nicely done googles.

interesting sponsorship of an open source program.

i was unable able resist the replacement of our existing stainless steel sierra mugs with a shiny titanium sierra cup from snow peak.  unfortunately, i can’t seem to purchase this locally and a purchase direct from snow peak was the result.  (such are obsessions) this was an entirely painless purchase experience, but i was surprised at how heavy the package that arrived was.  my titanium sierra cups had been co-packed with a 2 lb. glossy printed catalog.  WTF?

i honestly don’t quite know what to make of this.  i realize that there’s a strong stigma to showing up in a publication such as this.  but wouldn’t purchasing this also imply that you know the folks that are going to be in there? the tag … “Now Even MORE Registered SEX OFFENDERS in Your Area” seems to indicate that this is a good thing, or at least a selling point.  odd.

for those interested in the answers to  ”Match the Perp to the Crime”, it’s B, C, A.  though, i’m really not quite certain as to what masterbating in the public library consists of.

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

the scraper in the scion gave up the ghost the other day. as a minnesotan, i’m more than a little picky about my scrapers. they’re critical tools. period.

most folks don’t appreciate the utility of the teeth on the back side of a well made scraper. they’re used to score deep ice or buildup and make use of the larger scraper blade more efficient. the alternative is to use the primary blade of the scraper to wedge through the build-up. a tedious endeavor.

the designers of this scraper clearly didn’t have an appreciation for the utility of these teeth, but they’d seen other scrapers on the market with these teeth. they structured the base of the scraper in such a manner as to render these teeth useless. fail.

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.

i’m behind on organizing pictures and notes from our recent trip to peru.  but when i was running through some video, i ran across this little nugget of annoyance.

imagine, if you will, that you’ve spent the better part of the last 3 days hiking 30 miles in the andes and you haven’t had a shower.  you’ve traipsed around machu picchu and you’re dog tired.  more than anything, you’re really looking forward to getting some sleep and chilling on a train on your way back home.

as a slight aside, i should point out that some folks who’ve hiked the inca trail and arrive at machu picchu to be confronted by, “we took a bus here” tourists get their teeth set on edge. when confronted by these tourists complaining about having to walk up and down stairs at a wonder of the world the last thing you want to do is have to put up with them on a train.

however, the company that runs the trains from aguas calientes is (justifiably) loathe to miss a marketing opportunity and after they’ve given you some light snacks and tea proceed to bust out the sales cart and the pulsating techno.  when you want to sleep and politely ignore the couple sitting 18 inches across the aisle from  you this is not helping things.

a note of advice – if you’ve going to do the inca trail and you’re making a decision as to which train you’re going to take back to cusco, or wherever it is you’re going back to, stick with your peeps.  you want to be with worn out fellow hikers and folks who aren’t going to be drunkenly whipping out their visa/amex/mc to purchase alpaca wool sweaters and shawls.  more importantly, you don’t want to be dealing with some rancid marketing techno while you smell like ass.

the speed is quite frankly mind-boggling.  javascript apps scream, rendering is honored appropriately, java support is dicey (keep safari handy) and the interface is really snappy.

this week gives me enough breathing room to poke at the latest firefox 3.6 build as well.  this is the default workhorse browser for 99%+ of what i do.  frankly, i don’t know what i’d do without the “it’s all text” add-on.  given the amount of wiki editing and integration with online systems that i have to handle on a daily basis.  if i could get this for chrome, i might be sorely tempted to jump ship.  firefox 3.6 carries with it the attendant hassle of a new release in terms of add-on support.  but fortunately i’ve been able to hack or cajole all the major ones for me into submission.  there’s some decided improvement in rendering speed.  but beyond that, it looks pretty much the same to me.  which is more than ok, it’s a solid performer in the workflow.

3:30a comes way too fast and i’m deeply asleep.  the porters wak us and as a group we do surprisingly well getting ourselves going.  we really only were running about 10-15 minutes behind the blistering pace that alex (our guide) had laid out for us the night before.

a comment about breakfast – cake.  seriously, it was cake, with frosting.  the porters and the cook are quite pleased with themselves, but i think everyone had the same reaction when they were introduced to the cake at 3:45a.  muted surprise and not as well muted disappointment.  still it’s a nice touch and kudos to the crew for doing it.

breakfast is short.  we collected our stuff and prepped for the trail.  in all of the hustle and bustle; elise falls from the tent terrace to the cooking / dining tent terrace.  this was about an 8-12 foot drop.  fortunately, she’s unhurt and what could have been a very bad situation is mercifully a minor bump.  she and her husband (josh) were understandably peeved by the relative ambivalence expressed by the guide and the porters to what was potentially a nasty situation.  still, kathy and i were impressed at the level of calm josh and elise seemed to have about the whole situation.

as a group we have to hustle to make it to the sun gate (intipunku) check point.  the check point opens at 5:30a and we’re almost the first ones in line.  all the groups queue up here.  the early morning rise was worth it.

it’s at this point that i develop a particularly strong appreciation for our group.  as i overhear the banality of our neighbors.  the whining brand-oriented 20-somethings w/very little daypacks.  daddy hired them porters for their makeup.

we get through the checkpoint and we haul ass.  i mean we seriously haul ass to the sun gate.  our group was passing the group ahead of us and it was a very brisk pace uphill to the sun gate.  from here, you have an amazing view of machu picchu.  more importantly, from this point, it’s a relatively short (and surprisingly modestly sloped) descent to machu picchu.  when we got down to machu picchu and looked back it was apparent that we seriously motored through that distance.  the distance between the sun gate and the funeral rock is a respectable amount and it took us no time to cover that distance.

finally, we’d made it to machu picchu.

this was our short day on the trail.  for other groups, this would be their longest.  we basically had one small pass (trivial after the day before) and we descended for a number of hours.  kathy wasn’t feeling particularly well, so we opted to bypass a small ruin and take the porters trail directly to the camp.  this enabled us to change clothes and take a nap for a couple of hours.

refreshed from our nap we had a quick snack and took an afternoon tour on winaywayna.  this was a pretty neat and relatively recent discovery.  with still working water falls and expansive terraces for agriculture it made for a very nice diversion.

happy hour was where we discussed the porter tipping situation.  tipping does tend to bring out some interesting cultural perspectives.  europeans aren’t accustomed to the bribery that we engage in as americans with tipping.  the U.S. contingent in the group was a bunch of democrats who just assumed that you tipped generously and carried with us a little bit of 1st world guilt.  france – was simply and diplomatically silent on the topic.  the english contingent seemed to feel that we were being held up by llama path.  in the end we settled on everyone contributing what they were comfortable with and took up a collection of ~720 soles.  which amounted to about 36 soles / porter and 72 soles for the cook.  this was well short of the recommended tip by llama path but better than i was expecting based on the tenor of the conversation that had taken place.

after dinner everyone was crashing early.  we had a 3:30a wakeup for the entry and trail into machu picchu.

at this point in the trail, the bathrooms are disgusting.  folks aren’t feeling at their gastro-intestinal finest and the squat toilets do next to nothing to make you feel any better.  brushing ones teeth is an exercise in gag reflex control.

crash hard, sleep hard and make sure you have your crap packed up for the early wakeup.

hell day.  breakfast was a healthy dose of pancakes.  then we hit the trail, we had the longest day of the trail ahead of us and it was a requirement to get going right off the bat in the morning.  it was basically climbing, climbing, climbing and some more climbing.  we climbed on stairs, through rain forest on stairs and on trail.  the scenery was really quite lush and after a couple of hours we got a break.

we broke in a nice valley where there were touts offering us water and snacks.  after hitting the bathroom we slogged up to dead woman’s pass. (DWP)  the valley at the base of the pass approach is really some of the most memorable in the hike, were we pestered llamas and sheep in between some steep rocky mountain sides.

DWP is so named because the pass has the profile of a woman lying on her back complete with lumpy breasts and perky nipples for imagery.  the trail itself consists of a handful of switch backs which gain altitude fairly quickly then a long, long set of stone stairs which take you to the top.  these stairs seem to go on forever.  you stop, take a look back, see how far you’ve gone and then look up and see how far you have to go.  the porters basically run up  the mountain side and it’s more than a little sobering to see these guys hauling ass with ~60 lbs of gear each up the side of the mountain.  the llama path guys all wear read and they move as a group so you see them coming and going and they pass you like you’re standing still.  often you are.

when you make it to the top of dead woman’s pass, you’re pretty well out of breath and you’re welcoming the opportunity to rest and snap some pictures.  then it’s down the back side of the mountain.  this is the cold side and the contrast is amazing.  you put on a hat and a shell and you haul yourself down the backside of the mountain this time it’s down the stone stairs.  if you think going down stairs is easier, you’re quite mistaken, this is a painful undertaking when it’s nice weather. on the back side of the mountain where it’s wet and cold, it’s a particularly nerve racking experience and downright dangerous in many instances.  doing this without trekking poles strikes me as insanity, but the porters basically run down the stairs here.  after a couple of hours of going down stairs, you’re body is screaming for a flat expanse to walk on.

we ended up having our lunch where several groups were actually staying for the night.  their day was done. we still had another pass to hit and the corresponding descent to our camp site.  kathy massively powered through this second pass which was wet and rainy.  when we got to the second pass there were all sorts of small stone piles left by previous trekkers.  it would have been a fun place to take some pictures had it not been pouring and a requirement that we haul ass down the back side of this mountain as well.

by this time, a number of folks in our group had become sick.  whether from altitude or something in the food it was tough to say.  two folks were trekking and puking their guts out en route.  not fun.  by dinner we were at about 50% of the start group.  folks just went to their tents and crashed.  we had dinner and then crashed. i don’t know that i’ve ever slept so well camping.

we woke right at 4a and hustled to pack the rest of the gear.  my pack feels crazy heavy.  we got a 1/2 porter for kathy to carry her clothes and sleeping bag.

we got on the bus at plaza regocijo and we met celia a hardy mid-20 something french woman who was sick the evening of the briefing and wasn’t able to make it.  she seems to be ready for this trek.  we took the bus to ollayantaytambo where we have breakfast and buy our bag of coca leaves and ash.  at this point we start to get a feel for the group interaction.

we also got to check out a guinea pig castle and the frog drinking game we’d read so much about.  i can see how this would be a mess you up drinking game.  it clearly takes some practice.

from here we ended up taking the bus to kilometer 82 – which has something of an interesting staging area next to the train tracks and the river.  it’s a essentially a village that pops out of nowhere with a helluva  lot of bustle and no shortage of touts.  folks pop up to sell you water, gatorade, walking sticks, ponchos and a litany of items which one might actually need but really should have had beforehand.

a slight aside re: the roads – the bus ride from ollayantaytambo to kilometer 82 gave us a first hand look at road conditions in rural peru.  in short, they’re pretty rustic.  a good hunk of the trip was on relatvely well paved single lane road.  at various points it devolved into single lane gravel road.  what isn’t always evident is the fact that the road often abuts a steep drop or in some instances a cliff.   driving here requires no small amount of concentration and situational awareness.  not to mention planning and coordination in the direction of what’s coming at you from the other driection on the road.

there seems to be something of an unspoken coordination between drivers where the party closest to the workable shoulder moves to use it to allow the other party to pass.  this is not something to try in the U.S. where every self important prick assumes that they have the right of way.

at the staging area we were herded to the first check piont where our passports are stamped and we’re checked into the trail.  we get to cross the rio urubamba on a swinging cable bridge.  it’s an auspicious start and sets you in the mood for a haul.  the first few miles on the trail aren’t as rustic as you might think.  there’s some meandering through farmers fields, plenty of folks offering to let you rent their bathroom and selling stuff on the trail.  there’s a surprising number of families who live on or next too the trail.  there’s also a surprising amount of donkey shit on the trail.  you spend the first couple of hours expending a lot of energy dodging donkey shit.

at first, there’s nothing particularly challenging about the the trail, and you’re fresh and eager.  towards the end of the day however, we got a bit of a taste of what was to come.  we hit a number of steep sections and got some healthy climbs in.  by the time you hit the camp after that first day, you’re ready to crash.

kathy left dinner early the evening of the first night on the trail. pretty tired and there was some rather spirited discussion about continuing; with her feeling under the weather.

inka museum – bring your own tp.  note, this is one of those places that you would think is included in the boleto turistico, but in reality, it’s not.  i run hot and cold on this one.  there’s some interesting stuff here.

very few of the displays here have english translations. so you have to puzzle through the explanation if you’re spanish challenged as we are.  there are guides available for hire based on tips only.  in retrospect, it might have been useful to get a guide to tell us the stories associated with the displays.  i don’t mean for the word “stories” to come off as pejoratively as it does, but you always have to go back and balance the account that you’re told when you’re on a tour with the research that you can dig up as an obsessively detail oriented individual.  in most cases, it’s close enough or romanticized appropriately.  sometimes you just want to hear a good story.  remember, if it bleeds, it leads.

getting back to the inka museum … they’re pretty aggressive about enforcing the ticket policy here.  there are guards all over the place and they ticket number at entry.  kathy couldn’t find a bathroom and they almost didn’t let her back into the museum.  a little bit of local explanatory help got her back into the mix, but seriously people …

the displays here are no where near as polished as the displays at MAP there’s a lot of card stock and fading ink-jet printing with ye-olde english font action.  there are however, a lot of artifacts that are well worth checking out and a few dioramas that are more than a little entertaining.   that said, the artifact displays are haltingly covered in english.  if you’re not conversant in spanish, you’re screwed.

almost worth the price of admission alone are a handful of large format aerial photographs from the 1930s.  these were clearly taken before exhaustive restoration and excavation had taken place.  ollayantaytambo looks practically native and machu picchu looks like it was just discovered.  there are a number of pictures from the 1912 national geographic expedition led by hiram bingham.  this had to be the first expedition of note since the “discovery” of machu picchu by bingham a year earlier.

as a side note – these pictures had me dig up the original national geographic articles from the natgeo archives.  fascinating stuff from a time when there was still active exploration to be done.

the first floor of this museum has a couple of small textile production exhibits.  one of the exhibits has a number of interesting displays detailing various textile patterns and their symbolic significance.  (star pattern / mountain range / etc.)  apparently, there’s a lot of interest in the part of the peruvian government in insuring that there’s a repository of native skills and they’re supporting a number of initiatives to teach and document the original techniques.

thursday evening – the briefing …

this was the pre-inca trail briefing at the llama path office.  this was more interesting than i thought it would be.  first off, it’s the first exposure to the people you’re going to be slogging 30+ miles on the trail with.  our impressions were very favorable.  there’s an underlying dread at the possibility that you’ll have to slog the next 3-4 days out with a bunch of douche-bags.  fortunately, we got a good crew.  largely non-U.S. in composition, we had a handful of australians, a portuguese couple, a woman fromt he isle of man, a couple from michigan and a venezuelan by way of seattle.

• day 1 – looks to be relatively chepa
• day 2 – looks to be a bitch
• day 3 – looks like stair hell with a break in the afternoon
• day 4 – wake up @ 3:30a – hike in the dark, wait in line, hike and tour within machu picchu – bus to aguas calientes and a train to poroy for us.  llama path bus to cusco.

we hauled our asses to the llama path office at 8:30a and were picked up by a tour bus marked “valle sagrado” only after i repeatedly said to kathy, “awesome, that must be our bus,” about a hundred times in the 15 minutes between our arrival and the actual pickup by the bus. we hopped on and proceeded to make number of loops through cusco picking up additional folks with no clear guide emerging. it was only after we got to a gas station on the outside of town that our guide boarded the bus. marco antonio, who was quite the player and drew numerous comparisons between himself and marc anthony, the singer.

our first stop was carao, a nondescript little village en route to sacred valley notable only for a big hunk of cement with a dog that i took numerous photos of and a clear relationship between the tour operator and the folks selling schwag at a roadside stand. we were also graced with a number of llama photo-ops.

from carao, we made our way to pisac. pisac is a surprisingly sprawling site, placed the crest of a mountain it contains some royal housing with a considerable amount of agricultural terracing. despite it being the offseason, we had to really hustle around this site to check out the elements that were interesting. of particular interest to us were the follwoing items.

- this was the first time we were able to see inca fountains in action. there was an elaborate routing of water from the moutainside through the “urban area” of the site.

- pisac has the largest known inca graveyard. this is actually a hill side facing the urban area with a large number of holes exposed. apparently each of these holes corresponds to a tomb, which had been looted at some point. the incas would bury their dead in the fetal position. a reference to the return to the earth mother (pachamama). buried as such, the tombs were on the small side.

we got a slow start to the day and ended up sleeping in a bit longer than we’d hoped. after grabbing a quick bite at the hotel we ducked down to the ATM machines to extract the balance of the necessary cash to pay the balance of the inca trail tour. we were able to quickly settle up with llama path and made our way to the Museum of Art Precolumbian (MAP). it bears noting that this place seems to have the toniest cafe in town. you got the opportunity to eat in a stylish glass cube in the middle courtyard of the museum. we were sufficiently non-plussed by the menu to skip it for lunch.

the MAP is actually one of the nicer museums in cusco. the displays are nicely laid out and there’s a considerable amount of content. they had a large collection of ceramics and sculpture from all over peru. it was well documented in both spanish and english which made it a fairly engaging museum for us. in addition to the ceramics they had a surprisingly large collection of wood sculpture, metalwork and some post-columbian painting. all of this was well organized and largely, well documented.

lunch – chez maggy. if you read the local reviews and the lonely planet writeup on this, you’d think that this was some orgasm inducing pizza. it’s not bad, but it’s not worth writing home over. we opted for the “super macho” pizza (sausage and red onion) which was tasty.

after lunch, we struck out for saqsayhuaman (aka: sexy woman) in typical fashion, this involved hauling ass uphill. both in town and on the stairs / trail leading to the ruins. an interesting (and annoying) feature of cusco is the presence of stair streets. resbalosa is one of these, “stair streets”. after reaching the top/end of resbalosa, we hugged the edge of a winding road leading up to the entrance of the trail to saqsayhuaman. it was a little disheartening to see so many people on their way down while we were climbing up. then it started to sprinkle.

when we reached the top of the trail to saqsayhuaman, the officials descended on us for our boleto turistico. at this point we also appreciate that it would have been a 5 minute taxi ride and there was no shortage of offers to take us back down. the easy part.

saqsayhuaman is a truly impressive site and it’s interesting to note that it’s still under active excavation. while we were up there they were actively digging out portions of the site and documenting it. it’s easy to see why the inca’s chose it for building their defenses, there’s an impressive view and assaulting armies would have a hell of an ascent.

we got about halfway down the trail to the winding road leading back into town when it started to rain in earnest. the descent in the rain while on the road wasn’t at all difficult. however, descending resbalosa when it’s wet is a bit taxing. this stone stair street has had years of foot traffic and flowing water to wear the stones smooth and it’s quite slippery.

we’d visited llama path, our tour operator to see if there was an option for us to pay the balance via american express or an alternative credit card, but they were adamant that the balance be paid in cash. annoying to say the least. while we were at llama path we took the opportunity to book the sacred valley tour. this amounted to a full day tour of a number of notable inca ruins which we were interested in, as well as a couple of villages in the sacred valley area.

another one of our errands was to purchase the boleto turistico, this would get us access to a number of the archeological sites as well as a handful of museums around cusco. though the nasty gotcha here is that there are a number of interesting museums which you’d really like to see that _don’t_ use the boleto turistico. we discovered this quite quickly as we went to go check out Qoricancha. aka, the nads of the jaguar.

Qoricancha was known as the temple of the sun. apparently when pizarro arrived in cusco and took control, the spanish got busy stripping the temple of all of its gold, melting it down and shipping it back to spain. a task they were apparently able to accomplish within a month. the church and aboveground structure is built upon the ruins of the original temple, and is not covered by the boleto turistico. what _is_ covered by the boleto turistico is the underground museum. this is a sad, dank underground affair that’s accessible from avenida del sol. it’s about 6-8 poorly lit rooms with correspondingly poorly lit and documented displays. there are some potential nuggets within that little basement museum but they had no english translation to the labels. of particular interest, to me, was the display on trepanning. they had a handful of skulls which had been operated on and it was clearly apparent that there had been some healing that took place. this would have been a fascinating topic to dig into when you had the skulls right in front of you. unfortunately, there was zip. you eventually end up climbing out of this museum to emerge in the middle of the grounds of qoricancha, which is actually quite pleasant.

the above ground museum on the other hand is quite interesting. you really get a feel for the spanish ability to build on someone else’s foundation. there are a large number of existing walls from the temple of the sun days, which the spanish simply opted to cap with colonial architecture. today, most of this has been opened up as a museum, where you can check out the masonry and earthquake proof trapezoidal doorways left behind by the incas. oh, and there’s the santo domingo convent on site.

while wandering about we also took the opportunity to check out the 12-sided stone and snap some photos with local students. kathy proved to be quite popular. those hot chicks always are. the stone was impressive and underwhelming all at the same time. you have to appreciate the skill in crafting it particularly given the toolkit available at the time, but it does come down to it being a stone, in the middle of a wall.

it’s a little irksome to be greeted by this when you’re filling up.  the fine folks at marathon have positioned this as if it were some sort of grassroots advertising.  but in reality it’s just shilling for their preferred mode of operation when it comes to cap-and-trade.

zendoggy% whois ourenergyvoice.com
Registrant:
Marathon Oil Company
   539 S MAIN ST
   FINDLAY, OH 45840-3229
   US

   Domain Name: OURENERGYVOICE.COM

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Promote your business to millions of viewers for only $1 a month
Learn how you can get an Enhanced Business Listing here for your domain name.
Learn more at http://www.NetworkSolutions.com/
------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
      Marathon Oil Company              externaldomainmgt@marathonoil.com
      539 S MAIN ST
      FINDLAY, OH 45840-3229
      US
      419 422 2121 fax: 419 425 7040

   Record expires on 09-Jul-2014.
   Record created on 09-Jul-2009.
   Database last updated on 31-Oct-2009 23:30:43 EDT.

   Domain servers in listed order:

   NS59.WORLDNIC.COM            205.178.190.30
   NS60.WORLDNIC.COM            205.178.144.30

setting aside that bit of silliness on my part, i noticed something. while i was grinding out real work and answering emails between the discovery of the breakage and repair, i discovered that my work flow had developed a dependency on having an automated “checker” come back and clean up after me.

now, i’ve had this realization in the world of MSFT Word and other packages with built-in spell checkers, but clean-up of typos was one of those things that i did in a batch manner, my fingers hadn’t actually adapted to the use of an integrated spell checking function like they had in my normal work tools. (read, emacs)

i’ve always had some level of pride in having relatively decent spelling skills. but the power of ctr-; and _knowing_ what your tool would do, has had an interesting impact on my productivity. one that i’m not entirely convinced is for the best in the long term.

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.

omnifocus – the most powerful productivity tool on my mac.  i used to use a collection of text files, scripts, etc.  this just slurps it all up and syncs to my phone.  i use a hacked version of GTD for my workflow, which omnifocus is oriented to. however, as a catchall for things that need to get done, this can’t be beat.  infinitely customizable and tweakable.  i haven’t found too many things that it doesn’t just do.

adium – the last word in instant messengers for the mac.  covers pretty much every protocol out there and a few that you really wish would just die already.  the latest beta builds include support for twitter.  i have to confess that integrated twitter support is a lot handier than i expected.

yep – i collect a lot of PDFs.  be they academic papers, work documents that i want to archive, presentations from conferences, etc. i need a way to tag them and organize them.  i happen to use yep. i’ve vacillated between this and papers countless times over the past couple of years.  particularly given that papers seems to be getting a lot more active development and has a sweet iphone application that matches up with it.  unfortunately, it’s a matter of inertia for me, i have sooo much stuff in yep right now that i would need to dedicate a few days to migrating to papers.  folks might actually benefit from looking at papers right off the bat.

gitx – gui git client for the mac.  this actually rocks pretty hard.  graphical display of what you have going with your local git repo and useful for dorks like me who do everything in emacs before they shove it into word to share with coworkers.  it’s been quite useful for me.

vmware – you just need this. period.  i used to be a parallels fan.  then vmware fusion came out and the performance was awesome and i could use other folks VMs and it didn’t sporadically suck up all available CPU and i was happy.

cord – the best remote desktop client i’ve seen to date.  full screen mode rocks, there’s support for font smoothing and unlike the microsoft remote desktop client, it just works.  neat features like connect in full-screen mode and drawer storage of configs, etc are quite handy.

yojimbo – a junk drawer app – this thing will hoover up PDFs, passwords, web clippings, bookmarks, misc. notes, etc.  i’ve found it to be pretty solid and speedy.  it has a handy quickfile drawer.  which lets you hit a hotkey and drag contents into it.  when i want to clean off my desktop and i don’t have a solid notion of what i need to do with something in terms of filing, i’ll simply stick stuff here and cull it later.  great for printing out boarding passes, web receipts, etc as a PDF print destination.

the usual apps

keynote – this is part of the iWork suite and i’ve personally found it to be a better presentation package than pretty much anything else i’ve seen.  which isn’t a particularly high standard to beat, given that pretty much all presentation software sucks rocks.  this is a notable exception it quite frankly rocks.

microsoft word – over the years i’ve made my peace with MS word.  under the mac it’s proven to be a more than capable platform for crafting those internal missives.

entourage – quite frankly i regard this as a flaming hunk of shit.  i’ve made my peace with it and perturb it as little as possible with the fear that it will flame out and crash horribly.  the sync function is barely passable.  that it talks to exchange servers is nothing short of a miracle given that it comes from microsoft.  it’s consistently had issues with parsing timezone information and the management of meeting invites and lack of a plug-in architecture has me consistently wondering if they’ve taken explicit pains to make this a royal pain in the ass to use.  treat with care it will likely fsck you over.  i refuse to put real email into this given the proprietary database backend and repeated exposure to horror stories involving corrupted databased.  if i can’t edit my email with a text editor something’s gone horribly wrong.

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.

this is definitely one of the more interesting slide decks i’ve run across in the past few months.  it’s been making the rounds as of late.  there are some refreshingly capitalist notions of how attract strong employees and to drive business direction.  however, i find their assertions re: scale of an organization interesting.  last i checked netflix was a relatively small company with ~400-500 employees.  a good chunk of their staff i suspect is associated with the packaging and handling of the DVD content and as they move online with more content they’re going to improve the efficiency (in terms of revenue / head).  but i find myself wondering how many of these principles apply to large organizations with lots of business units and departments within business units.

is there a practical limit to how well these principles scale? or do you simply look to subdivide the application of these principles to new and smaller contexts?  as corporations grow, a level of process emerges or you have chaos.  or at least that’s what i’ve been told. i’m quietly reserving judgment.

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.

saturday afternoons don’t really get a lot better than yesterday. bike down to the park, hit the archery range, mosey on over to get the groceries, meander back home (with a side trip to pick up ice cream).

“i made that pirate ship.”
“oh? what did you make it out of?”
“playmobile.”

apparently playmobile is a raw material these days.

i might be the only person that really finds this hilarious.  but we were grabbing some miscellaneous household crap at target and this was on an endcap. in the office supplies section if you’re in the market for this kind of thing.  which happens to be a pencil box for kids, made out of recycled plastic.

i find myself desperately wondering if the person that did the buying for this particular item is familiar with the rap song that has the same refrain.  for those of you unfamiliar with this song the wikipedia entry is quite instructive.

my thought here was to simply use the shelfari to FB integration and do a fresh export of my delicious library into shelfari and link the shelfari profile to FB. done.

no dice. first my shelfari profile required some serious scrubbing to eliminate a bunch of stuff that i’d eliminated and new acquisitions. this proved to be an exercise in _we’re just going to keep your stuff_ data grabbiness by shelfari. after a moderate amount of swearing i was able to get this resolved.

then i tried to import my library. turns out that they’re not used to libraries as large as mine? i find this shortsighted but splitting the library into 3 chunks w/vim seemed to get it to accept the first chunk of the import. then i was presented with what looked to be screen after screen of cover art verification. although i was never really given the opportunity to test that theory. after i hit "next" to proceed to the next it just crapped out on me. apparently importing just 18 books. that sucked. at this point i had no interest in proceeding any further.

the reviews for the FB application aren’t particularly plussing either. i’ll cut my losses while i’m still ahead. feh.

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

• Running Out of Numbers? The Impending Scarcity of IPv4 Addresses and What To Do About It (benjamin edelman) – this is definitely worth a read for anyone who’s interested in the IPv4 depletion issues we’re running into as an industry and it provides a surprisingly good background review of the problem space. (IPv4 and IPv6 history and high-level technical issues overview) if you have to give someone a single paper to read regarding the IPv4 depletion situation, this would definitely be at the top of my list.
• The problem of synthetically generating IP traffic matrices: initial recommendations (antonio nucci, et al) – as someone who’s interested in realistic testing scenarios for routing platforms i thought this was a great overview of the challenges that arise in constructing a appropriately balanced synthetic traffic. definitely worth the read for router dweebs, but high on the nerd factor.

on a decidedly non-nerdish note

i was also able to burn through naomi wolf’s, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot . while ms. wolf certainly goes for the emotional jugular here with the constant comparison to the nazi takeover in germany and mussolini’s rise to power in italy, it’s certainly worth noting the parallels. it should be interesting to see what transpires with an Obama presidency. there’s no shortage of things which need to be corrected in terms of the direction of this country. this book certainly provides a list of places to start. the question remains as to whether we as a country can address these matters at the same time we’re addressing the economic downturn.

when folks worried about their jobs and homes, correcting lapses in the core tenets of our democracy tend to move to the back burner.

no seriously, dude. the pyramid’s right behind you.

while it would definitely be a challenge to unweight the front of this bike, you have to appreciate the volume of the configuration and the fact that they’re not pushing any lame gear ratio.

$Id: osx-nits.txt,v 1.4 2001/05/03 11:50:52 sulrich Exp sulrich $

# os x nits
## general os and interface nits

 * when i hit the cmd key in a modal dialog box - i'm not presented with a
   list of keyboard short-cuts for the dialog box. it's a capital letter
   crap-shoot!  it would be nice to be able to hit the cmd key and have the
   corresponding keyboard shortcut displayed.

   >> it bears noting that this interface nit still stands.  however,
   >> i've come to terms with this to some extent.  changing the
   >> extension on a file from the finder is no where near as annoying
   >> as it used to be.``

 * it would be nice to have a real print manager that worked. the current
   printer controller is really lame and doesn't allow you to view the
   configuration of current devices.  it looks like the menu item is there
   but it's grayed out.

   * further to gripe about the printer support there appears to be a lack
     of real definitions for printer description files that you install.
     meaningful names for the printer definitions that are there would be
     really nice.

  >> this is an area where i have to say apple really stood up and did a
  >> good job. i admittedly have rather modest printing requirements,
  >> however, for a guy that has to add printers in foreign offices at
  >> work all the time, the support is wide and the hassle is minimal.

 * what i wouldn't give to be able to remap the apple key in terminal to
   behave like a meta key.

   >> this gripe stands. i've ameliorated this to a large extent through
   >> the use of the shipping X11 implementation and the use of
   >> xterm/rxvt. still, this leaves me with a nagging issue wrt cut and
   >> paste.

   just a follow up to this - you can kind of do this in emacs for mac os x
   with the option key but that is just a little too awkwardly placed for
   my tastes.  looks like i'll be an escape-key emacs user for a while

 * why must changing the desktop background color be such a chore? if i want a
   solid color why can't i just select one w/the color tool? i surmise that i'm
   missing out on something fundamental here but it's really annoying

   >> this gripe still stands. sure, there's a solid color option there,
   >> but you still don't get the color tool.

 * teeny hardware nit here.  why is the escape key so small?  the ~ is
   in the right place though and this is nice.

 * virtual desktops! - i'm running out of screen space and there is no
   virtual desktop functionality that i can find anywhere.

   >> spaces. need i say more? sure spaces isn't perfect, but it's
   >> pretty damn close and it's built-in with reasonable defaults.
   >> color me tickled.

 * make the PDF generation access a little more prominent on the print
   dialog.  while i love the ability to have PDF output i hate having to
   select that option repeatedly.  i'd like to make pdf output my default.

   >> well, you still can't make PDF generation the default, (to my
   >> knowledge.)  but it's featured much more prominently and there's
   >> slick integration that's taken place with the ability to direct
   >> output to applications.  which has my Yep! setup quite happy.

## terminal
 * terminal performance over the long haul is horrible.  this needs to be
   sped up considerably.

   >> fixed this, but i still don't use terminal - ref gripe re: cmd key
   >> utilization and emacs keybindings

 * more on terminal.app - this needs some real work on the termcap side of
   things.  there doesn't' seem to be a really consistent mechanism for
   making sure that you're dealing with the terminal on this.  what i
   wouldn't give for just really decent xterm support.

## airport / wireless
 * how about some meaningful stats regarding signal strength?

   >> still sucks if you ask me.

 * opening up the driver interface on the airport cards to support things
   like airsnort.

   >> improved considerably. there's a pretty wide range of support here
   >> and folks have filled in a lot of the gaps relative to tools for
   >> sniffing out additional wireless APs, etc.

## general networking
 * IPv6 support (addendum - looks like this will be in jaguar)

   >> pretty damn good support if you ask me. 

 * multicast support (w/support for IGMPv3)

   >> grrr. still outstanding. 

 * i would really like dummynet or some form of queueing for network
   traffic.  this would let me use my mac for testing some network
   configurations. altq would be heaven.

   >> no progress here.  understandably, this is a consumer OS after
   >> all.

 * pf would be preferred vs. ipfw (in all honesty i haven't had a chance
   to see if the necessary kernel hooks are there for pf)

   >> there's been a lot of forward progress on the firewall front. i've
   >> added to this with the use of little snitch which provides a lot
   >> more granularity in terms of the per-application visibility that
   >> you'd be interested in. still. pf is pretty much the bomb for this
   >> stuff.

overall, i really have to say a lot of my longstanding nits have been admirably addressed. if you look at this from the perspective that there are a fair number of nits that are purely networking dweeb oriented in nature, and you keep in mind that this really is a consumer oriented OS, you have to be impressed at how well they’ve addressed the spectrum of user requirements.