Live Development

Today working on Lighttpd

fit and fit2 - I'm learning Korean! It's a lot of fun, and the teachers are very engaging. I've got my classes to finish up this quarter, so you might think that I am taking on too much. Not so, I am easily distracted, and it's actually a big help to walk around wearing headphones.

Just hope I don't get hit by a car ;)

Step 1: I wanted to be able to edit my code in place. I am coding in Haskell for Axel's Programming Skills class; it's a very interesting functional language, and it can do anything that C can do. In fact, the haskell compilers can actually produce C. You probably want binaries.

Step 2: I was sitting down at a mac and something convinced me to visit a Korean website! This website was produced by a korean; at least he has a korean name. Neither here nor there; I was sitting at a mac, and I was very impressed that when I pasted Korean text into my code, it lived in the terminal! I was using gnome-terminal, forwarded from my irie-eth0.rit.edu ssh host.

Windows is not so easy.

So what happens if I wanted to document my code in Korean? Korean developers can't use Windows! Unless... if it was a web application! So long as they have the correct fonts installed, Korean developers with a web browser could read and edit my code in place.

OK, so they could e-mail me too. But, my phone doesn't handle Korean either... I needed a good project that won't run out of problems, and this was it.

Back to the mac, I started learning on the 2-set keyboard layout. That means consonants are on the left, and vowels are on the right; the top row consonants can be repeated to indicate aspiration. An aspirated consonant is P instead of B; I hope you can hear the difference!

I thought it might be inconvenient to install the Asian keyboard layouts, especially if a system administrator has denied you permission to modify your keymaps. So, this particular system administrator hasn't done it... he hasn't installed the east asian fonts where I can get at them, and he hasn't installed files for complex script (joining) or right-to-left languages.

Those boxes are grayed out.

What does it mean? Even if I can get the fonts, I can't guarantee that my keyboard will send Korean signals to the program input. I need a function to translate english language characters to hangul, and it's not transliteration. Unless... does a tree fall in the forest?

Were you paying attention? I'm saying that the sounds on the Korean keyboard are not in the same place as a QWERTY. They're not illogical, they're just different.

Yes, they're actually stepping on your toes.

Dual-Booting EeePC on Ubuntu and Debian

Hardware

My new Eee PC (I call it kpeeepb) came with a variant of Debian Linux installed, ASUS-branded Xandros. Two problems: I don't like branding, and if you follow the instructions on the EEE Wiki called "Pimp My EEE", you wind up with a brick that (while it can still read Word documents) hasn't got any disk space left for user modifications.

Unacceptable, I bought a memory card just so I could mod the thing out, now I've got Ubuntu installed on it but until recently I had mucked the thing up so I couldn't boot without using a USB Key. I don't know. I've got it fixed now so Grub is installed on the main system disk, and you can actually boot the XFS root on my memory card if you want to use the basic Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

I'd rather have Debian EeeOS on the main disk, so you can actually boot the system without a memory card. I was kind of hoping to use that memory card for carrying movies around with me, and if I could keep a backup of my own modifications with a pretty small footprint. The installation instructions call for an already working Linux system on the host computer, the backup Ubuntu System OS is on the memory card. I will need that if I turn it into a brick.

As long as I can boot GRUB, I should be able to enter these commands with the memory card in and expose a working Linux system:

grub> root (hd1,1)
grub> kernel (hd1,0)/vmlinuz-2.6.24-21-eeepc root=/dev/sdb2
grub> initrd (hd1,0)/initrd.img-2.6.24-21-eeepc
grub> boot

I've entered those commands and the wheels are turning... sdb has been recognized in only 731 jiffies... next my system is booted, and ready to overwrite the main system disk according to the instructions.

Oh no! I put the root filesystem specifier on the wrong line, initrd booted but the kernel couldn't find a root filesystem, and the grub process dumped me out to the busybox prompt. I thought I would mount my filesystems and poke around just to see what happened.

Well, I forgot to unmount them, and apparently ext2fs is just that fragile!

grub> kernel(hd1,0)/
Error 2: Bad file or directory type

So, I'm going to have to take a detour on these instructions. Ready to wipe my USB key completely, lets install eeeos_beta2 on the key and boot from that. There we can run e2fsck and find out what happened to my /boot partition on the memory card.

If that exercise was any indication of my luck, I'm going to need more than one solution for independent backup.

gunzip -dc eeeos_beta2.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/DEV

On IRIE, the DEV here is /dev/sdf1 for the first partition on my Kingston 4GB Data Traveler. Depending on phases of the moon (or, what device gets plugged in first) this is either (hd1):/dev/sdb or (hd2):/dev/sdc on the Eee. Once the system is up and running from the stick, I can copy the beta2.img file to the main system disk and complete the installation instructions normally.

Wait... I can still fix it without the stick! I had the foresight to copy the newer 2.6.24 kernel from Ubuntu system onto the Xandros root on sda1. My kernel is still hanging out somewhere I can get at it. I should still be able to boot. Phew!

Oh well, of course I will be overwriting it soon enough... don't forget to fsck sdb1 first chance you get, it really needs the cleanup after that mess.

Commentary

I surely won't need these instructions again. The machine is a rock. It's not going to need another reformat, once I installed Debian. Maybe a new set of menus... but that can wait until I learn some UI programming.
D'oh, so I really hosed that ext3 partition somehow. I think it's best to leave the booting to the system disk. Here's what you need to get strapped into Xandros, or whatever is the main system on disk sda1:

root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1
initrd /initrd.img
boot

Looks like it's Ubuntu today.

Homework List

Today is C#/Haskell day. There is an assignment each from last week that needs review, and an assignment each for next week that needs new code. Systems Programming assignment was not completed, I think it's due this coming week... one Physics WebAssign each week and the first has already been lost to inattention.

Chemical Literature: the first submission of my Bibliography (using the Professor's template) is due TONIGHT at 11:59PM on RIT's myCourses website.

lets jack mycourses

My annotations are in plain, unitalicized text.

<<<>>>
Authored by: Alexander Haruk
Authored on: Sep 4, 2008 10:01 PM
Subject: Once Again All The Talk of Academic "Integrity" Makes Me Want To Rant

1. No

2. Not Sure

3. No

4. No

5. No

6. Yes

7. Not Sure

8. No

9. Not Sure

10. Yes

11. No

12. Yes

I suppose I should explain myself and these answers. These talks are always the same repetitive thing, nothing new is ever said, and frankly the scenarios almost always piss me off.

"A student completes a paper and submits it for two courses, but each requires 'original work' prepared for this course." This one always pops up, and it's the same thing "This is a very bad thing to do, and uh if you do it your a Nazi!" Reusing something that you wrote should never be thought of as a bad thing. Suppose you wrote a report one year How the Color Red Makes People More Inclined to Defaecate, or some such nonsense, then the following year your boss (yes this was an employment setting) want's you to do it again, and he tells you to put in all the new stuff. After checking you find there is nothing new, so you give the same thing again. Or alternatively you retake the course. Understand my point

Timeshifting is good. Nobody should be able to monopolize your hours in your day, requiring you to tediously repeat something hour after hour or day after day. OK so maybe it's your livelihood (hey professor) but maybe you're not carrying the news that day? Nobody, least of whom should be the cable company! #kpb

"A student allows another to copy his or her work during an exam." This is rather ambiguous because it doesn't specifically state that the "work" has anything to do with the exam. If it's a French exam and the work being copied is homework for Anthropology then "No." Even if we assume it is for the same class it still isn't necessarily wrong. What if what's being copied isn't on the exam? There's really only a narrow circumstance where this is wrong, if and only if what's being copies actual pertains to the exam.

If the purpose of an exam is to test each student's individual knowledge of a subject domain, then it is rendered ineffective by two students sharing information inside the walls of the exam room. If the goal is to engage in discussion and present as many facts or viewpoints as possible, then to copy is to share and to enlighten. The test is really about your note taking ability, one way or another. #kpb

"A student uses copies of previous exams to study, but the instructor does not return exams to keep." This isn't wrong for one of two reasons, either the instructor is an idiot and doesn't notice that he's short a graded exam, in which case shame on the instructor, or the student is able to transcribe an entire exam without being noticed, in which case the student deserves to keep the exam.

"A student obtains information from someone who has taken the same exam in an earlier secion (anyone notice that spelling error before?); the instructor requires all exam takers to sign a vow of silence." Unless the instructor works for the Pakistani intelligence agency (or something like it) and the punishment for breaking the vow is death it's unreasonable to expect people to keep their mouths shut.

"After taking an exam, a student 'swipes' a copy that is not supposed to be 'out.'"

Note: The following is based on the assumption that "after" means immediately after and is confined to the testing area, and as such does not apply to any breaking and entering at a later time or date.

Again the scenario is left open to interpretation. This could be the way a person similar to the one in question 3 operates (technically can't be the one in question 3, because of the presence of the word "return" in the question) or the instructor brings copies of the next exam with him; making him an idiot and deserving of his exploitation.

Is nothing sacred? In the industry, we have what are called trade secrets. A degree (or lack of degree) is a sort of bar to entry into an industry. Professors should be expected to invest in their testing materials and to proffer grades accurately. How then if they must take extra care and invest in "safe" workspace and storage of their valuables to keep students from stealing them?

#kpb

"A student obtains a term paper, report, or homework from some source and turns it in as his or her original work." Well obviously it's wrong. It's like asking if counterfeiting is okay.

"A student uses a programmable calculator during an exam when such devices are expressly forbidden." Reasons why it could be okay: there's nothing programed into it, what is programed in it isn't relevant, it's open book, or complete formula sheets are provided.

"A student receives full credit on a team project on which he or she did little or no work." Don't hate the player hate the game. The student has no control over how the project is graded, so why this keeps on getting asked baffles me.

You can't crash the boat if you're not at the helm. What have you done for me lately?

"A student obtains an advance copy of the exact same exam he or she is going to take and uses it to study." Is this the same idiot instructor from question 5? Was this a review sheet passes out, by the instructor, to the class that happens to be the test? Or did the student break into an office and steal it? Can you guess which of the three is wrong?

"A student alters answers on a test returned for review and then gets credit for the 'mistake.'" Far far to cheap of a tactic for me to defend in any way shape or form, after all I have integrity.

I have seen professors who will grant credit for students after the fact if they show that they have learned the lesson. That's not what's being described here, but seriously, haven't you ever heard of extra credit?#kpb

"Teams agree to share information on a project/case after the instructor explicitly forbids doing so."

Note: The following assumes that the "project/case" is in an academic setting and is a graded assignment, and does not apply to research, legal proceedings, or anything else that has inherent competitiveness.

Information is different from answers. Information is how to do something, and telling/showing someone how they're supposed to do it is fine.

"A student uses crib sheets, notes, or similar materials during a closed book/closed note exam." Why. Why. Why. Why, do they have to ask this? Of course it wrong!

Credit Card Debt Analysis

Gee-ze-o! Look at these numbers, if I can command a higher salary today then I should. I am paying way too much interest.

Right now you are $3,886.23 in debt. If you continue to make minimum payments, it will take you 114 months to get out of debt. You'll pay $984.00 in interest.
If you make a one time payment of $1,000.00 today and you pay $200.00 a month, it will take you 22 months to get out of debt and you'll save $953.00 in interest.

---

Right now you are $7,344.77 in debt. If you continue to make minimum payments, it will take you 129 months to get out of debt. You'll pay $1,543.00 in interest.
If you make a one time payment of $600.00 today and you pay $370.00 a month, it will take you 22 months to get out of debt and you'll save $1,492.00 in interest.

I'm talking about Data Mining

I always imagined that my Del.icio.us Inbox should be my primary Inbox, and that if a person wanted to say something to me, they could simply put it on a web page and "say it out loud," you know what I mean?

Some web developer types are taking over my office at Tuesday Studios this week, and I am about to start wondering just how much free time they've got... not fluent in any web frameworks but I've lots of ideas, and I bought a book on Groovy and Grails the Java-derived dynamic languages, but there are diversions...

My business partner at Tuesday Studios is a Ruby pro, and I am finishing my Computer Science degree in November (God-willing) with some classes in Haskell and C#, so unfortunately Grails will have to wait.

Web Developers? Send me your portfolio!
Get an account, and tag your stuff with "for:yebyen"

http://del.icio.us/yebyen

The Casino Out Behind Nick's

I had the greatest dream, I was at Steve T's (formerly Nick Tahou Hots) and the fire was out on the grill, it was getting cold or hey buddy was cleaning it or something, and I had to wait for my plate so I did... then when they served me, actually I don't remember if they ever served me, but I got shown to this great casino room in the back with a bunch of absurdly huge slot machines!

Hey buddy was there, and I brought out $10 and another $10, and maybe a dollar besides... I couldn't resist the temptation to gamble in that casino, well I played the first $1 in a dollar machine and another $10 and for that $10 I was standing next to a beautiful blonde girl that was trying on a pair of thong underwear, some red gap shorts with a picture of Mao in the crotch, and she wanted to take my place at the machine so I let her... I didn't see any more of her then...

Anyway the machines were all dispensing these novelty Giant Dime Balls that were some marked as "this is not money, don't take it with you or its stolen," some not marked at all because the lettering had worn off—eventually I found the machine where you go to redeem them, and it spit out this gnarley looking quarter... then I kept looking and I found it was dumping a shitload of $20 bills and ones and fives, concert tickets and nacho cheese fries, it was like some glorious dreamland behind Nicks, and was Hey Buddy ever smiling!

I was trying to figure out how it could possibly be legal to gamble at Nick Tahou's and Mike Kush showed up, took a few dollars from my winnings, and just walked the other way while I figured out how to pick up and collect my nacho fries...

"The Magic Beer Hat," or "Beer Dues: WTF"

Here is the story of how that case of beer we bought after the Modest Mouse show turned into a magic beer hat... in case I become an alcoholic and suddenly can't explain where all my time and money is going, and because I didn't sign this into the lease, but it seems like it should get written down somewhere anyways

We bought that 30rack after the Modest Mouse show, Jason said "Well, I'm gonna drink some of those, I'll go buy an 18 pack, same brand" now he's drank most of those, and he says "hmm I'd better replace them" ok so we're up to 66 beers from the initial investment of $20... sounds pretty nice of Jason, eh?

Come to find out this particular day he's not happy about someone owes him some money. Apparently Regina has been consistently paying rent late every month, and Jason has been covering it out of his own pocket because he's such a nice guy.

This month, he can't do it. He wants to increase everybody's rent by $20 so that extra $208 doesn't come out of his own pocket for the 11 or 22 days it takes Regina to getting around to paying it.

Is $208 enough money to keep 8 people drinking for 30 days? I don't know, but I'm afraid I just bought a $208 slice of Jason's credit while we all decide if we want to share our alcoholism or keep separate checks.

Have you ever got some money and you spend it twice, just because you have the credit available that particular day? That's how I live, that's why I have over $10k credit card debt, that's why I don't grant someone a pass to use my credit on their own discretion.

Personally I'd rather see that money go towards things that everyone can use, like a working dryer for the house (which will cost as much again in electric as it did to buy outright, don't forget to spend it twice!) or some repairs for the second bathroom (shouldn't the landlord pay that, or the person who made the hole in the sink? nah, neither of those are fair...)

*SNARL* I'm fuming mad!

Futurama: The Arraignment

I dreamed an entire episode of Futurama last night, it wasn't a real episode but you could've fooled me... I don't know how much I can remember, but by the ending an entire stadium full of people are convinced that Fry is a gay molester (and boy do they find it amusing) -- he has been transformed into some kind of an eagle beast creature who can fly away for dramatic effect, and the whole crew of the ship is transported into outer space where the show terminates.

"Arraignment: The Human Condition, if ever there was one."

It's fading fast. but I want to get it down... there could be money in writing episodes, right?

There is a murder, a bag of evidence that is traced back to him, now I'm remembering another dream where I had to kill a person and chop them up, dump their body somewhere... stay focused, one script at a time! How did Fry become an eagle beast? And where did they get the idea that it was a case of molestation? (From the asian girl... that's where...)

Wouldn't it make more sense to prosecute the murder? No, not if it was all one big lie.

The abductor aliens, they made sure to supply those folks with enough toothpaste and plenty of comfortable beds. The last scene in my head, Fry is explaining what just happened with a crooked half-smile on his face, and a mouthful of toothpaste which he spits into the toilet. He is super wasteful. That is way too much toothpaste.

Use a dab no larger than the size of a pearl! That was two or three large oysters, no mother of pearl toothpaste servings on Decapod 11 please...

"It's called Arraignment: The Human Condition, if ever there was one"

What's that supposed to mean? If there was ever a human? If there was ever a human condition? Who knows where dreams come from?

I hope they do continue to come, after I put down those Marlboro brand I-CHING bones... a busy mind is a happy mind! OK Folks, illumination - improved focus +5, I'm graduating real soon now and there are plenty of jobs in Rochester for people who know how to look for them.

Blogger Stylee

Experimenting with my own blog that I can take offline quickly (USB Stick) in case of some reason why I would want to work offline. Like, I've got a client who I want to bill for something really juicy, and I don't want someone else to steal my thunder.

Normally, I like to work openly... there is perhaps no reason to make this an absolute policy, sometimes working transparently can actually affect your bottom line. Today, I believe there is good reason to work in the open, where others can benefit from your example.

Filesaqs and Development

So there are a couple of different kinds of files out there... source, binary, document, and as a scientist I'm sure I'll need to be prepared to deal with all of them. Network file-systems are expensive to maintain and deploy, in particular when visiting friends you really can't expect them to let you install your drivers on their boxes unless you're about to establish a serious relationship.

Sharing files and disk (sharing with yourself counts here also, for people who are multi-homed or multi-boxed to manage their instances across the various computers), you can make filesystems on disks and use networks to fill them up, transparently with DAVfs2, but more on that later...

liveusb-creator from Luke for some help with that development environment, the system is a static Fedora Core 9 live image, with a transparent overlay filesystem that can be used to keep all of your work on a USB stick. When it dies or is lost (inevitably this will happen) your changes will be preserved as long as you can maintain a backup of this overlay, which means storage requirements are pretty low, really people throw 2GB around like toilet paper these days, and the overlay can't get any bigger than that.

Ontology Management

I meant to look this up today: SWOOP

but, I found myself sitting in front of a computer with no java, and a cell phone with some. uncomfortable installing Java on random peoples' computers, I will take a look at this when I get home.

this one looks good too:
Differential Ontology Editor

Why is this important? The best verse is terse.

Vigorous writing is concise. An ontology can help you to manage the coherency and breadth of your thoughts, or so the story goes... I hope my writing doesn't wind up looking like those awful spam monkeys I still hear from every now and again!

Sadly, Facebook and Delicious still seem to be not supporting Chinese or Korean. Maybe it is just my input method that is at fault. I can't believe it doesn't work.

The Sixth Layer: A Business Blog

Building an example of how to build a churning queue for blog posting bandits on the internet... this Blogger blog on blogspot.com is a good example of a content channel, the basic "news output," the first step to recognition in any sort of publishing company. The most you can ask for in the realm of consumable content (here we're talking newspaper articles, not video games) is a content author who provides content in text, audio, video, and URL formats.

Visit the Posts (Atom) feed link on the bottom of the front page and find the FeedBurner RSS frontend which shows the content in this blog: I am generally not posting MP3 or Video content, but the capability is there between Blogger and FeedBurner to add media files for a rich feed viewer such as iTunes to recognize and retrieve. You can include podcast content in your blog postings!

Text articles with embedded content can be viewed in a web browser and podcasts can be scanned in a podcast aggregator. Now, what about those URL-based posts with titles, text summaries and tag data: they're all coming from a particular account on the del.icio.us service, and if you have the account name you can request the set of tags by URL. But, what if you want to edit these tags?

What if you want to collect a group of posts, and tag them all a certain way? What if you want to drill down inside a large set of already tagged posts, and update the tags for a subset? The interface to handle this behavior has already been developed with tagging for gmail, but the feature described here is not available on this database... yet.

I'm on a mission to build this feature into my workflow. Anybody want to stop me? Please, I'm begging you, tell me this feature already exists before I write it myself!

NOHO-NYC Adventures

We're on a trip to The Moon, says Remy D... with a mild diversion on the way, a stop in Pluto. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center and Columbia University Law History department, has asked for a meeting with the founding members of The Causemaker Foundation, and it's just a little out of the way: we came out this way to see the show for Umphrees McGee in Northampton Massachusetts, and that was a bust for me. We went to a nice restaurant (The Dirty Truty) instead of that, Mike said that the concert was a rockin good time!

Have been enjoying Northeastern hospitality and the beautiful weather and scenery of New York and Mass, we're taking a train into NYC and I have yet to contact anyone for lodging or more serious scoping out of the area. We've got enough friends in NYC, and Remy has made some links, that I'm not worried about it. I could come out of this trip with an incredible story or even an internship with one of the great heads of the Free Software movement, with doors leading to Law school and worse: real political activism.

Wish me luck! My phone is out of service, if you need me call Amy Gavin at 585.781.4145, we're in Northampton for a day more, after that you can try my number or Jeremy DeCausemaker at 315.945.1601 -- he's got a Cingular phone, my Cricket has been out of service since near Syracuse. I hope it works in NYC!

ST101 - Software Testing 101

Professional Queue Managers/ and Product Reviewers, take Heed!

The latest post on my delicious:

images/red-kashmiri.png at master from kingdon's tues-crep — GitHub, can you tell without a password, that I think this soda tastes like crap?
... just posted

You are reading this page and you probably can't see it from here. I can't even remember if I included a portal into that bucket on this page. That's not good! Worse, I'm not sure from where I sit, with my saved passwords, if you can even view the product review in question...

Still, the important thing you should get out of my message is this: do not drink Red Kashmiri soda. The Red Kashmiri soda tastes like the ocean. It is made of salt and mixed spices, as well as a token quantity of sugar. Only a fool will drink the Red Kashmiri soda after that!

http://del.icio.us/yebyen/ post#3464

The second most important thing you should get out of this message, if you are a delicious user this will come as no surprise, there is no easy or reliable way to find post #3464! That is not a permanent link, and the facilities for permanent linking are reserved exclusively for permanent records, which could not usually be deleted or absconded with. A delicious feed is more like a queue than a base or a permanent record, and as I learned from MSDN article about immutable data structures (reference still not handy) ahem there are some immutable queues, but this is not a property of queues that you can count on finding every single day! Queues are sometimes immutable, sometimes indexed, in this case not either. Not exactly, the URL is an index or key.

In Delicious world, you can tell if a post is unique or not because it has a URL that distinctly identifies it from other posts; it is assumed here that the value is not in the 255 character summary and unlimited vocabulary of tags, and this is perhaps a foolhardy assumption. The URL is the meat of your HTTP request, and unless there are some special POST variables or unless the referenced website has a special dynamic nature like what is often found on news portal websites (and Delicious pages) you should have no trouble retrieving the same content with the same request URL.

Delicious posts can arrive in a queue many posts all at once, or a handful at a time, and fortunately it is possible to aggregate a day's posts in digest format. What does this mean? If I am posting many times in a day, or many times in a week, with multiple trains of thought, then after that you don't check your mail incoming from what I am sending every day, we are going to have a disconnect: that means either you are going to have a lot of catching up to do, or I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do, either way we will be taxed (my brain and yours) to get a meaningful report of what I've been doing.

I'm in a different office every week.

What does this mean to you? You've probably never been in touch with me on a daily basis. Probably only person who has been in direct contact with me every day for the last year is me. Does this mean that I can't tell you what I've been doing for a year running? Lord I hope not!

You shouldn't spend time on links that you have already reviewed, unless there is some expectation that there will be something to gain from revisiting that URL. How do you guarantee that behavior on a consistent, repeatable basis? I'll start with PlanetPlanet Feed Reader — currently evaluating output formats — and ReiserFS v4 — this one might be over the top.

A triangle with 2 points

He's a dork and a nerd, and he kind of thinks they're going out, but she is thinking not really... and she is like Miss Congeniality: Yang Jie. In this lesson, the monologue is over as we exit the diary and they finally meet in person!



"Prepare for a snotty exchange"

Integrated Podcasts

Hey, don't let me leave this place without giving you something to study! I have a habit of doing that sometimes. You should be studying Spanish and Chinese, unless you really want to learn Arabic or Korean. Episode 1 of ArabicPod.net is priceless...

Heyna nizzarati? Fouq at-tawila? La araaha! Unzhur tahta at-tawila!!




Take this Chinese and Spanish lesson with my cumpleaños. I mean, compliments!

Word of the Day

wài 外 outside, external, foreign, in addition
guó 國,国 country; state; nation

wàiguó - 外國 foreigner

A foreign national is willing to say anything for the benefit of his own nation. He is not from your nation and he does not by default understand your concerns. While he is visiting your nation, he will probably integrate some of your cultural mores.

Arabic: mustashariq - Somebody coming to visit the east: when we say as a greeting Ahlan wa Sahlan it means we expect that our visiting "ta-kun" will become a part of the local culture. It says basically "come as a guest and stay as a friend."

We don't really have any inexpensive or convenient way to deport him so we really don't know how long he will be staying. There's a German story about a family with a thatched roof belongs right here, and the punchline sounds like this:

"If you keep taking my thatches for souvenirs, I will sooner have no roof at all!"

Now I think I should write a novel.

Word of the Day

Husbandry - the art of caring for horses. It's much easier if you have some kind of wall or fense to keep them in (or the she/wolves specially named amy, to keep them out) for sure. Google thinks this word is about real estate...

farming: the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock

That's how you get to be a plant lady. You don't want to be a plant lady. Surely not unless you can have a lake with that. Ooh ooh ooh, I'm still in time for Madonnals...

sharepoint

is great Ø:-D
i swear it to be true!

Java Server Faces

OK so I know it's a pain supporting legacies sometimes but this is just absurd... 6000 by 9000 pixels? How am I supposed to print that with any less than an enormous (and surely expensive) plotter, like the HP DesignJet? I don't like having schemas if I can't keep them on my wall, and my office printer puts out 8.5x11 sheets, well I don't know if that can even print this many pixels on a sheet.

So CTAF, the common testing automation framework, is pretty big and complicated. The myThomson application, on the other hand, is GREAT and seems to be full of a lot of useful content, like this introduction to Java Server Faces. I wish more people would use it!



I don't know if that link is going to work for you. It works for me! My Repo is password protected, and if you haven't logged in then you probably won't get the image. You've probably seen Windows screenshots before, not missing much. Whatever the case I'm quite sure this software could be simpler than it is.

What's the old adage? You can't fix all the bugs... that's what they say anyway, but I heard a rumor that you can actually fix all of the bugs! Must have been someone in the US Marines told me that, all programs can be shortened to one line that doesn't work.

We'll get there some day, my friends :D

Open Format Debate

I want to talk about this some more, but I'm afraid it's not worth our time. What does a transition to an open patent-free format really mean? What does it mean that ooXML is free to use?

It means that the developers of an application won't pay any royalties for their application's data structures. It means that the people who have invested so much time to figure out what is the best way to store a particular document as data will not be compensated for their attention to detail.

This could be a positive thing, or it could be a negative thing. Surely if formats are not designed with the best interests of their data in mind, the users will not be as happy with the quality and arrangement of their data, or the application developers will have to spend more time making the formats fit the typical data of their application users.

It means: software as a subscription (these developers have got to eat), or software development as slave labor or software as idols to be worshiped. (Or, sure, you can bet the developers will derive enough revenue from reselling and using their own software to repay their investment into the works).

What did I just say? Those paragraphs are a mess.

Word of the Day

profluent - The first imaginary word in our series of words, this is the newspeak replacement for confluent. It means flowing together!

Why newspeak so soon? It was bound to come out sooner or later, I am reading "Get Ahead by Going Abroad: A Woman's Guide to Fast-track Career Success." A woman's guide, which clearly men are not allowed to read! OK, I'm actually quite sure that's not what the author meant when she chose that for a title.

Patricia Kranz, who is cited as one of the primary sources for this book, says: "As a journalist I sometimes found it useful that the Russians never considered women to have powerful jobs—you could blend into the scenery more and hear things maybe they didn't want you to hear or see things they didn't want you to see."

I'm a little bit surprised to hear a powerful woman pleased to be referring to herself as scenery here, but be sure there is some truth to what she's saying! As for the paranoia in her sentiment, it's not really any surprise to have paranoid thoughts coming out of the mouth of a journalist... especially one working in New York International Business news!

Skype Prime echoes the End of Civilization

OK, maybe it won't be as popular as I'm making it out to be. Maybe this is actually how business is done already. Maybe I like to beat a dead horse, did you ever think of that? Huh? OK, so here's my business model, plain and simple for all to see. Skype knows all about this, and they seem to think it's a good enough idea to incorporate this into their internet telephone product.

Edited transcript from the Board Meeting follows, I tend to run all of my ideas by Joe whenever I feel like talking and he's got time to listen. Here goes:

[7:27:43 PM] Yebyen says: Skype Prime Beta
[7:27:45 PM] Yebyen says: did you know about this
[7:45:28 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: Prime seems way useful for making dough.
[7:46:03 PM] Yebyen says: The money goes to Paypal, 15% VAT if you are living in EU
[7:46:40 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: paid debian support?
[7:47:02 PM] Yebyen says: i was just thinking (been meditating for weeks actually) about your distaste for metrics and performance standards as arbitrary
[7:47:46 PM] Yebyen says: and been thinking and it's a pretty big hangup for me, thinking I shouldn't be paid a rate unless I'm providing that much value, nearly impossible standard to meet for me today
[7:47:55 PM] Yebyen says: and even harder to prove
[7:48:13 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: I no longer believe they are arbitrary. Now I think they are there to reinforce the arbitrary dominance of the small group of capitalist elites and the technocrats that enable them to dominate the rest of us.
[7:48:26 PM] Yebyen says: right
[7:48:54 PM] Yebyen says: well i think there are not actually a small group of technocratic capitalist elites
[7:49:11 PM] Yebyen says: but actually an enormous unmanageable oligarchy-like system
[7:49:39 PM] Yebyen says: and as you convince a single person from a group to give you money, and he's happy about it, he tells his friends and you are suddenly overwhelmed with more work than you can handle
[7:49:51 PM] Yebyen says: or he tries to manage you, and you are suddenly subject to his tax
[7:49:55 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: we'll there are two groups. a tiny group of large-scale capitalist and a larger group (bout 20 percent of population) of technocrats and bureaucrats that run society and make decisions
[7:50:10 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: on behalf of the tiny owning class, but with their own interests in mind
[7:50:16 PM] Yebyen says: that makes sense
[7:50:23 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: some of which might be noble, others might be not
[7:50:39 PM] Yebyen says: i was listening this video at work
[7:50:43 PM] Yebyen says: about 1:20 long
[7:51:32 PM] Yebyen says: here's the link, if you ever want to break your head this did it for me
[7:53:07 PM] Yebyen says: Building Gods
[7:53:20 PM] Yebyen says: talks about the artilects and the terrans
[7:53:42 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: scientology?
[7:53:58 PM] Yebyen says: and the terrans are the ones who believe that any technology advancements are extremely dangerous, likely to result in further enslavement of mankind by our mechanical overlords
[7:54:04 PM] Yebyen says: are those terms from scientology?
[7:54:27 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: nope, but they sound like they could be :)
[7:54:39 PM] Yebyen says: and the other group, the ones who are content with building artilects, the cosmists
[7:55:26 PM] Yebyen says: go on building artilects for the betterment of their selves and their fellow man, whether causing irreparable damages or not
[7:56:01 PM] Yebyen says: the artilect is supposed to be the intelligent computer, the one that can be self-replicating and self-improving with unbounded limits
[7:56:40 PM] Yebyen says: but presumably still improved by interaction with and development from humans... otherwise they would surely destroy us or leave the planet

... and after a brief intermission, when I emptied the washing machine into the dryer...

[8:11:40 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: we do code reviews with every commit. I'm really liking it
[8:11:56 PM] Yebyen says: i do that too, they're called commit messages :D
[8:12:09 PM] Yebyen says: the trick is getting people to read them, which is what I assume you mean
[8:20:10 PM] Yebyen says: we've got this guy David who reminds me of Brock
[8:20:24 PM] Yebyen says: lots of energy, always something to contribute
[8:20:58 PM] Yebyen says: he's the guy I met randomly on my first day who I e-mailed then he proceeded to send me a 3 page essay full of useful information
[8:21:08 PM] Yebyen says: written on the spot, from the hip
[8:21:21 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: about how the company works?
[8:21:32 PM] Yebyen says: about libraries and code I might be interested in
[8:21:46 PM] Yebyen says: i have no idea how the company works, other than one or two products pay for the operation of the whole company
[8:22:26 PM] Yebyen says: then later I found out that he's actually the one in charge of staking out the new co-ops and it was no accident I met him on my first day!
[8:22:36 PM] Yebyen says: whether he put himself in that position or was appointed, hard to say
[8:22:50 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: how many coops do they have?
[8:23:08 PM] Yebyen says: a boat load, there are at least 10 who I have encountered with regularity in the lunchroom
[8:23:20 PM] Yebyen says: three of us just in my area
[8:23:42 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: do you get company lunches? do they pay for the time when you take lunch?
[8:23:59 PM] Yebyen says: we're all encouraged to take a 1 hour unpaid lunch
[8:24:14 PM] Yebyen says: and we all pay, prices are reasonable and cheaper than most restaurants nearby
[8:24:36 PM] Yebyen says: but we're right near main street and broad, exchange, ford street area
[8:24:47 PM] Yebyen says: which means we have access to nick tahou's and a lot of good restaurants
[8:24:48 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: sounds pretty decent. I take 30 minutes unpaid lunch usually because I want to get home earlier
[8:24:57 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: cool :)
[8:25:05 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: have you been going to the real nick tahous for lunch?
[8:25:19 PM] Yebyen says: for lunch, god no, only twice since I've been there
[8:25:33 PM] Yebyen says: but to pick up a plate from nicks ON THE WAY home is amazing
[8:25:52 PM] Yebyen says: 1 hour lunch is good if you can maintain it, without that it's hard to get to know your co-workers in this atmosphere
[8:26:12 PM] Yebyen says: if you want to maintain a separation between work and play, you want to be talking about work when you're on paid time
[8:26:29 PM] Yebyen says: or not talking, just coding... and when you're on lunch, you want to be doing anything else
[8:26:49 PM] Yebyen says: unless David cons you into a chat about something work related, has happened a couple of times and usually worthwhile
[8:27:12 PM] Yebyen says: speaking of which
[8:27:18 PM] Yebyen says: yoga, web design, bed for me

... then, after only a few seconds, I manage to spend the next half hour sitting in front of the computer in spite of my better judgment, talking about the fleecing of my customers as if they're never going to read this!

[8:27:45 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: got logged off by skype install. I want to check out Prime
[8:28:01 PM] Yebyen says: i'm not paying for this chat
[8:28:09 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: :D
[8:28:15 PM] Yebyen says: but the next one we could think about it
[8:28:23 PM] Yebyen says: my business model right now is very interesting
[8:29:20 PM] Yebyen says: i set an hourly rate (usually exhorbitant), i fudge the hours to make the pricing reasonable once the job is nearing completion, and my clients tend to tell me when the sale is made, by writing out a check
[8:29:40 PM] Yebyen says: afraid i'm going to have to start printing invoices soon though, that's an awful lot to manage
[8:32:14 PM] Yebyen says: i say exhorbitant, but the rate Lomax quoted is twice that
[8:37:49 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: I'm having trouble finding people who do paid phone support on skype.
[8:46:34 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: do you think something like rentacoder (for phone support on god knows what - maybe gardening?) could be made utilizing skype Prime?
[8:52:11 PM] Yebyen says: i think paypal is kind of expensive, but certainly not much more expensive than accepting a credit card for business
[8:52:22 PM] Yebyen says: skype prime is per-minute fees
[8:52:36 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: or per-call
[8:52:58 PM] Yebyen says: still, i think you're unlikely to find coders charging a rate per-minute for consultations
[8:53:06 PM] Yebyen says: or anything but per-project or stipend-style funding
[8:53:31 PM] Yebyen says: "we'll pay you x dollars weekly while you code this for us"
[8:53:33 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: Well, like a per-call for some single tech problem
[8:53:43 PM] Yebyen says: project accounting is sooo difficult
[8:53:44 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: like help with apache
[8:53:52 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: setting up and etc
[8:53:59 PM] Yebyen says: i could be Apache support on skype
[8:54:12 PM] Yebyen says: problem is there's already good free support in the form of forums
[8:54:36 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: the customer would post a request on rentsupport.com and he'd get offers from programmers
[8:54:40 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: or techies
[8:54:48 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: and then they'll arrange the time of call and the charge
[8:55:18 PM] Yebyen says: very hard to have a person who is going to ask a pointed question in the room with a person who is going to deliver a quick and easy answer, and know exactly which one should be paying the other
[8:55:18 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: or the site would arrange that. the customer and the techie would agree on what each wants
[8:55:52 PM] Yebyen says: i would do freelance apache admin for so long and eventually somebody comes along says "hey i want you on my staff"
[8:56:23 PM] Yebyen says: how does that conversation end... "come work for me, train the rest of my staff to do what you do, and we'll make a killing"
[8:56:29 PM] Yebyen says: only then you're breeding competition
[8:56:35 PM] Yebyen says: that's why you move to alaska before you start any of this
[8:56:37 PM] Juozas Gaigalas says: that's a good point. I'm not sure what kind of services there'd be exactly though

... and here, I actually threaten to send a bill! this is where the conversation dwindles.

[8:57:10 PM] Yebyen says: consultation
[8:57:40 PM] Yebyen says: you spend 5 minutes explaining what it is you want to do, i spend 5 minutes telling you about the best deployment of whatever it is you want that I've ever seen before, and some features I know about that I've never seen used in something like that
[8:57:49 PM] Yebyen says: you write a check, and I send you on your way
[8:58:42 PM] Yebyen says: or, you say "ok, lets build it, this is how much of my budget/equity I'm willing to fork over based on my gauge of your competence and value to the project"
[8:59:17 PM] Yebyen says: all of this is dependent on an established credit as a valuable consultant for [foo]
[8:59:28 PM] Yebyen says: here comes openid and jyte
[8:59:34 PM] Yebyen says: now, where's my check?
[9:00:46 PM] Yebyen says: i wonder if it's possible to pass out tokens allowing a person to validate your openid
[9:00:48 PM] Yebyen says: rather than a webserver
[9:02:22 PM] Yebyen says: probably no point in that, you write your own knowledge base and at that point they have to log into your website and they have a thousand other ways to authenticate you
[9:02:30 PM] Yebyen says: and you can bill them however you like

Word of the Day

Going to take a little diversion from Word of the Day standard format, we're going to go with Root of the Day now.

Lib - Libro, Liber, Library, Liberate, Libra

Shannon is a Libra, if I remember correctly.

This guy looks pretty free to me, but I don't know if he's liberated:

Name:	Thomas Ost, 42/Male
Last login:	0 min ago
Location:	Germany
Networks:	Germany
	"i am history"
About me	I will disable this account tomorrow. I had enough - it was most of the time funny, but somethimes disappointing and costed often to much time. Thanks to all friends! I discovered here, that many women have really bad characters - iam really supriced. Iam happy that I have in real life a wonderfull, faithfull wife and superb kids. Many thanks to my owner she was really nice to me all the time - thank you!
About you	i had enough - prefer real life
Looking for:
Orientation:	Straight
Herds:	None

Human pets: the new weapon of the revolutionary liberation government. Just kidding!
Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!