Humor, Brasero Style

I was burning a backup DVD this morning on Ubuntu 8.04LTS using Brasero 0.7.1, and, as I added files to my project, got the oft seen 3.10GB follows 3.9GB error. I always thought something closer to 4 than 3.10 would follow 3.9, but whatever. Then I burned the backup disk. The drive slid open after burning, as usual, and so I closed it for the verification. Except, instead of verifying, an alert popped up saying that Brasero was unable to eject the disk, and so it then didn't attempt the verification. Did I miss something? When the the tray slides out, isn't that ejecting the disk? This was a backup, and so verification is critical. Fortunately there's diff. It's the old tools that work, though wc has been messed up because somebody decided it should adapt to character sets rather than just count bytes, which I guess is the right choice, but breaks it on some installations. I wrote my own wc in response, and it actually runs without warning and error messages. Other Brasero glitches are that, for data disk projects, it defaults to burning a DVD, but it also defaults to a drive that doesn't burn DVDs. Dumb. This could be Windows software.

LaTeX to XML

There's a LaTeX to XML converter called Tralics which is used by the folks at Inria. Expect a posting on experiences with Tralics real soon now.

Speaking of False Positives, Sales, Catching Terrorists

Go Figure

BBC has a columnist, Michael Blastland, with an excellent (based on a small sample) column entitled Go Figure: Different ways of seeing stats. A few pieces in particular that I'll recommend are

• The problem with junk stats? It's you which discusses the problem with self-report in survey data.
• A scanner to detect terrorists which discusses the problem of false positives in the context of detecting terrorists. A number of people have pointed this problem in a number of contexts, but policy makers and reporters, in particular, just don't get it. Companies selling face recognition systems and data mining software for detecting terrorists probably do get it, but sell the government junk nonetheless.
• Just what is poor? explains how the poverty line is set.

Good reading. It appears to be published every two weeks, and there's an RSS feed.

Yahoo Video

A friend suggested I check out a web tool called pipes (they're not going to trademark that name are they? That'd be like trademarking word, or office, or windows, or some other common day-to-day term.

Anyhow, I watched a video showing how to use the tool. The video was boring and not very informative. Or maybe it was informative. Hard to tell. The video site, video.yahoo.com, is very distracting. There's this video playing, but there's also text scrolling around in two places competing for attention. So whenever another part of the screen changes, the eye is drawn to the other place. What's happening in the video I was watching? Don't know--I got distracted. Should I go back and watch the video again? Well, if they really cared they would have hosted it at a more competent video site.

Or maybe not, since the pipes site itself is hosted at yahoo: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Chrome: Darn the Luck

It looks like my favorite feature of the Linux version of Chrome, the lack of Flash support, is going the way of the dodo: http://h3g3m0n.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/linux-chrome-flash-ext/ It's nice to have a browser that doesn't support Flash simply because so many web sites use it for advertising content. Perhaps advertising is the predominant use of Flash.

Fixing a Broken Link

In November I posted about my last mile, and the entry included the Xohm logo. But I linked to it rather than grabbing my own. And the link rotted. So, I've just grabbed my own and will update the broken link in the old post.

gFTP Much Nicer than Nautilus for sftp

Gnome ships with GUI sftp support built into nautilus, but it's not ideal. I was living with it, and do prefer it over the command line version (I'm getting lazy in my old age) but recently have been evaluating xfce as an environment. This is a whole different story, but I'd like to find a less bloated, less buggy environment than Gnome. Xfce doesn't seem to ship with a GUI sftp client, which is totally fine--why ship software that many users won't use?

Looking around, I found gFTP. So far, it seems gFTP is as good as nautilus in every respect. A major difference, however, is that when transferring files to and fro, gFTP maintains modification times. This way, if I have two copies of the same file in two (or more) places, they all have the same modification time. Seems pretty basic and pretty obvious--and very important--but nautilus gets it wrong.

Is my preference for a GUI sftp client really a sign of laziness? I don't think so. In many cases command line tools are quicker and easier, but when maintaining web directory trees it's nice to be able to quickly glance at two directories and see if their contents match. gFTP does have one quirk that's inconvenient in this regard, however, in that it sorts files and directories differently. IMHO, this is another sign of Linux developers not understanding Unix: a directory is, like a file, a link in a directory, darn it, so sort it like other links.

Image Editing

I've been a bit frustrated (so, what else is new?) by image manipulation software on Ubuntu. The GIMP makes even the simplest operations complicated. Imagemagick[sic] is sufficiently buggy as to occasionally be useless, though it usually works fine for simple things. I installed a KDE package on my work machine, but of course that comes with an amazing amount of baggage that stays resident after the program terminates. What's a guy to do? Grin and bear the GIMP? I don't think so. As a partial solution, I've installed a version of LView Pro that I registered (and paid for) in 1996 and used to use on Win95 and NT4. WINE certainly has improved in recent years. LView might be sufficient, except it doesn't deal with PNG or EPS images. Neither of these is a surprise: Windows has never had the Postscript support Unix folks assume, and whether PNG was around 13 years ago or not, I'd never heard of it. Still, the LView guys did a nice job with this program. My immediate plan is to use ImageMagick to convert among file formats and, whenever ImageMagick barfs on an image, use LView for the actual editing. We'll see how that goes...

To Use Blackboard is to Hate Blackboard

It may be that Blackboard isn't so bad from the student side, but it's terrible from the faculty side. This afternoon I was trying to create a quiz and Blackboard locked up before I was halfway done. A couple days ago the same thing happened to me inside the grade center. BTW, who thought the new grade center would be an improvement over the old gradebook? It's harder to use, and very cumbersome. Almost anything a faculty member does causes a page reload while some slow script somewhere runs. Lovely.

Chrome on Ubuntu

I've started using Chrome on one of my Ubuntu Linux machines, and kinda like it. It's fast, and pointing it at a PeopleSoft SA page doesn't lobotomize it (Firefox 3 slows to a crawl when SA is visited and remains at a snail's pace until the browser is closed--generally a mercy killing). A few minuses to date:

1. The formatting on some of the PeopleSoft SA pages is sufficiently messed up as to be unreadable. It's not as though they were all that readable to begin with, though.
2. It doesn't seem aware of my Flash installation, which may be a simple configuration issue.
3. I can't right-click on an image and ask it to never load images from that particular server ever again. Thus I see a lot of ads I've trained Firefox to not fetch.

The Bombe: Prelude to Modern Cryptanalysis

There is a small mistake in the NSA publication The Bombe: Prelude to Modern Cryptanalysis available at the National Cryptologic Museum at Ft. Meade. The bibliography lists Isadore Jacob "Jack" Good as J.I. Good rather than I.J. Good. Anyone active in the Va. Tech Philosophy Club circa 1980 knows the correct ordering of the initials. Another error in the same publication has been noted in Cryptologia.

Web Pages by People Who Don't Understand Algorithms

I've used the Online Etymology Dictionary a few times and basically like it. But it's used to look up words. Words have spellings. To browse, picking the first letter, then the second, then the third, etc. would make the most sense. Did I mention that words have spellings? This would be easily implemented as a trie. Instead, we're expected to pick the first letter, and then use a number, like page 23 of the letters starting with 'b'. Two explanations: (1) whoever designed the page didn't care; (2) whoever designed the page didn't have a software background, and so never thought to use a trie.

Improving Usability of myUMBC Continued

In February I talked a bit about improving myUMBC usability. I've gone a bit farther, by partially disabling the spotlight "feature." Here's my up-to-date UMBC-specific karma blocker code:

# Block myUMBC 404 not found chipmunk
[group]
score=10
rule=$url$='dramatic_chipmunk.flv'

# Block UMBC Alerts
[group]
score=10
rule=$url=='https://my.umbc.edu/modules/dashboard/images/alert_bubble.png'

# Block myUMBC Rotating Banner
[group]
score=10
rule=$url^='https://my.umbc.edu/shared/modules/spotlight/'

# Block myUMBC Rotating Banner
[group]
score=10
rule=$url^='https://my.umbc.edu/modules/spotlight/'

This is for the Firefox Karma Blocker add-on, which works nicely.

Heard on Car Talk

Congressmen should wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers so that constituents can see their corporate sponsorships.