Blog: 2009-09

Out of the Mouths of Ducks

Recently, I was touring an urban development area with some city officials, urban planners, architects, and other civic-minded people. We stopped near the Zakim Bridge while some people discussed the Big Dig plant that was situated there.

As we turn to move on, a Duck Tours vehicle drives by slowly, and suddenly we can hear the wisecracking tour guide, oblivious to who exactly is within earshot, say over the PA, "[And over here, this structure] was designed to look like Newark, New Jersey." (The part in square brackets was paraphrased from memory; the rest I wrote down verbatim at the time.)

Which was hilarious in context. And there was a combination of amusement and embarrassment.

That Story

Today I was walking to work, and in a hurry, but trying not to walk too fast, since it was uncomfortably humid, and I had to be pretty to get my headshot taken.

A small, young, muslim-looking woman stepped into the sidewalk in front of me, held up her index finger to get my attention. She said in very broken English that she didn't speak English, and indicated that she wanted me to speak with someone on her phone. Long story short, she needed directions to meet the person on the phone outside a clinic. The first turn was blocks away and not labeled, plus where she needed to go wasn't the safest, so it became clear she needed to be escorted quite a bit out of my way.

You might've heard the story of the novitiate traveling to meet the head of the monastery to which he was newly appointed. He passes by someone asking for his assistance, but he excuses himself because he is an important person going to meet another important person about important matters of the spirit and service to others and such. Even if you don't know the story, you can guess how it turns out. I remembered the story, as soon as I realized she needed help.

I think that a lot of opportunities to remember the story happen to a lot of people, pretty often. For example, if you're rushing on a work deadline, and a cow orker needs your help: perhaps it's story time.

One of the more memorable story times for me was when I was walking to meet an ex-girlfriend for lunch after not seeing her for a few years. It was winter, there was snow on the ground and in the air, and I was going to get to the restaurant just in time. I had a fear of being late, since the artist with the weakness for drama would extrapolate overmuch from that. I was guessing that five minutes late would be declared a metaphor for our entire past relationship, or some other leap of logic with dramatic appeal. So, I was within a couple blocks of the restaurant, going to just make it in time, when I see a guy in a wheelchair in the middle of a side street, stuck in the snow. He was going to need to be pushed wherever he was going. Again, I remembered the friggin' story.

Shortening Backpack Straps

Lots of people already know or suspect this, but you can shorten many backpack straps by cutting the strap to the desired length, then running a cigarette lighter along the end until it's melted enough not to fray easily.

When cutting, make it strictly in one of the grooves that is perpendicular to the length of the strap.

Disclaimer: Don't blame me if you ruin your backpack, house, or eyebrows.

RDP, Rdesktop, and FVWM

If you happen to be using FVWM and rdesktop, and you want a slick way to launch the RDP session, and your display on Linux is always the same resolution, you can kludge it something like this:

Style "rdesktop" NoTitle, HandleWidth 0, BorderWidth 0

AddToMenu RemoteDesktopMenu "Remote Desktop" Title
+ "&my-remote-box" Exec rdesktop \
                        -T my-remote-box  \
                        -g 1398x1024+0+0  \
                        -r clipboard:no \
                        -u my-remote-username \
                        my-remote-box

Replace the strings beginning with "my-" with the obvious values.

Basically, this gives me a hotkey sequence to invoke an RDP session to the desired host, making it fullscreen except for my taskbar.

The magic numbers for the geometry are particular to my desktop, and you'll almost certainly need different numbers.

Note that this example disables clipboard sharing. Remove the "-r" line if you want to copy-and-paste between local and remote.

Update: You probably want clipboard:off rather than clipboard:no.

GMail, IMAP, Draft Folders, Privacy

Google pretty much already owns you (thank heavens that they have some interest in not being evil), but here's one small way in which you might rather they did not own you quite as much, and which you can actually do something about...

If you're using GMail via IMAP, you're taking more than a couple minutes to compose an email message, and your IMAP client periodically saves checkpoints to the Drafts folder on the IMAP server... it appears that GMail currently stores each one of those checkpoints indefinitely. You can see them as messages in your [GMail]/Trash IMAP subfolder. Even when they finally disappear from there, I believe that Google offers no guarantees that the checkpoints aren't still stored somewhere by Google. Indeed, I imagine that such a guarantee would be difficult and expensive for Google to make.

If you'd rather that your pre-wordsmithing and second-thought backspacing not be stored in perpetuity, but you still want the convenience of GMail and IMAP, consider setting your IMAP client to not checkpoint drafts to the IMAP server, if possible. For example, with Thunderbird, you can change the settings for an IMAP mail account to store your drafts in any mail folder, including folders on the local disk.

USB Flash Scams, eBay and PayPal

Fourth pretend USB flash device from overseas eBay sellers arrived recently. Like the others, it is a scam one, hacked to make a 1GB or so device half-heartedly pretend to be a 16GB one.

This scam is not new -- a Web search says it's been going on for years -- but I was surprised that eBay would continue to let it go on. Then I remembered how eBay/PayPal worked, and did the math with imagined numbers. Suddenly it made sense why PayPal would insist that you submit proof of return to the scammer before they'd refund: eBay/PayPal is probably making a tidy profit on the scams. In the US, it's called mail fraud.

I'm not a total idiot. I had several orders in the pipeline, each for different models of device from ostensibly different eBay sellers, or I would've stopped after the second.

Fake Butter

Earth Balance Natural Spreads is great. In Cambridge (MA, USA), it's available at Harvest Co-op..

Hyper-V, KVM, RDP

I've recently had occasion to use Microsoft Hyper-V and and Linux KVM heavily for server and desktop virtualization throughout the day, and I'm pleasantly surprised with how well they work.

If KVM had worked this well a couple years ago, I might not have figured out VServer.

RDP of Windows desktops (yes, circumstances has me doing Windows) also works surprisingly well. It's not just the modern processors and fast networks: NX, which I've been using for Linux administration desktops, is surprisingly clunky.

It's still pleasant to come home to my slicker and more productive custom tools, however.