Embracing Chaos

Remember what internet search was like back in the pioneer days — say 1998 or 1999? There were lots of bad ones out there, but I’ll talk about three representative ones. There were lots of page-search engines along the lines of Alta Vista. They crawled the web and indexed the contents of each web page. They would try to figure out which web page best matched your search keywords based entirely on the contents of the pages themselves. This didn’t work very well since spammers could fill their pages with keywords they liked that didn’t necessarily add any value to…

...full article

Pike or Pine? For those of us who live in Seattle, this is an eternal question. Often rhetorical. The two streets run parallel from downtown through Capitol Hill and nobody can keep them straight. This fact was institutionalized by the local sketch comedy show Almost Live in a game show called “Pike or Pine?” where contestants were asked which of the two streets various landmarks are on. “Where is the Paramount Theater?” “Oh, I go by there every day on my way to work. It’s just before the bus-stop where I get off. It’s … it’s … it’s on Pike!”…

...full article

The volume control system on Windows XP is somewhat broken. The main volume control is pretty easily accessible — you can adjust it with a single click on the volume icon in the tasbar icon tray. This master volume adjusts everything going out to the speakers (or headphones or line-out or whatever). But model for adjusting the relative levels of different sound sources is awkward and not well implemented. Feeding into the main volume is the “mixer.” You can get to it by double-clicking the main volume control. It lets you adjust the relative volume of various sound sources like…

...full article

I’ve been installing OS’s a bunch lately. Every time I do the installer asks me what part of the world I’m in so it can set the timezone. This totally seems like 20th century technology to me. There are really accurate IP-geo lookup databases these days that can tell from your IP address where you are in the world pretty reliably. So once the OS has my network stack working, why does it need to ask me what part of the world I’m in? When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real “you-get-what-you-pay-for”…

...full article

A little while ago, I got my hands on a MacBook Pro. I’ve been slowly switching over to it as my primary machine. It’s pretty. It’s fast. When using it, I feel calm and happy as if I’m sitting in a japanese garden. (I bet if it wasn’t so expensive, this effect wouldn’t be so pronounced. But that is part of the charm too.) I haven’t had the guts to switch over to it as my mail e-mail machine yet, but maybe the new .mac email will convince me. Here are a couple of thoughts on why I’m liking it…

...full article

Small note of personal pride and pride in my team at work: www.rhapsody.com has stripped off its “Beta” branding with a fresh new design and cool new AJAXy features including an improved web player and better personalization. We launched last night, which was unusually stressful. Our load test numbers weren’t glowingly positive. And if the servers couldn’t handle the load, things could get really bad. Normally, we’d just roll back to a previous version of the code, but because of marketing requirements around a new product launch, we couldn’t do that. So last night after we launched and the servers…

...full article

I consider myself a transhumanist. I spend probably too much time thinking about very long-terrm trends of humanity. Some of the trends I see seem obvious to the point of being irrefutable, while others I’m sure are controversial. Nevertheless, I’ll lay out a few of the basic tenants of transhumanism, and begin to explain why they lead to the very deep and personal implications they have for me. Computers are getting faster and more powerful. As they do so, they’re helping humans be smarter. Maybe not invidual humans, as some studies have shown that things like e-mail and powerpoint can…

...full article

My house pretty much always has music playing in it. Generally the same music is playing throughout the entire house. I do this through a fairly complex involving a pirate radio station, a PC dedicated to playing music, and a set of custom perl scripts and remote-control applications to be able to select music from any of the house’s internet appliances. When it’s working (most of the time, actually) it’s a fantastic system. I wander around, and hear the same thing, and it’s pretty much always something I want to be listening to. For everybody else out there who didn’t…

...full article

I was thinking about getting all serious-like and talking about how cultural relativism makes it hard for me to judge the immorality of gangsta rap that glorifies crime. And I’ll still rant just a bit. But really my main motivation is to shout out props to Weird Al for his new song “White & Nerdy”. (For extra entertainment, watch the questionably-legal video at youtube, at least until they take it down.) It’s parodying a song by Chamillionaire that glorifies smuggling drugs. Nice work dude — way to be a positive influence on other people’s lives. This is one of the…

...full article

I’m posting this because I didn’t see any quick answers on google when looking for other people having my problem. Recently all the unit tests for one of my Ruby on Rails projects started failing mysteriously. The continuous integration server didn’t report any problems, but on my windows dev box (where I use instant rails) nothing would pass. The errors came out like: 15) Error: test_update(Admin::ConnectionControllerTest): ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: Mysql::Error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query: DELETE FROM connections c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract_adapter.rb:120:in `log’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:184:in `execute’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:199:in `delete’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/fixtures.rb:283:in `delete_existing_fixtures’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/fixtures.rb:256:in `create_fixtures’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/fixtures.rb:256:in `create_fixtures’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/database_statements.rb:51:in `transaction’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/fixtures.rb:255:in `create_fixtures’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/base.rb:794:in `silence’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/fixtures.rb:248:in `create_fixtures’ c:/dev/fritz/InstantRails/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.14.4/lib/active_record/fixtures.rb:565:in `load_fixtures’…

...full article