Go Terk Yourself

A coworker asked me what I'm doing for the holidays. My response?

Commiting heinous acts in the name of Lord Satan.

Why do "money" and "monkey" differ by only one letter?

From the GNU Coding Standards:

If you do support Windows, please do not abbreviate it as “win”. In hacker terminology, calling something a “win” is a form of praise. You're free to praise Microsoft Windows on your own if you want, but please don't do this in GNU packages. Instead of abbreviating “Windows” to “un” [sic], you can write it in full or abbreviate it to “woe” or “w”.

On another note, I need to stop suffixing all of my post titles with "Of The Day."

At work I'm doing some old school C programming, which made me think of the OS class I took at BU. Just for shits and giggles I looked up the man page for longjmp(). The best part of the page, by far, is the NOTES section:

longjmp() and siglongjmp() make programs hard to understand and maintain. If possible an alternative should be used.

Understatement of the millennium (and the last millennium too).

What a weekend. I got back last night from my trip to Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama. My friend from college, Thomas, got married to his gorgeous girlfriend, Jennie.

It was a helluva trip. We went to Waffle House a million times, drank every night and saw the biggest aquarium in the world. We even got in an accident and stood on the side of the freeway in the sweltering Georgia heat for an hour and a half. All of this was before the wedding even started.

The wedding was fantastically lavish and incredibly swanky, not to mention an absolute blast. Thomas and Jennie make a beautiful couple and their friends and family are second to none. Everyone I met was incredibly nice and generous, which was a nice break from New England "hospitality."

It was, however, incredibly hot in Alabama in August. I wish someone had told me that would be the case. Birmingham is impossible to get around; all the streets look the same. And all the streets are really three-lane highways; half of the time we were driving was spent cutting people off to get to the right lane for our turn. I can certainly understand why no one walks anywhere in either Atlanta or Birmingham.

I flew back on Continental Express, so I got to fly in a (relatively) small plane. It was a nice experience but the flight attendant was a little odd. She did the usual "turn off your electronic shit" thing but then insisted that people remove their headphones even if the device to which they were attached was off. One guy had the gall to argue with her, so she got on the PA and threatened to have him met at the runway by FAA/TSA/FBI agents for questioning. It was a little vindictive and not very becoming of a person who purports to provide good customer service.

Me: man, I'm going to be such an awesomely ornery old man

Andrew: you're already an awesomely ornery young man

Me: exactly!

Andrew: all you gotta do is get old

Kerri and I finished watching an American Experience episode about the Summer of Love this weekend. The main point of the program was that the Summer of Love in San Francisco was a great countercultural success at the beginning but eventually failed because there were too many people doing drugs and freeloading.

<typo:flickr img="478751292" size="small" style="float:left;margin:0.5em"/>

It occurred to me that simply saying that druggies and freeloaders showed up isn't quite enough to explain why the whole big experiment failed. The Hippies wanted people to be able to do drugs and get stuff for free (the Digger soup line and the Free Store are good examples of this). The problem wasn't that people were taking the things offered to them, it was that there weren't enough people creating. Plenty was being sucked out of the system they created but not enough was added back in.

We can think of it as a sort of user created content system. Since the Hippies weren't creating new wealth in the form of money, they needed to do so in the form of food, goods, etc. But when everyone is stoned instead of contributing to the community the whole system consumes itself in very short time.

Andrew: So what about this whole Gore mansion fiasco?

Andrew: Think it'll actually hurt him? Or fizzle out fast?

Me: Fizzle fast

Me: It won't hurt him with the people he's working to convince.

Me: And face it: he wouldn't have any credibility if he lived like an ascetic hermit.

Me: The environmental movement needs someone who can show that you can "make a difference without becoming a hippie."

Now that we have The Hitchings Factor, Vastly Important Notes, Geechorama, Dial M for Mr. Swanky (in no particular order) and, of course, Go Terk Yourself I think we need to create our own exclusive blog network a la 9rules. Names?

Over the past, oh, year and a half or so, I've followed the rapid ascension of Ruby on Rails to the top of the web development heap. In the process I read a lot of blog entries, a lot of "Hello World!" introductory articles and a lot of best practice documents. A big part of the thinking behind Rails is Test Driven Development (TDD) - the idea that you should write automated tests before writing code to make sure that a) you know what the code is supposed to do before you write it and b) once the code is working there is a quick, easy way to make sure it keeps working as you further develop your application.

I never really had a chance to try TDD until recently. I started working on a project at work that isn't part of any of our old projects - I got to start something brand new. So I set out to use TDD from the start and I must say that it's going quite well. Writing the tests is forcing me to think carefully about the interfaces of my classes and to separate the project into more atomic parts than I might otherwise.

I'm using JUnit and have an Ant build file set up so that the default target depends on my unit tests. I can see very quickly if a change I make to the code makes things work or not. I don't have to mash together a driver program to exercise my work and then throw it away once it finally works. Sure, I write code to test, and that's analogous to a driver program, but the key is that the test will stick around after I'm finished with it for the time being and the work that I do to test my work for correctness won't need to be repeated by someone else when the program needs to evolve. The tests make nice example usages too.

I'm a convert.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, is pirating his own book.

I've been holding off posting about the "Bomb Scare" in Boston yesterday because I wanted to see what Bruce Schneier would say about it. Most of the time he articulates my position on these sorts of things much better than I could. Schneier just posted his reaction. The first sentence of his post is "The story is almost too funny to write about seriously."

Thankfully, the folks who the Boston Police arrested have the right attitude:

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!

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.

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’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.

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.

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”

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!

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.