Being a vegetarian, I occasionally wondered whether I'm getting enough Omega-3 goodness. On impulse, I picked up some Nature's Bounty cold-pressed (!) flax oil, which is sold as a nutrition supplement. One teaspon twice a day, preferably with a meal, they say.
This stuff is not too appetizing straight, and tastes like I should be cooking with it. I'm thinking on sandwiches, on pasta, in salad dressing...
My FilterStream DirtTamer Ultima V2510 cordless HEPA vacuum cleaner arrived yesterday, and I gave it a spin after the recommended 24-hour battery charging.
Initial impressions:
Suction is good enough. I'm not disappointed.
Battery life wasn't as long as I'd like, yet I suspect is normal for this type of device. I wasn't timing, but a very rough estimate is 7-10 minutes before I noticed the red light, and the motor power declined noticeably a couple minutes before then.
HEPA filter seems to work. No immediate aggravation of dust allergy.
The exhaust didn't seem to stir dust not yet vacuumed.
Accessories don't fit well in the recharger base.
There are a couple obvious corner-cuttings in build quality. Fortunately, there's a 2-year warranty.
I think the headlight on mine might be broken, as it repeatedly flickered off when the unit was rotated or very lightly jostled. I'm going to ask the manufacturer about sending a replacement bulb, if that's the cause.
I also looked at the DirtTamer Deluxe and DirtTamer Supreme, and went with the Ultima because it was the strongest. However, the ways different resellers were positioning the Supreme and Ultima were confusing, even though both models appeared new and at similar prices, as if the Ultima had some known drawback relative to the Supreme. Web searching didn't enlighten me, but you might want to do your own due diligence on that.
While speaking fairly well of a FilterStream DirtTamer product in my prior blog entry, I couldn't give FilterStream a proper Web link like I intended. The reason is that their Web developer took the highly unusual approach of breaking URLs by apparently hiding the info about which static page you're seeing within PHP session data.
They must have no idea how wrong this is, for multiple reasons.
I just checked, and, sure enough, FilterStream's site doesn't appear on a Google search for "dirttamer" until the 4th page of hits. And they sell direct, so this is probably costing them very real, immediate money.
I'm not yet synchronizing data between my Nokia E61 and my Linux desktops, but I've put enough data into the E61 contacts and calendar databases that I wanted to have a backup in case the E61 was lost.
The solution was to back up the E61 phone data to the miniSD memory card, mount the E61 as USB Storage on Linux, and copy the backup image.
For this to work, one needs to be using Linux 2.6.18 or later (see Greg KH post to LKML, "USB patches for 2.6.18-rc1").
Once I had 2.6.18 and all the right drivers (see updated kernel
.config at GNU/Linux on the IBM ThinkPad X20), I added the following entry to /etc/fstab, and made
a mount point.
/dev/sda /media/nokia-e61 vfat ro,user,noauto,nodev,nosuid 0 0
Note that the device is /dev/sda, not
/dev/sda1. I also mount it read-only, as that avoids potential
risk of corrupting the card's filesystem.
Now to see what the E61's memory card looks like through Linux:
[claire ~] mount /media/nokia-e61
[claire ~] cd /media/nokia-e61
[claire /media/nokia-e61] ls -l
total 176
drwxr-xr-x 2 neil neil 16384 Oct 20 23:50 Backup
drwxr-xr-x 2 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 02:41 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 4 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 02:41 Images
drwxr-xr-x 2 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 02:41 Others
drwxr-xr-x 2 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 02:41 Presentations
drwxr-xr-x 2 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 02:41 Sheets
drwxr-xr-x 4 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 02:41 Sounds
drwxr-xr-x 6 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 02:41 System
drwxr-xr-x 3 neil neil 16384 Oct 21 03:16 Thumbnails
drwxr-xr-x 2 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 02:41 Videos
drwxr-xr-x 5 neil neil 16384 Oct 19 03:29 private
[claire /media/nokia-e61] ls -l Backup
total 1232
-r-xr-xr-x 1 neil neil 1252751 Oct 25 05:00 Backup.arc
[claire /media/nokia-e61] tree
.
|-- Backup
| `-- Backup.arc
|-- Documents
| `-- [[elided]]
|-- Images
| |-- Screenshots
| | |-- Screenshot0029.png
| | |-- [[elided]]
| | `-- _PAlbTN
| | |-- Screenshot0001.png_47x40
| | `-- [[elided]]
| |-- _PAlbTN
| | `-- [[elided]]
| `-- [[elided]]
|-- Others
|-- Presentations
|-- Sheets
|-- Sounds
| |-- Digital
| | `-- [[elided]]
| `-- Simple
|-- System
| |-- Apps
| |-- Data
| | `-- mg2
| | `-- DB
| | `-- E
| | |-- 0.dat
| | |-- 1.dat
| | |-- 10.dat
| | |-- 11.dat
| | |-- 2.dat
| | |-- 3.dat
| | |-- 4.dat
| | |-- 5.dat
| | |-- 6.dat
| | |-- 7.dat
| | |-- 8.dat
| | `-- 9.dat
| |-- dmgr
| | `-- 1020724d
| | `-- contents
| | `-- login
| `-- temp
|-- Thumbnails
| |-- [[elided]]
| `-- _PAlbTN
| `-- [[elided]]
|-- Videos
`-- private
|-- 100012a5
| `-- DBS_101FE031_mcv4.mpd
|-- 10003a64
| `-- temp
`-- 1000484b
`-- Mail2
|-- 00001000
|-- 00001001_S
| |-- 0
| | |-- 00100310
| | |-- 00100330
| | |-- 00100330_F
| | | `-- Screenshot0001.png
| | `-- 00100340
| |-- 1
| |-- 2
| | `-- 00100352
| |-- 3
| | `-- 00100353
| |-- 4
| |-- 5
| | `-- 00100335
| |-- 6
| | `-- 00100336
| |-- 7
| |-- 8
| | |-- 00100338
| | `-- 00100338_F
| | `-- Screenshot0002.png
| |-- 9
| | `-- 00100309
| |-- a
| | |-- 0010030a
| | `-- 0010035a
| |-- b
| | |-- 0010031b
| | `-- 0010035b
| |-- c
| | |-- 0010030c
| | |-- 0010030c_F
| | | `-- [[elided]]
| | |-- 0010031c
| | `-- 0010035c
| |-- d
| | |-- 0010032d
| | `-- 0010035d
| |-- e
| | `-- 0010032e
| `-- f
| |-- 0010030f
| |-- 0010033f
| |-- 0010035f
| `-- 0010035f_F
| `-- [[elided]]
|-- 00100000
|-- 00100000_S
|-- 00100001_S
|-- 00100005_S
|-- 00100006_S
|-- 00100007_S
|-- 001002d8_S
| |-- 0
| |-- 1
| |-- 2
| |-- 3
| | `-- 00100363
| |-- 4
| | |-- 00100364
| | `-- 00100364_F
| | `-- Screenshot0002.png
| |-- 5
| |-- 6
| |-- 7
| |-- 8
| |-- 9
| | `-- 00100339
| |-- a
| |-- b
| |-- c
| |-- d
| |-- e
| `-- f
| `-- 001002df_F
|-- 001002d9
|-- 001002d9_S
|-- 00100349_S
| |-- 0
| |-- 1
| |-- 4
| `-- 5
|-- 0010034a
|-- 0010034a_S
`-- Index
83 directories, 83 files
[claire /media/nokia-e61]
I've had reason lately to want to spiff up my Web presences, but not wanting so much that I've done much about it.
For one, there's several major improvements I want to make to my blog software (e.g., permalinks, smart links to related blog entries, automatically-placed thumbnails for linked images, "two-phase" publishing). I've actually already implemented most of the features in my new Scheme and XML architecture, but the older software that generates my deployed Web site is based on Emacs Lisp. I've been focusing on paid work, and not wanted to get enveloped in the personal coding work that would be required to finish the new site software. Even though the result would make for a nicer professional showcase.
Another regrettable thing with my Web presence is that I found, through vanity-Googling, that there's at least one email list post out there in which I don't sound like a perfect team player. What's missing from the Web, which potential clients and employers might stumble upon, is crucial context: what appears out of context as a little abrasive was in fact diplomatic. In the interests of diplomacy, I didn't articulate much about the underlying problems.
If half of diplomacy is what you don't say, then you need to be aware of the Permanent Record. Like colleagues I admire, I frequently take little losses of face in the interests of integrity and trustworthiness. In practice, enough of the right people come to respect you, and these losses of face-- usually aren't.
Even then, some innocuous publicly-archived emails can give an undesired impression to HR screeners. For example, in the first post of the Scheme SRFI-71 proposal discussion, I say things like "kludge" and "syntactically ugly," which in some development cultures would be considered abrasive. In that particular crowd and process, it was more appropriate. (A big part of Scheme is clean syntax, and Scheme developers tend to be of the "rugged individualist" sort.) An uninitiated reader might not appreciate the nuances of the SRFI group dynamics, but preferrably s/he doesn't draw any conclusions without at least reading the entire discussion.
In a recent blog post, I said:
Oh yeah, maddeningly, the front pocket on my Lowepro TopLoader 70 AW camera bag is just a few millimeters too small for the [Canon Speedlite] 420EX to be squeezed in.
Turns out I was wrong. I just discovered accidentally that the Toploader 70 AW's main front pocket and the odd little pocket below it are separated internally only by a velcro'd divider. I was able to shift the divider down a centimeter or so -- enough to accomodate the 420EX -- while I believe leaving enough velcro attached.
As if being vegetarian and avoiding caffeine and alcohol weren't masochistic enough, lately I'm reducing my sodium intake.
I just noticed that my favorite salad dressing, Annie's Naturals Goddess Dressing, has 390mg (16% Daily Value) of sodium per serving. Were I actually tracking my salt expenditures, that'd be a sizable chunk of my budget.
Note that the nutrition info on the Annie's Natural's site lists Sodium at 320mg (13%). Likely cause of the discrepancy is that my 390mg-sodium-per-serving bottle says "Organic" on it, and the photo accompanying the nutrition info on the Web site does not. I don't see the "Organic" variant anywhere on the site.
Yesterday, I said I have over 10,000 JPEGs of photos I've taken (2006-10-11).
Turns out that, despite recent culling of thousands, I have over 20,000.
I've tagged slightly over 5,000 of them.
Thank heavens I don't have to store negatives.
Kodak should buy Seagate.
I just bought a lightly-used Nokia E61 smartphone.
I needed both a mobile phone for occasional voice calls and highly-portable SSH terminal for checking email and remote server administration.
A key feature of the European-version E61 is Wi-Fi, which is absent from US-version E62. The reason Wi-Fi is missing in the E62 is the same reason that it's so important to me: if I can use open access points for my mobile data connectivity, the flexibility that gives me with voice plans means that Cingular gets $1500 less of my money over the course of 2 years.
One concern with the Wi-Fi is that, although it's reportedly usually faster than using an EDGE data service, I've also heard a suggestion that it sucks battery faster. I don't yet know whether or how much faster Wi-Fi sucks battery over using a carrier's data service.
My E61 is not locked to a particular carrier, and I won't be locked into a service contract. I plan to get Cingular, although if they peeve me, I'll resort to T-Mobile.
The E61 and E62 have QWERTY keyboards, 320x240 displays, and run Symbian S60 9.0. Reportedly, open source SDKs are available (Java, and a GCC-based toolchain), although I don't plan to do free development for a closed mobile device platform, so I haven't looked closely. Perhaps I should rewrite T-Map, as it's going on 10 years old...
The Blackberry Pearl is certainly cuter than the E61, however.
I have an archive of over 10,000 digital photos I've taken. In spare time over the past two days, I estimate I've tagged at least half of them, using slightly under 500 different tag names.
I'm using a concept model that adds a couple major semantic improvements over the keyword models used by services like Flickr, yet (with appropriate UI affordances) should be accessible to nontechnical users.
This approach is orthogonal to those of my early work on distributed and collaborative ontology development, such as MindShare ("Knowledge Sharing via Personalized Views on a Composite Ontology").
When bumping into The Ontology Problem, even small successes confer bragging rights. For now, I'll publicly opt for grandiosity over proof of concept.
One tangential thing I've learned already is that I have a ridiculous photographic oversupply of Boston skylines, seagulls, and old roommates' cats.
After years of rodent- and pest-free living at my current home, we've acquired a mouse, and possibly two.
The landlord brought over wood snap traps, which proved useless except for snapping at human fingers and making hearts skip beats.
I just bought some d-Con Ultra Set mouse traps. They worked wonders last year at my then-girlfriend's house, when an army of mice found a hole between the basement and her kitchen.
Normally, I'm the live-trap kind of warm-fuzzy person, but that wouldn't work in all the places I want to put traps. Also, I keep a very clean home, so this bastard is going down.
I bought one of those 5-in-1 collapsible disc photography reflectors that are sold on eBay. It has a springy circular frame that folds into a circle 1/3 original size. It can be configured via zippers to show one of 3 possible reflective surfaces (white, silver, gold), show a black surface, or function as a translucent diffuser. It comes with a cheap zippered carrying case. I got a 24-inch one primarily as a relatively discreet reflector for available-light portraiture in settings like cafes.
This particular one, branded "igozz," was purchased from eBay user
digital_and_tech, and cost only $15 ($3 base plus $12 shipping).
It did indeed take a couple weeks to arrive, as they warned. It also did ship
from China, so the $12 "shipping" cost wasn't just profit-padding. The
product seems fine, and so I'll probably soon buy at least one large oval or
rectangular reflector from the same seller, for outdoor body shots and general
studio use.
Award-winning photog friend Jim would say that, instead of my fancy-pants springy 5-in-1 crutch, I should just grab a free newspaper from a street box and slap it down on the cafe table beneath the model's chin. But I'm not quite that cool yet.
Speaking of reflectors reminds: I never blogged that I've begun to forsake my available-light purist ways with flashy dalliances. A while ago, I picked up a used Canon Speedlite 420EX and a Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce diffuser. The immediate need was for a dawn/dusk location model shoot, and I decided I should have a decent hotshoe flash in my kit anyway.
Oh yeah, maddeningly, the front pocket on my Lowepro TopLoader 70 AW camera bag is just a few millimeters too small for the 420EX to be squeezed in. As someone observed, there's no perfect camera bag. I'll blog additional tidbits on the TopLoader 70 AW later.
Lately I've been working on Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey user scripts, and incidentally using JavaScript.
JavaScript is trivial to learn, if you have a programming languages background and can identify from where they borrowed the various semantics and syntax. Then you can add "JavaScript" as a keyword to your resume, to ratchet up the number of cold-calls you receive from recruiters who deal in jobs with titles like "Principle HTML Engineer" (sic) and "Associate J2EE Analist" (sic).
Yesterday, in Kendall Square, I walked past a middle-aged man sitting in a convertible that was parked very much askew to the curb. After a few moments, I turned back, talked to him, and found he seemed cognitively impaired (but not drunk). I asked to borrow the mobile phone of a passing woman. She spoke with the man ("Are you all right?", "I'm all right") and she suggested that we probably shouldn't call 911. I went into the closest business, found the police non-emergency number, called, and described the situation. I waited at the car only a couple minutes before police, fire truck, and ambulance arrived.
Turns out the guy didn't know where he was, nor from where he'd been driving, and he didn't seem to be processing other questions being asked of him. I don't yet know whether he'd hit his head, had a stroke, missed his diabetic or psychiatric medicine, or what.
In hindsight, I should've called 911 immediately. I'm glad the police dispatcher had the wisdom to send an ambulance rather than just a patrol car.
I think the guy had been there a while, visible in his convertible, with people driving and walking past, and nobody had realized he needed help.
I hope that, if I'm ever beside some street, in need of medical attention, that a passerby realizes it and gets help more quickly than we did for this guy.
My quality of life would be somewhat improved, could I find a "Wi-Fi router" that ran OpenWRT and had at least 2 switched 1000BASE-T ports on the LAN side (and 4 to 5 switched Ethernet ports, of at least 100 Mb/s each, altogether).
Of course, I could interpose a gigabit switch on the LAN side of my current OpenWRT router, but I'd really prefer to reduce the number of boxes (i.e., single points of failure) involved.
Presently I have an ADSL bridge, leading to a 5-port 10/100 switch (since I have a host outside the OpenWRT router for historical reasons), leading to the OpenWRT router with integrated switch. Ultimately, I'd like to move all hosts behind the OpenWRT router, and get rid of the standalone switch. Between the router and the ADSL bridge, I'd occasionally have a nonswitching hub, for diagnostic sniffing of WAN link traffic.
The main barrier to home network re-architecture is that the present setup just works (knock on wood), and therefore I don't want to mess with it.
My workstation is an IBM ThinkPad X20, claire, that I
bought used on eBay three years ago for around $450. I buy ThinkPads for three
reasons: (1) general build quality; (2) TrackPoint; (3) clean black style.
I was reminded of the build quality selling-point the other morning, when I knocked my open X20 off the bed and onto the floor, where it struck a lamp base. After bracing myself for cracked LCD carnage, I found no apparent damage, and even the hard drive seems to be fine.
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 12410 -
This is the second drop of the X20. The first was a couple years ago, when the X20 hit a brick sidewalk, wrapped in a towel inside a courier bag (see 2004-03-06).
Would another make of laptop have also survived these incidents? A few others might've, but (excepting a ruggedized unit), had a non-ThinkPad failed the drop test, I would've asked myself whether springing the extra dollars for a ThinkPad would've made the difference.
I like it when laptops survive long past their freshness date. The X20 is still usable, but noticeably sluggish at some tasks, even with a nicely tweaked GNU/Linux setup, and is not good for some demos. I was meeting with Tim Berners-Lee a few years back, and I declined to demo one of my projects since it ran so slowly on the ancient ThinkPad I had at the time that much of the effect was lost. The meeting otherwise went very well, but saying one had an opportunity to demo their work one-on-one to Sir Tim Berners-Lee -- and couldn't because one penny-pinched excessively on one's laptop -- sounds ludicrous. And it's feeling about time to upgrade the X20.
I'll see how ThinkPad quality has fared since the sale to Lenovo.
See also GNU/Linux on the IBM ThinkPad X20 and GNU/Linux on the IBM ThinkPad 560E.
The "broad and persistent nature of the claims of executive authority forwarded by President Bush appear designed to inure Congress, as well as others, to the belief that the president in fact possesses expansive and exclusive powers upon which the other branches may not intrude," the [Congressional Research Service] report said.
Under most interpretations of the Constitution, the report said, some of the legal assertions in Bush's signing statements are dubious. For example, it said, the administration has suggested repeatedly that the president has exclusive authority over foreign affairs and has an absolute right to withhold information from Congress. Such assertions are "generally unsupported by established legal principles," the report said.
—Charlie Savage, "Bush signings called effort to expand power," Boston Globe, 2006-10-05
Read the whole article.
The report question appears to be this one, as listed on OpenCRS: T.J. Halstead, U.S. Congressional Research Service, RL33667, "Presidential Signing Statements: Constitutional and Institutional Implications," 2006-09-20
My only comment at the moment on the issue is: how can patriotic people continue to work for the Bush administration in good conscience? I'd be shocked if all of them considered the expansion of Presidential powers to be a good idea.
See also 2006-08-05, 2006-08-03, and 2006-07-24.
Takes no prisoners.
None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.
—Garrison Keillor, "A shameful retreat from American values," Pahrump Valley Times, 2006-10-04
First three Google hits for audrey tautou pronounced.
If you're developing Firefox extensions, here's some changes you might want to make to your GNU Emacs 21 setup.
For editing JavaScript files, install Karl Landström's javascript.el.
For editing XUL files, you can use xml-mode, although lately
I'm trying out nXML mode.
For viewing XPI files, archive-mode
will work.
To associate XUL and XPI files with the proper Emacs modes, set
auto-mode-alist. For example, add something like the following to
your .emacs file.
(setq auto-mode-alist (append '(("\\.xpi\'" . archive-mode)
("\\.xul\'" . nxml-mode))
auto-mode-alist))
These are initial quick&dirty accomodations. I'll probably find better tools soon. I don't plan to develop a Quack for Firefox extensions, however.
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