I looked up at the sky and said, Thanks.

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Thu, 10 Jan 2008

Matt explains being a grownup

My roommate Matt:

There's two things that, for me, define being a grown-up. One is going to funerals of your peers, and the other is polishing shoes. I prefer shoe polishing.

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Tue, 08 Jan 2008

Passwordless alpine with Dovecot

Do you run a server that people SSH into for email?

Do you like to offer them (al)pine?

Do you use the Dovecot IMAP server?

Do you think your users would like to enjoy IMAP benefits from the comfort of alpine without entering their password?

I do! Here's how: Add this to /etc/pine.conf:

rsh-command=/usr/local/bin/alpine-rimapd %s %s %s %s
rsh-path=/bin/sh

And store this in /usr/local/alpine-rimapd:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/sbin/dovecot --exec-mail imap

chmod +x that sucker and you're off to the races!

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Shoes and socks

I exclaimed to Lisa when I signed my contract to start working, "Someone's going to hand me thousands of votes every month!"

I try to treat these dollars with respect. So far, I haven't given any of them to the MPAA as part of watching movies in theaters or buying movies. (I haven't participated in free advertising for them either by watching their movies for free without their permission.) I've bought music from eMusic.com or directly from the artist in the case of Girlyman.

It's easy to watch when I hand dollars to the copyright industry. But what to do about socks and shoes? Where can I go to buy shoes that weren't made in sweatshops?

Enter the Blackspot sneaker brand. It's by the people from Adbusters.

They tell me the shoes are made in a union shop in Portugal from organic hemp. I don't (yet?) feel like I need everything I own to be made of hemp, but the organic bit is a nice touch. I can buy them practically next door, at De La Sole Footwear in the Castro.

Thu, 03 Jan 2008

emostat

Bernardo Innocenti explains One lol per child:

>> ps -emostat,wchan:22,pid,tid,pcpu,comm,args
> 
> I did not know about this!  :)

Me neither...  "emostat", lol!

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Tue, 01 Jan 2008

Welcome to the new year

What went well in 2007

I have a job working to advance a cause I believe in.
I have a fairly nice server being treated to love and pampering.
I'm living in a nice slice of a house with an awesome roommate.
I've settled on some asheesh.org tech that I seem to be interested in actually using.
Since taking over the tech for Students for Free Culture, I've been fairly responsible and reliable. (Certainly when compared to our previous experiences.)
I (still) have good friends.
I seem to have adequate social skills.
I've been consistently uploading packages (through a sponsor) to the Debian archive, and I now have Debian Maintainer status.

What went poorly

I still am not using a phone running only Free Software for everyday use.
The asheesh.org tech is quite barebones - no comments, no photos, no artificially-creative automatic free-association.
I'm still only "nearly" using full-text search on IMAP.
I lost freaking gobs of data in a massive disk crash.
I still don't have quick automatic easy access to all the songs I own.
My computers still don't do everything I want them to in the blink of an eye without me even asking, and all my computers aren't connected to each other with wireless gigabit links.
I'm still afraid of voicemail and of calling some people.
My bedroom has been a disaster zone.

What I didn't guess would happen

Gaurav seems to be using Ubuntu and enjoying Compiz Fusion.
Apple launched DRM-free music on their iTunes store.
I ran into #joiitoers at least twice by accident.
I went to Burning Man, and learned that I think I prefer the Mystery Hunt.
I sat on a terrace in Croatia and drank Absynthe (I know, the boring legal-in-Germany kind).
I went to Tokyo to present about the Semantic Web (and Neurocommons) to a room full of people twice my age. While in town, I struck up a conversation in French with some Swiss dudes.
I looked at myself in a mirror on two separate occasions, and realized that getting a haircut looked really good, and also that torn sneakers look like someone sticking his tongue out.

I wonder what 2008 will be like.

This must be it. Welcome to the new year.

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