Older blog entries for sjanes71 (starting at number 79)

auspex's open     I wouldn't think of it as a pitiful "file manager"--this is a good idea and better if you made a "user friendly" version that did not require getopt style arguments for "ordinary people" who are adverse to getopt-style command lines:

view x [with tool]
edit x [with tool]
compress x [with tool]
encrypt x [with tool]
decrypt x [with tool]
translate x to language

We already typically use MIME types to decide what program to "view" something with, why not also create mappings for edit, compress, and translate? I have heard of many users of computers who might have used some program every day for the last 3 years on their computer and didn't know what it was called. ("Do you use Word to edit your manuscripts?" "What's Word?" {{Clippy bangs on the CRT and mouths "I'm Word! Look at me! Help meeeee!!"}}) Too often icons on desktops represent file-types as application tools (e.g. there's a Winamp icon for a sound file, but no distinct WAV, MP3, or OGG icon) instead of file types. This idea has given me a small kick in the pants and I actually started prototyping in Bash-- but will switch back to Python because of better array support. More verbs than just those will be available and the issue of "x" where "x" is some filespec (hard to remember/type by users) will be looked at.

4 Mar 2003 (updated 4 Mar 2003 at 13:23 UTC) »
RMS (Richard Stalman or Microsoft Rights Management Services?)     Interesting how Microsoft is picking some TLA's that are commonly associated with people. Somewhere someone in Redmond, WA is having a a good snicker. I wonder what Microsoft ESR or Microsoft JWZ might become.

Sendmail     Saw another news note about another buffer overrun hole recently published about Sendmail. I decided years ago to stop using Sendmail because of things like this, so I've been using either QMAIL, EXIM, or POSTFIX, depending on whatever was easiest to install. I do typically nuke Sendmail if I find it on a machine if I become responsible for that machine.

Leonardo's Laptop     This book should perhaps become required reqding for GNOME and KDE developers. I'm very worried about the insistence of "cloning" Microsoft user interfaces to increase acceptance of Linux. Evolution may well be a very faithful clone of Outlook, but is Outlook the best user interface for a personal information manager? One thing the book points out in "The Quest for Universal Usability" is that:

A fundamental interface improvement would be support for evolutionary learning and a level-structured approch to design (Baecker et al. 2000). Why can't you begin with an interface that contains only basic features (say 5 percent of the full system) and become expert at this level within a few minutes? Game designers have created clever introductions that gracefully present new features as users acquire skill at the first level of complexity. [...] A good level-structured design in the interface must be acompanied by levels in the tutorials, online help, and the error messages. (pg 47)

I would add that getting the computer to puzzle out your intent AND be smart about it is one of the key issues of making computers easier to use. Microsoft's Clippy was widely hated because it interrupted the user with guesses at the user's intent-- "I see you're about to write a suicide note, would you like to see a list of the most successful ways to off yourself?" What's worse, is all the work involved in making this interruption animated (eating that little bit of processor time that could be better used by everyone's instance of the Distributed Net OGR cruncher!) Open Office make this intent-help less intrusive with the little transient light-bulb icon at the lower-right corner.

Advogato Needs Book Lists     If we have ranking for diary entries, I think it would be a simple matter of programming to also rate lists of books in various categories using the same system. More interestingly, it should perhaps give you the same kind of evolutionary learning scale or level structured and could even take the existing "categories" of Observer, Apprentice, et al. for pigeon-holing books. Observer-level books get you things like "In the beginning was the command line" by Neal Stephenson, Apprentice "Learning Perl", Journeyer "Programming Perl, Mastering Algorithms in Perl, Perl Cookbook" and Master "Perl in a Nutshell". Maybe its too much work but the idea is appealing to kind of see "What's on everyone else's bookshelf?" vs. "What's on everyone else's desk?"

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Programmers     Tim Sweeny's "radical claim" that
our thought processes as programmers are deeply influenced by the language we programmed in.
is not a new claim as it was theorized early last century that (natural) language affects how we think and related languages affect how we think similarly. I don't think that anyone could dispute that a programming language could not be considered a "human" language, considering the amount of Perl poetry that exists. :)

Gentoo and KDE     Got bitten by the KDE 3.1 bug in Gentoo where everything just collapsed and fucked up after I logged out. Solution is to edit /etc/env.d/49kdelibs-3.1 and add KDEDIRS=/usr/kde/3.1 to that list of variables. You'll probably have to reboot. Without this, look for basically zilch in your KDE menus and no ability to even launch an xterm from inside KDE. TWM makes me shudder.

Orange Juilius Equivalent     Never had one from the mall, but this is pretty good.

  • 1 cup orange juice
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 heaping cup ice
  • 3/4 tsp. vanilla extract
  • 1/8th cup powdered milk

Chuck in a blender, blend until frothy and smooth. Makes two drinks. The "Top Secret" recipe says to use 2 egg whites, but with a 2/60,000 chance of salmonella, I'll think that I'll stick to powdered milk.

Nullsoft Superpimp Installation System     v2.0b1 is verrrrry nice. My favorite "windows installer" software for sure.

Regular Expressions     Didn't get much time to play more with these jewels. The first one I'm experimenting with is ([A-Z][a-z]+) ([A-Z][a-z]+), a simple one intended to find "Firstname Lastname". It doesn't handle the multiline Firstname
Lastname case yet, but it certainly does a fairly good job on my e-mail. I can already think of a whole bunch of other cases where it will not match more complicated names like First Middle Last. With some simple scoring, I can filter out most of the spurious matches which is all I really want-- it doesn't have to be perfect. I wonder if there is a catalog of useful regular expressions-- I think I remember one in the Mastering Algorithms in Perl book.

Realtime with Bill Maher     So far, I think it's a better show than his previous show, Politically Incorrect, which was run off the air immediately after 9/11 when he voiced an "unpopular opinion." Perhaps because it's on HBO and not network television is what makes the difference.

Where there is Traffic, There is Innovation     Noticed on the BBC London site they have something called "jamcams" and "sequences"... jamcams are oviously the American equivalent of traffic cameras, but the sequences was something new to me. The sequence is a useful ordering of existing jamcams along a commonly traveled path. I think most traffic sites I've seen in the US only give you a map to pointyclicky.

Life     Up and down. Chaotic. Big ups. So-so downs. I guess I'm averaging up on the "ok" side.

Quadra      I've taken to emerge -C quadra when I need to get some work done and then emerge quadra when I feel the urge... the time it takes to compile gives me some more time to do real work. I think I've got a serious problem. :) The serious skills that these players show makes me think I'm playing the game wrong-- they must be modeling the state of the game in their head and just watching and dropping the blocks at the top.

Regular Expressions     Now have a short python fragment that figures out and scores "proper names" of a particular format found in a string. it's helping me get used to Python (which is pleasing to program in, you write something that seems plausible and then you are pleasantly suprised that it works.) The more interesting part of the project is going to involve the management of lots of different regular expressions as they are used.

Quadra     Surely, this is the Solitaire of Linux-- and it's cross platform, and you can play against other people over the network. I'd better put it away for now or I'll never get anything done. The huge high scores I've seen make me wonder if those players are really that good or if someone put a robot on the game. Watching the replay (one of the nice things about Quadra) is helpful for learning new strategy however, bot or not.

Television     What's that?

Nethack     Run away! Run away!

I'll just go back to my books and sleep for a bit-- I'm none too happy about having an hour and a half of my life wasted in traffic yesterday-- however, I did get through reading about 80 pages of Bitter Java while waiting in traffic, but it's not very much fun reading and driving at the same time.

26 Feb 2003 (updated 26 Feb 2003 at 15:20 UTC) »
Joe Celko's Trees in SQL; amars, obi, jbucata     I've personally implemented a flavor of the nested set representation and it is indeed very fast on queries for subsets and parents (the supervisors problem discussed in the other article)-- but starts to get very very slow on inserts, and especially with PostgreSQL, transaction loads start to get very large with all of the shifting of the number line as you insert into the tree. Now the pointer to the other article that includes the materialized path representation is something else to consider. I'm going to look at that regarding some of my own hierarchical libraries (which I haven't been using very often recently because of other work-demands.)

Regular Expressions     Together with XSLT, is going to create something very special for me and hopefully for everyone else as well-- something somewhat related to Alvin Toffler's Third Wave. I need to win the lottery so I can do this more "interesting" work without losing my house. Let's say for the moment, that we are not making our computers do enough of the work in the information economy and they absolutely don't have to get it 100% right all the time with semantic understanding as long as you can weight what the computer does with some kind of confidence rating. A lot of what heuristic anti-spam software does is creating technology that could be better used elsewhere. What's the best heuristic anti-spam software out there if it is not SpamAssassin? I don't think that SpamAssassin is the best antispam tool available because of how it trys to kill the spam-- I think Tagged Message Delivery Agent has the best solution-- but I do think that there is some very interesting alternative applications for the same technology.

Meetup: ww.meetup.com     What a cool site. Out of curiosity I followed a link that mentioned the "Slashdot Meetup." I haven't searched for any other meetups other than Python and Advogato and there were some meetups for Python. Advogato seems like a community that could have use for meetups. The best thing about meetups is perhaps, the thought that we don't have to have a Linux World, or PyCon, or CodeCon to bring great people together.

SyncML     Downloaded all the PDFs. I'm a glutton for reading-punishment. I've got a stack of books checked out from the library and dozens of PDF's saved for future reference.

Libraries     Don't neglect your library-- just because you can clickypointy Amazon doesn't mean that you couldn't just get it for free from the library. One of the books that I checked out that's on my "list" to read is Bitter Java and I'm already halfway through Technomanifestos.

25 Feb 2003 (updated 25 Feb 2003 at 19:19 UTC) »
Installing Netscape 4.79 (clarified)    I feel so dirty. The number of times I've been interrupted by pop-ups from the browser asking me to make it become more a part of my system is extremely annoying. I have to install it because some organizations think it's too hard to deploy a newer browser (maybe because of all the dialogs and pop-ups?). I think someone in the IT staff just isn't being honest with their organization-- you can absolutely bet they are not using Netscape 4.x on their "personal" machine. I really don't care to make web pages "compatible" with 4.x if I have to make the pages "non-standard" to acheive a certain look and feel on the 5.x browsers. This "lust" for pixel-by-pixel control over web content that everyone wants and the problems of cross-browser support should be a sign that the web isn't Intended To Be A Platform.

Mathmatics     I've been reading whenever I can from http://planetmath.org/, which has become one of my reference bookmarks.

Python      This could probably use some casting or perhaps use of the Number classes, but I'm not sure that I like how IMDB calculates their ranks anymore after playing with the formula.

def weighted_rank(v,R,m,C):
   """From http://us.imdb.com/top_250_films :
The formula for calculating the top 250 films gives a true Bayesian estimate:
 weighted rank (WR) = (v / (v+m)) * R + (m / (v+m)) * C
 where:
  R = average for the movie (mean) = (Rating)
  v = number of votes for the movie = (votes)
  m = minimum votes required to be listed in the top 250 (currently 1250)
  C = the mean vote across the whole report (currently 6.9)
"""
   return (v / ( v + m ) ) * R +  ( m / ( v + m )  ) * C;

I played with this shortly after reading a little bit about the Advogato diary ranking system, hence also the interest in the PlanetMath site to understand Eigenvectors. At the moment I don't understand them well enough to compare to the IMDB estimate of rank.

New Mouse, New Harddrive     Upgraded the 10GB drive to a 60GB drive-- the process of migrating my Gentoo installation was pretty simple, the actions and command lines roughly as follows (and adding in a step where I forgot that /dev was it's own filesystem and ignored by tar, please realize that these are approximate command lines not intended to be used by anyone, only for ideas for migration.)
  1. install new drive as a slave, mkdir /mnt2
  2. create partitions, mount root drive under /mnt2 and /mnt2/boot
  3. tar -clSpf /boot - | (cd /mnt2/boot; tar -xpvf - )
  4. tar -clSpf / - | (cd /mnt2; tar -xpvf - )
  5. cp -Rpv /dev /mnt2/dev
  6. Make a Grub boot floppy, disconnect original drive and make the new slaved drive the master.
  7. Boot the floppy, use GRUB to install a boot loader
  8. reboot the new hard drive.
This should work pretty well. In this process I also converted from XFS to ext3 to see if that would help with concurrent disk-access latency. It took about 50 minutes to copy 9GB of data. This Western Digital drive is 10x quieter also. A bonus. I might start doing this every six-months or so for whatever $100 drive is on the market, and I'll never run out of disk space again. :)

The new mouse is a Logitech cordless optical. I accidentally bought a Logitech cordless "ball" mouse-- I thought Logitech had stopped making these dinosaurs. The only big issue I needed to do was turn down the accelleration factor to 1x from 4x. It seems that the Microsoft Intellimouse was rather "slow" or very high resolution or whatever. The biggest issue with that mouse however grew to its unreliability (mouse freezing during normal use.) Once you've had optical, you'll never buy a ball-mouse again. If only I could get a keyboard that is as worth as the optical mouse, something with real click.

Leo     Started playing with this outlining literate programming editor. I don't know how much I'll be using the tangle/weave in the future, but I really do like the outline editor itself-- better than Microsoft's outline mode in Word because there are keyboard shortcut equivalents for moving nodes around the hierarchy. It's written in Python and does not feel the slightest bit sluggish.

21 Feb 2003 (updated 21 Feb 2003 at 16:46 UTC) »
Search for Turbo Tax Alternatives     Thanks to the copy-protection issues of Turbo Tax, I'm looking for an alternative-- there was a site that I saw someone recommend that has free software to download-- you pay only for the electronic filing, which seems pretty fair to me. However, I can't remember the name of the site anymore so I've indirectly screwed myself. I will be sure to drop Turbo Tax a note detailing why I didn't use their product this year--I've used it two years in a row, the first time someone gave me an extra disc that Intuit mailed them, the second time I bought it-- in both cases I paid Intuit the electronic filing fee. I wouldn't think that everyone out there who "copied" their software wouldn't also pay for electronic filing so I don't understand why Intuit thinks they're losing so much money. Well, they lost $29.95+$19.95 from me when they introduced the risk of wiping out my bootloader. There are many other better ways of reducing lossage with software than trying to write some secret data-- I would have preferred even an activation style of protection ala Microsoft than some background process tying up resources watching a block on a disk drive somewhere. I wonder if it's http://www.taxact.com that I was thinking of. Now it looks like a free-download-- and you can even get a CD-ROM for free-- giving you the option to pay $10 for a desktop-calculator program called 10-key is the way to make your money selling a calculator along with a program that was designed to reduce the use of calculators. :) The other item of opportunity is a desktop assistant which is another $10. I wonder how much money they're making from people who think "Hey, they're giving this away, I should send them something." $5.95 is a little steep for shipping a CD-ROM, but I'll go with it because I don't feel like downloading it and burning my own CD. I'm lazy. But I like the model-- I'll burn copies of it and give it to all of my friends who usually use Turbo Tax. When you rain on everyone's parade, watch out for people with free weather control devices. However, if I start getting weird postal spam addressed to Simon Pataxactrick Janes, you'll hear it here first.

Bitstream Vera     The serif fonts are growing on me, I force Mozilla to use my fonts instead of whatever the page designer used. The issue is I'm using a 1600x1200 desktop and I need to force the font sizes up to a point where I can read anything. If I could get Mozilla to do the same for the Menus/Tabs/Bookmark buttons that would be great.

Disk Space Crunch     I've been limping by on 10GB. Such a sad thing to say. This weekend I'll probably pick up a 60GB or 80GB, whatever the size du-jour is for < $90.

A+ Certification     Have the book now, it's ridiculous that I would need to get one, but getting it is going to enable some future opportunities. I have the study materials for CCNA and CCNP as well, but never the time to do it.

Microsoft®
The High Performance Software
     Looking at this advertisment from UNIX/WORLD November 1985 and noticed that the Microsoft logo at that time had the AT&T deathstar motif for the middle-o. I didn't know that Microsoft had ever made a Fortran, Cobol, or Pascal compiler but this ad says they did.

The XENIX® market is taking off. To keep up you've got to convert your MS-DOS® software to run on the new, faster 80286 machines. Quickly. Efficiently.

Nobody makes porting software to the XENIX environment as easy as Microsoft; you simply recompile the original source code.

Our full-featured XENIX languages use commands and syntax identical to their MS-DOS siblings. So you don't have to rewrite your program to move it.

Whether your applications are written in Microsoft versions of Pascal, BASIC, COBOL of Fortran, we have the solution to your transportation problems. For the name of your nearest Microsoft dealer call (800) ...-..... In Washington State, Alaska, Hawaii and Canada call (206) ...-.....

Today it is a little weird to see Microsoft say "port it to something that isn't Windows! yeah!"

Come to think of it, I think a fantastic use of distributed networks would perhaps to make a PDF library of dead-tree periodicals.

11:41am: Still Screwing around with Fonts     Solved my fonts problem when I figured out that the X server wasn't loading the "freetype" module. Now Open Office and KDE see the Bitstream Vera fonts but Konsole still won't let me choose Bitstream Vers Sans Mono.

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