Michael Jay Lissner's Blog

My girlfriend and I have been travelling around Peru for the past week or so. It has been nothing short of awesome.

Our first stop was in Lima for one night, after which point, we left to go to the Amazon Basin, specifically Puerto Maldonado. In Puerto Maldonado, we were picked up by our guide, and quickly ushered down the Tambopata river. From our jungle lodge, we had a number of rather excellent excursions. We went to a bird clay lick, where we saw a fair amount of birds, including red maccaws. We went to a jungle farm, and learned about their practices, and ate a bunch of fruit (some normal, some strange). We climbed a tower into the jungle canopy and did some bird watching from there, and we spent a night camping in the jungle. On that last excursion, we saw the most poisonous spider in Peru (I think), and saw some other spiders that I have to admit were damned frightening. So far, no malaria, or other jungle diseases to speak of.

At the moment we are in Cusco, which is effectively the tourist capital of Peru. Today we saw the Sacred Valley, and tomorrow we head out on a four-day hike along the Inca trail, culminating at Machu Piccu.

From here, we head to Arequipa, and from there, to Lima and then home.

My girlfriend and I have been getting ready to go to Peru finally, and one thing we had to do was to make some real hats to will keep us warm at night.

I've spent some time shopping around for hats, but really, when it comes down to it, there is no finer camping hat than a balaclava. It can be worn on your head Smurf-style; It can be worn all the over your head burglar style; Perhaps you want it below your chin, or maybe above. You can pull the whole hat over your entire head and poke your head through the face hole so it works as a scarf. I ask you what other hat could possibly accomplish all this?

Ah, the balaclava - My favorite piece of gear. After months abuse, they never give up. The ones that I make are always made of 200 weight Malden Mills Polartec fleece, which is the finest fleece in the land. I just take a sheet of it, hold it around my head and start pining. After a good twenty minutes of pinning and stitching, I cut out the face hole, give it a blessing and consider it done.

Just a quick post today to promote Catalog Choice.org. I've been using it now for the past six months, and I am beginning to reap the fruit of my labors.

It's a pretty slick site that I recommend everybody sign up for. Essentially, once you're signed up, whenever you get junk mail, you log into the site, look up the publisher, and opt out. They contact the publisher on your behalf, and you're done.

I've come across a couple of pieces of junk mail so far that aren't in their database, but I have suggested those items to Catalog Chioce, and they say they'll get to them.

The site itself is sponsored by the Ecology Center and the National Wildlife Federation, so it seems legit enough.

Check it out and take control of your junk mail.

One of my favorite utilities lately is the Disk Usage Analyzer that comes installed on Ubuntu. It can be run either locally or remotely.

It's pretty awesome. I have been playing with my backups lately, and this utility allows me not only to see which directories are large, but also where my files are taking up the most space. For example, the picture at right depicts my home directory. By mousing over the slices of the pie, you can see what's in them, and how big they are. By clicking on a slice, it becomes the center of the pie, and you can see which directories are within it (and how big they are).

In terms of UI, I have to say this one works very well for me. I have yet to see another app for this purpose anywhere else, though admittedly I have not been looking that hard.

You may recall from one of my earlier posts that I was running two servers in my attic when I originally set things up at the end of last summer. Originally, I had one server for Zimbra, and the other for Drupal. I did this because I was scared that if I didn't, people would be unable to access the website without getting the email, and vice versa. I had no familiarity with apache, and a limited understanding of ports.

Well, today I had a moment of inspiration, and decided it was time to retire the older of the two servers, and to move the Drupal installation to the Zimbra server.

In addition to reducing the number of servers that I am maintaining, this also reduces the amount of energy I'm consuming, and also allowed me to update my Drupal installation. I was running Drupal 5.3 because that was the one that was in the Ubuntu repos, but I am now up to 5.9 (the most recent version).

So, how did it go? It went pretty well. I had a backup of everything on my second server already, so it was largely a matter of copying things to the right places. Probably the most important lesson I learned is that symbolic links are not followed by rsnapshot, so my backups until this time have been incomplete. In my new installation, I am not using symbolic links, so that problem should be alleviated.

Another challenge I encountered was that I had to update my dbconfig.php files to line up with the new database configuration, and I also had to spend some time getting the correct document root to function in apache2, which I also just installed.

The biggest problem I encountered was that the clean URL's broke, and were a pain to get fixed. I have fixed those now, so the only remaining thing is to get gallery functioning again. The thing to remember here is that clean urls function by directory, and that the higher up the directory tree you go, the higher the priority of the .htacces files.

As for Gallery2, I have to say it is a big pain, so I may just revert to trusting Google with my images. We'll see if I have another moment of inspiration.

I just learned about this, but it's pretty shocking so I thought I would post it. Apparently a few years ago, Bush said that he uses "The Google".

Observe:

That's pretty bad. He's the president. From this clip, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't use the internet. It would probably be a useful tool for his line of work.

In a similar vein, McCain said, "Well, basically, it's a Google. You just, you know, what you can find out now on the Internet. It’s remarkable, you know." Emphasis mine.

He also says, "I am a [computer] illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get."

Observe here.

This is really, really sad. Is there ANY job for which you would deliberately hire somebody that professes internet and computer illiteracy?

Shocking.

I spent a couple hours cleaning my block today. Among the very special trash I picked up, I found not one, not two, but two and a half used hypodermic needles. Also of interest, one of my neighbors seems to have placed a box of 100 fresh, sterile needles outside their house.

I can't help but wonder if that is a good way to do a needle exchange program. You throw it on the street. I put a whole box of them outside my fence on the sidewalk. Hmmm...

On the up side, picking up trash seems to be a great, high-profile way to build community. The trash around my house is so bad that I could definitely use help picking it up, and every time I or my girlfriend are out there, we seem to meet allies that want to fix up the neighborhood. I collected one guy's info today, and she collected somebody else's info last week. If we keep this up, we may build a nice set of contacts of all our neighbors. So that's how meeting your neighbors works. Huh.

I thought I would post a quick entry today about how I came to be a Linux user and enthusiast. I guess it's a combination of a couple things.

Historically, what happened was that I was using XP and looking at thumbnails of some pictures in their file navigator. I was looking at about 300 pictures, and I didn't want to open them all up individually (this was before useful apps like Picasa came around). I just wanted to look at the thumbnails. Except those were too small, so I wanted to make them bigger. I spent about two hours searching online to try to figure out how to make such an adjustment. Eventually, I discovered a Windows "Powertool" that you could install. It seemed like overkill, but it did the job. What bugged me though about it was that obviously it didn't require a Powertool to adjust image size. It just required a tweak of some bit of code somewhere in the system. That was my tipping point. I decided I couldn't take the viruses, the expense and the closed product anymore, and promptly decided it was time for a new OS.

So that's what brought me to Linux. What kept me here is the openness and the philosophy. Sure, at times it's a bit trickier to get certain things done, but I love the philosophy that if I want a change, I can either make it myself if I am a programmer, or I can file a feature request with the developers. Somebody will read that request, and maybe it will get integrated, if it's a good enough idea.

I also love the fact that I can download, install and run an excellent email server, and a top-notch web server. For free. Also, no viruses. Ever. Nor any anti-virus software to pay for. And did I mention the whole thing is free?

As for the day to day stuff, I really don't notice much difference. At work, I use XP, which involves using Firefox, Word, Excel and Outlook (the latter three of which my work paid good money for). At home it's Firefox, Open Office and Evolution, all of which are very similar to the Microsoft package, only with better compatibility with other programs.

The other thing I really like about my Linux system is the ability to set things up like in the previous tutorial. I did an Internet search for "Linux wake on USB", and knew exactly how to adjust the system in a matter of moments. That kind of customization is a power you just don't have in Windows.

I recently began using my laptop at my desk with a USB keyboard and mouse, and I thought I would explain how to set up Ubuntu so that USB peripherals will wake up your computer from sleep mode. This is convenient if you have your laptop set up such that the lid is closed and inaccessible.

In Ubuntu, the way to set this up is to edit the file located at /proc/acpi/wakeup. To see the current contents of this file do this:

% cat /proc/acpi/wakeup
Device S-state Status Sysfs node
P0P2 S4 disabled
P0P1 S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1e.0
MC97 S4 disabled
HDAC S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1b.0
P0P4 S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1c.0
P0P5 S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1c.1
P0P7 S4 disabled
P0P8 S4 disabled
P0P9 S4 disabled
USB0 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.0
USB1 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.1
USB2 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.2
USB3 S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.3
EUSB S3 disabled pci:0000:00:1d.7
P0P6 S4 disabled pci:0000:00:1c.2
SLPB S4 *enabled

This shows you a number of devices, most of which I don't claim to understand. The ones to notice are the USB ones, which you will see are disabled by default.

Once these are toggled on, your computer will wake up from sleep when USB peripherals are used. To toggle one of these on, as root, run:

echo "USB0" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

This will toggle USB0 from disabled to enabled. To check this, run cat /proc/acpi/wakeup again. You should see that it's enabled, and you should be able to test this by suspending your computer.

This will set up your computer to wake up from USB...for now. To make it work after your computer has been restarted, you will need to write a short init script named wake.sh with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
echo "USB0" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Save this file to /etc/init.d, and make it executable by running:

chmod +x wake.sh

Finally, once this file is in /etc/init.d, and is executable, as root run:

update-rc.d wake.sh defaults

That will make init know about the file, and run it at startup. Happy awakenings!

source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=711747

For the past five years or so, I've been using a feed reader of one kind or another to read RSS feeds. For those who don't know what these are, they're great. What they allow you to do is "subscribe" to web sites, so that if the site is updated, you know pretty much immediately. I have about 40 of these subscriptions, which are mostly to friends' blogs, news sites, or some other sites I like to keep track of. It's really convenient: I don't have to monitor some 40 sites, I just check my feed reader, and it will do the legwork for me on all of the sites.

Anyway, I digress. One of the feeds I subscribe to is Ars Technica, Open Ended, which is supposed to be their journal of open source news. It's usually top notch news, but I have noticed that occasionally certain open source news items don't make it to into Open Ended. I mentioned this to them yesterday, and today they have created a new RSS feed for open source news.

Talk about service. They're officially the bomb. The new feed is arstechnica.com/oss.rssx.

Check it out. Pretty slick, I must say.

This picture made me laugh. I'm coming to the end of my days with my work before school starts, and I was thinking about buying and actually installing MS Office, since Open Office works, but not always that well.

I think after seeing this picture I will wait for another time to buy office.

Thanks Microsoft. A picture does tell a thousand words.

I keep having this problem where I want to use somebody's computer to check my gmail, but I know that if I go to mail.google.com, I will see their email. I was thinking about this last night, and I came up with two solutions. The first was to bookmark the gmail logout link into their browser or maybe del.icio.us so that I could visit it without having to go to their gmail, and the second solution was to post that link here.

So, if you know that you want to log out your friend from gmail without seeing their inbox, all you have to do is click here.

USA Today had an article a few days ago about the recession that we seem to officially be in. It's pretty shocking.

For example, here's a fact from the article: The Dow Jones had its biggest June loss since the great depression.

And another: The U.S. stock market has lost $2.1 trillion in value this year - $1.4 trillion in June alone.

For perspective that's 15.2% of the 2007 estimated GDP.

Got my eyeballs checked at the Berkeley Optometric Group on Friday. They dilated my eyes and took this picture. It was awesome. Now we know that my eyes are in good shape. Good.

That's a picture of my eye.

I've been more aware of the happenings in the street lately after one roommate had his car stolen, another had hers broken into (they took a bag of coins), and my car was front-ended a week or two ago. I've learned some valuable lessons just by watching what people are doing.

1. I have a mattress, and live in Berkeley. How do I get rid of it?
Get a U-Haul. Go to Fairview St. Remove mattress from truck. Set it on the curb. Depart.

2. It's noon on a Sunday, and I've finished my breakfast. How do I dispose of my beer bottle?
First, find a storm drain in a gutter, preferably one with a metal grate. Smash the bottle, either with your foot or the grate. Using your foot, sweep the debris into the drain.

Seriously. This is what people do on my block. I just do not get it.

As we progress in science, the time is going to come when we can transfer memories from one person to another. They exist in some material form (as proteins I believe), and thus should be measurable, copyable, etc.

One interesting thing however that was captured both in an excellent Radiolab show, and in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, is the destructive power of recalling a memory.

It's interesting. As McCarthy states, "...each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins." According to Radiolab, McCarthy is right on the money. In their show, they explain that as we think about a memory, really we are constructing it from fragments of that memory, recreating how we imagine it was. Unfortunately though, the next time that we recall that memory, we lose some accuracy because we can't quite keep track of which parts we constructed the last time, and which parts were there from the beginning.

This is why people who dwell on a memory, or are repeatedly asked to recall the same thing, will quickly forget what was fact, and what they constructed. It's not that they are making things up, per se, it's just that what they believe, and what they constructed have merged.

So, what's the best way to remember your first kiss, or your the face of a loved one lost? Don't think about it - unless, of course, you're sure you want to.

Well, it seems somebody is reading my blog after all. After reading my post regarding my hate of Fiji water, Fiji has responded by creating a new website that tries to lure consumers out of their minds.

I think it's great that Fiji Water wants to lower their carbon impact, but come on folks. Talk about green-washing. This is just stupid. If you care about the environment, stop bottling water in Fiji. Actually, just stop bottling water.

The end.

For a while there, I was struggling to get the Citrix client installed on my computer. It was frustrating, and I put hours into debugging it, and trying to get it to work. In the end, I took a circuitous route, installing VirtualBox in Ubuntu, Windows in VirtualBox, Firefox in Windows, and finally Citrix in Firefox.

Last week, I took another stab at getting this done, and for some reason it went very smoothly. To install Citrix in Ubuntu Hardy Heron:

• Begin by downloading the Citrix client as a .tar.gz.
• Next, unpack the install file using the terminal by running:
  

  sudo tar xvfz en.linuxx86.tar.gz

• Change into the Citrix directory, and run
  

  sudo ./setupwfc

  This will begin the install script. As it proceeds, simply allow the default settings, and you should be good.

• The final step is to install the root certificates. To do this, attempt to start a Citrix program, and it may fail, reporting an error message. In the message, it will tell you what certificates it needs installed. Go to this website, and download the certificates the error message informed you that you need by right clicking their download links, and selecting "Save as..." Once those are downloaded, rename their extension so they are .crt files, and move them to
  

  /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts

• Restart Firefox, and you should be good.

Thanks to Skarh for this how to.

I have begun training a replacement at work, and I need to teach him all of the excel formulas that we use in our department documents. I started making a list of all the formulas, but my mind quickly went blank, and I decided I needed a way to automate it.

Here's the technique I figured out. Open each of the files that you believe has useful formulas in it, and go to File > Save as... Save each document into an empty directory as xml spreadsheets (.xml). If you open one of these documents in a text editor, you are likely to see a line something like the following:

<Cell ss:Formula="=SUM(C:C[1])"><Data ss:Type="Number">0</Data></Cell>

The key is that each row in your new xml documents that contains a formula will have the formula keyword, so to isolate these, run the following on a Unix computer in the directory where you saved all the xml documents.

grep 'Formula=' *.xml | sort | uniq > uniqLinesWithFormulas.txt

That will create a file called uniqLinesWithFormulas.txt that will contain each line from all of your .xml files that contains a formula. From there, you can skim them visually for useful formulas, or put the file into Excel again and play with it there. This was as far as I needed to go in my analysis. Once I had this done, it was pretty easy to see the 30 or so formulas I regularly use.

Dear Hillary,

It seems you have lost the contest, and it's time that you accept that fact. I won't say you ran a good race, but you really did put one heck of a lot of effort. By my count though, there are 313 delegates remaining. Obama needs to get 72 of them. You need 243.

I think it's time to throw in the towel, and - dare I say it - move on. Please?