Category: Uncategorized

Rants

1. Wiki markup is great if you only have to learn one version of it. However, there isn’t only one version of it, many wikis have their own subtly different form. I don’t know why this is upsetting me, I already know about five text markup formats, what’s another few matter?
2. Switching hosting providers always lands me with a worse hosting provider. Now that I’m down to 70 or 80% uptime, I’m considering settling.
3. Every serious Free Software Thinker in the world can tell you why they hate every Free(-ish) creative work licence out there. The only two licences that anyone seems happy for creative people to use are the GPL and the BSD licence. Everyone understands code licences and they are good, what hey?
4. Advice sucks. I’m considering adopting a personal philosophy involving only giving people advice in times of an immediate life threatening emergency. I am failing badly.
5. I should never have promised that I’d work on my holiday.

Curiosity

Why are people so keen to pass on GMail invites? I don’t recall constantly being asked if I wanted a Livejournal account back in the days when those were invite-only. I keep looking at the invite spooler though; there’s something about the graphs. Andrew was really disappointed that they weren’t selling them, because he had a Buy-Sell graph nostalgia attack on seeing it.

Ubuntu Linux

Since Ubuntu Linux has just had a public preview released (ISOs here if the download page still has broken links when you read this) I thought I’d comment on, well, whether or not you’d want to use it.

Point of view: I’m a professional software developer (computer science oriented) with enough sysadmin capabilities to run a home or small office non-critical network. So I’m not your mother or father or whoever it is in your life you use to gauge “is Linux ready for the masses yet?” by. On the other hand I’m notoriously unlucky with hardware and I hate low-level system configuration (like PPP config files) and every time Linux makes me learn a new gotcha these days I get cranky. I have my little tools (mutt, vim, Firefox) that I configure endlessly, but everything else just needs to work.

So with that in mind, here’s why you might like Ubuntu if you’re someone like me (obviously, if none of this applies to you you’ll need to rationalise it yourself):

It’s Debian-like. It has apt, aptitude, dpkg. Its universe Archive even has Debian main in it, pretty much. (Technically you aren’t meant to Debian sources too, but I’ve been sneaking contrib and non-free in.)

Except it’s going to be released every six months. You will have noticed that that is not how Debian works by now.

It has GNOME 2.8. It is apparently going to track GNOME releases fairly closely in following releases too.

The installer is not yet pretty, but it is simpler. Mind you, Debian’s will be soon too. But this installer is pretty step-by-step.

X will be configured for you. Well, most likely it will be. It was for me. And wasn’t that lovely after endless years of being asked for my horizontal sync ranges or whatever they are, and never once, during that time, having anyone ever give me a monitor manual.

Some other nice things for me personally were: having the ipw2200 firmware in the kernel distribution; having the first user given sudo access and being put in all the right groups automatically; and… actually I think the rest of it is GNOME 2.8 stuff, like having sftp:// URLs work.

In summary, if you’re a desktop Debian user, particularly a GNOME user, Ubuntu is worth looking at.

Stuff that’s wrong with my laptop

For the record (my record):

• wireless card (ipw2200) seems to lose connectivity after a certain period of use, never fixed by a module reload, occasionally fixed by a full reboot;
• irssi + screen + gnome-terminal have a well known (informally) bug where they “turn the screen blue” instead of rendering properly, occasionally fixed by detaching and reattaching screen;
• irssi + screen + gnome-terminal have a little known bug — I produce it regularly if not deterministically on multiple machines, noone else has ever heard of it — where the “turn the screen blue” bug also causes gnome-terminal to immediately chew through about a minute’s worth of CPU time (causing, as a side effect, my fan to spin up and laptop to heat up noticably); and
• sound doesn’t work yet, although having two devices show up in gnome-alsamixer, plus two mics, is confusing me.

For fairness’s sake: yay X autodetect, yay, yay, yay!

Python-centric distro

Got a semi-targeted mail from the people who allege they have no name to me in my capacity as maintainer of the defunct Sydney PIG. Glad most distros don’t do that. It’s the old universalisation problem: if everyone did it, it would definitely be a problem.

Projects that want your loving

In the beginning of what is probably a highly intermittant series, two projects you could be writing for: Wikitravel and Open Guides. Wikitravel is a pretty regimented project: it’s meant to be a comprehensive free online tourist guide. It is fairly patchy at the moment: New York City has relatively poor coverage. Open Guides is a collection of wikis about particular cities and has a looser idea of what on-topic might be: you can write about local politics, by way of example.

Laptop

Yeah, got one. It’s a Fujitsu Lifebook S6210. Apparently these guys can be nasty little pieces of work to configure X on, but Andrew thinks that having a standard screen ratio might stand me in good stead, and that I won’t actually have to patch X to get a full sized display.

I’m still running Windows on it: as I am a Ubuntu beta-tester, I think I am obliged to download their newest CD release and test it. Andrew provided me with said advice.

I went to 5th Avenue (yeah, I know it’s the most expensive retail space in the world by square foot but it also was the most reliable place to find shops in New York I could think of off-hand) for it and accidentally spent four hours walking around fuelled only by fruit trying to avoid seedy computer vendors who called me "baby" and advised me that John Kerry is gay. My criterion was that I wanted to leave with the first sub-5.5lb laptop (imperial measures are like the US dollar — if everything is quoted in them, I might as well think in them) I could find in my price range. What a hunt that was. This baby is below 4. It is so light I could throw it at people.

Laptop redux

Thanks to people who’ve made comments about this mess over the past few days. Apologies for negativity. I seem to have confused everyone with this, so:

Why I’m having difficulty buying a laptop from any one of the billion online retailers: either they explicitly state that they don’t take international credit cards at all; they don’t allow the entry of any but US billing details (although Kelly Martin points out that they may not actually check details of international cards); or I can’t set up all the things I will need to pass the credit checks they will run for such a large transaction. The standard list of things I would need to be able to do would be something like: provide them with a number for my credit card issuer; answer the home phone listed by my credit card issuer (which is in Australia and would be answered by a confused German PhD student these days); and ship the package either to my home in Australia or to an "authorised shipping address".

It’s also possible that my bank or Visa would try to contact me independently to confirm a transaction of such uncharacteristic size.

I could set this stuff up, but I can’t do it quickly enough when I’m leaving the US after a week and staying in two cities during that time.

Why I’m having difficulty buying a laptop in person: because I’m staying in cities I’m totally unfamiliar with (and in the case of Boston, I’m mainly seeing people who have only lived here for a short time); I don’t have a car here, or lifts; the US doesn’t seem to have a reliable Yellow Pages equivalent; I don’t have reliable access to phones; and most physical stores don’t have webpages (Australian computer stores seem better at this, actually). Hence, I have difficulty finding out what they have in stock without somehow getting myself to their store.

In the end, since the last paragraph is shorter than the one about credit checks, I will undoubtedly end up buying one in person. It’s just surprising that it’s been so hard to actually find the union of a laptop I want and a retailer who can sell it to me.

Twisted

I have a couple of things to get out of the way (buying a laptop to work on, finishing some work that I promised to my former employers in Australia about a week ago). After that, my plans for the rest of the holiday involve doing writing in the mornings.

At this stage, that will primarily be Twisted documentation, although given my track record, doing that will cause other projects to spawn spontaneously.

IBM seem to have a good deal happening with their Think Express program — it looks like one of the better ways to get a thin-and-light notebook. And there’s lots of them around at the unending number of online retailers.

Unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me find one that will accept a non-US billing address. US delivery address I can do, but my Visa card has an Australian address, and there’s not a lot I can do about that on short notice. I do need, of course, to give them an accurate billing address, because otherwise they will refuse to bill the card.

But of the fifteen or so online retailers I checked, only one allows you to enter a non-US country for your billing address, and it does that only to inform you that they do not ship internationally yet.

IBM itself may be an exception, if they use the same billing software for every part of their site, but I can’t tell because the cheap models they advertise as ‘ship today’ can’t be ordered, because when you click on them they tell you that the order code isn’t found.

There seem to be about forty computer retailers of various sizes in Boston, only about three with websites, and if I had a car I’d just visit them all. If I had a phone I’d call them all. But unfortunately I have neither, and Boston isn’t compact enough for me to visit more than four of them on foot before I leave (nor did I imagine that was how I’d spend my time here). IBM’s website ‘find a business partner’ function is currently broken.

Why everything is so ready to stop me spending money, I don’t know.

USA

I arrived this morning (west coast time) having left this afternoon (Australian east coast time). Three months until I’m home, I’m a little homesick 🙂

Notebook

I’m thinking of buying a notebook computer while I’m in the US, since the saving is about AU$1000 over Australian recommended retail. Anyone got any advice on vendors? I would be looking at a new (or ex-demo) lightweight notebook, eg the IBM Thinkpad T or X series, or HP’s nc4000. I don’t really have a fixed address in the US, but if I could get next day delivery I would be willing to get one shipped.

E-mail is mary-puzzled@puzzling.org.

Brickbats

Two programs that have hindered me lately through design decisions that might well have been right on the money, but not my money:

Epiphany has everything I want in a browser except for one thing. (Well two things, I don’t know how to make it pretend to be Mozilla for Windows in order to fool my bank’s dodgy browser detection software, but for some reason I’m inclined to be forgiving here.) When I go to the location bar and start typing a URL, say http://example.com/foo, and I see http://example.com/ in the auto-completion list, I would like to select http://example.com/ and then just have to type foo. Epiphany, I love you but you have betrayed me.

workrave, I think you’ve saved my hands, but I wish you wouldn’t be so punitive when someone types during a break. Sure, block the input, but let the break run. Without exception, anyone who needs to quickly grab my keyboard for something is soon found in the middle of a break ritually pounding on the keyboard and cursing at you while you obstinately sit at "time left: 13 seconds". Stopping typing seems to be something that just doesn’t come naturally. And all those curses will add up eventually.

Mail

I’ve been working one day a week as an administrative assistant for the last year (it’s hard to get someone with LaTeX knowledge unless you’re willing to pay for someone with typesetting/publishing experience or… you know some computing students). I’ve just finished training my replacement, and if there’s one thing I’ve realised, watching her, it’s what a mail-hound I am.

My entire computing routine is focused around email, and a bunch of my computing knowledge, especially Linux knowledge came directly from trying to ensure that I have round the clock access to email. I’ve read much of the mutt manual. I taught myself regular expressions so that I could use procmail. About half of what I know about my editor comes from a desire to output email as fast as possible. I’ve spent hours on an elaborate setup involving multiple copies of my mail, automatic spam filter training, various From addresses and other such things.

Thanks to an alignment of the planets, that’s exactly what I needed for this position, which involved, among other things, accepting tarballs as uuencoded data smacked into the body of mail messages. (I could automate this, and mutt should, but it turns out that Evolution can get it out automatically, and then I use mutt to delete the attachments. Oh well, noone’s perfect.)

My custom setup for handling medium to large amounts of mail is by no means unique among people I know, but it certainly seems pretty rare among people as a whole. I wonder what processes admin staff have evolved in parallel?

I’ve been working on Backwards again: I’m trying to pull all the stuff out of it that’s specific to my site so that other people can use it. I’m getting closer: Andrew is trying to deploy it now, which is helpful. I’ve finally provided site creators with the ability to drop in their own DocFactory easily, which is a nice touch because you can choose to do the DocFactories with Stan, which is ever so much nicer that typing HTML tags, or you can do it with HTML/XML if you like. It means that it’s still a programmer’s web content tool, but I don’t intend to change that.

I’ve also finally stuck in some code that adds the cache validation Last-Modified and ETag HTTP headers to every page request. I added it to the RSS feeds a while back after I noticed that Jeff’s aggregator and Planet SLUG both poll for updates every ten minutes. I didn’t think it would be so useful for the rest of puzzling.org, because most browser visitors come in from Google to look at my summaries of my high school texts.

I’d forgotten about the Googlebot itself though. It’s a pretty regular visitor to my site now — it seems to go through every few days. Other search robots are less frequent visitors. The cache validation headers are preventing the full transmission of an awful lot of content to robots now. Something for a lot of dynamic blog tools to consider doing — perhaps many do it already.

The only problem I’m having is working out what to do when the templates change because really, the validation headers should change then too. The content of the page won’t have changed, but the layout will have. There’s a couple of possibilities:

• drop the Last-Modified header and base the Etag header on some kind of hash of the page content (I’m currently setting weak ETags based on the timestamp, actually), which means turning off Nevow’s incremental render; or
• extend the existing “change detection” mechanisms to detect changes in the template as well as changes in the content.

Changes in the content are currently detected in a variety of ways, but they’re all based on file timestamps. I haven’t come up with a way to detect a template change yet that doesn’t place burden on the site maintainer to record the fact or date of the change manually. I could insist that the templates be files so that I could check the datestamp but having them as nevow.loaders.DocFactory Python objects is desirable for other reasons. I guess I could also stick the template in some kind of database and timestamp it there. (Actually, doing the latter might be one way to avoid the “need to restart the process when the templates change” problem too. Maybe I have a winner here.)

There’s a few other things I want to sort out before resting for a while (by which I mean “making a numbered release which probably noone will use anyway”):

1. Documentation. I actually loathe documenting my own projects as much as anyone, it’s only documenting other people’s that I don’t mind.
2. URL generation. Unfortunately, the fact that I’m using old twisted.web with my personal Backwards site means that the URL generation code is an immense mess. Because old web only talks to it through a proxy, and the proxy code doesn’t set the forwarding headers, I can’t use Nevow’s URL generation mechanisms without ending up with a bunch of http://localhost:8080/ URLs. So I have my own clunky hard-coded base URLs because there’s no way to get them from the request object when it’s behind a twisted.web.proxy. I keep wanting to have a weekend-long hackfest on new twisted.web to get it deployable, but I’m not a “twisted developer” in that sense, and the way they use sandboxes has always said “my rewrite, no you touchie!” to me.
3. Persistence. The amount of data stored in memory is really too large and should be much lower. So I need to stick it somewhere. Which means choosing between persistence systems on what I currently feel is way too little information. I currently have a bastardised mixture of shelves which really should be one file.

You know, this really ought to be called my "misc log" not my "tech log". But I’m sure you all understand that that would mean I might start posting quizzes. Hence, I can only continue to apologise for being off-topic on my own damn website.

Trip planning: finale

Lookit! Look! We have a final itinerary, at least as far as Asia. I’m likely to move about a bit using this as a base, Andrew will be tied down by his need for an umbilical cor… Internet access.

8th August

Andrew in London

20th August, 21st August

I arrive in San Francisco from Sydney on the 20th, Andrew arrives from London on the 21st. (Something to note here is that the 20th is our fifth anniversary. Observe that not only will I have a lonely anniversary, I will also have a rather long one, thanks to crossing the date line that day.) At this stage we’re intending to spend a few nights in San Francisco and then a few more nights at Stanford, but… this depends on people at Stanford.

26th August

Boston

30th August

New York

2nd September

Washington

7th September

London. Well, London for Andrew, I’m currently planning on visiting Scotland and France as well as whatever bits of England sound like a good idea at the time. Don’t expect a firm itinerary for that, I only do these things for other people’s benefit. For the good of my own soul, I intend to travel at a whim, or at least the whim of the Pound.

1st October

Palma de Mallorca. Yes, this is a somewhat odd choice of location in Spain, but we found somewhere to stay with wireless ‘net access. What can you do?

23rd October

Prague. The thing in the Austrian mountains fell through. I maintain my sanity by reassuring myself that there are plenty of other fish in the sea and mountains to be seen. But opinions of Prague are uniformly good, if you ignore the travel advice about crime — hey it’s not their job to sell the place. And Andrew likes the cold…

13th November

Bangkok. Yes, it’s terrible isn’t it? Hopefully we can get out of Bangkok as soon as possible and spend a few weeks elsewhere in Thailand and possibly neighbouring countries.

28th November

Sydney — although Andrew will, I guess, have another overseas meeting in December, so goodness knows how this will work for him.

While the time has now past to say things like "hey, you know, Russia is an excellent destination" we’d still appreciate hearing from anyone in or near these areas who’d like to meet up, and also of interesting things to see (natural beauty is great, I like historical sites and Andrew wouldn’t say no to art galleries…) in areas near those listed.

This is, I hope, the last time I’ll post this publically. At some point in the future you can look forward to me having something meaningful to say about these places.