Alice Lee

Kitchen Phone

2007-07-18T05:35:19Z

On order, coming slowly from Germany.

Wall mounted; should fit in well with the rest of the kitchen. All hail eBay.

Save A Tree & Such

2007-06-21T23:55:59Z

Get off the credit card offer mailing lists (note: the only fields required are name and address) or call 1-888-5OPT-OUT

Pay the DMA a buck to get off junk mail lists.

It's a little frustrating that Green Dimes offers what appears to be nothing more than resending your info to the DMA, but charges a premium for it. Maybe I am missing something and they do something useful. NAI has a handy cookie opt-out form if you do not use other cookie management tools. And there's a link to opt out of double click in particular.

Phone calls: there's the Do Not Call registry. Reminder: Congress wrote themselves an exemption. If you wish to avoid robocalls each November ("Yes, I voted five hours ago and have had 17 calls since! Stop it!") there is a very simple tactic. Don't fill in your phone number on your driver's license form. It is not required and that's the data source for most campaigns.

Military recruiting phone calls: High schools are now obligated to turn over information about students (name, address, phone number) to make it easier to recruit. Some families report weekly calls and high pressure tactics. Parents (and students over 18) can opt out by asking their schools not to send contact information to recruiters.

What else am I missing?

[Edit: Wow. Sorry. Looks like I accidentally flipped to rich text mode, then back to HTML like God intended, and that went... poorly.]

Spot the Martian

2007-06-04T21:31:45Z

There are some very pretty images from Mars.

Life is Too Short

2007-05-31T23:42:51Z

to debug someone else's perl code

Dear Authors of Eclipse,

2007-05-18T21:41:40Z

Thank you. My early experiences with IDEs were... unpleasant. Vince's fear that Pascal Genie was a DoD weapons project was far off the mark, but I do grant that Genie did induce violence. And I've logged a few hours documenting half-baked IDEs. I've seen the sausage in the making. I have few hopes.

Today when I pasted a for loop with an index i into a different for loop, also with an index i, Eclipse very politely let me know perhaps this was not going to end well.

There's a good half an hour of teeth gnashing avoided. It is so nice to have tools that Don't Suck.

Sometimes little things count a lot. From 0 to i. And j.

(Anyone reading this who isn't friended? Lemme know.)

My New Hero

2007-05-10T16:27:15Z

Check out this interview with Steve Boyett, better known as djsteveboy of podrunner fame.

He also answers email. Quickly. I am now satisfied that his podcasts are legal, ethical, and non-fattening. He's done some tremendously cool to make things work in this crazy area where there is no case law.

Also, from his website:

dj steveboy @ Flavasauce, San Francisco
I'll be spinning my first SF gig at Flavasauce @ Wish Bar on Friday May 11. This looks like a great night! Wish Bar, 1539 Folsom St., San Francisco, CA. Hope to see some of y'all there!

ooOooh.

Signs of Sanity

2007-05-02T06:26:04Z

The Senate Intelligence Committee is doing much better now than the meeting I sat in on last year. Basically: no, you cannot have more domestic surveillance tools until yinz show you're not messing up what you already have. Step away from the cookie jar.

Senator Wyden seems like one of the good guys.

emacs pinky

2007-04-22T22:15:47Z

gotta love the shooting pains up to my left elbow.

i'm 53% done with my current pass through the xml files i need to parse. i would be very happy if my current pass is also my last pass. well. where "happy" means "less miserable."

(heh, sometimes music lines up to whatever i'm posting about all too well.)

Shooting Spree

2007-04-16T20:35:07Z

32 students & faculty are reported dead at VA Tech today.

Note the article contains things like "a woman who answered the phone..." as a source. It sounds like the reporter just randomly dialed numbers to get quotations. That's pretty nauseating behavior. You have a bunch of people under lock down, in fear for their lives, aware they probably know several people who were killed and injured. Maybe they're trying to reassure loved ones that they're ok. Maybe they're trying to get information as cell phones and websites are intermittently available. Gee, I know, let's call 'em up at random and see who will talk! How ambitious do you have to be to put aside any sense of humanity and make those calls?

I thought Sand Brothers was slimy but their folks can't hold a candle to journalists. Huh, Sand Brothers doesn't show up in Google for anything but historical stuff. Did they go under?

Week's Links

2007-04-08T21:59:01Z

It is so completely April. I am behind on everything and dooooomed. I have no idea how I am going to get through this coming week let alone the full month. If this month were a hill, I'd get off and walk my bike. If this month were a river, I'd head to shore and carry my kayak overland. If this month were next December, I'd be lucky to have so little stress heading in to quals. :-( Aiigh.

Closing out tabs in Firefox to cut down on visual / mental clutter. Look, stuff:

Joshua Bell v. rush hour, which is actually entitled "Pearls Before Breakfast," is interesting on many different levels. If you have five minutes go read this. Really.
Henry Blodget writes about ISPs selling click stream data.
WaPo piece touches on the mess created by the specially designated nationals list of people with whom it is illegal to do business.
Kerr's Four Models of Fourth Amendment Protections.
Professor Solove is an author on the concurring opinions blog (mostly privacy law issues, some econ, a smattering of general interest).
The University of Washington has a great collection on Internet analysis.
Sample Java code for parsing XML and the Document Builder class.
Nice examples for SED.
The few FTC actions for violating privacy policies.
A few interesting bookcases: modular & curved, which has the advantage of many configurations. Then there's a corner piece, which might look really interesting depending on the paint colors behind it. It's hard to beat glow in the dark paint.

Time for another short-term to do list.

Simple Joys Have a Simple Voice

2007-04-06T17:16:40Z

Last night we had key lime pie for dinner (one of the perqs of being a grown up) and then my husband got his Atari set up. It was about 1 am and we had a lot more to do but we took a short break. We played Pong first. Had to. Then Yar's Revenge and Space Invaders and Hangman and a bunch of other stuff and CENTIPEDE. Whoo!

It was funny how much I remembered. I never had an Atari, but my friend Jennifer did. (She had all the toys. Later in life I realized this had to do with her family being really screwed up but at the time it was unmitigated goodness. For me, at least.) Pong sounds just like I remembered. I knew there had to be a two-player version of Space Invaders because as soon as it came on the screen I knew there was a missing ship, and the exact shade of orange, and that it is easy to forget which one you control after you swap sides on the screen. In 50 years when we are all in nursing homes drooling on ourselves, all they will have to do is play the sound for when the aliens are moving really fast and just about to land. All the geeks will perk right up. You can hear it in your head right now, right?

The joy sticks are designed to create RSIs in under ten minutes. In some ways this is good because it means I will not spend research time playing centipede. I will not spend research time playing centipede. I will not spend research time playing centipede.

Anyway: the Atari is now disassembled again. The house is full of sawdust. Progress tastes gritty.

Things I'll Want to Find Again

2007-04-04T07:26:45Z

Pertenent Art has a collection of privacy-related videos and cartoons.

Data!

2007-04-01T06:10:29Z

Shiny happy data.
Pretty data.
So soft.
Pet the data.
We like the happy data.

I could actually get a quarter of this paper done tomorrow. It's only a year late.

And now, I sleep.

The Right Tool for the Job Redux

2007-04-01T00:13:50Z

I am taking the markers to my next exam. I am astonished at how much color coding things helps me to keep it all straight.

The code that kept me up until 5 am does not work. I replaced it wholesale with a new approach that did work. I have a little more to go from that to actual results, but now it is just cranking through it: there are no mysteries left. I have done most parts of this before and actually have a good grasp of what I am doing from here forward. Yay.

Debugging is always so mixed for me. Yay! + Duh! = can I have those hours (days) of my life back now, please?

The Right Tool for the Job

2007-03-31T05:02:39Z

I wrote some code that had some crashing bugs. So I fixed the bugs. And then there were new ones. So I fixed those. And now... now I am down to logic errors. Once again this is the sort of thing where anyone reading here would look, laugh, fix it and be done. But me? I am gnashing my teeth.

It's a few if loops in a while loop, really, how hard can this possibly be. A few arrays. Nothing hard. And yet, my output from my test file is really not right. So I figure it's time to trace it all down by hand, look at what's going on, yadda yadda yadda. And I just rebel a little each time. Such a pain to have to think it all through and see what's wrong now.

...so I broke out the Crayola markers I bought for my husband a few years ago. 45 colors!
Here we go.

Flashbacks

2007-03-29T03:38:41Z

Once upon a time in 5th grade I learned two neat things: how to create a loop in BASIC, and the sequence to make the Apple ][ beep. Unfortunately I learned control-G but did not recall control-C. This resulted in two things: a teacher powering off the Apple ][, and losing my computer privileges for a few weeks.

Apparently EMACS gets grumpy when you query-replace yourself past the maximum buffer size. Grumpy and vocal.

The happy ending in 5th grade: having nothing better to do, I discovered the wonders of reading the documentation. The happy ending tonight: sed. Not happy enough, alas, but at least moving forward.

Math is Hard, Let's Go LitSearching

2007-03-28T05:49:08Z

So I'd like to know how much of my word count I've blown on the Abstract / Intro / Related Word sections. But since I am writing my quals paper in TeX, that is not quite as easy as it might be. I could just run my old friend wc on the .tex file, but that reports markup too. Not to worry, there's a shell script in the CTAN collection that is designed just for this problem.

The shell script reports back *more* words than wc.
Shyeah.

Not that it matters at this juncture. I know I am way past the quantity of material that will make the final cut. That's fine. Once I have results it will be easier to see which parts are actually relevant. Meanwhile, at least I have something to show for the past few weeks of my life. Some days I think the only thing worse than writing is not writing.

I am back to the point where I crawl through haze into waking each morning and panic at how behind I am. April came early. It's basically fine, though. I am still finding time to eat, sleep, and occasionally even exercise. That is the difference between April and May.

If anyone is interested in privacy policy literature, or insomniac, I can hook you up with pdf via email.

Spring!

2007-03-26T18:44:37Z

It's skirt day. I thought it would be and dressed accordingly. Yay for better weather.

I am sitting outside in one of the new mini-parks on campus. (My favorite got torn down for a new building and I am very very very bitter. Not only was in the middle of a stand of trees, there was a power outlet to go with the wifi coverage.) Trees, chirping birds, spring flowers. The construction guys must have DVE on: the Clark's Cigarette is pouring forth over the sound of trucks backing up and drills hammering down. The train whistle reminds me just how close we are to the tracks.

Alums don't believe me when I say the school is better, the students are happier, &c. So I offer a new example: they've found a lower-odor fertilizer. The cut is still resplendent in brown, but it is more a visual than olfactory assault. Come to Carnevil if you don't believe me. :-)

In other news, I am watching a project (not mine) go right off the rails due to the bitter political fighting that academia is known for. This sort of thing doesn't happen within my department so it is a bit of a surprise for me. Yes, I know: I am spoiled. Wonderfully so. At least for once the stakes are not low. Yet that also makes the backstabby machinations all the more disappointing: the outcomes matter, this is not just about scrambling for resources.

Pouring the weekend into work was a good move. I can see the path through today and tomorrow, and if I just keep working all the time I might survive Wednesday's morning meeting without massive trauma. Maybe. I suspect the next month will remain very busy, with a spike into frantic in early May. Just in time for the last snow of the year.

Paid by the Word

2007-03-26T05:18:58Z

The good news: by word count, I am about 10% done with my qualifier paper. The bad news: I am just working on the background and related work sections, and I feel like I am only about half way done (and they were "due" over a week ago, but it's all the soft expectations of internal deadlines.) These preliminary sections really cannot take up this much space, seeing as I will also want to discuss things little things like hypotheses, methodology, and results. My current plan is to just write and worry about word count later. No doubt I will add a few things as well as cut a lot over the course of the next year. Uh. More like nine months. Tick tock.

Random collection of links from the past week:

20 questions for Presidential candidates is a fun read. While it is moot, seeing as he dropped out, number 17 is my personal favorite.

A study in Texas finds about a fifth of people have been stalked in the past two years. I expect the study was skewed toward college participants, but even still: the bar for what constitutes stalking is high. So why aren't students more concerned about privacy issues?

As predicted, the FCC is stalling on NN for another year.

Faster, faster

2007-03-25T17:22:53Z

I am sick. Again. I think I managed to be not sick about a week and a half out of the past two months. I started coughing a few days ago and I figure I have at least half a week more to go. On the bright side, my hands have healed from when I went sidewalk surfing and the bruises on my knees are more manageable.

I am not able to submit a paper at the end of this month and that's really a shame. For one thing I'd like to be done with it. For another it was my best shot at getting it published. Here's hoping I am not disappointing faculty too much, but I am worried that all of the "I don't see how I could get this done" comments I made along the way might not have been believed.

Work is piling up. My weekend to do list keeps growing even though there is no way I can get to all of this, yet they are still things I really need to get done this weekend. Um. My inbox is approaching 2000 messages. Um. And everything is taking longer than it should, in part because I can't think straight. For example, one of my to do list items is "Email (person) Re: duh." Unfortunately I have no idea what this means. Generic male first name, could be one of three people, and "duh" doesn't exactly narrow it down. Spiffy. I am now to the point of a zillion small tasks that are nibbling me to death, plus several large tasks that are only good for something when I manage to complete them. Every time I get something done I realize more things exploded and need attention somewhere else.

Plus, you know. Other stuff. Serpents and dragons, lions and tigers and bears.

But posting to LJ is a great use of time...
Kill me.

Get Ripped

2007-03-25T06:26:54Z

I need to do more reading about a case that is presented as being about fair use. The lack of amicus briefs is perplexing.

How does Apple TV (&c) fit in with this brave new world?

(Also interesting: an argument that the MPAA should embrace P2P, then buy the market winners, as a way to wring the profits out of organized piracy; one of the 600 zillion articles about COPA getting shot down. I have yet to read the decision but look forward to seeing familiar names when I do.)

Technology to the Rescueish

2007-03-23T22:37:31Z

I am scanning barcodes on CDs prior to shoving them in plastic storage bins in the basement. It would be nice to be able to go find a specific album, should that ever be needed, so I created a shelf in Delicious Library for each plastic box. Ok.

Only, after each scan I have to go find the newly scanned item and drag it to the shelf. Ugh. Each time. Well that sucks.

I noticed there is a list of recently scanned items. Hey. If I just delete everything off of there, I can take all new items en mass as one happy drag & drop to the shelf. Only... instead of just deleting the list of new items, Delicious Monster actually deletes the full record. So hundreds of items already scanned in disappeared out of the database.

That was a ... surprising interaction.

Undo didn't.
Force quit was too late.
I sat cursing and shaking, thinking about how many hours I just blew away.

As it turns out Delicious Library does a reasonable job of publishing the db location (~/Library/Application Support/Delicious Library/Library Media Data.xml) And as it turns out I had not yet put away the external drive I used to do a full backup prior to swapping in a larger HD, and restoring the file I needed was utterly easy.

So, quasi-happy ending, in that I'm right back where I started.
Yay. I think.

Data Visualization

2007-03-23T20:11:58Z

An interesting talk on population changes, largely designed to show off data visualization tools. Sort of web 2.0 meets SQL -- it's all shiny, but not necessarily in the ways I want.

google++

2007-03-15T16:54:16Z

As seen in Tech Republic:

Currently, Google maintains the search data logs indefinitely. Under the new policy announced on Wednesday, which Google expects to have fully implemented by the end of the year, the company will anonymize the final eight bits of the IP address and the cookie data after somewhere between 18 months and 24 months, unless legally required to retain the data for longer. The information on specific searches will remain indefinitely, but it will be much harder to tie the searches to specific individuals or computers.

"Logs anonymization does not guarantee that the government will not be able to identify a specific computer or user, but it does add another layer of privacy protection to our users' data," the company said.

---

It would be cooler if goggle also offered an opt-in way to get out of being logged at all. Say, a cookie with the same string for everyone who cares more about privacy than about being directed to the right country-specific page. Most people would fail to set it up and for most people that is just fine. But it would help protect Chinese bloggers and freaks like me who actually think privacy is important. As the AOL flap painfully demonstrated, a thin veneer of anonymity is insufficient in too many cases.

I fall in the "great first step" camp, and I am very pleased to see Goggle's new policy. I should send a thank you note to the guy who must have been right smack in the middle of this one.

It also illustrates that folks who care about privacy and wind up in corporate America can and do play an important role. Plus look at the interesting web of privacy laws and how other nation's laws are pulling US companies in various directions. Nothing new, but we will see more of that.

Lazy Web mysql argh

2007-03-06T18:13:30Z

I used fink to install mysql on my OS X laptop. No joy. Worked through other directions and it's still failing.

Probably something very obvious & I haven't looked at this much. Anyone have pointers on what I missed?

Output (password omitted):

91:/sw/bin $ sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql &
[1] 23179
91:/sw/bin $ Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /usr/local/mysql/data

91:/sw/bin $ /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password XXXXXXXXX
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)'
Check that mysqld is running and that the socket: '/tmp/mysql.sock' exists!
91:/sw/bin $ STOPPING server from pid file /usr/local/mysql/data/e.c8bed1.client.atlantech.net.pid
070306 11:43:16 mysqld ended