Older blog entries for SyntaxPolice (starting at number 44)

Buying online gives me the willies

This entry is somewhat off-topic :)

I don't like buying things. When I go into a store, I get what I need and leave. I'm sure many of you are like that. When I buy stuff online, I usually buy it from the manufacturer, for better or worse, because at least I've heard of them for heaven's sake.

I decided I'd buy an orinoco wireless card (see my last entry), but could only find them on these "Computer parts mall" type stores, none of which I've heard of. So I actually started reading online reviews of the stores themselves and found one that didn't have too many complaints.

I will need to buy a new PDA soon, but there are too many choices, I can't digest all the information available to me. Even if I limit myself to handspring phone-type machines (I have one now), I still can't ever get through picking a model, narrowing the field, finding good prices from a reputable store, figuring out what the linux support is like, etc. I usually give up. When its something that I really need, I usually just end up picking something rather arbitrarily after digging through way too much information. <hr>

This all reminds me of an email exchange I had with a person (lets assume they were male for the sake of this story) who was selling a used food processor. I emailed him to ask what the model number was so I could check out online reviews. Amazon's reviews were the worst I had ever seen in my life. The average was 2 out of 5, several people said they wished they could give it negative stars. One person even complained that the machine cought fire! Another said that it smelled like burning. So anyway, the guy was asking $15 (original price $35) or best offer. It wasn't worth that much to me, so I decided to make him a really low offer in case he couldn't sell it, I decided I'd be polite about it, but only offer him $5.

Owch, it got truly terrible reviews on Amazon including catching fire
for someone!  If you don't get any better offers I'd give you $5 or
maybe a little more for it.  But good luck with the rest of your stuff
:)

All the best.

peace,

isaac

I thought that was pretty polite, probably could have been better. I always sign my emails with "peace". Here's his reply, which to my satisfaction, I did manage to _not_ reply to:

hi

if u don't know how to handle fire, u might catch fire too - does that mean there is something wrong with u? anyways, thanks for ur offer... if i someday need ur $5, i will surely let u know.

peace, ???

I guess he's got a point there. In some deep, philosophical sense, any of us could catch fire at any time. Why reject a food processor just because it has that fire-catching property of all beings inherently possess?

yours in fire,

isaac

Wireless Card Hell

I have an urge to swear a lot.

  • Well I got a Gateway 450X laptop and really want to use the Centrino internal wireless, but that is not to be, at least not yet, something to do with the FCC, idono. I wrote to gateway and to Intel about this and got some OK replies.

  • So some time back I got a linksys card which requires wlan-ng it kinda worked, but crashed my machine every so often, which isn't so good. So I returned that card and decided to sit tight until I got a wireless hub anyway.

  • So I got a wireless hub the other day for a good price. I've seen it work, and even used it with my computer and someone else's wireless PCMCIA card.

  • So I got an SMC wireless card and got it home and it doesn't work in Linux yet. I fear wlan-ng so I want something that'll work without wlan-ng

  • So I returned that and got another linksys card, this time WPC11 ver. 4, and there were drivers on Linksys's web site. Sadly, those drivers crash my machine and even when they seem to be talking happily to the card, it won't connect to my router. So I'm going to return this one too.

    Anyway, who has time for this when there's real hacking to be done?

  • Non-Geek

  • Had a nice weekend camping. Did some good hiking, didn't manage to do any rock climbing since the guy with the equipment didn't come, mostly my fault for not realizing that my cell phone wouldn't work out there.

    Debian Stuff

  • I finally sent in my Debian Tasks & Skills answers. There were lots of questions.

  • In the meantime, I had taken over the haskell-mode and hugs packages which were both in pretty bad shape.

  • We released APT Secure, a patch to APT to add checking of GPG signatures of the list of MD5 sums of the packages. I've mentioned that project here before.

    Haskell Stuff

  • I'm excited to be attending the International Conference on Functional Programming this year in Sweden. I might even give a little presentation to the Haskell Implementers Meeting about the Library Infrastructure project.
  • Ahh, almost a month since my last entry.

  • Working hard on the Haskell Library Infrastructure project. We have two people working on make-based build systems, two people who are at least thinking about distribution infrastructures (like CPAN) and I'm working on something that looks vaguely like Python's Distutils coupled with Haskell's HMake.

  • Our server had some hardware problems and we had to replace the motherboard.

  • This weekend I'm going camping and maybe even rock climbing at Hocking Hills near Columbus Ohio. This should be tons of fun.

  • I got a wireless router today for $60 - a $30 rebate. I haven't sent in the rebate thing, but assuming that the wireless stuff works, and assuming that I get the rebate, I think its a pretty good deal. I'm using it wirefully now since I don't have a wireless card for my laptop and this Gateway 450X's internal wireless doesn't work in Debian GNU/Linux.

    Gotta go camping, peace.

  • Annoyingly, as noted on walters's blog, our web server was successfully used to send a lot of spam. They must be getting me back for bragging about how well spamassassin works for me. Damn spam.

  • I was nominated as the leader for a project to assist 3rd party programmers in creating and distributing libraries for Haskell. See this thread for details. It seems to me that Python's distutils is very similar to what we want, but others disagree. This is a hard space to work in: there are lots of things that do something similar (I added a page to the Haskell Wiki to track and discuss them), but Haskell has its own issues.

  • I'm still moving very slowly on my debian NM process. I swear I'll finish it soon! Feel free to harass me.

  • I really liked the new matrix movie. I heard a lot of bad reviews, though no one I actually talked to had much bad to say about it.
  • Been pretty busy lately. I took over as the Debian maintainer of Hugs (a Haskell interpreter), which is pretty fun. It now seems to build happily on all the autobuild arches.

    Weekends have been nuts. I have been out of town every weekend since easter, and will be out of town for the next few weekends. For mother's day, my mom rode in a horse show and won her first 2nd place ribon! She was very happy and I was proud. She's been working hard.

    My laptop is working well, though builtin wireless might not work for a while :(

    Work has been busy with new work and new deadlines.

    The Haskell Wiki is doing well with frequent updates. There has been discussion in the Haskell community about what to do with 3rd party libraries; how to build and distribute them well. The problem is pretty hard for Haskell because there are a number of major compilers and GHC does not have binary compatibility between releases. You can read the Haskell libraries mailing list for more info.

    I gave two talks on Haskell for the open source club a few weeks back.

    I'm probably going to be moving soon, and gave notice to my landlord that I'm moving out. They are doing a good job of talking me into staying even though they have given me no compelling reason to do so! Now that's salesmanship.

    I seem to have a good email address to confuse non tech type people. I don't know why; maybe this always happens, but non tech people always make stuff up about my email address. I don't know where they get the ideas they do. Changing ".org" to ".com" is just the tip of the iceburg. I always know that someone screwed up when they tells me, "I think I emailed you the other day, but it might not have worked."

    Blog Ideas: I've been working on writing a real diary on my new laptop which tracks various things like what did I do for exercise today, what I've been thinking about lately, etc. I'm doing this in emacs-wiki. I hope sometime to integrate such a diary with my notebook from work, my web page, my advogato diary, etc. The tricky part is putting the right stuff in the right places and keeping my private information and writings off of my employer's computer and off of the web :)

    Is anyone doing something like this? I posted some elisp code a while ago which posts advogato diaries from emacs buffers. I'd like to echo my most recent diary entry to the front of my web page, and archive my old diary entries.

    Great Weekend

    Well, we were supposed to go to Boston this weekend to visit a friend and help another friend move. We were just outside of town when Phil's car broke down (overheated) and we had to head back home. Boston will have to do without us for a while.

    After pointing the car in the right direction, we screwed around for a while and finally went out to a coffee shop and hacked for a while. This week I made new packages for xppaut and hugs. I took over as maintainer of hugs.

    Saturday I went out for breakfast with Phil & Jaquelin & walters, then went for a bike ride for a few miles with Phil & Jaquelin. We biked from the campus area to a lake where people walk their dogs (hey, this is Columbus, Ohio, we have to take our "nature" where we can get it.) We wandered around the lake for a while and through the woods to this little river. We walked out onto these rocks on the river and stood there chatting and watching the geese for a while. Eventually, the water level started rising and we became stranded on the rocks before we knew it. (Stranded in the sense that we couldn't escape without getting our feet wet.) We watched the water level rise for a while then took off our shoes and walked through the water back to shore when all of our rock island was gone.

    Later, I watched a movie with my gf and we went to bed.

    Sunday I got a new laptop, much like the one walters mentions here.

    Yesterday I went to this new japanese place in town called "Bento Go-Go" and "Asian Yum-Yum". It was good food.

    Secure apt updates:

    I sent off the patch that walters and I have been working on. It implements secure updates for apt. It was only 2000 lines of unified diff, (but it had to be the right 2000 lines). I promised myself that I'd wait until this was done before buying a laptop. Now I should be able to get one soon :) See my home page for slightly more information and a link to the patch. I sent it out this morning and we're waiting for some feedback. I'm sure there will be more to do.

    Misc:

  • The open source club I founded has been taken over by free software radicals

  • I'm in somewhat agreement with robocoder about april 1st. The above joke was really pretty funny as an inside joke (I actually don't know who pulled it off) but I had to wonder for a short period whether or not the server had been hacked. I actually had hoped for a little while that this was some sort of "agressive Linux marketing" thing we were planning.

  • bgeiger good to see you're learning Go! I don't know much about my rating yet, but I have been playing for about a year and recently started going to a club.

  • At OSU, it was previously believed that the best thing to yell out the window of a car was "Woooooooh!", but further research shows that its actually "MUTEX!".

  • I'd like to come up with a rule that tells me when its better to use which of the following two types in Haskell. I typically use the later:
    type Foo = (A, B, C)
    data Foo = Foo A B C
  • A friend of mine recently had his laptop stolen. Since he can't really afford a new one at the moment, he wants me to put Linux on an unused desktop machine for him. I'm planning to use knoppix to get information from lspci about the machine, then reboot with the debian installer. I have to get my new CD burner working first, though so I can make the CDs. Rebuilding my kernel now.

  • I heard about an aquantence of mine in Cleveland that was arrested at an anti-war protest. This is coming 2nd or 3rd hand, but supposedly she was pushed into the street by an undercover cop (how did she know it was an undercover cop?) then "body slammed" and arrested for blocking the street. She was handcuffed for over 24 hours, has a cracked wrist (from the cuffs?) and was left in the cell with a "crack addict". I don't know if any of this is true, but it is a very disturbing story.

    Good Weekend

  • Got to see J.C. Superstar live here in Columbus. Sebastian Bach was supposed to play J.C., but had an understudy instead. It was quite good, though.

  • Did some good work with walters and we are very close to finishing our little project. This is exciting.

    Last week

  • I found out that instead of said java project I'll be working on a Haskell project after all!

  • On Thursday, I helped a friend replace his car's starter. This was actually pretty fun, though I've never done anything this complex w/ a car before, he pretty much knew what he was doing.
  • chalst As a guess, I would agree that Lisp is used more in industry than Erlang. I get the feeling that the author is actually trying to express something else, something about how and why Erlang was invented and used, and why it is successful. Erlang is often used to prove the point that functional languages are useful in practice, and I think when trying to convince someone of that, they don't want to hear about Lisp.

  • The gimp can be a little frustrating, and I never want to RTFM because I only ever want to do "one little thing". In the long run, I'm sure I'd save time if I learned it properly. In searching for answers, I came across this sarcastic little tutorial. It did tell me what I wanted to know, though.

  • I had a great time hacking with walters last night. I think we're very close to finishing our patch to Apt.

  • Working on a wiki for my church. We want a way to have a lot of people collaborate on our church history. I want to link together people's personal histories with the church or with religion to the over-all history of the building, the congregation, etc. A wiki seems perfect. I also hope it could be a place where people can put some thoughts on religion, stuff they wrote, questions, discussions, etc. There doesn't seem to be a defacto piece of software for this (I keep hearing that there are too many wiki implementations). I'm playing with UseMod at the moment. Anyone have recommendations for software? Preferrably in Debian. The ones I see listed are:
    • aswiki
    • usemod-wiki
    • moin
    • emacs-wiki
    • phpwiki
    • twiki
    • zope-zwiki

  • A new version of Hat, the Haskell Tracer came out yesterday, and it does Multi-Parameter Typeclasses! This has been a problem for me lately as I've been doing some heavy debugging of Haskell code where there was no tracer that would work with MPTC (which is an extention to Haskell). I've been using lots of Debug.Trace statements. Now as you saw in my previous entry, I reached a milestone in my development / debugging so I won't be doing it as much. Ah well, I'm sure I'll use Hat soon.
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