A carnival of technology

Do you use Cygwin? Do you ever get that error “fork: Resource temporarily unavailable” (EAGAIN) when trying to do something like compile a package? I finally tracked down the solution. The problem is that Windows doesn’t allocate enough memory for the process headers or something like that. There is a cygwin mailing list post linking to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that explains how to make things go, reproduced here for the sake of hopefully making it easier to find.

• Find the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems\Windows
• See the value for “SharedSection”? There should be three numbers there.
  It doesn’t matter what they mean. Memory stuff.
• Double those three numbers.
• Reboot.

So far it WORKSFORME, and memory is cheap, so I can probably safely give more than 4KB to the desktop.

I don’t actually get to the topic in the title of this entry until later on. This is primarily a post on the happenings of on the past couple of days. Be patient, fair reader.

Matt, whom I’ve known for about as long as I can remember, came over from Alabama on Thursday with a lady friend and stayed through today. We went to the Aquarium—one of those touristy things that I hadn’t gotten around to doing—and Ikea, a trip during which my patience I regret, since I should have known better than to expect it to be quick. The Aquarium was pretty rad, and the whale sharks were as huge and weird as could be hoped. The whale shark exhibit consists of a plexiglass-enclosed corridor through a part of the gigantic tank, and it was neat to look up and watch a thirty-foot fish lazily making its way above, always accompanied by an escort of little fishes that I guess were either cleaning the whale sharks or stealing their plankton supply. The other stuff was pretty neat, too, but I mostly enjoyed how the city of Chattanooga is now mostly pointless. It was nice to see Matt again, and he and Clarissa got a chance to visit the local Mormon temple. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I assume it’s a good thing. The frequently questioned answer on the LDS website makes it out as a kind of combination of church, school, and private country club, so I guess that’s pretty alright.

As far as tipping goes, there was an incident at a meal that underscored for me just how confusing this practice is. It’s an action based entirely on unwritten custom, so there’s always some element of uncertainty, and traveling throws the whole thing off. Based on what I do and what I’ve seen others do, it seems usual in Atlanta to tip 20% at restaurants where the food is brought to you (I suspect this is less out of some increased Southern generosity than the fact that it’s easier for people bad or lazy at math to double 10% than to add back half again), maybe toss a buck from your change into a tip jar if you’re having a good day at a restaurant where you bus yourself, and every other situation is up in the air. I usually tip a couple bucks when I get a haircut, and, on the occasional times that I take a taxi, I feel so confused that I use Elliott’s method of throwing a wad of cash at the driver and running. Tipping in general seems so demeaning if I stop to think about it too long (like now). Anyhow, back to the story, Matt, Clarissa and I went to Fat Matt’s chicken shack at one point, which, though they bring the food out to you, fits more in the “fast casual” category. I dropped a buck from my change into the tip jar at the register, whereas Matt and Clarissa left a few bucks on the table. Who was more right? Is there a more right? Why does paying for something have to be so confusing?

So I guess “blogosphere” is the new “Information Superhighway”? Just once I’d like some technological shift to take place without a wave of neologisms. We have perfectly good words—even some perfectly good made-up words—to describe a wide variety of people, places and things. Creating a new word for every situation, like the frequent use of profanity, reveals a vocabular laziness, a crutch for those unfamiliar with the English language. I see this trend not as a desire to add a special PR punch to the next big thing but rather a result of a deep-seated disdain for words. What I’m trying to say here is that I hate you and all of your kind.

In the case of “blogosphere,” I probably would have used nothing at all, as it’s a meaningless noun. As an aside, I checked Merriam-Webster for the etymology of “neologism” (it’s French, bitch), and I found its second definition amusing and oddly specific: “a meaningless word coined by a psychotic.”

My reaction to this omnipresent annoyance was triggered today by a news article I read. I use 11alive for my local news, since, even though I hate the station and everything it represents, they have the greatest volume of articles of any of the local TV stations’ Web sites, and they update more quickly than the AJC. WXIA-TV is a Gannett birdcage liner in a non-print medium, publishing lackluster news and vapid commentary to the ethereal paper of VHF. Somehow blogging became “local news,” and I, of course, read the article. The hook for me, rather than simply a masochistic streak, was in the advice of headline: “Blogging 101: Writer, Reader Beware” (emphasis mine). The only thing I can think to be wary of in this narcissistic exercise is that it’s kind of dumb. I was hoping for some fear-mongering May sweeps story about how revealing the emptiness and futility of my life could expose my credit card number to hackers or something. Instead they just told me what I already knew. The danger of writing blogs is that it creates a record of how you’re a dumbass.

There are twenty uses of the word “blog” and its derivatives in this 400-word article. I’ve become fairly desensitized to the use of “blog” in place of “Web page,” yet this article still manages to offend me. Soon after being put en garde by the bogglingly hyphenated “blog-reader” and “blog-writer,” 11alive drops a bomb on me with “blogosphere.” It’s not a word. It does not add to the expressiveness of our language nor describe any situation or thing. It is a bizarre, Frankensteinian portmanteau that has no reason to live. The blogosphere did not grow; there is no such thing. More people blogged, or, better, more people wrote something on a crappy Web site.

So how’s everyone doing? I went to a MC Frontalot show last Friday. It was pretty rad. Thanks to Mike for playing man-on-the-Internet for me, since, though I remembered the corner of Ponce and Ponce where the Drunken Unicorn is located, I didn’t read the directions closely enough to remember in which dingy basement of an unmarked building it actually is. On something completely unrelated, I’ve started making coffee at work using an electric kettle and a french press. It’s been working out fairly well. Rather than trying to stomach the devil’s milk spewed forth by the pod machine or spend $2/day at Caribou, I get to enjoy the coffee of popes and kings from the comfort of my desk. I’m starting to wonder whether Carribou may be cheaper, though (and healthier, since I think dodging cars as I cross the street counts as aerobic exercise). While groggily pondering my big jar of beans this morning, I made an obvious discovery: I’m going through my overpriced coffee about twice as fast now.

I still haven’t gotten a cat. Someone had originally expressed interest in going kitty shopping with me, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with her. So my current plan, unless I change my mind again, is to talk to the apartment complex this weekend, if they’re open, about giving them the pennies and nickels I’ve been saving for the pet deposit, and then go to the animal shelter downtown sometime after that. As for Boris, I guess I’ll have to see how determined the cat is to get into the aquarium. I can always just leave the hamster in my bedroom or that sunroom area with the door(s) closed.

I don’t think I’d ever make it working for the IETF. Although I can usually see the rationale behind some of the weirder aspects of their standards, they quite often do things in a fashion entirely different from how I think I would have done it. For an example, let’s take a look at secure FTP. Were I given the task of securing FTP communications, I would have used a new TCP port, connecting to which would require an SSL connection to be established on top of the TCP connection, thus inserting something into one of those OSI layers that don’t really mean anything, leaving the transport and application layers unchanged. The IETF instead decided to implement it as an extension to the existing FTP protocol, creating a sort of encryption switch that can be turned on and off at will for both data and control connections and, though creating something extensible to other means of encryption, producing a handful of caveats for the casual implementor.

RFC 4217 isn’t a real standard, not currently listed in the STD0001 document, but it’s what everyone uses, and, in the great tradition of the Internet, everyone does a half-assed job of actually implementing it. The most major issue on the server side seems to be that every server, when closing the connection on binary data transfers, doesn’t bother to shut down the TLS session. I don’t care about the server, though; I just want a working client.

I had a need for a means in python of doing FTP over TLS transfers, and I quickly found that everyone who’s tried to create such a class implements approximately half of the necessary extensions. Since I need to send files as well as receive them, I figured I’d take a shot at doing it right, and so I put together ftpslib. If you’re looking for a Python class that can connect to secure FTP servers, give it a shot. You have to pick your favorite SSL module, but I’ve provided the means of tying in the builtin socket.ssl and M2Crypto. I use M2Crypto myself, since it doesn’t lock up on close() like socket.ssl. There was a fun little issue with M2Crypto not closing the TCP connection when you call close(), an issue quickly discovered when trying to upload anything in either binary or ASCII mode, but I added a workaround for that in the glue function provided in the ftpslib module, so if you use that you’ll be fine.

I went and got dentisted today. It’s been a while, and I have this one tooth that feels nondescriptly funny, so I figured it was about time to have my teeth scraped. I had expected something akin to the only dental experiences I’ve ever had—those with Dr. Leach back in Decatur—melodramaticized through a lens of guilt from not having been to a dentist in a few years. “Forgive me, Doctor, for I have sinned. It’s been three years since my last visit, and in that time I have not flossed.” Stuff like that. I expected to be told that I need to brush forty-seven times a day, floss before, during and after each meal, and that I’m a terrible person.

After some confusion in trying to figure just what my dental insurance covers, I settled upon Dental TLC, one of the first pages that popped up when I put “Sandy Springs dentists” into google, as my dental care provider. They’re right next to the Punchline on Hilderbrand, and, since Hilderbrand crosses enough other roads that I use that I often find myself wondering in an average day just where that crazy street goes, I figured that’s close enough to home. It was actually a pretty nice dental experience. There seems to be a realization there that going to a dentist kind of sucks, so they do everything they can to distract you from the pointy metal things being jabbed into your mouth. The big reclining seat had a back massager, there were headphones, there was a TV on the wall and another on the ceiling, and I did not hear one note of smoove jazz while there. The music playing when I sat down in the chair was something from the new Coldplay album. I don’t really like Coldplay. My first exposure to them was A Rush of Blood to the Head, which I greeted with cautious enthusiasm. I thought “Clocks” was interesting, and it’s not often outside of post-something whatever-core that I start listening to the triplets closely because I’m having trouble deciding whether that really is 4/4 time or if they managed to sneak some 3+2 meter in there. X&Y dispelled any mistaken conceptions I had formed that maybe they knew what they were doing, but that’s another discussion for another time. The music when I left was U2’s “Vertigo,” and U2 hasn’t done anything worthwhile since Achtung Baby or so, so that wasn’t such a great pick either to me, but at least somone was trying. The music in between I have completely forgotten because these dentists are apparently pretty liberal with the nitrous oxide. I was feeling a little anxious about the whole deal, so I accepted the offer (“You want some laughing gas? It’s free.”), and it turns out that dental visits really are a lot more pleasant when you’re high through most of it.

Dental TLC was not able to tell me why my tooth feels funny, but they don’t believe anything is wrong with it, so I guess that’s good to know. I apparently do need to floss more or better or something, but this tiny incident was the only confirmation among my thousand dental fears. I don’t think I’ll mind too much going back there in six months.