Staying out in the rain

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Bill Sullivan

Users who “live in” Emacs don’t get trapped paying for software upgrades just so they can continue to do their work or use their data. They don’t get told that their older computers are no longer supported (there’s a ten-year-old laptop in my living room right now that easily runs the latest version of Emacs). They don’t have to ponder the cost in time and treasure of switching operating systems. And they generally don’t have to worry about license agreements, proprietary file formats, or DRM. Emacs—and programs like it—may require a little more from their users, but in return they offer a remarkable escape hatch from proprietary lock-in and planned obsolescence. - Thoughts on Learning Emacs

I will usually prefer to stand outside in the rain if the alternative is a standing under a roof that comes with house rules. That’s why I carry an umbrella and check the weather before I leave my house.

Another person leaving Austin

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Bill Sullivan

Amelia Gray is an interesting writer. She lives in Austin, but is leaving town at the end of the month. Why?

“Austin is like the oasis in zombie movies.”

There’s more to it, of course. The overall unreality of life in Austin (and also the heat) over time wears on smarter people, it seems. I know it wears on me. I’ve seen a lot of very capable programmers leave town in the three years we’ve been here and I don’t expect the outward flow to stop. Austin is a small town and has a lot to offer, especially if you like to have mindless fun. Over time, though, ambition is a liability here and the ambitious seem to recognize that.

Remembering to not forget

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Bill Sullivan

The Archive Team is really doing good work. In addition to the actual back-ups they are making, they are also reminding us all that the web is made by actual people. Those people deserve dignity and respect and that means their web sites do, too. This video is one of the most humane things I’ve ever seen on the internet. I wish I saw more of it and I’m going to try to remember that I should show more humanity as well.

You are the product

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Bill Sullivan

“They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”

“Real names, they say, turn out to be the names on your driver’s license and your passport and your credit cards so that they can track you. Are you happy to be a product?”

- Don Norman on Google, via GigaOm

Google Plus is a case of Google becoming what it is. Google’s business strategy has never been dignified, but it used to be largely invisible. There are many things people will go along with, so long as we don’t have to pay too much attention to it. Google Plus provoked some people into paying more attention to Google’s strategy and now what used to be invisible is slowly becoming the dominant fact in the conventional wisdom about Google.

Lightening my school load

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Bill Sullivan

In the CS department at UT, we have lots of servers we can log into to do our work. Each machine’s load is listed on a public website, so we can make sure we log into a machine with some capacity to spare. The routine is check the page, pick a machine, and ssh into it.

Checking a webpage when what I want to do is ssh into a server is kind of a bummer, so I wrote up a quick ruby script to grab that status page, nokogiri it up, sort the 32-bit servers, and then send me on my way. I assume that at some point the script will stop working and I’ll have to do a better job, but in the meantime I’ll enjoy not touching a browser when I do my school work.

#! /usr/bin/env ruby

# This script is pretty fragile in that it will break if the UTCS
# lab status page changes its HTML in a fairly small way. So far,
# it works great.

# It requires nokogiri (gem install nokogiri).

# I have my user name set automatically with my ssh-config file, so
# it doesn't figure into the ssh command below. Later, I might either 
# add some code for a -X flag with ssh, or maybe just switch to that 
# overall.

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://apps.cs.utexas.edu/unixlabstatus/'))

lines = doc.css('td.ruptime')

machines = Array.new

i = 6

while i+4 <= lines.length
  if lines[i].content == "Public Linux Workstations - 64-bit"
    i = i + 6000
  end
  if lines[i+1].content == "up"
    this_machine_name = lines[i].content
    this_machine_load = lines[i+4].content
    this_machine_data = Array[this_machine_name, this_machine_load]
    machines << this_machine_data
  end
  i = i+5
end

machines = machines.sort_by { |e| e[1] }

puts machines[0][0] + " has a load of " + machines[0][1]

exec "ssh " + machines[0][0] + ".cs.utexas.edu"

Writing Near Hills

Bill Sullivan, on the web.

Category Archives: Programming

Staying out in the rain

Another person leaving Austin

Remembering to not forget

You are the product

Lightening my school load