slampoud's Blog

An inspiring talk

2011-10-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

I recently went to a seminar talk by Michael Nielsen that I really enjoyed. So here are a couple notes and thoughts on that. Nielsen spoke mainly of what he calls "extreme open science", and touched on many of the topics he covers in this essay. This is an area I've been "working" in for the last few months, in quotes because the work is mainly thinking, and, as a result, there aren't that many artifacts to point to. Nielsen emphasized that the system by which scholarly work is evaluated currently does not incentivize open sharing of results, code, data etc. He also brought up the same example I always use, namely that of the NIH's requirement for depositing of genomic data resulting from work they funded, as a case in which a funding agency mandate is creating an incentive for sharing and, consequently, open science. Nielsen is in a position that allows him to be quite inclusive of all relevant good ideas, and vague about whether he's advocating any specific approach in particular. In a sense his attitude seems rather descriptive, so I'm finding reading what he's written informative and quite comprehensive.

At the same time I was trying to find a way to justify my own first stab at an approach in this field, in a way that was consistent with his framework. By necessity, anything I have to say about this has to be a lot more focused, and it has to be translatable to artifacts, code, methods, what have you. That has led me to think of the situation in terms of the following diagram:

The idea here is that the odds of a scientist sharing or not sharing the raw fruits of his or her labor (as opposed to just publishing something *about* those raw fruits) is a function of the incentive to share them and the ease of doing so. For the purposes of this diagram, then, I'm assuming that, even if there is no incentive, if it is very easy to share, a scientist will choose to do so (i.e. the x-intercept is somewhere to the right of 0). Conversely, even if there is an incentive, difficulty in sharing will overwhelm the incentive (i.e. the y intercept is also upward of 0). You can set up this diagram differently by making different assumptions about the intercepts, and of course you can argue about whether the line separating YES (inclined to share) from NO (disinclined to share) should be straight, curved, or whatever. I'm neither a psychologist nor a game theoretician, so I'm sure there's a more sophisticated version of this somewhere out there, but I don't know where to look for it. In any case, the gist of the point I'm trying to make is this: there seem to be two strategies for shifting behavior from NO to YES. The first, shown by the red arrow, is to increase the incentive to share. This is what Nielsen focused on in his talk, making references to the scientific patronage system of yesteryear, and alluding to the possibility of something similar emerging today (e.g. innocentive.com). The second strategy, shown by the blue arrow, is to increase the ease (i.e. decrease the difficulty) of sharing. As a technologist, this is the strategy I've been thinking and writing about. While I love the idea of institutions like NIH and innocentive.com changing the incentive landscape, I, personally, have no influence over them and no voice with which to advocate the wider adoption of such policies. But as a technologist, someone involved with designing open source, next generation system-ware, I do have a say about the environment that scientists conduct science in. My ideas, then, center around making that environment such that it increases the ease of sharing simply by virtue of what it is.

More about the specifics of that coming soon...

Steve Yegge's rant

2011-10-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

I absolutely *loved* Steve Yegge's rant about Google and platforms. His point is, incidentally, what I tried to hammer in to our Capstone students last Spring Quarter. At least one project (snuffle.us) totally got it.

OKMO tech report

2010-11-09T15:57:00.000-08:00

Back in 2003 I did some work for my mom. Yep, my mom. She's awesome! She's a doctor and she needed a hardware/software solution for allowing her patients to record "subjective appetite related sensations", namely how hungry, full etc, they were feeling, at particular times. I wrote an all open-source based piece of software for PalmOS 4 that allowed them to do just that. The remarkable thing is just how much research that little piece of code enabled. The tech report describing the design considerations and research enabled by this little program, OKMO, is here.

A bugreport for XOAD

2010-03-04T12:06:00.000-08:00

I realize that XOAD is a dead project and all, but we still have a website around that uses it, and which, in turn, is used by a fair number of people. This website recently broke, probably due to an upgrade in the Apache PHP module (to v. 5.2). This cost me a few sleepless nights, but I also learned a bunch in the process.

The symptom we were seeing was an unserialization error. Basically, XOAD has its own code for serializing Javascript objects into PHP format. The server-side then calls PHP's unserialize() on them. Some of those serialized objects were not unserializing properly. Specifically, objects with deeply nested __meta fields were failing to unserialize. It took days to figure out what the hell was going on, mainly because I've never looked at AJAX before in my life, having spent the last 8 years hacking numerical code in C. In the end it was instrumentation of the offending XOAD code with error_log()s that solved it. And it turned out that the bug was due to human error, a human error that's gone undetected FIVE years!

The error is in classes/Client.class.php in the XOAD_Client::register() function. This function builds objects that are then passed on to the serializer. The line that reads:
$attachMeta[$key] = $valueType;
should be:
$attachMeta[$key] = $value;

That's it. Isn't it reminiscent of those sentences that completely change meaning when you move around their commas?

So why did this bug show up now? I only have a guess as to the answer. The effect of this bug was that in objects with deep (as in 2 levels down, don't imagine anything extreme) __meta attributes, some of the fields that should have been filled with the values of variables were filled with their types (duh). From a semantic point of view, this did not affect our application, because we never looked into those deep levels of the objects in question. But what about from the point of view of serialization? When the field for which we get the type instead of contents is __size, and __size is then used during serialization in a meaningful way, then there's the potential for problems. Consider this fragment of a correctly serialized object:
"__meta";O:6:"string":7:{s:1:"0";N;s:1:"1";N;s:1:"2";N;s:1:"3";N;s:1:"4";N;s:1:"5";N;s:1:"6";N;}
vs the same fragment serialized incorrectly, with the size field (derived from the __size attribute of the object being serialized) replaced with "int":
"__meta";O:6:"string":int:{s:1:"0";N;s:1:"1";N;s:1:"2";N;s:1:"3";N;s:1:"4";N;s:1:"5";N;s:1:"6";N;}

I suspect that our previous version of the Apache PHP module contained an unserialize() function that unserialized on the basis of curly brackets only. Based on curly bracket matching, the second fragment will unserialize just fine. But if the newer Apache PHP module actually looks at the size field, which precedes the contents of the array in curly brackets, then the first fragment will unserialize, whereas the second won't ("int" not being a valid array size). Is the second, stricter unserializing method the correct one? Absolutely! I don't know that this is what happened, but if I'm right, I can deduce that PHP has improved. I can get behind that.

Playing catchup

2010-01-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

In the last two months I've moved cities and jobs, returning to my beloved Santa Barbara and UCSB. That explains why blogging activity came to an abrupt halt. As things start to settle into a new routine, I think that it's important to do a debrief of sorts regarding things I learned and ideas I generated in my last postdoc. So you can expect a couple posts on single-cell fluorescence microscopy and quantitative measurements of intracellular protein networks. I also have some ideas about how I think a big impact could be made in High Performance Scientific Computing, the field I used to be in and that I'm transitioning into once again. Stay tuned...

Idea of the day: systematic specification of cmdline parameters

2009-10-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

You know how now there are fantastic ways to generate documentation from within source code by using special annotations? I'm referring to things like perldoc and javadoc. They probably call it "self-documenting code" or something equally cheesy, but it's really just a simple markup strategy + a convention for what information is considered useful. Well, my idea today is not exactly analogous, but it's close. Why isn't there a way to systematically specify the format, syntax and semantics of commandline parameters to UNIX programs? For instance, for every binary in a software distribution there could be an XML file (following an as of yet undefined schema, whose definition is really the technical challenge here) specifying all the ways in which that binary can be run. A lot of effort has gone into standardizing the format of "flags", the little -single_char or --blah_blah bits preceding arguments in commandlines. Ditto about --help output. In fact, it's now possible to automagically generate man pages from well-written --help output with help2man. Would it really be such a leap to start including XML specifications for commandline inputs? The potential uses for automation are limitless!

How I learned to stop worrying and love twitter

2009-09-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist using this title, but the point of this post is more nuanced. Well, at least what's in my head is more nuanced; now to what extent I'm going to succeed in conveying it... we'll see.

Once upon a time, several months ago, I decided to check out twitter. I was curious, and I overcame my inertia when I heard that there was a vibrant community of climbers breaking new ground in social media. So I started an account under the username "slampoud". Normal, right? I mostly used it to communicate with climbing tweeps, to post announcements of my blogposts on "Little did I know..." (my climbing blog) and "If pressed" (my review blog), and to ruminate. All fine, all within the normal use parameters of twitter.

Except that I found that because of all the indexing, republishing and referencing websites out there, the page rank of my twitter posts was fairly high, and they came to dominate the google search results for "slampoud". Since I'm a UNIX geek, my username is really a professional handle for me. Yet, during that time, if you did a search for "slampoud" you'd get results that included quips about climbing, compliments and gripes about products, and random ruminations about cats and traffic. I found that such search results were disorienting and detracted from my identifiability as a practicing geek.

There was an additional problem. Social media is the new playground for sophisticated folks in product evangelism and promotion. There are companies that do it right, companies that do it wrong, people who do it right and people who do it wrong, as in any field. But by being plugged into the twitter climbing community, by playing by its rules (and there's a fairly delicate, emergent web of RTs) I found that I was being exposed to a lot, way too much, product promotion. Conversely, of course, when it was information about a product that I needed, that information was readily available. Then again, its location next to so much promotion made even useful information suspect.

In a way, I was proud to have slowly gotten the hang of how the thing worked, of who was what to whom, who was worth listening to and who needed to be filtered out, and what the bots and spammers were attracted by. But, also, the situation was becoming slightly ludicrous: if there was someone I felt I needed to filter out, then why not simply drop them from my feed (or "unfollow" them, in twitter-speak)? 9 times out of 10 I felt the obligation not to, sometimes because this was clearly a newb learning the ropes, sometimes because the offender and I were embedded in a network of relationships with others, a network whose balance I didn't want to upset -- both real world reasons applied to an electronic social network of people I essentially didn't know!

So, because I was alarmed at the fact that my professional handle was being overwhelmed by gibberish, and because I was vaguely nauseated by the amount of product promotion that was passing before my eyes, and, finally, because I was put off by the fact that I was applying real world social mores to my twitter-verse, I deleted that account (or thought I had -- turns out twitter keeps them around in case you change your mind, which begs the question: how does one make a fresh start on twitter?). I believe my final tweet was "I am so burned out on this twitter nonsense. Buh bye." I probably used less punctuation, though.

But I'm not a luddite. In fact, more than anything, I find myself mesmerized by twitter, and especially by marketing on twitter, in the same way I'm mesmerized by stock exchange data. You have to admit that to a geek it's fascinating. There are patterns in the thing, and it plugs into or mirrors the real world in interesting ways, yet defies its rules in more interesting ways. It definitely has a pulse.

So I'm back, after a fashion. I'm now "dubid0", the username portion of my throw-away yahoo email. I'm rebuilding my network of climbing friends, who I missed like hell. I'm excluding some sources of mostly noise -- and some good, I have to say there wasn't anyone who was all noise -- that I felt too guilty to exclude last time around. I'm lurking more and RT'ing less, though it's hard to kick the habit of RT'ing my favorite article or blogpost of every morning. And, in the meantime, I'm debating the utility of bringing back the "slampoud" account in a professional capacity. Yeah, I guess I'll do it.

Adding RAM to a current generation Mac Mini

2009-09-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

This weekend Dan and I attempted to add a 2GB RAM stick to his Mac Mini, since the RAM was on sale at Fry's and he needed more to run Garage Band. We followed the procedure as described here, but had a couple difficulties that I wanted to point out.

First of all, it seems that between the generation of Mini the tutorial guys disassembled and the current generation, the black cable next to the battery has been removed from the design. Not knowing that, we went after the closest black cable we could find, the one that goes from the IR transceiver/LED to the main board. In the first place, that cable does not need to be removed to get to the RAM. But, more importantly, I'm not sure it's removable anyway. We unfortunately ripped the two leads out of their terminals and never managed to get them back in, as the terminal plastic broke. So Dan's Mini doesn't have a working LED or IR receiver now (actually, I didn't think there was an IR receiver, but that's what the instructions say it is, so I'm going along for now).

The second issue we had was with seating the RAM. It takes a disturbing amount of force to seat the RAM properly, but you have to do it. If you boot the Mac with the RAM not well-seated, it apparently detects its presence and the fact that something is wrong, beeps and doesn't boot. So seat the RAM until you can barely see the tips of the gold terminals.

That's it for the new generation Mini: a) don't bother disconnecting any cables, and b) seat the RAM well the first time around.

Idea of the day: the JiT installer shell

2009-09-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

I had a totally bullshit research-free day today because I was busy trying to fix a bunch of SQL databases and PHP scripts living on two antiquated linux boxes (incidentially, both displaying DNS bugs I've never seen before and that had me completely stumped). I finally gave up trying to fix them and decided to install a third fresh ubuntu server machine to migrate the dbs onto. So there I was ... and if you know me, you know "so there I was" is the cue that the story turns bad at this junction.

I decided it might be nice to have X and gnome on the server, just in case someone other than me has to administer it. I'm perfectly happy with just a terminal, but the people in my lab aren't computer scientists. So I apt-get install gdm gnome, and I'll be damned if it isn't more than an hour and a half later that the bugger finishes installing all the dependencies. If you want to be able to press every button a default gnome installation comes with and get the right answer, I can see how an hour and a half's worth of dependencies are legitimately needed. If, however, you needed gnome because you're insecure about your ifconfig skills and would rather use network-manager or whatever the little thingamajiggy is called, as I expected would be the case for anyone other than me logging into this server, then you do not need CUPS and screensavers and game-data and all the other shit that gnome depends on. In fact, it will be nowhere near a tragedy if at some later point you click on the games menu folder and find it empty, or try to run the printer manager and get a message that you need to apt-get CUPS first. Far from it.

So this got me thinking about how the idea of "Just in Time", JiT for short, could be applied in this context. Let's define it first. JiT compilation combines elements of static and dynamic code compilation. In static code compilation, all the code is compiled ahead of time. If a function is never encountered in a particular execution path, then the time and resources spent compiling it have been wasted. In dynamic compilation, each unit of code, usually a statement or line, is compiled as it is encountered in the execution path. In JiT compilation the unit of compilation is increased from a line of code to, usually, a function or block. When the execution path enters the block or function, all the code in that "compilation unit" is compiled at once. In this way it is available "just in time" for its first execution (incurring some latency) and statically thereafter, since it's cached.

Now, what does any of this have to do with installation? Well, the only game in town when it comes to installation of files (which are almost exclusively either binaries, libraries or config files) supplied by a distribution is static installation, if we borrow the nomenclature of compilation. What might dynamic installation look like? Well, as soon as a request for access to a file is made, then the file is obtained. Why is this kind of silly? Well, because, while the file is the unit on the filesystem, and certainly is a unit of access, it is not really the unit of installation. Instead, the unit of installation is the "package", a .deb, .rpm , .tar.gz or whatever, containing all the files necessary to successfully do something, as well as information about dependencies on other packages.

So what might a JiT installation strategy look like? When a user first tries to execute a binary, if the binary is present on the system, it is executed, if it is not, some latency is incurred, and the package containing the binary, as well as any immediate dependencies are installed. Can the notion of an immediate dependency be defined? Perhaps it is subjective, but I do think a common-sense, useful choice can be made in most cases.

So how might something like JiT installation be implemented? The obvious way seems to me to be as a shell. Instead of running bash, one would run ubuntu-jit-bash. When a user types the name of a binary, say foo, into bash, the shell looks in the search path (which lives in $PATH) for a binary with that name. This can be simulated by running 'which' on the name of the binary, i.e. which foo. So what ubuntu-jit-bash will need to do instead of run which foo is go to a list of all binaries provided by all .deb files that live in all the apt-accessible repositories for that machine, and find the package (or packages, and this is a problem) which includes foo. Then ubuntu-jit-bash will download the package and its immediate dependencies, install them, and run the binary.

Are there potential issues? Sure there are, as always. Security, for one, but that's always a problem, so let's drop it. Dependency on the distribution and the packaging mechanism. I certainly hope serious distributions provide their package information in some legitimate database format, but I don't know this for a fact. What about binaries with multiple installation candidates? Query the user, maybe. What about the latency? Sucks, but maybe not as badly as waiting an hour and a half for every imaginable dependency to be satisfied. What about non-immediate dependencies on libraries. There could be a JiT linker. Bottom line, this gets a little complicated, but I think the JiT installation model is not a complete bust. For one, it can seamlessly coexist with the static installation model, so it need not be imposed on anyone. But it does provide a way, when there is time pressure, to proceed to add features, services and packages to a machine in a barebones, JiT way.

Maybe I'll try to implement it one of these days.

The "If pressed..." manifesto

2009-09-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

What got me thinking about product reviews was the realization that, in a google search for my name, my Amazon reviews showed up on the first page of results. Obviously Amazon has thought quite a bit about their review system, implementing reviewer rankings, usefulness feedback on reviews, the "real name" badge, which gets applied to users who use their real legal name, etc. Other internet selling outfits have recruited small armies of celebrity reviewers ("experts") in order to boost the authority of their reviewer system. The bottom line is that every successful internet vendor has embraced product reviews, and rightly so, as they've been shown to increase sales. As a result there are now review aggregation services and other derived products.

But in some sense, the whole product review situation smells like a rights grab. Every time a buyer writes a product review they are a) creating something, a piece of writing, and b) exerting influence. I will freely admit that I haven't read the terms of Amazon's or anyone else's product review pages, but I suspect that at least some of the rights to the piece of writing the user submits pass on to Amazon or whatever website the review was submitted to. Likewise, the influence the author of the review is able to exert is now channeled through the vendor, a chip added to the vendor's pile of influence chips, if you will.

So is all of this a problem? Yes and no. On the one hand, buyers are presumably not coerced into writing the reviews. Instead they are freely expressing their opinion, perhaps even in the interest of giving back to the presumed "community of buyers". There is nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, would a system in which the value (in terms of rights to the writing, and influence) of reviews is openly acknowledged break the online vendors? Probably not. In other words, would it be possible to have a system where each reviewer chooses explicitly how many of her rights to give away, without hurting business? I think so.

What I think would work is some mechanism by which reviewers can publish reviews, possibly authenticate them, and explicitly specify the distribution rights. When I thought about this, I had two choices: 1) go out there and come up with some RSS/XML schema that allows one to do just that, or 2) start an RSS feed for my reviews, and explicitly specify the terms under which they can be reproduced. I have no illusions of grandeur regarding my relevance and influence in this matter, so I decided it best to start low key. The quickest way to start a RSS feed is via a blog, so If pressed... was born. Friends quickly joined me in posting reviews, though I do need to urge them to explicitly specify the licensing terms for their writing.

Everything we create, write, photograph, doodle, and post online, is a work. It would be a better internet if we all realized the value of what we make, then chose whether to give it away for free and to whom. Clearly defining what constitutes labor, and what constitutes a work, the result of labor, is a great start for making the internet a more ideal society than the one we live in is. Respect for labor and works, however small, insignificant, or freely given away they may be, should not be taken for granted. Right now the entities making a profit on the internet often do so based on people's ignorance of their rights, and willingness to hand them over without discussion. Respect for what we create, and for our right to determine its fate, is not prevalent in the internet mirror world right now.

Update 1: I was reading Jeff Atwood's column this morning, and his fourth point seemed related.

Companies may appeal to your innate sense of community or public good to convince you to do their work at zero pay. Consider carefully before choosing to participate; what do you get out of contributing your time and effort? Is this truly a worthy cause? Would this be worth doing if it was a paid gig?

The rest of the article, and probably the book that sparked it, "Predictably Irrational", seem worthy reading.

Wherein slampoud explains where "slampoud" came from

2009-09-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

People wonder what the name "slampoud" is all about, and why random folks refer to me as such, so I thought I'd do a little writeup about it. Let's begin by pointing out the obvious: it's not a name, it's a username that became a nickname. In the olden days (1998!) the University of Chicago ran its mail, web, directory and other services on a very old UNIX machine. (I don't know whether the servers actually ran on midway.uchicago.edu or harper.uchicago.edu or those were just the front-end machines. The campus-wide stuff was handled by NSIT, which was probably the only sysadmin outfit on campus I never worked for. Incidentally, midway was finally taken offline in the last couple weeks; we held a minute of silence for it on Facebook. RIP midway!) Back then university policy was that every incoming student got an account, with an 8 char username, which was made up of their first initial and however much of their last name could fit in the remaining 7 chars. So "slampoud" was born.

ANL's username policy was less automated, and therefore appeared more enlightened: on ANL's machines I was "lampoudi", which actually made sense, but never stuck. However, the account creation folks must have been completely stumped by the task of assigning a username to Bill Allcock. He ended up as "ballcock", but I'm not sure "allcock" would have been much better. But I digress...

"Slampoud" propagated to Uchicago Computer Science, where all the 1337ness began for me. Around CS, or at least around Techstaff, where I worked, we all referred to each other by our usernames. Brian Ward ("bri") was especially persistent in calling me "slampoud", and it stuck.

I was hired as a summer student at Argonne's Math and Computer Science Div'n because I was just about the only person in Illinois, and probably all of the Midwest, who knew anything about Myrinet, the high performance interconnect that MCS was planning to use on the cluster they were building, Chiba City. Indeed, Ridgway Scott had hired me to build a cluster at Uchicago CS, codenamed "Avalon", that used that very interconnect. So when I started working at ANL, my self-chosen username on the system administrators' MUD was "myri", short for Myrinet. There are probably still people who think of me as "myri".

But coming back to "slampoud", I have two more things to say. One: I love the ideas people come up with to explain what the heck a "slampoud" might be. The real provenance of the name doesn't occur to almost anyone. I especially liked the suggestion that some really twisted climbing move should be called "slamming the poud". Two: I briefly had a twitter account with that handle. I hated it, because every little 160 char remark I made got copied over and over by this and that meta service, completely robbing a google search for "slampoud" of any meaningful results. So I trashed my twitter account, which I'm sure caused a kerfuffle in the twitter-climbing community, but I'll tell you more about that decision some other time...

Making the Sony Reader experience more book-like

2009-09-13T08:11:00.000-07:00

I just got back from vacation, and instead of having to haul 5 kilos of books from the US to Greece, or having to devote an entire day to buying new books when I arrived in Greece, I downloaded 30 books to my Sony Reader, which weighs 200 grams, and I was done! I love this little thing for several reasons. Obviously, being able to carry that much reading material in that little space, and not compromise the reading experience (as you would if it was loaded on a palmtop or laptop device) is huge. In addition, I love that the battery life is measured in page turns, not time left on or time left lying around (although, like any battery, I'm sure there's a self-discharge rate, but I suspect it's negligible). That means I can read my several thousand pages when I feel like it, and as fast as I feel like it. In addition, several thousand page turns is really quite adequate for a week of reading, at my vacation pace, so I didn't have to charge the Reader until I got back from our beach house, which is not on the power grid, and got ready to get on a plane.

One thing that would make me love my Reader even more is the following. Reading a book starts with a little introduction, the "priming" action of holding the book and opening it to your page. Every book looks and feels different, and this priming action actually serves a purpose. I would absolutely love it if the Reader similarly incorporated a priming action, a Pavlov's bell that puts the reader (with a lower-case "r", as in the person reading) into reading mode. That could be something very traditional, like a 2 second flash of an image, the "cover" of the book, or it could be something innovative, like a literal Pavlovian chime, which could be different for each book, or unique to each Reader device (like a ringtone), or perhaps even uniform across all Readers (think about the fact that iPhones, for one, have completely uniform system noises!). I think something like this, a two second visual or auditory hint that "I'm now reading a book" would enhance the Reader experience.

My other blogs

2009-09-10T20:51:00.001-07:00

I have had many blogs, some now defunct, some alive and kicking. I was especially susceptible to this genre of writing, because a favorite English teacher of mine, at age 13, started me journaling. She believed that, whether the writing was grammatically correct or not, keeping a journal was a good way for ESL students to get more exposure to the language. So she made each and every one of us keep a journal, which she collected once a week and read without correcting. I kept up the journaling until 19 or 20 years old, at which point I was on my third or so physical journal. Then I increasingly lapsed until I started grad school, and my first blog.

The first one was a free LiveJournal blog, and its purpose was to directly replace my paper-and-pen journal. It went through various phases of privacy settings, and was largely not read by other people, as should be the case for this type of blog, in my opinion. I recently downloaded the whole thing, and shut it down.

My second blog was about logging my research goals, literature searches etc. It was private, ran on some PHP-based blogging software on geeknix.com, and I kept it roughly between 2003 and 2005. The files still live on eu-zein, the server for geeknix.com, somewhere.

I started my third blog when we bought Shadow Line, my sailboat, in 2004. That first incarnation of the Shadow Line blog again ran on geeknix.com, probably until early 2007. The blogging software and the PHP gallery software I was using didn't play together especially well, so at some point I decided to switch my picture hosting to flickr and my blog to Shadow Line's blogspot blog. In December 2008 I sold the boat, and I suggested to the new owner that he take over the blog, but he wasn't interested. Even though I've picked out the name for my next boat (and have the blogspot subdomain parked!), I can't bear to take the Shadow Line blog offline. So there it sits...

My next blogging project was If pressed.... This is a blog of reviews, based on the manifesto whose short version appears on the sidebar, and whose long version is going to appear in this blog soon. It's reasonably active, with two more contributors who are former colleagues of mine from UChicago techstaff, and bloggers themselves.

When I moved into the Winthrop house and started thinking about writing my dissertation, defending, selling the boat and moving away from SB, I decided I was going to need something else to obsess about (besides those things) to get through it. So I started climbing. Six months later I was in it for real, and the day after I defended, I started lead climbing. I knew I'd be taking lots of interesting trips to cool places during fall 2008, so I started Little did I know, my climbing blog. Climbers are really really stoked people, so many of us have blogs about our adventures, big and small, and it's a fun community to be part of.

Which brings us to this: the point of starting this particular blog was to have a place to muse about geeky, work-related or otherwise tech-related matters. This sort of thing used to go into my first personal journal type blog, or my private research blog, but at this stage in my life I'm clued-in enough, and have enough to say that's worth sharing, that I don't feel bad about putting it out there.

Multiplexing downloads & updates

2009-08-14T17:43:00.001-07:00

Can someone explain to me why updaters -- ones that don't require rebooting the machine into a safe state, like the OS X one occasionally does -- do not multiplex downloading with installing updates? As in, why can you not be installing update N while updates N+i, i=1...k are downloading. The answer is not dependencies, so what is it?

Adobe Digital Editions on Mac OS & Sony Reader

2009-08-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

It's possible to use Adobe Digital Editions as an ebook downloading and sorting portal on a Mac. If your Sony Reader has been authorized for use with your Adobe account (this has to be done on a Windows machine with the latest Ebook Library Software AND Adobe DE, and, additionally, your Reader needs to be up-to-date on its firmware), then you can drag & drop ebooks from you Mac onto the Sony Reader, which just appears as a mass storage device when plugged into your Mac. This blogpost does a pretty good job of explaining. I'm also grateful to this site for exposing me to booksonboard.com.