I've read joelonsoftware before but never realized how good his articles were. Somehow I found a link to it again and spent about half an hour going through some of the articles.
I found this really great one called Biculturalism. Its more of a book report than anything else - the book in question is Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming. (Note: In the tradition of free as in beer, you can also read the book online here)
But on to my commentary on Joel's commentary on Raymond's book: Joel being tad bit more right wing than Raymond, (where Left == Linux) approaches the eternally religious Windows vs. (Li/U)nix question from a different perspective. He comments that both operating systems are converging to rather similar points and the question really is of culture. Windows culture is user centric (Aunt Marge, to use Joel's terminology) while Unix is definitely more programmer centric. He brings up a lot of points that programmers who've dealt with both worlds will concur with - for example UNIX's decided bias towards the command line and making output from one program pipeable into another vs. Windows's marriage of the GUI with everthing.
This made me think: the ideal operating system in this case would be something that has a command line interface to everything, where GUIs are just nicely applied lipstick (this is still completely the UNIX philosophy). The only difference between this "ideal" operating system and UNIX would be that the GUIs are much more tightly integrating into the OS so that you really can do almost everything from the GUI without ever having to see the command line.
After all this thinking I realized something: Oops! :-)
I crashed a friend's cousin's engagement party. They had some crazy good bhangra music playing and since the friend's cousin is half gujju, the had to put on the obligatory raas as well. Wildness. I was going nuts on the dance floor and made a complete fool of myself - I didn't realise I was sweating like a pig and practically drenched my light coloured shirt, thus adding a nasty "dark" rings to it. Ugh. Everyone was staring at me and I got quite a few of "You've been dancing hard, haven't you"s. Oh well. I learnt a couple of new bhangra moves, taught some chicks how to do some raas - all in all a most excellent evening despite the embarassment.
There is a simple problem with Zempt - everytime a non-admin user closes Zempt (after having opened/used it) it generates a nasty warning saying "could not open draft.zmt". Rather ominous sounding and Zempt dies right thereafter. Since I was closing it anyways, you'd think that this was just a minor annoyance and nothing special; so I should just click okay and move on.
Nooooo. That's not how computer geeks are wired. We'd rather spend 2 hours of our holiday time trying to figure out why some program doesn't work exactly right. So I downloaded all the Zempt and associated libary code (lots of it) and groked through and finally found the bug and a workaround. I can't fix the bug and send in the diffs, because I could not get the damn thing to compile. But I did post the bug on sourceforge and also posted a workaround. Now I may sleep in peace.
So I was right and w.bloggar was freaking out because of some permissions issues. In admin mode everything's nice and fun. I think its going to be easier to fix zempt to do the "right thing". Bloggar isn't exactly open source.
So apparently right after I posted that update, zempt had an access denied that it couldn't handle and died. Oops. But this time I have source, thanks to sourceforge. So this I can fix. In my copious free time, that is.
Andy suggested that instead of bugging him to do this and that in order to support blogging, I should get myself a thick client. So I got Zempt . Pretty cool so far. I'll keep you folks updated about how good / bad it is. I tried using w-bloggar but was unsuccessful - it keeps giving me access denied issues even though i gave it the right password. I suspect its because I installed it using my admin account and my current account is not quite as priviledged. Oh well.
So I was browsing the dell website today for no particular reason and looking at the desktop boxes they had for sale. Now, I really like dell so don't get me wrong. But I was rather upset by the stupid marketing gimmicks they had up on their site. Nothing had a real price sticker on it. Its like visiting a used car dealer. You pick a computer and then you gotta choose this, choose that and even if you make the vanilla choices, you somehow end up between 150 - 200% of the original price quoted on the site. Boo. Don't MBAs and marketing people have better stuff to do? Do they think that just because people spend more time on their website, they must be getting more marketshare? Ugh. I'm recommending emachines from now on. They rock, their price is the same as what they show on the very first page. Keeda's been running on an emachine for about half a year and it just rocks.
So Andy has tried to get this notification thing working and finally gotten mt to a point where it can send some emails.
Only to discover that everytime you want to notify people of an update to your blog, you gotta _tell_ MT to do the notify. How stupid is that. I mean if I were going to manually do it, I'd send them an email anyway right? And while I was doing that, I'd tell them about my blog contents right? Kinda obviates the need for blogging. Oh, the irony!
Anyways, since this weekend looks like a no snowboarding weekend because of the stupid weather, there is a goodly chance that I might get around to hacking mt so that it allows automatic notifications or something of that sort. Seems like a worthwhile project to me.
This post on Dave Farber's interesting people mailing list is hilarious. With a title like "The Fish that threatened national security", how can you not read it?
I thought I was into emacs and then I looked over some of the .emacs files at dotfiles.com. Apparently people do way way more customizations to their operating system^H^H^H^H^H^H editor than I do. Go Emacs!
Oh and I've been categorizing my blogs - and this one clearly belongs to the "/geek" category, but of course movable type doesn't display the categories. Doh. Will have to fix that. What's the point of having categories if you can't see them. (yeah, archives, sure, but who reads those anyways)
We continue testing the email system on redefine. This one gives me hope.
Bah! No luck yet. Hold on to your horses.
I went to this restaurant in Bellevue called Eating Factory - its a sushi place that follows in the tradition of Todai. Its just as expensive - $20 for an all you can eat sushi buffet. Now this would be reasonable if you could eat everything there, but as vegetarians go, there were about 3 things that you could eat provided you didn't ask about what broth they had in the soup and didn't care that they used the same oil for frying shrimp or other tempura. Its not a great place to go if you're a vegetarian. My friend (who was throwing the party) had to talk to the owner and got me a one-time 50% discount, which then made the place worthwhile ($10, all you can eat veggie rolls is a good price). Kaori, who is Japanese, actually reviewed this place for a Japanese magazine and gave it higher ratings than Todai - the food here is much better apparently. However, it still isn't great value for money if you're vegetarian. Go to Blue-C instead.
So yesterday I had a full day of work, followed by a harsh game of raquetball, followed by some dancing at the baltic room. Fantastic day, but now I don't feel so well this morning. Ugghhhh.
So this email thing doesn't work yet. Let see if we can test it out.
[update] Redefine doesn't have a working MTA and hence cannot send out email. This will eventually be fixed.
So I have one thing to do say about snowboarding in zero visibility weather with hard packed snow: don't. Falling on packed snow is rather nasty, its so slippery that you keep skidding and don't get any edges. Consequently when you do get an edge, your board gets jammed and in the air you go! (to land on your head or back or if you're very lucky, on your butt). Ugh.
But it was still snowboarding and so I probably would go again :-) No, I'm not hooked at all.
So for those not in seattle, the Federales threw a wine and cheese tasting party. Given that its a house full of almost psychologists, it was double blinded (kinda) and they collected stats on it which are to be published in an upcoming seminal psych paper. We all rated the wines we had and then compared the ratings and estimated prices to the real thing.
"Its a good thing: you can enjoy cheap wine because of your unrefined taste buds" - Danielle's comment this evening after finding out that I had given two charles shaw wines a 4/5. So I officially suck and if I tell you that a wine is good (or not) I'm talking out of my behind.
Kristin also posted pics to this party. They're available off her website
So apparently this thing can send out blogs in email. I'd have thought its a much ignored feature that nobody'd use but guess what - i got a person next to me telling me its really quite helpful and she gets bothered by having to check the site now and then. So here's another test for lazy people to see if this emailing thing works.
Okay, note to self: Don't drink a cupful of super strong espresso. I've been shouting at the walls, jumping on my chair, banging my keyboard (probably will have to replace it soon) and generally being very antsy for the past hour (after my super triple espresso). Wow. What a thrill ride. And its all legal.
I finally finished Gita Mehta's novel "Raj".
I think it was a decent book but the synopsis just blew. It completely misrepresented the book and so my expectations were completely off (and subsequently the book didn't live up to my expectations). On the other hand, if the synopsis had accurately reflected what the book was about, I probably wouldn't have read it.
The book is about the life of a princess set around the time of India's independence. It drags on at times; however it redeems itself by fantastic descriptions of rajput culture. I thought one of the most interesting aspects of the book was the way in which it puts major events in india's history (such as the Mutiny of 1857, various Round Table Conferences, independence itself, the assissination of Gandhi) in the background and forcefully maintains spotlight on the main characters in the story. This part was really well done and prevented the book from becoming yet another historical commentary on India's independence struggle.
Overall: decent book, give it a shot if you have copious amounts of free time.
Score (maximum of ***** in each):
Language and composition: **
Story: ***
Overall "feel": ***
So I ran across this list of the top 100 banned books of the last century.
Link to ala.org
How many have you read?
So nothing came up on the front page. so this is test 2