random($foo)

9/29

As alluded to earlier, I'll be in the Bay area this weekend, tomorrow to Sunday afternoon, Valleyish early in the week, and in SF proper for the weekend. My Saturday and Sunday are currently quite unstructured, so, if anyone wants to hang, give me a buzz, randomfoo at gmail.

9/28

My Treo 600 unfortunately started crapping out on me last week and has since gotten worse. I was finally able to get a tech at the Sprint Store to look at it and got a 'fail' status back. It's still under warranty (just barely), so I'll be getting a replacement.

This, of course, doesn't mean that they opened a box up, but rather that they're getting one shipped out, scheduled to arrive Oct 4. After my weekend trip up north where I'm sure to need my phone. I'm going to see if I'll be able to resurrect my old Timeport for the trip.

One unfortunate thing about ServerMatrix's service is their lack of publically accessible authoritative bandwidth usage. This is nothing that a little WWW::Mechanize can't solve:

# User Agent
my $a = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$a->agent_alias('Mac Mozilla');

# TokeParser
my $stream;

# Login
$a->get('https://orbit.theplanet.com/');
$a->field('username', $login);
$a->field('password', $passwd);
$a->submit();

# Get Bandwidth
$a->get('https://orbit.theplanet.com/nav_hardware/a1_bandwidth_utilization.html'
);

$stream = HTML::TokeParser->new(\$a->content());
while(my $token = $stream->get_tag('td')) {
  my $text = $stream->get_text();
  if($text =~ /^Estimated RAW Usage: /) {
    my @t = split(' ', $text);
    print "muffins bw:\n";
    print $t[3] . 'GB, ';
    printf('%3.1f%%', $t[3]/12);
  }
}

This runs on cron and gives me a nice little output like so on my desktop (care of GeekTool):

muffins bw: 154.3GB, 12.9%

9/27

I recently saw Brad Barrish's blog in the ol' referer logs. His A Garden State Mix is good, definitely less obvious/on point than the actual soundtrack. Also, the new matt pond PA song he has linked is great.

I noticed on his sidebar that he was really blown away by the new U2 single. I'll be truthful here. I used to be (probably still am) a U2 superfan, but for some reason, I'm not entirely feeling it. (Don't get me wrong, a lot of the new song, like the bridge is just awesome. shades of the Salome) Maybe it'll grow on me.

While I'm riffing randomly on music, Audioscrobbler (my profile), my top RFEs:

Mama mia that's a lot a' CODECs

The FSF (join!) sent me a copy of Lawrence Lessig's latest book Free Culture. Cool. I had begun reading the book in PDF format while I was serving Jury Duty (flip the Powerbook sideways and go into full screen w/ Preview.app and you have a decent ebook), but never got around to finishing it. I just finished Imperial Hubris, so I will definitely be throwing it on the queue.

Stewart on O'Reilly the other week - here's the clip

9/26

Unleashed Trailer - an english-language Jet Li movie that won't suck?

9/25

9/24

Wow, Aaron's blogging about his Stanford experience. It wasn't so long ago that he was a 13yo boy genius, contributing to RFCs, and now he's off to college already. In light of the closing of "I Found Some of Your Life," this shall have to be my daily source of vicarious thrills.

Goatse Rescue Floppy - no matter how you slice it, it's just plain wrong.

9/23

It really warms the cockles of my heart that the Sifl and Olly clip I put online tops alltheweb's video search for the search term "orgasm" (you can try it w/ the content filter off, it's still #1). RAWK.

Wow, this Bushism's DVD (trailer) is cheap enough to send in mailers as pre-election-day gifts. Aside: I'm still surprised that no one has mass mailed political DVDs. It worked for AOL right? Maybe they'd just get tossed. But not if, say, you included something that people wanted, I guess... (like the Paris Hilton video or something).

TiddlyWiki - an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by JeremyRuston. It's written in HTML and JavaScript to run on any browser without needing any ServerSide logic.

Looks interesting, but not entirely useful (use case: detachable interface that can sync once you get network connectivity again). Notes: install by doing a 'save all' from the browser. No permalinks (see Ahoy for some possible ideas). Doesn't save anything (yet). All data is on one page. Neat animation

Ahh, looks like our public government is preemptively collecting True Names.

9/22

Guardian Unlimited: After Abu Ghraib - goddammit, and half the country still wants to re-elect Bush?

Alazawi says that US guards left her sitting on the chair overnight, and that the next day they took her to a room known by detainees as "the torturing place". "The US officer told us: 'If you don't confess we will torture you. So you have to confess.' My hands were handcuffed. They took off my boots and stood me in the mud with my face against the wall. I could hear women and men shouting and weeping. I recognised one of the cries as my brother Mu'taz. I wanted to see what was going on so I tried to move the cloth from my eyes. When I did, I fainted."

We killed one of her brothers in custody, and tortured/confined her for eigth months. Her two surviving brothers remain in Abu Ghraib, all because an Iraqi informant's report (part of a blackmail scheme). Words fail to describe what I"m feeling right now.

They hate us for our freedom, do they? I think not.

9/21

Metadata. Specifically the capture, auto-generation, visualization, and interaction of. Like for many others, it's fair to say that my intellectual orbit has been firmly captured in its gravity for some time. I believe that I can say without much controversy, that at the current point in the information age, the control and processing of this n-order information has increasingly superceded the importance of the information itself (very pomo; but of course, the distinction between data and metadata itself becomes increasingly murky as one tries to pin down the referent).

I swung by the local Korean supermarket today and picked up a number of things I've never eaten before, many with labels that I can't read. It occurred to me that might be an interesting project: to try to get through every single fit for human consumption item in a market. (Over the past year or so, I've been entirely too conservative, and also eaten out way too much. I'm trying to better take advantage of the bounty and variety that generations past couldn't even fathom).

Another interesting project might be to document that said endeavor. Which of course, gets the wheels turning about the best way to enter, tag, organize, represent, and present this data. How flexibly and most easily allow these arbitrary pursuits to be dashed off? Obviously many individuals, groups, companies and research institutions are exploring different aspects and approaches to this.

Still, it's sobering to think about how far we have to go in reducing the complexity of even the simplest tasks when you consider Jason's description of his Movie Listing functionality, self-described as done fairly easily, but requiring the installation and set up of 4 plugins combined together (ExtraFields, Compare, MTSQL, and MTIfEmpty for those counting at home).

9/20

Enabled Extensions: (41)

Adblock 0.5.2.039
Add Bookmark Here 0.5.2
Allow Right-Click 0.1
Alt-Text for Links 0.1
Autohide 0.9.5
BugMeNot 0.6
Copy Plain Text 0.2
Diggler 0.7
Disable Targets For Downloads 0.6
Download Manager Tweak 0.5.2
Download Sort 2.0.3
Download Statusbar 0.9.0
EditCSS 0.2.2
FLST 0.8.1
FirefoxView 0.31
FoxyTunes 0.61
GooglePreview 0.5
Image-Show-Hide 0.1.3.2
JS Console Extras 0.2
JavaScript Debugger 0.9.84
Launchy 3.3.0
LinkPreview 0.2.3
LinkVisitor 0.4.20040607
Linkification 0.9.18
ListZilla 0.4
LookAhead 1.0
Magpie 3.1.2
MiniT (drag+indicator) 0.3
Mozilla Calendar 0.8+
Net Usage Item 0.5.8
Nuke Anything 0.2
PRGoogleBar 0.9.0.24
Plain Text Links 0.2
Sage 1.2.2
Send To 0.2
Tabbrowser Preferences 0.6.11
TargetAlert 0.7.2
Thumbs 0.1
Web Developer 0.8
Wikalong 0.9.5
Word Count 0.1

Amazingly, it all seems to run ok.

No matter what I tried (deleteing folders, profiles, mozreg files, registry keys), running the Firefox (1.0PR) or Thunderbird (0.8) installers would always result in text that said it was trying to install Thunderbird 0.6 (which looks positively bizarre w/ the Firefox logo. Turns out it was a stale tmp folder in \Local Settings\Temp.

Now that was a frickin annoying bug. (ns_temp is evil)

Was thinking about making a mirror yesterday, and sure enough, the I Found Some Of Your Life blog is gone. Taken down preemptively with an apology. The concept, discussion, and fallout is all fascinating.

Azure Ray - New Resolution (TPS Mix) - a great mix from the single. Also, this Good Life EP has some amazing tracks (can you tell I just got a shipment from Saddle Creek?).

flub, flub, flub

Never have important phone calls on cell phones if you can at all possibly help it. Also, Sprint on campus during the day is apparently now horrible. Two lessons uncomfortably learned this afternoon.

9/19

Heard Ben Lee's cover of Float On on KCRW today. Not too shabby. For those of you w/o vinyl playing apparati, here's an MP3.

Hmm, so I Found Some Of Your Life made it to a /. story. The blog admin removed the post in the comments of that one post about the identity of one of the people in a picture (that I linked to earlier). That seems rather unsporting. Here's the direct link of the photo of Lindsey (Herrel?) for posterity.

9/18

The new idea: rip BIN/CUEs into incoming folder. Encode at night on cron (replaygain to HQ VBR MP3 and M4A) and zip up the image files in archive folder), rsync nightly.

9/17

9/16

Ooh, neat flash interface (mouse over the faces). Very clever. [via boris]

9/15

Who knew? Windows XP doesn't Blue Screen very much because it automatically reboots on lockup. See Control Panel -> System > Advanced > Startup and Recovery for settin the options and C:\WINDOWS\Minidump for the timestamped dump files.

9/14

Metadata that could be extracted from emails:

There is more that could be gotten with address books (address books should also pool w/ feed aggregators, IM conversations

On the other end, email2kb tools are a good idea, especially for capturing project documentation and tracking ticket/task status.

See also:

9/12

I've been reading Imperial Hubris, by CIA analyst Anonymous, which has been simultaneously illuminating, terrifying, and blood-boiling.

...In addition, these institutions—led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—had run in Afghanistan the largest, most expensive, and most well-publicized covert action program in U.S. history to support the anti-Soviet mujahideen...

During the course of this endeavor, multiple hundreds of uniformed military personnel, intelligence officers, analysts, logisticians, military trainers, medics, geographers, imagery analysts, demolition experts, mule skinners, communication specialists, and cartographers developed strong expertise on Afghanistan. As important, they experienced an intimate acquaintance with the patient, brave, devout, brutal, and stubborn men who beat the Soviet and Afghan communists....

...Using nonexperts to devise strategy when experts were at hand would, of course, be a great disservice by the U.S. intelligence community (IC) to Americans and their elected leaders too serious to contemplate. Then again, soon after the war began the New York Times quoted unnamed "senior intelligence officials" who claimed the U.S. government did not "have the people to exploit [information about Afghanistan." ... I have found, in my career, that the IC leaks this kind of comment only when senior managers have failed to develop a cadre of substantive experts, when they want to put their "pets" in charge of programs for which they have no substantive expertise, or when they want to prepare the public for failure. As noted, the first motivation is not the case here, and our hubris ensured no thought went to possible failure. And so, it seems, substantive experts were not used and that we are paying an exorbitant price because we ignored Sun Tzu's advice not to "demand accomplishments of those who have no talent."

While it's not surprising that Bush has had the unmitigated gall to be running based on his "success" in the "war on terror," it's disheartening to see that his campaign strategy seems to be successful. Honestly, from his blunders in the middle-east, his ridiculously deleterious tax policy, ineffectual economic planning, his attacks on education, the environment, and safety, and completely ghastly infringements on basic civil rights and freedoms, you'd think it wouldn't be that hard.

In my estimation, that should piss off the middle class, libertarians, greens, liberals, and centrists. (I guess it doesn't cover the fanatics, willfully ignorant, or gullibles -- do they really outnumber sane people?)

9/10

I ordered a $500 (well, $526.39) Dyson vacuum cleaner today. It has an interesting story and people seem to rave about it, so hopefully it'll be worth it (over twice as expensive as the Hoover I was looking at, but the lack of requiring any type or replacement bags or filters is quite appealing).

(I haven't regretted the last more-expensive than average home appliance I bought)

Stop being economic girly-men

9/9

I've been a little annoyed lately by xterm so I've switched to aterm. Strangely, aterm renders the 7x14 font differently than xterm. Fading is nice. I ran across a ssh/screen problem with backspace, but this solved it:

aterm*backspacekey: ^H

9/7

Debian on Dell Servers - how many times have I looked for a Debian install CD that has megaraid/aacraid and e1000/tg3 drivers built in? Here they are [keywords: Dell PowerEdge, IBM x330, x335, ethernet drivers, netinst boot CD]. Why oh why don't the Debian kernels come with this pre-compiled? Every single Dell and IBM rackmount I've ever seen uses these.

Jesse on loading JS Console in the sidebar:

  1. Bookmark chrome://global/content/console.xul
  2. Right-click on the bookmark, select properties, and check "Load this bookmark in the sidebar"

I found myself today in need of a free Windows ISO burner sw package (to burn a Linux ISO of course). Here's what I found:

9/6

I hit a minor roadblock trying to see how I could get an object reference from within an object. Tom Trenka whipped up a quick little function (which is so obvious after you see it :)

function getObjectString(obj, scope) {
  for (var p in scope) {
    if (scope[p] == obj) return p;
  }
  return null;
}

It's messy and O(n), true, but unless you have a mess of variables, not too bad.

Jesse made a suggestion on how I could avoid needing the string completely by assigning an IFrame.onload, but there are race conditions (unless you use event attachment, see below), and also Mozilla was giving me crap (is it running the onload before the document is finished?)

It occurred to me that there are lots and lots of little JS snippets like Tom's which are enormously useful helpers, but hard to keep track of. Perhaps they should all go in a little snippets library/repository or something...

9/5

Instead of working on computer stuff, how about cars:

$400 Engine ACT VR6/TDI/G60/B3-16V Heavy Duty Clutch Kit
<$100 Engine Flywheel lightening, resurfacing (13-14lb)
$1200 Suspension Koni or Bilstein PSS9 Coilover kit
$500 Lights Hella Dual Round Smoked Headlight Kit

9/4

I've finally finished upgrading my system (I dropped in an ATI 9800 Pro [which detects as an XT and clocks accordingly] and an Athlon XP 3000+, but needed a beefier heatsink), and although my CPU is underclocked a bit (my old motherboard only goes to 12.5x multiplier, not 13x). My Doom 3 timedemos have gone from a rather anemic 20fps at 800x600 Low Quality to a respectable 45fps at 1024x768 High Quality.

That being said, I think I'm pretty much over this "installing my own hardware thing." I think I realized this after I managed to pry off the old heat sink and as I was removing glue residue from the new one.

9/3

I'm not a huge fan of the MkV design, but the new GTI looks great (love the old school trim). Hmmm, probably $25K w/ DSG, hitting US shores Q3 2005.

MkV GTI

9/2

I spent most of last night helping out a friend whose Mac had suddenly stopped booting properly and was instead flashing a 'not allowed' symbol (no sign, prohibitory sign, denied, circle slash, ghostbusters). Interestingly enough, in working w/ OS X since it came out, I'd never seen it before.

Held down 'v' on boot to see what it was hanging on. It couldn't find the root device. After trying zapping the PRAM and NVRAM to no avail, I booted the rescue disk and checked the drive utility. It couldn't see the HD. That would explain things. The drive sounded fine, so my suspicion was on the card or cable, but when I swapped drives it worked. But then, booting it again, it didn't. Swapped SCSI card/cable and put old drive back in and it worked. I can't really explain it, must be some bizarre connection problem.

Ken Layne asks What Conservatives? Mostly about the lack of fiscal (well, any kind) or restraint, but also puts all this RNC talk of strong leadership in perspective:

With the Crystal Methamphetamine Ball I keep for such occasions, I can predict those of you who continue to invent apologies for this government will tell me that logic, responsibility, coherence and competence don't matter a damned bit & never will again, because 3,000 of the 300,000,000 people living in this country were killed by an elusive enemy three years ago, and that for some mysterious reason the current inept administration should be further rewarded for failing to catch the culprits, failing to make this country safer from either similar or new-fangled attacks, failing to remove the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan or Pakistan, failing to win an elective war that had nothing to do with those who launched a war on our shores, and not only failing to make a dent in the Islamic Terrorism movement but in fact creating millions upon millions of ready new converts who now have a massive wrecked state in the center of the Middle East as a home and training base for decades to come, along with a very new and real reason to attack us on every flank that makes Bin Laden's flowery historical rhetoric seem quaint by comparison.

I just can't figure out how anyone can look at our post Sept. 11 leadership and see anything but a smoking heap of tragic failure, and yet that seems to be the only thing the Bush loyalists have to offer as a concrete reason to re-elect this administration. Why? Is Losing the new Winning?