Author Archives: pappp

Nokia Plan B

Posted on 2011-02-14 by pappp

To follow up the last post, this is pretty cool – a shareholder driven concept for a slimmer, more directed Nokia that remains in control of their core platform. I’ve read through and am in near complete agreement with their plan, and it sounds a lot better than “Become the next Kin.” I don’t directly own Nokia stock (apparently I do indirectly hold some through mutual funds), but I would be seriously considering it if I did, and I hope they succeed. I’d also like to add a proper citation for the previous claim that Microsoft’s mobile partnerships are a string of painful failures.
In more pleasant news, some users have hacked together another new patch set for the Diablo/OS2008 maemo release the n810 runs, and now that I’ve got a new battery and rid myself of the BME bug I hope to play with them. I’m thinking I’ll be a little more cavalier with my use of alternate OSes and software on my n810 now that it is getting problematically obscelescent.

EDIT: It was a hoax.. The issues are real though.

Posted in Computers, DIY, General, Objects | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Nokia + Microsoft = Fail.

Posted on 2011-02-11 by pappp

This morning Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft, and a transition to Windows Phone 7 for their high end products. Why they were incapable of learning from Microsofts many successes in the mobile space, and quality mutually beneficial relationships with partners isn’t clear. The fact that Stephen Elop (current Nokia CEO) came from Microsoft last September could be related. The reason I care is that Meego (successor to maemo) was the only mobile platform I was in any way optimistic about fulfilling the promise of “Computer in your pocket,” and it just became a second-class citizen with a limited lifespan.
Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Entertainment, General, Objects | Leave a comment

Moco Loco

Posted on 2011-02-09 by pappp

Two food posts in a row, because my hobby time for the last few days has been squandered on a Minecraft addiction. I made myself Moco Loco earlier tonight, as a planned consolation prize for the shitty weather. This is both the first time I’ve had it come out really well, and the first time I’ve managed to get a photo that looked reasonably appetizing.

Moco Loco is contemporary Hawaiian food, and is very much the modern follow-on to “Things that used to be peasant food are delicious;” as the story goes it was created as a cheap lunch for local boys at a cafe in Hawaii, and spread on it’s own merits. Strictly, it consists of white rice, topped with a grilled hamburger patty, a fried egg, and brown gravy, but I’ve rarely seen it served without fried onions, which I’ve always included in my attempts to make it. Aside from being tasty, I get a kick out of how much (possible) kaona there is in the name. It is also a sort of one-shot explanation for weight-related health problems being so endemic among Polynesians…

Posted in FoodBlogging, General | Leave a comment

Chicken Nyumen

Posted on 2011-02-06 by pappp

I’ve made myself spicy chicken Nyumen a couple times this week, and decided it was photogenic.

Nyumen uses the same thin Japanese wheat noodles as the better known somen, but is a hot dish. It is really easy to make too: boil a pot of water, throw in some trimmed vegetables (Radishes, red onion, and mushrooms are particularly tasty), let them blanch, and pick them out. Then, throw a bundle or two of somen noodles in for a few minutes, and dip off some of the vegetable infused water to make a broth; I’ve been using a little bit of bullion and a small blob of Guilin Chili Sauce to make a nice spicy base. I also made myself some chicken pieces fried in a generic Asian sort of seasoning, and threw some in each bowl.

Posted in FoodBlogging | Leave a comment

The Raskins

Posted on 2011-02-06 by pappp

I always enjoy reading things by the Raskins, both Jef, and his son Aza.  The latest article making the rounds is The Mac Inventor’s Gift Before Dying: An Immortal Design Lesson for His Son, which is a charming story about the mindset that makes them both so interesting.  There is an ever present bit of pretentiousness and excess verbosity to both of their writing, but between their overt self-awareness of the behavior, and my own writing having many of the same properties, it rarely bothers me.
The really interesting thing in stories about Jef, and his own writing is hearing what the prime mover for the direction of computer interfaces for the last thirty thinks went wrong, especially with regard to things he was directly responsible for – it helps remind me that the currently dominant interface paradigms are the result of a long evolutionary process with lots of missteps, not some sort of manifest destiny.

Posted in Computers, General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Beware WordPress Revision Behavior

Posted on 2011-02-03 by pappp

The editing/cleaning/etc. I’ve been doing to the new blog has caused lots of inconsequential minor revisions to content… which would be fine except that, by default, recent versions of WP generate a new PostID (and associated database cruft) EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A REVISION, resulting in about 350 bogus PostIDs between my last two posts – about 200 of them from leaving the editor up and autosaving for a couple hours. The interwebs are full of notes about adding define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false); to wp-config.php to turn revision saving off, and there is a handy delete-revision plugin to purge any that got by without having to bust out SQL tools, but what a dumb behavior.

Posted in Computers, General, Meta | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Hackbiscus

Posted on 2011-02-03 by pappp

I’ve had the idea of a “Hackbiscus” emblem rattling around my head for a while, and I was contemplating it again as a possible option for theming the new blog. The idea is to have a hibiscus with it’s stamen arranged in the pattern of a glider(⠠⠵).  The glider has been suggested, and weakly accepted, as a suitable emblem for hacker culture.  Even better, most Hibsicus really do have five Stigma, so it is biologically correct.  With my affection for Aloha shirts and both Hawaiian and Hacker culture, it seemed like a good sigil… and the pun on “Hacker Stigma” is too good to pass up.
It should be an easy trick to make; take one of the common outline images of a hibiscus (It turns out there are about 10 of them from which nearly all prints/stickers/etc. are derived), pull it into GIMP and massage the dots representing the five stigma into the correct pattern.  The problem with this plan is I’ve never found an example of the separated-stamen pattern larger than an oddly aliased 400×400 gif. The solution to that problem arrived the other day when my advisor showed me how to use the Trace Bitmap tool in Inkscape, during a discussion about preparing images for the Silhouette SD cutter the group bought recently to use in some projects (more on that later, hopefully).   I’ve never had good luck working Inscape in the past, but decided to try it to get a nice resizable smooth-edged Hackbiscus. I got excellent results with only a little bit of parameter fiddling, as shown above (although, that is 400×400 like the source image. It scales up indefinitely, promise).

Posted in DIY, Entertainment, General | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Notes on Migrating Flatpress to WordPress

Posted on 2011-02-02 by pappp

I’m going to post up some notes on the process of migrating my content from the Flatpress (wordpress-like flat-file backed CMS) instance at my old blog to a WordPress (the dominant CMS for blogs, MySQL backed) instance here at pappp.net.  The short version? It is seriously aggravating. Long block of text follows.
Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, DIY, General, Meta | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Blog Move

Posted on 2011-02-02 by pappp

This blog is in the process of moving in from it’s previous location at http://www.engr.uky.edu/~pseber0/ to it’s new home at pappp.net on bluehost. This current page will no doubt be repeatedly created and destroyed in the process, as I try to explain to the terrible migration tool about internal linking, resources, categories, and a variety of other things it is doing it’s best to lose or mangle. Things should be up and running in a couple of days, when the links will be updated, and the relocation notice will go up at the old location. This post also has a full set of categories, to force updates.

Posted in Announcements, Computers, DIY, Entertainment, FoodBlogging, General, Meta, Music, Navel Gazing, Objects, OldBlog, School | Leave a comment

IPv4 Depletion

Posted on 2011-01-31 by pappp

Oh look, the allocation to IPNIC today set off the IPv4 endgame provisions! Now to watch another problem unfold because we (as a culture) spent the last several decades focusing on short term profits instead of investing in infrastructure. We may have lagging communications infrastructure, a desperately eroded manufacturing base, and a whole heap of other stupid (not to mention our ludicrously inefficient healthcare stemming from the same “Why pay now when I can pay more later” attitude) , but at least we aren’t socialists, right?…Goddamnitsomuch.
Next up: Peak Oil (unless it already happened.. oh right, it probably did).

Posted in Computers, General, OldBlog | Tagged | Leave a comment