{ dubovsky.com rantings }

Diann and I spent a lovely Memorial Day weekend up in Kinsale, VA. Paul referred to the event as “Medium-Sized Dog Fest”:

Since my new job will have me working from different places, I needed to bite the bullet, buy a mobile phone, and move into the 21st century. I bought an Android Dev Phone 1, an HTC Dream (a.k.a. a fully-unlocked T-Mobile G1). Getting it on T-Mobile service proved a little tricky, as they sent me a SIM card provisioned for Sidekick service, which simply doesn’t work on the G1. It took a while to find someone at T-Mobile who could help me, but once I got on the phone with Lindsay, she got me all fixed up.

The good:

• Nice case, display, keypad, and slider (if you want to call it that). Thicker than an iPhone, but about the same mass. HTC has a reputation among my peers for building phones that don’t last very long; we’ll see.
• Very nice UI. It only took a half hour of use before the interface became second nature and I stopped noticing it. The notification system (you have a message, weather alerts, etc.) is unobtrusive but useful.
• After upgrading to Android 1.5 (a.k.a. Cupcake), the interface is as nice as any phone I’ve used. The on-screen keyboard is very usable, the camera is snappier, and the UI got a bit glossier.
• Absolutely fantastic integration with Google services. (Big surprise, I know.) All your email contacts are in your phone book. Upcoming Calendar items can show up on your “home” screen as a widget. Google Talk IM sessions work seamlessly like texting but with your contact icons and such. You get the idea.
• The web browser feels snappier than the one on the other phone’s I’ve used (better panning and scrolling).
• Market has a ton of useful apps (a good ssh client, ConnectBot; a passable Google Reader client, Greed; etc.). The vast majority of them are free.
• Respectable battery life for a tiny computer. I don’t use the voice part much, but use the browser/email/etc. over WiFi a lot; I can go two days between charges.

The bad:

• The default browser can’t run Adblock Plus. Sigh.
• Marketplace interface could use some love: only two sort options, and there must be a better way of browsing a thousand apps.
• Turning on/off WiFi or GPS (to save battery) is cumbersome, requiring navigating several menus. Thankfully, the free Market apps “ToggleWiFi” and “Toggle GPS” make them one-touch.
• Built-in camera is pretty poor; though not atypical for a phone. Lots of haloing, fairly slow focus, low ISO, lousy automatic while balance, etc.
• The lack of multi-touch zoom is a slight hindrance on documents and some web pages.
• Developer’s kit can be tricky to install. Some pages haven’t been moved from the old Google code site, so I found broken links and out-of-date instructions.
• There doesn’t yet appear to be any easy way to run apps from the SD card. The phone will store your data there, but there’s limited space for installing applications. There’s are a few tutorials on doing it via command line, but I’ve not yet tried them.

Must-have applications:

• ToggleWifi: one-touch toggling of the WiFi radio; great battery-saver.
• Toggle GPS: one-touch toggling of the GPS receiver; great battery-saver.
• Ring Toggle: one-touch switching between ring, vibrate, silent. Faster than tapping the volume button many times.
• Greed (not free): RSS reader that ties in to Google Reader. It’s not a fantastic RSS reader, but if you use Reader already, the integration is well worth it.
• WiFi Tether for Root Users: only for unlocked phones, but makes your phone act like a WiFi access point (well, an ad-hoc peer, to be precise). Essentially allows tethering your phone to your laptop.
• ConnectBot: ssh and telnet client
• DroidRecord: use your phone as a voice recorder
• RingDroid: convert your audio files into ring tones; has basic editing like cropping.
• WeatherBug: a little slow and bloated, but the best weather app I’ve found. The weather alert notifications are nice.
• Magic 8-ball: shake and wait for your answer

All in all, a strong smartphone. If you’re already using Google services (gmail, calendar, etc.), this phone will very likely knock your socks off. If you aren’t, it’s still a good phone, but a harder sell.

Continuing with Jono’s meme:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest.

My result (while at work): “DeviceRect must compute these values from those supplied.” — Design Patterns, Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides

To folks who are wondering if I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, a quick note:

Sorry for the lack of interesting updates, but a few things have gone down in the past couple months that have kept me from keeping in touch. My company is closing down our office and moving the product elsewhere, so we’ve all been doing two jobs (our normal schedule work and trying to get everything transitioned to the new development team). Add in little things like doctor’s visits, a water heater cracking open, and some travel for work, and you have one busy and tired me.

It looks like things aren’t going to calm down here until Thanksgiving week, so until then: be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Trivial but handy utility/function to give you a subversion diff with paging and syntax coloring:

svndiff ()
{
  svn diff $* | colordiff | less -r
}

Pass it anything you’d pass to “svn diff”: e.g., “.” for the current directory, a list of filenames, or options like –no-diff-deleted.

Here in the underground bunker we have computers named after fruits:

• lime
• lemon
• mango
• cherry
• indigo - not a fruit, but replaced “indulgence”
• oreo - my wife has convinced me that Oreos are definitely a fruit

All machines run Ubuntu server or Kubuntu, and several dual-boot and/or virtualize XP.

The Wordpress RSS widget has two little flaws, in my opinion. Here are my fixes, in case they help anyone:

1. For an article the widget will provide a “title” attribute that contains the whole content from the article. Since this site implements a tooltip-like hover box for links with a title element, that can get really ugly. The fix is trivial, and involves truncating post content at 500 characters.
2. When given a feed from my Google Reader “shared items” list, the title of the blog is mashed against the end of the article title. I’ll get things like “Cat Stuck Up TreeRoanoke Times”, which is also really ugly. The fix is somewhat more complicated, and involves not including the “source” element in the article title.

Wordpress 2.6 also finally integrated the ability to log in and administer your blog over HTTPS, so that’s one less patch/plugin I need to track.

Happy hacking!

(Click through the last image to see it in a bigger size, in which I think it looks considerably better.)

John Adams continues: “The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

This was going to be the first year I donated money to a political candidate. The movement of this country’s national politics has become more frightening by the week, and I thought that adding campaign money to my advocacy might be another method for changing that. I was going to contribute to my national Congressional races and to that for the Presidency.

Today’s FISA capitulation, to be frank, knocked me on my tail and made me reconsider. Over the last several months I’ve called, written, and persuaded several friends to do the same. I watched politicians who had stated they would support blocking retroactive immunity for law-breaking companies turn tail and vote for this bill, a bill better for the Executive than the previous FISA bill. I’ve heard some say that voting for the bill was politically wise, a CYA move to show strength against “the terrorists” for the upcoming elections. I do not disagree; I do believe, though, that civil liberties and national security are not at odds with one another, and that true leadership should demonstrate this.

I’ve now spent much of the day reconsidering my upcoming donations. Where is the leadership standing up for constitutional protections? Where is the leadership standing in opposition to torture, kidnapping, and undermining our image worldwide? There were voices leading in the Senate and House, but they had too few friends to prevent this travesty of a bill from passing. So, I’ve decided that I’m still going to donate money, but not to whom I had planned. I’m going to see if I can get Dodd and his like some more friends.

To every Senator and Presidential candidate who failed to support the three amendments today, to every Representative who voted for H.R. 6304: you’ve made yourself an opponent. Here’s what I will do:

• I will not donate any money to your campaigns.
• I will donate money to your opponents in primaries and, if you generally vote in ways I don’t like, general elections.
• I will lobby my friends and associates to do the same; given that they generally have a limited budget, I’m willing to bet that means less money for you, too.
• Provided you’re an otherwise reasonable politician, I will not speak ill of you, but I will refrain from speaking of you. You’ve just lost a persuasive advocate.

Please call your representative right now and implore them to not pass the false-compromise FISA bill, H.R. 6304. The vote comes up this afternoon, so please hurry!

Passing H.R. 6304 would amount to a Congressional seal of approval on illegal surveillance. Even if the President and the telecoms knowingly and brazenly broke the law, the provision in the bill seeks to prevent the courts from holding them accountable. Yet, the suits against the telecoms may be our last hopes for a judicial ruling on whether the President can break the law with impunity.

This project would have fizzled at several points had Diann not been there to teach and encourage. (I can be stubborn on rare occasions.) The interior is recycled graph paper and the exterior is wallpaper from an old sample book. It was great fun and will be used as my next work notebook; one wonderful feature of this type of binding (and why Diann suggested it, despite 30-odd tiny knots) is that it lays flat when opened. Highly recommended if you have someone to teach you the stitch!

Movie at the Lyric tonight, so nothing complicated:

I made a freezer paper stencil shirt!

The instructions elsewhere are as clear as anything I’d write, but what I learned today:

• For multiple color prints, don’t paint the under layers where the top layers will go; you build up too much ink if you have layer on top of layer. A bit of overlap to make registration easier would probably be fine.
• Iron a piece of freezer paper on the inside of the shirt before ironing any pattern on the outside; it will keep the outside fabric surface from wrinkling from the paint, stretching, etc.
• If you’ve a short or long torso, adjust the height of the stencil appropriately. (Duh, but see image below.)
• Shun the frumious bandersnatch!

Design copied (with permission) from Quadro’s fabric work:

When Diann and I were in Williamsburg in 2006 we purchased some delicious cherry cognac sauce which was somewhere between preserves and pie filling. It was fabulous on ice cream and, continuing yesterday’s cherry theme, I decided to try making something like it.

• 4 c. sweet cherries
• 3 Tbsp. lemon juice
• 2 tsp. almond extract
• ¾ c. sugar
• ½ c. black currant vodka
• 4 Tbsp. cornstarch dissolved in 2 Tbsp. water
• ¼ c. brandy

Cook the cherries, lemon juice, almond extract, sugar, and vodka in a saucepan for 20 minutes. While stirring, add the cornstarch mixture. Cook until thickened. Remove from heat and let stand 10 minutes. Thoroughly blend in the brandy. Spoon into jars and cool. Store in the refrigerator; serve over vanilla ice cream.

I may have used too much brandy above, but it tastes good so far. We’ll see how it turns out after it sits for a day or so.

From the Blacksburg Farmer’s Market, buy:

• one Weathertop Farms pastured chicken
• five cups of sweet cherries
• one loaf of sesame and wheat bread
• one head of leaf lettuce

Spatchcock/butterfly the chicken, brine it with garlic, sugar, pepper, and rosemary. Chuck it in the refrigerator for the afternoon.

Clean and pit the cherries. Add a little lemon juice, cornstarch solution, almond extract, and butter. Cheat and buy a couple pie crusts from the store (I hate making pastry dough). Pour in the cherries and cover with the second crust, cutting a few slits in the top. Throw it in the oven for about an hour.

Fire up the grill and drain the chicken. Baste it with an olive oil and rosemary mix and throw it on the grill (the half that isn’t on), breast side down and legs toward the hot center (dark meat needs to cook more). Close the lid. Flip and re-baste it every 15 minutes until done. Remove from grill and let stand 10 minutes before carving. Eat with a fresh green salad and tasty bread (not pictured, because by the time they were ready, we were too hungry for pictures).

The pie should be cooled enough to cut by the time you’re done with dinner.

Today, on this father’s day, my creative work is dedicated to my father; he taught me that doing is fun, and that I can learn to do anything.

Diann and I spent the time between breakfast and shower making potato stamps. I’ve cut a few linoleum and eraser block stamps for her over the last year or two, but hadn’t used potatoes since I was in high school art class. There’s something satisfying working with a stamp base that costs pennies, has limited resolution, and won’t last the week.

My friend Paul is raising money for his local Muscular Dystrophy Association and would greatly appreciate any donations that you could send his way.

The latest VMware Server 1.0.6.91891 will install in Hardy (v8.04), but wouldn’t run for me. A short page on HowtoForge gave me the pointer I needed to get it to run: sudo cp /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1.

If you find your control, shift, alt, and caps lock keys suddenly stop working outside the guest OS, run setxkbmap to get them back. The bug report indicates uninstalling VMware Tools from the guest will solve the problem, too, but I haven’t had to take so drastic a step.

My output from history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn.

58 dir
49 cd
44 svn
40 ssh
25 cat
21 sudo
21 make
18 telnet
18 svnmerge
18 rgrep
18 man
18 cvs
17 svndiff
14 scp
9 grep
8 route
7 kate
7 ifdata
6 kdesu
6 echo
5 ping
5 less

I’m ashamed that sudo is so far up there, but I just upgraded this box to Hardy and it took a bit of package juggling (proprietary video, VMware, etc.).

Competition is good for everyone! Well, everyone save the entrenched leader. Help Firefox set a new record for most downloads in a day.