roguelazer's website

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.

So, the more enterprising amongst you may have noticed that my blog is now at blog.roguelazer.com instead of anonymous-function.blogspot.com (although it's still there, too). This is because I was playing around with my website stuff today. For one thing, I've moved to Google Apps for my Domain, because e-mail over DreamHost's IMAP servers was sometimes slow, and e-mail through the Gmail servers probably won't be. This also gives me better Jabber server (i.e., SSL supported without me paying umpteen dollars for an SSL certificate and a static IP and such). It's generally neat.

I'll post more on my thoughts and opinions of Google Apps for your Domain as they occur to me.

Yesterday I went to the 2008 Newport JVC Jazz Festival, and I figured I'd review it a bit here.

We started off the morning with a set by the Mark Rapp band. Mark Rapp is a trumpet player, somewhat modern. He uses a wah about half of the time, and it's pretty cool. His band was good, too. The guitarist was a little over-the-top, but he was generally good, and the bassist was excellent. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, Rapp also played didgeridoo, which was cool.

So, after Rapp, I saw a bit of Lionel Loueke, who was an excellent guitarist. Unfortunately, his band was not quite as excellent, and the first couple of songs ended up being a bit snooze-worthy, so I wandered over to another stage and watched George Wein and the Newport All-Stars (Howard Alden, Anat Cohen, Jimmy Cobb, and Eperanza Spalding. That was pretty good, although it was a little odd for all of those people to be playing together. Esperanza Spalding was especially good — Wein had her do a solo bit (she's a bassist who also sings, which is a strange but nice combination).

At 1:50, I went over to the Waterside stage for the "Newport Sunday Surprise", which turned out to be Bill Frisell! Considering that I was in the second row of a quite small tent, that was awesome (not that that was a surprise, or anything).

After Frisell, there was a 20 minute break before Esperanza Spalding came to the Waterside stage, so I unwisely decided to get up and stretch. When I came back 5 minutes later, there were a few thousand people crowded into the area and I couldn't even get within 20 feet of the tent! So I watched a bit of her act from a distance, then went over to the Pavilion Stage to see Guillermo Klein Y Los Gauchos, a jazz band. They were a little raggedy, but they tightened up over their set, so it ended up okay.

The last act I saw was Herbie Hancock, who was on the main stage. I was very unimpressed. For the first couple of songs, he had a trio of female backup singers whose voices seemed designed to bore into my head. When they weren't there, the guys on the mixing board just jammed the gain all of the way up on everything else, so it was actually painful to listen to, even from the middle of the field. Like, tooth-rattlingly loud. I'm sure Hancock was good, but I couldn't stand to try and listen to him. Such a shame.

So, that was my Sunday. Pretty fun. Ciao.

I've only got one more week left of summer research. This time next week, I'll be back on the East Coast. I've already sent my desktop off to a cozy garage, and am posting this from my laptop. It was a pretty involved process - I needed to move all of my RSS feeds from Liferea to Google Reader, copy over my .vimrc and .emacs files, get a list of all of my webcomics... But all of that's done now. So, yeah, now I'm even less likely to post to this blog. Woo hoo.

I've now had my iPhone 3G for four days, and I've had a chance to use it in some real-world scenarios.

Apps

The App Store is, unequivocally, the most important feature of iPhone OS 2.0. Exchange support is nice, yes, and there are lots of little tweaks. But the App Store is what makes the iPhone attractive to me, more of a computer instead of a silly smartphone. I've been using a few apps pretty solidly for the past few days: Twitterific (a Twitter client), Exposure (a Flickr client), and the official Facebook client. All of these are well-written, and leverage the iPhone's interface and featureset. Twitterific is particularly enjoyable to use (although I'm not sure if I'm entirely sold on the concept of microblogging yet). As time goes on, I can see myself using these apps even more, and there are a few apps that I'm still waiting for (for example, where's my blogger client? The post interface is pretty terrible in the browser).

iPod

I haven't really been a big user of iPods per se. It's true, I do have an iPod Color. But it has rockbox on it, and mostly serves to keep me from listening to the engines on plane rides. The iPhone is the first iPod that I've actually wanted to use as such. The sound is pretty good (using 256 kbit/s AAC files), and the interface is nice. I'm not sure if I'll be able to use mobile players where I can't pause by pressing on the headphone cable again.

Where the iPhone really shines, though, is as a portable video player. Dr. Horrible is a comedy-musical-superhero webshow written by Joss Whedon, and it's available from iTunes. Watching it on my iPhone has been a joy — quality is immensely better than through Hulu, and the iPhone's screen really shines for this sort of use.

Incidentally, "Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" is a really funny little show. It apparently will consist of 3 ~15 minute acts, and so far seems to have a lot of the wacky humor that I'd associate with Joss Whedon. That, and Nathan Fillon.

3G and GPS

As I mentioned in my previous iPhone 3G post, 3G reception in my dorm (and workplace) is pretty shoddy. This isn't really a problem, because I've got Wifi of on sort or another all over campus (and even at the Starbucks across the street). Off-campus, it's another story. 3G reception in Claremont is pretty good, and data is noticably faster than over EDGE. However, I did not notice a significant improvement in call quality over 3G than 2.5G, which might be important considering the power demands associated with 3G technologies.

One of the other things that I didn't get to test before was GPS. As expected, going outside made the GPS signal pop right up. It's actually sort of neat — we start with a location circle whose diameter is about a mile, then it zooms in and the circle's diameter goes to about 200 feet, then the GPS signal kicks in, and the circle turns into a dot at my exact position. I guess it was sort of fun to watch my dot-self walking down the line-street equivalent of the street that my real self was walking down. I certainly don't see Google Maps + iPhone GPS replacing standalone GPS units (the requirement of network service for map data is a deal-killer alone), but it's a nice improvement of my previous way of navigating (print out a Google Maps map before I left). It also sucks up battery even faster than the 3G, so make sure to bring a car charger when you're off on your great adventure with your iPhone 3G.

More on the Hardware

So far, the iPhone itself is holding up very well. It's a veritable fingerprint magnet, but no scratches, despite being in my pocket with some change and such. The battery life is also fairly impressive — a couple of days of medium use, and it's still at more than half charged.

Well, I suppose that's about it for my review today. Ciao.

I've posted a few pictures of the unboxing of my iPhone 3G. As usual for an Apple product, the packaging was excellently done. The box was surprisingly small, but contained everything necessary:

• Docking Connector -> USB cable
• Tiny, tiny power adapter
• Iconic white headphones (with microphone... somewhere...)
• SIM Card Removal Tool
• Cleaning cloth

Once I got done with my activation mess (see previous post), the iPhone was a dream. The first thing I noticed was call quality: it was excellent. I don't have 3G reception indoors (curse you, foot-thick concrete walls), but even over 2.5G, it was an amazing upgrade from my Motorola L2, and significantly improved over first-gen iPhones I've used. People on the other end of the call also reported excellent sound quality.

The OS and bundled software is much the same as in the original iPhone. I haven't really had a chance to try the App Store yet (waiting for CIS to turn on 802.11b for this MAC ID, and GSM is a bit too slow for that sort of thing), but it looks like the real game-changer in this 2.0 software. I'm thinking Twitterific and Exposure will be my first stops, but we'll see.

GPS, another of the touted features, also doesn't work indoors. However, Skyhook managed to get my location pretty much straight away, so whatever. I'll post again on GPS when I get out of the dungeon and into the real world some time, I suppose.

All of my PIM stuff transferred straight away. This is far and away the best contact management on a cell phone, say, ever. This is blasphemy coming from me, but I think it's even better than Palm's. Yes, the guy who used to run a Palm OS blog before the word blog existed and who has had every generation of Palm OS device ever released says that this PIM is better than Palm's. Put it down in the record books. Multiple phone numbers are handled sanel, personal ringtones and pictures just work, and calendaring is excellent. I'm a happy man.

E-mail is also good. Gmail just worked. Woot IMAP. I haven't tried to set up any other accounts yet, but I'll probably put something at roguelazer.com, also over IMAP. Mail management is quick, and I think I'm already getting used to the keyboard.

I went ahead and got the 200 SMS plan, even though I'd be surprised if I used 50 a month. It's cheaper to spend $5/mo and get 200 than to spend $10/mo on 50. The interface is pretty straightforward. I'm a little disappointed with speed (why does it still take 5 seconds to send an SMS? I can send an e-mail in less time than that!), but whatever. Incidentally, the new screenshot feature? Pure genius.

I also played with the iPod features a bit. CoverFlow is embarrassingly cool on this screen. So much so that I actually reimported a bunch of my CDs into iTunes (yes, I could have just ripped the FLAC files into AAC or MP3 files, but I had the originals, so what the hell) and copied them on. Sound quality is pretty good. Next up will be video, I suppose. Hopefully, NBC and Apple will clear up their little spat, and I'll be able to watch all the good Sci-Fi channel shows from my iPhone. *crosses fingers*.

Well, that's it for now. I'll get back to y'all once I've got some more time with the thing, and can report on 3G, GPS, and App Store performance.