mim's blog

I just finished a small re-arrangement of my main website. I’m now using bibtex2html to generate my publications list from my CV. It puts in abstracts, bibtex, and links to the paper, poster, slides, whatever. I wrote a little script around it to combine the different sections generated by bibunits into one big html file. I also shuffled around the front page of the site a tiny bit, adding a picture Adrian took of me.

You may have noticed a few weeks ago that mr-pc.org was up and down, mostly down, for a number of reason. First my subletter turned off the computer, and when it was turned back on, it had a different internal IP address and I had to talk my roommate through changing the settings. Then, electricians were installing new sockets and lights and things in the apartment and they needed to turn off the power two days from 9 to 5. The second day it came back up, it was in need of an fsck and I was still away for a week. When I got back I fixed it, but it started crashing every day or two and I knew it was on its last legs.

So I ordered a new Dell desktop with ubuntu pre-installed. It’s up and running now and all of my data is transfered over. It’s got a pentium dual core, 2 gb of ram, and a 320 gb hard drive so it can serve as my general compute server as well. And it only cost about $400 with tax and shipping. The old machine has served me well, but will have to be retired, although the hard drive lives on (for now) in an external enclosure. Hopefully this one will last me eight years as well.

A bunch of my friends have started using twitter, seemingly all at once. I think the whole status update part of it is pretty dumb, I just use it for posting interesting tidbits in under 160 characters. It’s nice because I text them in as well, which I guess would be less notable if I could send email with my phone, but I can’t. Adrian asked me how I got my twitter updates into my sidebar. When my response was longer than I expected it to be, I realized that it hadn’t been trivial and other people might be interested.

As of version 2.2, wordpress has sidebar widgets. You get to them by going to the “presentation” tab and then the “widgets” sub-tab. You can move around all the stuff on the sidebar, take things out, etc, as long as your theme is compatible. I think my theme was compatible, but if you have a custom theme or are a theme author, there are instructions. There’s an RSS widget that shows RSS feeds which I think it checks every hour or so. Getting that running is the first step.

The only problem is that the wordpress RSS reader doesn’t like certain RSS feeds. Or at least that was the case with my version of it, maybe it’s been fixed since 2.2.2. It likes RSS feeds from feedburner, so I set up all of the feeds I wanted it to display on feedburner and have the RSS widget read them.

The third thing, which is still sub-optimal is getting the right rss feed from twitter. I wanted it to be the last N things I’ve posted, but unfortunately twitter has some sort of time limit so things that are too old don’t show up in the feed even if they’re in the N most recent posts. It would be nice to get the rss feed from the twitter archives, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do that. Another tricky thing was getting the feed for just me, not for me+friends. Also on the wishlist is some way for people to comment on the twitters, which might involve getting a different feed from twitter again, but I’m not sure.

You may have noticed that the sidebar on this blog now contains things that are slightly less ignorable than before. If you’re reading the rss feed, then you probably haven’t noticed, but they’re just few more feeds to read. Gutsy includes wordpress 2.2.2 (dismissed as coincidence), so I am now able to take advantage of the rss sidebar widget. For some reason, wordpress couldn’t properly read the raw rss feeds, but it can read them when run through feedburner.

The first is from my twitter account. I don’t think I’m using it in the officially sanctioned way, but I like posting one-line thoughts or questions that don’t warrant a whole blog post. It’s nice that I can text them in from my phone as well.

The second two are from my photo gallery, specifically random phone pictures and photos from concerts. I’ve gotten into the habit of taking at least one picture of every band I see, so I can remember who I saw and when I saw them. It’s also nice having a camera on my phone, so I always have it handy to snap a picture of a funny sign or situation. I’d like the pictures to actually show up in the sidebar, but that will take some more tinkering.

I upgraded both of my computers to ubuntu version 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon, a mere six months after upgrading to 7.4, Feisty Fawn. It was quite easy this time, the installer ran all the way through without stopping, but there were still about a dozen pauses in the action where it asked me to keep an old configuration file or upgrade it. This made the overnight install on my desktop less efficient than it could have been. The only hiccup was that Gutsy dropped support for apache 1.3, so I had to quickly hack my httpd.conf into apache2 sized pieces.

The other notable upgrade was from emacs 21 to emacs 22, an event that only happens once every 6 years. The only thing that that upgrade broke was python support, which I regained by purging the python-mode package. Emacs 22 also ships with org mode, which I started using on Ron’s recommendation instead of the hierarchical notebook, hnb, I’d been using for the past few years.

Org mode stores everything as a flat file, using emacs’ outlining abilities to fold things up. Hnb, on the other hand, uses an xml file and a diff shows many more differences than the ones I make. This makes merging hnb changes between computers nearly impossible, but it is slightly more possible with org mode. Org mode is also more flexible, keeps track of more information, and does better todo lists. It’s also actively maintained and uses my emacs keybindings. I’m still learning the interface, but it’s been very useful already. I wrote a little python script to convert my hnb xml files to org-style text files.

Gutsy also solved a few problems on my laptop. I no longer have to close the lid twice to put it to sleep. This was a mysterious problem that began when I started using some gnome applets in fluxbox with docker. NetworkManager was still worth the extra trouble, but now I can use it without worrying about sleep weirdness. Dbus crashes seem to be less frequent as well, although I really wish I didn’t need to run that at all. Every once in a while it still has trouble waking up, the sleep light flashes and the hard drive seems to be active, but the screen never comes on. Some combination of closing and opening the lid and plugging and unplugging the power usually snaps it out of its coma.

Recently, there has been a great upsurge in the use of the name “mim”. A few weeks ago I ran across this flyer on the street, wondering who this MIMS person could be. Jon Werberg forwarded me this village voice story explaining who MIMS is and the implications of his #1 hit, “This is why I’m hot”. I am less than impressed with his cooptation of my name. Also, although sherv would have you believe otherwise, I do not have any affiliation with the movie “The last mimzy”, nor have they paid me any royalties for their use of my name.

Other famous and less transient mims include the Maoist International Movement, fond of distributing newspapers at 77 Mass Ave, mim’s knitting frenzy, a knitting blog, metal injection molding, the masonry institute of michigan, meetings industry megasite, the multilateral initiative on malaria, and so forth.

Other famous Michael Mandels include the Michael Mandel who is the chief economist at Business Week magazine, the Michael Mandel who is a law professor at York University in Canada, and the Michael Mandel who was a CS grad student at CMU and now works at apple.

You have been warned, don’t be fooled!

My network’s been hosed recently here at my apartment, so I put some bandwidth restrictions on apache. The upload over my cable modem has always been tiny, maybe 60 kB/s on an average day, so I limited apache to take 40 kB/s of that. It looks like most of my bandwidth goes to search engine spiders. Then there are all of the comment spammers still looking to post on my old blosxom blog, and the myspace folks (another) who link directly to my paisley background instead of downloading it themselves. The worst part is that they’re not even using the right tile! I’ve been spending a fair amount of bandwidth on Adrian’s radio show archives, but at least I agreed to do that. That’s generally getting a few full downloads a day, way to go Adrian!

Using mod_bandwidth it was relatively simple. I added the module to my modules.conf and dropped this block into the main section of my httpd.conf

<IfModule mod_bandwidth.c>
BandWidthModule on

# All other bandwidth is 40 kB/s
BandWidth all 40960
</IfModule>

The local bandwidth un-restriction doesn’t appear to be working, but I don’t really download much stuff from my own website anyway.

To prevent myspacers from linking to my pictures directly, I followed a straightforward tutorial from one of apache’s developers which was written in 2000 (!). If you notice that this has broken anything for you or for me, let me know.

In a fit of insomnia, I’ve installed wordpress 2.0 and copied all of my blosxom entries over to it. You can read it here and get the rss here. I won’t lie to you, you should switch the feeds by hand, I had to do some meddling with the formatting of the text and your rss reader probably won’t like it. Right now, it’s using the boring default style. When I “have” a little more time, I’ll change it up to match the rest of the site. Don’t worry, the paisley will be back soon enough.

I have to say, wordpress is pretty slick. Lots of ajax in the interface on my side, making things look very nice and behave nicely as well. The highlighting that fades out is cute, if a bit over the top. How did they fit a javascript as-you-type spell check in here?

I was using blosxom because it was relatively easy to set up and was simple to use. While wordpress is less simple to use, the interface seems well laid out and there are a lot more features. It was also quite easy to install, since it’s an official package here in Ubuntu. When I installed blosxom, which just uses files for entries, I was also afraid of databases, a fear I’ve since gotten over.

I seem to start out most of my entries here with a phrase approximating “a couple of weeks ago…” The fact that narrator of this blog doesn’t have to be exactly the same as the author, made me think that the narrator could experience things a couple of weeks after the author, and so that the author has had a chance to think about them and burnish them to a sheen. This raises some issues of consistency with the outside world, for which you can forgive me.

This all links in to an opinion I’ve been cultivating, that I’ve always been too litteral and earnest in my social interactions. Many times, what is called for is not a story about something that actually happened, but simply a story. My proclivity for truth-telling makes me want to tell more or less the truth, the whole truth, etc. but who is going to mind if I take a little artistic license to make the story more entertaining? Perhaps many people find themselves on the other end of this spectrum, but I’ll have to work at it. There must be some middle ground. On this middle ground, I’ll tell you a truthful, entertaining, slightly embellished version of an event that more or less happened to me.