Flgith to Germany....

So my folks moved out to Germany, and I decided to visit for the holidays.  I figure its a good excuse to visit Europe, since I haven't really been there since I was much smaller, and couldn't really appreciate it.  That ... I *usually* really like traveling.  I love flying, and its a free roller coaster ride when getting from A-B.  (ie go to six flags..but when you get off your in a difference continent). 

So, taking other friends advice, I showed up at the airport stupidly early, just in case the security lines are super long and feel like doing a cavity search.  My plane was at 4:50 pm, and I got there around 1.  I fly through the security checks...and I got plenty of time to kill using my pretty shiny nook.  I turns out the flight was delayed leaving Germany, so we won't be leaving until close to 6 pm. 

Meh, that's annoying, but not the end of the world.  I find my seat, we get fed some okay-ish food for Airplane food, and are provided with a wide array of movies to keep you busy.  No drugs was sadly provided to enable you to sleep in those coach seats. 

7 hours later we arrive at Drusseldorf.  By arrive, I mean we've flying over.  The airport is closed.  So after flying to Drusseldorf, we are rerouted to Frankfurt Airport. 

We are told the trains are still functional, so we can get to Drusseldorf via rails.  Well.... alright...grrrr  (note I haven't slept yet...coming to close 6-7 am at this point).

Alright.. go find one line to wait for 15 minutes.. oh you have special ticket x,y,z you should go to this other line... which way faster.  uhmm..but...urgh.. fine..whatever...

Go search for the proper line again....processed my boarding pass, and was provided a ticket to a train from Frankfurt to Drusseldorf.  I ask about the luggage...and I need to go drag it behind me on the train.  On to baggage....

They're unloading our baggage....hmm... I put a pretty little bow on mine... I don't see the bow, ... or the luggage.  Alright, they're unloading miami flight.  I'd like to visit Miami, but pretty sure my bag isn't coming from Miami.

Take a quick look at all the other lines unloading bags...nope.. no bag.  Alright.. go to the lost baggage line (of course there's a line).  Well, there's a lady handing out forms for those from Drusseldorf... apparently I'm not the online one.  Amazing...........  Well, one less thing to carry.. that's good... right?  most electronics are on my backpack... so they just my socks, clothes... (woot streaking germany).

Fine.. go ask a few more people.. find those english speakers... oh there's everyone from my plane... sweet.  Go on the train.  choo choo choo choo... oh what? we have to take a connection.. its not a direct train? grrr

Get off at Kolm, find the next train....with a nice windchill factor.  Train is of course late... 20 minutes later... or 30 instead of a 5minute wait...

Get on the last train... that drops you off at Drusseldorf (conviniently there are 3 train station at Drusseldorf in case you needed more confusion). 

I meet my dad the station, take another train to get home since no cars can circulate outside.  I have lost track what time it is now... maybe lunch time?  so..  I would do the math, but my head is too fuzzy atm to comprehend the concept of numbers, timezones, and basic arithmetic. 

Oh yes.. no foreign currency... haven't eater since the plane food dinner the previous day.  Get home... eat anything that's presentable.... sleep...

time zone totally screwed.. so now I'm up at around 9 pm CST, and some ungodly hour locally writing up a blog cause i can't sleep. 

Next time I have the brilliant idea of traveling.... or tell someone I love to travel... do me a favor and just shoot me.. or least tazer me for a less permanent solution. 

Guns are safe... see it says so right there..

I ran across this on a completely unrelated site....
It got a few laughs out of me.. so I felt obliged to share the love.

I Can Read Your Mind.. *dramatic music*

I'm not really sure what I want to do with this.. but given enough $$$ I would love to
buy a few nice toys.  Maybe for christmas I'll spend the $500 for the dev kit.

But.. here's some basic info I found really interesting.

Let's start off with a ted.com link, since that website just owns..and you should all
regularly lurk on there to see what they release.  "Click Me"

In theory, you buy this little headset, which costs around $300 or so.  (bound to go down in price).
Emotiv seems to be the biggest player in this area.  The headset reads your brainwaves.

Now, it's not *actually* reading your mind, but it does detect patterns.  So if someone
is concentrating really hard on something.. or thinking about it in a certain way, it.. in theory ...
can detect that and can be programmed to react.

Emotiv has a nice little mini market where you can publish your apps.  So.. I *think* about
it, and I can flip the next, or previous picture in an image gallery.  There's a game where the surrounding
changes based on my mood.

The potential implications of this sort of technology is just amazing... I can't wait to see it a bit more mainstream.

forget the ps3 move, wii... you have physical movement + mind and emotional input that would affect the gameplay.

You could in theory make it so you walk into the house.. think about turning on the light.. lights are on.. think about watching tv... and the tv responds and turns on....

man.. I really can't wait to play with this.  Anyone want to donate one of these to me?  Also, if you have any great ideas..feel free to comment, would love to hear some feedback/thoughts on this.

On a side note... this was totally supposed to be science fiction... I know its not quiet there yet.. but thinking about something..and having it respond.. we're a few steps away from creating artificial ESP.

PS.  Best thing I like about Emotiv right now.. is that they're working on a Linux version*before* looking at mac.

MetaClass

I ran across this from an old email.  One of my favorite little snippets.

6.3.3  The Class Metaclass

As objects, metaclasses are also instances of a class, and that class is
also a metaclass since the metaclasses are class objects.  However,
unlike classes, all metaclasses share the same protocol, namely the
message that creates their single instance.  Therefore, the metaclass
objects are all instances of the same class, namely the system class
Metaclass. For any class C, the expression C class class returns
Metaclass. Metaclass defines a single instance variable, thisClass,
which refers to the metaclass's instance.

Now consider Metaclass class, which is the metaclass of Metaclass. Every
metaclass is an instance of Metaclass, so Metaclass class is an instance
as well.  Because Metaclass is the instance of Metaclass class, this is
the point of circularity in the system with respect to class (i.e.,
"instance of") references. The class/instance relationships among
objects, classes, metaclasses, Metaclass and Metaclass class, are
illustrated in Figure 6.6

If you can make sense of that on a first read, you get a gold star.

Google Talk + Arch Linux (Depricated)

 In theory the updated plugin and ssl packages fix this.  Left on the interwebz mostly for reference.

Well I discovered that google talk was released for linux and that it was in aur, which translated into not having to futz with the deb/rpm files to figure out how to convert them to a proper arch PKGBUILD.

Okay.. beautiful. so.. let's install it.

packer -S google-talkplugin

(replace packer by your favorite aur package manager).

google-talk depends on libnotify and pulseaudio so.. simple enough.

Okay, load up chrome or firefox, open up the plugins about page.

Excellent... now what?  everything looks good.. I log into gmail, click on the cam icon and it tells me to go download the plugin I just installed...  *angry face*. Well, that's not what its supposed to do.

Fine.. lets run this in terminal.. to see what's going on.


[000:040] Started GoogleTalkPlugin, path=/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin
[000:040] Waiting for GoogleTalkPlugin to start...
/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING: unhandled variable 18 () in NPN_GetValue()
*** NSPlugin Viewer *** WARNING: unhandled variable 18 () in NPN_GetValue()


Okay.. so.. lets see what this plugin is doing:


ldd /opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin

    linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf772b000)
    libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libX11.so.6 (0xf75d5000)
    libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib32/libXfixes.so.3 (0xf75d0000)
    libdl.so.2 => /usr/lib32/libdl.so.2 (0xf75cc000)
    libpthread.so.0 => /usr/lib32/libpthread.so.0 (0xf75b2000)
    librt.so.1 => /usr/lib32/librt.so.1 (0xf75a8000)
    libssl.so.0.9.8 => not found
    libcrypto.so.0.9.8 => not found
    libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.6 (0xf74ba000)
    libm.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libm.so.6 (0xf7495000)
    libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf747a000)
    libc.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf732e000)
    libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libxcb.so.1 (0xf7316000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf772c000)
    libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libXau.so.6 (0xf7313000)
    libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xf730e000)


Hmm.. Okay.. libssl not found. I'm fairly sure I have openssl installed, though it seems I have 1.x. Arch Linux seems to be too new for its own good in this case.


Okay.. fine. Let's see what we can find.


packer -Ss openssl  

which returns among other items:  lib32-openssl-compatibility


pacman -S lib32-openssl-compatibility

Now we should have all the components that we need.  I tried running it again, but it seems it still can't find library we just installed.

pacman -Ql lib32-openssl-compatibility returns the path name where it will be installed.

Okay, it install the library in /opt/lib32/usr/lib which I'm guessing most apps aren't going to check.  It also doesn't seem like it installed a conf file telling our system to look in that directory.  Well, we can help it along a bit.



echo "/opt/lib32/usr/lib" >  /etc/ld.so.conf.d/lib32-openssl.conf
ldconfig


Reload your browser....and amazingly enough.. google chat video and all works perfectly.

Problems:  This drove me up the wall on my arch linux OS for longer then I care to admit.  open up alsamixer.. find your mic volume, and hit the spacebar to enable capture.  *insert homer moment*

The Internet Explained

source:  Image originally obtained from here.

Twitter/ Identi.ca Project Ideas Part 2 ( AutomatedAgileDents )

so project 2.. which is the more sensible idea.  AutomatedAgileDents (initial wiki drafts).

Let's consider this in part parts.  


Part 1.  Input source:  Lets say identi.ca and twitter initially.  Identi.ca has more practical applications since it can be hosted internally.  (and is actually usable for itch I want to fix). 


Initially I was thinking of just a time management plugin/tool.  Given a user's public feed, in a specific format say:  Project: Task : Comment   which would account for the user's current task being worked on.  Or alternatively we could use the !group tag.  Though establishing hierarchy would be difficult. 


And a given a time period for example....   1 day, 1 week, etc... fetch all the the tweets and format them appropriately. 

Part 1 problems:  Ideally, I'd like to find something I can use where the user can write a simple template file that the core program would use to establish the parsing rules it will use when reading tweets. 


Part 2:  is the core program, takes in all the tweets, strips out what's not needed, and formats in the appropriate format.


Initial API that is more fitting to our needs? 



Part 3:  is the transport....   for my case i'd like the tweets matching the my user's info... for the time period .. maybe provided in my own in house API



Web Service Transport:

You could in theory have multiple transports.. so I can register a web service API that receives my message...  and pushes it to the appropriate host, translating it to JSON, XML, or whatever format is needed.  (example..  Tweet I need to see the doc on Sunday, push a web service request to your dentist requesting an appointment)


Wiki Transport: 

Format content according to <insert markup language> and publish to wiki.. or email to listserv.



(S)FTP:

Take the text, format it in... <choose format> and push to site.



Notes:  Do we want to have a pre-processing ?  Format my messages as MarkUp?  LaTex?  HTML?   

Twitter/ Identi.ca Project Ideas Part 1

So this project is mostly motivated out of a sheer laziness on my part. 

Talking to a few people I've gotten two potential ideas now....

1. idea which I'm not sure if there would be much use out of it or not.. is to allow some form of encoding.  ie.  Read a user's twitter feed given a starting tag in one of his messages  ie.  ==BEGIN== (or something more intelligent) followed by the message.. and keep concatenating the messages, interpreting html tags maybe and such for formatting, until a closing tag is found.  So I can push a 10 page essay divided into 140 chars bits and be readable on the other side, and be transparent to the user.. maybe click here link to link that stream to tweets as a single document.

the real question is why... twitter will probably spit fire at you if you do this.. and kill their already overloaded servers.. probably more applicable applications would be in an internal status.net server. 

Mainly, I'm getting really annoyed with the 140 char limits.. I'd like to be able to express a proper idea without having to sound like a mentally handicapped teen.  I can type full words, but I find myself using silly acronyms like 2 and ur and removing spaces in order to tag and fit the full idea across the 140 char.  If enough clients supported this new theoretical format..   then we could write full sentences and express a coherent thought...   this seems like a practical application of the project.  a 10 page essay via tweets is just silly..but it would be a fun little exercise just to watch smoke come out of twitter.. especially if enough users adopt it.

Arch Linux vs Ubuntu

I have a very .. vivid love and hate relationship with Ubuntu.  Many times I love how easy Ubuntu is.. other times when it tries to bypass me and make up its own mind on how to do things for the sake of ease of use..... it does provide some strong incentive to throw my laptop out the window for the sheer amusement of seeing it being destroyed and shatter in 1000 little pieces.  Sadly, it would involve destroying my laptop as well.  :(
That being said.. I wanted to write my attempt at an unbiased comparison between Ubuntu and Arch.



Ubuntu:

Pros:

• It is designed to be stupidly easy to use.  One of its strong selling point is that it just finds all your hardware, sets up your networking, and allows you to easily configure your operating system through a nice pretty and shiny brown...uhmm.. purple interface.
• It seems that when someone says "Linux Support" these days it means Ubuntu more then any other distribution.  Fedora coming in a close second.  The ability to install .deb file makes it very easy to obtain and install certain software.  Goolge chrome for instance is not available for Linux Arch.  The Open Source version, chromium though is.  There are many packages that you'd have to write a PKGBUILD in arch in order to get it working under arch, or simple compile from source.
• A huge community of support.. in theory
• Theoretically the ability to buy a dell computer with Ubuntu would also provide you a phone number to call for technical support.
• A large collection of software is available via apt-get/ aptitude

Cons:

• Its designed to be easy to use.  So if you try to do something advanced.. you end up fighting the operating system.  Ubuntu Server works a bit better then the desktop edition for this.  Network Manager turns into an abomination from hell.  Disabling certain services like pulseaudio in favor of Alsa for example is a pain.
• KDE support is minimal and is very much an after thought.  If you want to use KDE I would stay away from Ubuntu and Kubuntu.
• If you run KDE or Gnome you're running the Ubuntu version of the window manager, not the upstream version.
• Community support is probably one of the largest in the Linux world, the problem is that because much of the audience is very new to Linux you get a lot of bad advice.  Many of the solutions involve the GUI rather the giving you the proper way of fixing it.  Many solutions for KDE/ XFCE under Ubuntu based distributions turn into apt-get install ubuntu-package in order to fix a KDE/XFCE problem.  This is getting a bit better and it is very annoying to have to install 10, 50, or 100mb of dependency to fix a very simple annoyance.
• If you want to stay away from the GUI for the most part and setup your OS via the CLI, Ubuntu makes it particularly difficult (granted this isn't an issue to most non-me users)
• In my opinion a con:  6 month release cycle.  Updates are fairly slow to get to the end user unless you're running the alpha/beta.

SideNote:

As a side note.  I haven't given true debian a fair attempt in a while.  But the last time I tried it they made installing proprietary closed source software painful.  Things like sun's jdk, nvidia drivers, mp3 support was more complicated then I wanted it be.  I didn't like spending that much time setting something as rudimentary as java support.  Base on the very cursory look I gave debian recently, it seems to have added Sun's JDK into the repos, so debian might be worth a closer look if Arch isn't your cup of tea.

Arch Linux:

Pros:

• Very clean, polished, simple distribution.  Everything is configured via the command line initially.  There are gui wrapper tools available, but for the most the CLI is the way to go.
• Optimized for modern architecture.  I believe Ubuntu is compiled for i386 or above.
• Rolling release.  Everything is release as it comes out.  Author makes an announcement for a new version of his software, it gets test, compiled, and packaged usually within a few days of release.
• Creating your own package is incredibly simple in arch.  After working with both .deb and .rpm packages, I find aur packages simplicity so beautiful.  Everything is transparent and you know what is being done by the package.
• Fairly well documented wikis / forums.  Not as large as the Ubuntu community or as good as the gentoo wiki used to be, but the content is usually better the the Ubuntu forums and less noise to filter through.

Cons:

• Lack of packages.  Pacman the main package manager does not have nearly as many packages available as Ubuntu's repos does.  Some packages cannot be installed under Arch because no source is release, or the binary are provided as a.deb and built against different/older version then what arch comes with.
• No easy rollback ability.  If the newer package breaks something, its not a simple task to rollback a package.  There is no support for installing older versions.  I don't believe that apt-get has this ability either though there are a few exceptions where the issue is solved using virtualpackages + multiple packages.
 

Rant:


I have a strong bias against gnome these days.  I find that creating features that are not accessible via the GUI is silly.  Then telling the user that in order to fix or enable this feature you need to run gconf2 and change some obscure flag to some even more obscure hexadecimal number is not a proper design.  Choosing "sensible" defaults and leaving everything out I find condescending if not insulting.  One of the bigger selling points of Linux is about choice.  You have the freedom to customize your environment, choices are not forced upon you.  *cough* mac, windows *cough*.  Actually, even windows provides more versatility to the end user then gnome in some regards.  If nothing else, the registry is better documented then gconf.
Now.. to be fair.. Ubuntu inherits a lot of the work that Debian does.  Ubuntu is horrible at committing back upstream, but you tend to have a ton of packages supported.  So when trying to get closed source programs like skype to install, or chrome.  odds are that there is a version already packaged and available as a .deb for your architecture.

References:

Many of the views expressed here are my own personal opinion, experiences.  Feel free to try both distributions and any other and find your favorite one.

• http://www.archlinux.org
• http://www.ubuntu.org

Legal Threats, Lolz

Google Rants

So.. Random thought spurred on by a conversation on IRC.

Given that so much information is online and google particularly.  Half the responses to most problems, particularly technical ones tend to be to "google" this.   Yes, we've turned a company into a commonly used verb in the english language.

Give the amount of market data they have about any one individual, particularly one that uses a good bit if not all of their services; it would be feasible for them to develop fairly elaborate psych profiles.  Based on your web history, your entire email history for the past few years, pictures, webchat logs, friend circles (gchat).  It would not be inconceivable that patterns of behavior can be extrapolate that would predict certain actions that an individual has yet to take.

Now, I'm not using any particular definition ....but you have a non-corporal entity (a network of cables, hard drives, and switches of information that mostly live in the cloud).  That has the ability to look into the future, and predict world events based on its data pool, If so desired, could easily manipulate the direction of world economics and politics if it had any interest to do so.  A simple omission of a particular topic could help mitigate a problem, or lead the sheep to a new direction which favors a particular party.  (The Chinese version of google proving that google has the ability to filter/prevent certain content from being exposed to a particular subnet/racial/local group).

So, let's re-cap.

We have a

1.  Entity that sees into the future.

2.  Capable of manipulating world events to shape the course of human history.

For the sake of coming to a conclusion and to not having rant about this, I've chosen the definition of a Greek god.

per:  http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Greek+deity a deity is defined as:

"any supernatural being worshiped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a force"

computers, clusters, and cloud computer are supernatural enough that by ancient greek standards they definitely fit the definition.  Even by modern standards, I believe that some of the magic that goes on at google's HQ is close enough to magic to count as super natural.  In an even more simpler terms.  the norm being the natural, Google exceeding expectations makes it above the norm, ergo, supernatural.

worshiped:  A company that like apple has developed enough fan boys that a google product is making people water at the mouth like Pavlov's dogs.  To the point where an early invitation on a google service is starting to sell on ebay for a high premium, when the final product will be free.

Arguably, as presented above.. it could control the entirety of the world, which is personified as a force to be reckoned with.

We have a religious symbol:  

And in all honesty, would something that can cause a respected business man, head of the largest multi-billion dollar corporation to act like this:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc be anything but divine retribution?

I therefore argue that based on all stated facts above, that Google is indeed a deity and should apply for a tax cut and qualify as a church.  I had a friend who used to pray to Sun Micro-systems, I don't see any reason why google should be excluded.

FYI.  This was a complete and total ran of bull shit...which hopefully hasn't hurt your delicate sensibilities before coming this line.  Take it all in good humor.  :)

IPad breakdown