The New (3rd gen) Kindle

Yesterday I received my new 3rd generation, Wifi-only Kindle in the mail. So far it's been a bit of a mixed bag, relative to my 2-year-old original Kindle.

Good things:

• it is, of course, smaller and lighter .
• The contrast is noticeably better, and the quality of images is dramatically better.
• Page turns are a lot faster.
• The software offers some nice new features (notably, collections).
• The wifi connectivity was easy to set up, including multiple networks.
• The wifi-only version is finally reasonably priced (call it $140).

Bad things:

• I can't find a way to set the sleep timeout; it seems like it's pretty short, and since I have a password set, that means I have to retype the password too often.
• The first time I tried to download new (as opposed to previously purchased content from my old Kindle), the items got stuck in a "pending - 0%" state. I called CS, and they had me restart the Kindle (which takes about a minute; it's shockingly slow, for a dedicated device...). That unclogged it, but I won't be happy if I have to do this very often. I got the distinct impression from the CS guy that "pending first downloads" is a common problem.
• To my surprise, I don't like the "arrow quad" for navigation as well as I did the old "roller strip". The roller was very fast, and since it used a display other than the main display (with a different technology), it was very responsive. Feedback from the new arrow quad is on the main (e-ink) display, which means it can't be very fast; and it feels glitchy; the quad is small enough that I find myself pressing the center "select" button inadvertently.
• Related to the quad vs. roller - the dictionary lookup is different, too. On the old Kindle, you scrolled to the line containing the word to be looked up, depressed the roller, and selected "lookup" on the menu that appeared. All the words on that line were searched for. On the new Kindle, you actually have to select a specific word, which requires more careful navigation with the arrow quad.

It may be that some of the negatives (like the use of the quad) go away as I become more adept with the device - but it distinctly feels like a more complicated gadget. I fear that Amazon has fallen prey to feeping creaturism. The real beauty of the first generation device was that it was dead-up simple to use as a book. This new Kindle has more features, but may not be as good a book reader - and if it tries to go head-to-head with the iPad, it's sure to lose.

The main reason I got a new Kindle was for sharing; I've been really annoyed that, unlike a book, I've had no way to lend out books on the Kindle to friends. Now that I have a second gadget, I can loan out the old one. 

Given that up to six Kindles can share an account, I can imagine a group of friends, or even a book group, getting together to share books. I bet Amazon - and the publishing cabal - would hate that.

Looking at Wheels

Yesterday I looked at wheels of various sorts. Last weekend RuthAnne and I took the Basic Rider Course from Training Wheels in Plympton and passed the exam to get our motorcycle licenses. I've wanted to know how to ride - and be able to do so legally - since my long trip to India in 2007, when it became clear that a 2-wheeler would have been the ideal way for me to get around. More recently, my daily commute to Burlington by bus has been getting me down; it takes an extra hour out of my day to go by bus than by car, yet I don't want to do all that driving, so I've been thinking a high-MPG 2-wheeler would be a good choice.

So - I stopped first at Boston Motor Sports in Arlington and looked at scooters. They carry scooters from (among others) Kymco and Suzuki. I was especially interested in the new Kymco Downtown 300i, but it's unfortunately not going to be available until the fall. It looks like a sweet vehicle; 60MPG, top speed of about 80MPH, large wheels (for a scooter), lightweight, FUN. While there, I looked at the Kymco People S 250, a similar scooter; it looked pretty good. I also checked out a used 2008 Aprilia 250 with 3000 miles, for $3200, including rear box.

I unfortunately couldn't ride anything; Boston Motor Sports (not unreasonably) requires a full license for test drives, not just a permit, and I'm still waiting for mine to come in the mail. After leering at metal for a while, I wandered upstairs to their gear department and checked out, helmets, gloves, jackets and such. One of the sales guys was particularly helpful, and I tried on a lot of stuff.

A helmet is a completely indispensible piece of safety gear, and I tried on helmets from Shoei and Arai. The Arai Vector medium fit me particularly well; it's about $450. I checked on the Internet (of course), and that's a very reasonably price for that helmet. I did price checks on everything I looked at at Boston Motor Sports, and they alway came in just a little over the best Internet prices. So I'll be buying locally!

For gloves, the Power Trip Grand National medium fit well and felt comfortable; $45/pair. For jackets, there were several that seemed pretty reasonable, costing between $250 and $450 for a complete system (outer shell with protective inserts, removable inner insulation layers). Chaps or other overpants seem like a wise idea, and boots wouldn't hurt, either. So I could be looking at about $1000 worth of protective gear before I even get a machine...

I left Arlington and went out to Framingham to look at a Sym Citycom 300 at Metrowest Scooters. They were a bit more laid back about the license requirement, and I got to take the citycom out for a spin. I was a bit disappointed with the acceleration; there's clearly a big performance difference between motorcycles and scooters with similar engine sizes. But the scoot handled bumps smoothly and was, of course, insanely easy to operate.

Finally, for something completely different, I stopped at Ace Wheelworks ( a few blocks from home) and took out a Trek Allant for a test ride. It was really fun being back on a bicycle, and this one is even pretty affordable. The 20" frame was right for me, and I had no trouble (aside from my terrible out-of-shapedness) gtting it up hills and stopped on the way down.

I'm sure I won't be making any purchase real soon, but it was fun to look.

Senator Robert Byrd is gone

Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia died on Monday, at the age of 92. I'll leave the obituaries to more capable hands, but I have one particularly powerful memory of Byrd I'd like to relate.

In early October of 2002, the Senate debated - and ultimately passed -  what became known as the Iraq War resolution. This pre-dated my blog, but I wrote about it on an earlier incarnation of my web site:

I headed up I-95 toward Pete's house in Casco, Maine on Friday afternoon, October 4th. The weather forecast had been changing all week, going from fair to bad to fair; on Thursday night we decided to just go for it, and hope the weather gods would take pity on us. I drove north through grey skies and occasional drizzle, which matched my rather somber mood. The Senate had taken up Bush's request for a free hand with Iraq. The debate between Senators Robert Byrd and John Warner was a rare display of passionate, yet civil debate. Byrd said at one point:

  The Framers were very wise when they determined that these two
  matters--the decision to go to war and the making of war--should
  be in two different places. The decision, the determination to
  declare war, should flow from this branch, the people's branch,
  and the matter of making war should be in the hands of a unified
  commander, the Commander in Chief.

  What are we doing? In my view, if we accept this resolution as it
  is written, we are saying both of these vital functions would be 
  placed in the hands of one man. And what did Madison say? He 
  said: The trust and the temptation are too great for any one man.

Pretty heady stuff, considering the usual tone of Washington politics.

You can find the full text of the debate on Thomas, the the official home of the Congressional Record. It's a little tricky to link to a specific page on Thomas, but if you follow this link and then find the link to page S9955, you'll be able to find it. The transcript is well worth reading.

Byrd was one of only 23 senators who ultimately voted against the war. Among those who voted for the authorization to go to war:

• John Kerry
• Hillary Clinton
• Harry Reid
• Christopher Dodd
• Dianne Feinstein
• Charles Schumer

Imagine how different the world would be if Byrd's eloquence had won over more of his colleagues.

Links of the day

Weekends are, for me, highly variable in their effectiveness in unplugging me from the pressures of the work week. This weekend, though, is turning out nicely. Yesterday was a "getting things done" day - bill paying, grocery shopping, laundry, all that stuff I either can't or won't do on weekday evenings. Today is a "recharge" day. It opened with a few hours of reading (the New Yorker, the Sunday New York Times, the comics), followed by food prep for this evening and the upcoming week while listening to the radio.

From the The New Yorker came A Man of Letters, a fascinating look at the neurology of reading and writing. In the summer of 2001, the novelist Howard Engel suffered a stroke that destroyed his ability to read - but left him otherwise essentially unimpaired. Curiously, his ability to write was not affected - though he was incapable of reading what he had just written! 

Then, as I puttered around the kitchen cooking, I listened to Speaking of Faith. SoF is variable in quality, but this week it's outstanding. Krista Tippets' guest is physicist and professor Arthur Zajonc, and the explore the relationship between science and meditation. Zajonc points to meditation as a powerful tool for focussing attention - a crucual skill for a scientist. He also muses about the increasingly large gap between the complexity and inner working of everyday objects (such as cell phones and computers) and the understanding most people of them.

Checking out the web page for the broadcast too me to this great little (3 minute) TEDtalk about our increasing online availability, and its effect on our face-to-face relationships.

An Imperfect Novel...

...but only because it's a delightful collection of short stories. I'm reading Tom Rachman's first novel The Imperfectionists, after reading a glowing review in the Sunday NYTimes Book Review. As I finished the devastating chapter "U.S. General Optimistic on War", it struck me that this book is much like two of my other favorite collections of linked short stories: Tillie Olson's Tell Me a Riddle and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place.

I'm enjoying this so much that I'll probably polish it off (very late...) this evening - the curse of a good book.

May Day 2010

My Morris team danced out on May Day, along with Clownfish Rapper and Commonwealth Morris. We started in Davis Square, a few blocks from my home, then danced for the Revels May Day celebration, Verrill Farm in Concord, and finally concluded the day with a feast at Tom's home in Sudbury. A fine time was had by all.

Sean Smith caught this nice moment of Dan and me in mid-leap. Thanks, Sean!

Ah, the Old Same Place

My buddy Dave spent some time yesterday walking our alma mater (stretching the term, in my case...) and sent me pictures. Thanks, Dave.

2010 FTU, er, UCF virtual tour

XKCD's April Fool hack

Go visit xkcd now, because I suspect it will be back to, ah, "normal" tomorrow.

Some cheats in the comments.

Update: The 2010 April Fools' Day xkcd hack will live on.

The Gamble and Stones Into Schools

My two most recent reads have been The Gamble, by Thomas Ricks (the atuhor of Fiasco, which I read several years ago), and Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson's follow-up to Three Cups of Tea. They were both impulse purchases from Porter Square Books; I should know better than to wander in there with my wallet.

The Gamble continues Ricks' description and analysis of the war in Iraq. It's a good follow-up to The Fourth Star, as it deals with many of the same people and issues. Ricks does a great job explaining how "the surge" became U.S. policy, why it succeeded - and why the war so far has been only a prelude to what promises to be a long saga. The successful revolution in U.S. military thinking brought about by General David Petraeus and his like-minded colleagues is extraordinary, but it can't make up for the preceding years of mismanagement and woefully misguided civilian leadership. Ultimately, the surge succeeded in its goal of providing "breathing space" for Iraqi politicians, but the politicians failed to use it. General Ray Odierno, who succeeded Petraeus as the top military commander in Iraq, said, "As Iraq has become more secure, they've [Iraqi politicians] moved backwards, in some cases, to their hardline positions..." Ricks believes that,like it or not, the U.S. is going to be in Iraq for a long time, and closes the book with the words, "...the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."

Stones into Schools is similarly a good foil to Sarah Chayes'The Punishment of Virtue. Chayes' experience in in southwestern Afghanistan, while Mortenson has focused on the northeastern areas (as well as Pakistan), so their perspectives are very different. Where they agree is on the increasing competence of the U.S. military in Afghanistan over the past decade of war. They disagree somewhat on their outlook for the future. Mortenson is relentlessly optimistic; Chayes is much more guarded. For the sake of the people of Afghanistan, I hope Mortenson is right.

Regrets

One of my coworkers just said this, and I just had to pass it on:

In my entire career, I've never written a line of code that I didn't live to regret.

Sigh. Welcome to the world of programming.

SkypePhishing

I use Skype as an intant messaging and VOIP service. Periodically I receive spam and phishing attempts - a more-or-less inevitable consequence of allowing anyone to contact me. Today's was cute; talk about high speed!

This scary-looking message from Update Registry popped up just as I got back from lunch:

[1:40:17 PM] Update Registry: WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
URGENT SYSTEM SCAN NOTIFICATION ! PLEASE READ CAREFULLY !!

http://www.onlinemt.org/

For the link to become active, please click on 'Add to contacts' skype button or type it in manually into your web browser !

FULL DETAILS OF SCAN RESULT BELOW
****************************************

WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION

ATTENTION ! Security Center has detected
malware on your computer !

Affected Software:

Microsoft Windows Vista
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Impact of Vulnerability: Remote Code Execution / Virus Infection /
Unexpected shutdowns

Recommendation: Users running vulnerable version should install a repair utility immediately

Your system IS affected, download the patch from the address below !
Failure to do so may result in severe computer malfunction.

http://www.onlinemt.org/

For the link to become active, please click on 'Add to contacts' skype button or type it in manually into your web browser!

I immediately clicked "block this user" button. Then, curious, I looked up the domain registration for onlinemt.org at whois.net:

Domain ID:D158521179-LROR
Domain Name:ONLINEMT.ORG
Created On:05-Mar-2010 13:05:57 UTC
Last Updated On:05-Mar-2010 13:05:59 UTC
Expiration Date:05-Mar-2011 13:05:57 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:ADDPERIOD
Registrant ID:2d91db7f97e279f8
Registrant Name:Andrej  Marsol
Registrant Organization:-
Registrant Street1:Najikal 21
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Prague
Registrant State/Province:CZ
Registrant Postal Code:21800
Registrant Country:CZ
Registrant Phone:+420.2319981
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:+420.2319981
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:andrejmars912@gmail.com

So the registration was all of about 5 hours old when I received this phishing attempt. Pretty zippy!

Update, in response to the comment from my buddy, Philip:

I browsed to www.sarahchayes.net with Chrome and was rewarded with this:



Thanks for the heads-up! I've emailed a warning to Ms. Chayes and (for now) removed the link.

MapReduce Patented? Bullshit!

I just learned (somewhat ironically, via a Google Alert...) that Google has just received a patent on MapReduce! I haven't yet waded through the actual patent, but I have looked at a nicely formatted copy of the first claim.

It's a patent on partitioned parallel processing.

This is bullshit! I notice that they don't reference either of these two patents:

• 6,311,265 - Apparatuses and methods for programming parallel computers 
• 5,966,072 - Executing computations expressed as graphs

I'm an inventor on the first of these (filed when I was at Torrent Systems), and I know the inventors on the second (filed by our, ah, colleagues at Ab Initio). Both of these are directly relevant to Google's patent, and I would argue that the Google patent either overlaps these two or is obvious to a skilled practitioner.

Maybe Google plans to release this patent for unrestricted use. I don't care. Patents like this are an abuse of the patent system.

The Punishment of Virtue and The Fourth Star

I'm currently reading The Punishment of Virtue, by Sarah Chayes, and enjoying it immensely. Chayes covered the fall of the Taliban as an NPR correspondent in and around Kandahar. She left Kandahar in mid January, 2002, and returned a few months later, not as a journalist, but as a field director for Afghans for Civil Society. She has lived in Afghanistan episodically since then and has a unique perspective on Afghan society and politics.

Chayes has done three interviews with  Terry Gross on the NPR program Fresh Air. All of them are riveting, but I really urge you to listen to the most recent, from February 2009. Chayes argued (just at the outset of the Obama administration) that the U.S. should drastically increase its military presence in Afghanistan, as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for bringing stability to Afghanistan.

Chayes clearly loves living in Afghanistan, and her words resonate with my own experiences of living in India. Rather than residing in the "journalist colony" in Kandahar, she lived just outside of town with an Afghan family, enabling her to largely escape the kind of western bubble I found so stifling during my first trip to Hyderabad. She also shares my dismay with the state of U.S. and western society. As she was about to leave Quetta in January 2002, she was asked by Hamid Karzai's uncle, Aziz Khan, to return to help rebuild Afghanistan. She relates her feelings at this request:

...this was, unwittingly, what I was waiting for. Well before 9/11, a part of me had been casting about for such a sense of potential as I was feeling now. I could no longer bear to watch our Atlantic democracies go through the motions, in a business of democracy, while half our people didn't even vote. That couldn't be right. Through my reporting, I had gained the conviction that somewhere out there, from one of these post-conflict disaster areas, a phoenix was going to rise. Someone from some other place - not America or Western Europe - was going to winch us up out of this rut.

I have one stylistic complaint about the book: the references are relegated to the back of the book, rather than footnoted the bottom of the referencing page. Chayes' footnotes are very much worth reading, and I wish they more easily accessible.






The evolution in U.S. military thinking that leads Chayes to call for in increase in troop levels in Afghanistan is skillfully chronicled in The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army, by Greg Jaffe and David Cloud. This is an interwoven account of the careers, through early 2009, of John Abizaid, George Casey Jr., Peter Chiarelli and David Petraeus, four key officers in the U.S. response to 9/11. For someone like me who has never served in the U.S. military, this book provides a terrific description of how the system operates, and especially how West Point culture and the "up or out" career path affect military policy, for both good and bad. We're very fortunate to have a system that produces leaders like these, especially Petraeus and Abizaid. It's tragic that the civilian leadership of the Bush era fell so far short of their quality.

Update: I removed the link to Chayes' web site, www.sarahchayes.net, because it seems to contain malware. Thank you, paz, for pointing this out.

Updated Update: The URL now belongs to someone else entirely. But here's a link to the 2010 version of www.sarahchayes.net, courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine,

The Reading List

I like to read. I start most days with at least a cursory reading of the New York Times (which we have delivered) and usually spend at least a few minutes reading before popping off to sleep at night. I like to think my taste in prose is pretty eclectic, but in reality, it's not. My favorite categories are:

• news and periodicals (the NYTimes, The New Yorker, National Geographic, AMC Outdoors, sometimes The Economist)
• science fiction (Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson are exemplars of the kind of writers I favor)
• mountaineering and orther outdoor adventure writing
• politics and history (leftward leaning...)
• novels, especially if they relate in some way to current life events (such as The Namesake, which I read on my way to India for the first time in April 2005)

I've decided I'm going to start blogging what I read, in part so that I can simply remember what I read. I'm often reading several books concurrently, and while I usually recall what I like and don't like, titles and authors don't necessarily stick. This has gotten worse since I've started doing much of my reading on a Kindle; I no longer see book covers very often (an interesting side effect of the Kindle...).

I'll tag these entries with "reading". I'll start by listing a few of the books I've read "recently" (for large and selective values of "recently"...).

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie. I borrowed this from my friends Dan & Sue; it's a novel about a man born into a Muslim family at midnight on August 15, 1947 - the date of India's independence. It's nearly impossible to summarize, but because it's set in Srinagar, Bombay, Delhi, Karachi, Bangladesh and contains characters that ring very true to my experience of India, I really enjoyed it. I found it hard to start, but once I finished "Book 1" (of 3), I was into it.

Forever on the Mountain, James Tabor. My coworker Bill loaned me this tale of the summer, 1967 ascent of Denali that left 7 of the 12 climbers dead. Reading this motivated the next book:

Minus 148 Degrees, Art Davidson. This is the story of the first winter ascent (in early 1967) of Denali (aka Mt. McKinley), written by the climber who conceived of the expedition. Only fair - the story is compelling, but the writing is only so-so.

The Last War, Ana Menendez. This novel is a veiled autobiographical account of a portion of the author's life as a war correspondent and photographer in "the war on terror." The setting for most of the book is Istanbul, with forays to Afghanistan and elsewhere. Her partner, "Brando", is Dexter Filkins. I loved this book. If you read it, I encourage you to first read...

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins. Filkins is a highly-published foreign correspondent, whose articles have appeared regularly in the New York Times and elsewhere. This book is a deeply personal account of what it was like to be that correspondent.

More to come.

Hercules

I need some sample IBM mainframe COBOL data at work for some testing, so I decided to have a go at installing the latest version of Hercules, an IBM mainframe simulator. It was remarkably easy, although having been an MVS systems programmer in a prior lifetime no doubt helped.

The key pieces are:

• The Hercules simulator itself, which simulates the hardware.
  
• The Turnkey MVS 3.8 system, which contains a full, ready-to-run MVS operating system, including compilers for COBOL, PL/I, FORTRAN and Algol 60 from the last release of MVT.
• A slick little Windows program that provides a nice front panel GUI. It also includes a utility for submitting jobs to MVS.
• x3270, a Windows tn3270 client; you need such a client for the MVS console and to log in to TSO.

It took perhaps two hours to get all this stuff downloaded and running.

It's striking just how small system software used to be. The entire MVS 3.8 download, including the pregenerated MVS disk volumes, source for much of the operating system, compilers, utilities, etc. is under 500MB.

Update: My buddy Dave has installed Hercules on his "high-zoot cell phone", with this scary result:

On the cusp of locking

Kurt Vonnegut has written that there are actually 6 seasons, not 4. Between fall and winter comes locking, after the leaves have fallen and as the snows begin to bring on the winter quiet; then, between winter and spring we find unlocking, as the snows melt, the ice thaws, and the ground begins to soften for the first shoots of spring. I like this notion, and I've always found locking to be one the most difficult seasons emotionally. Fall has color, and the pleasure of the occasional warm day. Winter brings quiet and, of course, skiing. But locking - it seems to make me think hard thoughts and feel raw edges.

Today Katy and I attended the memorial service for Pat Field, who lived across the street from our first home in Cambridge. The service was in the beautiful Bigelow Chapel at Mt. Auburn Cemetery; after the service itself, we followed a sax player to the family plot, where Pat's ashes will be interred. A reception followed at Pat's home, and for the first time I got to see the interior of the house. It's stunning, full of incredibly elaborate woodwork and fine hand-knotted carpets. It's sad to think of this home, containing over a hundred years of furnishings from Pat's family, being broken up and scattered.

Pat died at home, attended by a great-niece, just weeks after the death of the last of her brothers. I gather the family has its depths; tensions in the family were hinted at in the memorial service. Much food for thought.

I walked home from Pat's and went outside to rake leaves. I've done a lot of raking over the past few weeks. I like raking; it's physical, but not really difficult, it gets me outside, and it has a tangible end point - even if it is a sure sign of the arrival of locking. This afternoon, as the sun was approaching the horizon of the surrounding houses, it lit up the red Japanese maple tree in our front yard, which stubbornly clutches its leaves long after most of the surrounding trees have dropped theirs. I had to take pictures; even these mediocre cell-phone images provide hints of just how lovely this tree is right now.



Here's a view from the other side, looking toward the sun.



Most of the trees, though, are bare by now, like this maple in our back yard.



So this afternoon I declared victory for the season; no more raking, I hope, until spring.

Farewell, Chemisa

We've known this was coming for a while, but that doesn't make it any easier.

This afternoon we had a vet come by the house and put down Chemisa.



Chemisa (we never really decided on a spelling for her name...), like all of our cats, was a foundling; Katy and the kids brought her home from Santa Fe some 15 years ago. She was never an especially friendly cat, but she mellowed a bit in her old age, and has slept with Katy and me for years.

She was initially an indoor-outdoor cat; our attempts to keep her in would cause her to start peeing outside the cat box. As she got older, she stopped going out in the winter, and after a run-in with another critter that resulted in a nasty, infected bite, she finally relented and stayed inside. After a period of stand-off-ishness she eventually accepted Willin and Ditz, and the three of them would sometimes curl up together.

Back in August Chemisa began to lose her appetite, and for the past few weeks she's been losing weight. Having seen what Willin went through to get to his diabetes diagnosis, we we decided we just couldn't do that with Chemisa and elected instead to put her down. Katy found a vet who would make a house call, and this afternoon, at about 1:30PM, Chemisa died, peacefully and quietly, in my lap, with Willin, Katy and RuthAnne next to her.

She's buried in the garden beneath a new tree. I'll update this next spring when it blooms.



Thank you, Chemisa, for being part of our family.

Emacs and Windows

My new job is forcing me, at long last, to embrace Windows as my primary development environment. As a result, I'm finally putting some real effort into getting emacs, complete with shell buffers, working well on Windows.

Here, as far as I can reconstruct it, is what I've done.

• Download md5sums for Windows, so I can verify the MD5 checksums on other software I download.
• Download and install keytweak, so I can remap the $#@ Caps Lock key to be a control key.
• Add a HOME environment variable to the Windows environment. I've set this to C:\Documents and Settings\mylogin\My Documents, in an effort to be as natively Windows-ish as possible. Note that this will affect the location of things like the emacs initialization directory (.emacs.d) and bash initialization files (.bashrc).
• Download and install emacs for Windows. Now I have an editor; I plunked a bare-bones init.el into $HOME/.emacs.d to get me going. It looks like this:

;; electric buffers
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-b"    'electric-buffer-list)

;; completion
(dynamic-completion-mode)

;; start the server 
(server-start)

;; font lock
(global-font-lock-mode t)

;; Don't store tabs. 
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

• Download and install Cygwin/X. My reasoning here is that I'm bound to need an X11 server at some point, and this gives me enough of the entire Cygwin system (including bash, grep, find, etc.) to get started. I also added RCS (for super-easy source control for init files, etc.).

Now the main pieces are installed, but there's a lot of customization left to do. In particular, emacs shell buffers are lame; they run the Windows shell, not bash, and directory tracking doesn't work.

The next steps I acquired from Henry Kautz, specifically his page Using Emacs and Bash or Csh under MS Windows. I confess, this is essentially a black box for me, but it works like a charm. I added this to $HOME/.bashrc:

# directory tracking (from http://henrykautz.org/Computers/using_the_gnu_development_enviro.htm)

alias cd=cdpwd
function cdpwd {
'cd' "$1"
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
} 
alias pushd=pushdpwd
function pushdpwd {
'pushd' "$1"
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
} 
alias popd=popdpwd
function popdpwd {
'popd'
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
}

I preceded these lines with a bit of path setup; this will no doubt vary based on your needs:

# Set up a vaguely useful path, in the context of an emacs shell. Thils will NOT have
# a bunch of standard Windows stuff on it.

cygdirs=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
tcldirs=/cygdrive/c/Tcl/bin
windirs=/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem
cmakedirs=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/CMake\ 2.6/bin
emacsdirs=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/GNUmacs/emacs-23.1/bin/

export PATH=$cygdirs:$tcldirs:$cmakedirs:$emacsdirs:$windirs

Then I added this to $HOME/.emacs.d/init.el:

(defun my-shell-setup ()
"For bash (cygwin 18) under Emacs 20"
(setq comint-scroll-show-maximum-output 'this)
(setq comint-completion-addsuffix t)
(setq comint-eol-on-send t)
(setq comint-file-name-quote-list '(?\  ?\"))
(setq w32-quote-process-args ?\")
(make-variable-buffer-local 'comint-completion-addsuffix)
(setq shell-dirstack-query "cygpath -w `dirs`")
(add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'perfect-track-directory nil t)
(add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'comint-strip-ctrl-m nil t)
)

(defun perfect-track-directory (text)
(if (string-match "\\w*Working directory is ||\\([^|]+\\)||" text)
(cd (substring text (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1)))))

(setq shell-mode-hook 'my-shell-setup)
(setq process-coding-system-alist (cons '("bash" . undecided-unix)
process-coding-system-alist))
(setq exec-path (cons "C:/cygwin/bin" 
(cons "C:/cygwin/usr/bin" (cons "C:/cygwin/usr/local/bin" exec-path))))
(setenv "PATH" (concat "C:\\cygwin\\bin;C:\\cygwin\\usr\\bin;C:\\cygwin\\usr\\local\\bin" 
(getenv "PATH")))
(setq shell-file-name "bash")
(setenv "SHELL" shell-file-name) 
(setq explicit-shell-file-name shell-file-name)
(cd "~")

Now M-x shell creates a fully-functional bash shell, with directory tracking enabled. Sweet!

While customizing .bashrc I ran into a little problem with line endings; I configured Cygwin to use Unix-style line endings (LF, or \n), but emacs by default creates files with DOS line endings (CR LF, or \r\n). Bash doesn't like this. Saving a text file in emacs on Windows to have Unix line endings is done via C-x <enter> f unix <enter>.

"Give yourself to the Dark Side."

Oh, and speaking of the dark side: Those ugly white-on-black command windows can be customised to be a bit less depressing. There's a "colors" tab in the properties menu of the command window, and you can save the preferences for subsequent sessions.

Paranoid Nation

Today's New York Times has an article about kids walking to school by themselves. My kids, being homeschooled, didn't face this specific conundrum, but we did allow them to start taking the T and walking places unescorted at pretty young ages - and we definitely faced disapproval from other parents about this. Fear of abduction is one of the most oft-cited reasons for not allowing children to walk places.

This little pair of facts is embedded in the story; I wish it had been a bit more prominent.

Critics say fears that children will be abducted by strangers are at a level unjustified by reality. About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents.

The Federal Highway Administration has a program to encourage walking and biking to school, with suggestions on how to improve safety for pedestrians and bikers, and ways to allay parental fears. For the sake of our children, I hope it succeeds.

Killer Micros

I recently wondered about the origins of the phrase, "attack of the killer micros." A little time on Google revealed many attributions of the phrase to Eugene D. Brooks III, who evidently presented a talk with that title at one of the annual Supercomputing conferences around 1989 or 1990 (there are conflicting references, but nothing I can substantiate). Brooks was profiled in the New York Times in May 1990, and the phrase is used as the headline of a May 1991 NY Times article. But I was really after the first, definitive use of the phrase.

Well, this may or may not be it, but Brooks' words appeared this way in the Usenet newsgroup comp.arch on October 15, 1989:

[...] Micros now dominate
the performance game for scalar code and are moving on to vectorizable code.
After all, these little critters mutate and become more voracious every
6 months and vectorizable code is the only thing left for them to conquer.
No NEW technology needs to be developed, all the micro-chip and memory-chip
makers need to do is to decide to take over the supercomputer market.

              They will do this with their commodity parts.

Supercomputers of the future will be scalable multiprocessors made of many
hundreds to thousands of commodity microprocessors.  They will be commodity
parts because these parts will be the fastest around and they will be cheap.
These scalable machines will have hundreds of commodity disk drives ganged up
for parallel access.  Commodity parts will again be used because of the
cost advantage leveraged into a scalable system using commodity parts.
The only custom logic will be the interconnect which glues the system together,
and error correcting logic which glues many disk drives together into a
reliable high performance system.  The CM data vault is a very good model here.

          NOTHING WILL WITHSTAND THE ATTACK OF THE KILLER MICROS! 

This was in a thread, not started by Brooks, entitled "Attack of the Killer Micros." So clearly the phrase had been kicking around before then.

This, BTW, was a bit of a Golden Age for Usenet news groups; The signal/noise ratio was very high, and some very smart, articulate people posted regulary: Brooks, John Mashey, Henry Spencer, Bob Colwell, Eric Raymond, many more. It was also an exciting time in the computer industry, with a lot of architectural experimentation and implementation. Fun browsing for old coots like me. :-)

Emacs for the Mac

Recently I've been making more use of my iMac for programming at home, and I've been struggling to get a comfortable, reliable emacs setup. Today I came across Tim Bray's blog entry on giving Aquamacs a personality transplant, and it really helped. In summary, I put these into my ~/.emacs file:

;;;========================================================
;;; AquaMacs tweaks
(setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard 't)
(setq mac-option-modifier nil)

These turn the command key into a meta key, cause the emacs kill buffer to participate fully in the OSX clipboard and, ah, do something to the option key (which, now that I have command as meta, I don't use). Thanks, Tim!

7,565,349...

...is the number of my newly-issued patent for the frequency distribution operators.

I think of this as my first "real" patent; the prior patents for which I'm an inventor are the Torrent patents, where we all played a role but it's hard to point to anything specific and say, "That's MY idea." This one is really my baby; Mike Beckerle was a very helpful sounding board, but the main ideas and the implementation are mine. IBM, of course, handled the logistics of the filing process - all four and a half years of it.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about so-called software patents, but this one at least meets the "non-obvious to a skilled practitioner" bar; so far, no one I've described the problem to has come up with this solution.

So - it's a funny milestone, but a milestone nonetheless.

Henna!

One of the things I enjoyed during my trip to India is the creative uses the Hyderabadis have for henna. It's used to make elaborate patterns on hands, called mehendi, and to color grey hair, for both women and men.

a young girl having a mehendi applied

From fabianfoo.com

From "10 Incredible Indian Beards and Moustaches" at sessionmagazine.com

I've been thinking of trying henna on my hair and beard since returning from Hyderabad. I recently found henna in the Little Market in Acton and tried it on a portion of my beard. I liked it, but the henna didn't seem very intense, so I ordered some henna from mehandi.com. It came last week while I was visiting my mother; last night I mixed it up, and this morning RuthAnne applied it.

Henna is basically ground up leaves from the henna plant, and it has an odd, funky, slightly-wet-dog odor to it. It looks remarkably like baby poo. RuthAnne wore gloves to avoid winding up with orange hands and slathered it on.

From HennaHead

I let it sit in my hair for about three hours; then Katy rinsed it out (a bit of a trick where the henna had dried out), I showered and washed my hair, and - voila!

Independence Day, 2009

It's still July 4th, but I have a few moments while Mom naps to start my 4th of July entry. Mom and I were up late last night (11PM) working on a puzzle, and we both slept late this morning - me until about 7:45, Mom until about 8:30. After breakfast and some packing for tomorrow we took the shuttle to Buchanan for the picnic.

The weather is lovely; blue sky with a few puffy clouds, warn without being hot, and a bit breezy. We checked in at the dining hall and then headed outside for lunch. We sat at a table with some of Mom's neighbors, as well as a couple who have one of the duplexes at Buchanan. (Her name is Arlene; I can't recall her husband's name.) They do a lot of traveling and had very interesting stories. Here's the husband with Mom.

And here's a picture Dan (who lives two doors down from Mom) took:



After a nap we went over to Jeannie and Bob's for another picnic. We had a beautiful sunset; the fireflies came out in force, and we set off sparklers.

From Sparklers

The next three links are to video clips.







Jeannie Marie will be going to church with us in the morning; then we'll be back here for lunch and final packing.

This has been an interesting visit - certainly grist for another posting.

Meeting Tony

I'm visiting my Mom in Elizabethtown, and this morning Karen and I took her to her physical therapy appointment with Tony. This is for her rotator cuff repair; Mom has been working with Tony since her surgery, and he's really helped her regain strength and motion. Here they are, going through the exercises.


before getting started




pumping iron, like Aahnold.





cranking away at full tilt



Before heading over to Lancaster for the appointment, we took a short walk to the top of the hill near Mom's apartment.

Mom and me




Mom and Karen

Pinewoods Morris Men 2009 AGM

My Morris team held its annual general meeting yesterday at The Point, as customary. Much was discussed and little accomplished, also as customary, aside from the consumption of crisps, beer and some delicious snacks brought by Jan. We did, however, confirm the current squire and bagman for another year (or portion thereof), and the foreman was reappointed.

Business concluded, we piled into cars and drove to the Heritage Museums in Sandwich for some dancing. The hot and humid weather caused us to wrap things up after fewer than a dozen dances, and we capped the trip with rides on the carousel and some portraits in the Art Museum.

As usual, we opened with Highland Mary.

From 2009 PMM AGM

We danced at several places around the grounds and wound up at the carousel for a ride.





After one last stand outside the carousel we went back into the museum for some portraits.