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Sun, 12 May 2013

Crockpots and kitchen improvements

Preeya and I cooked together at my place yesterday, and after the event, I wrote down some notes so that next time it can be even better.

The idea of the cooking was to create leftovers for us both to eat during the work-week. Preeya's angle is that she loses interest in eating something during cooking it, so we thought we could make food for each other.

We cooked:

Notes

Here are the notes I wrote up from the event. Mostly I'm sharing these to provide some insight into the process of "Do something in the kitchen, then think about how to improve the kitchen" that I've been going through a lot lately.

Dry things we could have had but didn't

(Fix: bought them by Google Shopping Express)

Locations of things in kitchen

Shopping

General

Recipe

Logistics

[food] permanent link and comments

Mon, 06 May 2013

asheesh.org/scratch/ back in business

For a few years, I had been storing public notes to myself (that might possibly be useful to others) at http://asheesh.org/scratch/.

Then OpenHatch happened in May 2009, and I paid decreasing attention to that site.

Eventually, as a semi-unprotected MediaWiki instance, it became spammed to smithereens.

Last night and this morning, I did the following things:

  • Made it so only sysops can edit the site.
  • Clicked every link off the front page, and manually reverted it to the most recent non-vandalized page I could find.

Now you can more easily read my scratchy notes, like:

Honestly, it is a huge relief to see those old bits of text back on the web. It makes me feel so much more pleasantly connected to the timeline.

[sysop] permanent link and comments

Sat, 13 Apr 2013

Why are you doing all of this?

fijal just asked me, on IRC:

<fijal> paulproteus: if you have a second, can you tell me *why* are you doing all of this?

Briefly, here is the reason I work on OpenHatch:

For free software to take over the world, and for all users of software to be able to have control over their computing, we need a few things it seems to me.

  1. Software that is free ought to be better.
  2. That will probably take more collaboration and contributors.
  3. More people ought to feel comfortable doing things like filing bugs and participating in projects.
  4. For people to understand that, it helps a great deal if they know how to program.
  5. Free software contribution experiences are best when you have in-person communities to work with and bounce ideas off, or at least people who you know fairly well even if you collaborate remotely.

I think that explains basically all of what we do at OpenHatch.

[free-culture] permanent link and comments

Thu, 07 Feb 2013

Notes from attempting to despam a wiki with git-remote-mediawiki

I just tried to despam a mediawiki instance with git-remote-mediawiki.

The idea is as follows:

  • Make a list of bad users, either by skimming Special:RecentChanges, or by some other more automated means. For example, use 'git log' to get everyone since the last time you felt the wiki was clean: 
git log --since='Wed Dec 5 22:57:06 2012 +0000'

(You can process that with either 'grep ^Author' and so on, or you can use an overwrought Python script I wrote.)

  • Get a list of their commits: 
git log --author=bad_user_1 --author=bad_user_2 --pretty="format:%H"

Here's where things start to go wrong.

You might try to revert them all: 

git log --author=bad_user_1 --author=bad_user_2 --pretty="format:%H" |
xargs -n1 git revert

That works great until the first merge conflict.

So then you write a wrapper script that does "git revert $1 || git revert --abort", and you can still only revert the first few hundred (out of ~800) spam edits because one of the commits causes a conflict when you try to revert it.

Why a conflict? I suspect it's because there are spam edits that I neglected to include in the revert stream. (Update: The conflict was actually a real conflict -- some kind soul on the web had already reverted a bunch of the spam edits!)

In our case, there are fairly few pages getting spammed, so it'd be simpler to 'git log' the pages we care about and revert back to the commit IDs that look clean. 'git revert' could still be useful in the case of tangled history, but (apparently) there is a limit to how useful it can be, anyway.

Oh, also:

It'd be useful to be able to create MediaWiki dump files from git-remote-mediawiki exports. That way, I could use 'git rebase -i' to clean up history. (That would break links *unless* the MediaWiki revision IDs somehow stayed constant for the revisions with the same content. Maybe that's feasible. Actually, the simplest way might be to write a tool that filters the dump file itself, rather than exporting straight from git-remote-mediawiki.)

Also also, I fixed a format string bug in git mergetool, one of my favorite little pieces of git.

P.S. In this corpus, of the IP address editors (i.e., not logged in), 0 (of 16) are spammers. About 80% of the logged-in editors are spammers. (Admittedly our wiki does require you to log in if you are posting new URLs to a page.)

Update: It is way faster if you run it with low latency to the MediaWiki server in question. It probably could be adjusted to make fewer API calls, and to make more of them in parallel.

[software] permanent link and comments

Sat, 02 Feb 2013

Receiving mail virtually

This is the most beautiful piece of mail I have ever received virtually:

Since a few months ago, I have been a very happy customer of Virtual Post Mail, a service where they'll receive mail on my behalf and, if I want them to, scan it. And if there is a check inside, they'll send it to my bank's "Deposit by mail" address so it gets into my bank account.

I've been using it for a number of OpenHatch inbound mail things, so that I don't have to go deposit checks at a bank branch if e.g. I'm traveling. But I've also been using it for a few personal things.

I suspect this is a wedding invitation. I've clicked the "Open and Scan" button in the website, and expect to find out shortly (in 1-24 hours).

[travel] permanent link and comments

Sat, 12 Jan 2013

A brief tribute

Angel engineer,
Peaceful pioneer[...].

Hold me.

The news.

[people] permanent link and comments

Thu, 27 Sep 2012

Censored on Facebook

For the first time in what feels like years, I wanted to share something with my friends on Facebook.

The background was that I read a note on Slashdot that Linus Torvalds thought a presidential candidate's remarks on a topic related to airline security were "moron"ic. So I did my own research, and I disagred. I figured this was a topic of general enough interest that all my Facebook friends might be interested in knowing my position, so I wanted to share that.

Facebook didn't let me.

I tried first with a link to snopes.com, which blocked me with the rationale that http://snopes.com/images/template/snopes.gif is "spammy or unsafe":

You can't post this because it has a blocked link. The content you're trying to share includes a link that's been blocked for being spammy or unsafe. http://snopes.com/images/template/snopes.gif For more information, visit the Help Center. If you think you're seeing this by mistake, please let us know.

Then I thought I'd be clever, and I linked to the .nyud.net version of the snopes page on the topic. I earned the same message that my post included a blocked link.

So then I tried again, with a link to a video on YouTube of the same clip.

That's when I first got the extremely generic message that "The message could not be posted to this Wall."

Finally, I removed all the links, and kept the first bit of text. For this, I got the same generic error: "The message could not be posted to this Wall."

Update: Patrick points out I should link to the actual video. Here it is, embedded:

(BTW: The first thing I did was to click "let us know" to indicate that I think I'm seeing this by mistake. I filled out the form to indicate there was a problem in an honest, respectful way. I got back an email autoresponse that said, "Thanks for taking the time to submit this report. While we don't currently provide individual support for this issue, this information will help us identify bugs on our site.")

[software] permanent link and comments

Mon, 13 Aug 2012

Zooming in

She zoomed in on the git commits to check that the new contributors were thanked properly. She was not looking for bad programmers or bad community managers. She was looking for the kinds of misses that even excellent programmers and community managers can make under pressure.

A mis-quote of "Can Hospital Chains Improve the Medical Industry?".


[debian] permanent link and comments

Mon, 30 Jul 2012

RHEL 7 will (probably) have GNOME 3

While chatting with Greg Price earlier this evening about the coming Linpocalypse, I said something I wanted to research. Upon further review, it seems that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will ship GNOME 3.

You can see a video of Jonathan Blandford talking about it, where he says:

And then looking forward to the future, RHEL 7.... We're giving demos of GNOME3, and the new desktop is a huge change; we're doing some pretty exciting things there. So if you're interested in it, please come by and take a look!

"CubedRoot" on fedoraforum.org did take a look, and (s)he wries:

I went down to the Partner Pavillion and spent over an hour with Jonathan and the RHEL7 demo they had running. Besides a new wallpaper (Which was very beautiful BTW) they were running Gnome 3.5 on the demo, an the only other major changes were a few more account service providers and chat plugins (like Sametime, Yahoo, and stuff). It did not handle multi-monitors with different resolutions worth a flip (but it is beta after all). This is when I asked him if they planned on putting XFCE or LXDE or even Cinnamon in the Extra's channel, and they very confidently said they would not be in there. They had no plans to offer them.

[software] permanent link and comments

Thu, 14 Jun 2012

Reactions to a public disaster

Quoth Laila Winter:

"It's a setback, but... it'll be fine. These things happen. It's just a strange day."

[me] permanent link and comments