Tackling Tickets

These are all of the things that I mean to do in the next short span of time. The plan is to run down the list and generate a file for each issue, then either prepare a note on my schedule to remind me of the time for action, or write another note expanding on the task at hand, or mark it as thoroughly completed. First priority is to fulfill my government-mandated obligations, I have two tickets on the books.

• Judge in Avon

Court date early in November, some time before the court date in the town of Henrietta. This was a simple speeding ticket, 75 in a 65. The officer told me that I was actually going 88 according to his laser, but the ticket was actually written for 75.

My own observation of the speedometer indicated my speed was between 80 or 82 MPH, though admittedly my first reaction upon seeing the reaction of the cloaked state trooper to my passing was not to check the speedometer, but to reduce my speed and prepare to pull over.

• Pay Bills (Check Bank Balance)

Do it now. Nothing to say about this.

• Set up Home Office at 204-1

No Go. Moving out of 204-1, as I'm still not sure how to pay the November rent. I'm about comfortable and moved into 149, but the arrangement with the computers and the furniture is not really finalized to this point.

• Clean out Trunk of Car

Still got a bunch of crap in it. The last thing I want when traveling over a border is to have to endure a lengthy, protracted search. If they are going to search me for guns or drugs, I'd rather make it easy for everybody involved!

• Take out the Trash

We generate more trash than anything in the world. I didn't generate half this much trash before I started cooking. Make an extra effort to minimize waste food and save on trash output. Also remember, if you're going to empty the trash, replace the bag so the next person who tries to use the trash doesn't have a conniption!

• Do the Dishes

Finally got everybody to participate in doing the dishes, thanks to delicious food. The trick is a repeat performance, and the better trick still is to make it sustainable. I do have high hopes for 149 Waterloo.

• Video Software

Provide a synopsis of tools I've learned that save you from buying expensive packages (both MRR and NRR), enabling content consumption and production for Audio Video geeks.

• HP Warranty Status
  

Fuck HP! I spent at least 3 hours on the phone troubleshooting and the result was they told me there was nothing wrong with the hard drive. I can't afford to drive out and see my dad again next weekend, if the machine is not fixed, I will be spending more of my own time on this issue that has no benefit to me!

End result: I bought a new hard drive and put it into my Dad's computer. A little white lie, I said it was covered under warranty, but really I couldn't stand to spend another 3 hours on the phone with HP to prove that the drive was faulty and get a replacement shipped.

We've got til February to orchestrate a catastrophic provable failure on this drive and get a new one under warranty. Maybe I can get Dad to load it up with porn and keep writing to it over and over again?` It probably will not crash on its own, hooked up in configuration as a secondary drive like it is now.

Would you ever know if videos, instead of system data and configuration files, were losing bytes due to corruption? There's no reason the system should crash because of incoherent data files. Is there any great symbolism to the idea of corrupting pornography? Kind of funny I guess, ha ha ha.

The unhappy conclusion to this story is that my new cheaper HP Slimline does not seem to have user-serviceable parts. I have no idea how to remove the hard drive, and if I had to replace it with another from Western Digital working on my own, I think I would become a slave to the HP warranty timetable. That sounds awful.

• NYS DMV License Plate Replacement for CVP1942 - Stolen?

Paid an $18 fee and spent 2 hours at the Brighton DMV to get the stolen plate replaced with a new set. I lost my cool plate number, and now I don't have the number memorized anymore. Bummer. Would have only been $3 if I had filled out a police report and brought it to the DMV.

Bluetooth Transactions

From what I'm reading so far, the anticipated limitation of the protocol is that audio data is not to be encoded in BluetoothTransaction packets without support for A2DP. I don't know how this compares to the encrypted Quicktime support that is embedded in the Apple Airport Express (that's WiFi, not BlueTooth) except that both protocols seem to make it prohibitively difficult for devices to support VoIP routing or transfer of audio packets without manufacturer support for A2DP. The jury is still out, whether this makes an effective copyright control device or not.

TODO: Expand this article to include code examples and a working implementation of two-way Bluetooth Transactions. Check on the filesystems available to the Sidekick developer, targeting the question of whether I can write a program that backs up my contacts, notes, schedule, and replicate other application files to a desktop interface, database, or other hiptop computer. Find out if there is any way to play my mp3s over a bluetooth A2DP headset without A2DP support in the hiptop from Danger and T-Mobile.

Pea Soup Design

Who has seen an example of my design sense? If you know me you should know that I am like a spartan and that I have no innate aesthetic sense of my own. I believe that furniture should be arranged to maximize positive energy flow, and so with the lay of a page, but to define what that means exactly is perhaps more art than science.

When I am designing a space, web page or home interior, I collect the chips, be they text images or furniture, and I arrange them in the first pleasing order that comes to me, included with absolutely minimal adornment, decorating them with only what I deem to be absolutely necessary to facilitate navigation and to preserve a sense of accommodation to save my readership from wondering what I wanted them to see.

I cook the same way. I'm making pea soup right now, and it matches the color of this page. I hope that it turns out quite delicious, but I'm short on the usual pea soup ingredients by a few, and I'm afraid therefore that it might turn out non-delicious. Such is life, so I suppose I'd better have a better list the next time I go shopping for food!

Recursive Backlinking

This is a note from a student who says he's working on some projects he intends to monetize. What should I tell him? I think it's OK to allow for-profit usage in academic contexts. He paid his tuition, so technically he has paid the bill for access to the software. So is there line crossing that mandates another new purchase after graduation?

Subversion RSS

So now that all of my important files are tracked under Subversion, I have some opportunities that I didn't have before. I can add to my iGoogle page or Netvibes any arbitrary tree or sub-tree of the files that I publish. I can maintain a window page with 500 or so links to samples of my work. I can publish that page as well, and share it with the world even. Neat!

I've added some tools to the Web Developer's Arsenal that I try to carry with me at every computer that I use to do publishing. The first cool toy that has a requirement of more cool toys beyond a simple printer is SeaMonkey's DAV publisher. DAV is like Subversion, in that it allows the user to publish a file directly using an HTTP client. It's a simple protocol for file exchange over HTTP, instead of another protocol that supports file exchange like FTP, Skype, or rsync.

SeaMonkey allows the user to edit a page as if it were Wiki content, and publish the changes directly to a DAV server. Subversion's DAV implementation is very friendly to ordinary web clients like Firefox and Safari: it allows the user to browse the tree of files and directories and download the latest revision of each. For an ordinary web server with simple support for DAV and any ordinary web page, it would not be so easy to identify the presence of the protocol.

Subversion repositories do not interact directly with SeaMonkey. Managers should not interact directly with Subversion repositories. Instead it is better for them to use the XML/RSS interface provided by WebSVN, and a reader like Google Reader or Windows Live Mail. Tuesday Studios Web Components implement RSS feeds, Subversion, DAV, and PHP applications. Support for Python and Ruby are forthcoming.

My Norwegian keyboard is still prëtty gøød, but it feels like an invitation to commit møre spellïng grëivånces into the revision history that is the world internet. Better to stick to the home keys I think, and I'm getting used to the location of the apostrophe ' parens () and forward / and back \ slashes. I still wouldn't say that I'm flu€nt in Norwegian but I'm quite sure that I'm well on the way ¤=) Thanks KPB

Something I Do

I really hope I can have a copy of Windows Server 2003! I'm running Windows XP on my Dell SC420 PowerEdge server, and it's just not the same without Windows Server! I've got no choice but to use the Wireless Internet, which I'm sure puts me in violation of some license agreement with some company, but I've got no choice at this point because it seems there are no network drivers for this machine's NIC in Windows XP!

Same goes for the on-board video and also probably the RAID chipset as well.

So why did you do that Mr. Dell-Gates? I can't afford to pay you whatever you seem to think the fair market value of this software is, and the hardware was delivered by one of your employees. When I received it, the included software was a release of FreeBSD, and that is certainly within your rights as a software provider, to redistribute BSD licensed software. But just because you put a box in my office, is that a good reason to owe you money?

Your license agreement would have me believe so... well, where I come from we charge a fee for storage. What do you think about that?

I checked on the list of supported operating systems, and I guess I'm supposed to be using Windows Server 2003 or Enterprise Server. I've got copies of both through the Microsoft MSDN Academic Alliance. But I keep telling people I'm not a student anymore... it does actually help to avoid drunken fratties and I can't just show up and tell some story about the hard work I've been doing in all my classes.

Still I go sometimes. These are my brothers, right?

So I'm not sure if I can use these softwares anymore without receiving Dell and Microsoft's both OK. I've asked permission to lie to a computer before, and received consent, while employed by RIT. I'm no longer employed by the university, and my lease on hard-line internet is almost up.

So can I still have my own office after November?

Games to Play

It's called Circular Chess

圍棋 in Chinese
囲碁 or just 碁 in Japanese... the Japanese name makes a metaphorical sort of joke about real animals, and the Chinese name does not include this information. Both names indicate a turn-based game, and 棋 sounds almost just like 星期的棋 which is 的其外的其

In RIT English we call it Go, and we usually say it is a Japanese game. Sorry!

Download Inventory

I was meaning to provide access to my normal Subversion repository which provides a full revision history over 40GB of data with accounting for users and groups. Subversion is the most useful piece of software in a Computer Scientist's arsenal; it provides a perfect revision history, but the cost of backup becomes prohibitive if files change frequently at random.

A DVD or hard disk is like a piece of land. Some real estate is more valuable than other places; so with software, but the going rate for a pre-mastered CD (700MB) loaded with software is $50-100. The cost is the same for access to the latest edition of my software collection of backup disks.

Software is traditionally exchanged using physical tokens and is sometimes marked as "not for resale" using license agreements. Insofar as I am an independent human being without a degree in law, I choose to ignore the legal risk that a piece of software I distribute at a particular (700MB) data storage cost may have a copyright claim against it.

I will send a digital catalog to each publisher that contributed to the release, along with a note indicating that I have enjoyed testing their programs. How does that sound for a business model? I wonder if I am obligated to standard handshaking procedure in this case.

Your Only Limitation

I am terrified by myself.  I'm learning to recite the Quran from memory.  This is your homework for the day.

أوذوا بالله من الشيطان الرجيم

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

الحمد لله رب العالمين، الرحمن الرحيم

ملك يوم الدين، إياك نعبد وإياك نستعين

اهدنا الصراط المستقيم

صراط الذين انعمت عليهم غير المغضوب عليهم

ولا الضالين

In English:

[A call to Allah from the vile Satan]

In the name of God the merciful

Praise to God, Lord of the world

King of the day of Religion

You alone we worship, you alone we beseech

Guide us to the right path!

The way of your grace, not the way of your fury

Lead us not astray.