Jeff Cutsinger

To Hallmark

2010-10-09T13:09:00.002-05:00

Nobody has any business playing the Christmas music you were playing at any time of the year. You have even less business playing it in early October, when it is accompanied by the shrieks and wails of your Halloween merchandise.

Why Rhythmbox is not my favorite music player

2010-10-06T17:27:00.003-05:00

In Rhythmbox:

Queue some songs and start playing them.
Browse to a different album and start playing a song from it.
When the song finishes, the next thing to play is: the next song on your play queue, not the next song in the album.
Hit stop.
Now, remove all the songs in your playlist. It will start playing the next song in your album.

That, my friends, is an example of a user experience train-wreck.

2010-03-16T15:54:00.003-05:00

Tonight I got home and decided to wash my hands for no particular reason other than to feel better about myself. A couple of minutes later, I was placing my keys & wallet on my bedside-table and asking myself "Did I just take my contacts out?"

I had. Not a big deal, except that I use Clear Care and had just committed myself to at least 6 hours of contact-free living. Not sure whether to blame age, daylight saving time, plain absent-mindedness, or some combination of the above. Oh well, guess I'll just have to wear glasses tonight.

Keeping care of your password(s)

2010-02-18T22:06:00.004-06:00

Do you want your data to be secure in this digital age? Follow these steps:

Create a 7 word pass-phrase using Diceware:
1. Get five 6-sided dice, a sheet of paper, and a writing utensil.
2. Roll the dice, writing the result down on one line of the sheet of paper. Read the dice from left to right. Order is important.
3. Repeat 7 times. When you are done, you should have seven lines with five numbers each.
4. For each line, find the corresponding word in the Diceware list. Write it down next to the number.
5. You now have seven words, chosen at random. This is your new password. For instance, in the highly unlikely event you rolled 11111,11112,11113...11121 (the first 7 words in the Diceware list), your new password would be "a a&p a's aa aaa aaaa aaron". This would be pretty hard to remember, but when you do it, the result will be easier. Again, order is important.
6. Memorize it, and store the paper you used in a secure location (in case you forget it).
Download a password manager. I recommend LastPass. If you are tech-savvy, I recommend KeePass/KeePassX. A password manager maintains a database of passwords for you. You should use your new password to protect this database, and only to protect this database. Do not give it to anyone or anything else. From now on, use this password manager to generate random passwords for everything that requires a password. Change your existing passwords.
When you are done, you will have one highly secure, easy to remember password.
From now on, when you meet a programmer, ask if the program he/she writes requires a password. If it does, punch him/her.

Nokia N900

2010-01-25T16:34:00.001-06:00

I bought a Nokia N900. It was a tough decision, especially since I'd never used one. I was afraid I'd have put in a large investment to be left with an unusable piece of garbage. Turned out really well. It's an eminently usable device.

My favorite things about it:

I have a fully functional computer on me at all times. And it can do pretty much anything my desktop computer can, including:
- Emulate NES and SNES games.
- Play 3D accelerated native games (Quake 3 is probably close to its upper limit).
- Download torrents.
- Browse the web using a real web browser (Firefox or Midori).
- Run a web server.
- Play media in just about any format.
- Read PDFs, e-books, and comic books.
Basically, anything a huge nerd such as myself could want to do.
The device isn't a proprietary black box. It runs a variant of Debian Linux with the Hildon desktop. It works with standard headphones, chargers, batteries, and memory cards. It has a freely available SDK and I don't need Steve Jobs' approval to write software that others can use on their phone. It will make calls on any GSM network. It can run other operating systems. It's almost like I actually own my phone. Novel concept.
It has a relatively nice camera, with flash and a shutter.
It multitasks really well, and has a good notification system. Instant messaging with multiple people is easy.

Things I would change:

The keyboard. The one it has isn't bad; but it could be a lot better. The screen should slide higher to give the keyboard more room, like the HTC Dream with its gorgeous 5 row keyboard.
The screen. Again, not bad. Again, could be better. Like a capacitive OLED.
The thickness. It's a bit too chunky for me.
The UI. It's a good UI, not a great one. Nokia is clearly putting a lot of effort into this.

All in all, it's a great device and I'm glad I made the purchase. I don't think I'll write another post of this length on it, though.

2009-11-03T20:21:00.003-06:00

Oven went on the fritz.

If I'd left it unattended, our apartment might well be burning right now.

2009-10-24T12:45:00.000-05:00

Installed Ubuntu 9.10 RC two days ago; haven't had a single problem.

2009-10-23T17:56:00.002-05:00

I feel so validated. One of my raid-1 drives failed yesterday (it'd been acting up before then). Thank goodness it was in a raid-1; otherwise I might have lost data. Sending the defective unit back to Western Digital.

2009-10-22T20:54:00.005-05:00

It's infuriating that so many companies don't get the concept of "you buy it, you own it". Why is it that virtually every device these days has locks built in to rob the owner of ownership? In no other industry would this be accepted.

I am an extremely loyal Nintendo customer-- I've owned (or my family has owned) an original NES, a Super Nintendo, a Nintendo 64 (missed out on the Game Cube), a Wii, and a DS. Every console/hand-held I've ever owned has been made by Nintendo. I own a Nintendo sweatshirt. I've got Nintendo toys on my desk at work. There's a Metroid poster on the wall above my desk. The only thing I'm missing is a tattoo, and if I had to get a tattoo, it'd probably be Nintendo related.

I love my Wii. It's the current object of scorn amongst most serious gamers, but I still think it's brilliant and I've wasted countless hours on it. But on the order of a year ago, it started making noise when reading from the disk drive. I put up with it a while until I found out that you could use homebrew to rip games to a USB hard drive. The perfect solution to my problem. No more noise, sure, but also no more messing around with game discs (which can be put away in a closet somewhere freeing up space in the living room) and much faster load times (no more waiting for doors to open or watching that animation loop). It was the perfect enhancement to the device I've enjoyed for so long.

So I did it, and for months I was happy with it.

I was sitting in the Chris Klinowski's living room, mesmerized. The little squares flew across the screen, ramming into the paddle in unison with the chip-tune beat, flashing while retro graphics scrolled around in the background. I couldn't pull my eyes away. I knew I had to have it and I was willing to pay Nintendo money for it. So when I got home, I booted up my Wii and started up the Wii Shop Channel. It informed me I needed to update my firmware.

You know what happens next.

You know what Nintendo? I own my Wii, not you. It's my device, and I don't appreciate you releasing firmware to destroy something that helps me enjoy it more. There was no functionality in that update; only code to break homebrew. I wanted to pay you money (and I did before I realized what happened), and what did you do in return? Vandalize my property. Well you know what else? I've got it working again. And I'm tempted to start pirating games, just because you've been a massive jerk to me. I've bought all the games I play on my Wii up until now, but you decided not to reciprocate my trust and loyalty.

Yes, I know it sucks that people use homebrew to pirate games. But guess what: no matter what you do, no matter how you try to lock down our property, people will pirate games. People steal music. They steal books. They steal software. Companies try to stop it, and companies fail. That's the reality of the digital age. You can try to stop pirates; you will fail. If I'd pirated bit.trip beat, I wouldn't have had to update my firmware. So you punished me for paying you. That's not a good business model.

So stop it! Or my next console won't be a Nintendo.

2009-07-25T21:59:00.006-05:00

Watched Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was a pretty good movie and overall they were true to the book (they took more than a little bit of "artistic license"-- but whatever). Sarah got to be heroine of the theater, too. If you're lucky she'll write a blog post about it.

What I'm really writing about, though, are the previews. There was one for "Where the Wild Things Are: Hollywood defecates on your childhood", and one for "Sherlock Holmes". After watching the trailer for Holmes, I couldn't help but picture the meeting that started it all:

Executive Producer: Ah, yes, you are in charge of stealing IP from the late 1800s, correct? You'll forgive me if I don't remember your name. I'll just call you worm.
English major, aka worm: Yes sir, thank you sir. I was thinking maybe we should make a movie based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Hol---
Producer: You can spare me the details of Sir Conan The Doylebarian, worm. Just tell me the plot.
Worm: Well, sir, it's the tale of a detective, Sherlock Holmes, who with the help of his friend Dr. Watson---
Producer: Are there explosions?
Worm: Well, not exactly---
Producer: Let me rephrase: Are there explosions?
Worm: Yes.
Producer: Tell me more.
Worm: Well, he plays the v---
Producer: He gets the girls, right? Lots of girls?
Worm: Hmm, not quite. You see---
Producer: Ahem.
Worm: Yes, he gets the girls. Oh, you'll like this: he's a drug addict.
Producer: Great! Make him a BOXER!!!
Worm: ...
Producer: Robert Downey Jr.! I love it! Great work, worm!
Worm: Thank you, sir, ve---
Producer: Let's see, I think story number, hmm, 27 will fit quite nicely. Thank God for computers, worm! In these hard economic times, we can't afford luxuries like "new stories" or "original plots". Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go fire the last of our creative talent and then take my company jet to the Bahamas to go play golf with my company-furnished pure-gold clubs and diamond balls.

2009-07-12T16:01:00.002-05:00

I know this is old hat for most, but auto-tune the news is awesome.

2009-07-03T13:38:00.006-05:00

I despise iTunes. It is allegedly DRM-free, but somehow we managed to get a track which needs authorization. In contrast, the Amazon MP3 store is good enough that I buy stuff off of it. Yes, I actually pay for music.

More Ubuntu love: people complain about linux hardware support, which is a legitimate complaint in some circumstances. But when linux supports your hardware, it's typically much, much better than in Windows. Case in point: I finally got around to setting up our printer on my desktop. It was extremely smooth, much smoother than on Sarah's Windows desktop:

The first part was the hardest: finding where to go. System -> Administration -> Printing (not shown). Then click "Add".

Searching? yeah right.

ZOMG! It worked. I didn't have to fill out any of this information, it was just there. Moving on...

Again, didn't have to fill anything in.

Why yes, I would like to print a test page.

And... we're done.

If you are a Windows or Mac user, I will refer you to the 129 page manual. Enjoy.

But the best part of running Ubuntu? I don't have to worry about accidentally installing iTunes.

2009-06-30T20:33:00.001-05:00

Just a friendly PSA: instead of the word "match" (which you strike to start a fire), you could use "fusee", "vesuvian", or "lucifer". The more you know and all that.

2009-06-27T10:47:00.001-05:00

Writing this from home. Finally broke down and got these newfangled "intarwebs" at the house. I've been organizing my computing life around the assumption that I don't have internet access at home for a while, so I'm going to need to re-evaluate a lot of the choices I've made.

2009-06-06T21:27:00.001-05:00

Missoula is a very cool place. I certainly wouldn't mind living here. Sarah couldn't get a job here, though.

2009-05-13T14:52:00.000-05:00

Two rules for storing passwords in a database: 1) Don't, unless you absolutely must. Let someone else do it (use Windows Integrated Auth, Kerberos, or some other equivalent). 2) If you must, generate a random number (the salt) per password and apply a relatively expensive one-way hash (SHA-512 is a minimum that is widely available) to the password concatenated to the hash.

2009-05-05T07:57:00.000-05:00

What I really want for Visual Studio 2010 is a feature that detects when a programmer is writing his own persistence layer and kills said programmer. It can start by looking for names like "DBHelper".

2009-05-04T07:20:00.000-05:00

Saw X-Men: Origins Friday. What an awful movie. Great fun. Also: adamantium bullets!

Saw Prairie Home Companion live at the Ryman Auditorium Saturday. It was nothing short of amazing. The radio show is one of my favorite shows; it's much, much better live. For one thing, I don't care for country music, so I often end up turning down the volume and not listening on the radio. But live, it doesn't matter; it's always interesting to watch skilled musicians play. There was Sam Bush, who can do crazy-insane-nuts things with the mandolin and the fiddle; there was Brad Paisley, who was good with the guitar; and there was some other chick who had a pretty good voice. Some highlights: Sam Bush and his band playing the Wabash Cannonball, which I won't even try to describe (it was that good), Brad Paisley playing an as-of-yet unreleased song "It doesn't matter who wears the pants, it matters who wears the skirt", which was clever, and the song with Garrison Keillor and Fred Newman about the human reproductive system.

On that note, the show we saw wasn't broadcast, which was good and bad. We missed a new Lake Woebegone; the one Garrison Keillor did was one we'd heard before. Funny, but disappointing. But, there were some gems throughout the show that probably wouldn't have happened in the broadcast performance. For one, during the Guy Noir skit (in which Brad Paisley is preparing for a performance which will open thusly: a group of bagpipes play the opening of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", a woman with an american flag gets shot out of a cannon singing "Brad Paisleeeeey", lands on a trampoline with a dancing chicken, and Brad comes out on a horse singing "La Bamba"), Brad lost his cool and started laughing, which was even funnier than the skit itself. Afterwords, he was playing one of his songs and, "I forgot the words to my own dang song! It's that 'La Bamba', I can't get it out of my head!".

Anyway, I'm realizing how paltry the whole thing sounds in my writing, so I won't punish you anymore. If you haven't already done so, you should tune into Prairie Home Companion. It's almost surely published by your local NPR station Saturday nights. Enjoy.

2009-04-22T12:16:00.001-05:00

My sincerest hope is that the Oracle-Sun merger will kill MySQL.

2009-04-17T13:05:00.003-05:00

Okay people, I don't see why this is so hard to grasp. Using only spaces for indentation is fascist. I don't agree with your tab-width. I don't care what it is; I don't agree with it. Use tabs to indent, and spaces to align. This always works. This lets me choose a tab with of 2, 4, 8, 3.5, -1, π, or whatever, look at your code, and be happy.

2009-04-13T11:40:00.004-05:00

"Why is programming fun? What delights may its practioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (...)
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men."

Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (via Grok2).

2009-04-07T10:08:00.002-05:00

What is it about sitting in front of a computer that makes people forget everything they know about punctuation and grammar?

2009-04-01T12:45:00.001-05:00

When I am president, I will outlaw putting the word "new" (and variants, such as "today's", "modern", etc.) in the names of things.

2009-03-31T15:16:00.002-05:00

OK. So in the "Resolve Conflicts" dialog, the "source" and "target" both have changes. But in the "Resolved Selected Conflicts" dialog, I can "undo my local changes" or "discard server changes". Excellent. As if merging wasn't hard enough already. Thanks, TFS.

2009-03-31T11:26:00.000-05:00

My hatred for Team Foundation Server knows no bounds.

2009-03-23T10:09:00.001-05:00

Just a friendly reminder. If you're still using Internet Explorer 6, stop. Upgrade to version 8 or Firefox (or Opera, or Safari, or...).

2009-03-19T07:46:00.001-05:00

It's always been awkward to say "niece and nephews". I'm so glad I can say "nieces and nephews" now.

2009-03-19T07:42:00.003-05:00

Bought a Brother HL-2170w. It arrived with a print quality issue; I called their customer support, who were very friendly and helpful. They resolved my issue, though I probably killed a tree in the process. Good purchase. Recommended.

2009-03-19T07:37:00.004-05:00

Just another day living with TFS:

Resolve Writable File Conflict - ccnet.config

Query returned zero conflicts. ccnet.config cannot be merged.

Please retry with another resolution option.

Yeah. I'm such an idiot. How could I have expected TFS to merge two files with no conflicts?

2009-03-09T07:51:00.001-05:00

Anyone else feel like they've just been robbed?

2009-02-25T10:03:00.002-06:00

Pointfree syntax in C# is some sweet. Why write

new[]{enumerable0, enumerable1, ... enumerableX}.Aggregate((enumerable0, enumerable1) => enumerable1.Concat(enumberable2))

when you can just write new[]{enumerable0, enumerable1, ... enumerableX}.Aggregate(Enumerable.Concat)?

2009-02-09T14:30:00.003-06:00

I made a turkey.

2009-01-26T11:53:00.003-06:00

I am very, very close to removing Windows from my machine at home. Linux has matured; it is ready for the desktop.

2009-01-23T14:20:00.001-06:00

I have my WiiMote talking to Ubuntu now. It's almost good enough to use as a mouse; but for now, it's more important that I have access to my classic controller.

2009-01-20T08:29:00.000-06:00

I ran yesterday for the first time in almost a week-- what a difference! My body is adapting pretty quickly.

2009-01-16T11:01:00.002-06:00

It is a strange feeling, being locked in your own home.

2009-01-16T09:24:00.003-06:00

I upgraded my Ubuntu install to 8.10 last night. Everything went smoothly. The Ubuntu upgrade situation is one of its greatest strengths. New releases every 6 months with a smooth upgrade process that not only upgrades the OS but all your applications-- makes maintaining Windows seem like a real chore.

2009-01-13T10:11:00.000-06:00

This small, quick post ("microblogging", if you're a doodyhead) method is working well. You can all quit complaining about the lack of updates, now.

2009-01-13T10:10:00.002-06:00

The run went well: 2 miles in 26 minutes. Looking forward to another run today.

2009-01-13T10:09:00.000-06:00

I'm going to roast a whole turkey for the first time this weekend.

2009-01-12T15:07:00.001-06:00

After work I am going for a run. I'm excited.

2009-01-12T12:45:00.001-06:00

Boom Blox is awesome. Be aware, however, that its music will never leave your head.

2009-01-12T11:51:00.002-06:00

Now that functional programming is becoming cool and practical, I think it's time to learn Prolog.

2008-12-27T17:47:00.002-06:00

I saw the Nutcracker as performed by Muscovites. A very fun experience-- The Arab dancers (who were actually Russians) were the most impressive, performing incredible feats of strength, flexibility and balance. I was, however, disappointed to find that there was no live orchestra.

2008-12-26T13:30:00.002-06:00

Since I'm such a big Freetard and DRM-hater, it should come as no surprise that I think HDMI is a big pile of fail. I was helping my dad hook up his brand-spanking-new home theater system, and in short, it was a huge pain. Thank God for HDCP, because otherwise, people might be able to "pirate" things, ARR. Also, it might be easy to hook up home theater systems.

2008-12-24T09:28:00.002-06:00

Biscuits, strawberry jam and sausage gravy, all homemade; and grovestand OJ. It doesn't get better than that.

2008-11-07T22:22:00.004-06:00

Twitter blows. I like the concept, but the execution is just terrible.

Firstly, web applications are allowed to ask me for exactly one set of credentials: the ones I use to identify myself to them. Asking me for the password to my email account is just unacceptable.

Secondly, notifications are evil. Notifying me that I haven't updated in the last 24 hours is, well, ludicrous.

Thirdly, how hard is it to provide a feed of all the people I'm following? You know, so I could subscribe to it in google reader?

The end.