On Trunks

Tagged as Linkpost, Music, Personal

Written on 2009-04-14 04:25:27

I can't believe it's mid-April. That's just wrong. Everything is going really well but it's hard to believe how fast this semester has gone by. Last week was pretty good. It just seems like so much is happening. I'll say this, I have a really fantastic and interesting group of friends whom I deeply care about. It's good stuff. This morning was adventurous. No fewer than three trees came down in our yard. It was pretty epic.

One thing that helped a lot lately was a song...

Things haven't been easy in a lot of ways and it's been hard to keep the faith. Then again, I don't seem to be the only one that's struggling right now. Also, this is going to be another rather linkpostish entry. Sorry.

UC Berkeley has a youtube channel. More and more institutions are doing this (The Obama Administration, anyone?) and I think it's a good thing. Stanford has some too but I'm more specifically interested in their CS Colloquia than anything else I've seen.

Speaking of the Obama Administration, I'm a bit frustrated with them and there are two primary reasons. One is that, apparently, Habeas Corpus is too good for some people even though we're shutting down Gitmo. I spoke to a friend today who remarked, "What on earth is there that two consecutive presidents would be afraid of releasing?". I hope it's not the will and fury of a fickle American public. The second is that they've actually STRENGTHENED the Bush Administration's position on Warrantless Wiretapping. I'm particularly livid about this because this is one of the biggest reasons I wanted Obama in office in the first place. The Consitution is increasingly in tatters and I'm pretty sure that counts as a broken campaign promise. The EFF's Kevin Bankston spoke about it on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Here's one link that just doesn't go anywhere else. It's a very interesting Wikipedia article about Math in the Sciences and relates to some of my ideas about math being "the Thing at the Bottom". I may write a little more about that later on but I've been thinking about it a little more often lately.

I've been a little interested in live coding lately but the available software is still not quite what I'm looking for. That said, Impromptu is the closest if only it wasn't OSX-only. I hate non-cross platform software in 200x. I even considered installing Hackintosh OSX on my X200 to get it going. I'll probably end up playing with Fluxus as it seems like the next best thing but it has to be built from source. *sigh* Gross! At least there's an AUR package.

Now that Kernel 2.6.29 and an updated X stack and Intel video card drivers are downstream, the software release I'm most looking forward to is Firefox 3.5. I spend a large portion of my life in that browser so any significant updates, especially those with performance improvements, are a big deal. Mozilla is already planning for Firefox 3.6 however and they seem to have quite ambitious plans indeed. Unfortunately, one other project I've been eyeing for quite some time seems to be struggling. OpenMoko, whom I was hoping would eventually produce a replacement for my aging Nokia phone, appear to be struggling mightily and the later models I was hoping for have been cancelled I'll together. I'll be crossing my fingers for their survival. They were indeed innovating but look like they might go the way of the OLPC project. Reinvention into obsolescence.

Beyond that, there have been a few cute things on Reddit of late. A Programmer Competency Matrix got put up recently and was, of course, lambasted for being bullshit. That said, it's cute and fun and for CS *students* it would serve as a pretty decent reminder for the things they ought to really have down by the time they enter the workforce. I'm talking about the log(n) column too not just the other stuff.

I'm a little confused about CPU Frequency Scaling. I've removed cpufreq from my Daemons array due to reasons I mentioned before. Namely, it wasn't doing anything and may have actually been causing problems. Now this guy is talking about how it's fail anyway. This is the same cpufrequtils we're talking about right? How did this get so widespread as good practice? Silly herd mentalities. Shame on me!

I hope to start exposing myself to new music a bit more regularly. Between Last.fm's recommendation engine and the backlog of pirated songs spanning everything from Tapes 'n Tapes to Triosk I think I'll be busy for a while.

I'm still distracted by personal code but I'm doing an awful job spending time on it. There's a nice article here about using Lisp for shell scripting. I love that kind of small practical example, even if you get looked down upon for being a newb reading it. You've got to teach yourself somehow and bootstrap yourself somewhere, right? I'm also looking forward to trying out Urwid this week to work on a user interface for Pycooker. If I have problems I can always fall back on Curses. More on the abomination of my intended progress later.

Finally, I'd like to cook these Cream Cheese Wontons sometime in the near future but I don't know where I can get some wonton skins. Anybody have any ideas? That's all I can think of for tonight. Now if only I didn't have school in a few hours.

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