Finding a job is work.

Business insider says the same thing I do about finding a job. Make finding a job your job.

OCR on PDF

Today I needed to take a PDF doc that consisted of a scanned book and convert it to text, to make it searchable. I used Craig Taverner's ruby script and it worked like a charm, once I changed the script to use the right tesseract path.

Motorola H700 Headset Pairing

Just in case someone else finds this useful:
We had trouble getting Motorola H700 headsets (we have several) to pair after a while. With multiple mobile phones in the house, we often mix and match headsets with phones. After searching on google, I tried the following, that seemed to work:

1. make sure the phone is ready to pair
   
2. With the boom closed, hold the call button on the headset until it flashes purple
3. flip open the boom
4. tell the phone to find devices

What's the best first programming language.

Just got through this article on Infoworld via Slashdot. It basically discusses opinions on what is the best programming language to start with. I'm of the contention that it doesn't matter so much, what matters is if the programming language lets the new programmer do something they think is cool. If a teenager is really into some MMORPG that has a scripting language, that is what they will learn. If you earn your bread and butter crunching numbers in Excel, you've got motivation to learn VBA. It's like human languages, you normally learn only what you "need";.My daughter got pretty good with LOGO, which they taught at school, because she got to use it to draw pictures.

Another pet peeve phrase

"Focused like a laser." "Laser-like focus." I could live with it if it weren't so heavily over-used. It gets to a point that a hackneyed phrase actually detracts from the point one is trying to make.

Firefox and Proxies

Seems not a very happy combination. I use a secured proxy to access internal websites at work from home. However, I don't want to go through that same proxy to access sites on the public internet. My system runs Ubuntu 9.04. For a while, I was running two parallel browsers, one using the proxy, and the other not. (Konqueror and Firefox). But Konqueror has issues with some of the websites. I gave a try to writing a proxy-auto-config file. And it worked. On everything except Firefox. So now I'm using FoxyProxy, which was the first proxy I came across, and seems to be doing the job. If this doesn't work as planned, I'll just install a proxy server to do the job.

The Definitive Guide to Grails

This book, by Graeme Rocher and Jeff Brown, gets a big FAIL for already being out of date. My goal in picking up a tech book is to get the cookie-cutter stuff in the tutorial to work right away, and then work my way deeper, explore the capabilities, and extend as I need, later. Examples started breaking in chapter 2, in the tutorial.
On the one hand, Grails is evolving quickly, so it is understandable that the book gets out of date. On the other hand, dropping $45 for a book where the basic tutorial doesn't work in six months means it's a bit premature to be writing books on the subject, that sort of content should probably be in a wiki that gets updated as the project evolves.

How do content producers make money in the future?

A post on slashdot got me to thinking about how creators of content will make money of their creations in the future. The most popular stuff is very easy to find pirated online. And what if the copyfighters get their way, and "information" becomes free? One thing I see happening is that technical content will be produced primarily by academics, as publications are one of the measures of academic success. Even if you make no money from your books and articles, as an academic you publish or perish. Or one would need some other means of getting a livelihood, and write for personal, not monetary, reasons. Author would cease to be a primary occupation. Certainly, it would cut down on pandering.

What about music? One century of making money off recorded music. I suppose musicians would go back to making a living the same way they did before records, by charging for live performances, and finding rich patrons.

Movies? For the time being, people still pay for the experience of seeing a movie in the theater. How long before the experience with pirated content can duplicate the in-theater experience? I think the route to keep bringing in money there is to make the in theater experience impossible to replicate at home. But I think that sales of DVDs are probably going to shrink.

Micropayments seem never to have caught on.

I used to think that "information wants to be free" was more of a rallying cry, or a justification for piracy of copyrighted content. But observation points to this as a statement of fact in the digital age, rather than a philosophical tenet. Mass-produced information will either stop havign any market value altogether, or only have value to the extent that it is very timely and very specific. We will move to a world where only custom content, which has value to only a specific person or small group, with resources to pay for it, will have value.

Advertisers will continue to pay for our attention. But we won't buy information, for the most part. We will pay for things and experiences. But not bits.

Good to the last drop - The Boston Globe

Good to the last drop - The Boston Globe
Mmmm... coffee. The addiction I just can't break. The only one complaining about my coffee drinking now is my dentist, who tells me it is too acidic.

Neurotic, a lttle?

Michael Arrington finds handshaking to be very objectionable. Main reason appears to be a germ phobia. So, is he of the sort to flush toilets with his foot (a practice I find highly objectionable). How about a mask to keep those floating germs people cough out all the time in winter from entering your nose? Some gloves, so you don't have to touch door handles?

He is asking the rest of the world to accomodate his phobia. Well, he does have some options that doesn't require the rest of the world to change to suit him. As I suggested, he could wear gloves. He could not touch his mouth and nose, or food, with unclean hands. (Isn't that what your mother taught you?) He could give would-be hand shakers a pre-emptive bow. Or, he could go all the way with his phobia, and stop meeting strangers in meat-space. How about carrying a tube of hand-sanitizer in his pocket?

Let's remember the significance of the hand-shake and the hug in American culture. Unwillingness to shake someone's hand, or accept a hug, signals to the rejected person that in some way you do not approve of them. Not a good way to win friends and influence people.

MindRaider

On the recommendation of FreewareGenius I took a look at MindRaider, because I'm always look for tools that can improve my knowledge management. My bases of comparison right now are Freemind and Evernote (since the announcement that Google Notebook is going away). From my perspective, although the author focuses a lot of his discussion around the semantic web, I have to treat it as another outliner. Adding the mindmapping and tagcloud features are very nice, it looks a bit like a combination of Wikidpad and Freemind. Some of its capabilities, such as the number of ways you can edit a node, are quite nice. 

What keeps me from wanting to use it as a regular note-taking tool:

• I find the inability to treat top level outlines, or even nodes with children, as leaf nodes, i.e., cut and paste and move around as necessary, to be a pretty big annoyance relative to how I work.
  
•  I can't look at multiple outlines at the same time.
  
• You can't refactor across outlines.
• Can't import outlines as subtree of existing outline.
• Attachments are only launchable. I can't just cut and paste a URL or file name.

Redemption of a failed culinary experiment

Last night I tried a new dish, chinese teriyaki chicken strips. 

• I marinated chicken breast strips in 
  
  • 4oz Shaoshing cooking wine,
  
  
  • 4 oz soy sauce,
  
  
  • 2 T sugar,
  
  
  • 1T grated ginger.


• Stir-fried chicken till almost cooked


• Added marinated and cooked until sauce thickened 

Unfortunately, my wok was too small for the amount of chicken. Next time I cook in batches. The chicken came out dry, although my daughter said the flavor was good.

Redemption of the dish came with lunch today. I made a sauce from duck fat, chicken stock, and a little Old Bay Seasoning, and added the chicken to it. With a slice of home-baked bread, it made for a very indulgent lunch. 

CouchDB creator's story

Damien Katz said that one of the reasons for the path he took in making CouchDB was that it would make an interesting story, and I have to agree.

Today's XKCD

Just classic.

Dvorak keyboard myth busted

Found this article by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis by way of Slashdot. It debunks the myth of the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard layout. Gives me the chance to feel a little smug about never bothering to learn that keyboard. ;)