Experiment ZM

Scientists in lab coats tell us that when we see someone make a mistake, we experience a specific kind of pain. It is the same kind of pain we would feel if we were making the mistake ourselves. In my experience, it feels kinda like frustration. A common human response to this feeling is to try to “help” the person making the mistake. It’s not so much that we want their existence to be more pleasant, we just don’t want to have to suffer vicariously over lessons we’ve already learned. I think this is a pretty common way for information to move around, especially information about how to do things.

My wife hates when I “help”. She comes from a very polite family. I come from a family that, in aggregate, thought inflicting physical pain was an acceptable and effective way to communicate. My peers behaved in much the same way, but replaced charlie horses and joint locks with sarcasm and insults. I try not to be like that, but I suppose she and I are calibrated to different norms. While I intend my “OMG NOOB LOL! u r doin it rong dumbass” to be a friendly and helpful tip, for some reason it makes her tense and unhappy. Women!

Over the years I noticed that advice delivered on the spot does no good. So I just sit there, writhing on the inside, and occasionally ask, “may I do that for you?” It is not really a good solution.

Fortunately, this blog has exactly one regular reader. She knows that if she stops reading, it will hurt my feelings and I will cry but I’ll cry on the inside and not even tell her for a couple of years and then spring it on her out of nowhere. And so, I am going to talk about effective Googling.

A week ago I wrote my MP. I posted the body of my email two posts prior to this one. Just now, this response came.

Delivered-To: XXX@gmail.com
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From: "Braid, Peter — Riding 1" <BraidP1@parl.gc.ca>
To: "XXX@gmail.com" <XXX@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 14:35:24 -0400
Subject: RE: War resister vote
Thread-Topic: War resister vote
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Mr. Pelletier,

Thank you for taking the time to contact our office.  I
apologize for the delay in replying.

With regards to the issue of student politics; as a Member of
Parliament, Peter aims to encourage all students to become engaged
with government and the political process, whatever their party of
choice. Whenever an opportunity is provided to meet and talk with
a student group, he tries to attend, if other commitments allow.
With respect to a discussion about student politics, Peter will
leave that to university students themselves to debate.

Peter was invited to address a group of students about his
campaign experience.

As the MP for Kitchener-Waterloo, Peter tries to meet and talk
with as many constituents as he can, to listen to their ideas,
suggestions, and points of view.

This invitation provided an opportunity for him to connect with
the students of WLU, which is in his riding.

All the best,
Mark Yolkowski
Constituency Assistant
Office of Peter Braid — MP

-----Original Message-----
From: Braid, Peter — Assistant 4
Sent: April-07-09 1:41 PM
To: Braid, Peter — Riding 1
Subject: FW: War resister vote


Eric Merkley
Constituency Assistant
Peter Braid, M.P.
Tel: (519) 746-1573
Email: braidp6@parl.gc.ca
________________________________________
From: Braid, Peter — Riding 1
Sent: April 01, 2009 10:33 AM
To: Braid, Peter — Assistant 4
Subject: FW: War resister vote

-----Original Message-----
From: XXX@gmail.com [mailto:XXX@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Mike Pelletier
Sent: April-01-09 9:56 AM
To: Braid, Peter — Riding 1; Braid, Peter — M.P.
Subject: War resister vote

I am very disappointed that you chose to vote with your party rather
than your conscience in yesterday's Citizen and Immigration vote
regarding American war resisters.  I am also distressed that you have
not yet released a statement condemning the strategies endorsed by
some of your close colleagues regarding using phony student
organizations to dishonestly obtain additional funding and voting
power.

I am a local property owner in postal code XXX XXX.

Mike Pelletier
519-XXX-XXXX

http://omegle.com I always wanted to make this. I’m glad it’s been done decently. It’s like ICQ’s random chat, but you can’t specify a partner profile. Which is actually nice.

I’ve had about a dozen conversations in about an hour. Few people would converse for long, disconnecting abruptly. One of the few good conversation was interrupted by a local network hiccup. It gives rise to frustration, annoyance, boredom and eventually to exchanges like this:

Connecting to server...
Looking for someone you can chat with. Hang on.
You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: Internet complaints dept, this is Joe Smith, how can I be helping you?
Stranger: BINGO!
You: There is no Bingo here sir
Stranger: I was told there'd be punch and pie
You: No sir you were misinformed I am regretting to say
You: Do you have a problem with the Internet sir?
Stranger: how can you be regretting?
Stranger: I have a problem with your grammar
You: It is a custom where I am from.
You: Boston.
Stranger: Ah Bean-town
Stranger: did you go to public schools?
You: Yes sir that is the place I and my many many siblings come from
Stranger: how many siblings do you have?
Stranger: was your mother a crack whore?
Stranger: how many baby daddies does she have?
You: This is Joe's supervisor Hank Smith. I am told you have a problem with your using the
    Internet sir?
Stranger: I was wondering why you would hire someone with such horrible grammar
You: That is not a problem with which I can be helping you today sir
Stranger: I see now that Joe has relenquished his bonehead crown, we have an heir to the
    throne
You: I hope your Internetting is experienced as most satisfactory sir
Stranger: *headexplode*
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

I sent a short email to my MP, Peter Braid this morning:

I am very disappointed that you chose to vote with your party rather than your conscience in yesterday’s Citizen and Immigration vote regarding American war resisters. I am also distressed that you have not yet released a statement condemning the strategies endorsed by some of your close colleagues regarding using phony student organizations to dishonestly obtain additional funding and voting power.

You’ve been waiting patiently, expectantly, dying to know what could make the rapture look like a Tupperware party. Well I did some research. On the one hand, I had confused Tupperware for Rubbermaid. So that rather reduced the magnitude of my promise since Rubbermaid is way better than Tupperware. On the other hand, I had confused the rapture for the time Jesus helped a guy out of a ditch. In fact, the rapture is when the most righteous of Christians get to go bodily to heaven, and the rest of us fight over dwindling resources, as foretold in direct to DVD prophecies.

Boy, was I embarrassed to learn that! I mean, I thought I just had to compete with the miracle of Jesus not getting muck on his robes. I was prepared for that. But I have to admit, what I had in mind just does not compete with the rapture. Please give me another week or two to punch it up a bit.

I was left hunting around for something to fill the gap. So, on Monday (yes I know this post is late) I completed a total upgrade of this blog. Please let me know if you spot any problems. There are very few user-visible changes I can show you. Instead, I’ll write about the process of upgrading.

Remember last week, when I said I was working on something really cool for my next post? That was a lie. I had no idea what to do. I still had no idea this evening until about 19:00. Then I slapped something together and shoved it online. But NEXT week, boy, it will make the rapture look like a Tupperware party.

So, I decided to try my hand at a couple of 3D photographs. Snapshots, really. I didn’t use anything to help me align the camera, I just “eyeballed” it and assumed I could fix it up after the fact. The results are not amazing, but a number of the problems could be corrected with another attempt.

These are “cross-eye” stereograms, because that’s my preferred format. I can see that type most easily. Taken from the wikipedia article on the subject:

To view the image cross your eyes until four images appear, then allow the image to converge to a set of three, focusing on the centre image.

They KINDA work. If you concentrate on a particular detail, you can see it, but it’s hard to wander around and explore the image like you can with a good 3D photo, and it is pretty much impossible to take in the whole thing at once. I think the obvious problem is that I used way too much separation between the images. So you can see local details, but there is just not enough similarity between the overall images to see it all at once, or to make looking around easy. They are also not perfectly parallel, not even close. I thought some convergence would help with the almost macro photography style, but I think it works against me.

I took a third set that didn’t suffer from that problem as the subject was much further away. However. the exposure was all wrong. I wanted to silhouette a tree against the setting sun, but I just got a blurry blob. In 3D, the flare from the sun ends up looking like a perfectly flat plane superimposed over the image. Not quite what I was going for but an interesting effect.

Another problem is that I did not make good use of the narrow aspect ratio. I find that narrow stereograms are much easier to see, but because of the huge separation and narrow field of view, there are a lot of background details that are only visible in one or the other image, contributing to the distracting noise when you look at them. Actually, the problem is probably not so much the distance I moved the camera between shots, but rather that I rotated the camera. Next time, I should pick a feature in the distant background to centre the shot on instead of using foreground features.

I think if I attempt this again I should be able to produce better results.

If you wish to use these images, I don’t believe it, and I agree to continue officially disbelieving it even in the face of evidence that you are.

Greetness, world. This week I offer you two images of rats. They’re 1920x1200, intended as wallpaper. But frankly, they are not great. I was working on something else that didn’t turn out, and this is a sort of a last minute thing. They aren’t even great images. But they are greycstorated, which gives me a good google term. I promise, next week’s thing will be way better.

The images are from March 3rd, 2008. At the time, we had three rats. The first one depicts them all; Ms. Green on top, Ms. Brown on the right, and Ms. White stretched across the bottom. Ms. White was still nervous around the other rats, but she has quite overcome that now.

The second image is the nose of Ms. Green. You’ll notice her orange teeth. That is normal and is caused by pigmentation. Does anyone know why rats have pigmented teeth? Ms. Green is often found with her head hanging off a ledge.

These images are offered under the Rat’s Ass License. I, Mike Pelletier, owner of these images and all rights pertaining to them, do not give a rat’s ass what you do with them.

Good morning, world. Please find herein a script for detecting sparse files. This is handy if you download P2P using a client with poor staging, and your media library keeps getting littered with partial downloads. Simply run:

mike@igor$ ~/bin/sparse /media |
  while read ;
   do rm -i "$REPLY" ;
  done

It has been tested on FreeBSD, and found to work with UFS and to not work with ZFS. It includes basic tests, which may be run with trial:

mike@igor$ trial ~/bin/sparse

Usage: ./sparse [path …]

If no arguments are supplied, ‘.’ is assumed. Check given files and recurse through given folders, printing sparse files one per line as they are encountered.

Bugs:

• Does not work on ZFS partitions! du report includes sparse blocks or sparse files not being created properly.

• Depends on du. Tried using os.stat().st_blocks but haven’t made sense of it.

• Depends on twisted.python.filepath and twisted.trial.

UPDATE: This software is offered under certain terms and conditions. If you cannot accept these terms, you cannot use this software. The terms are as follows: I do not give a crap what you do. Try not to hurt anyone. FURTHER: fixed editing.

The visual theme of this site was not inspired by the gmail Terminal theme. But it’s cute, too!

I’m liking the theme. It has fewer bugs that prevent the use of blog features now. There are still some configuration quirks regarding the blog’s ability to generate absolute URLs. I need to read a bit of Django lore to fix it.