Finally Serious

I am constantly frustrated by how ugly Google Notifier looks on Leopard, so whipped up some decent icons for personal use, and figure someone out there might care.

So what does it look like?

If you like that better, just drop the image files in this zip into Google Notifier.app/Content/Resources. I’ve not updated all the images, simply because I expect Google will do this eventually. This just gets us all through to their next release.

Now if only Apple would let us adjust this thing’s blur and opacity. It’d be really nice to be able to tweak the “exposure” of the wallpaper behind it, too. That might actually look good when combined with heavy blur.

I’ve had many problems with the Ruby RegEx parser. My AIX machine at work was choking on very small regular expressions. Google is filled with complainers, as pointed out on one of my favorite blogs. The problem manifests especially so with BlueCloth, resulting in errors of the form:

 Stack overflow in regexp matcher

After much gnashing of teeth, I’ve found the cause of the problem, at least on my AIX 5.3 machine. Ruby’s regex.h would love to define RE_DUP_MAX to a very large number, but the assignment is guarded by an #ifndef, and the file /usr/include/sys/limits.h defines RE_DUP_MAX to be a paltry 255. My solution was to remove the ndef and let ruby determine the size. In fact, I bumped it up to the next larger power of two, just to ensure there are no more problems. After recompiling ruby, I’ve not seen this dreaded error. Maybe there is something to this “Open Source” thing…

For a few summers back in Edmonton, I photographed a pair of Swainson’s hawks and their chicks in the area I always walked my dog. The last year I was in Edmonton, a developer started extensive redevelopment of the area, and the nest was right in the middle of it. I’ve just learned that the plans have been altered in order to accommodate the birds! I’m not sure if I helped at all with this issue, but I am glad the situation has changed, and I hope they continue to nest near my former home.

Recently I got back from a vacation of sorts in Ecuador. I spent just over two weeks in the country, accumulating awesome stories and unforgettable experiences. To avoid retelling these things endlessly, I need to put it all down in one place and just fire off the URL to interested people. Click through for a grand tale (with photos).

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It’s fast, fun, and not ugly!!

Networking started out as being about connecting wires for conversations. Then it was about addresses and packets between endpoints. Where are we going next? Van Jacobson has been in the center of a lot of incredible advances in networking, and he has an idea about where it goes next.

Addresses are growing less important. What a network is really about is efficiently moving data around to where it is needed. To do this, the network needs to know the identity of data, and it needs to be able to move data to the places that need it from the places that create it. He proposes named and signed data.

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There is a new sort of fascism arising amidst us. This new sort springs from health and safety and fear, and less from appeal to a great leader or to simple racism (But of course the classic form will never die.) If this new thing is really fascism, what can we do?

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In a previous post, I opined that a language is any protocol which is self-communicable and self-bootstrapping. Can a programming language be used to bootstrap itself? This is actually a tricky question with an interesting history! English, Mandarin, French or German have wonderfully intelligent hosts who possess a language instinct. Computers are woefully stupid in this regard. Fortunately for this essay, this does not disqualify them from having self-describing languages.

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