Hi I am Alex

Engineers like to tinker. So let them tinker. Then when they bring you whatever it is they've made, first you say you're too busy to meet with them. Then you say you've changed your mind and you will meet with them after all. Then you wait until they're all in the conference room with everything set up, and you send Katie down to tell them that you're going to be a little bit late. You make them wait an hour. Then two hours. Then, at six in the afternoon, you send Katie down to tell them that you've changed your mind again and now you can't make it. Then, finally, you set up another appointment and this time you do meet with them -- but before they can even speak you just look at whatever it is they've made and you say, I'm sorry, that's a piece of shit, and you walk out. Trust me, engineers love this. They're all masochists. That's why they became engineers in the first place.

—Fake Steve Jobs

So I stashed a battery for a few months while I wasn't using it. I just pulled it out and tried to use it, and this is what I got:



No matter what, "Battery is not charging".

I open up System Profiler, and learn that at 270 cycles, my battery is 100% dead:



That's Full charge capacity: 0. That means my battery cannot be charged.

I've reset the SMC multiple times, reset the pram, and tried removing and reinserting the battery over and over. This is the second battery I've had for this macbook pro fail, and I'm now long long out of warranty. WTF Apple? My battery should at least try to charge.

Any advice on jump starting a dead battery into charging?

Totally excellent. Crazy dancers, crazy outfits, neon hats, golden microphones. (photo stolen from flickr, not mine).

Found this on my Macbook Pro running Leopard.
The next time I get a mac I'll start fresh instead of using Migration Assistant. Avoid some cruft.

In the email sent to all students on May 8, 2009:

UC Berkeley computer administrators determined on April 21, 2009 that restricted electronic databases had been illegally accessed by hackers, and that the data thefts began on October 9, 2008, and continued until April 6, 2009. All of the exposed databases were immediately removed from service to make sure that they would be completely protected from any future attacks.

That's six months that my private data was being accessed without your knowledge? Have you guys even heard of security? How many people had access to this database?

I have been tweeting a lot lately at http://twitter.com/apretz . I think it will probably begin to replace this LJ, as I rarely make LJ posts more than three lines anyway. Actually I had been posting pretty infrequently long before I got on twitter.

I spent some time crawling around http://flurnl.alex.turnlav.net/fromlj today (anything to avoid the midterm at 2 pm tomorrow), and realized that having my own website/blog was always a strong motivator to post interesting things I found. Looking back, I'm going hey, this was pretty cool! Stuff like this makes me want to start more actively geek blogging again.

When I never finished Flurnl (the name's a tongue-in-cheek web 2.0 conflagration of flickr and livejournal meant to entertain nobody but me), the ruby on rails tumblelog I started programming in Spring 2006 (freshman year) I got discouraged. I never even wrote about the damn thing, every entry about it is at my flurnl livejournal tag; there's not much. Repeated problems dealing with dreamhost hosting and my lack of knowledge about how to not trash my DB resulted in my spending less and less time with it. I haven't updated from Flickr since November 2008 (manually) and it hasn't updated from livejournal since March 2008 (which only happens automatically).

Summer projects:

• Fix up flurnl and get it working, now that I know RoR so much better
• Fix up Yarg and really get it polished. Major bonus points for writing a tutorial in trac on how to use it with a dreamhost backup account
• Either abandon link toss or make it work more gracefully
• Write some well thought out blog entries on issues I've run into while working on these projects. Topics can include:
  • Synchronizing entries between my database and livejournal
  • Using imagemagick and flickr's metadata to pull information out of pictures
  • Security issues running privileged tasks in Cocoa
  • Writing a cocoa application that only sometimes should have a GUI
  • The wonders and pains of rsync
  • Interesting Javascript and RoR things I've learned along the way

p.s. http://flurnl.alex.turnlav.net/9-2007/1189197720
p.p.s. http://flurnl.alex.turnlav.net/11-2005/facebook-goes-open-source/

I'm sorry Adobe, but these icons are just too damn similar out of the corner of my eye.


How 'bout something other than a box? Or make use of some of the unused colors on that wheel of yours? Maybe make Flex a nice bright pukey greenish-yellowish color? Those seem pretty available. Nobody uses dreamweaver anyway.

Man there's something about the richness of film that my rebel xt still doesn't capture. Maybe I'm just not doctoring my photos enough, but man these straight up slide scans from 2005 have absolutely beautiful color. I guess 40 years of chemical processing maybe still haven't quite been beaten by technology.



Scan of E100 slide. I think it was even a shitty scanner.

I have created a command line client to Petri Purho's controversial game 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness. It prints a "." every two seconds while playing. Its exit status will be zero if you win, otherwise it will be one. It is written in ruby. Its permanent home is this gist. You can download the code here.
This is it:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

STDOUT.sync = true; token = rand(28000); time = 0
uri_root = "http://www.kloonigames.com/nordicjam2009/"
start = URI.parse(uri_root + "new_game.php?v=#{token}");
whois = URI.parse(uri_root + "whois.txt"); 
start = Net::HTTP.get(start)
if ! start =~ /1/ then puts ""; exit 1; end

while (true)
  if time >= 273 then puts ""; exit 0 end
  who = Net::HTTP.get(whois); me = who.split("|")
  if me[1].strip.to_i != token then puts ""; exit 1 end
  print "."; sleep 2; time += 2
end

Code licensed under the WTFPL.

Now without immediately crashing the first time you run it!

(whoops ... that bug was a one character typo that I haven't had time to hunt down since June. Shame.)

RT: "until programmers stop acting like obfuscation is morally hazardous, they’re not artists, just kids who don’t want their food to touch." —@_why

The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

—pg

Have you ever tried to get into something new? We’ve almost all done this: You go into a bike shop, or a record store, or a comics shop, being not an expert on bikes, or comics, or the hottest new bands. And you ask the clerk a question. It’s not a stupid question; it’s just a beginner’s question. It’s something that everyone in the bike (or comics or music) scene already knows. And this clerk, this snotty little insecure punk, who has never been the big man anywhere—not at school, not with the ladies, not on the socioeconomic scale, nowhere—well, he’s the big man in this shop. He knows all about this stuff, and you don’t, and he wants to make sure you understand that, so he belittles you. He gives you this attitude.

Now, he could have acted differently. He could have been excited to share his expertise with someone who’s new to his community—who, by joining, would have enlarged and strengthened it. But nooooo. So you leave, kinda annoyed, and you never feel very much like going back, so you end up not really getting all that into cycling (or whatever it is).

That’s what your new Linux users are going to face this year, alright? So don’t give them guff. Don’t treat them like they’re morons. Welcome them. Answer their questions. Nurture them. And, I swear, by the end of the year, the community could grow… I dunno, whateverfold. A lot.

And then you can be like: “This sucks; I liked Linux better before it got all big.”

— woot.com

Who knew?

A preliminary version of the Last.fm Explorer can be accessed at http://alex.turnlav.net/vis/final_process/
If you have never used it before, it will take a while to download your tags. The progress bar doesn't work, but it is actually downloading your tags.

Uh, not really sure what's up with the misaligned weeks up there. Remember when I said preliminary? The whole user comparison feature was new last Thursday...