Perl’s “natural language” emphasis and non-obvious locutions encourage developers to document their code. Many times I have put some hard work into a line or a block of code, and ended up writing in some comments as a part of the process.

Python code is nice and readable but often very poorly documented. “The code should speak for itself,” and while it is easier to read Python code sometimes a few human-language comments would save some time and annoyance.

Maintaining Python code is easier than maintaining Perl, but using Perl modules is often easier than using Python modules because Perl developers are kinda forced to explain their work.

One of the first things I had to accept about pydoc is it is almost universally worthless, and even good functional documentation will often omit the sort of useful examples that I am most likely to find quickly intuitive.

This is why I have transitioned so slowly. Python’s strengths breed a certain weakness just as Perl’s weaknesses breed a certain strength.

At this point, I would consider myself approaching bi-linguality, and pretty comfortable in either language. If I have a preference it would be for Python, because I am lazy about documentation and even maintaining my own code, it is a lot easier to figure out what I wrote in Python somewhat after the fact. But my fondness for Perl and its generally more approachable documentation stands, and I’m not about to dis what has served me so long and so well.

First off, if you ever hit an error, drop and re-create your MySQL database, or at least drop the tables, or things just get weirder.

Grab the data from SQLite:

python manage.py dumpdata > $APPNAME.json

The, update settings.py to connect to the MySQL database, and if you are really lucky:

python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py reset contenttypes
python manage.py loaddata $APPNAME

(Thank you, Carl Meyer!)

Now, here’s the cute things I ran into. I had originally built a model with a TextField primary key. This is fine by SQLite but when Django tries to create a BLOB field you get in trouble asking for it to be unique, never mind a primary key. Fortunately, it was easy enough for me to simply change it to a CharField, which will tell Django to use VARCHAR. (SQLite certainly didn’t mind.)

The other was that neither Django nor SQLite were enforcing field length limitations, so I would hit some errors when loaddata tried to bring in database entries that were too long. I worked around this by raising my length limitations. There was also some ugliness with a UTF-8 string, which I solved by creating the text object in question.

It is pretty nice: basically a refresh of Windows XP, with extra spit-and-polish. Zippier, too! It boots and shuts down faster than XP or Ubuntu, and manages OS updates without requiring my intervention and subsequently breaking things, like Ubuntu does. I was musing to my coworkers that if it had the following, I could switch from Linux:

1) A decent software packaging system.
2) Built-in Virtual Desktops.
3) Middle-button paste.

Boot/Shutdown Speed

I turn my computers off when I’m not using them. I like that Firefox will remember tab sessions. But waiting for an OS to boot is wasted time.

Despite recent improvements, Ubuntu still takes way too long to boot, and seemingly forever to shut down. Windows 7, by contrast, is pretty darn zippy. I like that!

Winner: Windows 7

System Updates

So, for the record, I’m thinking to turn off system updates on my Ubuntu environments, because they aren’t worth it and they keep breaking my stuff. I’ll just refresh twice a year when the new release comes out, therefor managing the pain of upgrades. Windows updates are more important, given the constant security threats. Fortunately, Windows does that for me without my noticing, save the stupid “I will forcibly reboot you in 5 minutes” thing that hasn’t hit me (yet?) on Windows 7.

Winner: Windows 7

Software Packaging

Windows seems to have made some improvements with software packaging, and I gotta say it is convenient to go to a web site, click on an installer, and a few minutes later have the application running. Of course, then there’s another icon on your desktop and the Yahoo! tool bar has been added to your web browser . . .

On Ubuntu, though, most of the time I go to a shell and type:

sudo aptitude install foo

And there I go!

Sometimes software isn’t available in the central repositories, but 9.10 has made adding some PPAs easier. And sometimes I go to a web site, click on a link to a .deb file, it downloads, the system asks for my password, and the software gets installed without leaving crappy toolbars in my environment. Victory!

Winner: Ubuntu

Virtual Desktops

Ubuntu’s Gnome interface would be nicer if I could drag windows to the side of the screen and they’d pop over to the next screen, like the fvwm2 pager. But, I’m pretty well content with Ubuntu’s virtual desktop ability.

You could probably install a decent hack on Windows 7 to get this, but really, virtual desktops and pagers should be built in.

Winner: Ubuntu

Command Line Environment

So, with Ubuntu I can fire off command shells with wild abandon and do what I need to do. (I’m a Unix system administrator, so I relate to computers mostly by typing commands and scripting.) Windows 7 has a new “PowerShell” feature that implements a few Unix commands. After half an hour of searching I discovered that you can get to the PowerShell by hitting Windows+R and then typing “powershell” — heck forbid we should put this in the start menu or make it available by searching for “shell” but okay . . .

With Ubuntu, I can highlight text by dragging and clicking my mouse. This is just like other environments, but instead of hitting control-C (or, ahem Open-Apple-C) to copy the highlighted text into your clipboard, and control-V (I mean, Command-V) to paste from your clipboard, with Unix, whatever you highlight goes straight to the clipboard, and you paste by tapping the middle mouse button.

That can be a little scary sometimes but once you get used to the convenience you really can’t go back to having to mouse and keyboard to cut and paste.

Once you figure out how to launch the PowerShell, you can not simply highlight text with the mouse. Seriously, WTF!? No, this is how you copy-and-paste stuff with PowerShell:

Hit Alt+Space to bring up the console menu, then type ‘E’ to bring up the ‘Edit’ menu and then ‘k’ to start copying or ‘P’ to paste the text in the clipboard to the console. In ‘copying’ mode, you just use the arrow keys while holding down the shift key to select text, and hit Enter to add the selection to the clipboard.

“Ah, hello, Microsoft? Yes, the 1980s called and they want their primitive user interface back. Thanks!”

Update: You can launch PowerShell is a window that supports text highlighting by dragging the mouse via Start > All Programs > Windows PowerShell > Windows PowerShell. It looks like you can copy highlighted text with control+C and paste with the right mouse button. (Getting closer, I guess!)

Winner: Ubuntu

Focus Follow Mouse

Down in the accessibility menu, there’s an option for “Activate a window by hovering over it with a mouse” . . . but checking that option doesn’t actually change the behavior . . .

. . . correction: it does. After some seconds it brings the window you are hovering over to front. No, I just want focus, not raise! Arrr! Ubuntu knows how to do this, with just a little checkbox.

Update: There are three ways to do this. The registry hack was my solution.

Winner: Ubuntu

Default Web Browser

I’ll give Internet Explorer some credit; I can type whatever crazy thing I want into the URL bar and the second it realizes I didn’t type a URL, it goes over to Bing. Nice!

But then the default behavior is to create new windows all over. Seriously: what is the point of tabbed browsing if you don’t put stuff in the tabs? The big fail though is that for whatever reason the WordPress HTML editor in Explorer keeps jumping up to the top of the text input window, which made working out this post a seriously annoying experience.

A quick install of Google Chrome and my web browsing experience not only interfaces well with WordPress and pops new windows into tabs, but I can type whatever crazy stuff I want into the URL bar and in a not-be-evil sort of way, it shunts me with due humility over to Bing. So, Chrome is my new default web browser for Windows 7. (And I’ll continue trying out Bing, even though I’m a Google fan-boy.)

Winner: Ubuntu

After making it home and grabbing a shower, I roamed in search of coffee. Alas, the Tea Lounge was pretty packed, so I wandered down to 5th Ave and ordered a hot chocolate from Ozzie’s. After making sure I was “to stay” they served me in a paper cup with a plastic cap, no whipped cream.

Yeah well, I wandered home and around 4:30pm started watching Nova on the TiVo, but fell asleep hard on the couch.

Monday, November 30

Booked my travel to California for next week. Mei is working night shifts this month but I was able to take her out for sushi this evening.

Tuesday, December 1

Last night I dreamed I was driving an old Beetle in California. Mei was with me and we were going to pick Brian up to take him to dinner. Brian still had long hair but the sides of his head had been buzzed clean.

Wednesday, December 2

Notes from Facebook:

I can only respect a Libertarian if they have the faith in their convictions to homestead in Somalia.

The Constitution enshrines the right to bear arms, in the interests of well-regulated militia. Police forces are a fairly recent innovation, often used in the service of tyranny, like standing armies. Somalia’s system of locally supported militias seems awfully close to a “strict interpretation” Libertarian ideal of limited government, with the burden of personal safety being placed upon the individual.

I walked down to the Tea Lounge for lunch: a giant salad and a pain au chocolat. One man beamed at a friend that the Senate was going to vote today, after setting aside 4 hours for debate. I knew what he was talking about. “You heard about DC,” his friend replied. Later I read a cartoon: why didn’t the Army notice Major Alawi’s erratic behavior? Because he wasn’t acting gay! I laughed out loud.

Thursday, December 3

Today I booked my holiday travel, and this time it is Amtrak all the way. Just over $200 round-trip, but this time my ride to Chicago will be via Washington, DC, where I will switch trains.

On Wednesday I had a small cup of coffee at the Tea Lounge. And a giant salad. That’s the only coffee I have had this week. Trying to “detox” a bit. Quite unintentionally, I haven’t eaten any meat either. A lot of oatmeal. I love oatmeal! Mei is working nights so everything just feels weird. It didn’t help that I managed to watch the six-hour “The Prisoner” mini-series this week as well. I thought it was really very good, and goes well with alcohol, but that means I am out of Scotch.

Tonight I ate a half pound of frozen veggies. Delicious enough but I’m a bit gassy, so it is just as well that Mei is at work.

If I were maintaining a Christmas list, I would add “HP 60 color and black-and-white printer cartridges.”

Friday, December 4

I spent the last of my cash on sandwiches, sodas, flowers, and some whiskey on the theory that Mei might like some tasty sammiches before she had to go to work. Alas, she is off Friday and Saturday night. Doh! We figured we could go see the Mr Fox movie, but ended up relaxing indoors instead. Despite the promised weather report, it did not snow in New York City.

I went to bed with a nasty headache. I rarely get headaches.

Saturday, December 5

I woke up with a scummy throat, and Mei was feeling worse all day. I took her out to Cheryl’s where there was a substantial wait, but it was a deliciously good experience nonetheless. She bought a chicken and stock on the way home and as she set to cooking I went and moved her car, dropping the old printer and scanner at the Goodwill, then scoring a Christmas tree off a friendly French screenwriter outside of the Rite Aid on Flatbush. Back home I sorted through digital photographs while playing “Blazing Saddles” and “Ghostbusters” off Netflix Instant on the TiVo, after which we enjoyed a soup dinner together.

I did not make it to the bicycle recycle store up in DUMBO . . . maybe during the week. I did some Christmas shopping online and built a spreadsheet to track my Christmas gift spending, on the theory that I’ll transfer a certain amount from Savings to cover it all.

What I could also use for Christmas: a wireless Ethernet doohickey for the TiVo HD.

Saturday, 21 November

On Friday I took Mei out to dinner, since we were going to not see each other for most of a week. We went to an Indian place up near the Kips Bay theater, where we then saw “Where the Wild Things Are”. I think the first time I saw that book I was impressed with its style, and so my Mom thought I liked the story and read it to me a bunch, but I always thought Max was kind of a spoiled brat. At the end of the movie I mumbled to Mei, “if my son pulls that crap he is not getting any chocolate cake.” When asked if he’d get any dinner, I responded that I wasn’t so sure. I wonder if the kid might have some blood sugar issues such that missing dinner may be a bad move.

Saturday morning, Mei was up early to go to work. I slept in a bit, and treated myself to brunch at Teddy’s, which served me two eggs, fried potatoes, Canadian bacon, rye toast, fruit salad, orange juice and coffee for $8.25. Now, Cheryl’s has some tastier food, so I’ll take Mei over there, but if it is just me, I stick with the cheaper, hearty meal.

I went home, washed the dishes and relaxed a bit, until around 1400 when I rode up to Penn Station to catch the 3:45 to Chicago. Now, a plane would have been faster and cheaper, but now that I live in New York, I can “afford” the relative luxury of a train ride home. The train was pretty full, and a guy named Don sat next to me. I got the modem working on my laptop and caught up somewhat on Internet reading. At Albany they took our engine off the train and shunted a series of cars from Boston onto the front. This was exciting to me, so I shot some dark, blurry video from the passenger area.

I treated myself to dinner in the dining car. Lamb shank, half a bottle of wine, dessert, coffee, and conversation with a cute college couple who were switching to the California Zephyr in Chicago, arriving in Emeryville on Tuesday to enjoy Thanksgiving in Santa Cruz. Robin the Film major and Miru the Art History major. They’re both minoring in Making a Living.

Despite ample legroom and a glass of Scotch from the Cafe car, I tossed and turned a great deal.

Sunday, November 22

After much tossing and turning at some point I blanked out for what must have been several hours, until they turned the lights on at 7am. I kept my eyes covered with my scarf for another hour or two, taking peeks out at as Indiana passed us in an early morning haze. After South Shore we set our watches back an hour, and our train pulled into Chicago about 15 minutes early.

Don had disappeared by morning. He found me on the platform at Union Station and explained that I had been tossing and turning so much he found a seat elsewhere. He said he wanted to afford me more room, but I think he also wanted some peace and quiet. I also got to bid Robin and Miru adieu, then went upstairs to be reunited with my family. We had brunch at a place called The Breakfast Club, and headed home.

I took a walk around the neighborhood, noting the really cheap house prices, the fat and friendly squirrels at Indian Boundary Park, and the friendly duck who approached the benches with what looked like a weird chewed gum wattle hanging from his chin. When he got closer I saw he was missing his lower beak, and that wattle was his tongue hanging limply down his throat. He looked otherwise healthy, and I like to think that people manage to stuff some food down his throat. My hunch is that he will not survive the winter.

After a dinner of Mom’s ham-and-potato casserole, at some point we were watching squirrel videos on the Internet, starting with this family classic.

Monday, November 23

For some reason my work laptop couldn’t join Mom’s wireless network, and after trying to fix it I only made things worse, so I upgraded Ubuntu to 9.10, and then fixed networking.

Following advice from Mei, I did some very light research on the physical rehabilitation benefits of the Nintendo Wii, and after talking with Gwen, went ahead and ordered a Nintendo Wii and a Nintendo Fit for Dad’s birthday. With any luck, he’ll find the video game system sufficiently engaging that it will improve his physical activity and range of motion.

In the evening we ordered a pizza from Gulliver’s and I found that Netflix had Wall-E available for instant viewing, which I showed Mom on her laptop. (Now that I have a DVR again, standard cable TV is just obnoxious.)

Tuesday, November 24

Dinner was $2 burger special at the sports bar near the house with Mom. I was supposed to go by Sue’s house to help repair chairs with glue, but forgot, so I invited Sue to join us for burgers, and she and Mom concluded over dinner that it would be easiest for everyone concerned if we just brought a few more chairs to Sue’s house.

Wednesday, November 25

At work I took a stab at converting my Django application from a SQLite backend to MySQL, but ran in to all sorts of trouble because in trying to reload the data, Django freaks out because Django’s internal metadata has changed between versions, and newer Django doesn’t want to deal with older Django’s data. So much for making things painless. Anyway, this will take more effort than I had hoped.

After work I shied away from the tuna casserole and discovered the leftover pizza I had promised Mei had in fact been consumed. She also scored an earlier flight so after picking her up at O’Hare, I had her order a pizza at Gulliver’s which I picked up on the way home. On the one hand, this was the late night before Thanksgiving and she would have been sated on our local leftovers. On the other hand, she was only going to be in town for the day and I wanted to indulge my girl in a Chicago pizza.

Thursday, November 26

Thanksgiving! Turkey at Sue’s house. As a bonus, Erik and Jeannie joined us with their one year old kid and Jeannie’s parents, who don’t speak much English. Of course, Chinese know how to feast just as well as Americans so they were very much at home. I was able to exchange a very few words in Mandarin, with Jeannie’s mother enthusiastically guiding my pronunciation.

Friday, November 27

Up at the butt crack of dawn to drive Mei back to the airport in Grandma’s car. She was hoping to try and catch an earlier flight just-in-case there might be delays. I dropped her off at O’Hare at 6am, then drove back home and hibernated. Mei called around noon to say that she had caught her scheduled flight, which arrived on-time in New York, and she would rest a few hours before work.

I took the bus down to join Erik and Jeannie at their place for lunch. Chinese-style noodles, followed by Jeannie’s inaugural experiment with home-made pizza, and then a dim-sum style dessert with puff pastry and ice cream. Fanciest home-made lunch I have had in some time. Along with Jeannie’s parents we were joined by Erik’s college friend. On the way back I saw a fire truck blocking Lincoln, and a body covered in a white cloth resting in the street. An ambulance came up and picked up body. I would guess a hit pedestrian, and only now do I wonder if they may in fact have been retrieving a corpse. At Paulina I managed to card in at the turnstile and leap through the closing doors: always a rush!

Dinner was Thanksgiving Part 2, featuring Janice and Dan and Dan’s new girlfriend. We played charades.

Saturday, November 28

Brunch at P&S with Mom, Grandma, and Jessica. I packed a container full of turkey, stuffing, and veggies that proved a delicious Greyhound meal. My “Third Thanksgiving” at a truck stop McDonalds amid other pilgrims. I also grabbed a small order of french fries.

Greyhound is more uncomfortable than I remember. All the same I slept better than I had on Amtrak. I figure my body had adjusted to “travel” mode over the week, the first night out of the usual comforts of my own bed being the hardest.

Sunday, November 29

At 2AM our coach arrived in Cleveland, and we all had to get off so the coach could be cleaned, but we could leave our stuff on and we eventually got to re-board before the other passengers joining us from Cleveland. This was not a joyful experience but at least the Cleveland station had some architectural style and orderliness to it that reassured us that the ugly chaos of Chicago is not the universal truth of Greyhound.

At around 2AM, there were about three bus loads of passengers boarding coaches for New York. We waited in a separate line as the throngs marched past, until our coach was ready and we were once again aboard. My new seat mate was a tall, thin, blond, bespectacled English major named Joe returning to NYU from Louisville, (lew-uh-ville) Kentucky. Nearby was a passenger from Chicago who, through strategic sprawl of his own corpulence and feigned sleep, had managed to secure two seats to himself thus far. But as the bus filled up and the Pretty Girl came aboard, he suddenly discovered that the seat next to his was astonishingly empty, and he gallantly offered it to her. Alas, the Pretty Girl had not just come into her beauty yesterday, so she managed to look past this offer to other seats that might be available to plain-looking folk. But at this point, the bus was pretty darn full, so she soon accepted the offered seat.

From Cleveland it was two rest stops until we hit Newark Penn Station, which was choked with poorly managed traffic. After some patient navigation were were finally en route to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and it was not much after noon that I was home, and grateful for a shower.

macro index Z '<tag-pattern>~f (cron\|nagios\|root)<enter><tag-prefix-cond><delete-message>'

Now if I hit shift-z, all the mail from cron, nagios, and root is marked deleted. If I’m feeling aggressive I can then hit x, which for me means “expunge” deleted messages. (I came from pine.)

You can download the large or 360dpi version from Flickr. Or you can download the InkScape SVG source file from ratchet.

I’m not 100% happy about it, and it is lacking the SamTrans buses I wanted to add. All the same, I’m rather proud. It is train-centric but features connecting bus routes. I managed to include the three levels of rail transit on Market St by consolidating each service into its trunk lines, which let me gloss over the whole KT thing. My original ambition was to populate it with all the landmarks you wouldn’t find on your regular tourist map, but I sort of moved out of town.

Alas, I like to think that modifying info on the map should be pretty easy for others to do. The SVG file contains multiple layers that can be turned on or off, modified, add a new layer . . . you could totally create your own map based on this, if you like . . .

In selecting the size of this map, I went for a square, because despite its free-wheeling ways, San Francisco is geographically quite square, and figured to make the map 15″ x 15″ . . . if one really wanted to one could slice it in fourths and print 7.5″+ on US Letter-sized paper and voila–your own map!

If anyone finds this map useful or hacks on it, please let me know! Enjoy!

-danny

Then I said to myself “I’m in Bangkok with a smart phone and its a Sidekick 2 when I know I own a G1, so like, am I dreaming?!” And so my unconscious was like shitshit, no look, it says Sidekick 4! Whoo! Shiny! Wouldn’t that make an awesome Android phone!? And I was like “damn, that rocks! When did we come up with this?”

I woke up.

(Thanks for the prompt, RJ.)

I shelved the project for a while when it came time to move to New York, but I have finally picked up again, due in part to inspiration from discovering this site, and hope to release an “open source” transit map soon.

Speaking of San Francisco, if anyone has a free guest room or couch this Tuesday and Wednesday evening, I would be happy to keep it warm for you! (I have been visiting monthly at my own expense.)

Some people wonder at the recent Achewood story arc, in which Todd, a substance-abusing squirrel, attempts to “piss up a rope” and thereby triggers his transportation into a text adventure game in which he and Kim Jong-il together flee North Korea to found the “PEOPLE’S KINGDOM OF ECSTASY AND WRATH!”

To quote a friend: “Man, Achewood, WHAT THE FUCK . . . I don’t know if [Chris Onstad] is ignorant or nuts.”

So, leveraging my International Baccalaureate high school education, I explained:

He is riffing on a Latin American literary convention known as “magical realism” popularized in the English canon by translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

An example of magical realism can be found in Marquez’ “One Hundred Years of Solitude” when the town of Macondo comes under an insomnia plague. At first, people don’t have to sleep, but then they realize they are losing their memories. So they start putting labels on things to remind them what what they are. And they put a big sign over the main road that says GOD EXISTS. In case one might forget.

In the context of magical realism, it is entirely reasonable that Todd should type with a stutter.

Many appreciate what he has to say, but then again, he is basically articulating what we all know, and plenty figure that maybe his writing is no longer fresh, and he is just cranking out articles in order to shill his warez:

“This might be a neat opportunity to use Scrum. Once a week, the team gets together, in person or virtually, and reviews the previous week’s work. Then they decide which features and tasks to do over the next week. FogBugz would work great for tracking this . . .”

My position is that most stuff we read is mediocre, and Joel at least writes well, and Joel wears his ulterior motives on his sleeve, so when he starts figuring FogBugz can cure what ails CS curricula, I just figure “and now a word from our sponsors” and my brain hits the fast-forward button.

I think Tom actually has the best reaction to the issue Joel brings up, in that he adds that different people have different learning methods:

We all know there are students that are “visual learners”, “audio learners” and “kinesthetic” learners.

We all know what? Okay, yeah, and “everyone” is talking about this, right? Anyway, Tom, like me, is a learning-by-doing kind of guy who didn’t always “get” the formal CS curriculum:

When I took my undergraduate class on software engineering methodology I felt it was useless because I couldn’t see the point of most of what I was being taught. Most of my programming had been done solo or on a small team. I could not take seriously the problems that were being “fixed” by the software methodologies discussed in our lectures. “Code size estimation? Bah! Impossible, so why even try!”

In my CS days, the bits I enjoyed most were the learning-by-doing: compiling my first C program, bending my mind around recursion and functional programming to complete assignments in MIT Scheme, implementing a virtual spanning tree, and coming up on my own with the idea of a finite-state automaton to parse NWS weather forecasts. (Okay, that wasn’t a CS assignment and I didn’t know how to talk to girls.)

The parts where I fell completely flat were the theoretical classes where we considered bizarre hypothetical problems that didn’t make sense, using Greek letters that didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality. One day my ECE roommate asked how, as a CS major, I would go about sorting one million integers. My response was “why would you want to sort one million integers?” Later I slept through multiple lectures where the best methods of sorting integers were discussed at length. I skimmed the slides so I know that Quicksort performs well and in-place, but that Bubble Sort may work better if your data is mostly sorted, so in my mind that just means that if anybody asks how you would sort one million integers, the correct answer is to ask some questions as to why they need to sort one million integers.

Uh, yeah. Anyway, what was I nattering on about? Joel’s schtick is that CS students aren’t taught to manage large, complex, “real world” projects with lots of moving pieces. CS mostly focuses on the “interesting 10%” like how you would sort a million integers and skips over the boring 90% of hard work like implementing the interface for the customer to provide their million integers and retrieve the results. And Mark Dennehy’s reaction was “of course we focus on the interesting ten percent: the other 90% is constantly changing and best learned on the job!”

But, addressing the “how do you tackle big projects” thing, I think Joel has a point. And his point isn’t new. The point is extra-curricular activity.

Whether you’re a visual learner or whatever, the biggest secret to learning things is to find the thing that you are studying interesting. The very best computer programmers are all fucking fascinated by the challenge of getting the computers to do things within given parameters. Computer programming is fun because when you get down to it, it is a lot like computer games: a person at the interface banging away until they get their dopamine fix by either beating the level boss or getting the damn thing to compile and spit out the correct result.

Well, that is for the learning-by-doing types. Some computer programmers get their jollies by trying to fathom a new and novel method of sorting one million integers. Whatever floats their boat, I guess.

Anyway, long story short, I’m thinking the learning-by-doing types tend to get a little queasy after a few CS theory classes and end up majoring in English in order to score a bachelors degree, but they keep tinkering with the computers along the way, and end up, like Tom and me, as systems administrators, figuring out the best way to keep 1,000 computers running in order to make it possible to sort billions of objects with map-reduce algorithms in constant time.

Oh yeah, and that I agree with Joel that motivated CS students ought to find non-class projects that they are passionate about, and thereby gain chances to collaborate with others on the sort of “real world” challenges that they are likely to face in their professional careers. Back at Illinois the ACM played a big role in this. I myself did some time apprenticing at NCSA and at an ISP, and the big win these days it would seem are the oodles of Open Source projects ready to put interested volunteers to work. And that’s why Google’s “Summer of Code” just sounds like a fantastically great idea.

Barack Obama stumps for his mayoral candidacy near Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn.

Here in New York City, there is a Democrat running a seemingly futile campaign against Mike Bloomberg. As far as I can tell the campaign platform is that Bloomberg is ambitious and power-hungry, with delusions of grandeur. Which, from what I can tell, must surely be a ringing indictment of character for the Mayor of Lake Woebegone, MN.

Anyway, His Holiness recently passed through town, bestowing upon Bloomberg’s Democrat opponent the ringing laurel of endorsement that his colleague was “in the house” . . . somewhere . . . they didn’t have time to meet . . . and then President Obama was off to New Jersey to stump hard for the governor there.

This morning the lamp posts in my black neighborhood are adorned with photographs of Barack Obama, who would surely be an awesome mayor . . . of Chicago.

Intelligence is the product of basic brainpower, passion, and education. The brain is like a car engine: whether you have a little two-stroke or a V-12 you still aren’t going to get anywhere without some passion fuel, and the going will be really tough without some nice, smooth educational asphalt to help guide you to where you want to go.

Also, to those endlessly debating nature-versus-nurture, the answer is usually “both” . . . you start with a certain genetic baseline, then a childhood you don’t have much control over, and you make of your life what you will. Some folks receive a terrible start in life and are going to have it hard whatever they do, but most people have something they can work with, and with the right sort of ambition, positive attitude, and tenacity, can achieve some sort of success in life.

Unfortunately, the binary offered by Ubuntu’s software distribution has audio disabled. I found a bug about that somewhere and added my two cents, then went and installed it manually. Then I had to reinstall it manually because the Ubuntu version had been bumped and the “newer” version replaced my audio-supporting version.

Step 1: Remove Existing xvidcap

sudo aptitude remove xvidcap

Step 2: Install XVidCap from SourceForge

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xvidcap/ — click “download now” and the rest is all point-and-click.

Step 3: Lock XVidCap Version

Ubuntu will be quietly bide its time until it can “upgrade” xvidcap to a version that doesn’t support Audio. Fortunately, you can tell it not to do that!

Open: System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager

Search for “xvidcap”

Select the package, go to the Package menu and select “Lock Version”

(From what I can tell, sudo aptitude hold won’t actually prevent xvidcap from being “upgraded.”)

1-7:45 djh@opshost ~> cat .ssh/config
StrictHostKeyChecking no
BatchMode yes
KeepAlive yes

That KeepAlive yes is more for my interactive sessions. but here’s the real mojo:

ssh -f user@server command

I can add an & if I like . . .