Weblog: Nov 2001

I have a backlog of received email to sift through. Am focusing 99.44% on finishing a different task. Will catch up in a few days.

I'm secure enough in my masculinity that I can sip mandarin orange spice herbal tea. Wanna make something of it?!

Chamomile tea remains undrinkable. At a deep primal level, your mind is telling you, "Dandelions. Poison. Yuck."

See EmacsWiki to hopefully finally collect all the ideas for an Emacs-based Guile IDE in one place.

Made a quick byte-compiler fix to spamprod.el and released it along with other accumulated changes as version 0.4.

In perhaps the majority of regions in the US, people are allowed to drive automobiles at age 16, but are not allowed to copulate until 18. Legislating Darwinism.

On a lighter note, I stumbled over an old screenshot from when someone's AltaVista query of "dyke wallpaper" had led them to my Web page at MIT. Today I am the first hit on AltaVista but only the second site hit on Google. A while ago I was the first hit on Google, beating out even the Indigo Girls.

Emacs users should check out EmacsWiki.

The day after Thanksgiving in the US is Buy Nothing Day. It's largely silly and pointless, but US-style consumerism is more than a little silly and pointless itself.

Just installed Blackdown Java 2 SDK 1.3.1 on my Debian box as a temporary measure. If you want to try it, add a long line of the following form to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb ftp://MIRROR/PATH/debian DIST non-free

where, for example, MIRROR may be metalab.unc.edu, PATH may be pub/linux/devel/lang/java/blackdown.org, and DIST is either potato or woody. Then do:

apt-get update
apt-get install j2sdk1.3

Note that this does not constitute an endorsement of Java or dependency on a proprietary SDK. My next research project will probably determine whether I commit long-term to Guile Scheme, Python, or Java.

Emacs users might try these scroll settings. They're more computationally inefficient than the defaults, but they'll keep the point's screen position more predictable and also give you a viewable margin of at least 5 lines below and above the point.

(setq scroll-conservatively           10
      scroll-margin                   5
      scroll-preserve-screen-position t
      scroll-step                     1)

If you haven't already upgraded to Emacs 21, it's pretty painless from 20.7 — a lot of infrastructure improvements and new features, but good backward-compatibility. To install under Debian GNU/Linux, just do apt-get install emacs21 emacs21-el. For my Red Hat 6.2 box, I built from the stock .tar.gzs (since the SRPMs I found didn't seem to want to build), and it was really straightforward.

If I still had my stamp collections, I could scan the stamps and write a database app for organizing and presenting the scanned images, and then I wouldn't need the physical stamps anymore. I could also give free copies of the images to as many people as wanted them.

I incorporated the contents of my "Projects" page into my main page, using a crude organization. Once I know exactly what my new research focus will be, I'll do a better organization and deemphasize the old and irrelevant stuff.

If you're a die-hard Emacs user, check out Kim F. Storm's ido.el for find-file and switch-to-buffer on crack. It was disconcerting enough when I first tried it that I was intrigued enough to install it. First thing I did was customize the faces.

Spinach salads are sometimes one of those foods of which you think "That's gonna taste icky and not be substantial, but I should get more greens," so you eat it anyway, and quickly remember that it actually tastes good.

Tonight I was accosted in Central Square by a charismatic woman from the Zendik Farm. Had I been thinking, I would've offered crash space. In addition to the info on their Web site, random info can be found via Google search.

Someone just asked why the Debian GNU/Linux apt package manager wasn't finding a particular package that they wanted to install. They suffered from the common affliction of having an incomplete /etc/apt/sources.list file. Here's a sources.list file that I believe will give you access to pretty much everything available for Debian 2.2 (including unstable and non-us stuff, so comment-out any lines you don't want).

Before you do a full apt-get upgrade from Debian unstable on a life-critical production server, you might want to put holds on some packages. I usually hold things like my custom kernel and modules packages and the bootloaders. Actually, I only do Debian unstable on my old laptop, even though it's been rock-solid so far.

Today's PhD Comics is funny.

Another weblog entry on kicking the coffee addiction. Two weeks after quitting, I'm happy to report that I have no regrets.

I still occasionally miss the taste and zing of the actual coffee drinking experience, but find I feel much more consistently peaceful and healthy and productive without it. I don't wake up feeling like I need coffee to function, I don't get irritable or upset like before, it seems easier to control my focus of attention, my tummy is free of coffee irritation, and I go to sleep more easily. I now understand why some cow orkers who I'd previously mocked as wimps had sworn off coffee.

How did my "nightmarish descent into sex and drugs" begin? I spent years as a software developer, and then grad student, drinking nothing stronger than Swiss Miss (a cheap just-add-hot-water cocoa beverage in the US, which is often provided free by employers as an alternative to the free coffee). But that proved a gateway drug when, as a new PhD student in the summer of '97, wrapped up in the euphoria of my new rockstar status, I started experimenting with an iced mocha in the afternoon. All hell broke loose when I moved to the Media Lab, where there were some ridiculous work pressures, and free coffee from the milk-foaming demon Akh'orto that promised to make them manageable. (True story: A few days after the Acorto was first installed, physically dominating the Media Lab kitchen and filling the air with its malevolent hum, an undergrad walked in, saw it, and fell cowering to the floor, whimpering "Please don't hurt me...")

Now, when latent coffee urges tingle, I placate them with Ghirardelli cocoa mix ($3 for a 20-serving container at Trader Joe's, $4 at the local supermarket). Instant hot apple cider seems good too. I haven't gotten the hang of this herbal tea thing yet, though.

While out walking shortly after 8am this morning, I snapped this photo of my favorite bus stop in Central Square (scaled down to 600x800). I snapped a much nicer scene with this bus stop on October 8th — amazingly saturated color patches projected onto the brick sidewalk — and showed it to a bunch of people, but just now found that all the photos I took that day have disappeared from my computer and have apparently missed the backups.

Time to plug two of my favorite online cartoonists: Carol Lay for Story Minute, and Tatsuya Ishida for SinFest.

This morning I removed a lot of clutter from my Web page, but there's a lot still to go. Once my new research area has been decided, I'll break the "projects" section into "research" and "software," with the emphasis on active research. I also need to put the publications online.

After 10 coffee-free days, and within an hour of remarking to someone that I was glad to be detoxed from coffee, I walked to Dunkin Donuts early this morning to get a large hot chocolate. Sipping it on the walk back, I thought it tasted funny, but figured my taster was just a bit off from the cold. Turns out the bastidges poisoned me with a coffee-based "Dunkaccino" of some kind. Glad I'd only enough change to leave a small tip.

"Your Anthrax-Fu is very good, but my flashy multimedia presentation style will defeat you!"

After sustaining a rate of five cups of coffee a day, abruptly decided to quit, cold-turkey, for awhile. Four coffee-free days later, I'm not really missing it.