procrastination diagram

Hmm, no moonbase or Jupiter missions.

If everything goes according to plan, I should be posting here more regularly, as I seem to have suckered my self into an Iron Blogger event, the basic idea being that everyone posts at least once a week or subsidize other people's beer (list of other participants unceremoniously dumped in my blog's sidebar).

It may not be productive, but I do feel like I should remind the universe of my existence occasionally, and it gives me an internal excuse to post before I finish my five-projects-deep rewrite of my website.

I don't have any resolutions at the moment (beyond go to the gym more and get stuff done), but I think I need to plan to be more distracted at events that lend themselves to maudlin recollection.

Hmm, I'm clearly not doing this often enough; the posting software kicked off the wrong web browser.

It is 2 AM the night before MITSFS inventory. We don't quite yet have all the data necessary to start generating shelf catalogs (in our local jargon "shelfdex packets"), at least partially because I sent some people home early. I will really, actually, have a checklist for this next year. Or possibly arrange to be in Argentina.

It is 1 PM the next day, and I am frantically trying to write a piece of software that I should have written two years ago: the resolver, so that spurious books aren't handled by a very tired person with a SQL interpreter. Of course, "frantically trying to write" means staring at a buffer consisting only of comments that I wrote yesterday.

It is 3:15 PM. The software is by no means done, or even at the required functionality level, but I'm improving something that sort of works rather than staring at a buffer full of vague comments and unparsable code. "We have a heartbeat!"

It is 6 PM. I know what this year's hilarious screwup was. But I can fix it... with a SQL interpreter. Fortunately I'm not yet that tired. (When you're matching the books that were unexpected in one place with the books that came up missing in others, you want to make sure you're matching with books that were missing in this inventory.)

It is 9 PM. "Yes," I said. "For the love of God."¹

It is half past midnight, and the library has been reconfigured to be a library again, not an inventory-taking machine. I am far too tired to do more than poke desultorily at the shiny thing in front of me. I can also only sit in awe of Kevin, who got three hours less sleep than I did last night (and in the student center at that) and then herded cats all day. It was claimed that inventories don't usually end with fewer boxes of books than they start with, so I guess we won.

It is 1 PM the day after, and I am fixing up this blog post, after sleeping for about twelve hours. My brain seems to be vaguely wondering where all of its neurotransmitters went. (Disclosure: I did actually start each paragraph at the the times specified, but I went back and edited, sometimes writing more based on recollection.)

1. (People have begun to barricade themselves with boxes of spurious books.)

My T60 is increasingly held together by scotch tape, and the T510 I ordered isn't supposed to ship until shortly before my birthday (and I seem to have ordered a display option that the official documentation doesn't admit to he existence of), so I picked up a ThinkPad X100e to fill a potential gap and to be lighter than the T60 or the T510.

It's not quite a netbook: it's a little too large, but that's hardly a bad thing. The keyboard is a little odd, clearly taking design cues from the weird, flat, semi-unusable Apple keyboards, but it's full-sized, seems to have nearly as much travel as my T60's keyboard, and has the force curve that we know and love from IBMLenovo keyboards (you get clear tactile feedback that you've actuated the switch before you bottom out). Also, it's not actually flat; the keys have a subtle curve to them that helps you center your fingers and hands properly.

Also, unlike netbooks that I've heard of, you can stuff 4G of memory into it (which I of course have).

It doesn't seem to be obviously slow, but I haven't actually benchmarked it against anything. It's at worst not obviously blindingly fast. Windows 7 was quite tolerable performance-wise even before the memory upgrade. (Of course, I nuked Windows 7 from orbit last night, and not just because it decided to uninstall Chrome and putty in a seeming fit of pique.)

Linux support seems a little rough around the edges, although I haven't explored nearly enough. I only just got the wireless working (had to download a tarball from the vendor and build it; I suppose I should package it for Debian now), and haven't tried suspend/resume or X. More later.

I've just found the following paragraph in an unfinished blog entry from February 2006, labeled "abandoned projects":

Obvious confession time: I don't have the attention span to get anything accomplished on my own. I put a pile of time into a project, and lose interest. Sometimes I only get to the point of doing elaborate planning in my head, but I can't be bothered to write anything down. This tendency actually shows up at work sometimes (I have this additional, related problem where I tend to lose interest in projects after I've finished the hard part but this is usually compensated for by annoyed bosses.

This is actually not entirely true, but given four year's perspective, it does help to know that you have a problem and to keep coping strategies (like, for instance, writing things down) in mind...

Here is is something I've been hacking on for quite a while: I completely rewrote the software that handles my website (and did some redesigning, which you who actually bother looking at the site itself have likely already noticed).

The big change is that in this version, everything in the blog is generated dynamically instead of being written to static html files. You don't care, but it gives me a lot more room to experiment, learn how things tend to be done in the modern world, and experiment with caching strategies. The decision to go with statically-generated pages was several iterations of Moore's Law ago, for reuse-grade hardware, and was overly conservative even then.

The primary new feature that I get out of this is now much more convenient comment moderation. Instead of fiddling around with a clunky command line tool, there's a convenient web page that I can use. Also, various other potential anti-spam measures (e.g. randomly chosen form field names) become much easier to play with.

After that... well, likely I'm going to get distracted by other long term projects that I've been putting off to get this done (because I seemed to be writing here much more often). On the other hand maybe I'll actually do something with the 18000+ pictures I've taken. (I have this idea that I'll start trying to take at least one decent/interesting picture every week. I know someone who's trying to do that every day for a year, but he's much more serious about photography than I am (plus he's got a lighter camera)). I've been intending to integrate my pictures with the site (and make them more public) for at least five years now, and this provides me with a much nicer infrastructure to work with.

Now that I've had it for a bit and am mostly using it as my primary laptop, here's a little detail on how well it works with Debian. It's not perfect (see below), but it does let me get work done.

Wifi is the big problem. The latest vendor driver doesn't seem to be able to stay connected to the network for more than fifteen minutes or so with any kernel I've tried building it against. There's a previous version of the driver linked off an ubuntu bug that seems to work acceptably with the 2.6.30 kernel that was in squeeze until last week (and still appears to be in lenny-backports). Unfortunately, it seems to exhibit similar behavior to the latest driver when built against the 2.6.32-trunk that's now in squeeze, which is annoying because...

Sound almost works. It plays things just fine over the speakers; it just doesn't turn off the speakers when you plug something into the headphone jack. Some digging suggests that this is because the snd-hda-intel driver doesn't know specifically about the codec/mixer mixer and is making guesses that turn out to be wrong. 2.6.32 appears to know about it, but I haven't checked that it fixes the headphone problem because I care much more about wireless support.

X, on the other hand, worked more or less out of the box, although it seems to be happiest (2D-acceleration-wise) when beaten into using the radeonhd driver. Really, I was so flabbergasted by getting a working xterm using the full resolution of the display when I started the server with no xorg.conf that I forgave the ati driver's usual detection problems.

Suspend-to-RAM via pm-suspend just works.

I suspect that the problems will get sorted out over time; the Realtek 8192 seems to be moderately popular, and having a working in-kernel driver would likely make all the pain go away. Still, a couple of weeks on, I could only be slightly more pleased with this computer.

So, we're actually having an Iron Blogger meetup... somewhere with open Wifi. Since I've already posted this week, and this isn't cheating, I figured I should post something.

Sometimes it is necessary to make the effort to give awesome coincidences the opportunity to happen. It is imperative, however, to not be disappointed when they don't. As they say, lotteries aren't a tax on stupidity, they're a tax on hope... and I think I would be a much happier person if I had less of an imagination.

I self-identify as a misanthrope. I dislike abstract people (and aggregates of such, like crowds), but I tend to like the concrete ones I encounter; often, it seems, more than they like me (apparently pessimism fails to endear). A friend who will remain anonymous once suggested I should that I could start a blog "Reasons Why People Should Die" and I'd never miss a day, much less a week. I don't remember what I said, but now that I've thought about it for a while, I think it wouldn't be that good for my blood pressure.

I drive to work nearly every day, because road grids and public transportation conspire against making a distance that, as the crow flies, should be eminently walkable, usefully so. The emotional journey usually starts through "Roads! Often used for getting from point A to point B!", passes through "Look, people, the pedal on the right makes it go faster, the pedal to the left of that makes it slow down, and the big wheel lets you change direction; this isn't that hard" all the way to "DO YOU HAVE THUMBS? SHOW ME YOUR THUMBS!" but often with more profanity.

The above paragraphs weren't actually written to fit together. Does that seem right to you?

Actually, the T510 arrived ages ago, but here's a summary (and a size comparison):

I installed Debian squeeze (with 2.6.32). Sound just worked. Wireless (iwlagn) mostly works (I have some trouble with MIT's (multi-AP) deployment, but there is some chance of pilot error there). X just worked with the free (nv) drivers (but see below). Suspend... mostly didn't work, crashing the ACPI driver on the way down such that it would lose the ACPI interrupt when it came back. "Oh well, I'll bet 2.6.33 will fix it." (Strictly speaking it would resume successfully to text mode, but spew kernel backtraces, and generally seem sad.)

Suspend-to-disk worked (sort of unsurprisingly), but hung on a return to X. (Even if you suspended and returned to the text console, the machine would hang when you switched to the X VT.) Some googling around suggested that the non-free (nvidia) drivers didn't have this problem, and lo, the suggestions were correct. (And no, before you ask, the system shows no sign of exposing any Intel graphics hardware.)

With a SSD, suspend-to-disk is tolerably slow, so I kind of got a working laptop out of it with almost too many pixels (1920x1080, beautiful color, good contrast), although apparently the T60p had more. I'll bet this screen size is cheaper for some strange mass-production reason, though. :-)

An excellent article on procrastination.

I would have some verbiage about Most Secret War by R.V. Jones here, and some oddly not entirely unrelated talk about in-progress adventures in ham radio here, but I put that off to add pubsubhubbub support to my blogging software.

(Although I have to say that I am thankful for transistors)

We all set our clocks forward (or, more likely, had our clocks "mysteriously" set themselves forward) today, and eastern Massachusetts is back in the the timezone that it probably should be year-round, and I find myself wondering whether the Iron Blogger script is going to get the right local time. "Hopefully, I won't be testing this." Anyway...

I alluded to some in-progress ham-radio stuff. Most of you know what the Green building is (and if you don't, well, follow the link to the Wikipedia) and that it is not, in most relevant ways, green. You probably know (now, at least, that is it has a large golfballish structure on the top):

That structure is a radome, housing an 18 foot dish that was used for an experimental weather radar between when the building was built in the sixties until the early nineties. The dish uses a pedestal az-el mount adapted from a SCR-584 radar, which was developed at the Rad Lab at MIT during World War II. (Yes, I considered making those Wikipedia links as well. No, I don't feel too good about it.) Anyway:

We changed the oil in the mount Friday night. One of the oil reservoirs looked remarkably clean-but-old. The other... looked kind of greenish, which is odd because the MP-61 pedestal doesn't have a coolant system. Regardless, it now squeaks less, but unfortunately it still squeaks. Apparently the bearings were designed to be greased at the factory and not subsequently serviced... I don't think they were thinking that they'd last for sixty years. More to come.

About a year ago, after having been exposed to Extreme Programming at my new job, and observing how it spilled over into system administration practices, I scrawled out an outline for a manifesto in a paper notebook. I remember googling for "Extreme System Administration" and being disappointed by the number of relevant hits I got, but it seems I should have been searching for "Agile System Administration".

It turns out that this is sort of thing is happening more from the developer direction, and seems to have turned into a movement called DevOps (thanks, Adam), although the grumpy sysadmin in me grimly suspects that some of these developer types (which I'm being paid to be at the moment, I should mention) are going to find the hard-real-time aspects of the job a bit of a surprise. Also, from the perspective of someone who prefers the phrase "Systems Programmer" on his business cards, it has seemed to me that a good sysadmin was already sort of between the pure-development and pure-operations cultures.

So anyway, in the spirit of "The useful things we were doing, let's do more of that"...

Obviously, from XP/Agile:

• pairing/review

  A second pair of eyes should be nigh-mandatory

• planning game/customer communication

  perhaps kanban?

• daily standup meetings
• refactor mercilessly/you aren't gonna need it/DON'T REPEAT YOURSELF
• everything possible in version control

  (really, the key thing is that everything needs to be reversible)

• testing/continuous integration

  (perhaps cruise control for your installer in a VM)

• test, test, test

  If you're not testing it, you don't know it works

But also:

• AUTOMATE

  If you do something twice, automate it the second time.

• MONITOR

  If you're not monitoring it, it's down

• TICKET

  If you're not keeping track of it, you'll forget it

• INVENTORY

  If you don't know where it is, you don't have it

Emergencies, once dealt with, are an opportunity to ask

• How could we have noticed this faster?
• How can we make this impossible or correct it automatically?
• How do we test for this?

User communications/Ticketing:

• Support vs. Trouble

  These are distinct processes and need to be handled differently.

• Support is a customer relationship thing:

  You need to figure out what the question is and answer it

• Trouble means something needs doing
• Tickets have potential many/many relationships
  • Many people may have the same problem, and the same problem may be several different problems
  • Potentially exposing to users that other users are having similar tickles the tension between privacy and transparency, on one hand, users will be embarrassed, on the other hand, encouraging them to help each other is always good.
• Every support ticket should end with "This was answer [link]" or "This is now answer [link]"
• Users should be walked past the current problem board on the way to complaining; possibly given a "I am also having this problem" checkbox

What Problem Do You Think You're Solving?

• This is something that needs to be have a clear answer for every task

Values

• Repeatability
• Transparency
• Privacy
• Communication
• Accountability
• no ad-hoc techniques
• Rational Security (realistic threat models)
• The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data

Transparency vs. Communication

• Transparency

  What your users find when they go looking

• Communication

  How you tell users things or how you find things out from users

This is obviously very rough, and is an only slightly cleaned up version of my notes. I don't actually claim that this is new, or interesting, but it's something that is more useful outside my head than inside.

Also, I really need to get these posts done before midnight...

And another thing: Record; take notes.

I've often thought that the biologist's lab notebook is something that computer types should pick up. When you're trying to fix something, writing down what you tried, what hypotheses you've eliminated, can be invaluable later when you run into the same (or similar) simple problem again, and can be absolutely indispensable for avoiding tail-chasing when you're dealing with a complex problem. If you've ever tried to fix something under pressure and find yourself wondering "Have I tried this already?", you need to be taking more notes.

I went to PAX, since they bothered to hold it so near by. My feet hurt. It was nice hanging out with friends who came to town to go to the show, and the spectacle was certainly impressive, but gosh that was a lot of people for an introvert to deal with. And I found myself not as interested in gaming as I could be, or as... much as everyone else around me seemed to be. There were some neat costumes around, but I didn't have my (good) camera on me. (And I suppose treating it as a photo-expedition might have given me enough psychological distance from the crowd that I might have felt able to do more than barely leave the house today.)

Oh well... maybe next year?

When I was younger, back in the upper Cretaceous, I somewhat desultorily took piano lessons, but also had a small stack of synthesizers. I've retained a theoretical interest in making music meanwhile, with occasional flashes of interest, but successfully putting it off as "another expensive hobby."

This began to crumble a little due to housemate-comrade joyp's band Soap Yourself's recording issues, reminded me of my small pile of hardware, most significantly the mixer. But that was nothing compared to newer housemate Yuki's KAOSSILATOR. A Kaossilator is kind of hard to describe adequately, but inadaquately it's a tiny looping synthesizer that you control with a touchpad. It's a blast to fiddle with, and I am told (and believe) that some people make fairly elaborate music with it, although I would prefer a keyboard... and I found myself strongly desiring one.

I expected this desire to fade with time, but it did not. I decided to make myself practice the piano, bought myself a copy of Hanon from Amazon, and promised myself that I was only allowed to throw money at the problem if I could make myself practice regularly (yes, I know that it's in the public domain and can be found on the net. It was worth the price to have a bound copy). Imagine my surprise when when I found myself looking forward to working on the exercises, and enjoying bending my fingers in new and repetitive ways.

So, given all that, it seems I need to figure out what I should be getting, and what the synthesizer/sampler market is like twenty years later. Summary of extended ruminations to follow.

When I was young, there were more or less three utterly desirable and droolworthy synthesizer/samplers. Though you may not realize it, you have almost certainly heard all of these.¹ They are:

The Kurzweil K250, clocking in at the low, low price of about ten thousand dollars. Legendarily created at the suggestion of Stevie Wonder, apparently the first sampler with a bunch of useful samples in ROM. It had a very impressive piano sound for 1984.

The Fairlight CMI, for $60,000-$80,000² in the model current when I cared (shortly before they went out of business). The first commercial sampler, probably about a quarter of the sound of 80s music.³

The New England Digital Synclavier, which apparently cost $200,000 in a small configuration, was, I think, the first attempt at a commercial product for making music (from composition with to sound generation) with computers. They added sampling shortly after the CMI appeared, but then expanded the capability into a fully tapeless study, back when that was not only fresh and new (as opposed to "duh" like is today) but mind-blowing.⁴

I don't actually want any of these devices any more, because trying to get anything done with what passed for an embedded UI in the 80s would be unbelievably frustrating. There's a K250 on eBay at the moment for $650 (for pickup somewhere in California), and while it's seriously tempting (they were supposedly really well-built instruments) it's almost certainly not worth the hassle.⁵

It's also worth noting as context, that a cheap (and as pianos go, you do tend to get what you pay for) new upright piano goes for about $5000, with instruments more acceptable to the discriminating going for $10,000, $20,000, up to (reputedly) $100,000 or so for a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand (97 Keys! Eight Full Octaves! I want one! I really have nowhere to put it!).

Today, the "high end"⁶ dedicated instruments cost between $2000 and $5000 and mostly classed as "Sampler-Workstations". The 61-key version of Korg's M3 (which is on the cheaper end of such things) for instance, has a typical street price of $1900. This still struck me at the beginning of this process as overly expensive, given the difference in available computing power between the then above, and the now, when the phone in my pocket has several orders of magnitude more computing power than anything above.

However, after adding up some numbers, I think it's actually a pretty fair price. First of all, we need to abstract the price of the keyboard controller; I'm going to pick the Akai MPK61 which has a street price of $500. Add a MacBook⁷ for $1000, and a copy of Ableton Suite (which should have everything you need) for $850, giving us a naive total price of $2350. Admittedly, the computer does more, but I actually suspect that it would be a good idea if my musical instrument does not have a web browser.

In the end, I'm going withhave purchased the 88-key version of the M3, with the RADIAS analog-modeling-synth add-in card as my primary keyboard. I decided that I wanted the big-keyboard version so I could at least practice for the piano (and you know, a little pitch range never hurt anyone). I'm very likely going to add a Blofeld keyboard, because I kind of want a second manual, and because it sounds so awesome (listen to the demo tracks). Oh, and go look at the entry for the module version...

Actually worth listening to on their own merit if you like this sort of thing.

I want to make music (hence the past two weeks). Specifically, (and at the moment) I would like to make music as inspired by the music of the following:

First of all, this dude:

I'm guessing that you know who this is. I am fond of contending that we can blame pretty much all of Western music on him. I am not including a link to his music because there's so much of it...

Emerson, Lake & Palmer are an odd case; they may be standing in for progressive rock in general, but... they, and Keith Emerson in particular, are amazing musicians from a technical perspective.

(There are youtube clips below. If you are reading this in some sort of aggregator and don't see them, see if they show up on my version of the story.)

Really, I worry that I just don't have the hair for it.

Kraftwerk (which non-German speakers are reminded means, basically "power station" or "power plant") basically invented pop music made via synthesis. They're also very strange.

Hifana sort of defy description. Watch the video.

It is worth mentioning that they are deservedly famous for not using sequencers in performance, although I think they may be cheating a very very tiny bit with some of their samples.

Honorable mention to Tangerine Dream, Orbital, Ochre... and I am quite certain that I'm forgetting someone in this category.

I figured I should at least show you a picture thereof:

It's not perfect, but all in all I'm pretty happy with it. (Some indication of how it sounds will take until I produce a sound I'm happy with...)

1. If you are in the habit of listening to music described as "phat", you may find this pleasant, and inducive of rhythmic movement.

2. People who are not caught up with the current season of Doctor Who but intend to be: There were bits of the first three episodes that were... worrying... possibly even disappointing. But I've seen the first half of this season's two parter (well, most of it it, anyway) and I think my faith in Mr. Moffat has been justified and rewarded. I recommend that you pay close attention to it in fact; don't look away as I did, and whatever you do... DON'T BLINK!

If you're around Cambridge, go see The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria. Remaining performances Thursday and Friday at 8pm, or Saturday at 2pm, all in Sala.

If you go to the weeknight performances, you'll get to see me drop heavy pieces of the set on myself. The music is interesting and the vocalists are quite talented.

(Yes, this is kind of a copout, but I am hella fried this weekend.)

Oh look, a Korg M3 wiki.

I have recently become aware of the the Nord Modular and Nord Modulator G2 synthesizers.The basic idea is that you have a DSP on your little black (red) box that you say "emulate this here analog synth", which is relatively old hat at this point. The trick here is that you tell these "emulate this arbitrary giant modular synthesizer", and while you're at it, make it polyphonic if you have the spare CPU. Not only could this make some potentially fiendish noises, but it could the eliminate the desire for much esoteric hardware.

This site has a bewilderingly continuous flow of synthesizer-related links and interestingly relevant e-bay options.

Here are a couple of demos of the Micro Modular, which is a scaled down version of the first-generation Modular:

Which led me to the following video:

Which in tern led me to the Metasonix TX-1 Agonizer, which is intriguing if expensive, which leads me to Metasonix, who, although they no longer seem to make the TX-1, do make new vacuum tube-based analog synthesizers, including, oddly, a drum machine made with vacuum tubes, which has to be as far into the cool×odd quadrant as I'm likely to get today.

A selection of my open tabs, some of which I'm closing because this constitutes a sort of bookmark...

The Stretta Procedure

RFC5868 - Problem Statement on the Cross Realm Operation of Kerberos

Learn the basics of roasting garlic

DJ Tech Tools blog

Echo Nest Remix Blog - Earworm and Capsule

USB Radio Interface

Nord Modular & Micro Modular V3.0.3 tips and tricks

modwsgi Access Control Mechanisms

English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects

wireless FSK transceiver modules RFM12B

JeeNode V4

Anonymous Kerberos

Pkinit configuration

W4RT radio mods and parts

Kerberos domain realm referrals

webfinger protocol draft

Implementing WebFinger

Notmuch -- The mail indexer

I replaced the front brake pads in my car this weekend. Someone (Hi, Mom!) along the way asked why I was doing this, rather than paying someone else to make my problems go away. My glib answer was that labor costs being what they are in Massachusetts, I didn't feel like paying how much it would cost, or spending the time explaining that I didn't want the disks turned, the pistons replaced, or the dooflatchie reframulized.

A better glib answer is that I want to retain my Morlock (Stephenson 1999, Wells 1895) cred, and this leads to a better non-glib answer: by repairing (preventative maintenancing?) the machine that carries me around, I reassert control over my environment, and reassure myself that I can adjust the aspects of my world that most people take for granted.

(The correct answer, of course, is that taking things apart, getting your hands dirty, and putting them back together, is fun.)

Here's a lame post because I'm having too much trouble with SVG embedding right now to get the post I want finished:

I was fiddling around with the M3, and ended up with a... tune that I thought sounded pretty neat. The process involved just sitting down at the keyboard, playing the first four notes of what I'll call the lead twice and saying to myself "Huh, that sounds way neater than I expected", then fiddling around for a bit until I had some variety in the lead, and a bassline to go with it.

(There should be a player widget there. It may require flash. It may also require following the link to the actual page on my site in what ever reader thing you're reading this in.)

This consists of

with each bar repeated four times on the right hand, and

repeated on the left hand, played with on a very simple sound I put together for the RADIAS card in my M3. It's basically a bunch of square waves and a bunch of triangle waves slightly detuned and run through some distorting effects so that it doesn't sound too polite.

Now, depending on how responsive you are to musical cues and how much other sorts of media you've consumed, the bassline might be bothering you a bit—it did me. Here's just the bassline sped up a bit:

Here it is sped and transposed up a couple of octaves played with a patch that allegedly sounds like a french horn:

Now, at this point you're likely either looking at me funny or nodding in familiarity. Once I recognized it, I realized that I have a relatively powerful emotional reaction to those four notes, especially when followed...

(Also, I apologize for the pun in the title.)

Also, yes, this was supposed to be last week's post, except that I got bogged down trying to export the musical score fragments into SVG. Images, though inelegant, Just Work.

I did ARRL Field Day 2010 at the OCRA/DFMA joint field day in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with my parents. The clubs set up a 10-transmitter station, all running at 5W on battery power for the duration of the event.

Sadly these don't give a good sense of the site. Notable innovations are the bucket truck on loan from the power company, and weather balloon; both of which I would describe as solutions to the problem of not having the Green building handy to string antennas from.

But inspiration, I have not.

Lev Grossman, author of the The Magicians, my favoritist book here I wanted to slug the protagonist for most of it (really, it's an excellent book), has a blog.

If you only ever read one piece of Harry Potter fanfic, read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Dubstep is a recent genre of dance music.

MiniMock looks useful for writing test suites in python.

Nine Inch Nails makes multitracks and such of their music available and encourages people to upload remixes.

Tom Limoncelli posted a great "catching up with javascript" linkdump. Like, ages ago.

Andy Ihnatko posted how to disable wake-on-open on a MacBook. Maybe I'll get around to getting one someday, although I'm really wondering whether I want to give up and start doing music stuff on Windows after all.

An attempt at a standard external radio interface for amateur use in the post-parallel port age.

A list of PKCS#11 implementations.

I note without comment that Google image search for "boa" at least for me, gets more pictures of the Korean singer than pictures of a snake.

An analysis of World War II as if it were popular media

A while back I wrote a, uh, thing to test zephyr servers in a bunch of virtual machines. I dusted it off today (taking a break from the other stuff I'm working on), and I just want to reiterate how much I like having automated tests. (It was just a smoke test before; it now tests user session persistence (jargonwise: "subscriptions") through server restarts.