roguelazer's website

So, I'm currently in San Clemente for a couple of days before going back to Claremont. As usual, the trip cross-country was fun. Lots of hours in a tin can. Anyhow, something amusing happened at T.F. Green when I was leaving. TSA got confused by my backpack in the X-Ray machine (understandable, since it's got a zillion wires and such in it). So they start going through it and they find that I brought a copy of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The guy then ignores the rest of my bag, pulls out the book, and runs it through the X-Ray while running swabs from it through the chemical analyzer. I'm not sure whether it's worse that

• they thought they'd find anything on a chemical scan/X-Ray of a book
• they were more concerned with a book than with the tangle of wires in my bag
• they were interested in a book in the first place

Isn't travel fun?

I just had a fun day. For some value of fun, at least. I spent most of the day fighting with CMSs for the Narrows Center for the Arts, which is considering moving away from their antiquated website that some guy hacked together for them. I mean, not that tables-based layouts aren't still cool and all. Oh wait, they're not. So I was playing with Joomla and Drupal to see if I could cobble together something slightly less ugly. I ended up spending most of the day withing with Drupal, the Drupal Content Construction Kit, and Contemplate. Joomla's admin interface got on my nerves too quickly. Anyhow, it takes a lot of clicks, but it seems possible to put together pretty much anything in Drupal, which is nice. Of course, I'm not sure that I want to invest the kind of time that it would take to make a decent theme/stylesheet for the Narrows. Especially not with the semester started. But I demoed a quick and dirty version to them, so hopefully their eyes are opened a bit. Of course, I didn't spend any time on the theme at all. So the odds are just as good that they'll ignore the content and focus on the mediocre presentation and just not pay any attention at all. Such is life, I suppose. You can see a screenshot of one of the pages at right.

After that, my folks decided that we should all go out to dinner. Fine with me. We went to a place called Mesa 21 in Fall River, which replaced a nice Italian restaurant called Il Piatto Semplice. Well, Mesa 21 did not live up to its predecessor. They decided to add a bar, which dominates the room in a terrible faux-stone design. They also installed a giant-screen TV behind the bar which shows loud ESPN. Basically, they turned one of the only nice non-Portuguese restaurants in the city into a loud sports bar with mediocre food and no atmosphere to speak of. *sigh*.

So then I get back and guess what I have in my inbox! A nice e-mail from Google informing me that while I have a nice shiny resume, they "do not have a position that is a strong match with [my] qualifications". I know, it was a reach to think that I could get one of the Google internships, but it's still a little depressing to get a rejection before the application deadline even hits. One less thing to look forward to, I guess.

That's it for me for now. I may or may not decide to post something else in the next couple of days. If not, well, I'll post again when I'm back in California. Ciao.

There are a few tips online as to how to use Twitter and QuickSilver together, but they're lame. Particularly because they send your Twitter password over a nice non-https connection. And because I don't like to have to choose between getting prompted to grant access to my Twitter password every time I post from QuickSilver and granting all AppleScripts free access to my Twitter password. So I decided to leverage Twitterific's AppleScript support and write the following quick AppleScript:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
    on process text t
        tell application "Twitterrific" to post update t
    end process text
end using terms from

Just drop it in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions and restart QuickSilver. Voilà!

Hello valiant readers. It's that time again. I've grown bored of what I had and moved on to something new. In this case, I've decided to migrate to WordPress, and to make it my primary website instead of being hidden away on a subdomain. I'm going to attempt to mix a "traditional" static-content website with a sort of blog idea. Roguelazer.com now includes (lambda x blog), and more. We'll see how that works. Anyhow, I've imported everything from Blogger, so we should be good to go

If you're keeping count, this makes my fifth weblog, although that's counting things from well before the terms "weblog" or "blog" had been introduced. And that's not counting the (many) old implementations of Roguelazer.com, most of which had some sort of a news feed that I treated like a blog.

Anyhow, welcome, and I hope you enjoy the new site.

Roguelazer.com is currently undergoing renovations due to its move from OnSmart to DreamHost. Owing to extreme business elsewhere, I am not sure when this site will be back up. Until then, you might want to read my blog on blogspot.

Here's the rules, as I've seen them on the Internet:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

And my result is,

"But this concept of nature is confirmed by experience and must inevitably be presupposed if there is to be possible experience, which is coherent knowledge of the objects of sense in accordance with universal laws."

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. I may have been writing a philosophy paper last night...

A few minutes ago, I was reading an article from my hometown's newspaper, the Fall River Herald News. It was an article indicating that half of the schools in Fall River have been classified as "needs improvement" by the state. I'm not here to talk to you about the article so much; it was hardly good news, but nothing new for Fall River. Instead, I'd like to talk about the comments. You see, I was reading this article online, and the online edition of the Herald has a comments field. Here are two of the posted comments, reproduced for analysis' sake:

duclos

city gets what it pays for--- city gives the least amount of money to education in the state-and the money they do have they misuse

1972

Thanks duclos, I knew that was the problem with our schools. We have to start paying our teachers more in order to get them to teach! I figure $80,000 to $90,000 a year might get us off the failure list.

I think that this represents an interesting divide in the perception of schools, and one which I've seen a lot, at least anecdotally. So I thought I'd do some research.

But it's okay, because reading Planet Debian totally counts as work. :-)

Machine names:

• caveofbirds
• seitchtabr
• caladan
• corrin
• ix
• thalim
• kaitain

Can anybody guess the theme?

As my profile mentions, I come from Fall River, MA. Sometimes, I get overly romantic ideas that it might be a place worth staying in. Then I see something like I saw today, and I remember why it is that I spend ten months out of every twelve 3000 miles away. :-(

Hello readers; it's been a while, hasn't it? It's summer, and, like many people, I'm a slacker. Anyway, I thought that today, I'd talk to you a little about the program that I've been using for a lot of my mail recently: mutt. mutt is a console mail-client. I know, I know, I should get myself out of the 80's. Well, I've found it to be much faster and more powerful than any GUI client I've ever used. I'm not going to go into much detail about the basics; there are are lots of good guides/tutorials on the Internet.

However, I do think I'll share some of my configuration tips, and some helpful hints that I've gotten along the way. My main .muttrc file can be found here. I'll explain some of the neater sections as we go along.

The first section deals with my mailboxes. I use a Maildir-format store on this particular server (if you're still using mbox, I feel sorry for you). Well, I suppose it's technically Maildir++. But whatever. So a decent portion of that first section enables Maildir usage. I then set the display to be threaded with the line set sort=thread. I just find it easier to follow a threaded discussion than to try and pick out the individual messages, although some people violently disagree with me; well, they're not the ones writing this post. :-) Finally, I tell mutt which mailboxes to monitor (I've trimmed this list because, well, you really don't care about all of my gazillions of mailboxes).

The next section is some pretty straightforward keybindings. Since I'm using maildirs, I change the way that I change folders to enable default browsing of mailboxes (as opposed to directories), and I add some keys for PGP.

Next up: colors. I like color. It often makes it easier to read things. Well, perhaps coloring smilies differently from text is a little excessive... Much of this list comes from various sources on the Internet, so props to all of the people who came before me.

Then I set some headers. By default, mutt shows full message headers, which is way more information than I give a damn about. I set some sane defaults here. Incidentally, if you are in a message in mutt and want to view full headers, just press h. It took me a while to figure that out, even though it's pretty intuitive when you think about it. This section also contains one of my favorite lines: set mime_forward. This particular line came to me from one Michael Vrable (not to be confused with Mike Vrable). What this line does is cause forwarded messages to be sent as MIME attachments instead of quoted inline. This is sometimes a bit more annoying when forwarding plain-text messages, but, unfortunately, many silly people now send HTML messages. Not only that, but some people send only HTML messages (no plain-text part at all!), so when you forward these with the usual mutt mimetype of text/plain, graphical clients get confused. So, yeah, mime_forward is very useful.

Finally, I include some other files. The first file is for mailing lists (mutt can mark them as mailing lists, and properly handle reply/reply-all) via the subscribe command, the second one (gpg.rc) sets up GnuPG, and the third one is for mutt aliases.

Oh yeah, and I set mutt to auto-pgp-sign everything, because I'm that kind of a guy. Below, enjoy some screenshots of my actual mail setup.