I finally got around to installing my own wireless router on my FIOS network, a Linksys e2100L with dd-wrt installed on it. After the router is setup (that's beyond the scope of this post) there are 2 tricks to make this work. First, Verizon FIOS gives out really long dhcp leases, and doesn't want to give them up. So you need to not only clone the MAC address for your router, but actually set it to the ip addresses that your old router was given. I'm told that after about 2 weeks you'll be able to start using DHCP again, but you can't for the switch over. Secondly, you have to set the upstream MTU. Presumably Verizon is doing some VLAN tagging, which would explain why your IP addresses can jump all over the place after a major network change on their side. 1496 should be a safe value, and it looked like it worked, but I left mine down at 1450, for no good reason other than superstition. This was the trick I was missing before, and since I've been dealing with bizarre networking issues at work recently the idea was still floating around in my brain. It's now working, and my port forwarding is setup enough that I can do any fixes I need remotely via vpn.

I didn't get home last night until 10:30, and sleep didn't find me until after 1am. All of this was because of a talk I gave at the Poughkeepsie ACM on my experience with Android Development with the Where is Io application. Why the ACM, and not the LUG? That question got asked at dinner, as the ACM regulars are well aware that I run MHVLUG. There were a few reasons. The first of which is that we did an Android talk in May, and while my talk was substantially different, the concept would feel stale to me. We've got a 2 year no repeat policy on topics, which I think works out quite well. But I had this quite good talk that I really did want to do locally and not just for the folks in Harrisburg. But something else happened over the course of the fall, which got me more excited about this talk. It occurred to me that mixing things up a little is always a good thing. MHVLUG is my familiar turf, and at this point I know the audience really well, so it's less of a lecture and more of a hangout with friends for me. I am definitely in my comfort zone there. ACM is new faces, new audience. I had spoken there previously, and while I knew a couple folks that come to LUG meetings are ACM regulars, it promised to be a mostly fresh crowd. Growth for me, and a chance to generate a bit of crossover between the groups. I advertised the talk to the LUG on the off chance that we'd get a few folks to come out. The ACM does dinner first, meeting second (reverse of MHVLUG). I happened to show up at the Palace just as Ben and Tim (2 of the other MHVLUG officers) did. As we walked in we found the ACM table which was 7 folks, with an open spot for me.  At +3 we kind of broke that assumption so wedged another table over.  It turned out that wasn't the last table addition we'd need. By the time food was being ordered there were about 16 people at dinner. Bob Cotton, ACM president, turned to me at one point saying this was the most people they'd had in a while. Gulp. At that point I realized an expectation was set, if no where else than in my head. This was going to be more of a draw than the ACM meetings typically got, which meant I felt an extra burden to not be wasting anyone's time. I knew the talk didn't suck, I'd given it before, and I'd refined it again, but live performance is what it is, and until you get swinging you never know. Dinner ran late, which means we got to Marist late, and while I was expecting a few other faces than at dinner, people who said they'd be there, I wasn't entirely expecting 20 more faces. Neither were they. There was a chair scramble while I set up. The talk went very well, one of my better performances. It clocked in at about 50 minutes, which seems to be my new norm, open questions for 30 minutes following, with stragglers there for another 40 to ask more questions. It had been one of the biggest draws in a while, and when people want to keep discussing the topic for a full hour after you ceded the floor, you know you stuck the landing. I still get quite an adrenaline rush after a solid presentation like that, which led to the whole issue in falling asleep. Bill Collier told me at the end of the evening I'd be welcomed back to speak any time, and I'll definitely take him up on that.

Over the past few weeks I've been redoing the Mid Hudson Astronomical Association website.  It looks like this: Yes, it's dark, but that's when astronomy happens.  The site is built on Drupal, as I've gotten some experience there recently doing sites for the Poughkeepsie Farm Project and MHVLUG.  For people that want to know more about the tech side, I'll be giving a talk in January at MHVLUG. I did come across one really odd thing in working on the three boxes (I was calling them chicklets, but they look less like that with content in them). Round corners in CSS are awesome (thank you w3c). IE9, at least the version in Adobe Browser labs, still doesn't support it (really Microsoft? I thought you were getting down with the standards). While a TD can have a round background, it's border is always square (I almost understand why, but it definitely limits what you can do. It also took me a while to realize this was happening as the round is subtle enough on the front page). Div height 100% doesn't work inside a TD (it seems like it should, but no one implemented it that way). So the only way to get 3 columns that correctly degrade to 2 columns (50% of screen each) when one is missing (there will not always be a special event), have round borders, and be the same height is.... jquery. While on the one hand, it seems crazy, on the other hand, yay for jquery. You can view the source on the website to see how I did it.

This is an old joke, but increasingly one that people haven't seen.  Given that I stuck a vi/emacs question at the end of the mhvlug survey, I thought it would be worth reposting for posterity.  The original version is here.

When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time. Ed, man!  !man ed

ED(1)               Unix Programmer's Manual                ED(1)

NAME
     ed - text editor

SYNOPSIS
     ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
     Ed is the standard text editor.

---

Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED! “Ed is the standard text editor.” And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:

-rwxr-xr-x  1 root          24 Oct 29  1929 /bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t  4 root     1310720 Jan  1  1970 /usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  5.89824e37 Oct 22  1990 /usr/bin/emacs

Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!! “Ed is the standard text editor.” Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:

golem$ ed

?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?

---

Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity. “Ed is the standard text editor.” Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all. ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!! When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a “viitor”. Not a “emacsitor”. Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!! TEXT EDITOR. When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their “edlin” on a Unix standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard. Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED “VISUAL” EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!! ?

A lot of people are upset about the TSA scanners, and I'm with them. It's ridiculous how burdensome flying is becoming for no appreciable safety increase. The most dangerous part of flying is driving to the airport. We surely aren't spending $8b to make that safer. Unfortunately, a big part of the rallying cry is around "be afraid of the x-rays". I was surprised how many of my tech friends got wrapped up in this one, even though the available data suggests otherwise. The FDA has a pretty thorough write up about the process and testing for the scanners. I do get that people, in general, aren't interested in facts, but I was hoping that in a more educated and technical audience that wouldn't be as true. Running around saying "be afraid of x-rays" is the same kind of scare mongering as the TSA is using to put all these ridiculous enhanced security measures in place. Fighting fear with fear just generate hysteria and stampedes, and drowns out all the rational conversation, the one that shows just how ineffective and invasive these scanners are.

It's an oldie but goodie, and good as a mantra when things like Galileowaswrong.com pop up on the internet (no, I'm not making that a hot link, that level of ignorance shouldn't get the google rankings). If after 400 years there are still groups that refute centuries of evidence, it is little wonder that solid scientific findings of the last 50 years still have deniers and opponents.  Given a couple more centuries, most will come around, and the rest, well, PT Barnum had a few things to say about them.

The default fonts for git gui (aka gitk) in Ubuntu are down right horrible.  Even Ubuntu 10.04 defaults to tk8.4, which doesn't support font smoothing.  Fortunately there is a simple way to fix this and make a whole bunch of applications look prettier all at once.

sudo update-alternatives --config wish

There are 3 choices for the alternative wish (providing /usr/bin/wish). Selection    Path                   Priority   Status

* 0            /usr/bin/wish-default   10000     auto mode 1            /usr/bin/wish-default   10000     manual mode 2            /usr/bin/wish8.4        841       manual mode 3            /usr/bin/wish8.5        840       manual mode

Then type '3' and hit enter.  Now you'll be using tk8.5 by default, and miracle of miracles your eyes won't be scarred by jagged ugly fonts in gitk anymore.

Today I found myself in a requirements database where a small group of people had come up with a priority scheme composed of three levels: Very Important, Must Do, and Critical. And I was stumped: what is the relative priority of these terms?  I, as it turns out, wasn't the only one confused by this.  I did appear to be the first one outside of the core group to raise my hand and ask the question.  (I have the answer, but I'll leave it as a guessing game in the comments for people). User Experience (UX) is important on many levels, some times surprising ones.  Reusing words that people think they understand in ways they don't causes a lot of confusion and adds a lot of confusion (and thus waste) to systems.  I did propose that priority words were annotated with a number, so those outside the core could get a handle on what's going on, which was a well received comment, and will go into the next version of this tool.

The Android tablet space that is starting to heat up is all running after Apple's iPad at the moment.  It's got a nice form factor and a nice screen, but it's entirely unsuitable for a whole set of applications that I care about for one simple reason: LCDs give off blue light. Blue light is really the enemy of both sleep and dark.  I mostly care about the dark part, because my interest is for Astronomy.  It takes at least 20 minutes for your eyes to really dark adapt when you go outside.  If you want to see other Galaxies from your back yard, dark adaption is really important.  We call them "faint fuzzies" for a reason.  Last month at our astronomy party someone brought an iPad with some astronomy application to let them know what to look at with their telescope.  After 30 minutes of it blinding them, the finally turned it off and started asking some of the rest of the folks there what they should be looking at, and where to find it. But, an eink tablet would be great.  You could use just enough red light to see what's going on, and be able to zoom in to your charts.  There are 2 things that come close right now, the nook and the kindle, but neither would work without a lot of effort.  To do your own apps on the nook you have to hack the thing, and you've still got this pesky lcd you'd need to put a filter over.  The kindle is a physically better device for this, but it's not android, so it's another sdk to learn, and they have all manner of restrictions because the user doesn't pay for their data usage.  As far as I can tell it would be too restrictive for this. The ideal device would be something like the kindle dx, have a gps, and be based on Android.  This device doesn't exist, but heres to hoping that someone makes one eventually.

The last Where is Io release was a few weeks ago.  That's because I've been working through a new chunk of math that I'll need for a few new features.  One of the things I needed was rise and set times for Jupiter and the Sun, which quickly turned into all the planets (because it's basically no additional work to fill it in for everything else). The application is evolving in it's own direction into a more general solar system almanac, which makes me wonder if a new name is going to be in order on the next release (probably called 2.0 because of so many changes).  Name suggestions are welcomed.