Weblog: Jul 2002

Life's little pleasures: doing a CVS commit over wireless at 5am from outdoor cafe seating.

Added emacs-w3m support to Quack, and made it so that PLT docs pop up in the other window similar to how the *Help* buffer does. Hopefully lightweight both in terms of window management HCI and of resource usage on old computers. Experimented with more rigorous font-lock rules for numeric literals (R5RS BNF, adjusted for MzScheme-isms, and converted to regexps with some reductions to minimize lookahead), but not sure that's gonna work out.

Early this morning, fixed a couple Quack bugs, and got a good start on PLT-style fontification: parens, comments, string literals, numeric literals, character literals, and quoted symbols. One advantage over DrScheme 200 Check Syntax's fontification is that font-lock keeps things fontified as you edit. Found the font-lock hooks that might let me implement PLT-style fontification of quoted and quasiquoted lists. Intend to do a version 0.3 release within a couple days, in any case.

Released Quack version 0.2. This adds a feature for viewing the documentation of the keyword under the point. The implementation is more convoluted than you'd think.

Breakfast of Patriots?

New 802.11b card. With the help of Gerald, got p2scan running. During a 10-minute walk down a residential street around 3am this morning, it found what appear to be 22 distinct wireless networks (one of which appeared to have two access points). The SSIDs of 7 of them were vendor defaults or otherwise generic. A few SSIDs were clearly people's names or initials. One SSID was based on the house number, and another was a street name. Someone who clearly knew that SSIDs are not private used stayoffmynetwork. Even the nearby franchise of a large chain pharmacy has a wireless network, which one presumes is not used for sensitive information.

Electronic voting without a human-readable physical ballot that can be audited outside the electronic system is just begging for trouble, and will be subverted. Any elections official attempting to deploy less-trustworthy electronic voting systems should be suspected of either criminal incompetence or ill intent. And in Florida, of all places.

It is policy to neither confirm nor deny that I attended dinner at an undisclosed location with an unspecified number of unidentified persons at some point in time.

Released quack.el version 0.1, for people who want to work with PLT MzScheme code from within Emacs.

From an associate who shall remain anonymous:

I just found out our hardware designers make our emulators "intentionally slower than real hardware" so the customers are happy when they get the real hardware. Trouble is, customers are using the hardware emulators for benchmarks, they run slow, and they go off and choose our competitor's hardware. I don't think our hardware designers work for us.

Sign in a Chinatown window.

Tried emacs-w3m 1.3. It works reasonably well, and has unexpected features like tabs (at least under Emacs 21). Might be an easy lightweight way to view PLT Scheme books in Emacs.

Appears some butthead dumped detergent in the Copley fountain.

Thursday, after they painted some street markings, you could see rainbows in the crosswalks (edits: cropped).

After failing to find a VCR at any of the local thrift shops, at daybreak this morning, found one someone had set out with the trash. If it works, it can be combined with the TV inherited from gb to form a Serendipitous Home Theatre of sorts. Mainly for watching French films.

Sign in the waiting room of Edward L. Lechtenberg, DMD, advertises Painless Dentistry. His novocaine-fu is strong.

Typical Boston schitzoid weather: heat index, 105F a week ago, is 56F this morning.

Web 'Designer' Award for today goes to Pier1 Imports for refusing to show you their content if they don't like your User-Agent header.

Made a small patch to add Galeon support to PLT 200.2 sendurl.ss.

A group of us went to Fire+Ice tonight. Since the last time I was there, they've gotten much better about keeping the vegetarian part of the grill vegetarian. Tonight, there were about 20 people waiting for the omnivore part of the grill but nobody for the herbivore part, so I got the VIP treatment.

Went to buy an AC Tue night, but the store was sold out. Went to a different store early Wed evening, but the store was closing early, and no ACs visible through the window.

Every night of this latest heat wave, Weather.com promises lows in the 70s and high 60s, yet continues to report the temperature never dropping below the 80s. At 1:30am, Weather.com is promising 74°F, yet indicating current temp as 85°F ("Feels Like: 89°F"). For the last 5 years, Weather.com's forecasts, which no doubt come from vastly complex climate models devised by thousands of Nobel-winning PhDs and running on acre-sized supercomputer farms, are less accurate than simple one-week averaging.

We had a nice little pre-fireworks rendezvous at the Cambridge Brewing Company, then wandered over and watched from the grass of Killian Court (which was mostly empty). I'll sort through the photos later, but here's one with a neat effect to tide you over. Thanks to those who were able to attend.

NYT article, "Why Childhood Lasts, and Lasts and Lasts" goes a long way toward explaining Computer Science students:

Dr. Bird observes that male orangutans that grow up in stressful or highly competitive environments sometimes remain juvenile in features and behavior well into adulthood, the better to stick it out safely until the opportunity to mate improves.

Weather report says "93F Feels Like 102F." Too hot to think. Time to unsheath the Platinum Card Of Doom and invest in an AC.

Hardware store at night (edits: shrunk, cropped).