Category: Geek

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Shell Scripting Class

Decided to further my career and become UNIX certified. Have never taken a computer class in all this time; everything I know I’ve learned “on the road” over the years. I’ll be taking a series of classes through UC Extension one evening a week — a series that will last several semesters, since I have limited time to dedicate. The first class wasn’t scheduled for this semester, so am starting with a shell scripting class taught by John Muster, a gentle and wise Einstein-like figure. His book UNIX Made Easy is our text — he sees the book as a “sherpa,” which I can relate to.

Did a ton of shell scripting in the BeOS days (the 1,000-line RipEnc was my piece de resistance) and so thought I could coast through this, but after tonight, it’s immediately apparent we’ll be rowing this boat hard. Entire first session was on vi; I’ve got enough vi to get things done (which is exactly the level of knowledge he presupposed), but Muster wants advanced vi/vim usage to be like breathing.

Music: The Flaming Lips :: All We Have Is Now
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AdSense

Finally starting to put energy into updates at kissthisguy.com again, and today signed up for Google’s AdSense. Replaced the mid-page graphical ads from Burst Media with context-sensitive text-based ads. Burst pays per impression; AdSense pays per click. Weirdly, Google won’t disclose exactly what they pay, though they make a vague reference to paying as much as or more than competitors. We’ll see.

I was most interested in using AdSense to see how well they could parse misheard lyric pages in real-time. If ads were targeted well enough that people could purchase the album from which the mondegreen originally comes, I figured things might go very well. What I’m seeing in the first couple of hours is that Google is succeeding at placing almost exclusively music-related ads (and no PSAs), but only a small percentage of ads are targeted specifically at the artist in question. Still, that’s a big improvement over Burst’s totally unfocused scattershot placement. I’ll be curious to see how things tally at the end of the month.

Another benefit: AdSense ads don’t blink, flash, or buzz.

Music: The Seeds :: Daisy Mae
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Bra / Ket

Follow-up to ~? What ~?. Clever piece by William Safire on naming — and deciphering the meaning of – all the obscure / lesser-used symbols on the standard modern keyboard.

The brackets with the nipple in the middle are called bracelets or curly braces, and here’s the latest renaming of the signs: forget less than and greater than. It’s now left angle bracket and right angle bracket, or bra and ket for short; this locution is in hot competition according to the Hacker’s Dictionary, with read from/write to; suck/blow; crunch/zap, and comes from/gozinta.

@ this . I )

In the above symbolic sentence, I was trying to say, “At this point I close.” However, many hackers will translate that as modern poetry: “Snail this dot I right banana.”

Thanks Abe.

Music: Black Star Liner :: Soft Sitar
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RSS Is Push?

Remember the famous Wired Magazine feature declaring “Push” the next big thing? (March 1997). Push was going to be so significant it would kill the browser:

“The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance. In its place…”

The feature is famous both for exemplifying Wired’s tendency to make huge, sweeping declarations and for being so painfully wrong (the public ignored push, PointCast died a painful death, and Wired scraped egg from face).

Now, seven years later (Wired 12.05, not online), the magazine has the cojones to run a story “The Return of Push,” asserting that the idea’s time has finally come. Author Gary Wolf makes the case that the rapid rise of RSS has finally proved Wired right. There’s only one problem: RSS is a pull technology. Just sent this letter to rants@wiredmag.com:

”
Gary Wolf is right about one thing (“The Return of Push,” Wired 12.05): RSS is fulfilling some of the original promise of push. But that doesn’t mean RSS is an example of a push technology. If I leave a plate of cookies on my doorstep and invite you to come take one every hour, would you then say that I brought you cookies?

In order to call something “push,” the publisher has to willfully send it to the user (and, ipso facto, to know something about that user). Thus, an email newsletter is an example of a push technology. In contrast, RSS “feeds” sit on a plain vanilla web server waiting for an anonymous client to come pick them up. This is plain old http and apache we’re talking about – no magic “push” protocol makes RSS delivery different from the rest of the Web. I request a web page; I pull it toward me. RSS works exactly the same way. If RSS is a push technology, then so is Tim-Berner’s Lee’s original web.

RSS probably is the Net’s next big thing. But it sure isn’t push.
”

Music: The Cramps :: Muleskinner Blues
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~? What ~?

In a conversation the other day with a colleague, I came to the crashing realization that not everyone knows what the ~ (tilde) character is on their keyboards — what it is, how to pronounce it, where to find it, or what it means when used in a shell or URL. I had thought that after ten years of web prominence it had been more or less assimilated into the common consciousness. Now I wonder. Straw poll:

Do you know what the ~ (tilde) character is and does?

View Results

Music: Modest Mouse :: Gravity Rides Everything
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The Ultimate Slideshow

ORA blog: A couple of professors in the Photo department recently asked for my input on methods for digital storytelling with still images. They’re interested in having student photos packaged up into multimedia modules that optionally include interleaved text, audio, effects, and transitions in addition to still images. I’ve started compiling a list of various slideshow technologies, with their respective pros and cons.

Music: Meat Puppets :: Up On The Sun
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The Fuss About Gmail

Many well-articulated and legitimate criticisms of gmail’s implications for privacy are circulating, and 28 privacy groups have co-written a letter to Google asking them to reconsider the plan. In a brilliant rebuttal, always level-headed Tim O’Reilly writes The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus.

There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan all mail for viruses and spam. Despite the claims of critics, I don’t see that the kind of automated text scanning that Google would need to do to insert context-sensitive ads is all that different from the kind of automated text scanning that is used to detect spam. (And in fact, those oppressed by spam should look forward to having Google’s brilliant search experts tackle spam detection as part of their problem set!)

Music: The Three Suns :: Danny’s Inferno
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Patent Overload

patent_overload

A little late to the party with this — massive online protest currently in process to counter the proposed European software patents directive. Absurd examples of already patented (!) widgets, the patents of which would become enforceable if the Council of Ministers has its way. Build a shopping cart, go to prison. Templates you can slap over your homepage to join the protest.

The only technology on this list that I take exception to is the MP3 codec, which represents thousands of person-hours of intensive R&D.

Thanks Rob.

Music: New York Dolls :: Frankenstein
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xScope

One of the most genuinely useful applications of OS X’s native PDF-based transparency engine that I’ve encountered: iconfactory’s xScope — a set of tools for designers and web developers that rides on top of your open apps and lets you instantly see what viewport would remain if you were to be working at a different resolution, or were using a different browser with different amounts of chrome. Also includes tools for measuring on-screen X-Y coordinates, for precisely measuring the pixel dimensions of any onscreen object, and so on. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered a piece of must-have shareware.

Music: Kristin Hersh :: Vitamin V
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ARD

With all love and respect, I can honestly say that no one I’ve ever met can mess up a computer faster than my mother (and I’ve worked with and for a lot of people for whom learning computer skills is a seemingly impossible proposition). Less than a week after moving Mom from Windows to OS X, she informed me that she had “messed up her network” and that all her mail was missing, though she swore she had not deleted anything.

And now I am kissing myself for thinking ahead and installing Apple Remote Desktop before handing over the box. After getting her back online over the phone, she read her current IP lease to me, I typed it into the ARD admin tool with user/pass, and bam! – I was controlling her desktop from home. Screen redraw was slow, but the fact that I was able to both correct the problems and educate her at the same time was invaluable.

Beyond simple remote control, the real power of this tool is that it freed us from the usual frustration of getting her to describe what she sees on screen, or to understand my requests for information. She was able to watch her mouse move magically, to see what I was doing as I described it. God, it was satisfying.

And the missing mail? She had been exploring menu options, just as I had encouraged her to, and had found one I didn’t even know was present on Entourage’s View menu – “Unread mail.” Her mail was there, it was just hidden from view.

Especially trippy was to send her email, then click her “Receive Mail” button and watch it roll in to her inbox, then watch her mouse go to read and reply to the message. Then, to make sure everything was as confusing as possible, I alternated lines with her as she responded to me – using Entourage and ARD in combo as a real-time chat app.

Music: Ennio Morricone :: March Of The Beggars