Re: [Discuss] Google Contacts on Web and Android

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

While people are on the subject of contact management and 
synchronization, can anyone suggest a good way to 1) remove duplicates 
and 2) keep multiple contact lists synchronized and integrated?  Best 
I've seen is "motoblur" on certain Motorola Android phones, but I have 
an LG Android (2.3).  I am trying to get FB, Twitter, Apple Address 
Book and 3 Google accounts all sync'ed up.


Ian
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Re: [Discuss] Virtual hosting provider (me too)

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On Fri Oct 28 14:28:13 2011, Jack Coats wrote:
> My old friend with the ISP used to keep
> a logged on computer at home.  If you called support in the middle of the
> night, it might take him 2 or 3 minutes to get online and wakeup enough
> to use a keyboard, but you got the guy that was VERY INTERESTED in
> your problem.

I can't help but reminisce back to when I was 15, had a BBS and did the 
same thing.  Once my folks caught on that I was spending most of the 
night chatting with users or trying to find sites with open lines to 
download new software, rather than sleeping, my second phone line was 
cut off pretty quick.

Ian
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Re: [Discuss] disk space analysis tools

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

And a few more:

multi-platform GUI-based:
jDiskReport for a java-based disk analyzer.

I've also written my own tool for doing this (single Python script):
https://github.com/ijstokes/duscan

This had the advantage of being runnable from a cron job and the 
results were always available to me (incl clickable HTML and pie 
charts).  It has the disadvantage of (potentially) creating O(N) 
additional small files, one per directory, if you choose to persist the 
disk usage summaries.  A sqlite (or similar) version would be a nice 
improvement!  Anyway, it accumulated disk usage by user and group, and 
kept a list of big files.  These were (and are) things that are 
relevant to me with a multi-TB multi-user system.

And while we're on the topic, but for OS X:
Disk Inventory X for OS X

Ian
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Re: [Discuss] 30% Apple

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 8/11/11 9:41 AM, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 10:48:46PM -0500, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
>> As soon as I heard about Apple's 30% take and price-matched inside/outside
>> app purchases, I figured Amazon must have a roomful of coders trying to
>> build Kindle Reader as an HTML 5 web app.
> http://www.tuaw.com/2011/08/10/amazon-releases-kindle-cloud-reader-web-app-sidesteps-app-store/
>
> No flies on Jeff Bezos.

Having just, unexpectedly, received an iPad, I've gone somewhat App
crazy and spent more on software in the past week than I have in 5 years
(in $0.99 increments).  It has made me painfully aware of how many apps
don't need to be a standalone app (especially the ones that really only
work with a network connection).  They can just be device-specific HTML
content with JS+CSS3+HTML5+LocalStorage.  I'm sure an advantage of the
"app" model is the device-locked nature.

Anyway, my prediction is that give it a year or two and everyone will
realize how painful it is to write a different app version for every
device and if they can manage it they will go for "responsive web
design" (http://ethanmarcotte.com/ and
http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design), and you'll
access most of todays apps through the browser.

Cheers,

Ian

For my own interest, here is the list of apps I've downloaded (and
possibly paid for) that I think would be an easy transition to the
web-based model:

Facebook
MyPad
NYTimes
AP News
Cvore
SaiSuke
LinkedIn
FourSquare
TweetDeck
CitizensBank
XE
PayPal
Pandora
last.fm
Flickr
RTM
DoBot
eBay
Craigslist
Flickr
ABC Player


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Re: [Discuss] Python script question

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On Wed Aug  3 10:44:43 2011, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 03, 2011 at 10:28:20AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>> A coworker of mine has a Python script set up as:
>> #! $PATH_TO_PYTHON/python

Another option is to simply have the version of python you want to be 
at the head of the system path at execution time, then you can do:

#!/usr/bin/env python

Ian
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Re: [Discuss] Firefox vs. Chrome

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 7/21/11 12:57 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Rich Braun wrote:
>> I can make it go away for that short amount of time by killing
>> and restarting the browser, but a day later Firefox is /always/ painfully 
>> slow
>> -- thrashing through memory (not disk) in some inefficient piece of core 
>> code.
> This doesn't fit your description, but one of the inefficiencies in FF
> is that it writes out the sessionstore.js file (session data for crash
> recovery) in its entirety every 10 seconds, which can cause a very
> noticeable hang once your session has grown. This happens after any
> action that alters the session, and that can include an action as
> innocuous as scrolling in a page.
>
> I often have 50 to 60 tabs open and after a day or so, FF does get
> annoyingly slow.

Thanks for the tip.  In FF5 it looks like the default is 15s, but I've
just pushed mine up to 90s with:

http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/09/change-the-session-store-interval-in-firefox/

about:config

then

browser.sessionstore.interval

value is in ms.

Cheers,

Ian
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Re: [Discuss] Firefox vs. Chrome

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

FF5 can be a huge memory hog.  I stick with it because I make heavy use 
of the extensions, however I am constantly experimenting to find out 
which extensions may be causing the extreme memory consumption and 
constant CPU load (assuming it isn't just JS/AJAX automated content 
reload/refresh, or Flash).  Colleagues have warned me of some popular 
plugins like Firebug.


Ian
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Re: [Discuss] Good hosting service for web application

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

I use webfaction.  Good support, ability to configure things through the
web i/f or do custom apache config on the command line.  $10/month.  I
specifically did *not* want to have to deal with OS updates myself or
installing and maintaining the full LAMP stack I was going to be using.

Ian
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Re: apache/dns question?

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 5/24/11 7:51 AM, Myrle Francis wrote:
> ello all and thank you in advance. (also sorry GAF, I sent you this question
> directly on accident :) )
>
>
> I have learned to set up apache to that each user can have their own webpage
>  (ie http://mafmanet.us/~user1,http://mafmanet.us/~user2 etc)
> what I would like to configure instead is to have these webpages accessable
> via  http://user1.mafmanet.us, http://user2).mafmanet.us)

Don't try doing this.  Apache has a nice and easy way to translate the
http://example.com/~user into a directory on disk from which you serve
static content, or even CGI/PHP.  It is called "UserDir" and used like
this in your httpd.conf:

UserDir public_html

will automatically translate the above URL into a file request in the
directory:

/path/to/home/user/public_html

One config option, easy to manage.  "public_html" is the convention, but
you can call it whatever you like. Make sure your users know, or simply
create the directories for them in advance.

> Is there some reason why I would/should choose one convention over the
> other?
Basically, your webserver handles everything in the "path" portion of
the URL.  The protocol (http or https), the domain name, and the port
are "dictated" by the client, and provide the route to your webserver. 
If any of them are wrong then the client browser will never contact your
web server.  You can point multiple domain names at the same webserver
instance, but you need to use something outside of the webserver to
configure that.

If you go the other route, you will need two do two much more
complicated things:

1. Manage DNS entries -- DNS names are handled by your DNS servers, not
by any web server

2. Create  entries in your httpd.conf

> And can you please point me to some docs that would explain what I would
> like to achieve and what it is formally called?  (ie http redirection?)

The one is called "UserDir" the other is called "VirtualHost", in terms
of apache configuration.  I know of no "de facto" name for the two
techniques, but if I were having to refer to them, I'd call one
DNS-based, and the other tilde-mapping -- since it special handles the ~
"tilde" character and does the equivalent of command line resolution of
"pwd ~someuser" then appending the "UserDir" directory name.

A third, less conventional, option would be for you to use symlinks or
"Alias" statements to allow resolution of

http://example.com/someuser

to /path/to/home/someuser/public_html

This is just making work for yourself.

In summary, you really really should just use UserDir and live with
~username in the path part of the URL.  Anything else is inviting a
whole world of extra work and problems for you.

Ian
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Re: All-in-one touch screen computers

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

>> Would installing Linux on such a machine take away most of the advantage
>> to the touch screen? (These machines typically come bundled with things
>> like photo viewing apps and the like that are purposely designed for
>> touch screen interaction.)
>>
>> Anyone tried Linux on one of these?
> I can't imagine that current Linux distros would work well, as they have 
> no touch screen UI. What might work would be a port of one of the 
> variants of Linux designed for mobile phones (Android, or maybe even 
> MeeGo if anybody is still working on that). Eventually we'll probably 
> see somebody do a Linux window manager designed for desktop touch 
> screens but I haven't heard of one yet.


Sadly I think it is more complicated than that.  It seems "generic"
mouse-like input devices (track point, touch pad, mouse, trackball) all
provide relative cursor movement signals.  The computer keeps track of
where the pointer is, and the input device gives details on which way to
move it, how far, and any "button" events (button down, button up,
button number).

It seems like existing "absolute position" pointing devices (wacom
tablets are the only thing I can think of other than touch screens) have
quite a different input that requires custom drivers and provides custom
input signals.  Multi-touch complicates things further.

The long-and-short of it is that you can't go out and buy a nice 24" HP
multi-touch LCD (like I did), plug it into your Mac (like I did), or
Linux machine, plug in the USB cable, and hope it will show up as a
standard mouse.

So while I think those all-in-one touch screen HPs look great, don't
think of OS X or Linux on them yet.  Hopefully someone will write a
driver for them soon (it isn't as if the screen touch signals are a secret).

Ian
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Re: Speaking of on-line/cloud storage... Wuala

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 4/23/11 10:04 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On the other hand, Wuala offers substantially better privacy and security 
> than Dropbox.

Can someone either give the 30 second version of security shortcomings
in Dropbox, or point me to something which describes this?  I'm
interested in understanding this better.

Or is it as simple as "Dropbox communicates over authenticated and
encrypted channels, but within their bit of S3 bucket space a suitably
authorized Dropbox employee, or anyone who circumvents Dropbox security,
can access files unencrypted."

If it is the latter, does the Wuala cryptree FS chunking allow efficient
rsync (or rsync-like) operations (e.g. on a per-file basis)?  The speed
of Dropbox syncs are pretty impressive.  Their focus on simplicity and
availability of a web i/f is also highly attractive.

Cheers,

Ian
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Re: Linux-ish Laptop Question

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

Dan,

I would get a Harvard 13" white MacBook and BootCamp it or VirtualBox it
to Linux and/or Win7.

On 4/7/11 8:46 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> This is now a pure tangent - but just to avoid people flaming me over the
> warranty comment - I like the dell complete care + gold support warranty
> because I get to call in, say I'm a tech, and then they'll replace any part
> I say I want replaced.  Next day, onsite, either ship me parts or optionally
> dispatch a tech with it...  Including accident damage.  But when I get the
> super duper warranty on lenovo, they do all the same stuff except accident
> coverage must go through their depot which incurs shipping wasted time and I
> have no control over what parts they're going to replace.  That's all.  It's
> a small difference but it matters to me, managing my CEO's and other
> peoples' laptops.
A few comments on warranties, Dell, and Apple:

I know a lot of people rubbish Dell, but I had a few Dell laptops and
while several parts failed (keyboard, trackpad, etc.), the warranty
servicing was great.  They collected the machine next day, and I had it
back every time within 48 (or perhaps 72) hours.  Once it was out of
warranty their online support provides PDFs will full tear-down
instructions so I could replace internal parts myself with ease and
confidence, plus eBay is full of parts.  Anyway, from that and other
laptops I've learned that any machine worth >$500 and with a hoped for
lifespan of >2 years needs to have a 3+ year warranty.  Things break and
parts are expensive or (near-)impossible to DIY repair.

I had similar problems with a very expensive Mac Book Pro this time last
year and after 3 attempts by warranty servicing folks to remedy it I
finally had to take matters into my own hands (while on a 5 day trip to
Canada and critically needing my laptop working), but was totally
stymied by the small star-drive (torx?) screws in the interior of the
MacBook Pro.  The silver lining on that story was that I went into
Chestnut Hill Apple store (for those in the know, the best place to go
to ask for Apple repairs -- they are, supposedly, 3x more likely than
the average store to immediately offer a replacement, probably due to
the demographic of their typical customers) very angry about my
chronically sick MBP and within 5 minutes was given a brand new i7 MBP
(only 2 weeks on the shelves), in exchange for my unhappy, 2.5 year old MBP.

Anyway, my advice: seriously consider a warranty, and look into what
accident damage insurance you have from home or work.  My wife dropped
her MBP and cracked the screen last week -- Apple quoted $1500 to
replace (out of warranty, no accident insurance).  $100 for parts (and
DIY) or $250 for 3rd party mail-in repair -- looks like I'll be buying
some small star-drive screwdrivers.

Ian

-- 
Ian Stokes-Rees, PhD   W: http://hkl.hms.harvard.edu
ijsto...@hkl.hms.harvard.edu   T: +1 617 432-5608 x75
NEBioGrid, Harvard Medical School  C: +1 617 331-5993


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Re: Computer died

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 4/3/11 12:59 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> I read online that 1. Disconnect the 24 pin connector from the MB
> 2. Short out pins 15 (gnd) anbd 16(power on).
> 3. Test pins with voltages.
> In any case with the power supply connected to the MB I was getting
> nothing, not even a fan. The article I read was specific to the 24-pin
> ATX 12V power supplies. another thing I did was to change the power
> cable. In any case, the multimeter read 0 when connected to ground and
> several other oins.

I'd suggest spending a bit of time looking for a replacement (used) PS. 
Alternatively, eBay or the MIT Flea (2 weeks?) are your friends.  I'd
expect the cost to be $free to $15 total.  A DMM is always handy and I
think <$20, or a little analog one is typically only a few bucks.  As
people have already said, be careful not to short out your PS by having
the DMM on the wrong setting.  I wouldn't worry about operating it
without a load, except that you may not get any good readings.

Ian
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Re: Problem have Apache display the "directory listing"

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 3/27/11 11:48 AM, stephen goldman wrote:
> I wish to create a web site I can copy software from. Later wish to 
> restrict access to an htpasswd file.
> Having trouble configuring apache to display directory listing from the 
> web site.
> The directory's path in shared 755 - an index.html file works file. 
> I 've tried many options with no success. Open to new ideas please.


I'd check a few things: you should probably have one or both of mod_dir
and/or mod_autoindex for this to work.  If you have an index.html file,
you won't get directory indexing.  Do you have htaccess files (requires
"AllowOverride AuthConfig" in httpd.conf  section)?  Apache
searches from the requested directory upwards and uses *all* .htaccess
files that are found (although you'd have to look up how these are
combined/prioritized).

The short version is: this should just work.  When this kind of thing
doesn't work for me, I strip my httpd.conf file to bare bones and add in
minimal features one at a time until the desired behavior is found, then
I add in blocks of the other config until something breaks.

Good luck.  Let us know how you get on.

Ian
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Re: Lightweight network monitoring program

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 2/28/11 10:18 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> One of my systems at work tends to drop its network connection. What I
> need is a network monitoring tool. Certainly nagios will do the job, but
> I'm looking for something more light weight that will simply check a
> list of hosts periodically. I would like to run the monitoring software
> from either my Windows laptop of one of the network servers.

In my (admittedly very limited) experience, you think you just want
something simple and lightweight and then quickly discover you actually
need more and more features.  Nagios was designed for exactly this sort
of thing.  While it isn't a "15 minute" solution, the ~half a day you'd
spend getting a basic Nagios setup in place is probably worth it.

Ian
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Re: Looking for possible options to NetApp storage

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

I started a good thread on this subject probably back in the spring or
summer.  There were lots of great replies to it.  I'd check the archives
for details.  May have been to bblisa...

Ian
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Re: keyboard trends

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

> Loud clicky keys might be fine for a desktop keyboard, but they're a 
> terrible idea for a laptop that is likely to be used in a crowded room. 

I have to admit I even find clicky keys annoying when others are using
them in the same office space as mine.

I haven't used a Microsoft Natural style (ergo, split keys) keyboard in
years, but when I did, I loved it.  I even got used to the "soft touch"
keys.

> And yes, keyboards, especially laptop keyboards, need to be more 
> durable. I had to replace the keyboards on both my previous laptops (not 
> the current one -- yet) mid-life because I wore them out.


I had a Dell Latitude for several years of good and hard service, but I
went through 3 keyboards and 2 trackpads.  At least you can get them
cheap on eBay and Dell even supplies (or at least then, supplied) free
PDF manuals on how to do your own field replacement of pretty much any part.

Ian
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Re: Software development models, pair programming, agile, team rooms, etc.

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

> One of the things I love about the agile group I'm on the board of
> (http://www.agilebazaar.org (soon to be http://www.agilenewengland.org))
> is that we are officially flavor-agnostic, and feel that different
> environments require different solutions.  So I don't feel "Thou Shalt
> Pair Program", but I do feel "Thou Shalt Somehow Promote Code Quality
> And Knowledge Transfer".  That may be through executable requirements,
> code reviews, or show-n-tells.

Interacting with other people can certainly be hard, but I feel it is an
essential part of an effective organization.  Non-work related
interaction is part of building a context to *facilitate* work-related
interaction, not just an excuse to use company money to see a movie,
play paintball, or drink beer.  Yes it is somewhat contrived, but
getting to know the people you work with is part of working together better.

In my opinion both sys admins and programmers could benefit from a lot
more of this.

I can only specifically comment on pair programming as part of the XP
agile strategy -- the teams I worked on that did this really struggled
to make it stick.  We came up with a hybrid system where people would
voluntarily pair if they were stuck or thought it would benefit their
work, and other times when I would (as the engineering manager) assign
pairs if I thought someone was stuck, if I thought some piece of work
needed multiple people to understand it, or if I perceived that someone
was deviating from our coding standards and needed to be "kept honest"
by the "continuous peer review" of pair programming.  We found pairing
worked well when it was easy to split (i.e. second computer immediately
available), as this aided with "parallel programming" where one person
codes and one person looks up some reference, API, documentation, bug,
email, etc.

All that said, there certainly seems to me to be something about
programming and system administration (which require overlapping but not
identical skill sets) that seems to attract people who are generally
*less* socially inclined.  Unfortunately for programming I think it
leads to lower quality code, and for system administration I think it
perpetuates the image "average" computer users have of the poor "bed
side manner" of the people they have to turn to for help.

Ian
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Re: Gmail no longer loads on Firefox solved

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

>> Speaking of bad plugins.   I've been using Firefox Sync (formerly
>> weave) to keep my bookmarks synchronized across multiple computers.
>> Version 1.6.1 came out recently and it has completely
>> screwed up my bookmarks.  Lost some, duplicated others on multiple
>> computers.  For now, I've removed the plugin and reverted to a backup.
> I use xmarks. They were recently acquired by lastpass. My bookmarks have
> synced pretty good between my computers.

That is great to hear.  I was just looking at the XMarks website last
week and wondering what their status was, since originally they were
shutting up shop next week.  I have been with them since the FoxMarks
days and find it works really well.  Hope the service continues.

Ian
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Re: Gmail no longer loads on Firefox

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 1/1/11 10:09 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> This morning, I tried to load gmail on Firefox (firefox.x86_64 
> 3.6.13-1.fc14)
> I ended up loading in on Chrome. The message is:
> This is taking longer than usual. *Try reloading the page*
> .
>
> I was able to load gmail using the Basic HTML setting, but I could not
> use that to make a phone call. I get the same thing with both my gmail
> accounts. With Chrome, it comes up fine. I'm wondering if there is some
> issue with Firefox or gmail. Since it was working yesterday and I have
> not performed an update I'm thinking that they may have made some change
> to gmail.


To second what someone else already said: flush your cache and dump all
cookies.  Google gets itself confused sometimes and needs a "fresh"
start.  This happens to me every few months and the flush cache and
delete cookies approach always fixes it.

Ian
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