Eric Garrido - ericgar.com

NYC Marathon 2025

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I received an unexpected email in March from the New York Road Runners with the subject “Claim Your Entry to Run on November 2!” I was confused. I had already used all of my 9+1 guaranteed entry slots from my time living in New York City (2019, 2022, 2024). I thought it must have been an error and they’d send a correction email shortly thereafter.

No such email arrived. I texted my friend, who pointed out that the guaranteed entry time for my new age group is 2h58m and I qualified with two minutes to spare from my 2024 NYC Marathon time! Sweet!

Chicago Marathon 2023

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I ran the Chicago Marathon on October 8, 2023. These are my notes on race preparation and execution (as usual, mostly written to remind myself about the experience in decades to come).

Result

2:48:42 (6:26/mi, 4:00/km), 1,184 / 48,292 overall, 1,093 / 25,672 males, 200 / ??? AG males 35 to 39

Goals

✓ Goal A: Sub-2:55

✓ Goal B: Sub-2:58:41 (to set a new PR)

Coffee in the Denver Metro Area

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 00:26:52 +0000

(…and outside of Boulder. Many of these places have multiple locations; the one we went to is noted. Additional recommendations would be welcomed!)

Atlas Coffee (Littleton): Cute, industrial-yet-homey, large space often with a guitarist/singer. Large latte menu; I liked the one with honey and cayenne pepper. Their breakfast burritos looked and smelled good, but alas, I did not partake. Highly recommended.

Lost Coffee (Littleton): Fantastically crafted micro-batch roastery and cafe in what appears to be a repurposed car repair facility. Good amount of outdoor seating. I should have gotten the overnight oats. Highly recommended. (At the time of writing, a new brewery, the Littleton Brewing Company, is building a large taphouse across the street).

Catskills Recommendations

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:26:52 +0000

This is a somewhat outdated list of places in the Catskills I’ve liked. As of the time of writing, I last went in November 2020 (memorably witnessing the call for the 2020 presidental election from our rental house). YMMV.

Slide Mountain Hike: The approach from the west from the Slide Mountain Trailhead Parking Lot) is among the easiest ways to the top of a 35’er. The view from the top is among the best in the Catskills. This can be combined for a longer day hike with the summits of Cornel and Wittenberg Mountains.

Boston Marathon 2023

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I ran the Boston Marathon on April 17, 2023. These are my notes on race preparation and execution (as usual, mostly written to remind myself about the experience in decades to come).

Result

2:58:41, 3,734 / 26,606 overall (beat my bib #6773!), 3,507 / 15,173 males, 2,489 / 5,285 AG males 18 to 39

Goals

✓ Goal A: Finish

✓ Goal B: Sub 3:05 (BQ cutoff for my age group)

NYC Marathon 2022

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I ran the New York City Marathon on November 6, 2022. These are my notes on race preparation and execution (as usual, mostly written to remind myself about the experience in decades to come).

Result

3:17:13. 1,861/47,745, 344/3,769 AG

Goals

✓ Goal A: Finish

✗ Goal B: Sub 3:14:16 (== π, my previous NYC result in 2019)

✗ Goal C: Sub three hours

✗ Goal D: Sub 3:05 (BQ cutoff for my age group)

Colorado Marathon 2022

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I ran the Colorado Marathon in Fort Collins, CO on May 1, 2022. These are my notes on race preparation and execution (as usual, mostly written to remind myself about the experience in decades to come).

TL;DR

Official: 2:59:59. (One page shows 2:59:58.9, leaving me a full half second to spare!) 29/507, 6/?? AG

✓ Goal A: Sub 3 hours. (By the skin of my teeth!)

✓ Goal B: Sub 3:05 (2019 BQ cutoff for my AG)

Buying a Tesla Model Y

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My Tesla Model Y

If you know anything about me, you know how much I hate cars. They pollute like crazy, take up a lot of space that could be used for better purposes, and cause a huge amount of human carnage, suffering, and death. You know that I say — despite parents having irrational fears of their child being kidnapped, poisoned, or electrocuted — that the most dangerous thing a parent can do is put their child into a car. You know that I complain that the government is beholden to car interests and is obsessed with growing car infrastructure, even in New York City where the population of car owners is dwarfed by that of non-car owners.

Living^WEating in Murray Hill

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

[I wrote this in late 2019 and intended to spruce it up with photographs but… a lot has changed since then. Still, I post this both selfishly – as a memento – and hopefully – for future relevance. Many of these places are open and deserve business, some are already closed for good, and still others might reopen someday.]

Coming from Tribeca, I was not particularly looking forward to living in what is dispassionately called Midtown East and more affectionately called Murray Hill. It has built a reputation as a place for young bank workers to live and party, due to the cheap real estate and cheap dive bars. But, even in the last few years, the neighborhood has grown around us and has definitely outgrown its bro-y reputation.

Isla Mori Garrido

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Isla Mori Garrido came online on December 11th, at 7:26pm.

Both members of the on-call rotation are handling escalations well, despite their shift starting with them having only some theoretical knowledge of what they were doing. Reverse engineering a production [human] system, employing an OODA loop, performing under pressure, and quickly filtering and employing available reference literature have been notably transferable skills.

Our cat, Fiona, is not impressed with her new roommate. (It’s been a rough year for her: we also got a Roomba.)

Tips for Running the NYC Marathon

Sat, 23 Nov 2019 01:26:27 +0000

Here are some New York City Marathon tips aimed at a first-timer marathoner, though some of these tips would be useful even for an experienced marathoner running NYC for the first time.

A Year Before The Race

Ride your bike along the course before the race starts. A bunch of different cycling groups organize an event (for example, the New York Cycling Club has a ride every year), but you can just go alone instead. The purpose of this scouting ride is to be able to visualize the course all throughout the training. In particular, you’ll know about the Queensboro Bridge, just how dang far it is to the Bronx from Brooklyn, what it means to get to Marcus Garvey Park, and the gentle giant slope that is 5th Avenue.

Registration

Register for the latest bus or ferry possible. Use the extra time for sleep. Getting on an earlier bus just means more time spent waiting outside in the cold before the race.
Consider registering for a bag at bag check even if you don’t use it. But, if the weather conditions are perfect, then most people will have no reason to check a bag. If the weather is sour, you might want some extra warmth waiting for you shortly after the race.
Register for a post-race poncho. If it is cold or raining, this will be a huge help, especially if you aren’t checking a bag. (The downside is that I have no idea when I’ll use an arm-less, thick, bright blue poncho. My training partner brought his from the prior year to the start of this year’s race).

The weeks before the race

If you haven’t already, or maybe even if you have, read A Race Like No Other by Liz Robbins. This New York Times reporter gives a mile-by-mile accounting of the history of the race, combined with vignettes of some personalities and neighborhoods involved in the 2007 race. This will provide some good motivation for your last few weeks of training.
If you live in the city, be sure to get some experience running over the Pulaski Bridge and the Queensboro Bridge. My standard 13.2-mile training route features both of these, so I was well prepared.
Experiment with gels and hydration. On the course, they give out Honey Stinger gels (definitely in vanilla, and maybe in some other flavors too), but not frequently enough for all of your caloric needs
- I use the espresso-flavored Gu gels with caffeine (since I really like coffee, these are actually a treat!) and the Maurten 100 gels (which have a higher water content and don’t coat your mouth like other gels). I take one every 45 minutes, but I’m now considering using more gels (say, every 30 minutes), switching over to Maurten exclusively, and drinking just plain water instead of Gatorade on the course.
Think about what specifically you will wear on race day. Do your long runs in exactly this outfit. Figure out where chafing occurs and either find a new piece of clothing, use medical tape to cover the area (protect the nipples!), or use an anti-chafing balm. Don’t wear anything — or do anything — new on race day.

The week of the race

Don’t run too much the days leading up to the race (keep the intensity high but the distance low). But if you do run, especially the day before the race as a shakeout, I highly recommend running the 2.2 miles of the course that is inside of Central Park. Start at Engineer’s Gate at 90th Street & 5th Avenue and run south on East Drive. During the actual race, you’ll exit the park to run on 59th Street, but ignore this today. Staying on the park drive is good enough. Run all the way to the finish line, as close as you can get. Stop your run, turn around, and visualize what it will be like to be tired and sore running up this last hill.
- The predominant direction of running flow along the park’s loop is counter-clockwise. I don’t know why; I think it is because that is the direction car traffic flowed when private cars were allowed in the park. From now on, I’m going to favor running clockwise so that I get more practice on this critical part of the race.
Try to visit the Expo to pick up your bib on Friday to avoid having to be on your feet for a lot of Saturday.

The day before the race

If you are meeting up with other runners, arrange a specific place and time to meet before getting on the bus. Trying to find people at the start village can be harrying: cell phone service can be spotty and there are a lot of things going on in a small space.
- If you’re taking the bus from the New York Public Library. Pick a meeting place that isn’t too close to the library itself. My friend and I met up on the southwest corner of 42nd & 6th, which was a decent choice, but by 5:45am there were already a lot of people waiting at that specific corner.
Very clearly identify where your spectators will be located: be specific in the side of the street and where along the block. A good choice for Manhattanites is along the northern part of 1st Avenue. The crowd is most dense just after entering Manhattan but thins out starting around 100th street, so north of there gives good chances. Then, your spectators can migrate over to 5th Avenue in time to see you before you enter the park.
Review the course map and the elevation profile. Make note of the five bridges along the course and the hills just before the finish. Remember that even small gradients will be discouraging the later they appear in the race. I think the Queensboro Bridge is far harder than the Verrazano despite being less steep and shorter, just by virtue of being later in the race.
Come up with a pacing strategy. Write it down. Consider even writing it on your arm right next to your wrist with a sharpie: this will remind you every time you of your goal look at your watch. It is very easy to go out too fast.
As usual, get everything you will be bringing with you ready to reduce the chance of error. Put your bib on your shirt, gels in your pockets, sunglasses in your bag, and socks in your shoes, and arrange whatever else you need to be in pockets or as nearby as possible. Charge your watch.
I chose to make some peanut butter and banana sandwiches, which are a mainstay of my pre-race breakfast, and stashed them in a ziplock bag in the refrigerator, to be eaten closer to the start of the race, on the bus or in the corral.
Go to sleep early. Don’t be nervous: there is nothing to be nervous about. Your months of training have gotten you prepared. Seriously try to get 7+ hours of sleep, which probably means you will need to be asleep by 10pm.

Race Morning

If you’re taking the bus, don’t worry too much about being at the New York Public Library exactly on time. No one checks the bus time listed on your bib, so just get on whatever bus whenever you can. Don’t be a jerk, though: try your best to arrive on time. Definitely don’t arrive too late, but also definitely don’t arrive early. As I wrote earlier, you’re just going to wait outside in the cold if you get to Staten Island too early.
Don’t worry too much about exactly when you enter your designated corral. The corrals are pretty small (about the same size as a normal NYRR race) and there are a large number of porta potties in each one. In our corral, the bathroom line closest to the direction of ultimate travel (i.e. away from the bridge) was the shortest, but it was also the most confusing since people were just standing around in that area, eagerly waiting for the race to start.
Don’t wear anything you haven’t worn on a long run before. For example, race day morning was a bit chillier than I was expecting, so I decided to wear some arm warmers that I had never worn before, with the intention of taking them off at some point after starting. I never did and ended up with some totally avoidable chafing.

During the Race

Remember: the last six miles is harder than the previous 20. Save your energy.
Take the Verrazano Narrows Bridge really easy. Consider this as the first part of your warm up. You might feel energized by everyone launching themselves down the bridge and into Brooklyn, but just let them pass you. It should feel as if you’re running backwards with the hordes having to run around you. Don’t worry: if you implement this strategy, you’ll pass them at mile 20, when it really counts.
- I did not do this. Do not do as I do.
Give high fives to some kids. Press some “power up” buttons. Take a banana or a tissue being offered by spectators, but I’d stay away from the offers of free beer.
Monitor your watch only occasionally.
- GPS in the city streets is notoriously bad, so don’t be alarmed when your watch says your pace is off by entire minutes.
- Use the lap function of your watch to monitor your average pace during the three different segments: after the Verrazano Bridge but before the Pulaski Bridge, after getting into Manhattan but before the Bronx, and after getting back into Manhattan but before the finish.
  - Some people say to use the lap function to measure every mile, but I think this is overkill.
Drink lots of water.
- Don’t slow down to a walk or a stop until after the water station and move to the side. Once you get a cup, move to the middle of the road to reduce congestion along the sides.
- I like the crumple method to avoid choking or getting water all over me.
- Use some decency and drop your used cup to the side of the route. Dropping cups in the middle of the street just makes everyone’s lives a little bit harder: literally tens of thousands of runners have to wade through your trash and unpaid, cold volunteers with rakes have to risk their lives in a literal stampede.
- Give a heartfelt “thank you!” to the volunteer that is handing you water.
Remember these cross streets to be able to gauge remaining distance;
- The bridge into Manhattan is the 59th Street Bridge.
- The Willis Avenue Bridge leading to the Bronx starts at 125th Street.
- The bridge out of the Bronx starts in Manhattan at 138th Street.
- The entrance into Central Park is at Engineer’s Gate at 90th Street. You have only 2.2 miles left at that point!

After the Race

Keep walking. Don’t stop, except for pictures (but if you stop for pictures, get out of the way). This part of the day was surreal: for the first time since the Queensboro Bridge, there is complete silence. The runners shuffle painfully, slowly along, with most people covered by a foil blanket, some people sprawled out on the ground against the chain-link fence trying to recover. It felt like a slow-walking zombie scene. * Try to consume easy calories while you’re walking to replenish your muscles’ and liver’s glycogen supplies and your body’s salt supply. Eat and drink the stuff in your bag slowly.
New York etiquette says that you should proudly wear your medal until midnight. On Monday, wearing your medal is unacceptable, with the possible exception of around the finish line and the marathon pavillion in Central Park. Tuesday is unacceptable with no exceptions.

The day after the race

Visit the Fred Lebow statue near the finish line and get a picture with your medal. Walk out to the park drive near the finish line and visualize what the finish was like for you.
The line for medal engraving at the marathon pavilion can be very long. Arrive early or don’t mind waiting a long time. (My wait was 1.25 hours starting at 10:15am, but it was a beautiful day and I didn’t mind passing the time by listening to a podcast outside on a crisp, Fall day).

Trip Report: Japan (2013 & 2017)

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Nara

These are some notes about places we really liked in Japan, mainly Tokyo, between two trips in a couple of years.

Beer & Cocktails

Codename Mixology

Codename Mixology: Definitely definitely definitely go here! This is probably the best cocktail bar we’ve ever been to EVER. In fact, we still talk about this place and can’t wait to go back. The staff is very pleasant and they really know their cocktail shit. It’s not the cheapest but it wasn’t too far off from cocktail bars here in NYC. The food here is supposed to be good, but we went to Matsuya Ginza’s basement for take-home dinner.

Trip Report: Charleston, South Carolina (2018)

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Yuko and I realized that we had a free domestic airfare certificate that would expire soon, so we cooked up a short jaunt to Charleston, South Carolina, where we hear the eating is good.

We definitely were not disappointed. We found a couple of new favorite restaurants and beers. And, we had to be selective about where to go, meaning there is more to be discovered on a future trip.

Trip Report: Boulder, Colorado (2018)

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

James Canyon

Since I was out West already to to attend a friend’s wedding and had a bunch of vacation days to spare, I had really wanted to tack on a camping trip. Then I procrastinated on getting permits and finding an appropriate solo route. So I fell back to my old haunt of cycling in Boulder, Colorado.

And I’m glad I did. I fell in love with the place even more than I had been already.

Trip Report: Sonoma Valley, California

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Yuko and I were invited to a friend’s wedding in Sonoma, California. We spent a long weekend in the area, eating and drinking our way though as usual.

SingleThread Farms

Friday

Yang Sing: I suggested we go to Marlowe, a California-chic restaurant. Yuko wanted dim-sum. We left New York City to come to San Francisco for dim-sum? Who am I to complain: I love dim-sum too. Delicious and worth the wait. Get the soup dumplings, the potstickers, a pot of tea, some shumai, and anything else that looks good. The guy at the table next to us asked me if Yuko and I were on a date. Sort of: I consider everyday a date with my wife.

Trip Report: Tel Aviv, Israel

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I had the occasion to visit Tel Aviv, Israel recently for work. I was admittedly not looking forward to this trip, but I was pleasantly surprised how much I ended up liking Tel Aviv. The food scene is pretty great and the beach-oriented, laid-back lifestyle was nice to experience. The city definitely has a car problem, but it is trying to ameliorate that by installing light rail and new bike lanes.

Dooring Costs

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 01:26:27 +0000

I got doored by a guy getting out of a livery cab a couple of months ago. The cab was in the traveling lane, stopped at a stop light.

I was super-lucky: I only had some bruised ribs. Apparently, my front wheel took the brunt of the force, but I was ejected from my bike and hit the parked Ford E-Series van with my torso. Nevertheless, I decided to go to the ER to make sure I didn’t have a broken rib in danger of puncturing a lung.

Trip Report: Copenhagen and Sweden 2018

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 01:26:27 +0000

Several years ago, Yuko and I watched the final episode of the first season of the Netflix documentary Chef’s Table. We became transfixed by the personality of Chef Magnus Nilsson and the idea of his creation, Fäviken. Located halfway up Sweden, in the woods, far from cities, visiting the restaurant has become a pilgrimage that only true food lovers are interested in taking. By the end of episode, we half-joked that we should go.

Trip Report: Richmond, Virgina

Sat, 09 Sep 2017 01:26:27 +0000

Yuko and I travelled to Richmond, Virginia, aka RVA, to meet up with some friends. Richmond is in the middle of a coffee, beer, donut, and ice cream explosion, so we wanted to get a taste of everything. The city has reportedly changed dramatically in the last few years, being a recipient of a strong dose of hipsterism. Richmond was a perfect target of this cultural shift, since the city has a vibrant college scene and underutilized industrial spaces.

Trip Report: Grand Teton National Park

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 00:26:52 +0000

My team won an company award for some software we built which resulted in a trip to Jackson, Wyoming and Grand Teton National Park (GTNP). Having visited just last year, I had a good picture of what was ahead of me. I was excited to return to experience the breathtaking views, to breathe in some heavy mountain air, and to see some cute, furry animals. The group was planned to meet on Monday afternoon, but I thought it would be fun to extend my trip to include the weekend to do some additional hiking. Since my wife would be busy at graduate school, I decided to embark on my first real camping trip too.

Trip Report: Boulder, Colorado

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:26:52 +0000

After my great experience after GopherCon last year, I wanted to show Yuko around Boulder a bit. Benny was going back to GopherCon, so the two couples scheduled an extended weekend for sightseeing.

Emerald Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park.

Day 1

Yuko and I were meeting some friends at the airport who took a later flight, so we spent some time in Denver.

City O’ City: A great vegetarian/vegan place. The menu is huge and the food is great. I had an El Jefe bean burger that did not disappoint.

Camping During Cycle Adirondacks

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 14:07:17 +0000

Camping at Cycle Adirondacks was the first time in my adult life that I slept outside with a tent and a sleeping bag. When I was a kid, we had a standard, multi-room car camping tent and I had a standard, massive sleeping bag. My parents and I didn’t even know that being insulated from the ground is a critical element in sleeping outside. The cold I experienced on those few nights in our front yard explains why I always thought camping was terrible.

Trip Report: Jackson, WY

Sat, 14 Nov 2015 13:14:20 -0400

Yuko and I took a trip to Jackson, WY after falling in love with the Four Seasons there (where we ultimately didn’t stay). We used a voucher from Delta, which prohibited us from flying into JAC itself, but instead we made a forced visit to Idaho Falls.

This turned out to be fortunate, as the drive from Idaho Falls allowed us to pass through Victor and the Targhee National Forest.

Trip Report: Denver and Boulder, Colorado

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I had the fine fortune of attending Gophercon 2015, a conference to celebrate my current favorite programming language, in Denver and extending my trip to check out nearby Boulder for the weekend.

Lefthand Canyon Drive

I’ve wanted to visit Boulder ever since I visited Portland several years ago. Boulder, Portland, and Austin are always compared against each other, and I fell in love with Portland when I was there. They have a strong cycling scene, a great brewery scene, and an equally great coffee scene, not to mention a weird culture that produces new and interesting things. My favorite t-shirt said, “Portland - Where young people go to retire.”

Lunch Spots for NYC Jury Duty

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head and where I’d go to eat any day of the week if I were on jury duty or not.

Sau Voi Corp - serves really great Vietnamese sandwiches and are really cheap. It’s a strange shop: along with cigarettes and lottery tickets, it sells Vietnamese music, beauty pageant DVDs, and porn. No matter, the women who serve up sandwiches are legit. Stay away from the crazy sweet desserts, though. The Vietnamese coffee is great, too. I would probably go here every day of jury duty.

How I Read the Sunday New York Times

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading the New York Times since elementary school, spurred on by my mother. She was an avid Times reader from as long as I can remember. As a stay-at-home mom, she was always extremely supportive in my education. Every morning before school, while we were waiting for the school bus to pull up to our hours, she would present a folio of articles that she had cut out from the previous day’s newspaper. We would sit next to each other at our dining room table, which overlooked our driveway, and I’d ask questions as I’d read. As I got older, I’d quickly read the article to myself, and we’d discuss the topic.

Braindump NYC - Algorithms

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight was the third meeting of the Braindump NYC meetup physically hosted by Hunch and logistically hosted and sponsored by my friends at Hackruiter. Each meeting has a technical theme and those present are invited to give very short presentations along the theme.

Tonight’s theme was “algorithms” with a wide variety of types being presented.

The first short talk I gave was on An Envy Free Cake Division Protocol, as given by the paper of the same name (PDF) and the fantastic book Cooking For Geeks. I cheated because a protocol is strictly speaking not an algorithm, but is still procedural. Nevertheless, the main criticism of the talk was that I didn’t actually bring any cake. I was happy to spread the sheer awe that I experienced when I found out there is a whole section of science devoted to optimal ways to cut a cake.

still alive

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m still alive. I have an itch to write about lots of technical things and rant about a few others. I started an awesome new job in February that has taken up most of my time since.

I’m still alive and life is good.

TLC Rules for Taxicab Drivers

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was reading through the TLC Rules for Taxicab Drivers (pdf) to satisfy some curiosity after reading through several posts from the entertaining blog Cabs Are For Kissing, written by a cabbie about stories from the job. I found these amusing sections:

§ 2-42 Courteous.

(a) A driver shall be courteous to passengers.

It turns out that from § 2-86 a violation of this section is a $150 fine.

§ 2-44 Luggage and Property.

Oh Snap -- You Just Got PEW PEW PEWed!

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

(via geekology)

I’ve never quite been able to get it out of my mind since I first saw this, driving me slowly insane. Plus, I love animated gifs.

Ricky Gervais on atheism in the Wall Street Journal

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Ricky Gervais presented a well-written piece on why he is an atheist last month in the Wall Street Journal. He also responded to some questions and his response to the question “How do you plan on celebrating Christmas?” was striking to me:

Eating and drinking too much with friends and family. Celebrating life and remembering those that did, but can no longer.

They are not looking down on me but they live in my mind and heart more than they ever did probably. Some, I was lucky enough to bump into on this planet of six billion people. Others shared much of my genetic material. One selflessly did her best for me all my life. That’s what mums do though. They do it for no other reason than love. Not for reward. Not for recognition. They create you. From nothing. Miracle? They do those every day. No big deal. They are not worshiped. They would give their life without the promise of heaven. They teach you everything they know yet they are not declared prophets. And you only have one.

Justice Stewart in New York Times v U.S.

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Emphasis mine:

In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry – in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For, without an informed and free press, there cannot be an enlightened people.

Replaced reliant robin

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A few weekends ago, I was poking around my site statistics and found that I had a huge number of hits and was using a much larger percentage of my bandwidth than I’d expect with a silly, personal text- and image-only weblog:

So I took a look at my referrers:

And sure enough someone is hotlinking one of my images at http://forums.vwvortex.com. It turns out it’s my from my post about Buying a Reliant Robin:

Amazon pulls WikiLeaks, I pull my account

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Amazon terminated the Amazon Web Services account that WikiLeaks was using to host the site, possibly caving to political pressure from the office of Senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman subsequently issued a statement calling for all companies to censor WikiLeaks. Daniel Ellsberg, the figurehead behind the Pentagon Papers, published an open letter to Amazon condemning this decision, closed his Amazon account, and encouraged others to do the same.

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece on how Joe Lieberman Emulates Chinese Dictators.

Reinforcing a republic

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

With today’s historic WikiLeaks release (which has been undergoing a DDOS of unknown origin; so here’s the NYT coverage), I couldn’t help but think of the closing of The Hacker’s Manifesto:

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Open ports on megabus to Boston

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The following is nmap output over Megabus-provided wifi (en route to Boston) showing the proxied ports.

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-11-02 19:39 EDT
Interesting ports on dagny.detechnis.com (173.255.227.97):
Not shown: 987 filtered ports
PORT     STATE  SERVICE
53/tcp   open   domain
80/tcp   closed http
110/tcp  closed pop3
143/tcp  closed imap
443/tcp  closed https
465/tcp  closed smtps
587/tcp  closed submission
993/tcp  closed imaps
995/tcp  closed pop3s
1863/tcp closed msnp
5190/tcp closed aol
5222/tcp closed unknown
8080/tcp closed http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 30.28 seconds

What’s sort of annoying is that:

About

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

contact

Email: eric@ericgar.com
Phone: 601-884-0354
Web: http://ericgar.com
GitHub: minusnine

ethos

Most of the problems we have are interesting in that they are questions looking for answers in a system of composed rules. Solving the problem is just a matter of solving at least a subset of the system or adding additional constraints to it.

For me, computers and computation represent an interesting microcosm of the available problem spaces in the universe. This is a system that, to anyone but the materials scientist or electrical engineer, is entirely constructed by humans. We decided to have a given number of registers in the CPU. We decided to limit ourselves to a particular transmission limit on the local network link. We meticulously designed the languages we use to express imperatives to the machines we want to control.

On Converting to Jekyll

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote that I spent some time recently to convert my Wordpress-based weblog to Jekyll. As partially mentioned in that post, Jekyll is a “blog-aware” static content generator written in Ruby that uses a lot of existing components, like Maruku for Markdown formatting and Liquid for templating.

The documentation for each of these components is at times a bit sparse and strangely arranged. The following pages I just found but I should have read them earlier:

Redesigned ericgar.com

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I decided that managing Wordpress on my web host was not interesting any longer. I wanted to host my simple blog in git, to compose using vim, and to not have to manage a database or the insecurities of a web application. Not to mention that the RSS feed was slightly broken and the pages were not standards compliant.

Consequently, I redesigned this site using Jekyll, a Ruby-based “blog-aware” publishing tool that is the backend behind GitHub pages. Instead of dynamically generating content, it transforms all the content to static HTML files. It uses Markdown for its markup language, so composing directly in cumbersome HTML continues to not be necessary. I now have both a suite of unit tests that are run prior to deployment, as well as a QA site to test changes before going production with them.

An armchair economic analysis of moving walkways

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Walking in the Charlotte Airport inspired me to do some research into the economics of moving walkways. I’m currently sitting (in a wooden rocking chair!) in front of one, which clearly illustrates a common thought: why do people stand on moving walkways?

Often being positioned in areas designed to get you from one place to another (say, transportation hubs), I think it should be obvious that moving walkways do not exist to present an opportunity of leisure and rest, but to propel us faster toward our ultimate destination.

Things I'm looking forward to.

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Giving a talk to my colleagues in Asia (via teleconference, sadly) about Git, how it works, and why it is super-concentrated awesome.
Visiting my best friend and his lovely wife in Charlottesville, VA and attending the Top of the Hops beer festival. (Which sadly means I may miss this weekend’s Ubuntu Kernel Bug Triage Summit. Ah choices and obligations…)
Giving a talk sometime in the next few months for NY.pm’s Perl Seminar group on some facet of Moose. All details TBD.
Posing as a real Linux kernel developer and attending the Linux Plumber’s Conference in Boston. I don’t feel bad posing because:
1. I believe that to be good at anything, you need to know as much about the level above and below the piece of the stack you’re most interested in. If you don’t have this knowledge, you don’t have a good picture on what you’re actually doing.
2. I’ve spent a good deal of my time, both on the job and off the job, poking around the kernel and drivers to explain emergent behavior or error conditions.
3. I really want to be a real kernel developer soon.
Attending the BeerAdvocate Belgian Beer Fest (which happily is the same week as the LPC and in Boston).
Trying out the non-permanent, non-furniture-like whiteboard on my wall. I love whiteboards and really love brainstorming with them. There is something less restraining with a whiteboard than dumping my mind onto a piece of paper. It’s a serious bummer that the whiteboards at work suck.

On Religious Freedom

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

New York Restaurant Recommendations

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

These are the places I’d go if I were visiting my city, in order of preference. I sent this exact list to one of my colleagues visiting from Hong Kong.

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

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

Killing an entire process group

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today, one of my colleagues inadvertently set off a linear fork bomb of ksh processes on a critical infrastructure machine. Linux held up well to this, since basically these processes were just entries in the scheduling table and very little else. The system was pretty responsive, albeit with a load average hovering between 800 and 3000, and we ran out of process identifiers fairly quickly.

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

Portland Travel Guide

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I had a wonderful opportunity to spend the last few days in Portland, Oregon in advance of attending OSCON. I can honestly say that of all of the places I went to, none were mediocre or worse. This is a really cool, well-planned, well-run city with a really great culture.

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

OSCON 2010 attendee profile

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I finally got around to posting my OSCON 2010 attendee profile:

I wrote:

I work as a database administrator in a global team looking after a large financial institution’s relational database plant. For better or worse, this plant is 100% COTS; we’ll see what I can do to change that.

While database administration in our group is awesome (computing + adrenaline = fun), I most enjoy the time spent writing internal tools in Perl and C, from compiled plugins for DB2 to automation solutions, and analyzing system faults in Linux.

autocrap tools

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A coworker sent me this amusing rant about autotools which pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject.

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

But as it transpires, that is not the case.

Citrix Client: Adding SSL trust in Linux

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The company I work for somehow decided to get their SSL certificate for their employee portal from a CA not trusted by one of the main applications on the portal, the Citrix Client. (There may be an addition of “Xen” in the actual product name, who knows).

I received the error:

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

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

Five Years of Kernel Development in Git

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A really sweet animation of Git interaction between developers of the Linux Kernel:

Muhammad Waving With Blue Rectangle

Wed, 19 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Muhammad Waving with Blue Rectangle (2010)

for "Draw Muhammad Day".

Eric Garrido (American, born 1985)

Digital Still, 449x384px

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

I want to blog more. But I'll just post this for now.

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There is no music more intense, dorky, and anguished than that born of the eternal struggle not to touch one’s own genitals or the genitals of others outside the union of holy heterosexual wedlock."

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

Just did this.

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Something I just noticed when signing up for Heroku

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On the bottom of Heroku’s Terms of Service, presented while creating an account, is:

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

I <3 Creative Commons.

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

Forever again

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

From 450,000 Without Power in Northeast:

Strong winds and heavy rain pounded parts of the Northeast on Saturday, knocking out power to more than 450,000 customers, diverting international flights and toppling a boom crane at an Atlantic City casino construction site, injuring one police officer…

The winds downed trees and power lines throughout New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut…

Logan International Airport in Boston received nine overseas flights bound for New York because they no longer had the fuel to wait for clearance to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport, said Massport spokesman Matthew Brelis…

haha

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

(10:33:03 PM) Eric: there's always a party around me.
(10:33:13 PM) Laura: like, a lan party?

Tracepath on Lucky Star Wifi

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

ericgar@pliny ~ $ tracepath google.com
 1:  192.168.0.150 (192.168.0.150)                          0.371ms pmtu 1500
 1:  192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1)                              3.179ms
 1:  192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1)                              3.263ms
 2:  68.28.121.85 (68.28.121.85)                          379.922ms
 3:  68.28.121.91 (68.28.121.91)                          424.449ms asymm  4
 4:  68.28.123.55 (68.28.123.55)                          163.418ms asymm  6
 5:  no reply
 6:  68.28.127.5 (68.28.127.5)                            178.967ms
 7:  no reply
 8:  68.28.125.69 (68.28.125.69)                          129.804ms
 9:  sl-gw20-hrs-10-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.224.112.17)   185.336ms
10:  sl-crs1-hrs-0-0-2-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.7.133)   511.799ms
11:  sl-crs1-nyc-0-6-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.24.97)   156.634ms
[ several hops of no reply]

Mutex vs. Semaphore

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I just want to say that this sequence of blog posts by Niall Cooling is a great, detailed discussion about mutexes and semaphores.

Forest Hills State of Mind

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is really well done.

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

(via Gothamist)

Where all used things reside.

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is mostly for my reference, to document a fucking sick night with Glassjaw, Thursday, and United Nations.

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:

Biking in a snow flurry was fun.

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

De La Vega Museum: recommended. I even received my change in $2 bills.

This was down the street and kind of beautiful:

My 2009.

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

bicycles ¹

Thursday ²

boston ³

craft beer ⁴

disaster ⁵

bahn mi ⁶

buses ⁷

(loud) music ⁸

(searching for) companionship ⁹

warm bed ¹⁰

brooklyn ¹¹

vegetables ¹²

postcards ¹³

darkness ¹⁴

[IRO Bike 012 copy][1] by Ninj0x, licensed under Creative Commons [1]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ninj0x/3749898579/ ↩︎

Excerpt from "Understanding Linux Network Internals"

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently reading Christian Benvenuti’s excellently written Understanding Linux Network Internals from O’Reilly which is helping to shore up my knowledge about how the networking stack is implemented in Linux. It’s a fantastic read so far, on course to match Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love, one of my all-time favorite books.

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!

Some news items.

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Some things around the internet today:

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.

Please support Creative Commons

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Twitpic Terms of Service currently reads:

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 (eric@ericgar.com) To: support@twitpic.com Cc: Bcc: Subject: Please support Creative Commons Reply-To:

Twitpic,

Updated links

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Using my nifty XSLT posted below, I’ve updated my sidebar links to reflect what I’m actually reading these days. I just pruned down my subscriptions: I had like 30 cycling blogs that were good, but time consuming. (How many pictures of Chinese girls on bikes do you really need to see in your week?)

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.

XSLT for OPML to XHTML List

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The following some XSLT sufficient to transform an OPML file into a list, ready for you to edit and post:

<?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:

Schneier on Terrorist Plot

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The below is from from Schneier on the terrorist plot. Normally I don’t lift posts in their entirety, but this one is just logical:

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?

This is something that makes me excited.

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

This is dedicated to bdotdub

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Pull harder, Mom.

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I found a printed copy of this among my mother’s things:

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

Maybe I should grow up more.

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

bdotr

apidae

purplewhales

(via likeneelyohara)

“blah blah blah.” by miabania

A real, but unfinished journal entry.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Questions that might stimulate interesting conversation

What constitutes interesting conversation to you?

Who do you typically have this type of conversation with?

Does P=NP?

For some reason, I stopped there.

Some background reading for you non-computer scientists.

Advice to future Columbia (SEAS (CompSci)) Undergrads, part one

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Following my last reflective post on advice for an aspiring technologist, I now present a laundry list of recommendations I have for a Columbia SEAS undergraduate majoring in computer science. One of the things I wished I had when I was in university was a mentor who would be able to give me this sort of practical advice and whom I’d actually take seriously. That said, part of the value of college, growing up, and life in general is stumbling upon knowledge and wisdom yourself that has been known for generations.

Oh no. Bug reports via Twitter.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

This is how we roll.

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

(Stolen from bdotdub.)

Natalie Tran. Adorable.

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If only she were actually saying hi to me.

Maybe I should start using that name more often.

Pasta with Greens

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

My Senior Traits, 2003

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In 2003, I composed the following “Senior Traits” to be placed next to my picture in my senior year high school yearbook.

Trademark: At least three computing devices on me at one time, my noises.
Pet Peeve: Those who do not signal when turning in a car.
Idol: Richard P. Feynman
Weakness: Binary, mathematics and science, a good espresso.
Favorite Saying: "Polymorphism".
Most Prized Possession: My palm pilot.
One Wish: To make a difference in someone's world.
Life Ambition: To make a lasting scientific advancement after I obtain a Ph.D.
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

2010 Michelin Guide New York City Starred Restaurants

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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)
~~Cafe 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 Joel Robuchon
Marc Forgione (N)
Marea (N)
Minetta Tavern (N)
~~Modern (The)~~
Oceana
Perry Street
Peter Luger
~~Public~~
Rhong-Tiam (N)
~~River Cafe (N)~~
Rouge Tomate (N)
Saul
Seasonal (N)
Shalizar (N)
SHO Shaun Hergatt (N)
Soto (N)
~~Spotted Pig~~
Sushi Azabu (N)
Sushi of Gari
Veritas
Wallse

Another reason why I like my ISP, Natural Wireless

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Auto-Dependency Generation in GNU Make

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Slashdot poll: Most Useful UNIX Tool

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Olbermann rant on "You lie!" outburst

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Two classic videos I've been thinking about (again)

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Reggie and the Full Effect - Congratulations Smack and Katy

Brand New, Welcome to Bangkok

Best flowers ever.

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Two videos I've been thinking about

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Both of these videos went viral recently, but documented here for posterity (and for my mother).

So catchy:

Served:

Trackstand in Sixteen Variations, by Cadence

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

With a great background track.

mbsync: success

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to Remko Troncon 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.

Observations on Bicycling in the Rain

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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:

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.

Darth Vader as MC Hammer

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This should have made it into the trilogy.[^1}

(via totallycrap).

git-scm logo awesomeness

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Email Hulu If Ads Malfunction

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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

Op-Ed: Steal This Code

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

how to: resume from suspend by keystroke in Linux

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The most beautiful necklace I've ever seen

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Free software causes airplane crashes?

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

2009 American Craft Beer Fest

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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 ______________ .

Save Our City

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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

speedtest-meme

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

To play off of the recent meme over on Planet Ubuntu, I’d like to reiterate how awesome my ISP, Natural Wireless, is:

Essay: Why No More 9/11s?

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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:

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

Intel Rock Star

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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

Thank you Brookfield Properties

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

ratpower.sh: a power menu for ratpoison

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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

10 things that changed my life

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

By no means an authoritative or ranked list.

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.
Brooks Brothers No-Iron Pants and Shirts - I'm a huge fan of these for work clothing. I spend zero minutes a week ironing.
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.
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.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson - I will never think of Alan Turing or Pearl Harbor in the same way. (Thanks Brendan!)
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.
Being on the right subway platform at the right time - Ah circumstance.
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.
Post-hardcore music - As with all music I like, I hated it at first, but have become devoted to it (for better or worse).
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.

Short Links

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Simple XSLT and Delicious API

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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:

(HACKERS) hstore improvements?

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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” (david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) writes:

Is a more Perlish syntax out of the question?

Yes. SQL is not Perl.

regards, tom lane

Downloading music from spin.com

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

meh. fine. removed.

Temptation wins.

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Things that are on my mind right now:

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

YouTube - Travis Barker Remix Soulja Boy "Crank That".

Tomatoes vs. Arrrrgh.

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Tired. Exhausted. Smelly

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Just Alerting You

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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…)

Samsung 3253H LCD television recalibration

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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

Happy Thursday!

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

why would you say that?

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The video on my mind all week so far.

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Old school 311.

Happy baby! Because of an HDMI Switcher?

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Wait, what?

New Computer!!!!111

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Physics Machine Shop @ Columbia

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When I was an undergrad, I should have worked here:

the Machine Shop at Columbia University’s Physics Department.

Workaround: Blank Google Reader

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Bellovin on working the polls.

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Steven Bellovin, computer security professor at Columbia, posted an interesting recount of his observations on being a poll worker.

I broke down and joined twitter.

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

On losing 91-0 at a high school football game

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

''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).

NYTimes Summary of SCOTUS Docket

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Rage Against the Machine A Capella at a Rally

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Freaking awesome. I <3 ratm.

Tony on Lipstick on Pigs

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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:

A pig with lipstick is still a pig

Palin (according to her acceptance speech) is a pitbull with lipstick

Palin is still a pitbull

That’s arguably unfavorable, except that Palin made the comparison herself.

I like things that make me laugh

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I love internet memes

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

they're just so good.

Build your own large hadron collider

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The mind of the scientist

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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

The politics of being a castle manager.

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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).

i <3 1A

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Laptop Border Searches = Illegal. Well, they should be.

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Not that anyone else really cares, but...

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Do it Live

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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

Thursday on Saturday

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this since it happened.

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

At the end of the day, we are geeks.

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Four things disturbed me today

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Behavioral change.

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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

Why I Can't Become a Senior Manager :-(

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Redesigning the Milk Jug

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

In the future, we will not be iPhones

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

ICANN's decision to expand DNS

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Things I found useful today

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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"

On Google Reader

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Somehow, this guy has to do with F1

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

From ITV’s pre-show promo for their Formula One racing coverage:

Dude, easy on the makeup.

A girl turned to me at a bar...

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

and said, “Hi. My friend really likes you.”

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

The t-shirt on the right brought back memories.

Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Sir Martin Rees: Earth in its final century?

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

RSS 2.0 vs. RSS .93 vs. Atom 0.3 ...

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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 this¹:

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?

Some things from today's Times

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

An interesting bug...

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.

On the enterprise mind.

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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.”

I ordered a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster last night

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

…but the bartender had no idea what i was talking about.

(This, a thank you post, to whomever anonymously sent me a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While I kind of enjoyed being made fun of for not having read it, it was really good to finally do it.)

Foo Fighters at MSG

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jon, Chris, and I saw the Foo Fighters and Serj Tankian (singer from System of a Down) at MSG tonight. Amazing show. The crowd was not really what I had expected. The three of us started the mosh pit. Me. Starting a mosh pit. Ridiculous. But it happened tonight. Many times.

By the end, we (met | had physical contact with) a nice group of guys, and one crazy girl, who felt the same we did.

A portion of my ToDo list.

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Some feedback from my screen patch

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A person on screen-devel, who shall respectfully remain nameless since he didn’t post to the list proper, sent me this in response to my proposed patch:

I would never use this feature because I would rather that window #n always remain window #n, but I can see the usefulness of the feature if you used to have more than 10 windows and now have fewer than 10 but some windows still bear numbers greater than 9, so you can go back to using Ctrl-A <n> to switch to them quickly.

Chad Curry is a cool person.

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

From this week’s “The Look Book” in New York Magazine (yes, again):

What do you do? I knew you were going to ask that, but I'm weird about being associated with what I do. We all label people based on that, so what I do is, I'm a human living life, just like you are.
But how do you pay rent? Vocationally, I’m a fashion stylist and an artist and I’m multifaceted. And then I also work at Jeffrey in their women’s designer section. I’m in a space with four walls and other people, and it’s been very challenging to wrap my brain around that.

Screen: Renumbering Windows to Fill Gaps

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

After running a single session of screen for a long time, I often find that I have several gaps in the numerical ordering of windows. Using :number is definitely feasible, but it takes a bit more effort than I’d care to contribute every time I want to make my windows contiguously numbered.

I’ve created a patch against CVS HEAD to fill in the holes of the window numbering. It simply moves windows to lower positions until there are no holes left. Any (constructive) comments are welcome.

My world was just torn apart.

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

From O’Reilly:

named is pronounced "name-dee" and stands for "name server daemon." BIND is pronounced to rhyme with "kind." Some creative people have noticed the similarities in the names and choose to mispronounce them "bin-dee" and "named" (like "tamed").

bzip'd tar file returns error

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

right. so I got this today when trying to untar all of my academic work from an archive:

ericgar@babbage extusb$ tar -xjf columbia-2007-10-31.tar.bzip2
You can use the `bzip2recover' program to attempt to recover
data from undamaged sections of corrupted files.
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
ericgar@babbage extusb$ bzip2recover columbia-2007-10-31.tar.bzip2 
bzip2recover 1.0.4: extracts blocks from damaged .bz2 files.
bzip2recover: searching for block boundaries ...
bzip2recover: I/O error reading `columbia-2007-10-31.tar.bzip2', possible reason follows.
bzip2recover: Input/output error
bzip2recover: warning: output file(s) may be incomplete.

I was thinking, “Well, data loss sucks.”

Et cetera

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My websites demand Swedish:

So really, that’s not a $190 flight:

I didn’t realize email could come without wires:

Not a traditional Nun:

One of these is not like the others:

Really useful tags:

PSA: https and gmail

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Those of you who know me know that I don’t use Gmail for a variety of reasons. But, I know you do. Here’s looking at you, kid.

When you go to http://gmail.com to login, your browser greets you with a happy “this webpage is secure” notification.

And you sign in. Your username and password is sent using an encryption technology called SSL/TLS so that people who see your information go by can’t actually read it.

Cythia Lopez is a cool kid.

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

From this week’s “The Look Book” in New York Magazine:

Tell me about your look. A lot of it is influenced by Japanese street fashion, but mostly I wear band gear. My favorite band is Glassjaw.
What are they like? It’s hard to explain them, but it’s music that you want to hear when you break up with the love of your life. Very emotional. Very angry. Honestly, I’ve never had a love of my life, but if I did, that’s what I would listen to when we broke up.

Thank you Columbia...

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

… for giving me a $24 student loan.

At least it probably bought a bottle or two of wine and is contributing to my credit score.

Home again.

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Back from Thursday at Starland. No major injuries to report. But wow, what an amazing show…

Slashdot Tags

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Tagging has been a great way for slashdot readers to interact with the moderated stories. My two favorites:

Yes and No

I’m really glad those questions were answered for me.

I love being an engineer.

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I love being an engineer. My iPod shuffle was broken. The left audio channel became intermittent, but worked with a bit of constant pressure. What does any good engineer do? break it open, put some solder on the connection and seal it back up!

As good as new.

I love being an engineer.

Software as commerce.

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“Open Letter To Hobbyists” by Bill Gates, 1976:

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000. The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

afk.

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

afk until the beginning of December ¹.

Monstar! party planning in progress. stay tuned. ↩︎

I <3 computer science

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Mostly because of things like this:

Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol.

From the paper:

The most obvious feature of this protocol is that it is complicated and would have taken a long time to carry out. We will advance a hypothesis as to why it is so complicated, and describe a simplified protocol with very similar features.

Junior Wizards Need Not Apply

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Failures happen; given the 24x7 support requirement (per 4.5), there will be times when something breaks badly enough that senior wizards will have to connect remotely.

- RFC2870, “Root Name Server Operational Requirements”

More Random Sights Seen

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I was trying to find out why the Daily News included a Perl variable in their headline:

From a registration page somewhere:

I love to be contacted! Thanks for asking!

My internet told me so:

(I wonder if that will actually be useful to anyone).

Free DNS Resolvers

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I just recently spent a few hours diagnosing a very inconsistent network behavior when browsing between websites. I’ve known for a while that it’s probably a DNS issue. After testing, I found that xo.net’s (the bandwidth seller to my ISP) DNS servers are just intermittently dog slow in resolving individual queries, up to 10 seconds a piece.

I demoed using opendns.com’s free resolvers, which indeed are fairly fast, but load my browser with advertising for every domain name typo. Not going to fly.

Councilman Oddo vs. Faux Ali G

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Gothamist reported on a New York City councilman irately shouting at what appears to be a Norwegian Ali-G style interview. The video was posted:

I think his response was so right on. He seems to think he disrespected both his mother and his constituents. I happen to think his reaction is just what happens when you screw with a real New Yorker.

Items of Interest

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The following is a list of the RSS items I either need to read or think about more.

Reading behind the lines

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After I saw this, I reflected how little news is actually made when Putin confirms a long running rumor and how much people actually want to read about “Tweens”:

Then I saw this, and thought, “Man, Columbia doesn’t have an army at all!”

Winning your employees

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a big fan of management practices where management understands they only earn their money because of the employees under them.

McLaren Mercedes was recently punished by the Federation Internationale d’Automobile (FIA) for improperly handling documents containing Ferrari secrets. The penalty was stripping McLaren of all its constructor championship points they earned this season, awarding Ferrari the win in that competition, and fining the team $100 million. (In real terms, McLaren screwed itself out of a lot of money).

Still alive.

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The blogs I read, the blogs I respect, both personal and professional, create content that is more than a “this is what I did today” story. That content is appropriate for a personal journal, not one that is published on the web. The blogs I hold in esteem write content that tells a story that could be useful or entertaining for whomever comes across it, be it regular readers or Google users.

Become an Organ Donor

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s world, you’ll never know when you will be incapacitated to the point where you need donations from others just to remain alive. To help others in their time of need, become an organ donor.

Note that the donor card on the back of your driver license is of dubious legal quality. Be sure to register yourself with your state registry. If you live in New York, sign up here.

Props to Local Businesses

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some notes on my positive interactions with two local business:

Jacks Art Gallery - I had two small pieces framed there recently and both turned out wonderfully. The staff were very helpful in helping me pick a solution that would make the pieces really pop out. They even were nice enough to give me hanging hardware and wall bumpers. I definitely recommend them for fairly inexpensive, quality framing work.

Tiecrafters - Realizing I had become out of fashion, I brought both my ties to Tiecrafters to have narrowed into a cool, hip, new tie. The ties came out exactly as I wanted them. The gentleman with whom I dealt was extremely kind and accommodating in helping me pick out a size. Everyone I know has used them, and everyone I know who has used them loves them. Highly recommended.

I looked in the mirror today...

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

and didn’t recognize myself.

Found Humor

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some humorous things I’ve seen around the web lately.

Random statistic:

But what about the other 6% of young people? Spawns of the hellbeast, must be.

You mean software vendors distribute patches to existing installs?

This is from the website of a new condo building being built in my neighborhood.

“Where SoHo meets Tribeca” ? You must mean Canal St, but don’t want to make people think of Chinatown or hellish traffic.

Maverick Action

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

While I’m not an NRA member, friends know that I am the proud owner of two of these babies. It seems some other people have had a similar interest in extremely-non-lethal weapons.

Natural Wireless

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

One of the supposed amenities of the building where I rent was that a good portion of the building is blanketed by Wi-Fi from a company called Natural Wireless. I figured it was a gimmick at the time I read about it but it turned out to be a really nice perk.

When I moved in, I picked up signal from their AP and I immediately signed up for their service, since a geek without internet service is rendered powerless like Spiderman without his spidey suit. I figured I’d only keep the service until I got a “real” internet service provider (DSL from Verizon or cable from Time Warner; Speakeasy was in the running at one point, but then they were picked up by Best Buy, and I hate that chain more than I hate consumer ISPs).

Street Jumper

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve seen this a million times before and could see it another million times before I get bored. A little parkour action for your evening.

Avenue of Speech

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I got excited when I read this because the New York Law School is my neighbor.

At noon Pacific time today (June 18), members of the Peer-to-Patent project team will discuss the project on the New York Law School’s Democracy Island in Second Life.

(emphasis mine)

Sadly, I’m not geeky enough to have an avatar in Second Life.

Merit-based Teacher Pay

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The New York Times published an article, “Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers” which describes several initiatives to pay teachers based on the improvement of their students.

I find myself disagreeing with those who believe teachers should be paid this way. In thinking about all of the best teachers in my life, those who actually made a difference, whether they were teaching exactly what they were supposed to or not, probably would not have benefitted from having me or many of my peers in a class. What they offered us was definitely not anything measurable by standardized tests. They offered us knowledge and wisdom that was most certainly beyond the scope of any curriculum that any state committee could develop.

When one eight becomes two zeros.

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We will return to regularly scheduled programming shortly.

From Dreamhost

Sat, 19 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This from a Dreamhost support worker (emphasis mine):

I just ran our new magical super jabber fixer script, and it's assured me that your jabber is working now. I have full confidence in this script, but should it have been lieing to me please let me know and I'll see what more I can do.
Thanks! James

I wrote him back asking if he had a version of the script for DB2 or Oracle 10g. He responded:

In both of our shoes.

Sat, 19 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you, as a parent, choose to not lie to your child about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, are you limiting that child’s imagination or heightening their sense of reality? Or are you just producing the kid who ruins the fun for all of the believers. Is that to say that there always is an acceptable level of naivety for a person? Only in the developmental stages? Why? Or, what does that mean for those of us who are knowingly veiled by this naivety but strive for truthful knowledge?

My Taste of Tribeca

Sat, 19 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I moved into my apartment on Tuesday. Many of you reading this have probably already been here, the rest should come by some time soon. It’s a gorgeous little place, perhaps seemingly better to me because of one fact: it’s mine. For at least a year. No moving out, no RCRs to fill out, no RAs. If the last few days of living in Tribeca have anything to say, the remaining 51 weeks will be a blast.

driving too fast.

Sat, 12 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

School is over.

I’ve been having a problem recently: I’ve out grown my music collection. It’s just not hard enough anymore. Just not enough screaming, thrashing, and noise. All the post-hardcore is too friendly. Even most Glassjaw isn’t loud enough anymore. (Their amps probably only go up to 10). I’ve turned to numetal for solace, back to where my penchant for loudness started, but it just feels a little silly. The people on DC just aren’t cool enough to have better music. I have resorted to begging some trusted authoritative music sources for input.

Posted SEAS Senior Dinner Pictures

Sat, 05 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some pictures of SEAS Senior Dinner.

AACS Processing Key

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Just to join the crowd, the current HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Processing Key is:

09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0

Amendment I, U.S. Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Added New Pictures

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve added new photos!

More random pictures of my friends.
Me and Emmi at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Matsuri Festival. Lots of cherry blossoms and turtles!
I leased my first apartment!

Another screenshot

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

From the software that came with our Probability & Statistics book:

Some screenshots

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The second subject in the list is definitely not what I was looking for:

Sure, they must launch an exponential attack to exercise every possible attack vector:

But even after six minutes, nothing had happened:

I'm going to miss this place.

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sitting in a hallway in an engineering building and no one walking by gives even a passing glance to the little dog-like robot that is just looking around.

Buying a Reliant Robin

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I kind of want to trade in my 2001 Olds Alero for this:

This is a Reliant Robin, made by a British company which is now defunct, and yes, it only has three wheels. Apparently, there was a version with a Rover (more powerful) engine in it which made installing wheelie bars required. How cool would it be to need wheelie bars on your car?

Admittedly, this decision is mostly because of this:

Sendmail SMTP AUTH Config Explanation

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Both for my own knowledge and that of the internet, I took the time to finely document my sendmail.mc configuration file for use with SMTP AUTH to an external SMTP server. In this configuration, my local users can send mail to the rest of the internet by authenticating with my ISP’s SMTP server and send mail through it.

The following sites were extremely helpful when initially trying to configure this:

SMTP AUTH in sendmail 8.10-8.13

Funny SCUBA Questions

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

…are toward the middle of this FAQ

(This was asked on a boat 2 miles offshore by a guy with his logbook. Here is the exchange that occurred...)
Q: What elevation are we at?

A: Us - “How tall are you?” Him - " 6'1" " Us - “OK…then your elevation is 7'4” " Him - “Cool…Thanks!”

A sad story

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A sad story in today’s Times: A widowed mother of seven resisted masked men who demanded she leave her home by calling American and Kurdish soldiers at a base less than a mile away. They apprehended the men as they were trying to escape, but the woman was shot and killed while doing errands the next day.

Response to Spec Opinion "Fines Violate Students' Rights"

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Stephen Cox, a Columbia College sophomore, wrote an opinion piece for the Columbia Spectator entitled, “Fines Violate Students’ Rights”.

It seems that students here at Columbia have a penchant for thinking that Columbia University is improperly acting on behalf of th RIAA in forwarding settlement notices to students who have been served with a DMCA copyright infringment takedown notice. While I dislike defending the practices of the RIAA, being of sound mind and in favor of a fair and equal judicial system, I believe that Columbia and its rival educational institutions are neither in violation of the law nor of any educational or moral standard.

Advice for aspiring technologists

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Several of my peers recently asked how I’ve become knowledgeable about technology. I remember the first time I was asked: I was taken aback and didn’t know how to respond. Even dispensing with modesty, I never thought that I was ahead of any of my peers in this area, given how pervasive technology, and technologists, have become.

I continue to assert strongly that my domain specific knowledge isn’t nearly atypical but in fact is often below par. This is especially true in comparison to the people with whom I surround myself. Though, I have noticed that there are a lot of people here at Columbia who want to know more about technology but don’t really know how to do it. Most people think that an education in computer science will get you there, but learning how to learn aside (which itself is infinitely important), most of the stuff I’ve learned that is practical came from outside of the classroom.

Direct Connect Hub Shares on a Recent Evening

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This is a graph of the share size of a small direct connect hub on a recent evening. Nice example of Bradford’s law.

Total amount of shared data at this time was 3.1 TiB, with the average being 78 GiB.

1337 h0rd3 h4x0r

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Amazing when the kids of today (very probably, the Road Runner residential customer at cpe-66-67-116-12.rochester.res.rr.com) think creating a page on a publicly-modifiable wiki is “hacking.”

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:03:23 -0700
From: Wiki Guest (wikiguest@horde.org)
Subject: (cvs) (Wiki) created: Hacked
To: cvs@lists.horde.org
Message-ID: (20070324180323.dwoylco4oow0o4w4@wiki.horde.org)
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset=UTF-8
guest (66.67.116.12)  Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:03:23 -0700
Created page: http://wiki.horde.org/Hacked
HACKED BITCH!

City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Totally unacceptable:

NYTimes - City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention

This was from/featured in the Fifth HOPE the month before the convention:

Other digests noted a planned campaign of “electronic civil disobedience” to jam fax machines and hack into Web sites. Participants at a conference were said to have discussed getting inside delegates’ hotels by making hair salon appointments or dinner reservations. At the same conference, people were reported to have discussed disabling charter buses and trying to confuse delegates by switching subway directional signs, or by sealing off stations with crime-scene tape.

Mmm. The Carnival Begins.

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The East Campus Residential Staff, both the SEAS and CC Senior Funds, and the Senior Series have teamed up to bring you a joint event featuring food from DINOSAUR BAR-B-QUE and ROAR-EE next Sunday night! Come by, have some food, contribute to the funds, and learn about what keeps Columbia strong for the next generations!

Hmm, yes. Dinosaur vs. lion vs. dead cow. That would be an interesting matchup. I put $5 on the dinosaur, but I’ll pay $5 to get the dead cow.

Spring Break Pictures

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve posted spring break pictures. Me and my beautiful girlfriend (giraffe?) traveled to Cozumel and stayed at the Park Royal resort.

Some notes:

I was impressed by the resort. I thought the service was fantastic. There were so many people working at the resort, cleaning, serving, servicing, and generally attending to guests.
The resort grounds were pristine and just great.
Our room was one of the better rooms I've ever stayed in. The beach was disappointing, being small and rocky, but the rest of the amenities were good.
The food was acceptable, but Emmi correctly points out that it would get monotonous for any more than the five nights we spent there. The two of the three a-la-carte restaurants (included in the all-inclusive package) we went to were slightly strange, the Italian being the better of the two.
There was often strong competition for lounge chairs.
I found it to be the perfect, relaxing, non-binge-drinking vacation.

For the record

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite poems:

Self-Pity

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself

-D.H. Lawrence, 1929

NmapFE-CVS-03-16-2007-ekg-intel

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve compiled what seems to be a working Intel version of Matthew Rothenberg’s NmapFE for OS X out of the CVS tree. See my previous post as to why this is necessary. It can be downloaded here. The md5sum is: ~~37c6f6269608fdb3d62efbfa58cec123~~ 36cc7e74f2e17b6c47148bfaa51dce91

UPDATE: I made some modifications to the DMG, thanks to Udi’s feedback. Download location is the same, the new md5sum is 36cc7e74f2e17b6c47148bfaa51dce91.

I’ve added this to the README.rtf:

Addendum: This version was compiled by Eric Garrido. If anyone reading this knows how to contact Matthew Rothenberg, please let me know.
According to Matthew Rothenberg’s website for this project (http://faktory.org/m/software/nmap/), this software is released under the GPL. I’ve included a copy of the GPLv2 (the GPL license available at the time of Matthew’s last release) in the disk image.

A spark.

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

And then there comes something that reminds you that you still can be at the top of your game. I just fixed a ridiculous problem that I’d say maybe five people at this university, all full-time AcIS-folk, would know how to fix.

Amusing.

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I love that when you become a geek, special meaning is attached to seeing numbers that are a power of two (and one less).

New Photos

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

My mother mentioned that she hasn’t understood what I’ve been posting about recently. In honor of her, I’ve added some new photos!

CVS Release: Intel NmapFE for OSX

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The developer of NmapFE for OS X hasn’t made a release since late 2004 and consequently is using an outdated version of Nmap. Outdated to the point it doesn’t work:

sendto in send_ip_packet: sendto(5, packet, 28, 0, 127.0.0.1, 16) => Invalid argument Sleeping 60 seconds then retrying

I’ve created an Intel build from CVS using nmap 4.20, which seems to work for me. It is available for download here. (link removed)

IMAPProxy: MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH undeclared

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When I attempted to compile IMAPProxy on Linux 2.6.18 with GCC 4.1.1, I received this error:

src/imapcommon.c: In function 'Get_Server_conn':
src/imapcommon.c:380: error: 'MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH' undeclared (first use in this function)

The post by Jakob Hirsch on the IMAPProxy mailing list provided the answer:

Problem is that md5.h is not longer included by evp.h (which is included by src/imapcommon.c), so MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH is not defined. #include <openssl/md5.h> in src/imapcommon.c fixed it for me.

Fix: Firefox OS X saving temp files to Desktop

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you ever use Firefox on OS X to open a document in a helper application (think downloading a PDF to read it directly in Preview using the “Open with…” dialog), I’m sure you get as annoyed as I do when Firefox saves this to your Desktop and not the download directory you specified in preferences.

In fact, Firefox downloads these files to wherever you set Safari to save downloads. You can fix the above behavior by going to the Preferences pane in Safari and changing the download directory there.

ssh_config usefulness

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sad to say it, but I didn’t know about ssh_config until last week. Sometimes you think you’re not that bad at what you do, but then there’s just something that makes you realize you don’t know as much as you think.

A long time ago, I obtained a copy of wireless hacks from a talk that was given on campus. Most of it were things I’d already thought of, the rest uninteresting. A good book for anyone who doesn’t know anything about using wireless networking to their advantage. There was mention of using bash shortcuts to ssh into remote machines easily.

The bane of an undergraduate's education

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

MythTV problem

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I just fixed a random problem with our MythTV box. The backend crashed for some reason, so we had to power cycle the computer. Upon starting mythbackend up, there was an error message about a failed schema update.

The fix was to manually decrement the DBSchemaVer setting:

mysql> update settings set data=data-1 where value='DBSchemaVer';

And reload the backend.

Jimmy Wales on Open Source Web Search

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This is an email that I send to a mailing list of my friends in response to an article about Jimmy Wales’s initiative to create a Wikipedia-like search engine.

While this is a fine idea, Jimmy Wales has to figure out how to make it exactly unlike Wikipedia – the wild wild west of information resources. If he does that, he has a chance. Could you imagine what Google would be like if we had every random person tweaking each constant and equation of Google’s Page Rank algorithm?

Three^H^H^H Four Pictures

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some developers really want their users to have the cutting edge:

Society is in strange point in time. Why should this be news?

Hot. (Addison Montgomery on Grey’s Anatomy):

One more. This should be a reason why Dreamhost is the mostest awesomest hoster ever:

Physics Lab Quote

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In Physics Lab, a 200-person lecture, on Tuesday:

Professor: If someone came to me and said that there is an invisible dragon in my garage, what can i do to prove it doesn't exist? Student: You can have a knight in shining armor enter the garage and the dragon by its very nature will be forced to fight it.

RSS added to Horde IMP

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

My patch for adding RSS support to mailboxes in Horde IMP was committed. This is the largest patch I’ve submitted so far. Thanks to Chuck Hagenbuch and Michael Slusarz.

Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 00:14:22 -0800 (PST) From: "Michael M Slusarz" (slusarz@horde.org) Subject: (cvs) commit: imp rss.php imp/docs CHANGES imp/templates/rss mailbox.rss imp/themes feed-rss.xsl To: cvs@lists.horde.org Message-ID: (20070112081422.423A23513C@coyote.horde.org)

slusarz 2007-01-12 00:14:22 PST

Modified files: docs CHANGES Added files: . rss.php templates/rss mailbox.rss themes feed-rss.xsl Log: Bug: 2733 Submitted by: Eric Garrido (ekg2002@columbia.edu) Add RSS/Atom feed for mailboxes.

Comparison.

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“We can, and we will, prevail.”

“We shall prevail.”

(Bush transcript and Apple Ad).

(Stolen Concept) My Vacation Included

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Hearing. No. Experiencing this guy live at Webster Hall:

(Glassjaw..which was a bit ridiculous. Went with Jenn who evidently doesn’t mind getting crushed by very large, hairy, sweaty men.)

Continuing to hate (but really, love) this guy:

(Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle). I even watched “Wordplay,” a documentary on the crossword puzzle culture. Jon Stewart is hilarious.

Getting a new one of these for my car:

Hooray! Two one-line patches!

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Hooray! Two more one-line patches! That brings my total up to 12 or so one-liners.

From Horde:

Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2006 09:59:06 -0800 (PST) From: “Chuck Hagenbuch” (chuck@horde.org) Subject: (cvs) commit: hordeweb/bounties bounties.php To: cvs@lists.horde.org Message-ID: (20061225175906.3B6D4351DE@coyote.horde.org)

chuck 2006-12-25 09:59:06 PST

Modified files: bounties bounties.php Log: fix bug number Submitted by: Eric Garrido (ekg2002@columbia.edu)

Revision Changes Path 1.175 +1 -1 hordeweb/bounties/bounties.php

Chora Links: http://cvs.horde.org/diff.php/hordeweb/bounties/bounties.php?r1=1.174&r2=1.175&ty=u

and from ViewVC.

(Wien6) i (we) cleaned again.

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I sent this a while ago to my suitemates in an attempt to motivate them to be cleaner. Some people found it funny. (It was intended to be half humorous).

Gentlemen,

The kitchen was filthy. Food particles were everywhere. RICE was everywhere. Nastiness in the microwave. Dirty dishes in the sink. Dirty dishes on the counters. A heaping pile of clean dishes in the dish rack. There were things superbly adhered to surfaces. When things are superbly adhered to surfaces shit hits the fan. Luckily for us, we don’t have a fan.

Pidget History and Culture

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Somudro links to two extremely well written articles about the lost culture of pidgets, “A Review of Pidget Sexual Culture” and “Pidgets: A Historical Overview” (both PDFs). Well worth the read.

From somudro.info:

Anthropologists believe that in ancient Africa the most common form of currency was the "pidget." Pidgets were in fact an enslaved race of short and stout people, resembling a cross between pygmies and malformed midgets... But how did such a cruel societal modus operandi arise? Was it effective as an economic system? And what was life like for a member of this noble yet ill-fated race? These questions will be examined in the series of articles that follow.

Thecus N2050 on Gentoo Linux

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I just received my two Seagate 7200.9 250GB drives and have already installed them into my Thecus N2050 RAID DAS device (both hd and das on NewEgg). I was initially worried because the 7200.9 drives are not listed on the Thecus approved drive list, despite the 7200.7 and 7200.10 devices being there. They work fine. The 7200.9 250GB drives were $10 cheaper than the 7200.10 drives. Since I don’t really need performance but do want space, the older model was fine for me.

Two articles

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

More CEOs should be this candid. From an interview with hard drive manufacturer Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins, entitled “Seagate CEO: I help people “watch porn”:

The secret to managing a board of directors: "You never ask board members what they think. You tell them what you're going to do."

“In Defense of Rosé Champagne” highlights why men should not be afraid of buying pink alcohol.

Install imapproxy on Mac OS 10.4

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Optional prerequisite, proctools: If you're going to use the init script to start imapproxy, you need to install proctools to let the script kill the process on shutdown. Installation is a little different than normal, but is explained nicely in the README.
Do the normal thing
1. wget up-imapproxy-1.2.5rc2.tar.gz
2. tar -xzf up-imapproxy-1.2.5rc2.tar.gz
3. cd up-imapproxy-1.2.5rc2
4. ./configure
5. make
Install executable files: `make install` is broken as the user and group is hardcoded as bin. You can either edit the makefile or copy the necessary files manually, as below:
1. sudo cp bin/in.imapproxyd /usr/local/sbin/
2. sudo cp bin/pimpstat /usr/local/sbin/
Install configuration files: sudo make install-conf
Install init files: sudo mkdir /etc/init.d/ && sudo mkdir /etc/rc.2 && sudo make install-init
Install Certification Authority certificates: The included documentation is unclear what to do if you intend to use imapproxy to connect to an IMAP server with TLS/SSL. First, imapproxy cannot connect to IMAP servers using port 993. Instead, imapproxy will only connect to servers using regular IMAP and invoking TLS though the starttls IMAP command (RFC 2595). imapproxy does not currently support a client connecting to it through TLS; it is intended to be run on the same host as the client. Second, you must install the appropriate Certification Authority (CA) certificates that will validate the TLS certificate offered by the server. I grappled with this for a while, even using a working imapproxy installation as a reference to no avail. In the end, I packaged all of the root CA certs from OS X's keychain into a .pem (which I've made available here). It is not necessary to create your own CA or certs as implied in the README.ssl included with the source.
Edit the configuration file: sudo nano imapproxy.conf . I changed the server_hostname string to the IMAP server I want to connect to, the listen_port to allow other IMAP server connection attempts to succeed, the listen_address to 127.0.0.1 to only allow clients on the localhost to connect, the force_tls to yes to force TLS (although the IMAP server I'm connecting to uses LOGINDISABLED). Finally, I changed tls_ca_file to the file path of the CA certs. My working imapproxy configuration file is available here.
Start the proxy: /etc/init.d/imapproxy start

That should be it for getting it to work. You should configure your IMAP client to connect to 127.0.0.1 on whatever port you specified above.

Things to read

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

These are the articles in my RSS reader that I’ve flagged so that I think more about them:

Virtualization Links
A performance comparison of DB2 9 pureXML and CLOB or shredded XML storage
More Trouble with Programming (Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, Part II)
Lego Programming (no, not the toy)
Web OS (but currently down)

This picture never ceases to make me laugh.

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Duck Tape definitely was not requirement for high school history class. Oh Dan.

Everything, everything changes

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

My vocal chords hate me. They are currently and have been complaining that I screamed too much at the Thursday concert I went to on Tuesday.

Circa Survive and Rise Against were ok, not exactly my taste. Billy Talent was fun, but again, too young of a sound. Thursday played really well and refreshed perfectly the notion in my mind that is a Thursday concert. When Rise Against ended their set, it was rather amusing to see all of the tiny and young Rise Against fans remove themselves from the front of the pit to make way for the Thursday loyalists. I much preferred the Thursdayists; they were much nicer and more fun.

IBM P&S Five Minute Poster Talks

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I attended last week’s IBM Privacy and Security Day where a bunch of IBMers and area security researchers got together to talk about the research they are doing to protect our identities and our systems.

One short session of the day, just before lunch, as a poster talk where several grad student researchers are given five minutes each to present their work and convince people to visit them at the poster session after lunch. Columbia’s representatives presented some interesting researchers, but were the worst five minute presenters.

IBM P&S Q&A

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Another note: one thing that bothered me about the IBM Privacy and Security day set up was that the chair of the day asked everyone to hold their questions to the end of the speaker’s timeslot, when a few minutes have been explicitly allotted to Q&A.

This is a bad idea in general. Questions are a speaker’s way of figuring out what the audience likes or dislikes, is stuck on or understands. Questions allow for a dynamic presenter to tune his presentation to his audience. They allow the audience to ask richer, more useful questions with the relevant information fresh in their minds.

New Photos

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser Intrigue

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I just found a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser in my mother’s cleaning closet and became interested in it. The product is pretty cool: it’s a hard foam that is composed of interconnected stands of the hardest commercially-available plastic: melamine. Melamine is interesting in this application because it is traditionally known as the main ingredient in formica as well as the stuff that make up a whiteboard.

The Magic Eraser, marketed by Proctor and Gamble, is actually a product from BASF called Basotect. Apparently, it also has good sound insulation properties.

Religion intersects science

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I start a slurry of holiday weekend posts by quoting an article published yesterday in the science section of the New York Times, “A Free-for-All on Science and Religion” by George Johnson. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and is the go-to guy when it comes to science quotes.

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”
It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

VO5 Ad on Chinese Schools

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I was just watching Letterman when this advertisement came on the tele:

I hope people don’t really think this is what Chinese schools are like. The girl is cute though.

Edit: Yes, it’s supposed to be China and not North Korea. The characters are Chinese and the map on the wall is of China.

More wine notes. Sort of.

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

There are four bottles from the last few weeks that have accumulated on the top of our fridge that I’ve been meaning to record. Unfortunately, I’ve lost my tasting notes for these bottles and don’t have a detailed memory about them.

Rock River Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 (California) - Delicious after being left out for 45 minutes. Nothing too stellar, but good enough, great value. $10
Signorello Syrah 2004 (Napa Valley) - The best Syrah I've ever had. Worth every penny (Especially when going to the tasting room with a manager of the Rutherford Grill). Beautiful color on the glass. The Viognier adds something special to the glass. This was my last bottle from the batch I brought from Napa and it was a fantastic finish to a great trip. $36
Gallo Cabernet Sauvignon 2003 (Sonoma County) - Dirt. I was told to add it to my case to balance in price some more expensive wines already present, with claims that the Gallo Family Vineyard is somehow better than the E&J Gallo Vineyard. One of the worst wines I've had. I'm fairly suspect of any wine company that adheres to ISO 4001 and produces that much wine.
Ballentine Chenin blanc Old Vines 2003 (Napa Valley) - A spectacular wine that made me and Varun really happy. It's too bad the 2003 isn't available direct from them anymore, only the 2005, which I haven't had. I would seriously consider joining their wine club.

Clos Mimi Petite Rousse and Luigi Bosca

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Casey, Varun, and I (later joined by Morgan and then Somudro) enjoyed a small wine assortment last night. There was no better way to make a decision about our party plans in light of Six’s illness but over a good glass of wine.

The night started with a bottle from a mixed case of Syrah I bought yesterday. Luigi Bosca Syrah Reserva 2002, Argentina promised “raspberries, blackberries, and hints of pepper.” It was fairly absent of a nose, color dark. The first glass was acceptable, worthy of drinking. The initial taste was a more subdued Syrah, giving a slightly oaky taste but not a lot of it. The finish was exceedingly strong; perhaps too tannin-y for my taste in Syrah. I immediately thought “blackberries, raspberries” which was confirmed by reading the bottle notes. The second glass was less forceful and more enjoyable, after allowing the wine to air about half an hour. $13

An interesting appointment...

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

An interesting appointment on Meredith’s whiteboard.

Added Photos

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Look Ma, I took more pictures:

A funny dream

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I had a dream a few nights ago that was particularly geeky.

I was back at a panel discussion about infrastructure technology at Morgan that we had in the middle of the summer, where I first met my future boss. At the real discussion, I asked a few questions at the discussion including, “What technology really excites you and gets you out of the bed in the morning?” I had hoped the three members of the panel would engage in some banter about how the technology of their division is the most important. Instead, I got the relatively predictable but obviously correct answer of “the internet”.

Flash Player 9 for Linux Released

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

(I’d like to do my part for contributing to a PageRank:) I’m very pleased to see that the Flash team over at Adobe has released a very working Flash Player 9 Beta for Linux.

I’ve tested it on a few videos in YouTube and the results are obvious: Sound and video are now synchronized well. I may very well be using my Linux desktop a whole lot more now.

I give a big thanks to the Flash team, especially Emmy Huang, the team leader.

Eclipse + JBossAS + EJB 3.0 setup instructions

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Today I was tasked with getting my software engineering group’s development environment set up. The requirement for our project is to build a three-tier application using a major component model framework. We chose to use:

Java/EJB because it is well documented and in a languagewe all know (and since we don’t want to use COM+ or .Net as we don’t have Windows boxes, the only language we could use)
Eclipse because it is the best Java IDE and is cross platform

Subversion: Add all, with spaces in filenames

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I found a one-liner few days ago that exactly accomplished what I needed to do: add a lot of files with spaces in each filename that exist in various parts of a source tree to the subversion respository. I reproduce the line here, to ensure use for posterity:

svn status | grep "^?" | sed -e 's/? *//' | sed -e 's/ /\ /g' | xargs svn add</code>

This one-liner is shamelessly ripped from Britt Selvitelle’s blog.

Added Photos

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve added the following gallery links to my photos page above:

I won a t-shirt!

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Hooray! I was one of the first 400 participants in IBM’s Master the Mainframe competition to complete Part 1, giving me this cool, ridiculously geeky t-shirt:

IBM took down the image link :-(

Varun correctly pointed out that the font seems to come straight from Grand Theft Auto. I’m not quite sure what the allusion means.

I’m still debating as to whether I should complete Part 2. I have one more step to go and there are a few spots left to qualify for Part 3, but Part 3 itself is labeled “Approximate time to completion: Weeks to months.” That’s a bit intimidating and I think I have better things to do. That said, I learned more during the first two parts of the competition over the few days I was working on it than I have in any one class in a semester. We’ll see; continuing depends on my mood tonight.

Samba hangs on service start up

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I just encountered a problem where Samba failed to start and just hung before daemonizing.

The last few messages left in /var/log/samba/log.smbd referred to trying to find CUPS: "cups server left to default localhost" and "Unable to connect to CUPS server localhost - Connection timed out". I don't use CUPS since I don't have a printer and the service was not active. Why would it hang on connecting to a service that doesn't exist? For kicks, I started up CUPS without any defined printers to see what would happen to SMB. No luck, smbd still hung at exactly the same place.

Then I realized that I’m a big dummy. Network interface lo was not loaded. I’m not entirely sure how it was removed from my startup configuration. After doing an ‘ifconfig lo up’, I started samba:

Project Status: Time Issues

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time ever, I’m actually enjoying all of the classes I’m taking. You would think this is would good thing. Unfortunately, reading all of the assigned scientific papers, journal articles, and textbooks, coding, managing a small team of developers, and living with five of my best friends has taken time away from personal projects that I’d like to peruse.

The Xen thing took off nicely, but crashed. Not literally, it ran fine, but I had issues dealing with networking as doing things outside of the standard operating procedure (SOP for you home-gamers) isn’t horribly well documented. I had wanted to create that documentation, but then the semester started. I’ve been feeling a need to want to start again, but I am now adverse to doing it on babbage, my Linux desktop. That said, there is no glory in not taking a risk.

Left Side Suicide

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

My friend Jenn has a radio show on WBAR called Left Side Suicide. She’s one of the most fun DJs I’ve ever heard, doing crazy white midget rappers to good Emocore to JT. Check her archived shows out, conveniently posted in MP3 and Ogg and listen to the live show starting at 12:01am Monday.

(Adam and Jenn at "Brodown" this weekend).

Maverick Rev-6

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Check out my new toy. It’s the weapon of choice for an awesome geek comic. And, it can be modded to be even more badass.

Yesterday, Casey and I were engaging in some of our daily banter at the office, commenting how dead it can be. It’s a nice floor, but the people are very intent on staring at their screens for a long time. He immediately went to the office warfare section of thinkgeek to spice things up. Then, realizing we would be in midtown in the evening, we made a pact to go to Toys-R-Us and pick up some blasters.

oh linux.

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

So I decided a while ago that Xen + Linux was a brilliant idea. I quickly learned, however, that Xen + Gentoo is just a pure mess. I’ve read about a lot of people having trouble with it and I personally found it hard to install.

I gave up.

I installed Kubuntu. Then I didn’t like that so…

I installed Fedora. And it’s treating me well. Until just now. I wanted to install X headers to compile a theme I downloaded to make my box look like this guy’s. So I start up Fedora’s “Package Manager” click on the package that I want (oh, and a anti-RSI program) and next thing I know I’m in package dependency hell. That’s bad for a program that claims to manage dependencies. So I’m clicking away thinking, “Alright, I must really need these random X headers.” Then it complains about dependencies. So I click a bit more. And some more. Then I click finish. Hooray! Dependencies resolved, it’s going to go download some packages for me. The first package: evolution-data-server. How did I get duped into installing that?

Projects

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Horde Project

Horde is an open source project that consists of an application framework and a smattering of applications in various states of development. The community is very keen on outside help and it was fun getting into the project, under the hand of Matt Selsky.

IMP - a very mature and feature rich webmail client that is used by small to large organizations. I’ve been contributing random bugfixes and small features and getting paid for it.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

-David Frum

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/frum-trumpocracy/550685/

Eric Garrido - ericgar.com

NYC Marathon 2025

Chicago Marathon 2023

Result

Goals

Coffee in the Denver Metro Area

Catskills Recommendations

Boston Marathon 2023

Result

Goals

NYC Marathon 2022

Result

Goals

Colorado Marathon 2022

TL;DR

Buying a Tesla Model Y

Living^WEating in Murray Hill

Isla Mori Garrido

Tips for Running the NYC Marathon

A Year Before The Race

Registration

The weeks before the race

The week of the race

The day before the race

Race Morning

During the Race

After the Race

The day after the race

Trip Report: Japan (2013 & 2017)

Beer & Cocktails

Trip Report: Charleston, South Carolina (2018)

Trip Report: Boulder, Colorado (2018)

Trip Report: Sonoma Valley, California

Friday

Trip Report: Tel Aviv, Israel

Dooring Costs

Trip Report: Copenhagen and Sweden 2018

Trip Report: Richmond, Virgina

Trip Report: Grand Teton National Park

Trip Report: Boulder, Colorado

Day 1

Camping During Cycle Adirondacks

Trip Report: Jackson, WY

Trip Report: Denver and Boulder, Colorado

Lunch Spots for NYC Jury Duty

How I Read the Sunday New York Times

Braindump NYC - Algorithms

still alive

TLC Rules for Taxicab Drivers

Oh Snap -- You Just Got PEW PEW PEWed!

Ricky Gervais on atheism in the Wall Street Journal

Justice Stewart in New York Times v U.S.

Replaced reliant robin

Amazon pulls WikiLeaks, I pull my account

Reinforcing a republic

Open ports on megabus to Boston

Recommended Reading

About

contact

ethos

On Converting to Jekyll

Redesigned ericgar.com

An armchair economic analysis of moving walkways

Things I'm looking forward to.

On Religious Freedom

New York Restaurant Recommendations

Killing an entire process group

Portland Travel Guide

OSCON 2010 attendee profile

autocrap tools

Citrix Client: Adding SSL trust in Linux

Five Years of Kernel Development in Git

Muhammad Waving With Blue Rectangle

I want to blog more. But I'll just post this for now.

Just did this.

Something I just noticed when signing up for Heroku

Forever again

haha

Tracepath on Lucky Star Wifi

Mutex vs. Semaphore

bicycles ¹

Thursday ²

boston ³

craft beer ⁴

disaster ⁵

bahn mi ⁶

buses ⁷

(loud) music ⁸

(searching for) companionship ⁹

warm bed ¹⁰

brooklyn ¹¹

vegetables ¹²

postcards ¹³

darkness ¹⁴