Digital Alterity

Dear My Space Users,

It is extremely rude to leech bandwidth from other people’s sites. The level of rudeness jumps by an order of magnitude when you’re ignorant enough to link directly to a wallpaper image thousands of pixels in size as a background image for your blog about how woeful high school is and how your mom will never understand you.

When you notice that for some reason the image isn’t appearing as the background of your profile, it’s probably because the Unix geek on the other side has blocked an entire domain of users from accessing said wallpaper—a domain that you happen to be a part of. Instead of the image you want, you’re getting a 404 error that claims that your file can’t be found. There’s really not a not a reason to sit there and refresh your page over and over in an attempt to metaphorically slap the damn thing and expect it to work. And honestly now, refreshing your obviously broken idea fifty times in the course of an hour is clearly obsessive behavior. It’s only a matter of time before you start washing your hands every five minutes and checking the lock on your front door ten times before bed.

As just one possible solution, you might consider downloading your own copy of the image and just using that for your blog. Crazy idea, I know, but it just might work.

With all due respect (which is to say none),
Rusty

Technorati Tags: The Internet, World-Wide Web, My Space

Nintendo and Opera are announcing that they’re going to ship a cartridge with a version of the Opera web browser, enabling DS owner (like your trusted narrator) to surf the web using the DS’s WiFi connection. I’m extremely excited about this possibility honestly.

Admittedly, being able to surf Slashdot or Fark on the go will be a cool application, but it only scratches the surface of the possibilities this opens. With properly designed web tools, you’ll be able to use your DS as a proper PDA. You’ll even be able to edit a wiki on the go. If this web browser cartridge can keep a locally saved web page, then you open the door for TiddlyWiki, and even the issue of having a WiFi connection becomes meaningless.

For years people have been telling us about how the web isn’t just a new technology. It’s a platform for development. This is the realization that Microsoft fought so hard to hide back in 1997. It’s the realization that the Mozilla Foundation and Google are using so effectively to their advantage. By giving the DS a web browser, they’ve opened the door for it to be pretty much anything else we want. If Opera DS has a Java interpreter, then we have even opened the door for emulation of older systems.

And that is why I’m extremely excited.

Technorati Tags: World-Wide Web, Nintendo Wi-Fi, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Opera

I have completely given up on all blogs and journal entries that don’t offer an RSS/XML feed. I don’t like having to constantly poll for new entries/articles.

Have they updated lately? No.
Have they updated lately? No.
Have they updated lately? No.

For over a year now, I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite as my RSS reader, and I’ve been thrilled with the time I’ve reclaimed just by not constantly refreshing the front page of Fark or Slashdot. If you’re on Bactroid.net, you have an RSS feed. If you’re on LiveJournal, you have an RSS feed. If you’re powered by Blogger or Moveable Type, you almost certainly have an RSS feed. Most blog software ensures that you do.

The downside to this has been that I almost never check User Status here at Bactroid.net. It doesn’t show up in your RSS feed, and I only visit the actual ChangeLog entry page when someone has posted an image.

Last night, while I was up and sick to my stomach, I started coding to keep my mind occupied, and I whipped up a generated RSS feed for each user’s status. You’ll find a convenient link to the feed just under your status queries in the sidebar immediately to the right.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net, RSS, XML

Earlier this week, I had a brief conversation with a co-worker that highlighted keenly the difference between the way most people in the world consume music and the way an obsessive consumes music. While answering the daily onslaught of admissions emails that came into our technical inbox, a co-worker dropped by to talk to me about a new Treo model and how his current Treo had just really clicked with the way that he works. At one point in the conversation, he said that he no longer saw a need for an iPod. I smiled and said that I rather liked having my entire music collection on my iPod.

“Yeah, but you could spend the money and get a two gig card for it.”
“I have over sixteen gigs of music. And don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people that downloads a ton of music either. I’ve got over four hundred CDs at home.”
“Yeah, but how many of those songs are songs that just came on the album you bought for just one or two songs.”

At this point, I knew that there was a great gulf fixed between us. This is not how I conceive of music, you see. I think in terms of entire albums as musical statements far more than I think of individual songs. Songs, for an obsessive, always have a context. I rarely if ever think of songs like “Straight Edge” or “Out of Step” as independent pieces. No, those songs are all Minor Threat songs on Complete Discography. I’m way more likely to want to listen the entire In Utero album than I am to listen to just one song off the record. Even my carefully crafted smart playlists are often just a jumping off point for what to listen to for the day. Today, I want to listen to Kiss and Moby. I heard both a Kiss song and a Moby song off of my Mix List while driving around with Allyson. I’ll probably listen to I Want to Score and Alive III at work tonight.

I tried to explain this integral part of my personality to my co-worker. I tried in three sentences to express the way that Best Before was an artifact of my life more than just a collection of data. I tried in three sentences to express the way that seemingly happy songs by Dinosaur Jr. or Weezer can bring actual tears to my eye. I tried to explain the way that listening to a Mountain Goats record is an emotional experience more than just some background music for your life.

“Have you at least ditched all those jewel cases to reclaim some space?”

No. No I haven’t. My CD towers are modern art. They are a sculpture that expresses where I’ve been, where I wanted to go, and where I ended up going instead. My life is listening to old David Bowie songs at three in the morning. My hopes are a They Might Be Giants congo line. My cynicism is a Crass cockney mind spew. My love is an early morning headphones audition of Smashing Pumpkins.

Technorati Tags: Music, Obsession

Over the past several days, I’ve become friends with a robot. After getting sick of the cat hair and dust that had started colonizing our apartment’s floors, I decided to buy a Roomba. I opted for the Roomba Red model since I really didn’t have a need for more than one virtual wall unit. With Amazon’s recent housewares discount offer, I only ended up paying $125 for the little vacuum. After a desperate four trips to the UPS distribution center to pick up the package and seven hours of overnight charging, I got up on Saturday ready to unleash my little robot maid.

If you’ve never seen Roomba work, you’ll inevitably sit and watch it through its whole first cleaning cycle. At first you’ll giggle at it’s seemingly nonsensical decisions. Then you’ll marvel as it learns the furniture placement in your room and starts just gliding effortlessly around corners. You’ll smile when it automatically decides to spot clean your heavy traffic areas. The first time it encounters cords or obstacles, you’ll swear that it’s going to be trapped even as it manuevers free without your assistance. Roomba is quirky. It’s the Heisenberg vacuum. Some areas of your floor will get vacuumed more than a dozen times. Others will only get vacuumed once or twice, but even after unleashing Roomba in several rooms, I have yet to find a surface that it didn’t run through at least once.

I bought Roomba because I’m lazy and the thought of letting a machine handle a task I hate while I worked on other projects sounded divine. I’ve been impressed by the fact that Roomba isn’t just a gimmick; it’s a solid little vacuum. Does it pick up dirt as efficiently as a big cannister vacuum? Not by a long shot. Roomba wins through attrition though. Over the course of about thirty minutes it vacuums until it has picked up all the dirt. It glides right under furniture to get the cat hair underneath that I simply wouldn’t move furniture to get. Roomba is the absolute king of pet hair. Every time I have emptied its little refuse bin, I have pulled out a clump of cat. I have never had an inexpensive vacuum pick up cat fur like this.

Roomba is an effective little hack to help me keep the floors clean by harnessing my love of tinkering and gadgets. I’m never going to vacuum more than once in a week, and vacuuming will always be a cringe task for me. I have no qualms whatsoever though with setting a little robot in the middle of a room and pressing a button every morning in a different room of the house. Roomba vacuums while I read my web comics, drink tea, and review my next action lists.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Shopping, Lifehacks, Roomba, Robots

Today at work, I spent over an hour doing hardcore math/programming/design with Dave, one of my favorite co-workers. It involved binary math and OR, AND, and NOR operations. We were throwing around 48-byte numbers around, using a database index structure that we made up to accommodate this. It was effing fun. I found myself wishing my job were more like this. I really do love doing this stuff. When it gets down to it, I love logic. I just get frustrated when end users or managers interfere with the process creating something by coming up with a less robust idea in an effort to ship something out the door yesterday. Often in our office, managers will arbitrarily change a constraint to make something easier (i.e. faster) to code. I hate this. I like elegant beautiful solutions. Not reality. I’m not a realist.

I periodically wonder whether I would do much better in an academic environment. The notion of research sounds pretty close to utopia for my skill sets and temperament. For various reasons, I’m flirting with the notion of going back to school for Comp Sci again. I shouldn’t have more than a handful of classes to qualify for a Master’s program at this point, and I sometimes dream about the paid galley slave/graduate assistant gig. Hard work? Sure. I don’t fear hard work though—not when I care about something.

The idea that Dave and I banged out will probably never make it into the real world, but it’s beautiful. It’s a mixture of high-level databases with machine-level logical operations. Heck, someone might point out that our design is over-engineered and there’s a much better way to do what we’re trying to do. That someone might even be either Dave or me. I’m still not convinced that DB2’s indexing won’t just beat the pants off of our operation, but I’m positive we’ve got it beat in terms of CPU time. The point for me is that it doesn’t matter to me if someone comes up with a better idea. I want them to come up with a better idea because I want the application to rock when it’s all said and done. That’s peer review the way it’s meant to operate, but this business major notion of shipping an inferior product now has zero appeal for me.

I’ve been doing the whole Getting Things Done thing for several months now, and I have accumulated quite the project list. Keep in mind that in GTD a “project” is nothing more than something that takes more than one next action to accomplish an envisioned goal. Today in my weekly review—which I really tend to do about every other day to keep rein on myself—I stopped to think about how disparate and strange my projects actually are. I include them here strictly for entertainment purposes.

Add comments to Bactroid.net
Keep up with soccer more
Schedule a weekend with the guys
Send out team leader notes for 2005-07-26
Make RAUF jobs run simultaneously
Automate backup system
Finish Knights of the Old Republic
Unclog the spare bathroom drain
Hook up video game systems
Learn French
Organize Magazines
Get new Gator 1 Card
Replace broken light bulbs
Put software registration codes into NV
Knit a sock for Jen
Move to new apartment
Knit a cozy for my camera
Knit alpaca sock
Create a DVD of family reunion for Allyson’s family
Add ping to ChangeLogs
Get office ready for new on-call rotation
Write article about Garden of Gethsemane
Add categories to ChangeLogs
Replace scheduling request form
Consider next place to live
Knit a baby blanket for the Consolo baby
Buy a new car
Hang thermometer
Set up computers in new apartment
Backup home directory on invoker
Sync phone to pick up new Address Book entries
Set up kitchen in new apartment
Unpack books
Redesign Digital Alterity to work like a typical blog

Keep in mind that all of these projects are currently active and have an associated next action on my “to do” list. See yourself or your project on my list? You can be assured that your particular project will get done. It’s in the pool of things I can do/move forward.

We Wants It, Precious

Sony has released a download video service in Japan for the PSP. Now I know better than to get my hopes up because I’m very prone to gadget utopianism and an I-want-a-pony attitude, but I can’t imagine how cool the possibilities are. If Sony could convince people to buy in to such a download video service, the possibilities would be enough to make me implant a PSP into my arm mark-of-the-beast style. All I ask of a video service is simple (and extremely unlikely). Allow me to:

1. Watch the shows I want at a reasonable price. (99 cents per show?) They could even charge me per view if they wanted as long as they kept the effing price down.

2. Download shows regardless of the market in which they originate. I should be able to download British sports programs or new Japanese anime regardless of my geographic location. It’s called globalization, boys. Get on board.

3. Allow me to download sports matches. Convince as many leagues as you possibly can to buy into this. If you can’t get the big boys like the English Premiership or the NBA to release their valuable properties, then let the free market take over. Smaller leagues like Japan’s J League or the Spanish ACB would be much easier to convince, and maybe once they started cornering a new market it would force the big leagues in.

Do this, and I will buy any manor of hardware to participate in such a service.

I have become somewhat enamored with Flickr. I initially heard about it by reading through 43 Folders, but I didn’t care enough to give it a look. On a whim, I started digging around the site on Friday before work, signed up for an account, downloaded a Flickr export plug-in for iPhoto, and convinced myself that I simply had to show this to Allyson. She was just as stricken with it as I was, and she went into a flurry of uploading images to her newly created profile. By Saturday morning, I had plunked down the cash for an upgrade to Flickr Pro for both Allyson and me. The uploading continued unabated.

At some point late on Friday night, I became convinced that to truly enjoy Flickr, Allyson needed her own digital camera. Since I’ve been wanting a new digital camera for a long time, I decided to shop around at Best Buy and see what they had. I knew that they had come down a bit since last year when I was looking for one and figured that I could score a five megapixel camera for a pretty reasonable price. After visiting Best Buy and researching online, I became convinced that the camera I wanted was the Canon PowerShot SD400 with an accompanying 512 MB Sandisk Ultra II (60x) SD card to go with it. Allyson talked with me about it and encouraged me to go ahead and get it before our trip to Boston coming up this week.

After a failed attempt to score one of the tiny digicams at Target this morning, I finally managed to get one from Best Buy along with said professional memory card before noon, and let me assure you that I absolutely love it. It takes pictures way quicker than my previous camera with higher resolution and quality. This picture convinced me that it handles color amazingly well even in questionable light. I’m pretty sure that it can even divide by zero with the right menu option enabled.

So expect to see great camera shots from both me and Allyson from now on. We’re packing flash, and we know how to use it.

I find comparison to be extremely beneficial to re-evaluating my own workflow. I love when someone on a blog talks about the applications they use to get through every day. Sometimes it teaches me about an application that I had either not heard of previously or to which I just hadn’t bothered to give more than a passing glance. Here then is the currently list of applications that I live in every day and whose absence would make my life much more difficult.

Apple Mail (2.0.1). I’ve been using Mail since about two weeks after buying my first iBook. Prior to using Mail, I had absolutely no use for graphical email clients and did all of my email using mutt over an SSH connection. Mail supports the secure connections that I care about. It simply checks my mail and gets the Hell out of my way. Since upgrading to Tiger, I’ve become an avid user of Smart Folders to manage emails that require follow-up. I just flag each message and then access all flagged messages with a single virtual folder without any concern over where the email is actually living at the moment I interact with it.

NetNewsWire. Simply put, if you aren’t using RSS feeds, you’re wasting your time. Instead of constantly polling for updates to the sites and blogs I care about, I rely on NNW to throw an interrupt. Imagine knowing just when new Fark articles are posted. Imagine accessing each article’s headline without having to wade through interstitial adverts. RSS fundamentally changes the way you interact with the web in much the same way that Tivo and other DVRs change the way you interact with television. NetNewsWire is the best feed reader that I’ve encountered thus far, but I’ll admit that I haven’t dug very deeply. It just works, and that’s good enough for me.

Microsoft Excel. I get a free copy of Microsoft Office through the terms of my campus licensing agreement, and I’ve made good use of Excel for keeping track of my weight and budgets. I also find it to be an indispensable tool for pre-development work. Do I understand my intended algorithm properly? Will it actually work across a range of data? Excel seems to be designed to handle test cases. While I could take or leave the other programs in the MS Office suite, Excel is truly worth the cost of admission. And, no, at least on the Mac, OpenOffice isn’t a viable replacement. OpenOffice doesn’t obey proper Mac keyboard shortcuts, and I’m not about to waste the years of reflex and motor memory that I’ve built up with other Mac apps.

tn3270X. My job is almost done inside of a mainframe TSO environment. tn3270X allows me to connect both CICS and TSO through SSL-secured connections. I can customize keys as I see fit, and the program is so lightweight that it is unavoidably zippy. The program does its single purpose job extremely well.

Quicksilver. I’m a late-comer to the Quicksilver party, but I’m nothing but enthusiastic about it after giving the application a spin for a week. As a Unix gearhead who used a console-only installation of FreeBSD for a year after college, I’m one of the keyboard’s biggest supporters. Quicksilver absolutely eliminates all of the headaches that I had with point-and-grunt interfaces. Ever wished you had something like graphical pipes? Ever wished that you could pull up any file anywhere on your computer just by typing? Heck, ever wished you could add songs to your iTunes Party Shuffle playlist just by typing the name of the song you’re looking for? Quicksilver learns. It molds itself to the way you want to interact with the computer, turning it into an extension of your own mind. I honestly can’t imagine someone using this tool for a week and not falling in love with it—doubly so if you’re a geek.

OmniOutliner. After being introduced to David Allen’s Getting Things Done through various members of the blogosphere, I went out nearly immediately, bought the book, and read it cover-to-cover in a matter of days. While designing my own personal implementation of GTD, I found an indispensable use for that copy of OmniOutliner that came included with my Powerbook. I maintain several different outlines for task/project management, but the three biggies are “@Next Actions”, “Project List”, and “Wishlist” (my version of Allen’s “Someday/Maybe”). Within each document I have fields that manage my various contexts. I use its ability to total hours to keep track of exactly how much time I’ve spent on each project. I abuse my ability to drag tasks between documents to manage moving next actions in each project onto my next actions list (or even moving projects from my Wishlist onto the Project List when I commit to getting them done). I could certainly do all of this with plain text (and might decide to in the future to ensure cross platform uniformity, but for now, OmniOutliner automates all of the parts I don’t care about and makes the whole process fun. Let me assure you that people having fun are way more productive.

iTunes. I’m nearly always listening to music at work using either my iPod or iTunes. I’ve hacked together an entire system for managing my songs that ensures that I’m always listening to tunes that I care about. If I get lonely and want to hear human voices, I just pull up the “Radio” portion of iTunes and listen to either standup comedy or soccer/football talk shows. If you had asked me five years ago if I would ever have an MP3 player that would replace WinAmp or XMMS, I would have flatly denied that it was even possible. Apple proved me wrong.

Vim. If there’s a fair amount of writing to be done, I will almost certainly fire up Vim. After several years of intense Unix hacking, the vi shortcuts are just sort of ingrained in my psyche. I can get far more editing done in Vim than I can in any other text editor. Recently, I’ve started managing lists of my mainframe jobs in a text file each evening. Using Vim, I just delete each line/job as it completes successfully. It makes postmortem cleanup a breeze. And don’t even get me started about coding and web work. Without Vim, my efficiency drops by at least 75% for such tasks.

Microsoft Entourage. Microsoft Exchange is a sad reality in my work life. Just like nearly every other office in the world, Exchange handles all of our calendaring and resource management. I’m not a big fan of the Entourage application in general, but it does the job and serves to segregate my work and personal email into two separate applications. It even allows me to tunnel all of my communication with Exchange over our SSL-enabled webmail server, saving me from signing in to a VPN when I’m away from the office and just need to check my email.

Notational Velocity. I first heard about this little program on Merlin Mann’s excellent 43 Folders blog. The first time you use Notational Velocity, you really have no idea what to do with it because the interface is really that simple. After putting in a few notes, however, it can quickly become a necessary companion for your brain. Imagine being able to dump whatever information you need to recall into individual notes that are instantly searchable with type-ahead finding. If I need to recall a bit of information these days, you can bet it’s going into NV. When a job is broken and I need just the right TSO mojo to get it running again, I’m glad for the several seconds NV saves me.

More Quicksilver Goodness

Just yesterday, I mentioned to Allyson that I really wished I could create a button in OS X’s Mail that would automatically move the selected message(s) to my Archive folder—much like GMail’s Archive button. Upon realizing that Mail had no such button to put on my toolbar, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I found an Applescript online that would move my selected messages and tinkered with it to make it do exactly what I wanted. Then I put it in my Script Menu, enabling me to run it from my menu bar at any time. Then I remembered that I’m already using Quicksilver to launch an Applescript of my own creation to activate my screen saver and lock my screen. After about thirty minutes of using QS to launch my Applescript, I remembered triggers and opted to set my new Archive Messages Applescript to a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl-A. Now, in Mail, I can Archive any selected message(s), just by hitting Ctrl-A. Beautiful!

Weight Loss Progress

I’m doing significantly better than last week. I’m already back up to nearly a kilogram of weight loss for this last week. This morning I weighed in at 118.4 kg, a total weight loss of 9 kg since I started back on May 4. Now admittedly my trendline is at 120.8 kg right now, but I still like the way the numbers are looking. I’m even more pleased that as of when I started again in earnest on May 4, I’ve not been above my trend line for any day. This means that my mass/weight is very much in steady decline. Each one of my daily values is further pulling the moving average trend line down. Hooray for me. Hooray for math. Here’s what my chart for this week looks like:

-0.93 kg/week with a shortfall of -1190 kcal/day.

Time for Personal Development and Fun

Yesterday in my moleskine, I did an exercise where I listed Things I Enjoy and Things I Don’t Enjoy along with the last time I did each thing. I noticed in looking back at the lists that nearly every one of the items on the “don’t-enjoy” list had a semi-scheduled frequency assigned to it. Though I don’t like doing it, the cat litter gets emptied and re-poured every week. I go exercising every morning. I initiate a call on my phone at least once per week. These things are forced to happen according to a fixed interval. The stuff I enjoy just gets fit in where it can. I have knit for like three hours in the past four months. This is unacceptable when I think about how much I love to knit. Internally, I’m a very well-rounded person, and this approach to my interests isn’t expressing that. I need to think a little more deeply about possible solutions, but the one that springs immediately to mind is that I need to move more of my “fun” projects off of my GTD wishlist and onto the list of active projects. Perhaps seeing “Knit such-and-such enjoyable thing” on my list right next to “Empty kitty litter” would encourage me to take time to do both. Allyson also recommended making my fun project public on Digital Alterity so that I would have some sort of accountability to the world as well. I think I may do that idea one better by publishing all of my GTD lists on the site. I just need to put my thinking cap on about that first.