Tonight’s theme was “algorithms” with a wide variety of types being presented.

The first short talk I gave was on An Envy Free Cake Division Protocol, as given by the paper of the same name (PDF) and the fantastic book Cooking For Geeks. I cheated because a protocol is strictly speaking not an algorithm, but is still procedural. Nevertheless, the main criticism of the talk was that I didn’t actually bring any cake. I was happy to spread the sheer awe that I experienced when I found out there is a whole section of science devoted to optimal ways to cut a cake.

I also gave an abridged short talk on the Linux O(1) and CFS scheduling algorithms by Ingo Molnar. The O(1) algorithm is special for me because its debut during the 2.5 series got me interested in kernel development for its sheer simplicity and mantra that working code speaks louder that words.

I’m really excited by this event series. I’ve learned interesting practical and theoretical knowledge both times I’ve went and have really enjoyed the people who attend.

I’m still alive and life is good.

§ 2-42 Courteous.

(a) A driver shall be courteous to passengers.

It turns out that from § 2-86 a violation of this section is a $150 fine.

§ 2-44 Luggage and Property.

(b) A driver shall not transport for hire any property, except blood or vital human organs, unless such property is in the possession of a passenger.

I find it funny that this exception exists. Is it normal for hospitals to give these items to cabbies for transport alone?

(via geekology)

I’ve never quite been able to get it out of my mind since I first saw this, driving me slowly insane. Plus, I love animated gifs.

Eating and drinking too much with friends and family. Celebrating life and remembering those that did, but can no longer.

They are not looking down on me but they live in my mind and heart more than they ever did probably. Some, I was lucky enough to bump into on this planet of six billion people. Others shared much of my genetic material. One selflessly did her best for me all my life. That’s what mums do though. They do it for no other reason than love. Not for reward. Not for recognition. They create you. From nothing. Miracle? They do those every day. No big deal. They are not worshiped. They would give their life without the promise of heaven. They teach you everything they know yet they are not declared prophets. And you only have one.

I am crying as I write this.

He goes on in that answer with a touching anecdote about his mother that is worth reading.

In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry – in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For, without an informed and free press, there cannot be an enlightened people.

Potter Stewart, Justice of the United States Supreme Court, in his concurring opinion in New York Times v. United States, where the government asked the court to issue prior restraint against the New York Times to prevent it from publishing the Pentagon Papers. The court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Times.

The rest of the opinion, only a few other paragraphs, is worth the read.

So I took a look at my referrers:

And sure enough someone is hotlinking one of my images at http://forums.vwvortex.com. It turns out it’s my from my post about Buying a Reliant Robin:

Which they found because I’m the first hit in Google Image Search for “Reliant Robin”:

So I replaced it with this:

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece on how Joe Lieberman Emulates Chinese Dictators.

I just requested that my account be cancelled. You can too. I used to use Amazon as a convenient one-stop shop for pretty much everything, so yes, my life will get a little bit more inconvenient without said account.

Thomas Jefferson, 1791:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I support today’s release. Democracy was never intended to be conducted behind closed doors. A government is responsible to its people – not the other way around – and both would do well to remember that: history shows that governments are expendible, but the citizenry is not.

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-11-02 19:39 EDT
Interesting ports on dagny.detechnis.com (173.255.227.97):
Not shown: 987 filtered ports
PORT     STATE  SERVICE
53/tcp   open   domain
80/tcp   closed http
110/tcp  closed pop3
143/tcp  closed imap
443/tcp  closed https
465/tcp  closed smtps
587/tcp  closed submission
993/tcp  closed imaps
995/tcp  closed pop3s
1863/tcp closed msnp
5190/tcp closed aol
5222/tcp closed unknown
8080/tcp closed http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 30.28 seconds

What’s sort of annoying is that:

1. Port 22 (ssh) is blocked.
2. ICMP Time Exceeded messages are blocked (not shown), making tracepath unusable.

I will be attending the Linux Plumbers Conference and the Beer Advocate Belgian BeerFest in the coming days. More on those as they happen.

• ”On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services” (PDF link) by James Hamilton is essentially an end-to-end checklist for making an application work, scale, and be manageable. The paper, presented at LISA ‘07, is 12 pages of bullet points of recommendations from the author and various other employees of large application teams within Microsoft, focused around ten themes:

  • overall service design
  • designing for automation and provisioning
  • dependency management
  • release cycle and testing
  • hardware selection and standardization
  • operations and capacity planning
  • auditing monitoring and alerting
  • graceful degradation and admission control
  • customer and press communications plan
  • customer self-provisioning and self-help.

  It is definitely a concise way to make sure you’ve thought of how your services works, acts, and operates, and where you can improve it.

• ”Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?” by Jaron Lanier is an essay that was included in the New York Times Magazine themed on technology and education a few weeks ago. This essay speaks volumes on how we interact with technology and how technology guides how we think. Technology itself won’t make better educators, he argues, but use of the right technologies in the right ways may enable us to be able to make better educators.

The documentation for each of these components is at times a bit sparse and strangely arranged. The following pages I just found but I should have read them earlier:

• Overview of Jekyll
• Bloging like a Hacker
• Jekyll

Between those three, they do a good job of discussing what Jekyll is and where it succeeds and fails. I’ll just comment on my process.

Looking over and stealing the structure of existing sites, including mine is recommended. Of course, be sure to respect the original author’s copyright for content and code (mine is Creative Commons and BSD, respectively). I borrowed Tate Johnson’s, who recently redesigned his site to explicitly mimic Latex output with CSS3 and HTML5.

The conversion process was both easy and painful: it was easy to get started and get all of the information in place, but was painful to import all 220 existing posts. Exporting the posts were painless: the provided Wordpress migration tool worked like a charm. I did have to tweak it a bit to get topic name → file name conversion just right, and to pull down the few drafts of unfinished content in the database.

Converting the posts to valid Markdown pages would have been a Herculean task, but I decided that I at least wanted to convert them to a format that Maruku would parse and export to valid HTML. Maruku is particular about where raw HTML can appear, namely approximately in its own block. A lot of time was spent wrapping things in <span>s to get Maruku to stop complaining. I wrote some shell aliases to help me with the edit-debug-commit cycle. For a large portion of the attention-required posts, I just converted to valid Markdown.

Wordpress has a nice feature that I started using liberally: if a media URL appears in the body of a post and is not contained in a tag, it uses the oEmbed standard to convert the media to an HTML representation. This meant that I had to revise all of my YouTube and Flickr references to be valid HTML or Markdown. I was half way done writing a Jekyll plugin that would support oEmbed, but then decided this defeats the purpose of having a simple, static conversion process.

The rest of the stuff was easy. I wrote an RSS 2.0 feed and heavily modified someone’s existing Atom one (both of which you should steal from me). I used Yahoo’s YUI 2 Reset-Base-Font and Grids CSS as I hate dealing with browser-specific CSS differences. I used W3C’s validator constantly. I wrote a Perl-based unit test to make it easy and integrated in my Rakefile.

I’ve so far decided against having comments, but I do have a trivial topic branch that integrates Disqus comments. I’ll probably merge it some day soon.

My next rainy day task will be categorizing or tagging posts, which Jekyll supports strangely, so a million different people have reimplemented it in different ways.

This work was worth it to uncomplicate managing this simple weblog. I can compose in Vim, write in a decent markup language, have Makefile-like automation for testing and deployment, maintain revision history and have sane branching with Git, and not have to deal with security upgrades and unnecessary slowness.

Consequently, I redesigned this site using Jekyll, a Ruby-based “blog-aware” publishing tool that is the backend behind GitHub pages. Instead of dynamically generating content, it transforms all the content to static HTML files. It uses Markdown for its markup language, so composing directly in cumbersome HTML continues to not be necessary. I now have both a suite of unit tests that are run prior to deployment, as well as a QA site to test changes before going production with them.

The unfortunate side effect was that your feed reader probably went a little crazy and marked-as-new a bunch of old posts. Apologies for this: it wasn’t worth keeping the same timestamps. Also, there was a late-breaking bug in the RSS feed (but the recommended Atom feed was fine).

The source for this blog is available on GitHub. Let me know if anything is broken.¹

Often being positioned in areas designed to get you from one place to another (say, transportation hubs), I think it should be obvious that moving walkways do not exist to present an opportunity of leisure and rest, but to propel us faster toward our ultimate destination.

The paper “An Armchair View of Escalators and Moving Walkways” (pdf link) by Roger W. Garrison presents a neoclassical microeconomic analysis of exactly the trade-offs involved in deciding to stand or walk, and is an enjoyable, short read.

I’ll spoil the ending by giving this quote:

The only downside to exposing students to this armchair view of escalators and moving walkways is that they may never again be able to pass through an airport without thinking of indifference-curve analysis.

(Perhaps I will now attempt to collect empirical data on moving walkway usage).

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

• George Washington on religious freedom, 1790

Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.

• attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

It’s outrageous that Andrew Cuomo is raising the issue of religion This is about security; it’s about the security and safety of the people of New York.

• Rick Lazio, Republican candidate for governor of New York State, on the proposed Islamic center in Downtown New York.

Public - My favorite restaurant in the city won a Michelin Star this year. Great ambiance, interesting dishes, great mixed drinks.

El Faro - Really great, real Spanish food, in a super-casual atmosphere. They’ve been open since 1927 in the same spot; this was my parent’s favorite dinner date spot. Have the paella a la valenciana, and/or mariscada with green sauce, and some sangria, then some flan or laruca for dessert. This place is super packed on weekends; it’s best to go early on a weekday.

Casellula - A really great, small wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen/Midtown West with an amazing cheese selection and good lite fare.

Casa Mono - More upscale Spanish restaurant with an amazing wine list.

At least one of Eleven Madison/The Modern/Tabla/Gramercy Tavern - Danny Meyer’s restaurants; Eleven Madison is particularly great (but more expensive than the others), but all are worth visiting. The Modern is inside the MoMA, but eat in the Bar Room; the Dining Room is not worth it. All of them consistently get great reviews and awards, and are known for their great service.

La Esquina - Good Mexican street food upstairs (very informal), dressed up Mexican downstairs (reservations required; good people watching).

Tarallucci e Vino - a nice wine bar-turned-restaurant with a good menu.

I have many, many more, but I’d start with those.

Clearly, all of these processes would have the same process group, so we just needed to kill the process group as a whole. My other colleague and I came up with a good, stupid simple solution that neither of us had immediately thought of. As it turns out, Perl’s kill() system call interface has an interesting caveat that allows you to kill processes in exactly this way: when the signal is specified as a negative number, the function treats the other parameters as process groups to kill.

Actually, it turns out a lot of systems and shells allow specifying the process group ID as negative numbers to kill command/built-in where the pids would ordinarily go to specify the same action. It’s too bad my colleague was using an old version of ksh.

I also happened to luck out with the weather: when New York was experiencing a heat wave, Portland was experiencing the largest number of consecutive, beautiful days that it has had in months.

Here’s a recap of some of the places I went.

Day 1:

• Heathman Hotel - My company has a behind-the-scenes deal with Heathman, so I was required to stay here. While I definitely wouldn’t have picked it myself out of the many hotel options available in Portland, I’m really happy that I stayed here and would totally do it again. The staff here are extremely friendly and the service is excellent. My room was small, but comfortable, well stocked, and pretty luxurious. The only negatives were a dearth of sunlight (there are only heavy curtains and a small, non-tinted window) and there was a strongly anticipated (read: hungover, see “Portland International Beerfest” below) breakfast room service order never arrived.

• Waterfront Bicycles - After dropping off my luggage at the hotel, I headed down to Waterfront Bicycles to pick up the bicycle I had reserved for the week. Interacting with the guys at the shop was enjoyable and they immediately picked up that I have a bit of an interest in bicycles. I got a Trek Hybrid that worked out pretty well, though part of me still wonders if I should have sprung for a more expensive road bike or even shipped my fixed gear from home. I even had a bit of an incident regarding a large stick killing a small, detachable component of my rear fender, which I pointed out but didn’t get charged for.

• Pine State Biscuits - While waiting for my plane in the airport, I overheard a cookbook author talk about how he only had one must visit restaurant on his list: Pine State Biscuits. I figured the idea of really good biscuits and gravy sounded amazing, so I decided to make this my first stop. Upon tasting their offerings, the only disappointment I experienced was that at some point in the near future, I would have no more amazing biscuits and gravy, and sweet tea. So delicious, this is a must visit destination. Apparently, this place gets packed on the weekends during peak hours, so do what I did: middle of the afternooon on a weekday.

• Saint Cupcake and Noun - I took a walk down the road and happened upon a cute little store front that houses both a cute little cupcake shop and a cute little kitchy shop. Both are worth visiting: the cupcake I had was delicious and I bought a cute little fabric sack as a case for my phone.

• Stumptown - Stumptown is the name in coffee right now, and it started in PDX. This particular outpost has a Stumptown cafe and their Annex, which sells over a dozen beans by weight. They also have daily coffee tastings, which I was fortunate enough to experience: the baristas take you on a guided tour of both how to taste coffee and what you’re tasting. It’s basically an open house on what they do when they source new coffees for their shop; moreover, it’s a time for the baristas to geek out about coffee and share their passion with their guests. Highly recommended.

• Chinese Garden - This is just an awesome example of a Chinese garden, situated in the middle of a city. Bring a book, find a place with a gorgeous view, and stay for hours.

• Clyde Commons @ Ace Hotel - I can’t recommend this strongly enough: I ended up at the bar three separate times because they have awesome food, even better bartenders, and they’re open ‘til midnight. Every bartender is so passionate about his craft: most of my drinks were off-menu, spurred by a simple question of, “Can you make something that would go with this?” The storied burger is overrated, but the lamb is beautiful. I even recommend coming here alone, if you’re travelling that way, placing a book down at the bar, and striking up conversations with your neighbors.

• Tear Drop - More really, really good cocktails, and open late. While the bartenders here weren’t as interactive as those at Clyde, their offerings were nevertheless delicious.

Day 2:

• Manhattan Cafe - Needing a bite to eat before my massage, I stopped by this cafe, just down the street from my next destination. The service here was excellent, but otherwise, this was a good, ordinary cafe. Its large space would be very conducive to coming here to hack or meet with people.

• Zama Massage - Great massage at extremely reasonable prices, but in the middle of nowhere. Note that this is not a spa, so you won’t get the whole bathrobe and tea experience.

• Backspace Cafe - A huge cafe with lots of art that doubles as a music space at night. Be sure to come here to write some code with good coffee and check out the list of bands playing.

• Gilt Club - I highly recommend coming to this restaurant. While the locals seem to look down upon it for its haute culture food and ambiance (which they consider non-Portland-like), this Manhattanite really appreciated their work. I had a “Tracy’s First Love” (house-infused cucumber vodka, muddled cucumber, basil, and fresh line) and the Foie Burger, a beautiful combination of house-cured bacon with foie gras.

• Ground Kontrol Barcade - Hell yes: a dark, dingy, beer-serving arcade, with tons of games at quarter play, a live DJ spinning good music, and – more importantly – tons of pinball machines. This is a must visit, especially if you think Barcade in Brooklyn is awesome. I came here twice and that was too few. Don’t mind the weapons check upon entering.

Day 3:

• Portland Saturday Market - All the guide books and websites say this is a must see. I don’t: it was much like the generic street fairs in New York. There are a few t-shirt artists worth visiting here, though.

• Widmer Beer - Recommended. The tour isn’t amazing (ours was cut short due to activity in the bottling room), but it’s worth a visit. And you get a free bottle opener and pint glass. Definitely taste the IPAs in the Widmer brew pub, though.

• Amnesia Brewpub - This was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my trip: This is a great brewpub, with great brews, great bartenders, and a great space. Sit at the bar, have one of everything, and talk to the other locals. The location is off of the typical tourist rounds, (but|(and therefore)) is totally worth it.

• Random Order Cafe - I had some time between the brewpub and a show of some local punk bands that was recommended to me by the guys at Amnesia, so I perused the neighborhood. I stopped by this cafe due to their beautiful array of pies on offer. The Jamaican stone fruit pie did not disappoint; it was easily one of the best pieces of pie I’ve ever had.

• Tin Shed - A good local bar with lots of outdoor seating. The punk show I went to was entertaining and free. It’s worth visiting if you’re in the area and need food/beer.

Day 4:

• Bijou Cafe - I had a delightful Sunday brunch here. Not only did I find a copy of the Sunday Times on the counter, but even the off-menu fruit plate side was pretty innovative. (Fruit plates? Innovative? Hmph.)

• Stumptown (next door to Bijou) - The coffee was great as always, with a lot of seating, and good music playing. The line is long on the weekends, but feel free to stay a while and enjoy their stable wifi.

• Springwater Corridor and Sellwood - I’m really happy I made the trip down to Sellwood, which is pretty far from downtown Portland. Cycling along the Springwater Corridor (bike path) was worth it alone; when I come back, I’ll bring a racing bike and do this path properly. The path itself is separated from any roads for miles and supplies some amazing views of the Willamette River. Sellwood itself is a cute little area, with lots of antique shops and small restaurants.

• Powell’s Books - This is one destination that both locals and tour books recommend. I didn’t understand this: a bookstore is just a bookstore, right? I was surprised at how much time I spent perusing the books and kitchy items they have around the shop. It’s kind of like the Stand, but way better. I totally echo the recommendation to come here. Also, for geeks, go to Powell’s Technical Bookstore down the street: I found some awesome original reference manuals and very niche publications.

• Portland International Beerfest - This was fantastic. I was surprised to see how many unique, rarely seen beers were offered here. The VIP package is a great deal, so long as you spend many hours with your friends here with copiously long breaks: they serve 4oz pours.

  Some notable beers I had here:

  • Nectar Ales Black Xantus (seriously awesome, have at all costs)
  • Mikkeller Simcoe Single Hop
  • De la Senne Equinox
  • Caldera IPA
  • Sam Smith Yorkshire Stingo

Rest of trip

Most of the rest of my time was spent at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). I did visit two other places during the conference worth mentioning:

• Slow Bar - A good local bar with a really good burger, open late.

• Oregon Brewers Festival - This is a seriously big beerfest, with two different lawns lined with long tables full of delicious offerings, at a great location in the esplanade along the river. Spend all of your tokens at the Buzz tent, where the most unique and the rarest beers of the festival are served. I wish I was here for more than one of the days of the festival; I totally would have returned. And, at $20 for 14 pours (7 pours at the Buzz tent), it would have even been a cost-effective way to spend time.

  Some notable beers I had here:

  • Caldera Mogli (Seriously one of the best beers I’ve ever had. Try at all costs.)
  • 21st Amendment Mo’TCHO Risin’
  • Medocino Brewing Imperial IPA
  • Terminal Gravity Single Hop Double IPA
  • Laughing Dog Dogzilla Black IPA

Unvisited Recommendations

Other places that were recommended that I didn’t get to (aka the “When I go back to Portland…” list):

• Japanese Garden - Supposedly a really awesome garden.

• Rose Test Garden - Supposedly a really awesome garden, part deux. I hear the guided tours are worth attending (and free).

• Davis Street Tavern - This place looked really nice with a good menu. It suffers from the same complaints of locals that it doesn’t really fit in Portland, but the volume of patrons shows otherwise.

• Park Kitchen - I arrived just after the kitchen closed, so wound up at Gilt. I should have and will come back here at some point as the menu looked good and the bar manager (whom I met at another bar) is a really nice guy.

• Prost - A German beer place where supposedly they serve a large number of German/Austrian beers out of a boot. I presume that the boot is made out of glass.

• Hop Works Brewpub - I’m told the number of hoppy taps here are off the charts, with really good homebrews. It’s supposed to be the best brewpub in Portland.

• Green Dragon - Another awesome brewpub, recently purchased by Rogue (which has its own brewpub in Portland, but which itself isn’t recommended).

• Beaker and Flask - This looked like a really nice bar and restaurant and was recommended to me by a bartender at Clyde.

• Saburo’s Sushi - All of the locals swooned at the mention of Saburo’s. Try their specialty rolls.

• Deschutes Public House - The brewpub of a well-respected, Portland-based brand. The restaurant looked cool, and the brews I had elsewhere from Deschutes indicates the stuff they have on tap would be fantastic. This seemed to be the standard brewpub against which the locals would compare everything else.

• Bridge Port Brewing - The above description of Deschutes also applies here.

• Laurelthirst Public House - recommended to me, but I don’t remember why.

• Voodoo Doughnuts - I still don’t understand the attraction of this place, but locals and tourists both speak about with absurdly high regard.

• Podnah’s BBQ - comes highly recommended by a local.

• Laughing Planet - Hipster Mexican.

• Pok Pok - this one is supposed to be seriously off-the-hook.

General Recommendations

• Ask for recommendations from locals - People here are super friendly and really want you to experience the awesomeness that is Portland. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

• Food Carts - Where I thought food carts were pervasive in New York, the food cart movement has totally conquered Portland, and in a better way. There are so many different kinds and they’re located everywhere. Ask some locals about their favorites.

• Resist temptation: Drink in moderation - Don’t let a good night preclude your activities tomorrow; there are too many cool places to experience.

• Rent, borrow, or bring a bicycle - Portland is a fantastic pedestrian city, with a well-organized mass-transportation system. But, since the city is so bike friendly (bike lanes everywhere, pervasive bike racks, and even bike hooks on the trolley system), having a bike here makes life more fun and more convenient. Spend the money to get a good bike or ship your own here: you won’t regret it at the end of your trip, but instead wonder how you’d experience the city without a bike.

Resources

Pick up a copy of these free, really useful resources to help plan your trip:

• Portland Monthly and Mix magazine - both of these local magazines are free at hotels and have some good tips on local events and where to go.

• The Portland Mercury - a local newspaper sort of like the Village Voice for Portland. Good goings-on recommendations.

• Walking Maps (from MapClicks.com, but in paper form)- pretty much all the popular places (and hotels) have the same walking maps, one per neighborhood. Pick them up, but only use them as a guide to where the neighborhoods start and end.

• Finder - “Willamett Week’s Guide to Portland”, a pretty, annual publication. This one smells more of directory and tourist index, but still has good descriptions of places and a good organization.

• Brew-Ha! - a directory of Oregon brewpubs.

I wrote:

I work as a database administrator in a global team looking after a large financial institution’s relational database plant. For better or worse, this plant is 100% COTS; we’ll see what I can do to change that.

While database administration in our group is awesome (computing + adrenaline = fun), I most enjoy the time spent writing internal tools in Perl and C, from compiled plugins for DB2 to automation solutions, and analyzing system faults in Linux.

Evangelizing and teaching new trends, technologies, and best practices to my group is as important and enjoyable as the code I write, though. I love the reaction I get from disciples who finally realize and understand the power of git and zsh.