ouij

Resolved:  If I am ever in a position of authority, and an underling gives me a spreadsheet that contains no mathematical operations or numerical data, I will at minimum have him fired, and, ideally, have him flayed and his bleeding carcass displayed from a gibbet above my door, bearing the legend: I DID NOT USE THE PROPER TOOL FOR THE JOB.

I am convinced that, in most offices, spreadsheets are used in three ways: 

1. Actually performing mathematical calculations on numerical datasets.  Even though this is the whole reason why this particular piece of software actually came to be, it is probably the least widespread use of the technology.
2. Collecting data--e.g., addresses--.  This is far more common.
3. Displaying text in a tabular format.  If I had to guess, I would say that 99 percent of all spreadsheet files currently in existence are nothing more than text in a tabular format.

I have never understood why so many people insist on using spreadsheet applications--e.g., Excel-- to display text.  There are other packages on your computer that can display text in a more sane way. 

What I understand less is people pretending that they're organized by dumping data into an Excel spreadsheet--and then not doing any data processing on the sheet at all.  If you're keeping, say, addresses, a spreadsheet is probably the worst way to do it.  You really should be using a real database--that way you can run useful queries over your data set, and sort the information you want in the way you want it for the reason you want to use it.

It has been pointed out to me that Excel, for its part, has a number of excellent text-formatting features.  This may be so, but the only reason that the program has bloated to include those features is because people see grid lines on screen and treat the spreadsheet as if it were a physical, tangible piece of graph paper.  

This is one of the most glaring examples, to my mind, of why WYSIWYG isn't all it's cracked up to be.  A less "cuddly" user environment might actually have nudged people into using the right tool for each job.  But instead, we end up with a blank sheet of graph paper, and users just doodle on it.  That'd be fine, except that they have very definite ideas what that doodle should be--ideas which have little or nothing at all to do with the designed function of the software.  So developers have to bloat otherwise good software with needless complexity to satisfy the myriad demands of their users--who could have made life easier for themselves by stopping to think whether they were using the right tool for the job in the first place.  A framing hammer and a pipe wrench are both heavy tools, and I suppose I could hammer a nail with a pipe wrench if I had nothing else--but I'd be a damn fool to do it, if I knew I had a hammer handy.

A kernel update hosed wireless on my eeeXubuntu install. I'm going to have to take this very carefully. After finals, it looks like I'm going to have to build me up my own *buntu, like I did with the Thinkpad 570e.

So I've installed eeeXubuntu on my eee 701. EeeXubuntu, as far as I can tell, is Xubuntu with a few eee pc tweaks---Tuxradar recently named it the best distribution to run on an eee 701.

Good luck getting a hold of it though---it seems to have been abandoned in favor of eeebuntu. But as much as eeebuntu appealed to me, recent versions ship with the awful ath5k wireless driver--which, I'm sure, will be great one day, but currently, is shit: latency measured in whole seconds and 75% packet loss make it unusable for all practical purposes. Fortunately, I was able to find a more recent build, based on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, here.

True to form, this is essentially Ubuntu with a few extra shell scripts to configure all the ASUS-specific gubbins. There's a catch, though: the build I've linked to labels the shell scripts in Japanese, so it was a bit of a leap in the dark to get that configured right. Fortunately the rest of the OS was properly localized in English.

Once up and running, I was relieved to see that it uses the older madwifi driver, and Wi-Fi was running trouble-free. That's more like it.

If this is all fine and dandy, I think I'm going to run this until Ubuntu Intrepid gets EOL'd in April 2010--that'll be enough time for the ath5k driver to improve to where I can take a second look at it. And if that's true, then the next install will be probably use Fluxbox and be based off a usable eeebuntu core.

I've been looking into LaTeX for legal documents. I already use LaTeX for personal things, such as generating study outlines:


My 1L CivPro outline.

The best part about LaTeX is that it makes the structure of the documents trivially easy. I can forget about formatting, and concentrate on the content.

Of course, this is hardly WYSIWYG:



The green-and-black terminal window is what I see when I create a document in LaTeX--the finished product is shown up top.

Of course, TeX is generally a science, mathematics, & engineering thing; humanities types don't use it very much, and lawyers don't use it at all.

One problem is that we're already too wedded to our working methods. We rely on word processors to generate our documents--even though we could benefit from the more predictable behavior of a typesetting language like TeX.

Our citation style doesn't help, either. The Bluebook is needlessly complex, and its conventions are so idiosyncratic as to make it nearly impossible to use existing bibliographic styles and software to manage citations in a complex document.

That means that we're left fly-specking documents for stray commas or spaces. Not only is it annoying, I figure it's a waste of time.

Unfortunately, all the work implementing legal citation styles for TeX seems to be overseas. Jurabib was developed for German legal style--close, but not quite. biblatex doesn't quite do law. The most promising implementation, Camel, seems to have ceased development, and its lead developerhas dropped off the face of the Earth.

What I wish I had was the ability to bang out legal documents in TeX, and then specify my citations on the fly, in a way that's familiar to me as lawyer--something like LyX, with Camel support.

Sigh.

I suppose I shall have to make it myself, if I'm to have it--but I wish I had time to learn how to do that.

I've been spending the last part of my vacation time sorting out various family IT projects. My dad's old laptop, a Sharp Actius MM20. The MM20 (and its predecessor, the MM10) was a couple of years ahead of the curve on what has since become the netbook trend-. It's thinner than a MacBook Air, has very humble hardware, and is meant to be a portable supplement to a more powerful "base" computer.

The Actius had one other thing in common with many of today's netbooks: it ran Linux pretty well-- well enough to be sold by Emperor Linux as their most portable system (the Meteor).

I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft" on it, and Dad had been using it as a Linux machine for a while now, dual-booting with Windows XP. He has a new XP laptop (amusingly, its' an ASUS eeePC 1000, running Windows XP). Since now he has a whole new box running Windows, he asked me to wipe his old PC to run Ubuntu exclusively.

I decided to take the opportunity to install a more up-to-date version of Ubuntu. An install of Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" failed--well, the textmode installer ran, but then on first boot, the machine just went black and did nothing--I couldn't even bring up a text console.

I burned through a bunch of CDs before it occurred to me to try to boot into a recovery mode session and see what was up. Turns out that the Ubuntu installer wasn't configuring Xorg properly.

Fortunately, it seems that novalugger David Cafaro has already solved this problem. I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf along his lines. The relevant stanzas go like this:


Section “Device”

Identifier “Videocard0″
Driver “radeon”
Option “AGPMode” “4″
Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps” “true”
Option “RenderAccel” “true”

EndSection

Section “Screen”

Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Videocard0″
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”

Viewport 0 0
Depth 24

EndSubSection

EndSection


Fix that, reboot, and X should start.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS "Hardy Heron" instead--figuring that Dad should probably get a stabler Long-term support release rather than having to update every six months like I do.

N.B.: Regular readers will know/remember that I'm an Ubuntu user. In the spirit of Linux install reports, I'm offering this post, trying to compare and contrast my experiences installing Ubuntu and Windows Vista Home Basic.

I am pleased to report that "Project Wintendo"--my Windows Vista Home Basic installation--was a success. A few impresions, scribbled down during the installation process:

This was my first "real" Windows installation. All my previous Windows machines were OEM preinstalled, and I never bothered wiping & reinstalling.

The first challenge was getting the goddamn box open. Microsoft's new "packaging system"--presumably designed to thwart thieves--was aggravating to open. Sure, not as vicious as those hated clamshell packages, but still plenty annyoing.

It occurred to me as I was opening the package that the package was the physical manifestation of the type of DRM: designed to protect the producer, and succeding mostly in annoying the consumer.

Once I'd managed to get the box open, I popped the installation DVD into sputnik and booted it up. I was pleasantly surprised to be greeted with an Ubuntu-type installation splash screen. The installer didn't pick the right video mode for my graphics card right off the bat, though. The result was pretty enough, but the bad graphics mode was a bit of a letdown, given that most modern Linux distributions manage to handle this sort of thing pretty well. White text, for isntance, looked terrible--I was reminded of an Apple ][ from the '80s.

I bothered to read the whole EULA through once. For someone accustomed to free software, it's quite an eye-opener. I'm not a big fan of software with remote killswitches--nor of a document that permits Microsoft, theoretically, to go rooting about my system.

Also, I was dismayed to discover that Windows still needs to reboot a few times before the installation is complete. When I install Ubuntu, I can carry on using the LiveCD as the system is installed in the background. Definite advantage to Ubuntu there.

Post-install housekeeping included an installation of a current version of Kaspersky's security suite--a step I nearly forgot. Luckly, my Dad's Kaspersky license was good for three concurrent installations, so he let me use an unused installation.

All told, however, the installation process was pretty drama-free. No BSODs, or RSODs, no major breakage. I'm guessing most Vista nightmare stories come from people attempting to upgrade. Here, I was installing onto a fresh hard drive-- so there really wasn't anything to go wrong.

There are a few downers, of course. My logitech mouse wasn't fully supported, so I don't get multibutton support or high mouse resolutions. Fooey. (For the record, Ubuntu gives me proper multibutton support on the live CD, even if high mouse resolutions seem to be broken in the current AMD64 kernel)

As far as performance? I'm not going to lie--I'm pleasantly surprised. I'd read that Vista was a complete resource pig. Officially, Vista Home Basic's system requirements are pretty reasonable: 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 20GB hard drive, a DirectX 9-compatible graphics card. sputnik Has an AMD Athlon 3800+ (the "Manchester" core) running at 2 GHz, 2GB RAM, gobs of hard drive space, and an appropriate video card.

The installed system actually runs pretty snappily. Granted, the only thing I've really been using it for has been playing Civ4, and it's been perfectly adequate for that purpose.

Home Basic doesn't come with any of spiffy Aero user interface effects. My guess is that the real resource pig in most "premium" Vista installs is really Aero. Home Basic--without Aero--actually runs just fine. Of course, it's not as pretty as the desktop effects that I can get on Linux or OSX--but I dont' really care about how my interface looks if I see so little of it anyway. (To tell you the truth, I'd really be happy if Microsoft let me use fluxbox as a user interface, but that's not gonna happen.)

Final verdict? I installed Vista and lived. In fact, I'm pretty pleased with the result. But I'm using that partition only as a glorified games console--so I don't much care if that OS install goes kaput, since I've got all the important stuff elsewhere.

If you're running Windows XP now, and can't or won't migrate to a more sane operating system, I'd recommend that you go to XP Service Pack 3 and not bother with a full Vista upgrade.

If you're running Linux or OSX and have no particular need of Windows-specific software, there's really no compelling reason to switch.

If you built your own computer like I did, and you would like to put a Microsoft OS on it, then you'd best be served getting a retail box of Vista Home Basic. The "System Builder" packages are cheaper, but the license is bound to only one set of hardware--so if you build a new machine and wipe the old one, you don't get to use the media you bought to install the OS onto the new hardware. Given the cost of the OS, going with the OEM "system builder" pack is a false economy.

I'm waiting for rsync to cook through another backup of my /home directory, then I'll power down and install Vista Home Basic.

Not gonna lie: I am filled with a great sense of foreboding.

I never thought I would be writing this.

I think I'm going to install Windows Vista on sputnik, my current box.

I have been a pretty satisified Ubuntu user for four years now. I have gotten to the point where I don't feel particularly tied to Windows as an operating system--at least not for work.

So why go to Vista?

Simple. I love playing Civ 4. Some people have been able to get it running on Linux. But there are always all kinds of hiccups running in WINE. Fortunately, sputnik's hardware is good enough to run Civ4 quite capably.

Why Vista Home Basic? I don't really care for the visual chrome that is Microsoft's Aero desktop. Linux desktop chrome is nicer and more useful. Nor do I have any real need for the incremental-backup features that the "premium" flavors of Vista offer me--for a price. Since the Windows partition will be used mostly as a light-duty gaming rig, I don't anticipate any real problems in that department.

Does this mean I'm going to switch back to MSFT? Not really. I'm treating this like a gaming-console purchase.

I have seen the end of 32-bit addressing, my friends, and let me tell you, it's not pretty.

My default e-mail client, Evolution, is great, but it keeps my incoming mail in a single mbox file. (for you *nix nerds, by default this is at ~/.evolution/mail/local/).

Over the years, as I've migrated from computer to computer, I have brought my archived e-mails with me in various mbox files. As of last night, that represented a little under six years' of e-mail correspondence. I'd simply folded the mbox files into each other, allowing me to have a single mbox file that I could search--not that I did all that much grepping through my old logs, but I do go poking into my old correspondence every so often.

But there was a problem lurking here. On IA32, the Linux kernel can only handle files smaller than two gigabytes. It simply can't address anything bigger. After years of folding mboxes into each other, my Inbox file finally got so huge that the kernel just couldn't deal with it any more--Evolution spat an error about the file being too large, and there I was.

Now I know what the Paleolithic inhabitants of the cave at Zhoukoudian/Choukoutien felt like, as they were slowly squeezed out by the ashes of their continuously-tended fires.

I spent most of late last night/early this morning installing the AMD64 build of Ubuntu. Just as expected, the 64-bit kernel addressed the huge 2 GB file with no problem, and I set to work moving older files in the mbox to a series of archives (by year).

Sadly, this hasn't yet shrunk the file by nearly enough to make it addressable by my 32-bit Ubuntu install. Evo spits out a "file too large for data type" error--and, sure enough, the software reports an mbox file over two gigabytes big.

Most of the prolbem comes from my ISP: about a year ago, their POP3 server started acting weird; occasionally resetting the "read" status on messages. Since I download local copies of all the data on the remote server, this could be bad news: every time the ISP hiccups, I'm obliged to download the past however many months of messages all at once. I've tried to deal with it as best I can, but I probably have a metric shitload of redundant copies in that mbox file alone. Thanks, guys. I'll need to install a plugin or run a script to get rid of the redundancies.

Or I could just bite the bullet and migrate to a 64-bit kernel. But I'm so dependent on WINE and various non-free codecs that are avalable only on IA32 that migrating to the new architecture would be a real pain in the ass.

Took the eee pc to school today. The network-wallahs were very impressed.

I came in this morning to get myself connected to the university network. The first tech who saw me was suitably impressed. By the afternoon, I had accidentally messed with the network settings, so I brought it in to the techs again.

The second tech I talked to was so surprised to see an actual eee pc he jumped up out of his seat, shook my hand, fixed my networking issues, then talked with me animatedly about Linux and the eee pc and how he really wanted one for diagnosing network problems--no sense lugging a huge computer for that job.

He led e back into his cubicle--a space crammed with manuals and hardware--gave me his card, and told me to keep him aprised of how I was getting along with the eee pc.

Then he took me aside. "Don't publicize this. We don't really support Linux. I run Linux, and you run Linux. You look like a guy who knows what he's doing. I don't want to have anyone else coming in here who has no clue expecting us to get his Linux laptop up and running--at least not until we're ready."

The form factor is great. I was able to work on a crowded Metro (hacking up a text file). The nearly instant powerup makes it an ideal commuter. I'm carrying it in an old (small) padded laptop case. The machine is just big enough to fit inside a large ziplock bag--so that's how I carry it, to give myself a measure of weather protection. A smaller ziplock for the power cord, and I'm good to go.

More reaction, from other users:

"Aw, cute!"

"Laptop? On you, that's more like a LEG top, buddy."

"What is that thing?"

Just as I predicted I now have a brand-new Asus eee pc just in time for the joys of exam week! As a matter of fact, I'm typing this update on it right now.

First impressions are VERY favorable. It runs right out of the box. The startup time is ridiculously fast. The system is remarkably responsive.

The keyboard, as you might expect, is miniscule. My hands, as you might know, are not miniscule. The small size of the keyboard does cut down on my maximum typing speed. But otherwise, it isn't too bad; I just have to remember to curl my fingers to get the tips right up on the keys--kind of like playing Bach on the piano.

This is pretty much what I want in a portable device. If this can work with the university wireless, then I'll be in hog heaven.

Sing it with me now:

I want my
I want my
I want my
eee PC


Yes folks, that's the laptop I've been waiting for. Flash memory for storage, about seven inches across (that's 18 cm or so) and less than a kilogram in mass. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to wait until September (or, the way things are going, October) to get my grubby little paws on this thing.

Of course, the haters out there might want to know why I would open my usually tight fist and spend nearly three hundred of my (well, Uncle Sam's, since I'm on the student loan now) money on a machine that, on paper, isn't terribly capable. Go back up and read the size figures on this thing: seven inches across and fewer than two pounds in weight mean that it doesn't add all that much to my daily burden. And it's not trivial: I'm probably hauling ten to twelve kilos of books and notes with me to school every day. For the same three hundred bucks, sure, I could just buy a Dell or whatever--but the Dell would be bigger, tougher to carry, and three times the weight.

Of course, the other nice thing is that the eee PC will run Linux right out of the box. My regular readers will already know how much of a Linux booster I've been for the past couple of years, so for me, the fact that the eee PC will run Linux is a selling point. Rumor has it that the eee pc will ship with Xandros. From the look of some demo screenshots, it looks like "expert" mode on the machine is pretty bog-standard KDE.

Best of all, since Xandros is a Debian daughter, I'm thinking it shouldn't be too hard to get my preferred distribution to run on the thing.

The School's IP-wallahs won't love me, though--officially, School's a Windows shop (with some grudging toleration for Apples). But if I can make it work for note-taking and then talk to the techs about what, exactly, is the super-duper top-secret way to connect to the campus wifi, then I'll be groovin' a lightweight penguin-powered laptop just in time for the joys of exam week.

If you're reading this blog, it's a pretty good bet that you're also a Facebook user. It appears that someone has somehow gotten a hold of Facebook's source code.

I don't know much about this sort of thing, but I am given to understand that Facebook seems to be nothing but a huge ass-piece of PHP code. Heaven only knows how these guys got hold of the source--all this would be executed on the server side.

TechCrunch has some commentary and analysis on what the code leak might mean:

There are a number of clear ramifications here. The first is that the code can be used by outsiders to better understand how the Facebook application works, for the purposes of finding further security holes or bugs that could be exploited. Since Facebook is a closed source application, without access to the code security holes are usually found through a process of black-box testing, whereby an external party will probe the application in an attempt to work out how the application behaves and to try and find potential race conditions. In closed source applications it is common that developers rely on the closed nature of the application to obfuscate poor design elements and the structure of the application. An attacker getting access to the source code more often than not leads to further security holes being discovered. It is for these reasons that it is often claimed that open source software is more secure than closed source software, since there are many more eyes auditing the code and obfuscation can’t be used as a security measure.

The second implication with this leak is that the source code reveals a lot about the structure of the application, and the practices that Facebook developers follow. From just this single page of source code a lot can be said and extrapolated about the rest of the Facebook application and platform. For instance, the structure doesn’t follow any object oriented development practices, and it seems that the application is one large PHP file with a large number of custom functions living in the same namespace (they also seem to be using the Smarty templating engine).

Not fun. Myspace has been target for Cross-site scripting exploits for a while now, and you can be pretty sure there are guys who are way more knowledgeable than I could ever be poring over the Facebook code, looking for similar vulnerabilities.

I am pleased to report the (thus-far) successful build of my new computer, hostname sputnik. Ubuntu Feisty installed and booted, and I'm letting it burn-in a few hours before I get to work getting the OS up to date and tweaking things to my liking.

Baa, baa black sheep, have you any wool?
"Yes, sir; yes, sir, three bags full:
"One for the Master and one for the Dame
"And One for the little boy who lives down the lane."

This is my life at work. I move piles of paper to and fro. Occasionally, I move them hither and yon. The cruel twist is that I am supposed to be living in the age of the paperless office. We are being buried by mounds of needless paper.

I am supposed to report the receipt of PTO Office Actions and to our clients, forwarding those same Office Actions, along with any references cited therein.

Along the way, I am supposed to make copies: two copies each of the reporting letter (one for the case file, one for the chron); and two copies each of all the references (one to the client, one to the case file, and one to destinations unknown and unknowable). Here's the rub: all of these references are available electronically, whether from the USPTO themselves or any number of online databases. The firm has just spent a small fortune on extra structural steel to bear the accumulated weight of our paper patent files--weight that might have been saved if I didn't have to make redundant copies of easily-available documents.

Even though I work with IP attorneys, who are, theoretically at least, in the "Technology" practice group of this firm, I have yet to deal with a group of people who are so adamantly averse to the actual use of information technology in practice. There is always at least one IBM Selectric rattling away typing labels--because the secretary in question refuses to learn how to use the label-printing function in her word processor. We are constantly making redundant paper copies of everything. And, worse, our clients refuse to deal in anything but paper or facsimile. Correspondence that could have been sent at zero cost via e-mail is sent at considerable cost via international direct dial fax. Some agents or clients have no e-mail access at all.

I don't know how representative my experience is, but I'm constantly amazed at the lack of openness to computers & IT.

In a triumph of new-media synergy, Slate, the Microsoft-owned online magazine, has posted a glowing review of Windows Vista. Surprise, surprise! [In fairness to Slate, I actually like their culture and politics coverage--they tend to have decent writers.]

The irony, of course, is that the Flash advertising on the page (at least when I visited) was Apple's latest "I'm a PC/ I'm a Mac!" commercial.

Elsewhere on the interblag, Auntie Beeb has decided to hold an OS shootenanny. Let the fanboi poo-flinging commence!

And even though I'm posting this from an XP box (foo on boxes on which I don't have administration rights!), my preferred OS is of course GNU/Linux--but you already knew that.

Teka, kaya ba natin 'to?
Kung hindi na'y aakayin ka't
Itatayo-- 'yon-'yon--
Kaya hanggang ngayon
Tuloy, tuloy, tuloy, tuloy--

'Wag kang bibitiw bigla,
Pikit ang 'yong mga mata--
Higpitan lang ang 'yong kapit
Maglalayag patugong langit!

--Sponge Cola, "Bitiw"

IT WORKS. The fsck repaired everything a treat.

I'm off to bed.

"I think I'll go home and mull this over before I cram it down my throat."

fatal corruptions were found


is NOT what you want to read after you run


# reiserfsck --fix-fixable /dev/hda3


OK. think positive. Knoppix 5.1 is a pretty kickass liveCD.

Now I'm crossing my fingers hoping that


# reiserfsck --rebuild-tree /dev/hda3


gets me somewhere. It'll take another three hours or so for reiserfsck to rebuild the tree. Then we'll see if we have a usable system. jdong's not optimistic; neither am I.

Let me give a shoutout once again to all my #ubuntuforums peeps for their support during this trying time.

I'm going to get some sleep. I think I've managed to pull my most important data off the hard drive. I hope there's some way to reconstruct my mails.

If this turns out to be a hardware failure, though, I'm going to be in the market for a new desktop computer. I invite suggestions for the specification of a reasonably powerful desktop. Bear in mind that I will also need to budget (soon) for a decent laptop as well. The laptop will necessarily be small & light (and thus not terribly highly specified), so let's hear your suggestions on cheap, heavy, and effective desktop computing.

funes, my main desktop, has suffered a particularly nasty crash that I haven't yet figured out. I'm trying to haul data off /home.

At the moment all I'm left with is a recovery console and a root shell. Just about enough to use cp and rysnc but otherwise nothing.

funes boots, but doesn't recognize a swap partition (notwithstanding the fact that cfdisk tells me it's there.

All this started out with some very sluggish performance in a normal session. Evolution kept quitting on me. I had a few hard lockups--100 percent processor use, no response to keystrokes, the rest of it. hard shutdown and reboot brought me to the black screen of death.

/ is dirty. I'm going to have to fsck it, once I get all this data off. With luck, I'll be able to fsck without much real damage. If it turns out I can't recover from this crash, I'm utterly shafted. Work. Logs. Photos. everything.

Finally.

I figured out why Rockbox wasn’t playing some of my ogg files. Apparently, I had mistakenly configured Grip to write id3 tags as well as vorbis comments on my file.

The commercial iRiver firmware on the H340 dealt with id3 tags well enough, but Rockbox treats ogg vorbis (and FLAC for that matter) files with id3 tags as ‘corrupted.’ Strictly speaking, these files should not be tagged with id3, and should instead use their native comments fields.

Thanks to the ever-patient jdong and #ubuntuforums I was able to write a handy script for stripping the offending id3 tags from my music collection:


#!/bin/sh
#a stripper for tags
find . -not -name “*mp3” -print0 | xargs -i -0 id3v2 -D “{}”


Now I can take advantage of all the coolness that is Rockbox--including a way to post the songs I listen to on the iRiver to mylast.fm user page.