Blog: Archive for January, 2003

We're back from the UK!

We had a pretty good time—lots of good food, and we brought back a huge pile of books.

The weather conspired against us—first to scupper my plans to visit Highgate Cemetery for the second year in a row, and then to delay our plane home for nearly three hours.

Apple has clearly decided that their deal with Microsoft is up. They announced a shiny new browser (literally, with its brushed stainless steel look) and a PowerPoint killer at MacWorld. Sadly they didn't announce a new tablet computer, which M would've had to tie me down to stop me from ordering. The Windows one has several problems from my perspective, not least being the fact that it runs Windows.

The new 12" AlBook sounds kind of cool, but is still missing some of the features the TiBook has that make it seem attractive. (In particular, the newer TiBooks have DVI video connectors so you can connect them to high-resolution digital displays; the iBook and AlBook only have VGA, and that only through an adapter.) We'll have to take a look at it at some point.

I don't understand Arianna Huffington. A few years ago, before I went off to Canada, she was a crazy right-winger. Since I've been back, though, she seems to have taken up some positions I agree with.

The most recent of these is the Detroit Project, which is against the auto industry's wasteful approach, especially SUVs.

Not only are they against SUVs, but they also decided to mock two of the most offensive antidrug ads that I've ever seen (and they've all been lame). Remember the ad claiming that some guy buying weed was funding terrorism? The Detroit Project has one with the same argument for George (hmm...), whose SUV guzzles gasoline that supports coutries who support terrorism. Frankly, I think that this argument holds more water than the antidrug one. José the drug lord in Columbia probably doesn't really want to kill his target market.
Via John Stewart.

It looks like I'm moving to a proper office, at least for the next semester. After that, the space joust resumes.

But I'm going for it. I've got the telephone moves in process, and had a bunch of network ports hooked up. I even went to Ikea to get a comfy chair (as opposed to my nice office chair, which is fine for working, but not for reading—as my job entails a lot of reading, I think it's important to be comfortable). I should probably start moving random objects tomorrow.

Amazon's “Just Like You” section is kind of amusing. (If you're logged in at Amazon, scroll down to the bottom of “your page”.)

The number of items that I don't have in common with the people they've paired me with far exceeds the number of shared items. As a result, we learn that they think I'm an Indian Jew, obsessed with the Holocaust; a technogeek with books about Java and XML and routers (and, to be fair, quite a large overlap, although I don't have any books about Java or XML or routers, even at work); and so on. The best one was “A customer Just Like You” who has no items in common with me, and loves Star Wars *shudder*.

It does seem like the more overlapping items you have, the more likely it is that you'll find something interesting in the collection of the other person. But some of the matches are amazingly speculative. Somehow, I don't think that you can make a useful comparison based on both people having The Matrix, which my partner's brother claims came with every DVD player sold during a certain period, in much the same way as Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms came with every CD player sold in a similar period.

A nice interview with Philip Pullman on a Christian website. The interview is all over the map, and Pullman comes off as being a bit abrupt, but it's interesting background. There's also a hint at a possible fourth book in the series.
Via the null device.

Moved! After spending pretty much all day, I got almost everything out of my old, tiny office, and into my new office. It's pretty much just stacked up on the wall-o-bookshelves for now, but at least it's moved. Now I need to go through it all and discard the stuff that's ancient and meaningless (there are stacks of files from 1994–1996, not to mention books from that era on Linux, Windows, and who knows what else).

I'm feeling kind of weird about it. However awful that office was in some ways, it also had its nice points, not least of which was that it was fairly isolated, which meant that I could play music pretty loudly without disturbing anyone. Oh, well, I can adjust.

Next step—furniture!

NOW with Bill Moyers has got to be one of the most surprising, and coolest, shows on PBS. After last year's election, Bill Moyers snapped and said what he really thought about the results and what they meant for America's future. It was breathtakingly honest, and the show continues to be harshly critical of the Bush regime and other issues dear to the hearts of Bush's corporate masters.

Last night's NOW featured a report on Copyright in America that hit all the right notes, with excellent people making excellent points about the importance of the commons (Eben Moglen, Siva Vaidhyanathan), and excellent people making the not-so-great case for monopoly (Jack Valenti, Pat Schroeder).

You might be able to catch it again, but if not, PBS has provided a transcript.

Finally ventured into downtown L.A., which is definitely one of the scarier downtowns I've been in. Very weird combination of rundown bodegas and yuppie apartments, with government buildings, performing arts venues, and museums scattered around.

Met up with my old friend Greg and his housemate, and visited the A + D Architecture and Design Museum, which was exhibiting a huge stainless steel sculpture by Edward Tufte called “Escaping Flatland” along with a number of prints from his three well-known design books, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations. There were also several prints from his upcoming book, Beautiful Evidence, which is supposed to be completed sometime this year for publication this year or next.

Based on the prints from the new book, it'll be great—we'll definitely buy it. The sculpture left me kind of cold. On the one hand it has an amazing subtly reflective finish, but on the other hand it's huge slabs of stainless steel. There are photographs of the sculpture installed in several outdoor locations in the exhibit's catalog and on the website, and I think it's better outside where it can reflect the environment and can also be viewed at a greater distance so you can get a better sense of its scale. Indoors, it's pretty overwhelming.

As it happens, the A + D museum is inside the Bradbury Building. Yeah, that Bradbury Building—Blade Runner, “Demon with a Glass Hand”, and so on. It's been completely restored, and it looks great. Annoyingly, you're apparently not supposed to go outside of the exhibit spaces. As they'd posted no signs and hadn't blocked the stairs, however, M snuck up to the top floor to take some pictures. The guard went after her, but she played innocent and said she was just taking some pictures and would come down as soon as she was done. These Americans and their baby buildings....

From there, we headed off to the MOCA, specifically to the Geffen Contemporary, which is currently featuring an exhibit called “Retrofuturism: The Car Design of J Mays”. Mays worked for Audi for a while, designing a car that was the basis for their TT. Then he went to Volkswagen, where he designed the new Beetle. Now he works for Ford, and is in charge of all of its divisions, which now include Volvo, Jaguar, and Rover, after a spate of acquisitions.

Some of the car designs were interesting, but definitely out there. They included a race car/sports car that looks just like a Hot Wheels or Matchbox toy I remember from kidhood, a minivan that looks suspiciously similar to the Honda Element, the new Thunderbird, and a very strange kit car made up of slats that looks more like a model than a functional vehicle.

We then walked over to the main MOCA museum, taking the scenic route. We finally got to see City Hall close up, a building I remember best for its appearance in Dragnet, and, more importantly, the “MathNet” segments of Square One TV. We also saw the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and associated cultural buildings.

The main MOCA museum was a bit disappointing, although it still seemed more interesting than the vast majority of the material in the Tate Modern. About half the museum was blocked off, presumably while they were tearing down or putting up a new exhibit. Much of the rest featured an exhibit of the work of Sam Durant, who I'd never heard of before, and whose work mostly consisted of somewhat subversive rednecky images.

Once we were done with the MOCA, we headed back toward the Bradbury via the Angel's Flight funicular railway (closed because of some accident that happened a year or so ago) and the Central Market, where we had dinner—excellent Mexican food from a place with cooked animal skulls on proud display next to a variety of other food options.

We parted on the corner, after a vigorous discussion of region-coding in DVDs and DVD players and why disabling it is good and our first direct encounters with some of the weirder people living in the area. Then it was back onto the 10 and off to our quiet suburban home, where crowds of noisy people managed to set off car alarms several times in a row.

Hey, wow, give me one of those cool wireless keyboards! On second thought, no thanks....

An essay on storytelling by Philip Pullman, from the Grauniad.
Via Locus.

A review of William Gibson's upcoming Pattern Recognition, which is starting to sound like it might be worth reading.
Also via Locus.

Spent most of the day playing with tar and tape drives; not one of my favorite exercises. Still, once I'm done, I'll have a nice archive of the oldest OS still running on the machines I'm reponsible for, and will finally be happy about wiping the thing and installing something a bit newer.

Ooh! Mock propaganda posters!. Now that I have a nice office where people might actually be able to visit me, I want posters like these even more.... Of course actually having them where people could see them might not be such a smart idea these days....

We saw some of the originals these posters are based on at the V&A museum in London.

While we're at it, here are some John Heartfield images. And some more....

(This one was used as the cover of “Mittageisen”, an early Siouxsie and the Banshees single.)

I remembered that I wanted to look into building a newer kernel for my new machine, in hopes of picking up some code that would resolve some of the “Unknown device” messages I get with lspci. Along the way, I thought I'd see if Alan Cox had anything new on his diary.

I never remember the URL, as I have a nice start page at home that includes a link. I still haven't put such a page together at work, though, so I did a quick search on Google.

The first result was the right one, of course, but number three sounded sort of intriguing—“ecosystem stats for Alan Cox's Diary”. What's that?

Turns out that it's a page giving some information about the pages linked to and from Alan's diary. Trying to find out more led me to the main page for the site, as well as a handy list of similar tools.

Looking back at the ecosystem for Alan's page, I noticed my blog in the list of backLinks, reminding me that I have a box of links on my blog I could use instead of Google. Live and learn.

I installed the latest version of mh-e at work the other day, and spent some time poking at it today. It has some really nice features, including the ability to view a mailbox as threaded (instead of just narrowing to a thread). It also apparently includes support for multiple identities, which is potentially a cool thing for being able to send home mail from work, or official “mail from the systems administrator” instead of from me. I haven't been able to find the alleged identity menu yet, though. It may require me to quit and restart Emacs now that I've activated the feature, or it may be on the graphical toolbar that I always disable. Whatever.

Very, very cool, however, was my discovery of a new speedbar feature that shows you your folders and indicates whether they have unseen mail in them. All I really need now to be able to completely abandon exmh would be some code to let me keep reading unseen messages in other folders once I've read all the mail in the current folder.

Janeane Garofalo on America's warmongering media. It's so nice to read what you already know is true.

On a similar note, Ken Nott, the main character in Iain Banks's Dear Air and I also think a lot alike. Oh, not to the point of having affairs with people, but there are some choice rants in the book (Ken is a DJ, specializing in offending people with the truth) that sound a lot like some of my own.

Ever wonder who the hell you are? I'm looking at procmail, the fiendish e-mail filtering system, because I'm tired of having to sort things manually. At home, on my Debian box, I use mailagent, but procmail is definitely more of a standard, and is also available sans effort for Red Hat.

It's also the basis for some nice spam filtering solutions, and given that I'm starting to see the occasional spam message showing up on my work account, I imagine that some of the faculty and students who've had accounts for years must see a lot of spam. Helping them deal with it would be a good thing.

Anyway, my original point occurred to me while I was playing with Evolution [which I don't like for the same reason I don't like other GUI mail clients]. I was looking at its filtering capabilities, and poking through some mail I'd loaded in a few months ago consisting of messages from when I first started this job. I really had to wonder who'd written some of these messages. Me? Hmm.

I wonder if mail written even further back would be even more weirdly divergent from who I think I am right now. I'm scared to look....

Yay! I finally figured out how to get almost all the buttons on my Kensington Expert Mouse Pro to work under X. [Everything but the URL buttons around the top, which I suspect may require some kernel-level USB tinkering.]

In case anyone else has one of these wonderful trackballs and wants to use with XFree86, I'm thrilled to be able to give you some hints.

To start with, I added the following section to my XF86Config-4 file (yes, it really does use the driver for Microsoft's Intellimouse Explorer):

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "CoolMouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "ExplorerPS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "no"
        Option          "Buttons"               "7"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "6 7"
EndSection

Then I run xmodmap from my ~/.login file on a file called ~/.xmodmap-$HOST (so I don't mess up the mouse on other machines). That file looks like:

!
! Switch buttons on the mouse around
!
!  Default layout is
! 
!  +-----------+
!  |     6     |
!  |     2     |
!  | 4   7   5 |
!  |           |
!  | 1       3 |
!  +-----------+
!
!  We remap to
!
!  +-----------+
!  |     4     |
!  |     7     |
!  | 2   5   6 |
!  |           |
!  | 1       3 |
!  +-----------+
!
pointer = 1 7 3 2 6 4 5

(The only important line is the pointer one, of course.)

Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with the extra button. Leaving the mouse wheel button undefined is an attractive idea, as I've had problems with it triggering random events while scrolling, but we'll see....

The Grauniad has an article about a journalist listening to a new 24-hour long collection of live Throbbing Gristle CDs continuously. Having just been in the UK during Christmas, I agree with his assessment of the experience of not listening while wandering through the streets and shops of London.

Once upon a time, I would have felt like I needed to have this collection, even though I probably wouldn't have actually listened to the whole thing. I'm feeling much better now, though.
Via the null device.

Sometimes I love the open source/free software community. Lars Wirzenius, fellow Debian developer, has a new mailing list manager—Enemies of Carlotta. Ah, obscure pop culture references....
Via Freshmeat.

A couple of issues with my amazing mouse stuff:

1. The comment character for X configuration files is !, not #. I knew that. (Fixed in the example.)

2. On Red Hat (7.3, anyway), there is a /etc/X11/Xmodmap file that is checked when X starts. You can add the pointer code to this file, and xmodmap remaps the mouse for anyone using the system.

   Debian used to have this file, but no longer does. When I get home, I'll try creating one and update this entry if it works.