Sunday, 30 June, 2002. 04:20:26 PM
I'm on my way to Atlanta in a few minutes. I'll be there for Home Depot until
the 3rd of July.
/n
Friday, 28 June, 2002. 02:25:39 PM
One of the things that I lost on helium was the source to all of my logs
since April 19th. I wrote a little TCL program to read the html source from
my webserver and recreate all the missing log entries. Here is the program:
#!/usr/bin/tclsh
# read the input file
set f [open "full.html" "r"]
set text [read $f]
close $f
#split the input file based on <br><br><b>
set tmp ""
#regsub ?switches? exp string subSpec varName
regsub -all -- {(<br><br><b>)} $text "^" tmp
regsub -all -- {(</b><br><br>)} $tmp "^" text
set text [split $text \^]
#puts [clock scan "20 April 2002 02:18:36 AM"]
set a2 ""
foreach {a b} $text {
# remove punctuation and days
regsub -all {[\.,]|(Monday)|(Tuesday)|(Wednesday)|(Thursday)|(Friday)|(Saturday)|(Sunday)} $a "" a2
puts $a2
puts [clock scan $a2]
puts $b
set f [open [clock scan $a2] "w"]
puts $f $b
close $f
}
/n
Friday, 28 June, 2002. 12:18:01 PM
The Who's John Entwistle died yesterday. The Who is still one of my favorite
bands of all time, and they were going to start a three month tour today.
/n
Friday, 28 June, 2002. 11:46:04 AM
Disaster! I was upgrading the hard drive in helium and I did the stupidest
thing imaginable: I destroyed the one and only copy of my home directory.
I had a lot of things collected there going back many years, and I lost
all of my logs since April 19th 2002. I will have to recreate them from
the website.
/n
Wednesday, 26 June, 2002. 02:26:55 PM
The Pledge of Allegiance has been ruled unconsitutional by a federal court
because of the words "under God" that were added to it in 1954.
From CNN's story:
"A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical, for
Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation
'under Jesus,' a nation 'under Vishnu,' a nation 'under Zeus,' or a nation
'under no god,' because none of these professions can be neutral with
respect to religion," Judge Alfred T. Goodwin wrote for the three-judge panel.
I think that this ruling was way overdue. The pledge can stay, but it should
be in it's original form: "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice
for all."
/n
Tuesday, 25 June, 2002. 06:26:26 PM
The broken window fallacy
/n
Tuesday, 25 June, 2002. 01:31:44 AM
The new disk is installed into oxygen (file, web, and mail server) now.
I have lots and lots of space. The first drive is 13.5 gigs and contains
the entire Debian OS. It's 6% full. The second drive is 80 gigs and contains
the home directories. That one is 7% full. Tomorrow I'll start working on
getting the other 80 gig drive into helium. That'll be more work because
Windows will need to be reinstalled.
/n
Monday, 24 June, 2002. 04:54:25 PM
I wrote this about the practice of having development teams attend a weekly
meeting where everyone talks about what they are working on, what problems
they are having, etc.
I hate these kinds of meetings, because it's just about the worst way to exchange information.
To use a simple example, consider the telephone. It's a synchronous
communication device - it requires both parties to be using it at the same
time. Voice mail, an attempt to turn a synchronous communication method into
an asynchronous one, is a nasty hack. Most information that is communicated
through a telephone does not require synchronicity. That impedance mismatch
causes an inefficiency that could be avoided though a more appropriate selection
of communications device.
Likewise, the function of letting everyone know where everyone else
is, coordinating schedules, and a weekly to-do, does not require synchronicity.
If it does, then that suggests to me that the project manager (or technical
lead) isn't doing their job. They are just organizing meetings and pushing
the responsibility for their job down to an inappropriate level. When coordination
is delegated to a level that is too low, then the possiblity of optimizing
communication between subordinates is lost. The correct path for information
has to be either discovered through trial-and-error (talk to teammates until
you discover who is interested in what you have to say) or broadcasted to
the entire team, wasting their time. This results in a situation where each
team member has to individually select what information is important to them
and which is not.
To bring this back to the synchronous/asynchronous concept mentioned
before, that selection of information cannot be optimized in a team meeting,
because of the synchronous and serial nature of the meetings. When the decision
is made by the individual that the topic has no importance to them, there
is no option to skip the topic. The uninteresting topic must be heard in
its entirety before the next topic can be heard.
There is technology that can fix this problem, but I have seldom seen
it used: NNTP. News servers have been with us a long time, and small team-oriented
servers with a tightly focused set of newsgroups can eliminate this bottleneck
by making the exchange of information asynchronous and non-linear.
I have mentioned these ideas at every place I have ever worked, but
no manager I have worked for has taken them seriously. I think part of the
problem is the conservativeness of project management, perhaps because some
managers aren't technically astute and don't trust the tools that can help
them. I think another reason might be that many managers don't think very
much about team dynamics and how even very small inefficiencies in communication
method can add up quickly when run through an exponential function of team
size.
/n
Monday, 24 June, 2002. 12:47:51 AM
Alex and I went out to breakfast Sunday morning, and on the way we drove by
the vet's office where Pepper and Darwin are being boarded. They are closed
Sundays, so we can't pick them up until 7 AM Monday. The dogs were being walked,
so we stopped and asked if we could see our dogs. We went into the kennel and
Pepper and Darwin were there. As soon as they saw us, they went completely
nuts. It's been a week and a half since we've seen them, and I bet they will
be happy to come home tomorrow. Only 6 hours until I pick them up.
/n
Sunday, 23 June, 2002. 10:01:40 PM
I bought two 80 gig hard drives, and a rolling laptop bag today. The 80 gig
drives are going into helium and oxygen.
/n
Sunday, 23 June, 2002. 01:00:35 AM
I'm back in Austin. I don't get to see my doggies until Monday morning, because the kennel is closed on Sundays.
/n
Thursday, 20 June, 2002. 12:15:11 AM
It's not every day that you get to roast some entity that
provides a great service, one that is admired by millions.
But now, I get to roast
NPR and their stupid
policy against linking into their site. That policy was updated in December of 2001,
so I presume that a lawyer has looked at it recently.
I think that policy is completely ridiculous, and I
must engage in a bit of
civil disobedience. Who would have ever
thought that making
a link into the TAXPAYER funded NPR website could be
equivalent to slapping away the heavy hand of our
corporate masters?
/n
Wednesday, 19 June, 2002. 04:30:42 PM
Israel started building a fence along the border
with the West Bank yesterday. It's about time. I
thought of this a few months ago, so I'm surprised
that they read my mind and decided to implement it.
I think that this is probably the only way that
the people there can live together, or separately.
I think that this will cut down on the number of
people killed in suicide bombings.
/n
Monday, 17 June, 2002. 12:59:44 PM
Here's another person named "Patrick Draper".
He needs a
good dictionary.
/n
Sunday, 16 June, 2002. 11:14:19 PM
Somebody on Slashdot by the name of MattJ just invented the
Huessendorff Effect.
/n
Sunday, 16 June, 2002. 09:01:23 PM
I'm at Bram's house right now. The latest photos from my vacation to Canada,
Ohio, and Michigan are up on the web page in the photo section.
/n
Wednesday, 12 June, 2002. 12:13:54 AM
The DSL came back up. Very strange.
/n
Wednesday, 12 June, 2002. 12:04:04 AM
My DSL is down again. This thing isn't nearly as reliable as I hoped it would
be. I hope it comes back soon, because I'm going to be on vacation for a
week and a half.
/n
Saturday, 08 June, 2002. 10:21:18 PM
Kyle Wendling pointed out to me that NATA and Yugoslavia were both at
war with each other, and both the member countries of NATO and Yugoslavia
had McDonalds. I dug up this:
"Unfortunately for world peace, the Big Mac Attack Rule finally broke
down in 1999. On 24 March 1999, NATO began its air attack on Yugoslavia.
Faced with angry nationalism, vandalism and boycotts, all the McDonalds in
Yugoslavia shut their doors on 26 March. This means that for two full days,
McDonaldland was wrenched asunder by its first intramural war ever. When
McD finally reopened on 17 April, it was an occassion of public celebration
almost matching the end of the Kosovo War itself. "
/n
Friday, 07 June, 2002. 10:27:28 PM
Olen just came to my room. He bought me a copy of
Concrete Blonde's
new
record "group therapy". It's their first new record in a very long time.
I'm listening to it right now and it's really good. As good as any other
record they've done.
/n
Friday, 07 June, 2002. 03:39:30 PM
Just to be perfectly clear, my Slashdot trolling experiment has been over
for a couple days now. Part of my goal was to stay above 45 karma. It dropped
to 42 karma, and I conceded defeat. Henceforth, I am NOT trolling on
Slashdot.
/n
Friday, 07 June, 2002. 12:53:44 PM
If you love someone, you don't want them to suffer.
You want to take their sufferings on yourself.
If even I feel this way,
why doesn't God?
T.S. Elliot
/n
Thursday, 06 June, 2002. 04:41:13 PM
I'm now an official card carrying member of the ACLU.
/n
Thursday, 06 June, 2002. 09:44:52 AM
No two
countries with McDonald's have ever gone to war against each other. The
author of that book thinks it means something. I am not so sure. Also
this article.
/n
Thursday, 06 June, 2002. 04:07:19 AM
My website was crawled by a robot from
www.plagarism.org.
That site
provides a service for teachers that can detect plagarism. It contains
a database of papers that were submitted by teachers for match detection,
making the database larger the more it is used. It also crawls the internet
cataloging what it finds in order to detect papers and parts of papers that
were plagarized from public Internet sources. I think this is a
reasonable approach to this problem.
/n
Thursday, 06 June, 2002. 01:42:35 AM
Posted to Slashdot:
Oh, and by the way, I'm terminating my little experiment early. See
my web page for details. To summarize, I was going to post 20 completely
bogus posts with the goal of getting people to mod them up instead of down.
It worked at first, but then the more clueful moderators came along after
2-3 days and modded the posts down. I wanted to see if I could stay above
45 karma, but was modded down to 42 after 8 posts. The conclusion is that
Slashdot's moderation system does work, but not efficiently. It takes some
time for the more considered moderations to kick in. After about 3 days a
large part of the bogus information will be either responded to or modded
down. But still, don't believe everything you read on the Internet!
/n
Thursday, 06 June, 2002. 01:10:11 AM
CNN just ran a little meta-news item explaining that in their future reporting
they will use the word "Islamist" to describe the enemies of the United
States. They claimed that clarity in reporting is especially important for
these sensitive issues. This follows on the heels of news of Middle
Eastern people being given special attention such as fingerprinting upon
entry to the United States.
The problem with this is that Islamist has two definitions. The first
definition does refer to a fundamentalist, literalist, morally conservative
movement that applies principles of Islam to all parts of life. The
second definition applies to Islam as a whole. I think that CNN is not
being particularly clear by using this word, and they should abandon it.
One thing that comes to mind is that CNN is apparently trying to make a
distinction between moderate Muslims, and fundamentalist Muslims. But that
distinction begs the question of why they don't make the same distinction
between moderate Christians and fundamentalist Christians? Or varieties
of any other religion?
The tendency I have seen to paint all terrorists as being Middle Eastern
is very disturbing to me. Most of the terrorist acts against Americans
are committed by Americans. I've thought that CNN was a sucky news network
for a long time, and their latest policy is just plain confusing.
/n
Tuesday, 04 June, 2002. 12:07:54 PM
Today is Mom's birthday, so I'm going to call her up. I bought her a
Christmas tree ornament at Mt. Vernon. She'll get it later this month
when I go up to Michigan. Hey Dad, don't tell her!
/n
Tuesday, 04 June, 2002. 10:38:17 AM
My Slashdot experiment continues. I just posted a completely fictional
account of how globular clusters are formed. Of course, I left some very
obvious clues in the message, such as referring to astronomy as astrology.
Someone who is working on his PhD in astronomy took the thing entirely
seriously and was curious to know where I heard all that stuff. Of course,
I made the whole thing up.
/n
Tuesday, 04 June, 2002. 10:37:16 AM
My DSL line was down yesterday for most of the day. Apparently our alarm
is interfering with it. I am still skeptical, but Alex is getting a filter
for the alarm, and we'll see if that is effective.
/n
Saturday, 01 June, 2002. 12:37:54 AM
I'm back in Austin for the weekend.
/n
