+1 to Tweetie support

This is why I love indie Mac developers. I just got this reply to a feature request I sent to atebits, who make Tweetie for Mac:

On 26-Apr-09, at 11:35 AM, atebits support wrote:

Hey Alex We're going to add an option to do just this in a coming version.
:)

~ash


--
atebits support
support@atebits.com
http://www.atebits.com/


-----Original Message-----
From: Alexander O'Neill
Reply-To: Alexander O'Neill
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:01:19 -0300
To: featurerequests@atebits.com
Subject: Allow option to hide menu bar icon in Mac Tweetie

Hi,

I think it would be a welcome feature to add a preferences option in
tweetie to hide the menu bar icon. Most Mac users are quite picky
about what software does to their systems, and forcing the menu bar
icon seems out of place on the Mac.

Cheers,

-- Alexander / http://twitter.com/alxp

Tweetie for Mac is just as good as Tweetie for iPhone, which I paid for and am very happy with.

Labels: Mac OS X, Software Development, Tweetie, Twitter

Dear UPEI Library Coffee Shop

Dear UPEI Library Coffee Shop
Originally uploaded by Alexander O'Neill.

Cream Cheese is not a precious commodity. Be a little more generous
with it, please.

Evergreen Patch Accepted

I love when this happens.

From: Dan Scott
Subject: Thanks UPEI! Google Book Preview patch integrated into trunk
Date: March 8, 2009 1:55:22 AM AST
To: Evergreen Discussion List
Cc: Alexander O'Neill, Mark Leggott

Hello:

Thanks to Alexander O'Neill and the University of Prince Edward Island
for posting their patch for integrating the Google Book Preview
feature directly into the record details page and making the code
available under the GPL v2.

I just committed a variation of the patch to Evergreen trunk
(http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/changeset/12465) - it needs a bit of
internationalization work before it's ready for prime-time, but it is
a great feature.

--
Dan Scott
Laurentian University

+1 to Evergreen. I haven't been able to work on Evergreen since changing my focus to Fedora-commons for now, but hope to get back to it when I can. It's a great project and it has absolutely the best-written and best use of JavaScript code I've seen.

God it feels awesome to have your work included into the main repository.

Labels: Evergreen, Libraries, Open Source, Programming

Earbuds after a trip through the dryer.

Earbuds after a trip through the dryer. RIP.
Originally uploaded by Alexander O'Neill.

Update: Holy Jebus, they actually still work! Even the microphone. Amazing. Buying Apple stock immediately.

Labels: iPhone

More Twitter Confluence

This was part of my Twitter feed this morning. Funny example of Twitter reflecting events in real time from different perspectives..

	kgs Late start to the day. Turned on NPR and guy with squeaky voice was swishing wine in his mouth and spitting it out. Outlaw that sound. 31 minutes ago from web
	garyvee u can listen hear!!!!! http://tinyurl.com/b26vsm 35 minutes ago from web
	garyvee I am on NPR's @weekendedition in 2 minutes anyone have a link to a website where I can hear it? tune into NPR now!!!!! 40 minutes ago from web

IslandScholar, UPEI's Institutional Repository

One of the things I appreciate about working in an environment where we use and create open source software is that I have the opportunity to talk about what I do outside of work. Unfortunately I just haven't had the blogging spirit much in general lately, so there are a lot of things I haven't gotten to write about yet.

Fortunately Mark Leggott, our university librarian, who directs all the projects I work on, just posted a great write-up about IslandScholar, which was launched in December. The post is here: Link. Mark outlines exactly what the repository is for and what we used to build it, in particular it is our most polished and customized use of the Islandora front-end to the Fedora repository system, written as a module for Drupal.

Mark's post describes it better than I would, but the gist is that IslandScholar will be a central location to show the research output of the entire UPEI faculty and related bodies, with as many as possible containing links to full-text versions of the published articles. We are using a form of crowd sourcing in that faculty can go to the site and view their own citations, and are able to upload the referenced documents directly to the site, with the rights from their journal publisher shown to them right on the page via SHERPA/RoMEO, and the system will automatically convert their documents to PDF format and ingest them into the repository.

Here's an example record with a full-text document included: Relationship between objective measures of physical activity and weather: a longitudinal study.

I really like the idea that we are helping to make information more readily available to the rest of the world. Getting to not only work on and create open source software, but to be furthering the philosophy of open access to information is quite a thrill as a software developer.

More big news to come, hopefully. But either way I'll try and be more informative about what I am working on on this blog.

Labels: Libraries, Programming, Repositories

http://webcrawler.cs.washington.edu/

Before webcrawler there really wasn't even a web. You had to basically know an address of a site and then type it in to get there, and to find that address you had to see it on TV, where the announcer would awkwardly enunciate "h t t p, colon, slash slash, double-you double-you double-you...." There was Archie for FTP and Veronica for Gopher (don't worry, kids, there won't be a test.) And of course 80%+ of your time online was spent on USENET anyway, so the web was more of a minor curiousity.

Then along came webcralwer and changed everything.

Which is why it's really incredibly sad that webcrawler is so crammed with ads that it can't even find itself on the frigging internets.



At least they don't force good old Spidey into appearing on this abomination of a zombie web search engine.



Rest in peace, little guy.

More history here.

Labels: History, Internet, Internet History, Search Engines

Bash has C-like for loops?!

My life just got a lot easier finding this out.

We have an OCR package and 65 directories of tiffs we want to extract the text of, and we want to run a few jobs in parallel to get the work done faster and take advantage of all this multi-core business, but obviously we don't want to run all 65 processes at once, just 5 or so.

The poor bastard who runs our scanners had a script where he had just copied and pasted the command line over and over with the different directory names.

Here's a script that does the same thing in a nested 'for' loop.


#!/bin/bash
LIMIT=65

for ((i=1; i <= LIMIT ; i = i + 5)) # Double parentheses, and "LIMIT" with no "$".
do
  for ((j=0; j < 5; j++))
  do
    imageList=" "
    for image in islmagfull/$[i + j]/*; do
      # Get all the files in the directory and build the image list to pass to the command line.
      imageList="$imageList -if $image"
    done

    ./CLI $imageList -f PDF -pem ImageOnText -pfpf Automatic -pfq 85 -pfpr 200 -of "/usr/local/fedora/abbyy/${image%.*}.pdf" & # Ampersand means run the process in the background.
  done
  wait # 'wait' is awesome, it just pauses until all child processes are done. I love Unix.
done # A construct borrowed from 'ksh93'.


I should start a wiki to store code snipits, just using the blog as a scratch pad for now.

Labels: bash, Programming, SHell, Unix

1x09: The Battle

I still love how the old Ferengi ships looked like angry cartoon characters with gritted teeth and red eyes.



In the future they don't get headaches, according to Dr. Crusher.

And here we present the debut of Wesley's stupid outfit. Mostly I just feel sorry for Wil Wheaton , who is an awesome blogger and honestly came out of this as well as anyone could have.



This is still where they were trying to position the Ferengi as the series erstwhile villains, before audiences overwhelmingly found them hilarious.

Ahh, this is the episode where they mention the "Picard manoeuvre". The Adama Manoeuvre, where he took the Galactica and brought it into the atmosphere to bomb the crap out of a planet, is a total rip-off of that.



The best part about this shot is that they had computers with colour displays in 1989 when the show was made, but chose to go back to green-on-black for something to look "computer-y".

"Data, reading picard's log file from the USS Stargazer: "'we are forced to abandon our starship, may she find our way without us.' Apparently she did, sir. So Data can't figure out that "do" and "not" can be contracted to "don't" but he can make jokes anthropomorphizing starthips.



"As you humans say 'I'm all ears'." LOLOLOLOL.



Apparently the Ferengi have the power to project thoughts into Picard's mind. Somehow they forgot how to do this in their transition to comic relief. Quark could have used that power to fuck with Odo in supremely awesome ways.

The ending to this episode: Picarad shoots the mind control device with a phaser. Yep.

The good:

• The Picard manoeuvre is frigging awesome.
• Yarr didn't say very much
• Worf didn't say very much
• Troi didn't say very much

The bad:

• The Ferengi still trying to be the villains
• The ending was basically "SNAP OUT OF IT, CAPTAIN". *sigh*

The ugly:

• Wesley's gay pride stripes
• Yarr's haircut. This will be applicable for all episodes with her in it.
• Riker without a beard still bothers me. WRONG WRONG WRONG.
  

Labels: Star Trek

1x08: Justice

Justice. Usually I have a pretty good recollection of what an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is about from the season it's in and the episode name, but this one is eluding me right now. The nitro is that they have stumbled on yet another previously unknown Class M planet while out ferrying passengers about and getting milk from the store. Won't the inhabitants of this planet be thrilled to hear they've been under Federation jurisdiction all this time and didn't even know it.



The director told Gates McFadden to cross her arms to contrast with Troi's soft demeanor.

There are two things wrong with this frame:



1. They forgot to turn on the fake computer wall panels, so they just look like closets.
2. Wesley Crusher not being eaten by wolves.

Geordi: "They make love at the drop of a hat." Yarr: "Any hat." These people on this planet sound very pleasant and therefore annoying. Please please please let this episode be about the crystaline entity coming to suck their planet dry. *fingers crossed*

Oh shit they're sending Wesley down to the surface first. This is that one where he almost gets the death penalty but doesn't. Worst tease of an episode ever. I almost want to just stop watching now.



Ahh the planet full of attractive Aryans. This was a good week for perpetual Hollywood extras. At least Worf knows they must be evil. Yes we get that Riker is supposed to be a horn dog, the 'we need to establish character' moments the writers are throwing in are getting old.



They need to work this guy into the plot line where Yarr has a secret half-Romulan daughter a few seasons from now. He can be the godmother and hairstyle moral support.



Is there a website that just collects pictures of Wesley looking baffled? I smell a meme.

He only gets a hug from the alien whore, poor Wesley.

Prime directive question: We are supposed to believe these people developed warp drive? Really?

I'm pretty sure they kept this episode from being shown in syndication out of sheer embarrassment.

Why is Data shaking his head while not looking at anyone in particular? He can display subtle physical signs of confusion but can't get that "do not" can be shortened to "don't"?



This soap bubble is capable of rocking the entire ship. Once again: Inside federation space, and no one noticed before, or thougth of mentioning it afterwards. I love these old episodes for this reason.

I think it's great that even Worf is offended by the idea of capital punishment. Oh Star Trek, you secret socialist fifth column, keep it up.

Ugh, the bubble thing is "God" for the aryan rule freaks. There's some message about human exceptionalism in here but I'm not sure what it is exactly.

Aaaannnd the climax to this episode is Riker saying "When has justice ever been as simple as a rule book?". He says that, they get transported off the evil planet of love and peace, and all is well. Endings were always the worst part of this series.

Labels: Star Trek

Neat pattern

Wasn't expecting to see any sort of pattern when testing range operations in Python, this is super cool:

>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 10))
285
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 100))
328350
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 1000))
332833500
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 10000))
333283335000L
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 100000))
333328333350000L
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 1000000))
333332833333500000L
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 10000000))
333333283333335000000L

After that it started to take a long time to compute so I gave up.

Labels: Mathematics, Programming, Python, Sequences

The grilled cheese secret

This seems to blow people's minds when I tell them so maybe it's not as well-known as I would have guessed. Anyway, for the perfect grilled cheese sandwich, don't put the sandwich together first and then throw it on the frying pan.

Instead, let the pan get nice and hot, throw in a healthy portion of butter and when that melts, lay two pieces of bread on to the hot frying pan and let them get toasty for half a minute. Then turn slice one over, put the slices of cheese (sharp cheddar, for god's sake) onto the now hot and buttery bread. Then quickly left the other piece and put the hot side down on top of the cheese.

This lets your cheese fully melt without having to overcook the outside of the sandwich, and your bread is evenly toasted on both sides.

Labels: Cooking

Outliers

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, Outliers, and I was totally impressed with it. I haven't read Tipping Point yet but I did enjoy Blink, so I was looking forward to this one, especially after seeing the subject matter was ironically about successful individuals and the book came out at the time when so many American success stories are being exposed as frauds.

His thesis is that innate ability is not enough to get you to success, however you define it, which means that telling a child how smart he or she is constantly as a kid will actually do more to harm their future character and chances of success than not telling them at all what their real intelligence level is. Instead he cites example after example of people we all know of as huge successes, like Bill Gates and Bill Joy and the Beatles, and dig deeper into their background to find a crucial combination of unbelievable hard work - Gates and Joy would spend nearly all their time outside of class working on computer software, and the Beatles spend a few years playing for 6+ hours a night in Germany before they ever hit it big, getting more time playing shows together than most bands ever get in their entire careers -- and one more thing: luck. Joy and Gates, for all their hard work, didn't work anywhere near the orders of magnitude harder than a lot of young programmers to follow them to justify their success. Rather, they happened to be probably the very first people in the entire world who got to program interactively on a time sharing computer system, the first to come along after punch cards, and not have to pay for their time or compete with other members of a computer centre for precious little hours on the machine. So they had a massive head-start over their would-be peers, and were helped every step of teh way by fortuitous events. This isn't a bad thing, it has to happen that someone is the first to come along and do the pioneering work when a new field opens up, or a new genre of music in the case of the Beatles.

But the thesis of the book is that these are not extra-ordinary people who would have risen from any background to become the people they were just by their nature. That is the way the American individualist hero myth would tell the story. Instead, whenever you dig in and really see the breaks and good timing of birth and circumstances that allowed these people to have their hard work be meaningful hard work, that is what creates these great success stories. The last part of the book explains how other societies have ingrained meaningful work into their cultural psyche stemming from farming methods, and how cultural background can and should be actively studied and we should see what good and bad effects it has on one's ability to succeed.

The last section of the main text is yet another go at trying to address what's wrong with the education system in America, and I don't really buy his proscription that students should be put into super-intensive year-round schooling to keep them from forgetting anything they have learned. Perhaps a glance toward successful education systems in Europe would be a better place to look than radically extending the time a child must spend in school and doing homework.

Leaving aside criticisms of rote learning in Asian education, Gladwell is only talking specifically about math scores, and in that area Asian students are measurable, undeniably better.

I don't want the fact that Asian education is also far from perfect to obscure the fact that we can learn a lot from other cultures' approach to knowledge, though. My favourite bit from the book was something that reminded me of my own experience studying math, when he described a video of a woman figuring out using a graphing program that it is simply impossible to graph a straight vertical line.. that it is undefined. It took her a long time, 22 minutes, but eventually the idea came to her and she will have an understanding of how graphing, and division by zero, works than she ever could have gotten in the usual time teachers allow students to struggle with a problem. For me in University I had a very difficult time in the classroom with some concepts, so I had to take them home and I ended up graphing every single problem assigned to me, whether it was called for or not, out on paper, sometimes doing slight variants as well. In the end it took me a lot longer to do my math homework, but I could eventually just look at an equation and instinctively tell how it should look if it was graphed out.

That's the main key to success that Gladwell says is within all our grasps, if we just learn to work and work until we actually come to a meaningful step in understanding. Probably why I love tackling a difficult programming problem, even if I know I won't have the accident of timing of a Bill Gates.

Here's a CBC interview with Gladwell about the book, let him tell it better than I can: Link.

Labels: Books, Gladwell, Outliers, Reviews

"Where No One Has Gone Before"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_No_One_Has_Gone_Before

Finally getting back to watching old Star Trek TNG episodes, this is the one with the Traveller in it. Awesome. I actually don't remember seeing this one more than one or two times on TV, so it always had a weirdly etherial quality to it.

Had to throw in some video of the sweet "let's pretend we're 2001: A Space Odyssey" moment for a while. I do so love the original-series-ish tension-building music.

The mentions of "rape gangs" on Tasha Yarr's home colony are totally out-of-place attempts at grittiness. Feels very tacky.

The crazy hallucinations the whole crew is experiencing are pretty awesome, mostly for the bad French-Russian accent from Picard's mother offering him tea and teasing him about the nature of space.

*sigh* the climax of this episode is for everyone on the ship to think happy thoughts so the Traveller can get the energy to bring them home. Endings were always the worst part of this series, this one is even worse than "reverse the shield phase arrays" bullshit, but they didn't really have much more room to do much else.

Oh Christ, this is where Wesley gets promoted to Ensign and gets that goofy rainbow stripey uniform. Great episode, horrible consequences.

Labels: Reviews, SciFi, Star Trek