Where’s the peanut butter?!

As Adam has said before, screen rules. It can be used in conjunction with a bunch of other stuff but its main benefit (in my book) is solving the scenario of getting re-connected to a remote shell session. The multiplexing is, IMO, like a poor man’s emacs buffer/window management system, but when I lose an ssh connection because I take my laptop somewhere or whatever, being able to reconnect with screen -r - that brings me great joy.

Note: this will not be the start of a recurring series to some day feature vi or svn.

I’m in heaven. I don’t know what part of Linux is broken but since this never happened to me before when I only worked with my Evolution (keyboard) in various multi-Windows machine configurations working with the (up to now) excellent software based keyboard/mouse sharing application, Synergy, I’m going to blame this on the introduction of Linux.

Symptom: after some unspecified period of time or apparently very hard to capture key sequence, my keyboard starts behaving as if the ctrl key is locked. “w” becomes “ctrl+w”, etc. which sux0rs.

Old workaround: unplug my Evolution, plug in a separate PS/2 keyboard, press the ctrl key a couple times, reconnect the Evolution.

New workaround: in X (on Linux) press ctrl+alt+F1, then alt+F7.

This seems to be a pretty well known workaround for whatever the problem is and now that I’ve found the better workaround I can eventually research what’s causing this and finally - make - it - stop. Or I suspect since I’ve maligned linux there might be some fanboy out there who might come to its rescue and tell me exactly how easy it is to recompile my kernel and make everything work But for now, I don’t need to climb under my desk six times a day to work around this, so my mood is describable as “transcendent woot.”

If you’re like me then you get your knickers in a kerfuffle when you have to deal with processing lots of email. Here’s my approach when I’m doing this in a desktop application. I haven’t really had to do this with personal mail in a while.

1. Categorize - add categories to mail as it comes in based on whatever properties it has (by what email list it’s a part of, who it’s from, whether it was sent directly to you vs. you got it via a mailing list, etc.)
2. Break if sent directly to you - leave messages which were sent directly to you in the inbox
3. Move - if the mail should be moved to a specific folder, move it there.

The net result is that your mail is all neatly labeled (by the categories you defined and applied in step 1). Mail which is addressed directly to you always stays in the inbox since this is more likely to need your attention. And other mail gets filtered to some appropriate folder.

Here’s one other tip to consider in the “Move” step: consider having some rules which move mail from high volume discussion lists directly to the trash. Lists like this tend to frequently be time sinks and if you have the time you can go find them in the trash pretty easily (because those messages are categorized, too) but they are less likely to suck away your time (since they’re already in the trash) and less likely to make you hit an inbox quota (since they’re already deleted).

But I’m sure there’s more than one way to do it - comments are welcome!

I think I’ve ranted before about how I think bluetooth is a giant disaster that works terribly for consumers. I still believe that - the different features supported by different vendors and different bluetooth stacks and the varying experience you get when you mix and match different, supposedly compatible devices with one another makes getting a bluetooth a complete grab bag.

Also, bluetooth almost always means “costs WAY friggin more than it should” - this holds for computer peripherals like mice or keyboards (where a bluetooth version typically costs ~2x what a regular device would set you back) and cellphone kits or headphones which cost even more than their non-bluetooth counterparts.

Finally, basically every bluetooth peripheral just screams out “I’m both a weenie and a dick.”

BUT…I’m suddenly incredibly happy with my HT820 headphones. I bought these headphones years ago to use with a WindowsMobile phone (the HTC Wizard / T-Mobile MDA) and it always worked

<terribly>

The headphones work decently as a handsfree calling kit, but the other core features (working as headphones) was terrible because of a compatibility setting between the headset and my specific phone which made the audio quality completely unacceptable. That was really disappointing because I wasted all this time researching and getting to understand that A2DP is a bluetooth based technology which is supposed to give you stereo audio which sounds totally awesome (except for when a bitpooling interoperability setting makes the end result worse than bad AM radio). And not only that but I learned that both also supported AVRCP, which means that using buttons on the headset I could adjust the volume on the music I was listening to or play/pause fastforward/rewind. Sweet, huh? Except that the implementation of that on my MDA was to emulate screen taps at specific screen coordinates, so pressing “play” wouldn’t necessarily play - it would tap the screen at a specific coordinate (and one that would only work with the build in Windows Media Player and not necessarily whatever player I wanted to use).

</terribly>

But now I’ve got the same headset hooked up with my blackberry curve and everything works. Audio (A2DP) sounds great. The music controls (AVRCP) work great. And the interoperability between switching the phone between music player or calls or anything else all a) works b) well. And it was good. But they still definitely make me look like a dork, and probably a jerk, but I avoid the typical usage behaviors which usually confirm that status.

How do I make Excel do value ranking among cells of a similarly typed value? For instance - I want a function which generates the values in the “Team Rank” column for the following sheet based on the score of people on a team:

In other words, I want the ref in RANK(number, ref, [order]) to be a lookup over the range “Team” and only compare the current row’s Score against those other scores of people from the same Team.

I was rickroll’d into navigating to a page on Oprah.com (don’t ask…) and was greeted with this:

Oprah.com is currently being preempted to accomodate our live Web event.

When did the internet become TV? Should I start twisting around the bunny ears on my monitor to get a faster connection to the net?

One that wont make me sick
One that wont make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick

gnome-terminal sucks. The keybindings are semi-emacs-ish but not quite/frequently get confused/don’t update the display to accurately reflect whatever’s in the buffer. What should I use? xterm doesn’t support emacs keybindings at all so it’s out. Should I just be sticking with eshell (or shell) directly inside emacs?

Here’s what I want:

• standard, simple movement commands (^a, ^e, ^f, ^b, up/down arrow)
• tab completion (duh…)
• standard, simple editing (M-d, ^k)

I think I probably just got my answer and it’s to use M-x eshell or M-x shell, but I don’t always have that available and would really love something I can fallback on. I’m sure somebody must have some advice…

I can’t wait forever for Microsoft and T-Mobile to get together and get a Windows Mobile phone on the market that supports UMA (the technology behind T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home and TalkForever services). There aren’t any Windows Mobile devices on the market or even forecasted with the stack (forget about carried by T-Mobile), so now I’m looking at a BlackBerry, which is different, but probably the next best thing. So now the question is whether to go with the Curve (8320) or wait for the update to the Pearl (8120) (which is rumored to drop in a week or two). The specs on the updated Pearl are almost identical to the Curve - it looks like basically a Curve that: adds video recording (yawn), weighs almost 20% less, has bluetooth 2.0, trades the full qwerty keyboard for their SureType thing, trims the screen from 320×240 to 240×260, and cannot be tethered to a laptop as a modem. Also, the Pearl comes in 8 fabulous colors while the Curve only comes in gold or silver. Decisions…decisions…

I have a bunch of recaps I need to get to work on…

• My trip to Salt Lake City with Scott from a week and a half ago, wherein the slopes were rocked.
• The weekend of races, wherein my track race was so-so but the Hart Foundation reunification saw me and the Anvil both setting new personal bests.
• The transformation of flexcar into zipcar, wherein my rates go up.

Monday I start real work again, so I guess I’m glad I’m keeping busy enough that I’m not finding time to blog, but as usual I’m not totally sure where all my time’s going. But I know in about an hour it’s going to be sucked up by 6×800’s with 1 minute recovery. But it’s on the grass! Just like old times!

I have a Western Digital external hard drive and have been frustrated with it on my laptop recently since it’s not been working. This morning I finally got it working again. The issue seems to be with the USB cable I was using - I’m now using a cable that’s about a foot and a half long and it seems a little beefier (this is probably the cable that came with the drive). This was probably sort of predictable - I think the drive (which is powered over the USB cable) probably wasn’t getting the power it needed to run, but it’s still frustrating. I wish computers could get some better diagnostics working explaining why the device wasn’t able to work rather than an infinite loop of “trying to find drivers…oops, no good…trying to find drivers…”

BUT - I have a working drive again. Yay!