DIY geekery

Knives! Magnets from old hard drives!!!. Alright, I don't know if the knives are geeky, but the magnets. from. old. hard. drives. sure are :-).

The article woke me up because I also happen to have a thing for knives, (and glue, and string, and tape, and fire, with which, one can fix anything :-).

Fun, Interesting and Long

Richard Feynman and the Thinking Machines Connection Machine.

Great article. Long, interesting, fun.

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

"We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids."

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

Great talk on designing a good API

Josh Bloch's great presentation (video talk) on designing good APIs

It's a long talk and I'm only at the very beginning of it. Sounds good so far though.

reddit.com not resolving

I'm an internet addict and I regularly go to Reddit for my daily fix. I can't go there just now though. DNS isn't resolving. I tried to go to a ping gateway, but the hostname wouldn't resolve there either. There's probably something wrogn with their DNS server just now. I don't see any mentions of what might be wrogn though. But I only wonder since I'm starting to miss my fix (heheh, not really,there's always Digg).

Old laptop, old distro

I had a problem with the right LCD hinge of my previous laptop a Winbook J4 733E pro. I sent the laptop back to be repaired and it's back and working perfectly. That laptop had Mandriva 2005 on it. In the meantime, I've been using a toshiba laptop with ubuntu dapper drake on it. I'm now trying to decide which laptop to stick with.

Ubuntu won't install on the Winbook. It fails around 80% of the way through the install progress bar. I'd forgotten that ubuntu wouldn't install here. So I've installed Mandriva 2006 (I don't have 2007 yet since I'd stepped away from Mandriva for the duration). It's now (slowly) downloading upgrades and new packages that I didn't install from the DVD but which have been upgraded so they need to be downloaded.

I like the winbook and can deal with its minuses (mainly the fact that it looks lived in, it doesn't look brand new by any means, plus the weight and the fact that it runs hotter than the toshiba since that's a desktop P4 chip in there, not a mobile P4). The Toshiba certainly is prettier, but pretty is actually a minus with me. A laptop (and a motorcycle, or shoes, etc) that doesn't look lived in doesn't feel as good or as comfortable.

On the other hand, I don't know how to get the wifi on the winbook working. This was never a problem before since I was always wired. But now that we've got wifi at home, if the wifi doesn't work, then I can't use the laptop (well, I could buy a PCMCIA card I guess, or a USB wifi device that linux supports). That's probably the biggest problem. I was getting used to the crypto /home filesystem on ubuntu and I'll need to figure out how to get that working in Mandriva.

While trying to get Ubuntu installed on the winbook (I swapped the toshiba and winbook drives due to drive size) I might have made a mistake with the ubuntu gui installer and trashed my encrypted /home partition. I'm keeping the partition around for a while (lots of space on this drive) and I'll try to recover the data later, if that's possible.

All in all, it's going to be an eventful distro switching Christmas experience. If I get tired of all this, well, I'll probably just switch back to the Toshiba, although I need to figure out some things. Among other things, the toshiba turns itself off when I run anything extremely CPU intensive (like a chess game) that runs for a long time (say 5 minutes). This doesn't happen in Windows (I'm told), so the current conjecture is that toshiba has special thermal control functionality that its windows drivers know about, but which Linux doesn't know about, so linux doesn't know how to make the fans spin faster, or whatever is needed to keep the laptop from turning itself off.

Damn, I might have to sell both of these laptops and get a lightweight, less powerful, non-desktop-replacement laptop for everyday use. I've got two other lightweight winbooks for just that purpose (everything works perfectly except for sound, but that's easy, I've got that working before, I just don't remember what module to load), but I like the power of the toshiba and the Winbook J4, so I'll try to get them both working first before giving up, restoring windows on them, and selling them at a bit of a loss.

Cancelled Interview

I had a candidate for a software development position scheduled for an interview today (Monday). She emailed early that she would not be able to make it because she had already received an offer from another IT company.

This was fine. It was a good break for her, and I was glad to have her email me early to inform me of the change in plans (shows good sense, consideration and a certain maturity).

I thought she made the wrong call though. Currently, in the Philippines, it's a geek's market. There is more demand than supply for good developers. I think that even for mediocre developers there is more demand than supply, although I don't want to have anything to do with that class of developer.

Therefore, I think that software developer candidates (particularly the really strong ones, but even those with no experience but who came from good schools) should not take the first offer they get. They should be willing to interview for a month or two (if things don't work out, there are always call center jobs available) and they should look at factors other than the pay. How much challenge will there be on the job? How many different languages/platforms/frameworks will be used on the job? Does the company have a commitment to helping make its developers as mature and strong as they can be?

For developers just out of school, how much will they learn in the first 3-5 years at the company? If they're going to be pigeon-holed into some specialization (e.g., SAP, Siebel, Peopleware or only one language or database), then that's the wrong company. The first 3-5 years out of school are a great opportunity to expand the developer's mind. Pigeonholing limits the developer and (except for those who actively search out new ways of doing things, a minority in everything) stunts his or her growth. Perhaps (likely, certainly, for most developers) forever.

Exceeding Gmail's 2GB limit

Brajeshwar posts his observations on what happens when you exceed the 2GB gmail storage limit.

Mildly interesting but, frankly, a bit dumb. If you're approaching the limit, take countermeasures. In the comments someone suggests downloading to thunderbird or outlook. I strongly recommend that no one should trust any web-based system with all their email. Gmail and yahoo (and particularly hotmail) have been known to lose email. Yahoo and Hotmail will expire an email address if the email is not checked for a certain period (a month or two), apparently MySpace will take profile names whenever they find a commercial reason to do so ("Bones"). Gmail doesn't have that weakness, but there are recent comments that Gmail seems to be slowing down. The company isn't going to go away, and it's as good a web-based brand as any, but trusting gmail completely is a bug (and trusting hotmail or yahoo even just a little is a stupidity and not merely a bug).

So backup your email. And why think about removing spam? Just go ahead and do it. Unless you're collecting spam for whatever reason, in which case, forward your spam to another email address or (if that can't be done, i haven't tried it, frankly), forward your legitimate email to another gmail address. Or forward all emails above a certain size to another email address.

Asking gmail for more space may help. I think it's just obnoxious whining though. Workaround your problems first. If you've got 2GB of email, there is something wrogn with how you're using gmail. And frankly, if gmail actually gives you more space so that you can abuse the service some more, there is something wrogn with that decision too. But it's their network, they can do with it whatever they want :-).

internet cafe computers

I was at SM Megamall today, at the Villman internet cafe which is located in the middle of the promenade among all the computer shops.

I wanted to post this (or a similar) article from there, but I didn't. No internet cafe computers can be trusted with my password (not even for throwaway accounts like my hotmail spamcatcher account), and certainly I wasn't going to type my blogger password there.

The computer was supposed to be locked down. After the internet cafe support guy enabled sol's terminal and mine, I saw that I could select from a few categories (I chose internet). And once a category was chosen it let me select internet explorer (strangely enough, windows explorer was an option, so I might have been able to run an internet game, or solitaire, or whatever).

I can't stand explorer though (although I haven't seen IE7, which is supposed to have tabbed browsing, that might make it usable instead of instantly execrated). And anyway, explorer was a bit weird because I couldn't right click on links (if I can't open a tab, I want to at least be able to open a link in a new window). Sure, I could have done Alt-F (something else to get to new window), but that's too much work. So I surfed on over to mozilla.org and found a link to download and install firefox. I was surprised that it installed. I was pleasantly surprised since at least I'd be able to use a competent browser instead of the crap that comes with XP, but I worried some more since clearly I could just as well have downloaded any trojan or virus or spyware I wanted and it would probably have installed.

Possibly that computer had antivirus, but I doubt that. Too much expense for a cafe computer. Or if it did, then it would have been pirated (actually, I assume everything on that box was pirated, but maybe it wasn't, if installed in an SM). Anyway, that is a seriously incompetent setup. Maybe they reinstall everything from a ghost (or similar) image every day, but anyone could still install keyloggers and such and at least harvest a bunch of people's passwords all day.

If Villman can't even get this right (and they're big enough to know how to do things right), who *does* get things right? Maybe Netopia?

15-20 minutes

Bill Gates took 90 minutes to solve Petals on the Rose, I took a bit less. I doubt if I'm smarter. For one thing, I don't have the memory to do the memorizing trick he did to partly solve it early on. I also had the advantage of not having to wait for the next roll. I just read through the article, looking at the rolls and the answers.

The name of the game also helps. And I think maybe I might have seen the story (or the game) before. Maybe in Scientific American or something similar, related to or discussing Godel, Escher, Bach.

Actually, I didn't time myself. I might have taken less than 15 minutes (that's about my threshold for puzzles, if something takes longer to solve than that, then I need to be paid to pay attention). But it certainly wasn't less than 5 minutes.

firefox gone wild

I saw this entry in reddit.com, the tag was "Firefox Gone Wild".

Heh, gone wild, indeed. Ian Sison says he has a lot of firefox extensions. I sure don't have as many as he does. I'm sure he hasn't gone as wild as that guy though :-).

ubuntu toshiba mousepad fun

I'm currently using a toshiba satellite A75 S-231 while waiting for my winbook to have its LCD hinge repaired. The Winbook is on the way back, I should have it in two days or so (along with a bunch of other goodies, a vonage unit and a long range wireless phone to attach the vonage to.

When I get the winbook back I'm going to have to decide which laptop to sell. Both are good boxes, both are *heavy* boxes. These are not lightweight low power boxes, they're desktop replacements.

I've been having problems with the mousepad on this toshiba for a while. There would be occasions when moving my finger over it just would not move the mouse. On the other hand, right now, at 2AM, the mousepad is beautiful. Not as beatifully smooth moving as on my wife's smaller winbook, nor on my brother-in-law's incredibly sweet fujitsu lifebook, but smooth. For a while, I'd just not be able to get the mouse to move at all (or if I could, it would involve using the bird finger or the ring finger. I don't know why it's suddenly working so well.

My best guesses are:

1. ubuntu upgrades - ubuntu dapper drake said that it had 200 updates to install (I reinstalled because I didn't have the patience to figure out what was wrong when X wouldn't run). It might be that some of those upgrades involved improving the synaptic mousepad drivers (it wouldn't have been the kernel though, I was already running the most recent ubuntu 2.6.15-27-i686 kernel back when X stopped working.
   
   
2. humidity - if the problem recurs tomorrow, then it probably has to do with environmental factors. I found that wiping my index finger would sometimes help (but not always), pressing down a bit harder would sometimes help (but less often than wiping). Using the bird finger or the ring finger almost always worked, but not that smoothly and not predictably (not clear which finger would work).
   

I hope it was one of those 200 updates though. This is a lovely box and it'll be cheap for the value when I sell it (3Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, 100G disk, everything except the winmodem works in ubuntu [well, maybe the winmodem works in ubuntu, I doubt it, but I've not tested since I don't need the modem anymore]).

If the mousepad works perfectly for the next week, it's going to be a tough call, which laptop to sell.

Misread

When I saw the title on Reddit and followed the link to TechEBlog's article on Controlling your XBox with a PSP I read it as controlling the xbox with ESP.

Crepe, ESP would have been cool!
:-)

Linutop!

The Linutop looks incredible. It's a very small, low power, diskless, Linux desktop. Primarily meant to be a cheap web surfing platform, this could hit Microsoft in the fundament when partnered with web based office productivity applications already available.

I tried out Google Spreadsheets yesterday and it was surprisingly usable. It was slow, but certainly usable. I already use gmail as my main email system. At work we use BaseCamp. And almost all of our business systems (except Point of Sale systems, although we saw a very impressive demo of a web based point of sale system from Imperium technologies a few months ago.

For an increasingly web-based world, the Linutop is a great box. It's got a slow CPU in there and not a lot of RAM, so a year or two after launch, I wouldn't be surprised if the first iteration were to become very cheap and they would then be perfect as LTSP clients (which we also run at work, and which we will be pushing out slowly, one department at a time, so that maybe in ten years only 10% of our employees will still be in Windows).

Ituloy ang Sulong SEO

I'm helping out a friend Ituloy AngSulong with his web site. Apparently there's some sort of contest and he needs some backlinks.

Al is a good guy to work with, knows his SEO, knows his website design, I was teaching him PHP at one point. I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, he leaves his day job and gets web design and optimization work on his own. I'm more conservative than that, I think that having one stable income and one contract income in a household is better than having either two stable incomes or two contractual incomes. But in order to do that, he's either going to have to work double time, or marry his girlfriend. I think it's time, Al :-).

wow, ubuntu installer

I had problems with my ubuntu installation on my laptop. X wouldn't start anymore. I don't want to try to fix it, I'll just reinstall after backing up relevant parts of /.

I had forgotten how cool the ubuntu installer is. Installation is done in the live CD gnome setup. So, while the OS is installing, I'm able to connect to the internet and surf. I could also have played any of the games on the live CD. I remember an older distribution that allowed you to play tetris while the OS was installing from CDs. This is much cooler than that.

I don't know about Vista, but none of the Windows versions up to XP can do that. In more than just the obvious way, installing Windows is a total waste of time.

too bad, no postgresl

I was excited when I saw a link to site5.com's bargain basement web hosting pricing. I'd love to have cheap hosting, that way, even if I had nothing to put there, it wouldn't be too expensive.

Unfortunately, there's no postgresql in those hosting plans. Mysql is good enough for most people, and it's improving, sure, but I can't stand it and will never use it if a better free database is available, and postgresql is that better database. I haven't looked into firebird yet. Haven't really needed to since Postgresql does everything I need and it continues to make great progress. I've heard some good things about it though. I may look at it sometime soon. At least at the feature set. It's going to be hard to set up a comparison with postgresql though, my database at work is upwards of 300GB now and it's going to get larger as I import more of the company's data into it.

Linux Imap email client that does auto-expunge?

I access my work email via IMAP. At work I have evolution with a whole bunch of filters to move mailing list and non-work related email to local folders. That way, the inbox is for work-related email only.



The problem is, evolution doesn't auto-expunge the inbox. So when i run evolution at home (locally, not over X or over VNC) I can still see the emails which the work evolution has already moved to folders. Those emails are still visible in the inbox.



I'm going to have to check on either command line (fetchmail or similar) or graphical (perhaps sylpheed or thunderbird) email software that I can configure to periodically check IMAP, move non-work-related email to folders (or an alternate email address) that can be managed separately, and actually expunge the moved email (not just mark them deleted). Of course, I've been thinking about this long enough that I really should have done it months ago. The problem is, it's not very inconvenient to just vnc to my desktop at work, start evolution and manually expunge with CTRL-E. The degree of inconvenience is directly related to the likelihood of getting motivated enough to actually look for a solution. If the itch doesn't scratch enough, nothing will be done :-).

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Performancing

I don't remember where I found a link to Performancing for Firefox. It was only recently. Certainly within the last two weeks or so. I think I'll switch to using it all the time now. The editor isn't as fast as the one on blogger itself, but it's very convenient. It allows me to post to any of my blogs (well, for now there's just this one and my other me, but that could change as virtual personalities multiply) from just the one screen that pops upward in the browser itself.



I'm still learning the ropes though. I've learned one good thing now though. the default mode was Rich (text-only) editing. I've switched to editing the HTML source since I'm used to doing that already anyway (despite a very basic knowledge of HTML). Took me a few iterations of trying to embed the fainting goats youtube link though to figure out that I needed to go to editing the source (the " icon at top left) .



I haven't played around with this enough to see if there's a way to save drafts *in*the*browser*. That way, I could start out posts in performancing even when not connected to the net. With fast internet wherever I go now though (my friends diggi and barb at camiguin action geckos tour and adventure tell me that there's PHP1000 eat-all-you can internet from Smart now on Camiguin. It's probably very slow, but it's 24x7. so slow doesn't matter much. they were even able to download and view the youtube video of my newborn son (completely impossible previously, with the local telco's dialup internet service), that's going to be a rare requirement. But I'm sure there'll be the occasional trip to Sagada and Banaue. There, there won't be ubiquitous internet for another year or so, I guess.



This reminds me, I've got lots of pictures to upload to flickr or picasa so that they can go on to my other blog. I need to fix those old photoblogs too to point at flickr. Right now they point at geocities sites that I used to store the images. That's inconvenient though since it's necessary to touch the site every month or so so that yahoo doesn't throw away the content for lack of movement.

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Netgear WGR614v2 firmware update

We recently got DSL and wifi at home. I've kept it open (no WEP, no WPA) so I can see if someone will notice and leech off it. I haven't seen anyone riding onto the wifi signal yet, so I'll probably keep it open continuously.

We have a Netgear WGR614V2 wifi router. We saw quite a bit of instability with this. Once or twice it was because the PLDT DSL link just went away for 2 or 3 hours after 10PM. That hasn't happened often enough yet to complain to PLDT about it. The Netgear router, though, does go nuts (to coin a technical term) pretty often. Every day, sometimes twice a day, it just stops responding to ping and routing. It's still on, and I can control it when wired, and the wireless link is good. It just doesn't reply on the wifi interface.

Last night I downloaded and installed the latest firmware update on the wifi router. It's been stable so far, and I'm hoping it'll remain that way. It probably will, it was probably fixed in the first firmware update :-). The firmware update also adds WPA support and some other things. I'm not going to use WPA, but it's good to know that it's there if I need it. It'll also be useful to test ubuntu's WPA support, just so I know how that's done.

Encrypted filesystems and US border laptop searches

So I'm concerned about having my laptop legally stolen at U.S. borders, or sort-of-legally stolen by TSA [or totally illegally stolen by baggage handlers] when I check it in.  Ignoring the two other cases, I considered putting my data on an encrypted partition on the laptop.  That's not so hard these days, with linux (and windows too, except I don't use windows).  But that doesn't fix the first case either.  If anything, it would just raise red flags for TSA and U.S. customs, and they'd confiscate the laptop and probably detain me until I told them the passphrase.  And then I'd go to jail since the passphrase might be something very uncomplimentary to the TSA.

So, no, encrypting /home wouldn't help.  It's probably still a good idea for another use case, where I get held up and the laptop gets stolen.  At least there would be no leaks of proprietary information.  So I may do that anyway.  But it won't help at U.S. borders.

Alright, I've convinced myself.  Now I just need to backup the data so I can wipe out /home and setup the encrypted partition :-).

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