Tag: projects

So, I suppose it deserves mentioning here with my other projects. I recently helped write a book and the finish product ended up with my name on the top. The book seems to be selling quite well and has received good reviews so far. It’s been in stores for over a month but I first saw it a couple days ago. It looks nice!

The book was a very collaborative effort and the real credit goes to all of other great folks who helped out with the writing, editing, and tech review. I wrote a few chapters and chunks and then acted a sort of conductor for most of the homestretch. Within the Debian community, the list of contributors included David Harris, Jaldhar Vyas, John Goerzen, and Micah Anderson. Jim Keogh and Kurt Wall also contributed chapters. Many editors, Sara Shlaer in particular, helped immensely.

The book is designed as an introduction to Debian and would be most appropriate for users with no Debian experience and even for folks that have never used GNU/Linux at all. That said, I learned things reading the other authors’ chapters and have no trouble recommending it to more technical users.

You can buy the book at any number of places online.

I received an email last week with the subject, "woops…attached this time," and decided that enough was enough. How many times I have read (or written) emails referencing the file "attached below" that is nowhere to be found.

I’ve heard people joke about creating a program that would remind people to actually attach their attachments but Googling only came up with two Outlook specific scripts. So I wrote one myself.

The only tough problems are interface issues. Since I send through Mutt, I figured the best, least invasive, and least MUA-specific way to set it up was a MTA wrapper that could fail and spit out warnings on STDERR (which Mutt and most MUAs will then show you) when the program expects attachments but find them missing.

The user then needs the ability to either confirm that they really want to send the message sans attachment or they need to go add their forgotten file. The former example is the tricky one from an interface perpsective. Since you can’t depend on being able to ask "Y/N", the program currently looks either for an added header or a CONFIRM command in the subject that it will then strip out before actually sending. This should make it work with just about anything that sends mail using /usr/sbin/sendmail.

At the moment, the program is smart enough to ignore attached PGP signatures but not smart enough to understand any languages other than English (and a super limited vocabulary at that). Patches and suggestions are welcome.

You can grab the script and the necessary Mutt configuration to make it painless at this little web page I put up for it here:

http://mako.cc/projects/attachcheck/

Because a birthday that involves copyright infringement is an Unhappy Birthday…

In a fit of copyright high-protectionist fervor, I whipped up Unhappy Birthday last night. Many thanks to Seth Schoen who helped save me from my own atrocious spelling, grammar, and thinkos.

The site is a commentary on the fact that the song Happy Birthday To You is under an actively enforced copyright held by Time Warner. This site gives folks the tools and information they need to report unauthorized public performances of that work wherever they may occur.

If educating people and upholding the principle of copyright means risking a DoS of ASCAP’s licensing enforcement infrastructure, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. Please join me and spread the word! Unhappy Birthday is more fun when more people play.

The site is online at: http://www.unhappybirthday.com

The Gates is a massive art installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Central Park, New York City. It’s only going to last for a little over two weeks. As a result, Central Park has been packed. Most of the people packing the park have come with cameras in hand.

Today, Mika and I went to visit central park to see it under some freshly fallen snow. Rather than take pictures of the gates, which everybody does, we decided to (sneakily) take pictures of the people taking pictures of the gates.

We’re calling the resulting photo-documentary Picturesque: Picture of Pictures of the Gates.

Many people are worried about the nasty privacy implications — realized and potential — of supermarket and chain store "loyalty" cards. As RFID chips are introduced, things get even more scary.

In an attempt to attack supermarkets’ data-mining operation and to gain a new shopping identity in the process, many people have taken to swapping cards with each other. Over the last few years, I’ve been among these people.

A couple years ago, a few friends and I came up with the idea of creating a sort of online loyalty card swap-meet where people could come and exchange their supermarket or chain-store loyalty cards with total strangers from the privacy of their own homes. Some other people have arranged to swap numbers for particular stores but our idea was to swap the actual cards from any store that uses a card. We actually built most of it but got hung up at the last minute on a couple of details and with writing some of the explanatory text.

Last night, I made the final push and finished the code and set everything up and seeded the database with the lists of as many supermarkets that I know use loyalty cards as listed on CASPIAN’s supermarket list.

If you’ve got an extra card (and maybe if you don’t), go ahead and sign up to swap! This is one of those things that works better when more people do it so tell your friends and spread the word.

Information and the card-swapping apparatus is all online at: http://cardexchange.org