paulproteus

zyprexakills

paulproteus — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 04:09:36 +0000

Will this be like the Diebold memo distribution efforts before?

Round robin DNS

paulproteus — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 19:44:54 +0000

Both Firefox and IE correctly handle round-robin DNS apparently. This means if you list multiple A records and one of the machines says “Connection refused”, both will retry.

Source for Firefox. Actually, I can’t find a source that confirms this solidly for Internet Explorer. Dear Lazyweb…?
Anywya, Venkatesh, thanks for correcting me on this important web tech issue.

More spam titles

paulproteus — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 10:33:00 +0000

I just got spam emails with these two subjects:

Let your computer be the PRO!
dickinson ethnology

For the first one, I have to say, expert systems were a long-promised result of Artificial Intelligence research that still haven't become fully real. And I don't know why spammers would be so interested in the cultural anthropology of Emily Dickinson. Unless they're trying to lure me into opening the mail because I would be intrigued by such a letter….

The 235 exchange

paulproteus — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:48:00 +0000

We recently got a new phone line installed at our apartment in the Dell House, and I asked Verizon for a number in the 235 exchange. “I just love that exchange,” I pleaded. Luckily, they were able to find us one.

If you're not already convinced that the 235 exchange is the best one near the Homewood campus (with the possible exception of 516), you might want to know this list of things in the 235 exchange:

WYPR, the local NPR affiliate
The Rotunda Theater
One World Cafe
Rocky Run
The “Goof Troop” house
The Real Deal Jamaican and American Carry-Out
The Maryland SPCA
New No Da Ji
Holy Frijoles
Angelo's Pizza
Environmental Fund for Maryland

I'm tired…

paulproteus — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 19:52:00 +0000

Having just read an article on kuro5hin, I can now say:

I'm tired of not being radical.

Thank you for running Copyleft for so long. It was wonderful.

paulproteus — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 19:10:00 +0000

Copyleft is the place where I bought my T-shirt. (It was a quality T-shirt, and it has lasted the years well.) I ordered a Debian sticker from them about a year ago, and it never came. I guess I must have ordered after the owner closed up shop.

I’d be upset, but really, Copyleft has a special place in my heart. (And it was only a couple of bucks.) If you Google the company name and its former owner, you discover that the owner has moved on to another company. And Copyleft was the place that sold the potentially illegal DeCSS T-shirt. So, I sent this email to Steve[n] Blood:

Dear Steve Blood,
I noticed that when I went to http://www.copyleft.net/ that I got “file
not found” errors. As I was becoming acquainted with Free Software in the
late ’90s, Copyleft was there to let me speak my mind through clothing.

Since then, my interest in Free Software and EFF’s mission have only
increased. My iBook G4 laptop runs GNU/Linux; I filed written testimony
in the EFF case OPG v. Diebold. I waited on the steps of the Supreme
Court on March 29 to hear the oral arguments in MGM v. Grokster. I
discuss digital freedom issues with artists and engineers alike in
college.

Thank you for running Copyleft for so long. It was wonderful. I miss it,
though I recognize that surely you have moved on.

Sincerely,

Asheesh Laroia

P.S. I made this an open letter by publishing it on the web (with some
more comments) at http://blogs.jhu.edu/users/paulproteus/18910.html .
I’d be honored if you read the extra notes I made there.

–
AMAZING BUT TRUE …
If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end
across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful.

I

paulproteus — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 10:57:00 +0000

I recently read The Tyranny of Structurelessness, an essay by Jo “Joreen” Freeman about how having unstructured feminism groups was a problem local groups needed to get over.

There are some good lessons in here; I'll update this with choice quotes.

Coral Cache and Debian packages

paulproteus — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:20:00 +0000

I just tried creating a Debian package repository that uses the Coral Content Distribution Network. If you're not familiar with it, it's an instant-temporary-mirror service that you can use by append “.nyud.net:8090″ to any URL.

Let me give a little background: My web server (asheesh.org) is on a slow cable modem uplink. Serving big files that are Debian packages to the Internet sucks from it. But if I download the files from Coral instead, they're fast:

http://www.asheesh.org/debian/dyna_0.3.8-1_i386.deb: 45 KB/s
http://www.asheesh.org.nyud.net:8090/debian/dyna_0.3.8-1_i386.deb: 501 KB/s

As I said, Coral is fast. So it would be great if I could hack a .htaccess to redirect access for the package files through Coral CDN but first have them hit my server so I can count package downloads. Alas, apt-get does not follow redirects:

paulproteus@hawking:/tmp/apt-0.6.35ubuntu2$ sudo apt-get source dyna
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Need to get 13.3MB of source archives.
Get:1 http://www.asheesh.org ./ dyna 0.3.8-1 (dsc) [317B]
Err http://www.asheesh.org ./ dyna 0.3.8-1 (tar)
302 Found
Get:2 http://www.asheesh.org ./ dyna 0.3.8-1 (diff) [7834B]
Fetched 8151B in 0s (74.0kB/s)
Failed to fetch http://www.asheesh.org/debian/./dyna_0.3.8.orig.tar.gz 302 Found
E: Failed to fetch some archives.

Unfortunately, the Debian apt program doesn't handle HTTP redirects at all. I have filed Bug 12378 with Ubuntu to see if they'll support it.

Bonsai

paulproteus — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 14:35:00 +0000

Bonsai Kitten can't hold a candle to a cat with two faces. Unless you consider this quote from the article:

Roughly three years ago, she [the two-faced-cat's owner] discovered a litter of smaller than normal kittens she calls “miniature cats.”

She now has plans to market the miniature cats, which grow to about 4 pounds, on the Internet.

MediaWiki; also, "Broadcom engineers are weenies"

paulproteus — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 15:38:00 +0000

In the beginning of the summer, I spoke with Safi Shareef about getting him an ACM server account so he could run MediaWiki to host the JHU Muslim Association's website.

Boy, am I impressed. Safi's wiki has non-techie users with accounts, and he's really doing cool things with it. He's using lots of the MediaWiki tools that I see elsewhere and think, “I should learn how to use that.” If I'm wikimaster@jhu.edu, he's sure showing me up.

Also, I decided tentatively to join the Linux Broadcom 4301 Driver Project. Broadcom is a chip company that makes, among other things, the wireless networking chip in my iBook G4. They refuse to tell anyone how to program their chip, so Linux developers can't write drivers for it. That means I have to use an external USB wireless stick just to get online with my Mac, since I run Linux.

The project's plan is to take drivers that already work, disassemble them to learn how they work, and use the disassembly knowledge to tell Linux developers how to write their own drivers. It's a cool application of the right of reverse engineering, and it'll hopefully make my laptop more useful to me.

The title of this post is taken from the old Netscape Engineers Are Weenies” message in a Microsoft product.