I have been very happy with the awesome window manager for several months since switching from Ion.

Here is a screenshot of my config:

Last night Andrew, Viddler's frontend guy suggested to me that the MySQL querycache free space graph looked like a waveform and that MySQL was trying to tell us something.

So of course I had to convert the RRD data into a waveform.

The resulting sound is here.

I can't make anything out. It could be a different language.

Here is the code I used to make the sound:

#!/usr/bin/python

import pygame
import time

from Numeric import array
pygame.mixer.init(800, 8, False)

#sndarray = pygame.sndarray.array()

sndarray = []

f = open('vals.txt')
for line in f:
    val = float(line.strip())
    sndarray.append(int(val*10))
f.close()
#numsndarray = numpy.array(sndarray)
numsndarray = array(sndarray)
snd = pygame.sndarray.make_sound(numsndarray)
snd.play()
time.sleep(20)

Out of curiously I signed up for freecreditreport.com. It is a membership based site with a 7 day trial. I was curious about the information provided and was not interested in maintaining a membership with them, so I started an account, checked it out, and then tried to immediately cancel.

Of course there was no way to cancel online. You must call. You won't find anything about how to cancel until you dig through the FAQ.

You must call and spend 15 minutes arguing your case about why you want to cancel.

After I had them convinced that I was quite certain about canceling, the CSR told me that this is a free 7 day trial, and I will have to call back in 7 days to cancel.

The nerve! They expect people to make an appointment to call them in 7 days? I responded "Well I'm letting you know now that I do not authorize any charges to my account and I will charge back anything that I see from freecreditreport.com"

That is the magic incantation -- the response was "OK you persist in getting this closed, so I will close it."

I am sure lots of people just say OK and then forget to call in 7 days. They are really taking advantage of their customers.

Something in my iceweasel configuration is causing images to break, and I don't want to lose my many years of carefully crafted configuration, so I'm removing add-ons one by one to determine what is causing this.

I though this would be a good opportunity to list my favorite add-ons.

• Flashblock -- Indispensable!
• Webdeveloper
• Torbutton -- Very handy for quick proxy switching.
• Greasemonkey
• Noscript
• Javascript Options
• Firebug -- I don't leave this one active as it's got some speed issues, but it's very handy.
• Yslow -- See above.
• Fasterfox -- Not sure this is needed anymore, but it was great for early versions.
• Ebay toolbar -- Nicer 3rd party ebay toolbar.
• Tamper Data -- I have use this to play tricks on web sites :) Good for security testing.
• Bugmenot -- Auto-fills forms for annoying forced-registration websites.
• Live HTTP Headers -- Unfortunately the current release does not work in FF3. I love seeing the Server: header in my status bar for every page I visit.
• Header monitor
• Adblock Filterset G Updater -- Keeps adblock updated.
• Adblock plus
• itsalltext -- Edit html textareas in a real editor!

It turned out Torbutton was the culprit. Kind of surprising considering it was in the "tor off" state when it was causing the image bug.

Here is today's contribution to the global pool. This data is a little hard to find.

As far as I know there are two FLOSS ways to make video thumbnails. Using mencoder:

mencoder /tmp/tmpMPbaKN/35dffc402a4b439978e6e05170d401c76b3c8cf0 -ovc lavc
-nosound -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:vqscale=2 vf scale=100 -of lavf -lavfopts
i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames:format=image2pipe -ss
1.0 -frames 1 -o out.jpg

...and using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i /tmp/tmpMPbaKN/35dffc402a4b439978e6e05170d401c76b3c8cf0 -f mjpeg -t 0.01 -y out.jpg

Neither one works particularly well with incomplete video files.

Two feeds I've tracked regularly for quite some time are Reddit and the slightly better version of the same site Hacker News. Lately I've been very disappointed with the posts that come to the forefront, perhaps in the same way I eventually became disappointed with Digg.

For those living in caves, all of these sites operate on a collaborative filtering model. Users submit interesting links and vote on what they think is most interesting. The top voted posts are put on the site's front page.

This model seems to work out great for the early lifetime of these sites, but every site I've followed eventually gets popular, and subsequently gamed. People vote up insignificant things, and posts get read because of their misleading buzz-filled headlines. Some such templates for this theme are:

• Why controversial thing X is better than controversial thing Y.
• 5 Easy steps to make your code sing
• Why [thing you like] sucks
• Tutorial on currently-buzzed topic that could easily be found simply googling

I feel like my limited attention is gamed by these "give me hits" posts even though some are potentially interesting. This is why I long ago unsubscribed from Digg and will probably have to do the same for HN and Reddit. I don't have a better solution yet. I think I could probably write a lot more about this. Back to work!

Because I forget such things all the time, this is how you rip real audio to a wav:

mplayer -ao pcm:file=target.wav pnm://stream.lol.lol/lol.rm

The reason that I needed this today? To archive the famous Bell Labs recording of the IBM 704 singing Daisy Bell :)

ibm7094singsdaisy1961.mp3

One advantage to IM based conversation over in-person is that when someone takes a long time (or a lot of words) to get to the point, one can easily switch to a different window and do something else while the other party gathers their thoughts. While I typically much prefer in-peron conversation, this is an important edge case in favor of instant messaging.

Cory Doctorow in The Pleasures of Uninterrupted Communication writes:

The mature information worker is someone who can manage his queues effectively, prioritizing and re-prioritizing as new items crop up, doing the fast-context-switching necessary to respond to an email while waiting for a file to download or a backup to complete. It's a little like spinning plates, and when you get the rhythm of it, it can be glorious. There's a zone you slip into, a zone where everything gets done, one thing after another clicking into place.

But once you add an interruptive medium like IM, unscheduled calls, or pop-up notifiers of mail, flow turns into chop. The buzz, blip, and snap of a thousand alerts turn plate-spinning into hell, as random firecrackers detonate over and over again, on every side of you, always there in your peripheral vision, blowing your capacity to manage your own queue as they rudely insert themselves into your attention.

This point truly resonates with my experience and my aversion to instant messaging. It kills my flow, and it can take a while to get this flow back.

A good way to mitigate negative the effects of interruptible communcation on the desktop in the instance that IM is a requirement is to use multiple computers. When you want to do something important, use the computer without an IM client, and make sure any auditory alerts are disabled.

Reason #1001 not to buy an iPhone:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)

via nanocr.eu