The ancient FreeBSD/i386 box that was running cgi.aggregate.org finally keeled over. I just blew my afternoon/evening scraping the data off of it because while the most critical stuff was backed up, not everything was. Some keyword and error string filled notes that will hopefully save others swearing and googling:
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I gave a quick primer on 3D printing as a Keeping Current (CS departmental) seminar yesterday.
It’s not a great standalone deck but posted (in reduced quality, gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=/path/to/output.pdf /path/to/input.pdf is good magic).
It seemed to be well-received, printed objects were played with, thoughtful questions were asked, I think this is the first time I’ve given a 3D printing primer to a wider group and not been asked the “guns” question.
Another response that outgrew G+ and its failings for long form and references (Which is all I’ve thought to post here recently: I need to see to that and get a couple other things written and posted). Also, a great outpouring of pessimism about the tech industry, but that isn’t exactly new.
My feeds brought me Joshua Barczak’s Stop Misquoting Donald Knuth! yesterday. I generally agree with the idea [that we need to think a great deal more about efficiency when developing software], thought the particular pesentation is a narrow and mediocre version of the argument. Niklaus Wirth made the cleanest, classic version of the argument in 1995 with Wirth’s law, which gets restated and updated for current trends by a major figure every couple years as it does an extremely expensive job of making technology miserable for everyone.
I’ll argue even deeper though. The more fundamental problem is that computing got way too “mainstream” (mostly terms of penetration) way too fast, and continues on that unhealthy vector. Neither the technology, the methods, nor the society we unleashed ourselves on was really ready. That’s a large part of why we have goldrush mechanics (I’m mostly referring to social features here) in the tech industry, which is a source of all kinds of problems. It’s also a major reason why we’re building dangerously crappy products instead of technologies as a matter of product cycle and methodology. Peter Sewell’s recent talk at 31c3 Why are computers so @#!*, and what can we do about it? is one of the better presentations on the methodolgy matter, which is largely that we’re not building on the shoulders of giants, we’re building on top of a garbage pile. I always find the arguments for verifiable languages an irritating combination of deeply desirable, and utterly naive: anyone who has ever fought one of the more verifiable languages to actually do something useful probably knows this inconsistency – the Mesa/Ceder/Modula family are probably the least miserable options and no one has used them for anything of substance in decades. Ada even introduced whole new classes of interesting bugs as a result of its so-called reliability features (What do you mean you initialized my IO registers to 0 when we entered the function scope? The peripheral is now on fire.). I’m particularly disgusted with the recent-ish move toward even less disciplining languages, most of which don’t even have a specification, or have an ignored, post-hoc one if they do, though the same batch of languages have made us so accustomed to terrible performance overhead and performance opacity that the overhead introduced by safety and verifiability now seems reasonable; I mean this in the least complimentary light possible.
There are some related phenomena: It is my feeling that the “too much, too soon” problem also ties deeply into the distorted ideas about usability that crawled out of the early ’80s and got into everything, and some scary thoughts about professionalism in computing – not in the awful “businesslike” sense, but in the sense of respect for something that is sincerely hard to do well, which can be made largely by analogy to illuminating historical parallels with what has happened to teaching in the U.S. in the early public-education era.
… And this is a large part of why I have a pile of degrees in computing disciplines and contempt for the industry.
I started responding to Philip Guo’s Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery that passed through my news feeds today, and my thought quickly outgrew the appropriate size for social media, so it’s going up here.
I understand and often share his frustration, but only selectively agree with his conclusion, and would like to clarify the distinction because I think it is very valuable to understand it.
It is often annoyingly difficult to leverage existing tools, especially the various development toolchains whose install process involves blood sacrifice or perfect replication of the (naturally, undocumented) platform they were developed on, but I object to dismissing all such difficulty as bullshit.
I found a forum.thinkpads thread while looking into another touchpad issue recently, and learned two important facts:
I finally finished danah boyd’s recent book It’s Complicated, and It’s one of the best pieces of non-fiction I’ve read in years.
I always feel there is a dramatic shortage of people equipped with both the appropriate formal methods in the social sciences and technological sophistication to make credible, meaningful, observations on technologically mediated culture. danah is reliably the best of them; I’ve read quite a number of her papers and articles, and the book is fuller and more readable than either.
Almost every passage roughly follows a pattern of statement, with attribution, relevant anecdote from original research, message. It is meticulously referenced (roughly a quarter of the book’s volume is appendices and references), which comes off a little academic, but anything less conscientious would end up being the kind of prognostication much of the book is trying to correct, and the actual writing comes off as far more pleasant and readable than it sounds. It is occasionally repetitive, but every time the repetition asserted itself, it was clearly a case of “I keep saying this over and over and they just don’t get it” rather than any sort of sloppy writing.
Occasionally, there are wistful references to the internet I grew up on; the author is about a decade older than I am, and grew up on the leading edge of the internet I was on the trailing edge of. The one where Ender’s Game (Locke and Demosthenes plot), True Names, and Ready Player One can happen, before the carpetbaggers arrived in force and (to quote the book) “When teens go online, they bring their friends, identities, and network with them.” situation asserted itself. I’m pretty sure my generation killed that different identity system, and buried it behind us (One of her early notable efforts was documenting the introduction of Friendster, which was in some ways the beginning of the end).
At least once a chapter, I found myself in vigorous agreement with some message being presented, enough that if there were people around when I was reading they could tell. The vast majority of the observations, while based in research into teens, also seem to generalize reasonably well to the behavior of most populations. The only unfortunate part is that I suspect the people making decisions about youth and technology who desperately need to hear what it has to say are not going to be the ones to read it.
Note that there is a PDF copy right on the author’s site, so even if you don’t want to go buy it, you can legitimately peruse it for free.
The Inspiron 11-3000 I’ve been carrying around developed a rattle the other day, and today I decided to open it up.
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I’ve recently added a couple tools to my standard set, and have at least a 4x improvement in the safety of my data by doing so.
The process was complicated a bit because I’ve become very sensitive about only depending on FOSS tools (ex:As much as I like SublimeText2, I stopped using it because it once demanded to be updated before it would run.), but frankly I think that constraint produced better results than I would have reached without it. Because it was something of a hunt, I’d like to recommend the particular tools I settled on, in particular are KeepassX, Attic, and Seafile, described individually below.
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I noticed I was scuffing up the not-my-laptop that I’ve been carrying, so I did a little “30 minute” sewing project (that actually took over an hour because I’m apparently retarded) after I burnt out on other things for the evening.
The intention is a little sleeve that will be snug enough to retain the laptop, and let me slide it between [note]books, etc. in a bag. That means a little long, with thick hems on the open end for retention, and no flaps, fasteners, or protrusions to hang up on other things in the bag.
Basically, I measured the wrapped length and width of the machine (to accommodate for thickness), cut a piece of fabric I had around to the full wrapped long dimension (+1.75″ for hems and clearance) and half the wrapped short dimension (+1″ for seams), hemmed the short ends, folded it in half, ran a seam down the sides, half-assed wrapped the first 2″ of each side seam, and called it adequate.
Downside:
Using my venerable old machine always makes me feel like it and 3 generations of my family are judging me when I do something inept or half-assed on it, which probably makes my projects better.
I think I’m satisfied. I’d like it to be just a hair snugger, but the fit is pretty good and snugger would have run the risk of finishing then not being able to get the machine in. I think I want to make some kind of companion pouch for the power brick, but I’m not sure how, an attached pocket would ruin the slip-between-things-in-my-bag functionality.
The KAOS lab recently bought a fleet of five Inspiron 11 3000 3138[PDF Warning] (Celeron N2815/4GB/500GB)laptops. They’re tiny little machines with 8 hour claimed battery lives, they’re pretty cute and sort of obstinate.
I borrowed one to play with, notes:
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