I ended up going with “Jack bag” as a result of my quest for the right bag, which I have been pretty happy with. It has its problems, but it is pretty nice. As I knew, it is not a laptop bag, which means I am always nevous when I carry around my laptop, as it is just a canvas bag. I have been thinking of getting a protective shell, much like most macbook owners have, but I haven’t bothered yet.

After starting season 2 of Dexter (amazing show) though, I am starting to have regrets. He has this really sweet laptop bag, which just looks awesome. All things considered, it isn’t what I was looking for, but it is still tempting. I did some searching, and the bag is the Oakley S.I. Laptop Bag. It is $180, which is absurd in my book for a bag, but it definitely looks strong and incredibly badass.

Last night, the block my apartment is on lost power. It was during a pretty harsh thunderstorm, so I didn’t think much of it until I realized that our power lines are underground. My neighborhood in Oak Ridge has above ground lines with lots of trees, so I am used to the power going out during storms. The storm last night was also one of the harshest I have seen in Chicago; the Ryerson weather station reported a high wind of 56mph around midnight and around 2 inches of rainfall in an hour. Anyway, the power was incredibly screwed up for the rest of the night. We unplugged everything after I saw the TV sort of flicker on (it was off before) when lightening struck really close by. Hopefully are surge protectors didn’t get the full 1.21 gigawatts of power. For a while, we got an extremely low amount of power; enough for some lights to barely glow. It was strange. At some point, a firetruck came by, which one of my roommates and I watched from the porch while clearing the drain, so we could watch a whirlpool form (entertainment options for a bunch of computer geeks is severly limited sometimes without power); A cop watched us and pulled off as soon as we went inside, which was pretty funny. As far as I know, the power is still out; hopefully we will get it back soon. We heard some strange, almost explosion-like sounds throughout the night, so hopefully the damage is not that bad.

The other side of the street wasn’t affected, but all of the streetlights and even the university police boxes were all off and all of the buildings next to ours were off, which made for about the darkest I have ever seen Chicago. I am used to being able to see around, even if all of the lights are off. There is so much background light, that it is easy to forget it is even there. It made for an interesting evening.

I have been lugging around a backpack for a while, and, while is is nice when I have a lot of stuff, I would really like something better for when I just want to carry around my laptop and a book or two. Really, I am looking for a nice messenger bag. Since about every other person I know has one, and they really seem pretty nice. I am looking for something that is around 15×11x4+ inches (that seems standard) and something that I can carry my laptop around in safely. Any ideas? I want to get something cheap ideally, so the army surplus ones look pretty nice. A few of the “paratrooper” style like this one or this one (I found both from a number of sites for about the same price, including on amazon). I am not a 24 fan, but apparently these bags or variants are called “jack sacks” as Jack Bauer uses one. I generally like the look of these bags, and I like the feel of military canvas too, but I just don’t want to get my laptop messed up. I currently have a Swiss army backpack, with a special padded compartment for a laptop, which is nice, but I am guessing excessive. Anyone have any advice on that one? The main other bag that appeals to me is one from Manhattan Portage that looks like their normal bag, but has a padded laptop slot, but it is pricey, at least by my standards. Right now I am leaning towards the military-style. Anyone have any suggestions or thoughts?

I just got a new cell phone (it is on my facebook profile if don’t have it already and you know me), so I have been dealing with wrong numbers. I can ignore those and let my voicemail deal with them, but what sucks are wrong number texts. I think texting is utterly stupid, but it is definitely right sometimes, but most of the time I don’t understand why someone has to use what has to be the most expensive form of communication (in terms of data size/price) in existence today when e-mail would be more appropriate and cheaper. Anyway, I can live with texts from people I know, but what I hate is when it is from someone with the wrong number. I have been getting a stream of incoherent texts recently, which I feel need documenting. I will obscure no details for reasons that will become obvious:

July 7 - 773-699-6104: Alrite ppl this is k. ken etc… delete my old number n replace it wt this 1
July 12 - 773-699-6104: Watz good
July 17 - 773-699-6104: New muzik dropic soon my pg so b on the look out this weekend
July 17 - me: you have the wrong number. please stop texting me
July 17 - 773-699-6104: Nigga shut up (it’s an exact quotation; sorry if you are horribly offended)

Will I continue to receive texts out of some combination of some ill-conceived form of spit and ineptitude? I guess I will have to find out. I honestly don’t get why I should get a nasty response for a reasonable request. Anyone know of something I can do if I still get texts? I don’t have a texting plan, so I am not so fond of paying for these.

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.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t quite get the point of “big deal” versioning and upgrading with something like Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu on my laptop and one of my desktops. I like it on my laptop, because I rarely have to spend time configuring anything. I use it on my desktop, because it is an AMD-64 machine, I like Debian, and Ubuntu has better support for AMD-64. There are some things that Ubuntu does pretty well. For core packages, Ubuntu’s packages tend to be more up to date, and there is less stupidity. As far as the actual distribution, it is pretty nice.
What I find annoying about Ubuntu is the community around it. Mostly as a result of StumbleUpon, I come across all sorts of blog posts that show you how to make your Ubuntu totally awesome by installing a few standard and obvious packages. Worse are the Ubuntu forums, which always seem like a clusterfuck of stupidity from the linux world. Maybe I am being harsh; I remember posting some fairly obvious questions to Linux Questions when I was first using Linux in high school. Still, it is just the feel I get whenever I come across a post.
As I mentioned, one of the features of Ubuntu that really annoys me is the emphasis on versioning. Each one has some clever name, and each one is made into a big deal on the internets. There was an upgrade made available recently, which I have installed. I could see that it was putting aptitude through a gauntlet, but I don’t quite see what was changed. Some packages were made standard, and some were taken out. You are always given an “option” if you want to remove all the packages that are no longer supported or not, but aptitude never stops giving you crap afterwords until you do. Last time I upgraded, I discovered that I no longer want to use xmms. Actually, I started using audacious, and I have been happy with it. Anyway, it seems like they just reinstall most packages for some reason. I know Ubuntu does some stuff to a few packages to get them to work better together. There were also some new utilities, but still, it all seemed like something that could be done by aptitude normally. I just don’t get the big deal made over it…

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!