Google Street View Map of Hyde Park. The streets without highlighting cannot be viewed.

I noticed recently that many of the streets in Hyde Park lost Google Street View, notably where my current apartment is. I also noticed that many of the streets had darkened. Is it really necessarily to remove the images? There used to be pictures taken inside the quads as well, which are now gone; I thought those might have been removed by request of the university, but I don’t really get why they removed the other ones. If they wanted to update them, fine, but there is no reason to remove images. I suppose it is a free service, so I have no right to complain, but I just think it is screwy when I can see my home in Oak Ridge, but not in Chicago. I did some quick googling, but nothing came up. Any ideas?

It’s true! Borja wrote up a summary of the GSoC lightening talk event, including pictures. If you don’t know what I look like, I am in both the GSoC student one and the ACM officer one. I really wish I got a haircut before this thing….

Borja linked to our website, which hopefully won’t get too much traffic. It is currently at 359 days of uptime, and I have shooting for a year of uptime before upgrading to the latest and greatest version of OpenBSD.

The ACM (just Borja really) organized a trip to Google Chicago, where all of the Google Summer of Code students who were accepted from UChicago (and in the US) gave lightening talks on our projects, which included me. The other GSoC students were Marcus Westin, Jordon Lewis, and Nick Edds. I put up my talk, as well as a more general page for my project on my CS site. Marcus and I both have projects with the Globus Alliance, so I was quite happy that he went before me, as I didn’t have to explain what Globus is. My project is fairly straight foreword to explain and I still don’t know the Globus Toolkit (GT) that well, so I couldn’t answer too many questions, and I ended up going under in time. Everyone seemed most interested in Nick’s project, since it is on the 2to3 tool in python, and a decent amount of the audience used Python, some with a great deal of dedication (it was at Google after all). I am pretty excited to see how Nick’s project turns out; we both went to the talk that his mentor, Collin Winter, gave at PyCon on the tool and the issues that Nick is working to fix.
The Chicago office’s engineering crew is dominated by subversion developers (in the small selection of software I like), but most of the presentations were about most unrelated projects. Ben Collins-Sussman discussed a VM for interactive fiction games like zork (I’ll still play my zork on the SDF TWENEX Machine; the version of zork installed is from 1981!). Karl Fogel, not a current Google developer, but subversion developer and good friend of the other googlers, gave a talk on script he wrote to help track patches from non-core developers based on logs. He put up some stats on the differences between subversion and GNU Emacs as projects; it further straightened my reasoning for using XEmacs. I went to a Russian choir concert the night before, as I had to go to a concert from a genre I don’t have any familiarity with, which he apparently was in; what a small world I live in. Brian Fitzpatrick gave a shortened version of the keynote he have at PyCon on balancing functional complexity with usability in software. Like all the other talks I have heard him give, it was an excellent talk; he has one of the best uses of slide shows I have seen, and I always end up thinking about the talks much later. There was also a talk from a developer for Blogger (he said he was now on feedburner); I would give his name, but I can’t remember it at the moment. I talked to him for a bit; I think my social awkwardness was in full swing at the time. I asked him about something I read on Valleywag about Google adding some preference search rankings with Blogger (I can’t find the post at the moment; I will link to it if I do); as I am sure is the case, he said that Google does no such evil. He also mentioned that Google crawls its own site with the same bot, which makes sense, but I hadn’t thought about it before. I wish I knew Blogger better, as I used it once for something else and had a couple thoughts about its workings.
It was a fairly awesome evening. I was very sleep deprived after one of my harder weeks here, so I was defintely in a strange state for the entirity of the thing. My thanks and appretiation go out to Borja and Google for this event. Apparently, my glorious face might end up on the GSoC blog or the Google open source blog.

I haven’t been posting a lot recently, so I thought I would just kind of outline a little of what has been going on recently.

Some members of the RAS installed the weather station on the roof of Ryerson today (I wasn’t involved in the efforts today unfortunately). In addition, the web view now works (not me again), which I started on. It is still temporary, but it is currently up. I will be assembling a better website, which will be more permanent. I was fearing we wouldn’t be able to get it onto a POSIX operating system, but then wview came to the rescue. I will put up some pictures soon. It was really great to see it finally on the roof. It was some random idea I had a while ago, and it finally materialized.

The biggest news for me today is that I was accepted to Google Summer of Code on the Globus Toolkit. I will be working on a diagnostic administrator interface framework; essentially, it is more Python+XML work, but with Globus. This will also be the third summer in a row that I have done XML work with people based at a national lab (Globus is based at Argonne–not the same as actually working there for the summer, but I will be visiting soon). I will also be working at the Maclab, which should be fun and a chance to do some real work on projects there.

A lot of people are leaving the maclab at the end of the quarter, so I will end up with quite a bit more on my plate it looks like. After the last two weeks or so, I look foreword to that less. Over the last break, I converted many of the servers to Leopard Server, Apple’s latest rendition in bloated bad design. From that experience alone, I lost all respect for Apple (there wasn’t much there in the first place). What kind of upgrade on a server edition of the Operating System overwrites the most basic of configuration and files on upgrade? This last week, our web/dhcp server went down at the same time as our print system, our two most vital systems. From what it looks like now, DirectoryService, the LDAPesque utility that Apple now uses for local accounts as well. epically failed, and I do mean epic. There are some other problems as well; the actual cause is still allusive, but we at first presumed hackers, which can’t be ruled out. The print system? As far as we can tell, the problem is that Leopard is a horrid piece of shit that ruins every piece of software it touches. The implementation of CUPS on it is horribly broken (to a vast extent), despite the fact Apple owns it! I will spend more time in the short future on a series of posts that outlines my points of hatred for it. Dealing with the problems rated pretty high on my rankings of stressful events, and there is still work to be done.

Together with another failure, this time from NSIT, I think I know fully grasp an important life lesson: assume incompetence. NSIT made a pathetic effort to announce that they were going to switch the LDAP server from OpenLDAP to a Sun-based implementation . Apparently, they had a test server, but they neglected to give the address out, or test it on their own machines. NSITE/USITE has its own Macs, even another Maclab (I think of it as the bazarro Maclab; the imaging work is handled remotely, the none of staff know much computers from what I hear, there are few users, and the software is up to date), of which at least some run Tiger. No one tested these to see if logins would, you know, work. Anyways, all our tigers failed to login after the switch. It turned out to be some check box on some security page (in fact the only check box on the security page), for which it took 7 people 48 hours (I think that’s with few breaks in it) to find the fix. We decided to let them deal with it as it was their problem. Incompetence really explains this whole thing well. When we were switching to Leopard on the servers, the ServerAdmin presented us with a catch-22; it was impossible to save setting on one page without saving the settings on another, but it was impossible to save settings on the other one without first saving the changes on the first. What accounts for this flagrant error in the GUI? Why incompetence of course! I experienced a similar sort of situation on a Sun box I work on; everything program I used seemed broken. I e-mailed the sysadmins for a while at which point this golden rule struck me. I ended up compiling any program that failed to work on something. For example, there was some weird error with make. so I compiled and installed gmake to my home directory, and it solved all my problems. I suppose it is not fair to just call this incompetence; laziness should be added in there somewhere.

Some other stuff has been happening, but that makes for a decent mind-purge. It’s nice out again! I can where sandals and shorts comfortably!

Bill Gates came to the GSB today to speak about random crap.I was one of the 400 “lucky” students who got to see it. There was a lottery that was supposed to be randomized, but it definitely wasn’t. Extreme preference was given to CS people; it seemed like half of those from the department who applied got a ticket. I know at least 13 people from our department who got tickets, and I know just a couple on non-majors who got in. Business students likely also got preference. I had no complaints, and it does makes sense to give preference to us (maybe more if people actually used M$ crap in the department, but that is besides the point), but it was supposed to be random.

The talk touched on a lot of random. The talk was framed around the fact he was leaving M$ to work at his foundation full time. He had some “comedy” video made with lots of big names (Al Gore, George Clooney, Bono, Brian Williams, Hilliary Clinton, Obama, Warren Buffet, etc…); it seemed like it had a fairly high production value. He drives a Ford Focus in it, which just strikes me as strange since he is loaded; maybe it was meant to be funny. At one point, he is in a recording studio, where you can clearly make out a Mac in the background. Perhaps it was just a tactic to ease the audience into the ensuing bullshit.

He talked about his foundation a decent bit, which was somewhat interesting. I think he has picked a lot of very good and important things to fund, but I do not think it a great act of humanitarianism. I think it would have been near a crime to not give most of it away; it is only his duty. Besides, I do not thing the non-merits of his career give him the right to decide how much of the world’s philanthropy. Apparently, he is pulling many of the same games with the foundation as he did at Microsoft. I think that, in large part, Gates has hurt the software industry far more than he is helped it. The main thing that I think Microsoft has done for the computer revolution is make computers cheap; without Windows, the cheap knockoff would have probably never been successful.

As far as his other comments, I thought he made far more points against Microsoft’s role in the future of technology than for it. At one point, he discussed rich, intuitive graphical interfaces on the web; he started to list things: “computer maps, computer Earth…” I think he continued, but it was clear, I think including to him, that if he had said Google instead of computer, it would have made more sense. I forgot many of the other lines, but it just struck me Gates knew Microsoft was being beaten by the likes of Google, Amazon (at one point, he described a device like the Kindle as being part of the future), etc… I cannot remember much of what else he said along these lines, but it was along these same lines.

It moved onto questions after that….

I was hoping to ask something about the OLPC, but I ended up not after he addressed enough to invalidate the question. I wish I had gotten up though. Most of the questions were either about the foundation, some random computer thing (some confused, some boring), and then it got to the obligatory open source question. The person asked something along the lines of “open source something something business something something future.” Essentially, Gates said that business and open source are incompatible, and there are only a few circumstances where it made sense, etc…. I don’t remember a lot of it as I just started getting pissed. One of my friends just got up and left. He made it out to be some weird, anti-social thing. He compared the GPL to a virus. The best comment, however, was something about how open source developers cut hair during the day and work on software at night. My CS friends and I all think that various barber jokes should circulate the CS department for a while to follow. I couldn’t help but think of Stallman after hearing it. It was really just infuriating that he just lied so blatantly like that to us. Borja, a CS grad student, wrote up a better summary than me. Such is Gates.

SG had some dumb thing that was consistent with my opinion of it.

It would be nice to believe that the rest of the audience came away thinking that he was as much of a toolbag as I did, but there is definitely a reason that the talk was hosted the business school and not the CS department. My roommate Alex, who got in with a press pass, said most of the reporters there ate it all up. They were happy to give all sorts of free press to Gates and MicroSense (thats a joke, laugh).

I suppose it just reinforced what I already knew. I just had never really encountered it so first hand.

A little while ago, I started playing around with the userChrome.css and userContent.css files in Firefox, and I have been rather pleased with the results. As far as I can tell, few people know about these files (perhaps I am mistaken, but most people I know have never seen them before). The files are located in the chrome folder in a given profile. On Linux at least, the path to that is
~/.mozilla/firefox/{weird alphanumerical sequence}.your_profile_name/chrome

On Macs, the profile directory is in
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles
I don’t care about windows…
The arrangements of profiles is what I consider to be one of the prime examples of why Firefox isn’t a great piece of software. If I ever want to edit my profile, I have to remember the my profile begins with an r, or at least view all the other profiles, when I tab complete on the folder. For some reason, using unique profile names wasn’t enough for Firefox; it attaches an 8 letter alphanumeric sequence before the name of the profile. I really see no reason for this extra bit of crap. Perhaps it allows for profile name changes more easily, but it is not like people really futz around with different profiles too often. Given that there are things that a user might want to edit in the directory, this crap seems unnecessary. The directory structure inside the .mozilla folder doesn’t make too much sense either, but I won’t go into that now. In general, I use Firefox, because I believe it to be the best browser out of a series of really awful software packages. Maybe I am horribly naive, but the browser doesn’t seem like such an achievement in software to warrant the amount of attention Mozilla gets (or the money). That aside, one can do some nice things with Firefox.

The userChrome.css and userContent.css files allow a user to change the default css for the XUL in browser.xul (I think it applies to all XUL, but I haven’t tested that or bothered to look it up) and the default css used in the browser for sites. These files must go into the chrome/ directory of a user’s profile. There are example files already in there, which just need to renamed to get you started. There is a page on these files on the Mozilla website as well as some additional examples. I haven’t done much to userChrome.css; I got rid of the throbber (thing in the top right corner, which likes to spin) and I set my url bar to have a fixed width font. Those mods are both in the example file. The userContent.css file is a little more fun… As outlined in the example file, you can get rid of annoying tags, like marquee and blink. I added a rule to remove text decoration from links except for hover:

a { text-decoration: none ! important }
a:hover { text-decoration: underline ! important }

The ! important part lets a page’s css override my own (update: whoops, opposite is true; the programmer in me must have remembered it that way since I read “! important” as “not important”). It sometimes tricky to spot out the links, but I appreciate the overall aesthetic it produces. There is also a way to set it to only apply to individual pages. I choose to modify my google search results:

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.google.com/) {
.g {
border-bottom: 1px solid grey ! important;
padding-bottom: 1em;
}

}

As of now, I forgot why I made the url prefix just google.com as opposed to google.com/search, but I must have had a reason. Either way, my experience has shown me that the g class is not used elsewhere on google. Anyway, this snippet adds a line between each search result. Here is a screen shot of the end result:

On the Google GTalk blog yesterday, a set of Google bots that translate was announced. I played around with a couple for a bit. It doesn’t seem to be anything special; it is just a bot interface to the Google translation services. I noticed that if you group chat with several of them, the one with the best answer would respond. So for example, when I was chatting with nl2en and en2nl, if said “hello”, en2nl would respond with “Hallo”, and if I said “Hallo”, nl2en would respond with “Hallo”. Anyways, the GTalk blog post does not include the full list of addresses, so I did. Here it is:


ar2en@bot.talk.google.com, de2en@bot.talk.google.com, de2fr@bot.talk.google.com, el2en@bot.talk.google.com, en2ar@bot.talk.google.com, en2de@bot.talk.google.com, en2el@bot.talk.google.com, en2es@bot.talk.google.com, en2fr@bot.talk.google.com, en2it@bot.talk.google.com, en2ja@bot.talk.google.com, en2ko@bot.talk.google.com, en2nl@bot.talk.google.com, en2ru@bot.talk.google.com, en2zh@bot.talk.google.com, es2en@bot.talk.google.com, fr2de@bot.talk.google.com, fr2en@bot.talk.google.com, it2en@bot.talk.google.com, ja2en@bot.talk.google.com, ko2en@bot.talk.google.com, nl2en@bot.talk.google.com, ru2en@bot.talk.google.com, zh2en@bot.talk.google.com

I also made a contact list suitable for import in gmail, which includes full language names in the contact name.

CSV File: Gmail Contact List (csv) with GTalk Translate Bots

For the last few days, I have kept my Gmail inbox at 666 unread messages. When it first hit, I got a quick laugh; I am not at all religious, so its not like “666″ has any particular meaning to me, other than the fact that I think it’s a dumb thing to care about.

Since then, however, it has become a force far darker. I feel this compulsion to either read mail as soon as it comes in or to leave messages unread just so I can keep my inbox at 666 unread messages. I just can’t stop!

So I am guessing I am going to get tired of it in about four days tops, at which point I will go back to my normal routine of letting mail pile up and then mass archiving it.