ProcrastiBlog

Where did my fonts go in Emacs? Be calm, child. Somebody got pedantic with path names. Search-and-replace /usr/share/X11/fonts with /usr/share/fonts/X11 in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Tired of reading snarky comments about George Bush and George Allen? Step up and do something about it!

Living, as I do, in a state where the Democratic candidates for governor and Senate are up by 48 and 36 points, respectively, and and a district where our congresswoman (Nydia Valazquez) won with 86% of the vote in 2004, it can seem like there's nothing one can do to make a difference in this world. And there's not. However...

There are lots of close races in the greater New York area that could benefit from a little old-fashioned door-knocking and phone banking. Rick Santorum, the man who can't draw a distinction between contraception and bestiality, is on the ropes just one state away. 8 of the most hotly contested House seats in the country are in New York and Connecticut, including New York's 26th, home of Tom "I think maintaining a Republican majority is more important than protecting a few kids from a sexual predator" Reynolds.

Next weekend, I am going on canvassing trips to Westchester and Pennsylvania organized by Act Now New York. You should come too. If you can't do that, you should make phone calls. If you can't do that, you should donate money.

And if for some reason you read this blog but you don't think that Republicans should be held accountable for the appalling corruption and incompetence that have been on display in Washington (and Iraq) (and New Orleans) for the last six years... I have no words. None.

• Act Now NY


• Do More Than Vote (in New York)


• Give money: DNC, DSCC, DCCC

Thinking about installing Ubuntu Linux 6.10 aka Edgy Eft? Thinking about upgrading to Firefox 2.0 on Linux (the first implies the second)? A word to the wise: Firefox 2.0 is highly incompatible with the Flash plugin. Like, your browser will crash in the blink of an eye if there's so much as a YouTube embed on a web page (and there are precious few YouTube-free web pages these days... ah, Web 2.0). Never fear! Just add

export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

as the next-to-last line in /usr/bin/firefox (before the exec line). Makes Firefox YouTube-arific. For this and other useful Edgy tips, visit The Ubuntu Guide.

P.S. This is actually Major Complaint the Second about my Edgy upgrade. Major Complaint the First is that it has completely hosed my Suspend/Hibernate settings. I am hopeful that this will fix itself with time. Major Complaint the Third is that Broadcom and Nvidia still won't play nice, about which I am less optimistic (There is actually a potential fix for this in not-CVS, but it is entirely unclear* when it might show up in a mainstream distro.)

* Seriously unclear. As in: maybe next month and maybe never.

Matthew Yglesias on diplomacy:

Here's a trick we haven't tried vis-a-vis North Korea and Iran -- seriously offering to do things Pyongyand and/or Teheran would like us to do in exchange for them doing what we want them to do in terms of not building nuclear weapons. Similarly with regard to Russia and China. As I've been pointing out, we've been doing "everything" to get Russia and China on board with our North Korea policy except, well, setting priorities, making compromises, cutting deals and, um, conducting diplomacy. We want Moscow and Beijing to do such-and-such. Well, what do they want from Washington? Diplomacy means finding out what they want and then, if the price is worth paying, paying it.

Isn't it odd that a group of people who profess to believe that free markets are a magical elixir---second only to tax cuts---that can solve any problem facing the world (e.g., health care, Social Security, energy independence, and global warming, just to name a few) think that diplomacy should be conducted by invoking abstract ideals and threats of force and not by old-fashioned horse trading? I mean, we've got homo economicus choosing glaucoma treatments, but Russia's going to double-cross a major trading partner to do us a favor?

After, like, two months in the wilderness, working over my disappointment with Thiru, the over-rated Sri Lankan dosa guy, and some random place on Lexington Ave, I had a really lovely, really authentic dosa at the Something Something Dosa House on Newark Ave in Jersey City.

Actually, it wasn't perfectly authentic... I decided to order a "Bangalore Masala Dosa"---an item I never once saw in Bangalore. This was a regular Masala Dosa the inside of which had been sprinkled all over with something like Bombay seasoning (an inoffensive yet inessential, mildly spicy, dry seasoning mixture).

The idlys where good. The coconut chutney was a bit blah. The jalebi was not-at-all fresh and kind of inedible. But the dosa itself---the dough and the potato curry filling---was perfect. Almost as good as Shanti Sagar (which, note, is a low bar to set in absolute terms).

Newark Ave! It's only three blocks (or so) from the Journal Square PATH station. Unlike Curry Hill, it's right in the middle of a place where actual Indians actually live (more of them there, I would guess, than anywhere else on the Eastern seaboard). And it's only fifteen minutes from Manhattan.

Jersey City is suddenly seeming like a very reasonable place to buy a gigantic house and have babies.

Kevin Drum on our war president:

I wonder how long it will take America to recover from George Bush's uniquely blinkered and self-righteous brand of ineptitude? In the past five years he's demonstrated to the world that we don't know how to win a modern guerrilla war. He's demonstrated that we don't understand even the basics of waging a propaganda war. He's demonstrated that other countries don't need to pay any attention to our threats. He's demonstrated that we're good at talking tough and sending troops into battle, but otherwise clueless about using the levers of statecraft in the service of our own interests. If he had set out to willfully and deliberately expose our weaknesses to the world and undermine our strengths, he couldn't have done more to cripple America's power and influence in the world. Beneath the bluster, he's done more to weaken our national security than any president since World War II.

Perhaps this is the rose-colored glasses talking, but I seem to recall that Scout badges were awarded for things like learning how to tie knots and picking up litter in the park and not for protecting the interests of economic elites. Wha' happen? (Via Kevin Drum)

This post is all about the SPOILERS.

Seems like every plot development of Season 2 has been washed away: the Pegasus is gone, Laura Roslyn is president once again, the Cylon/human baby is a Cylon/human baby, and New Caprica is the new Old Caprica. Everybody's back on the Galactica, in search of a place called... wait a sec, nobody's talking about Earth anymore. Whatever happened to the Arrow of Apollo?

Random thoughts:

• I don't like how Tigh handled that situation. If there's one thing I learned from Army of Shadows, it's that traitors want to be killed, and publicly. I expected to either see Old Testament Saul wring Ellen's neck with his bare hands (which is what she deserved, after all, for being so damn annoying for so damn long) or for him to say, "I know what needs to be done, but I can't do it myself" (see: Christopher Moltisanti in re Adrianna La Cerva).


• Shorter Gaeta to Baltar: "All logic and emotion [ed: ah, heck, this is the Sci Fi Channel... all Spock and McCoy] are telling me to shoot you in the face, but somewhere I hear some writer's screaming, 'Don't do it! He's a principal and a fan favorite!'..." Although, I have to say I admire how the writers have made my sympathize with Baltar who is, in his own selfish and fundamentally flawed way, trying to do what he thinks is best (at least since after he handed a nuke over to the Cylon infiltrator...).


• Starbuck: I told you so! I told you so! I told you so! Still, and yet, if the Cylons had just thought to change the brat's name, Starbuck could have said, "I'm sorry lady, you've got the wrong kid." (Is the moppet a mute?)


• Will D'Anna (stupid sci fi name) be transformed by her love into an annoying simp?


• Don't you think Adama seemed a little overly chipper to be back on the run in the far reaches of outer space? See you later, 'stache!


• We didn't pull out of Iraq; Iraq pulled out of us!

NOTE: The episode number is accurate. The two-hour season premiere officially counted as two episodes.

If you read the light news in New York, you must have come across this obnoxious phrase. As in: "South Bronx is the new Williamsburg" and "Tuesday is the new Thursday." Today, the New York Times brings us "40 is the new 30." The units are dollars; the product is entrees; the construction is, like, so over.

"Is the new" rests on the following unacceptable pretensions: (a) some class of people who are relevant to your life are sick of "the old" whatever; (b) the whole world is hungry for "the new" one. But guess what? I hate Williamsburg and I don't need a new one; Thursday is just fine---a little better than Tuesday, actually; and if I can afford a restaurant that charges me thirty or forty bucks for an entree, I should just shut the fuck up and stop complaining.

[UPDATE] It's the "Quotation of the Day"! I think the New York Times editors are trying to incite a Communist revolution (reliable leftists that they are).

Do ergonomics experts recommend typing with a cat draped across your wrists? If not, why not?

So, let me see: the Cylons were drawn to New Caprica by evidence of nuclear weaponry; the decided to invade and occupy in order to help improve the humans way of life; are surprised by a committed and fierce resistance, getting trapped in a cycle of increasing violence and repression; recruit and train native police who are put to use as death squads, while the insurgency decides to experiment with suicide bombings targetting "collaborators"...

Nope, doesn't sound familiar at all.

The situation for the humans of the 12 Colonies continues to be bleak. Can Starbuck be stupid enough to actually fall for that cloying little moppet? (I thought she was working up the courage to snap the kid's neck when the "accident" happened.) Will Apollo go low-carb or low-fat? Will Adama shave off that damn moustache? How will Roslin manage to survive a Centurion firing squad? (Or will BG suddenly become a show where major characters can die? (Billy doesn't count. Billy was lame.)) What is the game plan here, Cylons? And, hey, Caprica Six, are you sure that sweaty, small little man is the object of your transcendent love?

[UPDATE 10/8/2006] Expert commentary here and here. A chat with the creators and cast here.

Go forth and watch it. I beg you. 9 PM EST on the Sci Fi Channel. Check your local listings. If you don't believe me, there's a fairly convincing case towards the end of this post, written by a real honest-to-god professional.

Don't let the channel scare you: there's almost no science in this fiction, really none in the "if we reverse the polarity of the positrons we can inhibit the valence of their gamma ray field!" vein. Yes, it is set in space. But here's what it's really about: a human race on the brink of extinction, making hard choices, and being scared out of their fucking minds. Go watch! Good good good!

[UPDATE 10/6/2006] There's an official primer. Season 2 marathon all day today on Sci Fi. "The Story So Far" airs at 5 PM. All previous seasons are available on DVD.

You have no excuse! Only your milquetoast aversion to high quality television!

I've only listened to it once, so a grain of salt, but I think The Decemberists' "The Crane Wife" might be the best album that ever was or ever will be. They've brought back some of the crunch of "The Tain" and skipped the musical-theater preciousness of "The Mariner's Revenge Song" (which I liked! But still!).

Note to Stephen: this is twee. Pooping back and forth is quirky. (And may get you ejected from the House GOP caucus. After, you know, five or ten years.)

1. The Genius Bar is a good thing: free face-to-face troubleshooting for any Apple product. Note, however: (a) you need an appointment, which you can get online, (b) you apparently need to sign in even if you have an appointment, which is not at all clear when you arrive, and (c) there is a separate Genius Bar just for iPods, which is past the regular Genius Bar, and which really, really isn't clear when you arrive.



2. It actually can be cost effective to repair an iPod. Portatronics replaced my batter and my clickwheel in under 10 minutes. The charge was, IIRC, $30 for labor, $20 for a the wheel, and $50 for the battery. Which means as long as my hard drive doesn't die (knock wood), I've got an essentially new 30GB iPod for about $100. Apple wanted to sell me a 5GB Nano for $120.



3. Trying to get your iPod working with Linux is not worth the effort.* The filesystem is liable to get corrupted if you look at it funny and gtkPod is laughably unusable.

* For those of you who are non-technical or who are tired of the Linux posts: I have my reasons!

From an interview with Radar:

Comedy may be an exaggeration of the truth, but it always resonates, sometimes painfully, in the body's truth-recognizing mechanism (a small chamber-and-membrane structure in the skull) or else it does not produce laughter. Often, it is a truth that we do not wish to hear, or that we have been trained to be embarrassed by—comedy breaks taboos. What is unique about our life today is that The Daily Show is breaking a taboo simply by making plain, truthful, obvious observations about our existing government, its bankruptcy of competence and vision when faced with the basic jobs with which it is tasked.

(If the title looks like gibberish, move along.)

Oh, woe. Woe. Woe!

The setup: a Dell Inspiron 6400, an nVidia GeForce Go 7300, a built-in Broadcom BCM4401 wireless chip, and Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 with the latest kernel patches (2.6.15-27-686 SMP PREEMPT).

The only way I've gotten the Broadcom to work is with a custom-compiled version of ndiswrapper and bcmwl5.inf. The free driver that's shipped with the kernel could but doesn't support the particular variant of the wireless chip that I have (code no 4311). (Support has been checked into CVS and will eventually trickle down to peons like me.)

I currently have the graphics card running under a proprietary driver (nvidia-glx) that was installed by Automatix. Previously, I was running a stock driver that caused the display to die on Suspend. (Now, the display only occassionally dies on Suspend.)

Since I installed the graphics driver several days ago, my PC has started periodically crashing, hard. Since this morning, my PC has started crashing hard and often. (It occurs to me that the hardware has gotten itself stuck in some crash-erific state and that possibly a solution is to somehow reset the hardware. However, this strategy, should it succeed, would still leave me facing intermittent crashes in the future.)

Here's the thing: the nVidia driver and ndiswrapper share IRQ 169. Here's the log of the crash:


Sep 22 11:33:25 localhost kernel: [17179867.804000] [__report_bad_irq+42/160] __report_bad_irq+0x2a/0xa0
Sep 22 11:33:25 localhost kernel: [17179867.804000] [handle_IRQ_event+61/112] handle_IRQ_event+0x3d/0x70
Sep 22 11:33:25 localhost kernel: [17179867.804000] [note_interrupt+135/240] note_interrupt+0x87/0xf0
Sep 22 11:33:25 localhost kernel: [17179867.804000] [__do_IRQ+253/272] __do_IRQ+0xfd/0x110
Sep 22 11:33:25 localhost kernel: [17179867.804000] [do_IRQ+25/48] do_IRQ+0x19/0x30
Sep 22 11:33:25 localhost kernel: [17179867.804000] [common_interrupt+26/32] common_interrupt+0x1a/0x20


This invariably happens after I bring up the wireless connection.

Egads! What to do?! Live without Suspend? Live without Wireless? Can you call that living?

SIDE NOTE: "Aha!" I thought, "I have an old, reliable Orinoco card. Let's try that!" But... is it possible my laptop doesn't have PC Card slot? What gives? What is this PC Card-shaped slot that the card won't slide into? What is its purpose other than to make me angry?

P.S. I have heard complaints about similar problems from students running other Linux versions/distros.

Not, in fact, crazy delicious. Sort of inedible, really. You could do better at your average PTA bakesale.

Note that, contra Ittai, the problem here is not with pouring cake batter into a cup. The batter itself lacks moist goodness and would be unacceptable in cake or cup form.

Everything. You know what's particularly, surprisingly cheap? CDs. New, popular, major label CDs cost Rs 149 (about $3). Right before I left, I went to Planet M and bought 3 CDs and a DVD* for about $15.

Yesterday, I went to Other Music and spent $50 on 4 CDs. (And 3 of them were on sale!) Boo!

* Are you curious? No? Well I don't care. They were: Asian Flava Vol 2 (a compilation of Indian hip-hop, which I developed an inexplicable fondness for), the soundtrack to Omkara (because the main single off that (the name of which I do not know because I don't understand Hindi) makes me want to shake my booty like I just don't care), Himesh Reshaminiya (because I like his beard), and the DVD of The Killer (which H and I almost went to see in Shimla, before we decided to spend the evening frantically trying (and largely failing) to make train reservations).

[UPDATE 9/17/2006] The booty-shaking track from Omkara is "Beedi". Go forth and get funky.

After my cry for help last week, I've visited three new (to me) sandwich places in the NYU area.

• bite is in that weird flattish building at Lafayette and Bleeker (the one that used to be a clothing store of some kind, I think, but I'm showing my age, because apparently it's been bite for several years now). It is a good replacement for Pamela's: it has the same kind of up-scale fancy cheese, fancy meat sandwiches, some of which are pressed and toasted. I had the fresh mozzarella, prosciutto, and sun-dried tomato panini and I had no complaints. It's a little pricey though: $7 for the sandwich and a lemonade, plus I went halvsies on a $2 brownie.



• BB Sandwich Bar (W 3rd between MacDougal and 6th) serves exactly one thing: a cheese steak sandwich. It comes on a kaiser roll, with white American cheese, onions, and some kind of ketchup/chili sauce. It is $4.50 for regular people and $2.75 for NYU people. It is very yummy. (They also have cupcakes, which I didn't try and which Ittai said he had never tried because he, "doesn't like cupcakes." Jackass.)



• 'wichcraft (8th Street between Mercer and Broadway) is Top Chef Tom Colicchio's foray into "fast food." I got turned onto this place by the NYU paper, which adorably thinks the "East Village" is between 5th Avenue and Broadway. I had the bacon, lettuce, and heirloom tomato sandwich, which cost an absurd $10 (it comes with aioli, not mayo, you cretins). Honestly, it was about as good as a BLT is going to get outside of a fine dining restaurant. But, even so, the tomato was a little mushy. Come on, guys, for ten bucks you can toss out a few mushy tomatoes! The "cheap" side of the menu is a $5 PB&J and grilled gruyere for $5.50. You can also get oatmeal, granola, or grits for $4.

for f in *.old; do mv "$f" "${f%%\.old}.new"; done

The quotes take care of possible spaces in the filename.