Blog: Archive for September, 2003

Wow—first day of classes and I was incredibly busy all day. I spent a bunch of time helping a visiting faculty member get his laptop up and running. Have I mentioned how much I totally despise Windows? Every time I deal with it, it's like rubbing a salt-encrusted Brillo pad against a barely healed wound. Yuck.

Much else afoot, as well. Four more Beowulf machines appeared. Hacking about with web pages. Lecturing people about asking for help if they weren't sure about what they were doing. Pointing out that the college's chosen “writing guide” was a sad, sad piece of junk compared to my preferred alternative (Dupré's BUGS in Writing). Dissing Windows.

Meanwhile, I've started reading Lewis Shiner's City Come A Walkin', the great grandpoobah of cyberpunk. Definitely Shiner, defintely good so far. I see major hints at stuff that appears in his “A Song Called Youth” trilogy.

From Apple's Panther page:

Unix-lover Heaven

Panther will include a final X11 window server for Unix-based apps, improved NFS/UFS, FreeBSD 5 innovations as well as support for popular Linux APIs, IPv6 and other important acronyms.

(My emphasis.)

Via Slashdot.

That pointer came from a discussion about Apple switching the default shell from tcsh to bash. Whatever. It's easy enough to switch back (or to something else), and I suspect that the average Mac user finds one shell to be as confusing and awkward as another.

I still use the tcsh, as I have since the days I had to compile my own when the only options were the real Bourne shell or the original csh. bash is pretty cool, I'm sure, but I'm used to the tcsh and have lots of aliases and stuff I've whipped together over the years.

I've been somewhat tempted by the zsh, which is kind of like the Korn shell, but with lots of nice bits from csh, tcsh, the Bourne shell, and even bash. Alas, the manual is an inch and a half thick, and I'm too busy trying to get work done to make the time investment necessary to get up to speed on a new shell.

I'm sure it goes without saying that I don't write anything meant to run more than once in {t,}csh. Shell scripts are in Bourne shell code, and more complicated scripts are generally written in Perl. I do do a fair number of throw-away things on the command line with the tcsh, such as iterating over a list of hosts running commands on each one via ssh, which I'm well aware could probably be done more easily with bash. Hey, sometimes I even start up bash just for that reason!

Yesterday I discovered that Evolution could use my MH mailstore. So I can keep reading and sending mail using the command-line and Emacs tools, but I could also read and send mail using Evolution. The main win there is that its “virtual folders” will also work, so I could set things up to monitor multiple MH folders for various patterns (e.g., mail from the chair, mail from machines indicating security problems, etc.).

I'm not sure whether I'll bother, as I'm still much happier with MH than anything else I've ever used, and I'm not all that fond of shiny graphical clients, but it's still pretty cool that they've made it interoperate with one of the older mail formats out there.

Pretty much the only shiny mail client I've seen recently that tempts me at all is Mail.app in Panther. Not that I've actually seen it, of course.

My gastroenterologist was surprisingly accepting of my defiance of his suggestion that I go on a gluten-free diet. This time, he basically said, “Well, sooner or later you're going to become symptomatic—you'll be anemic and have nutrient absorption problems—because the results of the blood tests that you had only come out that way if someone is susceptible, but if you want to risk it, fine.”

I was expecting more of a lecture, stern disapproval, dire warnings, and so forth. As far as I can see, it could take years before any of the negative effects happen, if they happen at all. In the meantime, I get to keep eating bread, pasta, cereal, cookies, and innumerable other foods and drinks that contain gluten. If it happens, it happens, and we can treat it then.

I had the exciting opportunity to use one of Dell's new keyboards today! Their “Performance USB Keyboard with 8 Hot Keys” has fancy styling, with chrome accents and 8 buttons set up to launch web browsers, adjust the volume, and make an audio player skip forward or backward. While the designers were getting excited about these new features, however, they apparently smoked an extra pure packet of crack and decided to rearrange the navigation keys so that, instead of being two rows of three keys, they're now arranged in three rows of two keys.

Yes, that's right. Apparently no one at Dell ever uses the Insert or Delete keys, so they moved them to a third row. Of course I use the Delete key all the time, not to mention the Page Up and Page Down keys that are now in “the wrong place” even though they haven't moved.

Everything Considered Harmful

Via Tantek Çelik.

Also: How to install Windows XP in 5 hours or less. I'm up to two days on the machine I'm building at work. Did I mention how much I hate Windows?

Eric Meyer on Containing Floats.

Wow. Verisign, not happy enough with its domination of .com and .net TLDs, has now implemented a new service that completely breaks the way that I—and many others—interact with the web.

Yes, that's right, courtesy of the geniuses at Verisign, you can no longer type the important part of an address into the location bar in Mozilla and have Mozilla tack on the www. and .com components. Type amazon, and you will be directed to http://sitefinder.verisign.com/lpc?url=amazon&host=amazon, which suggests that you might have wanted www.amazon.com about a third of the way down the page.

You'll find the same thing for any address you type in that isn't autocompleted.

The problem doesn't seem to affect Safari or Internet Explorer on the Mac, but it does affect Konqueror, Lynx, Galeon, and Epiphany on Linux.

See this Seattle PI article for more details.

Update: Seems like browsers on Red Hat Linux 9 work okay. It may be an issue with Debian.... It's still really annoying.

Or not.

Aha. Slightly my bad, as I had my resolv.conf looking for our domain without actually running an authoritative DNS server (been on my list of things to do for months).

It's still completely evil.

Disturbing optical illusions.

Via Hivelogic.

Our G5 arrived! Much excitement and rejoicing (and annoyance at having jobs that keep us from just going home and playing with it)!

Dell announces new death star design. (Scroll down to August, 2003, issue.)

You may have noticed my site was missing for a while today. That's because I've managed to rack up so much mail that I ran over my quota. Of course, being over quota made getting my mail off the system lots of fun. scp (both ways) and sftp both failed. In the end, I zapped my website and a partial copy of my mailbox and dumped a (17 MB) bzipped version of the full mailbox into my public_html directory. I then downloaded the thing to my work machine, verified I could read it, and zapped it.

I still can't get my mail to download, though, so if you've mailed me within the last few days and not heard anything, that's probably why.

M put more RAM in the new G5. After that, she decided to run Apple's hardware tests. During the memory tests, the machine turned on every single fan in the system. While it's very quiet most of the time, it definitely moves into hair-dryer or vacuum-cleaner territory when it's going full blast. So far, though, the toughest work we've thrown at it has barely made the fans run, so we're pretty happy.

Joel Spolsky has an article about his company's new office. Wow. Amazing stuff, and some really good ideas—I'll have to think about trying the “long, narrow desk” concept in my incredibly cramped (due to stacks of computers that don't really belong here) office.

And check the Christopher Alexander reference near the bottom. That's my kind of design.

Via Slashdot.

I hadn't really followed the link to the “Light on Two Sides of Every Room” pattern, but it turns out to be a site with most of A Pattern Language available online. I finally gave up and bought the book, myself, but this website is a pretty nice way to get a taste of the concept. (The book itself is a nice sensual experience on its own—published by Oxford University Press in an endearingly small form factor, with a strangely flexible “hard” cover and clunky typesetting.)

Of course, A Pattern Language is available online elsewhere, as well, at the official site. Unfortunately, the site is one of the clunkiest I've encountered, and, while it's improved a bit recently, it's still kind of crude and difficult to move around in. (In particular, it has adopted the extremely annoying use of JavaScript for almost every link (cf., Anthro). There are few things more annoying for people who like to open almost every link in a new tab or window.)

I've probably droned on about Christopher Alexander in the past, but I think that the approach to building described in A Pattern Language is an excellent one, and one it's a shame our society hasn't adopted.

The idea of starting with a smaller house and hanging onto some money for renovations, expansions, and general tinkering hasn't caught on. These days it seems to be either about buying the biggest house you can afford (whether you need all that space or not), in anticipation of “moving up” in the future with the proceeds from selling it in an even higher real estate market, or finally making it and building your “dream home”, with every idea set in (often literally) stone—a huge mansion with structured wiring, talking closets, and refrigerators with IP addresses.

While poking around Zeldman's site, I followed a link to Derek Powazek's response to an article in the Sunday Times. The article was the usual “designers get carried away” thing. Near the bottom, it mentioned Jakob Nielsen's hatred of PDF. (Aside: If Nielsen were really cool, he'd've called it “PDF Considered Harmful”.)

Anyway, I saw Nielsen make this point on The ScreenSavers a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't gotten around to commenting.

He's right and he's wrong, which is often the case. The particular PDF files he had on the show were terrible. But the whole point of PDF is that you print it out. Some data really is too dense to be usefully presented in an HTML table—I would much rather print something for careful consideration than have to scroll back and forth in order to see a huge amount of data in a table that's wider than the standard width of my browser windows.

Now that Google can search PDF files, I actually like them better for some things. When I next revise my résumé, I will almost certainly drop the HTML and text versions (which have always been a bear to maintain) in favor of the PDF version, which has the added advantage of using fonts and typesetting nuances that I choose.

Apparently ISSN registrars are starting to become less than enthusiastic about the idea of registering blogs as serials. Joe Clark has the details.

There's an interesting interview with Jeremy Hogan, “Community Relations Manager” for Red Hat, about Fedora, Red Hat's new “nonproductized” Linux distro.

He compares it to Debian GNU/Linux, which is the same comparison I've made. It's a more community-oriented distribution, with, presumably, more packages provided by people outside the core developer community than there are today.

Of course it's going to be utterly unsupported by companies (as was made clear in a thread on Dell's linux-poweredge list. Which opens up a whole slew of issues that I was tangled up in at the beginning of the summer. Red Hat is really nice on workstations because it's well integrated, even though there are more packages available on Debian. It's also easy to set things up so you can do installs—it includes relatively friendly tools for that purpose.

On the other hand, without errata support, keeping it safe and secure will be harder, and it really won't be suitable for servers. Unfortunately, Red Hat's pricing for their “enterprise” Linux products is really more than our department can afford, and their academic discounts are negligible. Maybe they'll do some rethinking on that before I'm forced to make a decision.

There's always BSD, too....

Solaris is shite.
Via linux-poweredge list.