The Lair

Strange, Firefox 2 released last week and I updated my primary workstation. I explicitly performed the upgrades from release candidate onwards and experimented with things. I liked it, overall. My notebook, on the other hand, was kept for an automatic upgrade notification. Only, it never happened.

I checked for updates via the Firefox menu item, infact I check on a daily basis. My notebook Firefox install is still a piddling 1.5.0.7 Only, I am informed that there are no available updates for Firefox. Ugh. So, I downloaded it myself and installed it over the old version. You’re not supposed to do that. But never mind, I did it anyway.

Discovered a few interesting extensions (mostly oldies but goodies) recently. Regular readers to the blog probably know of my ken for Greasemonkey; a means of transforming web pages using JavaScript. I had held off installing Greasemonkey because I wanted to take it slow with new extensions… Greasemonkey has been known to leak memory from time to time and I didn’t want the shiny new Firefox 2.0 to become a bloated memory hungry balloon too soon. So, in the hunt for potential alternatives, I discovered Stylish, yet another transformation extension which has been getting a lot of decent press recently.

Stylish is not exactly the same as Greasemonkey, of course. Their own comparison notes the differences - it’s more complementary than replacement. However it can actually modify the actual Firefox application look and feel - something that the JavaScript based GM can’t do. I can see uses for fiddling with user look and feel, if only to smooth over some minor Firefox UI niggles. Beats hacking around with ChromEdit anyday. Installed it and I like it thus far. I miss the power of a real programming language (yes, JavaScript is a very nice programming language. Bite me) and using styles don’t really compensate… This will, however, do nicely in a pinch.

Speaking of Greasemonkey, I’m wondering if I need to update a script I did some time ago to account for the new changes to theme and so on. I rarely use the GM script these days because I rarely visit the site; but prod me into revamping it if you feel the need.

A couple of interesting Firefox extensions that I’m contemplating using as well - a fresh look at Performancing and an alternative, Deepest Sender. Still; easy does it. I need to figure out the bad extensions and make sure the memory leaks don’t recur. Seem to have Firefox 2.0 down to leaking about 10 megs a day or so; which is acceptable considering it would leak 10 times that in a day in the 1.5 era.

Also got me a mess of RATM and Primal Scream from elric. Woo.

A car, a bus, a train, a plane and then several traffic snarls compounded by pouring rain. But I came home. Home, to a city that becomes nearly uninhabitable after a minor drizzle. But I came home in a deluge, the aircraft descending through the murk of clouds. I came home in the middle of a cloud burst that threatened to make Colombo a lake, with haphazard tramlines of vehicles stalled in a traffic block that seemed to stretch interminably. Of course, there were vehicles trying to maneuver everywhere to escape the inevitable, they were practically climbing onto each other in a futile attempt to escape the the block and as usual, making things that much worse.

Is this a good time to mention that I really really wanted to take a leak and the drip drip of water down the windows of the vehicle wasn’t exactly helping? Well, yeah. At least the copper who stopped us at a checkpoint (always happens) took pity and told us to stay in the vehicle - nice of him considering that he was getting soaked himself.

The next day, traffic in Colombo nearly ground to a halt for a different reason. A random search-every-vehicle operation started in Bambalapitiya. Everyone, including people travelling by bus, were stopped and checked. This made for an exciting Saturday morning if you hated work and wanted to spend the day just staying on the road. For everyone else, well… unlucky. This day was also made notable because elric had to slap me (Yes, really. You can ask him about the sordid details). Actually, the slapping incident may have been Sunday morning instead of Saturday; but that’s just a technicality. I also visited the Inn on the Green. Decent place, terrible choice in EPL team supporters. Also a few heathens because one guy clearly hadn’t heard of the word pansy being used as an insult. It apparently struck a chord, he kept repeating the word at random intervals and shaking his head thereafter. I’m told he’s a writer. Maybe the word will make an appearance in his next body of work…At least we didn’t call his favourite football team a bunch of wankers, he should be happy.

Yeah. He outweighed all three of us by a good few kilos. I don’t know what I was thinking either.

Today, I’ve eaten my weight (seems like) in steak and I’ve had an over tabascoed, under vodka-ed Bloody Mary. The German Restaurant (errm. Now called the Bavarian Barn) still has a lunch time offer which makes it one of the cheapest places to get awesome quantities of really unhealthy (but oh so delicious) artery clogging steaks.

Random trivia: I discovered over the weekend that the Sinha regiment celebrated 50 years of existence at the start of this month.

The US bans Vegemite. I mentioned this in snippets a few days ago, but this story has evolved to the point where not poking fun at it seems … a waste.

There are two types of people. Those who like (adore) vegemite, marmite and promite and other derivatives… and those who think the former category are freaks and refuse to have anything to do with the icky yeasty spread. I belong to the vegemite/marmite fan category. Now consider that I’ve had dodgy customs incidents in my time, but a customs officer asking if I were carrying any banned brown substance? That would lead to odd looks. Wait. How else would you describe vegemite?

What happens when a ban occurs? Why, you get protest websites and a petition drive, of course. The Vegemite ban is no exception.

Now, what will be the consequence for the poor vegemite deprived USians? Vegemite runners? Vegeshine? You can see how banning a sticky, salty brown substance can lead to catastrophe. If you don’t do either of those, an obvious option is to get someone in more gastronomically liberated climes to mail you a care package. Right? Happens all the time. Used to have a flat mate from China whose adoring parents sent him some truly mind boggling (yet very tasty! he used to laugh at my reactions) food in a brown cardboard package clearly marked “medical supplies”. (No, they didn’t mean surprise.) What happens when a suspicious customs sniffer dog is set among the Vegemite care packages? a SWAT team and people in biological MOP suits evacuating the USPS sorting offices because suspicious brown substances were found in a parcel?

First they came for the MickeyDs food and I didn’t speak up; because I don’t really eat too much Mickey Ds food anyway. Then they came for the Vegemite… You can see where this is headed. Pretty soon, the only option will be … (*drumroll*) Soylent Green spread - the taste differs from person to person.

Why is it that the past week of my life has started to increasingly resemble something that happens in a Dilbert comic strip? Aargh. And it’s not like I’m playing Catbert or the PHB either. This is, as someone would say, completely not of the good.

The systems support guy came around to my desk last morning and removed a piece of non-standard equipment that had expired. Yes, I said expired. Electronic equipment in this here department has a clearly stamped expiry date. Specifically, a mains extension (that thingamajig which allows four plugs) was past its use-by date. Now, consider. There are four dedicated floor ports on this side of my cube. My neighbour needs at least three (computer, LCD and desk lamp). I have … three computers under my desk, two LCDs, a pair of speakers and a desk lamp. I also need to plug in a notebook. Four floor ports? Not really going to cut it.

The cubicle gestapo has struck. My expired mains extension has been taken away, so I’m playing musical chairs with the plug points. Actually, I’m less annoyed about this than the initial tone would suggest - I’m apparently getting a larger (6 plugs! zomg!! the riches!) extension later. However, daisy chaining extensions is not allowed, they say. Yeah sure. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. The moral of the story, never ever allow even well meaning IT staff to poke around your desk. It can only lead to the discovery of transgressions.

You know there’s a bubble afoot when the Dow hits 12k. So, what would be more obvious than a spate of rotten projects and burnout articles? Yup, Dare Obasanjo talks about identifying bad projects. An interesting tie-in with that, the AngryAussie on workplace discretion. Incidentally, angryaussie and engtech have now become regular reads since Joel jumped the shark.

I’m still quite entranced by last.fm and its possibility for great evil (or good) with available data feeds. Need to see what comes of it, I suppose.

A couple of blogs that I read are run by people who use a pseudonym. I can certainly understand why they’d want to remain anonymous, the internets being a dangerous place and so on. I do the same obviously (no, my parents didn’t actually name me “drac” although that would have been cool too). I can see a difference in my approach and theirs, if only because I use a pseudonym to prevent embarassing Google powered collisions between my real life and the blogger world. My real name is out there for anyone who knows where to look. However, these people actually go to extreme lengths to edit references to their names (in comments) and take seemingly elaborate precautions to prevent accidental disclosures of their identity.

Unfortunately, they also embed photos from Flickr in their blog. As a thought exercise, I wanted to see if this practice was a good idea or not, in light of their need for anonymity. So, I wanted to see if I could go from a static.flickr.com URL (which is commonly used to link photos uploaded to Flickr) to a Flickr user account. Stalker wannabes, please start your engines.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s often the case (especially for geeks) that going out of the country can result in, how do I put this, a certain lowering of epicurean standards. Lots of reasons for this, but one easily preventable reason is lack of knowledge. There are lots of parallels between programming and cooking; but even if you set aside the really bad jokes about spaghetti code, it seems to follow that the two disciplines are not completely unrelated. As evidence, let me offer you Cooking for Engineers. Anyone can cook. Seriously. Basic recipes are all that’s necessary. As also mentioned in the comments on that linked post, curry paste and bottles and bottles of exotic cooking sauces don’t harm any, either.

Wait. That was the trippy happy, peer through rose coloured glasses and cheer everyone up version.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading The Scheme Book and a slightly dog eared Military Maxims of Napoleon which I had lying around. Both completely reasonable things to be reading, given what I’m doing next week - but somewhat strange companions. Now, Machiavelli and the Scheme book? That sounds vaguely plausible.

By the way, no I am not planning on taking over continental Europe, the reading of military maxims has a far more prosaic explanation.

In other news, IceWeasel has been announced. One of those unfortunate things where you agree (in principle) with both sides of the case (as written here) but don’t really like the outcome. Although I have to admit that it’s a bit disingenuous to say that people will be confused by the name change. If you can’t handle the confusion of “Iceweasel == Firefox” in all but icons and names; the Debian installer would probably have been a traumatic experience (</rimshot>).

And since I can’t stop raving about it, my Firefox 2.0 has 33 tabs open and consumes a reasonable 147mb of RAM. Reasonable, I say because this browser instance has been up and running since Friday night without a restart. The Firefox of old would be around 400mb by now. Next week, I intend finding out if Greasemonkey contributed to the memory leaks. I’m taking this one extension at a time.

Ok, so I’m a bad person. Remember I said I watched Lost Season 3 Episode 1 on Youtube yesterday? Well, not only did I do this (and gloat and rub my hands together and say “yessssssss, my precioussssssss” entirely too much) but I also inflicted Ed with the curse of the “future episode”. While watching Lost myself, I pasted each and every Youtube link into Ed’s GTalk window.

See, the problem is that Ed hasn’t watched Season 1 or Season 2 yet. He has yet to experience the gorgeous mind-fuck that is polar bears, predator (ala Michael Crichton) style dust devils, mysterious hatches that lead to bunkers with computing equipment that is decidedly non-standard, the Others, lots of attractive people on an island and all the rest of those unresolved mysteries that make Lost so intriguing. Oh, wait. Ed. Sorry, that was a SPOILER WARNING. *grin*. So, now he’s understandably aggrieved at being given the opportunity to watch the first episode of the third season before he gets himself the DVDs for the earlier seasons.

My point (made to both Ed and sage) is that Ed knows about as much as we do about Lost at this point, so it’s not going to make a difference. And hey, this is a sneak peek. Next week, Gootube could take down all those videos. Then what?

In a somewhat related vein, What currently illegal thing do you personally really want to be free to do?. Would you rather watch episodes of TV serials which haven’t screened in your neck of the woods yet? Or download copyright protected media? Actually, if you do break existing copyright law (or any other law) already and haven’t suffered the consequences; does legalization have any benefit on you at all? If someone makes jaywalking legal, would you stop doing it? Do it more often? The reason I ask is that I tried coming up with a list of things and reviewing it at the end made me feel like I was some sort of anarchist. When I had previously considered myself to be reasonably law abiding, mind you.

And on yet another related note, is someone’s attraction for current runway models really a repressed attraction for adolescent boys? If … umm… bonking adolescent boys is your thing (as it was for centuries) is there a case for making it legal? (I personally hope not, but never mind me).

Two more quick snippets, I’ve just been offered a chance to demonstrate Scheme to the undergrads and I’ve provisionally accepted. I only had a fleeting chance to get into it during my final year (UK degree, thus an unhealthy Prolog obsession was manifest in course materials at the time). And Firefox 2.0 appears to have solved some of the pressing memory leak problems - I closed a tab and had the never-before-seen picture of Firefox’s memory footprint actually decreasing by a couple of megs. Winnar!

It’s been a while since I remember having some substantial free time. Being immersed in the nitty gritty of a fledgeling company can do this to your spare time. Small wonder that ten things I hate about crunch time at a startup struck a chord. For extra points, the first six comments are both hilarious and sadly true.

So last week, due to incidents both within and outside my control, I decided to step back and smell the daisies, as it were.

This week, I’m still inhaling the fresh scent of daisies while doing the job I signed up to do and life has gotten a whole lot less stressful. Much to my amazement and horror (no, not really), I actually had time to tinker with the new Firefox. Yup, didn’t run the alphas, the preview releases or anything. The first new Firefox I’m running is 2.0 RC2. For a person who liked to roll their own Firefox and had a finely tuned mozconfig going, this is a sad sad state of affairs.

So, the newness. To be perfectly fair, my persistent memory leak problems with the 1.5 series didn’t completely go away despite assiduous leak monitoring and swapping out bad extensions for “better” ones. So, what I really wanted with this Firefox was a fresh start - a way to get rid of the 600+ mb bloat that would build up after a few days of continuous running. My first try at a solution: only four extensions installed thus far. I’ve even dispensed with Greasemonkey although the user scripts that I wrote may drive me back eventually. I like the new Firefox look, overall. I do not like the close button on each tab; but I’m not going to risk a new extension just to get rid of it. The network connections button has now changed location; in fact the whole preference UI has been revamped. No more SessionSaver or TMP for me; the builtin session saver functionality seems to work - and I am trying to trim down the extensions anyway. So what if the context menu seems a bit crowded? I can get used to that.

The theme installation seems rather braindead to me, but then I usually run the default theme … installed Blue Orbit just to try it out. Wanted me to restart Firefox (ok, fair enough), but didn’t switch to the new theme on startup. Years (yes, really) of Smart Bookmarks vanished because I used a brand new profile for the new Firefox. Needed an import to get that stuff in. Overall, this update seems a bit lighter and faster but that’s probably because I had 30+ tabs open on my old, creaky Firefox 1.5.0.7 and I still have a piddling 8 open on this. Give it time, give it time. I’ll drag it down from this blazingly fast response to a more tolerable crawl in due time. The huge wins in the user interface, however, were the scrolling tab bar (it actually works now? Or was it just that TMP was interfering with it before?) and the list of available tabs. There is also an intriguing feature that allows use of cursor keys on any page for navigation; but it behaves weirdly on links and artifacts on a page, so I disabled it after a few hours.

In other news, I happily amused myself by watching the entire first episode of Lost season 3 on Youtube. In 10 minute chunks. Yes, it’s out there folks. I wonder how much longer this happy state of affairs will last, given that Youtube is going to become GooTube (GTube? Yougle? Youtoogle?) - but tubing a random TV episode is a much less problematic act than attempting to torrent it. Yes, by gawd, it was good. And I’m not referring to the guilty pleasure of watching an episode months before it reaches the UK. In case you didn’t realize, this is one of a handful of instances where I’ve actually bothered to watch an episode of anything before it was screened on terrestrial TV; hence the novelty and my wide-eyed wonder.

Now, I just need to find some time to write required documents; work on the sadly neglected Ach a bit and a few other random odds and ends and my work life balance will be in harmony once again. At least till my supervisor comes calling *grin*

Update: Who needs an extension? browser.tabs.closeButtons rids me of those troublesome close buttons. Sanity prevails.

Mmmm… ham. Mmmmm. eggs. No, wait. That’s not what I wanted to say.

Someone wanted a breakfast of ham and eggs. Eggsciting! Cholesterol laden! But never mind. Some hypothetical being needed sustenance and the chicken and pig were talking about their contributions to this repast. [Yes, dear reader : this is an Aesop’s Fable where animals like … talk and stuff. Get over it. Reality sucks anyway]

Chicken : Obviously, I am the primary contributor here. I’ve given 3 of my best (nest) eggs to this breakfast. *cluck cluck* to you, you dirty sow.
Pig : *Oink* You may be involved, dear chicken; but I am committed.*

Amazing how many chickens make noise, regardless.

*No animals were harmed during the making of this blog post. But mmmmm… ham.

There is an accusation (vile and completely unfounded!!!oneone) written elsewhere that postgraduate students are unsociable. Clearly, this isn’t true. So untrue, in fact that I have my own little anecdote to support my case. Yesterday, we had a power failure. Quite unusual, it was only the second time that there had been any sort of power cut and the first time it happened during the day. In context, the last time there was a power failure was when lightening struck somewhere on campus and knocked down the a tree or something. So, middle of the day : one minute we’re staring at monitors and the next moment everything inside the department is plunged into twilight hues. This wasn’t some piddly little brown out, it was a do-not-pass-go, stop-the-electronic-clocks power failure. The servers were also shut down to prevent a UPS disaster, so we basically lost all our network capability at the same time.

A few minutes later, deprived of the comforting glow of LCDs and the ambient heat of number crunching CPUs, people started streaming out of their cubicles and offices. A few minutes of waiting around and it seemed obvious that the power wasn’t coming back on any time soon. So people started going around chatting. I actually chatted with people I hadn’t had a chance to speak to socially for … months. People that I wave at each morning and say hello to; but never get around to carrying out a conversation with … people like Robbo downstairs and Matt across the open plan area… those people. It was fun. The only other time in the year where we actually have a conversation like this is during the annual fire drill; always scheduled for the depths of winter when you must either speak or have a chilly arctic breeze freeze your cheeks into a mini-ice slab.

Unsociable? Not us. We just prefer IM to conversation. It’s by far more efficient to IM multiple people than speak to just one, clearly.

In other news, I watched “Diary of a mail order bride” last night. Nope, not like Memoirs of a Geisha at all, this was Channel 4’s documentary on (wait for it) mail order brides. The BBC runs a feature called 10 things we didn’t know last week on weekends. My entries for this week include the following:

• Mailorder bride sites are not always scams.
• Russia has a gender numbers disparity amounting to an excess of 10.5 million females… A bit of checking with the factbook appears to bear this factoid out.
• The “conversion rate” for successful matches was said to be between 5 and 7%. That’s about the same return as spammers and significantly better than the average online advertising campaign.
• There are actually people out there (if the documentary is to be believed) who’d make a declaration like “There are no suitable women in Texas, St. Petersburg is the place for me to find a wife” and expect to find women in Russia. Despite being somewhat ill prepared for the different environment and not knowing anything about the place or its people.

I don’t think I’m making a moral statement about the whole business of mailorder bride websites (questionable though the practice might be), but some of the stuff in that documentary was quite disturbing to me at some level. Perhaps it was the (as I perceived it) thin veneer of bravado masking the desperation and loneliness?

I’ve sold out. I’ve subscribed to yet another social software phenomenon - last.fm. Yup, I’m only about two years behind the rest of the planet but never mind. It’s taken me that long to get over my internal cringing at the thought of sending my musical tastes over the wires to be recorded on a webpage. It took me a while to get used to publicly bookmarking pages, then someone invited me into Orkut and then a host of other social networks opened up. But still …

All I need now is to get into MySpace and my descent into the abyss of attention whoring will be complete. Wait, maybe I need to get into Facebook too. Perhaps I’ll actually answer persistent mails to get into Hi-5. Ugh.

In other news, it looks like more people are delving into the messy world of systems administration besides myself. Funny thing, running servers. Take for example, the simple lojack solution of changing every service (except the webserver) from the default port into something obscure. The moment I did this with the proxies, we dropped unauthorized traffic (that was being blocked anyway) by 20%. A whole fifth of traffic aimed at our proxies was stuff that shouldn’t be there. There were even clueless denizens from various parts of the planet who’d been trying to connect their Yahoo Messenger for weeks till I slapped a few iptables rules on their IPs. Change the ports and they all went away. Makes me think I should have done it when I set things up instead of waiting so long.

And look you, Slothy has landed in Cardiff. No news on his attempts to chat up the local sheep yet though, but I guess he’s still uh.. feeling his way around.