Home of the Wanderer

of a modern mathematics geek. See my new poem, “Intermediate Value Theorem” (though perhaps it ought to be “Intermediate Value Proposition,” since the proof is left as an exercise).

http://sillypoorgospel.blogspot.com/2008/03/geek-squad-jesus.html

Peggy Parsons, who has a paid position with universal tech support, writes skillfully about the ultimate programmer, the big software re-write, and the human interface. As a tech support volunteer – and as one who likes to customize the system settings, download new software, get all the latest upgrades, and sometimes even do beta testing – I’m particularly grateful for the 24/7 help-desk.

While I’m often more excited about the new releases than I’ve ever been about the millenia-old re-write, I recognize that it’s all being done by the same dev-team. In fact, I think that a lot of the new releases I get so excited about may really just be custom design adjustments to get my interface working. One thing I love about the dev-team: there is no abandon-ware, and they’re always taking bug reports. It’s nice to know that the lead hacker takes a personal interest in making the software work for each and every one of us.

I was poking around this morning on a school district website, when I noticed a couple of links (on the “parents” page) to resources around online safety for kids. On a related page, there were a bunch of links to resources for the kids, and immediately this idea came to me.

What if a person could tell their browser, “yeah, I trust this website to give my kid links to pages he or she can safely visit”? What if you could also tell your browser, “I trust this page to tell me about other pages my kid can trust, too”? This quickly develops into a web-of-trust model, in which individual pages don’t vouch for themselves, but for each other. (more…)

It’s funny to watch my blog stats – I get all sorts of interesting data, but none of it covers what really interests me.  Note that while I believe that privacy is, in some sense, at an end (a la Earth by David Brin), and I don’t feel much compunction about having a website that also reads you, I do treasure personal private space, and I respect that of others.  Oddly, the stuff I can learn about my readers gives a somewhat mechanistic picture, without the human details that I cherish, and none of it is particularly revealing of private information. (more…)

I’ve been using iTunes again, and wishing for software that will fix my music library. (more…)

We have access to the OED. I knew it before, and I’ve known it for a while, but very time I remember, I think to myself… I love the Multnomah County Library.

On a cost basis alone, this more than makes up for the minimal portion of my taxes that go to maintaining this awesome service, and it’s barely a fraction of what they provide.  I’m glad to be a part of a community that has decided together to provide such a service to itself, and to all those who live and/or visit here.  Collective purchasing and management are truly effective – and highly efficient – ways of providing for common needs.

I heard a volunteer say, as she was leaving the office, that it works well for her to have a regular weekly time for volunteering here. That works well for us, too, and hearing it from her today I had a new idea.

Often, when scheduling events, meetings, and the like, I want to look at the same day on several successive weeks. Alternatively, I occassionally want to schedule something for the xth y-day of each month – the fourth Sunday, for example. I can do this with my current calendaring system, but I have to page through successive weeks or months – and each time, the software loads all the events for the time-period being displayed. What if I had software that would show me all third Wednesdays for the next six months? Third, Wednesday, and six are all artibtrary values here, which the user should be able to set, and maybe even combine, so as to look at potential days on which to schedule events.

Sometimes, I’d want to look at the next n Tuesdays, presented all in a row, so that I can schedule something on one or more of them. At other times, though, I would want to schedule something at the same time on each of the next set of days, whichever set it may be. Thus, I’d want to be able to switch between displaying a bunch of days side-by-side, and overlaying all events on the set as if they were happening on one day. Then, I could see if I would be free from five to six in the evening on each second Monday for the next six months, or pick one of the next eight Tuesdays on which to have (or attend) a breakfast meeting.

Sadly, I have no R&D team at my beck and call, I don’t know anyone on the iCal dev team, and no-one has yet set up ideaBay, the online concept store for fun and profit.  What do you wish your calendar would do for you?  What other ideas do you have that you aren’t going to implement yourself, but would love to use if someone else were to make them happen?

Okay, so part of the reason I never quite got around to switching this blog to drupal was because I so dislike the process I’ve gone through when trying to upgrade from one version of drupal to the next. Perhaps that’s because I had customized a few of the modules I had installed, but nevertheless it was challenging. I had to refigure it out every time I made the attempt.

Now, as careful readers may have noticed, I have just upgraded the version of wordpress used to run this site. There was a security issue of some kind, and I don’t like leaving holes in the walls, so I dug in and prepared for a long and perilous task. Or, in any case, I took a look through the upgrade instructions. They looked simple and straightforward enough – delete and then replace a few directories and files, restore the ones you backed up earlier (you did back them up, right?), and you’re done.

I thought to myself that this could be even easier. Because I don’t have wordpress installed in the documentroot, or even in the main directory where my web server looks for webpages, (/foo/bar/wandreilagh for the sake of this conversation), but rather in /foo/bar/wandreilagh/wp, I figured I could make a new directory wandreilagh/wp-2.0.6 in which to store the new version. Then I could overwrite the appropriate files from the old version onto the new, copy the old files to a directory called wp-2.0.5, and replace the old wp directory with a symbolic link pointing to the new wp-2.0.6 directory. If the site didn’t function for some reason, I could simply change the symlink to point to the old directory.

And lucky me, I was right. Got it on the first try. And I thought, in thanks for such a wonderful gift from the free software community, I might offer this as an upgrade process for others in a similar situation.