Quantum Forest

After playing for a little while, I managed to connect my Macbook Pro to the internet using my mobile phone via bluetooth. I have a small Samsung ZV10 and my service provider is Vodafone New Zealand. The steps are quite simple:

• Click the bluetooth icon in the topbar and select ‘setup bluetooth device…’.
• Check that the phone is running bluetooth and that is discoverable (Under settings, connectivity).
• Select mobile phone in the list of available devices.
• The computer will search and—we hope—find your mobile phone.
• The computer will generate a numeric passkey that has to be keyed in and accepted in the phone.
• Select ‘Access the Internet with your phone’s data connection’ in the next menu.
• The settings to connect to Vodafone in New Zealand are:
  • username: vodafone.
  • password: vodafone.
  • GPRS CID string: *99#
  • Modem script: Vodafone VC701SI

This explanation is based on the excellent—and illustrated—version by Pukupi.

I some times visit Techcrunch, a site that profiles new web 2.0 companies. Most of them share the use of tags (some ridiculous name for the good old keywords), allow sharing content with other users and will go bankrupt. I may try some of them but most of the time they have no incidence at all in my workflow and just forget about them.

Google mail has changed my workflow, at least for personal email. No more folders, just keywords and archiving. Some people may have privacy concerns but, hey, do you encrypt your email? I didn’t think so, so stop complaining because anybody can read it. I would love to encrypt mine, but none of my correspondents actually uses encryption, so it is an uphill battle.

All the other Google services (Froggle, Maps, Chat, RSS syndication, news)? Have not made a dent on my workflow, so from a practical point of view, they are pretty useless to me. One exception in the horizon is Google Calendar (CL2). The fact that it is an internet calendar is not surprising or innovative at all (they are dime a dozen at the moment), but integration with my Google mail (which I find really nice) it is.

There are services from which it is very easy to move away; for example, web search. I may be used to Google, but if there is a new service which provides more relevant results, I will start using it without hesitation. That is what I did when moving from Altavista to Google in 1998. Yahoo is now looking more relevant to many searches I am doing, so I may switch to them.

Apart from that, what would I like to have?

• My desktop everywhere, like YouOS (a java script based web operating system) but that actually works for me. Having a crummy editor and spreadsheet does not qualify as useful, because I often use the more obscure features of software. However, the idea of runnning a desktop that I can easily access from anywhere is compelling.
• A well integrated wiki+blog. I use PmWiki and Textpattern, but I would rather prefer to use a single system with complete linking across themes and posts. Infogami looks like going in the right direction, but still needs a fair amount of work. If it is a hosted solution I want to have a escape route, so I can save my data externally in a meaningful format.
• A remote disk to keep my things synchronised across computers, something that I can mount from my PC, Mac or whatever I am using at the moment. It needs to have a decent amount space and no, 1GB is not enough (think of pictures, please)!

I started browsing the web near the end of 1994, at a mind blowing speed of 8.6 Kbps. That is almost 12 years of web sites, news, changing tech, bad writing, etc. It woud be fair to say that internet has been my main time waster for over a decade.

Having an interest in personal productivity, GTD and the works, and maintaining such a time waster are completely incompatible things. Thus, it is time to dump the old habit and move on. I am stopping all non-essential use of the net, which includes everything but:

• Search of professional information (e.g., scientific papers or class materials).
• Maintaining the ASReml cookbook, which is the software that I use for genetic evaluation.
• Basic blogging using a blog client (most likely Azure talking to Textpattern—yes, I want to use my Palm for this—using XML-RPC through a plugin) to keep documenting work related issues and my family informed on what is in my head. The use of a client is mostly to avoid being online as much as possible, although it has the advantages of being able to autosave what I am writing at the moment.

Will it work? I hope so, because I have so many things to do that I need the extra time. Will I miss the web? You bet—particularly at the beginning—but I can not possibly fit the rest of my plans with my current usage.

PS 2006-03-14: Azure wanted my Palm to be connected to internet just to set up a blog profile. Too much to ask just to try it: not worth it, so I deleted the program. I may just use a text editor to write the posts.

In my previous post I explained that I finally chose to use Drupal for a new web site, after comparing it with several other systems. However, downloading and installing the default Drupal installation was still far from what I needed for the site: I still needed to download and install additional contributed modules, in order of importance to me:

• e-publish is a simple great module that allows to put together a group of posts as a publication (a magazine, say) with different issues.
• image permits users to upload and store images (obviously). I still do not know why this module is still not part of the core of the system.
• img_assist provides a simple interface for users to upload figures in to posts, including thumbnails. Very useful for people with little experience in HTML.
• flexinode provides a simple interface for administrators to create new content types, and I used it to create a calendar event type, which is then managed by the next module.
• event shows a calendar interface for coming events, as well as as a block for the front page containing a list of coming events. I still find this module a bit lacking on configuration, and I need to do some further work with it to display exactly what I want.
• quicktags is a simple java script menu to insert basic HTML tags (like strong, em, blockquote and a). I first tried with tinyMCE an interface to a full-blown WYSIWYG rich text editor; however, loading the editor made loading posting pages a bit sluggish. I should probably try FCKeditor an alternative WYSIWYG control when I have some time. There are modules for Markdown and Textile available too, but I do not want to push users of the site to learn additional syntax to post some news.

As an alternative to downloading the core and separate modules, I am aware of at least two ‘distributions’ (CivicSpace and CivicCRM) that package systems for NGO and grassroots organisations. This may be an easier way to go for people not inclined to trial and error.

Now, reading again this list let me realise that this post is not really about configuring (sense tweaking the options) the system, but more about tailoring (sense choosing modules) it. I am impressed with the amount of work going in to the development of Drupal and the good quality of the documentation. A somewhat minor drawback is the small number of good quality ‘themes’ (combinations of templates and CSS) freely available for the system, particularly compared to the number available for E107 and even more here.

Sharing a database

I have cheap hosting for my site, which allows for a single MySQL database. It is still possible to have more than one program requiring access to MySQL, but this makes using table prefixes a highly desirable option to avoid table name clashes between applications (for example, more than one program wanting to have a ‘users’ table). All programs that I tested allow for easy use of table name prefixes, sometimes in an easy to use option at installation time (like E107 or Mambo) or a more obscure ‘after installation’ configuration (like Drupal). In Drupal it is necessary to set the variable $db_prefix to a value, for example using ‘drupal_’ as the prefix one would use $db_prefix = 'drupal_'; in the settings.php file. One thing to remember is that when adding modules that require creating new tables, those tables must have the same prefix.

This has been a long hiatus without posting in the blog. My excuse? I was evaluating a number of CMS to provide members of the IUFRO unit 2.04.02 (Breeding theory and progeny testing) with a way of communicating, including web page, newsletter, forum, calendar of events, etc. As the coordinator of the group, I am really keen on having people interacting, but the IUFRO site is, to put it mildly, close to useless.

I tested Drupal, E107, Mambo / Joomla and Plone. The first four are written in PHP and require PHP+MySQL, while the latter is written in Python. Although I prefer Python as a language, the idea of getting special hosting for Plone, because of especific server requirements is a bit of a turn off. I first had a quick drive test of lots of CMS at the Open Source CMS site, which is a great resource. After that I installed and configured Drupal, E107 and Mambo in my test system, where they are still working together without any conflicts. CMS Matrix provides a fairly detailed comparison between all the systems.

In principle the simplest interface seemed to be Mambo’s (plenty of eye candy), followed by E107. Initially I struggled with Drupal’s interface, but after a while I got the hang of it. On terms of functionality, all systems seem to provide most of the features I need: basic user management, forum, event coordination and easy posting. However, after a while I found that Mambo/Joomla are a bit of an overkill, bringing too many things by default. Putting together a magazine-like interface in E107 implied creating folders by hand (one per issue) and posting in those folders (a bit too primitive for my taste). Going back to Drupal, I started exploring all the contributed modules and I think I can get everything that I need from there.

I am now slowly putting together the IUFRO Breeding theory and progeny testing site, which should be operational by January 2006. The configuration of Drupal will be explained in my next post.

I was writing a Python prototype of DogSim, an inheritance (sense Mendel) mode simulator, happily coding and brushing up my Python coding. I usually listen to energetic music while coding, and this time was the Red Hot Chili Peppers turn. First was Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik, then ‘Californication’ and then ‘By the way’ (my least favourite album). But no, wait a minute: ‘By the way’ would not play at all in my laptop. Tried again, and the disk was not recognised. What was going on? Quick Google search and then discovered that the Australian released CD had ‘copy protection’ that would not allow it to be played in a computer.

I understand that artists may not like someone making a million copies of their CDs and selling them for a profit. But from there to denying a legal user the possibility to play a CD in a computer… that is way over the top. Over ninety percent of my listening is in my computer while working, the other ten percent is listening children’s music in the car. So, what happens when I am faced with that situation? Well, I just have to circumvent the protection, so I can make a copy of the CD that plays in my computer to listen to the bloody thing, so I can justify spending the money in an overpriced piece of plastic.

My web search found a reference to IsoBuster, a data recovery software that mounts the CD and ‘shows you all the tracks and sessions located on the media, combined with all file-systems that are present’. So it gets around the typical double table of contents problem that renders CDs unplayable in a computer. Then one can copy the music contents to the hard drive and then back to another CD. The funny thing is that I did not manage to mount ‘By the way’ in my crammy Matshita UJ-820S CD drive—so I need to try in my desktop computer—but I managed to get a copy of the enhanced version of Portishead’s Live: Roseland NYC. The latter has given me grief for many years, always trying to use its special player to play in the computer, not letting me do any other thing.

What is the point of the whole exercise? Commercial piracy will not be deterred by some lame form of protection, but end users will be really annoyed. May be music companies should read Cory Doctorow’s presentation on digital rights management.

P.S. By the way, a lot of this copy protection issues are completely side stepped in my mac.

I got you! This post is not about the end of forestry activity in Tasmania, but about the end of the Forestry in Tasmania web pages. After two years compiling materials and hand formatting HTML I have decided to stop updating the sub domain. The fact that I am leaving Tasmania at the end of the year—so I will not have time to keep up to date with what is going on—is just the straw that broke… you know.

I still need to decide what to do with the site; either I will leave it unchanged for posterity’s sake or pull the plug and delete the whole thing. Over these last two years I have received a fair amount of abuse and a few examples of praise for keeping the site and trying to present a ‘fair view’ of environmental discussion in Tasmania. However, whatever tries to pass as debate is so low quality that it is easy to get disheartened with what one reads in the media.

Will I start a ‘forestry in New Zealand’ page? I doubt it; my role will be completely different and forestry activity over there is much less contentious. I rather spend some time learning Maori—I am quite keen about this—and practicing the haka with Orlando.

After a false start, I am again putting some of my bookmarks in del.icio.us. I will probably add the tags (newish term for old-fashion keywords) to blog posts too.

Playing with cream

Paul Ford’s comments on Amish computing certainly hit a soft spot on me. I do miss Wordperfect 5.1! It was back to simpler times when using computers was certainly much more productive for me. Multitasking is a nice feature to have when strictly necessary, but not all the time.

Next year I need to spend a fair amount of time writing lectures and I am certainly tempted to ‘going back to basics’. Most of the text that I need to prepare is not highly complex, so I am thinking of writing at least the first drafts in text files with a simple markup. The most humanly readable markup is probably Markdown. Once the text is in Markdown it can be easily converted into html (e.g. using the Markdown dingus, and adding the ‘html’ and ‘body’ tags to get a complete page) and from there to other formats like LaTeX or MSWord. If I decide to go for a longer document probably LaTeX would be the way to go.

I have been playing with Cream, the VIM mode for dumb users like me (another distraction). I hope to slowly learn a few tricks at a time to become a more proficient VIM user, but that is not a real priority. It is a really nice editor mode!

I installed the vim-latex suite, which seems to add pretty good latex support to VIM/Cream, but it seems to override some of the Cream configurations (e.g., F9 is not code folfing/unfolding anymore). It seems to be a matter of getting used to that though. Anyway, I will not need it for the first version of the documents.

Making more changes to Tim’s site

We have had a few problems to have the PDF file of Tim’s book indexed by search engines. My theory is that engines aren’t very happy with Textpattern’s internal links (of type http://mysite.com/file_downloads/2) for a PDF file. Today we changed it to something more explicit like http://mysite.com/bookfiles/file.pdf. Actually, the story was not as simple as that. When first trying to use the new code we ran into a ‘missing page’ problem, which I traced back to a problem with the .htaccess file. I dropped a <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> condition from the file, leaving it like below and it just works.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^(.+) - [PT,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php


This post is about people “saving time” doing the wrong things. The whole ‘life hacks’ area has become much more visible since the presentation by Danny O’Brien on 11 February 2004, who presented results of interviews with highly productive hackers (notes of the presentation taken by Cory Doctorow). There was a second presentation (notes by Cory again). This has spawned a number of sites treating more or less seriously; for example, 43 folders and Life Hacker.

Originally, the idea was very simple. These ‘high achievers’ all use mainly one application (and one file to keep EVERYTHING). This can be a combination of text file + editor, a private blog or wiki, etc. There are a few scripts using data from that file (if text) or RSS feed (if blog or wiki) to keep things synchronised. Now, how come that this concept has been expanded to cover such a diverse array of approaches?

First, different things work for different people—fair enough. However, the main problem seems to be that people have been developing all sorts of hacks for the wrong reasons. An example of the first approach is the Hipster PDA. Why bother with big electronic files if there is a simpler, low-tech approach (more about this later). Another example would be this article on dealing with email overload. The second approach, however, implies just a simple waste of time. Some examples:

• Why do you need to worry about how to organise thousands of RSS feeds? That is clearly too much information, unless your job description is ‘to summarise thousands of feeds per day’.
• The last few weeks there have been plenty of people worried about watching too much TV, so there are ‘life hacks’ to reduce time seating watching TV, movies, Tivo, etc. Just turn off the bloody box! Easy. There are some people clearly using too much disposable income for getting more ways to be distracted.
• And anything iPod (in its many incarnations) related.

Let’s go back to simple and important problems and drop the fluff. Talking about fluff, I put in that category most online approaches to keep your life sane (e.g., Backpack). They imply constant connection to internet, which at least for now it is not possible, unless you are a completely urban-being with your rear permanently glued to a chair in front of a computer.

After our 1998 expedition to India, we gained a bit more appreciation of Indian food. Hobart has four or five Indian restaurants, with Annapurna being probably the best one. Anyway, we have not had Indian food for a while and we decided to order this time from that Tandoor and Curry House (101 Harrington Street, Hobart). The food used to be very good and this time we ordered simple and mild dishes: Lamb Korma and Palaak Paneer. However, it seems that they have changed chef or something like that; the food was pretty ordinary, the Palaak Paneer quite spicy and we both got heartburn. Not recommended anymore.

And the movies

Last weekend was—as any weekend—horrible on terms of TV programs, so after putting Orlando in bed we just started watching our copy of the twentieth anniversary edition of E.T. the extraterrestrial Twenty three year later the movie is still magical for me and, embarrasingly, I still get emotional when E.T. say goodbye.

On Sunday I decided to watch The girl in the café, which was broadcasted by ABC. The previews of the movie promised something a bit different and funny: it starts with a socially disfunctional public servant (Bill Nighy—for some obscure reason I have a weak spot for him) meeting a mysterious low-key girl (Kelly Macdonald) in a café, with the background of G8 summit negotiations. Unfortunately, as time passes the movie becomes a propaganda medium and very incredible. The movie promised much more than it delivered.

This reminded me of some (relatively recent) movies that I had really enjoyed, in no particular order:

• American splendor: a mix of fiction and reality portraiting the life of comic book author Harvey Pekar. Paul Giamatti does a superb job as Harvey. Movie web site, Rotten tomatoes reviews and Amazon link.
• Sideways (link to IMDB): another movie with Paul Giamatti, this time working with Thomas Haden Church. A drama with comedy overtones, or a comedy with drama touches. Movie web site, Rotten tomatoes reviews and Amazon link
• Being John Malkovich: interesting, funny, weird. A real treat. Rotten tomatoes reviews and Amazon link.
• Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: I find Jim Carrey really boring as a comedian, but I think he does a great job as a ‘serious’ actor. A very intense movie about the value of our memories and of each part of our lives, even the most painful ones. Would you erase parts of your life because they were too painful to remember? Movie web site, Rotten tomatoes reviews and Amazon link.
• The Royal Tenenbaums: A very funny and carefully made movie. The cast is great and really matches the characters. Incidentally, the use of Futura font across the movie is excellent. Movie web site, Rotten tomatoes reviews and Amazon link.

I should probably prepare a list of older movies that I still like (coming one day, maybe soon).

Working with Tim and quote

We have almost finished adding content to Tim’s web site, including a PDF version of his book. We have implemented the whole site using Textpattern. Yes, this is a shameless plug to get Tim’s site indexed by search engines.

Finally, the quote of the week:

Rehab is for quitters—Unknown.