| Joe Edmonds Blog | ||||||
|
Email
Subscribe My Other Pages
Job alerts powered by ZipRecruiter
|
Fri, 28 Jan 2011
Reducing Chrome Power Usage in Linux
I'm running ubuntu maverick on my ASUS U35F. It's got a couple problems (LCD screen viewing angle is right out of the 1990s, no nvidia graphics because they only offer the jury-rigged and linux-incompatible "Optimus", no CDROM drive -- I used to care about this; somebody remind me why) but it's fast & quiet, has plenty of RAM and hard drive space, and it has phenomenal battery life. Like you can use it during the whole flight ... to Korea. That is, it will last the whole flight if you're careful. What's the best way to manage power usage in linux? Powertop. What causes the most problems for a web browser tab-addict like myself? Unsurprisingly, Adobe's flash player ("npviewer.bin") and the resource-hungry applets people create therein. So how do I track down the obscure pages where flash is doing nothing but wasting battery? (the AWS login page, anyone?!?) Press shift-escape to open chrome's awesome task manager, then scroll down to "Shockwave Flash" and click "End Process". Any tabs running flash get a little message bar at the top and battery usage falls to a tree-hugging 8-watts-or-so.
Speeding up Google Chrome in Linux
Google-chrome was getting slower and slower on my otherwise-performant-seeming EeePC laptop. Sometimes it would take 10 seconds to open a page. And, after opening a page, while further assets were loading, the browser would become unresponsive and Chrome would offer to kill them. Why? Well, I'm running ubuntu karmic, with a luks-encrypted ext3 home directory on the EeePC's cheap SSD. Somewhere in that stack, I believe Chrome's disk cache writes were beginning to bog down, as evidenced by kcryptd's appearance in "top". To prove that disk performance was the culprit, I copied ~/.cache to my ramdisk /tmp/ directory and symlinked it back to my home directory. This instantly made chrome feel faster than a flying potato. So how do I get that level of performance while still storing my cache on a persistent storage medium? After mucking around in /proc/sys/vm/ for a while to no avail, I tried ext3's "data=writeback" option. Works like a charm. The occasional fsck seems like a small price to pay. And, of course, it speeds up every app on the machine -- not just Chrome. This is life-changing if you have a cheap SSD. Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. You are a little soul carrying around a corpse. (just a couple of Epictus' many great quotes) Helped build CrowdPhoto this weekend at Startup Weekend LA. What was fun for me: Doing another project with the talented "ShareMySpot" gang from last year's SWLA, attracting a couple developers willing to learn the Android platform (in 48 hours!) and able to launch the mobile app that makes CrowdPhoto push-button simple, learning about the power of realtime PR (Twitter), learning about Amazon SimpleDB, working with the new ubuntu "lucid" release, barbecue on the roof of an Ocean Ave apartment building, a third customer for filter.to, and meeting a bunch of smart people from the LA startup world. CoLoft graciously hosted the event and sponsored a 1-month free membership for the 2nd-place team, so I look forward to taking advantage of that over the next 4 weeks!
ZipRecruiter
Filter.to
Buddhist Proverb
Firefox Search Tool for Google
Lost your Firefox Search Tool (aka "search plugin") for Google? I did. Here's how to get it back without reinstalling firefox. Right click this Firefox Google Search Tool link, select "Save Link As..." and save it in the "searchplugins" subdirectory of your profile folder. You may need to right-click in the "save as" dialog and tick the "show hidden files" checkbox. Restart firefox and you'll have your google search plugin back.
What I Do When Android Is Slow
When my HTC G1 (running android) gets slow, I have a simple, free way to speed it up (for a while). Eject the microSD card. Remember to unmount it first (Home -> Menu -> Settings -> SD card & phone storage -> Unmount SD card). Plug the card back in, and life is good.Unfortunately, the first google result for "android slow", has been marked read-only ("archived") by T-Mobile and its upshot is "buy a new SD card". Here's hoping this blog post climbs high enough in google to save a few people some money. I converted each of my CDs to a single FLAC file for online access and backup. See earlier post about abcde. Here's my recipe for using ubuntu hardy to convert them into small audio files with id3-style info available, for use on my android phone or Michelle's Sansa Fuze:
That's it. Mp3splt extracts artist, album, track information from the cue file and puts it in ogg comments, which are read by both the Sansa Fuze and the android music player. Economizing yesterday, I went to Subway for lunch. With my order, they gave me four of those scrach-and-win type cards. The first three yielded nothing, but the last one showed I was the winner of a BOGOF Reggae Chicken Sandwich. Exciting! I've never had bogof reggae chicken before. Normally, I wouldn't eat Subway two days in a row, but I recently read about a study that shows people tend to put off appealing tasks just as much as they put off unappealing tasks. And, while I'm savvier and more diligent (not to mention more handsome) than the average punter in a psychology study, in this respect I'm afraid my propensity for ruts leaves me on the other end of the bell curve. So today, I went to another Subway to cash it in ASAP. I can almost taste the delightful bogof reggae chicken as I stand in line and the manager congratulates me as their first winner! Even better, my golden ticket curiously didn't specify whether I was to be the recipient of a free 6" sub or a free 12" sub. But guess what... she's preparing the full 12-incher for me. Truly, today is my lucky day. At the end of the line (No thanks, no sauces on that; I wouldn't want any superfluous flavors that might compete with the delicate mixture of bogof reggae herbs and spices) she taps at the register a bit and demands £2.99. Excuse me? That's more than a whole sandwich at the Subways back home. And what about my golden ticket?!? "No," she says, "that's the price of a 6 inch. You see, this here means 'Buy One Get One Free.' So I gave you one 6-inch sandwich for free and you have to pay for the other one." I'm not sure what the penalty is here for pelting the cashier with those obnoxious little pound coins, so I thanked her, took my sandwich, and left. So today's recommendation to heal the economy is: Let's not give our tax dollars to the !@#$% marketing department.
One Small Step for Crisiskind
The Solitary Basics at Parque Nacional Puyehue
We are sipping a cup of wine-from-a-box at a roofed picnic table in campsite 23 at Camping Chanleufú in Aguas Calientes, Chile. The night is damp and chilly but we have warm clothes. There's a light under the roof, so Michelle is reading her book, and I have the laptop plugged in so I can blog and do a little computer programming. We plan to break out the MSR stove in an hour or so to cook instant risotto. There's nobody else in the campsite. So far, we haven't even seen a ranger to collect the alleged $20 fee. Maybe has something to do with the car barrier at the entrance, but of course we just walked in from thee bus. It's kinda bizarre, but we have everything we need. Another day well below our target budget... userbin=$HOME/bin PATH="$userbin:$PATH" cat <<EOF >~/bin/cabal-install-this #!/bin/sh setup="\$1" runhaskell \$setup configure --prefix=$HOME --user && runhaskell \$setup build && runhaskell \$setup install --user EOF chmod a+x ~/bin/cabal-install-this sudo apt-get install libgmp3c2 gcc libc6-dev g++ zlib1g-dev libgmp3-dev darcs wget http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.10.1/ghc-6.10.1-i386-unknown-linux-libedit2.tar.bz2 tar jxvf ghc-6.10.1-i386-unknown-linux-libedit2.tar.bz2 pushd ghc-6.10.1 ./configure sudo make install # installs in /usr/local/ by default popd httpv=4000.0.4 wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/HTTP/$httpv/HTTP-$httpv.tar.gz tar zxvf HTTP-$httpv.tar.gz pushd HTTP-$httpv/ cabal-install-this Setup.lhs popd wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/zlib/0.5.0.0/zlib-0.5.0.0.tar.gz tar zxvf zlib-0.5.0.0.tar.gz pushd zlib-0.5.0.0/ cabal-install-this Setup.hs popd cryptov=4.2.0 wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/Crypto/$cryptov/Crypto-$cryptov.tar.gz tar zxvf Crypto-$cryptov.tar.gz pushd Crypto-$cryptov/ cabal-install-this Setup.hs popd darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/ pushd cabal-install cabal-install-this Setup.hs popd cabal update cabal install happs-tutorial happs-tutorial 5001 True True
A rough outline of the procedure I followed to get orchid-demo 0.0.4 working in ubuntu 8.10
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev cabal install orchid-demo orchid-demo --extract w3m -dump http://localhost:8080/
Tab Mix Plus Session Management
ripping to flac + cue for slimserver using abcde in ubuntu hardy
Ubuntu Hardy Heron erased my mp3 collection. OK, I was a little reckless in assuming that, if I installed it over my existing ext3 partition, it wouldn't overwrite /usr/local/mp3/. Photorec actually was able to recover over 15,000 mp3 files. Unfortunately, I don't own 15k mp3s. It had recovered 15k mp3 fragments. Fun to listen to on shuffle play (sounds like somebody fiddling with a radio dial in a city full of people exactly like me) but not really "recovered" in any useful way. My take-away from this experience? Store files like this (not sensitive, but expensive to reproduce) on a partition that has good undelete support. Ext2 supports undelete; ext3 does not support undelete. On the bright side, this is a perfect excuse to re-encode my entire collection in a lossless format. I'm still trying to decide whether to pay $1-2 per CD to have an outside service rip and encode my CDs or just feed CDs into the machine myself. In the meantime, I'm at least trying to identify the perfect format. I think I've found it: FLAC + cue seems like the best "copy of the CD" approach. Slimserver plays them gaplessly and you can burn a FLAC + cue file to a CD directly, if necessary. In the past, I've liked abcde for ripping CDs, so I used the following command to rip the CD and the cue file in ubuntu hardy: abcde -1 -M -p -o flac
This worked fine, except that slimserver wouldn't read the FLAC file. It just showed 10 tracks, each with the title of the album. After a little fiddling, I found that changing the "FILE" line allowed slimserver to read the file. So here's a messy litte script to fix up the cue files after ripping: find . -name '*.cue' -print | xargs perl -pi.orig -e 'my $flacname = $1 if $ARGV =~ m#/([^/]+\.flac)\.cue$#; s/^FILE "dummy\.wav" WAVE$/FILE "$flacname" FLAC/;'
Firefox Search Plugin Selection
Using a firefox search plugin has some advantages over a custom keyword:
A couple months ago, my office moved near my apartment. Not only are we now located in a vibrant, scenic, progressive, beachside community, but we are also close enough to my home that I can bike to work. And, four days out of five, that's what I do. I knew driving in Los Angeles made me frustrated. It just seems like such a tragic waste of everyone's time. But I had no idea how happy I would be commuting by bike. Well, the jury is in. What do I like about biking? The smells. The unobstructed panoramic views (OK, maybe a convertible would work for that). Sneaking right past lines of stopped traffic. Free parking. No time spent in the parking garage, waiting in a line of cars behind the Escalade that just has to have the parking spot currently occupied by the world's slowest person. Free exercise. Food is cheaper than gas. I can bike home after three beers.
Keyconfig for Mouseless Mozilla
Today I learned a little about the wonderful world of Keyconfig. Install that keyconfig.xpi in both firefox and thunderbird, then get started assigning keys to javascript functions. If keyconfig doesn't include a javascript function to do what you want, you may have to search the web for it. In thunderbird, to move an email to a folder with a single keystroke, I followed Deef's helpful instructions. In firefox, to open the "back button history menu", I quit firefox, added a couple of snippets of javascript from Mozillazine's Keyconfig Page to ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/prefs.js, restarted firefox, opened keyconfig (with Ctrl-Shift-F12) and assigned Alt-Shift-Left Arrow to "Back Menu". I've spent a few hours over the past few weeks getting my ubuntu postfix installation configured to support SMTP AUTH. After screwing around with Cyrus SASL for far too long, I found this suggestion in the postfix SASL README: Use Dovecot's SASL support instead. Since I had already switched from courier to dovecot as my IMAP server, modifying its configuration to serve SASL for postfix was a breeze. Dovecot rules! Matter : Energy :: Noun : Verb :: Data : Function Why do we divide things up this way?
Childhood Smells
Family That Walks on All Fours
I saw a touching and educational Nova episode tonight about a family in Turkey, many of whose members are afflicted with a genetic disease that interferes with their ability to walk upright. It's fascinating how our genome leads to our actual morphology. It's as if our genes were designed for evolution. I wonder if other organisms (viruses?) or ecosystems fail because the way their genotype encodes their phenotype doesn't lend itself to stable mutations like ours does. Perhaps this trait could be defined and measured as a reduction in the percentage of possible mutations that yield catastrophic (unsurvivable) failures. There are lots of ways to encode (compress) information. Some just seem to be more useful (meaningful?) than others.  Here are some techie gift ideas for your favorite nerd. If your favorite nerd is me, you have no excuse for getting me a tie for Christmas. See more of my Geeky Gift Ideas list at ThisNext. Everybody loves to make fun of the luddite who slaps a piece of masking over the incorrect, blinking time displayed by their VCR. Granted, in this age of DVDs and PVRs, only a luddite would still own a VCR. But these infernal, blinking, green, epilepsy-inducing, referenceless non-clocks are installed in everything these days, including radios, microwave ovens, and cars. The masking tape user does not deserve our scorn. It's the VCR designer who is to blame. He assumes the user wants their VCR to know the correct time. Now, some people use their VCR as a clock. Some people ask their VCR to record a specific channel at a specific time, and this requires that the clock be accurate. But nobody else, luddite or technophile, needs their VCR (or radio or microwave oven or car) to know what time it is. Setting the time on your VCR isn't trivial. Even if the buttons are clearly labeled, first you have to find an accurate clock and then you have to press your clearly-labeled buttons in one of the seemingly-infinite combinations and permutations on which all the different manufacturers have failed to standardize. Power outages are inconvenient as it is. Why must our presumptuous appliances hassle us further? The VCR should be able to figure out whether I need it to know the correct time. Only show me the blinking clock if I have a program scheduled to record. While I'm defending the luddites, I gotta make a case for the VCR too. Its superiority lies in its comprehensible user interface. The DVD menu is, possibly excluding Brad Pitt, the most-annoying invention of the movie industry. What made them think I wanted to solve a goddamned choose-your-own-adventure game just to watch my Star Wars 2 DVD? Which button is highlighted? Do I go "right" or "down" to get to the next button? Did my remote control's infrared command not make it to the DVD player, or did it receive the command and is it just waiting for steam to come out of my ears before actually performing it? I long for the "play", "rewind", "fast forward" simplicity of the VCR. The DVD gives me nothing in exchange for the simplicity it stole.
Solar Computers
Here's a fun way to make linux system administration more like first grade: alias simonsays=sudo
Personal DNA
Scratch-and-Vote System Could Help Eliminate Election Fraud
I'm optimistic about the Pret-a-voter voting system. Could be the voting system of the future. Pros compared to traditional paper voting:
Pros compared to existing electronic voting systems:
Plurality
Gnome "Run Application" Dialog
I am very pleased with Ken Mixter's GmailUI Thunderbird extension. My #1 favorite feature is that it lets me use the "Y" key to yank the message into my archive folder. But it took my a while to figure out how my IMAP server (Courier) organizes its namespace. All the folders are under "Inbox.". So, in order for the "Y" key to work correctly, I need to configure GMailUI to point to "Inbox.Archive". If I get a free hour, I'd like to extend GmailUI to move the message into "Inbox.ConfirmedSpam" (for input to spamassassin's Bayesian classifier) when the "Y" key is pressed on a message that's marked in thunderbird as "Junk". I just started using Tab Mix Plus. It's great. I'm a fan of these features:
Send Bug Reports to PalmSource
Here's a page that explains how to send a bug report to PalmSource. I assume these are the people who can fix bugs in the OS and apps that came pre-installed on my treo 650. They say:
I guess my expectations for superhero movies (or action movies employing Liam Neeson) have finally sunk low enough. I really enjoyed Batman Begins. Jeremy Zawodny hosts a long discussion about how to clean your LCD screen. My take-away: 50% isopropyl alcohol + 50% water worked well.
Building HAppS in Ubuntu Dapper
Took me a while to figure out how to build HApps under ubuntu dapper. Here's what I did: # build fps (seems to be no ubuntu package for this) darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/fps cd fps # HAppS calls breakFirst: darcs obliterate --from-patch "we kill breakFirst/breakLast" runhaskell Setup.hs configure --ghc --prefix=/usr/local runhaskell Setup.hs build sudo runhaskell Setup.hs install # build HApps darcs get --partial http://happs.org/HAppS cd HAppS darcs obliterate --from-patch "we kill breakFirst/breakLast" runhaskell Setup.hs configure --ghc --prefix=/usr/local runhaskell Setup.hs build sudo runhaskell Setup.hs install When the radio voice says "NPR; National Public Radio" he stresses the word "Public". As if to reassure me that my donation is allowing any old underprivileged American to access their quality radio programs. But when I try to listen on the Internet to a radio show recommended by a friend, using my free operating system of choice, I am in for half an hour of searching for a working media player. I even considered installing a product from one of my least favorite companies. The company I don't like sent me on a wild goose chase to an open source real media player that has an ubuntu package but when I tried to open this stream it gave me the error "The following components are required: protocol_rtsp_rdt". Eventually, I just gave up. I'll resume my monetary support of NPR when they support me and my fellow linux/ubuntu users by releasing content in an open format such as ogg or mp3. When I set up my dual monitor workstation, I was in a bit of a rush. I cobbled together an xorg.conf file for my ubuntu breezy workstation, got it so it looked right and didn't think much about it for 5 months. Over that time, I noticed that window drawing was surprisingly slow for my state-of-the-art workstation. OpenGL screensavers -- which I expected to run reasonably fast with my modern-if-not-gamer-quality Nvidia Quadro NVS 280 PCI-E card -- ran at a pace reminiscent of Mesa. So yesterday, I did some googling and came upon TwinView. I set it up with a simple device section in xorg.conf:
Get Rid of Silly Colored Bars in Mozilla Thunderbird
I got a plaintext email newsletter today that included some headers that look like: >>>>>>>>>>>>>> HEADER Of course, thunderbird thinks it's clever and wants to render this as a 14th-level blockquoted citation with a large pyramid of stacked colored bars. I decided I'd like to do without the eye candy and finally found a forum posting that tells how. Since it's not so easy to read that forum, here are the distilled instructions: Add this to ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/*.default/user.js: Add this to ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/*.default/chrome/userContent.css:
Setting gnome-terminal Default Profile
After creating a few gnome-terminal profiles to set different foreground/background colors for different types of terminals, I found that newly-created gnome-terminals would use the profile I created last rather than the original one now misleadingly named "Default". My friend showed me how to fix this: This is one of the gnome-terminal commands that is only available through the menubar. Right-click in window, select "Show Menubar". Under the "Edit" menu, select "Profiles...". Then you can select from the pulldown titled "Profile used when launching a new terminal". Whew.
Spam Review Autoscrolling Viewer
Somewhat obsessive as I am, every week I review my spam folder. These are messages spamassassin has scored as spam. I don't want to miss any ham and, more importantly, I don't want to mess up spamassassin's bayes network. I couldn't find a way to convince mozilla thunderbird to sort by spam score, so I wrote a perl script to read my Spam Maildir and display it in an 80-character-wide format with the columns [score, from, to, subject], sorted by "score" and "from". Then I use "less -m" to view review this report. So far, so good. But the way I review it is to scroll slowly in the beginning and quickly toward the end. It's fairly unscientific. What I'd like to write is a program that scrolls through the entire list in X minutes, giving each message review time inversely proportional to its spaminess score. And I think it would need a pause button. I've added another weapon to my anti-mouse arsenal: XBindKey. Here's a quick cheat sheet:
I'm a big fan of operating my computer using the keyboard (as opposed to the mouse). The advantages include:
Unix used to be very keyboard-friendly. Now that so much of what we do on the computer is graphical, Windows' integrated OS and graphical toolkits generally put the X-gnome-gtk mishmash to shame in terms of consistent keyboard navigability. Emacs remains a paragon of super-efficient keyboard navigability [I just pressed alt-slash to autocomplete the word "navigability". There. I did it again. :)], but many of the other programs I use on a day-to-day basis require me to reach for the mouse. The worst offenders are firefox and thunderbird. Once upon a time, I thought the best way to deal with this problem was to read mail and browse the web from emacs. Unfortunately, w3, w3m, and gnus, while having some serious strengths are just too slow, unable to display graphics, and difficult to configure. So I'm stuck with firefox and thunderbird which, despite their lack of obvious shortcuts, boast thousands of developers who make them the leading networking applications of our time. If you want to learn how to save some miles on your mouse while browsing the web, first go read Adam Pash's Mouse-less Firefox article and the thunderbird keyboard shortcuts page. That's a nice start. But there are still a lot of common tasks for which I've found no reasonable keyboard shortcuts. Here's my wishlist. I'll post solutions as I find (or create) them.
Looking for a way to open one of J2 Communications / JFax's .jfx files from an ubuntu linux machine? Just use evince.
Charles Schwab fails to provide sufficient transaction history
It is frustrating, in this day and age when I have a $20 USB key in my pocket that holds a gigabyte of data, that Charles Schwab, with their millions of dollars and thousands of servers, can't show me a single transaction I made more than four years ago. They say they're "working on it". Well I'm working on transferring my account to Etrade. Let's see who finishes first. Looks to me like the only game in town for automated stock trading for individuals is Interactive Brokers. Sure, you could write a WWW::Mechanize script to slog through your broker's frame-filled web site, hoping you don't someday accidentally purchase 1000 google puts just because your broker changed the order of the items in the pulldown list, but I would feel a lot more comfortable entrusting my transactions to a broker that has given some thought to a simple online API. Interactive Brokers seems to provide a Java API that they claim works in unix. Getting java working on my debian box and then programming in it sounds like the kind of pain I would not enjoy. But the Interactive Brokers TWS API Wiki also mentions C, Python, and Perl APIs that have been crafted by community members. Hmm... [updated 2006-03-15] There's an application called Medved QuoteTracker that has a stock trading API. It, in turn, passes the requests on to one of the ~14 brokerages they support. Sounds like a jury-rigged solution that involves keeping Windows running on a computer or a virtual machine. But it just might work... A few weeks ago, the exim installation on my ubuntu laptop stopped using SMTP AUTH to communicate with its smarthost. I wrestled with it for a few hours over the intervening time and never made any progress. Tonight I thought "maybe I'll see if postfix can do it." I did an "apt-get install postfix", then followed these instructions) and, less than 15 minutes later, it was working. I'm underwhelmed by the Ultra-Mobile PC. Microsoft's marketing site fooled me into thinking it might be a little revolutionary, but it looks to me like they just skinned Windows Explorer. The on-screen keyboard looks somewhat innovative. No thanks, I'd prefer a Nokia 770.
Running 32-bit applications under ubuntu amd64
If you try to run a 32-bit application under ubuntu's 64-bit amd64 distro, you get the following error: unable to execute <program>: No such file or directory The Debian AMD HOW-TO describes how to configure a debian-based system to run 32-bit apps. Below is my ubuntification of those instructions. sudo apt-get install debootstrap sudo debootstrap --arch i386 breezy /var/chroot/breezy-ia32 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ # this takes a while ia32root=/var/chroot/breezy-ia32 sudo chroot $ia32root file /bin/ls sudo chroot $ia32root /bin/ls If you're looking for /usr/share/dict/words (which seems to be missing from my ubuntu breezy installation), You may want to install "scowl" instead. It has contains a number of comprehensive, easy-to-parse word lists.
Xmodmap for Sager NP5720 keyboard in linux
The default keyboard layout for my new Sager NP5720 laptop had some problems. The numeric keypad's PgUp and PgDown keys almost worked except, when the shift key was depressed, they would output the numbers 9 and 3 even though Num Lk was off. This is a pain because linux terminals use shift-PgUp/PgDown to scroll. After an hour of research, twiddling, and trial-and-error I found that this fixed the problem: xmodmap -e "keycode 81 = Prior Prior KP_9 Prior" xmodmap -e "keycode 89 = Next Next KP_3 Next" I used "Prior" instead of "KP_Prior" because the gnome app evince didn't understand ctrl-KP_Prior. I'm sure this will come back to bite me someday when I'm playing a game or something. This approach also has the drawback that it breaks the 3 and 9 keys when num lock is on. But I never really use the numeric keypad, so this isn't a problem for me. Joel Splosky's recent article about The Perils of JavaSchools mentions fixed point theory. Despite the fact that my CS degree required nothing so advanced as a true understanding of a fixed point theorem, I wanted to feel that I was the kind of person who, if he put his mind to it, could wrap his head around the concept. Besides, it's related to the Y combinator, and my friend Ben and I had taken the time to understand that a few months ago. Right? When I was a kid, lying in bed trying to sleep, sometimes I would play a game with myself where I would visualize a golf ball rolling into a hole. The particular image is fairly irrelevant (Freudian analysists start your notepads) but the point is that I often couldn't get the ball to roll in the hole. I would try to push it in and it would slip away. An inability to command one's own mental visualization is disconcerting. Anyway, visualizing why or how the Y combinator finds a fixed point of the function that's passed to it is giving me that same feeling. I get this close to understanding how it all fits together and then <poof> it slips away as I lose track of the pieces.
NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers
If federal agencies like the NSA aren't allowed to use HTTP cookies, how is Carnivore/Omnivore/DragonWare legal? I guess the federal government's too big to be consistent. Maybe consistency in the government would be a bad thing. It might lead to fascism or memetic stagnation. Someday I'm going to argue that we the people should make all information free, but first I have to read David Brin's "The Transparent Society"
Logitech V270 Bluetooth Mouse in Ubuntu Linux
My new Logitech V270 Bluetooth Mouse On my way to work today, I followed a truck with the phone number for a Los Angeles PC Recycling company: 1-877-PC-RECYCLE.
Wifi- NTP- Enabled Clock Mechanism
I posted an idea about a Wifi- NTP- Enabled Clock Mechanism on halfbakery today.
How bad form is it to post a fortune fortune on your blog? As an entire entry? Hopefully the blog police will overlook this transgression. Enjoy: Take time to reflect on all the things you have, not as a result of your merit or hard work or because God or chance or the efforts of other people have given them to you. I created a handy firefox keyword for Google Local: Name: google local Location: http://maps.google.com/?q=%s+90402 Keyword: gl I'm a sucker for physics simulation games like BridgeBuilder and moon lander. Lately I've been wearing out my arrow keys on the thoroughly-enjoyable X-Moto. I've lived in rented apartments for over 10 years. But now I'm getting to the age where I think I would really like to invest some of myself and some of my money in a place. Unfortunately, I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country. And real estate prices have been rising quickly over the past five years so I don't want to risk losing a lot of money when the market inevitably cools. I often wonder whether commune-style living could work for me. I don't need a lot of private space -- pretty much just a bedroom and a refrigerator. The rest of the space I'd like to invest in -- a big yard, a living room, a bathroom, a kitchen, an Internet connection, a garage, even a car -- could theoretically be shared, given the right arrangement. I actually like having people around. And, while there are inevitably conflicts among people who have to share spaces, the built-in community, the shared destiny (if 10 people depend on the Internet connection then ~10 times as many resources can be dedicated to fixing it when it's broken), and the diversity of skills might make up for the work required to resolve conflicts. Last night I finally did a little googling and reading and found that the modern, PC term for a commune is intentional community. It looks like people have done lots of thinking about and experimentation with various models. Parameters include: work affiliations, how income is shared, religious affiliations, decision-making style, and much more. I think I'd favor a fairly capitalistic arrangement. I'd like to save money and build community by sharing big, expensive things, but I would like the freedom to work and spend the rest of my money how I please (entertainment, travel, food) without these private decisions being subject to community review. I also might be willing to pay others to do community chores I'm not interested in doing.
Old personal web page (further) retired
My old home page is so 1996. Back in those days, web pages were largely static. Accordingly, I guess I felt the need for a single page that described "me". I'd edit it as friends created web pages or I wanted to publish some new source code or pictures. But the page was all presentation and no semantics so changes to it weren't easy to discern. Recently, I've come to realize that the aspects of myself that change are more numerous and maybe even more important than the aspects that remain constant. It looks like this blogging/RSS thing is here to stay and, while I still find the notion of polling for updates absurd, at least RSS acknowledges that change is important enough to be a first-class citizen of the web. I'm sure that when there are so many RSS producers and consumers out there that the Internet grinds to a standstill, people will migrate to a more scalable system like FeedTree or something. In the meantime, I'm a-bloggin and I'm so embarrassed of my old home page that I just changed my four-letter domain to redirect here instead of there. My grandmother needs a laptop computer. Since her needs are simple (web browsing, emailing, viewing digital photos sent by her adoring grandson) I thought I'd install linux on an older laptop and give her that. Over the past few months, I've tried to refurbish two different laptops. The first, my Dad's old Gateway 400 MHz P2, worked OK until I tried to get the PCMCIA (Cardbus, actually) port working so she can get 802.11g wireless access from her room. At this point I don't remember the exact problem, but it was a no-go. The Gateway had a flaky power switch and a pretty annoying keyboard layout to boot. So this weekend, I dusted off the old Dell 400 MHz P2 laptop that served me well for years after I bought it from my previous employer. I tried to install ubuntu on it. It failed repeatably with some vague error message like "could not install base packages". So I tried debian and noticed some funky hard drive noises accompanied by an extremely (brokenly) slow formatting process. Remembering that this laptop also has a jenky power cord and that the value of the time spent on this project was climbing into the hundreds of dollars and that I really like new gadgets myself, I began to investigate a new laptop for myself. Here's what I found: I've gotten lazy in my old age. Nobody ever got fired for buying Dell and they've come out on top in many of my own past comparison shopping exercises. So I went through a navigational hierarchy that was obviously designed by a large committee of people who profit from you making the wrong choice at any turn (Wouldn't it be nice if the page you go to when you click the word "Notebooks" at the top of their site went to a page that showed you all of their notebooks?), and eventually found Dell's uber gaming laptop (I'm sure that link will break next time the committee decides they want to redo their entire site in pink). Nice. Looks good, has a higher resolution than any desktop machine I've ever used, and is undoubtedly faster than any desktop I've ever used. They say gaming laptops are here and I believe 'em. But once you select the GeForce Go 7800 GTX and the 7200 RPM hard drive, Dell's XPS M170 costs more than $3200! On the off chance that there might be somebody out there who could undercut Dell, I did a little googling and found the Sager NP5720. Wow. This can be configured with all the features of the Dell for just $2300. And it has a nifty built-in camera and a built-in 4-in-1 card reader. It doesn't look like a pair of Nike sneakers (the Dell does), but for $900, I'll buy myself a few pairs of Air Jordans.
Fun with userspace filesystems (FUSE)
Userspace filesystems have a high gee-whiz factor. I expect a filesystem to be a simple, clunky, old repository of data that changes infrequently. Sure there are filesystems like procfs, udev, sysfs, usbfs, and tmpfs. But I don't know what half of those are and the other half are just little read-only or write-only windows into the kernel. But FUSE lets you write your own filesystem as a user-level process in less than 100 lines of code. In fact, there are 37 different filesystems built on top of FUSE. These include a versioned filesystem, a versioned filesystem built on top of cvs, a way to mount a relational database as a filesystem, a simple bluetooth filesystem, a gmail filesystem (maximum filesystem size 2.6 GB and counting :) ), a bittorrent filesystem, and more. I followed Jay Wren's instructions to replace xscreensaver-getimage-file with a perl script that gets images from flickr. Neat. But I have no photos. So I think I'm going to modify Jay's script to find images by tag. I guess I'm going to need to read the flickr API documentation.
Sony PFM-42X1 transformer buzzing
I just recently noticed that my Sony PFM-42X1 plasma TV makes a 60Hz buzzing noise when it is displaying a bright image. It's as if drawing all that power makes the transformer noisier. Annoying as it is less than 1/60th of the way to its expected half life. I found that putting it in "power saving: reduce" mode makes the picture a bit dimmer and pretty much eliminates this noise. I suppose it'll probably increase the life of the TV too.
"Google This Site" Bookmarklet
Many web sites have sub-standard or non-existent site search engines. Fortunately, there's google. I often found myself using my google firefox keyword to search the current site for a page like this: "gg site:joeedmonds.com bookmarklet". But I do this so often that I wanted to save a few keystrokes. This bookmarklet does the "gg site:joeedmonds.com" part automatically, popping up a dialog to ask you for the search keyword(s). To add it to your browser, drag this button into your bookmarks or your toolbar: google this site
Gaming LCD Monitors
xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -size Average -telnet sou history examine joeski 0 unex # tell
Elevation-Aware Hybrid
First Post!
Deformable Sphere Robot
I, Robot
Michelle and I landed in London over a week ago, on Saturday morning. Though the seats on Virgin were smaller than the seats I remember on Delta a year and a half ago, lack of sleep, earplugs (provided in the complimentary Virgin gift pack), and a sleep mask (ditto) let me get a full four-or-so hours of sleep. Since then, we've flown to Dublin, where we rented a car and spent a couple hours learning, the hard way, how to drive on the lefthand side of the road and negotiate the dreaded European roundabout. A few hours later we made it to the beautiful seaside town of Westport. Here we found the first and nicest of the many B&Bs we would stay at over the next week. After a visit to Matt Molloy's (a member of the Irish band The Chieftains) Pub, we split a doner kabob and chips and then headed for a younger pub where we played cards and watched the locals. The next day we headed down to the Ailwee cave and through The Burren -- beautiful and remote. Then on to Galway, where we had the best (and least Irish; coincidence?) meal of the trip near the Spanish Arch. I should mention the Irish Breakfast, the source of much discussion among health-conscious travelers: Every B&B serves, for the 2nd 'B', an egg or two and a variety of fried pork products piled on the plate. To soak up the extra grease, some non-Atkins-approved bread is served with butter and jam. On the bright side, that's enough calories to get you through the entire day. At dinner, we sat next to John Montague and his wife -- on a book-signing tour for his latest poetry collection -- who recommended the Dingle Peninsula as a smaller, more beautiful version of the Ring of Kerry. So, after Galway, we headed there, cycled around, explored the remote grassy peninsula and beaches, and had a nice lunch overlooking the ocean and some of the ancient beehinve fortresses. We considered spending the night in this nice little town but decided instead to press on to touristy Killarney. While the town itself isn't very special, we took a spectacular, 34 mile bike ride around the lakes and through the Gap of Dunloe. While a pain in the ass (literally), it has probably been the high point of the trip so far. You'll see when I post the pictures... Next morning we decided to try to get halfway to Dublin, so we went to Kilkenny, which the friendly woman who ran the B&B in Killarney had recommended. Turned out not to be quite all it was cracked up to be, but the Butler Castle tour was neat. Yesterday we drove in to Dublin, dropped off the car, and made our way to our first and last hostel of the trip. We've sort of been collecting ourselves, doing laundry, shopping, sending postcards, and looking for good nightclubs for the last 24 hours. Tonight: the famous Wagamama restaurant and more nightclubs, no doubt. Tomorrow we fly to London and catch the chunnel train to Paris, where we can hopefully settle down in one room (with its own bathroom) for a few days before the wedding on Saturday.
A Giant Soapbox
AC/DC
Welcome
|
|||||
, which is on order from Amazon.