Planet LILUG

PENN Arbitrage Play

2008-11-13T06:50:41+00:00

In June of last year, PENN National Gaming Inc. (PENN) agreed to be acquired by a group of investors led by Fortress Investment Group (FIG) for $67 in cash for each share of the stock. At the time of the buyout announcement this was a 31% premium over the previous days stock close at $51.14.

Right after the merger was announced the stock shortly dropped for 7 straight trading days. Normally after a buyout announcement stocks trade pretty close to their buyout price, say within 5% of the actual buyout offer. PENN was only at that range the first day the merger was announced. Now the date of the merger also has a play on how close the stock will actually trade to the buyout price. In the case of PENN the merger wasn't set to complete till 12 - 16 months after the announcement, a bit long for some people's tastes. The terms of the buyout agreement had a clause that said if the merger wasn't complete after 12 months the purchase price would increase by $0.0149 per day after June 15th 2008.

The closing price of PENN today was $47.13. The stock is currently trading below the price it was before the buyout offer with no news that the merger is not set to go through. Fears about the credit situation have obviously been in investors minds so I can understand some people wanting to dump their shares and take a profit. But for the stock to now be trading at a price 42% below the buyout offer is a bit fishy. Right up until 2008, the stock had been hovering around $59 a share for a while showing around a 13-14% discount from the buyout offer of $67 per share. Once the new year passed the stock dropped 9 straight trading days to $50.20 close on Jan 15th. The stock rose the following day on an upgrade from Jefferies & Co. Does someone know something I don't know? During this time period there was no announcement about any concerns for the financing of the merger. Since then the stock rose as high as $56.85 only to drop back down to a low of $45.53 a few trading days ago.

So what is going on with this stock? Are there that big of doubts about the current credit situation that this merger won't go through? FIG already announced on August 22nd that they had secured financing for the deal from Wachovia and Deutsche Bank. According to the agreement the merger could not go through if there was a "material adverse effect" or the financing backed out and paid a pretty fee of $200 million dollars.

“ Material Adverse Effect on the Company ” means a material adverse event, change, effect, development, condition or occurrence on or with respect to the business, operations or financial condition of the Company and its Subsidiaries, taken as a whole; provided, however, except (other than in clauses (A), (B), (C), (D), (H), (I) and (J) below) to the extent such changes have a materially disproportionate effect on the Company and its Subsidiaries, taken as a whole, when compared to other companies operating in the same industries in which the Company or its Subsidiaries operate, that Material Adverse Effect on the Company shall not be deemed to include any event, change, effect, development, condition or occurrence to the extent resulting from any one or more of the following: (A) changes in general economic conditions, the securities or financial markets, the gaming industry generally or in any specific jurisdiction or regulatory, legislative or other political conditions or developments; (B) public disclosure of this Agreement or the transactions contemplated hereby, including the identity and/or structure of Parent and its Affiliates; (C) any taking of any action specifically required by this Agreement; (D) changes in Law (other than a change in Law enacted by the State of Illinois, the State of Indiana, the State of West Virginia or the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prohibiting all gaming activities which are currently permitted therein) or GAAP, or the interpretation thereof; (E) any outbreak or escalation of hostilities or war or any act of terrorism; (F) any weather-related or other force majeure event; (G) any outbreak of illness or other public health-related event; (H) any divestiture or disposition of any assets or operations of the Company or any of its Subsidiaries which, as of the date hereof, the Company and its Subsidiaries have committed to make to satisfy any Gaming Authority or which is disclosed in the Company Disclosure Letter; (I) changes in the share price or trading volume of the Shares or the failure of the Company to meet projections or forecasts (unless due to a circumstance which would separately constitute a Material Adverse Effect on the Company); or (J) any litigation alleging breach of fiduciary duty or other violation of applicable Law relating to this Agreement or the transactions contemplated by this Agreement.

Regulators also could not approve the deal which could cause the buyout to not go through. Although I can't find much information about any news regarding regulatory approval or disapproval or if they are even in talks about it.

The cynic in me is hoping that some big bad institutional investors have been driving the price down so they can accumulate more shares and out of no where we will see this stock begin taking off. But what do I know...

Disclaimer: I own stock in PENN

I just had to do this....

2008-11-13T06:50:41+00:00

Optimal Configuration for 3 vs 3 seats: PART 1

2008-11-13T06:50:41+00:00

THE PROBLEM

The LIRR has a section of seats in each car that are 3 seats facing one another (see diagram to right). I always aim to sit in these set of seats due to the fact that I'm 6'5 and sitting in the regular seats hardly offers me enough leg room to sit comfortably for an hour long train ride. Of course this only works in my favor if no one sits across from me. If they do, I gain nothing from this seat and in fact I'm no better off than I would have been sitting in a seat with my knees in the back of the seat in front of me. This fails in every situation a person sits across from me no matter how old they are. I've calculated the only way this could work out is if the person were to have no legs at all.

I had a 5 year old (estimate) sit across from me last week on the train that his legs were too small to go over the edge of the seat and flex his knee, so I was left with him kicking my bony knees all the way to NYC. Petite women think they are special and can fit without a problem, but no matter how skinny you are, you are fat to me in this position. There's the occasional person who thinks "Oh I'll just spread my legs and they can put their legs in between mine or vice versa." First of all lady, I barely do that with my girlfriend and I just met you, and quite frankly you're ugly and you sir, I'm not homophobic but I'm not inviting you into my personal space with myself spread eagle, nor am I entering closer to your jean bulge(is it a penis or not? I'll never know) with my freakishly long legs just so we can have a "little leg room."

There are a couple of reasons I put myself through these risks everyday.

75% if the time I'd say everything works out optimally. No one sits across from me because I make it abundantly clear how my massive frame(more of a portrait than a landscape) is mostly made up in my legs(think pencils).
When people do sit across from me, it usually doesn't occur till Jamaica station, which is only about 20 minutes into Penn, but this annoys me even more as I will explain shortly.
If everyone follows unwritten commuter code for sitting in this seating arrangement, then 3 people can sit here optimally with maximum comfort level and thwart off all attempts at anymore people sitting. I will explain more in Part 2 when I discuss the optimal seating arrangements.

Useless social networking links

2008-11-13T06:50:41+00:00

     Web 2.0 has brought upon perhaps the silliest design trend to date, that even big media companies are doing. That is the addition of social networking links attached to articles.

     To the right is an example from nytimes.com. How many people honestly take the time out to bother clicking those links to 'Digg' the article or share it with their friends on facebook? Nytimes.com is atleast smart about it and saves on valuable screen space by making the list expandable, while some sit there giving you about 8 useless different ways for you to whore their article on your favorite social networking site.

     AddThis makes this easier for companies to add this web 2.0 funness to your blog posts, or news articles through a widget. A widget that offers 36 fucking different social bookmarks. ARE YOU KIDDING ME. You are going to spend more time reading through the choices to share the article than actually reading it. Definitely the first thing I want to do after reading a fine article on foreign policy is share it on mister-wong.com , whatever the fuck that is. I'm sure to show my friends on facebook how sophisticated I am through posting the link in my profile. Out of those 36 links on that widget, I can honestly say I've never heard of half of them, literally, and I'm a pretty big web browser.

     I'd bet if you replaced the "Share This" space with an advertisement you'd probably end up earning more for your bang than hoping someone ends up launching your article to the front page of Digg.com

     I just died on the inside a little bit when I saw an article on wsj.com with "Digg This" right next to the RSS feed link. WSJ just lost a few points of credibility right there from me. I can't really picture a Pulitzer prize winning article being on the front page, right above 1 Male Who is Feeling Anything but Enhanced. Yes, that article is currently on the front page of digg.

Doctor Office ideas

2008-11-08T14:46:11+00:00

Doctor's waiting rooms have so much potential for some sort of product to be placed in there to occupy peoples time while they wait for sometimes hours at a time to see a doctor. I went to a dermatologist about 6 months ago that actually had 3 computers setup for people to use while you waited, but I don't see that working in a place where people are actually sick and spreading germs. This was one of those posh dermatologists who really just wants you to come in for some cosmetic work and not cause you have some strange mole on you that looks like its smiling at you. People are often left to sitting there watching a tv on mute, or reading scientific America's latest article on how the polar bears are causing the ice caps to melt (this may not have been the exact subject).

It seems like the Doctor's office is a prime place for some sort of marketing product to be placed, could be something that involves interacting with other patients waiting or just on an individual basis. I see people fidgeting with their blackberrys bored out of their mind and trying to text anyone who will respond.

I think for city environments Doctor offices should implement some sort of buzzer system like restaurants have to let you know that your table is ready. You sign in, get your buzzer, and you can walk around within a 5 block radius , if you aren't too ill, and not be cramped up in a small room reading about polar bears causing global warming. This would reduce the amount of people going up to the poor receptionist asking when they will be seen by the doctor and lead to less anxiety in the waiting room for patients.

Another enhancement that I think ALL Doctor's should get together and sort out are some universal fucking new patient forms. It's so mind numbing having to fill out the same shit anytime you goto a new Dr but often repeating that information multiple times on different forms (How many times do you need my insurance information and home address?) I should be able to go into any Dr office with my universal forms already filled out, hand them to the receptionist and maybe only fill out one form as to why I'm seeing the Dr there today (Not like ANY Dr ever reads this btw). The forms would include all my insurance information, my health history, any allergies, medications I'm on and any other revelant information that every Dr office in the world asks for but uses a different form.

Sound pollution

2008-11-01T21:36:57+00:00

I must finally reveal to the world my secret for the solution to help curb NYC sound pollution and hope someone out there somehow finds a way to get this done. The solution... ::drumroll:: is to track taxi cab horn usage and impose fines based on excessive horn use. I know , I know I'm a genius , stop it, please. In my ignorant mind about cars, it seems simple enough to create a device that would activate anytime the horn is pushed, record the datetime, and record the duration of the honk. You can give the taxis some sort of quota for honk time, maybe even impose a point system based on the time of day?

Right now I'd say a majority of the time (just based on my own personal experience) that a taxi uses it's horn, its either excessive or just serves no purpose but to release anger. I know the horn is primarily a safety device to warn of impending danger and get another drivers attention but when I have to hear a taxi driver hold onto his horn for 20 seconds at a time outside my window, it makes me want to setup a sniper rifle and take them out one a time (joking ECHELON). NYC would benefit from some extra cash from all the crazy cabbies and neighborhoods will all be a little more quieter. So someone please do this and give me credit, thanks.

smokeping's whacky source

2008-10-27T22:46:11+00:00

I'll first start off by saying I think smokeping is a great program and Tobi Oetiker is a great programmer whose contributions to the community have been great and in no way could I ever create MRTG or RRDTool. But.... After downloading the source to smokeping today and trying to configure it to run, I was completely shocked at how poorly it was put together. It's clear that Tobi did not bother with making his code easy to run on any other system but his own with constant absolute paths to his own home directories on his personal machine! His own documentation and install notes are vague at best and I can't figure out why he did not use relative paths at all in the source. While you do have to edit most files anyway to reflect where your RRD perl libraries are and your perl location, I just find it very odd that he left the paths in like that. Even his example configuration file is catered to his machine and his network making it confusing to delete out what is not needed.

Andromeda: Give it a chance

2008-10-13T11:04:47+00:00

I have been working with Andromeda for well over a year now and I can honestly say that I love this framework! I have tried many other frameworks including the following:

Mach II (ColdFusion)
FuseBox (ColdFusion & PHP)
Joolma (Not necessarily a framework)
MyCMS (PHP) developed by jeff@madtasty.com

And I have always found a reason that I could not use the framework in the fashion it was intended. I guess this is because alot of framework take the MVC approach and try to separate the business logic from the display logic. The MVC approach can cause a very large headache when you are picking up somebody elses' project and they are no longer around to answer questions. It also can cause a little bit of a headache because in my option it tries to be too organized. So I have never really used a framework for any given project because once I have started on these projects I have found the need to modify the framework in such a way that now what I have made exists outside the framework.

Now going back to the MVC approach, its definetly a good idea on paper however in the site/application is still just file based. So in the end instead of looking in say one object file you are looking in about 2,3,4 or even more places just to add a field to the page.

In my opinion Andromeda takes an MVC type approach and separates the business logic from the code completely, and puts it in the database. All your business rules go into the database and now the database does the validation, so you can never have invalid data.

Andromeda uses YAML to define the database and the rules. An example of this would be:


table contacts:
 module: addressbook
 column name:
     primary_key:"Y"
     description: Name
     tooltip: Persons Name
     uisearch: "Y"
 column add1:
     primary_key: "Y"
 column add2:
 column city:
 column state:
 column zip9:

The above creates a table called contacts with 6 column: name, add1, add2, city, state, zip.
Andromeda has predefined columns. I have used only predefined columns in the table above, but sya you wanted to create another field to store the contacts favorite food, you could achieve this in the following way:


column favorite_food:
 type_id: vchar
 description: Favorite Food
table contacts:
 module: addressbook
 column name:
     primary_key:"Y"
     description: Name
     tooltip: Persons Name
     uisearch: "Y"
 column add1:
     primary_key: "Y"
 column add2:
 column city:
 column state:
 column zip9:
 column favorite_food:

You now have defined a column "favorite_food" that can be used in any other table in your application. Now once we build our application this table will exist in our application and can be edited right away with 0 code. One of the things I love the most about Andromeda is that it created the CRUD (CReate, Update, Delete) screens for you, with 0 code so any time you might have spent creating these screens is no longer needed and if you go back and look at my table definition you'll see there is a property called "module". This allows us to assign permissions groups for each of these modules. This is done in the following way:



group editors:
   description: Address Book Editors
   module addressbook:
       permsel: "Y"
       permdel: "Y"
       permins: "Y"
       permupd: "Y"

This defines a group called "editors" and gives it SELECT(permsel), DELETE(permdel),INSERT(permins), and UPDATE(permupd) permissions to any table in the module address booke. OK I am sure by now you are asking "but how does this put the business logic in the database?" OK lets say we now want to be able to assign phone number to these contacts we can now add a couple more tables to allow for this.


group editors:
    description: Address Book Editors
    module addressbook:
        permsel: "Y"
        permdel: "Y"
        permins: "Y"
        permupd: "Y"
column favorite_food:
    type_id: vchar
    description: Favorite Food
table contacts:
   module: addressbook
   column name:
       primary_key:"Y"
       description: Name
       tooltip: Persons Name
       uisearch: "Y"
   column add1:
       primary_key: "Y"
   column add2:
   column city:
   column state:
   column zip9:
   column favorite_food:

table phonetypes:
    module: addressbook
    column name:
        primary_key: "Y"
        uisearch: "Y"
        description: Phone Type
        tooltip: Phone type eg. Cell, Home, Work

table contactnumbers:
    description: Contacts Phone Numbers
    foreign_key contacts:
        uisearch: "Y"
        primary_key: "Y"
    foreign_key phonetypes:
        primary_key: "Y"
        uisearch: "Y"
    column phone:

We've now added two tables(phonetypes & contactnumbers). The phonetypes table is extremely simple and allows us to add phone types such as Cell, Work, Home, etc...

The contactnumbers table has foreign_keys to the two previous tables contacts & phonetypes and that will tell the system that the primary_key fields from those tables need to be included in this table and to also make the primary_keys for this table. Our CRUD screens we will also have a drop down list for the foreign_key entries and this is done again with 0 code. What these primary_keys do is restrict each contact to having one phone type for each contact. If you try to insert more than one phone number for each phone type for a given contact, whether it be through the CRUD screens or even the SQL command line you will get an error telling you that the record already exists. So you don't have to make sure the record exists before you try inserting it, its done for you...yes of course you can still do this just so that your application wont have a DB error thrown back but the benefit of this is you can never get more than one phone type for a given contact into the system.

Now say for instance you wanted to have the number of phone number for each contact included in the contact record, you can have this done in the database for free with what Andromeda calls AUTOMATIONS. Here is how this is achieved:


column num_phones:
    type_id: int
    description: Number of Phone Numbers
table contacts:
    module: addressbook
    column name:
        primary_key:"Y"
        description: Name
        tooltip: Persons Name
        uisearch: "Y"
        column add1:
        primary_key: "Y"
    column add2:
    column city:
    column state:
    column zip9:
    column favorite_food:
    column num_phones:
        automation_id: COUNT
        auto_formula: contactnumbers.phone

Once again we've added another column definition(num_phones) and now you'll notice the automation_id property of COUNT and the auto_formula of contactnumbers.phone this tells Andromeda to do a count of records in the contactnumbers table that reference this table as a parent table(foreign_key). This is only a tip of the iceberg when it comes to Andromeda. There are many other useful automations and features such as ranged primary keys and dominant records.

This entire article is my opinion and probably not that well organized but I highly suggest taking a look at this "Database Development System/Framework". My basic examples above do not even compare to what is possible with Andromeda. It does sometimes take changing the way you approach certain things but in the end you will have drank the coolaid realized why you will never use another framework again.

I would highly suggest joining the mailing list and sending an email if you think something cannot be approached in the way you like. I have found more than once that the way that I like isn't the best way.

**Comments are welcomed and appreciated, even if you don't agree**

Appeal to linux, get tested early in development

2008-10-11T00:47:14+00:00

I’ve been seeing a lot of OSS software lately that isn’t supporting linux, but could easily. Especially 64 bit users, which are growing in numbers thanks to ubuntu making 64 bit linux so damn easy.

Linux users are naturally early adopters (thus, they use linux). Limiting the support for this platform is a big mistake, because they are more likely to test the software early, and report bugs whenever there’s a problem.

Now, that doesn’t mean that this is always the case, I’ve met some pretty stupid linux users, but the majority is involved with open source in some way, even if it’s not programming.

What I’m trying to say is, I really want Gears to work on my main box, but it isn’t just limited to that. Firefox extensions really should support 64 bit, because by default 64 bit firefox is used in 64 bit Ubuntu, as with most other distros. Personally, I’m not going to start using 32 bit firefox just for Gears, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

Anyways, that’s my rant. Now go fix the problem. Thanks.

New SMTP RFC

2008-10-02T16:16:51+00:00

I just came across this… a new SMTP RFC (5321). I wonder what changed - I wish they did the change bar that IBM uses in its documents. :/

SIGSEGV

2008-10-02T15:27:59+00:00

After moving to Michigan, I had to get license plates for my car of course. This being my first car that I own 100%, I decided to splurge a little bit…

First month

2008-09-27T14:54:16+00:00

It’s been a month today since I moved to MI. Time flies! I know, I have been neglecting this blahg a whole lot, and I promise to try harder :)

Here are some photos of stuff from the past few days…

I like bread. This one even looks tasty:

A couple of days ago, I got myself a can of Spam. Unfortunately, it turns out, the can’s seal got compromised, and the insides look quite uneatable:

Today, I was doing some more grocery shopping, and I couldn’t resist but get some drink worthy of a warrior:

(Yes, that’s a 40th anniversary of the IBM S/360 mug.) It’s hard to identify the contents of the mug, so here’s a photo of the bottle:

That’s it for today’s what’s-Jeff-up-to post.

Hamlet

2008-09-27T14:53:41+00:00

Yesterday, I forgot to mention that I got myself a copy of Hamlet….in the original Klingon:

Double Guitar Solo

2008-09-16T01:20:47+00:00

Holy Jesus.

I think the most impressive part is where he plays two completely different parts on each side. (2:20)

This just amazes me.

Microsoft’s BlueTrack: A bunch of marketing bull

2008-09-10T01:17:02+00:00

Ok, so Microsoft announced this amazing “dream mouse” that works on everything from carpet to granite. I think it’s a bunch of marketing bull, and I’ll show you why.

I’m going to be comparing the BlueTrack to my Razer Diamondback. Below is a comparison of the two mice.
Note: I don’t actually own a BlueTrack. The data below is based on what I’ve read. The data from the Diamondback is my own findings.

#article-bluetrack-table { border: 2px solid #888; text-align: center; } #article-bluetrack-table tbody tr td { padding: 1px; }

	Price	Colors	Wireless	Surfaces
				Wood	Granite	Carpet	Glossy Plastic	Glass*	Mirror
Razer Diamondback 3G	$36-$52	Green, Red, Blue	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Microsoft BlueTrack	$80-$100	Blue	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Dunno	No	No

* Not frosted

The only real thing BlueTrack has that my Diamondback isn’t wireless. It’s not too big of a disadvantage, because wireless is worse for gaming, and you need to buy batteries for the mouse if it’s wireless.

I also measured both mice. Microsoft claims that their big BlueTrack mouse is about 3.1″x4.5″. The Diamondback is about 2.5″x4.75″. They’re both about the same size. The Mini-BlueTrack is around 2.7″x3.8″, so it’s about an inch shorter then the Diamondback. Quite frankly, I’d rather bring the slightly bigger mouse, and not risk getting carpal tunnel.

I wish I could have found the DPI and frame capture rate, but I couldn’t find anything for the BlueTrack. The Diamondback has 1800 DPI, and can capture 6400 frames per second.

So, there you have it. My Diamondback (which is cheaper, older, and uses infared) matches the performance of a new mouse that Microsoft made. Cool.

odd nmap timings

2008-09-09T00:45:49+00:00

Back story

A section on a web application I have pings (using a background AJAX request) a list of IP addresses. Most of the time all of these adresses are up, sometimes one or two of them are down. One day I noticed that if all of them were down, nmap would take much longer to ping them all.

The odd part

Lets ping 19 addresses on my home network, none of which exist.

justin@latitude:~$ time nmap  -sP 192.168.5.2-20 

Starting Nmap 4.53 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2008-08-22 21:56 EDT
Nmap done: 19 IP addresses (0 hosts up) scanned in 4.072 seconds

real    0m4.081s
user    0m0.068s
sys     0m0.004s

Ok... now lets add the routers address, which is pingable.

justin@latitude:~$ time nmap  -sP 192.168.5.1-19

Starting Nmap 4.53 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2008-08-22 21:58 EDT
Host router (192.168.5.1) appears to be up.
Nmap done: 19 IP addresses (1 host up) scanned in 2.258 seconds

real    0m2.259s
user    0m0.048s
sys     0m0.008s

Notice anything odd?

I have experimented with the usual host timeout and max rtt time options, but I am not sure what the problem is. As soon as I get a chance I will look into the code. I am not sure if it is a BUG or just user error. A simple strace of the two commands show much different 'select' behaviour.

Exploring Ann Arbor

2008-09-07T07:15:04+00:00

Today (well, technically yesterday), I decided to go explore Ann Arbor with my camera. Here are many of the photos I took - minimally edited for your viewing convenience.

It was a sunny day; not many people around - quite strange actually.

The Lurie bell tower is a hard to miss feature of North Campus. It has 60 bell clarion.

Unfortunately, I did not have a tripod with me, so the source images for this panorama weren’t as good as they could have been as I was forced to hand-hold them. You can see the Duderstadt on the left, the Lurie tower next to it, then you have the CSE building, the Dow, and then the EECS building. I will probably go back with my camera and a tripod to take some good panorama source material.

I’ve climbed up the bell tower at Trinity church in NYC enough times, but not even once did I consider the fact that a bell tower could have an elevator. Well, the Lurie tower does!

And another shot of the tower, from the other side now.

Then it was time to head to Central Campus and explore things there. By the bus stop, I noticed these two guys…

Once on Central Campus, I didn’t have to go far to see this sign (which I saw few days ago, but didn’t have a camera with me then). It just reminds me of XKCD far too much.

The university runs a bunch of buses to get the students between the North and Central Campuses, as well as the hospital that is located right between the two. My understanding is that they are called Magic Bus. I can’t help but wonder if it is in any way related to The Who song…

A fountain…pretty self explanatory. I took a bunch of photos with different exposures to see how each would look.

The Rackham Graduate School building. I actually took enough for a panorama shot; I’ll create it and upload it some time later.

This sign was above a door to a shop of some sort, that was on the second (possibly third) story of the building - you know, the kind that has a enough of the building’s ground floor for a staircase and nothing more. I do not know what it is that they deal in, but something tells me that I’m not going to go check it out.

Edit: I did some searching on the internet, and it seems it’s a smoking-related supplies shop.

Few minutes later, after being surprised by a stream of people that did not seem to end for at least 15 minutes (after a few minutes I realized that it was the result of people pouring out of the football stadium after a game), I ran into Bruce hanging out with his juggling buddies. Well, before I ran into them, I took a bunch of photos for a high dynamic range photo. I haven’t done the combining … yet.

Then I headed off toward North Campus. Since the buses were full of the crowd I mentioned before, so I decided to go on foot. On my way there, I saw a parking lot for bikes:

Few minutes later, I noticed a sign by a parking lot:

Just a few dozen meters later, I got distracted by an entrance to an arboretum. I entered, and not long after, I noticed this sign. It’s actually nice, they have a bunch of trails that are quite manageable in a wheelchair (I haven’t tested it myself), or with a stroller - more on that in a bit.

Almost a mile of walking later, I came across a more "vehicle" friendly path. There was even a nice rest area.

I wouldn’t have taken a photo of the rest area if it wasn’t for this label on one of the railing-type things:

After exiting the arboretum, I had to walk past the hospital. Since it is a major one, they had helipads - I counted 3 in total. They were all fenced off, with these assertive signs all around.

Then, I found a pretty sweet spot to take a photo of the hospital. Unfortunately, as I already mentioned, I did not have a tripod. I tried anyway, hand-holding the shots. When I got home later, I tried to combine them to get higher dynamic range. It turned out ok, not great, but ok. The following are the 5 source images (left 3, and first 2 on the right), and the resulting HDR image on bottom right.

Here’s a larger version of the resulting HDR. The ugliness with the clouds is because they moved enough during the 20 seconds I spend on taking the source images.

Since I had the app (qtpsgui or whatever it is called) all loaded, I tried to tone-map the HDR image. Here are the two I liked the best.

Some walking later, I got back to North Campus. Here’s another view of the Lurie tower.

You may have noticed this already in the panorama, if not, then surprise! There’s a 9-10ft ground to tip Rubik’s cube in front of the Duderstadt. It doesn’t actually work, but as far as I know, the base allows it to rotate - one degree of freedom is a good enough start, no?

I ended my exploring with a shot of the spiral staircase in the CSE building. Definitely a great place to have a sword fight!

How Chrome will improve other browsers

2008-09-04T02:17:50+00:00

After reading Alex’s post, I’ve thought about what chrome should be, and what tech editors don’t seem to get.

I think the point of Chrome is to really get some ideas rolling for the major browser vendors. Specifically, threads. Threads are great, and I really do think browsers should start using them. I’ve been wanting this for a very long time. Chrome will (hopefully) start getting the browser vendors motivated to try them out. But, when you use threads excessively, it adds un-needed overhead (which is exactly what Chrome is doing). The way they sandbox plugins using them is a good plus, because it takes the blame off the browser when a plugin crashes. Pages, however, should definitely let the browser take the blame. I feel that it makes fixing renderer and js engine bugs less important when you use threads, since their consequence isn’t as great. On top of that, using a thread for every page is just wasteful of resources. Think of what would happen if several popups opened up (all having some sort of “shoot the monkey” flash game). Yikes.

So, how would things work in a perfect world? Browsers could get the renderer, and the js engine on separate threads (either both on the same thread, or each having their own). This way, the browser will work well on a multi-core system, but it doesn’t become a “thread whore”. When you think about it, the user only uses one RIA at a time, and most RIAs don’t use the CPU when they’re not being interacted with (and if they do, they should really use worker pools). Epiphany, Gnome’s web browser, implements this behavior, and it works very nicely. All while avoiding the need to spawn a bazillion threads while doing so.

So, Not only is the press making crazy stories (as you can see from Alex’s blog), but Chrome isn’t what they’re making it out to be. It’s not “Google is taking over the earth”, it’s more like “Google is trying to bring their ideas to the table”. And quite frankly, I can’t wait to start seeing the browsers follow Google’s path, and implement threads (sparingly, of course).

My thoughts on Google Chrome (Part 2)

2008-09-02T22:19:01+00:00

Ok, so I tried out Chrome. It’s pretty damn fast. If it’s that fast on linux, I’m going to be very happy. I also like how the UI is very condensed. It has some quirks with javascript stuff though.

I also saw something weird involving dijit.Menu, I think those are artifacts of iframes being shown.

Anyways, it’s nice. The dom could be a bit faster, but it’s not bad.

I wonder if they’ll use the native UI toolkits for OSX and Linux.

Anyways, I still don’t see the point.

Update: I’m kinda agreeing with this post as well…

Update #2: interesting… there’s some weird stuff going on in their ToS…

Text-based battle engine in python

2008-09-02T19:52:06+00:00

I wrote a simple battle engine in python while I was teaching a friend about the aspects of OOP. Somebody may find it useful, so I’m just throwing up the package. It’s licensed under the AFL. Enjoy.

Download

My thoughts on Google Chrome

2008-09-02T02:07:28+00:00

So, for those that don’t already know, Google’s working on a new browser called chrome. To be honest, I don’t see the point. Each tab having it’s own process is unnecessary, if anything the renderer should have a seperate thread. Firefox already has ubiquity, which is in-the-works. Firefox 4 will have a javascript VM. I can see the point in sandboxing each plugin, but that’s the only good point I see. Why is google making their own browser, when they could just as easily pay some firefox devs to get what’s already planned done faster?

Update: John Resig posted his reaction

Update #2: And so has Alex Russel.

Even after reading the two responses, I still don’t seem to get it. The cartoon I read talks about how the architecture is superior, but Alex’s post is talking about how chrome is getting back to the content part of the web. Maybe I’m missing something here.

Update #3: I’ve read the post on the google blog now. I’m still confused, but it seems that it’s trying to provide a clean un-cluttered browser. I don’t think we need that, if anything I think the browser should become smarter, and do things involving microformats. Eh, I’ll wait until tomorrow until I make my final decision on weather or not it’s necessary.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

2008-08-31T14:31:44+00:00

It’s been a couple of days already, but I should mention it just the same…

On Tuesday (August 26), I drove to Ann Arbor with the intention of living there for the next n years - however long it takes to do a PhD in Computer Science. The drive was mostly ok. Going through NYC was a bit slow, but still manageable. NJ was better, but there were still too many cars on the road. Once I hit PA, things were great…I-80 has just the right amount of curves, there are mountains, trees, and other things to look at. I stopped for gas near Allentown, PA because of the Billy Joel song. The couple of hours driving in OH were dreadful. It was the most boring part of the 10.5 hour trip. Do you know what you can see in OH? Fields! That’s it, nothing more. Just fields to your left, and fields to your right. The road has a slight turn every so often, but nowhere near enough to keep the mind busy. Also, since there are only fields, you actually get some pretty nasty gusts of wind that are really annoying. The drive in MI was much better…turns, etc. One thing that really amused me was a road sign saying “Prison area Do not pick up hitchhikers” or something to that effect. Unfortunately, I was busy driving to take a photo of sign.

647 miles total. 10.5 hours (30 mins spend on food and gas).

My apartment’s layout is something like this:

I actually have the left-right reverse…entrance is upper right, balcony is mid left. It’s quite big for my purposes. I still need to work on the furnishing and all. (I don’t like shopping for things, so I’ll just do a demand-purchases…when I need something, I’ll go and get it. I am thinking a recliner would be nice :) ).

Wireless woes

2008-08-29T03:54:19+00:00

Things have changed a great deal since 1982. These days, having a computer is almost synonymous with having access to the internet. In truth, a computer that cannot access the internet today is almost quaint. Sure the average Linux distribution comes with enough software to run an entire office out of the box, but if you can’t communicate with your customers via email, fill in forms at online websites, or look up information on the web you’re SOL.
For the home user, instant messaging has become almost as much of a “critical app” as email, family members are sharing photos and videos online, and much of the younger set is blogging or otherwise keeping friends up to date on their activities at various social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace, or Facebook daily.

While you can certainly buy a new PC with Linux pre-installed and configured (hopefully such that all your shiny new hardware is working properly), installing Linux on a PC that shipped with Windows will invariably require downloading drivers from a manufacturer’s FTP site or scouring tech forums for some clue about how to go about getting your hardware to work well, just work, or even be recognized at all. While there are still many reasons to have a PC even without internet access, getting Linux installed on it at all may actually require it.

For laptops, and an increasing number of PCs in environments where wired ethernet isn’t possible or is just too much of a hassle to set up, folks are routinely using wireless cards to communicate with a wireless router in order to connect to the internet. This is presenting some daunting challenges for Linux adoption at least among the home user crowd who might be looking at Linux to provide some fresh life for their older hardware. When dealing with laptops or PCs the problem is generally the same except that on laptops the wireless card may already be built in, though its true that many older laptops didn’t come with wireless at all. Cheap wireless cards sold in consumer electronics stores everywhere seem to work right out of the box for Windows users on PCs and laptops alike, but almost always present some kind of problem for a Linux user. While techies know that this is just a function of the fact that the companies are churning out Windows drivers for their hardware and keeping those drivers updated regularly, the average home user may not realize this until *after* they bring their shiny new wireless card home and pop it into their machine. Once they’ve plunked down $40 to $60 on a card, they just want to pop it in and have it work. Unfortunately, since Linux is not officially supported by nearly any manufacturer, it often does not - and for whatever reason if the user does not have another method to reach the internet, either through a wired connection to the router or another machine already connected to the internet, they will be unable to access the documentation and help forums they might be able to leverage to get this new hardware functioning. I see this as a major stumbling block to broader Linux adoption.

If by now you’ve guessed that I’ve recently had some run-ins with this problem, you’re right! Futzing around with getting a Linksys PCMCIA wireless card to operate at all in a Thinkpad (eventually succeeding with bwcutter) and a Belkin F5D7000 PCI card to even be recognized at all in an old Dell PC (also eventually succeeding with ndiswrapper) both under Ubuntu 8.04 was enough to convince me that unless the average user is very lucky, getting to the internet wirelessly in Linux is likely to be a problem. My eventual success was bittersweet because the only way I got these devices to work at all was to use the proprietary Windows drivers in a way that wasn’t intended by the developers. Some users of Linux would balk at the thought of using proprietary drivers at all, preferring to be completely free of “non-open” software. My wireless devices still don’t work natively under Linux, and as long as users can get them to work in this manner, what incentive is there for manufacturers to create a native Linux driver anyway?

It wasn’t my intention to explain the reasons for this problem - the constantly changing chipsets used by wireless card manufacturers, the entrenched Windows monopoly, the relative “newness” of the technology in general (as compared to ethernet), but rather to point out a weakness in Linux folks should be aware of. Before running out to buy a wireless device, check for Linux compatibility! Some chipsets are better supported by the two methods I mentioned. Don’t plunk down good money on hardware that won’t work at all in Linux, even if you’re running Windows today. If you decide to try Linux in the future you’ll wish you had.

Blahg outage

2008-08-17T01:04:19+00:00

As some of you may have noticed, my blahg has been down for about 2 days. The reason is, I upgraded my system, and php4 packages broke. I just installed the php5 packages, and things seem to work again.

Busy Week

2008-08-08T18:02:34+00:00

Well this past week has been extremely busy both @ work and after work with Andromeda. Which is funny because both are connected. The e-commerce project I have been working on for the past ~5 months now uses Andromeda, so a lot of the bugs, most in my custom code not so much Andromeda lately, that I find keep Ken a little busy.

But besides that Ken has been busy this week getting SVN(subversion) working for upgrades of Andromeda, and also deploying Andromeda applications. We will hopefully be announcing the AndroPage feature this week, it is currently available in the most recent releases of this week we just haven't announced it. I am working on getting the LIPHP site wrapped up so we can get that out there.

I have a couple of extra that I am going to work on this coming week for Andromeda which include report back features this way we can start to see how people are using Andromeda as well as where in the world people are using it.

I can actually say that I finally have used a framework that I would use for anything. And it does try to separate the code into all sort of sections and folders, my worst experience with something like that was fusebox(Coldfusion) or Mach-II also coldfusion. Drupal and Joomla both have way too much stuff to sort through to find anything, and then when you have found it, you havent it's something that just has the title that you were looking for.

Andromeda makes creating an application with logic easy, and even just a website is easy to throw together with Andromeda and is even easier since the introduction of AndroPages. I am going to also start working out my idea of creating a google chart plugin for AndroPage which will bring reports to the next level.

Well that also for now, happy programming everyone.

Audacity UI feature

2008-08-05T20:45:28+00:00

Although I’m filing this under the “rants” category, don’t get fooled. The rant is about UIs in general, with Audacity being the exception.

Here’s what happened…I was going to save the recordings of my radio show to my computer, and I noticed that the first hour recording started about 4 minutes after I took over aether. That meant that I needed to get the previous hour, and cut whatever short portion into a small file and keep it along the 3 1-hour long mp3s.

For audio editing, I tend to use Audacity. It works well, it’s rather intuitive, etc., etc. I did the cut, and I was going to export it as an mp3 (to keep the file format consistent with the other 3 hours of audio, otherwise I’d make it an ogg/vorbis). Audacity let me chose the new file name, the new format, but then when it was about to start the actual encoding, this dialog popped up:

This is absolutely brilliant! And I mean it; I’m not being sarcastic as I usually am. Normally, one of these scenarios happens…

…the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at start (if at all), and disables export to that file format
…the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, forcing you to abort the encoding, potentially closing the application, to installed the codec, and redoing whatever you did and trying to re-export
…the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, making you look through numerous preferences windows to find the one you care about - if it even exists
…the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, making you trying to figure out which environment variable (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LD_PRELOAD, etc., etc.) will make the linker do the right thing, and make the application find the .so

All are sub-optimal. Asking the user for the path to the .so, while not the newbie-friendliest of things, is really the best thing the application could do. This way, if the .so isn’t installed, the user can install it anywhere - system wide or in one’s $HOME - and then point Audacity to it. If the .so is installed but Audacity couldn’t find it, you can manually point it in the right place.

I use Debian, so installing libmp3lame was a matter of making sure I have the Debian Multimedia source in my sources.list, and then running a quick aptitude install to get it on my disk. If you are using a less privileged distro (or if you don’t have root access to install it system-wide), you’ll have to quite possibly go to the project’s website, and grab a copy there. Audacity’s UI designers haven’t failed you there. A convenient way to go to the website to download the .so is right there.

Overall, seeing this dialog didn’t make me agitated that Audacity wants something I don’t have installed, but instead it made me write this post about something that makes sense, but people fail at doing things like this.

Wordpress sucks, archive.org rocks

2008-08-02T16:32:37+00:00

This is a follow up post to Wordpress sucks from a week ago.

I decided to try to figure out some more category names, and then it hit me…my site is crawled from time to time by The Wayback Machine. So, I searched, and found a copy from November 2007. Not the latest, but quite new enough to have all the categories I had. A little while later, my blahg is back to its former glory. And there was much rejoicing.

Wordpress sucks

2008-08-02T16:22:49+00:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to upgrade my Wordpress install. Every single time I upgraded it, I have no problems whatsoever. So, this time around, I didn’t make a backup of the DB tables. Well, that was quite stupid of me. I copy over the new files (2.6 release tarball), and run the upgrade script. Poop! I lost all the category labels and descriptions. Gah! Absolutely, not fun. I have 40 categories, and now they don’t have any labels. Well, not anymore, I’m trying to figure out which category id was which category (sometimes not as easy as it should be). I got some, I’m not sure about some. If you had links to any categories, they’ll still work. If you had links to any posts, they’ll still work. Things will just look a bit disorganized if you look at the list of categories on the website, or if you look at which categories a post belongs to.

Please send any and all hate mail to the Wordpress developers for breaking an upgrade from one stable release to another.

Island Labs

2008-07-29T02:12:44+00:00

We started this new organization called Island Labs, located at www.islandlabs.org.

The group is focusing on mechanical engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, and even some chemical engineering.

The group is open to the public, and you can see meeting time and location on www.islandlabs.org on the top links.

The next meeting will be a cool talk about multitouch on Wednesday, July 30th, at Farmingdale State.

2008-07-28T20:23:54+00:00

So a few of my peers have decided to launch a new organization called Island Labs, located at www.islandlabs.org. The group is focusing on mechanical engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, and even some chemical engineering. the group is open to the public and you can see meeting time and location information on their website.

I personally have a tremendous appreciation for people who are knowledgeable in areas that can improve the human experience.

OLS 2008 - Day 4

2008-07-26T19:01:02+00:00

I’m a still a day late when it comes to writing about OLS. Here’s Friday’s list of talks, and other happenings.

The day began with A Practical Guide to using Git (From a Kernel Maintainer) - it was very crowded in the room, so much so that I didn’t really see the slideshow, but since I already know enough about how to use Git, I don’t mind all that much. Good talk.

The next talk which I kinda had to go to was SynergyFS: A Stackable File System Creating Synergies Between Heterogeneous Storage Devices. It was a disaster - and I put that mildly. The first 30 minutes of the 45 minute talk consisted of Samsung branded marketing material showing that solid state disks were better than the regular platter-based disks. Since the marketing people care mostly about Windows users, the propaganda materials consisted of things like a video thing showing Microsoft Windows Vista booting on two identical laptops - with the exception of the storage device.

Anyway, about 2/3 of the talk through, a SynergyFS got mentioned. And that’s when the one quite important bit got mentioned. At the time of the writing of the paper, the filesystem was a “proposed filesystems.” In other words, it didn’t exist. I am not certain if it exists at the moment, and if it does, what state it is in, but I do know (since an audience member asked when/where he could look at the code) that unless one signs an NDA with Samsung, he can’t even look at it. The code is not GPL licensed, since Samsung lawyers apparently see it as a way to lose some magical intellectual property, which as far as I know they never had. There has been papers published about hybrid storage, there have been papers published about fanout stackable filesystems, there have been papers published about fanout stackable filesystems which use different storage technologies (in no particular order: FiST, GreenFS, RAIF, Unionfs).

Overall, I feel like going to the talk was a waste of time. Meh.

Then I lunched.

Well, just before lunch, I was playing around with SELinux on my laptop, and after logging in, the processes weren’t getting the right context. After lunch, I went to SELinux for Consumer Electric Devices. I walked into the room, and saw the NSA/Tresys/RedHat SELinux developers (including Dave Quigley) clustered in one area of the room. I just couldn’t resist, and I said “SELinux sucks” and then proceeded to walk away. The really amusing thing was all the SELinux people turned around to see who it was that dared to say such a thing. Very amusing. I sat next to them, and mentioned my SELinux problem. Stephen Smalley tried to figure out what the problem was, and in the end, reached the conclusion that somehow, even though the targeted policy was in use, the system was using some information from the strict policy completely confusing everything. I installed the strict policy, and things started working….well, for the most part. I should file this under the Debian bug tracker since it is a bug.

The SELinux talk was ok. It was what I expect…SELinux is kinda bloated for embedded systems. Some time after the talk, I overheard Stephen Smalley talking to Dave, saying that they should look into it a bit.

The next talk which I went to was Around the Linux File System World in 45 minutes. The reason I went to it was because it was being presented by Steve French. It was interesting, as I expected, and I’m going to read through his paper to see what exactly he did for the accounting (and what his thoughts are).

After Steve’s talk, I was going to go to a BOF about MIPS kernel port, but got distracted by people (including Steve).

At first, I wasn’t sure if I was going to go to the keynote (The Joy of Synchronicity) by Mark Shuttleworth (of the Ubuntu, space travel, and other-random-stuff fame). The title alone makes it sound like a hand-wavy, dreamy thing, but in the end I decided to at least spend 5 minutes listening. It was ok. Not great, from a technical perspective, but he did have some interesting ideas…well, it was really all just one idea - open source projects should have regular release schedules. I don’t know if I agree or not. On one hand it’s a nice thing, but at the same time, schedules are quite annoying when you want to make major changes (the KDE 3.x to 4.0 changes come to mind). In the end, I did stay the entire time, but I bailed at the beginning of the Q&A session.

Some food later, I headed to the hotel room to finish up writing notes for the day before. Well, I tried to upgrade my Wordpress install…but more about that later.

Porcelain Incident

2008-07-26T02:28:38+00:00

Earlier today, July 25 2008 at 9:35 AM EDT, in Les Suites hotel room 1614 located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, an unidentified Canadian national going under the alias Shawn, was caught by security moving porcelain items from one of the bathrooms into his bed.

OLS 2008 - Day 3, Part 2

2008-07-26T01:49:56+00:00

Ok, here’s the rest of what happened yesterday.

My BOF went fairly well. Of course, I have the slides for your perusal. For the demo, I started with following the HOWTO in the Documentation directory of the guilt repository, but soon after, I just deviated, and used the demo time to show people what happens under some cases that they were asking about. I got some useful questions. I even got an email from one of the people asking a question with the details about the question he asked.

After my BOF, a former labmate, Dave Quigley had a BOF about SELinux. During it, I decided that it would be fun to try SELinux again. I installed a bunch of Debian packages, fixed up a few config files based on the SELinux Setup page on the Debian Wiki, and rebooted to have the system relabel itself. That took a looong time. Mostly because I have something close to 300 thousand files on my laptop, and each and every one of them had to get a new extended attribute => every inode had to either set up an in-line xattr, or if there isn’t enough space, a new extent for the 20-40 byte label (I guess closer to 64 bytes with the label name + value).

One amusing thing that happened during the BOF was…at one point, Stephen Smalley (SELinux master-mind), was commenting about AppArmor (a competing security system) when he said “AppArmor is better…” well, the ellipsis really is “…than nothing.” :) Someone there actually made this joke.

After the BOF, Shawn Starr, Dave Quigley and talked for a couple of hours about a ton of random topics. Fun, fun, fun.

When Shawn and I got to the hotel, I mentioned the fact that he moved parts of the toilet the day before at an ungodly hour (something like
7:45am)…but for whatever reason I said “you moved the porcelain” … that’s where things took a strange turn… The endless stream of porcelain jokes just kept on going on and on.

OLS 2008 - Day 3

2008-07-25T19:45:34+00:00

Yeah, I really wanted to write this yesterday - since it is about yesterday, but I was too tired when I got to the hotel. Either way, here it is.

The day started at 10am again - I love it. Previous years, presentations started at 9am (except the first day that was 10am). The first talk I
attended was a about kernel documentation - where it resides, and why the current state is bad. The talk was a bit confusing. At one point, the presenter decided to read some text right from a HTML file - opening it in a text editor instead of a browser. He also seemed to contradict himself a bit … at one point he seemed to have said that HTML was better than plaintext docs, and then some time later, he said the other thing - plaintext docs were better than HTML.
I kinda gave up understanding what his point was.

I decided to be lazy, and stayed in the same room for the next talk: On submitting kernel features. I zoned out for quite a bit - I knew a bunch of things already, and it was a bit hard to lex what Andi Kleen (the speaker) was saying.

I was going to go to the ext4 talk. Unfortunately, I got distracted by people on my way to the talk, and before I knew it, I missed most of it. I guess I’ll just have to read the paper.

After lunch, I went to Virtualization of Linux servers: a comparative study. The talk was interesting, and I will read the paper. It showed exactly how much x86 virtualization sucks (at
least compared to what’s on the mainframe). I can’t wait to have some time to hack on HVF some more. :)

Then, I got distracted by people, preparation of slides for my BOF about Guilt, pondering about trying SELinux again, etc., etc.

Anyway, I’m going to finish a summary of what happened yesterday later today. Until then…

OLS 2008 - Day 2

2008-07-24T02:57:16+00:00

Day 2…well…day 1 of the conference. The first talk (a keynote, actually) started at 10am. Unfortunatelly, I couldn’t use my phone as an alarm clock as the LCD broke earlier this weekend…

…and yesterday before going to bed, I forgot to set the time on the alarm clock in the hotel room. So, I got up when it felt like a good time to get out of bed. Well, oddly enough, that turned out to be something like 7:30. A bit scary actually.

Anyway, a croissant and some orange juice later, I was at the conference center, with about 45 mins to spare. I ran into Bruce Fields (one of the NFS guys; working at University of Michigan).

The keynote was ok. First, there were some technical problems (the mic and the projector didn’t work), once those got out of the way and the actual talk began. The speaker was a bit too quiet - not sure if that was his fault or if the amplifier wasn’t set to the right level.

After the keynote, as people started pouring out of the room, I saw Dave Quigley (a former lab mate from FSL) hanging around some SELinux guys (makes sense, since that’s what he’s working on). We talked for a little, and then headed down to one of the talks in the next time slot: Confining the User with SELinux. It wasn’t bad…but being no fan of SELinux, I probably didn’t get all the fun out of it. I am somewhat tempted to give SELinux a try…again.

Seeing that there were no interesting looking talks, Dave, I, and 5 people doing SELinux work went out to get lunch. I had some pretty good burger with blue cheese…I think I’m on a blue cheese binge.

After lunch, it was time for another talk to attend. I decided to check out the “Real Time” vs. “Real Fast”: How to Choose?. It wasn’t bad at all. Not being into real-time systems, I learned a few things here and there.

For the next talk, I just stayed in the same room. It wasn’t much fun. The presentation wasn’t the best, and about 15 minutes into it, I realized
(talking with some people on IRC) that there was another talk in the other room that I wanted to see. So I left.

The other talk (Tux meets Radar O’reilly - Linux in military telecom) was good. Well presented, and while obvious, it made a couple of thoughts explicitly stated.

The last talk (A Runtime Code Modification Method for Application Programs) for the day was quite interesting. I am going to check out the project website and read the paper in the proceedings.

After talks, there were BOFs… I went to the ones about Kernel.org and iSCSI HBA with Linux OpeniSCSI.

The kernel.org BOF was much like last year - and it was a good update to see what’s going these days with the services they provide. The summary: things work. :) And more will work.

The iSCSI BOF was interesting. I got to hear about some iSCSI offload stuff that Broadcom is working on.

After the BOFs, I waited around for a little bit with Christoph Lameter, Pekka Enberg, and Bruce Fields. Then a bunch of people from the conference (I guess something between 25-35 in total) headed to a rather fancy place for some food. The soup was good. The salmon was good. The ice cream was good.

Anyway, it’s getting late, and I should get some sleep tonight.

OLS 2008 - Day 1

2008-07-23T18:51:57+00:00

Times has come once again to talk of Ottawa Linux Symposium. Yep, that’s right it’s that time of the year again (ok, I’m posting it a little bit late).

Today was mostly uneventful. I woke up just before 6, got to the airport, flew to Ottawa, got to the hotel, realized I was about 4 hours early for check-in. I left my bag at the hotel, and went to the conference center. There I ran into Christoph Lameter. Having nothing better to do, we decided to pick up our registration and then go eat something.

When I got to the airport (LaGuardia) in the morning, I went on to continue reading a book I was about 2/3 of the way through - Princess Bride. My reading got briefly interrupted by the boarding call. After boarding the plane, I resumed reading. There is one really nice property these paper things have over electronic ways of eating up time…they don’t need to be turned off for take off and landing. Anyway, I fished the book while waiting for the hotel shuttle at the Ottawa airport. For what it’s worth, it’s a good book that everyone should read.

Around 6pm, a bunch of people I know (but probably shouldn’t associate myself with them in public ;) ) got to the hotel…about 2 hours later, one
of them, a weather-loving KDE code monkey (yeah, that’s you Shawn) and I ordered pizza. It was quite tasty, as were the chicken pieces in the
blue-cheese sauce.

Anyhow, time to run to the next talk….I’ll try to post at least once a day with random stuff…we’ll see how that goes.

BIND zone file management

2008-07-22T22:22:58+00:00

Anyone out there have any recommendations for managing zone files in BIND? It seems the general consensus is that people just end up using home grown systems. A lot of the web based projects out there are either abadoned or use strictly a database backend which is nice but it adds another layer of complexity, and a failure point. I'd like to be able to switch back and forth between using the management system and being able to do an inline search and replace if need be , on my zone files.

First open phone

2008-07-22T12:42:44+00:00

The first open phone is already out (for developers) called the Neo Freerunner. By “open” I mean that the OS is fully documented, and customizable by those with the skills to modify it. It is using Openmoko which is the competing open mobile operating system (OS) to Google’s Android mobile OS (still no phones with that yet as far as I know). Both projects are leveraging the linux kernel which makes this exciting to me. You can use the new $400 device (which is currently sold out) on the AT&T network, but its mainly going to Universities for use in computer science classes right now.

To be fair, these types of devices are really a lot more than just a “phone”, they are really true mobile computing devices with touch screen input, nice screens (relative to the little Motorola RAZR screens if not the iPhone and enough OS horsepower to actually be useful for real computing. While I don’t expect anything as amazing as the iPhone to secretly emerge, I would be more interested in an open phone than a closed source one on principle as well as potential. (disclaimer: I don’t currently have a cell phone).

Two good websites to watch for news as the 700MHz spectrum opens up next year are:
http://www.openmoko.com/
http://code.google.com/android/documentation.html
We will either see a whole lot of new open phones appearing next year, or a whole lot of nothing since the ‘open spectrum’ was gobbled up by AT&T and Verizon (Google didn’t get any), and neither company probably has any real interest in allowing the other’s customers to operate over their network.

Marion’s Attic

2008-07-20T02:53:23+00:00

Today, while spending some quality time on IRC, a link to Marion’s Attic appeared on my screen. Instead of describing what’s going on, I’ll just quote the website:

My show features recorded music with the original records from the 1890’s to the early 1930’s. The theme of the show varies each week. One week may feature early brown wax cylinders and another week may have 20’s dance music. Two-minute wax, Blue Amberols, and Diamond Disc Recreations are featured frequently.

I listened for about 30 mins, and it was quite interesting to hear recordings over 100 years old.

Instruction booklets for furniture

2008-07-13T20:47:02+00:00

Since moving into the city I've had to assemble a lot of furniture from ikea and other various places. Today while putting together snack tables from bed bath & beyond I believe I discovered my source of why I hate putting this crap together, the instructions.

You see in order to save money on printing costs places like Ikea use picture only instruction manuals so they don't need to translate every booklet into every language where they ship to. Ok, that's fine , and anyway you don't need much verbal explanation when it comes to fitting round pegs into round holes, you just need to know which is the proper hole to place said peg in.

Here is where Ikea, and all those other places fail , they lie to you in the number of steps it takes to assemble. "This drawer assembles in 3 easy steps!", fuck you, step 1 has me placing 10 screws in and involves 5 separate pieces , step 1 should only involve one smooth motion of me inserting one item into another, bam step 1 is over with, now lets take a look at step 2. Got 5 screws? 5 separate steps. Stop with these shortcuts. When you have 453 things happening in step 1 the picture becomes a massive scribble of fail. I have yet to completely assemble anything 100% correctly that involved picture steps , my ikea draw has a piece on backwards and one of my side tables is missing a few screws, but as long as they don't collapse on me without warning, I'll feel mildly content.

Scala, XSLT, Java, JSTL, XML

2008-07-07T18:43:52+00:00

Well, since last thursday I have been reviewing this new super language called Scala it sits on top of Java or .NET (which means you can use all of the libraries of these two platforms). This is great! I have another 3 words for it: I Love it. One big reason it's such a plus for me is because you can mix Scala code and XHTML (or xml) at the same level so for instance:

var aVarName = insert html code here (the blogger won't allow it);

Thats right, it's that easy. There is even a full online XML book for Scala available. Just follow the links off of scala-lang.org and you'll find it. Anyway, I found that I wasen't getting much work done so I started work under XSLT on Sunday which made be feel better again. I think I'll just save Scala 's tutorial for times I need to wait for things in real life. Otherwise, It's onwards with the programming languages for the masses. I really enjoy programming and all the varieties of languages. But when I'm not implementing my head goes dry and I get depressed not good. Always good to bounce ideas and plans with those you know so you can ingrain this knowledge.

I'm about to make a simple program to weed out defintion text from wikipedia.org's site using XSTLproc. The example I have works fine , but the implementation I wrote doesn't , so the solution is just a matter of blending both together (I get no errors either).

Until next time,

JohnnyL