2005-02 Archive

Parenting.

Many times, parenting is a joyous and wonderful experience. It teaches you many things about yourself, and other people, and it lets you demonstrate things that you would have never believed otherwise. You get to learn joy, and happiness, and what they can truly mean.

Other times, parenting is something along the lines of being screamed at by 3 or 4 people at once, while trying to get your work done. There is literally nothing you can do right.

Guess which one of those this morning was.

julie fix

One of the biggest complaints about using julie, or at least, one of my biggest complaints, is that it requires namespaces to be used explicitly in some cases. Or should I say, that *was* was one of my biggest complaints: I just fixed it.

From now on, julie will automatically add namespaces to a query. It checks if there already are any (by looking for " using <"), then adds the rest of the predefined namespaces, trying to match syntax. There may be some commands which break because of multiple spaces between "using" and "<". If there are any, feel free to fix them by simply pulling the namespaces out of the command: they will be added automatically.

This allows for more complex queries with less work, which is always a good thing. Any bugs can be reported to me.

comment spam

Everyone said that nofollow wouldn't have any effect on comment spam, that it was a silly proposition. Although I can't say generally, obviously, I personally have seen a huge amount of benefit.

Before nofollow, I was getting ~5 comment spams a day . Since I implemented it (by upgrading Wordpress), I haven't gotten a single one.

It's possible it's just a random change. But hey, It seems to be working to me.

Lordd of the Rings

This is a good movie. It's especially good on our brand new shiny TV.

I hope I feel better tomorrow. I'm still sick. I hate when my almost-perfect immune system fails me.

viol

A while ago, sbp wrote about viol de gamba, i think. It was on miscoranda, and I'm too lazy to look it up anyway, apparently one of my friends actually plays the "viol": When asked about it, she linked to this page . I just kind of thought it was nifty.

i was going to write an entry...

Sparql interface. Dump all your RDF documents from your site into one place, then get a sparql query engine running over it. Suddenly, you can ask all the stuff you want about documents and get answers back . This seems like a cool way to get people to see that RDF can be cool: Simply create a simple browser plugin that knows where a SPARQL interface is (maybe from auto something something) and it doesn't have to od the full parsing of the RDF results, just some XML parsing . This makes the whole dealing with RDF in the browser simpler.

Also, there's no fetch of tons and tons of data: it's all tored in the query engine, and you can get the answers you need, and only the answers you need. I dunno. this might not even work. I don't have a clue: I'm sick and tired and blah blah blah. but it's something I want to write about.

foaf meeting

I wanna have a foaf meeting on feb 26th. I sent an announce out to the mailing list. I've already gotten a couple responses on it, which is cool and shit. I should still blog about it though, cause some non-foaf people might be interested in hanging out. Still not sure if dan/libby will be able to make it, so I may end up chairing as well.

Related to the email I got: Why would someone mention a completely unrelated fact as if it were important? That's what one of my email respondants did: He replied about the meeting, then said "Drupal has foaf now." No other information at all. so what? Why do I care? Then again, I think this may just be related to the actual person who sent the email, rather than the fact that it was sent.

anyway. if you're going to email me, be useful. That sums up my feelings on that point, I think.

If you care about foaf, read about the message for the meeting. I want to get as many people to commit at least an interest as possible. Thanks.

Geekery

Centralug meeting tonight. NHTI campus library, in Concord.

In addition, there's a Python SIG meeting at 6pm before that, in the library. I'm hoping to bring the powerbook and show off a little bit of my S60/Python hacking. However, all my code pretty much sucks, so I may just end up showing it off as a toy, rather than as a tool, at least at this meeting.

Some notes from GNHLUG Meeting

Linuxworld is next week.

Dave has an article in the latest "Linux Magazine": pdf here.

Demonstration of Ruby on Rails for next month from Dave.

Usenix having annual tech conference Aprial 10-15, 2005: For more information, see homepage

Peterborough meeting, this thursday in Peterborough: On Knoppix and dual boot machines

For information on how to set up Fedora Core yum, see fedorafaq

Official presentation start: Presentation on CUPS

CUPS is becoming the standard printing system on most distros, and works really well when it works. These are some notes on how to set it up locally.

In order to print over cups, the printer is broadcasting data on which printers there are. Getting the client to work is typically just install, and you're done: getting the server to work is a bit different. Thing you always need is cups server, client, and gimp-print foomatic. If you just install cups you get a very limited number of printers supported. HPIJS driver, foomatic, gimp-print is a lot of printers, lots of support.

localhost:631 will show what printers you have available: web interface. You need to ensure that you only have each server broadcasting about local printers. Printer config is all done via clients: you can control authentication, or who can change the aspects of them.

Demonstration using abiword: Word, Wordperfect, Staroffice formats. List of printers from CUPS: page layouts and so on can be changed via abiword, but resolution and so on are set throuhg commandline or web interface. Question is posed: you can print to a PDF Distiller: so, you can run print jobs through a piepeline.

CUPS clients listen for printer broadcasts , which are sent out on the subnet over IPP. You can set up a local server which will rebroadcast information about a far away printer: sitting here, I could set up an ipp printer on my machiene and all the other wireless laptops here would see it in their cups client enabled print queue.

Does CUPS run over SMB? The answer is yes: Windows machines will see the cups network printer. Coming the other way around: just add a smb printer: smb://printername.e Can install printers over SMB to a windows machine: lots of cups setup that you can 'breeze through', but is useful for more complex things like setting up drivers over network. During setup, cups will recommend print drivers: higher quality ones, for example. Print drivers are actually "postscript to printer-specific-format filter" files: a "PPD" file which tells the printer how to make those translations.

Setup: Need to set a "ServerName" (ip address or something that people can look up): lots of other configuration details, but very little of it needed. Ensure that browsing is on, set a port, then set options: "BrowseAddress @LOCAL" will allow the local network to browse the web interface.

Showing off sharing of printers in the local wireless net: several people in the room with different cups clients broadcasting print info.

IPP Printing RFCs: 3239, 3381, 3510 2910 , 2569

Demonstration of a program called xpp, which allows you to print a text file with printer options. A pretty GUI that shows all the options that will allow you to change the printer. cups-xpp

Also set up a CUPS server quickly and easily: plug it in and it "just worked" when using a parrallel port->ethernet dongle.

And that's it that I'm going to keep writing. Which I wasn't doing all that well anyway.

EMO EMO EMO

I HATE PEOPLE WHO ARE PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE. I HATE PEOPLE WHO CAN'T TELL ME TO MY FACE THAT THEY DON'T LIKE ME. I HATE THE FACT THAT PEOPLE CRACK UP AT ME BEING CALLED A DEGENERATE ASSHOLE.

That is all.

Bug Squashing

I'm never sure whether I should send off Redland bug emails or not. Usually I don't send bug lists unless I plan on working to resolve the source of them myself, which is almost never the case with Redland. I just sent a pretty big email outlining some of the problems I'm having with querying in the latest version of Redland, which is now archived. Am I just being a pest, or, as a possible software developer, would you want to know about issues that might exist with your software?

The real reason I ask is that many of these situations might never pop up in any scenario other than mine. I'm kind of a unique case as far as use cases for Redland go, at least based on other ways I've seen people using it. Does this mean that bugs I find are more or less important? I don't know: edge cases always annoy the hell out of me in my own projects. I really just hope that I'm seen as helping, rather than being annoying.

Images of the past

Looking back at some photos lying around for a project with Alicia. It's interesting to look at the past and see the memories that are there. I've never before realized how far away some of these things seem, given how long ago they were.

Looking at 18 months ago seems like years. Back to a time when I wasn't a parent, where I was in school and not working, where I was a really, completely different person.

Just interesting, really: How far I've come in such a short time. I've gone from comfy living in my parents house to living here in the commune, even though one of our communites is mostly living at her mom's now. We still have a kind of communistic living: parties where lots of people come over and hang out, that kind of thing.

I'm still the same me though. And that's cool.

Computer is tired

I told jess that the computer wanted to go to sleep because the battery was out. and therefore i should go to sleep as well.

She insisted that the computer wanted to play, so she plugged it in and pulled it out.

I think this is just her way of saying she's not ready to go to bed yet, so she's going to make me stay up too.

aim is evil

The windows AIM application now includes spyware and adware as a matter of course. Hooray for America online.

If you're running an Apple, you can use iChat. If you want multiple services, get adium. If you're on Windows, get gaim. Linux, also get gaim. Or you could try out my personal favorite aim client, called "pork" - it's kind of like irssi for aim.

If you fix people's computers, uninstall aim and install gaim. No ads, no spyware, open source. You're not only promoting an ideal, you're saving yourself future work. You will thank yourself later when they don't call back again. Adware and Malware is the bane of the tech geeks life: never ever let anyone install something if you can stop them. Swap IE for Firefox: change the icon and the name, they probably won't notice a difference.

There are a lot of things the normal computer user can, but does not, do in order to become a more safe computer user. Help them out by doing it for them.

Mobile Phone Madness

jim is right that mobile phone providers don't provide decent, fast, simple phones anymore. A lot of people out there really don't want the latest and the greatest: they want a $30 cheapy phone that's *fast* to run stuff.

Is there really no good solution for this stuff? It's hard to believe that providers have missed out so completely on what seems like is probably a large, if not quite as profitable, area of the market.

International Shipping

UPS makes things entirely too complex. There are way too many variables that you need to have included in a web request for shipping.

I just want to ship a package from a specific post code to Hong Kong. Now, you would think that would be simple, but you need to have information on everything from cities (on both sides) to the size of the package, to the customs value.

While I understand that each of these is important, I really wish there was a "Simple" form which would allow you to just get "rough" data on how much it was going to cost. A client of ours wants to do international shipping, and they want accurate charges, of course, but they'd be pefectly willing to pay an extra $5 out of pocket, rather than make their customers deal with a second charge for shipping. But, so far as I can tell, there's no way to get this information. Not that this is a shock: the entire process is really quite confusing, and the documentation doesn't help. The PDF Manual to the UPS shipping webapp is 114 pages.

I just want things to be simple!

New Phone

I'm getting a new phone. Specifically, a Nokia 6600. Nokia uses really crappy URIs for their phone homepages. Seems silly, given their semweb efforts, and the fact that clean URIs (like /phones/6600) work for most devices.

My new phone cost me quite a bit, but I ended up talking myself into the bottom of the range that could be expected, I think: I threatened to move my account to another provider a couple times, and ended up getting the typical new contract price, minus a rebate's worth (down to $200), minus an extra bonus ($30), minus a month of service. This is all tied to a new year long contract, but for this phone, it's worth it.

Considerations: I was going to buy a new Memory Card for the 3650. Cost, probably $30-$40. I would have to have a month long waitbased on past experience, for my 3650 to come back. I wanted the 6600 anyway. The only way I could get it for the price I really wanted (free) was through $250 in Amazon+T-mobile rebates (6-8 weeks from now), as well as having Jess fill out the contract, because my name already has an account.

Nifty things now that I'm going to have a "modern" phone: Internal Memory! twice as much. External memory! It comes with a 32 MB MMC, I'm pretty sure. Less Crashing! The firmware on this thing is suppposed to be way more stable than the one on the 3650, which despite all its fanciness, is still very much a first generation machine. Java MIDP 2.0, which opens up a new set of Java API functionality. SDK 2.0! good for development: this means I'm dealing with something much closer to the latest in the Symbian/Nokia development toolchain, so I can install more toys. More Python! This is the platform that Python was really designed to work on, and the combination of the more memory (internal and external) will allow me to install the Python libs that I couldn't before: basically, anything that is pure python can now be installed and run on my phone, which means that I will be able to port some XML stuff.

All in all, I get a bunch of things I've really wanted for a while. I've wanted the phone for a while. Well, honestly, I've wanted a *better* phone, but this is the US, where we live in the stone age, and doubly so when I'm in the Northeast, where "Phone with Camera" is still considered the newest feature. I get bluetooth, I get the latest firmware type things, and all in all, I get a phone that's probably going to crash less, and that's a pretty significant concern. Not to mention that the processor on this thing is supposed to make it feel significantly snappy-er, so we'll see.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the phone: It gets here on Friday or Saturday, hopefully, so less than a week without it, rather than the month I had to endure last time.

hula

It just started. Give it time people. Stop whining that feature X isn't done yet. If you care, start working on it. The project started yesterday, it is not going to be complete. I appreciate your excitement, and I'm sure developers do as well, but this "Why isn't this done yet" is getting tiring.

Hula is kinda neat though, it's just that a first day project has such high expectations. "Why isn't LDAP integration over POPSMTP with my preferred mta done yet?" Well, did you write it?

Hula is here.

noets writeup

sbp finally wrote up noets, for those of you who might be interested. A history of the blogbot/noets project, and some stuff about what has come out of it.

LJ FOAF Update

I'm crossposting this like hell, but that's mostly because I want someone to do something with it. I put some work into a FOAF update patch for LiveJournal, described in an entry in the lj foaf community. I want this to go somewhere, but I just don't have the energy to fight the battle myself anymore. So, if you care about improving the FOAF output of LiveJournal to any extent, please, toss a comment on the entry, even if it's just "cool idea!"

I think LJ developers see FOAF as my "pet project", so they don't tend to listen when I blabber about how much better it could be, but I know that some of the people here and elsewhere do care about it. In my experience, however, they dont' tend to crawl out of the woodwork often enough. So, please, crawl out of the woodwork for me. Comment to the entry, say that you think it's cool, mention it to other FOAF-interested people, or people with LJ accounts, or anyone.

If I could get Slashdot to cover how much this stuff is ignored, I'd want it, despite the fact that it would lead them right back to my whining, annoying self. I could live with that, if it meant that I actually saw something on LiveJournal improve because of it.

Accidentally in love

I absolutely adore Jess. and I can tell you that when we started talking, I never expected it. And it's the best thing ever.

witw

Julie now supports querying of Norman Walsh's "Where In The World" Web Service. Simply type ^witw crschmidt, and find out where I last was.

Wordpress Comment Spam

Remember that bit about comment spam? And with the new rel stuff, I wasn't getting any?

Well, that went away last night. I'd gotten a few before that, but last night I got 90 trackback spam. Most of them were dumped straight to my moderation queue, but about 15 of them got onto the site.

I got an email asking me why I had a feed with only obscenties in it for a recent comments feed. I explained the idea of spam to him. He hasn't responded.

Message to LinSpire

Hire d8uv for your branding design. Or anyone other than who you have already got.

Also, just give up the whole OOoFf thing already. Thanks.

Notes - GNHLUG

What is GNHLUG: Evangalism, or just talking?

What topics do you want to hear from? As kon the mailing list, see who knows who, and who can talk. "An expert is just someone who knows more than I do."

Follow what your group wants and what your group does, rather than trying to force what *you* think the group wants. If a group wants to do it, that's great, but if they don't, don't force them to.

People want to have fun and learn about Linux, and that's cool. Don't need to neccesarily be attmepting to convert all of New Hampshire. But there are some people who want to do that, and they can. Schools converting over to Linux, other things like that.

Delegate, delegate, delegate! Finding a room, finding a speaker, whatever, make sure peopel are aware that it's their group. The more that other people do, the more you can concentrate on the rest. Volunteers don't always follow through: they need encourage meent and someone standing on their backs. Or whatever part is appropriate.

Lots of people here tonight: lots of different things.

Lots of really smart people here. Interested in algorithms and people putting Linux on every device known to man James Tried to install Gentoo, failed (of course), switched to Knoppix. Discuss some things that people have things with problems with. The way to pick hardware is to findd who wrote the driver and buy what he buys.

Suggestions for the future

Beer and highly technical discussions! :) There are new users that visit, we want to make this as good as good as possible for the grey-hairs and newbies at the same time. Suggests that B&N, Panera both have wireless, and may have meeting spaces. Bookstore might be distracting for install fests or something like that Colleges might be better for that kind of thing Weekend installs or something like that.

No recent install fests in this area, maybe start doing something every 6 months. Maybe a New User Night, give people a new distribution to try, because they're not that hard to install anymore. Specific questions or something like that could be done. Also consider coordinate with other areas: Boston LUG install fest.

Lots of companies in the area that can help out with talks on things, Linux in government, corporations, good area for this kind of thing. Talk about problem solving

Good and bad ways to evangalize Do we cover all of Open Source? Is this just Linux? Is it about Free Software Maybe case studies of large instituions: comparison of Free Software v. non free software... Opens up avenues for work, proglem solving stuff...

How can you make money off free software? How can you make money off open source support? Service is where the money is.

Talk about which apps are out there? Maintain a list of "Top 10" products or whatever. Cameras: talk about all their software, camera software. Come in, talk about your favorite app Common problems nights.

Use the wiki to do something useful.

Order of importance: Regular meetings. 4th wednesday of the month, a routine, so people can always plan it. PLan a month or two in advance. Get an idea of what people want. Plan something in every meeting for everyone.

Establish an audience for speakers.

Talking about Financial stuff: for speakers, etc.

DVD Burning

I started to compose a message to the local LUG asking how the hell to see my DVD burner in cdrecord -scanbus. Then I remembered dev=ATAPI, which is how to list devices that are IDE (and being emulted over ATAPI) or something like that. In any case, I knew I was doing something wrong, and it took until I was actually writing an email asking how to make it right before I realized what I had to do to make it right. I think this is one of the cases where I was too tired when I was looking at it last night.

Setting up a Planet

Planet aggregation is really easy. The whole thing is a simple process, and I really like it. I set one up for mobile-related weblogs, and I was browsing past it, and I was like... whoa! What's that thing! then i realized it was my own site that I made

One thing I've noticed is that mobile people post a lot of pictures. Every post from half the weblogs has a picture in it: apparently that's how they get people's attentions in their posts, by posting really big images. It's actually pretty cool to see lots of images of new phones and apps and stuff like that.

In addition to all the posts that have pictures, I also have planetmobile pulling in flickr images with the tag mobile, as well as technorati and flickr recent posts tagged with mobile. So, you get a whole range of stuff in the sidebar, along with all the posts that are aggregated into the actual planet.

Oh, and .us domains are cheap right now. 6.95 or something like that? I should really buy domains more often. I mean, seriously: it costs less for me to buy a domain than to buy lunch, yet every time I think of buying one, I hold off because I'm worried it might cost too much. I do need to alter the site so it's less stolen from planetrdf: that was a temporary thing that is going to become permanent quickly if I don't do something about it.

Oh, and as far as planets go: I finally got up the nerve to ask dajobe to only watch my semantic web posts from my weblog. No more limitation of posting due to forced audiences! I like that. I'm hoping it leads me to new levels of posting. It probably won't though. I'm lazy. That is all!

New Levels Of Posting

So, let's establish a hierarchy of posts! LOW - These are posts which are made by such as mongrasls. They are typically low in nutritional content, espousing proradicalist neoconservativite views. Not only that, but they are often m... yeah, I'm just making fun of crschmidt.

That is all.

noets and google

So, apparently noets gets good googlefu. Which is really strange, considering there aren't really a whole lot of links to it. It's just odd to see lots of top hits on noets for things like "mt-daap" (above the mt-daapd project page, even). On the plus side, it is useful for what I set out to use it for: notes to self, and things like that which might help me and other people. So, I suppose it's doing its job. I'm really just confused as to how some venture which I don't link to anywhere on my site gets all kinds of good googlejuice.

On the other hand, I did link it from my LiveJournal, which is also pretty impressive as far as googlejuice goes. So, who knows. I sometimes wish I could learn why google ranks results as relevant: like, what factors lead to it. Too bad there's nothing out there that can tell you taht kind of thing, as far as I'm aware.