kudos to the applidium guys for simply doing this and putting it out there. well done.

seriously, i’m looking at you spotify. i would like to like you. the reviews are pretty consistently positive, the pricing seems reasonable and the music selection appears to be pretty good.

but i go to sign up and you require that i link to a facebook account. no. i would like to moderate my interaction with that petri dish, thankyouverymuch. that’s a deal breaker for me. you know, i’d even be willing to pay a bit more to not have to use facebook auth. howsabout hooking a brother up there?

• Rightist extremism: My right to say abhorrent things | The Economist.

the real nuggets here are in the linked research and the robin hanson posting which is referenced in the body of the article. both are worth the read. in short, hanson surmises that you have a lot fewer opinions than you think and that a lot of shit is just made up on the fly.

personally, this reinforces the notion that you have to work really hard to avoid confirmation bias. the knee jerk reaction being to simply ack what you’re surrounded with or you’re brought up with or what you surmise is the right solution. subjecting information to scrutiny, and your opinions as well, is hard. further, it’s consistently uncomfortable.

perhaps a better (but psychologically more difficult) response is to just say, “i don’t know.”

i wonder how much better off we’d be if we just copped to our individual and collective ignorance and thought really hard about stuff before opening our word holes.

lately, i’ve been a sucker for these bag emptying, pocket dumping spreads. to me, it’s interesting to see the stuff that folks carry with them on a daily basis.

to that end, here’s my pocket dump. i do a lot of traveling and i dropped the pocket knife a long time ago. it became too much of a hassle to remember to drop the pocket knife / multi-tool from one day to the next. this is as minimalist and readily replaceable a setup as i can imagine, that’s been sanded down over the years.

top (L to R clockwise)

• iPhone 4S – incase snap case (the soft-touch coating is slightly tacky but doesn’t prevent it from just sliding into my pocket). did i mention how mindblowing siri is when you integrate it into your workflow?
• tumi money clip – i’ve had this thing for like 8 years and it just keeps going and going and going … it’s worn a hole in more than a few pairs of jeans.
• moleskine cahier 12 month weekly planner – i just shifted over to the planner version this month. i previously used the gridded moleskine cahier notebook. all receive the clear duct tape reinforcement on the spine and back pocket. this is particularly key since moleskine simply glues the back pocket flap in place. one would think that a fold over and a single seam along the bottom would be easier than gluing 2 seams. shrug
• sakura micron 05 – i’ve vacillated between these, G2s and sharpie pens over the years. they’re cheap, they have a great line and the pocket clip is incredibly solid.
• gerber shard – you need something to help you open boxes, tighten loose screws, open beer bottles in the lab, etc. i’ve been thinking one of those peter atwood creations might fit the bill nicely too. it’s interesting that gerber markets this as airline safe. i’ve never received any flack from the TSA on it, but if i have to toss it i’m only out $6.
• timex weekender w/zulu strap. this has to be the best deal in simple, functional watches going. i immediately replaced the strap that it comes with, with a zulu strap. up til a month ago i carried an O&W submariner style with a zulu strap. the ETA movement in that started to gain upwards of 3 minutes / day. getting it serviced didn’t seem like a particularly worthwhile expenditure, but i’m pretty attached to the watch. i might end up doing that anyway.

tools

• cast iron frying pan (what? you don’t have one of these? WTF is wrong with you? go get one and come back when you’ve come to your senses)
• tongs
• stovetop capable of getting that frying pan really hot

ingredients

• brussel sprouts – 1-3 lbs.
• kosher salt
• pepper
• chili powder
• onion sliced – 1 large
• garlic sliced (4 cloves)
• walnuts
• olive oil
• dijon mustard (optional)

instructions

1. clean and halve the brussel sprouts. halving them is important
2. get that frying pan hot, like really frickin’ hot, but not so hot that your oil smokes
3. pour in enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the frying pan
4. put a layer of brussel sprouts in the pan, cut face down
5. let the brussel sprouts sear
6. liberally salt and pepper the sprouts while cooking
7. add onions and garlic
8. let onions soften and start to scorch
9. add walnuts
10. toss the whole concoction with a few passes of chili powder
11. if stuff falls out of the frying pan, STFU and eat it.
12. when the mixture has reached the appropriate level of badass sear remove from heat and serve with dijon mustard on the side
13. evaluate offers of baby-daddy-hood from consumers of these sprouts

additional notes

i will acknowledge that it is indeed possible to improve upon this recipe through the judicious application of bacon. however, bacon use is widely regarded as cheating.

however, there’s a need to have a competitive counter to iOS and something that’s open source provides a strong rationale.  the ability to manage and sandbox the phone in the same manner as a PC is still in its infancy.  i simply don’t have the confidence in the android marketplace right now in terms of device and app validation.  i’m left to puzzle it out as a consumer and most consumers simply aren’t there, or in my case, willing to invest the time to vet applications and their operation.

right now, i’m at a place in my life where i need things to work so i can focus on the problems at hand.  i lack the time to hack together the dependencies to make my phone workflow as seamless as i imagine you can get with android; nevermind working through the diagnostics to resolve conflicts.  you won’t see me ragging on android, i find it a compelling alternative, but i’m not willing to make that tradeoff at this point.

check out the research that russian scientists are doing on this front as well.

the narrative throughout the book is a look at what your personal energy utilization is (skewed towards the behaviors of a UK reader) and then layers a range of sustainable energy technologies against this energy use and shows how much of each technology would be required to address your energy use.  the scenarios are readily digestible and if you’re genuinely interested in the viability of living a sustainable lifestyle or getting an understanding where you should be pushing for technological development in either the market or regulatory space i can’t recommend this book enough.

increasingly i’m of the opinion that folks who want to wax poetic from one end of the spectrum or another without having done some personal research on the topic should really just STFU.  if you’re really concerned about global warming / climate change and you think we need to take dramatic steps to halt our carbon consumption and exhalation, then you need to be prepared to think long and hard about where you stand on topics like nuclear energy (classic or novel new designs) and how to make some serious modifications in your lifestyle.  if you don’t think that global warming / climate change is human influenced, well, you’re suffering from other problems and i suspect you don’t do a whole lot of thinking for yourself so this is kind of pointless.

if you’re interested in the tl;dr summary…

this stuff is hard.  really, really hard, there are no easy answers and ones ability to make effective personal changes in their lifestyle has limited impact.  sure, you can put a turbine on your roof, but the impact is negligible.  PV on the roof top is a good thing if you’re in the right area, etc..  still, there’s a lot of retooling that needs to be done, and that’s going to chew up carbon.  in a stroke of, go check my math, brilliance, all the content is online. (http://www.withouthotair.com) go check the facts, go check out the analysis, run the numbers for yourself.  more books should do this.  particularly those on contentious topics.

p229 – has a rather handy chart that outlines individual actions which can have a rather profound impact on your personal energy footprint.  going vegetarian has some notable bonus points other than the health benefits.

A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting - if you’re looking for a  portable means to do an efficient multi-subkey record sorts this is a great run down on the machinery within perl to make it faster.  acquaint yourself with the Schwartzian Transform. it’s a good thing.

yes, i know, you could just use Sort:Key:IPv4.  but that’s not very portable and self-contained, now, is it?

dennis ritchie died – he gave us UNIX, we all learned C from him and we stood on his shoulders to build the internet and tools we have today.

stephenson alludes to the reason for stagnation as being certainty and something of a litigious environment. but i can’t help but wonder if the reason is simply laziness. as we’ve become accustomed to the ease with which we can get novel new things or fat with the artificial abundance that we load our fridges with have we lost some drive? is it simply easier for the corporations to tell us what we need? as we spend ourselves into oblivion is the big stuff simply too expensive for us to care about if the corporations keep the price just on the right side of painless enough? *

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

+DRAWERS: FOOBARNAMEWITHOUTUNDERSCORESORPUNC

* first level shiz ** second level shiz

:FOOBARNAMEWITHOUTUNDERSCORESORPUNC: foo bar baz blurble plotz. :END:

i’m sure that the rules for drawer naming are well documented somewhere, but i can’t seem to find them. don’t use punctuation in drawer names.

sigh …

ZenDoggy[sulrich]% grep -i  2011  ~/Desktop/ipv4-address-space.txt
           2011-01-31
   039/8  APNI                                     2011-01  whois.apnic.net   ALLOCATED
   106/8  APNI                                     2011-01  whois.apnic.net   ALLOCATED

ZenDoggy[sulrich]% grep -i unallocated ~/Desktop/ipv4-address-space.txt
   102/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
   103/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
   104/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
   179/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
   185/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
        UNALLOCATED: not yet allocated or reserved.

may you live in interesting times.  ahh – blessing or a curse?

i initially purchased the iPad specifically for media consumption, primarily research papers, news, and books. i had no desire to make this replace my laptop (which is my desktop btb). rather it was intended primarily a means for me to catch up on my reading backlog when i’m offline and to eliminate all of the academic / work papers that i have chewing up trees. that it plays video and has a kick-ass web browser was a huge plus. but this looked to be the un-kindle for me. since then i’ve found myself re-evaluating a number of elements of my workflow to see if i could incorporate the use of the device in a portable manner more efficiently.  it’s getting progressively better, but it’s certainly not a laptop replacement for me by any stretch.

interaction with the cloud

this part of the ipad sucks. there’s no notion of being able to attach to local storage or effectively use an application with network based storage, unless of course this function exists within the application and in the cloud. the sync of docs between keynote and pages and the filesystem on your computer is abysmal and seems like a horrible afterthought on the part of apple.  they did a half-assed implementation for integrating with the iWork site and in the most recent release they added webdav functionality . this is certainly a welcome addition, but it’s a rather tedious means of interacting with the device.

i can certainly appreciate apple’s desire to eliminate the notion of a filesystem from the device, but this limits its laptop replacement utility for quick edits, etc. considerably. i now have to plan on how i’ll get the docs and very consciously plan the edit / review flow if i want to use the device for content creation.  this doesn’t quite put me where i need to be for a lot of my travel.  this has relegated the device to text editing and presentation.  useful, yes.  sustainable as a work flow? no.

utility computing device (for lack of a better term)

we have a room in the back of our house which is intended to be a library, but is effectively a mud room / storage area / library. we had put an old laptop back there to facilitate catching up on email, writing quick docs /notes, etc on the main level in the house as opposed to lurking in the office. we’ve since shoved the laptop aside and put a keyboard stand/charger in that location. the notion of being able to handle a lot of this quick stuff from the iPad is increasingly the knee-jerk reaction. however. there are a lot of times where you just want a real keyboard.  to address this, we ended up getting one of those ipad keyboard docs.  it does a pretty darn good job.  i fire up simplenote and away i go.  i can push the resulting output into something more durable when i get to a real computer.

it turns out that the simplenote workflow is deceptively elegant,  particularly when i coupled it with the associated simplenote sync capabilities that are provided by cefstat’s simplenote.el tools for emacs.  these and a little bit of org-mode happiness have given me a wicked amount of productivity when i’m waiting for things and when i’m crammed in a little seat on the airplane.  (a work condition i deal with, with alarming frequency.)

news / rss / etc.

news

i’m surprised by how pathetic the news situation is on the ipad.  the nytimes editors choice app seems to radically miss the mark it doesn’t provide much in terms of interesting interaction with the web site.  the content is limited to the, well, editors choice.  the reading experience is however, rather pleasant.  for content, however, it’s a lot easier to just go to the site.

rss

rss might be the salvation for news content on the web on the ipad.  i’m frankly shocked by how awesome the rss readers are on the ipad.  i use google reader to to read my rss feeds from my workstation/laptop, and reeder for the ipad has to be the slickest interface i’ve seen to date for rss reading on the ipad.  it’s fast, it’s engaging and works great offline.  however, there have to be about a half-dozen or so extraordinarily compelling rss readers for the platform.  this seems to be an area of considerable innovation.

twitter

while on the whole i’m largely ambivalent about twitter, i’ve found that i’m really impressed with the “official” twitter application for the ipad.  this was tweetie for the iphone.  with the integration that they’ve provided and the ability to drive pretty much any twitter feature from the ipad itself, color me massively impressed.

magazines

zinio – this app has been consistently improving over the past couple of months.  i’m a huge economist fan and more and more articles have been enabled with the text view readily available.  it used to be simple graphic snapshots of the magazine pages which were impressively rendered and readable.  however, now it’s taking the form of a more dynamic electronic magazine.

wired – i’m so massively disappointed and frustrated with the pricing on their application that i’m just going to let the subscription lapse until they fix it. i am of the impression that a good chunk of this is outside of their control with the manner in which apple handles in-app purchases, making subscriptions a total pain in the ass and/or unworkable, but shelling out more than i’d ever pay for the magazine is just vile.

runners world - i’m equally frustrated with their pricing and their model, but to be fair they don’t bill themselves as a technology rag, so i’m surprisingly willing to cut them some slack.

ny review of books – seriously, i need a proxy for instapaper for these guys.

instapaper – if one was looking for a succinct reason to purchase an ipad, this is quite possibly it.  this is a labor of love and it shows.  i’ll grant you there are a couple of annoying nits with the app (i’d rather that the trash can wasn’t the archive metaphor, i’d like to be able to actually delete an article from my history/queue which wasn’t worth keeping around, etc.) but in terms of being able to enjoy long form online content, this is the app.  this deserves a spot in your dock. period.

i was a little curious as to what kind of checks were implemented with the API and how interaction with the API actually worked. it turns out that the API operation is dead easy. however, they don’t do some things like check the realistic time difference between checkins or the distance between venues for consecutive checkins.  as such there’s no notion of physicality associated with the application and the check-in process and the game.

of course this means that they’re dependent upon well behaved client behavior. to that end you only have to present the coordinates for the venue(s) you’re interested in, in order to obtain (or maintain) mayoral dominance.  you can use this to periodically check into a venue, even if you’re not physically there to pick up the GPS coordinate.  given that there are often perks associated with being a mayor of a particular venue, there might be some value in squatting on a particular location.

this begged a little experimentation. yielding foursquatter. a perl foursquare client script which can be trivially used to squat on a venue, or venues.

code and such is available on github.

% mkdir path_to_repo
% cd path_to_repo
% git --bare init

from the local machine with your content/code, add the remote origin and push your code to the repo.

% cd path_to_local_source
% git remote add origin ssh://hostname/path_to_repo
% git push origin master

share it or get it from another location …

% git clone ssh://hostname/path_to_repo

assumes that the person has an account on the host with the appropriate permissions to modify or read the repo contents.

pull changes from the server to pick up the latest …

% git pull origin master

i’ve been catching up on a massive reading backlog as of late. one of the topics egregiously in the backlog has been digesting the information associated with internationalized domain names (IDNs) and poking at some of the attendant follow-on considerations. given that there’s a huge hunk of the world that doesn’t use latin character sets, this is an increasingly interesting and relevant topic. particularly for network infrastructure dweebs.

for those looking for a good place to start on the topic of internationalization i highly recommend geoff huston’s writeup on the topic, Internationalizing the Internet. he provides a reasonable primer on interesting topics such as digraphs, glyphs, etc.

fortunately, localization of content presentation is an area which has received a considerable amount of attention within the computer industry. further, it benefits from the fact that there’s been a bit of give and take socially and from a development perspective to accommodate various localization requirements. e.g.: japanese writing and layout has undergone a bit of accommodation to “modern” publishing capabilities and computer interfaces.

internationalization of the Internet is another matter. of considerably greater difficulty is enabling the infrastructure to support the variety of localizations that are out there. the first among these is the DNS infrastructure. this leads you down a windy path of different encoding mechanisms and a whole host of additional security implications. of notea number of interesting variants on homograph attacks.

looking at this from the perspective of network engineering, we’re really moving into a world where there will be new stresses and strains placed upon the DNS infrastructure.  what was previously a relatively low bandwidth infrastructure service will rapidly explode in terms of bandwidth utilization and processing requirements going forward.  considerable attention will need to be given to application design and verification mechanisms in the background to alert users to a host of new attacks.  it’s unclear what the implications will be on service / application developers over the near term given that most of the infrastructure elements associated with web services are ascii oriented.

misc. background reading:

• punycode – a means of encoding unicode into the ASCII character space.
• Phishing defense against IDN address spoofing attacks – abstract: Address spoofing is a common trick used in phishing scams to confuse unsuspecting users about a Web site’s real origin. With the introduction of Unicode characters into domain names, also known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), the risk has significantly increased even for the most cautious users. The author explores the various types of address spoofing attacks focusing on IDN, and presents a novel client-side Web browser plug-in Quero which implements several techniques—including highlighting—to protect the user against visually undistinguishable address manipulations.
• RFC 4690 – abstract: This note describes issues raised by the deployment and use of Internationalized Domain Names.  It describes problems both at the time of registration and for use of those names in the DNS.  It recommends that IETF should update the RFCs relating to IDNs and a framework to be followed in doing so, as well as summarizing and identifying some work that is required outside the IETF.

seriously. just do it.

if you need a GUI, SuperDuper, works wonderfully.  this will save your ass. no joke.

somehow, apple managed to really screw up the X11 implementation that they shipped with leopard.  fortunately, they had really sharp guys tracking this and the xquartz project stepped in quickly to plug the gaps.  if you’re running leopard, this is the release to get.  personally, i keep a copy of the latest version on my machine in the odd chance than an OS upgrade happens to trigger nastiness on the X11 front.

why use this versus terminal?

if you need to run a UNIX X app, you’re going to need an X server running.  however, for the most part, if you’re just doing CLI stuff you’re not going to care.  i happen to have an apparent inability to use the option key as meta.  terminal doesn’t allow you to remap the command key to meta so  .. i use rxvt (built from ports) and xterm is  obviously readily available.  X11 will honor the use of the command key as meta so my thumb will do the right thing.

make sure you’re using something later than r2.3.2.1

x11 preferences

release 2.3.2.1 and later provides the ability to update the system pasteboard w/copy on select from X11. this means that copy and paste work pretty much the way you would intuit between OS X apps and xterms, etc. without having to manually invoke the copy operation from the menu w/i X11. this of course assumes that you have sanely disabled “Enable key equivalents under X11″.

note to make this work you need to enable the “update pasteboard immediately when new text is selected” option in the preferences. this has persisted across a number of releases and pretty much just works the way you want it too.  this was a major nit for me for a number of years.  if you’re  a recent convert, enjoy.

essential tools / things to get:

go and get the developer toolkit (aka Xcode) – this will get you a working compiler and a kick ass development environment.  unfortunately, i haven’t had a lot of time to monkey with Xcode for its primary purpose of developing mac apps.  you should be able to install this off of the optional software installation on the OS distribution disk.  alternatively you can get this from the apple developers web site. (http://developer.apple.com/mac/ – note you might have to create an account on this site to get the latest tools and they are a big download.  get it when you’re someplace where you have a solid and fast connection.)

macports – run, don’t walk, to get this one.  i’ve messed with fink, i find this to be more complete and  more often than not, it just works.  to make life easier, you should periodically update your ports collection.  this is trivially accomplished via a periodic sudo port selfupdate.  note, you’ll need to have a working Xcode installation to get this appropriately installed since, like the FreeBSD version of ports, it will build this stuff from source and resolve dependencies in the process.  it’s not a binary build system like fink, et al.

editors

emacs / vim – without taking a religious perspective on this topic it’s good to know that there are first rate implementations of both on this platform.  i install both and toggle between the two of them as it makes sense.  personally, i’ve toyed with some very useful 3rd party editors as well. i’ll include some additional notes on these as well.

• emacs – i use this one, there are folks that swear by aquaemacs, but i can’t make the keybindings happy enough for my taste.

• vim – macvim – need i say more?  i used this version for a long time prior to finding an emacs that made me happy on the mac.  the new version of macvim is sexy as hell and has tabs and shit.
• TextMate – this one seems to have all of the web 2.0 folks in a twist.  i find it to be a remarkably good editor with emacs-like keybindings that work for most things. (meta-b/f don’t work as expected so that’s a frustration for me, personally.)
• SubEthaEdit / Coda – i mention these in the same breath.  SubEthaEdit is a collaborative text editor which allows folks to simultaneously edit a document, this editor is embedded within the coda web development package.

OSX oddities

su / root account – if you’re used to just su’ing to root, then you’re going to be surprised by the fact that root isn’t enabled by default.  instead you use sudo for pretty much everything.  if you’re used to running things as root and you feel like doing this all over the place you’re welcome to enable root (done by following these directions), over the past couple of machines i’ve had, i haven’t enabled root.

cron – OSX doesn’t run the crond like you’ve seen on other platforms instead there’s launchd.  which assumes the responsibilities of a whole host of classic UNIX processes (notably, init and crond).  if you use crontab -e a la the classic UNIX interface to crond, then all of the launchd stuff is handled in the background for you. if you expect to just copy over your crontab files from /var/spool/cron then you’re in for something of an awakening.  to make all of this just work, use crontab, it will make sure that launchd is updated appropriately.

turning a page in eucalyptus

i recently ran across a number of references to hiram bingham’s, Inca Land, which is available for free from project gutenberg.  this of course prompted the search for an appropriate ebook reader with hooks to project gutenberg.  behold eucalyptus, which will download books from project gutenberg on the fly and give you a killer interface for viewing the contents of the book.  insane attention to detail is visible everywhere.

the text is rendered in very high quality fonts, the animation is tight and the search function is spot on.  my only nit, is the lack of graphics for books which do have photos.

http://eucalyptusapp.com/ – definitely worth the $9.99 that they’re asking for it.

i should point out that i’ve also purchased classics (http://www.classicsapp.com/) which is equally stunning visually. however, the library that’s embedded inside classics is anemic.  while they’ve taken great care to display the content beautifully i find myself aching for more content.  i’d give up some of the visual appeal for the content and the portability.  eucalyptus seems to have struck a very nice balance here.

while all these two apps are capable reading platforms, i do find them lacking a few features which i really irritate me.  specifically these:

• the ability to annotate or make notes. now, i know that there are all sorts of additional considerations associated with this and there’s a corresponding need to provide a means to extract those notes into a different application, provide sexy input overlay, etc.  but i’m a margin writer or a highlighter.  if i like a book i like to make it mine.  while this is a general nit with ebooks, i would love to find a reasonably decent digital proxy.  failing this, i would like …
• the ability to copy a selected region of text and use the paste function to bring that content into another application for sharing or notes.  seems like a pretty duh item for me, particularly given that the content is all without copyright encumbrance.

these are hardly damning criticisms of these apps, in fact they’re more reflective of my desire to have a host of reading functionality in my pocket which to date i haven’t been able to find.  these apps represent the greatest non-kindle based means of portable reading that i’ve personally poked at and i find my curiosity piqued and a couple of things lacking.

note, this grabs the phone number to dial from your system clipboard. (note the use of the pbpaste command. users of non-OS X platforms should adjust to something appropriate. i seem to recall the gnome had something similar.

in the interests of posterity.

vonage dial