Backup of David's Livejournal

This is an archive of my LiveJournal journal, spanning the eight years from 2004 to 2012. It is fast, easy to navigate, mobile responsive, and it doesn't have ads. I've also curated out some deleted conversations and spam, so it's more more relevant than the original journal.

Here's a few representative posts...

• The six-limbed bat.
• Just a random busy weekend.
• Oh, and this climber's awesome.
• Being nostalgic on LiveJournal... ten years ago.
• I fixed the links for 3 videos I love.
• When I felt like the first chimpanzee to put a stick in a termite hill.

Please feel free to look around.

I came across an old LifeHacker article Get Shit Done Blocks Distracting Web Sites So You Can Do As the Name Instructs, that mentions a productivity script, get-shit-done. So I went to the github repository only to discover that the Python script was no longer functional. I didn't have permission to fix the script at the site, so here's a quick note-to-self to get around to that. Until then...

[Edit]: There's a better, live branch at GitHub. Use leftnode's version.

Here's an archive of my changes before I discovered leftnode's branch.

• The syntax errors were fixed. (Like the "play" string in the dictionary at the end that was supposed to be the play method.)
• It's more Windows friendly. Changing the "hosts" file doesn't require a network driver restart in Windows.
• You no longer have to specify an argument, "work" or "play." It'll just toggle modes every time you run it now.
• When reverting to "play" mode, it retains whatever was in the hosts file after the endToken now.
• I removed the bit of code that optionally reads in from an ini file. The ini file format (the keys, in particular) struck me as awkward.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import getpass
import subprocess
import os

def exit_error(error):
    print >> sys.stderr, error
    exit( 1 )

restartNetworkingCommand = ["/etc/init.d/networking", "restart"]
# Windows users may have to set up an exception for write access
# to the hosts file in Windows Security Essentials.
hostsFile = '/etc/hosts'
startToken = '## start-gsd'
endToken = '## end-gsd'
siteList = ['reddit.com', 'forums.somethingawful.com',
            'somethingawful.com', 'digg.com', 'break.com',
            'news.ycombinator.com', 'infoq.com',
            'bebo.com', 'twitter.com', 'facebook.com',
            'blip.com', 'youtube.com', 'vimeo.com',
            'flickr.com', 'friendster.com', 'hi5.com',
            'linkedin.com', 'livejournal.com',
            'meetup.com', 'myspace.com', 'plurk.com',
            'stickam.com', 'stumbleupon.com', 'yelp.com',
            'slashdot.com', 'lifehacker.com',
            'plus.google.com', 'gizmodo.com']

def rehash():
    if sys.platform != 'cygwin':
        subprocess.check_call(restartNetworkingCommand)

def work():
    with open( hostsFile, 'a' ) as hFile:
        print >> hFile, startToken
        for site in siteList:
            print >> hFile, "127.0.0.1\t" + site
            if site.count( '.' ) == 1:
                print >> hFile, "127.0.0.1\twww." + site
        print >> hFile, endToken
    rehash()

def play( startIndex, endIndex, lines ):
    with open(hostsFile, "w") as hFile:
        hFile.writelines( lines[0:startIndex] )
        hFile.writelines( lines[endIndex+1:] )
    rehash()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if sys.platform != 'cygwin' and getpass.getuser() != 'root':
        exit_error( 'Please run script as root.' )

    # Determine if our siteList is already present.
    startIndex = -1
    endIndex = -1
    with open(hostsFile, "r") as hFile:
        lines = hFile.readlines()
        for i, line in enumerate( lines ):
            line = line.strip()
            if line == startToken:
                startIndex = i
            elif line == endToken:
                endIndex = i

    if startIndex > -1 and endIndex > -1:
        play( startIndex, endIndex, lines )
    else:
        work()
 

Yesterday my daughter in the fifth grade got the following homework assignment "arrange the digits one through nine into a nine-digit prime number." (Note, since zero wasn't included, it's not really a pandigital number.)

So I asked her how she'd start. She started the way I'd want her to, by excluding the digits 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8 from the units place. And then...

...we got nuthin'.
What did the teacher want? Could we use the computer to test answers? Did the teacher teach some tricks I don't know about? Maybe.

After trying and failing to construct a few nine-digit nearly pandigital prime numbers, I finally gave into every programmer's temptation.

The brute-force tactic! Test them all! In Python, it looks like this:

#!usr/bin/python
import itertools

l = '123456789'
for p in itertools.permutations( l ):
    n = int( ''.join(p) )
    if isprime( n ): # find an implementation on the web
        print "Found it!", n
        break
 

We ran it and... What the hey‽ There isn't any such prime‽ What kind of stunt is this teacher trying to pull?

Dear self,
Never admit to the world you lost a couple of hours thinking that the following line created a list of objects.

    l = [Obj()] * n

It doesn't. It creates a list of references to one object.
What you meant to write was this:

    l = [Obj() for _ in range(n)]

You dummy.

Today was to be errand day.  But an out-of-town family member needed to drop by so his young daughter could take naps and play with my kids while he was stuck in the neighborhood on business.  That was OK, I just wouldn't run quite so many errands then.

The credit card company (for our only credit card) emailed me to verify that the last few purchases were fraudulent.  They were.  We cancelled the credit card, and will now update all the accounts with recurring charges, and will wait for the new cards in the mail.

The kids wanted to watch TV, but the remote wasn't working.  I replaced the batteries, but the remote still didn't work.  I tried a few flavors of new sets of batteries and factory resets, but they failed, too.  (It's a TiVo remote, and the resets rely on an amber light turning on and staying solid, but the amber light flashes in my case, and never goes solid, even when holding down the special combination of buttons.)  So no watching T.V. for the kids and our guests today.

My son left his new jacket at the community pool yesterday, and when we went there to retrieve it today, it wasn't there.  The pool area has no lost-and-found.  Any clothes left there that get picked up by the janitorial staff get thrown away. (They're usually wet underwear and such. Nobody's going to want to pick that up and store it in lost-and-found.)

I had to set a "home" user environment variable on my Windows computer so that ffmpeg could render the gource movie of my lifestream.  But that broke the automatic backup script that I have run from cygwin.  I was done with the movie, so I went to my System Properties  window, selected the "HOME" User variable, and clicked on the Delete button ... wait for it ... under the the System environment variables group.  That's right, I deleted whatever default selected System-wide environment variable was there for the whole family.  I have no idea what I just permanently deleted. The computer might be good and screwed at this point.

I took my kids to get their haircuts today, since their usual person should be back from vacation.  Not only was she not back yet, they don't know when she'll be back, and the line for haircuts was over an hour long.  We left without the haircuts.

I went to Best Buy and Fry's looking for a replacement TiVo remote. No luck.

Our Rock Band drum set broke.  (OK, that was yesterday.  But I may as well pile it in there.)

Today can DIAF.

Namesake.com released an infographic that was brilliantly designed.  It's informative, addresses a hotly contested issue, has plenty of high value keywords, some statistics and - the biggest reason for getting mentioned here - is wrong.

Their Transparency vs. Anonymity infographic provides the following two rationales:

For Transparency, Mark Zuckerberg says:

You have one identity... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

For Anonymity, Moot says:

The cost of failure is really high when you're contributing as yourself.

What the...?  No.  Here, let me contradict the statements of experts and billion-dollar company founders with anecdotes from a nobody.

On Transparency

I fall solidly into the Transparency camp.  The only reason I don't come up on the front page when you search for me on Google is because another David Blume used SEO practices.

But don't lump me in with Mark Zuckerberg.  I have dozens of identities.  I'm a coder, a rock climber, a father, a husband, a son, a video game player, a web surfer, a comic book reader, an artist, an employee, etc.  Online, each of those facets of my life belong to different domains.  There's no reason those online identities need to be the same one.  Some of them are, but only because I want to be discoverable.  I've chosen that my username from some domains is the same at some others.

I just visited a Twitter Statistics page that had a persistent popup window in the bottom right corner that looks like this:

It's got a non-standard shape, ample background space obscuring the page, a close/minimize box, a polite question in a static text field, and a radio control cluster of one choice, "Yes."

So, do I select the "Yes" radio button, then scroll that little window up so I can see an "OK" and "Cancel" button?

I bet all the other websites on the internet feel so foolish for just having "Retweet" buttons.


Why have an simple button with a clear one-word instruction when you can have an overlay obscuring the main page with window controls, static text, and a radio cluster to do the exact same thing?

 The oldest computer in the household, "That Fucking Laptop", running Windows XP, is finally giving up the ghost.

We're thrilled!  Finally, we get to replace it with something that can actually run a client for Minecraft.  Finally, we get to replace it with a system that'll run the latest Firefox correctly.  (Firefox 4.0 doesn't show the Bookmarks Button in Windows XP.)  Nevermind that Microsoft itself won't allow that computer to upgrade to a modern Internet Explorer.

So, here are the uses for the computer:

• Web Browsing
• Casual Gaming, especially Minecraft (for now)
• Web Development (Often remote via ssh, usually PHP, Python and Javascript.)

Here are the things I'm really curious about:

• Google Go  (Suggests Linux/Apple, but I don't have products in mind.)
• Xcode (Suggests Apple, but I don't have products in mind.)

We've been saving up forever.  Options include buying a generic laptop and installing a Linux distro on it.  (But which one?)  Or, I could hop on down to the Apple store.  Here are some contenders:

• MacBook Pro 15" - Most expensive, but the bigger screen is really good for development.
• MacBook Pro 13" - Less expensive, but more powerful than the air.
• MacBook Air 13" - Wonderfully portable, probably as powerful as I need, but it costs a little extra.
• Some cheap, powerful laptop that I could install a Linux distro on - Lots of work to maintain, but a fun experiment.

What are we going to do?  Suggestions?

 Now that it's been a few months (since the second attack), I'll admit that when my WordPress blog was originally compromised over a year ago, I didn't know that I didn't completely fix it.  I missed a back door, and a virtual storefront later appeared deep in my blog's hierarchy.

I wrote a script to find out which other websites were affected by the same attacker, and wrote an anonymous post about it, List Of Compromised Blogs.

I contacted most of the other victims, and got a lot of great responses.  Most people were grateful to be informed of the issue and had it fixed.

Two books that I think I'd really enjoy but haven't purchased yet: Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind Of Science, and James Gleick's The Information (aww, there's no Wikipedia entry for that book yet).  They're the kind of geniuses who've crossed a certain line that really appeals to me.

I know that this isn't a fleshed-out blog post.  It's more of a public note-to-self.