Blog:Benner
From Ben's Writing
The following is my attempt to lead a more public life. Not because I think I'm so interesting that anyone will care about the all the same things I find interesting, but rather that one person might find something I have contemplated interesting as well. Maybe doing this will help remove the onus of research on the topic from them. Maybe they will be able to correct a thought I've had. In the worst case, it'll just be a place I can come back to and rediscover the things I've thought about in the past.
First phone based manipulation
I am surprisingly easy to manipulate apparently. Not for malicious intent, which is fortunate, but the outcome of it still felt abusive in some way.
I've realized that I have been so sucked in to Reddit that I've actually had to go out of my way to fill the front page I get displayed with mostly pictures and a dozen article links. Further, I only allow myself to read whatever is on the front page after which my time is up. I almost went on to Reddit just to post this. It's that bad.
What got me interested in Computer Science
Some one recently asked me what first got me interested in Computer Science. I had a bit of a hard time coming up with a good answer.
A Speculative Memoir
I started writing this is 2007, and I'm surprisingly not to upset at how it started. It's only a small portion of the text, but it seemed worth having in a place that is easily accessible. Keep in mind it needs some serious editing.
The story is about me, many years from now. By then my family and wife have left me, and I’ve gained over 800lbs and grown rather fond of KFC. Well, fond does not quite describe my new found affection for the food. If you’ve ever seen the Seinfeld episode where Kramer gets hooked on the bird, then you only have an inkling of what I’m referring too.
My new addition get so bad that I stop even bothering to bathed or even wash my, what have then become paws, between meal, so my entire house hold slowly becomes coated with a thin to medium coating of grease and honey mustard meddle.
Once, In Belize
I remember a time in Belize, we had just finned a hike. We were starving, hot and exhausted. On our way back down the trail we saw a sign to a waterfall. We weren't convinced it was a great idea, but we figured we'd likely never be back, so it would be best to see it while we could. It probably took us 20 minutes longer than the 10 minute trail hike to get there, but what we found made up for it all. I am not sure if you have jumped in glacier water, but that is how cold the water felt. I think I recall wondering if my body was going in to shock. Fortunately that passed, and the hunger and exhaustion disappeared as we found different ways to jump in and through the water fall. The water was poring over so swiftly, and from such a hight, it felt like you were being hit with very large and very cold rubber mallets. After we go out, all the pains from before returned, but I think it was the best part of the trip. (And this is compared to snorkelling for hours on the reefs.)
Getting an Acer Aspire One (722-BZ610) to run Linux
I just got my hands on a new (to me) Acer Aspire One (722-BZ610). It's a nice little 10-11 inch netbook with a rather interesting CPU. Actually, it's an APU: it is a CPU and GPU combination. Anyway, before I could working on running experiments on it, I needed to get it to run Linux. Surprisingly, given the state of most modern Linux distributions, there were a number of frustrating issues that came up during the configuration of the new machine.
Force Mail to Display All Messages as Plain Text
For one reason or another, I've grown used to viewing my email in plain text, and having to continually subject myself to other people's idea of a good font is irksome, to say the least. I've had my system configured to hide all the jazz from me for sometime, but I have no refenrece for how I did it originally. It seems the simplest method to put this in effect is:
$ defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE
Restore alternate-click in OS X Lion
The new track pad options in OS X Lion (10.7) do not allow for Snow Leopard's classic two-finger plus button click combo as a right-click. Running the following from the shell will enable it:
$ defaults -currentHost write -g com.apple.trackpad.enableSecondaryClick -bool YES
The best quality LaTeX is made with Rubber
Addressing threats to Canadian an US security, or: How I learnt to feel concerned about the misuse of personal information on Canadian citizen
"The Declaration on a Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness is based on principles that recognize and respect our separate constitutional and legal frameworks that protect privacy, civil liberties, and human rights. It also recognizes the sovereign right of each country to act independently in its own interest and in accordance with its laws.
...
Collaborating to address threats before they reach our shores, we expect to develop a common understanding of the threat environment through improved intelligence and information sharing, as well as joint threat assessments to support informed risk management decisions."
Go here to voice your opinion.
Writing online
As much as I like writing, blogs and wikis, I wish the whole mess was a lot more unified. As much as I fight the Facebook urge, I love sharing things with people, and having to do it manually each time I write something is tiresome. Maybe we'll have another rainy Sunday and I can sit down and connect this thingamabob to Facebook, so I don't have to push the updates manually. Should I really be publicly advertising that I have so little a life that I'd welcome a rainy day after so many months of snow. Yes, I guess I should be; maybe it's a cry for help.
Help! I have no social life!
Naw, just kidding, I'm ok.
Dynamic link libraries and grids
It seems natural to have an error at the OS level, when a dynamic link library is missing. If the library is not on the machine, or not in the search paths, then of course the executable cannot be run. But this style of feedback does not scale well.
Last time on...
I was thinking the other day---odd, I know---that it might be nice if the video game industry paid closer attention to the needs of their aging players. As much as I hate to say it, my memory---if it ever was worth anything---is starting to fade. For years TV shows have been kind enough to remind me of the critical details in the stories plot so far, but video games still have me resorting to writing notes, so as not to loose any precious clues. I'm not saying they need to add a full highlight reel, but it would be nice if they gently reminded me of some of the things I previously did in the game that might be relevant to my current position.
Finding Balance in remote terminal sessions
While working remotely on a *nix system, it is, as times, convenient to have a series of hosts aliased to look like the same entry point. Not only does this simplify script writing, it also saves valuable irritation time that could be best be spent on things that matter, rather than on hosts that are not responding.
A more powerful spelling tool
Second round on the suggestion tool. This time, I used a sqlite database for the back-end, and seeded it with 17,000 common misspellings. The tool first checks the database, then tries Google. If a correction is found in the database, it simply prints it. If a suggestion is made by Google, then the program prints it and stashes it in the database.
Using the tool is pretty easy:
group-spell-suggest <word>
As before, the code is freely available here.
Using Google to help me spell
I have been meaning to write this tool for ages, but I finally found the time. It is a very simple idea: use Google to do my spell-checking. I already do it by hand, whenever the native checker fails, so I figured I would try to automate the whole thing. It turned out to be very simple. The new tool's interface is equally simple:
google-suggest <word>
Where word is some poor attempt at using the English language. The code is available here.
Simplest method of enabling the root user on for OS X
I recently found nice and simple new way to enable the root user on Mac OS X:
$ dsenableroot -u <your-username> -p <your-password> -r <root-password> dsenableroot:: ***Successfully enabled root user.
That should be all you need. No GUI; not wait.
Missing strace on Darwin
I've been switching between three OS on a daily basis for a number of years now, and my mind seems increasingly less capable of remembering all the different commands that give roughly the same functionality. One of the Linux tools I've found to be very helpful is strace, but, go figure, it is not available on OS X. Fortunately, there are a number of options. Some are far more advanced and flexible, like dtrace, others like ktrace are too primitive. There is one tool, however, that does provide a nice in-between tool: dtruss.
Hacking DisplayLink's USB display drivers to work on OS X Lion 10.7
I decided take OS X Lion (10.7) for a test run. Everything seems quite nice, but my two Arkview USB Display Adapters stopped working. Clearly there is no support for them yet, but I managed to convince the latest beta drivers to run on my rig.
Enhanced keyboard shortcuts
It occurs to me that we should have the ability to encode single keyboard short-cuts that tell the computer to ignore the modifier. I know that a user can express the same statement using two rules: Ctrl+PgUp and simply PgUp. But since this is likely only ever done by expert users, having a more complex syntax seems reasonable, not to mention the duplicity of the rules can be reduced. If we allowed rules of the form {Ctrl}-PgUp to mean optionally press Ctrl while concurrently depressing PgUp. This type of shortcut may show up in the case of a media centre, where only a subset of the keyboard is used. Controls sequences like the following up show up in some of my configuration files:
- <left>StepBack</left>
- <left mod="ctrl">SmallStepBack</left>
- <right>StepForward</right>
- <right mod="ctrl">StepForward</right>
Where < tagk > refers to which keyboard button k has been pressed, attribute modj refers to a modifier key, like ctrl and shift. The ones of interest are the tagright with and without modifiers. I could have been re-written like so:
<right mod="-ctrl">StepForward</right>
Meaning that the state of the control key should be ignored, for savings of one keyboard shortcut statement.
