Walking down the hall at work, I hear an engineer lament.
“Click to focus? Arr!!”
And of course, I shout:
“Focus follows mouse!!”
I hear, beyond cubicle walls, a chorus of agreement.
Back at my desk, which I have recently switched from XP to Ubuntu, I note that I’m clicking to focus. Fortunately, I spent the morning tweaking mutt, which I started using again, after many years, because it deletes e-mail faster than Thunderbird does.
I like this place.
I hear muffled discussions of multiple desktops. I think I’ll figure out how to FocusFollowsMouse in this Gnome stuff real quick before I return my attention to work-work.
ObSolution: In Ubuntu / Gnome, go to System > Preferences > Windows and enable “Select windows when the mouse moves over them”
I am a big fan of Google and their myriad products, but sometimes they get on my nerves. I like having Yahoo! as an alternative. I love Flickr. I would hate to see Yahoo! swallowed up my Microsoft, leaving the biggest players on the Internet being a choice between the Google and the Microsoft.
I prefer an online world that isn’t simply black and white, but which also has a weird shade of purple to it.
I have been less the NPR / Politics junkie than I have in the past. And in the February 5 primary, it doesn’t take much thought for a Democrat from Chicago to prefer Barack Obama. I have already had the privilege of voting for him twice to get him in to the Senate. I just really like the guy: he is eloquent and he seems like and honest, good-hearted, hard-working guy who can pull things off.
But I don’t know much for him on the substance, so I have kept kind of quiet on the matter.
I want, for once, someone I can vote for not because I dislike the other candidate, but because I’m proud of mine. Obama is the real thing.
Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy (to take an example close to home for xkcd) others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons (under which xkcd is published) and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obama’s commitment to open systems — for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizens’ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, it’s corrupt to the core. Through these excellent and long-overdue measures, Obama is working to fight this corruption.
Obama stands against bad governing not only in his support of specific practices like open data standards and basic network neutrality, but in his work against corruption from day one. He’s sponsored legislation to restrict gifts to Congress by industry representatives (which also carried a whole slew of anti-corruption measures that were a breath of fresh air). He’s fought against vote fraud. He’s been pushing for election and lobbying reform from the start, and in his campaign he’s refused to take lobbyist money.
[…]
The Democratic party has a long, painful history of nominating unlikable, uncharismatic ‘default’ establishment candidates who are eventually swatted aside by the voters. Nominating Clinton would be continuing that tradition at the very time when we have a chance to do so much better. Let’s not let that chance slip by.
I like Hillary Clinton, as well. Don’t know much about her, but the thing is we have had “Clinton” or “Bush” in the White House for two decades now, and it is time to do something different. I liked the Clinton years, but they could have been . . . more inspired.
I can’t say that the system won’t grind Barack down in his first year in office, but you gotta dream, right? And Barack Obama is the candidate who inspires me most.
I have been playing with Google Trends, which will be happy to generate a pretty graph of keyword frequency over time. A rough gauge to the relative popularity of various things. This evening, I was riffing off a post from the Royal Pingdom, regarding the relative popularity of Ubuntu and Vista, among other things.
“If you just want equipment you’re not ready,†Mr. Egami said in an interview. But, he added, James Freeman, the owner of the cafe, is different: “He’s invested time. He’s invested interest. He is ready.â€
“Siphon coffee is very delicate,†[James Freeman] said. “It’s sweeter and juicier, and the flavors change as the temperature changes. Sometimes it has a texture so light it’s almost moussey.â€
I have long preferred brewed coffee to espresso. That is a combination of my proletarian roots and my experience as a barista: I have a strong sense of what I want from a dry cappuccino or dry cafe-au-lait, but this sense is not easily found in a cafe, and I lack the technology to do it myself, so let us keep it simple, right?
(In Japan, siphon coffee masters carve their own paddles to fit the shape of their palms.)
I was startled by this YouTube video, where we discover that Bill Gates can make fun of himself. Or, at least, his people can assemble a video where Bill Gates makes fun of himself. Good for Bill! I was then reassured at the consistency of the universe, when it was revealed that Bill really can’t make fun of himself without at least a dozen star cameos to reassure us that it is not so much that he is poking fun at himself, but that he is “acting”.
It is telling that Al Gore has the funniest line.
I hope Bill’s foundation does much good in the world. I almost feel sorry for Microsoft that after all the effort, Vista has proven to be a cold turkey. For what its worth, from a UI and performance perspective, I prefer Windows XP to Mac OS X. Though I’m not sure that this is praise for Microsoft as much as it is an aversion to the Smug Cult of Apple.
(Yes, I am a contrarian. People hate contrarians. Especially Mac people, who think they have the contrarian cred: the last thing a contrarian wants to encounter is a contradicting contrarian!)
Friday afternoon. Sick two days this week, but got important stuff done today in preparation for a little work on Saturday. Drinking a beer. At work. Before heading home. It’s Friday!
And then this comes across the work IRC channel:
Awesome!
For the record, I am these days working at a once-startup that has already sold out to a larger company. Decent hours, good pay, and an awesome team. No complaints here!
I acquired a scanner at work, for $25, minus the $1 I still owe a co-worker. Now, I too may dream of being about .01% as awesome as XKCD!
I have this season’s flu, or something. It is rare for me and rather nasty. Hopefully, after two days sleeping in and getting a little work done from home, tomorrow I can make it in to the office.
So, a quick briefer: the girlfriend recently bought a new car, and wanted to give her old car to her brother, who lives in New York. Instead of merely shipping it, I suggested that driving it across the continent is indeed a fine undertaking, and this is what we did for Thanksgiving week, taking a southern route through Barstow, CA to Chinle, AZ to Durango, CO, and stopping to see my relatives in Pueblo, CO, her relatives in West Des Moines, IA, Thanksgiving with my folks in Chicago, and on East to spend some time with her family in New Jersey, where we also got to explore New York City together. We flew home on Virgin America Tuesday evening.
The trip itself was not easy, but you could say that we covered considerable distance in space and in heart. The gory details are a story for another time and medium. Here I share an anecdote.
The girlfriend demonstrated her cool little Eee PC to my father, who was of course impressed with the little bugger running Linux. I told him that I myself had ordered from the OLPC “Give One Get One” program and he said he had wanted to do that himself. Unfortunately, times are a little tough for his family just now and they can’t really afford it.
When we got to New Jersey, the girlfriend’s brother wanted to reimburse us for some of our travel expenses–the girlfriend and I viewed the trip as our own vacation, but the brother had budgeted something to ship the car. I thought a moment and accepted some payment, which I then turned around and sent to OLPC to ship a computer to Dad. “A gift begets a gift begets a gift . . .”
(Today happens to be Dad’s birthday, too!)
I had worried that the Give One Get One program had concluded, but according to their web site the program has been extended through December 31st, so no difficulties ordering another for Dad. Then I got another e-mail today:
Your XO laptop is on the way.
Your donated XO laptop will soon be delivered into the hands of a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. In one of our recipient children’s own words, “I want to thank you people because you had given us the laptop and I love it so much.” Your generosity will make a world of difference in these children’s lives, and in the future of their respective countries.
Thanks to your early action, your XO laptop is scheduled to be delivered between December 14 and December 24. Our “first day” donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible. We will send you an update upon shipment.
Sweet! This is the first new laptop I have ever ordered for myself! I’ve been following the HDL-cum-OLPC project for a while now, and the eBook functionality has always sounded sweet to me. I’m eager to check this gear out:
Give One Get One
Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in North America. This is the first time the revolutionary XO laptop has been made available to the general public. For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. $200 of your donation is tax-deductible (your $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will be receiving).
For all U.S. donors who participate in the Give One Get One program, T-Mobile is offering one year of complimentary HotSpot access.
I’ll probably post something once I receive and get to play with it a bit, but I figure that’s a month away . . .
The Girlfriend is set to receive her Eee PC today.
After yesterday’s post, I figured I would have to re-synchronize the slave database from the master, but probably build a more capable machine before doing that. I figured at that point, I might as well try fiddling with MySQL config variables, just to see if a miracle might happen.
At first I twiddled several variables, and noticed only that there was less disk access on the system. This is good, but disk throughput had not proven to be the issue, and replication lag kept climbing. The scientist in me put all those variables back, leaving, for the sake of argument, only one changed.
This morning as I logged in, colleagues asked me what black magic I had done. Check out these beautiful graphs:
The default value of this variable is 1, which is the value that is required for ACID compliance. You can achieve better performance by setting the value different from 1, but then you can lose at most one second worth of transactions in a crash. If you set the value to 0, then any mysqld process crash can erase the last second of transactions. If you set the value to 2, then only an operating system crash or a power outage can erase the last second of transactions. However, InnoDB’s crash recovery is not affected and thus crash recovery does work regardless of the value. Note that many operating systems and some disk hardware fool the flush-to-disk operation. They may tell mysqld that the flush has taken place, even though it has not. Then the durability of transactions is not guaranteed even with the setting 1, and in the worst case a power outage can even corrupt the InnoDB database. Using a battery-backed disk cache in the SCSI disk controller or in the disk itself speeds up file flushes, and makes the operation safer.
The Conventional Wisdom from another colleague: You want to set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 for a master database, but for a slave–as previously noted–is at a disadvantage for committing writes, it can be entirely worthwhile to set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0 because at the worst, the slave could become out of sync after a hard system restart. My take-away: go ahead and set this to 0 if your slave is already experiencing excessive replication lag: you’ve got nothing to lose anyway.
(Of course, syslog says the RAID controller entered a happier state at around the same time I set this variable, so take this as an anecdote.)
As of 11AM this morning, and until 11AM next Tuesday, I’m “on call” . . . which means that if something breaks, especially at 3AM, I’m the first guy responsible for fixing it.
This is actually a new form of “on call” for me–this is the first time I have been in a “rotation”. At other, smaller companies, I have spent years on-call. Now, that isn’t quite so bad in a small environment where things seldom fail, but it is something of a drag to keep your boss informed of your weekend travel plans so he can watch for pages in your stead. In a larger environment, a week spent on-call can be particularly onerous, because there are plenty of things that will break. But, come the end of the week, you pass the baton . . .
So, this week, I will get my first taste, and over time I will have a better sense as to whether “on call” is better in a smaller environment or a larger environment. I have a feeling that while this week could be rough, that the larger environment is an overall better deal: there is a secondary on-call person, there is an entire team I can call for advice on different things, and the big company provides nice things like a cellular modem card, and bonus pay for on-call time.
I was dining out with coworkers, in a group of four. These colleagues were nobody specific: just extras fabricated from spare parts in the subconscious. The topic drifted to the subject of building rapport, and how light physical touches can build a connection with someone, but you might be careful about that in the work place. I reached across the table to brush my colleague’s wrist, and he leaned back, grinning. My hand came to a stop before it would have come over his dinner plate. I smiled back, “and this is about the line where I would have invaded your personal space,” and withdrew.
I headed to the bathroom, where there was a short line waiting outside the men’s room. One or two guys turned back, not wanting to stand in line, and thus making it shorter. I was confident that the line would move quickly, and in a moment I was attending to my business at a urinal. (more…)
I recently participated in some beta test challenge thing for something called Yahoo! Insiders. They sent me some schwag, including a nice little flashlight that came without the requisite 3 AAA batteries, and a cute little USB mouse that is too tiny for my massive hand. The program consisted of 9 “challenges” which basically boiled down to “use our search engine to find the answer to this question and you might win a prize.” (The prizes were nice, one day was a nice digital camera.) The search engine had some “suggestions” of what search terms you might be better off searching, which would appear if you clicked a little widget. Kind of like the Google spell checker, but with synonyms.
I didn’t use the feature because, well, it was buried under a widget and because I’m pretty good with typing keywords into search engines. I’m guessing they think “suggested keywords” might do something for newbies, though it really isn’t clear.
They just solicited some feedback. I filled out the form, and at the end they asked “is there anything at all that you would like us to know about Yahoo!, The Yahoo! Search Insiders Program or Yahoo! Search Assist?” I thought a moment, then:
What are you trying to accomplish? Build a slightly better search engine? Google works awfully damn well 90% of the time, so the bar to get anyone to switch for “better” is extremely high. Maybe you can put your massive resources behind a more ambitious idea like combining social bookmarking with Netflix/Amazon-style “recommendations” and thereby build a more personalized “Page Rank” index using social networking . . . the sort of thing Google SUCKS at.
