Older blog entries for louie (starting at number 262)

great Buckminster Fuller quote

Hadn’t seen this one before:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

R. Buckminster Fuller

Kudos to those who are doing that. (I was going to make a list, but it was longer than I expected- which is great.)

Syndicated 2007-05-29 01:07:36 from Luis Villa's Blog

choice usually sucks; documenting choice sucks more, though.

Yast thumbnailThis is the most depressing thing I’ve read all morning. (Granted I’ve only been up for 15 minutes.) Remember, kids, choice is usually just another way of saying “the engineers and PMs don’t have the balls to make the hard decisions, so instead we’re going to give the users a ‘choice’ they can’t possibly make with any more reliability than a coin flip.” But hey! After that post is successful, Fedora users will be able to waste time reading documentation which can’t possibly explain anything useful before they make the coin flip! Yay progress!

(It of course could explain something in a way that would be useful to users, but then it would offend one camp or the other, and that would require the aforementioned balls, so it won’t actually be useful.)

(Not that Fedora will be unique in this problem; this may be the most maddeningly stupid screen in all of YaST, and I seem to recall that older Fedora installers had something similar. But at least SuSE has basically admitted there is no way to provide useful information on this choice without pissing someone off and didn’t bother to waste time documenting it.)

(Wow, took me all of one week to have to say ‘this post is purely my personal opinion and does not represent the opinions or policies of Red Hat, Inc., particularly the legal department, who would surely think I’m off my rocker for even knowing what this particularly controversy means.’ :)

(ed. after a shower and some head-clearing: it is of course possible that KDE apps may be best of breed (though I can’t think of any and the first person who says k3b gets their posting privileges revoked), and those should be documented. But if your example is konqueror, you have already lost the game for many reasons.)

Syndicated 2007-05-25 11:18:00 from Luis Villa's Blog

deep, deep breath

I’m exhausted. And I’ve only barely started. This is great… I’d almost forgotten what it is like to do something because you’re really interested in it, rather than running in fear :) [Edit: I realize that could be misconstrued to be a comparison to past jobs; it was supposed to be to the last year of law school, not any past jobs.]

A couple one-line observations as life flies by at high speed:

  • paraphrasing one of the other lawyers: ‘keeping your data locally may be like keeping your money in your mattress- makes you feel better, but possibly going to be obsoleted by banks real soon now.’
  • I’m very impressed with RH’s focus on culture so far- they seem to be deadly serious about being not just a company that sells open source but an open source company. I’m utterly sure that is far from perfect, but even the attempt is impressive to me.
  • It is embarassing that sending someone else an ics file doesn’t Just Work, still.
  • That said, I still have a lot of pride in saying that evo is My Product, and now that I’m using it again day-to-day… it holds up pretty well. The new maintainers have done some really nice work.
  • Hello planet fedora! Still not actually running fedora, but hopefully I’ll fix that next week- I’ve been pretty impressed by RHE5 on my work box, so I have to imagine that F7 should look good.
  • Red Hat really, really likes to get their interns heavily involved, and quickly. I wish I could talk more about what I’m doing- so far just about everything I’ve touched has been almost Shockingly Serious and Very Not For Public Consumption Yet. Incredibly awesome to be that involved, that quickly. This job is not going to be good for my workaholic habits.
  • NCSU housing is…. not so organized. But everyone I’ve screamed at has been very nice. :) And my final/permanent summer housing, while definitely a dorm, is pretty darn nice. And my roommate improved it a great deal by bringing a lot of stuff. :)

Syndicated 2007-05-25 03:30:36 from Luis Villa's Blog

I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up

The recurring question lawyers ask first year law students when they meet them is something like ’so what do you want to specialize in?’ The answer I really want to give is something like ‘open source law generalist’, but sadly that isn’t really something that people hire, and probably isn’t something you’d really want to be anyway unless you were an academic- law is a highly specialized profession where ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ is quite true. So at some point in the near future I’m going to have to figure out what or how to specialize, I think… and I have no idea what it is going to be. I’m definitely interested in patents, copyrights, trademarks, antitrust, and a few other things. But none of them yet jump out as something I’d like to pursue single-mindedly for several consecutive years. Definitely something I hope folks around here can help me figure out this summer.

Syndicated 2007-05-24 15:50:42 from Luis Villa's Blog

break reading

[Am in Raleigh; getting a network connection has been a real PITA. Wrote this last night while unconnected from the network; more coming on The Red Hat Experience ™ in due course. :)

A quick run-through (mostly for personal journaling purposes, but possibly of interest to others) of the books I read over my post-exam vacation in the mountains.

Latin American bits:

The Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: like 100 Years of Solitude (which I started re-reading Thursday but have not yet finished) a sort of warped view into the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, in this case with a focus on the perspective of the dictators. Probably helps to be at least comfortable with Latin American history before reading it. The style is almost experimental (very stream of thought) so I found it a little harder and uglier to read than I had hoped. Still, brilliant in its own way, as is to be expected from Garcia Marquez.

Dreaming In Cuban, by Christina Garcia: a novel of Cuban women from ‘72 to Mariel, with some pre-Fidel history as well. Couldn’t help compare it in my head to the recent (male-centered) pre-Fidel Havana movie I saw with my family last summer- could have almost been a sequel in some ways. Like the movie, I enjoyed it, but probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t deeply interested in the period.

Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, by Louis A. Perez: a good but eventually troubling non-fiction history, covering the island from European settlement to virtually the present. I knew very little about Cuban history before Fidel, and now know a fair amount more, so that was great. The author’s framework for historical analysis is Marxist. This is completely reasonable, given the dynamics of poverty and power in Latin America, particularly in pre-Fidel Cuba. That portion of the book, at least, seems solid. But his apparent blindspots in his treatment of Fidel (no dissent or repression worth noting between Bay of Pigs and the US’s response to the Special Period? seriously? in a book which has dissent and repression as major themes?) make me wonder how accurate the rest of the history is- what else was left out? Was that a condition of his access to the libraries in Havana? Does he just not feel that is worthy of treatment? I’m very curious, and it marred what was otherwise a very informative and (apparently) rigorously analytic book.

couple Islamic authors:
Tariq Ali, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree: a family novel, set in the years immediately after the Reconquista of Spain. Clearly written to make a politico-historical point, sometimes to the point where the caricatures of Islam and Christianity get dull rather than interesting or informative. Still, the core of the story is moving and historically accurate. Particularly recommended for anyone (sadly, like some of the folks I met this past week) who doesn’t realize that 500 years ago religious terrorists slaughtered and tortured innocents and destroyed a progressive, tolerant, mostly superior culture - in the name of Christ. Pot calling kettle black, yadda, yadda.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Rushdie: a really lightweight, fun story. Like Serious Rushdie but kid (or summer vacation) appropriate.

Also some scifi:

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: Don’t know if it is a great book, exactly, but an interesting thought experiment in writing about anarchism and ownership. Surprised I hadn’t been told about this earlier- exactly my kind of political theory/sci-fi mashup.

reread The Carpet Makers, by Andreas Eschbach, which is just as brilliant as it was the last time. Scifi is rarely spare and beautiful, but this is.

reread Vernor Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky. A fun romp, if a little long and a little predictable. Bonus for compsci geeks: the protagonist is a 1337 programmer. Bonus for serious compsci geeks: read closely enough and you’ll note that it is implied that, 9-10,000 years in the future, starships run on Unix.

Now that I’m back at a computer and back in a more serious mental mode, I’ll probably finish Hundred Years and then work on Wealth of Networks and Infotopia.

Syndicated 2007-05-22 12:40:11 from Luis Villa's Blog

last day in New York

Managed to make the last day in New York pretty stereotypical:

  • wait 25 minutes for a bus that should come every 12: check
  • switch trains in order to save yourself a two-block walk, end up waiting 20 extra minutes: check
  • take a cab ride which makes you violently nauseous: check
  • go to a spectacularly beautiful Olmsted-ian park: check
  • go to (a branch of) the Met; see plundered but incredibly beautiful and unique works of art: check
  • have a dinner that would be hard to have anywhere else, featuring steak tartar topped with ice cream, freeze dried mustard, and pretzel consomme: check

Also spent a big chunk of the day packing and doing laundry; leave for North Carolina in… well, about 15 minutes if you count the ride to the airport. Will miss Krissa a lot but am really looking forward to the summer job. And I think she is looking forward to an excuse to visit the Triangle again :)

Next week I’ll be basically completely offline and in the mountains around Asheville, so if you’re looking to get in touch with me, leave a message after the beep.

Syndicated 2007-05-13 12:05:02 from Luis Villa's Blog

oh lazyweb- problem copying files with : in them to n800

[Not so much lazyweb as rushed/paniced/damnI’mtryingtopackandstillhaveatleastalittlecelebrationtonightweb…]

I’m trying to copy a large number of oggs from my HD to two vfat-formatted SDHC cards in my N800, mounted over USB. (16G worth of files, to be exact.) As far as I can tell, copying files with : in them (e.g., about 10% of my ogg files) to the target drive causes cp and nautilus to choke. I’m guessing this is vfat’s fault, but the N800 doesn’t seem to like it when I format the cards as ext2.

So… anyone have any suggestions on how to either rename the files (lots of them) temporarily in such a way as to make them copiable, or otherwise work around vfat, or (maybe ideally) how to use a more modern fs altogether on sd cards that will be used only in the n800? Pointers ASAP much appreciated as I leave for NC on Sunday and would like to have my oggs on the n800 by then :)

Syndicated 2007-05-11 20:59:06 from Luis Villa's Blog

donedonedonedone

Richard is so much more coherent than I can manage, I’m impressed.

Vikings:    Done done done done…
Waitress:    …done done done egg and done; done done done done done done baked beans done done done…
Vikings:    Done! Lovely done! Lovely done!
Waitress:    …or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and done.
Wife:    Have you got anything without done?
Waitress:    Well, there’s done egg sausage and done, that’s not got much done in it.

Syndicated 2007-05-11 19:29:35 from Luis Villa's Blog

private journaling tool?

Is there any decent local desktop journaling tool available for linux? I want to be able to, with a very minimal number of clicks, say ‘I just had this thought’, write it down, tag it, and easily find it later (say, at the end of a summer employment gig) so that I can review, edit, and perhaps turn it into something more concrete. (Idea being that I’ll journal my summer job both for personal growth and to help deliver useful information to the company about the experience after the fact.)

I’d do it in wordpress, but I’d like to ensure that it is private and don’t want to run wp + mysql on my local machine- a bit of overkill for what I really want, I think.

Tomboy plus the Note of the Day plugin (not packaged for Ubuntu?) plus the new tags plugin might do what I want, but I won’t be able to try it out until… well, not clear when, but ‘not now’. And will require playing with source, which I’m not so excited to do right now (though will be more so once I’m done with school.)

I’ll probably go with one of those two solutions (probably tomboy) but if anyone has other suggestions, I’m all ears.

[19 1/2 hours until I am done with my first year of law school. I am soooo psyched. And I actually think that, miraculously, I’m reasonably well prepared for my last exam…]

Syndicated 2007-05-10 22:38:29 from Luis Villa's Blog

good, bad, ugly, part 20070508

good: accepted to the staff of the Columbia STLR. Should be fun.

bad: criminal law exam. Will almost certainly be my worst grade of my first year barring a brutal curve, though property on Friday could give it a run for the money. Am going to need to do some serious post-mortem on this semester after it is done; nutshell is that I think I’ve learned a lot about myself and how to be more productive, but that it came too late to save the semester.

ugly: had dinner with Ross and Vicki at RUB. Delicious, and good company. Ugly only because Ross clearly hasn’t shaved since he left Britain. :)

Syndicated 2007-05-09 11:48:08 from Luis Villa's Blog

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