Choices
Habits run on autopilot, so to change one I set a standing order to notice it, then ask “What Would I Do?” as my heroic, values-driven self.
All posts tagged: hacker
Sometimes I tag very loosely or obscurely so the link might not be obvious.
Article
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One Calendar to rule them all
A MobileMe Calendar upgrade broke my Rube Goldberg calendar sync, and the simpler replacement, Google Calendar direct to phone and BusyCal, works better and leaves me wondering what MobileMe is still for.
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Perpetually getting organized
I’ve been trying to get organized since high school, and my habit of letting the best destroy the good keeps turning a simple GTD system into an elaborate software project.
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Fedora and Windows XP dual boot problems
Installing XP after Fedora Core 4 wiped out my first OS, and a Fedora developer’s write-up explains why and how to recover.
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Geeky Bookworm Frugality
To resist buying $50 O’Reilly books, I got a library card: the Bucks County Community College library gives access to the Safari collection.
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Mind Games
Despite every reason to dismiss it, I want to spend my spare time writing video games, the thing that hooked me on programming back on my Dad’s TRS-80.
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Eye Relief
Here are my five habits for easing screen-staring eyes: use an LCD, turn down brightness and contrast, look at faraway things outdoors, and remember to blink.
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Zenity, Gmail & GTD
A tiny zenity shell script mapped to F12 lets me mail a next action to my Gmail inbox in seconds, making a Gmail-based GTD system actually usable.
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The importance of icebergs
Reading Joel Spolsky’s Iceberg Secret convinces me that the user interface is the most important thing in software, and that demos should look as unfinished as they are.
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Make: the magazine
O’Reilly’s new Make magazine arrived and delivered, especially its 5-in-1 network cable project, which ends my hunt for console and crossover cables.
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Battery Corrosion
My Aiptek pencam was dead from corroded battery contacts, and a screwdriver flaking the corrosion off the springs brought it back to life in time for the bike race.
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Individual Productivity Considered Harmful
A programmer’s real day involves far fewer bug fixes than the optimistic version going around, and ignoring email to get more done just means a bad idea reaches customers before anyone can stop it.
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Googlebombing SCO and other counterattacks
The Googlebombing of SCO has put an informative page near the top of its search results, so here is one more push, plus other ways to make SCO’s extortion campaign costly.
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Redhat 9, MySQL 4 and DBD::mysql
Installing Bugzilla on Red Hat 9 with MySQL 4 broke the DBD::mysql build, and the fix, which I found on a Perl mailing list, is to unset LANG before running perl Makefile.PL.
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PIX-to-PIX VPN via a Lucent Pipeline 75
My notes on getting a Cisco PIX-to-PIX IPsec VPN working through a Lucent Pipeline 75 whose NAT breaks it, fixed by routing a second address from the ISP and turning NAT off.
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Struts
Apache Struts and its Model-View-Controller architecture give architects and developers a shared frame of reference, and I argue, through Howard Roark, that building on such material is no betrayal of creativity.
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Lindows is bad
A cheap Walmart PC I bought for Michelle’s Nan ships with LindowsOS, whose default account is root, a security sin that makes it a poor pick for getting grandma onto Linux.
Note
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linux gmail notifier
A friend of mine recently released a gmail notify applet for Linux. gmnotify from what I can tell it is pretty sweet compared to some of the alternatives. Go ahead and check it out. That is if you use gmail and want little windows popping up telling you that you got an email.
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Requesting good naming for the impatient (MySQL)
I guess I am impatient, and I don’t want to read everything, and therefore I demand of people that effect my life choose good names for stuff. The current complaint is about MySQL’s privilege system. Apparently USAGE privilege is a synonym for âno privileges.â? Any reason, why this can’t simply be NONE, or “TOO FEW PRIVILEGES TO BOTHER MENTIOING” or anything besides a word that makes it look like something?
Yes I get the low level irony of me claiming to be impatient and taking the time to write this rant. But if you think about it, I have now seared this into my memory with this 5 minute interlude.
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Scrounging Hardware
Anyone out there have a mini-ITX board, or any generally associated things like like a DC-DC ATX converter or and old 60 or 80 Watt laptop AC adapter, or some old low wattage ATX power supply that I could at least use for some prototyping or testing with said board? Anyway, I obviously have a little project in mind. I plan to mess around with Asterisk on one of these. I’d like to get the lowest TCO home PBX system running that I can. I may even consider a Soekris. If I can get my hands on one relatively inexpensively.
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A worthwhile Sunday
So far so good today. I finally isolated the bad part on my laptop. (Allison spilled a large cup of water on it a couple months ago). I tried booting with a linux CD and noticed that the resulting kernel panic mentioned some errors relating to the VM system. So I decided to use memtest on the Knoppix disc. And stopped it at around 13,000 errors at just above 128 MB. So I pulled out the soDIMM in slot 2 and it booted. My new memory should be here Wednesday. :) It gives me an excuse to squeeze a little more life out of this laptop, by bumping the memory to 512, from 256. And I have two worthwhile 1PM NFL games to watch for the first time in a million years. Probably because the Jets play tonight, god I hate watching Jets games.
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bit rot
Amazing how some technology left out Friday after confirming it works, heck it had been working the same way since July. Seems to grow fungus or mold, or simply atrophy and no longer work after the weekend is over. Like making JBoss talk to MySQL luckily trial and error correction is made nearly impossible because it takes a good 10 minutes for each round trip on the cycle. :-(
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Javascript reference
A while back I noted that devedge was dead. Well googling for some javascript stuff led me to the Mozilla Developer Center, Javascript page. The references link gives you the good stuff. Thank you for getting this together finally. Because it gives me a definitive source for this type of info.
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geeky self help
This attempt at defining how human conciousness works is worth a read: The Multiple Self. It would be interesting to find other thoughts along these lines.
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The Zen of Deleting
If you use a computer as much as I do there is something very refreshing about deleting old crap and clutter. If you are a programmer and are responsible for thousands of lines of code, there is something great about deleting old, unused code. It makes you feel so much more in control of the environment. Very theraputic. Today, I am taking nearly a whole day to delete old broken down code. Gotta board up the windows and wall off the slums from the shiny code that actually does good work.
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Image theifery
I noticed a whole bunch of referalls to my site from the Jet’s message board, I thought maybe someone had linked to the whole Ed Hochuli debacle, but I hunted it down and found out that no, someone was stealing my bandwidth to show a picture I have on my site of Chuck Bednarik. Well I don’t approve of that, so I used a friends instructions on how to let the people know what I think of them using mod_rewrite. Thanks Darxus. Now instead of concrete charlie that persons signature on the message board contains this.
plus the Jets suck. Seriously a first round pick for Doug Jolley, watching your preseason it doesn’t even look like he is starting.
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Gnome custom key bindings
If you use Gnome and want to do custom keyboard shortcuts, i.e. write your own script and have it executed when you hit a magic key combination, it is not as easy as going to the “Keyboard Shortcuts” preferences. Apparently you gotta mess around with gconf (The linux registry?!), anyway after a short bit of google hunting I found this mailing list posting: Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Gnome (Solved). Thanks, Philip Chapman.
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Notebooks of McLazarus
So I liked the way Tom’s websites have evolved to have a fancy one where he writes long articles and a not so fancy one where he tells the world off through his away message. I don’t know if this is what encouraged Mike to break off and create his separate Deep Thoughts blog, but either way the combined effort has caused me to do something similar. Of course I tried to make it more complicated, by using my single wordpress install. I have simply created a separate category called Notebooks and changed the index page of my site to only show everything but the Notebooks category. However my RSS feed should pick up all the entries to the Notebooks category, so the three people that faithfully read my RSS feed every 72 days when there is a new post, should have a bit more than they are used to handling. Everyone else (which I think there are only 3 of them also) of course will simply have to go to the Notebooks Category page.
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Podcasting, Fools and Canadian?
Why does google think I am in Canadian. When I am at work and go to google.com it automatically sends me to Google Canada. I know Jersey is a little strange, but I didn’t know we (the US) were shipping them off to be some other countries problem. Apparently it’s All Fool’s day as evidenced by all the half assed Slashdot stories and the whole assed Google Gulp product announcement.
I guess with it being a Friday I will have to read the the joke RFC too. Side note: If you try really really hard to tell a joke and it really is only mildly amusing, does it still count as a joke?
Also I downloaded ipodder last night and grabbed a few podcasts to listen to on the travel to and from work. Mildly interesting, I guess at least as good as some of the commercial radio around here. The only problem is the people tend to not have a very strict agenda and digress into really boring topics or inside jokes, it’s like college radio where all they talk about is how cool it is to be able to communicate over this wonderous medium that is radio. “And here we are voices coming to you through the air, isn’t radio great! I wish everone would do this.”
Although I think an hour long podcast of just the little 5 - 10 second self-promotional rock and roll intros with ominous voiceovers that each caster inevitably makes for themselves would be fun to hear. It would be like just hearing that little segment of the Rob Zombie song Howard uses to launch his show every day, over and over. (Yeah I know, I am the only one driving around at 6 that hears this. But it sounds cool.) Seriously I think most of the people doing podcasting probably wanted to do it, just because they always liked this really cool part of some song wanted to have it as their intro music, much like the WWE wrestlers have, or that episode of the family guy when Peter wished for theme music to follow him around all the time.
“Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus ….”
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Six Times
In the past week more than six times as many messages were delivered to my spam folder by spamassassin than my inbox. (not counting mailing list traffic). I also probably had about 10 - 15 spammy messages sneak through to my inbox. So thats:
- 59 to INBOX
- 373 to the caughtspam folder
- 10 misses
- 0 false alarms
That means I got 7.8 times as much spam as I got messages in my inbox. I am sure there are much greater horror stories out there, but damn, I really am not going to buy a rolex or prescription drugs based on an email that looks like a ransom note, because of all the interspersed mispellings and numbers to try and make it through my filters.
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RSS feeds for cheapskates
Wanna track all the daily deals in your favorite news aggregator? Well get on over to Roosster and add a couple feeds so when you finally do crack open that wallet to buy crap you will have some money left over to put your McDonald’s coupons to use. Some other good resources for the more thrifty among us are freecycle and craigslist. Freecycle: I was able to get a “new” color printer for my brother, I think the Wookie secured a chest freezer to store dead things in, and there were another couple near misses. Plus once I start filling up on extra junk I will be more than happy to give back.
And check out your local craigslist, which is basically a high signal to noise classifieds section. I think they charge for job postings to support themselves, but otherwise anyone can post. And they wisely have RSS feeds for most of their stuff too.
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Firefox Bookmark Management
A few posts ago I mentioned in passing that a great firefox plugin would provide the ability to sync up bookmarks over the internet. Well I shouldn’t have rhetorically asked myself and the 3 people who read this thing, I should have asked google. So I did. And someone has written the greatest plugin for firefox ever: Bookmarks Synchronizer. You just need access to an FTP or WebDAV server to upload. But now finally after many years of using web browsers is the bookmark function actually useful and makes it worthwhile to maintain some level of bookmark organization. And if you don’t currently use firefox, maybe you should.
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IP Portability Act ?
The courts are trying to break the Internet. There has been a temporary restraining order issued in a state court allowing a customer to take a non-portable IP address with them when they leave. Read about the insanity here. This would be a bad thing for service providers if the precedent is set. And provides no measurable gain for consumers. I mean DNS sort of solved whatever problem the petitioner seeks to rectify by keeping their IP address. Frankly I am of the opinion that telephone number portability is stupid as well. I barely remember phone numbers any more, my cell phone has made that practice obsolete.
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DoubleClick Opt Out
Opt out of Doubleclick Now you can be tracked as id=OPT_OUT instead of whoever doubleclick thinks you are. This is a nice step forward in privacy.
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Firefox SSL bug workaround
Perusing bugzilla led me to a workaround that solves this problem: install the Firefox help.
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Firefox 0.9 SSL bug
The new release of firefox seems to have a major bug in Linux. If you browse to a secure site which doesn’t have a pristine SSL cert, it locks it up. I found the following bug that appears to have been hijacked by 0.9 users to report this bug. So either show me the real bug so I can vote for it, or everyone hop in create an account and vote for this bug.
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Desk Saga
So I found my temporary desk replacement: the Jerker from IKEA. (Where the hell do the come up with these names) I liked it because it is mostly steel, and I can easily (with an allen wrench) break it down to 5 pieces. And be reasonably sure that I can put it back together in relatively good shape. I used the upper shelf as a monitor stand to have the monitor raised up a little. So it is efficient, durable and useful, and it wasn’t one of those crappy all particle board ones that I saw at every other furniture place.
Now I have to work on designing my new corner desk.
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Computer Desk
My el-cheapo desk which I got from Best Buy a while ago finally bought the farm. I was moving it to get my new rugs installed when a major supporting part turned into mostly sawdust. Luckily for me the township trash guys seemed to not have any problem taking all of it. But unlucky for me and mostly unlucky for my wife’s UT2K4 game. I currently have no where to stick my computer.
So I am currently seeking options, I have basically ruled out replacing it with something similar. I would prefer a desk that will support being moved (taken apart and put back together) many times without an extroidinary amount of damage occuring as a result. So I guess anything made out of some kind of metal or pvc tubing hooked up to wooden horizontal areas would do okay. But I haven’t had much luck finding anything that was too interesting browsing on-line furniture collections.
So here are the basic requirements.
- Sturdy enough to support moving without breaking
- Strong enough to support my Dell 21" monitor
- Corner desk (the above mentioned monitor likes to be in the corner so it isn’t three inches from the edge of the desk)
- the monitor should be raised, so it is at the right eye level.
- Plenty of horizontal surface area for all of my crap
- I think I like to take advantage of the vertical as well, for storage, some sort of hutch or shelving system
- Something that is smart and puts computer parts where I can reach them would be nice.
- need something quickly.
My current thought, is the only way I will meet all my needs inexpensively is to build something myself. But to meet the quickness demand, I will probably have to buy something crappy temporarily, which will eventually make it’s way to the basement, after I can build the ultimate desk.
Anyone have any desk suggestions? Or even some suggestions on how to build a desk?
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MT-Blacklist
On Ryan’s suggestion I am trying out MT-Blacklist to filter the spam. Basically it takes blacklist I entered and compares any URL’s in the ping or comment to the blacklist. Any that match are discarded. You can see my blacklist. It is the same as the master blacklist, except for one entry that was added by scanning my existing spam laden comments. It seems this should work pretty well, at least against the ones I had been getting.
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Scumbag weblog spammers
I am sure there is already quite a bit of work on filtering the scumbag spam comments that get posted to popular weblog entries. But now I have to try and figure out how to implement it. In case it wasn’t clear. No one is welcome to utilize my software and computer resources to advertise their crap without my prior approval. So bugger off!
Is there a SpamAssassin MT plugin?
Or is the solution much simpler?
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isNull
using an object before checking if it is null makes baby jesus cry.
c’mon people check your return valuebetter yet:
- Before you start writing a method, decide whether it will ever return null. Document this decision in the @return section of the method’s Javadoc.
- Never have a method return null unless there’s a really good reason for it.
- If your method returns an array or a collection, there’s no reason to ever return null. Return an empty array or collection instead.
- If you have a situation where null is a valid value for a variable, you can make use of the Introduce Null Object refactoring, to make the behaviour explicit.
Read more here.
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Unit testing premise
There are few creatures more feral and dangerous than a stressed, sleep-deprived, overly-caffinated programmer who has just been told that a bug they fixed two months ago has resurfaced… for the third time.
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WORST CVS Log Entries Ever
“no message.” I think this one may top the list, followed closely by “changed some stuff.”
When working in a geographically distributed development environment. Anyone who can’t find the time to be as verbose as possible when updating the rest of the team as to what they have done, should be promoted to management as soon as possible where they can do the least amount of harm.
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Potentially Useful
I have recently come across a new project called WikiTravel. It is intended to be a collaborative and freely available travel guide. It is just getting started so there is not much information available at this point. But I think this could be really useful. I mean I use the Wikipedia almost every day to look up some information, and it is starting to get really good. And of course Everything2 uses a somewhat similar model for collaborative information sharing. And both of those resources have quite a bit of good information there, but without the authors who contribute their work, there would be nothing. I can see a great use for the vision of this WikiTravel guide so it would be interesting if it can succeed. So the point is, go to WikiTravel and Plunge Forward, you probably have quite a bit of interesting stuff to share be it about your hometown or about the exotic place you just visited. I guess I should find some time to write about my recent trip to Disney.
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SCO vs IBM nonsense
If you are interested in Linux and the status of the SCO vs. IBM debacle that is going on, probably the best place to follow it is on, Karsten Self’s wiki here. You can also follow along on the linux-elitists mailing list or associated archives.
Lots of good information, and a high signal to noise on the linux-elitists list. If you are interested in Hard free software questions and clever answers.
Let me close this entry with a quote from Darl McBride the SCO Group CEO in August 2002 (reference).
Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim.
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CodeWeavers CrossOver Office
I am now the owner of a license to run CrossOver Office 2.0, and am currently installing MS Office 2000 under RedHat Linux 9. So far it is going very well, and I will be happy to not reboot in order to collaborate on co-workers documents or to convert my work into MSWord format.
Also MSWord takes a lot of kicking around from myself included, but it is not terribly difficult to get it to do what you want. I think working with Knuth’s TeX, LaTeX, and GNU texinfo, have helped me to better understand what goes into document formatting and therefore be more effective in using MSWord when I need to format my documents. But give me emacs and people who can read plain (extremely portable) text files any day.
My favorite part of the CrossOver install is captured in this image.
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New Smoke
I wrote a while ago about Letting the smoke out. Just wanted to give an update. I purchased an Antec True550 from CompUSA that same morning. Yeah 550 watts may have been overkill for what I had, but it certainly wouldn’t be as underwhelming as its predecessor was. And Sherlock is humming along as it should.
Luckily there appears to be no collateral damage from the War of smoke containment. This upgrade of power supply has cleared up a few of the idiosyncrasies that I have experienced with this system over the time I have been using it. So, lesson learned, the power is the lifeblood of the computer. So don’t skimp on the powersupply just because it will come packaged with your really cool case.
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Letting the smoke out
Every computer has a magic silver box in it that contains the smoke. The smoke is the ephemeral life force behind all your computers actions. Apparently the magic gnomes or elves that live inside the machine and do all the work, utilize this smoke to give them energy, maybe similar to the way animal life utilizes oxygen in the krebs cycle.
So it turns out once you let the smoke escape from that silver box, the machine will not work. And it is possible, even if you get a new box with brand spankin new smoke, that some of the elves and gnomes, maybe even some of the critical ones, could have been killed in the fallout of the massive smoke release.
The power supply in sherlock died today. Sherlock is the name of my desktop, anyway the PS is the only part of the system I didn’t hand select so it is my fault. I was running my geforce4ti in there and it was only a 300W powersupply from “Deer Compuyter CO, LTD”.
I have been given recommendations for the following types of PS: PC Power and Cooling and Antec. Hopefully I can find a nice 450W from one of these manufacturers at CompUSA this morning, otherwise I will have to decide if the cost of overnight shipping is less than or equal to the value of getting Sherlock back up and running, and assessing any additional damage.
Additional powersupply recommendations are welcome…
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RedHat 9.0?
Well after the unprecedented .3 release in the 7.X line of RedHat Linux it appears they are skipping right over .1 and .2 in the 8.X line. I recieved a message today saying that since I am a subscriber to the RedHat Network I will be able to get RedHat 9 on March 31st.
So does the standard advice of don’t use a .0 release for RedHat, which I have often recieved, apply to this 9.0 release? Should I continue using 7.3? Is this jump to 9.0 along with their recent announcement of their RedHat Enterprise Linux, just evidence that the marketroids are taking over.
Just in case you wonder, both my desktop and my laptop are running 8.0 and I have been generally pleased. It is very pretty. I have also heard from a few that have upgraded to Gnome 2.2 from RedHats Rawhide that they are quite pleased with the enhancements, and claim it is even more complete. So I will be taking advantage of my subscription to download the 9.0 isos, and promptly installing.
Maybe someone with bandwidth to burn would let me upload the 9.0 isos to their server, once I grab them?
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Pinging Jeremy
As requested this entry is here to ping Jeremy’s blog as a test.
resulted in an error: 2003.03.19 10:07:20 XXXXXXXXXX Ping ‘http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/557' failed: Need a TrackBack ID (tb_id). -
Dell saga
Well it looks like Dell is finally going to make good on my service contract. Apparently their part backorder problems are resolved, and I just heard from Jeff the service technician who should be here in about 45 minutes.
Now I can get back to working at 1400x1050 and in Linux. The backup laptop I was using was only capable of 800x600 under Linux, and 1024x768 under wintendo
Now if only I could run M$ Project under Codeweavers Crossover Office.
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PS TWO
My parents got me PS2 for my fast approaching birthday. (March 7th)! I wasn’t sure if I wanted one for a while, because I was worried it would sit unplayed, since I am usually rather busy, between work, the gym, karate, my general thirst to increase my knowledge, and most importantly, spending time with Michelle, I am usually rather short on down time.
But I have already spent a few hours playing, and am glad to get back in the console scene. And the simple distraction factor is always welcome, I find it a few minutes fully committed to playing a game helps me focus more thouroughly on my work later.
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Dell Problems continued
Apparently when Dell support schedules a dispatch, it is only an estimate. And not only that, but if that estimate turns out to be wrong, it is the customers responsibility to track down that info.
So they know they are going to miss the date, but I wasn’t able to find that out until I called them up and sat on hold, and went through the whole process of giving my service tag number, phone number and email address to the technician. Then I needed to give him the dispatch number for the service (shouldn’t that be in their database next to my service tag number?). And he tells me, they had a stock issue shipping the part to the local technician and they estimate that the part will be in the techs hands on Monday March 3rd.
So a timely email with that information is beyond the capabilities of the mighty Dell
Apparently Benjamin Curtis isn’t the only guy associated with Dell who is is guilty of low cognitive ability.
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Dell problems
The laptop I acquired as a going away present from one of my previous employers finally gave up the ghost. It is a Dell Inspiron 5000e. Got it working very nicely with RedHat, and the fact that it can do 1400x1050 is really nice. It was even a suitable machine for playing Unreal Tournament
But anyway the motherboard seems to be shot, It won’t progress from the BIOS POST screen any longer. Luckily it has onsite support until October 2003. So a Dell dispatched technician will be at my house today to replace the motherboard, CPU and Thankfully the cooling fan. The fan in this machine has always rattled rather noisily, causing me great irritation. So hopefully the light dusting of snow today won’t keep Dell from their appointed rounds.
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Accessibility
So far I have been generally pleased with MT. It makes it rather easy to add content, I have been able to simply and effectively change the layout. (Well it is currently one of the example layouts, but I get the idea) It has introduced me into the wonders of CSS, and through an entry on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog found myself looking at Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive into Accessibility.
First I must compliment Mark on providing such a detailed yet easily read and understood explanation of many of the accessibility issues faced on the Internet. Second I must compliment Ben and Mena Trott of MovableType for implementing the majority of Mark’s suggestions into verstion 2.6 of MT. The only change I can remember making is the one on Using relative font sizes.
I highly recommend that all who are maintaining an information store on the web at least review the Dive into Accessibility site.
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New SpamAssassin
The new SpamAssassin is out!
I installed it and ran a quick test… and a spam that made it through yesterday, got squashed with the new version. It also sleekly sports support for Bayesian filtering.
