The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for the ‘Other Sources’ Category.
The Gates, Christo’s latest crazy-giant art thing opened today in New York City.
From SignonSanDiego
“It’s a waste of money, but it’s fabulous,” said student Shakana Jayson. “It brings happiness when you look at it.”
Well then, it wasn’t really a waste of money then, was it ;-)
From Boing Boing:
Here’s the text-crawl from the upcoming and final (?) Star Wars movie, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, as leaked on the Star Wars official site.
General Grievous? Isn’t he a contemporary of Professor Chaos?
Separated at Birth?
This works great. Stolen from here.
Cygwin + Rxvt
I’ve been playing around with Cygwin since I’m forced to run WinXP on my work laptop. Cygwin’s great, I’ve used it on and off since when it was GNU-Win32 by Cygnus, but there’s a lot of improvements to it in the last year or two.
One of the things that’s irritated me is that the default console uses the cmd.exe shell as a base – makes it hard to copy + paste with the mouse, among other things. After some effort, I found the right combination of tweaks to get Rxvt working as a decent console in Cygwin.
[You’ll of course have to install Rxvt from your favorite Cygwin mirror. – Lee]
Step 1: Edit ~/.Xdefaults – the settings below create an 80×80 terminal window with a deep-blue-black background and yellow-white text (looks nice, easy on the eyes) and assign VIM-style color codes:
(see comment 6. A change might be needed to this code. I haven’t tested it yet but you might need it. Tell me if it works for you please)
! ~/.Xdefaults - X default resource settings
Rxvt*geometry: 80x80
Rxvt*background: #000020
Rxvt*foreground: #ffffbf
!Rxvt*borderColor: Blue
!Rxvt*scrollColor: Blue
!Rxvt*troughColor: Gray
Rxvt*scrollBar: True
Rxvt*scrollBar_right: True
Rxvt*font: Lucida Console-12
Rxvt*SaveLines: 2000
Rxvt*loginShell: True
! VIM-like colors
Rxvt*color0: #000000
Rxvt*color1: #FFFFFF
Rxvt*color2: #00A800
Rxvt*color3: #FFFF00
Rxvt*color4: #0000A8
Rxvt*color5: #A800A8
Rxvt*color6: #00A8A8
Rxvt*color7: #D8D8D8
Rxvt*color8: #000000
Rxvt*color9: #FFFFFF
Rxvt*color10: #00A800
Rxvt*color11: #FFFF00
Rxvt*color12: #0000A8
Rxvt*color13: #A800A8
Rxvt*color14: #00A8A8
Rxvt*color15: #D8D8D8
! eof
Step 2: Modify your c:cygwincygwin.bat to invoke your shiny new Rxvt instead of cmd.exe:
@echo off
C:
chdir C:cygwinbin
set EDITOR=vi
set VISUAL=vi
set CYGWIN=codepage:oem tty binmode title
rxvt -e bash --login -i
From IEEE Spectrum Magazine, January 2005
THEN THERE’S THE INTERNET’S utility for planning and coordination. There are any number of sophisticated tools for collaboration, plus the obvious ones of e-mail, instant messaging, and chat rooms. It’s easy to build a new, temporary identity and post entries from public Internet kiosks and cafes. There are plenty of ways to hide or encrypt messages, or terrorists can just speak obliquely.
Weimann says that Mohammed Atta’s final message to his fellow 9/11 terrorists was: “The semester begins in three more weeks. We’ve obtained 19 confirmations for studies in the faculty of law, the faculty of urban planning, the faculty of fine arts, and the faculty of engineering.” Weimann believes the talk of various “faculties” referred to specific facilities, such as the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Sifting the plans from the chatter is perhaps law enforcement’s greatest task.
I’m not going to put my blog on some “free” advertiser supported site where you have to click-sign away rights to your own material, that’s put into a database that I don’t have access to, on a server of unknown reliability.
But then…
You might think I’m overreacting when I talk about not using a particular system because of comment spam problems. But I’ve seen WAY too many blog posts like the following “i never write here anymore. i’ve had it up to here, there and okay there with pr0n comment spam.” That comes from a b2evolution user.
Just do a google search for wordpress “comment spam” or b2evolution “comment spam”. It’s a huge problem.
My current system still keeps chugging away…. a flat file index.html file that I hand edit with Frontpage. CSS makes it look good.
Here’s a nice analysis from Kas Log (I would have put this behind a ‘cut’ but I don’t have a very sophisticated blogging system ;-)
Open Source weblogging tools
This weblog is powered by WordPress, and aside from saying thanks to the WordPress team for building a great Open Source weblogging tool, I thought it might be useful to share my reasons for choosing this package over several others.
Before I started looking at any specific tools, I came up with the following list of requirements:
- Must run comfortably on accounts hosted at
- FatCow. This weblog isn’t hosted there, but nabeepchen.com which I set up at the same time is. Also, my corporate site (felinity.com) is hosted at Fatcow, and I might want to add a blog to that later. [Note: I’m a Fatcow affiliate. If you sign up for a web site with them by clicking on the Fatcow link above, I get some moolah.]
- Must have a browser based interface that is easy to use, but powerful enough for first class blogs. The interface should be lean and efficient, although a little eye candy never hurts.
- Must have integrated comments, pings, and trackback.
- Must provide comment moderation.
- Must be actively maintained.
- Must support RSS feeds.
- Must update pages automatically [added after trying Greymatter].
- Must allow multiple categories per post [added after trying Nucleus].
- Look and feel of weblog must be completely customizable.
- Should have automatic comment spam filtering.
- Should support Atom feeds.
- Preferably Open Source.
- Compatibility with desktop weblogging front-ends would be nice.
- The fewer external dependencies (plug-ins, libraries, etc.), the better.
Fatcow runs MySQL 3.23.x, and Apache 1.3.x with PHP 4.x and Perl, on Sun Solaris servers. Unfortunately, neither Python nor PostgreSQL are supported, which limits my options a bit. After a quick look at the system requirements for various packages, I narrowed my list of potentials down to four programs: Blosxom 2.0, Greymatter 1.3, Nucleus 3.1, and WordPress 1.2. On the commercial side, I knew that Movable Type would fit the bill, if none of the Open Source alternatives came close enough.
WordPress came out on top and meets all of my requirements, including the optional ones. Not considering price, I think it even beats Movable Type. Read on, for my impressions of each package, but note that I spent only two or three hours with each of them, except of course WordPress. Just keep in mind that there is probably a lot of stuff I missed, and newer versions may shift the overall picture considerably.
Each of the packages is relatively easy to install, if you know your way around a Unix system. Blosxom and Greymatter store everything in plain text files, and are written in Perl. Nucleus and WordPress require a MySQL database, and are written in PHP 4.
I quickly crossed Blosxom and Greymatter off my list, because neither had the must have features. Nucleus and WordPress were a much better match, and it took me a bit more time to decide between the two.
Blosxom is great for people who live their lives in the Unix shell. You just create a simple text file, and voilà, the blog entry is on-line. Categories are the directories underneath the main data directory. This approach makes it exceptionally simple to automatically post stuff from scripts and whatnot. Unfortunately Bosxom has no real web based interface. The plug-in for that is experimental and bare bones to the extreme. I was also a little concerned about performance for large sites, because each request might require searching through multiple directories and files, although the caching plug-ins that are available might address those concerns. Blosxom itself is just a single Perl CGI script with a few hundred lines of code, and installation is trivial. However, to get the functionality I want, I would also have had to separately install and configure a number of plug-ins, and while that might give me the functionality I need, it also means a lot of tweaking and fiddling, and extra work to keep everything up-to-date. What I did like and have not seen in other packages is the simple, but effective URL hacking scheme Blosxom offers. Basically, you can just concatenate categories and dates with slashes, to drill down by category or date. I am using the same approach for some internal tools, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the same idea implemented here. The bottom line: Blosxom is too complicated for casual users, and it didn’t have the features I was looking for.
Greymatter came a bit closer to what I had in mind. It did have a web based interface, built-in comments, and like Blosxom, the blog entries are stored in plain text files. One thing I learned from playing with Greymatter was, that I didn’t want a program that requires me to rebuild my pages manually. It wasn’t on my original list of must have features, but I added it as a requirement. Aside from two step updates, Greymatter didn’t support comment moderation, pings, trackbacks etc. On a more subjective level, I didn’t like the look and feel of the interface.
Nucleus made a strong impression immediately, with a clean and well designed interface. Setup was trivial, and I liked the little pop-up window for uploading images, and choosing existing files from a list. Surprisingly, adding a blog style calendar is only available via a plug-in. Out of the box, Nucleus allows comment deletion and IP banning, but comment moderation, pings, and trackback require plug-ins. One requirement I added to my must have list, after using Nucleus, was the ability to put posts into multiple categories; Nucleus supports only one category per item. The biggest drawback from my point of view was Nucleus’ template system. If your site design fits neatly into the Nucleus framework of templates and skins, then customization is easy enough. But if you expect to go beyond basic blogging functionality you might find it quite limiting. One feature Nucleus offers that I didn’t need, but that could make all the difference to some people, was the ability to handle multiple blogs.
WordPress was the last program on my list of candidates. Installation was trivial, and although I might prefer the Nucleus look slightly, the WordPress interface is pleasant enough and functional. Most importantly, WordPress had all of the features I was looking for right out of the box; no plug-ins needed. The main template is simply a PHP script with a style sheet. You can change the look of WordPress sites quite dramatically by just dropping in a new style sheets, but even editing the content and layout is easy enough, if you know HTML and just a tiny bit of PHP. Multiple and even hierarchical categories are supported, as are pings, trackback, and the various feed formats. After using Nucleus, the image upload feature seemed a bit bare bones, but it works and a plug-in might improve things. Where WordPress stood out was in comment handling. You can configure the program to queue comments for moderation if they contain common spam words, come from certain IP addresses, or contain a certain number of links. If there’s one complaint, it’s that the documentation is a bit sparse and scattered, but it was sufficient to get everything set up the way I wanted it. The WordPress forums are very active and helpful; all my questions had already been asked and answered.. Make sure to check out the WordPress Wiki. I overlooked that at first, and it seems much more complete than the reference documentation on the main page. All in all, given my requirements, WordPress was the clear winner.
This was posted to the Burning Man NYC mailing list today. I’m flying to Reno tomorrow.
Plaid just got a call from a friend who is out on the Playa helping with infrastructure.
the latest report is that is has been raining so much in the last three days that there are only about 500 people out there. It has been too wet to drive on.
bring “wet shoes” and “dry shoes”Strong winds have been reaching up to 100 miles per hour and blowing over the porta potties..
Bring extra “tiey-Down Stuff”
100 miles per hour?!?!?!?
One hundred miles per hour?!?!?
One. Hundred.
[Gulp]
But that was MY idea!
Yesterday I opened up EMedia Magazine, saw an ad for an industrial multi-CD burner and again thought about an idea I had a while ago. Use fast CD burners to make a live recording of a music concert just minutes after the show is over. I had this idea maybe a year ago while looking through a similar magazine. So last night I went out to my local music house, The Stanhope House, to spec it out.
Perfect. The place held about 150 concert goers. I guessed that maybe 10% of concert goers would spend the money on a CD… That’s 15 CDs…. such a burning rig would cost under $2,000… working 3 or more nights a week, it could make money. The Stanhope House already had a good permanent mike setup. I could tap into that. There wasn’t much room in the soundboard area…. hmmm… and it wouldn’t be cost effective to have me come out and mix the album for just 15 sales. I could make a small box with 2 or 4 burners, a mini PC, maybe running Linux with special software and just a few buttons on the case. Buttons for “Start recording”, “Stop”, “Next song starts here”, “No music here”. The sound engineer could make the CDs. But what music licensing when a band plays a cover? Ah. The Harry Fox Agency is all about music royalties. For just $0.08 per song, we can burn a CD of a cover… Figuring out the exact royalties to be paid is a technical task…. But well suited to the computer: it could keep track of every song burned and at the end of the month export a list of who gets paid what. But that means the track names (and authors) have to be inputted into the computer as it’s being burned, to give proper credit. Hmmm. The sound engineer might need to have a keyboard and screen, tied to the Harry Fox music database. That’s ok, it’s doable.
I called my sister, asking about Greatful Dead bootlegs (she knows about such things). She offered good advice (except for the part about my idea being dumb and unworkable, but hey.)
I was getting ready to call the owner of the Stanhope House today or next week to talk about my plan. I called up TJIC to mull the idea and maybe look for programming support. He said, “Oh yeah. I read about something like that in the New York Times a while ago.” ERK! What? No. It’s MY idea. So I go online and…. fuck.
…the Who jumped on the idea and wound up grossing $1.2 million on live CDs from their 2002 tour. Early this year, Phish made every 2003 show available — within forty-eight hours — on livephish.com; the band has sold more than 150,000 of the recordings and earned more than $2 million.
There is probably room for me in this industry. I could probably even make a living at it if I worked hard at it. But it isn’t my idea.
M
olls sent this to me before xmas. I stole it from this site and pulled it local for posterity. Click on the picture to play this shocking Shockwave.
I sent this to a bunch of my programmer-type friends recently
It’s the algorithm, stupid.
If you’ve ever taken a computer programming course, you know what a binary tree is…. and dreaded implementing it.
I present to you what looks like the obituary to binary trees:
(and check out the link, the paper is very readable)Skip Lists vs B-Trees (added: 8-May-2003)
http://www.enhyper.com/content/skiplist.pdf
Skip lists are a relatively new algorithm introduced in 1987 by William Pugh. Their simplicity and performance makes them an attractive alternative to the well known Btree algorithms. Testing reveals a dramatic speed advantage for skip lists when compared to B-trees. In addition to the basic speed advantage of the algorithm, skip lists also show an additional speed advantage for large data sets.If this article doesn’t impress you, then float it to a programmer friend of yours and you’ll likely put a smile on his face (and another tool in his toolchest)
Happy Day,
lee—-and now your random quote—-
My friend Katherine W was looking for comments on a user manual that she was writing. She sent it out to one co-worker and asked for comments back a couple days later. When returning it, he said quite confidently, “Oh yes, I read the whole thing.. And it looks just fine.” Then she pointed out the several spots where it read, “When you read this, come see me and I’ll give you 5 dollars.”
Here is a local copy of Skiplist.pdf
TJIC has set up his own domain for Technical Video Rental. :-)
So where are all those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Colin Powell was talking about in front of the U.N. on February 6, 2003. He had recordings and confessions and photos with circles and arrows (and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining…). They haven’t found a single bit. Did Colin lie? Did the U.S. Secretary of State fabricate an entire presentation in front of the U.N. and international television? Maybe everything was trucked to another enemy country… maybe it was all smoke and mirrors. Jeez, the real world is more tense and exciting than the TV show 24; that’s a hard act to follow.