Author: lhl

Posted on by lhl
  • Opening up the theyworkforyou.com development wiki – l/p in page
  • Migrating to del.icio.us – high on my list
  • Python Web Project docs – every doc site needs a PHP search equivalent
  • Mac Geekery: Random CLI Tools – /usr/sbin/screencapture is certainly the niftiest listed. Also, not mentioned there, but sips is great (but destructive, kids!)
  • Economist: The economy and the election – interesting chart
  • CivicSpace Labs – Joe Trippi swung by campus for a lunch chat, I got a chance to (very briefly) squeeze in my question to him, which was about what were the biggest tools missing, and he gave a plug on Zack’s CivicSpace (Drupal-based) project. I should probably write more about Joe’s talk, as I’ve missed his spiel at multiple conferences/events. He posits that the bottom-up, the distributed has won, and cites Napster and his campaign. While these are large ‘insurgencies,’ I think that the results of both his examples show that while things have changed dramatically that we have not won, but lost. This medium has not routed around the damage being created in the legal/social domain, and is being co-opted in a way that may ultimately corrupt its core. I think he brings up relevant points in the political domain and he’s not as rah-rah Wired 94 as his thesis might make you assume (after all, he’s a campaign manager), but still. Interesting that this wasn’t even up for discussion. Of course, almost all the dialogue was steered by the regular Annenberg crowd (hint: not students, not people remotely familiar with the techno-social landscape, but people who think the world revolves around their media power and more interested in rehashing their tired old theses than covering new ground).
  • Best of Vim Tips – some good stuff
Posted on by lhl

2.6 kernel compilation notes:

Oh wait, I have autofs already installed and set up. It just can’t see my cdrom drive properly. Hmm… That’s good b/c I can’t find a 2.6.8 supermount patch

I’ve been working w/ Linux for 10 years now. Why are such seemingly simple things still so hard?

Posted on by lhl
  • a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture – Danah makes some interesting points on RSS aggregation and its “IM” counterpart. By and large I can agree that current models of the ‘feed-reading’ activity are weak (for example, I strong prefer the newsmap [even better with time-based checkpointing). That being said, I do like the idea of flagging what I want to see (things to remember, things I haven’t seen). Some of this has been discussed before. But it’d go a long way into making ‘feedreading’ a fundamentally different activity.
  • aaronland.info: stagger into perl – one way of organizing code. My recent thoughts have strayed away from the repository dump and towards a release blog
  • c2: The Prevayler – discussion on C2 page
  • ABC News Redesigns – Mike Davidson writes more (see also Y! redesign a little while back)
  • OpenLaszlo – looking cool. OSI approved. on the TOPLAYWITHEVENTUALLYWHENIHAVETIME list
Posted on by lhl

While I’m futzing around with hardware stuff, I want to make sure that I’ve gushed appropriately about OpenWRT and the super-router my $50 Linksys has now become.

Here’s the ping to my a work server:

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 8.33/12.443/21.739 ms

And here’s the ping while I’m rsyncing at 230Kbps (off of theoretical 300Kbps upstream):

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 9.119/51.399/95.571 ms

Oh, and now here’s while uploading at 250Kbps and downloading at 1.2Mbps:

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 11.564/34.727/51.772 ms

About a 20X+ improvement over performance w/o traffic shaping. It’s the difference between my shell being unusable and being productive while I’m transferring.

Posted on by lhl