Someone on the Haskell Cafe mailing list pointed out the Haskell humor page on the wiki. Here are a few snippets:
<shapr> In my experience, Flash is mostly used as the hi-tek replacement for <BLINK>
”sigfpe”: Haskell is so strict about type safety that randomly generated snippets of code that successfully typecheck are likely to do something useful, even if you’ve no idea what that useful thing is.
So lots of technology sites are all excited about the launch of cuil.com, yet another in a long line of companies that the hype says could dethrone Google.
I went to cuil.com and searched for Amtrak.
It came up with hits for various routes, a historical society, etc. Everything except the actual homepage of Amtrak, amtrak.com, which has the most useful information about Amtrak.
#1 hit on Google.
If Cuil can’t get that right, why bother?
On Wednesday, OSCon really goes into high gear (and the wifi croaks) at OSCon. The people that aren’t going to the tutorials all arrive, and aren’t yet sluggish from the late-night vendor parties and BOFs.
The keynotes were OK, and after that, I listened to Keith Packard talk about the future of X. Then it was off to finish the preparation for my own talk on Linux on the corporate desktop. It was the first time I spoke at OSCon, and it seems to have gone well. I keep running into people that were at the talk and thought of some more questions — and of course I chatted with a number of people right after as well. There are a number of other companies that are planning on doing what we’ve done, or even started down the implementation path already. It’s some effort making something of OSCon quality (Damian Conway suggests something like 10 hours preparing for every 1 hour presenting — I didn’t do that), but I’m glad I did.
The Expo Hall opened Wednesday as well. Met some interesting folks there — Open Lina, a company that sells Linux hardware, an Open Source groupware product I hadn’t heard of before (they are apparently working on Debian Packages too), and some others I can’t remember right now…
Tuesday I had dinner at Andina, a Peruvian restaurant, with fellow Haskellers Bryan O’Sullivan and Don Stewart — the first time the three of us Real World Haskell folks met in one place.
Today brought Nat Torkington’s excellent keynote, and also r0ml’s great talk this afternoon (“I started this talk in 2003, and it’s run a bit long.”) Another great time for some networking in the hallways and expo hall. One of the LinuxFest Northwest folks had attended my talk, happened to see me as I was stuffing one of the may free t-shirts that vendors were giving out into my laptop bag (by afternoon, they were getting quite in your face about it), and struck up a conversation.
Went for sushi over lunch with a couple of folks from #oscon on IRC, then dinner with Debian folks.
Been a busy week, but met lots of people. I didn’t go to as many talks as I planned because I was so busy talking to people — guess that means the conference was a hit.
I’m really enjoying OSCon this year. I’ve been here two days and just Tuesday afternoon actually went to what I had planned to go to. There’s an XMPP summit here (wasn’t on the schedule), and I dropped in there a few times. Got one of the XMPP developers to look at my system and figure out why Empathy isn’t doing video chat with the N810 right.
Had an OSCon moment yesterday. I was sitting at a table with my laptop, trying to meet up with someone I had only met online before. We were chatting over Jabber. And I realized that person was about 20 feet away. This pattern has repeated itself several times now.
We went to McCormick and Schmick’s for dinner. Great seafood and everybody there seemed to really enjoy Jacob too.
The People for Geeks talk was fun. They talked about how geeks tend to apply the tact filter in input, and everybody else on the output, which causes frustration for everyone. Though somebody in the audience asked why that applies to computer geeks but not theater geeks — an interesting question, and one I wish they had probed a bit more.
I keep running in to interesting people here. One day I was talking to someone about alternatives to cfengine (he suggested parrot). This morning I was talking to someone that works for IBM, who is involved with their project to convert desktop machines to Linux and was interested in how we fared. I’ve met several people that spot my Haskell ribbon and are interested. One of them told me at breakfast that he heard there is this new Haskell book coming out that’s about using Haskell in the real world. Another OSCON momemt when I told him I’m one of the authors of that book. The surprise was fun.
Damian Conway had a great talk Monday night on “how to give a great OSCON talk.” I haven’t found his slides anywhere.
Back in May, I wrote about starting to bicycle to work. My plan was to do that 3 days a week. My ride is 10 miles each way, with the first 2.3 miles on dirt, gravel, and sand roads.
It’s been going well. Yesterday was the first day that the ride really felt easy. It’s been getting more and more fun, too.
And I’ve been getting faster. My worst time lately was 49 minutes, also yesterday morning. I really was riding slower than I felt normal, just taking it easy. But I had a headwind, and when I started my normal time in calm conditions was 60 minutes or more. That’s almost a 20% improvement already.
Due to vacations, holidays, and weather, I haven’t been able to average 3 days a week. When it’s raining, or has rained recently, our roads get muddy and pretty much impassible on bicycle. Though some days, my ride is 2 miles longer because the short route is too muddy but the long route isn’t.
So, overall, I’ve been enjoying bicycling, and plan to keep doing it.
I’ve had a problem with recent kernels. (I think it’s the kernel that’s doing this.) When my workstation is doing heavy I/O, it repeats keystrokes. For instance, while I was typing this paragraph, audacity was writing audio to disk, and I got this word:
heavvvvvvvvvvvy
It seems as if it thinks I haven’t let up on the keys.
I’ve seen this on two different machines and it seems to have started with 2.6.24 or 2.6.25.
Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas where I’d go to fix it? Incidentally, I’m in X when this happens. I don’t use the console much when there would be a chance for it to happen.
This is such a weird problem I’ve struck out googling, and I’m not even sure which mailing list to take it to.
I have been using Gandi as my preferred register for some years now. They have probably the most customer-friendly AUP out there, are reliable, and good decent folks. I have liked everything about them.
Except the fact that they don’t have whois privacy. But now they do! Woohoo! They did have whois spam protection all along, but your address and phone number was visible to everyone.
Whois privacy services are something that you have to keep a close eye on. What you want is for your name to still show up in the public whois database, but just nothing else. Some whois privacy services put *their* name there, which means technically they own the domain. I wouldn’t trust that. Gandi is better about it. Your name, their address and phone number.
Of course, you still have to give Gandi your real contact info, and there are some situations in which it will be revealed. But all in all, I am very happy to see them doing this.
I had looked at other registrars that provided whois privacy, and never liked them for various reasons. Many happened to also have quite restrictive terms of service (hello Dynadot), maybe were good people but had restrictive ToS and crappy interface (register4less), etc.
Now I get to stick with Gandi and get the features I want. I’m very happy with that.
I’m working on switching from using a Mac to using Linux for editing video. I have a mini-DV camcorder that a bought a few years back, and I’ve been looking at capture and editing software for Linux.
Along with that, I want to post some videos online for family to be able to see I want to preserve the original quality as much as possible, offer the option to download the video, and be able to share some videos with family only (not the entire Internet).
I’ve been looking at various reviews of video sites (such as this PCWorld one) and decided to look at blip.tv and Vimeo in more detail.
Blip seems to have lots of controls, options, etc. And, they seem to really care about end users, respond fast, and care about freedom. There’s an impressive response from their support team concerning Ogg Theora out there. They offer FTP uploads (which are a huge improvement over HTTP POST uploading, in my opinion, and easily scriptable). They can also automatically post your video to archive.org or about a dozen other video or blogging sites.
But what I want to do is not really what they are aiming at. They are set up for “channels” (you can apparently only have one channel per user), and for more professional users. Most notably, you can’t make videos private or restricted without paying for their $100/year or so “pro” account.
Vimeo looks very much like the Flickr of video. They do offer various options for restricting who can see a video. When they transcode video to Flash, they have the option of preserving it in HD, which blip.tv doesn’t (both go 640×480 or so by default, and blip maximizes out that that). Though both offer the option to download the full, unmodified original. Vimeo has only one option for uploading, and it doesn’t seem to work well with Firefox. They have little detail about anything in their docs. Maybe it’s more the Photobucket of video than the Flickr of video. (Oh, who am I kidding — that’s Youtube).
Of course, there is Youtube. Maxes out at 320×240, doesn’t offer the original for downloading. Doesn’t make me think all that positively about them.
I could also use Flickr. I’m not sure if they offer the original, but there’s a 90-second limit on uploads there.
Any other thoughts?
Later this month, I will be giving a talk at OSCon about Linux on the corporate desktop — something we have done where I work. I’ve been alloted a 45-minute timeslot. I will, of course, be posting my slides online and I think OSCon also posts videos of these things.
I’m wondering if readers of my blog would like to leave me some comments on what you’d like to see. What would you like to know about Linux on the corporate desktop? Is there anything that you’d like to make sure I discuss?