Sat, 31 May 2008
Venkatesh clarifies
Mar 07 18:49:41 <venkatesh> often, your flames lack flame
I guess that's a good quality to have....
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Reverse smileys
Kristian Hermansen sent an email to the San Francisco Linux Users Group list expressing shock at my "reverse smileys". Others have, too, so let me take a moment to explain.
Some time around 1995, I started using AOL. (I also stopped some time in the same century.) I learned important vocabulary like "a/s/l" and "rofl" and PC Magazine sent me a free mousepad with Windows 95 hotkeys like "Windows+R" for the Run dialog box. Then our free month expired, and we went on to some other network.
Eventually I got into IM, and I started messaging friends routinely. I got into the habit of making complicated smileys - my favorite was Abe Lincoln: =|:-)= [source]. And some time later on, the smileys started getting turned into pictures. It may have been cool that :-) turned into a picture of a smiling yellow face, but I found it offensive that (a) they (AOL) started doing this without asking me, on other people's computers, so I had no idea how my emoticon was going to be displayed, and (b) that they would totally corrupt smileys like Mr. Lincoln.
So I retaliated. I came up with two counter-attacks. The first was the smartest: :-) would not get graphicalized, I realized. (View the source if it's not clear how that works.) That worked fine in media where I had rich formatting (HTML), but would fail me in emails. It was great for confusing my IMees, for whom it looked like a regular, old-school smiley, except all the other old-school smileys had gone away in favor of yellow circles with black lines and points.
The other way was more drastic and, instead of hiding between the lines, vocally made the point that not all smileys needed to be graphicalized. That was to reverse the smiley. I don't know when I started doing that, but it's probably some time between 1998 and 2000.
I also liked to abuse smileys to make grinning asides in emails. (-; You might wonder why asides needed to grin; usually they wink instead! ;-) I don't know if that idea came before or after I started making backwards smileys in the first place. I don't do this as much now in large part to me having seen Thunderbird turn my closing smileys into lame yellow things that ruin the symmetry.
One day during natural language processing, Jason Eisner said in class that he thought people who did the above thing (presumably without knowing I did it) were making an NLP joke. That added to the feeling that NLP was right up my alley.
All in all, smileys have been a big part of my online life. It's only fitting that the EFF and They Might Be Giants contributed to this post.
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Mon, 26 May 2008
IPv6
Kartik pointed me to this post about "The Future without IPv6". IPv6 is the future addressing scheme that the Internet will hopefully be transitioning to in the next decade or so; IPv4 is the current setup. The reason we need a new addressing scheme is simple - we've run out of addresses. The dream of the Internet was "end to end connectivity," but you can't do that if you don't have enough addresses to give everyone on the network an address.
You've seen this every time you open up a laptop and it gets an IP address from a "wireless router" - the IP address created for you by that router actually can't be reached from the broader Internet. Network Address Translation (NAT) is a trick the router plays where it changes the headers on your messages destined for the Internet so everyone else on the network thinks the box sent the message. But this means if you want to do something not allowed by that box in the middle, or allowed but misunderstood, it is in an incontrovertible position to screw that up.
The article writes:
Ubiquitous multilevel NAT means the Internet becomes a system for making TCP connections.
Using the Internet only for TCP connections to me spells the end of decades of Internet innovations like Voice over IP that rely on the flexibility of the Internet. And the fact that these connections must always go to the few servers able to have their own dedicated IP addresses creates a separate class of connection in the Internet world: "consumer" vs. "distributor". That class distinction is what IP was designed to erase.
I don't agree with the author that we will never move to IPv6, but I also know we won't do it fast enough to satisfy me. Luckily, thanks to the "end to end" nature of the Internet, especially IPv6, I can do my own migration now and give my computers both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. I'll be here in the future, waiting for the rest of you guys.
P.S. I'm already "multiplexing multiple transports over a single TCP connection" with my always-on SSH tunnel. I am aware of the drawbacks he lists.
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Mon, 19 May 2008
Humility in the open source world
"Thanks, Markus. I'm glad to know I was dumb"
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Fri, 16 May 2008
Another satisfied customer (of Dovecot)
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Thu, 08 May 2008
Hypotheticals
<l7_> hmm, well that's a rather problematic hypothetical <shiznick> what? <shiznick> oh, the nuclear holocaust thing?
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Sat, 03 May 2008
Lessons to learn
<vsrinivas> what I really really wish existed somewhere was a 'lessons to learn from N' <vsrinivas> where N was plan9, coyotos, erlang, alef, .... <vsrinivas> because srsly, we're not using them. but it'd be nice to understand what worked and what didn't and how it was applicable to reality <paulproteus> "Programming UNIX as if it were Plan 9" <paulproteus> "Programming Python as if it were Erlang" <paulproteus> "Coyotos idioms for kernel designers" <vsrinivas> something like that <paulproteus> "Alef for Naught? Not!" <vsrinivas> hahahahahaha!
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reCAPTCHA
CAPTCHAs are a name for programs designed to test if they are being used by another computer (a "bot") or by a humamn. They do this by asking the user to do a task that presumably can't be done by a computer; for example, reading obscured words.
reCAPTCHA is a well-known CAPTCHA service that takes images from the Internet Archive's book scanning project. Some words are hard
But as for spam in MediaWiki, it seems that simply using the blacklists mentioned earlier is not enough; the Reed Free Culture wiki (for example) has been spammed beyond recognition with link spam. So I am deploying reCAPTCHA to show a CAPTCHA to users when they register, and showing a CAPTCHA to anonymous users who try to add links.
P.S. Attentive people may consider a personal link I have to the Internet Archive's book scanning project. That has nothing to do with my liking reCAPTCHA. (-:
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eSpeak
While I was listening to the Raven, Matt remarks:
"I don't know what the purpose is, but clearly it should be a female voice with a British accent."
Kragen replies online: "oh, use -v en/en+f2 for that"
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A name
<cdchan> That seems like Awkward City. <paulproteus> Awkward City Soundtrack
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Who is that Mailer-Daemon anyway?
"He's a magic dwarf with a taste for destruction."
Another good quote: "On the Internet there are no cops, just system admins."
And the part where I think I like him: "It would be a shame if we lost our public postal system to private companies!"
He suggests sysadmins use collaborative filters. That's interesting, since I currently just use a local DSPAM that collaborates with nobody.
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Tuesday
was like simulated annealing, but where you never turn the temperature down.
