Mental Masturbation, Musings, and Methods

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give Google Reader a try.  I have been addicted to Netvibes for at least 2-3 years now, but I saw that Reader had a more active community around it, so I thought it was worth trying out.  Almost immediately I disliked the look and feel.  I am subscribed to over thirty fairly active RSS feeds and  in Reader it was hard to see which blogs had new posts.  The default action is to just look at a long list and viewing posts by blog is almost hard to do.  As a result “Mark[ing] all as read” for a specific blog takes many more scrolls and clicks, which had been extremely easy in Netvibes.   About this time I was giving Mozilla’s Jetpack a try and found the Google Reader Notifier, which would notify me via Growl of new posts.  So I decided to give Reader a longer try, despite some initial disappointments.

Ultimately, I became addicted to these near instant updates for new blog posts that the Jetpack extension provided.  At the same time I learned to love the fact that by default I was forced to read the title for every blog post in Reader.  Where as before in Netvibes I would never scroll through the backed up posts from Gizmodo and Engadget, Reader’s chronological ordering makes me go through each post.  Recently, this is just another case where what I think I want does not match up with what actual creates a better user experience (similar to Google’s analysis of users searching more with 10 results despite asking for as many as possible or  Dan Curtis’s explanation that we are not in control of our deicions).  Also, this reminds me of Aza Raskin‘s statement “Every time you make the user make a decision they don’t care about, you have failed as a designer.”  Interestingly, Google forced me to make a harder decision than I wanted to make; where before I could avoid deciding whether or not to remove the blog by just leaving it on my page and just easily clicking away new posts with “Marking all as read,” I now had to decide to either read the post titles or make the leap to get ride of the RSS feed all together.  While I was able to be lazy before, it made for a more concrete decision and user experience.

The other thing I realized was that the Jetpack extension for Reader notifications was causing my browser to hang when I had a bad internet connection.  Sadly, living in an off campus apartment with spotty Internet this happens all too often, and I decided to disable Jetpack.  However, I missed the notifications and decided to fix the Jetpack extension.  I reworked the old extension to only perform asynchronous AJAX calls, getting rid of the browser hanging issue, and modified the extension to display notifications to show new posts by blog title, thus making the notifications more informative.  The status bar display and the new Growl notifications can be seen below.  Click here to install this extension or here to view the code.  Of course, let me know your thoughts or any bugs you run into.  Thanks.

Also, as some friends like Niru, DJ, and Marc have pointed out, I have somewhat decreased my blogging but have been posting a good number of posts on Twitter.  So of course, you should follow me on Twitter here.

For the past few months I have been following the progress of Chromium for Mac and watching it develop and it has definitely made a lot of progress in that time. In the past few month it has received increasing press, with people asking why it is taking so long. One of the lead developers on the project responded that people need to chill out and that building a browser takes time.  So, in part to show myself and others the progress, I decided to make a little application to show this progress.  Throughout the day builds and updates of Chromium are posted to http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/sub-rel-mac/ but to read each changelog was a pain. So, to give myself more exposure to new Python libraries and give the Twitter API a swing, I created a script to check for changes to the builds, pull log entries on the changes and post them all to a Twitter stream so there is a single source you can view updates. The script is far from perfect, as it has to be running to catch the updates and doesn’t go back and look for ones it missed. And currently I just have it running on one of Duke’s servers so it goes down occasionally. But it generally works and provides plenty of updates so you can see what is actually be worked on and updated. Check out the source code below (twitter username and password cut out).

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#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
 
import sys
import os
import urllib
import urllib2
import base64
import time
from xml.dom import minidom
 
def twitter(twitter_username, twitter_password, message):
	request = urllib2.Request('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json')
	request.headers['Authorization'] = 'Basic %s' % ( base64.b64encode(twitter_username + ':' + twitter_password),)
	request.data = urllib.urlencode({'status': message})
	try:
		response = urllib2.urlopen(request) # The Response
	except HTTPError, e:
		print "Error posting to twitter"
		print "HTTP Error code: ", e.code
	except URLError, e:
		print "Error posting to twitter"
		print "URLError reason: ", e.reason
 
def main():
	message = ""
	last_update = "17514";
	chromium_url = "http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/sub-rel-mac/"
	while(True):
		try:
			response = urllib2.urlopen(chromium_url + "LATEST")
		except HTTPError, e:
			print "HTTP Error code: ", e.code
		except URLError, e:
			print "URLError reason: ", e.reason
		else:
			latest = response.read()
			print "latest: ", latest
			if(latest != last_update):
				try:
					response2 = urllib2.urlopen(chromium_url + latest + "/changelog.xml")
				except HTTPError, e:
					print "HTTP Error code: ", e.code
				except URLError, e:
					print "URLError reason: ", e.reason
				else:
					html = response2.read()
					# print html
					dom = minidom.parseString(html)
					entries = dom.getElementsByTagName("logentry") #[0].childNodes
					print "entries: ", len(entries)
					for i in range(0, len(entries)):
						link = chromium_url + latest + "/ "
						msg = entries[i].getElementsByTagName("msg")[0].firstChild.nodeValue
						num = entries[i].getAttribute("revision")
						print "Revision: ", num
						twitter("USERNAME", "PASSWORD", "Chromium Revision " + num + ": " + msg)
					last_update = latest
			time.sleep((60*2))
 
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
	main()

Play with the code or follow the twitter. Also, I decided to try a new WordPress plugin for code so let me know what you think. Thanks.

As usual I haven’t posted in a while but there actually have been some things going on that may be worth writing on here.  I’m at Duke for the summer doing research with the Physics Neutrino group, among other things so here are some things that have happened:

Ethical Hacking Seminar

Duke OIT gave me the opportunity to take this hacking seminar at Duke the first week of summer.  It was definitely an extremely beginner course and I was a little disappointed to see that so much of it was just “pick the right tool and run it,” but good opportunity to dig a little deeper into network protocols and learn some new things; without a doubt was worthwhile.  If anyone reading this is as much of a beginner as I am check out things like Ettercap, nmap, and Nessus.

Duke’s AFS Online Interface – Webfiles

The past year I have been working with OIT, half doing web application security and half doing programming updating Duke’s online interface for its AFS file system, Webfiles.  Essentially, it was an attempt to make the online interface more comfortable for average users and make it most similar to Windows Explorer and OS X Finder so that using it is as intuitive as possible.  The coding was anything but beautiful, but it was a good opportunity to learn more about Javascript and play with some fun things.  General changes are that it now has an icon and outline view, drag and drop, some of the typical shortcut keys, etc. Below are some screenshots and I will try to create a demo site at some point.  I am also excited to say Duke is making all my code open source so let me know if you would like to implement it yourself.  I believe Carnegie Mellon is currently looking at deploying it on their systems, which I think is exciting.

Neutrino Physics

I just started working with Professor Chris Walter and his Neutrino Physics group.  So far, just to get into the group, I have been working on creating a plug-in for ROOT to make it read and write to a specific kind of distributed file system faster.  It has been an interesting experience getting back into C++ and a little bit of Fortran, and learning about this large project out of CERN.  I’m still finishing up the plug-in but hopefully I will be able to post the code or at least write about how to easily integrate the plug-in into ROOT when I’m done.  Not sure what I will be doing after that; I am taking classes on GEANT4 and think I will be doing monte carlo simulations of some sort for the rest of the summer, but I will write about this when I know more.

Simple Flash Cards in Python

The second reason I am here for the summer is that I need to take Spanish to fulfill Duke’s foreign language requirement.  If you actually know me, you will know that I am horrible at foreign languages and have been dreading taking these classes since I got to Duke.  It has now been two years since I last took a Spanish course, so jumping back into the language has been an interesting experience.  Also, Spanish 63 is known to be a lot of work and over the summer its so jam packed together that it is actually a good amount of work each night.  Anyway, we had our first test last Friday, and I had about 100 words of vocabulary to memorize, one of my worse skills.  So, both to procrastinate from actually studying and because I thought it could be useful, I decided to make a basic command line flash card program.  I’m trying to bit by bit pick up Python, so I used it and it was fairly simple.  The program essentially takes in a plain text file with the two sides of the flash card on one line, each side separated by a colon.  It then goes through the lines, shows you the second half of the line first, waits for you to press enter and then shows you the first half.  If you press enter again it will discard the word and go to another random word in the deck; if you type ‘x’ and then press enter it will put the word back in the stack.  Fairly basic, and the code is nothing special; probably took about 15 minutes to throw together, but it was surprisingly very useful as I could run through a lot of the vocab very fast and repeatedly. I’ll probably update it to make it a little better packaged together with proper arguments, etc. so you can check back for that.  Anyway, to run it (if you have a Mac python is installed by default and in Windows you need to do it yourself) open up a terminal and make sure you are in the folder where the code and the text file with the vocab are.  Then just type:

python flashcards.py yourvocabfile.txt

The code for flashcards.py (example vocab linked here) can be seen below:

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#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
 
import sys
import random
import os
 
def clearscreen(numlines=100):
    if os.name == "posix":
        # Unix/Linux/MacOS/BSD/etc
        os.system('clear')
    elif os.name in ("nt", "dos", "ce"):
        # DOS/Windows
        os.system('CLS')
    else:
        print '\n' * numlines
 
def main(argv=None):
	if argv is None:
		argv = sys.argv
	allLines = []
 
	again = 'x'
	if(len(argv) > 2):
		again = argv[2]
 
	f = open(argv[1], 'r')
	for line in f:
		allLines.append(line)
 
	clearscreen()
 
	cnt = 0
	wrong = 0
	wWords = []
	while len(allLines) > 0:
		cnt += 1
		l = allLines.pop(random.randint(0, len(allLines)-1))
		parts = l.split(":")
		p = 1
		p2 = 0
		print cnt, "(", len(allLines), "). ", parts[p]
		inp = raw_input("")
		if(inp == "exit"):
			break
		print parts[p2]
		inp = raw_input("")
		if(inp == "exit"):
			break
		if(inp == again):
			allLines.append(l)
			wrong += 1
			wWords.append(l)
		clearscreen()
	clearscreen()
 
	print "Missed ", wrong, " times"
	for line in wWords :
		print line
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
	sys.exit(main())

Again, nothing special or fancy, but seemed to work well; I guess I’ll know how effective it was when I get the test back haha. Anyway that is all for now, I may make public a post I wrote a few months ago that I never published, so check for that and I’ll write of any other things I do this summer. Also check my twitter as I post more frequently there. Time to go outside.

I tried this over break but didn’t have enough room on my internal hard drive, but now that I’m back at school downloaded the source for chromium to my external (took up about 10 gig) and built it (about another 5 gig).  And it actually runs!  Its definitely still in development, crashes on all sorts of little things, but its cool to see it progressing and it is definitely lightweight right now.  Odd thing you’ll notice in the screenshot is that half of the Chromium processes in Activity manager show as being Not Responding.  Anyway, here’s a screenshot just because I thought it was cool.  Click for full size.

Haven’t posted in a while and having some free time for the first time in a long while, I thought I’d write something.  After having a few friends becoming obsessed with Twitter at The Chronicle (Duke’s student newspaper that I am partially involved with – I’ll write about this at some point), I can’t bring myself to write a full blown 140 character tweet but should be able to write a good few paragraphs here.  Anyway, I think I’ll delve a little more than I have previously into my academics.  I am currently taking Physics 181 (Intermediate Mechanics), Physics 176 (Thermal Physics), Math 107 (Linear Algebra and DiffEq), CS 104 (Comp. organization, essentially assembly), and cultural anthropology 181, which is about musical protests.  Interesting mixture of courses and constantly changing my view on the different subjects.  I have to declare my major within the next two weeks and am planning on officially declaring as a double BS in physics and computer science.  However, I am not sure what that will actually result in, as I would like to shape my CS degree to be more oriented towards CS theory and less on systems and large projects.  On the other hand, shaping my major this way means I would need to either not get an official CS degree although I’d have more than enough courses, or getting an interdepartmental major, which the DUS of physics seems to be very against.  Neither seems ideal, but I figure I’ll take what interests me and what helps me further my work and knowledge, and let that philosophy take me where it may; I figure it can’t lead me that far astray, especially if I don’t even know what path I am straying from.  Anyway, that’s where I am at right now.

Yesterday at work (my job with Duke OIT) we finished up my code for the new version of Duke’s online AFS interface – Webfiles, which should be tested and rolled out in coming weeks.  I believe we will be making it open source, which I think is exciting.  This led me to my next endeavor today, which was to finally install Git and integrate it with Textmate.  As usual when I do small new things like this that change what I am used to, I realize how little I know about some parts of computing, especially Unix.  I am thinking about forcing myself to use Vim for a little while and properly learning Unix.  New great command: which.  After installing things with macports like mysql or git, and with my not great knowledge of Unix systems  this command is really helpful for integrating it with the rest of my OS X installation (such as letting Textmate plug into it).

Ironic, I know that I started off the post explaining I don’t like CS systems courses and finish the post by explaining the cool new Unix command I learned, but I think I am comfortable with that paradox.  Random Unix commands and little tidbits like that seem more like something I will continue to learn in practice, not something I should spend a semester on in one of my few semesters left here.  Anyway, this was a nice exercise in public introspection.   As I always say, I’ll try to write soon; hopefully I’ll actually do that one of these times.