master smith

I got my sword back from Alisha's friend who's a blacksmith. Not only did he sharpen it, but he made a great stand for it:

beat apple by two days!

I got Beagle working!




This is pretty much too cool to explain in words; take a look at Nat.org's demos and revel in the coolness. Take that, Apple!

I wrote up some instructions on how to do the same thing if you are running Ubuntu "Hoary Hedgehog".

In closing, here are some cool pictures of lattés.

genius and folly II

Steps:

1. I buy a $100 parking permit so I can store my parents’ car on Biola campus.



2. The permit either falls off or is stolen off the car.



3. 
   
   1. Campus Safety tickets me.
   
   
   2. Campus Safety tickets me again.
   
   
   3. Ten minutes pass. Campus Safety tickets me again.
   
   
   4. Campus Safety tickets me again.
   
   
   5. Campus Safety tickets me again, for a total of five times in two days.



4. I appeal the tickets and get my permit reissued.



5. A month later, I get two “Ticket reduced to a warning” notices, and one “Three Appeals denied” notice. Apparently according to Campus Safety it is the duty of any owner of a car to check every day on their car to make sure that the permit hasn’t been stolen. Final score: Campus “Safety”: $241, Phil: -$241.

I’m really not sure what to do now. In retrospect I should have registered the car in my brother’s name since he’s leaving Biola at the end of the semester, and the unpaid tickets could have lingered forever, mocking the ineptitude that issued them.

The real irony here is that last week I got what promises to be the first of many letters asking for me to donate to Biola. (Decency would dictate that these would not arrive until my diploma was at least in the mail, but no such wisdom prevails.) Nothing engenders a generous spirit like charging seven times for five tickets, zero of which were deserved, during a semester in which I should be graduated and am only still in class because of a mistake regarding which classes of mine were counted for credit.

Actually, the title of this post is somewhat misleading. It is not about genius and folly, it is pretty much just about folly.

more music

People are strange when you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly when you’re alone
Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted
Streets are uneven when you’re down

When you’re strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange
No one remembers your name
When you’re strange

People are Strange by The Doors

genius and folly

Genius: the brown hose-holding bit moves back and forth along the green bar as the hose is extended and retracted. This keeps the hose rolled up tidily.





And just in case you weren't sure that all semblance of dignity has been squeezed from the Star Wars franchise:

press pass

Biola’s newspaper The Chimes published an article on Eigen, one of my many projects. They emailed me last night to get the inside scoop. My comments didn’t appear in the final article (perhaps because they emailed me twelve hours before it was printed?) so here they are for the curious:

hi phil, i am doing a story for the chimes about eigen and i was wondering
if you could answer a question for me. basically i want to know if you
are on any other websites like myspace or friendster. if you are can you
briefly compare one of them to eigen?


Sure; no problem. I’m most familiar with Orkut, so I’ll make my
comparison there. The biggest and most obvious difference we have with
Eigen is that it is Biola-only. We were very intentional about this
because I think it makes it more valuable to Biola students—everyone
on the system is a person with whom you know you have at least one
thing in common, and that is Biola itself.


The other big difference is that we specifically tried to avoid
duplicating functionality that is available elsewhere. Orkut includes
a way to send messages to people, but I honestly never check it
because I already have a very good comprehensive messaging system with
email and AIM. We want to make it so you can contact people through
Eigen using bubbs emails, not create an entirely separate system that
nobody uses because it’s simply not as good as email.



Oh, and they got the URL wrong in the article. it’s http://eigen.biola.edu.

bad classes

In response to Joel:


Well, I suppose I should get to accounting now. sigh Have I mentioned that I hate accounting? A lot?

Your hatred for Accounting pales next to my combined hatred of Calculus, Calculus II, Linear Algebra, Numerical Analysis, and Operations Research.

Your hatred is a candle burning in a dark room. My hatred is the heat of a thousand suns.

My hatred is the trih xeem that cleanses all.

spare a moment

You know that feeling you get when you step outside and you happen to be listening to just the right song? It’s as if your life were a carefully crafted piece of cinematography, and the song that plays perfectly reflects the mood of the moment, whether in the lyrics or just the general rhythm and mood. Time slows down a bit, and you realize this is so that the beat of the music perfectly coincides with your steps.

This happened to me twice on Friday. It was awesome. (Bullet the Blue Sky and New Year’s Day. U2 is good for the soul. It doesn’t happen often. Other notables for this phenomenon are Kraftwerk and Urge Overkill.)

... and they said the web would never compete

User interfaces on the web will be as good as desktop applications. Just you wait. Or, if you prefer not to wait, take a look.

Coolness is instantaneous file transfer:

[phil@technomancer _{/Desktop/music/aerosmith]$} scp Dude Looks Like A Lady.mp3 thoth:
Dude Looks Like A Lady.mp3 100% 4138KB 4.0MB/s 00:00
[phil@technomancer /Desktop/music/aerosmith]$

to the point

StopIE.com: Help stop Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular and worst internet browser.

What more needs to be said?

... with our powers combined ...

Come one, come all: Planet Zacchaeus is open for business!

Planet is a nifty aggregator written in Python that grabs blog feeds from divers ends of the web and strings them together in one place. I was reading Planet GNOME and thought how great it would be to have my own. It’s really easy to set up; the only marginally difficult thing is setting up the “hackergotchi” heads that appear next to every post. (I like the idea of my head showing up to my post—I’m tempted to do it in my personal blog—but that would be too much ego.)

(Just realized this is going to look really dumb on Planet Z because I just mentioned this on the Zacchaeus Blog, so there will be two posts saying the same thing. To make up for my foolishness I fixed up a little script that takes Xanga RSS feeds (which are broken by default) (reason number I’ve-now-lost-count why Xanga is t3h suck) and returns something more reasonable that Planet can read.)

what is brewing

I just remembered a story that’s kind of funny. Last time I was at home, I was sitting there when my brother came in. He was carrying a cup that looked rather strange. I asked him what it was, and he told me it was water with dry ice in it, all bubbling up and giving off vapours. I nodded, “Cool.”

The point of this story is that I found nothing strange in his answer. In fact, I rather expected it to be something like that, and I probably would have been disappointed if he had come in drinking just plain water. I just realized a few days ago that this was not, in fact, normal at all. The only conclusion I can come to is that my brother is absolutely insane, but in an awesome way.

tele-pfhoto

Come check out tele-pfhoto, my replacement for my old guthwine photo album. New exciting technologies hacked together in as yet unpolished ways. Marvel in awe as photos are shown without refreshing the page! Three geek points to anyone who can tell me all three reasons it’s called Telemonian Pfhoto.

quack

Ducks on campus.

And holy cow, GMail's spell-check is amazing.

outage

Sorry for the interrupt in the program. (No, I'm not coding my web page in Assembler. The pun doesn't work; sorry.) Anyway, philisha.net is back and better than ever. Well, it's better than it was earlier today, that is.

The gory details: Apache was freaking out on most my pages and segfaulting without giving any indication why. It was awful. I did what I could, but I was having problems, and I was in over my head. (Penguinomicon, my server, was running FreeBSD, (the name is quite ironic) and I'm really much more familiar with Linux.) In the end I decided it was time to retire my good old Penguinomicon.




Farewell!

Penguinomicon began life as an eMachines desktop in the offices of Rancho Mar Realty. When its power supply failed, it was passed on to me and became my primary desktop after my Power Mac G3 Bahamut died. That was in August 2003. I was tinker-happy, so I ran it without a case. It just sat there with its components next to each other collecting dust. In retrospect, "because I was tinker-happy" doesn't seem like a good enough reason for doing something like that.... Ah well, it was free.

In July 2004 I moved off Biola campus and got a real connection to the Internet, so I decided to host philisha.net from Penguinomicon. I also bought for the first (and only, as of yet) time in my life, a new computer to use as my main desktop. I wanted to try out FreeBSD, so I replaced the Debian GNU/Linux installation on Penguinomicon with FreeBSD and migrated my site from Jacob, Biola's academic server, to my home.

Fast forward to yesterday and the problems I mentioned above. Today I got a new (er--"new") machine named thoth and installed Debian GNU/Linux on it to replace Penguinomicon. It's got twice the disk space, and is a bit faster as well. (I'm learning Rails without FastCGI, so the CPU increase is important.) It's not that I don't like FreeBSD, it's just that at this point I don't have the time to maintain two very different systems. FreeBSD has a lot of strengths, but the fact that I know Debian backwards and forwards kind of clinches this one.

So after PHP5 finishes compiling on thoth, I'll be back to where I was on penguinomicon. (Storing all the files on an NFS share from my desktop helped speed up the transition.) I would have liked to keep penguinomicon around, but I just set up thoth in less time than I spent trying to isolate the problem on penguinomicon. There you have it.

Now that I included the option to hide tech entries, I feel a lot more free to blog about things that would be terribly dull to the random viewer. Don't like this post? Fine, you don't have to see it! Perfect.

googlewhacked II

Googlewhacked on the first try: telemonian javascript.

The funny thing about blogging Googlewhacks is that once you do it, it’s no longer a Googlewhack. It’s one of those things you can only do once.

as we may think

I named my laptop ‘memex’ after this nifty device. Read it! It’s interesting to consider what people were thinking of in 1945.

I found a piece of software whose goals were quite remniscient of Vannevar Bush’s dream. A more modern implementation with the same goals is Tomboy, which I am going to try out. Quite fascinating, the flow of ideas. And the fact that it took this long to implement is kind of interesting. Main observation: it takes more than a great thinker to get this done—it also takes doers, but thanks to the web the thinkers and the doers no longer have to coincide geographically or even chronologically in the case of the Memex.

an insight

At the end of last week I had an insight:


“Oh! It’s spring break! So that’s why I haven’t felt guilty about not going to class.”