The engagement was first and when the news hit my Facebook profile, I was struck by how many more of the commenters were female. Eight people posted on my wall, all female. 42 people “liked” the news, females at twice the rate of males. My Fb friends are gender balanced (48% female, 47% male, 4% not specified) so I wondered what accounted for the difference. Are females more likely to be happy about an engagement? The comments were gender split 14/15, but counting up all 79 responses, 50 were female to 29 male, still almost twice the rate of reply.

When I passed my thesis proposal, the responses seemed mostly male, but once I counted them out it was less clear. Of 13 comments, 8 female and 5 male. Of 50 likes, 30 female and 20 male. So of all 63 responses, 38 (60%) female and 25 (40%) male. Are women just more supportive? (Or more specifically, my female Fb friends?) Hard to say. It is still striking that there were 8 wall posts from women on the engagement and none from men (and none from anyone on the less romantic proposal). Maybe women are more likely to make that stronger public support (that is the wall post) of love? Dunno, but I do know I managed to avoid working the last 20 minutes while still doing work-like activities.

I worked on it a little more to be able to add it to Homebrew’s bash-completion package. Though it turns out that Homebrew’s package just grabs from the main bash-completion distribution so I’ll have to see about adding it there.

In any case, here in all its glory, a bash-completion for Rake. It caches automatically so all but the first use is fast. It also checks for a tmp/cache directory (present in Rails projects) and places the cache in there if available. This saves you from having to add the .rake_t_cache file to your SCM’s ignore list.

But Quicksilver is also old and buggy. The build I’ve been using is from 2006 and it’s is prone to long pauses and abrupt crashes. I’ve tried newer builds but they break SSH Plugin and I could never part with it. Today I decided to give it another try and discovered RemoteHosts. It does a lot more but there’s one critical setting if you want it to work like SSH Plugin: Go into the catalog for it and enabled the checkbox for ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

Incidentally, if you also need the latest Quicksilver binary, this is the latest I could find : Downloads for tiennou’s blacktree-alchemy – GitHub. There are new versions in the quicksilver source tree if you want the latest. All you needis XCode and it’s a one button build.

It’s a shame that Quicksilver has languished when it does so much that its upstart competitors still lack. Maybe the new Quicksilver Collated site will help.

expected valid? to return true, got false

So I went looking for a way to see what errors there actually were in the validation. First I came upon rspec: model.should be_valid // opensoul.org. That looked good but it didn’t work for me on Rails 3 with Rspec 2. Then I found Creating a custom “be_valid” matcher for rspec_on_rails « nuby on rails, which has more details but still didn’t work. (Also the way I also found (My) RSpec best practices and tips | EggsOnBread, which is too good not to share.)

With some more searching I found a good walk-through on writing custom matchers RSpec 2 with an example of how to show errors on one specified field: solnic.eu / Custom RSpec-2 Matchers. I’m not sure how it’s different from the built-in errors_on. It also used the deprecated module Spec:

*****************************************************************
DEPRECATION WARNING: you are using a deprecated constant that will
be removed from a future version of RSpec.
<internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require'
* Spec is deprecated.
* RSpec is the new top-level module in RSpec-2
***************************************************************

With the help of all the above, a version that works in Rails 3 and RSpec 2:

RSpec::Matchers.define :be_valid_verbose do
  match do |model|
    model.valid?
  end
  
  failure_message_for_should do |model|
    "#{model.class} expected to be valid but had errors:n #{model.errors.full_messages.join("n ")}"
  end

  failure_message_for_should_not do |model|
    "#{model.class} expected to have errors, but it did not"
  end

  description do
    "be valid"
  end
end

Change the name to “be_valid” if you want. That works but I don’t like replacing standard stuff. Guess I’m not a Rubyist yet.

Is there a way to get this functionality without writing a custom matcher? Is there a safer way to override the be_valid?

How do they look? I needed YAML highlighting so that’s what my screenshots are of. (Incidentally, the YAML “brush” is not distributed with SyntaxHighlighter.)

Here’s the Google one. It parses strings wrong so only some words are highlighted. It gets dates. It gets comments. It gets numbers but interprets them as numbers even when they’re part of a string.

So I tried Alex’s with the YAML brush. It’s a little better. It colors the keys of the hash but it misses the first of each hash, maybe because it’s in a list. It doesn’t detect strings or dates. It has the same problem with numbers.

But the killer is that it resized my <pre> out of the boundary. I tried hard-coding width but that had no effect. So I’ll go with the Google one. Maybe someone will improve it, or if I really need to I will.

Mutually exclusive categories

By default WordPress categories are checkboxes; a single post can be in multiple categories. I want each category to be sort of its own blog so I made a category for each audience: Coding, Computing, and Research. WordPress requires you to have an Uncategorized category so I renamed that Whatever.

To enforce a single category per post, I added the Radio Button Categories plugin.

Subscriptions

By default WordPress has just one feed for all posts (and one for comments). I needed a way to have a feed per category. I also wanted to let people subscribe by email per category. FeedBlitz does it all but it costs money . FeedBurner is free and does email subscriptions so I just needed to make it work with category feeds.

I already wrote about how to set up a FeedBurner feed per category. With that, a browser can find the RSS links in the header and offer them to the user to subscribe too,  but I also wanted a way to subscribe by email. For that I wrote a subscribe widget using this tutorial. The widget reads the FeedBurner config from the plugin and if there is a FeedBurner feed for the currently displayed category it presents a form with an email address field the user can use to subscribe.

Navigation

Lastly, I needed a clear visual navigation between the categories. This was surprisingly difficult to implement because the WordPress theming API, the Thematic framework and the Earlymorning theme I was building off were all new to me. Along the way trying to learn the framework upon framework, I wondered if I’d have been better with fewer abstractions. I already know PHP, HTML, CSS and now I have to learn this stuff too just to get my page up? I go back and forth on re-use versus DIY, but I digress.

I couldn’t get wp_list_categories() to look right so I sort of reimplemented it:

function childtheme_category_info() { 
  $current = single_cat_title("", false); 
  $categories = get_categories(); 
  echo '<div id="category-selection">on '; 
  foreach ($categories as $catinfo) { 
  if (in_category($catinfo->term_id)) 
  $class = ($catinfo[''] == $current) ? "current-category" : ""; 
  echo "<a class=\"$class\" href=\"/category/$catinfo->slug/\">$catinfo->name</a> "; 
}

echo '</div>';

Then I thought there must be an easier way and realized that I could use CSS to make the <ul> look how I wanted. So here’s my code for the category navigation in the header in functions.php of my Thematic child theme:

function childtheme_category_info() { 
  echo '<div id="category-selection">on <ul>'; 
  wp_list_categories("title_li="); 
  echo '</ul></div>'; 
}

add_action('thematic_header', 'childtheme_category_info', 4);

And here’s my CSS too:

#category-selection {

font-family: "Copperplate Gothic Light", Georgia, Times, serif; 
  font-size: 16px; 
  font-weight: normal; 
  line-height: 34px; 
  float: left; 
  margin-top: 70px; 
  margin-left: 60px; 
  position: absolute; 
}

#category-selection ul {
  list-style: none;
  display: inline;
  margin: 0 -1pt 0 2pt;
  padding: 0;
}

#category-selection ul li {
  list-style: none;
  display: inline;
  margin-top: 4pt;
  margin: 0 2pt;
}

#category-selection a:link, a:visited, a:active {
  color: black;
  text-decoration: none;
  border: none;
}

#category-selection .current-cat a {
  border-bottom: 3px solid #92bf9b;
}

#category-selection a:hover {
  color: #fe5757;
  border-bottom: 3px solid #92bf9b;
}

There’s probably an easier way if you’re a WordPress ninja. I’m not and don’t have time to be. Even finding and using the wp_list_categories() function was, in hindsight, probably a waste of time versus hard-coding it for my site.

Now I’m pretty satisfied with the design. Next I want to transfer my old OpenEducationResearch posts to this blog. And then, I don’t know, write.

I’ve been posting at multiple blogs and I’ve decided to consolidate them all under one site, turadg.aleahmad.net. What were separate blogs before will now just be separate categories. I needed a way for people to subscribe to just one category, either by RSS or email. I use FeedBurner to handle this email subscription and also provide ego-stroking stats.

The WordPress support and FeedBurner support docs recommend the FeedSmith plugin but it only handles one feed for all posts. (And the link from the WordPress docs is dead since the Google acquisition.) The WordPress docs also recommend the Flagrant disregard Feedburner plugin. The FD plugin supports redirecting category feeds to FeedBurner but it redirects all or none of them and hard-codes the naming scheme. It also redirects tag feeds. I don’t want to make a FeedBurner feed for every category and tag. I also want to control the FeedBurner feed name on a per-feed basis.

So I went with the Feedburner WP Plugin Category Fix from interfacelab. It took me a while to find and I wanted to add an option to redirect permanently, so by the power of open source I checked it into Github and customized it. I found the name a little confusing so I gave it a new name, wp-feedburner. I hope that other FeedBurner-related functionality can be added to this plugin through forks on GitHub and pushed to the master after vetting. To install the main branch, unzip the master branch archive or check it out into your plugins folder:

cd wp-content/plugins
git clone git://github.com/turadg/wp-feedburner.git


Once you activate it, the settings are quite straightforward. If you need any more help or tips on setting up a feed per category, see this excellent post, Category Feeds with WordPress and Feedburner.

Below are the questions for your rumination. Answer them however you like, sincerely or sillily. Or any -ly you like. Note that your answers will be visible (anonymously) to other people who’ve answered, but please don’t let that prevent you from honestly considering the year behind us and turn to the New Year ahead. Without further ado…

I use an aging MacBook Pro that’s on its last legs and I have several times considered building my own Hackintosh. Today, after another sickly cough from my computer, I decided to go for it. Then after spending >3 hours researching and shopping for all the components, I compared what I’d put together against what Apple offers and decided to wait for the next iMac.

The Hackintosh does have some things going for it…

Pros

• Faster for cheaper (Quad system for ~$900 vs. $2000 from Apple)
• Get PCI slots for cheap (slots from Apple require Mac Pro starting at $2500 )
• Huge HD (though that’s easy to upgrade at OEM prices on any Mac, and external works fine)

But once I put the system together, I thought about some of the drawbacks.

Cons

• Requires a bunch of work to build, install and iron out
• May stop working when Apple chooses
• Will always have all sorts of annoying quirks
• No warranty if something breaks
• Home built noisier than Apple hardware

Then I thought more about the economics. An iMac equivalent to the system I spec-ed would be $1900 (with my $100 student discount), and it would include a 2560×1440 monitor which is $1100 and up anywhere else. That’s effectively $800 for the hardware, meaning I’m not even saving money with the Hackintosh and all the cons above. Plus the iMac comes with the Magic Mouse ($70) and Wireless keyboard ($70), which while I wouldn’t pay that much for, further tip the scales.

If you don’t care about the 27″ monitor, the comparison is less clear. If you compare the Hackintosh to a Mac Mini at $800, it might be worth it to you to bump from the Intel Core 2 Duo up to a Core 2 Quad, get a bigger hard drive and better video. But you’d be trading that against your time, system stability, hardware warranty and clean design. So I plan to buy an iMac 27″, though I’ll probably wait until the next product release.

If you decide to go that route, here’s the system I spec-ed for $840 (plus tax, includes shipping).

And from Newegg:

Short version

If you sent mail to my aleahmad.net e-mail address in the range of March 16-26 (inclusive) please send it again. My mail receiver was broken those dates and the mail sent then is lost in the ether.

Long version

Earlier in the month I switched from BulkRegister domain registrar to GoDaddy. (I was happy with Enom but they moved my account to BulkRegister which is shady. No I don’t understand why.) I transferred multiple names over and the others kept their DNS server settings, but aleahmad.net didn’t. The transition went into effect on March 16, at which point the name resolves to some ad site and mail addressed to aleahmad.net started going to /dev/null.

I finally noticed yesterday after someone chatted me twice, “will you reply to my e-mail?” and fixed it. To help avoid such a problem in the future, I set up a page monitor for changes in my main aleahmad.net page, which is static. For good measure I also set Google Reader to monitor changes (nice feature, that).

In the course of doing this, I got frustrated with the long cache on my ISP’s DNS server so switched to OpenDNS. I also tried Google Public DNS, but liked the features with OpenDNS.

Sorry for the trouble if you sent me mail then. It’s unsettling to not receive 10 days of e-mail, without the sender knowing you didn’t get it.

So that’s great but it gets better.  The file icon subtly indicates whether the file has any unsaved changes, by graying out.  (Reading that page, I also learned that the red close button gets a black dot if there are unsaved changes.)

Here’s the thing that moved me to write a whole blog post: right click on that file to see and navigate its hierarchy in the file system.  You ever need a file that’s in the same folder as the file you’re working with?  Just right click on that icon and click the containing folder.  So simple, sorta intuitive, and I can’t find it mentioned anywhere.

In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions. But the spectacle has found a subversive afterlife on the Internet. One image that has gone viral is a split frame showing two photographs of former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Before his arrest, on June 16th, he is a rotund, smiling cleric; in court on August 1st, he is drawn and sweat-soaked, his face a mask of apprehension. The juxtaposition belies the courtroom video, making the point that the only genuine thing about Abtahi’s confession is that it was coerced through torture.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, which gives a brief history of show trials in the Soviet Union and Iran’s history.  Most interesting is how in Iran among a large portion of the population, these televised false confessions are having the opposite effect.

The indictments prepared by the public prosecutor are almost surreally obtuse. Before the election, one indictment claims, Western governments, foundations, and individuals joined forces with corrupt Iranians in an attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic and institute a regime compliant with American designs. The nefarious plotters engaged in “exposing cases of violations of human rights,” training reporters in “gathering information,” and “presenting full information on the 2009 electoral candidates.” Apparently, the Iranian citizen is meant to consider it self-evident that the country’s national interest depends on concealing human-rights abuses, censoring the news, and obfuscating the electoral process.

People are seeing right through these.  They’ve even, in some cases, preëmpted them, such as when Mohsen Armin declared last month that should he be taken into prison, he is not the agent of foreign powers, no matter what he’s beaten into saying.  So when Iranians see this:

[translation from the YouTube video description:] HARD PROBLEM WE HAVE IN OUR COUNTRY RIGHT NOW IS BECAUSE WITH 40 MILLION VOTES WE COULD BE THE ONE OF BIGGEST COUNTRY WITH DEMOCRACY BUT BECAUSE MUSSAVI BEHAVIOR AND KHATAMI AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE FOR DIFFERENT REASON AND COUNTRY GOT IN

AND THERE WASNT ANY CHEATING IN ELECTION AND WE SHOULD KEEP THE REGIME THAT IS THE SAME AS PRAYING FOR GOD AND SUPREME LEADER DIDN’T BACK UP AND THAT WAS GOOD BECAUSE IF HE WENT ONE STEP BACK OFF WE WILL HAVE A UNSAFE TRIANGLE OF IRAN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, AND THAT WILL HURT PEOPLE IRAN OUR REVOLUTION AND MIDDLE EAST AND MUSSAVI SHOULD SAY CONGRATULATION BECAUSE A 13 MILLION DIFFERENT VOTES ANDTHE CHEATING WAS A DELUSION

They’re really seeing this:

…in which the enemy of the state “confesses to meeting with a C.I.A. agent, importing green velvet, and having affairs with Carla Bruni and Angelina Jolie.  He apologizes to the Supreme Leader and to the paramilitaries who ‘kindly’ beat him.”  For evidence of the beating, note the band-aids he amasses through the recording.

I wish I had this comic in my pocket last summer. I spent some weeks at the University of Washington CS department working with Steve Tanimoto. (I mention Steve because he was an amazing host.)

I didn’t know many people in Seattle and so when a student at UW invited me to go hiking along with her husband and cousins, I was happy to make some new friends and take in some of the area’s extreme natural beauty. The hike was fun and everyone was pleasant. After we went to their favorite Taiwanese restaurant. They were all Taiwanese so we got the no-English menu with the scary dishes, which made me happy.

I was happy eating with my new friends until one said she didn’t like California. That’s where I grew up so I asked why. She asked if I had seen Idiocracy. “No, but my parents liked it and I like Mike Judge, especially King of the Hill.” “It’s so funny.” Something to the effect of how, because stupid people have more babies, eventually everyone will be stupid. I asked what that had to do with California. She explained that CA is filling up “Joses”. I hoped this was merely dark humor and pushed back. She persisted, though a year later I don’t remember many more details except that my attempts to disabuse her only made everyone uncomfortable. As their guest, I decided to drop it, but I couldn’t stop hearing the TMBG song, Your Racist Friend, echoing in my head.

What’s the best course of action there? Racism is not just offensive but dangerous. I didn’t want to react harshly because I didn’t want her to conveniently retract what she was saying. Better that racism be discussed openly so it can be examined and rationally disassembled. Right?

Later in the meal I offered her more water from the pitcher and she mentioned that she wouldn’t drink tap, only bottled water. Even water filters wouldn’t do. I explained that most bottled water is simply filtered in a factory but that made no dent. I figured at that point I was better off not trying.

UPDATE: Here’s some good advice. When you do respond, never claim the person is racist. That’s an argument you can’t win and they can dismiss. Explain how the thing they said was racist. That’s external to them. Jay Smooth says it smoother of course:

There’s a video on YouTube about thinking skeptically, the Baloney Detection Kit. It’s sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

Many of the comments are about whether science is an alternate religion, but there’s also a theme of denying climate change. What I find notable, though not surprising, is that deniers are using the Spam button to censor the messages of people asserting climate change.

It’s worth bearing in mind the way that tools to protect collective norms (e.g. defeating spam, terrorism) can be used as tools against someone an individual simply disagrees with.

Wondermark » Archive » #471; In which Bill ends up paying Full Price.

I sympathize with this comic. The last time I sent in a rebate, it was declined. It went like this:

- We couldn’t process your claim because it lacked the original receipt.
- No, I sent the original.
- You’ll have to send the original paperwork.
- How can I? I already sent the original.
- Do you have proof?
- Well, I photocopied everything before I put it in the envelope.
- Okay, send us that and we’ll process it.
- Do you realize how insane that is?
- It may sound crazy to you sir, but you’re not here and I assure you it makes perfect sense.

Vick Timlee wants you to join Yaari!

Is Vick your friend?

Yes, Vick is my friend! No, Vick isn’t my friend.

Please respond or Vick may think you said no

Thanks,The Yaari Team

So, that’s a lie. Vick didn’t send me anything. He’s not waiting vulnerably for my attestation of our “friend”-ship.

What has happened is that he created an account on Yaari.com and they spammed everyone in his Gmail contacts. Further, they claimed that Vick sent these messages himself.

A nice blog post goes into this practice in more detail. The short of it is, stay away from Yaari.

I wonder when digital identity will become so pervasive as to transform our idea of the self à la psychology, the ego à la Buddhism and the soul à la Abrahamic religions.

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Increasingly, who you are is what you’ve done.  Not just your idea of it, or anyone else’s idea, or the idea of a group, but the ever-growing corpus of data about the life you’re living.  Not only is there always more data about you but there are increasingly powerful and handy tools to analyze it.  This week Google added face recognition (not just detection, recognition) to Picasa Web.  There was a similar face detection web site in early 2006, but now it’s just another easy-to-use feature in a popular image management application.

I’m giving up hope that technology or policy will do anything to abate this torrent of data about us rushing out into the public eye.  Getting off the grid is not an option for most people, especially me.  I expect that it’s mostly culture that will adapt.  Knowing everything about everyone is how things were for thousands of years before the industrial age.  I appreciated the observation in the article that anonymity may just be a phase of the 20th century, like the automobile.  In tribes, everyone sees and hears everything, first or secondhand.  Some might say that it’s the same online today, except now there’s nowhere to escape too because the eyes are global.  From what I know of Native American tribes, you didn’t have anywhere to escape to either.  If you left your tribe, no other tribe would accept you.  Or at least others would always be suspicious of you.  Maybe in the future we’ll have identity asylums.  E.g. for people who’ve experienced psychological trauma or damage to their frontal cortex.  (e.g. by a tamping rod)

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be vigilant about privacy.  Just that relationships will adapt.  It’s the political order that I’m really worried about.

I do delete stuff that I know I’ll never read again, like “bagels in the copy room” or automated reminders from RTM.

I think of the Inbox as another label and for me “in:inbox” means that it requires action. When the action is complete, I archive it. A reply in the conversation brings it back into the inbox to act on. I also have status labels “Waiting On” and “Some Day” to qualify the inbox messages.

I use the Quick Links feature in the Lab experiments settings tab to make new views on the inbox, like, “Research to process”. That’s “in:inbox label:Research”.

The Better Gmail extension for Firefox has a really great macro, f-Focus, which takes whatever your current view is and narrows it down to messages that are (in:inbox OR is:unread) AND !is:muted. i.e. ({in:inbox is:unread} !is:muted). I used to love that, but I use Mailplane now for Gmail on my Mac and it’s not extensible.

Since writing that e-mail this morning, Google released a beta of their new Chrome browser for Windows. I gotta say, it’s nice. The best part is it has a simple “Create application shortcuts…” function for any website that basically turns it into a desktop app. Mozilla has something similar with Prism but compared to Chrome it’s bloated and slow. I’ll probably stick with Fluid on my Mac, and I look forward Safari 4.0, which is supposed to have something similar. Hopefully Google will have ported Gears to work in Safari by then. Shouldn’t be hard since Chrome also uses WebKit.