Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:05:03 UTC
traffic
This is something I
saw a decade or so ago, mentioned in conversation with someone vaguely
recently, and couldn't find when I went looking for it.
Fortunately, someone else linked to it when they linked to
this.
Remember, only you can prevent traffic jams.
Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:14:34 UTC
thoughts
My stubborn insistence on writing my own software for things like
maintaining this blog causes me to spend more time thinking about
the problem and less time writing about other stuff.
There are large projects that occupy a lot of my spare time that I never mention here because linking to them isn't particularly useful yet.
I need to sit down and do something about a lot of my infrastructure; my mail reading pattern isn't standing up to the current demands of work, my personal mail infrastructure could use some work, I'm still depending on Debian Sarge in places where I really shouldn't be; I'm running three or four different pieces of IM software for three different systems and as such missing critical information, and of course, I don't write here as often as I'd like. (see above)
Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:22:24 UTC
twice in two days?
Remember the cuecat? It's not a
great barcode scanner, but it does work. Most of the time.
Deep-Fried Coca-Cola. . . .
Home built USB logic analyzer.
Like I'd have time to use one, much less build one.
Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:52:58 UTC
three links
Read your Own DHS Travel Dossier. For various reasons, I
would be disappointed if they weren't keeping at least something of an
eye on me. I wouldn't expect that to be true of everyone, though.
Make a Jacob's Ladder.
I've always wanted to do this. Where do you get neon sign
transformers, anyway?
Super Probe. This just
looks handy.
Sat, 27 Jan 2007 17:56:07 UTC
PSA
Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:45:47 UTC
UI issues
I'm beginning to think that I need to switch to Windows on my laptop
for a while, if only to try and understand how the other half (which
is to say, nearly everyone else) thinks. I say this, because whiz-bang
"new" applications (about which, more later) are seeming to have
increasingly incomprehensible (to me, anyway) UI methodologies.
I suspect at least part of it is that one of the applications I was
trying (jarnal) is either
flaky or just doesn't do what I think it does, and possibly doesn't
work very well with my window manager.
I could get much of the effect from switching to Gnome (it has enough
Windows/Motif-think in its UI to have the right consequences
in my head) but it would be too easy to cheat. I'm also not sure how
much good it would do me unless I gave up emacs for mail, zephyr, and
coding, but there isn't a windows alternative for zephyr (I guess I
could switch to owl to maintain the the complete alienity of it all),
and the temptation to beat all of those into working on windows in
emacs would be high.
I could also probably get much of the effect from switching to a MacOS
machine, but it many of the same problems switching to gnome does,
only those problems would be more annoying because I've gotten really
used to Debian and switching Unix platforms is no longer something I'm
used to doing. (Also, I may want to play more with OneNote.)
It's been several years (I think the last time was early 2003) since I
both gave much thought to my computation environment and actually did
something about it. (This involved switching to
ion as a window
manager and emacs term-mode as a terminal emulator in order to make
some pointing-device related RSI go away; ion stuck, and seems
particularly addictive from a UI perspective (I haven't seen my
desktop background in years), term-mode had problems and seemed
like overkill once my hands stopped hurting.
I wonder how happy MacOS X is on a T42, or if I could convince work
that it needs a loaner MacBook Pro.
2 comments
(updated Sat, 27 Jan 2007 17:17:06 UTC)
#
I deleted ~5000 spam comments earlier this evening. Then in a fit of
activity, I wrote code to let me disable comments on specific entries.
Then I disabled them on everything. I'm going to leave them off
entirely until the spammers appear to have lost interest; then I'm going to
have them automatically turn off after two weeks for new entries.
Sometime in there I might write a real entry.
Sat, 08 Apr 2006 17:55:40 UTC
rumors, coolest
I wish to announce that the rumors of my death have been only slightly exaggerated, and that
this is the
coolest thing ever.
That is all.
Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:24:26 UTC
almost an epigram
The problem with a broken heart is not that it aches, but
that it won't bear any weight.
So, once again I find myself in the
Logan Terminal B Satellite (low earth orbit, more like) on my way to
visit my parents. This time I found some outlets useful for charging
things (which is good because my new old phone (see below) seems to
have crashed in the night and not bothered to charge itself), and they
want to sell me network access for the low price of $8/day, which
seems like it's not quite worth it given that my flight should be
boarding shortly.
I notice that they're allowing udp dns through, which If I'd been
prepared, I know there are tools available to tunnel through.
However, prepared is not an adjective I'm really ready to apply to
this trip so far.
So anyway, new years resolutions, fortunately or unfortunately made in
front of witnesses this past Monday:
I will not fret about women who aren't interested in me.
(Some of you are feeling knowing at this, some of you are feeling
confused and left out of the loop. Please feel free to continue
feeling however you're feeling.) But anyway, this is fairly
self-explanatory.
I will not pick up any more time-consuming hobbies this year.
Jiujutsu, my extra-curricular coding, photography, and the occasional
running around and shooting people with dartguns really should be
enough. I think I've already reached the point where I'm getting less
out of things than I could because I'm trading stuff off, and I really
should finish the delivery mechanism for the photos, which ties into:
I will get stuff done.
I will procrastinate on the distracting short stuff rather than the
major stuff than I need undistracted blocks of time to accomplish.
(Paul Graham has an article on this concept of
good procrastination vs. bad procrastination, which rings true as long
as you don't procrastinate too long on paying the rent).
(We interrupt this message to mention that I am now typing this on the
plane, and would gladly play much more than $8 for Internet service
on a two-hour plane flight.)
I will make lists so I don't forget things or waste energy or time
trying to remember them.
I will be more awesome.
This is also fairly self-explanatory, although it does seem like it
might just be a consequence of the previous resolution.
Hah! There! I just made good on the technical laziness alluded to in
the last posting, as demonstrated by the bullet list above.
Anyway, I mentioned a new (old) phone. My T39 was being increasingly
recalcitrant (difficulty getting outgoing channels, people being
completely unable to understand me) so I picked up a Nokia 3650 that
was lying around at work (yay for GSM that lets you switch phones
without the cooperation of your carrier).
The 3650 is an interesting historical artifact in that it was one of
the first generation of Nokia Series 60
smartphones (I can't just say Nokia smartphone because of the Nokia
Communicator, which has been around forever in various forms. Now,
it's quite a brick (the follow-ons are much smaller), but it is
interesting because you can get a python interpreter for the
Series 60 phones, and run arbitrary code on it. I find this a little
less exiting that other people I know, because you still don't have
quite enough rope to fix the things that annoy me about the UI (to be
sure, much less than annoyed me about the T39) since you can't get T9
input yet, and thus can't replace the SMS-sending application.
However, I suspect that I will be able to use it to fix the muddle
that it made out of the contact list from my SIM, with out hours of
drudgery fiddling with a stupid contact manager UI...
In retrospect, I should have picked up a 6600 from T-mobile while they were still selling them, but I always thought they
were too big.
Ah, well, the E60 or the E70 should come out soon enough, and they will rock.
Well, that's about enough for now, other than the links that I will be filling in
later. I expect we'll be on approach soon, anyway.
(After I got home, it occurred to me to mention that in order to get
on the bus that takes you to the satellite terminal, you still have to
go through a door marked "Emergency Exit Alarm Will Sound" and another
marked something like "Security Badges Only Past This Point". This is
slightly amusing and commendably pragmatic, although you'd think
they'd've done something about it in the past two years.)