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?
I just got a message from the facebook group for students staying at UofC over the summer; I never go, but I still get the messages. Something just seemed wrong with this one:
Subject: Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Party (Open Bar)
SUMMERFEST: benefit for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. There will be everything from:
Free food and drinks (including OPEN BAR)
Games and music
Awesome raffle and silent auction prizes, like gift certificates to high-end restaurants, memberships to museums, tickets to shows at places like Second City and the Metro, airfare and hotel stay at a spa, and so much more.
Maybe is is just the phrasing, but I always think there is something wrong when a disconnect between the charity and the supposed benefactors exist. Sure it’s for college students, but that doesn’t fix it. There is a decent episode of Dilbert that “delves” into this problem:
Really, I just found the message amusing, but something is definitely wrong.
Any UChicago student has certainly seen, and probably used, one of the many recycling bins on campus. As any Maclab tutor could tell you, the Maclab recycling bins are emptied into the same container with all the other trash. Just from that observation, I think it would be fair to assume that the rest of the Reg’s recycling containers are treated the same way, but surely other buildings recycle, right? Apparently not so… Apparently the bins in the Reynolds Club are treated the same way. We only have paper bins (ignore the sticker that says aluminum cans only), but the Reynolds Club has full on different bins for different types of recyclables. I think it is safe to assume that the same is true for the rest of campus. I realize that recycling in Chicago sucks, but surely the university could find some way of recycling. I think this whole mess is really offensive on so many different levels, besides the fact UChicago is not recycling. Is this thing some sort of ruse on someone’s part so that students and staff can feel better about the university and feel good for thinking we are recycling. I go out of my way to recycle when I can, dammit. The university could at least show the same respect for its community.
Update: Apparently, trash is sorted after the fact, so it doesn’t really matter, but it is still less than forthright to put up recycling bins if they are just combined anyway.
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.
I pass a sign every morning that reads “no trespassing violators will be prosecuted,” only with each word on a new line. I walk through the place as it blocks off my street. I don’t think I should have to walk through a sketch ally turned road that is without a sidewalk just because some construction group bribed some local politicians. The place’s location makes next to no logical sense without considering graft or “patronage.” Back to the point, the place seems like the type that would definitely want to go after trespassers, though I don’t think UofC students are exactly the target audience. I always find this sign curious as it does nothing to separate “no trespassing” and “violators will be prosecuted,” which I assume is what it meant as that message is the norm. Regardless, the full statement clearly says that no one will be prosecuted for trespassing. I don’t know much about what the legal meaning of sign even is, but I would think that if they meant anything, the apartment complex might have a hard time going after trespassers in court if the trespasser just pointed out the sign. Perhaps the usual meaning would win…
I noticed the same problem on a sign outside the botany pond. The sign read “keep off thin ice.” If there was a separation, the intended meaning would come through. I of course am assuming that the UofC would generally prefer people to stay of a possible hazard…
I just don’t get why companies who do nothing but make signs would have gotten the concept of separation down at this point.
Somefriends of mine from the maclab and I are planning to go into a startup of great hilarity. We just got the domain names, so hopefully we will have something we can be more public about soon.
I spotted three local new crews today when I went to watch the UofC annual polar bear run today. It is a naked run in the quads, as part of the Kuviasungnerk and Kangeiko festival here. Events in the festival are normally early in the morning all week to celebrate winter or something dumb like that; I have never attended any of these and I expect I never will. Anyway, it finishes up with the naked run. It is 28F outside, so it is a challenge of sorts, but it is mostly an excuse for some to streak in the quads. There are always a few photographers out there, and the pics have made it to internet in various forms (see video from last year). I was surprised today to see the local news show up. I saw cameras for CBS, FOX, and WGN. It is just a little bit creepy. Slow news day or whatever, but it seemed at least a little bit odd to me. Any runners pretty well gave up there privacy, but it seems a little bit on the wrong side. Either way, it was good for a laugh. I think I might have been in one of the few pans they did of the crowd…
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