Thursday was awesome.

I got myself down to SOMA to go to a justin.tv tech-talk. Sure, they were talking about OAuth (which is pretty much a nice standard for authenticating to share data on the web) but of much more interest was who “they” are. But let’s back up.

The point of my going down there was to answer the question Dad asked me at Thanksgiving:

“Where do you want to work?”

I hadn’t really thought about it in the sense outside of “depends on who wants me”. It started to grow on me, and when I heard about this talk through Karen through Facebook, I found an outlet. Over time, it’s gotten in my head that, (a) there are a lot of tech startups in the City, (b) they do either cool or lame things, or some of each (depending on the startup) and (c) the lifestyle is vaguely like being a pirate: you have a small crew of dedicated folks; much riskier life, but also more rewarding in other ways.

So I figured I’d test the waters.

I found myself chatting after the talk with some of the people I’ve read about in tech blogs and whatnot; people who do crazy and interesting things. I rode back on the BART with a similar sort of buzzing feeling as when I first visited Berkeley as an eighth-grader, and it lasted all afternoon. I may not know exactly with who yet, but I think I’m starting to figure that I’m understanding where I want to work. Or at least how it should feel.

On the other side of the coin, I’m flying up to Seattle in a few days to be shown around Amazon. Amazon strikes me positively in other ways — the benefits of a bigger, more established place. My take on their “corporate culture” as I can see it from here is that it’s roughly a looser, friendlier Microsoft; though part of the goal of going up there is getting a very solid read on it, and what exactly they’d want me to do. They may really surprise me, and I may come back really jazzed.

But now they’ve definitely got that buzzing feeling I got from the cool kids* in the City to compete with. Which is good for all parties involved; if I really want to work at Amazon, I’ll know.

The rest of Thursday was cool in that I helped a friend-of-a-dancing-friend with his computer troubles for an hour or so; and for my time, he helped me brush up my piano skills and showed me how to improv some blues — cause this is what he does for a living. I’ve yet to record myself, but it sounds pretty good when I plunk on my keyboard here.

And then I went to 920, as always. All in one day!

*I say “kids” — I was probably the youngest one there, but the vast majority were 20-something, so I didn’t feel out of place at all.

A quick note before I make another post about why the other day was awesome:

My Ubuntu install on eponine had been freezing. Just up and freezing. So I built a FreeBSD install from scratch — decided that, for the desktop, it was lame (though the next time I overhaul fantine, my server, it’s going FreeBSD; what I learned makes it kinda rule for non-X11 things). So I tried 64-bit Ubuntu — which had the same problem, but fortunately worked just as well as 32-bit in terms of proprietary functionality (nVidia drivers, Flash, etc). Currently sitting on 64-bit Fedora 8; but it’s not apt to stay too long.

(Mostly, I’m coming to suspect it’s the ACPI — I’ve tried the nVidia beta driver to no avail)

Meanwhile….

I’m downgrading to XP on cosette.

For all intents and purposes, I did so about a week and a half ago — just booted my old XP partition. Hey, sudden burst of comfort, speed, and it worked right. Huzzah. But then I came to remember why I tried Vista in the first place — this old partition is starting to feel “dirty”. I need a reinstall.

The reason I hate reinstalling Windows, of course, is installing the software I like. If ever there were a major plus to Linux, it’s package management; go out, grab your favorite software, all with one command and be up and running just-like-that. I was able to switch distros like mad recently and it shows. You just can’t do that in Windows.

Until I went by the CSUA office today and was told of a magical XP image, with all the greatest hits installed. I grabbed it to my iPod and am now munging my partition tables but good (ntfsresize -P --force --force /dev/sda2) to throw the image over my Vista install, killing it forever. It’ll run overnight. And if it doesn’t work, I’ve got my trustier XP CD sitting here.

Meanwhile, I’m pondering putting a fresh install of Leopard on marius, my old Mac mini.

It’s the time of year to clean house, digitally.

And in case you’re wondering and like my naming scheme of Les Miserables characters; I’m writing this on enjolras, my MacBook Pro.

Today was fantastic. More later. Right now I’m going to sleep, cause I’m beat.

Let me show you them.

I have new pictures up! 34 of them even. (Finally….)

http://flickr.com/photos/barakmich/archives/date-posted/2007/11/29/

This covers the rest of summer, Yahoo Hack Day, the New Pornographers concert, and the Embarcadero Lighting Ceremony.

I think this brings me current. It’s good to be current.

Go. Comment. Have fun. I’m going to sleep.

(You can always see what’s new by viewing the “Starred Photos” over on the right there — the feed is useful for tracking my best uploads.)

Better make this quick; a fan in my laptop is dying and I’m going to call Apple on Monday; it’s momentarily fine, but it’s easily repeatable and needs fixing before the shit hits the fan. *drumfill*

Got my car an oil change today, then swung by Mekka. (Funny story — there’s free wireless, but it comes up with only a login prompt, no continue-as-guest or anything. Viewing the page source is a cheesy and horribly insecure way to find that “guest” is a valid login.) While there I helped this fellow with his old Powerbook get Firefox installed and gave him some pointers. Earned myself a free hot chocolate, so I can’t really complain.

Tonight I went to the Midtown Stomp; it qualifies as perhaps the largest consistent venue I know of — granted, it’s smaller than 920 on an open-house or some other big night; or even our Last Lindy at Night — but for an average week, this seemed to be a lot of people (although maybe it was a holiday weekend, meaning more people in town. Who knows?)

Anyway, lots of good dancing, but the DJs were always on high-tempo. Like, rarely dipping below 170 high. People get tired. People like to mix it up. Beats should do the same. You could notice the sheer improvement on percentage-of-people-dancing in the last half-hour when they slowed it down a little starting with “A-Tisket A-Tasket” and then went into the Motown Sound starting with “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”.

It’s been an interesting time at home. I’ve been quite reflective; of course, that seems to happen a lot when I go home. Getting away from all Berkeley-goings-on is a way of rationalizing all of them. Hell, I’ve been reading Kierkegaard — just to show you kinda what’s been on my mind (yay Existentialism)

On the way home from dance, coming up on Auburn, I saw a shooting star falling away from the bottom-left star of the Big Dipper’s cup. My mind went to three or four places at once (quite the momentary mind overload) — the next full second I had a wish in mind, apropos to all of them. *crosses fingers*

And then it occurs to me: You are lucky! Full moon tonight.

I wrote a long rant today on the Berkeley Oak Grove Protest in response to a post on the Berkeley LJ. I’m reproducing it here for view, posterity, and candor.

The Daily Cal’s version of the Open Letter that Prompted My Response

IMO, the whole thing is kind of an emotionally-charged psycho negotiation. But at heart, it’s a negotiation.

As pointed out, this is a demand letter disguised as a letter for dialog. While I do support bringing influential parties from both sides to the negotiation table, what’s screwy about this letter is that, in fact, the last thing the tree-sitters want (given their demands) is an honest negotiation.

The first rule of negotiation is knowing what you really want; and this is where the tree-sitters are blinded by rhetoric. That money-quote chasingred described (equating trees and humans or whatnot) is merely a result of that; I doubt they actually believe that human life is equal to a tree (or hope they don’t?). Mainly, in their minds, they have painted anything less than full capitulation by the University as failure. The real money-quote of the letter is, as pointed out, “help save the oaks and build the new training facility in an alternate location” — this is their sole victory condition.

On the University’s side, they would very much like to build the facility in that location. They have money for it (private, whatever — that’s a whole other kettle of fish) and it is, in fact, their land. It was their land when they planted the trees in the first place.

IMO, the legal high ground is entirely on the side of the University. Even free speech has it’s limits; I’m not up on my constitutional law, but an argument could certainly be made for the tree-sitters posing a clear and present danger or even imminent lawless action, especially now that the courts have gotten involved and ruled that the tree sitters should leave. IMO, they by all means have the right to stomp around campus, distribute flyers, write open letters like this one, etc… content should be free, they should push the limits of where and how they distribute it — and they did! (kudos from a free-speech perspective) — but they’ve clearly crossed the boundary here.

So really, the negotiation comes down to a moral argument instead of a legal one. Again, I’d say the tree-sitters are blinded into a false dichotomy. What they don’t realize is that they could “win” the moral argument without keeping the trees. And this is where the negotiation could take place — hammering out some environmentalist agreement, limited mainly by their imaginations and staying within reason. Revitalize the Eucalyptus Grove (and make it safe — hell, with all the UCPD watching the tree sitters….). Negotiate a UCB effort to study some environmental problem. Get some money thrown toward rainforests (as someone suggested). Hell, transplant a few of these so-called old-growth trees to somewhere else on campus. Any number of possibilities.

And I betcha the University would come to the table on that one, because let’s consider the weapons for each side:

Right now, the tree-sitters have:

• Endurance
• A higher “moral” starting ground from the public opinion
• Scare tactics, threats
• Liability/Danger Threats
• Position (they’re called tree-sitters for a reason)

The University has, in broad terms:

• Money (ours, some of it)
• Influence
• UCPD
• A growing public opinion
• Time

What I’m suggesting is that the tree-siters give up their threats and position for money and influence. Everybody wins, noone gets hurt, the building goes up in a legal way, and the tree sitters win a moral victory.

As suggested, the tree-sitters will lose in the long run if they maintain their current strategy. The UCPD will attrition them out of the trees (ancient art of siege) and the people will shun them, and favor the resolution of the conflict in favor of the university and the public interest.

When they sat in the trees for a month, they had a much higher public opinion than they do now, after being in the trees a year. That would have made their bargaining position better, had they gone for the moral victory as soon as the legal one was even tipping to the side of the University. Now, the more scary they become, the more blind rhetoric they spew, the more trouble they cause, the more the public will come to distrust them. It’ll seem as though the tree-sitters are against progress, their moral argument shattered.

They should negotiate while the negotiation is good, because it’ll be a smaller and smaller victory as time goes on.

(Disclaimer: Personally, I started pretty neutral; I don’t like the idea of so much emphasis being put on throwing a ball around, but then again, it doesn’t affect me too much. The trees are nice, sure, but the rhetoric around them is kinda nuts. I was okay with a protest and tree-sitting until it became a problem (a line crossed a long time ago))

Most hillarious misheard lyric in a long time. At Teresa’s karaoke birthday party tonight, someone sang Toto’s “Africa”, and the lyrics that came up on the screen (that all can see) were, honestly:

Like a leper above the Serengeti

Never mind the real lyrics are “Like Olympus” — I heard it as “Like a leopard” given the Africa theme… but this case of a bad mishearing was public and hilarious.

(this post dedicated to Katie-in-Cape-Town)

http://www.unsanity.org/archives/haxies/leopard.php

That’s what was wrong with my Leopard install. I was using (an uncompatible) hack to run Witch, a really nice power tool (which I hope, once they update, will remain Leopard-compatible)

My take on Leopard, now that it works:

• New Finder really beats the pants off the old one. Not a hard task, but an important one.
• You can almost feel the underlying API changes (I recompiled MacVim from SVN because of this)
• It’s a little more shiny. Stupid blue folders are gone, though I’m not a huge fan of the Tango-esque ones.
• Stacks are genuinely useful.
• They got Spaces wrong. I mean, this one should have been hard to mess up, given the precedent, but they did. It’s a fine virtual desktop manager (a feature in the X11 world for AGES) but it could use a few more keybindings — it’s great that I can switch desktops logically, but why must I use the mouse to move applications around? (Needs a Move-Current-App-in-Direction key combo)
• Also, closing a program will switch Spaces on you. This is wrong. It should work it’s way down the apps in the current Space, not bounce all over based on last-usage. arg.
• Time Machine is about as useful as Dashboard — which is to say, oh, it’s cute, but it’s disabled and apt to stay that way.

So you may wonder “What’s the point?” if I just kinda shot down the big features.

It’s for developers.

They’ve added official Ruby/Cocoa bindings. Python TK apps no longer require X11 (as I found out from running Pacman). Both of these are at the current version and include many nifty non-default libraries (Rails, Twisted, NumPy, etc, etc…). Not to mention all the optional dev tools (I recompiled the latest MacVim, as stated earlier. This is UNIX thinking). I’m thinking that interpreted-languages-as-second-class-GUI-programs is coming to an end. Ruby is the new Java. Make the devs happy, and they will develop for your platform.

MS is doing it too. Visual Studio Express was no accident. And today I hear about F# — which is essentially Microsoft OCaml (as C# is Microsoft Java)

The real power of Leopard — as with the real power of Vista — is yet to be seen. It comes down the line, about a year and a half from now, when the freelance dev masses come along. Vista arguably added a number of genuinely useful API stuff — the .NET 3.0 backings come as an obvious example. Microsoft, logically, is backing it’s own horse. Apple knows the flaws of writing in straight Objective-C and so opens up to more casual devs and UNIX devs by backing open, interpreted languages.

In fact, I bet they added PyObjC by default, instead of giving a user guide to it…

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import objc
>>>

Oh look….

tar -cvvf /Volumes/BARAKPOD/backup.tar michener/

So I got Leopard today, and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to upgrade my system.

bzzt Wrong! I am hosed!

So I’m lifting my userdata out onto my iPod — praise be unto the gods of the command line — and am going to do a fresh install.

I guess it all works out; but I would be lying if I weren’t disappointed (so far)

However, playing with the display computers at TSW I discovered that python is ver. 2.5 and has Twisted and NumPy by default. Which is awesome.

A few days with it and everything seems to settle in a bit.

Network card works better (maybe when it got the updates something clicked) but the network is SLOWER. I dunno what they did wrong, but my Samba NAS takes forever, until I read this: http://jamespo.org.uk/wp/archives/190 — This seems to make it work fairly well

Still best to get video drivers straight from nVidia. Sorry MS.

I like the new Explorer. It has it’s faults, but it’s an improvement. Sidebar, meanwhile, is stupid and nobody uses it.

Still no major incompatibilities. So far so good.

Just finishing up these few quick notes before I write something completely different.