Bookmarking Chatrooms in Adium

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This took me forever to puzzle out, so here you go. This explains how to avoid having to fill out the stupid dialog every time you want to join a chat room in Adium. Adium is a very nice IM client on the Macintosh, much nicer than iChat.

Most (all?) the instant messaging networks also support chat rooms (sometimes called conferences, and sometimes rooms). Adium has a command for joining these chat rooms “Join Group Chat” in it’s file menu. That command pops up a complex dialog what you then fill out.
All this is good up until you discover that filling out the complex dialog is tedious and your doing it over and over again so you can stay in your chat rooms.

So here is the trick. There is a tool bar gadget to create new “buddies” for your chat rooms. It is not enabled by default. So. Once your in a chat room you need to: show the tool bar if it’s hidden; customize the tool bar; add the “bookmark” tool into your tool bar; and then use that to create a pseudo buddy. From then on in you can join a chat room by clicking on that room’s pseudo buddy.

Now, if I can only figure out how to tell these to automatically connect & reconnect.

For example there are chat rooms for each US weather district; and if you enter one of them you’ll get all the weather alerts for that district automatically. These are found in the jabber IM network at the jid muc.appriss.com, for example the boston district is known as box; and it’s room is zzboxchat. As far as I know jabber’s xmpp: uri scheme doesn’t include a syntax for denoting these chat rooms.

Standard chute

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Here’s a thought provoking example of a exchange standard along with an short informed essay about the effects it has on the adjacent parts of the system.  The example is the trash chute in an apartment building.  In my experience, at least in NYC, much of the trash is broken up into units the size of a plastic shopping bag.  That happens to fit nicely into many of these chutes, and size standardization flows back up the supply chain nicely.  There are household trash bins that take a standard plastic grocery bag for a liner.  Living in an inner ring suburb in Boston, as I now do, I was surprised how hard it was to find a source for those trash bins.  In seemingly related news my wife recently made some cloth grocery bags, which are identical in topology to the plastic ones.

Model Employee

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I find this to be the most amusing line in the Google paper (pdf) about their prediction market.

“As noted above, participants are not representative of Google employees as a whole: on many dimensions, they are closer to the modal employee than the mean.”

It suggests to me that if you want to fit in at Google you’d be wanting to model your behavior on the attributes of this population.

  • Optimistic when a new employee
  • Longer tenure
  • Work in the engineering division
  • Degree in computer science
  • Attend code reviews
  • Work in Mountain View, or New York
  • In Mountain View you’ll want to near the center
  • Be deeply embedded in the organization
  • Have friends, at Google, good enough that they name you
  • Be a senior employee.
  • Get with the program: i.e. over-price favorites
  • Shun pessimism, i.e. have an aversion to shorts
  • Stay the course, under price extreme outcomes

Sounds like the default culture, or at least the culture aspired to, of all high tech firms in my experience.

Update: Yes, I know the difference between modal and model. 🙂

Identity Hub Shutdown

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Unsurprisingly all the driver’s licenses in the US, which are nominally issued by the states, are actually coordinated through a centralized hub.  We know because it broke.  I love puzzling out where these hubs are.  For example there is another one for medical information, that I gather is here in Boston.

I’d be very interested to know how much these hubs talk to each other.  I.e. how much the driver’s license data pool mixes with say the credit rating data pool.

It’s hypothetical, but seems like a safe bet that the breakdown was associated with the new year and probably an big risky upgrade required by the Real ID boondoggle.

Self Trading

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When hanging out in the world of ideas created by Ainsle’s work Emerson’s cliche “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” offers a nice perspective. Possibly Emerson’s point was that given a larger mind you can house yet more than one hobgoblin.

In related news I see that when they cleaned up the data from Google prediction market they discarded some trades, including “self-trades (which resulted from the fact that the software allowed traders to be matched with their own limit orders).” I wonder how much of that goes on in real markets. It’s clearly a sign of the temporal inconsistency which Ainsle’s work focuses on.

These trades took place between the hobgoblin that decided to place a limit order, and a later hobgoblin that decided to make a trade at that moment. It isn’t clear to me exactly why it’s best practice to remove the trades between these hobgoblins just because they were housed in the same person’s corporal body.

There is a wonderful classic poem, Goblin Market, here’s a bit of one of the many beautiful illustrations it’s engendered over the years. In this scene the heroine, after attempting to act as a middleman, has drawn down upon her the rage of the merchants.
goblinmarket.png.

Good news on solar power?

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Some years ago this chart from the DOE convinced me that solar power was in trouble; that 4-5$/watt was about as good as it gets.  Bad news, given that coal is substantially cheaper than than.  It was beyond my wit to know what the source of this problem is.  It might be market forces – that the floor looks like it was hit just about the time the pulse of money generated by the 70’s oil crises is thought provoking.  It might be a technology limit of some kind, something in the physics say.

In any case it appears there is good news.  Because these folks are claiming they will hit a dollar a watt soon.  “we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt.”  That’s the future tense, and it doesn’t include the rest of the capital equipment involved in the installation.    Good news none the less.

It’s weird that they are shipping them to East Germany; you’d think they would prefer someplace sunny.

Tripping up dead elephants on chains or interop converters

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I have an affection for the stories about great standards battles, like the ones around the battle betwen AC and DC (including particularly the electrocution of an elephant). I also have an affection for all the plumbing we build to convert between forms. The adapters from this to that. I particularly love the attachement for your PC that provides it with a cigarette lighter plug, like the one’s found in automobiles, so you can then plug in all those gadgets for your car. So it is with some delight I pass along this letter from the IEEE spectrum magazine.

Can there be any more absurd idea than the Coleman Powerworks power inverter for cars [Resources, November]? There’s something very wrong with this picture: the engine’s alternator generates alternating current (ac), which is converted to direct current (dc) to recharge the battery and is also distributed to a cigarette-lighter receptacle, into which we’re supposed to insert a cigar-shaped plug to send that dc power to an inverter to change it back into ac so that we can plug in our laptop’s power converter, which changes it back to dc to power the laptop! To recap: ac to dc to ac to dc. That doesn’t seem like sound engineering. It’s more like Edison and Tesla are still fighting it out in the backseat of my car.

You can get a gadget (with cup holder) to put in one of your PC’s drive bays so as to provide a cigarette lighter plug on the PC. So there is hope of making this chain longer. A quick search shows I can find many adaptors from a cigarette lighter to a power’d USB cable, but I’ve not found an adapter from a USB cable to cigarette lighter plug.

maintaining a freebsd install

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These notes are almost certainly wrong, you’ve been warned.

First off you need to decide what version of FreeBSD your running. When I last did this I decided that 6.2 was the safe choice. 6.3 had a few release cantidates, but wasn’t actually released.

6.2 is a pain to install because after you install it you need to upgrade the X11 support and that involves hand work to get over a major transition in the X11 system. This is documented in the ports upgrading file. You’ll want to do that before you start installing too many ports that depend upon X11.  (Oddly I also must set ForwardX11Trusted).
Next up is the problem of getting the security patches installed, and that effects all the OS, the core utilities, and the ports; making for another reason to temper your enthusiasm for installing ports early. This step is eternal, particularly if the machine will be exposed on the open internet; and really one way and another – what isn’t?
There are tools to help, but they are in various states of current. In fact there are two many tools and something of a lack of guidance about which ones to use in which situations.

Freebsd-update is a help for the kernel. It’s a port, so you’ll need to install it. Then you need to wire it up so that it polls from crontab regularly for security patchs.

Portsnap, portupgrade and portinstall are a good. You may wish to wire portsnap into crontab so your informed of the freshest ports. (There seems to be something odd with my portupgrade, I have two /usr/ports/{ports-mgmt,sysutils}/portupgrade. I think happened early on as part of running portsnap. I believe I had to slam the one from ports-mgmt in over the one I’d installed earlier. Note that this happens in the middle of getting X11 upgraded.)
Portaudit, another port, needs to be installed so your informed when your ports have security issues.

Then you have to apply the patches freebsd-update is telling you about by hand, and you have to make thoughtful choices about how closely you track the latest and greatest ports. Of course upgrading to fix the problems portaudit points out can cascade into other ports.

All that that is hand work, which you have to do regularly; and you have to read your email from root. It’s a particular pain that portupgrade will occasionally decide it wants to interact with you personally to configure a package; when that happens it will want you to be on a traditional terminal.

I suspect that the approach outlined here doesn’t upgrade the core utilities should they have security issues uncovered. Similarly freebsd-upgrade is useless if you’ve compiled a custom kernel. I was pleased that I didn’t need to do that this time.

I suspect that I haven’t managed to fall into a “best practice” pattern with all this yet. It appears that there is a lot of variation seen through out the FreeBSD community for how to do this. The various tutorials and handbooks are interesting. Some are out of date. Most are confusing because they are full of too many choices! Some are confusing because the new better way hasn’t quite settle down and attracted a wide following, sometimes there appears to be more than one generation of new better way in that state.

Advice is welcome :).