I’m 32 years old, and so I try to behave like a grownup and not get excited over all the injustices of the world. And I try to have a reasoned, diplomatically nuanced outlook on world affairs. When it comes to Chinese politics I understand the tensions between regional independence and national cohesion, the tension between personal freedoms and the scary business of managing a rapidly industrializing nation of 1.2 billion people and limited natural resources . . . I care about what happens in China but I uhm, try to be a properly diplomatic adult and defer to them doing it their way.
The other day I was working on a shell script to be run on several hundred machines at the same time. Since the script was going to download a file from a central server, and I did not want to overwhelm the central server with hundreds of simultaneous requests, I decided that I wanted to add a random wait time. But how do you conjure a random number within a specific range in a shell script?
Updated: Due to much feedback, I now know of three ways to do this . . .
1) On BSD systems, you can use jot(1): sleep `jot -r 1 1 900`
2) If you are scripting with bash, you can use $RANDOM: sleep `echo $RANDOM%900 | bc`
3) For portability, you can resort to my first solution: # Sleep up to fifteen minutes
sleep `echo $$%900 | bc`
$$ is the process ID (PID), or “random seed” which on most systems is a value between 1 and 65,535. Fifteen minutes is 900 seconds. % is modulo, which is like division but it gives you the remainder. Thus, $$ % 900 will give you a result between 0 and 899. With bash, $RANDOM provides the same utility, except it is a different value whenever you reference it.
Updated yet again . . . says a friend:
nah it’s using `echo .. | bc` that bugs me, 2 fork+execs, let your shell do the math, it knows how
so $(( $$ % 900 )) should work in bsd sh
For efficiency, you could rewrite the latter two solutions:
2.1) sleep $(( $RANDOM % 900 ))
3.1) sleep $(( $$ % 900 ))
The revised solution will work in sh-derived shells: sh, bash, ksh. My original “portable” solution will also work if you’re scripting in csh or tcsh.
“I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America. And to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All.”
Notice anything missing?
Some time in grammar school I figured there was something wrong with an Atheist pledging allegiance “under God” and after some time I came to pause when we would recite those two words. “one nation . . . indivisible.”
I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance no problem. But as a devout Atheist and an honest patriot I skip the Joseph McCarthy “under God” feature because it is sacrilegious to make false professions, and dangerously reckless to claim holy sanction for the State.
So, here’s to Independence from Tyranny and state-sanctioned religion!!
Saturday morning was volunteering with Mount Sutro Stewards via One Brick. A contingent of Cisco employees appeared from their haunts across the region as part of some sort of New Hire / outreach program. Nice kids. “I work for IronPort.” We were clearing a path for a trail re-alignment. The first step is removing the “duff” which is the top soil and its organic matter. Organic matter decays over time so it is not the best bed for a trail. Clearing the “duff” is harder than it sounds because the aforementioned organic material is layers and layers of interconnected, knotty roots. It is good, hard work.
I napped in the sunshine for the afternoon.
Later, after seeing Someone Special I was waiting for the L-Owl on Market St. A motley crew — the guy who asked if he could borrow my phone but since his own phone was dead he couldn’t retrieve the number. There was a “crazy homeless woman” and a short guy with a case of Modelo Especial. This guy checked the next bus on his cell then popped open a beer. He continued drinking on the bus, which was raucous.
Still waiting, I noticed a pretty gal in high heels on the corner. I had a moment of hope that she would join our party but pretty girls in high heels do not belong on the night bus. She very subtly hailed a cab. Another guy showed up smoking a joint. He offered to trade with the beer drinker for a cigarette after the beer guy offered the joint guy a can of Modelo Especial.
My personal drama involved the “crazy homeless lady”. While shifting around to pull on her gloves, I noticed a ragged slip of paper drop to the ground. I figured it could be her transfer and in another time with a different passenger I probably would have said something. But this evening I rationalized my disgust towards the homeless woman as wanting to be a fly on the wall. “Writers are parasites watching the lives of others” or such was a line in the movie I had caught earlier in the evening with Someone Special.
A bit later the lady was shifting around again and rummaging through her stuff with increasing agitation. She was clearly upset and looking for something important. I wondered what would happen to her if she couldn’t board the bus. I wondered if I had a $1.50 in change to help her out, if it came to that. I took a look around and spied that ragged little slip of paper in the street. I fetched it, found that it was not merely ragged but soiled, and I handed it to her. She was grateful and remarked that hers was a ragged slip of paper. She kept it firmly in her gloved fingers and as far as I know she had a good night.
Thursday I attended an art opening at a gallery called 20 GOTO 10. I learned of the show as I learn of many parties these days–through a friend on Facebook. Most such parties I learn of through one particular friend and it lends me to wonder if she spends her time searching for events on Facebook. (I tried this recently, but the interface is poor.) My working hypothesis is that she networks with a lot of the hipster Web 2.0 crowd and she thereby gets invited to events posted to Facebook. She probably gets more invites than your average Internet groupie because she is a “total babe” but whatever the deal she has lately been responsible for a fair proportion of my going-out / nightlife in San Francisco.
Anyway, yesterday I hit a gallery opening after work because the art in question was technological in nature and because art openings are a good way to score free snacks and wine. I showed up at the start time of 7PM because I didn’t want to romp around so late and because I figured it would be less crowded and possibly more delicious at the early end of the evening.
They needed more time to finish setting up. (In San Francisco everything happens late–it is a cultural thing.) I waited on the sidewalk with a middle-aged Asian man named Mike. He had a scruffy goatee with several meandering strands of beard, many of them white. He said he had recently moved from Bayview which has bad air that irritated his skin and bad neighbors, to the Mission, which suits him better in many ways. The hallmark of a true San Franciscan, he at one point mentioned his cultivation of avocados in Bayview. He said he is an educational technologist. One thing he did was design a widget for the old 8-bit Nintendo that slotted in between the system and the cartridge, and would show you and let you fiddle with the various registers and whatnot so that a curious kid could explore how fiddling with these things affected playing the game. I thought that sounded like an awesome fun thing that would help open the understanding of technology as something we can control to the people for which such appreciation is most important. He seemed proud, but explained that the project never really got anywhere.
There was plenty more time to wait and I think Mike really needed to talk because he continued through stories of himself–geek friends inviting themselves over to his workshop to use his lathe, for example. He said now that he had divested his life of such things as the workshop that he didn’t get visitors so often. He did not tell this story as an appeal to pity but as a simple matter of fact.
“It should be, ‘Hey Mike, I’ll bring a pizza over tonight and then maybe I can use your lathe.'”
“No, they never brought food.”
“Well,” I offered, “geeks do tend to lack in social graces.”
Another story he told was of his efforts to touch up a mural. He strategized things out in Photoshop then, frustrated that the muralist was busy, he went and fixed things himself. “Because I had to look at it every day.” He said that his efforts had been recognized as an excellent job, and that this had softened the attitudes of his neighbors towards him.
He asked if I knew of ephemeral art. I know of Mandelas made of sand and then cast into the wind. He said a large one had been assembled outside of the De Young Museum and while it lasted he took his own steps to preserve the thing — a series of photographs stitched together into a very large image. He wanted to build a tilt-shift lens, and I was pleased that I could ask a question along the lines of “it somehow shifts the lens to get a consistent focus across the depth of field?”
The show opened, and Mike took an SLR digital camera from his bag. It sported a home-made fish-eye lens and he explained that this took round pictures which he wanted. Lenses on the market distorted such optics back to a rectilinear format, which is not what he wanted. He seemed dubious of his ability, however, to fashion a tilt-shift lens.
A crowd of us entered the tiny gallery — fascinating paintings of various repeated geometrical shapes that were set into motion with changing colored lights. Fascinating and wonderful. I squeezed carefully to the back and grabbed a plastic cup of wine and a handful of what I suspect are actually gourmet dog treats. I squeezed my way back through the gallery, really digging the art work, especially two of the more complex works that did a lot of subtle color mixing within layers of geometric shapes — one was quartets of circles within ever larger quartets of circles, and another was circles within faces of stacked cubes.
I finished my nosh and since space was so tight I stowed the empty plastic wine cup in my bag, made my way out the door, where a line of people had formed, and headed home.
NPR happened to have a couple of reporters in Sichuan when the earthquake hit. The other day I heard this story on NPR. It is a story of one family bringing in an excavator to try and recover people from the rubble. It is very touching and emotionally difficult to listen to. The reporter’s voice is choked up and failing at the end of the twelve minute piece, which concludes with a great deal of heartfelt wailing and people setting off firecrackers for the dead. The government is estimating 50,000 dead. Horrible horrible news. you can read the contents of the NPR story on the reporters’ blog.
SAN FRANCISCO — — The California Supreme Court ruled today that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry, rejecting state marriage laws as discriminatory.
Curious about the results?
Well, energy use embedded in 1 L drinking water delivered to Berkeley CA are:
Calistoga Water –> 1.0 kWh
Fiji Water –> 1.7 kWh
Aquafina –> 1.4 kWh
EBMUD tap water –> 0.0003 kWh
[BTW, if you leave your MacBook Pro on for 16 hour, that’s about 1kWh…]
Our boundary includes transportation, packaging, end-of-life, pipes, dams, treatment plants, supply…almost everything.
What about raw water? 1 L of drinking water is equivalent to…
Calistoga Water –> 3.9 L raw water
Fiji Water –> 5.1 L raw water
Aquafina –> 5.8 L raw water
EBMUD tap water –> 1.2 L raw water
All the embedded stuff mostly comes from the PET bottle, which we tracked all the way back to petroleum extraction. Don’t drink that crap. THE END.
For the record, “raw water” is in the aquifer. It costs 20% extra to be treated and delivered via tap.
Anyway, the thing with bottled water is convenient hydration. Plus we have it infused with various flavors and fizziness, never mind the sodas . . . anyway, I just went to the company kitchen and passed up the beverage refrigerator for a mug of tea. And I have to wonder at the carbon footprint there. It is probably way way less than a plastic bottle, and while a tea bag can travel quite far, it also weighs much less than a bottle of water, so it is a lot more energy efficient. (How you heat the water could matter a great deal: we have a hot-water dispenser her at work, but at home I burn a lot of natural gas to boil a kettle.)
All I’m saying is, maybe tea can be promoted as a more conscientious and classy hydration alternative to bottled water. It’s tap water, dressed up a bit.
Use of the word “satiated” tends to annoy me. I figured one is “sated”. I just spent some time looking at dictionaries, thesauri, and my etymological dictionary to figure it out once and for all. Google and Google Trends imply that “sate” is the more widely-used term, though this appears to be in large part because journalists keep mis-spelling “state”.
The word “satiated” looks to derive from Latin “satis” which means enough. (Satisfied?)
“Sate” derives from older English, Dutch, and Germanic, and apparently shares the same root word with “sad”.
The Brooding Northern European part of me wonders if my ancestors had some keen understanding of the connection between satisfaction and sadness.
SATIATE and SATE may sometimes imply only complete satisfaction but more often suggest repletion that has destroyed interest or desire. SURFEIT implies a nauseating repletion. CLOY stresses the disgust or boredom resulting from such surfeiting.
At any rate, I see that there’s nothing wrong with being “satiated” yet it is perfectly fine for me to stick with sate and sated. (Though I do enjoy the word “satiety”.)
I am satisfied with this state of repletion. I am sated.
“So you don’t approve of getting even — of taking revenge for something that was done to you?”
“Revenge does not alter what was done to you. Neither does forgiveness. Revenge and forgiveness are irrelevant.”
“What can you do?”
“Forget,” said Borges. “That is all you can do. When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.”
“Does that work?”
“More or less.” He showed his yellow teeth. “Less rather than more.”
Talking about the futility of revenge, he reached and his hands trembled with a new subject, but a related one, the Second World War.
“When I was in Germany just after the war,” he said, “I never heard a word spoken against Hitler. In Berlin, the Germans said to me” — now he spoke in German — “‘Well, what do you think of our ruins?’ The Germans like to be pitied — isn’t that horrible? They showed me their ruins. They wanted me to pity them. But why should I indulge them? I said” — he uttered the sentence in German — “‘I have seen London.'”
Jorge Luis Borges speaking with Paul Theroux
_The Old Patagonian Express_
Revenge has its appeal, but I don’t think it helps. We use the expression “forgive and forget” but the concern is that certain things should not be forgotten. I figure it is better to forget than to have difficulty stuck in your heart. I think I’d say “forgive, if you can, draw a lesson from the memory, and then move on.”
Try to remember the circumstances and what happened, and that you felt a certain pain and whatnot, perhaps with great intensity. The pain itself, the “pain memory” I would leave behind, if you can. We are fools to forget, but we are foolish too to react in the present to pain from the past.
Tuesday morning Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech in Philadelphia about the need to talk openly and honestly about America’s racial troubles, and the need of all Americans to unite and focus on real issues and not get caught up in the usual crud of divisive politics.
The gist of it is that America started with a serious problem: slavery, and America has been moving away from that problem for a long time, but problems of racism and the legacies of inequality have left scars that one can still feel today. Sometimes black folk express anger and frustration at injustices and the slow pace of progress, and sometimes white people express frustration and offense at the idea that they should have to work to repair the damage wrought by generations past, when they have plenty of their own difficulties to focus on.
And all too often, politicians exploit these frustrations to set Americans against each other and distract them from working together on the real challenges that we collectively face. If we want change, we can not pretend that these divisions do not exist: we must acknowledge them, openly and honestly. We must remember that they can be a distraction from important work. We must reach out to one another and work together on the more important common concerns that unite us: education, health, defense, climate instability.
Here’s a link to a high-quality video from the campaign without the CNN ticker:
America is fortunate this year: in Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain we have a diversity of candidates whom we actually admire. I’m supporting Barack Obama.
It is fun to see how people change over time, and how they stay the same. A decade ago I wrote a “Computer Literacy Narrative” for an English class:
The Internet continues to play a very big part in my life. My web site grows slowly every week. I keep my diary on-line for others to read. I write CGI applications. I’m a hard-core Unix geek, administering two of my own systems, writing my HTML and perl scripts in vi, wowwing friends with afterstep. I work for the networking group at NCSA, for the CSIL as a labsitter, and worked last summer at an ISP in Chicago called EnterAct, where I may very well return this summer.
I now use only Unix, and my old Amiga systems from time to time out of nostalgia and respect for history. I own two Unix boxen, four Amiga systems, and the old Commodore 64. While most of these are antiques, I still lend some systems out to others from time to time to facilitate their computing needs.
My fanatical Unix snobbery does mean that I know very little about Windows 95 or Mac. Because I have good computer karma, I still tend to negotiate such systems better than the average Joe, but I’m by no means a wiz. Instead I enjoy spending my time tinkering with completely open systems like FreeBSD. I am proud and inspired by the idea that there are now several very competent Operating Systems available even for normal users that are built and maintained entirely by volunteer effort. It is my goal to continue to learn and ultimately contribute to this effort as I can.
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.
But this latest story from the BBC, about something trifling, just makes me wanna smack somebody with a stick. (more…)
