Loxosceles

I forgot to include a quarter for scale. The XO makes my laptop (right) look big.

The mcdonald's employee sweeping up told me that MY laptop was really small and cute.

Here's a fun picture from YAPC::NA 2007. Adri also stars.

Hey perl geeks - the CFP for the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is open for another few days! I know some linuxchix read this blog, and it's always great to see more women speaking at conferences. The PPW is a small conference (last year it was one day, this year it's expanded to two) that is smaller than YAPC but still a lot of fun. I gave my first conference talk at last year's PPW and went on to speak at YAPC too!

They're encouraging anyone with a Perl story, hack, or idea to speak, and there's even a list of talk ideas if you're having trouble thinking of what to speak about.

Hey, perl hackers!

A Perl Mongers group is getting started in Ithaca. If you're in the area, join us! We plan to hold casual social meetings at first, possibly branching out to technical meetings later.

Help spread the word! I know there are lots of perl hackers hiding in various corners of Cornell and Ithaca, so let's try to all get together and compare notes or just hang out. Get involved by joining the mailing list. That's where all the action is.

(See also: Ithaca.pm.org.)

IF YOU MAKE A COMMENT ON FLICKR WHERE YOU ARE SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS, your text is automatically converted to normal (sentence) case.

After watching Wordplay, a documentary about crossword puzzle enthusiasts, I got a craving for a good crossword puzzle. That's probably normal.

For a while I'd been thinking about subscribing to the nytimes online crossword, and today I finally gave in. Now, I was already sore about the way they removed features from the free crosswords over the years (they now only offer one crossword per week, and only as a java applet). So I log in to my new, paid subscription and think "I'll just print off a crossword, solve it, and then go to bed! Perfect!"

Nothing is ever perfect. To print the puzzle, you have to use the .puz file. To use the .puz file, you have to run Across Lite. To run Across Lite, you have to download the version for your platform. They thoughtfully provide versions for Linux and OS/2 (first sign of trouble there). The download page mentions Motif libraries. Also, the program doesn't run! (It's not compiled for linux/ppc, and apparently doesn't run on 64-bit processors either.) There's no source code in the tarball, just an ugly little LICENSE file saying I can use the software if I agree to use it "only in machine-readable form" and it goes downhill from there.

A quick google showed no free software replacements for this program. Why not? The puzzle format should be easy enough to figure out. The toughest part is assigning the numbers to the clues and boxes, and if I can do that, surely a computer can.

Normally Chris encourages me to get to bed at a reasonable hour, but tonight he said "Hey, if you're going to stay up to reverse-engineer a file format to write a GPL'd replacement, fine by me!"

So that was my evening. The viewer is available here. You run it on the command line, and it outputs an HTML file on stdout. Just redirect that puppy into a file, print it, and you're done. The program is a perl script, no external modules needed, and it might even turn out to be cross-platform. Enjoy!

Sometimes I talk myself into things by saying "well, it's been a long time since I did something really stupid."

Whenever I notice that I haven't done anything stupid in a while, I get an overwhelming urge to go ahead with whatever crazy plan presents itself. I think the last time this happened was the knitting olympics.

So, last night I booted into OS X to do my homework (we use a proprietary stats program that I can't run on linux) and, after agreeing to a software update, I ended up with a Sad Mac. At 2 am I was still trying to rescue the Mac. That's not the crazy part yet!

The crazy part was when I decided, at 3 am with homework due in just a few hours (which, by the way, I hadn't started) ... that this is an excellent opportunity to learn to use R.

The even crazier part is that it worked. I finished the homework just a few hours after sunrise.

This article, "Unhappy meals" by Michael Pollan confirms a few beliefs that I've been calling my "crackpot theories" in recent years, including that (a) we don't know shit about nutrition (future scientists will laugh at our carbs-vs-fat debates like we laugh at the Four Humors) and (b) numerical measurements of food contents (calories, etc) will be shown to be almost meaningless.

Pollan's story about the government always recommending "eat more" and never "eat less" is told in more detail in the book Food Politics, which has lots more juicy gossip on the USDA and friends.

Speaking of juicy gossip, word on the street is that the FSF's associate member meeting is set for Saturday, March 24th. If it's anything like the past meetings, it'll be on MIT's campus and will feature an amazing afternoon talk by Eben Moglen. His talk alone (full of juicy gossip about under-the-table deals in the software industry) is worth the price of membership, and you can think of the rest of the conference as a freebie!

The same weekend is the Boston Tea Party, a swing dance event with six tracks of workshops, and tons of dances and competitions. Only 20 minutes away! They even have a beginner's track, so if you're in town for the FSF meeting you can learn to swing dance while you're there.

Meanwhile the CFP is out for YAPC 2007! It's in Houston this year. Hopefully I'll be there, and hopefully I'll be speaking, but I don't know yet about what. (Hey perl dorks: If you heard my talk at PPW, did it leave any burning questions that you hoped would be addressed in a later talk?)

OK, your bonus for reading to the end of this rambling post: a song from the new-ish album Strange Conversation by Kris Delmhorst. All the songs are other people's poetry, set to her music. They're all beautiful tunes, and some of them are really rockin', like this one, "Water Water". The album also features an excellent rendition of anyone lived in a pretty how town done as a fast-paced country ballad. It's available on emusic, my favorite DRM-free mp3 store (cheaper than itunes, works on any device, and it's a great place to discover new music. No, they don't pay me to plug them, but I want to support them because they are awesome. Happy customer for 2 years now.). I browsed back through Kris Delmhorst's other albums; none of them grabbed me like Strange Conversation but I did like several of the tracks on Five Stories - especially the energetic "Honeyed Out" and the really sweet "Lullaby 101".

Microsoft finished writing Vista today. This reminded me of what Eben Moglen said at the 2005 FSF associate member meeting. To quote from my notes:

Microsoft, he said, is "one failed upgrade away from serious trouble". It's possible that Longhorn will be that upgrade. A 3-GHz chip is required to run its kernel. So, Microsoft has committed for a RTM (release to manufacturer) date of May 2006, so that machines with Longhorn installed can be sold for Christmas 2006. It's not clear that they will be able to make that deadline. According to plan, the consumer version is hitting the market before the server version, which may be a mistake. Longhorn's server version is supposed to be out in mid-2007, which will probably be more like early 2008. IBM isn't worried - they say they'll have everybody running free software on their servers by then. "Some of the largest and most powerful businesses" share our opinion of what software the majority of servers should be running in 2008.

Just a little bit of optimism for today.

I'm sure that anybody who's cool and hip and in-the-know enough to read this blog already knows about the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop that's coming up. Make sure to be there! I will be giving my first-ever conference talk.

This guy knows the workshop will be "a ten ton can of whoopass" and I like his description because it implies, in very vague terms, that my talk will be cool. This is especially encouraging because I haven't finished writing it yet.

This is all I have to say.

open SEQOUT, ">$seq_in_file";
open QUALOUT, ">$qual_in_file";

It's a classic, really.

For such a short trip, I sure spent a lot of time in airports. I even nodded off on a plane for the first time ever. (Usually I can't sleep on planes even if I want to).

I sort of organized a herd of cats perl hackers into meeting for dinner. We went to a Malaysian restaurant called Penang (it's the first restaurant you'll see from the train stop in Chinatown). The food was delicious, and the table had a lazy susan thing in the middle. There were ten of us, and everybody shared, so I had a delicious vegetable curry, chili tofu, mango tofu, tofu with peanuts and vegetables, and so many other tasty things I can't recall. Peanut pancakes for dessert, and coconuts to drink. (They THWACK a coconut with a cleaver, peel the lid back, and you drink what's inside with a straw). I didn't have one, but I seemed to impress most of the table with my ability to drink bubble tea without gagging. (I guess that's a rare skill.)

I left my camera at home to save space in my bag. My rationale was "I didn't take pictures of anything interesting last year". Turns out I have another good reason: everybody else is taking pictures, so I don't have to!

Today I packed the lightest I've ever packed for a 5-day trip: 4 sets of shirts/underwear/etc; toiletries; laptop/phone/ipod all with chargers and spare batteries; and a bunch of knitting to keep me busy while in transit. Total volume: One messenger bag that fits easily beneath an airplane seat. Woohoo! The only things I chose to leave behind were my camera, my swimsuit, and a couple of skirts/pants. (It's OK, I still have enough to clothe me for the week).

The conference starts for real tomorrow. I expect to have so much fun I forget to blog it. Wish you were here.

YAPC North America, the coolest party on the continent this month, is happening next week. Yes, there's still time to register. Yes, it's all Perl-programming geeks hanging out together, learning about Perl, and (new this year!) playing free video games and maybe even skee-ball.

If you're a perl programmer in reasonable traveling distance of Chicago, there's no excuse to miss out. Registration is cheap. See you there.

1. I just saw bees having sex outside. Just two little bees, on a dandelion, gettin' it on. That's not supposed to happen!

2. The other day at work, I downgraded a debian system from testing to stable. It worked without errors. That's not supposed to happen either!

Maybe I'm just going crazy?

It seems that whenever we buy thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment, at work, the company sends us swag. Penguin Computing was the best - each server comes with a little stuffed penguin. They also sent mousepads (is there some part of the world where people still use those??) and t-shirts.

More recently we got a bunch of AMD stuff. No stuffed penguins, just totally ridiculous things, like a pair of binoculars with an AMD logo on its carrying pouch. Perhaps so we can spy on people in the building next door? Oh, and a couple of business casual polo shirts. (For context, our official dress code here is "Nothing illegal." This means that, thanks to NY state law, I could come to work in a pair of underpants and nothing else. Shirts are totally unnecessary.

And the shirts are always in a size that fits nobody, like a Large. (we only have small, medium, and extra-large bioinformaticists). So I was thinking..

You could cut a square out of each shirt, making sure that the square contains the logo. Sew them together into a cube, and stuff. Then, whenver you have a computer problem, roll the cube! Whoever's logo comes up is the company to blame. The more ill-fitting T-shirts they send, the more likely it'll be their fault.

This knitted sea monster is extremely awesome. Do the mouth and hair suggest salt vampire possibilities to anyone else?

The salt vampire is one of my favorite star trek guest villains. I like the way they show its face for just a second, just long enough to see how alien it is, and how sad; but not long enough that you start thinking about the costume and how silly it is (which was usually what happened with star trek villains, for me). Its face was a really powerful image in that episode. Did anybody else notice that the Squire of Gothos had a stuffed salt vampire decorating his living room?

The salt vampire was designed by Wah Chang, who also made the tribbles, the flip-open communicators, and the alien face with the big eyes and pointy chin.

Last year I took many months to post my notes from the FSF associate member meeting. This year, the FSF posted their own notes and, best of all, recordings.

If you only have time to listen to one, listen to Eben Moglen's. If you don't have time to listen to any of them, listen to Eben Moglen's anyway.

It looks like there is a brand new Nautie knitalong here. I'm really going to enjoy seeing how they turn out!

I've received a lot of emails about the Nautie pattern, many from knitters who are also paleontologists, malacologists, science teachers, and other sorts of science geeks. Thanks for the kind words. I love knowing that there are so many knitting science geeks out there. You guys are awesome.

The Guide to Geeky Knitting was also brought to my attention: links to all sorts of science-related knitting patterns and articles.

There are some really cool ways to tie your shoes on this site. And knots, too, I think.

I remember, years ago, hearing about SANE and how it meant "Scanners Are Now Easy". My first several experiences with scanners were all day-long configuration struggles (Thanks Chris!) punctuated with comments about how it's supposed to be easy, and how it actually is easy with scanners other than mine.

Today I dragged my scanner out of the closet. It worked once before, then I couldn't make it work on my next computer, and that was a few years ago.

Today I plugged it in to my USB port, installed libsane, and before I could say "I forget, did this thing have a power adapter?" GIMP was showing me a preview and asking what resolution I would like. Thank you, SANE hackers!