Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it

Umbrella

Make, a community of tinkerers and open-source affectionados, has published a list of gift suggestions. Some of their projects look really cool. Among them:

They are also selling a neat Leatherman warranty voider, in case you know a geek that does not yet have a multi-tool. (I have two: a Swisstool X and a little SOG Crosscut on my keychain). Their philosophy of “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” is increasingly relevant in a world where manufacturers are allowing fewer and fewer things to be done by those who purchase their products.

I have long been a huge fan of open source software. The blog runs on Redhat Linux, using Apache Server, and both WordPress and MediaWiki are open source projects. All of these pieces of software can be used for free, even more usually, your right to take them apart and rebuild is limited only by your creativity. Wikipedia is probably the best website ever created, and it is all about collective effort and shared information.

Old v. new economy

Google, a company with 9,378 employees, now has a stockmarket capitalization of $155 billion: about $16.5 million a person. General Motors has about 326,999 employees and a stockmarket capitalization of about $19 billion: about $58,000 a person.

It is impossible for me to believe that Google has enough good ideas to justify such a huge amount of capital per employee. That said, they did earn $1.47 billion in 2005, compared to a loss of more than $10 billion at GM. Also, everybody has known for years that GM’s pension and health care obligations are going to bury the company, barring some massive default.

Living with low light

For those interested in digital photography, you can find a good set of very comprehensible suggestions on the Lens & Shutter website. Judging by the photos you see on Facebook, I would say that the one on flash use is the most essential piece of reading for most amateur digital photographers. As highlighted in Philip Greenspun’s good free tutorial, awareness of light is critical to all good photography.

Reading about photography frequently makes me miss my tripod, which is back in Vancouver. (It makes a cameo in a relatively bad photo of Astrid.) I should get a little one so that I can actually aim my camera when I use it in timer mode on a solid surface, rather than just shooting straight up or at whatever angle the surface allows.

PS. Despite my love of wide angle, and hence aversion to digital SLRs with small sensors, my heart is definitely softening towards something like the Rebel XTi. That said, my dSLR fund is only worth about 36% of the price of that kit, and seems unlikely to expand prior to my departure from Oxford.

Cognitive boundaries

Eye Boss, in a Link to the Past

Sometimes, I wonder whether I should be disturbed that there are dozens of video games I know by heart. I mean that, after not playing them for five years or more, I know exactly which block needs to be pushed, what sequence of answers needs to be given in a run of questioning. The situation is altogether uncanny: you see the little girl made of thirty pixels and you know the instant you see her that she will ask you about her cat: this in a game that you last played in your friend’s basement when you had never had a sip of beer or wine and didn’t know what continent Oxford was on. It is like some kind of insane mockery of my inability to remember the three or four main points in the forty page article that I just read.

Human brains have not evolved for this ‘unknown person 31’ said ‘position 16/34’ on ‘topic 8041D’ style of interaction with data. I would venture to say that we are better suited to the ‘if it flashes, hit it with that weapon more’ style of interaction with data.

Wiki restriction in progress

The wiki came under discussion in today’s seminar. As such, it is offline until such a time as I can come up with a robust way to restrict access to seminar notes, while leaving all the material that I have been producing myself available.

Ideally, I would like to either make specific pages of the wiki require a password to access or, alternatively, restrict certain pages to specific user accounts. If anyone knows how to do this elegantly, please let me know.

I expect that I should have my portions available again by Monday. If you care to report any bugs on the blog between now and then, feel free to do so as a comment to this post.

[Update: 4:30pm] Much more quickly than expected, I have been able to establish a content management system for the wiki that allows certain pages to be restricted from public access. This treatment has now been applied to seminar notes from the thesis seminar and the Developing World seminar. It has not been applied to my reading notes, notes related to public lectures, or other such pages. As with any such change (one that requires me to edit PHP script and MySQL database settings), please report any bugs that you encounter.

Once again, I must say that I am impressed with MediaWiki as a platform. All I did was backup the MySQL database and the /images/ folder, erase the old install (except for LocalSettings.php), install a patched version of MediaWiki, run the installer, throw out the config file it generated, add the restriction patch code to the old config file, and then configure user accounts to have access to restriction features. That may sound very tricky to a lot of people, but it was actually a breeze. The whole thing was done in half an hour, with no hiccups discovered so far. Now that it is publicly known, the Lecture and Seminar Notes section of the wiki has graduated out of the experimental grouping.

Replace generic blog templates

Folding bicycle

As more and more friends and colleagues set up blogs, it becomes harder to distinguish between so many identical looking pages. While the default Blogger templates are generally attractive, they have now been used so many times that anything written on one automatically looks generic.

A good template should, above all, be clear and readable. Next, it helps for it to look stylish and professional as well. While it is beyond the means of most beginner bloggers to create their own template, there are masses available to be downloaded for free. Regardless of whether you use Blogger, WordPress, or something else, changing your template is a quick way to make your blog more distinctive and memorable.

If you want to see the snazziest of templates (though many are more beautiful than usable), have a look at Zen Garden.

Listed below are a few places where decent, free templates can be picked up. Dozens more can be found in less than a minute, through Google.

For Blogger:

You can easily find instructions online on how to change your Blogger template. One thing to note: because Blogger generates every page of your blog in advance, before they are requested, you will need to republish the whole blog before the template will appear everywhere.

For WordPress:

There are so many such sites, and they are so easy to find, that it is almost pointless to list them. Instructions for changing WordPress themes are likewise easily available.

If you are using a system other than Blogger or WordPress, Google and ye shall find. You can also find some basic tutorials on customizing a template that you find, so as to make it individualized. Here is an example.

Data exchanged

Grad students in Oxford should definitely make use of the 50GB of free backup space provided by the school. A backup is the best defence against anything that can happen to your computer: from viruses to abrupt falls. Before you can backup your data, you need to register.

After about ten hours, my data is on the HFS server. It seemed like overkill to back up all the music, but this was the default configuration. It took enough tinkering to make it work in the first place, and I was able to tell it not to back up videos. Fifty-four gigabytes, passed across the network at about 800kb/s.

It’s odd to think of the robot arms sorting data backup tapes, in fire safes wherever they may be. I am glad everything sensitive is durably encrypted, as far as I can recall.

New blog on Vancouver speaking events

Most of what I write here is for people attending or interested in Oxford. Here’s a link for people in Vancouver. My friend Tristan is setting up a blog that lists speaking events in that fine Pacific city. If you have something to suggest, please email him through the links provided therein.

People with web design experience are particularly encouraged to help develop this into a useful service for academically inclined Vancouverites.