mim’s blog

I’d like to have a firefox memory monitor, like the unix program top. It would show a list of all of the web pages currently open in different tabs and windows and how much of my system resources they’re each using. At the last, I’d like to know how much memory and CPU each is using, but other things like network connections, bandwidth, etc would be nice to know as well.

Since I’ve been using gmail and google calendar, I frequently find myself watching the water level (memory usage) in bubblefishymon rise until the duck flips over in unhappiness. The only solution seems to be restarting firefox every few days. Other times, I can see that firefox is using 50% of my CPU, but it’s not at all clear which tab is doing it. The main culprits of both memory and CPU usage are clearly javascript and flash, but it would be nice to know when they’re running and what they’re using, so that I could turn them off, avoid leaving certain pages open, or just avoid certain pages altogether.

Obviously, I’m not the first person to notice firefox’s memory issues. There was a post a while ago on techcrunch talking about the forthcoming release of firefox 3 and comparing its memory usage to flock. There’s also a feature request on bugzilla requesting an about:memory page in mozilla, which kind of addresses this issue, but only in a very developer-centric way.

I got two big letters in the mail today. One was from the US district Court Settlement Administration telling me that I was

eligible to receive a Court-approved refund of fees charged to [my] eligible cards, which are Visa, MasterCard, and/or Diners Club credit, charge, and/or debit/ATM cards. The fees were based on foreign transactions, including both purchases and ATM withdrawals, from February 1, 1996 to November 8, 2006.

The total settlement was $336 million and I could claim either $25, 1% of my total foreign transactions, or 1-3% of my annual estimated foreign transactions. The fine print also says that

The Defendants have agreed to create a settlement fund of $336,000,000 to pay valid claims, attourneys’ fees and expenses, and the costs of administering the settlement and notice. The plaintiffs will also ask the Court for up to $350,000 in service awards from the settlement fund on behalf of the 20 class representatives for their efforts on behalf of the classes.

The second letter told me exactly the same thing. They both told me to “please disregard any earlier notices [I] have received.” One was addressed to “Michael I Mandel” and the other was addressed to “Michael I Mande Michael I Mandel.” The one that got my name right messed up my address. The moral of the story is that it pays to be a class representative and you can’t trust lawyers to do a proper mail merge, especially when someone else is footing the bill (which they always are). If you’re interested, check out the website for the settlement.

It seems like the only driving I do these days is long distance. Joanne and I recently drove her and her stuff up to Montreal so that she could start at McGill. On Saturday, we loaded the truck, drove to Montreal, and unloaded most of the truck. On Sunday I drove to Burlington, VT, and flew back to NYC. I returned the truck having driven 472.6 miles on 48 gallons of gas.

We started at 7am on Saturday, walking to the Penske store. It’s a good thing we got there early because their computers were down (on the busiest moving day of the year) and they were doing everything by hand. We did manage to get the truck she’d reserved and the special insurance needed to drive it into Canada. We drove it back to the apartment and waited for the super. Presumably everyone says they’ll be ready at 9am and never is, but we were, so we waited until he showed up at 9:30. The elevator is small and the super had the hand truck, so I felt a bit useless for the first few elevator loads. But eventually I found enough stuff to move to regain my usefulness. Many elevator trips later (11am) we had the truck loaded and headed up to Columbia to pick up my laptop. We needed to get my laptop because I was lending it to Joanne while hers was in the shop. The hard drive in her MacBook had shattered, according to the tech at TechServe, and it wouldn’t be replaced until after our trip.

We left Columbia at noon, crossed the George Washington Bridge, and I immediately made a wrong turn. After much panicking about the traffic on I-95 north, we took a detour through beautiful Teaneck, NJ to get to route 4, which we took to route 17, which we took to I-287, which we took to I-87. There were no more turns until Canada. The weather was nice, and we cruised along admiring Adirondack state park, in which I saw two female pheasants by the roadside, mostly listening to Feist’s new album.

We arrived at the border around 7pm, that was where things started to get hairy. Cars were lined up about 20 deep at the border, but our line was hardly moving at all. We think that we may have had a trainee border guard, because our lane had two flashing yellow lights while other lanes only had one. We watched as a graying motorcycle gang in the next lane passed us and crossed the border before we’d made it halfway. After waiting in line for an hour and a half, we finally made it to the guard, who told us we needed to park the truck and go into customs to declare things.

Inside, Joanne presented her meticulous inventory of every box and bag only to be asked to enumerate the value of each one and the serial number of each piece of electronic equipment. We were incredulous, but the officer insisted, although when we asked for a flashlight to search for serial numbers he relented a bit. Then we took him out to the truck to show him the contents and he relented a bit more when he saw that the two page inventory only filled half the truck. A quick and dirty price estimate got us the secret password to escape into Canada. We passed under the official border gate at 9pm.

After driving through miles of over-lit cattle-chute border road, full of traffic cameras and impending lock down, we came to a normal highway from which we could see the stars. They have nice stars in Quebec. We arrived at the apartment at 10pm, less than eager to start moving. The furniture and light things were done by midnight, and we decided to get some dinner and leave the rest of the stuff for the morning. Somewhere in that moving, my “oh crap, this job isn’t going to do itself, I’d better get it done” instinct kicked in, perhaps inculcated by countless wrestling practices in high school. It’s amazing how big a pile of stuff that will move.

The locals were a colorful bunch. The first people we met were some of Joanne’s neighbors, who helped her into the building to get her keys. Subsequent passersby were significantly more drunk and the alley where we’d parked the truck turned out to be a good place to relieve oneself. Luckily no one confused the furniture waiting outside the truck for a pissoir. Finally, a drunken neighbor standing on a balcony over the truck started haranguing me in French. It took me a few minutes to realize he was addressing me, as it’s quite easy to ignore someone speaking a language you don’t understand. I reassured him that I was moving the truck in 5 minutes and everything seemed to be smoothed over.

In the morning we finished moving everything in from the truck and had time to get something to eat and to hang out. Saying goodbye was sad and it was compounded by the stressful anticipation of driving the truck to Burlington, VT in time to catch my flight back to New York at 7:30pm. I left at 3 and immediately hit traffic getting out of the city. It wasn’t bad, though, and from there it was pretty smooth sailing to the border. The best part was a little road that was almost a highway, route 133, which was full of afternoon sun, motorcyclists, and farm stands advertising “maïs sucre.” It only took 25 minutes to cross the border into Vermont and the border guard was only slightly suspicious of a twenty-something guy driving an empty truck. He hopped into the back and tapped around looking for secret compartments. Driving in Vermont was also nice, I saw lake Champlain and a wild turkey on the side of the road.

I got to Williston, VT by 5, filled up the tank with $75 of gas, and dropped the truck off at the closed rental office. A taxi I had called from Montreal picked me up and drove me the mile to the airport. The woman at the taxi place had answered the phone, “Taxi. Hold on a sec, I need to give the baby to my husband and get a pen…” The taxi that showed up was early and from a different company, so I presumed that my reservation had been overheard on the radio and poached. When I called the original company, however, it turned out to be legit. I guess I revealed my city slicker’s suspicion to the nice people of Vermont.

It was a relief to be done with the whole move, which was stressful for all, but then the sadness kicked in.

The world is a violent place and American society is violent. Being at a shooting and hearing about other shootings, these are the thoughts that make me the most sad. According to the violence policy center, in 2003, there were 12,000 firearm homicides in the US, not to mention 17,000 firearm suicides. This averages out to about 33 homicides per day. One Virginia Tech massacre every day is the average.

Not only is there violence in reality, there’s violence in all of the usual media outlets, bleeding and leading, etc. Violence infects social institutions and behaviors. People are violent to each other in dating, in sports, especially in business. The “free market” seems like a good excuse for violence against allies and competitors alike, negotiating down your soon-to-be employee’s salary, taking just a little bit more for yourself. The distinction between violence and good old fashioned competition seems to revolve around respect and the golden rule.

Why do so many people get shot? Because of the gun lobby, you say? Who is this gun lobby? The NRA? Who is the NRA? Now that’s a good question. Who is the NRA? It’s not at all clear from the news or their website. They don’t seem to publish a list of donors, individual or corporate. Are they like the Cigarette lobby, the Drug lobby, the Trial Lawyers’ lobby, funded by people and companies with a direct financial interest in the issues at hand? Is the NRA supported by Smith and Wesson and 4 million rifle-loving patsies? Or are they like the anti-abortion lobby, with no one standing to make much money from proposed legislation?

My fear is that violence is the natural order of human “civilization.” We’ve been killing each other for tens of thousands of years, why stop now? Since time immemorial, it seems that warlords have ruled with bands of thugs. Some have been more powerful than others, e.g. Sulla’s march on Rome, followed by many others, but on a pessimistic day it doesn’t seem difficult to describe world history in such terms. I would like to believe that the 21st century will usher in an era of peace and cooperation, that structural and technological changes have fundamentally changed the ways that people interact with each other, but then violence stares me in the face. Maybe I’ve just spent too much time watching Godfather movies and the news from Afghanistan.

I’ve had a fish tank at my parents’ house for a long time, but my last fish just died recently. She was a silver dollar fish, and I believe that she was around 13 years old. That’s 13 people years, not fish years. When we cleaned the tank out, there was a sticker on the bottom that said it was manufactured on December 14, 1992, which would make the tank 14.5 years old. She’d been the only fish in the tank for the last 10 years or so, outliving all the others by quite a margin. She was originally one of a pair of silver dollar fish that I purchased, but I think she might have eaten the other one or at least some fish in the tank ate the other one. She had a few wide vertical stripes, which an aquarium book that I found indicates that she was a female. And she was pretty big, maybe 4 inches from nose to tail.

She was surprisingly aware of the goings on in my room. The tank overlooked my bed, so I could see her in the morning, watching me sleep, wondering when I would wake up and feed her. When I finally did start to move around, she would rush back and forth expressing something a little bit more than just hunger, until I finally fed her. It was a little bit disconcerting to wake up with a fish staring at me, I never was able to teach her proper manners, and yet waking up just won’t be the same without it.

I don’t like most “labor-saving devices”. They don’t save any labor, they take up space, they’re expensive and fragile, and so on. Consider the electric razor. Whenever I’ve used one, it has taken me twice as long to get a shave that’s half as good as with a regular razor. Not only that, but it’s expensive and it can run out of power. Consider just about everything in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Why do you need a nose hair trimmer that’s as big as an electric razor? Is it that much better than the pair of scissors you already have?

This brings me to the two labor saving devices that actually save me labor. The first is my electric toothbrush, which does a much better job of brushing my teeth than a regular toothbrush. Maybe it’s that I’m more patient with it, but I think that in the same amount of time I can get noticeably more plaque off of my teeth with it than with a regular toothbrush. The second is the swiffer that my roommate brought home recently. Not only does it do the work of a broom, vacuum, mop, and feather-duster, but it’s also just two pieces of plastic. Generally, I’m not a fan of things with disposable parts, like alkaline batteries, because of their inherent waste, but I’ll buy into it for the swiffer, especially when you consider the waste of replacing vacuum bags and worn out brooms and mops.

The swiffer is a good illustration of some ideas I’ve been thinking about with regards to designing products. It is an elegant solution to the problem that it’s solving and it saves me money, what’s not to like? For consumers like me, Proctor & Gamble is eating the lunch of all of the companies who make brooms, vacuums, etc., i.e. I’m saving money instead of spending more money. Perhaps other people get a swiffer and keep using everything else as well, spending more money overall on cleaning supplies. P&G are definitely making money on this, but it remains to be seen (well, it probably already has been seen) as to whether other companies are losing money because of it. That is to say, have they expanded the total market or just taken a bigger piece of it? It should be much easier to convince people to switch to your product if it’s saving them money than if they need to spend more money to get it.

My grandfather (Gran) is turning 80 in January and to celebrate, my grandmother (Gram) threw him a party last weekend. It was quite out of the ordinary, my mom isn’t sure whether Gran has ever had a birthday party before or Gram has ever thrown a party. It was fun, just about everyone who was invited was able to come, totaling 50 people, including all of my uncles and various cousins on my mom’s side who we never see. My uncle Wayne collected stories about Gran for a walk down memory lane, so here are mine.

Probably my earliest memories of being with Gran are sitting with him at his Apple IIE, specifically apple’s first paint program. I remember painting some pretty nice pictures in black and green, lots of dinosaurs and robots. The idea hasn’t changed much between that program and photoshop, except for the addition of colors and pictures and all. Gran patiently showed me how to use it and encouraged me to artisticly progress from squiggles to actual images.

Then we started programming, probably in logo to begin with and then basic. Once I got the hang of logo I really liked making all sorts of crazy star shapes, especially ones where the turtle had to go around a few times to make it symmetric. Gran was very methodical in teaching me about FWD, PEN UP, and the other commands. Then on to BASIC, which taught me the fundamentals of IF THEN ELSE and interacting with a person (me). I wrote some number guessing games, but then Gran said, “Take a look at this game that I wrote,” the Oregon Trail. Before I’d learned anything about using the computer’s memory, here was a game with graphics where you could fire a shotgun at a deer, and if you timed it just right you’d get to eat it.

Besides computers, Gran always had a chess set out and ready to play. There were the giant plastic chess men on the big vinyl board, the medium sized wooden pieces on the folding board, the little plastic set from toys r us. The wooden folding one seems like the perfect chess set, perfectly weighted, perfectly sized, nicely shaped, durable, a very nice set to learn to play on. Gran taught me how the pieces moved, how the game was supposed to go, some elementary strategy. I don’t think my game has developed much since Gran taught me to get control of the center of the board early and then castle.

Other fragments of memories float around in my head. There were all of the movies and TV shows that Gran methodically taped and labeled in his own inscrutable system, including an endearingly odd live-action version of Alice in Wonderland that we watched a few too many times. There was the Chloraseptic always ready to battle a sore throat. There was Gran always napping wherever he could after dinner, before dinner, or whenever he could. And there were numerous New Year’s sleepovers, watching the Mummer’s parade on Gram and Gran’s living room floor.

Madison was a fun town. While it is a college town, it’s also the state capital, so it’s got a bit more going on that a place like State College, PA. I hear that there is a bar there with a beer ticker overhead on which the prices of beers respond to the demand of the clientele. My sister and I met up with Amrys on State Street and hung out in a cafe a bit catching up and then headed out. We were hoping to make it to South Dakota by that night, but we had to stop in the middle of souther Minnesota and pitch our tent because it was getting late.

We stayed at a camp ground in Myre/Big Island state park outside of Albert Lea, MN. We got the last camping permit of the evening, which cost a whopping $22. We had to drive through some farmland to get from I-90 to the campground and all of the farmers seemed to be out harvesting. Their combines looking either like giant bugs or deep sea robots with lights shining all around them, surrounded by clouds of dust, sucking up all of the plants in their paths. It was a bit freaky. That was my first time camping and it was fun, but awefully cold. I slept in my hat and gator and with the sleeping bag cinched shut as much as possible without suffocating me. When I woke up in the morning, what I had thought to be farms all around the campsite was actually a lake, the Big Island part of the park, partially explaining the coldness.

That morning, we hopped back on the highway and made our way finally into South Dakota, Lauren was very excited. On advice from our dad and maybe fifty billboards, we stopped at Mitchell, SD’s corn palace (the world’s only). The corn palace is a big building covered in mosaics made out of different colored corn. An artist draws the scenes on big pieces of tar paper, indicating which color of corn goes where. These pieces of paper are then tacked to the building and covered in appropriately colored corn. The brochure described it as a giant corn-by-number project. It’s been there in some incarnation or another for over a hundred years as a testament to the crops grown on land that people thought couldn’t support them.

Of course, once we passed Mitchell, the land really couldn’t support crops like corn anymore. That was where the farms really stopped and the plains began. I figured that it would be farms all the way across the country, but the plains can really only support pasture. The pasture was mostly for cows, but there were some buffalo around as well.

For lunch, we followed signs for a gas station, buffalo farm, old west town, convenience store, and buffalo cafe. They turned out to all be in the same two room building, but they served a hell of a buffalo burger. Actually, the store was manned by a guy in his 70s who we talked to a bit. He told us he had been a history teacher for years, but since he retired he was helping out his sons, who owned the place. He also used to be a Republican, but three years ago he decided that he could no longer support them. It turns out that he’s a big fan of Pat Buchanan, who thinks Bush is being too soft on illegal immigrants. I didn’t really know how to respond when he suggested that building three walls on the Mexican border would save us money in the long run, but it was interesting to meet someone who disliked Bush for completely different reasons.

Less politically, while I was eating my buffalo burger, he told us some bison facts. His own herd was 100 animals, of which they slaughtered one each week to supply the store with burgers, jerky, etc. Ted Turner’s herd, on the other hand is 50,000 animals, which he uses to supply his chain of restaurants (Ted’s Montana Grill) with buffalo meat. He also showed us a book of buffalo facts claiming that Jane Fonda, while generally a vegetarian, cooks buffalo for her family weekly because it is so lean. While he claimed that it was 95% fat free, my burger was very juicy, although that could have had something to do with the butter he put on it.

The rest of central South Dakota was mostly billboards for stops in the west of the state, although there were quite a few anti-abortion ones thrown in. We made it to the badlands just as the sun was setting that night and pitched our tent in the Sage Creek campground.

I’m finally going to write up some of my thoughts on my cross country trip with Lauren. It’s been nearly a month now since I got back.

On our first day of traveling, we went from Philly to Chicago in 13 hours. It was mostly uneventful, we passed through places that looked quite familiar from other road trips on the east coast. There were lots of farms, the Poconos were nicely fall-colored, and interstate 90 was toll the whole way. We stopped in some little town in western PA for lunch at Perkins pancake house, where we were by far the youngest and slimmest people around. It was noon on a Wednesday. Just before we got to Gary, IN, we hit the time change to central time, which gave us a much needed extra hour, as we were running a bit late. Gary seemed to be to Chicago what Newark is to New York or what Trenton is to Philly.

We got to Chicago at around 9pm and ordered some pizza for dinner. While it was deep dish, I’m not sure that it was Chicago style deep dish. It was a lot like Sicilia’s stuffed pizza in Boston, which I really like, so that was great. It snowed overnight, which was quite odd coming from 70 degree weather in Philly, but it didn’t stick. The next day we visited Millennium park, the Art Institute, and the School of the Art Institute and took an architectural boat tour of the buildings on the Chicago river.

My sister got a kick out of Millennium park because it was a collaboration between lots of landscape architecture firms including some of the ones she’s interviewing with in Seattle. I was particularly fond of “the bean”, a giant reflective steel bean. Photographing it made me think of the series of papers we read in Shree Nayar’s class on catadioptric imaging (using mirrors in imaging systems to get certain photographic properties impossible to achieve with lenses alone).

We had a great view of the park from Maureen’s 14th floor workspace at the School of the Art Institute. Ok, not exactly from the workspace, but from the lounge on that floor. The workspace was a bit more cave-like. The Art Institute itself was huge. It seemed like the collection of art that I was interested in just went on and on, much more so than at the Met. Now they’re making it even bigger, with a lot of construction going on that was also visible from Maureen’s floor. I particularly liked some of the paintings by de Chirico, Beckman, and Ernst.

The architecture tour was also quite interesting, especially for someone who knows very little about architecture. We learned a bit about the Sear’s towers design as nine separate towers lashed together, a proposal to turn the hulking decommissioned post office into a mausoleum for a million bodies, the various phases the architecture of Chicago went through including some sub-phases of modernism, the careers of various architects who designed multiple buildings in the city, and the army corps of engineers’ reversal of the flow of the Chicago river. It was bitterly cold and both Lauren and I were shivering uncontrollably by the end, but it was worth it. I don’t think I’ve ever thought a beverage wasn’t hot enough until we stopped at Starbucks after that tour to get hot chocolates.

That night we ate dinner at a restaurant in Harley and Maureen’s neighborhood, Logan Square, called Lula, which it turns out was the only restaurant that Joanne ate at when she was in Chicago the next week. What a small world. After spending another night there, we took off bright and early the next morning for Madison, WI.

Today I installed Ubuntu 6.10, also known as Edgy Eft, on mr-pc here. A number of small problems had been piling up and I really liked Ubuntu after installing it on a few servers. I also wanted to get my hands on some newer versions of things like firefox before Etch was released. I know, I could have used it while it was still testing, but I’d rather have a real release. Problems included random crashing when running one of the scripts in cron.weekly, leading me to stop rotating my logs and updating the locate database, and the kernel module ipt_recent
crapping out after 25 days.

After trying to copy my /etc/passwd and /etc/group directly, I found myself in something of a pickle. Ubuntu’s /etc/sudoers allows people in the “admin” group to sudo, but I wasn’t in the admin group in my old setup, so I could no longer sudo. Ubuntu also doesn’t have a root login, so I was out of luck. I had to reboot from the CD a couple of times to get it right.

Otherwise, setting up apache, blosxom, mysql, gallery, fluxbox, etc. were pretty easy. Firefox 2.0 seems to be a lot snappier than 1.0 and restarting things like apache seemed to take less time as well. I’d also like to get wordpress set up here, so I can get some decent comment spam filtering going. And that might make me migrate to apache2, but we’ll have to see.