Blog: 2009-07

That Wedding Entrance

I accidentally watched the Jill and Kevin's Big Day video a few times recently. Now, not only is the song stuck in my head, but the choreography and camera work are too.

Potheadedness Should Be Consensual

Who smokes marijuana at 4am on a Monday?

I think that people should have the right to use marijuana, even though I'm highly (ha) averse to it myself. However, there's been an epidemic of marijuana odors getting into my apartment over the last 2-3 weeks. Broadcasting requests to the neighbors in my perforated old building to please keep it to themselves isn't working.

I begin to suspect that the culprit's apparent heavy marijuana use is a barrier to them taking the hint. Short of laying down ultimatums of calling the police, to people I'm not 100% certain are the ones responsible, I'm not sure what else to do. (Starting this year in Massachusetts, possession of small amounts of marijuana became only a $100 citation, no longer a felony, but still I think that this is the sort of thing that neighbors should be able to work out themselves.)

I'm going to have the landlord eliminate the alternative explanation of a skunk family trapped in the walls, and then consider my options.

My options in addition to opening all the windows, running fans, and getting my textiles cleaned, I mean.

(Graphic is from AllPosters.com. Fair use, and they get a link.)

Sun Tea

Sadly, Snopes says that sun tea is dangerous, due to being a bacteria farm.

They tell me only after I sampled my first half of a glass of herbal sun tea, liked it, poured a whole glass, and sat down to blog a suggestion that other people make sun tea.

I suppose the lazy way to do it safely is to find some glass bottles small enough to fit in my little microwave, and substitute NStar Electric heat for solar heat. That substitution ruins much of the appeal, but it's still healthier and cheaper than drinking juice or soda.

If PLT Scheme Help Searches Lock Up Firefox

I forgot to blog this in June...

If you're using PLT Scheme, and your documentation searches are locking up Firefox for 15 seconds at a time, then you're probably using Firebug (in my case, version 1.3.3), even though you're not actually running Firebug on the documentation. Suspending Firebug (see right-click menu on Firebug status bar icon) makes this lockup go away.

Firebug as the cause was reported by Eddie Sullivan, after I and key PLT developers experienced the problem.

Note that a contributing cause is the strain that the documentation search puts on the browser, so you might be seeing delays in browsers other than Firefox for this reason. In the case of Firefox, Firefox's own JS implementation is efficient enough to handle it, but not if a non-suspended Firebug secretly has its meathooks into Firefox.

Neils

Neils get a bad rap. In observance of Neil History Month, I began cataloging respectable Neils on my Namesakes page.

Just now, I added Neil Giraldo, who I guess is cool enough, by virtue of being married to Pat Benatar.

Speaking of namesakes, my favorite other Neil Van Dyke, who I 'met' online in the mid-'90s, is featured in the Vermont Sports publication this month.

Update: I'd forgotten Neil Flynn, the real name of Janitor.

Clearing X Selections and Cut Buffers

Tired of having arbitrary text -- say, proprietary source code, or personal email -- sitting around on your Unix/X desktop, waiting for an errant press of the middle mouse button to liberate it into a command shell or Internet chat room?

Basically, you need to clear three X selections plus (despite what JWZ advises) the X cut buffers.

To do this from a shell script, there are several command-line programs that could be used, but none of them is likely part of the base install of your OS. On Debian stable, get the xsel and xcb packages.

If you're using the xsel and xcb programs, do the following in your script:

xsel -p -i < /dev/null
xsel -s -i < /dev/null
xsel -b -i < /dev/null
xcb -s 0-7 < /dev/null

Note that this clears only the first 8 cut buffers, which seems to be the default number and what my own system uses. I haven't looked into how to determine the number of cut buffers from the command line, nor how likely it is that there will be more than 8.

Known Chomsky Collaborator

A while ago, I screenshotted this odd Web page some site had for me without my knowledge, which seemed to finger me as a Chomsky collaborator.

I Was Only Joking

Last night or the night before, a colleague remarked, in an idle manner, that "Kindle" was an odd name for a book replacement.

Thinking of books as kindling (and channeling myself from many years ago), I said something about the Amazon Kindle obsoleting book-burnings, since every copy of a book could be deleted instantly by a central authority. Additionally, you could even have the offensive book itself identify all the subversives who read it.

David Pogue reports that, this morning, people had their copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm removed from their Kindles by Amazon without their permission.

Besides the irony of which titles were involved (What? Was Fahrenheit 451 not an option?), in my opinion, these happen to be two of the most important books ever written.

As an immediately practical matter, this isn't a big deal, but surely Amazon and the publisher realize how bad this looks in principle and symbolically.

Challah

Challah is one of my favorite types of bread, even though it's suboptimal for fashioning structurally-sound sandwiches. (Yet more evidence that my first girlfriend could have used, as she tried to convince her mother that I was "probably Jewish.")

I've been eating less Challah the last year or two, due to its price at the local co-op grocery ballooning. Currently the only variety they carry is $7.99, when I think for a long time it was $3.99 for the same quality.

I think Trader Joe's might still be around $4, up from $3. Same with Shaws's. Neither is near as good as I recall the now prohibitively expensive stuff being.

I'm not saying that $8 is unreasonable for all the costs that went into it; but with most everyone feeling the economic slowdown, generic bread on sale for $1.59-$1.89 a loaf at Johnnie's Foodmaster has its own appeal.

IKEA CORRAS Equipment Rack

For $10 and considerable sweat equity today, I acquired another IKEA CORRAS birch-veneer TV/bedside table' equipment rack. It has my entire greatly-downsized LAN except for my laptop: LaserJet, networking gear, and UPS.

These are clean little tables on casters that happen to be sized for 19-inch rackmount gear. (See Google Image Search for "ikea corras" for some pretty examples of how people use it.) A normal short-height rack cabinet would start at several hundred dollars. Also, with the IKEA, you can match your rack to your IKEA desk and other home office furniture. Note that most rackmount servers are deeper than a CORRAS table, but someone has doubled up two CORRAS tables to fit servers.

In addition to the discontinued CORRAS, you can get the EINA, which is virtually the same thing, but in different finishes. I recently accidentally bought an EINA "Light Brown" that had been mistakenly advertised as "Birch," and that would be better named "Pressed Beaver Vomit." (Well, accidentally, as in, the guy who scheduled me to pick it up on a weekend morning was not there at the appointed time, so his very nice roommates got up and brought it down in the elevator, and I didn't have the heart to tell them that it was not as advertised. It got me by until I found proper Birch one.)

I was going to just have the LaserJet and UPS on the floor, and then velcro and bolt the networking gear to the underside of the desk, on the other side of the privacy panel. But the UPS and whatnot were getting in the way of my feet, it was a bad place for the WiFi antennae, and the landline jack was on the other side of the room. Also, having everything on a little table on casters that can roll away from the wall is convenient.

Eternal Moonwalk

Eternal Moonwalk is a great idea. If I ever become a physician, I will display this in my waiting room.

If you were around when Billie Jean was first on the radio, try not to be horrified by the numerous contributors who think it means walking backwards. I'll grant special dispensation to the one who did it as pointe.

Speaking of horrified, check out the familiar moves in the "Snake in the Grass" scene from the 1974 "The Little Prince" film. I hadn't seen this until recently.

Fixing a Flimsy simplehuman Trash Can

About a year ago, I checked online and in several brick&mortar stores for a small white trash can with a foot control for hands-free lifting of the lid. (Small, because most of my kitchen refuse goes into the large recycling can.) Eventually I found a sturdy-looking white metal one with clean lines, branded "simplehuman."

Perhaps a month later, the foot actuator stopped working. I flipped over the can, and some cheap white plastic had simply (simplyhumanly) snapped off.

I was annoyed, since the quality of this plastic piece was not consistent with the quality of the rest of the construction. I believe that I wrote simplehuman about it, but I never heard back.

I saved the broken piece of plastic for possible repair, but got distracted with other matters for a year, while my once-beloved trash can continued to bother me.

Finally, this afternoon, I wanted to once again be able to cut stems out of tomatoes over a trash can, so I rummaged around the toolbox. A bracket from cheap miniblinds (found on the curb), hammered out, and a tube of superglue with Cyrillic instructions (left behind by a Russian roommate), and it's working and stronger than ever.