http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga Just another weblog Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:12:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I don't know about other people but my daily checklist aspires to be something like this... 1. Come in 2. Kick serious ass 3. Go home For some reason steps 2 and 3 can be quite troublesome... luckily today was one of those days that the checklist went well! http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/01/06/the-anatomy-of-a-daily-checklist-for-an-awesome-day-at-work/ A nice back story on Writely (what is now known as Google Docs) via HN. I particularly like this snippet [The creators] have been in the application software business for nearly 20 years... they understand the user problem so deeply that they can blend the advantages of each ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2009/01/02/writely-years-in-the-making-months-in-execution/ If you have ever heard of Alex Kerr and have read his book Dogs & Demonsyou would think much less of Japan as a country. Some of the things in that book refer to many pork-barrel politic government projects that include such monstrosities as huge concrete damns in the ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/12/31/zoorasia-and-the-yokohama-greenery-foundation-its-not-all-dogs-demons/ Luke describes a nice methodology for using Mercurial as a way to track patches from a subversion checkout. This type of workflow stuff is very cool imo because it has the following: Shows a concrete example of how to use a not so trivia tool Works within constraints (in this example, ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/12/28/708/ Akihabara as many people in Japan know was originally the home for buying electronic goods in the Tokyo area. It still holds that reputation however the Anime Otaku crowd have changed the face of Akihabara to also accomodate their needs and desires. One thing that is interesting is the ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/12/22/on-the-origins-of-the-name-akihabara/ After having dain bramaged myself for years with Linux usage. I had gotten spoiled into believing an OS should make it simple to do the following: 1. Shutdown computer 2. Swap around hardware components 3. Restart 4. Life is good However any techie should tell you this is a pipe dream on Windows. ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/12/07/getting-x-working-again-after-swapping-hardware-on-open-solaris-nv100/ I've been silently scanning some Solaris blogs and skimming some of the appropriate websites for documentation on some of the more interesting features of Solaris for awhile now. One thing that requires time to adjust to is the number of acronyms that the Solaris community has to describe their ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/11/29/understanding-what-an-l2arc-is/ According to the Fedora FAQ one should be able to update with just this sudo yum --enablerepo=updates-testing groupupdate "KDE (K Desktop Environment)" However when I did, I ran into some icons from packages kdepim-3.5.9 and kdegraphics-4.1.0 conflicting with packages crystalsvg-icon-theme and libkipi. Here is a log... file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/48x48/apps/kpalmdoc.png from install ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/11/29/getting-kde-410-on-a-fedora-8-machine-when-kde-3-is-already-there/ It seems that with most default UNIX-like installations outside of FreeBSD just include craptastic manpages. This really puts a dent in RTFM. In Linux-land this has been a serious PITA for years (Yes, I know how to hunt around for the packages to install the manpages in Redhat-ish and Debian ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/11/29/i-cant-get-no-satisfying-manpages/ 少子化 is the term used to describe the shrinking population in Japan and the many hardships that will bring to the country economically. I remember hearing some analyses on why this is happening on a social standpoint. I've not heard (or really bothered that hard to search for) ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/11/15/japanese-declining-population-rates-how-come-i-cant-find-a-doctor/ I love this quote It's obvious that GNU/Linux is a woman. She's high maintenance, expects everything to be given to her for free, and no matter what goes wrong... it's your fault. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/11/10/linux-is-a-woman/ iBanjo talks about hgsubversion which seems to be a good mercurial-subversion bridge at last. I'm surprised it took this long to show up but I guess the Mercurial community had not prioritized 'Build a better git-svn' as something someone should roll out... until now. Installation still looks a little painful (and requires ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/10/15/hgsubversion-finally-a-mercurial-subversion-bridge-that-jfw/ Scott Ru gives us some insights on the process Amazon uses to handle user reviews on their site. You start with some philosophical rules, and you try to make them stick. Providing guidelines is the only way to start. References Read more Scott Berkun's Blog Post on User Reviews http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/09/30/handling-user-reviews-on-a-website/ Via Kvardek-du through Planet Lisp http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/09/23/when-despaircom-meets-stackoverflow/ CNet reports that Tim O'Reilly keynoted a message to the Web 2.0 community that they should stop building SuperPoke and try to challenge more real problems. The CNet article jabs at O'Reilly Media itself helped to spawn some of these SuperPoke applications with all of these tech conferences that they have ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/09/19/oreilly-nudging-web-20ers-to-build-something-real/ So recently I saw this when doing a svn checkout of a project and ran into the following: $ svn co http://svn.somewhere.com/svn/projects svn: Unrecognized format for the relative external URL ''. Wonderful. This indicated to me there was a problem with the svn externals somewhere. After noodling a little I ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/09/18/fixing-that-svn-unrecognized-format-for-the-relative-external-url/ Seems that some cloud vendors (sheesh I really only knew about Google Ape... err App Engine, Amazon's EC2 service, and GoGrid) have been having some issues watching customer data go up in a poof. oops. Datacenter Knowledge mentions Flexiscale having issues The problems for FlexiScale began when one of the main ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/09/03/losing-data-in-the-clouds/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/07/24/social-networks/ There are many multiple file rename utilities that you can dig up. One that I am used to on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros is called rename which is one that is derived from the Perl Cookbook. However, note that this rename script does not seem to exist on other UNIX ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/07/16/multiple-renaming-utilities-mmv/ My short, short suggestion is... don't: This blog post explains it much better than I can although I definitely have been the victim of trying to generate a GPG key on a headless server to no avail: While trying to generate a gpg keypair on a remote server, I discovered ... http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hoanga/2008/07/14/on-the-irritation-of-trying-to-run-gpg-on-a-remote-headless-server/