Month: July 2002

Does Radio not support user comments?

<grumble>Or is it a user preference to make it a one-way interaction?</grumble>

Paul Holbrook’s Radio Weblog

A bit of introduction: the major project I’m working on at Georgia Tech is a campus portal. I’ll try to blog more about the subject of portals at another time, but for now, portal software aims to give each member of the campus a personalized view of the resources of the campus: a student might see their class schedule and grade information, a faculty member might be able to update a class calendar, staff members might have a view of their own, alumni another .. you get the idea.

Sounds a lot like myUW.washington.edu . . . . you can do almost anything, from registration to paying for classes and checking your degree status there. Even look up price and availability of your textbooks . . . very handy.

It even offers webmail (WebPINE, natch), weather, and the usual portal stuff. It would be nice to see updated parking info, but that’s a pervasive Seattle problem. For all the talk of Seattle’s traffic, it’s largely due to not having enough parking: if everyone could find a space, the congestion would be gone. Here’s more information on how it works.

Hacking OpenDarwin

I think OpenDarwin looks to be an interesting project to watch. There are lots of areas in which to work, many loose or un[der]documented components, but a the same time, it’s pretty mature and robust. It’s not a pre-1.0 release.

It’s already platform agnostic, since it runs on x86 and PPC hardware. With the XPostFacto hacks, it will support PPC Macs dating back to 1995, so it’s not like you need a super modern box to get in and play.

And of course having Jordan Hubbard on the core team helps: interesting interview with him here.

It cleared up some of the vagueness about why Linux exploded instead of the BSDs. It’s not so much a quality issue, which is not to denigrate Linux — it did get to where it is today w/o the CSRG legacy to build on. It was a leadership void on the BSD front, versus Linus Torvalds’ well-documented blend of charm and laziness (lazy like a cat, I mean).

Perhaps we don’t really need another flavor of BSD (this makes five, I think) but a more accessible one is worth pursuing. And I think OpenDarwin aims for accessibility while still retaining high-performance and stability.

windows XP: bah

[update: Jun 9 2007] Amazing to me that this is still one of the most popular posts here. Meanwhile time has rolled on to Vista for the Windows masochists, and newer versions of OS X and new distros of Linux: Ubuntu seems to the way to go for people who just want to get stuff done. I’m re-opening comments on this just to see if anything useful gets added to the thread.

[update: Oct 11, 2007] The old saying “if I had a dime for every time” is apropos of this post and thread: 2600 dimes would be handy šŸ˜‰

I burned my Windows XP CD today (actually, I burned two since the first didn’t seem to work). I then proceeded to install XP over my WIN2K installation.

I’m pretty sure most of the Windows fans I hear from have never installed it from scratch: what an abysmal installer. White on blue ASCII DOS text: yeagch. Contrast it with OS X’s installer or even Redhat’s, if you like.

And that was the best of it. It proceeded to copy all its bits and pieces to the disk, make the windows partition active (de-activating my BSD partition), and then reboot. Only then do I discover some file in “d:\i386\asms” can’t be located and we’re stuck. Bad CD? I don’t know: both of them give the same error. I assume the image is OK, since it should have been checksummed when it was downloaded. And of course w/o a windows installation, I can’t fetch it again.

I think FreeBSD supports some kind of mounting of ISO images as filesystems. If so I can perhaps see what’s missing, if anything.

UPDATE: mounting ISOs is a snap thanks to this page.

I’m not what the discrepancy here is from: perhaps this is the wrong way to look at this.

[/cdrom]# du -sk ~/WinXP_Pro.ISO .
500592 /home/paul/WinXP_Pro.ISO
494745 .

The sad thing about this is that I have the WINxp volume mounted in FreeBSD: if I only knew what was missing and where to put it, I’d be home free. Perhaps in a day I’ll take another whack at it. The swelling should have gone down by then.

[update Aug 25, 2007] Interesting that all of MSFT’s authentication servers are down, meaning all affected installs of those OSes are marked as counterfeit. I can only imagine what that means for whoever has the job of enforcing those agreements. DRM: defective by design is about right, I would say.

Open Food

It occurs to me that this phrase “Open Food” sums up what I have been thinking about for a while. Just as Open Source means you have access to all the information inherent in a piece of software, meaning you can alter it, improve it, whatever you like, I would like to see the same transparency applied to the food we eat. I’d like to know what’s in it and why. Why is there TSP in Cheerios? (You can look it up). Why are milk solids in so many things? Is it to meet some dietary guidelines, like protein content? Or is it just better living through chemistry?

I think if people really knew where their food came from, it might change their eating habits or at least understand the choices they’re making more than all the diet books ever written. The Openness I refer is that of information and understanding the impact of their decisions. If you take some cow slices off the shelf at QFC, what do you know about them? What did that cow eat? How old was it? How was the product you see prepared? You can find out that kind of thing when you buy fish and seafood: cows and chickens don’t merit that kind of curiousity?

We no longer have any insight into or relationship with food production: we don’t know what the local farmer we buy from feeds his animals or how he controls pests on his crops. I think we should know that.

There’s a lot to be said about food and our relationship with it. We don’t value it as a medium for relationship building (unless we’re dating). Preparation is seen as a chore than an opportunity to create or express our feelings about the ingredients or the lucky diners.

I like to eat and I like to cook. I make my own pasta, my own breads, cook pasta sauces from scratch (OK, from canned tomatoes but nothing cooked), bake pies, cookies, cakes, tarts, etc. It’s not for everyone, but what if more of us did and had higher expectations of the food producers? What if we expected them to produce information about the food so we can better choose whose to buy: the farmer who sprays pesticides indiscriminately or the one who favors a more natural approach? Do we choose the biggest vegetables or the tastiest? Genetically-enhanced or heirloom?

Perhaps this is more involvement with food than most people want: but how many times do you eat in a day? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that people spend more energy choosing toilet paper (once a day) or their grade of gas (once a week) than they do on food. That seems wrong.

le maillot blanc

My cycling exploits being as non-competitive as they are, a simple white T will suffice, to be peeled off and tossed in the laundry as soon as I get home.

Another short ride today. Something I learned from yesterday’s ride: getting a bike fitted can’t be undersold. I found I had a much easier time after I raised my seat a couple of inches. Of course this means when I stop, I have to keep my toes en pointe, but it makes all the difference to the riding experience.

I still may need a couple more inches of lift . . . . I find myself scooting back to get more leg extension.

Even with as little riding as I am doing, I feel better each time, and can do more each time. Keeping my pulse out of triple digits would be nice (my resting pulse is about 60), but that should come.

Of course, for real cycling fans, you’d better head over here.

has anyone found anything good in their Amazon.com Gold Box?

As I’ve heard from people in the know, this is where Amazon displays the stuff they can’t sell any other way. I think the first time I got this I was tempted by a salad spinner (since I have all these fresh greens here), but since then it’s been junk.

The premise is that you have 60 minutes to decide on each item as it’s revealed to you, and once you pass you lose your chance at that price forever. Nice ploy, but they’re not tempting me to press the “buy now” button.