• 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:

(via Gothamist)

Mu Empire:

John Lennon:

Tip Your Bartender:

Ape Dos Mil

Pink Roses

Pretty Lush

Siberian Kiss

Babe

Autobiography of a Nation

Signals Over the Air

Revolutions in Graphic Design

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

This was down the street and kind of beautiful:

Thursday²

boston³

craft beer⁴

disaster⁵

bahn mi⁶

buses⁷

(loud) music⁸

(searching for) companionship⁹

warm bed¹⁰

brooklyn¹¹

vegetables¹²

postcards¹³

darkness¹⁴

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"?>

<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">

    <xsl:template match="body">
        <ol><xsl:text>
</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>

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

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

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

Questions that might stimulate interesting conversation

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/10/29/columbia-advice/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/10/29/oh-no-bug-reports-via-twitter/ http://ericgar.com/2009/10/29/oh-no-bug-reports-via-twitter/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:18:15 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=543 This was a post on the mailing list for the Moose object system for Perl:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/10/29/oh-no-bug-reports-via-twitter/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2009/10/25/this-is-how-we-roll/ http://ericgar.com/2009/10/25/this-is-how-we-roll/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:02:09 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=541

(Stolen from bdotdub.)

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/10/25/this-is-how-we-roll/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/10/17/natalie-tran-adorable/ http://ericgar.com/2009/10/17/natalie-tran-adorable/#comments Sun, 18 Oct 2009 02:06:53 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=533

If only she were actually saying hi to me.

Maybe I should start using that name more often.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/10/17/natalie-tran-adorable/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2009/10/12/pasta-with-greens/ http://ericgar.com/2009/10/12/pasta-with-greens/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:25:28 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=529 My mother gave me a cookbook called “The Best 30-Minute Recipe” a while ago in an attempt to get me to learn how to cook. I was just flipping through it when I noticed this entry in the table of contents:

    * 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.)

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/10/12/pasta-with-greens/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/10/10/my-senior-traits-2003/ http://ericgar.com/2009/10/10/my-senior-traits-2003/#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:24:13 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=525 In 2003, I composed the following “Senior Traits” to be placed next to my picture in my senior year high school yearbook.
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
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/10/10/my-senior-traits-2003/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2009/10/05/another-reason-why-i-like-my-isp-natural-wireless/ http://ericgar.com/2009/10/05/another-reason-why-i-like-my-isp-natural-wireless/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:39:34 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=523
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/10/05/another-reason-why-i-like-my-isp-natural-wireless/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/10/05/2010-michelin-guide-new-york-city-starred-restaurants/ http://ericgar.com/2009/10/05/2010-michelin-guide-new-york-city-starred-restaurants/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:08:49 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=518 It looks like I need to start eating more.

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
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/10/05/2010-michelin-guide-new-york-city-starred-restaurants/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/09/19/slashdot-poll-most-useful-unix-tool/ http://ericgar.com/2009/09/19/slashdot-poll-most-useful-unix-tool/#comments Sun, 20 Sep 2009 06:09:16 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=516 In response to the current /. poll, Most Useful UNIX Tool: I have the following from my ~/.zhistory at work:

$ 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.
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/09/19/slashdot-poll-most-useful-unix-tool/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/09/19/auto-dependency-generation-in-gnu-make/ http://ericgar.com/2009/09/19/auto-dependency-generation-in-gnu-make/#comments Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:13:38 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=512 I renovated some makefiles this week and found myself wanting to generate dependencies of a piece of code automatically from ‘gcc -M’. The existing Makefile had an explicit “make depends” step that would invoke ‘gcc -M’ for each of the source files. This is annoying because all generated Makefiles would have to be recreated if one file’s dependencies changed.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/09/19/auto-dependency-generation-in-gnu-make/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/09/14/olbermann-rant-on-you-lie-outburst/ http://ericgar.com/2009/09/14/olbermann-rant-on-you-lie-outburst/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:42:00 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=509 This is a purely amazing rant on Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama speech:

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?

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/09/14/olbermann-rant-on-you-lie-outburst/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2009/09/12/two-classic-videos-ive-been-thinking-about-again/ http://ericgar.com/2009/09/12/two-classic-videos-ive-been-thinking-about-again/#comments Sun, 13 Sep 2009 06:47:37 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=505 Reggie and the Full Effect – Congratulations Smack and Katy

Brand New, Welcome to Bangkok

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/09/12/two-classic-videos-ive-been-thinking-about-again/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/08/31/best-flowers-ever/ http://ericgar.com/2009/08/31/best-flowers-ever/#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:08:28 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=501 I discovered these at the Boston Public Gardens earlier this year. I am amazed that such a living creature exists.



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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/08/31/best-flowers-ever/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/08/23/two-videos-ive-been-thinking-about/ http://ericgar.com/2009/08/23/two-videos-ive-been-thinking-about/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:28:11 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=496 Both of these videos went viral recently, but documented here for posterity (and for my mother).

So catchy:


Served:


]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/08/23/two-videos-ive-been-thinking-about/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/08/09/trackstand-in-sixteen-variations-by-cadence/ http://ericgar.com/2009/08/09/trackstand-in-sixteen-variations-by-cadence/#comments Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:23:01 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=492 With a great background track.
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/08/09/trackstand-in-sixteen-variations-by-cadence/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/08/07/mbsync-success/ http://ericgar.com/2009/08/07/mbsync-success/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:58:17 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=488 Thanks to Remko Tronçon for supplying a patch to mbsync to enable recursive synchronization.

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/08/07/mbsync-success/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/07/26/observations-on-bicycling-in-the-rain/ http://ericgar.com/2009/07/26/observations-on-bicycling-in-the-rain/#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:12:46 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=478 Having just arrived home from an evening of company, drink, and debate (three of my favorite things), I have these observations to make on riding home in the rain:
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.
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/07/26/observations-on-bicycling-in-the-rain/feed/ 3 http://ericgar.com/2009/07/23/darth-vader-as-mc-hammer/ http://ericgar.com/2009/07/23/darth-vader-as-mc-hammer/#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:45:53 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=471

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

1. remember: there was only the original trilogy
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/07/23/darth-vader-as-mc-hammer/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/07/20/git-scm-logo-awesomeness/ http://ericgar.com/2009/07/20/git-scm-logo-awesomeness/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:06:28 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=463 Never before today did I notice the great logo on git-scm.com:



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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/07/20/git-scm-logo-awesomeness/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/07/17/email-hulu-if-ads-malfunction/ http://ericgar.com/2009/07/17/email-hulu-if-ads-malfunction/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:50:05 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=457

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/07/17/email-hulu-if-ads-malfunction/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2009/07/17/op-ed-steal-this-code/ http://ericgar.com/2009/07/17/op-ed-steal-this-code/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:26:39 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=454 There is a nice little Op-Ed about the bond that forms between coders and their code and the value of ideas over implementation.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/07/17/op-ed-steal-this-code/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/07/08/how-to-resume-from-suspend-by-keystroke-in-linux/ http://ericgar.com/2009/07/08/how-to-resume-from-suspend-by-keystroke-in-linux/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:22:58 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=449 I’ve always wondered why Macs could wakeup from sleep by a mere keystroke, but my Linux boxes required me to press the power button. It turns out you can enable wake from suspend/hibernate in Linux by adding the following to /etc/rc.local, which is run at startup:

for i in `/bin/grep USB /proc/acpi/wakeup | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}'`;
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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/07/08/how-to-resume-from-suspend-by-keystroke-in-linux/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/07/06/the-most-beautiful-necklace-ive-ever-seen/ http://ericgar.com/2009/07/06/the-most-beautiful-necklace-ive-ever-seen/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:43:02 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=445 The Julia Necklace



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

See Wikipedia’s Julia set article.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/07/06/the-most-beautiful-necklace-ive-ever-seen/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/06/27/free-software-causes-airplane-crashes/ http://ericgar.com/2009/06/27/free-software-causes-airplane-crashes/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:00:06 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=441 From the January 7, 2009 New York Times article, “Data Analysts Are Mesmerized by the Power of Program R”:

“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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/06/27/free-software-causes-airplane-crashes/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/06/24/save-our-city/ http://ericgar.com/2009/06/24/save-our-city/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:50:26 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=435 New York Times: MTA Sells Brooklyn Subway Station Naming Rights To Barclays

Dear New York City government,

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

Thank you kindly,
Eric

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/06/24/save-our-city/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/06/24/2009-american-craft-beer-fest/ http://ericgar.com/2009/06/24/2009-american-craft-beer-fest/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:35:49 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=424 This past weekend, Leah, Casey, Molly, and I attended the second session of the 2009 American Craft Beer Fest held in Boston. It was a beer lover’s dream: 75 American craft breweries offering unlimited samples of 300 of their finest beers (at 2 ounces at a time). This is the place in a beer lover’s dream, a place where the last rule about the event was “Respect Beer” with a capital B, a place where one of the most distinct differences between America and the rest of the lot was celebrated, and a place where being a hot Asian girl ______________ .

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
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/06/24/2009-american-craft-beer-fest/feed/ 4 http://ericgar.com/2009/06/10/speedtest-meme/ http://ericgar.com/2009/06/10/speedtest-meme/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:25:45 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=420 To play off of the recent meme over on Planet Ubuntu, I’d like to reiterate how awesome my ISP, Natural Wireless, is:



]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/06/10/speedtest-meme/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/06/03/essay-why-no-more-911s/ http://ericgar.com/2009/06/03/essay-why-no-more-911s/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:33:44 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=416 Bruce Schneier pointed out a great essay, “Why No More 9/11s?” by Timothy Noah on Slate. It’s long, but worth the read.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/06/03/essay-why-no-more-911s/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/05/27/intel-rock-star/ http://ericgar.com/2009/05/27/intel-rock-star/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 03:37:08 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=411

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/05/27/intel-rock-star/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2009/04/22/1ny/ http://ericgar.com/2009/04/22/1ny/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:22:27 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=407 I just want to give a public shout out to Brookfield Properties for being cool with us geeks bringing our foldable bikes into One New York Plaza.

The midtown offices would probably have none of that

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/04/22/1ny/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/04/19/ratpowersh-a-power-menu-for-ratpoison/ http://ericgar.com/2009/04/19/ratpowersh-a-power-menu-for-ratpoison/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:02:19 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=401 I’ve started to use ratpoison on my netbook. I’ve made a script that displays a menu of power-related actions and the current state of the battery. Here is a screenshot:

[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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/04/19/ratpowersh-a-power-menu-for-ratpoison/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/04/09/10-things-that-changed-my-life/ http://ericgar.com/2009/04/09/10-things-that-changed-my-life/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:36:50 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=393 By no means an authoritative or ranked list.
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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/04/09/10-things-that-changed-my-life/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/04/07/simple-xslt-and-delicious-api/ http://ericgar.com/2009/04/07/simple-xslt-and-delicious-api/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:46:46 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=382 I decided I wanted to take five minutes today to implement a simple idea I’ve had for a long time. When I get home, I typically eat dinner while reading news in my RSS reader and I’ve found less and less time to write my own posts. I simply wanted to be able to bookmark the things I found interesting and have them automatically appear as a weblog entry.

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">

<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>

<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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/04/07/simple-xslt-and-delicious-api/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/04/07/short-links/ http://ericgar.com/2009/04/07/short-links/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 03:20:37 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=378 Posts around the web that I found interesting today:
• 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.
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/04/07/short-links/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2009/03/29/hackers-hstore-improvements/ http://ericgar.com/2009/03/29/hackers-hstore-improvements/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:21:16 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=374 Is a more Perlish syntax out of the question? Yes. SQL is not Perl. regards, tom lane ]]> The most profound words I’ve seen today:

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/03/29/hackers-hstore-improvements/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2009/02/04/downloading-music-from-spincom/ http://ericgar.com/2009/02/04/downloading-music-from-spincom/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 04:29:45 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=356 meh. fine. removed.
]]> http://ericgar.com/2009/02/04/downloading-music-from-spincom/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2008/12/26/temptation-wins/ http://ericgar.com/2008/12/26/temptation-wins/#comments Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:07:43 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=352 I really dislike bragging. To make conversation over your good fortune or situation as if to say, “hi, somehow, in this little insignificant way, I’m better than you” is simply not worth the effort. But, I do like my friends telling me about fortunate sequences of events, good news, or just saying hi, or the like (I especially like postcards or even notecards as one of the best gifts). There is a distinct difference: the former is wanting attention for being somehow more exalted, the latter is sharing, spreading goodwill.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/12/26/temptation-wins/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/12/24/things-that-are-on-my-mind-right-now/ http://ericgar.com/2008/12/24/things-that-are-on-my-mind-right-now/#comments Thu, 25 Dec 2008 04:10:07 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=347

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/12/24/things-that-are-on-my-mind-right-now/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/12/15/tomatoes-vs-arrrrgh/ http://ericgar.com/2008/12/15/tomatoes-vs-arrrrgh/#comments Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:17:38 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=342 On sailors trying to defend against the Somali pirates:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/12/15/tomatoes-vs-arrrrgh/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/12/07/tired-exhausted-smelly/ http://ericgar.com/2008/12/07/tired-exhausted-smelly/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:47:19 +0000 Eric http://ericgar.com/?p=340 Ended my last primary on-call shift of the year just now, and not a minute too soon. I like to say that my job is at the intersection of system administration and adrenaline because for 37 hours a weekend we are constantly solving issues where data loss is not an option and speed is everything.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/12/07/tired-exhausted-smelly/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/30/just-alerting-you/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/30/just-alerting-you/#comments Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:40:00 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=335 I was telling some friends yesterday that whenever I meet new people who are interacting with me socially, I always think of this xkcd cartoon:



(Makes meeting girls at bars difficult).

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/30/just-alerting-you/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/27/samsung-3253h-lcd-television-recalibration/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/27/samsung-3253h-lcd-television-recalibration/#comments Fri, 28 Nov 2008 05:14:25 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=328 I’m among the huge (and growing) number of people who really like to take things apart or to further investigate hidden options just to know how things work. (One might call this characteristic “intellectual curiosity” aka the “break shit open and put it back together again” syndrome).

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.
]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/27/samsung-3253h-lcd-television-recalibration/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/26/happy-thursday/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/26/happy-thursday/#comments Thu, 27 Nov 2008 03:08:06 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=326

Since the holiday season is upon us, all of us at DreamHost would like to wish everyone on the internets a very happy Thanksgiving.

Well, you know, so long as you live in a country that gets to celebrate it. Otherwise, we hope your Thursday is really nice.

via Dreamhost Blog.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/26/happy-thursday/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/16/why-would-you-say-that/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/16/why-would-you-say-that/#comments Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:26:51 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=322 Saw this on Freshmeat today:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/16/why-would-you-say-that/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/12/the-video-on-my-mind-all-week-so-far/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/12/the-video-on-my-mind-all-week-so-far/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:11:29 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2008/11/12/the-video-on-my-mind-all-week-so-far/

Old school 311.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/12/the-video-on-my-mind-all-week-so-far/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/physics-machine-shop-columbia/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/physics-machine-shop-columbia/#comments Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:32:17 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2008/11/09/physics-machine-shop-columbia/ When I was an undergrad, I should have worked here:

the Machine Shop at Columbia University’s Physics Department.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/physics-machine-shop-columbia/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/workaround-blank-google-reader/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/workaround-blank-google-reader/#comments Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:21:05 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=313 There have been sporadic reports that Google Reader does not display content sometimes. For me, this is chronic, but I haven’t isolated the cause yet. There is a work around that I haven’t seen discussed: the page displays properly with the sidebar expanded. When the page renders empty, there is not a lot of hint that it can be expanded.

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!

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/workaround-blank-google-reader/feed/ 4 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/happy-baby-because-of-an-hdmi-switcher/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/happy-baby-because-of-an-hdmi-switcher/#comments Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:47:32 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=308

Wait, what?

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/happy-baby-because-of-an-hdmi-switcher/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/new-computer111/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/new-computer111/#comments Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:36:25 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=304 This week, I purchased a new computer:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/09/new-computer111/feed/ 5 http://ericgar.com/2008/11/05/bellovin-on-working-the-polls/ http://ericgar.com/2008/11/05/bellovin-on-working-the-polls/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:45:47 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=300 Steven Bellovin, computer security professor at Columbia, posted an interesting recount of his observations on being a poll worker.
]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/11/05/bellovin-on-working-the-polls/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/10/14/i-broke-down-and-joined-twitter/ http://ericgar.com/2008/10/14/i-broke-down-and-joined-twitter/#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:48:01 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=296 So as many of my readership found out (all three of you), I’ve broken down and joined Twitter. I explained my break down to bdotdub thusly:

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.
]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/10/14/i-broke-down-and-joined-twitter/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/10/13/on-losing-91-0-at-a-high-school-football-game/ http://ericgar.com/2008/10/13/on-losing-91-0-at-a-high-school-football-game/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:20:05 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=294

”Naples did absolutely nothing wrong,” Dombroski said. ”We just didn’t do anything right.”

- 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).

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/10/13/on-losing-91-0-at-a-high-school-football-game/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/10/05/nytimes-summary-of-scotus-docket/ http://ericgar.com/2008/10/05/nytimes-summary-of-scotus-docket/#comments Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:39:05 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=291 The New York Times has written an overview of some of the more important cases appearing in the Supreme Court’s docket this term. There were three paragraphs that made me laugh. Emphasis mine.

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?”

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/10/05/nytimes-summary-of-scotus-docket/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/09/25/rage-against-the-machine-a-capella-at-a-rally/ http://ericgar.com/2008/09/25/rage-against-the-machine-a-capella-at-a-rally/#comments Fri, 26 Sep 2008 04:37:39 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2008/09/25/rage-against-the-machine-a-capella-at-a-rally/

Freaking awesome. I <3 ratm.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/09/25/rage-against-the-machine-a-capella-at-a-rally/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/09/10/tony-on-lipstick-on-pigs/ http://ericgar.com/2008/09/10/tony-on-lipstick-on-pigs/#comments Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:15:10 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=283 My old friend Tony has it right when he says:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/09/10/tony-on-lipstick-on-pigs/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/08/30/i-like-things-that-make-me-laugh/ http://ericgar.com/2008/08/30/i-like-things-that-make-me-laugh/#comments Sat, 30 Aug 2008 23:12:53 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2008/08/30/i-like-things-that-make-me-laugh/ Quote this Slashdot poster:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/08/30/i-like-things-that-make-me-laugh/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/08/27/i-love-internet-memes/ http://ericgar.com/2008/08/27/i-love-internet-memes/#comments Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:08:05 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=278

they’re just so good.

.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/08/27/i-love-internet-memes/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/08/26/build-your-own-large-hadron-collider/ http://ericgar.com/2008/08/26/build-your-own-large-hadron-collider/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:07:48 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=275 I’m a fan of open source hardware as it lowers the barrier to entry for a software geek to dabble in RL fabrication.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/08/26/build-your-own-large-hadron-collider/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/08/14/the-mind-of-the-scientist/ http://ericgar.com/2008/08/14/the-mind-of-the-scientist/#comments Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:47:53 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=271 Veracity in science fiction:

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/08/14/the-mind-of-the-scientist/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2008/08/12/the-politics-of-being-a-castle-manager/ http://ericgar.com/2008/08/12/the-politics-of-being-a-castle-manager/#comments Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:12:14 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=266 This from Randy Cohen, the New York Times Ethicist, on a castle that charges more to foreigners:

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).

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/08/12/the-politics-of-being-a-castle-manager/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2008/08/11/i-2/ http://ericgar.com/2008/08/11/i-2/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:13:32 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=261 While I’m on a constitutional rant, I bring your attention to a developing case of a federal district court judge issuing a temporary restraining order to prevent three MIT students from giving a presentation at Black Hat, the awesomest security (hacker) conference, because it contained information on how to circumvent the payment system of the Boston transportation system.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/08/11/i-2/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/08/11/laptop-border-searches-illegal-well-they-should-be/ http://ericgar.com/2008/08/11/laptop-border-searches-illegal-well-they-should-be/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:14:45 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=256 Peter Swire, Professor of Law at Ohio State, wrote an excellent piece of testimony for the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights & Property rights entitled “Laptop Searches and Other Violations of Privacy Faced by Americans Returning from Overseas Travel” (pdf). Basically, he makes an analogy between unrestricted laptop searches at the borders to when the US government tried to be a third party in all cryptographic communications. End result: it failed. Miserably.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/08/11/laptop-border-searches-illegal-well-they-should-be/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/07/31/not-that-anyone-else-really-cares-but/ http://ericgar.com/2008/07/31/not-that-anyone-else-really-cares-but/#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:24:59 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=254 A long time ago, I wrote:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/07/31/not-that-anyone-else-really-cares-but/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/07/29/thursday-on-saturday/ http://ericgar.com/2008/07/29/thursday-on-saturday/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:59:52 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=244

I’ve been thinking about this since it happened.

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/07/29/thursday-on-saturday/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/07/29/do-it-live/ http://ericgar.com/2008/07/29/do-it-live/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:36:29 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=246

.

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

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/07/29/do-it-live/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/07/12/at-the-end-of-the-day-we-are-geeks/ http://ericgar.com/2008/07/12/at-the-end-of-the-day-we-are-geeks/#comments Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:21:17 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=242 I recently attended a talk by Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com, where he opened with:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/07/12/at-the-end-of-the-day-we-are-geeks/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/07/09/four-things-disturbed-me-today/ http://ericgar.com/2008/07/09/four-things-disturbed-me-today/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:27:35 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=239

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).

The fact that Barack Obama, “the harbinger of government change”, reversed his previous stance by voting for the corporate lobbyists with money. He refused to stand up to them and do the right thing, making him no different from any other politician. I would have loved for him to champion support against this bill, I would have settled for his individual vote against it, but I cannot accept his vote for it.

The fact that both Senators Schumer and Clinton of New York voted against this telco amnesty bill. At least they had the guts to stand up to the Bush administration.

End result?

Epic fail.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/07/09/four-things-disturbed-me-today/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/07/01/why-i-cant-become-a-senior-manager/ http://ericgar.com/2008/07/01/why-i-cant-become-a-senior-manager/#comments Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:45:29 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=238 9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless.

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/07/01/why-i-cant-become-a-senior-manager/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/07/01/behavioral-change/ http://ericgar.com/2008/07/01/behavioral-change/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:04:26 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=237 From bennywong:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/07/01/behavioral-change/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2008/06/29/redesigning-the-milk-jug/ http://ericgar.com/2008/06/29/redesigning-the-milk-jug/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:44:14 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=236 From “Solution, or Mess? A Milk Jug for a Green Earth“:

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.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/06/29/redesigning-the-milk-jug/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/06/27/in-the-future-we-will-not-be-iphones/ http://ericgar.com/2008/06/27/in-the-future-we-will-not-be-iphones/#comments Sat, 28 Jun 2008 05:11:07 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=235 > android => [...]]]> My good friend and esteemed colleague has posted his thoughts on “Why I think the iPhone is Important“.¹ He adopts the opinion that “the big advantage Apple has with the iPhone is that they control the entire product, top to bottom.” He compares the iPhone to the Android platform and says, “iPhone >> android => Apple!”

Okay, so that quote was actually me summing up the argument.

I agree with his assessment that the iPhone has a great user experience. Everything is pretty sharp. Its components feel like they belong together. Things just flow.

But it is still a closed platform. One where you cannot publish software without Apple’s acceptance. One where usage of the device outside of Apple’s vision is prohibited. One where the power of a single entity has control over the utility of the platform.

This may be good for “user experience” but is horrible for the user. Is this an acceptable compromise?

If the user is limited in the usefulness of a device, knowingly or not, the user loses. There is no reason for Apple to be authoritarian on this matter. Users deserve a choice to do what they would like with their own devices.

Could you imagine what computing would have been like had Microsoft said, “We will give the masses this platform called Windows, but we will control the vertical stack. We will not allow external innovation. We will not allow other people to be creative, unless that creativity is synergistic with our platform strategy. We will control computers ‘top to bottom’.”

This too might have been good for “user experience.” But, this would have been horrible for the user. (We would be forced to use IE. There would be no such thing as Firefox.) This would have been a very bad thing for personal computing in general. And it could have happened. It did not because market forces did not give Microsoft the gift of inventing the hardware.

This is what Apple is doing with the iPhone.

That Apple created its hardware base does not make it any different. This authoritarian control will be a very bad thing for mobile computing.

I’d agree that Android is flawed for various reasons. It’s hard to program for a device that doesn’t exist. And it’s hard to program for multiple types of devices.

This was one of the downfalls of the Windows CE development back in the early 2000s. Multiple processors, multiple screen sizes, and multiple input methods all made it difficult for a programmer to appeal to a wider audience. Standardization is a powerful thing; Apple has de facto standardized its hardware platform, allowing software developers to be able to predict usage patterns.

This is kind of like the rest of the computer industry: A programmer knows, with some exceptions, that the person using his software will have a screen that is wider than it is tall, have buttons to press to input characters, and have a method to move a cursor around on the screen.

This standardization does not mean that the user has to sacrifice user experience. Nor does it mean the user must sacrifice the freedom of choice. Standardization at lower levels is a very powerful force that pushes developers to creativity. Standardization could have occurred at the hardware level and then Apple could have provided an open interface for alternative operating systems and programs. Apple could have invented the physical parts, but leave the bits in memory to be manipulated by the end user as he or she pleases. Apple could have given their operating system and their software as the default choice, but allowed users to chose otherwise.

I sit here typing this post on a Apple MacBook Pro running Linux 2.6.24 in a text editor whose source code I can download and change. Apple created the physical parts but I own the information. Does this use of their hardware design harm Apple or Apple’s brand in any way?

No. It allows them to have another happy customer, while all of the customers who choose the default on their systems being happy as well. This is how it could be on the iPhone.

Give people the choice. Never think that a closed platform is an advantage.

Recently, Jeremy Clarkson began a segment on Top Gear about the new Ferrari Scuderia with, “Do you know what’s wrong with Ferrari at the moment? They’re nerdy. It’s all about the plumbing and the wiring and the computer systems. When I drive a Ferrari, I want it to be all about passion. And excitement.”

Then he drives it. He ended the segment with, “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel to be driving a proper Ferrari again.”

A flashy user interface, cohesive user experience, and an open platform are not mutually exclusive goals..

1. As in any post that ends in “Shabowza,” it is very intellectually deep and only fit for the philosopher-king.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/06/27/in-the-future-we-will-not-be-iphones/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/06/26/icanns-decision-to-expand-dns/ http://ericgar.com/2008/06/26/icanns-decision-to-expand-dns/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:24:40 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=234 The world has grown up with the internet having DNS addresses (the first part of URLs, web addresess, for the lay person) with a top level domain (TLD) of things like .com, .org, .net and so on. ICANN, the non-governmental body that governs such addresses, decided today that it would open up these suffixes to an “application period,” whereby anyone can apply for any possible TLD. This means http://icanhas.cheezburger is a real possibility.

Computer scientists and system administrators like the current system, without these extraneous, crazy TLDs, because DNS forms a very nice tree which is easy to manage. (There are specifics here that I should gloss over with the desire to not repeat how DNS actually works). Trees are a very basic computer science data structure, one whose properties are extremely well known, in conjunction with cooperating algorithms. Recursive DNS doesn’t work for obvious reasons that iterative DNS does, for example. (Yet, stragely, everyone teaches that DNS works recursively. That annoyance is for another time).

This tree structure gets completely destroyed with the addition of arbitrary TLDs. This is because ICANN is no longer valuing a TLD more than a [second-level] domain name (or the part before the .com). We will have a flat structure for DNS, exactly what it was created to prevent.

My thoughts on this are three-fold:

1. The tree structure of DNS is rather nice, but arbitrary. The tree will now become a forest, in Microsoft Active Directory-speak.

2. That the DNS root servers will have to cope with more queries is a non-issue. Root DNS administrators will step up and get the job done. They want a functioning internet before they want a tree-like DNS structure.

3. The internet doesn’t care. Having a naming scheme where there are far more than three letters after the last dot means nothing. DNS is for human consumption and should not purport to be any other type of addressing system. DNS is no longer a very structured system of naming a particular computer on the network; it is now tag-based. That’s all.

The last point needs to be expanded. The very notion of having people remember pointers to particular machines on the internet is silly. This is effectively what you do every time you type in a URL. You first identify the protocol your computer should talk to the other computer (typically http://), then you specify a human-readable form of an identifier for a machine (ericgar.com uniquely identifies a particular machine that holds the files that make up this website). Any additional bits of the URL are to specify to the machine what you actually want to see.

Take a step back. Why should a human care about contacting a particular machine on the internet? He or she should not. They want the content. The content is what matters. The service is what matters.

I predict we will see an internet where it isn’t unreasonable to search for whatever you need as a first point of contact. Want to get to slashdot? Search for news for nerds. Want to read the news from the US? Type “journalism north america” and your choices will be presented. This will take the form of a combination of Wikipedia, where there is peer-submitted, peer-reviewed links and a search engine, where the information gathering is algorithmic.

I’d imagine that this seems foreign to most people. We’re so used to specifying a URL that we take it for granted.

I think the traditional notion of DNS is going away and faster than I can imagine. I think something like google, today a celebrity, will become a very necessary tool for navigating the internet. In the future, we will consider this kind of search infrastructural, just as we do DNS.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/06/26/icanns-decision-to-expand-dns/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/06/24/things-i-found-useful-today/ http://ericgar.com/2008/06/24/things-i-found-useful-today/#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:07:37 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=232 Really, I found most of these useful last week. But then I got my GPT and my partition table hopelessly out of sync and had to spend my weekend rebuilding my laptop, instead of getting my DB2 administration foo on. I’ve revisited almost all of them and found some new ones.

• The authoritative reference on Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro is just a life-saver. My ubuntu experience would be so much more hell without its existence.

• Using Mutt with Gmail (the minimal way) gives a copy-and-pasteable few lines on how to use Mutt with Gmail over IMAP. Easy to remember, but easier to look up and forget. Most of the other references are with fetchmail. The only thing I would add is to include other IMAP folders as mailboxes:

  mailboxes ="INBOX"
mailboxes ="[Gmail]/Sent Mail"
mailboxes ="[Gmail]/Drafts"
mailboxes ="[Gmail]/Spam"
mailboxes ="[Gmail]/All Mail"


• The official Mutt & GPG Notes.
• myopenid gives free domain-customized openids. My openid is now http://eric.ericgar.com. Watch out.
• This post on CPU scaling reminded me how to root-enable some CPU tools to allow me to easily scale my processor speeds
• The Lifehacker post detailing how to minimize Firefox 3’s toolbar. Do it. You’ll feel less constrained. It’s a new world.
• Recovering from a failed LOAD operation in DB2 LUA. Enough said.
• An overview of the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and why I probably won’t use it ever.
• Doug, who pointed out there exists an Ubuntu package for mutt with some really useful patches that vanilla mutt doesn’t roll with. It saved me probably a good 45 minutes of patching mutt myself out of the source.

Remember kids: 64-bit web browsing in Linux currently sucks. Avoid it. Since I doubt you have over 4GB of RAM: Do the right thing. Go 32-bit.

Update: Here’s a screenshot of my ff menubar:



]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/06/24/things-i-found-useful-today/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/06/23/on-google-reader/ http://ericgar.com/2008/06/23/on-google-reader/#comments Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:44:41 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=231 How much bandwidth do you think Google Reader saves, considering it can aggregate RSS pulls? I’d be really interested to see:

• …server logs from a really large blogging site and see how Google interacts with the site.
• …logs from several different sites to figure out how Google staggers them (hopefully distributed randomly), and
• …Google Reader usage statistics to correlate Reader membership to RSS pulls.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/06/23/on-google-reader/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/06/08/somehow-this-guy-has-to-do-with-f1/ http://ericgar.com/2008/06/08/somehow-this-guy-has-to-do-with-f1/#comments Mon, 09 Jun 2008 03:47:57 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=229 From ITV’s pre-show promo for their Formula One racing coverage:



Dude, easy on the makeup.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/06/08/somehow-this-guy-has-to-do-with-f1/feed/ 1 http://ericgar.com/2008/06/01/a-girl-turned-to-me-at-a-bar/ http://ericgar.com/2008/06/01/a-girl-turned-to-me-at-a-bar/#comments Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:47:48 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=227 and said, “Hi. My friend really likes you.”

I’m sad I wasn’t instantly reminded of this:



]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/06/01/a-girl-turned-to-me-at-a-bar/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/05/10/the-t-shirt-on-the-right-brought-back-memories/ http://ericgar.com/2008/05/10/the-t-shirt-on-the-right-brought-back-memories/#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 03:12:33 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=225

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/05/10/the-t-shirt-on-the-right-brought-back-memories/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/04/22/sir-martin-rees/ http://ericgar.com/2008/04/22/sir-martin-rees/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:00:59 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=224 I was introduced to TED several months ago. For me, it’s an ingenious collection of original content, comprised of talks from some of today’s foremost thinkers. And, the vast majority of the speeches are under 20 minutes long, letting one learn about the world while brushing one’s teeth even.

Were I to post all of the clips I think are interesting, I’d end up duplicating TED.com’s index. I can’t help but share this one below: Sir Martin Rees discussing the future of Earth. Starting off by stating that he speaks “first as an astronomer and then as a worried member of the human race,” he asks the questions that I, hopefully along many others who are much smarter than me, have been thinking about for quite some time. In 17 minutes.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/04/22/sir-martin-rees/feed/ 2 http://ericgar.com/2008/04/05/rss-20-vs-rss-93-vs-atom-03/ http://ericgar.com/2008/04/05/rss-20-vs-rss-93-vs-atom-03/#comments Sun, 06 Apr 2008 03:46:18 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/?p=202 The other day, I was visiting a weblog that I wanted to include in my RSS aggregator. I clicked on the icon my web browser that indicates that the site provides such a feed and was presented with this*:



Great. Which one do I choose? I guess it’s clear: 2.0 is an order of magnitude better than .93, which it self must be three times better than 0.3. Right?

Uhh…No.

Okay. I’ve been a developer for a while and I’ve even developed RSS-related stuff. If I don’t know what the real differences are and how it affects my choice and subsequent enjoyment of the content, then I feel like most people wouldn’t either.

As syndication format family tree clearly shows, RSS .93 is the wicked step-child of earlier RSS 0.9x versions and the extinct scriptingNews formats. Basically, Dan Libby at Netscape borrowed (ahem.. stole, really, but for the better) in an effort toward standards. Then, RSS 2.0 is the inbred child of all RSS 0.9x versions, and, strangely, RSS 1.0. Then, the Atom format was created to make a fresh technology and leave all of the accumulated crud that an old protocol takes with it.

What does that all mean? Nothing. Not when the end user doesn’t care, just randomly picks one from the list, and hopes his or her client works well with it. Even after reading a more detailed account of RSS lineage, do you care which version of RSS you use? **

Any software developer will tell you that they’ve had the urge to throw out a piece of legacy code and start all over from scratch, applying best practices and lessons learned. That’s what Atom is supposed to be. It’s raison d’etre is to be the child who observes what his parents don’t like about themselves and improves upon those aspects.

On the Atom wikipedia page, these two points are listed among others under “Barriers to adoption”:

Many sites choose to publish their feeds in only a single format. For example CNN, the New York Times, and the BBC offer their web feeds only in RSS 2.0 format.

…which is actually doing a service to the user. This shouldn’t be criticized as a “barrier to adoption”, but a embrace of usability.

Sites that publish Atom will often publish RSS as well.

But why? If backward compatibility is a concern, then continue publishing content in all formats that you’ve given to users in the past, but advertise only the current best format.
I understand that backward support is good, so that people who subscribed to the RSS 0.93 feed don’t get burned when support for RSS 2.0 comes along. I also understand that too much meaningless choice for an unknowing consumer is just that: meaningless. And, if we’re supposed to be using standard technology, why are there three competing standards with no winner in sight? ***

Incompatibilities may exist with software being able to read the formats. **** Here is an informal survey of some popular feed readers on the formats discussed here:

Google Reader: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
NewsFire: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
RSSOwl: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
Bloglines: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
NetNewsWire: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
FeedDaemon: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0

Do you get the point?

Feedburner, a recent acquisition by Google, at least is tending toward the user:



Here we see a application-centric model of how to advertise syndication formats. Feedburner presents icons denoting popular applications that the user might use. If I’m a user of Pageflakes, I may not know anything about RSD 3.2 vs Atoms 1.4, but I do know that I go to www.pageflakes.com to see this week’s Dilbert cartoon on my homepage.

Here’s the bottom line: Stop advertising the older formats. It’s fine to continue to serve up the others, just don’t actively advertise it. No one cares what formats you advertise, or the format they click on, as long as they get the content they want.

I’ve chosen Atom. I think it’s in the winner in its modularity, feature-set, and future growth. I could go on about why I think it’s the right choice for this application, but here’s the point: no one cares.

* Admittedly, www.ericgar.com suffered from this affliction, which are the default options for Wordpress. This has been locally remedied.

** Ironically, that wikipedia article has an “Incompatibilities” section, with no “Features” section or similar. What is the (probably unintended) implication of that?

*** The Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD competition at least was better in this regard: there was a financial motive that would produce a winner. This is not so in RSS .93 vs 1.0 vs 2.0 vs Atom .93, Atom 1.0

**** Strangely, this isn’t listed under as a “barrier to adoption” on the Atom wikipedia page. I wonder why?

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/04/05/rss-20-vs-rss-93-vs-atom-03/feed/ 5 http://ericgar.com/2008/03/23/some-things-from-todays-times/ http://ericgar.com/2008/03/23/some-things-from-todays-times/#comments Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:24:39 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2008/03/23/some-things-from-todays-times/ Emphasis mine.

From an interview with Marc Ecko:

Whatever you do in life, be passionate about it. At least once a month, if not every day, reassess what you’re doing and make sure you still love it. If you’re passionate about something others around you may see as a dead end, pave your own way. Be a trailblazer.

From “Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking,” a discussion on mainframe technology:

“Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on,” he said.

From the opinion piece “The Republican Resurrection” by Frank Rich:

Mrs. Clinton is fond of mocking her adversary for offering “just words.” But words can matter, and Mrs. Clinton’s tragedy is that she never realized they could have mattered for her, too. You have to wonder if her Iraq speech would have been greeted with the same shrug if she had tossed away her usual talking points and seized the opportunity to address the war in the same adult way that Mr. Obama addressed race.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/03/23/some-things-from-todays-times/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/03/12/an-interesting-bug/ http://ericgar.com/2008/03/12/an-interesting-bug/#comments Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:44:36 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2008/03/12/an-interesting-bug/ I was just looking through Adium’s changelog when I came across this:



I said, “Naw, that can’t be.” So I clicked on the Trac ticket number:



Freaking awesome.

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/03/12/an-interesting-bug/feed/ 0 http://ericgar.com/2008/03/12/on-the-enterprise-mind/ http://ericgar.com/2008/03/12/on-the-enterprise-mind/#comments Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:05:42 +0000 Eric http://www.ericgar.com/2008/03/12/on-the-enterprise-mind/ When work is a big playground (albeit with real consequences of failure), it’s hard to get out of the mind set of the enterprise infrastructuralist.

Today I was walking back home and thinking, “My apartment is a single point of failure for some of my critically important data. Hmm. Okay, well, I should replicate it remotely somewhere. But if I were to do that, I might as well have remotely replicated storage as well. So I need some SAN space mirrored at the hardware level between two disparate geographic sites. But then, I need two dedicated servers co-located with that storage to actually serve me the files. Or maybe I should just use snap-mirrored NFS toasters.”

Then I came to my senses.

I’m still sad I don’t have my own datacenter(s).

]]> http://ericgar.com/2008/03/12/on-the-enterprise-mind/feed/ 0