The banjo came from Africa. White people began playing banjo in the 19th century in Minstrel Shows. As white people in black face got better at playing the banjo, black people lost interest.
. . .
Mei was called in to substitute at the hospital. Left without any better ideas of how to spend my day I hopped on the train, transferring to the 7 at Times Square, figuring that I might as well cover the IRT system. Once it hit Queens, a borough I haven’t visited since moving to New York except to fly through the airports, we rode on elevated tracks. At one point the elevated tracks were double-stacked, which thrilled me and I thought “only in New York . . .”
I hopped off at Woodside 61st St to admire the LIRR overpass. I then rode two more stops up to 74th St Broadway thinking I might transfer to the trains running out to Jamaica, then take some complicated set of transfers back, but first I had to explore the neighborhood, which began Indian, everyone offering a $12 lunch buffet, though I wasn’t hungry. A bit further and I saw some stoop sales and a sign advertizing a Flea Market, but what I found were many people milling around a board with lots of spread sheets posted, each spreadsheet headed by “Mesa” and a number. At first I figured this was table assignments for the flea market, or maybe a silent auction. I got closer and saw that the spreadsheets were tallying rows of numbers in the tens of thousands. I am used to wandering in foreign countries where I don’t speak enough to ask intelligent questions so my natural instinct was to wonder to myself and continue my wander.
People were standing around filling out forms on clipboards. Others carried red, yellow and blue flags. “Venezuela?” I wondered. No, Venezuela has stars. Finally campaign posters and small groups chanting for their candidate. I caught the name Columbia, and at last understood that people were campaigning for mail-in ballots.
I wandered back around, passing a lady who was selling meat kabobs from a grill set on a grocery cart beneath the elevated tracks. I was tempted, because the last street vendor of this nature I had seen was nearly a decade ago, in Bangkok. I was glad that New York had enough people from developing countries that someone had balls enough to (I assume) flout the authorities and sell some proper street food.
Back at the station I reconsidered my plan: the other trains ran underground, how far I did not now. There were also multiple service advisories: shuttle buses to Jamaica? Nah, I took the 7 to the end of the line: Flushing.
The Flushing station gave very much the impression of a transit outpost: plenty of people ride to the end of the line, and pass past a dozen signs indicating which buses connect nearby, then they go stand in long lines on the street to head, I assume, home. Also, everyone is Chinese. And many signs are posted in Chinese, without translation.
I wandered in the commercial bubble surrounding Flushing Main St, wandering into “malls” of little stalls. I didn’t buy anything, but I recalled that Mei’s parents had declared San Francisco Chinatown superior to the one in Manhattan, which was too cheesy. There was little dairy for sale in Flushing: just Chinese people selling goods and services to Chinese people. There was no self-consciousness of outsiders. I saw a man hold a little boy over a street curb so he could urinate in the gutter, as I thought to myself “there must be a toilet he could use.” In the basement level of one mall I caught sight of an ancient man sitting in a stall impassively watching a porno. The video screen was angled away from me but I could see what was on the screen. I smiled: people were being human and that was all there was to say.
A while back I outfitted my personal workstation with 4GB of RAM. That’s plenty of memory and since disk space was tight I didn’t want to waste any on a swap partition, and I lived happily without swap for a very long time until I began using more virtualization. (I freed up space on my physical desk top by migrating my work environment from a laptop to a virtual machine on my personal workstation.)
I wrote a script to add a “temporary” swap file on demand but what I wanted was a swap file at boot. That actually turns out to be pretty simple. In this case, I just prepare the swap file:
I recently migrated this web site to a virtual server at the Rackspace Cloud. I started with the cheapest, 256M slice, but after hitting some performance issues really quickly, I figured that the extra $10/month to grow the slice to 512M was worthwhile. Even so, I don’t think MySQL and Apache are tuned, out-of-the-box, for such “small” systems.
I am running WordPress, a PHP application, on Apache and MySQL, running on CentOS. I am using Munin to track the system health. Since MySQL performance tuning can be extremely complicated I have focussed my initial efforts on Apache.
So, the memory graph would ideally top out at 512MB, but in practice, the system and programs allocate excess memory they rarely touch, and that gets paged out to swap. It is when the swap activity gets high that system performance goes to heck. A spike in system load is a good symptom of possible performance issues.
When things went bad on Wednesday, I tuned Apache down somewhat from the defaults and then enabled the Apache status page, and told Munin to go ahead and graph that. I am new to Munin, but Slicehost has some excellent articles on installing and configuring it in my environment.
This morning Munin sent me e-mail that it was having trouble collecting data, so I took a look, and reset performance values for Apache based on the above graph:
Hopefully, this will hold. I would love to audit the system memory use in greater detail to allow Apache some greater flexibility, but in the interests of achieving a stable system quickly, this will hopefully prove to be a good strategy.
So, occasionally someone asks “well, what will we replace Facebook with?” We don’t really need to replace it right away, but there are some NYU kids who figure it would be a fun project to build a distributed social network where you get your own little “seed” site on a server somewhere, and you can connect with your friends, determining what you intend to share with whom. It sounds totally doable, though who knows if they’ll actually manage to execute and gain traction.
They asked the Internet for $10,000 via KickStarter. So far they have been pledged $174,915. $25 of that is mine. I guess they won’t fail for lack of interest or money. Go go underdogs! :)
Oh, and if you’ve been tempted to ditch Facebook, but didn’t want to be the only crazy dweeb out there, you can join just over 6,000 other folks planning to quit on May 31: http://www.quitfacebookday.com/
Yes, I still use mutt. The killer feature it has over Gmail is that I can go through my old messages in forward-chronological order. That and I don’t have to hack my web browsers to display plain text messages in a monospace font. But, in order to use mutt with all the latest and greatest patches, I had to apt-get install mutt-patched.
It is convenient that they maintain a package with all the patches. Unfortunately, when I fired up mutt it had this ugly left-pane, like it wanted to be Outlook or something? So, I did a little research and tracked the sidebar to its source:
Unfortunately, though, mutt lacks an important feature that most email clients do have: a folder list that allows you to see all mail folders you have and how many (new) emails they each contain.
One person’s important feature is another person’s nuisance, but further down the page I found the config to turn the thing off:
On my way back from the Post Office around 11:30 I passed a big police tape scene on Franklin Ave at Lincoln Pl. I saw a small river of blood on the sidewalk next to a dropped shopping bag. A neighbor tells me that he heard five shots and a passing fire truck stopped and had police on the scene in two minutes. I assume the victim is in an ER somewhere and I hope he’ll be okay. The neighbor says that is one of the places where people from outside of the neighborhood like to hang around, and he always walks past there quickly, because although they aren’t aiming at him, they don’t have weapons training and he doesn’t like to be around poorly-aimed bullets.
Update, via Save Brooklyn Now!: At around 10:56am, a 34 year old black male was shot in the head, pronounced Dead on Arrival at Kings County Hospital.
Of course, Google wouldn’t be spotting a trend for this search item if you didn’t have to use Google to figure out how to delete your Facebook account. CNN credits Danny Sullivan for noting this trend.
To a discussion as to preferred password manager solutions, I added the following:
I developed a simple algorithm I use to generate passwords using my brain. I have changed this algorithm a little a few times. At the most basic level, something like this would be you like to use the password “frog” . . . but then add the first two letters of the web site name: Yahoo -> frogya, Google -> froggo.
The benefits of this “password manager” are that as long as your brain functions appropriately, you will always have platform-independent access to your passwords. If any given password is compromised it is non-obvious to an attacker what your other passwords are.
The main drawback to this password manager is that different password policies are mutually exclusive: one site requires a special character, another site prohibits special characters.
I use a different algorithm for more complex passwords for important stuff like ssh keys and unix logins.
I love Metric, but I think for human purposes, Fahrenheit is more useful, and actually closer to the convenience of metric:
Celsius:
0: water freezes
100: water boils
Fahrenheit:
0: colder than Denmark
100: warmer than human blood
If I want to boil and freeze water: hell yeah, Celsius. But if I want to know how hot or cold it is outside, explain it to me in terms I can understand!
After some transient disk issues I was stuck with an Ubuntu VMWare image that was brain dead. I figured I would give the install CD a chance to fix but the Ubuntu install CD doesn’t have a fix-it option. (Really?!) Since the issue was somewhere in how Gnome and X were configured, I launched an xterm session and managed this command:
You remember how everyone was on Friendster? And then, Friendster was too slow, and everyone lost interest?
Then we were all on Orkut? But it turned out the guy just stole the code from somewhere else and it got boring pretty quickly, too.
Then there was Tribe.net, but I never signed up for that.
Then there was MySpace, and suddenly you could pretty much do anything with your profile, hook in doo-dads and gewgaws and blinky backgrounds? Well, I dipped my toes in that trainwreck but yeah . . . old news.
And then Facebook came along, which only stole the idea from someone else, and not the actual code. It was fast and scaleable like Orkut, and it had applications and stuff so you could have the flexibility of MySpace but within a controlled environment. Boy that thing took off!! But, Facebook was still missing a critical ingredient: you can not trust them.
So, I figured I would get ahead of the curve on this one. They keep revising their rules and re-jiggering things to make it harder and harder for people to keep their information private. Eventually enough people are going to be spooked at that. I tried to re-re-re-re-review my privacy options and look at taking out most of my profile information but they made it enough of a pain in the ass. Eventually I used Google to find the option where you can just delete your account, which, in true Facebook style, takes two weeks. Anyway, in another week and a half, I will have vanished.
If I change my mind someday I can sign up all over again. Despite the hooplah, though, I think there is a very good chance that lots of folks will move on in the near future. Either some kind of open-standard, or maybe a comparable platform run by a company that regards trustworthiness as a central ethic. (Speaking of which, you can stalk me on Google.)
I have long legs and long arms and I love to look out the window when I fly. Whenever possible, I check the seat map for an upcoming flight to jockey for the best place to sit. Instead of printing my boarding pass the night before I will wait until I am at the airport and hit a self-service kiosk and check again for a good seat. I use seatguru.com to help assess the quality of various bulkhead and exit row seats.
Sometimes I fly Southwest Airlines, which doesn’t assign seats, so I will try to print my boarding pass as early as possible (24 hours before your first flight segment) so that I can board early and homefully score an exit row. When I can not board early or if the exit rows are taken, I may go for the bulkhead row. No tray tables but plenty of leg room, and you get off the plane quickly: best “middle seat” there is!
Unfortunately, a lot of people think it is “clever” to store stuff in the forward overhead bins, where I have to stash my bag when I am sitting in the front row. So, I drop my coat or my hat on my new seat and head back several rows to stow my bag. The danger here is that when we get off the plane I have to wait until the aisle is clear to swim upstream to fetch my bag. So, sometime before landing I sneak back, fetch my bag, and stash it safely beneath my knees. As we get near landing time, I drape my jacket over my knees and tuck my hands in to this “blanket” allowing the flight attendants to check the cabin without noticing my “un-stowed” bag. Once the plane lands I am one of the first on my way!
Recently I secured a bulkhead window seat in the same row as a gentleman sitting in the aisle seat, and some of the middle seat. I figured he’s a good guy to share a row with because people prefer not to sit wedged in next to a fat guy. Better yet, there was a card in the middle seat saying the seat was “reserved” . . . a reserved seat on Southwest?
The man explained that Southwest has an excellent policy for people of his stature. When he travels, he purchases two seats: one for Tim and another for Timothy. When he gets to the airport they exchange one of the tickets for a “reserved” placard and then let him pre-board. He boards the plane first, takes his bulkhead seat, lifts the armrest, places the “reserved seat” sign in the middle seat, then stretches his legs and watches everyone board. The best part is that unless the plane sells out, Southwest then refunds him the cost of the second seat! “Its as close to ‘first class’ as you can get, and even if I pay double its still cheaper than first class on another airline.”
I like the elegance and fairness of the solution: there’s no slippery slope of aspiring “fatties” trying to claim extra room from the airline’s profit margin, and the airline isn’t extorting extra revenue to accommodate oversize folk; A “reasonable accomodation” is achieved! For me, the bonus is having a mostly-empty middle seat to compensate for the missing tray table.
It reminded me of travelling with my sweetheart. If we sit together I can borrow extra room from her and she can snuggle against me. “Yeah, my wife is all of 125 lbs.” “Ha! My girlfriend is 4’11.” “Funny how that works out.” “Yup. I figure the kids will come out average.”
