I try to use a password generated by my “standard model” — ie, a standard prefix depending on the nature of the site and some salt determined by the website itself. However, some sites have stupid rules on their password requirements. In real life, I have encountered a wide variety of password requirements:

• A requirement of an exactly 6-character password
• A prohibition on “special characters” like any of !@#$%^&*()+=></?{}[]|\/.
• A requirement for a special character that happens to be one of !@#$%^&*()
• A requirement for numbers, uppercase, and lower case in the password
• A requirement for two sets of letters and numbers in the password — ie, fit the regex /([a-zA-Z]+[0-9]+){2}/

When my standard model password doesn’t fit into one of the more esoteric requirements, I have to modify it to fit. Fortunately, I find that on this subject at least, I tend to think the same way over time, so, given the standard model and a set of constraints, I will usually come up with the same password. However, it is uncommon for websites to list their password constraints on the log-in page. Therefore, I will usually try the standard model password first, and only when that fails twice (in case I mistyped the first time), and I’m down to one more try, do I realize that this website might be “special.”

Then I have to go to the trouble to find out what the password requirements are. This is not difficult — usually it involves clicking the “sign up button” and reading a little bit — but it does take some time and it is very annoying. Listing the password requirements at the login screen would make for a much better user experience (since it is so easy to find this information, not displaying it on the login screen can’t be interpreted as a security measure either).

Of course, the real solution is for websites to get rid of their inane password requirements, so I never have to deviate from the standard model.

{ // Safety agains reopen

I think I understand what it’s supposed to mean — the writer is pointing out that the code is checking again, to be double sure that the log is still open (although, if it can close between this call and the last call to is_open(), I’d be worried about it closing after this call too… note that both checks are after LOCK_log has been acquired).

What I’m more interested in is what the comment, as written, actually means? The grammar is very odd. I’m open to suggestions.

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

This is easy. Nothing is ever too big to fail. That is a term invented by bankers and politicians to justify taxpayers supporting banks. Taleb is on to something about hidden risks, though.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

Nothing actually ever has to be bailed out, or nationalized, but I suppose nationalization would be preferable to the current trend of just giving bad companies money.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

No arguments here. It is interesting that the government, the media, and probably most people still view the ones who created this mess “financial experts”.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

I think this is sound advice to financial companies. I see no need to legislate this opinion, however. Rather, get rid of the corporate safety net, and companies will shape up or fail and die, and the problem will fix itself.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

Seems to be sound advice again, for me and for you. Again, I don’t see any need to mandate this sound advice in law. But some people see the need to outlaw salt, so probably not everyone agrees with me.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

The world somehow survived 4 billion years without banning complex financial derivatives. I know that many people think regulation solves everything (it doesn’t), but I really think the world will survive this too. Let those who learned from this go on without blowing themselves up. Again, I see no need to open the door to unintended consequences by trying to set up rules (that will be circumnavigated) to prevent a one-time occurrence from happening again.

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

Many banks were robust in the face of these rumors. They are the ones not receiving any money from the government (That’s why I “love” the bailout(s)). Most of the economy is still fine and has proven to be robust in the face of tempestuous times.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

I agree. Many people seem to be under the impression that the legal and economic system we currently have — progressively more regulations outlawing progressively more things and creating progressively more perverse incentives — makes sense, and that it only fails occasionally. Well, it doesn’t make sense, and it is always going to fail.

Of course, many people disagree with me about what constitutes a fix. So I say to them, go ahead and try out your ideas, just don’t force me to be a part of your fix. Then we can both be happy.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

This is very bad advice. Citizens should make this choice themselves, depending on how much risk they are willing to take on. I think it is generally good to have people invested in a market economy — it is one of the best financial engines ever developed.

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

I like the voluntary part. Market capitalism itself has never been broken. It is the continuous political patching of perceived flaws in the that has created the many perverse incentives of our current wonderful system, somewhere in the murkiness between fascism and capitalism and socialism and stupidity.

Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.

In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.

Humans have used their intelligence to out-compete the rest of the natural world. I don’t see why we should model one of the best wealth production mechanisms we have developed yet — the market-based capitalist economy — on a biological world that will continue to become less relevant as technology progresses. This is just useless sentimentalism.

The writer is a veteran trader, a distinguished professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The writer calls himself a “veteran trader” — ie, a “financial expert”, and wonders if maybe we should take the part of  advice where he says we shouldn’t take the advice of financial experts. As a fellow beneficiary of a relatively free, relatively stable, capitalist market economy, I would urge you to not make the situation any worse.

I have five or so unfinished drafts. Some of them have really good titles:

• Time Horizon
• Tags
• Is Antitrust Regulation Harmful to Consumers?
• (no title), but the content seems to be a fairly well thought-out post about the “black swan effect”

Maybe I should try finishing these articles.

1. Changed my blog’s MySQL tables storage engines from the MyISAM to InnoDB
2. Installed the Wordpress Memcache Plugin to mimimize database queries (16-25 queries reduced to 2-7)
3. Installed APC (Alternative PHP Cache) to reduce PHP bytecode compilation overhead. As a result, all PHP sites on mimimus should be faster.

In addition, I did some general cleaning up and upgrading of software on minimus and nexus.

Altogether, these changes reduce the typical Checksum Arcanius page load from 2.5-3.5 seconds to 0.5-1.5 seconds, a 2-7x improvement.

These are very easy steps to take — I would suggest them to anyone running Wordpress. Step-by-step directions follow (assuming Ubuntu Linux):

1. For each table in your blog’s database, execute the following SQL via a mysql client instance, phpMyAdmin, etc:
   ALTER TABLE <tablename> ENGINE = InnoDB;
2. Install memcache:
   sudo apt-get install memcache
3. Download the Wordpress Memcache Plugin and place it in your wp-content directory. That is all you have to do to get memcache support in Wordpress!
4. Install APC:
   sudo apt-get install php-apc
5. Restart Apache:
   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Very simple steps with a very high payoff.

The Trend is Clear

As I have become more involved with Facebook and Twitter, the number of idea that actually mature enough for me to  blog about them go down. Also, I’m not taking enough time to review my thoughts and write about them.

My first resolution of 2010: I resolve to do blog more. I need that time to reflect reflect on my life. Status updates are not sufficient.

Notice how it magically disappeared for almost a month after reaching Kentuky, and then reappeared in Menlo Park, only to be shipped off again. UPS magic!

That means the package has travelled over 7,000 miles since when I tried to ship it!

• Complete a marathon
  Result: Success! I completed the Portland Marathon in October. It wasn’t my best moment, but I did make it. I had to verify that this resolution said “complete” rather than “run” because I certainly did not run the entire marathon.
• Complete an Olympic-length Triathlon
  Result: Failure. Had I been a little more aggressive with my schedule before starting work, I could have participated in an olympic-length race with Kunlun; however, I was not sufficiently on the ball and I missed this one.
• Get a better time on a Sprint Triathlon
  Result: Success! I completed the Seafair Triathlon three and a half minutes faster this year than last year.
• Complete Seattle To Portland bike ride in One Day
  Result: Success! I left Seattle with the first wave at 4:45 am, and many hours later, arrived at the finish line in Portland just after 9:00pm. Apparently, I didn’t blog about this, perhaps because I was preoccupied with my upcoming travels (see next item)
• Visit Australia and Peru
  Result: Success! I traveled to Peru with Kunlun, Scott, and Ben in June. I enjoyed myself, but I’m not itching to go back real soon. I wrote about the trip in five blog posts. I returned home just long enough for the Seattle to Portland bike ride and the Seafair Triathlon, then I headed out for Australia and New Zealand with my parents, a trip that I consider to be the most wonderful success of any trip I have ever embarked on. I definitely have more I want to see and do in Australia and New Zealand.
• Work out (1+ hour) at least once a week
  Result: Mixed. I probably got more exercise than this throughout the week, but often not all at one time.
• Get my Motorcycle certification endorsement
  Result: Failure. I just didn’t get around to this. I will try again next year.
• Complete my Masters degree with a grade at least as high as my Bachelors degrees
  Result: Failure. I’m pretty disappointed with the overall grade I achieved in grad school. If I ever go back, I won’t let it happen again.
• Eat slower, smaller portions
  Result: Partial success. I’m getting better at regulating how much and how quickly I eat, but I still have too many lapses. Fortunately, I’m learning more about myself, which is helping me make progress here.
• Eat only until I’m full
  Result: Partial success. This is of course closely related to the last point, and I have gotten better at moderating my intake at each meal. Again, this is a work is progress.
• Curb over-snacking tendencies
  Result: Success. I’ve found that by limiting what I have around the house, I can control what I munch on much better. This is made a little more difficult by easy accessat work to junk food, but it hasn’t been a major problem, so I feel good about claiming this as success.

Overall, I feel good about my accomplishments this year, even though the failures bite a little, I hope to learn from them and do better next year.

Stay tuned for next year’s resolutions.

First, work has been fantastic. I’m definitely being stretched, which is great for me and I hope for Facebook as well. I’m pretty excited about a couple of the things I’m working on right now, and I may be able to share it sooner rather than later. Part of my sleep woes are the fact that my schedule got knocked pretty off kilter when a friend-of-a-friend reported a bug on Facebook to me, and I stayed up a good part of Saturday night managing that. My schedule has been a little wonky since that, but it has still been a good week overall.

Last weekend, I made it up to San Francisco again and visited with Paul, who I’ve known since 1st grade. I’m pretty sure he’s the oldest friend I have that I’m still in touch with. He showed me his art studio and his apartment in the city, and we visited San Francisco’s Ocean Beach in time for a nice sunset, took pictures in some city-enhancing fog, and ate Mexican and sushi at a couple of restaurants. It was good times. I’ve posted pictures on Facebook that anyone can view.

I visited the family for Thanksgiving, returning my car to Washington in the process. I drove up Wednesday night, staying at my sister’s place in Eugene before arriving in Bellevue in time for a nice low-key Thanksgiving dinner at my parent’s place with some family friends, the Paulsens. We were expecting a more bustling time with my Redmond-based cousins and their kids, but they were all suffering from illness and weren’t able to make it. The food was good but unconventional, as is my family’s tradition. We ate Salmon instead of Turkey, for starters. Afterward, we had a wonderful conversation with our guests.

I also got to see a lot of friends. I watched the Apple Cup with Jon, Maneesh, Bobby, and Ananth, played Munchkin with the 5011 crew, heard Peter Ellis perform his Cello at Kate’s Pub in Wallingford, chatted while walking around Seattle with Theo, met up with a long lost high school friend, watched Ninja Assassin, and generally kept myself busy — or at least occupied! I even met some new and interesting people along the way. I worked from home on Monday, and flew back to SFO on Tuesday morning.

With my upcoming trip back to Washington for Christmas, I will have visited Washington every month since I moved to California, and I think I will have spent more time in Washington after summer than I did during the summer this year. On my trip, I will actually be stopping in Las Vegas to see my brother, sister-in-law, and my new niece, who I have yet to meet in person. I’m am very much looking forward to that.

– Ryan McElroy, November 19, 2009

I tweeted this about a month ago. Several friends quickly asked why I said it, or what article I was referencing. I said it because I noticed that Wikipedia had just deleted the article about the Titan Robotics Club, the high school robotics club I helped start during my senior year in high school at the Bellevue International School. The reason: the Titan Robotics Club was not sufficiently “Notable”.

Wikipedia has rules for when they delete articles, and they followed their rules in this case. There is still an electronic trail on Wikipedia of the deletion, and why it occurred. I have no specific problem with those that followed Wikipedia’s rules to their logical conclusion. What I have a problem with is the idea of Notability.

The Titan Robotics Club is notable to me and many people I know. I think it makes sense to have a Wikipedia article about the club. However, I understand that the Titan Robotics Club is not notable to everyone. Just as, say, Sigur Ros’ album commonly known as “The Recycling Bin” is not notable to me. But it’s on Wikipedia. And that’s exactly the point.

There is a long tail phenomenon going on here. Maybe not many people care about the Titan Robotics Club, but a lot of people care about a lot of different topics at least as unnotable as the Titan Robotics Club, and they will spend time to write high-quality articles about these things, just as I would spend time to write or improve an article about the Titan Robotics Club, if I were confident that it would not be deleted by some rule-following robot editor. I believe that is the criteria that Wikipedia should use to judge articles — Quality, not Notability.

Wikipedia has been successful because it fostered this semi-unregulated free-for-all knowledge sharing extravaganza. Now, Wikipedia is nearing the limit of what their current policies allow in terms of growth, and it is time for them to change their policy if they want to remain relevant. If Wikipedia continues on its current path, it will fall even further off the exponential growth curve it used to ride, and in this day and age, if your growth is not exponential, you are falling behind.

Studio I to Gate 4 on Page Mill Road

UPDATE: Elevation graph, per Jayson’s request!

The view from the top as the Sun set was well worth the effort:

Since then, Firefox has seen over 1 billion downloads and has made significant inroads against the once totally dominant and stagnant Microsoft Internet Explorer. Despite experiments with Chrome, Safari, Opera, and the newer versions of IE (which wouldn’t even exist had Firefox not forced Microsoft into action), Firefox has remained my browser of choice, due in large part to its constant improvements, rich set of extensions, and supporting all the little things that make browsing fast and fun.

In a lot of ways, the culture of Firefox has grown into a religion, with its adherents being encouraged to spread the good word of Firefox, convert their friends, and so on. Nevertheless, it is a religion I feel good about being a part of. So, if you don’t already use it, go give Firefox a try.

This morning, an engineer at Facebook started a discussion thread on the language. That’s when I learned about the now famous “Issue 9“: In short, there is already is a language named Go! (as compared to Google’s chosen name, ‘go’). In the somewhat rancorous discussion that followed, one recurring theme emerged: ‘go’ is a bad name for a language, and “Issue 9″ (or perhaps Issue9) should be the new name. Robert Greiner wrote a good post about this. In a similar vein, here is why I think a name change is in order:

1. ‘go’ is a poor name choice for a programming language, and of all companies, Google should understand this: ‘go’ is a too-common word that will make search results almost useless (try a search for “debug go”). Even with well-established languages with poor names such as C, searches can be troublesome.
2. As I mentioned before, there is already a language named Go! To stay in line with their “Don’t be evil” mantra, Google shouldn’t squash the little guy, which they are perfectly capable of doing here.
3. There is an epic marketing opportunity for Google here. Many people and the press will love it if Google renames their brand new language in order to do the right thing. At the same time, they can deal with the fact that ‘go’ is a poor name to begin with.
4. ‘Issue 9′ or ‘Issue9′ — abbreviated i9 either way — is a good name for a language that incorporates a computer science idea but is still generic (but not too generic!)
5. There is already a groundswell of support for the Issue 9 name.
6. Issue 9 would not have any search engine name collisions.
7. Others have already suggested incorporating the new name into language constructs. For example the keyword ‘go’ could be replaced (or aliased by) ‘issue’ — this even makes sense!

I hope that Google makes the right choice without litigation. Even if Google doesn’t make the right choice, I hope there is not litigation — it doesn’t actually help anyone in this case. The creator of Go! has gained more publicity through this than a lifetime of toil would have gotten, so in a way he should be grateful. There is no other way most people who are now aware of his language would have heard about it otherwise. I want Google to do the right thing, but even if they don’t, I think legally it should end there.

Finally, I will give mad props to Google — and I promise to learn the language — if they change the name to Issue 9.

• Post pictures from Peru on this blog (these photos are already posted on Facebook)
• Post pictures from Australia and New Zealand here and on Facebook (I’m way behind on this front).
• Bring the Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery up-to-date.
• Swap my Apple Macbook Pro for a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 with Windows 7 at work. My plan is for this to also become my main laptop; my current laptop, Graphitica, a Dell D630, will go to my wonderful mom. I will miss the touchpad on the Mac, but I think that pretty much everything else will get better for me with this swap.
• Help the new housemate, Jasmine, move in. This will probably involve finding a truck that I can borrow for a weekend.
• Drive the Saturn back to Washington for Thanksgiving; leave it there, and fly back to SFO (this will lower the car pressure on the house, which after Jasmine moves in, will be at 5. Returning my car to Washington will lower that to 4.) As long as I can occasionally borrow a housemate’s car, I will be fine with respect to transportation.
• Have a few good contributions to Drizzle’s development

That is all for now. More schemes may come.

At any rate, the best parts of bootcamp for me were two excellent onboarding sessions: one on JavaScript a few weeks ago, and one on  Git last week. The engineers presenting had good presentations, but more importantly, they took time to answer my questions very thoroughly. It is very exciting to be working with people who have such deep knowledge and are so readily available.

One of the tasks during bootcamp is to figure out what team to join out of the teams that are hiring. I found I enjoyed most of the tasks I worked on, so I had trouble narrowing it down initially. In the end, it really came down to working on Scribe, an open-source distributed logging system that Facebook created, or working with the Databases team on what essentially amounts to MySQL hacking. As hard as the choice was to make, it was a good choice to have because I’m certain either team would have been an interesting place to work. However, in the end I had to make a choice, and today I started with the Databases team.

For now, my task is to get up to speed on Drizzle, a stripped-down branch of MySQL. I certainly have my work cut out for me, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The changeover took place early this morning, after hours of struggling against forces that I had never before met, namely AppArmor, a security system in Ubuntu Linux that is newly enabled-by-default as of Ubuntu 9.04. Specifically, it prevented Mysql from reading to a new directory I had set up for it on the non-root drive. Once I knew what the problem was (after barking up the wrong permissions trees for a long time), the fix was fairly simple — adding a couple of lines to Mysql’s AppArmor config, and bouncing AppArmor made everything work fine.

The only remaining issue appeared to be Gallery’s non-relative-path issues, which I temporarily fixed up using a symlink. but, Scott, Dan, and I all need to update our Gallery configs to use the right path, because one of these days I’m going to delete the symlink.

Of course, if you used to have a user account on SilverFir, you probably don’t anymore, unless your name is ‘Dan’ or ‘Ryan’. Send me a message about it (email is best. but a comment also works) and I’ll set it up for you. Also, if you notice anything not working, let me know, and I’ll look into it.

Down in Portland, however, my mom suggested that I invest in some new shoes, since the ones I had were fairly battered. I thought it was a bad idea, because breaking in new shoes during a marathon didn’t seem that smart. But then my friend Scott, who run done a few marathons in his time, agreed with her, saying that good running shoes don’t actually need to be broken in. Thus I found myself in a Sports Authority on Saturday night buying new shoes.

Also on Saturday, I spent some quality time in a hot tub, which seems to have, in large part, miraculously healed the blistering and bruising on my right foot. Combined with the new shoes, I suddenly started believing again. Maybe I could complete the marathon. I really wanted to get this out of the way, because during training I discovered that I didn’t like long-distance running at all, and if I didn’t finish the marathon now, it would bother me until I finally did, so getting it out of the way was pretty important to me.

And thus, I found myself on the start line of the 2009 Portland Marathon, in new shoes, new shorts, new socks, and wondering how far I was going to go. I started out by walking. I found that by turning my left foot a little further out than normal, combined witht eh new shoes, I could eliminate the pain that I usually felt in that foot. The right foot, as discussed earlier, seemed to have spontaneously healed in a hot tub. Or maybe it just got better all week and I didn’t notice until after getting out of the hot tub, but that story isn’t as fun. And so I walked. And walked. And walked.

A few miles in, I was feeling alright, but I was still skeptical about my chances of finishing — after all, the previous week, I had felt pretty good until a popped blister suddenly halted my progress. When asked by my cheering family if I thought I would finish, I simply shrugged, and kept on walking. About 10 miles in, still walking, I noticed that my left knee was protesting a little to my left foot’s new outward position, so I started changing the position of my left foot around a little, which helped enough to keep going.

At the half way mark, I actually started to believe for real. I was slowly feeling worse, but I could tell that the rate at which I was feeling worse would get me well past the finish line. So I continued to walk, miles slowly ticking off as I continued to pound sports drink and occasional gummy bears from enthusiastic volunteers.

Walking gives one a lot of time to talk to people around you, since it certainly isn’t your respiratory system that is maxed out. I met a few nice ladies (I seemed to be in the pace preferred by 50-60 year old women), and generally had a good time, depsite the creeping pains.

Around mile 24, I started flirting with the idea of running the rest of the way, but I found that it was hard to get myself to change the motion that I had been doing for six hours already. At mile 25, however, I actaully did start running, albeit slowly. Even at the barely-running pace, I was quickly passing people, which helped me keep it up. But I promised to myself that I would actaully kick up my feet and really run after mile 26. Thus mentally preparing myself, I found that I actually could do it this time, and I came across the finish line considerably faster than anyone else around me.

Six hours, fifty-five minutes after I crossed the start line, I finished a marathon.

It was nice to be done.

Today’s adventure consisted of 14.3 miles in about 3.5 hours, which is around 4 mph. I walked the first 9 or so miles at a pretty good clip, then started running back on Middlefield. A few miles into the run back, I had a sharp pain in my heel, so I stopped to check it out and found a popped blister. I found it hard to even walk in my shoes immediately after that, so I actually went barefooted for about a half mile before deciding that shoes would be better in the long run.

So, I put my shoes back on, and adjusting my gait a bit, was able to stay mostly pain-free. I even got up to a pretty good clip with a modified gait and a good amount of ignoring the pain.  At Loma Verde, just over a half mile from my house, I ran into a friend from work, who was tooling around town in his brand new rally blue Subaru Imprezza WRX. He offered me a ride home, and it was a pretty good way to end an otherwise kinda crappy walk/run.

I managed to listen to music the whole way, thanks to the iPhone and another not-as-advertised iTunes experience. But that may earn its own post.

It turned out that downloading and patching the code was straightforward enough: With a few development packages in cygwin (namely make and the normal C/C++ gcc), make worked (almost) without a hitch. All I had to do was download the PuTTYcyg icon (which was not included in the patch), and everything compiled properly. However, after compiling, when I ran a cygwin terminal, a second windows command-prompt-style window with a bunch of debug info popped up:

This of course was a non-starter, so I searched in vain for a few hours to try to fix this, and ended the night by opening a new issue at the PuTTYcyg home page.

The PuTTYcyg developer pointed me to the Makefile used to build the PuTTYcyg releases. In it are a few special XFLAGS that magically make the extra window not appear:

XFLAGS= -UDEBUG -UNO_MULTIMON

Using the new Makefile, I compiled again, and this time when I ran PuTTYcyg, there was no annoying extra window. Brilliant!

Feel free to contact me if you need any more info.

I am using GNU screen while logged in to linux machines extensively during work, so I invested a little time in setting up a good screenrc. Afterwards, I noticed that I was unable to get the screens to switch using ctrl-left and ctrl-right the same way I would be able to from a Windows machine.

After being frustrated with trying to get Terminal to send the right control characters, and getting screen to recognize them using bindkey, I took a step back and found a solution that actually works. Despite its failings at behaving like PuTTY in every respect, Terminal does offer a lot of customizations, including the ability to change what control characters get sent when you press control-left and control-right, for example. So instead of trying to divine the right bindkey option for Mac OS X (which no one seems to have succeeded at as far as I can tell), I took another approach:

I told Terminal to send “ctrl-a p” (\001ap) for ctrl-left, and “ctrl-a n” (\001n) for ctrl-right. This makes hitting those keys the equivalent of going to the previous and next screens manually, but without the manual part. Of course, if you use a different control character for your screen, you will want to use that instead of ctrl-a as I did, but this finally got screen to behave the way I wanted, which makes me quite happy.

For reference, my screenrc looks like this right now:

vbell off
autodetach on
startup_message off
defscrollback 10000

hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kG}%-Lw%{= kW}%50> %n*%f %t%{= kG}%+Lw%< %{= kG}'

I love the touchpad and the transparent terminals, and the back lit keyboard is sexy and functional, but there are also a lot of keys I miss, especially when I’m away from the extended keyboard at my main desk — home, end, page up and down, and delete (forward) being the leading examples. The function key on the laptop is also misplaced (I prefer control on the outside, as is the case on every reasonable keyboard known to man). The menu-bar-atop-primary-display decision is, quite frankly, terrible. There are also lots of other little annoyances: half of what “should be” control-key is command-key (ie, copy and paste), while the other half is still control-key (ie, changing tabs in Firefox, everything in the terminal).

The end all is that I am seriously considering swapping the Macbook for a Thinkpad. I haven’t made that decision yet, but it may happen next week. Or I may decide to tough it out, since I’ve already learned how to deal with most of the quirks.

Apart from the Macbook blues, the first week went fairly well. The first day was the normal mostly-government-mandated HR stuff, and then on day two I got to check out all of Facebook’s codebase and set up a sandbox. With some onboarding sessions, good documentation, and some help from a knowledgeable returning intern, I was actually able to be a little productive in my first week, a vastly different experience than I had at Amazon last summer.

Also, the food has been uniformly quite good to excellent, so living cheaply (except for the exorbitant rent at my too-nice Palo Alto pad), will be possible. At least, I won’t be spending too much money on groceries or restaurants.

Last but not least, there was the news that had to make this the best week to start at Facebook ever:

1. Facebook hit 300 million active users, another unprecedented milestone in social networking
2. Facebook became, for the first time, cash flow positive, a year ahead of their own projections

So overall, a good week to start, I would have to say.