procrastination diagram

Nigh-obligatory posting

2010-03-08T01:56:37-05:00

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)

Never mind the X100e, here's the T510

2010-03-01T01:28:11-05:00

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. :-)

hope, misanthropy, and driving

2010-02-15T02:25:39-05:00

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?

Iron Blogger meetup

2010-02-07T00:17:45-05:00

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.

Debian on the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e

2010-02-01T20:57:09-05:00

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.

New look, mostly new software

2010-02-01T01:52:08-05:00

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.

unfinished

2010-01-25T02:16:35-05:00

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...

Lenovo ThinkPad X100e

2010-01-14T11:35:58-05:00

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 ~~IBM~~Lenovo 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.

inventory

2010-01-10T20:04:32-05:00

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.)

2010:

2010-01-01T21:03:27-05:00

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.