Tue, 18 Nov 2008
Obama's digital writing
The New York Times says this about Obama:
"His messages to advisers and friends, they say, are generally crisp, properly spelled and free of symbols or emoticons."
There's hope for me still!
Sat, 01 Nov 2008
Mouse cursors
John Goerzen was surprised by a mouse pointer change. His mouse changed from X.org's class black mouse pointer to the new GNOME translucent set. Upset, he wrote:
I noticed that my beloved standard X11 cursors had been replaced by some ugly antialiased white cursor theme. I felt as if XP had inched closer to taking over my machine.
Windows users seem to place similar importance on that clicky thing. A recent PC Magazine article writes, "Few things are more important in Windows than the mouse pointers." Dave Taylor discussed mouse pointers once, showing this picture of Windows XP's mouse pointers:
Windows XP's mouse pointer, then, doesn't look like the one John Goerzen got. They look like a bent version of the normal X11 pointers with inverted colors. Windows Vista's mouse cursors do look like GNOME's (via a BlogIsEverything post):
For this reason, Windows Vista feels like a cheap knock-off of GNOME to me whenever I use it.
Thu, 30 Oct 2008
Renaissance Faires and :D
Lisa and I were recently discussing both Renaissance Faires and people who make smiles like :D.
For everyone, take a look at http://farmerchris.com/illusion/2/.
Make sure your mouse is not over the picture, so it is in black and white. Then move the mouse over it, and look at the dot toward the center. After a few seconds, move the mouse off the picture.
It's now in beautiful positive color!
More information at John Sadowski's original post.
Fri, 24 Oct 2008
Voice mail greetings
When you call me and I don't pick up, a recording of me greets you with:
The names and faces may have changed,
but our commitment to you remains the same.
My mom writes:
i finally found the ad that inspired your voice mail
UBS: the world around you may change, but our commitment to you does not.
UBS
I think it was some other ad I was looking at while being driven around Baltimore by Andy Bette in 2005. Seeing it just inspired me: this has to be my automated greeting! Since it was right there, I'm pretty sure the way I said verbatim.
I think my ad was about the company changing, perhaps through an acquisition.
Chris Chan adds, astutely:
The ad that your voicemail is based on isn't for a company. The ad was for UMBC or a hospital. Your not-blog needs commenting.
Tue, 21 Oct 2008
Hixie Limerick
RDFa is a standard now. Meanwhile, Ian Hixie is considering how (and if) to make this part of HTML5. To celebrate, I wrote this Limerick as a vision from the future.
There once was a fellow named Hixie,
Our pal Joi lent him a fixie.
He took HTML5,
Added RDF jive,
And returned positively a-rixie!
Sun, 19 Oct 2008
Packaging, and other joys of Debconf
I was trying to explain to my friend Emily (C.) some of the fun things about Debconf.
On one of the first days I attended, I was standing around while some people I didn't yet know discussed piuparts, an automated Debian package tester.
At this point when talking to Emily, I thought, Maybe I shouldn't bother explaining what piuparts is. If I do explain it, it will make me much more interested in the telling of the story, as well as let her make sense of the story. Or I could be vague to avoid boring her, but then I'll bore myself by only teling the skeleton of a story.
I know Emily well enough that she'll forgive me boring her, I decided. So I'll give it a try.
"The bulk of work in Debian is packaging, which means finding up-to-date open source software and bundling it up into a nice installer," I began. "Windows installers, if you're lucky, will create an entry in Add/Remove Programs. But Debian installers, to comply with Debian Policy, have to do a lot more."
"Let's say you already had the Safari web browser installed and you wanted to install Google Chrome, their new browser based on the same core as Safari. When you upgrade Safari, it would be nice if Google Chrome also benefitted from the upgrade."
"In Debian, it would." I continued with another obscure fact about the Debian Policy. "Another element of the Policy is that when a package is fully removed, it must leave no files and leave no programs running."
Suddenly she was interested! For a moment I didn't understand why. Then I realized what I had said: Something I take for granted in Debian, the "leave no trace" element, is something Windows users often wish they had.
I continued, "There is an automated tool called piuparts which takes packages, creates a small virtual install of Debian, run the package's installer, the uninstalls it and verifies that the package does in fact leave no trace."
Explaining the rest was easy: The first day I was at Debconf, I ran into some people discussing piuparts. Lucas explained he was slow to program in Python, the language piuparts is written in, and Emily rightly picked up on the fact that Python is my favorite programming language. Lucas explained that piuparts needed a machine-readable report format so that you could automatically run it on the whole Debian archive and get a list of which packages have problems. I volunteered to add that.
After a few days of hardly working on this, I finally was sitting with some new friends Thursday night. They left, and I worked on everything I could possibly justify working on. Then it was 5 a.m., and I knew there was no more time to waste if I wanted to actually finish the modification to piuparts. So I began it, ate breakfast, and finished it.
It was really great having a comfortable environment to work all night in. It was even better that I had people to stay up late talking to about geeky things that came from a shared interest in programming, system administration, and Free Software principles. When people left, there was always a great reason to stay awake: more great people to talk to, or finally the assignment I gave myself at the start of Debconf. I had that joyous feeling from the people every evening at Debconf, and Thursday night the feeling brought me all the way to morning.
Sat, 18 Oct 2008
Interpersonal
You're still administering geeks, right?
-- Quinn to Shannon.
Wed, 15 Oct 2008
Mining Wikipedia for style edits
I had an old project that never quite succeeded to mine Wikipedia for style edits — through this, one could learn what made a style improvement, and attempt to generalize that to other texts. Think of it as the minimal boostrapping of a purely-statistical "grammar checker." It was originally to be my masters project under the awesome Jason Eisner. (Instead, I contributed to a storage layer branch of Dyna's compiler.)
It has some nice filters (written using SAX, so they don't chew up all your RAM for pages with 2GB of history) for filtering down MediaWiki page dumps into just what we want, also optionally modifying their text so that the new outputted versions contain the results of data processing.
The code also has some hilarious (and useful!) Makefiles that treat a bunch of heterogenous computers as a compute cluster. The higher "-j" you pass into make, the more machines it will SSH into, copy your code onto, run your code, and rescue the output.
I'm putting in my git repository having dug it out of my JHU NLP Subversion repository. Check it out in my gitweb.
It's not the prettiest thing ever....
Sun, 05 Oct 2008
qemu IP address patch
I sometimes use the qemu virtualization system, or its cousin kvm, for creating virtual computers to test software in. Conveniently, qemu makes networking those really easy.
Unfortunately, the IP addresses it assigns for virtualization happen to be in the same subnet as my desktop at work (at CC, 10.0.2.x). I had some fear of changing a piece of software as presumably complex as qemu.
I forged ahead and came up with a patch that I posted to the qemu-devel mailing list. I'm just wring this post in case someone wonders, "How can I change the IP address of the user net layer used by qemu to avoid a conflict?"
The answer is as easy as replacing the string "10.0.2" with "10.0.3" globally across the qemu codebase and recompiling. If that mailing list post ever goes away, I have a local copy of the patch.
(This work was sponsored by CC, but pending an okay from CC, you should be free to use it under the terms of the WTFPL.)
Toasted flash drive
I just got an email. (For background, Matt B. is my flatmate's name.)
From: Travis M. To: Asheesh Laroia Subject: Matt B. left the oven on!!
I am here in the park with Matt. He left the oven on, with a Flash Drive in there no joke!
As it happens, this email was real, not malarkey.
