Go Terk Yourself

Typo supports Markdown, which is super sweet. I far prefer it to Textile. The only problem with Typo is that I have yet to find a good Emacs XML-RPC mode/library that work with Typo, so I've decided to compose my blog entries in Emacs as Markdown and then add them to the blog when I'm done. This may have the added effect of making me think more about what I'm writing.

I didn't find a good Markdown tool that works with Emacs, and all I really care about is being able to preview the HTML that it will output. The following will do just that:

(defun markdown-preview-buffer ()
  "Preview the current buffer as it will look when run through
markdown."
  (interactive)
  (let ((buf (get-buffer-create "*markdown-preview*")))
    (clear-buffer buf)
    (call-process-region (point-min) (point-max) "~/bin/markdown" nil buf nil)
    (browse-url-of-buffer buf)))

(defun clear-buffer (buf)
  "Clear a buffer"
  (save-excursion
    (set-buffer buf)
    (kill-region (point-min) (point-max))))

M-x markdown-preview-buffer will run the current buffer through markdown (assuming it's installed in ~/bin/markdown and is executable) and open the resulting HTML in your default browser.

Edit: That's much nicer with save-excursion and bare references to point-min and point-max.

There's a whole lot of very cool web music technology in the works right now. Services are popping up to facilitate tour tracking, music blog tracking and seamless music experiences. I don't really have much to say (for now) but here's a good list of some cool stuff.

• Hype Machine - See what music all the cool kids are blogging about.
• Tour Filter - Track the latest and greatest live shows in your area.
• Archive.org Live Music Archive - Descended from the venerable etree, it seems these guys have something new every time I visit the site and an ever expanding hard drive.
• XSPF Music Player - Not so much a web site as a tool used on music sites. Build a play list, point the player at it, listen.

Know of any other cool sites and tools? Toss 'em in the comments.

I've switched this blog to Typo. this is exciting and fun and it means that you can comment without waiting for me to read your email and add it to the post. It only took one day of that for me to get tired of it. All the old content is still here except for the few comments that were left; for that I apologize. But I won't apologize for anything else! Ever!

Here’s a Flickr set of postcards and toys held in place of real tourist attractions.

Stolen shamelessly from Jason Kottke.

This is just awesome:

I was listening to the BBC News Hour this morning. They were covering the recent Science report on fish stock depletion and, in the course of the report, interviewed a British fisherman about the report.

The question asked, of course, was “do you believe this report?” And the fisherman’s reply, of course, was, “no, we don’t believe the report.” With the use of the word believe all scientific research and logical analysis is thrown out the window. If we don’t believe the report it can’t possibly be true.

I know this has already been done to death – this is just truthiness in disguise – but it just astounds me that, on so many fronts, so many are able and willing to ignore hard numbers and logic to make themselves feel better.

Environmental issues are the most galling. Whether it’s global warming or fish stock depletion these are issues where it will do less harm to act in a cautionary manner and fix things now than it will be to sit and wait and see if the shit hits the fan. If we turn out to be wrong and global environmental collapse is not imminent we have not wasted money or time; our world will be a better place if we reduce emissions, utilize renewable energy and fish more responsibly.

In business, if your accountant told you the company would be bankrupt in a year, it would be foolhardy to spend as if that were not the case. Why, when our scientists (whose business it is to investigate the world and predict future trends) tell us the Earth will be bankrupt in 50 years, do we choose not to believe them?

I think Conrad likes my new iMac:

This video of a 500kV electrical switch opening in the middle of the Nevada desert is bad ass.

This morning I woke up to an email from Amazon. I finally have my EC2 account! Hooray for me. Now I just need to find out why making a large (greater than 60GB) S3FS freezes my machine.

I’m playing with http-access2, a Ruby library for programatically accessing web pages. I want to write a web app that sits between people and a privileged admin interface and this seems like it will do the trick. It’s a little slow but I think that’s the SSL talking.

Here’s a reminder to myself to check out The Battle for Wesnoth when I get home. That’s all.

Cross posted from Today in Brief.

Ars Technica has a chilling summary of the current problems with electronic voting.

As the article states, even if we assume there is no willful tampering being done with these electronic voting machines, we’re in for a terribly shitty midterm election in those states/precincts using the machines. Poll workers are poorly trained, procedures for making sure the correct votes are recorded and counted are not in place, the machines can easily and undetectably tampered with, there is no dependable audit trail.

Electronic voting is not a panacea for the problems we saw in 2000. Voting problems are addressed with procedure, including auditing (paper trails) and vote verification (preferably at the polling place AND after you’ve gone home). As we see in too many places these days the focus of current voting system work is on presenting a facade to make it appear that our votes are secure and will be counted correctly. Unfortunately it seems that, in many places, that facade will break down when it is least convenient for the electorate.

A side note: the eminent cryptographer Ron Rivest proposed a damned good verifiable voting system, the best part of which is that it uses no fancy math and no computers to cast the votes. Read the paper, as much as you can, it’s an incredibly simple scheme that would work very well.

Amazon announced the beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) today; it’s pretty exciting. The basic premise of the service is that you can get any number of virtual machines and pay for what you use as far as the number of machines, disk space and bandwith go. I’m absolutely bursting with different ways to use this technology, from web hosting to streaming radio to batch processing to QA.

I signed up for an Amazon Web Services account today, hoping to play, even if only a little, with EC2, but the beta is full already. I am, however, on the list of people waiting for spots, and I’ll still have a chance to play with S3 (which I wrote about, if a bit tangentially, in the context of JungleDisk) in the mean time. Cool stuff is coming out of Amazon, cool stuff.

At my office we do a lot of functional testing – interacting with our software as an end user would. This, in itself, is enough of a problem: much of what we do would be better tested with unit tests or automated functional tests (see Selenium for example). But it’s hard to retrofit comprehensive unit tests into a large, established code base (that wasn’t created with unit testing in mind) and it takes time to convert from written functional tests to automated functional tests. With all the test writing, editing and performing I’ve done, I have a few notes on what you should (and should not) do with your written functional tests.

Please, for your sanity, use a text based file format for your tests. If you don’t, version control (CVS, Subversion, etc.) won’t work for your tests. It’s a good thing to be able to see what changed between revisions of a test and you simply can’t do that if your version control system can’t do a meaningful diff of two versions of a file. Even more importantly, if you use a text based file format, your version control software can merge differences when you update your working copy. With a binary format, only one person can edit a file at once. This means no Word tests!

Use a source format that uses cross referencing and handles (nested) lists automatically. I like LaTeX, but as long as the software takes care of lists and cross referencing for you, you’ll be happy. I’ve spent a lot of time renumbering tests and updating references; it just isn’t a sensible use of anyone’s time.

Make your tests compartmentalized. It’s OK to have a set of setup steps for a set of tests, but if a test changes anything so that it’s different from that base line it should change things back when it’s done. It might take a little longer to run a test that cleans up properly but there is no reason that you should have to track down what the test you ran half an hour ago did to sabotage the test you’re running now.

Ultimately, don’t depend too much on human executed functional testing. It’s useful for end-user facing interfaces but it is too prone to human error to use on a very large scale. Automated tests and unit tests – those where the instructions can’t be misread or steps can’t be forgotten – are easier to maintain, faster and, because of their speed, can be run more often (which will shorten your development cycle and catch bugs sooner rather than later).

It’s so hard to post regularly. Let’s sing a song about waitin for Amazon to let me pay them lots of money for EC2:

La La La! Waiting for EC2! La La La! I’m way lamer than you! La La La. Please don’t hit me with your shoe! La La La! I want to spend all my money on EC2!

Thank you, I’ll be here all week.

Hobix uses Textile for post formatting, which is fine, but I prefer Markdown myself. Sometime “real soon now” I’ll figure out how to change that…

Hooray! The bike works! I had to replace a ton of wiring and connectors and make lots of things play nice with each other and then I want for a ride last night for two hours! Hooray!

Really, I just wanted to post something to the blog. Hooray!

Unless you haven’t been paying attention to me for the past year or so (who am I kidding, you haven’t) you’ll know that I have a thing for this crazy language called Ruby and the MVC framework that started the Ruby Craze, Ruby on Rails.

I’m always searching for new resources for learning new things about Ruby and Rails and I’ve recently stumbled on Jamis Buck’s blog the { bucklogs :here }. From his own about blurb, “Jamis Buck is a software developer who has the good fortune to be both employed by 37signals and counted among those who maintain the Ruby on Rails web framework,” so he knows his shit when it comes to Ruby and Rails.

Just now I’m reading his post Skinny Controller, Fat Model, which is a good description of how MVC should work. Judging by this this post and the others I’ve seen there, his blog is a good resource for Ruby, Rails and general web-appy thinking.

Hobix uses YAML for its entry format, which is all well and good, but it introduces a small problem: syntax highlighting and indentation don’t work well in Emacs. See, YAML is nice in that it’s all free form and human readable/writable, but it makes it hard to figure out what the indentation should be for a given bit of YAML.

Take the following bit of YAML:

 --- !hobix.com,2004/entry author: jterk created: 2006-07-13 20:18:02 -04:00 content: > Hobix uses YAML for its entry format. _ 

Imagine, if you will, that the cursor is sitting where the _ is, and I hit the TAB key. In generic YAML, with no specification of how this particular data should be layed out, Emacs has no way of knowing what I want to do next. I might want to continue the block of text corresponding to the content tag, which would use the same indentation as the line beginning with “Hobix”. Or I could want to start a new tag, in which case the indentation of the line would be the same as that of the content tag.

Even after I’ve typed the next thing, and Emacs can figure out if it’s regular text or a new tag, it still can’t indent. I could be making a compound data type for content. Yeesh!

To add insult to injury, tag identifiers (those guys like author:) can have white space as part of the tag. In fact, as far as I can see, there isn’t much that can’t be part of a YAML tag. This particular little tidbit makes syntax highlighting more or less hit or miss. But that might just be ignorance on my part.

I think, however, that I have a solution. I can impose an insufferable dictatorship on hobix-mode (when I finally get around to it): if the mode knows that only a few specific tags will show up at the beginning of the file and that after that it’s all gravy, things will be much easier. It’s like I’ll be letting the emacs mode know what the schema is beforehand, or something. Imagine that! There’s still a small problem of in line html, and the (for now, anyways) Textile syntax that I’ve complained about. Indentation for those isn’t quite so cut and dry … I wonder if I can detect what sort of “region” the cursor is in from hobix-mode and set a mode for that region? Hmm.

It seems I always learn about a new blog by looking at my referrals. Seth started a blog. Now, I’m all for clever names and whatnot but he’s going to be in big trouble when Bill O’Reilly hears about this.

In regards to the previous post, where I mentioned being able to edit regions of a Hobix post with different modes, MMM Mode looks very promising. More to come.

A while back Amazon released their S3 service to provide unlimited, reasonably priced, on demand web services based storage space. At $0.15 per GB space used and $0.20 per GB transferred (both per month) it’s rather a good deal.

JungleDisk claims to provide a DAV interface to an S3 account for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. I’m contemplating giving it a go, just to see what it’s like. It would certainly make a nice off-site backup solution, if it isn’t too expensive. I’m pretty sure that it’s cheaper than co-location, although a little bit limited in scope (relatively speaking).

I added a rudimentary commenting system to GTY today. If you navigate to the page for an individual entry (by clicking on the entry title) you will be greeted with a comment form on the bottom of the page. Your comment will not appear immediately but don’t despair! The form sends me an e-mail for each comment and I have to manually add that to the blog. This is the easiest way for me to implement comments and it will help avoid a deluge of comment spam … at least for you, my faithful reader; I’m sure my inbox will promptly fill up with advertisements for v14gr4.

Edit: I’ve switched to Typo, which does comments in the normal fashion, obsoleting this post. Hooray!

Never, ever forget to stay DRY. Getting wet is just too painful.

I’ve started using Last.fm for music. It seems like a great service, with recommendations like Pandora. The difference is that Last.fm uses other people’s tastes instead of Pandora’s “music genome.” To make the best of the service, it seems, I should always be hooked into Last.fm when I’m listening to music.

At home, it’s easy: they have an iTunes plugin that pings the servers whenever I listen to a song. It will even update with what I listened to on my iPod while I’m away. At work, things are more difficult, since I run Linux and can’t use iTunes. I can listen to recommendations and such with either the Last.fm client or the flash player they have integrated into the site, but I haven’t figured out what to do if I want to listen to my own music.

The problem is compounded by my desire to track when I listen to particular tracks. My iPod is too small to hold all of my music so I’ve set up a somewhat complicated array of playlists to load music based on my ratings, the last time a song was played and whether a song has recently been added to my library. Again, anything I listen to on the iPod gets updated when I plug it into the computer, but anything I play on my machine at work is completely ignored.

What it comes down to is this: I want a way to listen to my iTunes library when I’m not at home. Now that I have an iMac at home (and can carry my PowerBook around with me) this would be solved by either 1) synchronizing iTunes between the PowerBook and the iMac or 2) being able to listen to my main iTunes library remotely (over the internet).

Got any suggestions?

A quick hobix.el idea:

Allow for unfinished posts in something like blog-root/drafts and only copy them over when the user says they’re finished. Create the created field at that point, so that the blog shows the post being posted when it was finished instead of when it was started.

Thanks to Org-Mode/Org-Blog for the idea!

Word has wacky wacky Windows key bindings. Why can’t it be Emacs?

As is apparent if you read any of my older posts, which you surely haven’t, I have a motorcycle. It’s a 1978 BMW, so it’s in need of periodic maintenance and repair. Thankfully there’s a wonderful resource – the Airheads Beemer Club – which, along with the airheads mailing list, provides a vast amount of advice and instruction from many people who have more knowledge of these machines than anyone else who does not work for BMW (and perhaps more than most who do).

The current form of knowledge distribution, as it were, is a monthly mailing called Airmail, which contains riding stories, upcoming events, classifieds and the technical advice of Oak Okleshen. For many, Oak’s tech articles are the reason for Airmail and for paying the yearly dues (a piddling $20) for the club.

Recently, on the airheads mailing list, which is disconnected from the club (one need not be a member of the club to join the list, nor do members of the club need to subscribe to the list), talk of a Wiki has come up. The reactions to the suggestions have been interesting and varied. The most vocal responses, surprisingly (to me), have been negative. The amount of opposition to the free editing and self policing nature of a wiki is counter to my experience – Wikipedia is a great resource for all sorts of topics and, for those that aren’t covered well, one can always add to or modify the topics to improve them.

There’s a lot of worry about theft of intellectual property and the presentation of someone else’s materials as one’s own. These worries are groundless; the versioned nature of a Wiki and the ability to track all changes, along with (at least on a Mediawiki powered site) the ease of discussing changes in an article, mean that it is extremely difficult to pass another’s work off as original. Someone familiar with the original work is bound to come along and call the plagiarist out.

I’ve been keeping my own opinion off the list; I don’t see a reason to muddy the waters further and, if a Wiki is a good thing for the club, it will succeed despite the efforts of those who might actively oppose it. Give the Airheads Wiki a look and, if you have anything to add, feel free to contribute.

I’ve commenced cleaning house and moving everything to the goterkyourself.com domain … both http://rain.xidus.net and http://cs-people.bu.edu/jterk – the two other locations I had on the web – now redirect to http://goterkyourself.com.

It’s a small change, for now, and a bunch of old stuff (from rain.xidus.net primarily) is now “missing.” But I have it saved and, in the coming {days,weeks,months} I’ll move it all to goterkyourself.com (and the various sub domains) and, hopefully, setup permanent redirects from the places they used to be.

For a while now I’ve been trying to think of some sort of business that I can start. I love my job – the people I work with and the work I get to do, not to mention the benefits, are great – but a bit of me knows that I won’t be satisfied forever. I also know that I’m spoiled; I won’t be able to handle working at a large company and it will be difficult to go to a less amiable work environment.

The solution then is to start my own company. Then I will be able to set my own hours, work with people I like and work on interesting projects. I’ve come up with a couple of ideas but it’s very difficult to focus on one. Mostly it’s an issue of not believing that a product or service will fly; it’s very easy to think that an idea is silly and won’t work and, subsequently, abandon the idea all together. To start, I need to bite the bullet and just try something; if it fails, I’ll still be OK.

The advantage of trying something now is that I can do it in my spare time. I can craft something without the risk of dropping everything and, potentially, losing my shirt. I don’t need to look for investors or co-founders because I can take my time and do it all myself. It’s time to pick an idea and run with it. The fear of failure shouldn’t deter me.

I’m starting a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah acoustic cover band. It will be called Snap Your Fingers Say Maybe.

Kerri and I had dinner at La Carreta at the Colony Mill in Keene, NH tonight. They bill themselves as “authentic Mexican” and, for central New Hampshire, it is (although it doesn’t hold a candle to La TaQueria La Mexicana here in Somerville). I had a plate with a cheese enchilada, a bean burrito and a cheese, bean and lettuce chalupa. It was very very good. The food is more Americanized than La TaQueria but, by American standards it was very authentic. The flavors were not overstated or bland and the portions were enough to fill us up quite nicely. The prices were very reasonable to boot!

I’ve been looking for a way to switch my email away from Evolution into Emacs (specifically VM) and the big hurdle so far has been message signing and signature verification. I thought briefly about roling my own, but lacking the time gave up.

Along came smime.el … it looks like it does what I want to do. If I get some free time maybe I’ll even try it.

After a quick stint with BlogMax I’ve now settled on Hobix. I had to get the latest SVN sources for it to work correctly. It looks like it does pretty much what I want to do and will be more easily extensible than BlogMax was. I’ve even started working on a set of Emacs Lisp functions that will let me create, edit and post all without leaving the Emacs OS. Hooray!

Hobix doesn’t (at least by default) organize the raw posts in a YYYY/MM/DD directory tree, but I’ve decided that’s for the better. Instead it puts them all in blog/entries, using subdirectories for categories. I think this is better; this way the path to an entry contains information about the entry, which will make it easier to go back and find entries later, if need be.

I can’t say I’m excited about the YAML mode that I found for Emacs; it doesn’t do any sort of indentation or formatting. I’ll have to fix that or find a better mode.

I just had the most awesome IM conversation ever:

Me: let’s start a metal band

Me: I want to be able to go dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala with the double pedal drums

Andrew: wow…dudala…that’s it exactly

Andrew: i’m in

Andrew: lets do it

Me: ok

Me: know anyone with a drum set?

Andrew: not up here

Me: damn

Me: well, we can post an ad

Me: “looking for drummer who can go dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala dudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudaladudala with the double pedal drums”

Update: I sold the bike. Images replaced with URLs to save some bandwidth, or something.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfvt/206024980/

This is a 1980 (or, maybe, 1981) Trek 412 or 414 road bicycle. It’s a hand made, in America, steel frame. I’m selling the bike because it’s too damned big for my 30 inch inseam – I originally planned to replace all the components and convert it to a fixed gear. This nice frame and all the components attached to it are yours for $150.

The year and model were determined with the Serial Number Decoder at Vintage Trek – this bike’s serial number is M5B7D42. The frame size is 25.5 inches as per Trek’s original specifications.

The bike sat out in the weather (rain, heat, cold, who knows) for an indeterminate amount of time before I acquired it. There are numerous chips in the paint and corresponding rust spots. However, the bike is solid and rideable.

The components on the bike are most likely not original and most are not in very good shape at all. There is no front brake and the rear brake is poor. The chain and rear sprockets are very rusty; the front sprockets are in OK condition. The pedals are old Shimano 105s, without clips. The front wheel is smaller than the rear and has a mountain tire mounted on it; this will need to be replaced.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfvt/206024962/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfvt/206025142/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfvt/206025314/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfvt/206025328/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfvt/206025137/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfvt/206025132/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfvt/206025331/

Reddit had a link to a Think Progress (left wing reactionary blog) post titled Fox News Segment Falsely Claims That Denver Blizzard Casts Doubt On Global Warming this morning. The article has an embedded video that includes the host, Neil Cavuto asking “if more of those who support global warming did not live in the East Coast … they might have a different take on things?” Of course he received an affirmative reply.

The reaction in the comments is what one would expect: outrage that Fox News reporters claimed that snow in Colorado disproves Global Warming. The article notes that the snow could even be caused by Global Warming because of carbon dioxide may increase the amount of water in the atmosphere. That’s all well and good but this article signifies a larger problem with the climate change issue.

One of the commenters on the blog posted the following:

They should come here to Indiana… so far this year NO snow just rain, some warm days, and a couple morning freezes. That isn’t proof of anything either, but it has never happened since I have lived here in the past 33 years. Unless things pick up I am starting to think this is going to be the year with no winter in Indiana.

The idea that higher temperatures in one area (in this case, Indiana) proves that Global Warming is a problem while low temperatures (low enough for snow, anyways) elsewhere don’t disprove Warming is preposterous. Every time we say “it’s warm here” to attempt to support the warming hypothesis we validate attempts to disprove warming with the same tactic.

Let’s all read this next sentence together: Global Warming is not a local phenomenon. The temperature and weather in any particular city, state or region can fluctuate drastically without proving or disproving Global Warming. The Global Warming hypothesis is that the average, global temperature is increasing and that the amount green house gasses in the atmosphere is rising. The Global Warming hypothesis is proved by measurements of current and past climates and observations of historical atmospheric conditions.

The debate should no longer be about whether Global Warming is happening; it is. Every time we let the argument shift to the existence of Global Warming we lose ground. The debate shouldn’t be about whether humans are causing Warming; it doesn’t matter, we should still do everything we can to protect the environment, our cities, our people and our economy. The debate should be about what the best way to address our energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

From CNN (via. BoingBoing):

Terrorists planned to use MP3 players and energy drinks to blow up as many as 10 jetliners bound for the United States, authorities said Thursday.

A senior congressional source said it’s believed the plotters planned to mix a “British version of Gatorade” with a gel-like substance to make an explosive that they would possibly trigger with an MP3 player or cell phone.

So the “terrorists” made Gatorade (subsequently generalized to include all liquids) and MP3 players suspect items. This is no terrorist plot! They’re trying to take away our cheap beverages (by forcing us to buy overpriced fluids on the plane) and our good music. Humbug!

Here’s a note to say “I’m still here.” I’m done with my epic vacation and the holidays are (thankfully, as far as I’m concernced) over with. I’ll get this blog plugging along again soon!

I want to wish each and every one of you a happy WoW day!

I added a bunch of feeds to my Bloglines subscription list (because of this list of the Best Blogs that You Aren’t Reading) and I noticed that most of the blogs has three or four RSS feeds (one or two RSS, an Atom feed, maybe a catchall like xml.someblog.com) and a few had ten or twenty or more because of sub blogs or category subscriptions.

All I wanted to do was subscribe to the blog. Why do I care whether it’s delivered to me as RSS (1 or 2?) or Atom? Just give me one URL that spits out XML parsable by my feed reader and I’ll be happy. It took a while, but now I really understand the utility of FeedBurner. You can always subscribe to this little blog with one, simple URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/gty.