I know of nothing more true

I'm pretty sure

The "Fresh Ginger" content isn't strictly regulated by the USDA.
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Makefiles rule

I'm giving a talk tomorrow. My slides are mostly compiled from the pile of talks I gave at the beginning of the year at KITP and while going around applying for jobs. Therefore, my figures are all scattered around in a bunch of different directories. I thought it was dumb to copy them all (again) into the workdir for this talk. This led to the thought that I should symlink them. This led to the thought that it'd be cool if I could convince the Makefile for the talk to figure out which figures are needed for the slides, and do the linking itself. Two hours of playing around later (talk content...um...somewhat postponed, I guess) and I have this (with added commentary):

This bit defines the directories to search for figures in. I also set the target list by using dark shell magics to extract the list of figures used in the slides.tex file.
FIGURE_DIRECTORIES := ../2009_02_24-Job_place ../2009_01_27-KITP_talk
FIGURE_TARGETS := $(shell grep myfig slides.tex | grep -Ev '^%' | grep -v 'newcommand' | sed 's/.*myfig\[.*\]{\(.*\)/\1/; s%^./%%; s/}.*$$//;' | sort | uniq)
FIGURE_TARGETS += PPR_thesis.sty

LINK_TARGETS = ${FIGURE_TARGETS}
LINK_SOURCE :=
CLEAN_OBJS :=

This is the cool bit. We define the linky command that accepts two arguments, the file we care about, and the directory we're looking in now. If we detect that the file exists in that directory, then append the full path to our link sources list, and also add that file to the list of files to auto-clean later. Then, we remove that file from the list we're searching, since we don't need to look for that file in all the subsequent directories.

define linky
ifeq ($(shell [ -e $(2)/$(1) ] && echo exists),exists)
LINK_SOURCE += $(2)/$(1)
CLEAN_OBJS += $(1)
LINK_TARGETS := $(filter-out $(1),${LINK_TARGETS})
endif
endef

This is the loop where we run over the directories and targets, and execute "linky" for each.

$(foreach d,$(FIGURE_DIRECTORIES),\
$(foreach t,$(LINK_TARGETS),\
$(eval $(call linky,$(t),$(d)))))

Now, since the variables we care about have been defined now, we can define the commands to actually do the linking and cleaning.

links :
ln -sf ${LINK_SOURCE} .

clean :
rm -f ${CLEAN_OBJS}


The coolest bit about this is that it's totally general, so I can use this same bit of code in all my LaTeX Makefiles from now on.

PS: It looks like blogger hates the whitespace and line breaks and stuff. It's probably pretty clear what it needs, though.
PPS: No actual necromancy was used for this project.

Random cupcakes

With random plastic markers from three different movies. Way to go, grocery store.
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Plus a free Isis!

"so I'm supposed to get up in like 2.5 horus."

New apartment pictures!

I finally got around to taking pictures of my apartment. I'm not done yet, because I haven't figured out how to frame pictures of my bathroom, kitchen, and lanai. The basic floorplan is sketched out to the left. Things in black are walls, and things in red are doors of some sort. This is hawaii, so 91% of them are sliding doors. It's pretty convenient, as I don't need to worry about door swinging space.

The top picture is the view of Honolulu from my lanai. In the distance on the left is Diamond Head, "downtown" is towards the right, and as is probably obvious, the ocean is in the middle. Also on the right and left. Technically also behind me, over the mountains. It's an island, we've got lots of ocean around.

• Living Room
  

The first view is of my living room from the front door. You can see the lanai, and all the boxes I still need to get the movers to take back. For some reason, I neglected to get a picture of the one chair that's to the left of the front door, so pretend you see it in that jaggedy black splotch.


This is the opposite view, from next to the kitchen door. This is a good shot to illustrate the "open arrangement" of my apartment. Since the living and bed rooms are separated by big sliding doors, I can open it up into a single large room. This also helps the airflow, since I don't have air conditioning. I really haven't needed it, though, since there's almost always wind coming down the mountains, through the bedroom windows, and then back out through the lanai. Also: there's some weird distortion in the mosaic. The area rug and the entertainment center are separated by maybe a foot at most. I should have caught that when I was making it.

• Bedroom

This is the view from the bathroom door into the bedroom. For some reason, they thought walking to the bedroom from the bathroom via the living room was far too much work, so they added a second door next to the other one. This door can also be blocked by the two big sliding doors. You can see where Roomba has his garage. The one wonky leg next to it on the desk is not a mosaic distortion, that's the leg the movers bent. I still don't know how they did that.

I'm still trying to sort out what I want to do in my bedroom. There's a big empty space (or, there will be once I get the last two boxes emptied and gone), that I'm not sure what to do with. I can't really put any furniture there, as it would block all sorts of doors, and access to the closet. My best thought is some sort of small table or bookshelf. The alternate thought is to buy a bunch of Legos, and have that be the Lego Building Area. This is a snazzy bounce shot, taking advantage of the mirrored closet doors.

• Closet

I spent far too long putting this mosaic together. There's still some bad joins, but I think it's pretty clear. This is what my closet would look like if it didn't have doors, using the magic of computers. You can see the pile of cardboard under my dresser, as the movers also decided that four legs was at least two surplus, and kindly broke the extras off. I'm trying to sort out where I put everything, so for now, a lot of stuff is just piled in where it fits. Since I don't have a closet in the bathroom, the shelves on the right are taking that job. I need to clean them up (those books need to go into one of the book piles I have around), and then adjust the shelves so that they're wide enough for all the towels and sheets and whatnot that needs to go there.


I'll probably do a second post in a few days with pictures of my kitchen. It's pretty small, so I'm not sure how well I'll be able to get pictures.

Roomba!

My Roomba arrived today. My old vacuum died inconveniently just before I moved, when the brush bearing seized up. I've been looking at these things for a while, and I bought one when Amazon had a fancy Gold Box sale on them.

My apartment has been getting messier and messier, as it's kind of hard to keep things clean with just a swiffer. This made it a perfect test for the vacuuming skill of a Roomba. Other than some difficulty navigating around everything on the floor (helped significantly when I remembered I had lighthouses), it did an excellent job. I now know what things it has trouble with (cords aren't a big deal, but rugs bunch up sometimes. Also: the chair in my living room is just an overpass on the Roomba highway), so I'll probably try to rearrange things to be easier for it.

The final thing I need to fix is to put the dock in a better place. It drove around for about ten minutes before I realized it was trying to go home. A quick lift, and it drove in and started recharging. The other problem is that even though the main idea behind getting a Roomba was so I didn't have to spend the time vacuuming, it's really cool to watch, so I'm not sure how much time it'll save.

I haven't set up the scheduling yet, but I figure cleaning MWF is probably good enough to keep things clean. I figure I'll see how it works after a month or so.

I learned almost everything about cooking from Julia Child

Dinner tonight was super tasty:

• Cast iron pan corn bread
• Mashed potatoes with speck
• Sauteed mushrooms with thyme and coriander
• Shrimp in Three Onion Sauce a la Julia Child (made by panfrying the shallots/onion/green onions with butter and garlic, adding shrimp (8-12 count) to pan, cooking until both sides look good, splash in a bunch of vermouth and cover to steam the middle of the shrimp, then uncover, and finish sauce with butter and cream).

Rule #1 of cooking: adding vermouth, cream and butter makes anything taste delicious.

Nom nom nom!

I was going to post about my apartment, and how nice it is since I've gotten all the boxes out of the way, but instead I spent the day finishing unpacking the last of my kitchen stuff. That allowed me a chance to finally sit down and cook for realsies again.

I only got a picture of the salad, as I was too hungry to wait on the rest of dinner. The salad was simple: romaine and strawberries, with a balsamic dressing and sea salt, pepper, and parmesan. The main goal of this was to see if strawberries go well with pepper (surprising answer: yes, very much so).

Julie was talking about a recipe for garlic studded baked potatoes she found somewhere, so I stole that idea. I spent far longer than I'd expected cramming little slivers of garlic into the cuts I'd made in the potato. I finally found the secret: don't try to stab them in, crush the garlic in sideways. I then rubbed the potato down with olive oil and salt, wrapped it in foil, and stuck it in the oven to bake for two hours (350ish. I know it sounds long, but for Yukon gold potatoes, the long cooking time helps carmelize the sugars).

This paired very well with the ribeye I got from Whole Foods last week. I put my cast iron pan in the oven with the potato, so it would be nicely pre-heated when I needed it. Salt/pepper/a pat of butter in the pan/cooky cooky cooky. The ribeye wasn't perfectly even, so I had a bit of a done-ness gradient, making the one side nicely rare, and the other somewhere around the well-done side of medium. While the steak rested, I made a quick sauce with a glass of vermouth, two teaspoons of this snazzy looking balsamic onion jam I picked up at Williams-Sonoma yesterday, and some butter. The sauce never quite thickened as much as I had hoped, something I'll probably fix next time by adding cream. Since it wasn't really the right consistency, I poured it into a rammekin, and used it as a dip for the steak.

All in all, a delicious end to the weekend. A dessert of some sort would have been good, but I don't think I have anything that quite works. I almost stopped at Godiva yesterday to get some chocolates, but the line people stretched out the door, and I'm not really patient enough to deal with that.

kadatheron

I've had this computer for close to twelve years now. I bought it just before my freshman year of undergrad so I could be "connected" and compute, I guess. The original specs for this Compaq Presario 4504 were a Pentium 1 running at 200Mhz, with 16 MB of RAM and a giant (at the time) 2 GB hard drive. Let's see if I can sort through all the modifications I've made over the years:

• Replaced the original 33kbit WinModem with a full hardware 56k modem that would work in Linux. At the time, Linux could not support software modems, so I needed a new one to connect to the MichNet. This modem supported the internet connection for the (somewhat questionable) LAN we made on 2A Bryan. That LAN was powered by
• The 10Base2/10BaseT ethernet card my undergrad roommate and I bought in a two pack. At the time, MSU had ethernet in only a few dorms. Given the cheapness of thinnet cable, we decided it would be easy to wire our own network by feeding cables through the smoke detector connections and lay the cables over the drop ceilings in the hall. I think we had six or so rooms wired together, with this computer serving as the router and gateway between the LAN and the modem driven internet connection. When I moved to Butterfield, I was able to switch over the the 10BaseT ethernet there. This card died recently, just before my move. This prompted me to buy a proper router, although it still forwards all outside connections to kadatheron for handling.
  
• An additional 32MB RAM module. Installing this was when I first cursed at the design of this computer: in order to get to the motherboard, all ISA and PCI cards need to be removed, the motherboard tray unscrewed, and then removed from the right side of the case. then the memory could be installed, and the process reversed.
• A second 10BaseT ethernet card, that I bought to allow me to continue using it as a router for my subsequent other computer purchases. Most of those are now dead. A summary of the computers this served as a router for:
1. "celephais" An IBM Thinkpad 455C if I remember the model number correctly. 486DX/66 with 12MB of RAM and a 700MB hard drive. My first laptop, and (although I haven't checked in a few years) booted perfectly fine last time I checked. I stopped using it because the odd power supply started to crack and fray, and I didn't want to burn down anything or shock myself on it.
2. "navi", homebuilt computer #1. Dual Celeron 533Mhz/128MB RAM/20GB drive on the sainted Abit BP6 motherboard. Built when kadatheron no longer seemed up to snuff. Suffered from the bad capacitor problem for its entire lifetime, dying finally after about 5 years to a shock while upgrading RAM. Hence:
3. "navi" Mark 2. Pentium 4 2.6Ghz/512MB RAM built with the same drives and case and stuff as the previous version. This seems to have perished in my recent move to Hawaii, so it will likely be replaced with navi, Mark 3 in the not too distant future.
4. "niea" A Toshiba laptop I got my first year of grad school to replace celephais. I don't recall exactly, but I think it was a 1Ghz/256MB/20GB (remember this hard drive for later). It died when I left it in my car during grad student recruitment a few years later, and then booted it up when I got home. Probably wouldn't have been a problem, except for the fact that it was in Michigan, in February, and I think it was somewhere around "ass-freezingly cold" at the time.
5. "tachikoma" A Dell laptop bought to replace "niea." 1Ghz/1GB/40GB? The screen backlight fritzed out, making it largely unusable as a laptop. I continued to use it as a file/process server for close to two years, and I developed a lot of my thesis code on it. I then converted it to play videos on my TV, as it had an Svideo out. I think it still runs, but once I hit post-doc-hood-itude, I replace it with
6. "thebigo" My second IBM (Lenovo, whatever) Thinkpad. An R61 this time, with a Core 2 Duo at 2.1Ghz, 2GB RAM, and 120GB RAM. What I'm using to type this post right now.
• An 8GB hard drive. Files got bigger, and 2GB no longer cut it, even after deleting the half devoted to Windows 95. This died at some point, after making horrible grinding noises.
  
The 20GB 3.5inch hard drive from niea, connected with an adaptor. Once niea died, it didn't seem useful to waste such a big hard drive. By this point, kadatheron was running as the CVS server I used to store most of my home directory. 48MB RAM + 24MB swap no longer cut it, so I devoted 512MB to what was at the time, the largest swap partition I'd ever heard of. I think it's the only thing that's letting the system make it through this upgrade.
• The Plextor CDRW drive I bought long ago when such things were uncommon for niea. It's sat fallow for years since I bought a DVD-RW drive, so it's been switched over for kadatheron for this reinstall.

I think that's it, not counting countless mice and keyboards. I think the fact that it's outlasted five other computers, four generations of processors, six major revisions of the linux kernel (I first installed 2.0.18, and I'm installing 2.6.2X right now), two major libc changes, twelve years, and three presidents suggests that those crack smoking Compaq designers (I mean seriously, the CPU fan blows through a baffle to cool the power supply? WTF?) must have known what they were doing.

I know it probably won't last forever, and it probably uses more power to do its jobs than a new computer would, but I'll be sad when it finally does stop working. I'm not sure anything less than a nuclear war will kill it though. If I count correctly, it made twenty-seven trips between my parents house and MSU, one cross town to my grad school apartment, and now to Hawaii via my movers' Two-Month Special. It would still be running fine if I hadn't tried to upgrade it.

I stopped bothering with upgrades long ago, in 2001 if I'm to believe the timestamp on my kernel. This left me with a 2.2 kernel, which cannot directly upgrade to a modern 2.6 kernel due to differences in libc. Without navi, I had no good way to access my USB drives from the office, so I attempted to upgrade using a fresh partition, chroot, and debootstrap. I'm pretty sure it would have worked correctly had I not screwed up running lilo. As I can reconstruct it, I accidentally had lilo point to the new (incomplete) installation on the disk MBR, and not on the partition. This caused lilo to panic on boot, preventing me from even accessing the old install. Therefore, I needed to make a "fresh" break, and install from CD. It's a bit of a shame, but I'll be able to keep the new system up to date now, so I won't have to worry about falling so far behind again. I will have to redirect things in the new configuration, as the webserver will have to get all my (https and password protected) MP3s from USB drives instead of NFS mounted from navi. When I finally put together the new computer, I'll probably have to design a more sane NFS/drive scheme.

In any case, the nostalgia of doing a reinstall of linux on this computer (which was first installed using a giant stack of floppy disks and the power of Quality Dairy slurpies) made me want to sit down and put together some sort of history for this wonderful little box. It kind of reminds me of R2-D2: it's old and a bit out of date, but it's nearly indestructible and does it's job far better than anyone would have ever expected.

Holy crap! Free books!?

That's right! I've been unpacking books for the past two hours, I've filled up all the space I have right now, and I'm not sure how many more book shelves I need to buy. Therefore, I've decided that I need to get rid of some books.

So, for the next week or two, anyone who direct messages me their address via twitter (@astrochris) will get a book mailed to them. I'll choose a book from my library, and send it out as soon as is reasonable via US mail. I won't guarantee that the book will be good, or interesting, or even in a language you speak.

Still, it's a book, and it's free to you. What more can you ask for?

Updates!

1. If you send me a quick description of the type of book you'd like, or some random fact about yourself, I'll try to find the book that I think is most appropriate for you.
2. I found some DVDs I have multiple copies of. Sounds to me like someone's getting a surprise DVD to go with their free book!
   

What I still need to work on

Is my thousand books, and my bed, and all my clothes. Oh, and my dishes and kitchen stuff. :-/
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What I did this afternoon

Was organize my computers and my television
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Just in case you need a visual

It's remarkably hard to find a picture of this online, so I guess I just have to be happy with the black and white version.

My neighbor is a moron

Last night, the night security guard knocked to let me know that there was a drain clog next door, and I shouldn't use the kitchen sink, the washing machine, or the dishwasher (all of which I had been using less than an hour before). This was due to the fact that the drains connect in the wall. Ok, no problem.

I then woke up this morning to the sound of something knocking in my kitchen cabinet under the sink. I opened the door, concerned it was a mouse or something, only to find the end of a pipe auger flopping around on the floor. As it was coming out of the trap under my sink, and noting that I did not have a bad case of Ghost Plumbers, I assumed that my neighbor had hired a plumber, who wasn't very good at what he was doing.

I went next door, to ask what they were doing, and found my neighbor and her "friend" operating the auger. I told them that they'd broken through my pipe, to which the friend replied, "oh, I was afraid of that."

Afraid you'd bore through someone else's pipes? What kind of plumber are you? "No, I'm just her friend." Oh, the type of plumber that isn't actually trained or a plumber at all. Great.

He then proceded to ease the auger out of my cabinet, leaving a nice hole in the trap. He offered to fix it, which I declined in favor of getting someone who knew what the fuck he was doing.

I piled a bunch of paper towels to blot up the mess in my cabinet, and then left for work. A day full of trading phone calls back and forth with the maintenance guy and the rental office and the plumber they called, and I have an appointment with a plumber tomorrow at 8:30. I returned home fearing that I'd find my apartment flooded, to be relieved that my paper towels had contained most of the mess.

I went next door again to make sure that my neighbor wasn't going to use that sink, and that she hadn't during the day, which she agreed to and claimed she hadn't. However, "he fixed the clog!" Great. Wonderful. That's as good as having a coat full of puppies.

Back in my kitchen, I start to clean up the mess, and find that my paper towels are kind of a messy soup. Thanks to Target's crazy sale strategy, I am in possession of a 12 pack of paper towels, so I use a half roll (and a pile of bleach wipes) to clean up the mess, and then wedge my kitchen garbage can under the trap to catch anything else that might drip out.

Upon washing up, I realized why the clog was gone. The burning sensation in the hand that wiped up the mess suggested that the majority of the liquid I cleaned up was drain opener. Yay sodium hydroxide!

Force of July! Part VI!

I already talked about Return of the Jedi, way back in March. I don't think there's much more that needs to be said.

Force of July! Part V!

I can't come up with much for Empire. Yoda's obviously insane at this point, but a quick chat with Luke helps him shake off 20ish years of living alone. That pretty much makes sense, given that when we get to the prequels, it's clear that Yoda doesn't notice the Emperor is the Sith lord until it's way too late.

My only other thought is that Lobot (picture on the left if you didn't already know him) is totally rocking out to sweet techno mixes while running all of Cloud City.

Force of July! Part IV!

I had originally planned on buying the Star Wars DVDs, blocking off a good chunk of this three day weekend, and watching them all, in series chronological order, in one go.

Unfortunately, this was before my furniture (and DVD player) decided to take a quick 3 week nap before getting on a damn boat. Oh well. Spike decided that I wasn't going to watch their channel if they didn't show Star Wars all weekend, so that's what they're doing. It's not a single run, and they're playing them in release chronological order, but sometimes you have to take what you can.

Watching Episode 4 made me realize something. Everyone in the movie, with the exception of Tarkin and Jabba are stupidly naive.

Rebel: "Hey, thanks Luke Skywalker for rescuing Princess Leia."

Luke: "No problem, it was fun, even though the guy who was like a father/mentor to me for at least two days got killed."

Rebel: "Yeah, that can be rough. Any plans?"

Luke: "Um...can I fly one of your fighters?"

Rebel: "Sure, got any space-fighter skills?"

Leia: "I'm sure he does. He shot down at least one TIE fighter when we were escaping. You've been flying for what, four, five years?"

Luke: "Um...yeah. Sure. Five years next Tuesday."

Leia: "Then it's settled, we'll give you your own fighter, and hell, you can even take my R2 unit with you. I'm sure both of these Very Expensive Machines will be perfectly safe with someone with your training. It's not like you grew up on a farm on a tiny podunk world where you were completely grounded."

Luke: ".... I hate sand."


I mean, they still pull it off, and it turns out Luke is great at flying something he'd never in his life seen before, but I'm willing to bet that's because none of those controls do anything. R2-D2 probably does everything, while Luke's inside flipping switches and jerking the wheel back and forth like a little kid.

I guess it's good that the Force was with that little blue droid.

Comcast sucks

I recently moved to Hawaii, and canceled my service with Comcast on the 22nd of May. However, I received a bill today at my new address (which I gave when I canceled the account) that was issued on the 28th of May, for service after the date of cancellation. This was especially troubling after I had been told that I would be receiving a partial refund for the time I would not be using the service.

When I attempted to resolve this via telephone, I found myself trapped in a long phone tree which always dropped me to a dead end noting that I'd "called after hours." This struck me as a surprise, given that both the comcast.com webpage and my bill itself note that I can call "24 Hours a Day/7 days a week." I apologize for attempting to contact you on the magical eighth day that you aren't open.

All in all, I guess this kind of half-assed fucktardary is what I would have expected after dealing with Comcast for eight years now. I should have known that the same company who tries to "serve me better" by removing channels from my lineup and periodically turning off my cable modem for "upgrades" wouldn't be able to let me cancel the service in peace without trying to take even more of my money.

What are you doing puppy?

You're not a chicken! You don't even have feathers!