Planet COSI

Bryan Clark: War Plan Red

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:00:19 +0000

Dear friendly neighbors to the north. Only Defence Scheme No.1 can save you now for I will soon be en route.

A Great Invention

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ranks Poutine as #10 in The 50 Greatest Canadian Inventions, impressive. And I intend to eat a lot of poutine while I’m up in Montreal this weekend. In fact I hope to stop at Au Pied de Cochon for their famous varieties.

hopefully I’ll see this sweatshirt that I can’t seem to find anywhere

Russ Nelson: Ride starting Thu May 15 15:06:06 2008

Fri, 16 May 2008 04:52:30 +0000

25.74 km 84447.04 feet 15.99 mi 6957.00 seconds 115.95 minutes 1.93 hours 8.28 mi/hr

Went into West Stockholm to mail off a package, and into Potsdam to drop off a newsletter at the meetinghouse. A gorgeous day in Northern New York. Started the ride with 5% clouds, ended it with 1%. The sun was warm, the air was cool, couldn't ask for more.

[Tags bicycling ]

Zach Shepherd: Jaw Surgery

Thu, 15 May 2008 22:59:57 +0000

Well, Tuesday I had a mandibular sagittal split osteotomy with rigid fixation and, while I was having work done, had my wisdom teeth (teeth 1, 16, 17, and 32) extracted (so that they didn’t cause issues at a later date).

In preparation for the surgery, I’ve had braces on for around a year. These were used to straighten my teeth and line them up so that, once the surgery ws performed, my jaw would close properly. Hopefully, at the end of the summer, once everything is firmly in place, I’ll be able to have then taken off.

The problem I was having with my jaw was that the top and bottom jaws didn’t line up properly. The first attempt at correcting this was through upper jaw expansion when I was in my early teens. While this helped, it wasn’t a permanent solution as many of my teeth were still misaligned and the jaws themselves didn’t match. One way to think about the problem is to think of each jaw as a curve (something between a “C” and a “U”). Ideally, the jaws line up on top of each other but, in my case, they were slightly skewed and my bottom jaw was out further (so my molars on each side met off-center, the center teeth on the top and bottom didn’t line up, and I had an under bite).

The picture below illustrates one of the problems with my jaw. The blue line is between the two center teeth on my lower jaw while the red line is between the two center teeth on my upper jaw. The problem was an issue with my lower jaw (and not my upper jaw) because the center-line of my upper jaw matches the center of my face (notice the position of my nose).

Here’s a top-down view that (crudely) illustrates some of the other issues. The center of the lower jaw (blue) was shifted from the center of the upper jaw (red), the molars weren’t aligned properly in the back (the upper molars were on the outside on the right, but but lower molars were on the outside on the left), and the lower front teeth stuck out farther than the upper ones.

The surgery was done on the lower jaw in order to move it backward, straightening it out in the process. The bulk of the work was performed between the back teeth and the beginning of the joint. The jaw was cut in such a way that allows for bony contact to be maintained (apparently this is something that distinguishes it from other surgeries, and what eliminates the need for the jaw to be wired shut, but, not being an orthodontic surgeon, I don’t quite understand what this means). Once the cuts were made, the jaw was fixed in the new position with three screws on each side, which involved a small incision into the cheek on each side. (Well, that’s how it was supposed to work. Apparently there were some issues that resulted in the surgeon removing the first set of screws on the left side, changing the alignment slightly, and re-attaching them in the new position.)

The picture below is from a scan taken of my jaw following the surgery. The dots on each side of my jaw are the screws now holding things together, and the red line is running through the center of my nose and between the center teeth on the top and bottom jaws.

The recovery for the surgery will last 4-6 weeks. Currently I’m on quite the collection of medications (I’ll probably revise this post once I’m not on them any more as I imagine they effect my writing) including Roxicet (for pain), Promethazine (for nausea), Methylprednisolone (for swelling), and Cephalexin (to prevent infection). For at least 4 weeks I’m on a “no chew” diet. After that it’s “soft foods” only for a few more weeks. I’m definitely interested in any suggestions for foods anyone has.

What I’ve tried so far (in roughly chronological order):
(I’ll add to this list as time goes on)

Sprite/Ginger Ale/Sierra Mist (helps a lot with “phlegm”)
Boost
Ensure
Yogurt
Pudding (The first attempt didn’t go well; it was too sticky. I might try this again at some point)
Apple Sauce
Powdered Instant Breakfast Mix
Blended Chicken Noodle Soup
Pureed Cream of Potato Soup
Soft-serve Ice Cream

Everything (except the swelling) seems to be under control (I’ll be sure to update if anything changes).

Russ Nelson: Ride starting Wed May 14 16:36:14 2008

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:49:04 +0000

21.89 km 71821.76 feet 13.60 mi 3692.00 seconds 61.53 minutes 1.03 hours 13.26 mi/hr

Went into town for ... no reason at all. Just to ride. Stopped by Heather's place of work (Myler Chiropractic).

[Tags bicycling ]

Justin Bennett: Android Winners

Wed, 14 May 2008 14:34:35 +0000

A list of the 50 winners of the first portion of the Android Challenge has been posted on the Android blog. After reading through the titles, I found a link at the bottom to the Phandriod site where links to many of the winner’s websites or videos have been aggregated. Take a look at them. These people developed some pretty outstanding applications. I looked at several of the 50 that sounded interesting based on the description and I’ve picked a few favorites.

Commandro - A new take on social networking, Commandro utilizes the Android platform’s location-based services to show you where your friends are and what they’re doing at all times. It makes good use of the Google Maps functionality available on the device and the interface looks very intuitive.
AndroidScan - This application is really cool. Using the phone’s camera, AndroidScan allows you to take a picture of a barcode that it will then process, giving you a list of places where you can buy it and the price it’s being sold for there. In addition to websites carrying that item (which you can view by clicking a link), the application also searches for nearby stores with that product and, in the case of a book, nearby libraries. One thing I thought was particularly cool is that if the barcode you scanned belongs to a CD, the phone will access the Amazon MP3 store and give you the option to listen to the 30 second previews for each track on the album. The AndroidScan website has a 3 minute video that shows it off pretty well.
ShapeWriter WritingPad - This application is truly phenomenal. Developed by ShapeWriter Inc., this application facilitates entering text into your touchscreen phone in a way I’ve never even imagined. The best way for you to see what I mean is to just watch the video. This application is really cool.

Now I can see more clearly why our application was not among the top 50. The applications that won had truly innovative ideas that were almost flawlessly implemented. Though I thought (and still think) that our idea was innovative, taking the whole social networking thing from a different angle, we didn’t have the skills or the time to implement it in such a complete way.

Bryan Clark: Signatures in Email

Wed, 14 May 2008 14:18:16 +0000

Last week I was blitzed by being cc’d on a lot of email signature related bugs. :-) To remain calm and keep delusions of control active I started on a wiki page for Message Signatures in Thunderbird. Right now the page contains lots of links to relevant areas and ascii art mockups for choosing a default signature for accounts; it’s meant to collect thoughts, research, and define direction.

Managing Signatures

I think a general improvement plan will involve simplifying the signature selection and creation process. Here are a number of points that I think can improve the current aspects of signature management.

Each account is created a default signature (from the person’s name and organization)
Every signature can be edited with a built-in signature editor (created from the compose window)
Signatures can be imported from files, but are saved in the Thunderbird profile or preferences (see bug 324495)
A separate dialog is used for managing all signatures, with import, add, edit, remove actions as well as a link to see the signature extensions available from AMO.

Concept Mockup of Signature Chooser in Account Settings

Using Signatures

In the relevant extensions section of the wiki page I tried to list most of the extensions that are dealing with how to use signatures in the compose window. There are a number of ways of solving this problem and lots of issues surrounding posting style that I am hesitant to battle with.

Several bugs (see bug 219197, bug 73567, and bug 37644) have suggestions that attack the problem from different angles. New comments and suggestions are welcome!

ASCII Art Side Note

I think I’ve started to use Johan’s ASCII Art Mockup post as a reference for my own ascii art; it’s good to see some style written down somewhere.

Todd Deshane: Delicious LiveJournal Links for 5-14-2008

Wed, 14 May 2008 13:32:44 +0000

Doodle: Easy Scheduling

very simple and nice scheduling tool

(tags: calendaring free generator Internet mail reference Software calendar meeting schedule collaboration Web2.0 poll)

Bryan Clark: A bit of a Communication Problem

Wed, 14 May 2008 01:56:51 +0000

I’ve been doing some testing recently with Thunderbird and its offline support; trying to get a handle on what the state of the onion is. One problem that has bothered me is the silent state of online to offline, not to mention the dialogs that happen after that.

Communication

How do you convey that Thunderbird is offline or online? I’m not too sure of the implementation yet but I think we can get some excellent ideas when examining IM clients and how they handle online vs. offline; for email it’s just a little less extreme.

Online

Should have some indication that is available, but not too prominent because this is the state where everything is good. When you’re online, emails will be sent right away and new messages will arrive, we don’t need a large piece of real estate to inform you that the situation is normal.

Simple and obvious green signal that you’re online

Offline

Requires a clear indication that is prominent and obvious. Auto-reconnection should be the default and timeouts created that indicate when the next reconnect will take place; allow people to interrupt and reconnect immediately.

You’re grey and offline, do you want to try going online now? I’ll try in a little bit anyway…

Because for email we can also expect that some people will want to be offline intentionally we need to allow for people to remove the indication and include ways for people to tell Thunderbird to stop trying to auto-reconnect.

Getting Back Online

When you’ve finally reconnected it’s a moment for celebration… Yay! Get back to work!! This kind of notification allows people to understand that you’ve reconnected and things will be back to normal.

Getting back online from an offline state can also incur some syncing and likely heavy network traffic so for those reasons alone it’s good to let people know that Thunderbird has realized the new online state and is going to start doing it’s business again. Hold on to your butts…

Woo Hoo! We’re back online!

Some Caveats

We examined an IM client with a single account. There are some extra things about Thunderbird and email that need to be considered, here’s just one: You could have multiple email accounts and only a few are not connecting. What does it look like to have the account you’re focused on online and another account offline? What does the opposite look like?

Jacob Torrey: Review: Blackfield - Blackfield II

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:21:57 +0000

This is my first music review, but I thought I’d give it a shot — any comments would be much appreciated.

After searching for more music like Porcupine Tree, I found another one of Steven Wilson’s project bands, Blackfield. Blackfield is a joint effort between british Steven Wilson and israeli Aviv Geffen. Blackfield II is their second album and overall is a very pleasant listen, with calming melodies and solem lyrics. From what I can tell, both Aviv and Steven take turns with the singing and the difference in accent is quite apparent. Listeners not used to a foreign English accent might find Aviv’s to be a little odd and take a little getting used to. Of the 10 songs on this album, the ones that stand out are “End of the World”, “1,000 People”, “Miss U” and “Epidemic”, each of which have sad, yet powerful lyrics, and a beautiful musical score to accompany them.

While very partial to Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree, I think that Blackfield expresses their emotions and thoughts in a very gestalt manner and comes highly recommended.

Blackfield Home

I know it was short, but please give feedback, as I’d like to review more music and critiques would be quite helpful. Ranok

Bryan Clark: Auto-Complete on Subjects

Tue, 13 May 2008 15:20:31 +0000

To make an initial start on our new search aspirations we need to begin testing and trying out some of our improved searching ideas.

Quick Search

Our first step in this direction is to add an auto-complete on subjects in the Quick Search entry. It’s important to get a lot of feedback on our search improvements so integrating our improvements with the current search is paramount. New behaviors need to be pushed out during our alpha releases to gain visibility and testing. This improvement doesn’t alter the current search behavior at all, everything is planned to act in parallel.

What will change?

The quick search will try to help you find message subjects by auto-completing on the subject name. The subjects it offers for auto-complete are searched from the available subjects in the folder Thunderbird displays in the current view.

For Example:

Type in the name “address” into the quick search entry
The auto-complete will give a list that match the word “address” somewhere in the subject
Selecting an item in the list will complete the whole subject name and search the message view for that name

Lo-fi mockup of Quick Search Auto-Complete on Subject

The auto-complete is only planned to work for subjects at the moment. Hopefully we’ll be able to start expanding this soon to include email addresses and names too. Once we have some experience with the auto-complete widget we can start expanding it’s scope a little.

Here’s the current design for the layout of the rich-item widget for matching message subjects.

There are a couple of other tweaks to the {meta} area that need to be improved. The light colors are a little hard to see and it might be better to brighten up the sender names. Also it could be good to add the date the message was sent. Perhaps like this:

$SENDER to $RECIPIENTS $TIME_AGO

ex: Bryan to you,david,gary 3 hours ago

What will stay the same?

The quick search should continue to search only in the current folder / view. This may change sometime in the future, but only when we have a better solution for that problem.

Also it will still work for searches that aren’t subjects, like senders. When you select a different search type, like “to or cc”, then it won’t continue to auto-complete on subjects; only when you select “subject” or “subject or sender” types.

When is this happening?

Everything is up in the air for discussion right now as we work through an incremental design that makes sense. The implementation pieces are going to come together soon when the new toolkit auto-complete widget from firefox is pulled into Thunderbird (see bug 370306 and bug 309081) and we figure out the best strategy for quickly searching a set of subjects from the current view.

Russ Nelson: Finance is not Economics

Tue, 13 May 2008 06:43:58 +0000

I think David Isenberg is a little frustrated with me, because he keeps snarking at me about economics. The problem is that not only does he not "get it", he doesn't understand that he's not getting it. It's like the guy who adds 2 plus 2 to get 5, and then when you say that he's bad at math, he says "Oh yeah? Well I know that 3 plus 4 is 8!"

From the looks of things, David is good at finance -- at least that's what his later posting is about. Trouble is that finance is not economics. Finance tells you how much, but economics tells you why. Finance can let you determine that two things have the same value, or the same cost, but only economics can tell you why people would buy one versus the other.

This seems to be a fairly commonly executed fallacy. Many many people feel free to criticize economics and economists, when it's clear that they don't know the first thing about economics. I think that's because they, like David, confuse finance for economics. They figure that they can balance their checkbook, so they know as much as somebody who has studied economics for years and year. At least, that's my best guess, but I might be wrong.

[Tags finance, economics ]

Russ Nelson: Ride starting Mon May 12 17:20:30 2008

Tue, 13 May 2008 02:12:27 +0000

55.78 km 183015.11 feet 34.66 mi 12577.00 seconds 209.62 minutes 3.49 hours 9.92 mi/hr

Wow, what a great ride. Of course, I got back in at 8:50PM ... perhaps a little late given that I'd lost most of the light at 8:35. But I was on back roads at that point and nobody overtook me (I would have gotten off on the shoulder if they had).

Rode from Knapps Station to North Lawrence on the Rutland Trail. I wanted to see the nice new bridges that "they" had put in. Here's one of them:

I had heard that Harry Dow (et al) had purchased a section of the trail, but I didn't realize that it was the closed section. This is great stuff!

[Tags bicycling ]

Todd Deshane: Xen + Ubuntu 8.04 Howto

Mon, 12 May 2008 23:30:59 +0000

NOTE: This is a work in progress

For details that I might be missing a good resource is:
http://howtoforge.com/ubuntu-8.04-server-install-xen-from-ubuntu-repositories

I will clean this up and do more testing when I have time

Any problems, questions leave a comment or post to the xen-users mailing list

Also, this is just proof of concept, in production I would recommend things like
LVM and network storage solutions like AoE, iSCSI, and DRDB.

Another NOTE: this is for amd64, there are also packages for i368

sudo apt-get remove network-manager
sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

sudo /etc/init.d/network restart
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-xen-server
wget http://downloads.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_8.04_server_xen_from_repositories/linux-headers-2.6.24-16-xen_2.6.24-16.30zng1_amd64.deb
wget http://downloads.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_8.04_server_xen_from_repositories/linux-image-2.6.24-16-xen_2.6.24-16.30zng1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.24-16-xen_2.6.24-16.30zng1_amd64.deb linux-image-2.6.24-16-xen_2.6.24-16.30zng1_amd64.deb

Restart into Xen

sudo xm list
Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s)
Domain-0 0 3888 2 r----- 57.7

sudo mkdir -p /xen/images
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/xen/images/para.partition bs=1M seek=10240 count=1
ls -lh /xen/images/
sudo mkfs.ext3 -F /xen/images/para.partition
sudo mkdir /mnt/para
sudo mount -o loop /xen/images/para.partition /mnt/para
sudo debootstrap hardy /mnt/para
sudo cp -a /lib/modules/`uname -r` /mnt/para/lib/modules/
echo para | sudo tee /mnt/para/etc/hostname

fix /etc/hosts, /etc/fstab, /etc/network/interfaces etc.

sudo umount /mnt/para
sudo gedit /etc/xen/para

kernel="/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-xen"
ramdisk="/boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-xen"
disk=['tap:aio:/xen/images/para.partition,xvda1,w']
memory=512
vif=['']
root="/dev/xvda1"
extra='xencons=tty'

sudo xm create -c para

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/xen/images/hvm.disk bs=1M seek=10240 count=1
sudo gedit /etc/xen/hvm

kernel="/usr/lib64/xen/boot/hvmloader"
builder="hvm"
device_model = "/usr/lib64/xen/bin/qemu-dm"
disk=['tap:aio:/xen/images/hvm.disk,hda,w','phy:/dev/<cdrom device>,hdc:cdrom,r']
#disk=['tap:aio:/xen/images/hvm.disk,hda,w','phy:/dev/loop0,hdc:cdrom,r']
sdl=1
boot="dc"
memory=512
vif=['type=ioemu,bridge=eth0']

Note that it if you want to use an ISO, just run the command:
sudo losetup `sudo losetup -f` The_ISO_file.iso

sudo xm create hvm

after the hvm install, you can do:

kernel="/usr/lib64/xen/boot/hvmloader"
builder="hvm"
device_model = "/usr/lib64/xen/bin/qemu-dm"
#disk=['tap:aio:/xen/images/hvm.disk,hda,w','phy:/dev/dvdrw1,hdc:cdrom,r']
#disk=['tap:aio:/xen/images/hvm.disk,hda,w','phy:/dev/loop0,hdc:cdrom,r']
disk=['phy:/xen/images/hvm.disk,hda,w']
sdl=1
boot="dc"
memory=512
vif=['type=ioemu,bridge=eth0']
#stdvga=1

NOTES:
UPDATE 1: add sudo in front of `losetup -f` so not it reads `sudo losetup -f`
UPDATE 2: change phy: to tap:aio: in the cases referring to image files (in the HVM config file examples)
UPDATE 3: added note at the top to state specific to amd64, but that i386 packages are available.

Justin Bennett: Google sucks

Mon, 12 May 2008 20:04:12 +0000

As may be evident by the title of this post, our team of 7 was not one of the 50 winners of the Android Developer Challenge. We were informed by email Friday afternoon that, regrettably, we would not be receiving one of the $25,000 prizes.

In all reality I knew we didn’t have much of a chance. I saw a few of the other entries that people had posted on the internet and our application just doesn’t even compare. I’m proud of what we did and I had a lot of fun doing it… I wish we’d had more time and energy to come up with a submission that could have competed better with the top entries.

There’s another Android Challenge starting later this year, perhaps we’ll continue work on our application in preparation for another submission then. At some point in the future the write-up we submitted (and possibly the source code) will be posted on our website.

Todd Deshane: Delicious LiveJournal Links for 5-12-2008

Mon, 12 May 2008 13:31:15 +0000

Fugitive Thought - Properly Extending NTFS disks

(tags: howto resize ntfs linux xen)

Russ Nelson: Ride starting Sat May 10 18:28:49 2008

Sun, 11 May 2008 03:45:10 +0000

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.

[Tags bicycling, railtrail, rutlandtrail ]

Todd Deshane: Delicious LiveJournal Links for 5-10-2008

Sat, 10 May 2008 13:31:22 +0000

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)

Zach Shepherd: Find-Replace

Fri, 09 May 2008 20:54:46 +0000

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

Zach Shepherd: Server Room Backups and Such

Fri, 09 May 2008 19:54:07 +0000

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

Chris Peterman: Site Downtime

Fri, 09 May 2008 18:18:07 +0000

The site will be down for a couple weeks following graduation until I can find someplace to stash the server. Thanks to everyone for reading!

Todd Deshane: Delicious LiveJournal Links for 5-9-2008

Fri, 09 May 2008 13:35:04 +0000

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)

Bryan Clark: Searching for a new find

Thu, 08 May 2008 18:49:03 +0000

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

Russ Nelson: Ride starting Mon May 5 17:14:00 2008

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:04:36 +0000

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.

[Tags bicycling ]

Russ Nelson: American Health Care is Totally Broken

Thu, 08 May 2008 14:49:10 +0000

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.

[Tags economics, health, insurance ]

Chris Peterman: The Senior Week

Wed, 07 May 2008 02:22:54 +0000

My Undergraduate Career is over. I passed all my classes with a 3.6 GPA on the semester and an overall GPA of 2.6. Now all that is left is to relax through Senior Week and graduate. Then it’s back home for a week and a half before coming back to Potsdam to start work on [...]

Russ Nelson: So-called "Junk Economics"

Mon, 05 May 2008 15:20:55 +0000

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.

UPDATE 5/12: David doesn't have much to say about this post. I think he is trying to trivially refute me by pointing to the fact that I don't think much of some people who call themselves economists. I've been saying that all along.

[Tags economics, foolishness ]

Pete Freitag: CFSCRIPT Cheatsheet

Mon, 05 May 2008 12:38:00 +0000

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.

Russ Nelson: Ride starting Sun May 4 18:35:36 2008

Mon, 05 May 2008 05:35:12 +0000

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?

[Tags bicycling ]

Todd Deshane: Delicious LiveJournal Links for 5-4-2008

Sun, 04 May 2008 13:31:41 +0000

Avi Kivity's blog: Memory overcommit with kvm

KVM memory overcommit description

(tags: virtualization KVM Linux)

Russ Nelson: Web 2.0 doesn't imply usability

Sun, 04 May 2008 04:56:07 +0000

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.

Jacob Torrey: How dare I be here?

Sat, 03 May 2008 15:54:27 +0000

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

Oleg Dulin: Java program to convert a DayNotez export into individual files

Fri, 02 May 2008 12:56:26 +0000

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)

Todd Deshane: Delicious LiveJournal Links for 5-1-2008

Thu, 01 May 2008 13:35:04 +0000

Time Warner Cable Central New York Webmail

for time warner users to login to email on the web

(tags: email Roadrunner mail)

Russ Nelson: PoopReport

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:51:40 +0000

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.

[Tags economics, india, poop, toilets ]

Russ Nelson: Mercantilism is not the key to job growth

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:37:24 +0000

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.

[Tags economics, mercantilism ]

Nate Straz: No Longer Home Owners

nate@refried.org (nate) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:00:22 +0000

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.

Justin Bennett: Happy Birthday Joelle!

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:55:41 +0000

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.).

Todd Deshane: Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-30-2008

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:31:29 +0000

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)

Russ Nelson: Understanding the Stimulus 2

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:50:06 +0000

Earlier I spoke about the "stimulus" when it was still merely under discussion. Today comes a LA Times article saying that most recent public opinion polls found that, on the eve of distribution of the stimulus checks, most Americans plan to save the stimulus rather than spend it. Of course, the stimulus serves NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER if people save it.

[Tags economics, finance, austrianeconomics, stimulus, interest ]

Zach Shepherd: Updated Resume

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:41:10 +0000

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.