Category Archives: Cool Links

Geekery

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Trying a different style for this post…

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We held our “Rock Band Night” event tonight. The turnout wasn’t that great, but it’s a long weekend and gorgeous, so we were happy with the people we got. I brought my Xbox VGA cable, so we ran the Xbox into a projector at 1280×1024. We also pulled out an awesome sound system and hooked into that. What made things even more awesome, though, was that we realized that the projector not only has a Computer In, but a Computer Out, which just mirrors the input. So we hooked up a big monitor, and ended up with the band in front of the screen, facing the crowd, as if they were a normal band. That is how you play Rock Band. It was essentially like having a live band performing, minus the actual musical talent. The crowd was also just right, happily listening, periodically singing along, cheering good people and (good-naturedly) heckling those who missed strings of notes.

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While listening, I spoke with a student who works in the admissions office, and she mentioned that she gets asked surprisingly often about video games at Bentley. We talked a bit about what we do, and then she asked if we had a website. We do, but the URL was long. So on a whim, I picked up bsgo.org.

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The process of registering a new domain was interesting. It’s been a while since I went ahead with it. Initially, I inadvertently went to register.com, and merrily proceeded through the registration until it presented me with the total and asked for my credit card information. $79?! It was for a few years, but I forgot that they inexplicably charged a lot. I went to GoDaddy, which charges a more sane rate, but was constantly having to uncheck offers I didn’t want. I wanted to register the domain for one year, not several. I wanted to register bsgo.org, not bsgo.biz and bsgo.info and bsgo.tv. Every time I progressed to the next step, there were more offers for me to turn down.

On the flip side, a couple minutes later, it was live.

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In the process of adding DNS records, I discovered that some of my existing ones seem corrupt / absent. www.ttwagner.com doesn’t resolve to an IP. If you notice any other assorted weirdness, let me know.

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We’d talked before about making the webpage more than a barebones site with a couple of pages. Of course, then we get into all sorts of problems with preserving look and feel, and all that happens if we want to update navigation, etc. So I figured this was a great chance to try out SilverStripe, a spiffy-looking CMS. It looks very promising, although it uses some newer features in PHP that require me to update it, which has given me roundabout cause to do a lot of side-projects. (Like working on moving over to the VPS…)

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I run a mailing list for the club on my machine, using Mailman. It works great, but as I graduate, I want to make sure that they’re not reliant on my server. I intend to keep hosting the list, but I’d hate for critical data to be in the hands of the aging server of someone that doesn’t even go to their school anymore. I wanted to back up the list, but Mailman lacks an “Export list…” feature. (Which annoys me almost enough to want to pick up Python just to add one in?) It turns out that it’s easy, but it took me some poking around.

Mailman, at least on Gentoo, keeps its stuff in /usr/local/mailman. There’s a lists/ folder, with a config.pck that seems to list all the members, as well as all the configuration. This might be good for backing up the list itself, but it’s pretty useless if you just want a list of members to pass on. I figured I could write a script to parse the file and extract the addresses, but I started to Google to see if it was done.

And then I found this page talking about it. And it turns out that there’s a tool to do it included with Mailman, in the bin/ folder. For me, then, /usr/local/mailman/bin/list_lists will list all of the mailing lists on the server. In addition to list_lists, there’s list_members [listname], which will do exactly what I wanted: provide a plain-text list of each member. I then redirected the output to my e-mail address….

./list_members BSGO | mail matt@example.com

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I’m back in Ubuntu for the first time in a while, and I’ve got it upgrading in the background to Hardy Heron, the latest build of Ubuntu. I’m hoping that Xen will work in Hardy for me, allowing me to stay in Ubuntu permanently: I have too much Windows stuff I need to access. It’s hardly credible without data, but my dad has told me that he did some benchmarking and found that Windows running as a virtual guest on Linux actually outperforms native Windows in cases where you have a VT-capable chip. So I’m not concerned with performance, as much as whether it’ll work.

I’ve found that, for whatever reason, I’m just more comfortable in Linux than in Windows. As I was upgrading to the latest distribution, the process seemed to be slowing down. So I pulled up a command line and ran iftop, which showed me a list of my active network connections with a visualization of bandwidth on each connection. And little things like my ability to pipe the output of a command to an e-mail. This isn’t to say that one platform is “better” than the other, just that I feel more ‘at home’ when I’m on a Linux machine these days.

Hugin

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Between Andrew’s amazing panorama created with Hugin, and Garrett almost simultaneously sending me a link to a Lifehacker* post about Hugin, I figured it was only fitting that I try it out. It’s essentially a software app (OpenSource no less) to stitch together a series of shots and create a panorama.

Since I don’t like reading instructions, I downloaded the software and worked on setting ‘control points’ for a set of five photos I recently took, thinking they’d be good for creating a panorama.

Hugin without reading the directions

I think I need to read the directions.

* It’s interesting that Garrett sent me a link to Lifehacker. Kyle’s recently become a big fan, too. I discovered the site at least a year ago, and always considered it a niche website that no one I knew would have heard about. I’m glad to be proven wrong!

Stats

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For the longest time, I’ve wanted a background process that would just increment a counter with each keystroke. A friend here (who has the exact same laptop I do) commented on how it was kind of scary that all of my keys had become really shiny and worn down from use. I couldn’t even give you an order-of-magnitude guess of how many keys I’ve pressed since the life of the laptop.

But that’s all changing. A friend had sent me a link to a site called WhatPulse before. It’s essentially… a background process that counts keystrokes and also measures how far your mouse has moved. Concerned about possible privacy implications, I immediately installed it.

Here’s my profile. It’s probably quite inaccurate right now, as I didn’t install it until recently, when I did some Wikipedia cleanup, which is probably 90% clicking, and of the remaining 10% typing, about 95% of that is copying-and-pasting templates and such. So clicks are artificially high, while keystrokes are artificially low.

After a few days’ time to normalize, I want to try to extrapolate this out over the lifetime of my laptop and see where I’m at. (I have a feeling I’ll be somewhat embarassed. Speaking of which, about 5,000 pageviews on Wikipedia for me now, since whenever I last reset my Firefox profile, which was not long ago. And I’m coming on 900 edits on Wikipedia, too.)

Elevator Electricity Usage

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I often take the elevator up a couple stories, or, worse, down a couple. It always seems like a waste, so I came to wonder how much electricity I was wasting.

It took a while to find, but the answer is: apparently, not much. Around 2 Watthours. This seems ludicrously small, lower than the new compact flourescent bulbs I just switched to. (Almost by an order of magnitude.) One interesting concept that might help achieve this number is regenerative braking: essentially ‘capturing’ the energy of the elevator moving downward. (Whether taking an elevator down actually contributes electricity to the system or not is unclear to me.)

In conclusion, see if I ever take the stairs again. (Well, unless it’s a weekend and some drunken jerk peed in the elevator again.)

UCWords

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Every now and then I find that I need to do something that seems remarkably obscure, and am surprised to learn that PHP has a function to do it. I found myself cleaning up a really sub-par Wikipedia article, where someone had entered a massive list of things in ALL CAPS.

It’s easy enough to upper-case everything, or to lower-case everything. But what I really wanted to was to capitalize the first letter of each word, because they’re all proper nouns. It turns out that PHP has a ucwords function to do precisely this.

And thus this page, which I suspect will never be useful to anyone, was born. Enter text, and it’ll covert it to lowercase, but upper-case the first letter of each word. And in this case, the time required to write the script was less than the time it’d have taken me to change it all by hand.

Priorities

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I find this image interesting for so many reasons.

The most obvious, and least interesting, one is that the laptop is engulfed in flames. It’s a Dell, and you may recall that stretch when a bad batch of batteries kept spontaneously combusting.

One of the bigger issues is the thought process. “Oh crap, my laptop is on fire. I’d better…”

I would think, “…try to extinguish it,” although, “remove the book practically on top of the flaming laptop” is valid too, as is, “…call 911 and get out of here!”

But instead, this guy thought, “…grab a camera!” I guess I’m glad he did, but it certainly wouldn’t be my reaction.

But above all else, what I find most interesting here is that he has a huge onion on his desk. I could see an apple, a nice snack for later in the day. Or maybe a pear. Or grapes. But this guy has an onion. A huge onion. Why? I refuse to believe that he intends to munch on it later in the day as a snack. It might be a decent ingredient in something else, except that he doesn’t seem to have anything else in terms of food. Just an onion. Why?!

Oh Dear

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I’m shocked to report that the Westboro Baptist Church has apparently had a lien filed against its properties in an attempt to satisfy the $5 million judgment against them when they picketed the funeral of a (presumably straight) soldier killed in Iraq. These are also the people who have gone around with “Thank God for IEDs” (Improvised Explosive Devices, the roadside bombs that keep killing our troops in Iraq), “Thank God for Katrina” (referring to the hurricane that devastated New Orleans), and even the group that praised God for killing firefighters on 9/11. Why are they excited about all of these horrific events? Because they’re apparently God taking vengeance on America for its tolerance of homosexuals. (In other news, America is tolerant of homosexuals?)

By the way, I should disclaim that, although they’re the Westboro Baptist Church, the actual Baptist Church has been careful to distance itself from them.

I’m not familiar with the case, but I do have to admit that, on the surface, it seems as if the First Amendment ought to have protected them. But, well, this is one group I’m not too sad to see go under.

She Ate All the Gherkins

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The UK’s Mark Steel has a particularly humorous piece on Hillary’s problems with accidentally mis-speaking and making strange claims, because she says so many words:

Her next round of soft-focus adverts will probably feature her soothingly saying, “My fellow Americans, I drank a pint of walrus milk once for a bet. I speak fluent Eskimo. I once ate all the gherkins in Belgium. My brother’s got a yak in his loft. I fell asleep on a night bus once and woke up in Munich, and had to get a lift back on a camel. I used to live on an iceberg. I’ve got a waffle-maker that works underwater.”

Okay, so maybe it’s overly critical of her. But I can’t help but chuckle as I read it.

Naming

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Fark.com reports that a group of people in San Francisco have started a petition to, well… I’ll quote them.

Kennedy had a stadium named after him. Reagan has an airport. Where will George W. Bush have his name emblazoned? In San Francisco, it looks like that honor will go to a sewage plant.

Of course, my understanding is that this is just something one group is proposing, versus a city initiative.

Lightning

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A cool map of lightning frequency over time across the globe. And a live version for the U.S. Heck, a zoomed-in version on the Northeast for the past 60 minutes. It turns out that you can even buy a small Lightning Detector to map local lightning strikes on your PC. It listens for the signature static crashes from lightning, sometimes called sferics (short for atmospheric noise), much like you can hear on an AM radio during a storm. You can even listen to streaming audio from NASA‘s (Alabama) VLF receiver.