Older blog entries for cmiller (starting at number 61)

dusting off old tools

I'm relearning to use some tools that I have forgotten about over the last ten years or so. E.g., I had forgotten how cool gnuplot is until I needed to make an illustration recently. The graph I created is pretty simple, but I didn't use 99% of gnuplot's options. If you've never played with it, I urge you to spend 15 minutes to learn a little about it. You may find yourself looking for excuses to make graphs.

politics

Well, if getting oral sex while President and lying about it isn't an impeachable offense, then I ask you, what is?!

abg, it depends on your compiler as to whether your dprintf function will be optimized away. Examine your compiler's assembly output and play with optimization flags, especially the "inline" ones. (Still, there should always be a return(int) outside the #ifdef, right?)

metacity

I'm going to tackle a metacity bug and one wishlist feature this weekend. The bug is hard to reproduce, and the "feature" may be considered by some to be "crackrock" if I design it badly, but useful and nice if it works well. (Specifics at my weblog.)

meta

I think Advogato should not be changed. It's a really nice community, and people will come and go. Some people may decide that a community (with all that entails) isn't what they want to participate in; it's okay for people to leave; we should expect it. A scheme that hides warts will also hide freckles, and that won't necessarily make for more beauty.

Raph's trust-metic ideas are attack-resistent but not very apathy- or ignorance-resistent. When you certify someone, you are certifying their competency as a developer of free software, not their competency in deciding how others should be certified. As with any system, the scale grows inflated over time, unless there's a great deal of vigilence to prevent it. Should I be "Master"? Probably not.

I've never stated my position on The War because I'm pretty undecided. Please don't interpret my criticism of authors of posts like

as advocating chocolate. It's the lack of tact I can't stomach, not the position. (Though, seeing enough of those definitely makes me want to be on any-team-other-than-that-guy's.)

Sorry, timcw. I have a theory that mgl*zer is stress-testing Advogato's trust metric by behaving poorly, but I can't prove it. Every community needs a town fool, right?

Our fool has 16 "Apprentice" ratings, and I suspect that most of those raters don't realize that by giving a rating, they're rating him up; there is no negative rating in Advogato. These people, rated him a journeyer, which suggests you might want to reconsider your rating of them too: binaryfoo, sand, Barbicane, besfred, const, Rabbitt, sye, badvogato, Tofu, kilmo, nixnut, and robocoder.

update: I'm not that thin-skinned, jaldhar; do what you want. How much merit does an author of a single software project and daily diary entries of nothing but vitriol and links to other places deserve, though? I don't think you'd behave the same if you didn't agree with his ravings.

tk: The real danger is that after you represent people as numbers, Godel's ghost will come show why our societies are either stupidly simple, or hipocritical and internally inconsistent.

In other news, I decided to write my own wiki last night. I'm almost finished, as using apache mod_python, postgresql, and xml.sax makes it almost too easy.

Appended after seeing dyork's diary: I'm using XML to store the data in a neutral format, and I'm providing multiple front-end languages for editing it, so knowledge of Ward's format, structured text, MoinMoin format, et c., or raw XML, will keep you from having to visit TextFormattingRules, hopefully.

I'm working in my loft these days, which doesn't get any direct sunlight. This is great for strain of eyes -- no harsh glare and such -- but not so good for my body's circadian clock, which doesn't have read access on /dev/rtc. I came up with a idea yesterday that I hope will work.

I've used "floatbg", the root window color changer for X, a long time. It's neat that it changes the colors imperceptably on a small scale, but that if you notice your desktop on the scale of 20 minutes, it's a completely different color. It slowly plots a sine-wave through a HSV color wheel, where the hue is time and the saturation is the height of the sine. The value is fixed at start of execution ...until now.

I added an option to change the value setting to be also a function of time, but in the sense that it tries to mimic the amount of light that the sun casts onto the earth based on your system's response to localtime(). At night, the colors are muted and dark shades of gray. At 7AM, the background begins to lighten, peaking at noon with bright pastels, and tapering off through the range of colors, until 7PM, when it's back to "night colors".

Hopefully, this will help my subconcious. It was easier than hacking my medulla oblongata. I _hate_ hardware.

I sent the patch to the original author, but his 14 year-old email address bounced, so I CC'd the Debian maintainer too. Maybe it will be in the next general release, so all we dark-cave hackers won't be so screwed-up by our habits.

I'd paste the source here, but that'd be rude.

Next, maybe I'll see if I can make my window decorations do something similar. I'm using sawfish, and nearly anything is possible when a program holds a built-in Lisp interpreter.

Who will be our Richard Feynman this time?

I too have used H2G2 -- years before it was aquired by the BBC. I wrote the Sweet Tea and Gnat Line entries in fact. Back then (and perhaps even now), the writing process was unidirectional: An average joe would write an entry and submit it as a potential official entry. Then, a person in the role of editor would come along, make vast sweeping changes, and publish it, without letting the author give input or corrections about the editor's changes. My Sweet Tea entry only has a few "unauthorized" changes, but the Gnat Line entry is only vaguely similar to what I wrote ages ago. Gnats are "a kind of blood-sucking fly"? Ha!

I don't think of it as very Wiki-ish. It's too edited. Too immutable. Too much like a moderated bulletin-board without the good organization. The web's progress has made H2G2 obselete; H2G2 could never be as good as a WikiPedia.

Wisdom from the 'Wiki' entry at Everything2: ``Allowing and encouraging an intranet Wiki is a sign of a good company to work for.'' It makes sense that the openness of a wiki must be anathema to companies that are unhealthy and failing. If management smiles upon free exchange of ideas, then they're probably pretty proud of they way they handle the business.

Do you have a wiki at your company? Why not?

Ah, it's been a while!

I haven't been silent, just talking to myself. I have a machine I'm intending to put on the 'net, and I've been recording my thoughts there. It's not accessable from the 'net, so the log is more of a "diary" than a "blog", I guess. Nothing wrong with that! I'm not that interesting anyway.

I am really impressed with Zope and its "TAL" method of creating pages. I was a bit unimpressed with TAL's predecessor, "DTML". It seemed really PHP-like, which made my skin crawl.

In any case, with Zope, I'm used the ZWiki product to replace my MoinMoin instance, mostly because starting up a python interpreter on a Sparcstation 10 for every request (MoinMoin currently doesn't run under apache's mod_python, unfortunately) was worse than painful. It would have been slightly faster to have a Pentium2-400 on the moon and wait for the round-trip. Using Zope and ZServer makes it reasonably fast, so the $5 I paid for the Sparcstation isn't a waste after all.

After "mastering" ZWiki, I implemented a MoinMoin Markup mode, to save me the time of converting all my pages to "Structured Text". After that, I realized that with a little bit of code, I could make a Blog out of such a wiki, so after writing just a smidgen of code, really simple things work really well. Zope is pretty neat.

The amount of time I have to fool around should give you a hint as to my job situation. I hope to be doing something productive soon. Nothing for a while and suddenly a few nibbles at once. Wierd.

I envy MichaelCrawford and his ability to strike out on his own and do cool stuff. I'm too afraid of failure, I think, to take such chances.

Though, here's a parallel of Michael's 11 Jan 2003 entry that I inserted into my own diary on the 4th:

Today's I love you (but you're a bit nuts) moment came when Mary Ellen and I are cooking in the kitchen and snacking. I told ME that containers of pistacio nuts have a built-in learning curve. "See," I explained, "the nuts arrange themselves according to their density because they're all about the same size, so that the ones with looser shells -- that is, most air between the shell and the nut -- are at the top, and the really hard ones to open are at the bottom. A well-shaken jar should teach anyone how to eat pistacios."

There's an awkward silence while ME thinks of some way to respond. Nothing pertinent yet couth seemed to come to mind, so she smiled dimly and "I love you. Here, taste this soup."