The Rodent's Burrow

When my company laptop is connected to the company network, the latter continually examines the former for various things. (Like whether Bittorrent is installed.) And, if there's a dictum out that Something Should Be Installed, it gets, well, installed.

One consequence is that it seems barely a day goes by without a little window popping up in the corner saying that something is being automatically installed. Unfortunately, sometimes those auto-installations end with an auto-reboot, catching the user — me — by surprise. Usually, though, the window just pops up, the disk gets flogged for a while, and things quiet down.

Another consequence is the amount of crap that happens without my knowledge or permission. For example, looking at 'Add/Remove Programmes' I see no fewer than 105 updates and hotfixes applied by this behind-the-scenes process. Or perhaps that should be behind-the-seens. Big Brother is not only watching, he's munging your software.

Better Living Through Involuntary Updates, I guess.

Technorati tags: Windows  BigCo  Big+Brother 

Scribed by coar at 2008-08-01 11:49:16 at 2008-08-01 11:49:16 (0 items in this thread)

People keep asking me, "Well, what do you want to do?" And every time I have to rethink it, even though the answer is pretty much the same every time:

• I want to hack. That is, I want to be able to hack on open software as part of my job, under common open development rules (e.g., no rigid drop-dead dates, schedules, or 'promised to customers' constraints). The stuff I hack on always ends up being useful, if nothing more than as a means of self-education. Sometimes it has a wider applicability, like the Apache Web server, or the Apache mailing list statistics.
• I want to promote open software. This includes things like educating company departments about how things work 'out here,' and how to work with 'out here,' giving presentations at conferences, and so on.
• I want to write. Things like books and articles about open software, its place in the world, et cetera.
• And all of the above not in a 'we own your brain' environment.

So, somewhat like Diogenes with his celebrated search for an honest man, I'm always looking for a job that will support my hacking, my conference activities, my OSI work, and the rest. (For example, for years I've only been able to attend conferences if I was a speaker, and then only if the conference was paying my way. I haven't been to a conference in order to just learn stuff for donkey's years. Never been to a YAPC, for instance. It'd be nice to occasionally be able to go as an attendee.) In return I'm happy to provide education, consulting, good press abroad, and connexions to people and places within the open communities.

Unfortunately, I've found that quite a few companies have concluded that they understand all about this open-software thing, and can write their findings into their policies and procedures and put 'em on the shelf. Also unfortunately — for them, that is — it's a moving target. What's happening in open software now is different from what was happening a decade ago. And a decade from now it'll be even more different. Remember, it evolves in Internet time, and large corporate structures sometimes have trouble advancing their CPU speed past 'dinosaur.'

I want to keep up. More, I want to keep 'way up, instead of lagging behind. And still more, I want someone to employ me to keep up.

So now you know. Too much to hope for, d'you think?

Warning: Contents under pressure. Manufacturer reserves the right to change any aspect of the product without notice. Your mileage may vary. For external use only. Offer subject to local laws and regulations. Professional hacker on open course. With a soft 'c'. Do not attempt at home, only at a neighbour's house.

Technorati tags: career  free+software  open+source  open+software  hacking  teaching  conferences 

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-30 17:39:54 at 2008-07-30 17:39:54, updated at 2008-07-30 18:17:42 (0 items in this thread)

I previously bemoaned the difficulty of presenting APL code online. The other night, overdosed on caffeine (thank you, SourceForge!), I started whacking at it using XSLT and the macro functionality I built into my blog software.

The result is that I can represent the funky APL characters using custom XML tags I defined, and the blog software uses XSLT to transform it into the appropriate character entities.

So, for example, the following should show up properly — at least funky character-wise — but may not render properly on your screen if you're reading this through something that strips out the CSS style attributes.

      ▽z←polyangle arg;rt;n;av;⎕io
[1]   ⎕io←1   ⍝ set index origin to a known value
[2]   n←1↑arg
[3]   rt←1↑1↓arg
[4]   av←rt+(○2÷n)ׯ1+⍳n
[5]   z←av-○2×~(○2)av
      ▽

      ▽z←rect
[1]   z←3 4⍴⍳12
      ▽

The actual markup for this looks like:

      <apl:del/>z<apl:gets/>polyangle arg;rt;n;av;<apl:quad/>io
[1]   <apl:quad/>io<apl:gets/>1   <apl:upshoe-jot/> set index origin to a known value
[2]   n<apl:gets/>1<apl:uparrow/>arg
[3]   rt<apl:gets/>1<apl:up/>1<apl:down/>arg
[4]   av<apl:gets/>rt+(<apl:circle/>2<apl:divided-by/>n)<apl:times/><apl:macron/>1+<apl:iota/>n
[5]   z<apl:gets/>av-<apl:circle/>2<apl:times/>~(<apl:circle/>2)<apl:gt/>av
      <apl:del/>

      <apl:del/>z<apl:gets/>rect
[1]   z<apl:gets/>3 4<apl:rho/><apl:iota/>12
      <apl:del/>

Ugly, perhaps, but less so than the original rendering I did.

Enough fun, back to serious shit..

Technorati tags: APL  XSLT  Unicode 

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-26 20:47:21 at 2008-07-26 20:47:21 (0 items in this thread)

No, this post isn't any philosophiosociopolitical rant; it's what it says it is: about my laptop which won't beep and won't go to sleep, either. One better than a baby, I hear. :-)

I've tracked down the disabling of the plugged/unplugged power feeper to something in the startup of udev. Unfortunately, twiddling the obvious entries — commenting out the pcspkr and alsa bits singly and together — has made no difference. It must be something less obvious.

And while pm-suspend has never worked for me, at least pm-hibernate did — until some recent update which caused the latter to fail in the same manner as the former. Namely, it goes mostly to sleep, and the little crescent moon lights up momentarily.. and then the bugger goes straight into the wakeup sequence. Crap.

So I'm having to actually shut down when I'm carrying the thing around, or else have it running continuously with the concomitant use of the battery and danger to the disk. At least it boots quickly..

And, by the way, I seriously dislike the lexical scoping of ECMAscript. I'll probably become accustomed to it at some point, but for now it's just a not-insignificant pain in my not-inconsiderable arse.

Technorati tags: Linux  Fedora  FC8  sound  power  ECMAscript  Javascript 

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-24 13:10:25 at 2008-07-24 13:10:25, updated at 2008-07-24 13:11:49 (0 items in this thread)

I'm staying at the Westin hotel in Portland, Oregon for OSCON this year. When I made the reservation something tickled the back of my mind about the chain, but I couldn't remember what it was. Now that I'm here, I'm starting to remember..

Right now the thing that's popping my corn is how they handle network access. There's free wifi in the lounge area, allegedly, but the rooms only have hardline access. Which is not free; it's US$12.95 per 24 hours. And it needs to be renewed every day. And it's charged per IPA assigned. Since I habitually use two laptops, that means they want to (and did, the first night) charge me US$25.90 just to get online from my room for a day.

In this day and age, there are so many aspects of that which are patently ridiculous. For instance:

1. Charging for network access? Wake up, Starwood! Many of your competitors have realised that this is a commodity, not a luxury, and free — or at least cheap — net access is a selling point.
2. Having to renew every day? Admittedly I've only been to a few hotels that had a 'for the duration of your stay' option, but, by methyl cellulose, more should!
3. Charging per IPA? Come on! I'm one guest, you're already making me pay for access.. give me all the access I need!

On the [scant] positive side, they don't futz around with filtering SSH or SSL or SMTP, which is a welcome rarity.

But that's not enough for me to want to ever stay at a Westin again. And Chris DiBona tells me most of the Starwood hotels are the same..

Technorati tags: Westin  hotel  travel  wifi 

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-23 11:44:43 at 2008-07-23 11:44:43 (0 items in this thread)

I've got making a radius cutter on my fun things to do list, but I'm not sure what style to make. So far I've found three basic styles:

I like the sturdiness of the slide-mounted style, but I really don't like the idea of having to dismount and remount the compound slide just to use this tool.

Since I've never seen any of these in use, I'm not sure how the tool is advanced to close in on the final radius. It looks as though either the finishing cuts are made by setting the radius and advancing the cross slide, or else the cross slide is stationary and tool is nudged forward to reduce the radius. The Y-axis style clearly advances the tool and the slide is stationary. But it looks as though it's intended only for quite small radii.

One possibility would be to come up with my own design, maybe combining the Z-axis circular rotor with the boring bar-style precision tool advance. But that's back to having to remove the compound slide again. Combining the C-style with the precision advance keeps the compound slide, but introduces the potential for chatter and loses the ability to cut concave curves. And the Y-axis method puts the cutting edge at the top of the work and facing away from the operator. Sigh.

There's too much I don't know and too many assumptions. More research needed..

Technorati tags: mini-lathe  radius+cutter  radius+turning+tool   

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-13 22:50:57 at 2008-07-13 22:50:57 (0 items in this thread)

Ever since I installed Fedora 8.0 on my latest Thinkpad, I've had trouble with the sound. I kept getting messages about something called PULSEAUDIO, of which I'd never heard before, and things that tried to play sounds (e.g., aplay, mplayer, xplaycd) would get errors (and silence) unless I took measures to work around it (where possible), like by telling them 'talk directly to the device.'

One of the problems, which has been particularly irksome, is that the Thinkpad no longer feeps when it's plugged in or unplugged. Which is particularly annoying when I come to use it in the morning and it's completely dead. This has happened a couple of times in the last fortnight, so it's become more than a minor inconvenience.

I got the PulseAudio problem fixed by starting it in the system xinitrc. (Curious that it isn't already there, and that the condition OOB is to have broken sound..) The power feep is still not happening, though. I've verified that it's working; I've made the appropriate changes to the BIOS, and popped the plug in and out during the bootstrap sequence, and it works fine right up to somewhere around the time the console says 'setting hostname.' So it's definitely something in Linux that's doing it, and not the hardware, and not X.

However, I can't find any mention online of anyone else having this problem. I guess I need to walk through the startup sequence and find out what the hell is going on — and then make it stop.

Technorati tags: Linux  Fedora  Thinkpad  unplugged  beep 

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-13 15:08:48 at 2008-07-13 15:08:48 (0 items in this thread)

What a messy day. It started off with a chiropractic appointment, which went well. Then I had to go pick up a prescription from one of my doctors (he can't call it in to the pharmacy because it's a C2 controlled substance), and then take it to the pharmacy to be filled. That was going to take a while, so I went home and did some work, then went back to pick up the Ρχ.

Except.. the medication wasn't what I thought it was going to be, based on my last discussion with the sawbones. I made a call to him to get it sorted out, but he was at lunch. When he returned my call he explained and we made a fix, then I had to go to his office again to pick up the new prescription, then to the pharmacy again to a) fill the new Ρχ and b) try to get a refund on the earlier one. (Which I was able to do, but they weren't happy about it — they have to destroy the pills, which means they get to eat nearly a thousand dollars.)

A goodly amount of driving, and a lot of waiting around. And nowhere near as much Java done as I hoped. But at least I've got my drugs!

Technorati tags: Rx  prescriptions  pharmacy  chiropractic 

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-10 17:09:01 at 2008-07-10 17:09:01 (0 items in this thread)

I've been wanting a drafting application for a long time, but have been too cheap to buy one. Someone on one of the machining groups I've begun frequenting posted a pointer to Solid Edge 2D by Siemens. I wasn't able to install it, though, because it requires Windoze XP and I didn't have anything running that.

I've got a system running WXP now, though, and I installed the package. News flash: It totally ROCKS! I haven't used a CAD tool in donkey's years, but on my first evening using it I was able to draft up plans for three different parts I've had in the back of my mind. Sweet!

Technorati tags: Solid+Edge+2D  Siemens  drafting  CAD 

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-10 16:13:54 at 2008-07-10 16:13:54 (0 items in this thread)

• Funny enough to make you spit blood: Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency. (via Doc Searls.)
• JAXP: A maze of twistly little passages: All I want to do is take some XML in a String and transform it according to an XSLT stylesheet either in a file or another String, and get the transformed XML in yet another String. Simple in theory, no? Yet as far as I've been able to determine, none of the relevant bits o' code deign to deal with something so primal as a String; it's all Streams and the like. Not improving my opinion of the Java religion.
• Turn, turn, turn: Lacking a radius cutter for my mini-lathe, I made a tool on the mini-mill to let me shape a lens on a piece of acrylic. Unfortunately my radius gauges only go up to 0.5", so the curvature isn't as precise as I'd like. It works a treat, though.
• From the Whatzit Department: I picked up a box of random electro-mechanical parts, and found what appears to be a tiny electric crucible. It's got heavy-duty connectors, and notes on the bottom saying "120VAC" and "1090W" and "Made in Taiwan." I'm a little fearful of just plugging it in, but if it's what it appears to be, it alone is worth twice the price I paid for the whole bundle.
• Come in out of the cornstarch and dry your mukluks by the fire: I've finally received a shipment of stuff packed in some of those cornstarch 'peanuts' I've read about. Très cool; they dissolve in water. How green. (And a tip o' the tonsure to anyone who recognises this item's tagline.)

Technorati tags: mini-lathe  onion  XSLT  JAXP  acrylic  cornstarch  green 

Scribed by coar at 2008-07-08 18:16:04 at 2008-07-08 18:16:04 (0 items in this thread)