Sabayon Linux seems like an interesting distribution to try some day. Maybe.
Author: Rowan Rodrik (Page 12 of 27)
Rowan is mainly a writer. This blog here is a dumping ground for miscellaneous stuff that he just needs to get out of his head. He is way more passionate about the subjects he writes about on Sapiens Habitat: the connections between humans, each other, and to nature, including their human nature.
If you are dreaming of a holiday in the forests of Drenthe (the Netherlands), look no further than “De Schuilplaats”: a beautiful vacation home, around which Rowan maintains a magnificent ecological garden and a private heather field, brimming with biological diversity.
FlashMQ is a business that offers managed MQTT hosting and other services that Rowan co-founded with Jeroen and Wiebe.
Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore and M.E.J. Newman published a paper in Nature about the automatic extraction of hierarchical structure of networks: Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks. There’s a free PDF of the paper on Mark Newman’s personal website.
In the abstract the say that their results suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.
This is of interest of a pet project of mine that I haven’t spent much time on in recent years, but may again in the future.
I’m rummaging through my old bookmarks… More to come.
The 10th of October, 2009. This was the day that I committed social suicide. Now, I’m dead. I can’t begin to tell you how peaceful it has been since I died, but I will anyway: “It feels fucking great!”
Look. If you’re being honest, social networking sites are all about sex, about getting some. But, they won’t get you anything. They’ll just get you bored. In exchange they’ll suck up precious time that you could have spend socializing with actual friends. Fuck social networking sites!
I thoroughly hate LinkedIn. The whole concept is alien to me. It’s a big CV circle jerk, but without the nakedness. LinkedIn is what you get when you take the concept of “social” and remove the component of “fun”.
Deleting my account was fun, though, and it took only five steps.
MySpace
I’ve never actively used MySpace. My account was mostly a means of stopping annoying little Asians from repeatedly using my email address to register their accounts (and to get all their fucking notifications; I still get a lot of invites for Asian social networking sites because of a few of such incidents). Beyond that, MySpace has always been the social site I least liked of all—its ugly, confusing interface, its ugly URLs, the long, confusing pages, the ill-conceived, user-customized pages. What’s not ugly about the site? Did I mention that it’s ugly? Well, it’s confusing too. And a mess. Worst of all, it has that dodgy “we’re a soulless corporation but we caaaaaare about you (and we’re so sassy and fun)” thing going on… If that’s not bad enough, there’s another unsurmountable problem: the fucking name!
If you’re not a band, a fan, or a fucking retard, there’s simply no excuse to use MySpace. Okay, there could be one: it takes fucking ages to delete your account!
Hyves
Reaching the 85+ friends mark in Hyves was the drop which made me jump from the whole social web wagon. I don’t have 85 friends. I don’t want to have 85 friends! Whoever does, needs to get some fucking counseling. It’s not healthy to have 85 friends. And if they’re not friends, then don’t fucking call them so.
And the site’s design has always been horrible. Like MySpace it has these horrible user-controlled designs which make my eyes bleed. (Ok, I admit these could be disabled, but that doesn’t make it any “cuter”.) The site is flaky as hell, too. Every piece of the site breathes crappy implementation, crappy DB design, crappy testing and even crappy systems design. They should take a long hard look at Facebook and start to feel really ashamed. Hell, maybe they fixed everything now. Maybe the friend counters have gotten reliable (and I don’t mean the kind of reliable that is achieved by a daily cron job to recompute them), and maybe the whole rest of the interface has suddenly seized to suck, but I strongly doubt it.
Although, I’ve used Hyves the most of all these sites, I miss it the least. Of course, this is also due to attention-seeking types who just want to have some kind of hip, public interaction with me, while giving me the mistaken impression that there’s something intimate within reach. No, I can’t say that I miss most of my 85+ Hyves “friends”.
Removing my Hyves account wasn’t terribly difficult, although, like with MySpace, I did have to dig in the FAQ to find out how, which I consider another UI fail.
Facebook’s interface I’ve liked since day 1. It was modern, slick, fast and responsive. The design was clean and everything worked as expected. Also, everything I’ve read about it’s technical design is beautiful. I liked facebook.
Yet, all (most of) my friends where mostly on Hyves, because Hyves is the predominant social networking site in the Netherlands. Hyves sucks, and the websites aren’t interchangeable, because none of the big social networking sites are (at least were, when I quit) open; they were all walled gardens. If you want to hang out with friends in a garden, you have to subdue to the owner of said garden. This is exemplified by the fact Facebook, for all it’s technical glory, won’t even let you delete your account!
At least deactivating it only takes two steps and, admittedly, Facebook is the one account that I’m most likely to ever reopen again. 😕
Later, I found out that there’s a much better/easier way to delete some social networking accounts. It’s called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and, like I understood it, it actually “purges” your accounts by first deleting all your messages, scraps and other nonsense created with your account. Best, of all: the corporate drones behind Facebook are angry at the Suicide Machine. Sooo sad. 😈
I’m proud that the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine comes from the Netherlands. It sort of makes up for the crap creation that is Hyves.
Some things that every new web developer should know.
Through this article on A List Apart, I came across a new project called eCSStender, which aims to make it easier to implement and test new CSS features across different browsers using JavaScript. As a side effect it can also be used to avoid having to fork your CSS code if you want to use cutting edge CSS features that are not yet available in all browsers.
I wonder how this compares to IE7.js… Well, I know IE7.js has already saved me from at least some parts of the IE compatibility nightmare on two of my more recent web projects, so, for now, I’ll stay with what I know.
Because I used it successfully before, I decided to use scrAPI to scrape the entries from the old Aihato guestbook. After preprocessing the HTML a bit, I finally got beyond an endless debugging sessions (which cumulated in me discovering a whole collection of nested <html> tags, which forbad any type of sensible parsing of the page).
The scrAPI script calls a simple PHP script to add the extracted comment to the WordPress DB. The next step was copying the script to the development server (which has command-line PHP and the MySQL daemon running). Of course, the development server (which runs Debian Lenny) didn’t have the scrapi package installed. So, I thought I’d install the rubygems package and be done after gem install scrapi
.
It seemed to install just fine, but… it just won’t fucking work! Adding require 'rubygems'
to the script doesn’t work either.
This whole thing reminded of a similar occasion a while back when RubyGems kept fucking up everything until we discovered through Google that the version of RubyGems shipped with Debian simply couldn’t handle the whole dependency graph we had to deal with (or something). We had to grab a newer version from Debian backports to make the whole thing work. Another couple of hours wasted on a botched up package management system.
This time I’ve already wasted enough time. I’m ready to change my PHP guestbook comment import code to some XML-RPC hack instead so that I can run it on my laptop.
I don’t believe in system passwords if they’re not backup by some type of disk encryption. It’s simply too easy to circumvent by changing a few boot parameters or by inserting a good boot disk. For performance reasons, I’ve decided against using full-disk encryption for my laptop and even against encryption for my home folder. This makes typing in a password to login a mere annoyance. Admittedly, my laptop features a fingerprint reader, but at the time I couldn’t get it to work and it still requires me to type in my username, which I find just as superfluous. Also, fingerprints aren’t that secure either.
For ages now, I’ve just wanted to be automatically logged in and greeted by an X session when I boot, especially since my xdm died after some upgrade about a year ago or so ago. For how much time I spend with this machine, I’m amazed how long it takes me before deciding that logging in in the console and typing startx might be not such a good idea.
(It probably has everything to do with “conditionality”. I tell myself, for example, that before ditching xdm (which is one of the few X login managers which doesn’t support auto login), I first need to get it to work again to make a screenshot of my “cute” configuration. Can’t kill my darlings; never could.)
So fuck all that. I’m too lazy to resurrect my darling, no matter how cute, so I took a look at this and added to following to /etc/conf.d/local.start:
# Start X as user if tty7 is free ! fuser /dev/tty7 >& /dev/null; su - bigsmoke -l -c 'exec startx -- vt7 >& ~/.xsession-errors' &
Done. Maybe I’ll also decide to make all my console sessions auto-login, if I can be arsed, that is.
hjkl for world domination.
Two weeks ago, I acquired a shiny “new” second-hand Nokia N79, because my good old Nokia 1600 (which has served me well for over three years) died as a result of drowning in my leaky tent during a high-school hiking trip in the Czech republic.
So far, I’m really fond of the phone. 🙂 It fills in the gadget gap that was left by my desire for a decent portable music player. After choosing an appropriate S60 app, it might even satisfy my decadent desire for a Bluetooth remote to control my laptop (when viewing a movie, for example).
FM transmitter
One of the things that I’m really happy with is the built-in FM transmitter. I’ve been wanting one of those so that I don’t have to much about with cables when I want to play media through some stereo system. Especially when I was thinking of buying a portable music player, I also wanted to be able to route it through any car radio. Now I can. I can even pick any frequency I want! I am surprised.
IMAP
Another neat feature which I find myself using a lot is the IMAP support. Now, I don’t have to boot my laptop just to find out if I have new mail and to write simple replies or delete some of the crap that I get sent daily. Setting up Gmail access was easy thanks to Gmail’s IMAP support. Yesterday, after teaching kung fu with a friend, on my way to relax at the lake, I found myself stopping my bicycle at a few unsecured WiFi networks to quickly compose a mail and check for responses so that I’d be able to better relax.
Maps
The Nokia-supplied Maps application is fun, but I don’t think I’ll a be a big user of it, since I’d sincerely like to learn to navigate without the aid of high-tech devices. Nevertheless, I’ve downloaded all map data for The Netherlands so that I don’t have to initiate an expensive Internet connection when I’m lost. Symbian Underground has a list of direct links to all the downloadable map files on Nokia’s own servers.
Syncing stuff
This brings me to the subject of syncing data to and from the phone. Of course, the phone has USB Mass Storage support, which makes it easy to add and remove music. Just an hour ago, I also added NL maps this way. However, this mode only gives you access to the installed memory card (which the phone supports up untill 8GB). To access other stuff, you need to do some Bluetooth magic, which I haven’t tried yet.
Normally, when using Windows, you’d download Nokia PC Suite to be able to backup and sync pretty much everything on the phone. I don’t have Windows, so for some tasks I either have to wait until PC Suite’s successor, Nokia OVI Suite, becomes available for Linux or I have to find or create some alternatives for some of PC Suite’s functionality.
Mail for Exchange
Google supports Microsoft’s Exchange protocol to sync Gmail contacts, Google calendar data and mail with mobile devices. For phones which don’t already support this protocol, such as my N79, Nokia supplies the Mail for Exchange application. I got this application set up successfully and synced my calendar successfully, but I can’t start the application a second time. I simply can’t open it. Maybe I should report a bug, but probably it’ll be easier to find another sync solution or to just give up Google Calender and settle for a backup only solution. For my contacts, I’ll also be satisfied when I find a backup-only solution. And my email needs are already well served by the device’s built in IMAP support.
Other stuff
I’ve never really wanted a camera, but still I’m glad that I have one now so I can look at movies of my baby nephew being bathed or make a quick photograph when I need it. Heck, it’s a fun toy!
Besides Mail for Exchange, the only app I’ve installed so far is Skype, which is fun to use on my phone although I find the quality horrible compared to my laptop (and I wasn’t a fan of Skype’s quality to begin with).
Did I mention that browsing for porn pics using Google’s mobile image search is strangely satisfying?:oops:
I’m collaborating with YTEC on a new website for Aihato. I’ve picked WordPress to do most of the heavy lifting for this project. So far, I’ve spent most of my time on this project to get a good development environment in working order, with WordPress living in its own directory and some deployment recipes managed from a Makefile.
Now that I’m well-settled in the YTEC office with everything set-up and running, I hope to make some actual progress on this project next time that I’m here. 😉
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