Offline media

Today I went Magazine shopping to one of the 24H open Eslite stores in Taipei. It's a fun place to go, in a multitude of ways:

One big floor for books & magazines.
Two big floors for designer stuff, gadgets and artsy things....
Two big floors for food, with one of the ever best cake stores I have every eaten (Awfully Chocolate).
One final floor with music, stationery and toys....
(Oh, and today a concert in front of the store by a band Wonfu Loves You [旺福爱你])

Anyway, went there to get my monthly / quarterly dose of magazine, since we still love offline media, even if most of my knowledge comes from online.

Make Magazine - Volume 20

This was the primary objective was this one, the new issue of Make. The last one was about DIY Drones (automatic planes:) and got me fired up enough. Didn't get too much done about them, but definitely made a few entries to my Someday/Maybe list. Hopefully with some time it will be even better, it's all a process... Anyway, how can I resist if one of my heros is on the frontpage: Adam Savage from MythBusters. :) He's someone who can really spread the love for science and critical thinking and tinkering... 

You know about the "20% time" at Google? All the developers having 20% of their time to develope their own ideas, completely free. How about having something like for physics researchers? 20% of the time for tinkering and developing things that are necessary connected to the current project of the research group, but worthwhile anyway?
Maybe a bit tougher sell, because we (should) already do our own ideas - that's what research is about, isn't it? But still, there are always room to improve....

Anyway, if one is interested, there's also Instructables, no more excuse to be idle. Coming up later: reviews of Make: content.



Wired UK - Ideas Issue

In the section where Make: was I found some other goodies too... Wired is one of my favorite only magazines, but couldn't really justify buying the paper version if I have already read most of the online contents. But! Behold, there's a new UK edition as well! And they had a special issue on big ideas.... Well, really couldn't justify getting all 3 of them, but let's get one. Always looking for inspiration from those people cleverer than me. :)

Reading through it, I really admire the whole design and execution. Still "magazine" meaning relatively disposable content, so it's not going to be very long-lasting for me, but definitely high quality brainfood. Gadgets that I start yearning at first sight, architecture, everyday chemistry, technology, company insights, people profiles, and much more... And a lot of advertisement that (almost) works on me... :P

Not surprised about the awesomeness... After all, being a writer for Wired is one of the entries on my Dream Jobs list... And you know what, this still can be done. Astronaut, probably not anymore.

The Celebrity Twitter Directory

However there are magazines there that feel like a complete ripoff. How about The Celebrity Twitter Directory? Didn't people know about e.g. WeFollow, or Twitter Lists? Why would someone pay more for this thing more than my Make: and Wired combined is beyond me... But certainly Twitter is one of the hottest thing out there right now: Wired had at least 2 proper articles in connection with it  (about 6 pages), while the only Facebook related thing I could find was the page-bottom tiny text  ticker of the biggest FB groups this month...

There are still some magazines that I would have chosen on an unlimited budget.... The Economist, Nature, Science, Newsweek, Scientific American... Have to check out the library, maybe they have them. And at the university campus where my office is, seem to have quite a few "magazine ladies" who try to sell subscriptions to a large number of these. Pretty good deals as well. Maybe treat myself for Christmas? Got to think about it....

Fixing someone else's code

All started with another round of "I'll organize myself!". This time get my books in order. Maybe music and movies as well, but books first. So been looking around the interwebs and the Ubuntu Software Center [sic], to find some suitable candidate for the job.

Alexandria popped up and seemed to have great reviews. It only does books, but seem to do it the way it should be, they said. Giving it a test-ride myself - man it was painful. The very first thing: it should be able to add books from Amazon (and other collections too, but those are tiny compared to that). Well, it doesn't. Just throws big hissfits when trying and that's all...

Now, instead of going and trying out a different program, what did I do? Grab git-svn, and check out the code. It's all ruby in the end... Poking around for about an hour, it turns out, that the library Alexandria uses processing Amazon's XML-formatted answer (Hpricot) just do some very very stupid things. It completely borks even simple XML structures. Not sure how this got through any testing, but probably it got through because there's no testing... And the problem is there for months, and even if there's a new version of Hpricot on Ubuntu, it's available for the next version (10.04 Lucid Lynx) but not the current one (9.10 Karmic Koala). Even Debian (Ubuntu's "daddy") has the new version...

So, there were three options that I could do:

1. Just wait until someone comes up with a solution
2. Repackage Hpricot for Ubuntu Karmic
3. Change the code for something else than Hpricot

Comments on these in turn:

1. Sure, but then where's the fun?
2. Could do, but I'm pretty annoyed with the Ubuntu packaging system now, because I don't know it well enough to do even simple things. Tried, but failed. It's for another post, but it's a but too versatile and complicated for me at the moment. Keep trying some time, though....
3. So this is what we gonna do, especially because there's another library, called Nokogiri. Seems to be pretty similar, except it was working.

Getting down to business, there was still some problem... Don't know much about XML (except what it is and more or less how it looks like, but much less about terminology and such, which kinda breaks "googleablility"). Also, Nokogiri didn't seem to have much of a documentation. The wiki on their github page was giving helpful suggestion to look around StackOverflow for nokogiri tagged questions. Not ideal....

Anyway after a few hours, it was working just fine, I could add books, I could add books with multiple authors, it had the pictures and all the goodies... Not a good-looking fix since there's still a lot of code there which I don't understand the purpose - since I never seen it ever properly work before... But it was a start. Happy, commit the changes, clean it up later.

Then I checked the original bug-report again, and someone just made Option 2 into reality, thus making all my efforts pretty much obsolete. Tried, and works...

Now, lessons from the story, and this fine weekend:

• XML seems to be fun - once understood, and a lot of possibilities to interact with websites if one can use it well. (you know XML and JSON and can handle most sites)
• Ruby seems to be fine but it's not different enough and too different from Python in the same time, that I don't yet see the point of trying even deeper. No offence, though.
• While so far I found Python-related projects have very extensive documentation, these to days I'm yet to find any comparably well documented Ruby project. It might just me, but the culture seems to be just a tad different.
• If I ever have some time, might do some benchmarking and if Nokogiri is really faster than Hpricot, might rewrite that code a bit better and see what those guys say.
• Even when this one bug was fixed, run into so many others. Not showstopper, but bad enough not to recommend using Alexandria just now. Maybe if the development picks up a little more...
• It's interesting to check out other people's code and even to be annoyed by it. That actually shows where I should improve as well. There's plenty of that....
• ... and lastly: maybe I should re-check my priorities, and spend my next weekend in a bit more useful. :P
  

Bad Computer Day

I think I'm getting a bit old geek now, or I have too high expectations? Many days I just hope the computer I us would just work. Amazing, these days all three systems I use regularly have "Critical" or "Showstopper" level bugs that I cannot seem to be able to fix (yet).

• Windows XP SP3
  For a while now, the system keeps being unresponsive, svchost.exe crashing and throwing "Access Violation" errors whever the machine is started. Well, 2 times out of 3. It's enough of a problem that makes the computer really-really annoying to use. Some people suggested it is because the machine is "too old". I call BS on that one.
  Searching around there was some advisory from Microsoft, related to a problem of the AutoUpdate. Oh, great, all those auto-updating programs at startup...
  It is pretty much what is said at KB927385 (You receive an error message after a Windows XP-based computer runs an automatic update, and you may be unable to run any programs after you close the "svchost.exe - Application Error" error message dialog box) and they have a few full page of solution, most of it is in the console. Great. The Windows version I have to use is in Chinese, so even greater. Never mind, GoogleImages is actually quite helpful in figuring out what setting means what. (related note: how much I wish for copy-pastable text on Windows dialogs and settings windows....) Okay, done that, the services.msc, the REGSVR32 the net start *whatever*, the everyting... No good...
  Well, today I found some related advisories that I have to try, like KB932494, but it is still stressing out.
  
• Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)
  I really want to love Ubuntu, I want it to succeed, I want to become abundant... That's why I was really cheering when I've found the Windows Ubuntu Installer (WUBI). The promise is great: people don't even have to jump head first into Linux, and they don't have to know years worth of Linux admin training to set up dual-boot.... WUBI downloads the correct CD image from the web, installs it on a windows partition and sets up proper dual-boot. Perfect!
  Except, that some kernel or grub (the software that handles the boot process) updates keep making my system unbootable... What the hell? The machine works fine, run the updates, everything finishes fine, reboot - nothing. Sometimes even worse than nothing, don't like Kernel Panics at all, that's no better than the Blue Screen of Death... Not helpful, you are....
  Done this three or four times: install, update, broken. Reinstall update, works, update, broken.... and so on.
  Have nice little bug-report submitted, but the people who reply are in two categories so far: users who try to save their data but clueless about fixing the problem, and people who supposed to be maintainers but their comments are just plain wrong most of the time, and if even I know that, it must be very obvious... Yesterday that happend again. Not sure if I'll try to reinstall once more, or just give up for a while until there's some fix. Argh...
• Arch Linux
  My favourite "geek distro", that I enjoy using a lot, but they have a track record of doing updates that break lots of people's computers - for the sake of cutting edge. Many times I don't mind too much, and they have a very responsive Forum, but sometimes it's still just plain bad.... The latest grief is that some latter day update made my laptops touchpad unusable. In the logs I can see some complains of psmouse.c about the Synaptic touchpad, but after "trying to reconnect" there's nothing... I can plug in a USB mouse and that works, but come on!! That's why the touchpad is there, and it works under Windows just fine, so not some more hardware break....

This makes me quite a bit frustrated. A bit more frustrated with Windows (as they do not have a proper bug reporting system that I know of). But things break down for the Linuxes as well: the usual argument is that if it's broken you can dive in yourself and fix it. I think in this case the Arch Linux problem will be like that when I have the right mood. But the Ubuntu thing - it's just so random, and so crippled and I so don't know enough about that part...

And I didn't even mention that my EeePC just does not start - lights are on for the wireless and the power but nothing at all...

Maybe I just go out for a while and read a book or something....