pebkac thoughts

Freenode now has SSL on all the nodes, so I figured I’d switch our supybot to use SSL via the Twisted driver. Trouble looked like this:

INFO 2010-01-30T18:49:30 Connecting to chat.freenode.net:7000.
WARNING 2010-01-30T18:49:31 Error connecting to chat.freenode.net:7000: An error
 occurred while connecting: -9: Unknown error 18446744073709551607.

Which was confusing, to say the least. Thanks to themill in the #supybot channel, I found this bug report, which suggested that if I connect to a hostname that does not have any AAAA records, I should be fine for now. Simply changing our config from pointing to chat.freenode to chat.us.freenode did the trick. I could have also put a bare IP address in. Both are fragile, since apparently chat.us should have AAAA records, and of course a bare IP could be pulled from rotation. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

I just called Congressman Price’s office. The details of the Why of that call are for another blog post. The How is what I’m really interested in right now. I got an email blast from Lessig about H.R. 801, and in it there was a phone number for the Congressional switchboard. I was looking at that email in my phone and realized that the phone number was a link I could click, and suddenly I was making a call. I know this is something that people with blackberries have been doing for quite some time, but I had such a powerful AHA moment when I placed that call that I had to share it. What happens when everybody who has a phone can do this?

I’m using Protégé for a class, and sadly the installer isn’t smart enough to install system-wide, which means I would have to cd to the install directory and issue ./run.sh to start protégé. Sub-optimal. Here’s the original run.sh:

#!/bin/sh

java ${CMD_OPTIONS} -Xmx200M -Dosgi.clean=true -DentityExpansionLimit=100000000 -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 -jar org.eclipse.osgi.jar

And my better one:

#!/bin/bash

pushd /home/<myuser>/Protege_4.0_beta
java ${CMD_OPTIONS} -Xmx200M -Dosgi.clean=true -DentityExpansionLimit=100000000 -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 -jar org.eclipse.osgi.jar
popd

This means that I can now go into my ~/bin and make a symlink to the run.sh as ‘protege’. Having done that, I can Alt-F2 and type ‘protege’ to start protege. Huzzah! Note that on some systems you may not have to replace sh with bash, but on Ubuntu sh is actually dash, which does not have pushd and popd.

Hopefully this will be useful to someone else installing Protégé on a Linux-based system.

My final project for my CMC class this Fall was a research proposal, and it looks like it was a good enough first draft that I’ll be meeting up with some folks to beat it into a form that I can talk about publicly with some confidence. Once I get to that point I can start dreading the IRB process. Yaaay!

I just had a funny conversation with a friend about why In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Amnesiac are both great albums with several songs that don’t stand well on their own (at least not on the first listen), and their release dates (Aeroplane in 1998 and Amnesiac in 2001) meant that the former was loved and the latter… not so much. Once Napster and all the rest had sufficiently permeated the culture, people were first exposed to an album not as the assembled whole but through the individual song downloads, and some of the songs just didn’t seem worth downloading, so people came to the conclusion that the album, taken as a whole, was crap. Clearly there’s more going on here (expectations, packaging, etc.), but I think my point stands. What’s funny, though, is that my friend was simply SHOCKED that Aeroplane was released in 1998. She thought it was much, much more recent. This is an album she’s heard all the way through maybe four or five times. I think her words were, “I don’t think I could have appreciated Neutral Milk Hotel without first hearing a lot of Sufjan Stevens.”

It says a lot about Aeroplane that it doesn’t strike her as being a decade old. Come to think of it, last year I was totally stuck on OK Computer. I think I’ll continue my tradition of getting stuck on albums that are 10 years old. Anybody care to recommend some great albums from 1999?