random($foo)

5/6

A huge media circus surrounds Pat Tillman's death, but not a single news source (searched via Google and Google News) had his brother's eulogy. Here it is via The Uncivil Litigator:

Thanks Pat. [toasting him with a glass of Guiness beer] I didn't write shit because I'm not a writer. I'm not just going to sit here and break down on you. But thanks for coming. Pat's a fucking champion and always will be. Just make no mistake, he'd want me to say this: He's not with God. He's fucking dead. He's not religious. So, thanks for your thoughts, but he's fucking dead.

Rich Tillman, younger borther of Pat Tillman, holds up a glass of beer during a memorial service for Tillman in San Jose, Calif., Monday, May 3, 2004. Tillman, a member of the Army's elite Ranger unit since 2002, died in Afghanistan April 22 in a firefight near the Pakistan border. (AP Photo/Gene Lower, Pool) . GENE LOWER (ap_photo - mardi 4 mai 2004, 4h29)

For those of you with preconceptions of the 'jock turned soldier' (I'm looking at you Rall, you ass), check out SFGate's writeup. If our leaders had half the spine, heart, and perceptiveness as Tillman, we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.

Tillman talked about everything, with everyone. According to the speakers, he had read the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and he underlined passages constantly. Garwood recalled how he'd mail articles to friends, highlighting certain parts and writing in the margins: "Let's discuss.'' A quotation from Emerson, found underlined in Tillman's readings, adorned the program.

It concluded with this: "But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

(some more insightful followup on Pat Tillman, media coverage, and Rall's stupidity @ Monkey Media Report)

Washington Post: A Wretched New Picture Of America

Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory -- the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure -- the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities -- is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience.

(/me hangs head in shame)

Also, still waiting for Bush's apology to the prisoners, Iraq, and the American public.

It seems the president is allergic not just to the words but to the concept of responsibility that underlies them. To apologize would be to admit he'd made a mistake. And mistakes are forbidden in the Bush White House.

(warning, incoherent ranting follows) For fun, lets see how this is being treated by the idealogues:

5/5

So, did you know that the new Music Videos section of the iTunes Music Store also delivers the videos over plain HTTP? Here's a great video by H5 (also available on the current issue of Res):

Glonoinha summarizes Sony's new Connect music store pretty well:

DRM'ed out the ass, doesn't work on anything besides Sony players, doesn't work on any of the players people already own.

Yet another wonderful idea from the Sales Prevention Team at Sony!

Check out the order-size of the 1-cent bid for SCO stock.

Modest Mouse played a great live version of "Float On" on CBC's ZeD last August (15MB RM, also mirrored locally)

(if you've not heard it, you can listen to samples of the album and buy it online -- Modest Mouse are on Epic [Sony Music] these days though, so be sure to toss the EFF a couple bones (or buy it used) if you're also of the anti-riaa predilection)

5/2

Google thought of the day. My graduation pics are the #1 result for usc graduation.

Thought I'd note a couple cool recent Mozilla bugs closed:

Now that UIEvent is actually implemented, maybe worth the time to fix the docs? :)

5/1

Skipping Coachella b/c I'm too busy. :/

Anyway, linkdump:

4/30

4/29

1AM thoughts: 9 of the top 10 Google hits for "Leonard Lin" refer to me.

4/28

Thoughts for challenges in designing DHTML web apps, frameworks:

God, what is it with Xanga users and their desire to embed MP3s from my server on every pageload? I wrote a mod_rewrite rule when I first spotted this a while back (suckas!) -- it only works when an external referer is detected, which embeds often don't pass. For now it's just a principal thing, but if gets more annoying I'll probably have to take more extreme measures (referral/ip/user whitelist).

4/27

4/26

Quantum Mechanics: Not Just a Matter of Interpretation

It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment, because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism, then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the absence of interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole or the other.

Fascinating discussion in the comments.

Seach under "Vaidman bomb" for an interesting take on interaction-free measurements. This is related to the "seeing with no light" article in Scientific American a few years back. Surprisingly, one can build experiments which have radically different results contingent on adding a component with arbitrarily small probability epsilon of interacting. The bomb part is phrase this way: Suppose I have a photo-detector connected to a bomb trigger. With what probability can I determine that the photodetector is there or not without setting off the bomb? The answer is I can do this with arbitrary small probability of setting off the bomb. This sounds very similar to Cramer's description of Afshar's result, and is perfectly understandable in all three interpretations of quantum mechanics.

more...

Sorry, folks. The waveform was collapsing along nicely there for a while, but in pure non-deterministic fashion, we're back to no one actually knowing anything...

Will be implementing IE7 (max-width) so images should be returning to normal soon.

Hey, this is cool: Mozilla Related Blogs aka Blogupdates.

Also, since when did Youngpup come back? Looks cool, will have to go through the structural changes.

Classic Onion:

Dick and Bush Cheney Wows Sept. 11 Commission By Drinking Glass Of Water While Bush Speaks

Making notes for a longer essay, better laid out thoughts when I have time.

One surprising thing about working w/in a University IT is a strange reluctance
at a high level against open source.  

This is to be completely expected from a corporate perspective, and reflects
the background.

two definitions of enterprise level, from the top down and bottom up
blurred in Net/.com (was a real difference in how IT is done) 
what does support mean
internet infrastructure: bind/bsd/linux/sendmail/apache/java/ssh

getting things done, not a problem, consistently more efficient/successful
vs commercial offerings

understanding it doesn't necessarily scaled out of that env; has it been tried?
current approach not very sucessful

se best practice, management, cio issues

4/25

My orkut geomap:

4/24

Tracking some gmail (related) conversations:

So, Technorati has introduced the idea of conversation tracking in their iconography, but it's not actually displayed or ordered as one. (I was going to include technorati links to all these, but it doesn't didn't because it's not actually that useful for tracking conversation flow from these links).

Peter Van Dijck's blog, Guide to Ease is great and chock full of all kinds of ideas and links that I have no time to follow right now.

Lately I've been closing tabs instead of blogging. Forget email, Google needs to organize my bookmarks/browser history. Soon to dump: geolocation, geowanking links, more Gmail thoughts, deconstruction; oh, also should write about Wil Wright, who spoke on campus Thursday. That was frickin great.

We'll see how I survive the next couple days. Have a couple large projects/papers to (try to) finish.

4/23

My mail configuration is still messed up on my new server, but I got around to configuring CRM114 at work (moved my trained .CSS files over and it worked flawlessly). I'd almost forgotten just how much of an amazing thing it is to have a spam-free inbox. It's like being able to breathe after being completely congested.

Although huge productivity impact numbers are thrown around, I think that the general quality of life and mood impacts of spam haven't been adequately accounted for.

Anyway, while I was at it, I updated my Mail.app smart training script. One functional fix (new versions of CRM114 add an X-CRM114-Version header that I now also drop), and then writing install and usage instructions at the top (zowie, documentation!)

Last summer I volunteered to do a site redesign for the Southern California Linux Expo. In the end, for what I thought were timing reasons, they decided to keep the old site.

So, a new redesign just went up today for next year's site (I'm on the planning list still). Ummm, ok. Granted there's a a bit of ego-stake here, but trying to look at it objectively, do people really think this looks better than this? That's sort of scary.

4/22

I got am email from the author of CLIX requesting elaboration on my comments on the interface and I felt it only fair to write a substantive response. That actually took a while to do, and since I went through the trouble of it, I might as well share.

CLIX is a simple (and very appealing) idea, a cmd-line trainer for newbs (somewhat similar to The Regex Coach), but the current implementaiton, a single-pane multi-table (w/ descriptions cut off and ordered by title) actually seems pretty hostile to the audience this tool is serving. A double-click drops a sheet which lets you edit and run the command.

So, my biggest suggestions were:

To do this, I made one possible suggestion, a 3-pane interface

          /--------------------------------\
/---------| [Search__________] [Filter[v]] |
|category |--------------------------------|
| + xxxx  | Name                  category |
| + xxxx  | Name                  category |
|         | Name                  category |
|         | Name                  category |
|         | Name                  category |
|         |=============AV=================|
|         | (viewer)                       |
|         | Name                  category |
|         | Description                    |
\---------|                                |
          | cmd                            |
          |                                |
          | shell results                  |
          |                                |
          \--------------------------------/

This is by no means the ultimate interface, there are a lot of different ways to go about presenting this, but what you get:

RFEs: track date/frequency of use of commands to automatically build lists of commonly and recently run commands; possibly also allow 'starring' (ala gmail - a quick way to mark favorites)

If anyone has any thoughts (critiques, more effective alternative layouts), feel free to discuss.

4/21

4/20

Headache-saving tips when setting up Postfix/Procmail/Courier-IMAP/SMTP-Auth/MySQL/Vmail on Debian:

4/19

As predicted, the Apple laptops got speedbumps. The Powerbooks are now at 1.33GHz and 1.5GHz. I did a little bit of searching for some stats. The information is sort of hard to to pin down (cribbed from sysctl, dev notes, various spec sheets), corrections welcome.

  PB12" Rev A PB12" Rev B PB12" Rev C
Model MPC7455 MPC7457 MPC7447A
Cache 64K/256K/- 64K/512K/- 64K/512K/-
Freq 867MHz 1GHz 1.33GHz
Bus 133MHz 133MHz 166MHz
Typical Power 12.9W 15.8W 18.0W
Max Power 17.5W 22.0W 25.0W

(Note, the 7457 is available at 1.1V w/ 8.3W and 11.5W poerw dissipation; the 7447A also has 1.1V models, but the specs max out at 1.17GHz -- can anyone confirm whether the Powerbooks (Rev B, C) are running at 1.1V or 1.3V?)

It'll probably be a while before we see actual performance data (if any). I'd specifically like to see data crunching improvements (better CPU/RAM, but still hobbled by inadequate bus?) vs battery-life (real-life usage and stress tested). Note, that the 7447A has dynamic frequency adjustment capabilities.

Waiting for:

4/18

After messing w/ Tech Tool and having my drive accidentally corrupted (not too much data loss) I decided to just bite the bullet and wipe my system. I'll keep a running list of the PB sw I'm installing, and setup I'm doing.


* Real One
* 3ivx + DivX (macosxhints: Play any DivX file using QuickTime Player)
* VLC
* MPlayer OS X
* Virtual PC
* iTaf - great GPL'd alarm clock
* Complete PHP4
* Complete Apache2
* CocoaMySQL
* Complete MySQL
* SizzlingKeys4iTunes
* SnapNDrag
* OmniGraffle Pro
* OmniOutliner
  * reinstall licenses: /Library/Application Support/Omni Group/
* Tektronix Phaser 8400 PPD files (direct link) - see driver search
* Office X
  * 10.1.2 Update
  * 10.1.4 Update
  * 10.1.5 Update
* iBatt
* SlimBatteryMonitor
* Temperature Monitor
* Menu Calendar
* SSH Tunnel Manager
* GeekTool
* AntiRSI
* Carbon Copy Cloner
* RsyncX
* BitTorrent
* Fink
  * too much to list: wget-ssl, ethereal-ssl, imagemagick, etc...
  * FinkCommander
* SideTrack
* MenuMeters
* Adium X
  * Speech Bubble Icons (see also Adium Xtras icons)
* Quicksilver
  * mini interface, quicksilver catalog matching, install cmd-line tool
  * remove all icons from dock
* Transparent Dock 2.2
  * transparent, no inner border, no drop shadow, magnify thumbnails
* TinkerTool 3.21
  * Dock: use transparent icons, position left, placment end
* Mozilla Firefox
  * default fonts to Georgia and Verdana
* Cisco VPN 3000 client v4.0.1a
  * Simple mode, minimize on connect
  * Save Password
    * edit /etc/CiscoSystemsVPNClient/Profiles/USC.pcf
      * SaveUserPassword=1
    * connect, check save password box, and type password
    * disconnect wifi
    * click connect
    * chmod a-w USC.pcf (make sure enc_UserPassword hash has been created)
    * reconnect wifi
* OS X.3 w/ X11
  * Turn on full keyboard access, assistive devices
  * Desktop: 16x16 icon, 10pt text, keep arranged by kind * Finder: show all extensions
  * d/l .Xdefaults, .bashrc, .bash_profile, .vimrc
  * slap self for not saving .ssh folder; generate new keys

Feed reading, tech, etc:

A read of the lead (How a hologram, a blimp, and a massively multiplayer game could bring peace to the Holy Land.) and a cursory search on Yitzhaq Hayutman, the subject of the write-up suggests the possibility that the article Apocalypse Now in this month's Wired is an April Fool's joke, but a little bit of digging turns up Proposed Infrastructure-research: Display media for human communications (searches: hayutman ezrahi, hayutman berkeley).

Anyway, it seems it's not fiction, just well, far out enough to be. (note also, that the site hasn't been touched for years)

While driving into work this past Thursday I caught a bit of an interesting NPR report on the number of private military forces being employed (it is apparently now a $100 billion/yr industry?). Some links:

4/17

DrunkenBlog: The Squandered G5 - a worthwhile read, with some good points. Some things I'd add:

Brad posted his OS X software inventory the other day. Instead of repeating or adding to his list I'm going to keep an account of things I'm still looking for on my Mac:

One newly discovered very cool program: Scenario - an app that runs Applescripts on certain system events. I wonder if there's an easy way to generalize this.

4/16

I was reading Andre's running notes on GMail and thought I'd toss in a few bones.

Jason's been collecting GMail reviews if you want actually useful/insightful comments.

4/15

Matt just posted about his recent Adventures in being a bandwidthaholic and made good points. Towards the end, he talks about solving the distributed bandwith problem, and for legal files, there is a sort of a solution already in the form of FreeCache. Here's how it works:

freecache diagram

This is pretty nifty because it's completely transparent to the end user, and it beats regular proxying because it still makes a HEAD request to the original source which allows them to track popularity and for FreeCache to update changed content and dump removed content.

That being said, the current 'cache client' is less than ideal for those who have bandwidth they want to contribute. Here are some features that I think should be added (also, hopefully the redirector software is open-sourced eventually).

I have some other ideas about what would be neat for mirroring systems, but those aren't as useful to the net-at-large.

Using Bloom Filters - Maciej continues his streak of writing about amazingly useful applications for math that I didn't even know existed.

4/14

Noticed my first A9.com referral earlier today. An Amazon search engine built on Google apparently. Uses iframes and innerHTML to do some in page loading (and sending history information, etc -- hooray jsrs). Discussion on /., writeup in John Battelle's Searchblog.

Being up at 3am has its advantages. Here's a mirror of The Sound of Mathematics site Cory linked to including the the Fibonacci Sequence MIDI (very post-rock noodling). Related: an discussion on music theory at Ask MetaFilter.

Worth noting:

I think that the past couple months of insane hours have really been catching up with me. My productivity/efficiency has been way down the past couple of days, and I've found myself being tired a lot and having a hard time focusing. Pretty weird feeling like not only your brain being stuck in 2nd gear, but the that the clutch is slipping.

4/13

I don't think anybody who was at ETCON (and stayed for the entire keynote) this year has forgotten about iRobot and its military bots. Discussion has hit mefi, here's a good point from Hidalgo:

I'm sorry, does our military need robots now? It seems like technology is making war easier to stomache for those who have it, and more deadly and (for lack of a better word) unfair to those who don't.

The nature of war changes when there is a reasonable expectation on one side of being totally annihilated on the battlefield, and on the other side, the reasonable expectation that you won't lose any soldiers on the battlefield.

What it changes into is a situation where the powerful side no longer has any fear of going to war, and the weak side no longer has any options but to pursue terrorism.

Wee graphs!

4/12

Yep, passing up seeing Danger Mouse for free b/c I'm too busy. What has this world come to? Quick RIA linkywinks:

Hmm, so my take on the whole thing... The RIA-space is pretty targeted to the corporate market right now. If Macromedia can leverage the Flex platform (say, allowing compile out to Flash Lite) they could have a winner. If not, they're going to get slaughtered come '06 when XAML comes out. Two years is a long time however, more than enough for the FOSS community to get together and put something together. The Flash-based solutions (Flex, Laszlo) are really compelling because, well, because the Flash plug-in is just waaaay faster and better at rendering custom widgets/graphics then JVMs out there.

Now, for the rest of us (WWW), I'm not sure how much of an effect this will have in the near future (next 2 years). Laszlo has been around for the past 2 years, and groups have tried to push pretty decent webapp clients (XWT, Thinlets) with pretty limited success. Does this have to do w/ not being tied into server-side frameworks? Just that it's easier to develop REST-based web apps?

(to interrupt for a second: for web applications (vs sites), the arguments of Google searchability, bookmarking, etc. don't really apply; most of the time those 'features' are in fact liabilities that need to be worked around)

While I'd like to think that there's a chance for DHTML to actually fulfill its promise, with 3-years of 90%+ modern-browser marketshare, we're still pretty much nowhere. I think actually, a lot of it can be tied to the immense popularity of scripting languages like PHP (scoff all you want, it's the most popular web development language on the web; and despite its deficiencies, not without good reason) -- and the failure of anyone to create a framework that makes it as easy (or easier!) to build a more robust interface w/in PHP. The pieces are there: mod_pubsub, jsrs, a gazillion widget sets, windowing kits, but none of it seems to tie together in a complete, easy to use, integrated (w/ the backend) way.

Some thoughts on tying it all together:

In theory, properly designed and constructed, this could *probably* be made to degrade into traditional REST if proper JS support isn't found...

Ahh, lets give this new server a little workout:

I'll be able to get some stats soon on how much traffic BoingBoing really gets. :)

4/11

I've been looking for a new laptop bag (or bag and sleeve combo) today. I'm trying to find something that is as compact as possible, that my 12" PB and related junk. Ideally I'd like something that could fit my 10D (w/ a short prime) as well, but I haven't seen anything out there that fits .

Other options include keeping my old Trager (or getting a new larger bag) and just using some raps on them. Any thoughts? (trying out this comment system I wrote a while back)

4/9

Put some SXSW 2004 photos online finally.

4/8

I bought a package of sliced mushrooms on a lark a couple months ago while doing some grocery shopping with a friend, and since then I've taken to snacking on them. A six ounce package is less than 50 calories and has a decent amount of B complexes and other such not-bad-for-you things. Mmmm, umami.

4/7

4/6

Topographic page layout - great bookmarklet for CSS development

4/5

'Holy crap I didn't know that was there' feature of the day:

PBCOPY(1)                                                            PBCOPY(1)

NAME
       pbcopy, pbpaste - provide copying and pasting from command line

SYNOPSIS
       pbcopy [-help] [-pboard {general | ruler | find | font}]

       pbpaste  [-help]  [-pboard  {general  |  ruler | find | font}] [-Prefer
       {ascii | rtf | ps}]

DESCRIPTION
       pbcopy takes the standard input and places it in the  specified  paste-
       board.  If  no  pasteboard is specified, the general pasteboard will be
       used by default.  The input is placed in the pasteboard as  ASCII  data
       unless  it begins with the Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file header or
       the Rich Text Format (RTF) file header, in which case it is  placed  in
       the pasteboard as one of those data types.

       pbpaste removes the data from the pasteboard and writes it to the stan-
       dard output.  It normally looks first for ASCII data in the  pasteboard
       and  writes  that  to  the  standard output; if no ASCII data is in the
       pasteboard it looks for Encapsulated PostScript; if no EPS  if  present
       it  looks  for  Rich  Text.   If  none of those types is present in the
       pasteboard, pbpaste produces no output.

man pbcopy for more info

4/3

4/2

Politics:

4/1

John Gruber writes a really long piece poking fun at Eric Raymond and then talking about UI design. Now, I'm all for poking fun at ESR. He needs some ego deflation. But Gruber is so off his horse talking about UIs that it's not even funny. UI design is certainly not "an art" that "requires innate ability." One can argue about soft factors within UX and HCI, but usability can be tested empirically and distilled into principles. At the end of the day, good GUIs have to do more with adherence to principles and guidelines and a commitment to user testing than some sort of 'genius' sensitivity.

Also, while I wholeheartedly agree on having strong direction for successful UIs, the notion that this is somehow casually related (as implied) on 'closed source' software 'produced by full-time professional engineers' just doesn't make any sense. Software engineers left alone would produce just as unusable preference panels regardless of whether it's closed or open source (also, most OSS developers *are* professional engineers). The difference in interface quality lies with the commitment and focus of *usability* engineers and designers. And even with that effort you're still not guaranteed anything.

Obviously I agree that good HCI is hard work. Along with documentation, it is often short-changed in typical OSS projects. I'd argue that most of these projects realize this, however they typically lack the expertise not only in the areas themselves, but also in even recruiting those w/ the proper skills to contribute.

Basically, good HCI has much more in common with development (standard practices, iteration, refactoring) than with making a movie (or some ridiculous notion of the genetically gifted 'HCI savant').

Sandra Hirsh (HP): Application of Usability Findings into Design

Ooh.

hellboy