Anthology of Interest

Dave helped me out with some of my Mac OS X annoyances recently. In particular, Carbonized Emacs is nice. I had it working for a little while last week, and then I installed some more fink stuff, and it started crashing on startup. So I compiled it from source with debuggin symbols and stuff, and got into the code, but it turns out it was the font definition in my .emacs file. I probably copied that over from my linux box around the same time I installed more fink stuff, so it probably had nothing to with that in the end.

Dave also pointed out that my perma-links in my blog aren't working. That's because of the wierd ass modpython configuration I'm using with PyBlosxom. This speeds things up a little bit, because Apache doesn't have to spawn a newPython process for each request, but there are some bugs in my modpython handler yet. I did get the catagories to work to a limited degree, but there's still room for improvment. Modpython also seems to leak memory... or something... after a bunch of requests it starts throwing up 500 errors for some reason which I haven't been able to track down yet. And it doesn't play nice with server restarts; I have to stop, wait until all the Apache processes go away, and then start again.

I guess I'll fix that up after I get some work done. I'm super behind in research and school. Ugg.

I've always wondered why EMACS always makes a buffer read only when you load a patch file into it. It's always annoyed me that I had to write the file (C-x C-w) the file to the same file name to make it read-write. Well, I stumbled across a shortcut this morning while typing on the iBook, which has a different keyboard than what I'm used too.

It turns out that C-x C-q is bound to the command toggle-read-only by default. Isn't that handy? It's so handy that I wrote a blog entry about it, so as to increase my chances of finding it out again when I inevitably forget about it.

We decided to get out of the city for once and drove up to Duncan to go to Laurie's brothers coffee shop. We also went for a short hike. In the left photo is Laurie's brother Morris; his other brother, Andrew the baker, he left just before we came in so we didn't get a chance to meet him. The other photo is the front of the shop (obviously).

Anyway, we had a nice visit and some great coffee (mmmm, double espresso) and baked goods, and then continued to the Chemaneus (which I have spelled very incorrectly). And then there was a hike so short that it's not even worth mentioning, although Tamara did take a large number of pictures.

Back to work.

This recent slashdot thread has a significant number of insightful comments on it. The story is about a woman who is suing the RIAA under rackateering laws. People are mostly debating how downloading music is theft, or not, that it is copyright infringement and not theft at all. It was noted that a judge in the Grokster case told the lawyer for the plaintiff to stop using words like piracy and theft when he was framing the case, because in the legal sense, neither is true in relation to downloading music.

These sort of discussions get me thinking about intellectual property (which is actually a misnomer that I should stop using), since as an engineer my career is to provide others with intellectual products as a service. Unless I have a patent personally, my work usually automatically belongs to my employer. My work is a service, as is the work of the guys (and gals) who write big commercial software like Oracle. This owner of this output can sell as many copies as possible, which sort of breaks the service relation ship between the corporation and the consumer. Its sort of a guessing game; how much money can I pump into my developers (or musicians, in the case of the music industry) assuming that I think I can sell N copies at M bucks a pop? Anything above that is almost free money.

Software, music, whatever, isn't a physical product which can be stolen, in that it can't be taken such that the rightful owner is deprived. It is produced by someone doing a service, yet can persist after the service has been complete. Like a plumber that continues to unclog your drain after he has gone home. So how much is the right amount to pay for the presence of the ghost plumber?

Tricky business.

Tamara's been at home all day, working from the easy chair on the iBook. It's pretty nice. Anyway, the whole point of this post is pictures.

We went to the Student Union Building (SUB) for coffee, and we were sitting there and Tamara asked me about changing wireless networks, since she wanted to try it out in her office. They supposedly have a wireless network set up in Elliot. Anyway, we get it out and start it up, and change the location to automatic, and it finds a wifi network with the SSID "SMC". That's the default for SMC's wireless routers. Hmmm. Se we connect to that. Tamara checked her email.

Since we have an old SMC router, non wireless, at home, I knew how SMC routers were configured. I was able to get into the router and could have changed the password and otherwise messed with it, but I didn't.

I suspect that it was probably the nearby computer store that had the access point running. It could be fun to map out the open AP's around here. But probably not worth the time to really try, except for being somewhere and trying out of curiousity.

Apparently this movie has been receiving a lot of critical acclaim lately, but probably just because it uses the trendy disordered story line tactic. That worked really well for the English Patient, where the guy was dying and telling this nurse the story of his love affair with a married woman, and it worked really well for Memento, where the guy has no short term memory and the story is told in reverse. In both cases there was some reason for the disjointedness that could be tied into the story, but this movie seems to use it just as the device of the week.

To be sure, it keeps the audience guessing about exactly what is going on, which is entertaining in a way, but I found myself asking why they were doing this and when they were going to get over it and straighten things out. There was some really cleaver film making in this movie as well, like the way they hint about the accident; you don't actually see it, but some guy's reaction to it.

The whole 21 grams thing annoyed me too; it didn't have any relevance until the very end when one of the characters does a little monologue that could have been about just about anything. Tamara figured it was like, "oh my god, we need a title for this movie... well, I just snorted 21 grams of coke, so let's name it that." You lose 21 grams at the exact moment of your death? Sure, whatever.

Chinook is our new iBook. We like it a lot; Tamara is having great fun watching videos from Survivor and super-bowl commercials online. This is possible in Linux, but it's not as well integrated as it is in Mac OS X or in Windows.

On thing I really like about OS X is that there is no (or almost no) focus stealing. On Window is always bugs me that every new application that starts up steals the focus. On OS X, new applications come up behind windows that have focus. The use case is the when I first log in, I start my email client and my Jabber client, and I hate it when I'm typing my password into my email account and the Jabber client steals the keyboard focus. It's really annoying, so I'm really glad that OS X applications don't do that. I haven't noticed this on Linux, but I think the focus grabbing policy is pretty much a non-standard, and it's closer to Windows than OS X in this regard.

Since there is no point in having a wireless card and no WiFi access point, I went and got a wireless router. When Tamara came home and played with Chinook for the first time, she asked if we could get a wireless router. I told her to open Safari, which opened to the default page Apple set. "Click on the link about such and such" I said. It loaded. Then she asked, "Can we get a wireless router?"

I got the X11 stuff working, so we can ssh into remote machines and run applications as need. Some local X11 applications are also installed, such as EMACS. I used Apple's X11 implementation, but there was also the option of installing the one from Fink. All of the CERN libraries Tamara needs are in Fink, so she should be ok to do her work on it. I installed most of the stuff I'll be needing, except now that I think about it I think I forgot to install an MPI implementation.

I really need to sort out a way to share bookmarks more easily, even if I have to just write a little script to store them in a database on this server. It's a pain in the ass to remember having bookmarked something and then not be able to find it on one machine because you did it on another. Sharing other things like a calendar and an address book would also be nice. Webdav helps a bit, at least for some things.

Printing was a bit of a hassle. OS X uses CUPS (common UNIX printing system) under the hood, which is nice, because that's also what I use on the Linux machine my printer is connected to. Tamara's computer is also setup to use CUPS, and can connect to my computer to print things just fine. There didn't seem to be a way in the printer set up dialog to connect to a remote printer though, and I tried a bunch of things. I ended up just copying the configuration from Tamara's computer into /etc/cups/printers.conf. This isn't 100% kosher with OS X; it prints to the remote printer, but complains that the printer doesn't exist. I'll figure out how to fix it later I guess.

One last annoyance was the fact that the default browser isSafari. Safari is cool and all, but I'm a Mozilla fan (and I want to make it easy to share bookmarks with my Linux machines), so I installedFirefox on there, but I couldn't figure out how to make it my default browser. The HOW-TO's on the web are out of date for Panther is seems. Instead of being under the Internet preferences in the System Properties, the default browser option has been moved to the Safari preferences. Admittedly it's not buried or anything, it's on the first preferences page, but why the heck is it a SAFARI option??

Overall, we're very pleased with it. It is nice.

I started reading it, because I need yet another distraction from studying for my upcoming midterms. They have these cars that run on methane, which some call fartmobiles. The protagonist throws a brick on one from a great height, and it explodes, and out comes the slang for methanol in this world: assoline.

Well, I thought it was funny. Humph.

Also, crypto-Tourette's: generating random input to help seed a new key!

Cory Doctorow, author of Down and out in the magic kingdom and Eastern standard tribe, gave an interesting talk at an O'Reilly conference recently about ebooks. Mostly he talks about how ebooks are different from paper books and so on, and why he's released his work under creative commons licenses. Down and out was recently relicensed such that anyone can create derivative works of it, such as plays, fan fictions, and so on.

Anyway, I'm not doing it justice, but if you are interested in intellectual property and how/why/if it should be protected, then it's worth reading.

On a side note, I downloaded both Down and out and EST, and put them on Chinook (our new laptop). As Cory Points out, downloads of ebooks tend to be more like people browsing books in a book store, except without the risk of catching something nasty. It remains to be seen if I will actually get around to reading them.

Project Utopia is a project with an incrediably bad web page, but big goals. It looks to improve the intergration of the Linux desktop. There are some rpms for Fedora on there that look cool as far as I can tell from looking at the screenshots the developer has posted on his blog. However, my own installation of Fedora is unbelievably busted (it locks up whenever anything tries to access the sound devices, stupid VIA onboard audio!) that I have been unable to test it.

I came across a CBC site that showcases new music in a variety of genres by Canadian artists. I haven't had a chance to listen to any of the samples yet, but it could be interesting. Search by artist, location etc.

The site is www.newmusiccanada.com.

Played around with iCal and a few other OS X apps today when I should have been working on school work (there is a Mac at work I've been using). iCal can upload calendar files to a WebDAV server, so I set one up and put some calendars on it. Since I've been forgetting about meetings and getting myself double booked lately, perhaps using some calendaring software would be a good idea for me. Fortunately, Mozilla Calendar can load the files produced by iCal, and vice versa. GNOME-PIM can as well, and so can Evolution, but neither of those supports WebDAV at the moment.

The other cool thing I figured out today is that TextEdit, the OS X default text editor, had EMACS style key bindings. I kept hitting home to go to the start of the line, which actaully takes you to the start of the document, and tried ctrl+a just for the hell of it. I was really surprised that it worked, as does other things like ctrl+k and ctrl+e. More sophisticated things like meta+w and meta+b don't work though. Oh well.

Just have to get the OS X native version of EMACS installed. The X version would work too, except X is broken on this machine right now. And I don't have the permissions to fix it....

Tamara and I went down to our friendly campus computer store (educational discount, mmmmmm) today and ordered ourselves a shiny newiBook 14" 933 MHz. Hmmm, this is turning into a "please break into my house" post.... Anyway, we're super excited. Tamara said that she's like a little kid: "I want it right now!!!" Unfortunatly they only have two in stock, both of which are "spoken for", what ever that means (it means that we can't have one). I mean, why pay for an iBook (or put a downpayment on one) and leave it sitting in the computer store for days?

So we have to wait a few weeks for it to come in. Thanks to Ryan and Tayfun for suggesting the iBook, and Dave for getting me thinking about Mac's in the first place. If we could afford a TiBook, ahhh, but this will do. Actually, what I really want is one of these, but its a little out of my price range.

So we're soon to be a mixed Linux/Mac household. It's all UNIX in the end though right? Fink has most of the OpenSource software we will need, including all the CERN software Tamara uses, which I found kind of surprising.

Next time Tamara goes to CERN, she won't have to resort to hand-to-hand combat to get time on a computer. Apparently the place is bathed in a sweet 2.4 GHz WiFi glow though, so the Airport Extreme card will come in handy.

As for me, I'm excited about the Velocity Engine (a.k.a. AltiVec). Mmmm, vector processor. And it just so happens that my project changed. Now I'm doing finite difference time domain (FDTD) electromagnetics simulations, and I get to parallize some C code, and write a bunch more. I'm even close to getting an account on Minerva, UVic's supercomputer (#470 (2003) of top500, #167 in 2001), which I've wanted ever since I got here. So MPI there, but it would be fun to use AltiVec to do some of the calculations. FDTD is pretty straightforward to parallize, and I think could be done with a loosly coupled cluster (regular ethernet), so it would be cool to convince people to add thier G4 and G5 machines to a adhoc cluster for doing FDTD simulations. But I digress.

Like kids in a candy store!!

There was a big tuition protest today, which I avoided partly because I was already double booked (taking a lab and TA'ing a lab), but also because I'm not much of a protester. I did see it on the news though, and it seemed like the students are coming across as very me-me-me. Also, I'm not a big fan of the personal attacks on Gordon Campbell. Of course, since he is the leader of the government, he's the natural guy to blame, but such a simplistic attitude (that it's all his own personal fault) doesn't work very well.

"Because it's my right, I deserve it, how else are we going to survive in the world?" - protester on the news, approximately.

Well, I'm not sure what the constitution says about rights to education, but it probably doesn't go farther than basic (primary school) education. There's a lot of good social reasons to argue against increasing tuition to a point where only the upper class can afford to attend, but it pretty much comes down to depriving society of people who are able to contribute in some way. A kid off the farm may be able to go to University and become a business man, politician, lawyer, engineer, scientist, author, painter, etc. Everyone contributes in someway; helping people achieve a higher education can lead to people living up to their potential more than they might otherwise.

It's pretty hard to study engineering if you are also working as a waiter to pay the rent and tuition (I assume). Of course, just as there are lots of motivated people who want to learn and make a difference, there are also lots of people who want to go to school just to party and waste four (or six) years. So it's hard to say where the appropriate balance is for making people prove they're serious by sacrificing to learn, and not forcing people to sacrifice so much that it's either not worth it or that they have to drop out.

Of course there is the brain drain problem; why should the tax payer fund ~80% (from the news) of a student's education when they leave the country immediately after graduation? Insult to injury if they go somewhere where they can make more money because the government doesn't collect taxes to fund higher education to the same degree as is done here?

Can you blame someone for leaving for greener pastures though? Patriotism only goes so far, especially in Canada. You've got to take care of your family, and most probably aren't concerned with big picture issues.... what percentage of the population votes after all?

Anyway, rant over.