Public – My favorite restaurant in the city won a Michelin Star this year. Great ambiance, interesting dishes, great mixed drinks.

El Faro – Really great, real Spanish food, in a super-casual atmosphere. They’ve been open since 1927 in the same spot; this was my parent’s favorite dinner date spot. Have the paella a la valenciana, and/or mariscada with green sauce, and some sangria, then some flan or laruca for dessert. This place is super packed on weekends; it’s best to go early on a weekday.

Casellula – A really great, small wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen/Midtown West with an amazing cheese selection and good lite fare.

Casa Mono – More upscale Spanish restaurant with an amazing wine list.

At least one of Eleven Madison/The Modern/Tabla/Gramercy Tavern - Danny Meyer’s restaurants; Eleven Madison is particularly great (but more expensive than the others), but all are worth visiting. The Modern is inside the MoMA, but eat in the Bar Room; the Dining Room is not worth it. All of them consistently get great reviews and awards, and are known for their great service.

La Esquina – Good Mexican street food upstairs (very informal), dressed up Mexican downstairs (reservations required; good people watching).

Tarallucci e Vino – a nice wine bar-turned-restaurant with a good menu.

I have many, many more, but I’d start with those.

Clearly, all of these processes would have the same process group, so we just needed to kill the process group as a whole. My other colleague and I came up with a good, stupid simple solution that neither of us had immediately thought of. As it turns out, Perl’s kill() system call interface has an interesting caveat that allows you to kill processes in exactly this way: when the signal is specified as a negative number, the function treats the other parameters as process groups to kill.

Actually, it turns out a lot of systems and shells allow specifying the process group ID as negative numbers to kill command/built-in where the pids would ordinarily go to specify the same action. It’s too bad my colleague was using an old version of ksh.

I also happened to luck out with the weather: when New York was experiencing a heat wave, Portland was experiencing the largest number of consecutive, beautiful days that it has had in months.

Here’s a recap of some of the places I went.

Day 1:

• Heathman Hotel – My company has a behind-the-scenes deal with Heathman, so I was required to stay here. While I definitely wouldn’t have picked it myself out of the many hotel options available in Portland, I’m really happy that I stayed here and would totally do it again. The staff here are extremely friendly and the service is excellent. My room was small, but comfortable, well stocked, and pretty luxurious. The only negatives were a dearth of sunlight (there are only heavy curtains and a small, non-tinted window) and there was a strongly anticipated (read: hungover, see “Portland International Beerfest” below) breakfast room service order never arrived.

• Waterfront Bicycles – After dropping off my luggage at the hotel, I headed down to Waterfront Bicycles to pick up the bicycle I had reserved for the week. Interacting with the guys at the shop was enjoyable and they immediately picked up that I have a bit of an interest in bicycles. I got a Trek Hybrid that worked out pretty well, though part of me still wonders if I should have sprung for a more expensive road bike or even shipped my fixed gear from home. I even had a bit of an incident regarding a large stick killing a small, detachable component of my rear fender, which I pointed out but didn’t get charged for.

• Pine State Biscuits – While waiting for my plane in the airport, I overheard a cookbook author talk about how he only had one must visit restaurant on his list: Pine State Biscuits. I figured the idea of really good biscuits and gravy sounded amazing, so I decided to make this my first stop. Upon tasting their offerings, the only disappointment I experienced was that at some point in the near future, I would have no more amazing biscuits and gravy, and sweet tea. So delicious, this is a must visit destination. Apparently, this place gets packed on the weekends during peak hours, so do what I did: middle of the afternooon on a weekday.

• Saint Cupcake and Noun – I took a walk down the road and happened upon a cute little store front that houses both a cute little cupcake shop and a cute little kitchy shop. Both are worth visiting: the cupcake I had was delicious and I bought a cute little fabric sack as a case for my phone.

• Stumptown – Stumptown is the name in coffee right now, and it started in PDX. This particular outpost has a Stumptown cafe and their Annex, which sells over a dozen beans by weight. They also have daily coffee tastings, which I was fortunate enough to experience: the baristas take you on a guided tour of both how to taste coffee and what you’re tasting. It’s basically an open house on what they do when they source new coffees for their shop; moreover, it’s a time for the baristas to geek out about coffee and share their passion with their guests. Highly recommended.

• Chinese Garden – This is just an awesome example of a Chinese garden, situated in the middle of a city. Bring a book, find a place with a gorgeous view, and stay for hours.

• Clyde Commons @ Ace Hotel – I can’t recommend this strongly enough: I ended up at the bar three separate times because they have awesome food, even better bartenders, and they’re open ’til midnight. Every bartender is so passionate about his craft: most of my drinks were off-menu, spurred by a simple question of, “Can you make something that would go with this?” The storied burger is overrated, but the lamb is beautiful. I even recommend coming here alone, if you’re travelling that way, placing a book down at the bar, and striking up conversations with your neighbors.

• Tear Drop – More really, really good cocktails, and open late. While the bartenders here weren’t as interactive as those at Clyde, their offerings were nevertheless delicious.

Day 2:

• Manhattan Cafe – Needing a bite to eat before my massage, I stopped by this cafe, just down the street from my next destination. The service here was excellent, but otherwise, this was a good, ordinary cafe. Its large space would be very conducive to coming here to hack or meet with people.

• Zama Massage – Great massage at extremely reasonable prices, but in the middle of nowhere. Note that this is not a spa, so you won’t get the whole bathrobe and tea experience.

• Backspace Cafe – A huge cafe with lots of art that doubles as a music space at night. Be sure to come here to write some code with good coffee and check out the list of bands playing.

• Gilt Club – I highly recommend coming to this restaurant. While the locals seem to look down upon it for its haute culture food and ambiance (which they consider non-Portland-like), this Manhattanite really appreciated their work. I had a “Tracy’s First Love” (house-infused cucumber vodka, muddled cucumber, basil, and fresh line) and the Foie Burger, a beautiful combination of house-cured bacon with foie gras.

• Ground Kontrol Barcade – Hell yes: a dark, dingy, beer-serving arcade, with tons of games at quarter play, a live DJ spinning good music, and — more importantly — tons of pinball machines. This is a must visit, especially if you think Barcade in Brooklyn is awesome. I came here twice and that was too few. Don’t mind the weapons check upon entering.

Day 3:

• Portland Saturday Market – All the guide books and websites say this is a must see. I don’t: it was much like the generic street fairs in New York. There are a few t-shirt artists worth visiting here, though.

• Widmer Beer – Recommended. The tour isn’t amazing (ours was cut short due to activity in the bottling room), but it’s worth a visit. And you get a free bottle opener and pint glass. Definitely taste the IPAs in the Widmer brew pub, though.

• Amnesia Brewpub – This was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my trip: This is a great brewpub, with great brews, great bartenders, and a great space. Sit at the bar, have one of everything, and talk to the other locals. The location is off of the typical tourist rounds, (but|(and therefore)) is totally worth it.

• Random Order Cafe – I had some time between the brewpub and a show of some local punk bands that was recommended to me by the guys at Amnesia, so I perused the neighborhood. I stopped by this cafe due to their beautiful array of pies on offer. The Jamaican stone fruit pie did not disappoint; it was easily one of the best pieces of pie I’ve ever had.

• Tin Shed – A good local bar with lots of outdoor seating. The punk show I went to was entertaining and free. It’s worth visiting if you’re in the area and need food/beer.

Day 4:

• Bijou Cafe – I had a delightful Sunday brunch here. Not only did I find a copy of the Sunday Times on the counter, but even the off-menu fruit plate side was pretty innovative. (Fruit plates? Innovative? Hmph.)

• Stumptown (next door to Bijou) – The coffee was great as always, with a lot of seating, and good music playing. The line is long on the weekends, but feel free to stay a while and enjoy their stable wifi.

• Springwater Corridor and Sellwood – I’m really happy I made the trip down to Sellwood, which is pretty far from downtown Portland. Cycling along the Springwater Corridor (bike path) was worth it alone; when I come back, I’ll bring a racing bike and do this path properly. The path itself is separated from any roads for miles and supplies some amazing views of the Willamette River. Sellwood itself is a cute little area, with lots of antique shops and small restaurants.

• Powell’s Books – This is one destination that both locals and tour books recommend. I didn’t understand this: a bookstore is just a bookstore, right? I was surprised at how much time I spent perusing the books and kitchy items they have around the shop. It’s kind of like the Stand, but way better. I totally echo the recommendation to come here. Also, for geeks, go to Powell’s Technical Bookstore down the street: I found some awesome original reference manuals and very niche publications.

• Portland International Beerfest – This was fantastic. I was surprised to see how many unique, rarely seen beers were offered here. The VIP package is a great deal, so long as you spend many hours with your friends here with copiously long breaks: they serve 4oz pours.

  Some notable beers I had here:

  • Nectar Ales Black Xantus (seriously awesome, have at all costs)
  • Mikkeller Simcoe Single Hop
  • De la Senne Equinox
  • Caldera IPA
  • Sam Smith Yorkshire Stingo

Rest of trip

Most of the rest of my time was spent at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). I did visit two other places during the conference worth mentioning:

• Slow Bar – A good local bar with a really good burger, open late.

• Oregon Brewers Festival – This is a seriously big beerfest, with two different lawns lined with long tables full of delicious offerings, at a great location in the esplanade along the river. Spend all of your tokens at the Buzz tent, where the most unique and the rarest beers of the festival are served. I wish I was here for more than one of the days of the festival; I totally would have returned. And, at $20 for 14 pours (7 pours at the Buzz tent), it would have even been a cost-effective way to spend time.

  Some notable beers I had here:

  • Caldera Mogli (Seriously one of the best beers I’ve ever had. Try at all costs.)
  • 21st Amendment Mo’TCHO Risin’
  • Medocino Brewing Imperial IPA
  • Terminal Gravity Single Hop Double IPA
  • Laughing Dog Dogzilla Black IPA

Unvisited Recommendations

Other places that were recommended that I didn’t get to (aka the “When I go back to Portland…” list):

• Japanese Garden – Supposedly a really awesome garden.

• Rose Test Garden – Supposedly a really awesome garden, part deux. I hear the guided tours are worth attending (and free).

• Davis Street Tavern – This place looked really nice with a good menu. It suffers from the same complaints of locals that it doesn’t really fit in Portland, but the volume of patrons shows otherwise.

• Park Kitchen – I arrived just after the kitchen closed, so wound up at Gilt. I should have and will come back here at some point as the menu looked good and the bar manager (whom I met at another bar) is a really nice guy.

• Prost – A German beer place where supposedly they serve a large number of German/Austrian beers out of a boot. I presume that the boot is made out of glass.

• Hop Works Brewpub – I’m told the number of hoppy taps here are off the charts, with really good homebrews. It’s supposed to be the best brewpub in Portland.

• Green Dragon – Another awesome brewpub, recently purchased by Rogue (which has its own brewpub in Portland, but which itself isn’t recommended).

• Beaker and Flask – This looked like a really nice bar and restaurant and was recommended to me by a bartender at Clyde.

• Saburo’s Sushi – All of the locals swooned at the mention of Saburo’s. Try their specialty rolls.

• Deschutes Public House – The brewpub of a well-respected, Portland-based brand. The restaurant looked cool, and the brews I had elsewhere from Deschutes indicates the stuff they have on tap would be fantastic. This seemed to be the standard brewpub against which the locals would compare everything else.

• Bridge Port Brewing – The above description of Deschutes also applies here.

• Laurelthirst Public House – recommended to me, but I don’t remember why.

• Voodoo Doughnuts – I still don’t understand the attraction of this place, but locals and tourists both speak about with absurdly high regard.

• Podnah’s BBQ – comes highly recommended by a local.

• Laughing Planet – Hipster Mexican.

• Pok Pok – this one is supposed to be seriously off-the-hook.

General Recommendations

• Ask for recommendations from locals – People here are super friendly and really want you to experience the awesomeness that is Portland. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

• Food Carts – Where I thought food carts were pervasive in New York, the food cart movement has totally conquered Portland, and in a better way. There are so many different kinds and they’re located everywhere. Ask some locals about their favorites.

• Resist temptation: Drink in moderation – Don’t let a good night preclude your activities tomorrow; there are too many cool places to experience.

• Rent, borrow, or bring a bicycle - Portland is a fantastic pedestrian city, with a well-organized mass-transportation system. But, since the city is so bike friendly (bike lanes everywhere, pervasive bike racks, and even bike hooks on the trolley system), having a bike here makes life more fun and more convenient. Spend the money to get a good bike or ship your own here: you won’t regret it at the end of your trip, but instead wonder how you’d experience the city without a bike.

Resources

Pick up a copy of these free, really useful resources to help plan your trip:

• Portland Monthly and Mix magazine – both of these local magazines are free at hotels and have some good tips on local events and where to go.

• The Portland Mercury – a local newspaper sort of like the Village Voice for Portland. Good goings-on recommendations.

• Walking Maps (from MapClicks.com, but in paper form)- pretty much all the popular places (and hotels) have the same walking maps, one per neighborhood. Pick them up, but only use them as a guide to where the neighborhoods start and end.

• Finder – “Willamett Week’s Guide to Portland”, a pretty, annual publication. This one smells more of directory and tourist index, but still has good descriptions of places and a good organization.

• Brew-Ha! – a directory of Oregon brewpubs.

I wrote:

I work as a database administrator in a global team looking after a large financial institution’s relational database plant. For better or worse, this plant is 100% COTS; we’ll see what I can do to change that. While database administration in our group is awesome (computing + adrenaline = fun), I most enjoy the time spent writing internal tools in Perl and C, from compiled plugins for DB2 to automation solutions, and analyzing system faults in Linux. Evangelizing and teaching new trends, technologies, and best practices to my group is as important and enjoyable as the code I write, though. I love the reaction I get from disciples who finally realize and understand the power of git and zsh.

Now, if the result of all this crap, was that I could write my source-code and tell a tool where the files were, and not only assume, but actually trust that things would just work out, then I could live with it. But as it transpires, that is not the case

.

I received the error:

“You have not chosen to trust “UTN-USERFirst-Hardware”, the issuer of the server’s security certificate (SSL error 61).

The answer is fairly clear: we need to add this particular SSL cert, or the CA’s root cert into our trust anchor. To do this, we could save this cert and put it in the right place, or we can trust that OpenSSL has the appropriate root certs.

I chose the latter. To do this, we simply move the certificates trusted by the Citrix installation and symlink to the OpenSSL-based certs. Not rocket science.

$ sudo mv /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts.old $ sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/ssl/certs /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts

Voila. Retrying to connect to the Citrix (?:Xen)?(?:App)? Server works.

Muhammad Waving with Blue Rectangle (2010) for “Draw Muhammad Day”. Eric Garrido (American, born 1985) Digital Still, 449x384px

“Let us not become so tolerant, that we tolerate intolerance.” – Bill Maher

This document is an adaptation of the excellent Google App Engine Terms of Service. The original work has been modified with permission under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Google, Inc. is not connected with and does not sponsor or endorse Heroku or its use of the work.

I <3 Creative Commons.

But still find two-space-after-a-full-stop people funny.

• Bike Snob on Christian Rock in High Road of Missiles and Missionaries”

Strong winds and heavy rain pounded parts of the Northeast on Saturday, knocking out power to more than 450,000 customers, diverting international flights and toppling a boom crane at an Atlantic City casino construction site, injuring one police officer… The winds downed trees and power lines throughout New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut… Logan International Airport in Boston received nine overseas flights bound for New York because they no longer had the fuel to wait for clearance to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport, said Massport spokesman Matthew Brelis… In New York, ferry service to Staten Island was suspended Saturday night because of heavy winds.

In the distant future, someone will read this as if it were written in the 1800s and read today, and say something like:

• “Well, didn’t they have personal fusion devices then?”
• “Gosh, why didn’t they just transform the weather?”
• “I wonder what happened to the intergalactic flights.”
• “Who wants to go to Staten Island anyway?”

• Part 1: Semaphores
• Part 2: The Mutex
• Part 3: Mutual Exclusion Problems

Empire State Of Mind – Forest Hills State of Mind with Billy Eichner and Rachel Dratch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nS5QyNC24w

(via Gothamist)

Mu Empire: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX-Usf6PZIc

John Lennon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdu41dxtmug

Tip Your Bartender: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o98sNuauX0g

Ape Dos Mil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQzXLSQcKs0

Pink Roses http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouO8G1w-YPk

Pretty Lush http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZgzpqX-dxY

Siberian Kiss http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujdO_C43ybU

Babe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRjDija2lAY

Autobiography of a Nation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4t-ZduaYps

Signals Over the Air http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfVpOFp5zE4

Revolutions in Graphic Design http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy9Icmd_f7U

And DIllinger Escape Plan played even after the projection screen was dropped and the house music came on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNt5tZtPyBM

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46186505@N02/4242392980/

This was down the street and kind of beautiful:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46186505@N02/4242393164/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ninj0x/3749898579/

Thursday²

http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlie_cravero/3556470077/in/photostream

boston³

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beantown/3439594937/

craft beer⁴

http://www.flickr.com/photos/forklift/3267289921/

disaster⁵

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alinssite/4175517381/

bahn mi⁶

http://www.flickr.com/photos/umami88/33620171/

buses⁷

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelcr/2149129662/

(loud) music⁸

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wicks/2192531042/

(searching for) companionship⁹

http://www.flickr.com/photos/isolano/438509016/

warm bed¹⁰

http://www.flickr.com/photos/windysydney/2313779184/

brooklyn¹¹

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sethw/278250870/

vegetables¹²

http://www.flickr.com/photos/docman/5053155/

postcards¹³

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ocherdraco/3296009/

darkness¹⁴

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cosmic_spanner/3743184586/

1. IRO Bike 012 copy by Ninj0x, licensed under Creative Commons
2. thursday_01 by charlie_cravero, licensed under Creative Commons
3. Downtown Boston *E#1 by castevens12, licensed under Creative Commons
4. On Tap by forklift, licensed under Creative Commons
5. The Phillips ICU monitor by Alin_S, licensed under Creative Commons
6. bahn mi by u_m_a_m_i, licensed under Creative Commons
7. December 22 2007 by seaworthy, licensed under Creative Commons
8. At last, my meditation room awaits by A-Wix, licensed under Creative Commons
9. Love is companionship by isolano, licensed under Creative Commons
10. On My Bed by windy_sydney, licensed under Creative Commons
11. Riding Over the Williamsburg Bridge in the AM by Seth W., licensed under Creative Commons
12. Morocco, vegetable-market by docman, licensed under Creative Commons
13. Postcard Board by ocherdraco, licensed under Creative Commons
14. Into the darkness… by cosmic_spanner, licensed under Creative Commons

The following paragraph from Benvenuti’s book really made me step back and take a look at the bigger picture:

A device driver can also disable the egress queue before a transmission (to prevent the kernel from generating another transmission request on the device), and re-enable it only if there is enough free memory on the NIC; if not, the device asks for an interrupt that allows it to resume transmission at a later time. Here is an example of this logic, taken from the el3_start_xmit routine, which the drivers/net/3c509.c driver installs as its hard_start_xmit function in its net_device structure…

That passage is just brilliant. Count the occurrences of jargon there!

I guess i should read more arXiv papers to better understand how much larger the world actually is.

• The Ten Worst Muppets – I honestly don’t know all of the Muppets, but as a geek and someone who used to wear sweatervests, I resent that Dr. Bunsen Honeydew is listed as number eight. Dr. Honeydew has inspired generations of once-normal children to aspire to be inventors, engineers, and wear lab coats. Dr. Honeydew in action: Amusingly, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s archnemesis, as shown above, lives on in Rob Dobi‘s recent acquisition.
• Rep. Peter King (R-NY) Wants Military Tribunal For Plane Terror Suspect – Ergo Peter King only ever wants the Constitution applied when he deems it fit and proper. That clause has never been included in that document, no matter how much posturing politicians wanted it.
• XBMC 9.11 came out today and looks super awesome. Congrats to the XBMC team! I’m readying my box for it now.

Wednesday is Thursday (and Dillinger Escape Plan, and United Nations(!), and Glassjaw(!)). I’m super excited, especially after this post from Thursday:

thursdayband: Thinking up some surprises for the holiday set list!

I seriously have to finish an entire day of work with this anticipation?

By uploading your photos to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your photos on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites All images uploaded are copyright © their respective owners

I sent the following to the generic email address publicly available, even though Twitpic a service I only use as a content consumer, not as a content producer:

From: Eric Garrido To: support@twitpic.com Cc: Bcc: Subject: Please support Creative Commons Reply-To: Twitpic, Please consider supporting Creative Commons by allowing new users to specify to license their content by default under one of the available licenses, and specifying per-work that a CC license may or may not apply. Creative Commons makes for a more useful internet and should be actively encouraged where there is a democratized content creation arena. Please consider making the internet even better by allowing your users the choice of Creative Commons. Thanks, Eric Garrido

Creative Commons is an organization that has published a set of standardized, but evolving, copyright licenses intended to increase content sharing on the internet. As a content producer, you can choose who can use your work and in what manner. For example, this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License which allows normal people to repost whatever I’ve written as long as it is used non-commercially and they cite where the content came from.

Creative Commons is basically a legal democratizer for the internet. It allows you to share the content you’ve published publicly, since all content is immediately covered under a strict copyright law unless otherwise specified.

Please think about publishing your own work (on Flickr, your blog, or elsewhere) under one of the Creative Commons licenses.

Not all of those I read are below and to the right for other reasons.

Also, if anyone knows of any good links I might like or blogs of our friends, send them to me.

• Ars Technica – More edited than slashdot, but less good content.
• tongue but no door (dot) net – Todd and Tony (mostly), who are friends from Bard (and are now doing super awesome things)
• bdotr – Benny’s tumblr. Oooh. Pretty pictures.
• Bike Blog NYC – Happenings in the NYC Cycling scene.
• Brooklyn Bike And Board – Cool bike shop in Brooklyn.
• but we’re the best – Marisa, who needs to write more.
• Casey – Casey’s blog
• NYT City Room Blog – Inside gossip about my island.
• DreamHost Blog – My webhost’s hilarious blog.
• Events at the New York Academy of Sciences – They have awesome super-nerdy events all the time, often free.
• FinalGear.com News – The best way to get torrents of Top Gear.
• Linus’ Git Repo – A great way to keep up-to-date with Linux kernel changes and hot topics.
• Gothamist – NYC Survival Guide.
• I sleep with my hands across my chest – Jenn, who needs to update more
• John Napiorkowski’s Perl Development Blog – Cool Perl developer who has interesting things to say.
• Just a Theory – Another cool Perl developer who has interesting things to say.
• mollyclare.com – Molly, who is amazing.
• Musings of an Anonymous Geek – A sysadmin/sysdev guy.
• NewYorkology – Random posts about New York
• bwong notebook – Benny’s notebook.
• Nullsleep | Jeremiah Johnson – Nullsleep’s tumblr. Former boss, current badass.
• NYCLU – Events Feed – The local ALCU chapter’s events.
• nylug-announce – The New York Linux User Group’s events.
• OkTrends – OKCupid’s Statistics Blog.
• Pacific Standard Blog – A cool bar in Brooklyn.
• Perlsphere – a collection of Perl blogs.
• Schneier on Security – All hail god Schneier.
• Secret Science Club – Monthly geeky meeting in Brooklyn.
• Slashdot – The Holy Bible (that is updated every day!).
• SMBlog — Steve Bellovin’s Blog – An awesome security researcher at Columbia.
• steady footing – Laura’s tumblr.
• The Five Year Plan – Allison’s blog.
• The Sustainable Cyclist – Sustainability + Cycling = win.
• Thursdizzle – Best band in my entire head.
• Tree Lobsters! – Amazing webcomic about lobsters in trees!
• Varun’s Blog Feed – Varun, my brother.
• Whitney Live Blog – Whitney Live events.
• words via jon – Jon, who ____. (I forgot what I meant to say in the initial post, but Jon is also a great guy).
• xkcd.com – best web comic ever.
• xkcd blag – best web comic ever’s blog.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?></p>

<p><xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  exclude-result-prefixes="xhtml xsl xs"></p>

<pre><code>&lt;xsl:template match="body"&gt;
    &lt;ol&gt;&lt;xsl:text&gt;
</code></pre>

<p></xsl:text>
            <xsl:for-each select="outline">
                <li> <a href="{@htmlUrl}" ><strong><xsl:value-of select="@text" /></strong></a> - your text </li><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </ol>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet></p>

<p>

It isn’t 100% complete, but will get you a list of the form:

</p>

<ol>
    <li><a href="URL"><strong>Title</strong></a> - your text</li>
</ol>

<p>

In a sane interface to an operating system, you can run the following to produce transformed output, given the XSL above and an OPML file:

$ xsltproc extract.xsl google-reader-subscriptions.xml

Chechen terrorists did it in 2004. I said this in an interview with then TSA head Kip Hawley in 2007:

I don’t want to even think about how much C4 I can strap to my legs and walk through your magnetometers.

And what sort of magical thinking is behind the rumored TSA rule about keeping passengers seated during the last hour of flight? Do we really think the terrorist won’t think of blowing up their improvised explosive devices during the first hour of flight? For years I’ve been saying this:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

Moving Mountains – Lights And Shapes (Official Video) from Gregory Dunn on Vimeo.

One day soon, I promise I’ll post something with original content.

Helen Garrido, 3/22/1951 – 11/20/2009.

bdotr:

apidae:

purplewhales:

(via likeneelyohara)

“blah blah blah.” by miabania

1. What constitutes interesting conversation to you?
2. Who do you typically have this type of conversation with?
3. Does P=NP?

For some reason, I stopped there.

Some background reading for you non-computer scientists.

I wrote this over a year ago but never got around to publishing it; I’m quite frankly not sure how much Columbia has changed since graduating over two years ago, so some of this advice may be less applicable now than I can even imagine.

I guess a late addition would have to be, “Don’t eat the hot dogs in the vending machine in Lerner“.

• Take as many 6000-level (graduate) seminars as possible. These courses are the ones all computer science students look back on as models of a quality education. These courses were the most interesting in terms of curriculum content and work required, possibly because the professors were actively interested in the material. I met a lot of people who were similarly interested in the topic, and in computer science in general, and I was enabled to interact with some very cool professors.
• Take as many 6000-level (graduate) lectures as possible. Sometimes, a lecture-style setting will be all that is available because of enrollment. Still, these courses were challenging and rewarding.
• Don’t wait to take silly, required courses like Physics Lab or Probability until your last semester. I guarantee from experience your life will become composed of dread going to these basic classes, knowing you only need them to graduate. They really put a downer on your finishing lap. If all else fails (which is exactly what you shouldn’t do with these courses), try to take them with friends to take the edge off.
• Don’t take Physics 2600 unless you’re really a physics student.
• Yes, even if you got a 5 on the AP.
• Yes, even if you think you’re a pretty smart fellow.
The course is hard. The people who say it’s easy either are playing to their own ego, lying, or are legitimately smart and talented (the kind who go to the bathroom and figure out an insanely hard homework problem out while doing it). Just being in a room with the latter kind of student and the professor, Norman Christ, made it somewhat worth it. The real value for me came in the realization that I’m not good at everything, that I can fail, and that I have a lot of better things I could be doing than trying to feed my own ego and living up to all expectations. The course grew me intellectually while doing very little for me academically, given that I’m not a physics god. That said, college in its entirety would have been a lot different had I not taken it.
• Find a passion, if you don’t have one already. And if you think you have one, reconsider it and/or find a new one. The people that have a passion are more interesting to talk to and are more in love with life. They see the world in a slightly different tint. They become more focused, out of discipline for the subject. They strive to move forward, instead of lagging. They understand how to transform an interest into a lifestyle. I always wanted to ask the people who didn’t have “any clue” what they’re doing after college what they spent their last few years doing instead of discovering themselves. You have four short years. Use them in the search for wisdom.
• Cry once in a while. Sometimes you might find yourself in a hard position, or in a situation that is deeper than you thought you could dig, and certainly bigger than you’d like to deal with. That’s ok. College is the last chance for you to safely and routinely do this, have dozens of people around you to help you out, and still be able just to take a step back for some perspective. It’s okay to get yourself in over your head; that’s how you define limits. In fact, I argue that if you don’t get yourself into these situations during college, you’re doing it wrong. You’re not pushing yourself hard enough. If you do it early on, college will be awesome by senior year. I distinctly remember calling home to my parents in tears over mental walls I hit. I felt horrible and pathetic at the time, but it was definitely formative and developmental for the years to come. Thank you, Mom and Dad.
• Get out of the Upper West Side and experience the city. You’re going to Columbia University in the City of New York, not Columbia College in the City of Columbia, Missouri. Go see a show, a concert, go to that bar your friend told you about, the restaurant that got a good review in the Times. Go see and do things. Oh, and: Read gothamist regularly. Figure out:
  • The rules of how many blocks equals a mile (~20).
  • How to tell which way is North (odd-numbered street addresses on numbered streets).
  • The orientation and arrangement of proximate bridges (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, 59th St…)
  • …and main landmarks (especially helpful in The Rambles of Central Park).
  • Know the direction of the clouds (generally East-ish) or the movement of the sun (East to West)).
  • Learn more than just the Upper West Side subway stops.
  You might become a real New Yorker just yet. (And, if you do,
  • Please offer directions to strangers who are looking at maps at a street corner.
  • Pick up random pieces of litter and properly dispose of them, even if they aren’t yours.
  • Stand to the side when people are getting on or off of any form of mass transit.
  • Pay attention and be cognizant to how you are affecting other people’s environments.
  • Hold doors for strangers. Say “please” and “thank you.”
  • And for your mother’s sake, even smile at strangers every now and then.
  You might even make New York a better place to live in).
• Live on campus. A huge part of the undergraduate community is formed simply because walking drunkenly between dorms at 5am after watching 18 episodes of Lost is not a big deal. Make sure you do well enough in academics so your parents don’t know this kind of thing happens and so they allow you to stay on campus.
• Make friends with people who bake. This is particularly advantageous during finals for obvious reasons.
• Take the lower-level CS courses in order. Don’t think that you’re a hot-shot and should be exempt. Some very smart people took a considerable amount of time to figure out what you should be learning when and at what pace. I was the bloke who decided I’m better than the standard curriculum and had to keep my head barely above water the whole time. It was fun and challenging, but I would have been a better, more well-rounded student had I done the normal thing. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have been able to take as many 6000-level courses and I’m definitely a better technologist for having been exposed to advanced concepts early. If you take the curriculum as prescribed (again, which you should), you will inevitably come to topics, sections, or projects, that you don’t enjoy or that are old news. Deal with it responsibly. Read a related, more advanced book that is highly respected. Spend a little more time on your project implementing some extra functionality or incorporating some other technology (especially if it relates to your interest; say, integrating Apache Lucene into a Advanced Programming project or using both Postgres and MySQL for your database project and comparing transactional throughput). You won’t have the time to do this. You’ll be too busy following the rest of my advice. My recommendation: make the time.
• Create something amazing. This is one of the only opportunities in the rest of your life where there is such a huge concentration of interesting, curious, creative people. Use that to your advantage by creating something, something so awesome and consuming that you’ll think back about the weeks (and early mornings) you spent implementing it.
• Get really active in an extracurricular activity.
  • Especially if it’s the ACM.
  • If not, explore your culture.
  • If not, explore your interests.
  • If not, attend events designed for amusement.
  • If not, explore someone else’s culture and reap the rewards of good, free food.
  Groups of like-minded people can be empowering. First, you have the management committee who are interested enough in a given topic to do real work to create events that will interest others. Those are good people to be around as they tend to be creative, dynamic, and even sometimes passionate. (And, if nothing else, they are useful for drinking circles). Then, you have the events themselves, which are designed to get you more information, more opportunities, and more fun, which are never bad things. I made many great contacts through the organization I was most heavily involved with and definitely got a job through it. I also ate a lot of deliciously free food. Being an officer in any organization is highly recommended. It shows you have the organization and the excess capacity to do something highly formalized in your free time for the betterment of others. That’s pretty powerful and commands respect. A word on the ACM (not the Apostolos Campus Ministry). The Association for Computing Machinery (note that it is “for” not “of”; this is a large semantic difference: I am not a piece of computing machinery) is an organization that has a lot of potential to unify all of the computer geeks on campus and get people interested in computing. It does this better some years than others. During my tenure there, we were unable to realize our vision of what the ACM should be. That is a strong regret I have to this day. That said, the officers of that organization try very hard to have good programming. Check it out.
• But don’t overcommit to too many groups. Contributing is admirable. Being elected to a post is good for your resume, ego, and sense of self. But, trying to be 42,397 presidents at the same time is good for no-one. You may be skilled, but target that skill. No one likes to work with someone who is over-committed.
• Get a job related to your interest. Start with getting any job with real responsibilities, where your execution impacts a larger community than just yourself, where you can show your reliability. Then, if not already, get a job aligned with your interest. (This latter recommendation, however, should be taken seriously throughout life). After that, ride the opportunities that arise from it. Being an open-source programmer and team leader was much more appealing to me (and to prospective employers) than being a theater technician (my first job at college).
• Get a job or hobby not related to your main interest. Being a theater technician was a hell of a lot of fun and filled a lot of voids that computer science just cannot possibly fill. I still miss its physicality horribly.
• Take some classes related to a secondary interest. Taking “Kings, Caliphs and Emperors: Images of Authority During the Crusades” was humbling, intensely interesting (the professor was a fantastic instructor), and useful at cocktail parties simply because of its name. Oh, and there were cute girls to interact with about a topic they adored.
• See the sunrise every now and then. It’s quite beautiful. Make the number of times you see the sunrise for academic reasons equal the number of times you see the sunrise for social reasons. This is called work/life balance.
• Go to professors’ and TAs’ office hours. I was told this constantly and I never executed on it until senior year. Then I realized: most professors and all TAs are very interested, both personally and professionally, in helping you succeed. They really will take time out of their extremely busy schedules so that you can learn. Office hours are where the student-teacher relationship is nurtured. Coincidentally, that relationship can simultaneously break down, as professors can transition to become allies and friends.
• Don’t live in Carman freshman year. That is, unless you should have gone to a party school. Don’t be afraid of other dorms; you will make friends regardless of where you end up. I made my first real friends while I stood alone on a long line for free ice cream during orientation. (Friends, mind you, that I desperately need to call).
• If you should have gone to a party school, don’t go to Columbia. Your spot could be filled with someone who actually is an intellectual and doesn’t just pretend to be one on his or her application.
• Take pictures along the way. This may be the only way you remember college, as the rest of it could be filled with sleepless nights at Butler, in the lab, and on the bar at Lion’s Head.
• Have fun. Corollary: Get out of your dorm room.

Next in my series of reflection: tools and technology I know today that I wish I knew about before.

Me on Twitter yesterday: “Had to hack Moose::Meta::Method::throw_error() to make it Carp::confess() to tell how an attribute constraint was being violated. Grrr.” and “T’was the attribute builder that did it.”. This isn’t the first time that I’ve had to muck with throw_error() to tell what’s going on. Only showing the stack from the caller and up makes debugging harder.

Oh no. Is the Internet going to stoop to using Twitter for bug reports and requests for enhancements? I certainly hope not. 140 characters of gripe an RFE does not make.

At least he didn’t have to shorten his posts by removing random vowels.

(Stolen from bdotdub.)

If only she were actually saying hi to me.

Maybe I should start using that name more often.

    * While The Pasta Cooks
        * Pasta with Greens
            * Spaghetti with Spinach, Bacon, and Toasted Bread Crumbs
            * Spaghetti with Greens, White Beans, Bacon, and Toasted Bread Crumbs

Let’s be honest: bacon does make vegetables taste better. Meat haters are missing out.

(That said, I <3 vegetables.)

1. Trademark: At least three computing devices on me at one time, my noises.
2. Pet Peeve: Those who do not signal when turning in a car.
3. Idol: Richard P. Feynman
4. Weakness: Binary, mathematics and science, a good espresso.
5. Favorite Saying: “Polymorphism”.
6. Most Prized Possession: My palm pilot.
7. One Wish: To make a difference in someone’s world.
8. Life Ambition: To make a lasting scientific advancement after I obtain a Ph.D.
9. Quote: “It’s perfectly fine to use the name of your pet or child as a password. However, for the sake of security, make sure the names of all your pets and children contain several non-alphanumeric characters” – Lore Sjoberg

Three stars

• Daniel (N)
• Jean Georges
• Le Bernardin
• Masa
• Per Se

Two stars

• Alto (N)
• Corton (N)
• Gilt
• Gordon Ramsay at The London
• Momofuku Ko
• Picholine

One star

• Adour
• Annisa
• Anthos
• Aureole
• A Voce (N)
• Blue Hill
• Bouley (N)
• Café Boulud
• Casa Mono (N)
• Convivio (N)
• Del Posto
• Dressler
• eighty one
• Eleven Madison Park (N)
• Etats-Unis
• Gotham Bar and Grill
• Gramercy Tavern
• Insieme
• Jewel Bako
• Kajitsu (N)
• Kyo Ya
• L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon
• Marc Forgione (N)
• Marea (N)
• Minetta Tavern (N)
• Modern (The)
• Oceana
• Perry Street
• Peter Luger
• Public
• Rhong-Tiam (N)
• River Café (N)
• Rouge Tomate (N)
• Saul
• Seäsonal (N)
• Shalizar (N)
• SHO Shaun Hergatt (N)
• Soto (N)
• Spotted Pig
• Sushi Azabu (N)
• Sushi of Gari
• Veritas
• Wallsé

$ for cmd in sed grep cat find telnet init exit ; do echo -n $cmd= ; grep -c “$cmd ” ~/.zhistory; done sed=85 grep=875 cat=762 find=126 telnet=15 init=32 exit=33

Which is interesting to me. I can explain some of the counts:

• I run ‘cat $file | (grep|sed|awk) | …’ too often out of a good/bad habit.
• ‘exit’ is small because I’ve bound ”x’ to exit (which itself is a bad habit; I should have just started using ‘Control-D’.
• ‘ssh’ > ‘telnet’
• I don’t have root, so ‘init’ isn’t really used, and my regex isn’t careful enough to eliminate ‘disk_init’.
• ‘sed’ is mega-useful, but is usually the second command in a pipeline. I want to start using ‘perl -pe’ more.

The GNU Make Manual has a section on automatically generating prerequisites, which only gets you part of the way.

I owe a good deal of gratitude to Tom Tromey and Paul D. Smith for creating and writing up instructions on how GNU Make can automatically generate dependencies for source files. They discuss even better ways of generating dependency files and build upon the GNU Make Manual method.

This is just true:

It is this week evident that the greatest threat to the nation… is not terrorism… nor the economy… nor H1/N1… nor even bad health care. It is rank, willful stupidity. When did we come to extol stupidity ahead of information, and rely on voo-doo, superstition, and prejudice ahead of education?

Brand New, Welcome to Bangkok

Photo Credit: “Purple Ball Flowers” by Cheddarcheez licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

So catchy:

Served:

mbsync supports bi-directional synchronization between a local Maildir structure and an IMAP server and is very pretty.

1. Biking in the rain is hella fun.¹ The feeling of the rain pelting against your face, being saturated with water, and having a brotherhood amongst the other bikers on the route… it’s just awesome. Highly recommended. I’ll even go with you, voluntarily.
2. But it may only be fun if you have eye protection. I happen to wear glasses, so I have eye protection wherever I go. It’s definitely worth carrying any type of protective eyewear on a rainy day.
3. It gives you a really good excuse to clean your bike. Well, the frame and exterior bits, anyway. Because all you have to do is scrub it a bit more and wipe it down. We all wash our bikes far less than we should.
4. Chrome bags are also awesome. The outside of my Chrome bag: totally saturated with water. The inside? Totally dry. It wasn’t even shut properly by the user, but it came through with flying colors. While I love to this day the backpack for which I substituted my Chrome bag, it definitely would not have this property.
5. Your shoes will be squishy. Okay, not great, but still super fun.

1. I learned the word “hella” when visiting Dan in California a few years ago.

This should have made it into the trilogy¹. (via totallycrap).

1. remember: there was only the original trilogy

Nor can I find any reason why that is the way it is, but it is most certainly appreciated.

Yup, I’ll get right on emailing you about you not being able to serve me advertisements.

The most interesting part of it to me, though, was the by-line:

Michael Osinski, a former computer programmer, is an oyster farmer.

Interesting life decision. I’d like to know more about that.

for i in <code>/bin/grep USB /proc/acpi/wakeup | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}'</code>; 
do 
    echo $i > /proc/acpi/wakeup; 
done

/proc/acpi/wakeup will then look something like:

$ cat /proc/acpi/wakeup
Device  S-state   Status   Sysfs node
PCI0      S5     disabled  no-bus:pci0000:00
PEX0      S5     disabled  pci:0000:00:1c.0
PEX1      S5     disabled  pci:0000:00:1c.1
PEX2      S5     disabled

PEX3      S5     disabled

PEX4      S5     disabled

PEX5      S5     disabled

HUB0      S5     disabled  pci:0000:00:1e.0
IGBE      S5     disabled

USB0      S3     enabled   pci:0000:00:1d.0
USB1      S3     enabled   pci:0000:00:1d.1
USB2      S3     enabled   pci:0000:00:1d.2
USB3      S3     enabled   pci:0000:00:1a.0
USB4      S3     enabled   pci:0000:00:1a.1
USB5      S3     enabled   pci:0000:00:1a.2
EHC1      S3     disabled  pci:0000:00:1d.7
EHC2      S3     disabled  pci:0000:00:1a.7
AZAL      S5     disabled  pci:0000:00:1b.0

and voila: when your Linux box suspends, you can wake it up by pressing any key on your USB keyboard.

from “Geek Chic | A Matter of Fractals” by Sandra Ballentine in the New York Times. Made by Boucheron.

See Wikipedia’s Julia set article.

“I think it addresses a niche market for high end data analysts that want free, readily available code,” said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

Anne Milley, you’re doing it wrong.

Dear New York City government,

Please don’t sell our city, like some other bloke did to his.

Thank you kindly, Eric

Below is a list of the beers we sampled. Italics indicates that it was really damn good. Admittedly though, I don’t think there was a beer that I wouldn’t mind having again.

• Anderson Valley Brewing Company Summer Solstice: American Cream Ale
• Bear Republic Brewing Company Crazy Ivan: Belgo/American Amber Racer 5 IPA: California IPA
• Berkshire Brewing Company Nitro Coffee: Nitrogenated porter with organic coffee beans
• Cisco Brewers Indie: IPA The Grey Lady: Belgian Wheat with citrus zest Whale’s Tale Pale Ale: English style pale ale
• Flying Dog Brewery Double Dog: Double Pale Ale Old Scratch: Amber Lager Woody Creek White: Witbier
• Foothills Brewing Sexual Chocolate Imperial Stout: Imperial Stout infused with cocoa nibs
• Honest Town Brewery Southbridge Ordinary Bitter: Ordinary Bitter
• John Harvard’s Brew House Mobay Stout: Jamaican Swestrong Stout
• Kennebec River Brewery Kennebec River Porter: Kennebec River Summer Ale
• New Holland Brewing Company Dragon’s Milk: Oak Aged Ale
• Opa Opa Brewing Co Watermelon Ale
• Prstrongty Things Beer and Ale Project Jack D’Or: Saison Americain Saint Botolphs Town: Northern English Brown
• Shmaltz Brewing Co Coney Island Human Blockhead: Imperial Amber Barleywine-style Munich Vienna Lager HE’BREW Bitterswestrong Lenny’s RIPA: Rye-based Double IPA HE’BREW Rejewvinator: Half Dopplebock, Half Belgian Inspired Dubbel brewed with date juice
• Terrapin Beer Co. Special Taco Mac 30 Year Anniversary Ale: Brewed with 30 ingredients
• The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery Barrel Aged Porter: Aged in 23-year old Pappy Van Winkle barrels Duck-Rabbit Milk Stout: Milk/Swestrong Stout Duck-Rabbit Rabid Duck Russian Imperial Stout
• Watch City Brewing Co ClockWork Summer Ale: Fruit Flavored Kolsch
• Woodstock Inn Brewery Kanc Country Maple Porter: Brewed with maple syrup Pigs Ear Brown Ale

The essay is divided into eight parts that discuss the various theories as to why there has not been a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11:

I. The Terrorists-Are-Dumb Theory: 9/11 was a lucky shot, being a big-time terrorist is hard. II. The Near-Enemy Theory: It’s easier to attack the closer enemy (Iraq, Afghanistan) than far (US soil). III. The Melting-Pot Theory: The US has been more successful in assimilating Muslims into society. IV. The Burden-Of-Success Theory: It’s hard to do better than 9/11, so don’t. V. The Flypaper Theory: It’s easier to attack Americans in the Middle East than in the US. VI. The He-Kept-Us-Safe Theory: Part of why George Bush will be considered the worst president in United States history. VII. The Electoral-Cycles Theory: (Non-)Correlation of terrorist attacks with US electoral events. VIII. The Time-Space Theory: Applying rational-choice theory to terrorism.

My new daydream for my future. Maybe I should start wearing sweater vests.

The midtown offices would probably have none of that

Next wish: provide centralized bike parking. Or at least non-rotating doors that actually open.

[discharging 58%] SLEEP HIBERNATE REBOOT SHUTDOWN LOCK

The script uses ratmenu to actually display the menu and uses dbus to send signals.

download ratpower.sh

1. Learning Perl (by reading some random guy’s series of emails, and subsequently by memorizing Programming Perl, my bible) – I learned Perl during college for a job I wasn’t really qualified for. Knowledge of Perl has opened more doors than I can imagine.
2. Brooks Brothers No-Iron Pants and Shirts – I’m a huge fan of these for work clothing. I spend zero minutes a week ironing.
3. My new Dahon mu p8 folding bike – since I bought it, I haven’t been on a subway and have never been more mobile. Life just feels better when biking every day.
4. Kinesis’ Advantage keyboard and Logitech’s Trackman Wheel mouse – For a while, I was bringing my work Kinesis home on weekends. Now, I have the pair both at work and at home because I love the setup so much.
5. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson – I will never think of Alan Turing or Pearl Harbor in the same way. (Thanks Brendan!)
6. GNU Screen, Mutt, and Ratpoison – While I’ve used GNU screen for its detach/attach feature when doing Gentoo compiles in my adolescence, I started seriously using Screen seriously about 1.5 years ago. Discovering hardstatus was the key to using it as a constant tool. Mutt is just how email should be. Ratpoison harmoniously unifies the world and throws out the extra junk one’s computing experience doesn’t need, especially when living in only Firefox, Mutt, and Vim.
7. Being on the right subway platform at the right time – Ah circumstance.
8. Google Maps and Reader – I recently didn’t have a phone for a few weeks and realized how lost I can become. Reader has become my de facto news source and an activity with with I begin and end my day.
9. Post-hardcore music – As with all music I like, I hated it at first, but have become devoted to it (for better or worse).
10. Having a kitchen timer in the shower – I really like taking long showers, like most people, but it is not conducive to either time or energy efficiency. Having a timer in the shower has vastly cut my shower time down. Admittedly, I’ve increased it to 4.5 minutes instead of just 4, but it still beats the national shower time of 8 minutes.

I’ll come up with more another day.

Part one was getting the data from Delicious, which is the obvious choice for bookmarking. They make it really easy to get all bookmarks made on the last day of activity with a given tag with their posts/get function. To get all bookmarks I made today with a tag of “viewed”, I simply ran:

$ curl 'https://minusnine:password@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get?dt=2009-04-07&tag=viewed' > todays.xml

which saves an XML form of the posts.

Transforming the XML into a list is a trivial task but I saw two approaches: sed would do nicely for the crufty old sysadmin in me, but XSLT satisfies the young whippersnapper in me.

The XSLT is very simple and elegant:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"></p>

<p><xsl:template match="/posts">
    <span>Posts around the web that I found interesting today:</span>
    <ul>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="post">
        </xsl:apply-templates>
    </ul>
</xsl:template></p>

<p><xsl:template match="post">
    <li>
        <a href="{@href}">
            <strong>
                <xsl:value-of select="@description"/>
            </strong>
        </a>: <xsl:value-of select="@extended"/>
    </li>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Combining these with xsltproc:

$ xsltproc posts.xsl todays.xml

yields a cut-and-pastable post. The next step is to pipeline these (also trivial) and upload it to my WordPress installation.

• MathWorld’s page on Pi: Always fascinating to read crazy facts about mathematical constants.
• Ignite: It’s Really Just a Series of Tubes: An interesting 5 minute talk on the intracity pneumatic tubes used for communication.
• Upgrading to 9.04 and Ext4 Remotely: Don’t do this, but this will be useful for me in the coming weeks.
• New Filing: DOJ claims immunity in wiretapping case: I’m sad that the Obama DOJ not only embraces the legality of domestic wiretapping, but they’ve produced a new legal doctrine that basically says the president is above the law. Glenn Greenwald gives a detailed analysis.
• Co-founder of Starbucks exclaims his love for his French press: I have mixed feelings about mine.
• Super-expensive bike store in TriBeCa, sales down: Leah and I walked by the other day; she asked me why I didn’t buy my bike here. This article explains why.
• Self-appointed traffic cop in Washingon Square: Give me 23 years and I might be this guy.
• Water Tanks in NYC: It’s nice to know a bit more about the water tanks on buildings in my town.

Subject: Re: [HACKERS] hstore improvements? Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:35:29 -0400 “David E. Wheeler” writes: > Is a more Perlish syntax out of the question? Yes. SQL is not Perl. regards, tom lane

I just want to say that my friends, some new, some old, made my day today. Between a great email, a fun day at work, a great conversation over good beer, and no less than two good packages from friends, today was amazing. This entire week has been good for similar reasons.

Amazing.

YouTube – Travis Barker Remix Soulja Boy “Crank That”.

Or worse. There was even a recent case, according to several security contractors, in which Filipino crew members pelted pirates with tomatoes in an attempt to stop them from scaling the hull of their ship. It did not work.

From “Pirates in Skiffs Still Outmaneuvering Warships Off Somalia” by Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times.

Anyway, two choice quotes from my weekend, emphasis mine:

From a Sybase ASE error log:

2008/12/07 02:34:34.40 server Error: 9970, Severity: 20, State: 1 2008/12/07 02:34:34.40 server DBCC cannot update the finish time in dbcc_operation_log table for this operation(opid = ’182′) of database ‘sybsystemprocs’. This can be patched by executing sp_dbcc_patch_finishtime.

I love software that has been patched to tell you how to actually fix the issue but won’t actually fix it for you.

Next up, an email from a first-level system administrator:

We see that the host is now responding. But host is on high load. Please check your applications. piias1332 /ms/user/v/venusrin 63$ rup pisdb38 pisdb38 up 29 days, 2:42, load average: 1.77 1.73 1.62

Um. No. Just no.

(Makes meeting girls at bars difficult).

(Now if only I had an apatosaurus [on which] to ride…)

The other day, I discovered the service menu on my one year old Samsung LCD television. It was glorious: gone are the terms “color”, “brightness”, and “tint” for controlling how the picture looks. In are the terms “LVDS_TX_Bit”, “Nor_Roffset”, and “SVP-PX”, which clearly are more powerful simply because they are unintelligible. “I will attract sexy women with a better picture using advanced settings!”, I exclaimed!¹

Among the new menu items is “Calibration”. I figured, “Sure! Calibration is a good thing! I want my TV to be calibrated!” and clicked it. Over the next few minutes, my television scanned various hues in an attempt to find the right color palate for my viewing pleasure.

But then everything was tinted way red. I mean, even grays were showing up reddish. It was bad. So bad that using the normal “tint” and “color” parameters couldn’t fix it. The default factory reset yielded no ground to my new tint overlords. The service menu factory reset did not do any justice either. It was bad.

Then I read on the Samsung TV FAQ on the Service Menu the following:

Calibration: STAY OUT. DO NOT TOUCH. You have been warned, this is designed to be run in the factory or onsite with specialized hardware outputting specific images. You can ruin your set if you use this.

Damn. Truer words may never have been written.

Various people around the internet say that getting a professional calibrator is the only real way out of that, which can cost around $300, about half or more of the value of the equipment. Then I read that all Samsung does is feed a pattern from a signal generator (which both makes sense and can’t actually be accurate since we’re talking about a digital HDMI input), which means that a layperson should be able reproduce the calibration image.

But what is the image? Color tones? Grayscale? Boxes? A random internet meme?

I tried color tones first for no reason other than they seem common enough for television calibration. Colors returned closer to normal, but still wrong.

Some other guy on the internet² says that a Samsung support guy told him that they use a checkerboard pattern. So, I used a checkerboard pattern and restarted calibration: colors are (more or less) back to normal. There is some ambiguity because I can’t really compare the before and after, and I feel like blacks were blacker before.

But, at least Jessica Alba looks human-like now.

My advice? Don’t mess with the service menu unless you actually know what you’re doing, regardless of level of intellectual curiosity³.

1. Well, I didn’t actually say or think that. In reality, I knew that watching old episodes of Battlestar Galactica alone might look better.
2. who should obviously be trusted
3. That said, you can get to it on Samsung TVs by pressing “Mute”, 1, 8, 2, “Power”, one after the other. Caveat emptor.

via Dreamhost Blog.

About: [some open source project] is a real-time collaboration (RTC) server. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). [some open source project] is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance. Changes [in the new version]: A security flaw allowed authentication to be bypassed, allowing arbitrary code execution. This was fixed. JDBC and JID optimizations were done.

(Emphasis mine).

Wait, really? rock-solid security != arbitrary code execution, last time I checked.

Old school 311.

the Machine Shop at Columbia University’s Physics Department.

Here is how Reader renders initially for me:

Hovering over the left edge of the page reveals the sidebar expansion tab:

And expanding the sidebar immediately reveals the content of the page:

I haven’t dug into Firebug to see why this is the case yet, but it should be fixable with a Stylish or Greasemonkey script, I’d imagine.

Update: Mihai from the Google Reader team provides this work around in the comments: “The ‘blank screen’ problem seems to be caused by a negative page zoom value (while the screen is blank, you can try going to to the View menu, and in the Zoom submenu choose Reset).” Thanks Mihai!

Wait, what?

Shuttle SG33 Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz 2 x 1GB DDR2 DIMMs Cheapo ATI Radeon X1650 ( 2 x DVI-D) 2 x Acer x243w 24″ LCDs (yes, that’s 2!)

(I already had cheap hard disks, a gorgeous mouse, and a nice keyboard; though, I envision I’ll be bringing the love of my life home from work more often).

I purchased all of the parts from newegg, as they were offering some good specials for pretty much all the components, including free shipping for the monitors, which arrived the next day.

Assembling and getting the machine running was mostly without issue. The only complaint I have about the hardware is that the graphics card fan is extremely loud, something I will have to remedy in the coming weeks. Since I’m not a hardcore gamer anyway, I tried just unplugging the fan, but the card temporarily died a few minutes later. It does run extremely hot. That’s what you get when you skimp on an important component and don’t consult slientpcreview.com beforehand.

I’ve found UNetbootin to be an invaluable tool despite the horrible name. I ran out of CD-Rs a long time ago and don’t care to buy any more. UNetbootin has saved a considerable amount of time by transferring an iso+bootloader onto a hard drive. Highly recommended.

Getting X to deal with spanning across two monitors was a bit of a pain: the ATI Catalyst Control Center is broken and segfaults before the configuration is written out to disk but after the settings are applied to the driver. It took some poking around to realize that after setting the monitors up properly in Catalyst, then running the vanilla screen resolution manager, then blindly clicking “Apply”, the settings become static.

I also had an issue where the max_cpu_freq for all four cores was static at 1.6 GHz and Intel Speed Step (EIST) did not work. This was resolved by upgrading the bios to the latest version, which is annoying when not running Windows and not owning a floppy drive. I got around this by following these instructions on creating a bootable USB disk with FreeDOS. Admittedly, that is kind of a roundabout way of installing DOS to a disk (requiring installing a DOS emulator), but it works, where the other methods were far more complicated and had mixed results.

Now that I have a sweet rig and some more time (the latter due to life events), I hope to hammer out code more often. I have an idea to write a version of rup that has the same features as fping, or at least times out in a reasonable period.

And, now that Ubuntu Ibex is out, I need to try getting my PS3 running Linux again. Sadly, it still doesn’t support WPA at the moment, meaning I need to get/fetch from home a really long ethernet cable.

Update: Despite this new rig, I’m still kind of jealous of NYCR.

even curmudgeons need to experience life outside the cave every once in a while. we’ll see how it goes. remember: the sun burns.¹

That’s not the whole story. I realized that I’m losing touch with a lot of my friends, mostly due to my hectic schedule, somewhat due to being selfish, and a little because I don’t have an adequate mechanism to shoot random ideas at people and get some back. While I think the idea of writing a less-than-140-character message expressing a random idea that probably no one will care about is a useless one, the idea of having a friend read my thought and think about that idea, having implicitly just communicated with me, is not a bad one. I get the same in receipt.

That, and it takes little effort to either send or receive, so the addition of it to my day is non-intrusive.

I’m still on the fence on calling them “tweets” though. I do hate that they’ve corrupted the use of ‘#’ to indicate a topic to which to send “tweets”. I hope that ‘#’ will never leave my mind as the IRC chat room symbol.

Alas, if you’d care to, you can now follow me at minusnine on Twitter.

1. Yes, thanks to my core classes at Columbia, I still reference Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave.

• High school football coach Rich Dombroski, from A 91-0 Football Game Tough for Both Sides to Take.

Even when one is down, realism is where the truth lies. It may not help the situation, but finding a place to lay blame when the reality is clear is generally non-productive.

(Or, at least that’s the theory I’m testing recently).

Environment Federal courts in California have issued injunctions limiting the use of sonar in Navy training exercises off Southern California on the ground that it harms marine mammals. In Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, No. 07-1239, the Bush administration argues that the training is vital to national security and that the courts should not interfere. In Summers v. Earth Island Institute, No. 07-463, the court will consider who has standing to challenge environmental regulations. Winter and Summers will be argued on Wednesday, and decisions are expected by the spring.

While I haven’t read the brief myself, I suspect that Summers v. Earth Island Institute was included in the article just to be clever in the last sentence. Though, I would have been more impressed had the author managed to get Fall in there somehow as well.

In Entergy Corporation v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 07-588, the court will consider whether the Clean Water Act authorizes the E.P.A. to use cost-benefit analysis.

This is kind of ridiculous. The actual SCOTUS question is, does some obscure law “limit EPA’s weighing of costs and benefits only to the Second Circuit’s ‘cost effectiveness’ test?” So, in other words, “Does the EPA have the ability to act rationally or should it be punished for doing so?”

Freaking awesome. I <3 ratm.

Some commentators have suggested he straightforwardly implied that Palin was a pig. Which would be insulting, but doesn’t sound sexist to me. A more subtle (although more sensible) jab would be the following implied argument: 1. A pig with lipstick is still a pig 2. Palin (according to her acceptance speech) is a pitbull with lipstick 3. Palin is still a pitbull That’s arguably unfavorable, except that Palin made the comparison herself.

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blockquote>I really cannot believe that glib is a word, I had to look it up. My English is not perfect, but it’s rare that I mix up Gnome dependency libraries and real words.

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Now, you can build your own large hadron collider, as a series of articles detailing its components has been published. I, for one, intend for this to be my next project.

Look at me. Look at me! When you make love to me Gaius, you don’t always think about me. Your mind wanders, I know that. You think of equations, puzzles… your laundry. it’s the nature of the mind to disconnect from the body and journey on its own .

• Six to Dr. Gaius Baltar, Battlestar Galactica

If this sort of transparency leads to complaints so be it. Castle managers should be prepared to explain their prices (or to pour boiling oil from the battlements onto vistitors who besiege them with complaints).

Let me rephrase. A judge issued an order to stomp on free speech.

“But they are hackers that intended to defraud the MBTA!” you say?

The prevailing legal theory is “prior restraint.” Basically, you can’t very well restrict someone from saying something. It is more encouraged to allow the act of speech to occur and deal with the potentially negative consequences later. You can’t arbitrarily restrict acts of speech you don’t like.

I point out yet another article by Eugene Volokh, called “Temporary Restraining Order Against Crime-Facilitating Speech About Security Vulnerabilities“

On the other hand, even otherwise unprotected speech generally can only be restricted after a finding on the merits that the speech is indeed unprotected. It generally can’t be restricted via a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction that’s just based on a preliminary, quick-and-dirty estimate of whether a crime was violated and whether the speech is therefore constitutionally unprotected.

The students’ presentation is available, and is rather enjoyable to flip through. Nothing groundbreaking, but in my estimation, very cool. And, in any case, it is certainly worth protecting.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has taken up their case and plans to appeal the judge’s ruling. With hope this will minimally reprimand a judge for bad decisions against society and maximally set a positive precedent to follow: don’t screw with our First Amendment.

Donate to the EFF.

He says, “Laptop searches will not succeed at a technical level at preventing data from entering or leaving the United States.” What this really means is: laptop searches at borders cannot possibly scale nor reliably produce any useful information for fighting crime.

At the end of the day, laptop searches and any unreasonable searches and seizures of any persons, houses, papers, and effects must be ruled illegal. Oh wait, we already have a constitutional amendment that guarantees just that:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

People who actually know what they’re talking about will then say, “Border Search Exception! Border Search Exception! Border Search Exception!“

Yes, but even the border search exception requires “reasonable suspicion” to qualify. From “District Court Holds that Border Searches Require Reasonable Suspicion” by Eugene Volokh, a noted professor of law at UCLA (who also achieved a BS in Math and Computer Science at the age of 15, three years after he started working as a programmer:

Although neither a warrant nor probable cause is needed for ordinary searches of persons and things crossing the border, cause is required for more intrusive border searches. Certain border searches are highly intrusive because they implicate the “dignity and privacy interests of the persons being searched.” Flores-Montano, 541 U.S. at 152. As a search becomes more intrusive, it must be justified by a correspondingly higher level of suspicion of wrongdoing. United States v. Aman, 624 F.2d 911, 912-13 (9th Cir.1980) (holding that to conduct a strip search, the authorities must have a “real suspicion” that the person is smuggling contraband and that “real suspicion” is “subjective suspicion supported by objective, articulable facts”.

Swire also has a shorter article related to the testimony.

I just look forward to the album from United Nations, the collaboration project between Geoff Rickly (lead singer of Thursday) and Daryl Palumbo (lead singer of Glassjaw, among other bands). Then my life will be complete.

Apparently, my life will be complete on September 9th.

I’ve been thinking about this since it happened.

Geoff Rickly, by bill shouldis. Licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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“This is two minutes and twenty seconds of extreme awesome.” -Six

I like to say that I am just a sysadmin for a little bookshop in Seattle.

Some bookshop!

His blog is pretty cool and strongly shows that he’s a really bright computer scientist.

The fact that I have two tickets to the New Kids on the Block show at MSG.

The fact that Congress decided corporate lobbyists with money are more important than our civil liberties by voting for telecom immunity and expansion of domestic spying. (Though, there is a snuggly bear who tells me it is a good thing. I don’t trust snuggly bears as bears have claws).

End result?

Epic fail.

So. True.

(Though replace “CIO” with “senior technical management” and “Is” with “Can Be”. While you’re at it, replace “Application Developers” with “System Administrators. Let’s try this again.)

9 Reasons Why System Administrators Think Their Senior Technical Management Can Be Clueless.

I don’t really see any reason not to start charging for plastic bags. Well, maybe I do. It’d be supremely inconvenient for consumers, but for places like super markets where your purpose of going is to buy groceries, it won’t be hard to bring a couple of canvas bags with you.

Precisely. People will adapt to this stimulus. They will change. That’s why high prices of oil are good for exactly one reason: it encourages positive behavioral change toward efficiency.¹

1. Granted, the fact that it may mean less food for some families suck. This is a consequence and a testimony to the power of economics and proper planning, at both the macro- and microeconomic scale.

The redesign of the gallon milk jug, experts say, is an example of the changes likely to play out in the American economy over the next two decades. In an era of soaring global demand and higher costs for energy and materials, virtually every aspect of the economy needs to be re-examined, they say, and many products must be redesigned for greater efficiency.

1. The system is working.
2. I love when things I take for granted are redesigned.
3. I love when things I take for granted are redesigned for efficiency.