Playing with Gmail

Been doing a little playing around with Gmail and regexes of late. A few things to note: (a) fetchmail is great, (b) if you want to backup your entire gmail account on Windows, this Life Hacker Guide is great but be sure to read the comment about port 995, (c) Google appears to only allow a certain number of pop messages to be fetched per connection, meaning you'll have to rerun fetchmail a bunch -- I don't think this is an error in how fetchmail is set up, (d) if you are looking for a good way of stripping attachments, try mboxscrub.pl from O'Reilly (though likely you'll need to modify the regex for the beginning of a new message (in the elsif condition), I think "/^From /" without the trailing dash is correct. It is amazing how much poorly structured data is in a few years worth of email.

GPSBabel (wonderful)

I bought a Garmin 305 a while ago (their new model looks even better) in the hopes that a gadget would spur me to exercise and to play around with geocoding photos. It has mostly worked. It did get me to exercise more and getting data on my runs is very satisfying but its windows software is sluggish and not that great. Plus it uses its own weird format making using the data elsewhere a bit of a pain. Fortunately, GPSBabel exists and was really easy to install. Just a quick "apt-get install gpsbabel" and the addition of "blacklist garmin_gps" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to make sure gpsbabel's usb driver is used instead of the default one on my debian/knoppix system. Then I use "gpsbabel -t -r -w -i garmin -f usb: -o kml -F out.kml" to create a KML file that is more useful. Woohoo! Will post more on geocoding photos (which it is fabulous for) in Windows and Linux later.

La Paloma *

based on the recipes found in Cocktail Jen (from Esquire) and The New York Times

3oz fresh grapefruit juice
1oz fresh lime juice
simple syrup to taste
soda
Optional: 2oz tequila (I used Conmemorativo)

Most recipes recommend starting with a grapefruit soda (Jarritos is recommended with others using Fresca or Safeway Select). I like the fresh fruit as long as it is well strained to get rid of the pulp. It also allows you to make the drink lighter and less sweet (especially for the non-alcoholic version). Some serve it with a salt rim, such as the version in the photo (credit to Urban Mixer), but I leave that off and serve it in a tall glass with lots of ice.

* I've been on a bit of a tear making interesting drinks at home. Mostly non-alcoholic though alcohol could go in most of them. Anyhow, I figured I would post some of the recipes here to spread the joy of a refreshing summer drink. Where they are consciously based off the creations of others, I'll post links.

Books are weapons in the war of ideas

David Weinberger describes a visit to the Open Content Alliance's scanning operation at Boston Public Library. A healthy dose of optimism after the sad news that Microsoft has stopped its scanning operation. The title of the post and the image on the right is from a U.S. Government war poster digitized by Boston Public. You can see the rest of the set or more from Boston Public at Flickr.

Congratulations to Boston Public and the Open Content Alliance.

 
[disclosure: I work on Google Book Search]

FOIA and Copyright

Another problem with crown copyright comes to light as British Columbia uses it to restrict distribution of FOIAed documents. Before you feel all superior (if you are an American), though the US doesn't have crown copyright (or federal copyright in the US in most situations), the federal government may be able to claim copyright abroad and states may also claim copyright. So this also could have happened here.

PS A good article on US government copyright is Becky Dale's column "Can The Government Copyright Public Records?"

Update: Only four days later comes news from Boing Boing that the State of Oregon is asserting copyright in the arrangement, compilation and notes of its revised statutes. Ug.

Graham: Creativeness, Roles and Companies

Paul Graham is a great writer and has written many great essays. His most recent makes the argument that humans are "naturally" suited to not having bosses and not working in large companies (he talks about the difficulties of groups over 8 people). I agree that there are many downsides to working at companies and I could certainly write about the upsides and why I love what I'm doing at Google, but that wouldn't really be disagreeing with Paul. I don't take him to be saying that starting your own company is always better, just that you should be aware that organizations of greater than 8 people have a cost that should be taken into account. He talks about it as being a "restrictiveness" that takes toll on creativity and says that it is a particular problem for engineers. Which brings us to his dismissal of why others won't feel the pinch:
"The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new."
I don't agree with this characterization of programmers as more creative than others. It is true that you never have to write the same code again (though how many times have you written authentication or a wrapper around an authentication class) but that doesn't mean that everything you write flows out of a brand new non-linear creative endeavour any more than a sales person's pitch is entirely new. Sales people sell services that have never existed (and then they get engineers to code this selling process into an online flow and move on to selling new stuff). Support folks get entirely new questions all the time (and then get engineers to code a system for responding to the easy stuff in an automated way). These folks that Paul singles out as being less restricted (or less "meant" to create) do all sorts of breathtaking new things too. I've seen support folks handle a very angry person with an issue with a brand new type of product by creating solution to the user's problem and explaining it in a way that is brilliant. I've seen sales folk come up with entirely new types of business arrangements or finding an elegant "in" to a relationship. It is certainly true that both of these groups do a bunch of work that is less creative, but so do engineers, even at startups (gasp!). These are the things that follow the creative move, things like debugging, unit testing, perfecting UI, etc. A good startup as well as a good big company, will value creation (and the stuff after the creation) in all of its people, not just the ones that are from Paul's chosen tribe.

Johnny Lee

Gotta say, Johnny Lee seems wicked cool. There is a lot to love. Goldman turned
me on to his homebrew head tracking Wii VR hack (see below), but his projects page is full of cool stuff (especially the community paint slingshot) and he's also funny (as evidenced by his videos and the names of his company -- Little Great Ideas -- and his blog -- Procrastineering.com). Watch the video, subscribe to the blog.

No-Knead Bread

Wow. I've been trying to make really good bread for many years with only mediocre bread as a result. About two years ago I clipped a great New York Times article about a fabulous new bread recipe. Unfortunately I didn't get the time to actually try the recipe until this past Christmas. And it is everything many people have described it as. Easy. Magnificent. Hard to screw up. Tasty. Moist. Fantastic. Mmmmm.

Since Christmas I have made it about seven times and I continue to be amazed by it. Now I've begun to try some modifications, but it has been hard to improve on the original. The basic trick is to use a very straightforward recipe (3cups flour, 1/4tsp yeast, 1 1/2cups water, stir together, let sit for 20hrs, fold down, let sit for two hours and then bake) with lots of water (when you fold the bread it will almost run through your fingers) lots of time (the first "sitting" is supposed to be at least 18hrs, but I have had good results with 24-30hrs) and a preheated dutch oven to bake (you bake in a covered pot that has been preheated with the oven to 450F, covered for 30mins and then uncovered for 20-30mins). Really, really simple recipe. Total working time (other than waiting) of about 15mins (including cleanup). And, really really good.

You should try it too. It will change the way you think about making bread. In case you need more encouragement, here is a video and flickr stream showing the results.

Photo by Alex.Lines

Update: I diverge from the recipe in two small ways. First, I use a bowl with plastic cling wrap for both of the risings (not cloth, which I have found to stick to the bread even when coated with flour) and I use parchment paper under the bread in the last rising so that I can easily pick it up and toss it into the hot pot. I tend to put the parchment paper in with the bread, though that doesn't make much of a difference either way, I just find it easier.