emacsen's journal

The sinking ship

2009-02-01T12:43:27Z

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"

yml2tex fail

2009-01-22T18:06:41Z

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.

Just Foods

2009-01-02T03:15:56Z

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.

Facebook?

2008-12-27T16:02:33Z

View Poll: Facebook?

The Metro just became a little more dangerous

2008-11-08T00:34:07Z

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.

On Farming

2008-11-05T15:12:47Z

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.

Pre-Update Update

2008-11-05T13:23:46Z

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.

Eat for Heath: Calculating ANDI and MANDI scores

2008-10-25T14:33:10Z

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 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.

Why change identi.ca?

2008-10-12T13:45:09Z

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.

Off the cuff thoughts on tonight's FringeDC meeting

2008-10-12T03:50:45Z

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.

Backups, good

2008-10-11T13:20:34Z

This morning I deleted dot, my dotfile management system I've been working on. Not just the program, but the version control system too, which had not yet been migrated to my server.

Thank goodness for backups. That $1.70 I've spent on Amazon S3 has now paid for itself.

Venezuela chooses Intel Classmate. I don't blame em

2008-09-29T03:01:11Z

Venezuela has decided to buy a million Intel Classmate laptops. OLPC clearly is going to take a hit for this.

This leaves us OPLC supporters asking "What went wrong?", so I thought I'd contribute my .02.

The XO-1 had a lot of brilliant ideas, the first of which was the original name, "The $100 laptop". Unfortunately at launch, the price was a little over $200 per laptop.

Secondly, the XO-1 was very clever in terms of some of its hardware design. A little too clever, perhaps. The keyboard is designed to be dirt and splashproof, but anyone who was around in the 80s can tell you rubber keyboards don't work. They don't hold up. To make matters worse, the XO's rubber keys were tiny, but like buttons than keys.

Third, Negropante decided to take the stance of an underdog when dealing with both software and hardware manufactuerers. While it was understandable to be angry at Intel for its decision to undercut OPLC with it's Classmate, Negropante needed to take a more diplomatic stance, at least in public. As for the operating system, instead of relying on the current state of interfaces (knowing there would be a language issue), Negropante decided instead to redesign the UI from scratch and developed Sugar.

Fourth, Negropante had no structure for handling support. His idea of a community supported hardware and software stack makes sense, but requires thinking of problems as a geek and not an education minister. An education minister wants to know who to call when a laptop fails and the argument of "the children will repair the laptop" simply does not work in that environment, even if it ended up being true. The Community is a great resource of unparallel efficiency and professionalism, but it should never be counted on as the single source of support, nor it is reasonable for someone spending millions of dollars to rely soley on the well wishes of mailing lists and IRC channels.

Fifthy, Negropante, unpon pressure, decided to ditch the Free Software base he'd built up and emphasize the relationship with Microsoft as the mission changed from empowering children with a new learning tool to providing laptops to children. As soon as the mission shifted from knowledge to an object, the Free Software community left the project. We left because at that point the XO-1 went from being a realization of an ideal to just another hardware platform, and the flaws in the hardware, which had been tolerated now became impediments.

In other words, OPLC alienated partners, customers and the community.

And that's why it's failed.

How it should work

2008-09-04T13:00:53Z

When the powerful abuse their power, the masses rise up:

The API-enabled web and a better browser

2008-08-27T11:59:41Z

All the cool hipsters have seen Ubiquity- the new Mozilla Labs project.

If you haven't seen the video, you should. The easiest way to explain Ubiquity seems to be that it's command line + firefox command functions + greasemonkey.

If you don't know, firefox can already do simple functions on the command line. You can type "google foo" into the address bar and it'll do a search for you.

Greasemonkey is one of the best tools a programmer can have on the web. I've used it for simple things like making certain web sites at work easier to use. If you spend a significant amount of time in other people's web applications, you may find Greasemonkey can save you some precious sanity points.

Ubiquity appears to take both concepts a step further by making the entire browser aware of itself, and able to not only modify single pages but work with APIs.

It all looked a bit flashy until I thought of a few examples of common tasks I deal with that could be made easier via a command line. For example, why either pull up Remember The Milk or (at home) use Tasque when "rem Return that book to Susan" would work just as well.

I briefly read the tutorial on making a new vocabulary and it seems relatively straightforward so long as the service APIs you're using are straightforward as well.

One hope I'd have is that something like this becomes standardized enough that local applications have APIs that work with it, or conversely that local applications would have a simple hook into the Ubiquity system that would allow them to share the data in both directions.

I'm leaving for a few days but I guess I'll need to throw Ubiquity on the pile of nifty new tools to look at.

beobob helps identify used space

2008-08-25T00:55:49Z

Most disk space visualization tools are pretty poor. The exception to that seems to be baobab, a Gnome disk space analyzer.

The version shipping with Ubuntu Hardy has a nice circular visualization. It seems they've replaced that in the newer versions and are now shipping the tool with the core Gnome utilities. I hope they've kept the program as easy to use and visually descriptive as it is now.

I suggest trying it out.

emacsen @ 2008-08-22T11:23:00

2008-08-22T15:23:32Z

Never forgetting the Free in Free Software

2008-07-28T02:29:34Z

A few weeks ago I posted a reply to my local LUG list asking them to reference a large event as supporting both Free Software as well as Open Source (which had been the original title).

The replies I received amounted to "Shut the hell up", and one list member stating that people should fear me, I am "capable of anything".

I decided not to go to the event, a "picnic" as discussed. I'd received too many responses- not just negative responses but threats. Why go into a situation with such negativity when I could just as easily spend it at home with my girlfriend? Moreover, why bring her into a situation where she could be hurt, or at very least, be fearful of my safety?

But when I saw this same group hadn't had a speaker in about six months, I stepped up to give a talk.

The premise of the talk is the role of GNU/Linux and Free Software in the mobile phone. And to be sure, I'll cover the basics of both the Android and OpenMoko platforms, but at the same time no less than 1/3rd of the talk will be dedicated to Free Software, specifically the unique role that Free Software plays in this new computing platform, or more specifically, the dangers of non-Free platforms in this space.

The question I've had to ask myself is why. It's not so much the flamewars. I've been on the 'net in various forms since the mid-90s. Trolls and flamewars are part of the fabric of online life. What's changed for me is that the hostility has moved from one of ideas to personal attacks. These have never been part of the equation and I can tell you that up until now, I've never felt physically threatened by the FLOSS community.

There's also the question of why give a talk to a group which has been consumed largely with apathy and hasn't booked a speaker in so long. It wouldn't be an exaggeration for me to tell you that I weighed these views heavily when deciding to offer to give another talk.

The answer is that despite itself, the "Linux" community needs us in the Free Software community to remind them of what's really at stake. It riles people up when I openly criticize Linux. I honestly couldn't care less about the kernel, nor the Unix design in general. My main focus is on control, ensuring that the user remains in control of their machine and their data.

This is why I make the effort.

Developing a mobile app in a scripting language rant 1

2008-07-15T13:12:21Z

I'm using the qtopia image on the Freerunner. It's a mix of high stability with bling.

The most bling for your buck is the ASU image, however, and there's a lot of work people are putting into app development there.

One of the reasons I wrote the phone was to write apps. I began by looking at qtopia + python. There are Qt bindings for Python, so I assumed this would be easy.

Apparently not. There are Qt bindings for Python, but not qtopia bindings, so apps won't be completely Qtopia compatible.

There are Python apps on ASU now, but they're all using etk, the Enlightenment Toolkit. That is fine for the phone, but not as good for desktop development.

The situation is sub-optimal.

Phone

2008-07-03T15:57:00Z

Remember that Free Software phone I've waited to come out for years.

I just bought it.

Collect em all.

OpenMoko.com

Beer and iCal

2008-07-02T02:48:10Z

Just added iCal support to the SIG-Beer site.

You can now add a group's SIG-Beer events to your ical enabled application (Apple iCal, Google Calendar, GNOME Evolution, etc.).

I bitch pretty loudly about the lack of event calendars published in a machine-parsable way, so since I wrote an event database, I decided I should put the effort forth to support ical output

It's pretty trivial to do in django. It was only 22 added lines of code. Most of the work is associating the fields in the database with vcalendar fields.

LugRadio, the Free Software Community and Me

2008-07-01T01:50:15Z

Today the LugRadio team announced that the next show, their LugRadio Live show, would be their last.

LugRadio has been on five seasons. From the start, LugRadio did a great service to the community, bringing together a great cast of characters, a diversity of opinions, motives, humor and technical interviews with people in the Free Software community, including and in fact featuring names which have not traditionally been the most popular.

LugRadio is a staple to me, much like Linux Journal and other long time publications.

The difference is that LugRadio also brought a great sense of community, of oneness that has not been felt in (what was once called "The Linux community") for many years. When I was first introduced to Linux (1997) and for a long time afterward we were united in a common struggle as a small minority, we felt a kinship and a sense of familiarity. In fact, in those days it was easy to be only one or two people away from anyone else in the community. LugRadio, through its humor and interviews, gave the projects a human face and reminded us of the diversity of skills and motives we bring to the table and how each member of our community brings something which enriches the whole.

I am not looking at the show with rose colored glasses. I often disagreed strongly with the majority of the views, especially the de-emphasis on Free Software by everyone but Aq, and by the whole team's dismissal of Emacs, serious languages (Lisp, Haskell, etc.) and of the role of servers and system administration, but it was in showing these diversity of opinions that we could come together.3

I hope that the LugRadio team, even though they're going off the air, won't disappear entirely. I'm not exaggerating when I say that on the news of them canceling the show, I had a lump in my throat.

I'm sure I'm not the only one, and I sincerely hope that they know how much they've meant to myself and others.

Starbucks is UDP

2008-06-30T10:45:51Z

The other day I was feeling tired and decided to visit Starbucks for some iced-coffee.

The barista was busy, so at the counter I ordered a tall iced caramel macchiato.

The barista was busily making drinks for the crowd, and I waited.

Then he began making and serving drinks to the people who came after me in line, and I waited.

Eventually the woman behind the counter saw me and asked me what I was waiting on. I told her I was waiting on my caramel machiato.

She wrote something down and I kept waiting.

Eventually the barista came back and announced "Caramel Macchiato". It was hot.

"I ordered this iced.", I said.

He responded gruffly, "You didn't tell me that!" "I didn't tell you anything!" I was pissed because in addition to waiting, he was accusing me of telling him the wrong thing.

At this point I considered asking for my money back. Eventually I got my coffee and I began to leave.

As I did the same woman behind the counter came up to me and offered me a coupon for a free coffee.

It was at that moment I had a realization, Starbucks's ordering system is UDP.

When I go to CalTor, or other fast food places, they carefully take my order, put it in the computer and make sure each person gets the exact order. But doing that has overhead.

At Starbucks they have done away with the overhead and have replaced it with a lightweight system of order processing. And like UDP, most of the time it works well. For those few times it doesn't, the amount they save affords them the money to hand out free coffee.

Carlin

2008-06-23T11:58:00Z

George Carlin has died.

I'll be praying to Joe Pesci today in his honor.

Quick shoutout to RDFa

2008-06-21T13:55:28Z

I've been interersted in the Semantic Web for a long time. To you non-computer folk reading this, the Semantic Web is a collection of technologies which allows a computer to form associations between pieces of information. Eventually these associations can be used in interesting ways. For example if a computer can associate your list of interests with a list of events in your area, it may suggest an event you weren't aware of, or at the very least, make it possible for you to sort through the information in a more meaningful way. The important aspect of this technology is that it's a set of standards for interchange- it's decentralized like the web, and not connected with a single service.

RDFa allows semantic data to be integrated directly into HTML documents (because XHTML is XML and supports XML namespaces). This means as an application developer, adding semantic data to my web application is almost as easy as changing the color of text.

Galvanic Skin Responses

2008-05-27T13:01:51Z

According to this story from Marketplace, ABC and ESNP are embarking on a program to monitor viewers heart beats and galvanic skin responses.

Stories like this make me glad I've gotten off the TV hamster-wheel.