dive into mark

Woods

2008-11-14T17:16:36Z

The local lake has a small patch of woods nearby. To say we took Beau for a walk in the woods might be stretching the definition of “walk”; it looked more like Family Circus map than a straight line. I sometimes wish I could “see” the woods the way he does, like if the entire woods were dark and I could wear blacklight glasses and see all the spots where other dogs had left their mark. Beau seems to ramble until he catches wind of another dog’s scent, then pisses all over it. Until I got a male dog, I’d only ever seen that figuratively.

Election results

2008-11-05T20:37:32Z

sha1("Obama wins by 100 delegates") = 91E7FDF9FD7C1BD287A47EF6344700FD79EE13D6

Not sure why I called them “delegates” instead of “electors,” but there it is. Assuming Obama squeaks out a win in NC and McCain squeaks out a win in Missouri, the final count will be 364 to 174, meaning Obama will win by 190. I wasn’t even close.

And you?

The pursuit of happiness

2008-11-03T22:46:57Z

Stop buying stuff you don’t need
Pay off all your credit cards
Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.)
Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.)
Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in one room of your house
Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a suitcase
Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a backpack
Get rid of the backpack

I’m working on step 4.

Essentials, 2008 edition

2008-10-28T18:45:26Z

Via email, “Chris” asks:

Enjoyed the 2006 Linux essentials list. … Do you have any plans to update the Essentials list for the latest and greatest that Linux 2008 has to offer?

Well, I do now.

Debian GNU/Linux, because of Firefox bug 354622. In particular, comment 39 outlines Debian’s position. (Yes, I know Debian still ships with non-free firmware, so Debian’s position on Firefox is inconsistent. But no firmware developer has ever tried to force Debian to “bend the DFSG a little.”)
GNU Emacs, still.
Iceweasel (see above) + Adblock Plus + NoScript + NoSquint + Greasemonkey.
Pidgin (formerly GAIM).
getmail instead of Thunderbird. It turns out I don’t actually want a desktop email client. I use Google Apps For Your Domain to manage my own address @ my own domain, and I archive it with a nightly cron job using getmail.
gPhoto 2 instead of digiKam. It turns out I don’t actually want a photo library, just dated directories of image files imported directly from my camera.
On the other hand, I do want a music library, and amaroK is still best-of-breed.
KSnapshot, KTorrent, Konversation, k3b, and k9copy are also best-of-breed.
There is still no good iMovie clone for Linux, but OpenMovieEditor looks promising. I learned about it at FSOSS last week. I fear that Linux video editing will always just “look promising.”
I’ve warmed up to GIMP, which has largely replaced Krita for my (very light) graphic editing needs. At FSOSS, I learned about ingimp, which allows you to opt-in to collect and aggregate detailed statistics on how real people use GIMP.
GNOME Do, a Quicksilver-inspired launcher++.
mplayer, specifically the version provided by the awesome debian-multimedia.org.

On the command line side, I now use urxvt, screen, ZSH, and these configuration files. If you use the command line more than once a day and haven’t learned about screen yet, you’re missing out. I still use SSH heavily, in too many ways to count. If you use SSH and haven’t learned about SSH keys and SSH tunneling yet, you’re really missing out. Also: sshfs, rsync and SSH, SSH VPN, &c. (Note: most of these work on Mac OS X too, and Windows with cygwin or PuTTY.)

I still use rsync for backups to my NAS, even though I have two Drobo enclosures that I manage with drobo-utils. RAID is not a backup solution, and ZFS on Linux isn’t quite there yet.

Things I don’t use anymore:

A desktop email client. As mentioned above, I use Gmail (on my own domain, so I keep my email address).
OpenOffice.org, or any other desktop office suite. I use Google Docs, which exports to Open Document format. I keep studious local backups in ODF/ODS/etc.
VLC. There is very little that mplayer can’t handle.
Democracy Player. Ze frank doesn’t post daily anymore, and I don’t particularly follow other video podcasts.
KMyMoney. It’s good, but I fell behind in organizing my finances and it got left on the wayside.
EasyUbuntu (now Medibuntu). Debian-multimedia.org satisfies all my illicit patent-encumbered needs.
Beagle. GNOME Do is more than enough for my local search needs.
Konsole. RXVT-Unicode instead.
AllTray.
Brightside.

I also no longer use the ratpoison window manager. I’ve settled on XFCE instead, with the PCMan file manager. I encourage every Linux user to try an alternate window manager for at least a month. Find one that fits your brain and customize the hell out of it.

Well, that didn’t take long

2008-10-28T00:31:41Z

Beau has found his spot.

Beauregard

2008-10-27T03:05:35Z

Our dog Adagio finally succumbed to old age several weeks ago. She was 16. I grieved, I sulked, and then I picked myself up and got another dog. His name is Beauregard:

As you can probably tell, Beauregard is a beagle/basset mix. We got him through the local beagle rescue center. We were not looking for a beagle, but you can’t choose the ones you love.

More pictures will be, you know, forthcoming.

Dive into HTML 5

2008-09-30T15:41:14Z

In case you missed it, I’ve started a new column at the WHATWG blog called This Week in HTML 5. The story thus far:

Episode 1: Web Workers, and how to specify alternate text for images you know nothing about.
Episode 2: the window.navigator object, meta http-equiv=”Content-Language”, the Worker object, outerHTML, insertAdjacentHTML(), and the continuing saga of the alt attribute.
Episode 3: the event loop, the onhashchange event, and content sniffing for SVG images.
Episode 4: the W3C’s HTML 5 validator, SVG-in-HTML, and the proper way to provide alternate text for Rorschach inkblots.
Episode 5: XSLT, MathML, Web Forms 2, and some light reading on character encoding.
Episode 6: multimedia accessibility, Ogg Theora, and the year 2022.
Episode 7: clickjacking.

There is a feed available for people who like that sort of thing.

Irony-free zone

2008-09-23T16:10:48Z

IBM announces new I.T. standards policy.

IBM today announced that, effective immediately, it is instituting a new corporate policy that formalizes the company’s behavior when helping to create open technical standards.

… The tenets of IBM’s new policy are to:

Begin or end participation in standards bodies based on the quality and openness of their processes, membership rules, and intellectual property policies.

… An invitation-only summit is planned for November.

Let me know how that works out for you.

Security questions

2008-09-22T20:48:40Z

Poi Circles © Hendrik Kueck / CC

In the wake of the much-publicized hacking of a webmail account, I thought I’d share my own anecdote about security questions. Sometime last year, I decided to consolidate my finances and roll over all my past employer 401(k) accounts to a new firm. Some companies make this easier than others, since, you know, they’d really like to continue holding your money for you. Most of them require you to call them up and get them to mail you some forms. And all of them have multiple layers of security.

In the process of convincing one of these firms to send me the requisite paperwork, a customer service rep challenged me to answer a custom security question that I had set up when I opened the account (close to 10 years ago now). This is a good thing, in theory. Most of the “canned” security questions (birthplace, mother’s maiden name) are easily answered with a quick web search these days, and even 10 years ago I was vaguely aware of this possibility. Thus, I had opted for a custom security question, in which I got to define both the question and the answer.

Like most people, I dated other people before meeting the woman who is now my wife. Like most people, I did not know when I met her that she would eventually become my wife. I had other relationships, some good, some bad, some that never quite got off the ground. One of those “never quite got off the ground” girls was a co-worker of mine who had come to work with me a few months after I had started dating my future wife. We became fast friends with a shared passion for electronic music (although she was way more into the “scene” than I was), but we never got around to dating because things were going so well with my future wife.

You see where this is going.

Nigh on ten years later, I find myself on the phone with a bored customer service rep who says, “All right, Mr. Pilgrim, I’d be happy to send you this rollover form as soon as you can answer the security question you set up with us: ‘Who is the queen of trance?’”

There was — literally — 45 seconds of dead air before I could come up with the name of the girl I didn’t marry.

The typography of Myrtle Beach

2008-09-09T16:03:29Z

For the second year in a row, we vacationed in Springs Towers in North Myrtle Beach. It’s an oceanfront condo with a pool and a hot tub. The beach was wonderful, the pool was wonderful, the weather was wonderful (except for a little one-day hurricane). There was only one problem: it was a typographical disaster.

3 signs, 3 fonts (click to zoom, then look at the “G” in each sign)

1 sign, 3 fonts

3 fonts, no waiting

Could it be… Helvetica Bold Condensed? No, looks like a knock-off.

I write like this sometimes, scrunching the last few lines because I’m running out of room. You don’t have to type like this, though.

I’m beginning to think that restricting the web to 6 fonts wasn’t such a bad thing

It’s not the only thing

Bad typography is free

My blood pressure was lower before I watched “Helvetica, the movie”

“diget”

Fail on so many levels

Please place all your fonts in dumpsters

Shallow water, condensed font. There’s a perverse logic here. Perhaps I’m overthinking it.

It’s like typography bingo night

Make it stop

Could it be… Helvetica?

The ampersands of Linux

2008-08-14T23:08:54Z

Taking an idea from Use the Best Available Ampersand and a list of pre-installed fonts from the Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows, I present “The Ampersands of Linux”:

(HTML)

Please try to contain your excitement.

Hello darkness my old friend

2008-08-12T16:08:43Z

My parents gave up on Linux and bought a Mac Mini. We bought an AppleTV for the kids and filled it with their favorite DVDs. I stood in line for three hours to buy my wife an iPhone 3G for her birthday. And nobody gives a shit about freedom 0.

Discuss.

A very serious question

2008-08-12T01:23:03Z

So, hypothetically speaking, let’s say you want to design a system where you had absolute control over which applications your customers were allowed to install on your device. Certainly you would want to ensure that you were the only source for applications. But for extraordinary cases, you might also need to create a blacklist of applications.

Each entry in the blacklist would also need a human-readable title — presumably the name of the app — and perhaps even a human-readable description to explain why the app was blacklisted. But each entry would also need a unique identifier, of course, so you don’t accidentally get confused between six apps named “TODO.” Finally, you would probably want to include the date that the entry was added to the list.

Furthermore, since you anticipate continually adding new applications to this blacklist to protect your and your partners’ business model, you would need your proprietary non-browser-based client to periodically poll the list for changes.

All of which raises a very serious question: what data format should you use for the list?

If you answered “JSON” then congratulations, you ~~win the Trendy Tech of the Month Award~~ lose! To collect your prize, please proceed through the door marked “This way to the egress.” Some restrictions apply.

Update: OK, OK, it’s a “Core Location” blacklist. Big deal. I’ll see your tree and raise you a forest:

… an independent engineer discovered code inside the iPhone that suggested iPhones routinely check an Apple Web site that could, in theory trigger the removal of the undesirable software from the devices.

Mr. Jobs confirmed such a capability exists, but argued that Apple needs it in case it inadvertently allows a malicious program — one that stole users’ personal data, for example — to be distributed to iPhones through the App Store.

As I’ve said before, “protecting users from malicious programs” is code for “cryptographically enforcing restrictions on applications to protect our and our partners’ business model.” The bullshit about “stealing personal data” is just a rhetorical sleight of hand, like the RIAA claiming that piracy hurts “artists and other rights holders” when 99% of artists don’t own the rights to their own songs. How many apps has Apple de-listed over privacy concerns? Only one that I know of, and it was quickly reinstated after a quick update. How many apps has Apple de-listed (or prevented being written in the first place) to protect their business? Lots and lots.

The 4 “B”s

2008-08-07T02:57:55Z

Little boys are so easy. It’s amazing how many games you can play with nothing but the 4 “B”s: blocks, balls, boxes, and bears.

Little drummer boy

2008-08-06T14:40:09Z

For reasons that are not particularly interesting, I found myself reading the XScreensaver FAQ last night, which answers the question, “The unlock dialog is funny looking, why not use GTK?” That led me to JWZ’s mini-rant On Toolkits, which reminded me of this ancient vulnerability in the OS X screensaver where you could unlock the screen by typing 1280 characters in the password dialog. I remember reading about it at the time, but I never really understood how people found bugs like this until I had kids.