Mad Times

Our IT guys have been rearranging the network at work the past few weeks. I got an email asking if it was okay to change the IP address on the machine named “hugo”. Hugo is a Sun Sparcstation 10 that was assigned to me in about 1993. It runs SunOS 4.1.4 which was the last BSD-based Sun unix before the SysV-based Solaris took over. The machine has been running in a rack in our computer room with no keyboard, mouse, or display since about 2002.

I told them to go ahead, but they were unable to access it. It was responding to pings, but wouldn’t answer to telnet. There are a handful of other machines of similar vintage in the same rack so I logged in to one of them to see how long it had been since it was last rebooted. 764 days. That’s over two years running continuously without a reboot for systems that are 15 years old. (These systems are all on UPS power backed by a big old diesel generator)

Since there was no display handy to show what was going wrong I tried power cycling it. It didn’t come back. The system hadn’t been in active use for a while so extreme measures weren’t called for. Time of death was 2:51pm 6/26/08.

I just didn’t think its passing should go unremarked. How old is 15 in computer years?

I use Windows for work. XP is fairly tolerable as an OS once you’ve spent a few years learning where all the knobs and sliders are. But my heart belongs to unix. I spend most of every day at a command prompt (or a bunch of them).

I’ve customized my environment extensively with various software packages. They accrete over time, so it’s hard to identify what they all are. Some of them become so ingrained that I forget that I ever installed them at all.

This is brought to mind now because I dropped my work laptop (just a few inches!) the other day and bricked the hard drive. My heroic IT guy got a new drive and image installed the same day I handed him the sad case. Now I just have to figure out what all the changes are that make life bearable. Hence this post where I’m going to try to capture all the tweaks and additions. I expect I’ll be editing it repeatedly, so apologies to those reading via RSS feeds. You might want to configure your reader to ignore edited entries for my site. I’m expecting a new desktop system soon too which will remind me of another flurry of gadgets.

The order here is the order I installed these on my laptop, so it sort of relates to urgency of need.

Tools:

VNC

Allows you to control a remote computer (that has VNC server running on it) with your local keyboard and mouse. The free download version 4.1.2 is enough for my purposes.

Firefox (plus Adblock Plus and del.icio.us and Long Titles plugins)

Do I have to explain this?

Vim

My fingers are most comfortable editing text with the vi editor and this is the best implementation I know of. I make this the default association for text file viewing and editing in explorer. (Here’s my _vimrc)

ActiveState Perl

Still my scripting language of choice. I keep meaning to learn Python or Ruby, but I’ve already got this.

cygwin default set plus tcsh

This is what makes a Windows command prompt usable. Pretty much all the command-line tools you’d find on a unix system. It’s not perfect, but it is so much better than the pathetic set of tools that come with Windows. I don’t even know how many different tools I use from this, but it’s a lot. (ls, df, grep, wc, sed, awk, du, cat, others I use without thinking). tcsh is a guilty indulgence. I can use bash, but I started in csh so its syntax comes more naturally. I know better than to write scripts in it. (Here’s my .cshrc)

Worldtime

Get the old 5.5.2.748 version unless the new version is newer than 2004. You have to tweak the timezone db for either to do the new lame US DST dates. This is not a user-friendly application, but it’s fabulous for compactly displaying multiple time zone clocks on your desktop. I regularly deal with groups on the US west coast, east coast, Germany and Slovakia, India, and Korea so I can’t live without this thing. Here’s my pre-customized version if you want to start there. It has clocks for all those timezones. Right-click on the clock face and un-select everything in the Display menu to get the best effect.

IrfanView

Simple, fast, image display and basic editing tool. Let it yank the associations from whatever crap tool Windows has for this.

Spybot Search & Destroy

I do some random surfing on the laptop that can leave some barnacles on the system. This tool hunts down the spyware and nukes it.

PuTTY

SSH telnet client

WinSCP

SFTP client

Microsoft’s Power Toys for Windows XP

This will be closer to the top on the desktop. Grab TweakUI. Primarily for the Mouse->X-Mouse setting. This makes it so the window focus changes to whatever window your mouse is over without you having to click in the window. It’s a life saver if you keep a lot of windows open. Or it may drive you crazy. I can’t live without it. There are other cool things there, but I don’t use any of them.

Palm Desktop

Need to move this off to some non-work computer, but hotsync doesn’t work very well on my old G4 iBook

iSiloX

Gadget for converting web pages and stuff to a format I can read on my LifeDrive

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Photo management and editing. The first commercial product on this list. I plan to move this to a new mac real soon now, but for now it’s on my work laptop. Don’t tell the boss.

Flickr Uploadr

Upload a batch of photos to Flickr. You can also use this to apply tags and titles and stuff, but I use Lightroom for that.

Config changes:

• delete stupid default user values for TMP and TEMP environment variables and change the system values to c:\TEMP
• add a HOME environment variable set to some useful easy-to-type local directory (like c:\jeffy) (or network directory if the network is ubiquitous (i.e., not on the laptop))

Update for the desktop system:

enable Virtual Desktop

Lets you have multiple virtual screens so you can have more windows open without having to paw through them to find the stuff you’re working on. There are free options for multiple desktops out there (one is in the Windows Power Toys above), but I came from the X windows environment on unix and was pretty picky about how I wanted this to work. The particular features I like in this one:

• ability to define custom hot keys to switch desktops
• ability to make rules to keep certain windows sticky so they appear in all desktops
• ability to drag windows around in the mini-window and drag windows out of the mini window

basically I wanted it to work just like olvwm and it comes pretty close. I don’t use the latest version because I paid for an earlier version and it works fine for my purposes. Looks like it costs $25 now ($20 plus $5 download fee. Um. Okay, whatever.)

David Longdon of the Seattle cycling blog Velocity has run a contest for the last two months for the “Most Visible Night Cyclist”, and I won for December! I’m sure it’s the star Christmas lights that pushed me over the top.

Thanks, David!

Have I got a house for sale for you! Sited in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Panoramic views of the San Joaquin Valley. Quiet friendly neighborhood of Cedar Ridge in Tuolumne County. Easy striking distance to skiing and other mountain recreation. The town of Twain Harte is minutes away, Sonora is a few more minutes.

The house itself is a nearly-new manufactured home. The build quality and installation are excellent. It feels (and is) solid, roomy, and cozy.

For all the details and to arrange a showing see the agent’s listing. Or if you have questions, leave a comment or fling me an email.

Rachel wanted me to blog this so she’d have the opportunity to ridicule me in public. Those are all the digital cameras we have in the house at the moment. They are (left-right, top-bottom):

Largan Chameleon
Used for the beginning of my photo-a-day project in 2002. The camera that took the first eleven lost glove pictures. Whopping 640×480 resolution, fixed focus, no on-camera review.

Pentax Optio S4
My beloved teensy camera. Got it in 2003. Took something like 5000 pictures with it. Still the tiniest of the batch (the fx30 is a half inch longer and a smidge thicker). Really miss having its excellent audio recorder function in my pocket all the time.

Fuji FinePix F20
Decent little camera, especially for low-light indoor shots (pictures aren’t stellar (as evidenced by the last couple months on the blog and flickr), but it can take them unlike the Optio that gives up as soon as the world gets a little dim). Pocketable but a little boxy.

Kodak EasyShare Z730
Becky’s camera. Takes very nice pictures and incredibly feature rich for its price range (the only camera here with aperture and shutter priority for example). Really big, though (relatively speaking).

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX30
28mm equivalent Leica lens. Back-filling crystal clear LCD. Fast. Will take pictures in low light (if you don’t mind them looking like something from Monet’s cataract period when you look at them too closely) Almost as tiny as my Optio.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3
10x optical zoom. 28mm equivalent all the way out to 280mm. In a package just a little bigger than the Fuji. Leica. Huge LCD. Did I mention the Leica 28-280 zoom?

Of course I won’t be keeping all of them. The Chameleon is really just a toy and has been sitting in a drawer for a few years. The Optio is getting wonky and I’ll probably just keep it around as an audio recorder. The Fuji and the Kodak will be finding new homes. The fx30 will be in my pocket and the tz3 will be somewhere near Becky. That is once I’m done doing side-by-side experiments with the lot of them.

I had one of those heart-stopping “oh !@#$” moments this morning. I’ve been using Adobe LightRoom since about February as my primary photo management and manipulation tool. Over the weekend I’d been exporting all the lost gloves from iPhoto on the mac and last night tried importing them into LightRoom. I had some problems so I deleted all the imported stuff, emptied the trash, and tried reimporting a subset. The problems persisted so I called it a night.

This morning while waiting for folks at work to make up their mind what they wanted me to work on, I fired up LightRoom again and was horrified to see that when I thought I’d been deleting the stuff I’d just imported, what I’d actually done was delete everything I’d ever imported. This revelation was followed by much cursing and head bashing and gnashing of teeth. All the photos Becky and I had taken since February gone. Poof!

Once I’d gotten done pounding on things I went googling for file recovery tools. I’m happy to report that I found a couple of free tools that allowed me to get back a large portion of the lost pictures. Neither tool is perfect, but they’re imperfect in mostly complementary ways.

Saturday was the second annual SF short film festival at the Cinerama. I’d have a hard time saying whether the overall quality of the entries was significantly different from last year. In other words, good stuff!

Here’s quick takes on the films (in order they were shown). I’ve put links where I could find a web page or trailer or the whole movie online. Some have multiple links. Hover over the links to see what they point to.

Fantastic Fortune: computer animated dialog-free story about an asteroid miner who finds a super-rich rock that turns out to be inhabited. Cool whimsical tri-laterally symmetric aliens, and a refreshingly civil first contact.

Spaceball: not sure how this made the cut. A dude in a cheesy space suit, a big rubber ball, and liberal use of mirrored split screen set to music. Nothing really happens.

The Realm: Cyberpunk noir. One of the lowest budget feels of anything in the festival, but I gave it points for intent despite the low quality.

The Inedible Bulk: A broccoli farmer and inventor has an unfortunate interaction with the machine he designed to imbue broccoli with the properties of other more savory comestibles. Think The Fly. Pretty funny in spite of its fizzle of an ending. The maker of this one was there and was so annoying in the post-screening Q&A that my memory of his film has suffered some degradation.

Atomic Banana: Another computer animated offering. Similar MacGuffin to Inedible Bulk in that a gadget causes the principal characters to make a transition from animal to vegetable. This one was more short and sweet than the other, making its joke and getting out while the laughs were still going. Very cute.

Machinations: A malfunctioning garage door opener leads to a startling revelation about a politician. Nice cohesive story with a simple, but resonant SF element.

The Un-Gone: Relatively polished entry from the UK explores the question of what happens if your matter transmitter transmits but fails to dematerialize. Fun dystopic comment on technology. Second prize winner.

F*ck You, Pay Me: Another high-budget dystopia, this one follows around a couple of Debt Enforcement Officers through several different cases highlighting different aspects of our consumer culture. Funny, but dark and just plausible enough to be scary.

Life Signs: Computer animated, but in a style that made me think of those computer animation samplers from the late 1980s. A few chuckles, but not otherwise a contender.

Singularity: A paraplegic gulf war vet accidentally creates an AI (by doing a web search. Whatever.) Better than it sounds. Great example of how a good meaty idea and a smart script can have more impact than a bunch of digital effects.

The Tragical Historie of Guidolon the Giant Space Chicken: Story of a movie monster’s attempt to direct his own biopic. Computer animated with a bright painterly style and an irreverent sense of humor. Beautiful and hilarious. This film maker was at the festival and the movie was clearly a labor of love for him (and his understated cheerful enthusiasm made me like the movie even better). Go watch it.

13 Ways to Die at Home: Very short short with quick title cards describing the 13 menaces (”carpet leech”, “poison toad”, etc.) with the action being clips from old 1950s-style household scenes doctored to include the danger in question. The audio seemed to have been clipped from similar sources and was a little elliptical and hard to follow. Went by too fast, I want to see it a few more times. Huge laughs for this one. Interestingly it got the Trumbull award for best visual effects. Also third place overall.

Project K.A.T.: Try at a big-budget actioner except short and low-budget. It was a little hard to follow the action. Highlights the fact that the only real attraction of this kind of movie is the spectacle. Without the spectacle there’s nothing really there.

Transgressions: Look at a dystopia where the law is focussed on punishing what we would consider minor infractions yet ignores what we would consider more major offenses (murder, spousal abuse, little things like that). Excellent pacing and a wonderful twist ending. Well-deserved recipient of the festival’s grand prize.

Agnieszka: Woman finds a little box, takes it home, and all hell breaks loose. The most beautifully photographed of all the films in the festival. There were a few shots that just took my breath away. The leggy scantily-clad Polish lead actresses didn’t hurt either. Nonsense plot, more of a Lovecraftian creeping dread kind of thing. Not that that’s bad.

Maklar, Anyone?: Audience award winner. Kind of a cross between Galaxy Quest and Terminator with a sprinkling of other homages. Very funny. I liked it better after hearing in the Q&A that it was created in a film shootout so it was written and produced in something like 48 hours.

TV Man: What’s with all the dystopias? TV advertising-dominated world love story. A little confusing. Nice production values.

Mizar: I thought this was a shoo-in for the Trumbull award. First off, it was the only movie in the festival shot in a wide enough aspect ratio to use most of the Cinerama’s huge screen, and even projected at that size (and viewing it from the 7th row!) it looked better than some big hollywood pictures. Very pretty visuals. Last year’s Trumbull went to a film that did a decent job depicting zero-gee, and that might point to why this one was overlooked since it had magical gravity generators on its space ship. It also had a nonsensical plot and stilted acting. Lovely to look at, though.

Haunted Planet: Talky story about a woman who sees dead people (and animals) and her theory that it’s all a dream. Great production values, nice effects and a decent script, but the dream thing seemed like something that would sound better in the dorm room after a couple tokes than it did on the screen.

Face Machine: Weird title. Set in a world where the atmosphere is unbreathable so everyone wears full face oxygen masks and images of the human face have been outlawed. Story follows a couple who fight the system for love. Not bad, but needed something to get me emotionally involved enough to appreciate it. Not sure what. Maybe a snack, cause I was pretty much worn out by this point in the festival. Speaking of which, there was no explanation of how people ate with their permanent masks.

As with last year’s lineup I found something to appreciate in every single film. And that made me a little bummed for the film makers who didn’t win one of the five awards the festival gives. A number of excellent films didn’t get any recognition at all. Except for being chosen for the festival which I guess is something. Still, it disappoints me to see so much great stuff get brushed aside when it comes time to give the awards.

The festival also makes me really curious about the economics of short films. Does anyone make any money off a short film? If so, how? You don’t seem to be able to buy them. Is there a market on some cable channel somewhere? As with last year, I’d love to be able to buy a DVD of all the films. Only a couple of the films are available online. Are they just portfolio pieces? If so, why aren’t they all online? Color me confused.

George Dyson was at Town Hall in Seattle last night doing a talk about computer pioneer John von Neumann. I saw Dyson about a year ago in the same venue talking about the Baidarka (the Aleut kayak).

It was a fascinating talk in a number of ways. First off, Dyson is in a unique position for a scientific historian in that his father, Freeman Dyson, is a scientist so George has actually known many of the people and places he’s talking about. For instance when introducing the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton he can go to a slide of himself as a small child in front of the main building and tell you that it was a really boring place to grow up with all the ivory tower types busy thinking their deep thoughts. And knowing these people he has access to papers that an anonymous historian might have trouble getting to.

But the star of the talk, of course was von Neumann and the work to build the first digital computer. Dyson is sort of a magpie when it comes to shiny bits of scientific trivia so his talk and associated slide show was full of wonderful little tidbits like photos of pages from the system logbook of that first computer and hand-drawn diagrams of and-gates and other circuitry and memos from ivory tower types to the administration complaining of all the engineers taking over the place and floor plans of the IAS showing the offices of Einstein, Oppenheimer, von Neumann, and Gödel all within steps of each other. Lots of funny quotes too, offered up without commentary.

While he didn’t say it outright, I’m sure there’s a book coming with all this great stuff. One of the things I’m most looking forward to hearing more about is the role of von Neumann’s wife Klara. Dyson has been able to read the letters the two wrote (they were almost never in the same place at the same time) and how Klara learned to program the new computer and was intimately involved in the work they were doing with the machine in those early days (bomb simulations).

Another thing he mentioned is that on his death, von Neumann left a sealed box which wasn’t to be opened for 50 years after his death. That milestone passes in just about a week from now, so there may be some interesting revelations coming soon.

The talk gave a great feel for what an amazing convergence of talent and inspiration there was at that time and how much the decisions made by these people have informed our modern technology (the architecture of that first 40-bit computer is essentially identical in broad outline to all the computers we work with every day). And yet rather than making it seem like a one of a kind event, I came away feeling like there must be similar convergences happening now or yet to come.

One of my favorite quotes from the evening came in the Q&A section when Dyson made the comment that “writing a book is 10% inspiration and 90% not being distracted by the internet.”

I made a stealth audio recording of the talk that’s reasonably listenable. If you’re interested, leave a comment or email and I’ll send you a link to download it. It’d be better with video of his slides–there are lots of spontaneous bursts of laughter as the audience read some quote up on the screen–but the audio is interesting enough.

Bought the red bike in the picture today. Love the Trek with the Xtracycle, but needed something more minimal for times when I don’t need to haul anything. In particular, the Xtracycle doesn’t fit on the bike racks on buses without some finagling.

The new bike proved itself right away cause I rode the bus over to Bellevue to take possession from its previous owner and brought it back on the bus. Then towed it home from the park and ride with the Xtracycle. It towed so well I had to look back a couple times just to make sure it was still back there.

In 2006 I read only 31 books (a couple of reviews aren’t up yet). This is even worse than the 36 I thought was so scandalously low last year. All the same reasons apply.

We did do some pretty cool things this year that might have eaten some of my reading time.

• Went to the first annual Science fiction short film festival
• Had a big party to celebrate our 40th birthdays
• Had an art and craft sale at our house
• Learned how to do chain mail. And did
• Went to the Philippines
• Switched blog platforms to Wordpress
• Got back into hand drumming, this time dragging Becky along
• Photographed lost gloves #69-111 (42)

We also watched a bunch of movies, so like I posted last year, here’s what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater. Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it. “B, R” means I skipped that one, etc.

That’s 75 movies (only 10 in the theater) and doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before. We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this. If you’re wondering whether you’d like something on here, leave a comment or send email and I’ll blather on.