BitTorrent was originally designed to distribute Open Source software installation CD images.
Jamendo uses it to distribute Creative Commons-licensed music, all of it with the explicit permission of its copyright holders.
BitTorrent is crucial to my musical aspirations, as distributing my music with it allows me to provide formats that would use a lot of bandwidth, such as FLAC, without incurring expensive bandwidth charges.
While musicians can host their music for free at places like MySpace, it's really best to for artists to have their own websites, and to host their own music. That way, growth in the popularity of their sites will enrich the artists, rather than the music hosting service.
But a hit song can bankrupt struggling musicians if they just supply regular HTTP downloads; p2p enables mass distribution at a very low cost.
It's very important to get the message through to lawmakers and the public that filesharing, while it can be abused, is inherently perfectly legitimate, and should be kept both legal and technically possible.
... the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. But I was working for an astronomer; our Vaxes ran VMS, which didn't support the Internet Protocol.
My friends who worked for the Physics department got to use the Internet though, because they ran Unix. They had all the source to it too - my friends' jobs was hacking on it.
One of their jobs was making troff output to graphics printers; the original troff only worked with phototypesetters, which were amazing optical devices that got their letterforms from images on filmstrips. The typesetter would load the film for the font you wanted, say to switch from bold to italic, then use the optics to scale the image onto photo paper at the right point size.
There was a huge debate in the astronomy department as to whether we should get on the Internet; it was thought that the expense of porting all of our data analysis software to Unix wouldn't be worth it. It was all written in FORTRAN!
I later transferred to UC Santa Cruz. I think they were on the Internet when I started in 1985, but it may have only been UUCP - Unix to Unix Copy Program, suitable for email and Usenet but not remote login. It worked great for file transfer too, if you knew the bang path from one end to the other. You might have to wait several days for your file to show up, but it generally arrived OK.
Later when I was a sysadmin at Octel Communications, I wrote a shell script called getrfc that would use UUCP to fetch the desired RFC from the IETF file server. My users thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Anyway, I knew for sure that at some point UCSC's only connection to the Internet backbone was a 56k leased line to the SF Bay Area, probably to Stanford. This was a campus of thirteen thousand students - which gave out free Unix accounts for the asking! - and thousands of staff and faculty, all connected to the rest of the world via the equivalent of a single 56k dialup connection. But it seemed to work really well!
It happened that I went back to school at UCSC this summer to sharpen my Computer Science skills (my degree is in physics, so my programming is all self-taught). It blew my mind that I could register for classes via a web page from my home in Silicon Valley - the web didn't even exist when I was an undergrad.
I was also quite surprised to find power outlets on each of the desks in the lecture hall. For laptops you know.
I remember being in high school, and my father telling me that someday there would be such a thing as a laptop. I found it hard to imagine.
Kids These Days. You don't know how good you've got it!
There are direct HTTP downloads in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, and torrents in a variety of format, including FLAC - the Free Lossless Audio Codec.
Also, you may request a free CD. It comes with an attractive 4-page case insert, as well as a nice full-color label printed on the CD itself.
The case insert includes my short essay Why Free Music? as well as the history of my Baldwin Howard piano, which my grandfather bought in the 1940s from a door-to-door piano salesman.
You can also download the sheet music for two of my songs from my site, with the others to follow hopefully soon. US Letter and A4 PDFs are provided, as well as Lilypond source code and MIDI files generated from the scores - you could use the MIDI in a sequencing program like RoseGarden or GarageBand to remix your own versions - I invite you to do so, provided you ShareAlike!
Finally, while this CD is burned, I'm composing new material for a new CD that I hope to release in the spring. That will be glass-master pressed, and again they will be given away free.
And yes, I'm absolutely serious that I'd like my free CD offer to be Slashdotted!
I have a real windows box, and also one on my Mac under Parallels. Debian is under Parallels, I don't know if printing would work.
I acknowledge that Ogg Frog has gone far too long without a release - I never meant it to take this long. Some life events disrupted its development completely. But I'll get back on it soon.
And I encountered other bugs that were reported on mailing lists back in the 1.x days, yet were still in 3.0.0 Beta.
Looking through the OOo forums, many others have trouble with label printing as well.
I don't think the existence of those bugs has anything to do with my failure to report - and in fact I did report the bugs just a few hours after I encountered them, in my oooforum post linked from my original comment.
I'm working on a Free (GPL) audio application called Ogg Frog. If you explore the site, you'll see that it's been there for several years, but there is no software to download.
I have come down thoroughly on the side of The Cathedral in my development methodology, because I feel that The Bazaar doesn't serve the needs of end-users. It unnecessarily subjects them to buggy, incomplete software.
I can see how The Bazaar would work well for highly technical users, for development tools, text editors and the like, but not for an audio application.
I was up all night last night trying to figure out how to use OpenOffice to print address labels from a database. When I couldn't get it to work, I downloaded the 3.0.0 Beta, only to find that all the same bugs were still there.
It didn't appear to me that the label printing function had been touched by the developers at all between 2.4.0 and 3.0.0, with the exception of a native OS X print job dialog for the Mac version.
Folks, this is a supposedly mature, full-featured and commercial-quality office productivity application, published by one of the world's largest computer companies, yet one cannot do even such a basic task as printing labels from a database?
That's just inexcusible!
I've done quite a lot of work on Ogg Frog, but it's still in a primitive state, and there are lots of bugs. I fear that if I released it, not even the version I have now, but future snapshots, it would get uploaded to all the shareware sites, where it would be downloaded by unsuspecting novice users, who would find it unpleasant to use.
That wouldn't serve their needs, and further, it would give me and my project a bad reputation. Quite likely I wouldn't get a second chance: my wife now flatly refuses to use Free Software, having had such bad experiences herself with Mozilla, The Gimp, and OpenOffice.
I know that I have the greatest chance of success if I wait until I have something rock-solid before I make its first public release.
Now, that doesn't mean the software isn't being tested, or that real end-users aren't giving me feedback. I have a small circle of testers, both end users and other developers, who are testing it for me - privately.
And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.
It does mean I get a lot of crap for not releasing yet, as evidenced by Kuro5hin's A Trolled Englishman. But it's a small price to pay for what I am confident will be my ultimate success.
I had just started on this huge C++ app, that was to take a year and lots of my client's money to develop, and figured that being my own project manager would be helpful. The client also wanted a time and cost estimate.
Worst investment I ever made. My memory is hazy, but I seem to recall it set me back five hundred bucks.
So with the manual open, I created a new project, and then the manual said "Enter your tasks".
Well, Hell, if I knew what my tasks were, I wouldn't need a project management tool. I gave up on it completely.
Ever wonder why it was, for several years, that Google would only hire PhDs?
There are these websites known as "scrapers" that steal content from legitimate sites, submit themselves to the search engines, and display ads. It's easy to create machine-generated sites with thousands of pages this way, that can overwhelm the search engines. I understand that it can be quite profitable.
You can find sites that scraped you by searching Google for a long piece of text out of the middle of one of your pages. Put it in quotes for an exact match. I've found lots of sites that have scraped my articles.
Quite often scraper sites have a paragraph from one site, and the next paragraph from a different one, so that although each paragraph makes sense on its own, the page as a whole makes no sense whatsoever.
The problem the search engines face is, how to detect this? Every sentence on the page may be grammatically correct, but the page as a whole has no real relevance to any query.
Google's founders have publicly stated that they want to use AI to solve this problem, but that it's still too computationally expensive. Quite likely they already have code that can identify a single scraper page, but it doesn't yet scale to the whole web. They expect reaching that point to take many years.
I worked on Sapiens Software Star Sapphire Common Lisp, which was aimed at enabling AI on 8086 PC-XTs running DOS. Yes, you read that right.
The problem was that the 640 kb "Ought to be enough for anyone" memory barrier was too small to allow a full Common Lisp implementation. So Sapiens founder John Hare created a software virtual memory system that allowed one to store and retrieve 8-byte Lisp CONSes into and from an eight megabyte backing store file.
Yes, again you read that right: software virtual memory. The x86 didn't have an MMU.
This meant that our code was fiendishly complex, with all these data structures being mixes of real data in real memory, and virtual data in virtual memory.
The complexity of all this meant that there were a lot of bugs at first, especially because John had the idea that hiring a bunch of college kids at five bucks an hour was a good way to run a software company. It went way over time and budget, but it did eventually ship.
It's now available as shareware. Tell John that Mike Crawford sent you.
I have both a MySpace page and a FaceBook page to promote my music. It just takes a glance to distinguish the clean, tasteful design of FaceBook from the garish, ad-ridden MySpace.
I've had no end of trouble with MySpace. I'm not able to prevent my music from playing when you load my page, even though that's how I set it in my profile. I've always allowed downloads of my MP3s, but at some point they stopped being downloadable. I had to delete them all and re-upload them to get the downloads back.
I have actually found MySpace pages that had been customized in such a way as to make FireFox crash just by loading the page!
My only complaint about FaceBook is that it doesn't allow for downloading MP3s - but that's a lack of a desired feature, and not an actual bug.
Most young people these days are trying out both. I don't think it takes much time for them all to figure out which one is better.
The GooglePlex - Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, has several buildings. There are some other businesses there too, so it can be a bit of a walk to visit another building.
So they keep bicycles by each door. They're very inexpensive single-speed bikes, with flags on tall poles. They're cheap enough that they don't worry about them being stolen.
And no, I don't work there - I've visited a couple times.
... quite frequently. Working Software sold a popular spellchecker for the Mac called Spellswell. It would do a lot more than built-in spellcheckers.
One of its features, which could be disabled, was to verify that there were two spaces after each period. The author of the Mac is Not a Typewriter would call me now and then to complain about it. He wanted me to change it to verify that there is just one space.
I always meant to allow it as an option, but just never got around to it.
Now, he has a point, that software ought to be able to handle the extra space needed at the end of sentences. But I've never used an application that did, and have always found it necessary to use two spaces to get the right typography.
A program that did it right would have to be able to parse natural language, because you want extra space at the end of sentences but not after abbreviations.
If someone doesn't know about phishing, it's easy to make them believe an email really is from their bank. A website you have to visit on purpose, and you're not likely to think it's your bank if you just stumbled on it by clicking a link.
If you think only idiots fall for phishing, I can prove you wrong:
I know a guy who is a college professor, has a PhD, has published lots of highly regarded papers, has scads of grad students supported by grants that he gets easily.
And he entered both his credit card number and bank account number into a phisher's web form. He lost four thousand dollars!
You'd think he'd know better - but he was simply unfamiliar with phishing; his professional area has little to do with computers, so he's simply not very clued in to Internet scams.
Why oh why oh why does message composition for new accounts default to HTML instead of plain text?
HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.
Who do I have to blow to get plain text mail made the default?
Most people wouldn't know the difference, and if someone really cared, they could enable it.
Robert Pirsig has a DVD out
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Running Xen
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· Score: 1
You can purchase it through a devoted fan's website. The site also has the guy's PhD thesis on The Metaphysics of Quality.
ZATAOMM made a huge difference to my life when I first read it, so I was very eager to read Pirsig's second book, Lila, but I just couldn't get into it.
I've been meaning to try again though because Pirsig says the discussion of philosophy is much deeper in Lila.
Can one migrate a guest from Parallels or QEMU?
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Running Xen
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· Score: 1
I run various operating systems under Parallels and QEMU on my OS X MacBook Pro. But I'm looking to build a fairly high-end Linux box that I'd like to run Xen on. Is there a way I could transfer my existing guests to Xen?
No doubt I could figure it out somehow, but a FM to R would sure be nice.
It turns out that you can't boot the BeOS 5 Pro CD under either Parallels or QEMU; the boot loader can't find the kernel, possibly because it accesses the CD drive in a different way than most other operating systems.
I figured out a painful yet effective way to install the BeOS under QEMU: install it on a real machine, then copy its partition into a disk image that's booted under QEMU. It involves a lot of tinkering with dd and sfdisk, a utility that allows one to specify partitions by exact sector numbers.
I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 1985. It's a serious condition: it's like having schizophrenia and manic depression at the same time. The symptoms include paranoia, auditory and visual hallucinations, dissociation, depression - which can be suicidal - and a profoundly euphoric state called mania.
Getting sick led to me making a complete wreck of my life. I lost many friends, screwed up my education and my planned career as a scientist, lost what had been a good reputation.
For many years I tried to keep my illness a secret, but it was a terrible burden to bear. I finally went public with it in 1997, by writing a page about my manic depressive aspect. Click the link and you'll see that it got slashdotted.
But I had a much harder time facing or admitting to the schizophrenic aspect. I finally went public with that in 2003, in my essay Living with Schizoaffective Disorder. I also published it at Kuro5hin, where each of its three installments was featured on the front page.
It's not real obvious to most readers, but I avoided saying much about my own experience in the section on paranoia. Again it was very hard to face it. But again I finally went public with it in 2006 in My Deepest Fear.
You'll understand why I had a hard time facing it if you read the essay. I was getting ready for an ambulance ride to the nuthouse when I wrote that, but, if you'll pardon my shameless self-promotion, I think it's one of the most vivid accounts of paranoia ever written.
I've written a lot of stuff having to do with mental illness, both my own and that of others. I finally compiled an index to it all. I printed hardcopies of most of it, and the stack of paper was over an inch thick!
Someday I plan to publish a dead-tree book about it. What's holding me back is finding the words to explain what I've learned from it all. I want to help others avoid it, to help others who suffer to get better, and to help their loved ones and caregivers to understand it.
One lesson I have learned though, is that the worst of the stigma against mental illness is the stigma that we mentally ill have against ourselves. Our shame for being sick is the main thing that keeps us sick. It's a disease, and not our choice. It's not something to be ashamed of.
As I write this, I've been employed steadily as a software engineer for over twenty years. For eight of those years I was self-employed as a software consultant. My title at my current job is Principal Software Engineer. I've achieved this success despite all the chaos that all those symptoms put me through.
I point this out because I sometimes get the impression that those who treat the mentally ill don't expect us to ever get better. Yes, it's difficult, and progress is painfully slow - but it is quite possible for anyone to overcome the worst madness and lead a happy, fulfilling life.
Someday I'm gonna be a famous composer - I've been studying piano intensively for quite some time now, with the aim of going to music school to study composition.
I want to write symphonies someday!
I've been a coder for twenty years. I have grown weary of it.
I searched for my own music on Baidu, and it didn't find it. How can I submit it?
I clicked all the links on the homepage, and hovered my mouse over all the links on the result page, and couldn't find anything that looked like a submission form.
I'd love it if everyone in China were to download my compositions - they are all Creative Commons-licensed.
I'm back in the US now, but I applied awhile back for Canadian permanent residency. Eventually I'll go back to stay, and plan to become a Canadian citizen when the time comes. I'm married to a Canadian, who is sponsoring my immigration.
I used to be self-employed as a software consultant, working out of my home in Truro, Nova Scotia. But when I grew weary of it, I found that there wasn't much in the way of programming jobs anywhere in Atlantic Canada, and what little there was paid very poorly.
So I used all the Canadian job boards - particularly Craig's List - to look for coding jobs anywhere in the country. The job I found was in Vancouver.
I kept blogging there even after I moved back to California, because I intend to return someday. Vancouver is a really wonderful place, or at least it is for some people:
It's also the location of the Downtown Eastside, the poorest neighborhood in the whole nation. My job in Gastown was just a couple blocks from there. Many of my diaries are about my encounters with Vancouver's homeless, many of whom were mentally ill.
I was advised never to give money to panhandlers, lest they spend it on drugs. Crystal Meth abuse is widespread there. But I wanted to do something to help, so I often bought them meals.
Often I found that it made their day simply to ask their name and to shake their hand. Folks like that don't get paid that kind of respect very often.
At first their office and server were together in a windowless closet in downtown Santa Cruz, California, just on the other side of the wall (and a short ethernet run) from Scruz.Net, the first commercial ISP in Santa Cruz.
They later expanded to about twenty-five employees and a nice office. I worked there for a time as a web programmer.
Chris and Thomas sold out to Verio. Chris' take was six million dollars. Thomas invested his share in two new dot-coms that failed, so that he wound up looking for sysadmin jobs again.
Chris did what most would say was the smart thing and retired. I didn't see him for a long time, until I came across him riding a mountain bike when I was hiking in the woods at UC Santa Cruz. I envied him for his apparently happy life.
One day, Chris was turned away from a psychiatric hospital because he was considered not sick enough to hospitalize. This is actually a very common problem - mental health is a popular victim of budget cuts, so there are never enough beds for all the potential patients.
The next day he blew his brains out.
It is thought that he was an undiagnosed manic-depressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Jamendo uses it to distribute Creative Commons-licensed music, all of it with the explicit permission of its copyright holders.
BitTorrent is crucial to my musical aspirations, as distributing my music with it allows me to provide formats that would use a lot of bandwidth, such as FLAC, without incurring expensive bandwidth charges.
While musicians can host their music for free at places like MySpace, it's really best to for artists to have their own websites, and to host their own music. That way, growth in the popularity of their sites will enrich the artists, rather than the music hosting service.
But a hit song can bankrupt struggling musicians if they just supply regular HTTP downloads; p2p enables mass distribution at a very low cost.
It's very important to get the message through to lawmakers and the public that filesharing, while it can be abused, is inherently perfectly legitimate, and should be kept both legal and technically possible.
My friends who worked for the Physics department got to use the Internet though, because they ran Unix. They had all the source to it too - my friends' jobs was hacking on it.
One of their jobs was making troff output to graphics printers; the original troff only worked with phototypesetters, which were amazing optical devices that got their letterforms from images on filmstrips. The typesetter would load the film for the font you wanted, say to switch from bold to italic, then use the optics to scale the image onto photo paper at the right point size.
There was a huge debate in the astronomy department as to whether we should get on the Internet; it was thought that the expense of porting all of our data analysis software to Unix wouldn't be worth it. It was all written in FORTRAN!
I later transferred to UC Santa Cruz. I think they were on the Internet when I started in 1985, but it may have only been UUCP - Unix to Unix Copy Program, suitable for email and Usenet but not remote login. It worked great for file transfer too, if you knew the bang path from one end to the other. You might have to wait several days for your file to show up, but it generally arrived OK.
Later when I was a sysadmin at Octel Communications, I wrote a shell script called getrfc that would use UUCP to fetch the desired RFC from the IETF file server. My users thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Anyway, I knew for sure that at some point UCSC's only connection to the Internet backbone was a 56k leased line to the SF Bay Area, probably to Stanford. This was a campus of thirteen thousand students - which gave out free Unix accounts for the asking! - and thousands of staff and faculty, all connected to the rest of the world via the equivalent of a single 56k dialup connection. But it seemed to work really well!
It happened that I went back to school at UCSC this summer to sharpen my Computer Science skills (my degree is in physics, so my programming is all self-taught). It blew my mind that I could register for classes via a web page from my home in Silicon Valley - the web didn't even exist when I was an undergrad.
I was also quite surprised to find power outlets on each of the desks in the lecture hall. For laptops you know.
I remember being in high school, and my father telling me that someday there would be such a thing as a laptop. I found it hard to imagine.
Kids These Days. You don't know how good you've got it!
My album Geometric Visions: The Rough Draft is minimalist instrumental piano, all my own original compositions.
There are direct HTTP downloads in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, and torrents in a variety of format, including FLAC - the Free Lossless Audio Codec.
Also, you may request a free CD. It comes with an attractive 4-page case insert, as well as a nice full-color label printed on the CD itself.
The case insert includes my short essay Why Free Music? as well as the history of my Baldwin Howard piano, which my grandfather bought in the 1940s from a door-to-door piano salesman.
You can also download the sheet music for two of my songs from my site, with the others to follow hopefully soon. US Letter and A4 PDFs are provided, as well as Lilypond source code and MIDI files generated from the scores - you could use the MIDI in a sequencing program like RoseGarden or GarageBand to remix your own versions - I invite you to do so, provided you ShareAlike!
Finally, while this CD is burned, I'm composing new material for a new CD that I hope to release in the spring. That will be glass-master pressed, and again they will be given away free.
And yes, I'm absolutely serious that I'd like my free CD offer to be Slashdotted!
I acknowledge that Ogg Frog has gone far too long without a release - I never meant it to take this long. Some life events disrupted its development completely. But I'll get back on it soon.
Looking through the OOo forums, many others have trouble with label printing as well.
I don't think the existence of those bugs has anything to do with my failure to report - and in fact I did report the bugs just a few hours after I encountered them, in my oooforum post linked from my original comment.
I have come down thoroughly on the side of The Cathedral in my development methodology, because I feel that The Bazaar doesn't serve the needs of end-users. It unnecessarily subjects them to buggy, incomplete software.
I can see how The Bazaar would work well for highly technical users, for development tools, text editors and the like, but not for an audio application.
I was up all night last night trying to figure out how to use OpenOffice to print address labels from a database. When I couldn't get it to work, I downloaded the 3.0.0 Beta, only to find that all the same bugs were still there.
It didn't appear to me that the label printing function had been touched by the developers at all between 2.4.0 and 3.0.0, with the exception of a native OS X print job dialog for the Mac version.
Folks, this is a supposedly mature, full-featured and commercial-quality office productivity application, published by one of the world's largest computer companies, yet one cannot do even such a basic task as printing labels from a database?
That's just inexcusible!
I've done quite a lot of work on Ogg Frog, but it's still in a primitive state, and there are lots of bugs. I fear that if I released it, not even the version I have now, but future snapshots, it would get uploaded to all the shareware sites, where it would be downloaded by unsuspecting novice users, who would find it unpleasant to use.
That wouldn't serve their needs, and further, it would give me and my project a bad reputation. Quite likely I wouldn't get a second chance: my wife now flatly refuses to use Free Software, having had such bad experiences herself with Mozilla, The Gimp, and OpenOffice.
I know that I have the greatest chance of success if I wait until I have something rock-solid before I make its first public release.
Now, that doesn't mean the software isn't being tested, or that real end-users aren't giving me feedback. I have a small circle of testers, both end users and other developers, who are testing it for me - privately.
And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.
It does mean I get a lot of crap for not releasing yet, as evidenced by Kuro5hin's A Trolled Englishman. But it's a small price to pay for what I am confident will be my ultimate success.
Worst investment I ever made. My memory is hazy, but I seem to recall it set me back five hundred bucks.
So with the manual open, I created a new project, and then the manual said "Enter your tasks".
Well, Hell, if I knew what my tasks were, I wouldn't need a project management tool. I gave up on it completely.
There are these websites known as "scrapers" that steal content from legitimate sites, submit themselves to the search engines, and display ads. It's easy to create machine-generated sites with thousands of pages this way, that can overwhelm the search engines. I understand that it can be quite profitable.
You can find sites that scraped you by searching Google for a long piece of text out of the middle of one of your pages. Put it in quotes for an exact match. I've found lots of sites that have scraped my articles.
Quite often scraper sites have a paragraph from one site, and the next paragraph from a different one, so that although each paragraph makes sense on its own, the page as a whole makes no sense whatsoever.
The problem the search engines face is, how to detect this? Every sentence on the page may be grammatically correct, but the page as a whole has no real relevance to any query.
Google's founders have publicly stated that they want to use AI to solve this problem, but that it's still too computationally expensive. Quite likely they already have code that can identify a single scraper page, but it doesn't yet scale to the whole web. They expect reaching that point to take many years.
The problem was that the 640 kb "Ought to be enough for anyone" memory barrier was too small to allow a full Common Lisp implementation. So Sapiens founder John Hare created a software virtual memory system that allowed one to store and retrieve 8-byte Lisp CONSes into and from an eight megabyte backing store file.
Yes, again you read that right: software virtual memory. The x86 didn't have an MMU.
This meant that our code was fiendishly complex, with all these data structures being mixes of real data in real memory, and virtual data in virtual memory.
The complexity of all this meant that there were a lot of bugs at first, especially because John had the idea that hiring a bunch of college kids at five bucks an hour was a good way to run a software company. It went way over time and budget, but it did eventually ship.
It's now available as shareware. Tell John that Mike Crawford sent you.
I've had no end of trouble with MySpace. I'm not able to prevent my music from playing when you load my page, even though that's how I set it in my profile. I've always allowed downloads of my MP3s, but at some point they stopped being downloadable. I had to delete them all and re-upload them to get the downloads back.
I have actually found MySpace pages that had been customized in such a way as to make FireFox crash just by loading the page!
My only complaint about FaceBook is that it doesn't allow for downloading MP3s - but that's a lack of a desired feature, and not an actual bug.
Most young people these days are trying out both. I don't think it takes much time for them all to figure out which one is better.
So they keep bicycles by each door. They're very inexpensive single-speed bikes, with flags on tall poles. They're cheap enough that they don't worry about them being stolen.
And no, I don't work there - I've visited a couple times.
The problem I see is that most people probably don't care either way, so they would find it acceptable if it defaulted to plain-text email.
I think most Thunderbird users are unaware you can even select the composition type.
One of its features, which could be disabled, was to verify that there were two spaces after each period. The author of the Mac is Not a Typewriter would call me now and then to complain about it. He wanted me to change it to verify that there is just one space.
I always meant to allow it as an option, but just never got around to it.
Now, he has a point, that software ought to be able to handle the extra space needed at the end of sentences. But I've never used an application that did, and have always found it necessary to use two spaces to get the right typography.
A program that did it right would have to be able to parse natural language, because you want extra space at the end of sentences but not after abbreviations.
I get friend requests, but know not to accept them blindly. When I check out their MySpace page, it's sometimes a fairly blatant ad for a pornsite.
If you think only idiots fall for phishing, I can prove you wrong:
I know a guy who is a college professor, has a PhD, has published lots of highly regarded papers, has scads of grad students supported by grants that he gets easily.
And he entered both his credit card number and bank account number into a phisher's web form. He lost four thousand dollars!
You'd think he'd know better - but he was simply unfamiliar with phishing; his professional area has little to do with computers, so he's simply not very clued in to Internet scams.
HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.
Who do I have to blow to get plain text mail made the default?
Most people wouldn't know the difference, and if someone really cared, they could enable it.
ZATAOMM made a huge difference to my life when I first read it, so I was very eager to read Pirsig's second book, Lila, but I just couldn't get into it.
I've been meaning to try again though because Pirsig says the discussion of philosophy is much deeper in Lila.
No doubt I could figure it out somehow, but a FM to R would sure be nice.
It turns out that you can't boot the BeOS 5 Pro CD under either Parallels or QEMU; the boot loader can't find the kernel, possibly because it accesses the CD drive in a different way than most other operating systems.
I figured out a painful yet effective way to install the BeOS under QEMU: install it on a real machine, then copy its partition into a disk image that's booted under QEMU. It involves a lot of tinkering with dd and sfdisk, a utility that allows one to specify partitions by exact sector numbers.
Getting sick led to me making a complete wreck of my life. I lost many friends, screwed up my education and my planned career as a scientist, lost what had been a good reputation.
For many years I tried to keep my illness a secret, but it was a terrible burden to bear. I finally went public with it in 1997, by writing a page about my manic depressive aspect. Click the link and you'll see that it got slashdotted.
But I had a much harder time facing or admitting to the schizophrenic aspect. I finally went public with that in 2003, in my essay Living with Schizoaffective Disorder. I also published it at Kuro5hin, where each of its three installments was featured on the front page.
It's not real obvious to most readers, but I avoided saying much about my own experience in the section on paranoia. Again it was very hard to face it. But again I finally went public with it in 2006 in My Deepest Fear.
You'll understand why I had a hard time facing it if you read the essay. I was getting ready for an ambulance ride to the nuthouse when I wrote that, but, if you'll pardon my shameless self-promotion, I think it's one of the most vivid accounts of paranoia ever written.
I've written a lot of stuff having to do with mental illness, both my own and that of others. I finally compiled an index to it all. I printed hardcopies of most of it, and the stack of paper was over an inch thick!
Someday I plan to publish a dead-tree book about it. What's holding me back is finding the words to explain what I've learned from it all. I want to help others avoid it, to help others who suffer to get better, and to help their loved ones and caregivers to understand it.
One lesson I have learned though, is that the worst of the stigma against mental illness is the stigma that we mentally ill have against ourselves. Our shame for being sick is the main thing that keeps us sick. It's a disease, and not our choice. It's not something to be ashamed of.
As I write this, I've been employed steadily as a software engineer for over twenty years. For eight of those years I was self-employed as a software consultant. My title at my current job is Principal Software Engineer. I've achieved this success despite all the chaos that all those symptoms put me through.
I point this out because I sometimes get the impression that those who treat the mentally ill don't expect us to ever get better. Yes, it's difficult, and progress is painfully slow - but it is quite possible for anyone to overcome the worst madness and lead a happy, fulfilling life.
I think that can be done only in the US. Are there other countries that allow business process patents?
I want to write symphonies someday!
I've been a coder for twenty years. I have grown weary of it.
I searched for my own music on Baidu, and it didn't find it. How can I submit it?
I clicked all the links on the homepage, and hovered my mouse over all the links on the result page, and couldn't find anything that looked like a submission form.
I'd love it if everyone in China were to download my compositions - they are all Creative Commons-licensed.
I used to be self-employed as a software consultant, working out of my home in Truro, Nova Scotia. But when I grew weary of it, I found that there wasn't much in the way of programming jobs anywhere in Atlantic Canada, and what little there was paid very poorly.
So I used all the Canadian job boards - particularly Craig's List - to look for coding jobs anywhere in the country. The job I found was in Vancouver.
I've blogged about it extensively:
- The Vancouver Diaries
I kept blogging there even after I moved back to California, because I intend to return someday. Vancouver is a really wonderful place, or at least it is for some people:It's also the location of the Downtown Eastside, the poorest neighborhood in the whole nation. My job in Gastown was just a couple blocks from there. Many of my diaries are about my encounters with Vancouver's homeless, many of whom were mentally ill.
I was advised never to give money to panhandlers, lest they spend it on drugs. Crystal Meth abuse is widespread there. But I wanted to do something to help, so I often bought them meals.
Often I found that it made their day simply to ask their name and to shake their hand. Folks like that don't get paid that kind of respect very often.
At first their office and server were together in a windowless closet in downtown Santa Cruz, California, just on the other side of the wall (and a short ethernet run) from Scruz.Net, the first commercial ISP in Santa Cruz.
They later expanded to about twenty-five employees and a nice office. I worked there for a time as a web programmer.
Chris and Thomas sold out to Verio. Chris' take was six million dollars. Thomas invested his share in two new dot-coms that failed, so that he wound up looking for sysadmin jobs again.
Chris did what most would say was the smart thing and retired. I didn't see him for a long time, until I came across him riding a mountain bike when I was hiking in the woods at UC Santa Cruz. I envied him for his apparently happy life.
One day, Chris was turned away from a psychiatric hospital because he was considered not sick enough to hospitalize. This is actually a very common problem - mental health is a popular victim of budget cuts, so there are never enough beds for all the potential patients.
The next day he blew his brains out.
It is thought that he was an undiagnosed manic-depressive.