Telegraph Road

Mark Knopfler's Telegraph Road for guitar junkies only; background here. In concert the end of the song turns into an extended jam:

Misheard in an oral culture?

Or a simple misspelling? I found "chickhen wire" offered on a local freecycle list. Sorta makes sense.

Poor man's noise canceling

I saw this video and did it meself to preserve my sanity while working at home. So... random lyric snippets (oh boy, you say...)

First up, a live performance by the Wolfe Tones:

Come out ye Black and Tans
come out and fight me like a man
show your wife how you won medals out in Flanders
tell her how the IRA made you run like hell away
from the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.

Five dollars?

So Lisa was reading this week's Catholic Post and found a small notice about a seminar in Peoria next month that she'd like to attend. When she saw it cost $5.00 per person, she did a double-take and checked that it was sponsored by a Catholic organization; most Catholic activities - even "days of reflection" or whatnot - are priced way out of our league. She read the notice to me while we were working on supper - it sounded Catholic but when she got to the $5.00 part I paused - "That's not the Catholic Post, is it? Five dollars?"

Speaking of money, the Post also had a creepy article about a new push for "stewardship" in the diocese of Los Angeles. The thing read like a Pravda feature about the new Five Year Plan and even featured brave peasants boldly confronting a priest who didn't understand the new idea of stewardship. Apparently these financial Stakhanovites were eager to give but the priest didn't want to preach about money. Reeducation changed that and now he's a steward, too.

Miles and Coltrane: So What, live in 1958

Our 5-year-old John says he's going to have a guitar and a trumpet when he grows up, so I googled up a video of Miles Davis playing my favorite of his, So What. Coltrane's there, too, and lots of guys smoking in the background. Good, good stuff:

Small-town news in the 21st century

This is the future of reporting - these jounalists know what to do with the internet (they could make their urls a little more friendly, though :-)

Don't miss Pauline Briney's weekly column called Methinks. She's been writing essays and poetry for decades and is one of the best essayists around. She was blogging like Lileks when Lileks was in diapers:

At my age, every day is a present and I intend to make the most of each one. Some of my friends say they hate birthdays and they hate getting older. Not me, I've never been an age that caused me to want to go back, because I've learned that every age has its own compensations. Well, I'm only 83 so I'll let you know more about more birthdays when I get old.

She has the Lileks eye for local history, too:

The Sept. 30, 1966 issue of the Findlay Enterprise included this portion of an advertisement for the Johnston’s supermarket located in Findlay. In the top left picture are Cratous and Rita Benner; in the bottom left picture is Gladys Mowry with an unidentified clerk; and Merle Minor is pictured in the photograph at right. Of interest to current-day shoppers, prices for items on sale included, for example, sirloin steak for 99 cents per pound; Del Monte tuna for 29 cents a flat; Meadow Gold ice cream for 69 cents per one-half gallon container; No. 1 Illinois Jonathan apples for 49 cents for a four-pound bag; and Banquet frozen meat pies, six eight-ounce pies for $1.

Looking for a programmer?

Michael Olson is graduating from Purdue in December, so grab him now before some other company does. I know him as the maintainer and developer of the emacs wiki & publishing package called muse, which I use to publish this here blog. He does lots of other stuff, too. Here are his resume and curriculum vitae.

The herd

This is a cool idea for people who work from home; the herd's website is here. An excerpt:

There are a number of telecommuters Cambridge/Somerville area who telecommute from home. The problems with this for many people are two fold:

• they're all by themselves during the day
• they work where they sleep/eat/entertain

The Nomadic Telecommuter Herd aims to alleviate these two problems by the following activities:

• The Herd will maintain a list of telecommuter friendly places in the Cambridge/Somerville area.
• The Herd will maintain a schedule of which places the Herd will be grazing on which days at which hours.

On a given day if you're interested in joining the Herd at their grazing location for the day, then show up! If not, that's cool too.

Setting up an rss feed from scratch

Or, adding rss to your pyblosxom flavour. This is for static rendering, which is all I use. I don't know whether this would work as-is for dynamic rendering.

UPDATE: Will Guaraldi set me straight. Adding "rss" to your "static_flavours" will give you a separate rss file for every entry and category in your blog along with the main rss file. That's crazy. If you're using static rendering and you just need one rss file for the whole thing, then add this to your config.py:

py["static_urls"] = ["/index.rss"]

and keep your original static_flavours setting.

Original entry (superceded):

The key to the problem is that rss is just another pyblosxom flavour. First, mention "rss" in the list of flavours to be rendered in config.py:

# What flavours should get generated?
py["static_flavours"] = ["html", "rss"]

Then create two files in your flavour directory, head.rss and story.rss:

head.rss

"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="$blog_encoding"?>
<!--
    This web page is actually a data file that is meant to be read by
    RSS reader programs.

    See http://interglacial.com/rss/about.html to learn more about
    RSS.
-->
<rss version="2.0"
     xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
     xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
     xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/">
<channel>
  <title>blog_author - $blog_title</title>
  <link>$base_url</link>
  <description>$blog_description</description>
  <language>$blog_language</language>
  <copyright>$blog_rights</copyright>
  <pubDate>$latest_rfc822date</pubDate>
  <managingEditor>$blog_email</managingEditor>
  <generator>$pyblosxom_name [$pyblosxom_version]</generator>

story.rss

"
<item>
  <title>[$absolute_path] $title</title>
  <guid isPermaLink="true">$base_url/$file_path</guid>
  <link>$base_url/$file_path.html</link>
  <category domain="http://members.wolfram.com/billw">$absolute_path</category>
  <author>$blog_author &lt;$blog_email&gt;</author>
  <comments>$base_url/$file_path.html#comments</comments>
  <slash:comments>$num_comments</slash:comments>
  <pubDate>$rfc822date</pubDate>
  <description><![CDATA[
$body
]]></description>
</item>

(Note my hard-coded category domain. Is there a pybl setting for that?)

And that's it! When you do your static rendering you should see a bunch of .rss files being generated. You may also want to link to your new rss feed on your blog, as in:

<li><a href="http://members.wolfram.com/billw/summa/index.rss" >This blog's RSS 2.0 feed</a></li>

Sorry, folks

A certain knock on the door for the second time in two weeks:

• Her: <opening spiel>
• Me, spying the Awake! pamphlet with her Bible: "Jehovah's Witnesses? We're Catholic; we're not interested. Thanks for coming by." Deliver quickly with a friendly smile, then close door.

If time weren't such a luxury around here I could have them in and we could hash stuff out.

Yet another Chinese toy recall

Here is yesterday's press release from the Consumer Product Safety Commission - this time it's more Chinese-made Thomas the Tank Engine toys with lead paint:

• All-Black Cargo Car from the Brendam Fishing Dock Set
• Toad vehicle with brake lever
• Olive Green Sodor Cargo Box from the Deluxe Cranky the Crane Set
• All-Green Maple Tree Top and Green Signal Base Accessories from the Conductor's Figure 8 Sets.

Code colorization via emacs muse

This muse markup:

<src lang="emacs-lisp">
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;;
;; highlighting stuff

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/emacs-lisp/vinicius-jose-latorre")
(require 'highline)
(highline-mode-on)

(require 'blank-mode)
</src>

produces this output:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;;
;; highlighting stuff

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/emacs-lisp/vinicius-jose-latorre")
(require 'highline)
(highline-mode-on)

(require 'blank-mode)

The really dangerous book for boys

Electricity for Boys! I'll have to take a look and see whether we can use any of it. I never did get electricity despite having a 300-in-1 electronics project kit in my early teens. My friend Bryan Hash came over quite a bit to wire things up with it.

New at Project Gutenberg this week:

• Electricity for Boys, 1914
• Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, 1906
• Home Life in Colonial Days, 1898

Google Maps & YouTube test

Here's the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France; the Meuse-Argonne offensive began today in 1918.

View Larger Map

And here's a video of the cemetery and memorial:

Adding a navigation bar to each entry

Just grab this file and follow the directions.

On bringing back the Great Books

Anthony T. Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, argues in favor of the Great Books in his book Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

From the blurb:

Kronman sees a readiness for change—a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities’ lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.

Here's a short interview with him at Inside Higher Ed, along with comments of varying quality.

Blogging with emacs

One great advantage to blogging in emacs' muse mode is that each entry is a separate text file that I can munge using the full power of emacs. I just changed the "ubuntu" references in all these entries to "ubuntu 7.04" where needed via dired-do-query-replace-regexp (er, 'Q' in a dired buffer). Try that in movabletype without getting down & dirty with mysql.

How to switch monitors in ubuntu 7.04

So I have a little 4-foot "church basement" table in our library with two computers on/under it, along with their keyboards and mice (obviously I need a KVM switch - maybe the junkyard will have one next payday). The new computer gets the big monitor, naturally, and the old one gets some old monitor I dug out of the garage. The problem is that ubuntu 7.04 was installed on the old computer when it used the big monitor. Now that I've switched monitors on it, it doesn't recognize the new one.

Solution: boot into recovery mode (or whatever it's called - hit Esc at the right moment during startup), then at the root prompt do this:

dpkg-reconfigure -pcritical xserver-xorg

Going to war and coming home

Dr Jonathan Shay of Boston has won one of this year's Macarthur prizes for his work with American veterans - using Homer's stories of war and homecoming to treat soldiers who fought in Vietnam. From the Boston Globe (registration required):

When Boston psychiatrist Jonathan Shay wanted to understand the psychological toll of the Vietnam War on the veterans he treated, he turned to the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." The classical Greek epics perfectly encapsulate the mental damage of combat, said Shay, who works for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston.

Online: Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character; Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming; NYT, 2003; Hellenic Communication Service, 2003.

How to install VMware under ubuntu

Vide: VMware runs beautifully on my new ubuntu 7.04 installation. I'm installing xubuntu under vmware so I can do some Mathematica frontend craziness. Some of the documentation tests open each of the 10000+ files in a Mathematica installation. On this new machine this happens fast enough to short-circuit the mammalian the nervous system if you happen to look at the windows flashing by as they open and close.

I couldn't find a way in gnome to isolate all an application's windows in one workspace and I couldn't get multiple X sessions working, so I'm giving vmware a shot. Very promising so far.

Another attack

I knew there was a reason I disliked that slimy little bugger Spongebob Squarepants - he's yet another anti-father propagandist. Via five feet of fury.

How estimates go awry

A must read for programmers: Building a Fort: Lessons in Software Estimation by Steve McConnell, whose blog I'm putting in the sidebar now.

Mozart with our meals

I spent money like a gazillionaire back in my Rich Young Bachelor days. Sometimes I even spent it well. I bought some Mozart cds back then but never really gave the crazy German bugger a chance til Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope and we all heard about his devotion to Mozart.

I found online reviews that bashed Mozart's miscellaneous dances - apparently the things were churned out factory-like - but the reviewers were so damn snotty I figured I'd start with the dances. They're delightful! They're not busy making big ponderous statements; they're not dazzling technical works - they're dances! What better accompaniment to a joyful meal with the family? And, unlike the local NPR classical music station, they don't pause at the top of the hour to report the latest enemy propaganda.

How to compile cvs emacs in a fresh ubuntu 7.04 installation

Once you've installed ubuntu 7.04 the very next thing you need to do is compile cvs emacs, right? Of course. Here's how.

First, to compile programs you need various development libraries (and you may want to grab some optional goodies):

sudo apt-get install build-essential libc6-dev libgtk2.0-0
libgtk2.0-bin libgtk2.0-common libgtk2.0-dev libjpeg62-dev libjpeg62
libncurses5-dev libpng12-dev libpng12-0 libsm-dev libtiff4-dev
libtiff4 libx11-dev libxext-dev libxmu-dev libxmu-headers libxpm-dev
libxt-dev xlibs-dev libungif4-dev flashplugin-nonfree gnomesword
sword-language-pack-en sword-text-web

get cvs so you can checkout emacs

mkdir ~/software
cd ~/software
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/non-gnu/cvs/source/stable/1.11.22/cvs-1.11.22.tar.gz
tar xvf cvs-1.11.22.tar.gz
cd cvs-1.11.22/
./configure
make
sudo make install

get texinfo so you'll have documentation in emacs

cd ~/software
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-4.11.tar.gz
tar xvf texinfo-4.11.tar.gz
cd texinfo-4.11/
./configure
make
sudo make install

checkout the latest emacs and compile (I hate the gui scrollbars)

cd ~/software
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
cd emacs
./configure --without-toolkit-scroll-bars
make bootstrap

I run emacs from its src dir by putting this in my ~/.bashrc:

PATH=/home/billw/software/emacs/src:$PATH

Note that you should check gnu.org for the latest versions of cvs and texinfo. The entire process from inserting the ubuntu install cd in a bare wiped machine to launching a freshly-compiled emacs took 45 minutes this evening.

Cola Chicken

Mom visited Saturday and brought a batch of this BBQ sauce and some chicken breasts. We dumped it all in the crockput and it made a great supper. She emailed the recipe later that night:

COLA CHICKEN

12 oz. Cola
1/2 cup Catsup
1/2 cup Bar-B-Q sauce (I used Bulls-eye) original -make sure it has Hickory smoke flavor
1/2 tsp. worchestershire
1 small chopped onion
1/2 chopped green pepper

MIX WELL
Place 4 chicken breasts on top (in skillet) cover and cook 2-1/2 to 3
hours.  Spoon sauce over chicken occassionally.  Or cook in crock pot.

She added the last bit to the recipe after our crockpot version was so successful.

Can I post from the new machine?

Which, by the way, has two 2.13GHz CPUs and 2GB of RAM. The fastest machine I've ever used. We used to call our old Windows box "the supercomputer", but it's horse-and-buggy compared to this.

vpn error 800 blues

My boss bought me a shiny new Lenovo ThinkCentre M55p to take home, and the WRI sysadmins got it all set up & working at the office. It's running windows since some Mathematica documentation tests I run work a lot faster under windows. I'll also run ubuntu 7.04 under vm once I get things up & going.

Now the box is at home behind my Linksys WRT54Gv2 router and I'm singing the aforementioned blues. Upgraded router firmware, opened ports, no joy. Waiting for sysadmin advice, which is understandably slow early on a Sunday morning. Meanwhile, I have an itchy install finger with the ubuntu 7.04 cd just inches away, and I'm intrigued by this open-source router firmware.

Nine!

Sarah turned 9 today! She spent most of the day writing a story (in emacs :-) about our visit to Indiana last week and drawing studies of faces. Our birthday traditions include a custom menu for the day and a scavenger hunt through the house for presents in the evening; Sarah's menu for today was French toast & sausage for breakfast, grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and spaghetti for supper. She also requested a "Tunnel of Fudge" cake from the Pillsbury cookbook and chocolate ice cream. Death by chocolate after supper!

Carblogging

I read about the old AMC AMX today and it brought back a few memories of old cars my friends and I had growing up. As the youngest of 5 or 6 kids, my friend Chuck Watkins (now a retired Army officer) inherited an old AMC Gremlin from his next-oldest sister, and boy did we have some great times in it. I wasn't present at the legendary Filling of the Gremlin, in which Chuck (6'3"), his dad (somewhere over 6'), and 3 or 4 other large guys all squeezed into the Gremlin. The old thing was buried at sea after many years of selfless service.

My first car was Mom's 1971 Datsun 510 with 98 ragin' cubic inches under the hood - we called it the Urban Assault Vehicle, of course. It was a tough little car that withstood years of abuse, including a high-speed wreck immortalized in a Steel Teeth song [mp3 file]. I was in the UAV on my way to my high-school job at a lumber yard in Decatur IL when I thought I'd take a moment to put a new lace in one of my workboots. I looked down for a moment and when I looked up the road was over there somewhere. If I hadn't panicked everything would have been fine.

Urban Assault Vehicle
Steel Teeth, circa 1984

Biff: Trying to get to work
Running late again
Stopped at the grocery store
To pick up some shoestrings

Jumped into my car
The Urban Assault Vehicle
Shoestrings right beside me
Bill: Boy my workboots need new laces!

Biff: Started down the road
Turned at the liquor store
Grabbed ahold of those shoestrings
Bill: I think I'll just unwrap the package!

Biff: I started heading down the road
Got going about seventy-five
Bill: I think it's time to lace my boots!

Biff: There I was a-singing
Singing "Break-a My Stride"
Trying to lace those boots
Bill: What happened next just blew my mind!

Sound effects: car crash from Kiss's Detroit Rock City

Bill: I saw a host of angels
And in the middle was Bob and Doug McKenzie
And they said:
Biff: Go for it, eh?
Hey hosehead, you know, like,
teach the world a few tricks, you know, like...
Bill: And they threw me the Golden Beer.
We did him a good turn, eh?

Biff: Everything's been settled
As I sip my glass of wine
The Urban Assault Vehicle
Biff & Bill: Is doing fine!

Puerile, yes, but we were puers back then.

That was cool

How about Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Korean?

สวัสดีครับ, สวัสดีค่ะ

こんにちは, ｺﾝﾆﾁﾊ

你好

안녕하세요, 안녕하십니까

Can I do this?

Post in Russian and have everything just work?

Здравствуйте!

The Math Behind NUMB3RS

Here's a Wolfram Research site devoted to all the math geekery behind the teevee show NUMB3RS. Pretty cool if you have time to work through it all. The WRI folks involved with the show are Michael Trott, Eric Weisstein, Ed Pegg and Amy Young.

Update: here's more from the Wolfram Blog.

Kinda like Easter

Here's an article from the Philadelphia Daily News about the hectic preparations for Yom Kippur (starts tomorrow night) in a large Philly synagogue, Congregation Rodeph Shalom.

But "hectic" bordering on "frantic" may best describe the days leading up to Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown Friday.

"I haven't slept in weeks," Carol Perloff, communications director for Congregation Rodeph Shalom on North Broad Street, said this afternoon. "It's like a meeting of a small nation."

Sounds like the folks who prepare Holy Week & Easter liturgies.

generating color palettes

Here's a cool color palette generator - give it a color and it selects complementary colors.

Orange and blue defined

So I'm working on a new pyblosxom version of my blog and I wondered what precise shades of orange and blue are used by the University of Illinois. Behold:

hail to the orange: #F47F24
hail to the blue: #003C7D

muse reads dirs only on startup?

Check out this bloggy goodness: highlighted code!

("blosxom"
 (,@(muse-project-alist-dirs "/home/billw/myblog/muse/")
  :default "index")
 ,@(muse-project-alist-styles "/home/billw/myblog/muse/"
                              "/home/billw/myblog/entries/"
                              "blosxom-xhtml")
 )