20.42 km 66992.06 feet 12.69 mi 6143.00 seconds 102.38 minutes 1.71 hours 7.44 mi/hr

Went for a ride on the Christopher Muka section of the Rutland Trail.

• MSI
  
  
  somebody, anybody, comment and explain this to me in a simpler way ;)
  
  
  (tags: MSI PCI computers)
  
  


• Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux | InfoWorld | News | 2008-05-09 | By Paul Krill
  
  
  really good interview with Ian Murdock (Debian founder) now with Sun.
  
  
  (tags: Sun linux debian opensource opensolaris interview)
  
  

Well, I wanted to find and replace over an entire directory (and keep a backup of the old files), and I couldn’t find any straightforward way to do it, so I came up with a nifty little bash command to do it using a for loop and sed.

for $file in $(find . -type f);
do
sed 's/FINDME/REPLACEME/g' $file > $file.tmp;
mv $file $file.bak;
mv $file.tmp $file;
done


Goals of the backup:

- Backup a Production Blade (dom0)
(Zach) Helium was backed up (locally in the /backups directory, to the server_backups folder on the cosi polaris storage, and to production backups folder on animal)

- Backup Animals root file system
(Zach) Animal was backed up (locally in the /backups directory, to the server_backups folder on the cosi polaris storage, and to production backups folder on animal)

- Backup Righteous’ root file system (or attempt to) & possibly backup Righteous’ old file system
(Matt) Domain 0 and all guests backed up to animal.

- Copy backups (as 2 gb chunks, due to AFS file size restrictions) to COSI’s AFS Space
See above

- Install UPSs for Animal, the Raid Units, Hadoop, Switches, etc.
Will be taken care of another time

- Test configuration for shutdown upon power loss
(Matt) Everything seems to work

- Rewire some of the networking on righteous to include a direct link to the Clarkson switches (not through the blade center) and to the server room network (not through the blade center)
(Matt & Zach) Six wires were run from the switches to the Blade center (four are in use now, two for future expansion)

- Kick blades that don’t need server room network access off of the server room network
(Matt) Blades five and higher were kicked.

Extra things accomplished:
- (???) Disk check on raids A, B, and C of Animal

- (Zach) Hadoop backed up to polaris space

- (Matt) Blade Center Management moved to the internal network

- (Matt) Backed up windows servers

- (Zach) Backed up production and requested images (8) to raidA

- (Zach) Old, unused, images cleaned out (moved to the “old” folder)

- (Zach) All image xen configurations cleaned out and regenerated

- (Zach) Updated docs to reflect changes to which VMs are running

Estimated duration: ~2 hours
Actual duration: >>2 hours

• Firewall in a guest domain 2005 Xen mailing list post
  
  
  should look into this to test out NET-VM stuff
  
  
  (tags: xen research PhD NET-VM firewall)
  
  


• IE-only marketing campaign skewed Firefox, Safari numbers
  
  
  I guess there is one way the IE numbers can go up...
  
  
  (tags: firefox IE browser marketshare)
  
  

It’s time to start looking into a new search method for Thunderbird. One of the major changes planned for Thunderbird is a new and improve search, but what does that mean?

What do we have?

First lets look at what we have for a search system.  At a very simple level most search systems break down into two pieces, a search interface for filtering and a results interface for listing.  Thunderbird does this in a couple places.

Quick Search

The quick search entry is always at the top right of the Thunderbird window and allows people to search over the current view.  The results of a quick search fill into the current view, replacing whatever listing was previously shown.

The Quick Search defaults to searching only the Subject or Sender and will only search mail that Thunderbird has downloaded already.  Messages that are not listed in the current view (like in another folder) will not be searched unless that folder is selected, otherwise a person needs to use the Advanced Search.

Advanced Search

Hidden under the Edit Menu and Find Sub-Menu is an advanced search dialog that can make use of the remote mail or news protocol to perform a full search instead of just a local search.   The Search Messages dialog provides it’s own search interface as well as it’s own results view directly below the search.  While the Search Messages dialog provides some more advanced search methods over the quick search it’s hard to find and difficult to use effectively.

The Search Messages dialog allows for complex search queries to be built with multiple search terms composed of a number of different field type selectors.  The queries require a lot of input from the user because of the tight structure used to create them.  The same search and results interface code is used for creating mail filters.

Edit -> Find -> Search Messages…

Advanced Search Dialog

What do we want?

I was lucky enough to chat with Andrew Gilmartin yesterday and he framed a future goal very well.  “We’re not looking to make search an added feature box on the side of Thunderbird“, we’re looking to make search the definitive method for viewing mail.

What does “Search as the definitive viewing method for your mail” mean?  That’s a good question and I’m not sure exactly what a good answer is yet. A search would help you find the message you’re looking for, and perhaps a search view never lets you lose that message in the first place.  There’s a lot to explore.

Here are two important pieces of a search system and view that need to be examined and somehow exposed in the interface.

Search and Filter

An impediment of the current search system is requiring people to choose a search type (Subject or Sender) before they even enter any text.  To help people hunt for the correct item you want to allow for starting their search very broad and then allow them to narrow down that broad search with filters like subject or sender.

The current search system has some speed issues that likely prevented a broad to filter system of searching to be implemented.  The mail client Mail.app provides a decent filter bar when searching mail that allows people to see what the current filters are (folder, account) and change them.

Browse and Filter

The SEEK extension is an excellent example of how offering a system of browsing mail by grouped attributes from the start can help people find the item or group of items they were looking for.  Instead of starting with a search term you give the person a list of attributes they might use to filter the list of messages.

An inspiring system for a similar searching, browsing, and filtering methods is things, you should try it if you haven’t already.

Getting What we Want

Moving towards a new search based paradigm will take some adventurous steps and it’s important not to disturb current usage while making those steps.  Here are a number of changes to look at making.

Merging Search Interfaces

Each of the two current search interfaces provide some needed features and capabilities, however having two separate interfaces for searching is confusing and difficult to understand.  We need to combine the ability to do a quick search with the ability to perform a full search into a single interface with an improved results view.

With a single search interface Thunderbird will be searching the local and remote mail (like IMAP) at the same time.  However local results will be listing quickly and remote results will likely take a little more time.  Both sets of results, local and remote, can be merged into the same search results view by showing local results instantly and filling in remote results as they arrive.

Offline Cached and Indexed Mail

In order to have a fast search system even while offline Thunderbird needs to do a much better job of caching and indexing mail as it encounters it.  With new messages instantly cached and indexed they can be made available to search queries, filters, and views immediately.

This is an excellent time to start thinking about the data mining mail in a way that helps searching messages later.  It’s also time to think about making the defaults tuned towards offline usage while still allowing people to control online / offline caching.

Auto Complete

With mail data indexed locally and quickly available Thunderbird should be able to provide a slick and fun auto-complete on search terms it knows about.   Auto complete when searching for items you’re already aware exists helps with miss-spelling errors and more complete matching.  The awesomebar shows how with just a little broken memory of a title or url you can easily find the page you saw once before.

Fetching Results

Our current drive is to investigate some indexing on messages (at least subjects), pull the new auto-complete into Thunderbird, and get a search bar using that fancy auto-complete on mail subjects and hopefully the addition of a couple more fun things.  Leave some comments or jump on the newsgroup to participate.

A wire frame of a possible mail search auto-complete

33.08 km 108514.70 feet 20.55 mi 6387.00 seconds 106.45 minutes 1.77 hours 11.58 mi/hr

Rode out to a friend's house on Bagdad Road. Upwind all the way out, and on the way back, the wind was pushing me up the hills.

Usually, customers seek the maximum value at all times. This could mean paying a lot for very high quality, or paying a little for something that barely suffices. But customers optimize for value -- bang for the buck.

In the American health care system, nobody is optimizing for value. The patient demands the highest standard of care regardless of the cost. The insurance company demands the lowest payments regardless of the quality of the care.

This is totally wrong. We need to move to a system where most people pay most medical bills out of pocket, and insurance companies step in only when the costs are completely unaffordable. To get there, we need to eliminate the deductibility of health care costs. Why should health care be deductible on income taxes when food is not? Food is way more important to your health than is a doctor's care. So is exercise, but neither one is deductible.

We also need to accept that most insurance companies will need to fire most of their employees, and that doctors' offices will need to fire one or more employees. On the bright side, consider that that will free up their labor for production that makes American society better rather than worse, as is currently the case.

David Isenberg drives me batty. He's the fellow who pointed out that a stupid network (intelligence at the edges) produces more public benefit than the smart network that his then-employer, AT&T, was building. Well, of course when you make a public fuss like that, you either change your employer's direction, or you have to leave. He left, and has been a successful consultant since then.

Unfortunately, David doesn't know much economics. Like most people who don't know much economics, he feels free to cast aspersions on what he calls junk economics. He complains therein that some of his friends deny the peak oil hypothesis. Maybe he means me? I don't deny the hypothesis in the sense that I'm not an expert on oil. I have been studying economics, however, and can make some predictions which counter David's "Junk" economics.

First is that there are sources of huge amounts of oil which are not profitable to extract when the Saudis are dumping oil. Second is that nobody is going to invest in these oil sources unless it looks like they can successfully sell their oil. So they're not going to act simply because the price of oil is high. Everybody expects the Saudis to try to push the price of oil up to extract the maximum possible profit.

But if the Saudis are artificially restricting the supply of oil, they can artificially expand it as well. The people sitting on more expensive oil are going to wait to extract it until they're sure that the Saudis can't screw them by expanding production.

As I said at and after David's WTF conference back in 2004, people will not act simply because experts say that peak oil has occurred on such-and-such a date. People will act when they wish to avoid discomfort and not before.

Yes, the end of cheap oil is going to be a challenge. But it's not going to be the end of the world. Probably the only bigger challenge we'll face as a species is the global cooling of the next ice age. That is going to be a problem when the ice starts covering the northern hemisphere.

UPDATE (since a friend pointed out that I hadn't made my point) 5/5.

The world lurches from crisis to crisis. You might think this is a sign of mismangement, a flaw in human nature, or simply God screwing up. (As for the last, I believe that God stops in from time to time to see if we've blown ourselves up yet, so he can promote the great apes, but that's the extent of his involvement in the world.) Regardless of your opinion, that is how people work.

In these crises, many people take different actions to try to resolve the crisis. People fitting underneath a bell curve, they will try all sorts of things. Some of them work, some do not. Sooner or later, a smart person invents something that totally crashes through the crisis. Blows it apart. The crisis is gone, and what we have is better than what we had before the crisis. For example, a hundred years ago, New York City was fast approaching a crisis of equine proportions: piles of horse shit in the streets, and no place to put them. "We" invented the automobile, and have experienced huge benefits in personal mobility.

The key to remember is that nobody can predict who will invent this new thing, nor what it will be. In order to facilitate this solution to the crisis, the best thing government can do is: nothing. Don't favor anyone or anything, let everybody do everything, don't stop anything that's peaceful.

You may ask yourself, "but why don't we get the government to do something to avert these crises before they become full-blown crises?" The answer is simply that the government is doing something. It is actively maintaining the peace. It is choosing not to interfere with peaceful human relations. It is choosing not to favor one solution over another. Choosing not to choose is a choice -- probably the hardest choice to make.

Last year I put together a CFSCRIPT cheatsheet for my cheatsheet collection. I just realized today, I don't think I ever blogged about it. Let me know if you find it useful or if I am missing anything.

13.79 km 45249.84 feet 8.57 mi 2829.00 seconds 47.15 minutes 0.79 hours 10.91 mi/hr

Just a short ride "around the block", but I also found out where is the access road for the cell tower they put in last year -- at the end of Dudy Road on the top of a 440' tall hill. That's surprising, because there are hills very close by which are 50' taller. Maybe they liked this hill because it's close to a road and also has no trees?

• Avi Kivity's blog: Memory overcommit with kvm
  
  
  KVM memory overcommit description
  
  
  (tags: virtualization KVM Linux)
  
  

I recently got myself a Flickr Pro account, and have been using Flickr for more of my photos. I find myself more and more annoyed at the rough edges in the Flickr user interface. For example, when you want to delete a tag from something, you click on the [x] to the right of the tag. Flickr asks you "Do you want to delete the tag?" Cancel/Ok:

This is almost certainly the wrong thing to do. It annoys people because the website is (in effect) saying "Hey, that might be a stupid thing to do, so I'm going to slow you down so you can think about it." The first couple of times people might pause to think (but what they're likely thinking is "you stupid computer, I told you what to do".) After that, when they want to delete a tag, the action will be "Click X; Click Ok", with no pause for thought.

That is how people think. That is how people are able to learn a complicated game like chess, or go. People chunk information and actions together. This allows the forebrain to go on thinking about other things while the rest of the brain carries out an action previously decided-upon. If an action requires a confirmation, the hindbrain will confirm it as part of executing the action chunk.

The way to work with human congnition rather than against it is to allow for Undo. Undo isn't a new idea -- we were using it 25 years ago. Undo works well with the human brain because it allows actions to happen without confirmations, but it also allows the forebrain (which operates slower than the hindbrain) to realize that it has made a mistake, and correct it with an Undo.

Flickr isn't all bad. They do use Undo sometimes:

When they add an image to a set, they add an indication that it's in the set over on the right, so the "OK" part is useless. They should skip the dialog entirely and insert a temporary "UNDO" below the set listing. Even when they do use UNDO, they spoil its operation with a confirmation:

Of course I want to remove it from the set! That's why I just clicked on UNDO, right?

Following the confirmation is another useless "Click OK to indicate that you are still alive" box.

Of course it's been removed, because the set listing is now gone. The proper way to handle this is to grey out the set listing on the right, and add an "UNDO" button below it.

Even if you've implemented your website using Open Source software like Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, you don't escape the low quality typical of proprietary software unless your software is Open Source.

It's easy to volunteer other people to fix problems. In the Open Source world, the typical response is "great idea; send a patch." Flickr lives in the Web 2.0 world, not the Open Source world. Their software sucks just like any proprietary program. We can't fix it. Only Flickr can fix it, and hopefully, they'll at least fix the problems I've outlined here.

That’s the reaction I’ve gotten from Clarkson for, wait for it, staying more than 24 hours past my last final. My final ended at 11:45 yesterday, and I’m hopefully going to be gone by 1:30 today. I say hopefully because everytime the maintainence people come knocking on my door (starting at 6AM this morning) they just can’t wait for me to leave. While I understand they need to clean the room, there are other rooms to be cleaned which will be rented out for senior week, and ours is not one of them as the attached room is occupied until after then.

Oh well, I guess I’ll survive.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

I've written a simple program to convert a DayNotez text export file into separate individual text files, one for each note. Those of you who use Natara DayNotez know exactly what I am talking about. Download DayNotezConverter.java (1.6K)

• Time Warner Cable Central New York Webmail
  
  
  for time warner users to login to email on the web
  
  
  (tags: email Roadrunner mail)
  
  

Having watched people poop on the streets in Mumbai, wanting to help stop that, and not knowing what to do, I was pleased to come across the PoopReport's project to help people in India. Specifically, schoolgirls in Uttar Pradesh. They can build a composting toilet for $250, which is a fair sum, but less than the computer you're using to read this posting. Granted, it's not Mumbai, but the problem is still the same.

Our new governor says that state government needs to do more to lower cost of doing business in New York:

To create a more conducive climate for business, the governor said New York must make doing business in the state cheaper by investing in infrastructure and reducing high energy and health care costs.

How the heck is he going to do that? By pressing the "lower energy costs" and "lower health care costs" buttons? He's a Democrat, and Democrats are historically unwilling to do what is actually needed to lower these costs: nothing. Government needs to get out of the way of creative resourceful people with ideas. Government has a positive role to play while getting out of the way: by ensuring that all relations between people are peaceful. But that's government's only role.

He goes on to say:

For his part, Gov. Paterson reiterated his commitment to belt-tightening and fiscal prudence. "Our economy is still reeling," the governor said. "When this storm hits, we can't simply do what Albany usually does: turn around and tax the first business or the first resident we see. Rather, we have to cut wasteful spending."

No, David, you need to cut all spending, not just the wasteful spending. You need to do less for us, you need to do less to us. You need to do less, period. Shut down department after department, and send the people home to get productive jobs. Most of what New York State does is either irrelevant or actively harmful.

Heather and I are pleased to announce that we are no longer home owners. No more mortgage payments. No more home owners associations. No more stressing about the falling Twin Cities housing market.

We received an offer on our townhouse on April 12th and closed the transaction on Monday. Instead of being in debt to Wells Fargo for another 25 years, we should be able to pay off the loss in a year. A huge thanks goes out to our parents for making this transaction possible. Thanks also to my brother Tim for giving me an old fax machine which made it much easier to complete the 22 page purchase agreement at 8pm on a Saturday.

Today is Joelle’s 21st Birthday!  If you see her or have some way of contacting her, wish her a happy one.  I’ve got to get her a present this weekend (or maybe I already did…).

It has been a long time since I posted on this thing, so several items of importance follow:

First, an update on the RSS Challenge I mentioned that we had in COSI. I didn’t win, Ryan did.  My entry had some database issues and several bugs which needed to be ironed out.

An update on Android: We submitted our entry to the contest on the April 14th deadline and are now waiting anxiously to hear from them.  Winners for round 1 are notified on or about May 5th.

School: Last week was dead week (the last week of classes before finals).  That means I had a buttload of work to do and no time to do it all.  I had two programming assignments due last Thursday, a project presentation on Friday, another presentation this past Monday as well as write ups for each of those.  I had one final each Monday and Tuesday and I have two today (one of which is already over).  Good news is that I got everything done and turned in on time and I think I’ve done decently on all my tests so far.

I start my co-op on Monday and will be working almost full time from then until Christmas.  I intend to work on a few different things this summer, hopefully one of which will be Android (I really hope we win this first round).  When the fall gets here I’m thinking I’m going to follow along with the Cryptography course Tino is teaching via Ryan and Jake.  I’d like to take the course but I won’t have an opportunity since it’s only offered in the fall.

All that said, I have about 80% of my stuff packed and will be heading home tomorrow probably around noon.  Hopefully I’ll have time in the near future to mess with the theme and get the colors the way I want them (I know some of you have said it’s too light, too boring, etc.).

• Review: Running Xen a Hands-On guide to the Art of Virtualization | cmdln.org (a sysadmin blog)
  
  
  A nice review of our Running Xen book
  
  
  (tags: xen book runningxen review Linux)
  
  


• Digg - Running Xen: a Hands-On guide to the Art of Virtualization
  
  
  Digg this
  
  
  (tags: digg xen runningxen book review virtualization)
  
  


• O'Reilly - Safari Books Online - 9780132074674 - Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization
  
  
  (tags: book linux virtualization xen runningxen)
  
  


• Review: Running Xen a Hands-On guide to the Art of Virtualization
  
  
  windows vista also interested in Xen it seems
  
  
  (tags: runningxen xen book review linux virtualization)
  
  

I’ve updated my resume and, because of the personal information it contains, placed it behind a bit of “security”. It isn’t foolproof, just fool-resistant.

If anyone notices any typos (in the security or in the resume), let me know.

Many, many programs written in C or C++ use a file called "config.h" which contains #define statement that control the compilation of the program. These programs are also nearly always build using 'make'.

I claim that these two attributes are in conflict with each other. Or, in layman's terms, "config.h sucks". The problem is that when you have multiple options in config.h, every file which may be compiled differently depending on the values defined therein, must be recompiled whenever config.h changes.

The correct way to do compile-time options is to have a config subdirectory containing a multitude of .h files, each with its own #define in it. These are easily managed because each file has only one #define, and when the source file mentions the thing being defined, it needs a #include of that config file. The 'make' program is trivially informed of these dependencies by looking at the files included in each source.

So, when you change one option, only those files which depend on it will get recompiled.

I wrote this blog posting while waiting for a program to recompile because I changed config.h .... and it's still not finished recompiling on pretty studly machine. Ahhhh, it just finished.

Of course, this is completely disrupted when you rewrite your Makefile (as GNU automake does), but that's a subject for a different posting.

With an hour or so of downtime during the Calendar Face 2 Face meeting this week I started a little CSS hacking of the Lightning Calendar extension.  My goal was to change improve the visual effect of the month view into more of a heat map than a listing of all your events for the month.  I believe the month view should only be answering the question, “What days am I busy, what days am I free?”, while avoiding answering every other possible question.

Old Calendar Month View

Here’s a screenshot of a day in the current month view.  There are dark drop shadows for each event listed, as well a (visually alarming) alarm bell for every event that has an alarm.  The borders are thick 2px lines with a dark color that overwhelms the board.

Effectively there is a lot of visual noise happening with all the different background and dark border shading that makes the view always appear somewhat cluttered.

Drawing the Eye

When you start shading the the areas of the calendar in a darker shade than they were before you can begin to see the visual effect created and where they eyes are drawn to.  Places and things that aren’t as important as others.

Plus the extra visual information that is provided in some of the shading isn’t always necessary in the month view.  For example, off month days are now indicated by a lighter shade of font color in the date text instead of a dark background color that makes them look important instead of additional.

Calendar Month Hack

In this screenshot of a single day in the new hacked month view you can see that the borders of days changed to a very light 1px color and the date numbering has been lighted up as well.  I put in a slight background shade for the top border as well to give it some separation (not completely necessary).  The colors and stacking of events in a day provides the necessary separation that the dark border colors were giving before.

In general everything has been flattened so the visual effect is about the colors of the calendar events drawing your eyes to the areas they exist in the most, while the empty parts of the calendar look much more open.

Designer code can be had at bug 430382 and you can see a full month view patch screenshot from there as well.

Next Steps

Start changing the timed events such that they don’t look so visually loud on the board.  Time events, ones that range for a certain time during the day, should appear to be less than an all day event on the visual landscape.

Further Improvements

The text for calendar events is obviously much too verbose.  You can see in the above screenshot that 08:30 AM could easily be changed into 8:30 and still provide the same information while taking less space.

Christian has much more work done for Improved Events and Tasks as well as others areas, all of which need to be merged.

Is anybody going to thank IT folks for this ? Nah, I dobut it.

Link: IRS IT Improvement Speeds Rebate Checks (The Risk Factor).

In a bit of good news, Government Computer News reports that a new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) computer program upgrade allowed the taxpayer rebate checks to be sent out a week earlier than expected. The initial schedule called for the checks to be sent this Friday, 2 May, but now they are going out today.

Foundeo has released 3 new Image Effects for ColdFusion 8!

The first is sepia tone, you can see an example image to the left. Sepia tone was popular in the 1800's (used to give black and white photos a bit of color), but thanks to modern photoediting technology is making a comeback. The idea for this effect came from a customer suggestion.

I also added two other effects to the component which can lighten or darken an image or photo.

You can score all 8 of the effects (rounded corners, gradients, reflections, drop shadows, etc) for $39.99 until Thursday May 1st, when the price increases to $49.99

Existing customers get a free upgrade, so just login to your account, and download the latest code.

Visit foundeo.com to order.

23.92 km 78479.41 feet 14.86 mi 4784.00 seconds 79.73 minutes 1.33 hours 11.18 mi/hr

Went out along the West Branch of the St. Regis River. Out on the east side, back on the west side. I'd broken a spoke on yesterday's ride, and it was threatening to rain, and I got started late, otherwise I'd have gone for a longer ride. Excuses, excuses.

• UbuntuOpenWeek - Ubuntu Wiki
  
  
  a couple that look particularly interesting ones are \"Ask Mark\" and \"Virtualization\"
  
  
  (tags: Linux open ubuntu)
  
  


• Software tagged with 'opensource' on Wakoopa
  
  
  (tags: opensource Software)
  
  


• Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
  
  
  (tags: filesystem opensource Standards fhs reference unix standard)
  
  


• The Ph.D Experience
  
  
  really good article
  
  
  (tags: PhD experience advice article)
  
  


• Giving an Academic Talk
  
  
  This is a lot of good advice all in one spot. A must read, even just as a reminder.
  
  A lot of things you learn with experience, but wouldn't it be better to learn them ahead of time from the experienced?
  
  
  (tags: advice article presentation academic)
  
  


• Remote Network Boot via PXE
  
  
  (tags: pxe linux boot netboot network diskless sysadmin)
  
  


• OSVids < OS\Zen
  
  
  (tags: video OS install Linux Windows Mac)
  
  

One of these days I think I am going to write my own RSS feed reader.

Link: rome: ROME: RSS/Atom syndication and publishing tools.

ROME is an set of open source Java tools for parsing, generating and publishing RSS and Atom feeds. The core ROME library depends only on the JDOM XML parser and supports parsing, generating and converting all of the popular RSS and Atom formats including RSS 0.90, RSS 0.91 Netscape, RSS 0.91 Userland, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and Atom 1.0. You can parse to an RSS object model, an Atom object model or an abstract SyndFeed model that can model either family of formats.

34.88 km 114442.15 feet 21.67 mi 9272.00 seconds 154.53 minutes 2.58 hours 8.42 mi/hr

First ride on the Rutland Trail. Rode to Winthrop on the trail and back on the highway. A tad muddy to go both ways. I'll have to spend some time with a hoe cleaning out the drainage ditches that I've dug out in past years. No rest for the weary. Met a fellow named "Joe" from Brasher Falls, riding an ATV on the trail. He, too, is weary of the people who can't stay on the trail, who dig ruts intentionally with their wheels, who litter, and otherwise make a bad name for ATV riders.

As the semester is coming to a close, I thought I’d list some of the things I was able to get done this semester and what I’d like to progress on in the future.

Accomplishments:

1. Released the Open Server Platform version 0.2
2. Managed COSI’s Zimbra server
3. Took the following classes: Compilers, Operating Systems, Network Security, Intro. to Psych, E. Linear Algebra.

Goals:

1. Polish off Wiki Wide Web
2. Work on OSP
3. Have a relaxing, fun summer
4. Work on MOSS

That’s all that comes to mind at the moment, I’m sure I’ll think of more as time goes by.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

Now this is pretty cool. It looks like a daughter-board of sorts that has a computer on it running Linux.

Link: PC World - Business Center: An ExpressCard Slot Computer Designed to Protect Main Machine.

The $199 Linux-based system built into an ExpressCard form factor is designed to offload all tasks from its host computer related to viruses, phishing, spam, malware, spyware, and intrusion. It also handles filtering and parental control.

• \"Running Xen\" - New Xen Book - Barry Flanagan
  
  
  new book on xen officially released: also see runningxen.com
  
  
  (tags: runningxen xen book)
  
  


• blog.xen.org » Running Xen book hits the streets!
  
  
  xen.org blog post on initial release of our Running Xen book
  
  
  (tags: runningxen xen book)
  
  

I learned a lot this semester. I’ll list some examples below.

• Android
  • A lot about Java
  • A lot about the Android language
  • A little about XML and DTDs
• Docs
  • The DPL syntax
  • A little about automated backups
• BenchVM
  • A lot about writing formal papers for conference submissions
  • A lot about KVM
  • A little about DTDs
• As COSI Director
  • How to get people to take minutes
  • A little about LaTeX
• As “Server Room Stuff” Maintainer
  • A lot about UPSs
  • A little about Screen

I worked on a variety of projects this semester. Information about each can be found elsewhere (and in other posts, of course).

• Docs
• Android
• BenchVM