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Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "emacsen" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
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07:43 am
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The sinking ship
As others have pointed out, it feels like LiveJournal is a sinking ship. With the company's "merger" a few years ago now resulting in all the LiveJournal infrastructure moving to Russia, I think we can safely say that the culture of Livejournal has, and will continue to change.
At the same time I and many others have joined Facebook, the ultimate peer pressure application.
It's been suggested that I love my LJ posts to Facebook, but I won't do that, and here's why
Facebook, for all its interesting features, remains in the walled-garden model of applications. It's designed to bring users into the system and keep them there. To that end, they require logins for most functions, do not accept standard like OpenID and in their TOS, claim an unlimited license to any works placed in the system.
You can contrast this with sites like Livejournal. No one needs to be a member of Livejournal to read a feed, and with the addition of OpenID a few years ago, you didn't even need to be a member to post or even read friends-only entries. You don't need to be a member of Flickr to view pictures, and you don't need to use Google to talk to someone on GTalk. All of these are "lock-ins" on Facebook.
Beyond the ethical issues, it's been my experience that walled gardens are intense but short lived. AOL was one the largest walled gardens, pre-Internet, and it lasted about ten years, while MySpace as a phenomenon lasted only three or four years. Walled gardens attempt to provide every application to everyone but ultimately specialized sites like Twitter will come around and offer a better service.
So, if a walled garden is both ethically and practically doomed, what is the solution?
I'm afraid that at this point, I'm at a loss. I certainly could install my own blog engine on my own web servers. This would get me away from the situation with LiveJournal but it wouldn't afford me the same flexibillity either. On LJ I have friend filters. I could implement them using OpenID[1] but then we're once-again limited by the technology. After all, do we expect that every friend of mine will know how to use OpenID and then know to use the special RSS feed?
Until I have answers or until LiveJournal makes a specific move that I feel is threatening or concerning, I'll be sticking put. But I'll still be using ljcharm to back up my entire post history should I need to leave in a hurry.
[1] I'll spare you the gory details about why RSS Auth is a failure and simply say that the solution appears to be "throw out any hope of genuine authentication in favor of "magic feed strings"
Tags: metablogging
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01:06 pm
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yml2tex fail
At this point I've given up on presentation tools other than Beamer. It's not for a lack of trying either, I've used everything from OpenOffice.org to MagicPoint, and even some HTML/CSS based tools. They all leave me frustrated eventually.
Beamer doesn't. The only feature I've needed and not found a solution for is embedded movies, and those are so rare with me that they don't deserve much time.
Nonetheless, I'll be the first to admit that Beamer is verbose, much like writing a presentation in HTML, there are lots of setups and tags, so when I found yml2tex, I thought I had a big win on my hands.
Alas, it wasn't to be. I already use an outline in the beginning of my presentation with outline-mode, so Yaml seemed natural, but yml2tex was too limited in its functionality, and when I began to dig into its externals, I realized I'd be changing the core if I wanted to make it more extendable. It turned out yml2tex wasn't going to reduce the amount of typing I'd do, only move it from TeX to Python.
Not long after, I read this post from Brian Cunningham about Emacs where he says
"IDEs add lots of tools and automation and put an emphasis on having developers write less code; Editors like Emacs, on the other hand, provide functionality to allow developers to write more code in a quick an easy manner."
I suppose that's the missing variable in this equation, I've been using AucTex and yasnippets but not really been thinking about them. When I dig a bit deeper, I realize how few of the features of either I'm using, and much of the verbosity is handled cleanly at that level, and I'm happy and more productive.
Tags: computer emacs
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10:15 pm
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Just Foods
I don't often do product recommendations. I don't get any money for them and if you didn't know me they might come
off tacky, but sometimes putting that aside:
I love Just Garlic. I get mine from Whole Foods but they have a web site with a wider selection of products.
I started out getting Just Peas as a rat treat. Rats love peas, but I didn't like dealing with the mess- so this
seemed a lot easier, and a $5 box lasted me months.
But Just Garlic is the best- it's little dried roasted garlic peices. I use the stuff on every salad, often with
pasta and sometimes I'll munch on a few on thier own.
The nice part is that there's no other ingredients. I don't know exactly how they get them to dry so well, but they last forever and
taste great.
Some of the products end up better than others. I'm not as fond of the Just Corn or Just Applies, but I like Just Blueberries and most of
the other fruits.
Like I said, I get them at the supermarket, though the prices seem to range widly from $5-$10 per container. The web site
offers a greater selection and comparable prices, though for larger quantities they offer a discount.
You might want to give them a try.
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11:02 am
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Facebook?
Poll #1321370
Facebook?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8
Should I join facebook?
View Answers
| Yes! Facebook is a great way to keep track of old friends! |
   2 (25.0%) |
| Yes! Facebook is a good way to not have to keep track of old friends! |
| 2 (25.0%) |
| No. Facebook is lame. Why can't you just use FoaF? |
| 1 (12.5%) |
| No. Social networking is just what THEY want you do to! |
| 2 (25.0%) |
| Captain Nemo and his purple crayon. |
| 1 (12.5%) |
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07:34 pm
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The Metro just became a little more dangerous
I know I promised election coverage, but this news just came out.
It turns out DC's Metro Transit system has enacted a new policy of random searches of passengers.
The link above includes a link to a A Citizen's Guide to Refusing DC Metro Searches which I suggest every DC area person read carefully.
As the article points out, this will do nothing to combat terrorism. You cannot be arrested for refusing search, and you can, as far as I know, still board a metro bus and not be subject to those searches. And depending on the location of the officer, you may even be able to board the train later.
So, how does this impact terrorism? A terrorist will know his or her rights as well as I do, and simply exercise his rights.
As someone who sometimes carries electronics in various states of assembly, and someone who has begun taking on the job of mapping the metro entrances, I believe I'm even more at risk for running into such a search.
I'm only glad I don't ride metro daily, as I did in the past.
When fares are proposed to increase again, I'd suggest people speak out against these practices and suggest that this program's funding be cut before riders pay any more to ride Metro.
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10:12 am
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On Farming
Food is becoming an increasingly important topic. It's certainly becoming a factor in everything from our health, our environment, but also our economy and energy usage.
I urge everyone to read two articles on this subject. First is "Farmer in Chief", by the author of the Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html
My other suggested material on the subject of farming is an interview with Dr. Dickson Despommier, Professor of Public Health and Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia.
There's a great interview with him on Quirks and Quarks, and a link on that site to a web site about vertical farming:
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/08-09/qq-2008-11-01.html
And lastly, some more audio, a link to a talk from the HOPE conference on urban farming.
Audio and Slides
I point these articles and talks out because I think it's clear to anyone who wants to eat healthy that the current model is becoming unsustainable. We need to begin to move back towards locally grown food close to the places we live. And as technology becomes a part of this, especially combined with urban farming initiatives, we have the opportunity to have lower cost organic produce while still maintaining the incredible diversity of plants that we've enjoyed at our local megamarts in the last fifty years.
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08:23 am
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Pre-Update Update
I have a lot to say, about the election, about how I became "Number
Six", about the OpenStreetMap project, but I think right now I think
we're all just having one collective sigh of relief.
Current Mood: relief
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10:33 am
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Eat for Heath: Calculating ANDI and MANDI scores
Having a father pass away at 57 and a family history of health issues, along with my own ongoing health issues (obesity and high blood sugar), I've always been conscious of, if not involved in, my diet.
I've dieted in the past with varying degrees of success. My weight is relatively stable, but it stabilizes high, just below the BMI measure for obesity, and as I see friends my age suffer from full diabetes or heart attack, I've become accurately aware that something needs to change.
To that end, I'm following ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) annecognito's advice and reading Eat for Health, Joel Fuhrman's book on nutrition and eating. One can distill the book into two basic statements: Eat lots of plants and don't each much else.
To that end, the book offers some excellent suggestions on how to go about this process. The only problem I've had is with the mysterious "ANDI" and "MANDI" scores. These are scores he gives foods based on their nutritional quantity per calorie, or in his words, nutritional density of foods. These scores range from 1000 to .05, and he offers a book (which I recently purchased) giving the values of these foods. What he doesn't do is go into a great deal of detail in how these scores were calculated. He does say they were done by taking nutritional information from a database (which he mentions by name), adding some values and doing a calculation, but never goes into depth on what that calculation is or where he added weights in order to derive his scores.
I did find that in the book, the ANDI scores are footnoted as "Patent Pending". A sidenote...
The patent system was designed in order to protect one from having people copy their work and resell it. For example, if you came up with a better wheelbarrow, you could patent is, and then be giving a limited time monopoly on producing such wheelbarrows. It would seem, then, that one would want a patent right away. What patent attorneys have found, on the other hand, is that it's often better for a patent to be put in the application process and then let it linger there. A patent in process is given much of the same protections as an actual patent, but delays the clock to expiration. This is also important because in the past (before the Internet) it was very difficult to do a patent search. One had to contact the PTO or find a patent attorney with the right contacts. Without a patent number, this would be more difficult.
The great thing about patents is that while you do get protection from your competitors for a limited time, you must also document how your invention works. So, thanks to the Internet, here is the patent application Joel Fuhrman put in for his entire program, including the scores.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20080177572&OS=20080177572&RS=20080177572
There doesn't appear to be any great secret in this document, the dietary program is quite transparent, but it does provide the missing pieces to calculating these scores.
Tags: health, personal
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09:45 am
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Why change identi.ca?
For those of you who follow my Twitter feed, you may have noticed that most of my updates of late have come from identi.ca and maybe you wondered what it is.
identi.ca isn't a site for collecting Canadian identities. That site will need to remain secret still.
Identi.ca is a more free alternative to Twitter.
What do I mean by more free? A few things. First, the software underlying Identi.ca, Laconica is Free Software. Second, identi.ca does Open Microblogging". That means that a participating Open Microblogging site can talk with identi.ca users, and that does include at least one big player right now, Facebook.
For the geeks out there, Identi.ca makes all the user posts available under a creative commons license, and provides a Twitter compatible API. identi.ca also allows for OpenID authentication, although since the Twitter API doesn't support it, you have to use the web site in order to use it, but I believe laconica will get its own API soon, and that should support out of band authentication schemes like OpenID.
Identi.ca did have the same ability to gather updates from Twitter, but since Twitter shut its IM service down, this isn't feasible right now. If they turn it back on or become a Microblogging service provider, this problem will go away.
How does this effect you?
For the short term, it doesn't. identi.ca propagates my identi.ca posts to Twitter and I'll still be checking Twitter to see other people's posts and replies. In the longer term, I'll be checking Twitter less frequently and one day, probably spurred on by something like a long Twitter outagage. I'll stop going entirely. By that time, I think much of the novelty of Twitter will have worn off, or Twitter will provide a way to get updates, or people will move to another microblogging service provider. If not, I'll have to use an RSS reader to keep track of people I care about, but that has limits on its practicality, so I won't be reading it as often.
So, if you're using Twitter, consider switching.
Tags: microblogging
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11:50 pm
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Off the cuff thoughts on tonight's FringeDC meeting
Some thoughts on tonight's meeting.
First, it was good to have HacDC hosting a non-HacDC event. I think that HacDC needs to keep pushing this or it will stagnate and atrophy. I've seen it happen before. I was part of the group that helped incorporate such a group in the past and don't want to see it happen again.
The issue of "umbrella group" came up. I worked to dismiss that a bit because of what happened with Tux.org. Going into it, I had high hopes that Tux would grow to be an important umbrella group. It's failure there was largely due to failure of management. HacDC is being smart in remaining neutral and simply offering a space, but I do see potential value in offering groups the ability to create mailing lists and maybe even web pages, so that might be something worth exploring further with them.
My own HacDC project is on hold until some administrative issues can be resolved, at which point I'll bring this up
The turnout was decent, though the members were a bit slow to arrive. We hit the comfortable room limit, but only after we had all settled in. We didn't use the auditorium.
Conrad spoke on his non-deterministic regular expression parser. If ever there was a concept which needed a better name, that's it. The parser's non-determinism doesn't only reference its internal representation but rather the amazing flexibility that his parser provides in offering alternate parsing mechanisms from within the same regular expression.
The main talk was great too. By explaining the motivation of EmbeddedML, the author really gave us a sense of not only the functionality, but also the incredible fun the language has.
I don't know ML, but I think, based on the talk, that it looks interesting and an ML book will make it on my shelf at some point.
A relevant side topic, it turns out a new Pragmatic Programmer book will come out soon on Clojure. Clojure seems to be getting a lot of good press lately. My first impression of Clojure was "Yet another Lisp on ____". That is, it's nearly trivial to write a Lisp-like language in anything. Often they're nothing more than either an interpreter in the language or Lisp-like semantic sugar. Clojure seems to be doing more than that. The author has made some decisions especially in the area of first class support of some data structures, but also and especially in adding an official blessed concurency model in the language.
This contrasts with Arc, which Conrad is using in his regular expression parser. Conrad seems to really like Arc, but I've yet to see any radical departure in Arc, and worse, since it has virtually no adoption, no libraries, and libraries, as Grahm himself points out, is a key to modern day adoption.
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