Most of my fitness transition plan has been focused on exercise. Get more exercise and eat the same as you did before, and you will lose weight. This has to be true, based simply on physics. Back when I was using the Hacker's Diet, it worked like a charm. Then it was all about eating less calories, because I wasn't really keen on doing exercise in my olden days. It worked for a while. Unfortunately I got stressed and stopped countign calories, and weighing every day. I've started the weighing again, and maybe I can actually fire up gnuplot again and produce some pretty graphs like the one on the left.


I've had an iPod for approximately 5 years now. That puts me a bit ahead of the curve. I still remember seeing the original iPod commercial, and looking literally seconds later for how much it was, and seeing how much I could sell my old player on eBay for. Having been in the mp3 scene for a while at that point, I knew that it would turn everything on it's head. I got it and replaced my normal player for walking to and from class and listening while coding. Now I have a new iPod video, and it is the chief entertainment while I'm in the exercise room. At first I was just listening to my fairly large music collection. Then I started listening to podcasts again - they are about the right length, and I enjoyed them. Now I've harnessed the power of the video iPod to kill two birds with one stone: I'm watching my large collection of Anime at an hour a day. This means about 3 episodes if I skip the openings and endings. I also watch Heroes on Tuesday nights, after I transfer it from the TiVo. The only problem I'm having with this setup is that the screen is small, so I need to hold it fairly close to my face in order to read the subtitles.

Today marks one month on the diet and exercise regimen. I started on the scale at 344 and this week's average was 337, 7 pounds lighter. I'm going a little slower than my goal of 2 pounds per week, but I seem to be hitting the right buttons at least.

This week (Nov 10 - Nov 16):
Minimum: 335.5 (-2.5) (Nov 14)
Maximum: 339.5 (-0.5) (Nov 16)
Average: 337.2 (-2.05) (137.2 to goal)
Exercise Calories: 2563 on 5 days
Average Calories per session: 512.16

It's getting around that time of year when kids start singing little annoying songs and thinking of the toys that they will be getting in slightly more than a month. In my family, when everyone gathered for thanksgiving, the younguns were expected to have a list which could be disseminated throughout the family with everything they wanted. This avoided some of the more clich gifts such as sweaters and socks. But who's to say that grownups can't have a little fun as well? It's rather easy to use del.icio.us as a holder for your whole Christmas list. If you find something you want, just add it to your del.icio.us bookmarks with a special tag - I'm using “xmaslist2006”. Using del.icio.us gives you a few advantages over the traditional list:

• A nice URL which you can give to friends, family and anyone else who might want to give you something - mine, for example, is http://del.icio.us/jamuraa/xmaslist2006. It's very readable and could even be memorable to someone who uses del.icio.us themselves.
• You get to put comments by each item, which may persuade perusers of your list to get a certain item, or point out synergistic items like the Two iPod things you want.
• The list can be updated by yourself, meaning there's really no deadline for your list to be finished. This also adds a little bit of non-repeatability - if I know that someone else already bought their gift, I can buy something added recently for a better chance of uniqueness.
• You get to keep your list around, letting you get those things you wanted with the plethora of gift cards that you received, buy the things you REALLY wanted yourself, or even carry things over to next year.

Things on the list need not be completely techie - if you're just looking for a nice sweater, you can add a general page or a representative item with a comment on it. Perhaps include your sizes as well, especially for items which come in a large number of sizes like pants. With any luck, you'll get just what you want this year.

This is just a short note to remind everyone that the most wonderful woman in the world deserves birthday greetings. She's still only 4 years, 5 months, and 2 days older than me, and not 5 years older, which she would like you to believe. Despite that, she easily is beautiful enough to be younger than me, and I'm blessed that she can tolerate my ineptitude.

Happy birthday ceilingsarecool!

Getting to the gym consistently is one of the biggest hurdles that I have stuck to jumping over while I'm trying to lose a bit more than a few. I seem to have no consistent schedule, except that I do end up doing it every day that I can. One downside of this is that I tend to work out late at night, almost always an hour or less before I go to bed. I've heard that this is not the best for the sleep, but I suspect it is actually better than nothing, so I continue to get to the gym at 11pm or 12pm. Unfortunately, I found myself with some extra roadblocks this week: the exercise room was half broken. The breakers on one half of the room tend to trip when the air conditioner and two machines that are on that circuit are all in use. This means that no one can use those machines until someone from the coop management goes and resets the switch. The treadmill machine, my weapon of choice for shedding a few pounds, is inconveniently on this circuit, and can't be plugged in anywhere else. This happened 3 times this week, Wed-Fri. I'm calling the office for the second time tomorrow.

It is significantly harder to exercise when I don't have the treadmill handy — the stepping machine works on semi-powered days, but it tires me out much too quickly and I cannot get enough exercise in. I'm not the kind of person to reliably run in place or do jumping jacks. My solution was to move the exercise bike to the powered side of the room. The biggest problem with semi-powered days is motivation. Usually I have the motivation to get to the exercise room and start the machine, and once I've started I can stop. Opening the door to a bunch of non-working machines is a huge motivation hit though. It's so much easier to take a roadblock like this and skip a day — in fact I did this week once. Luckily I discovered that the bike is on wheels on one side so it is easy to move to the other side of the room. However, I'd like to solicit suggestions for alternate exercises for semi-power days. The things that work in the room are a weight machine with a bunch of attachments, the stepping machine, and the exercise bike. I can't really go outside and exercise, because of the late hour and neighborhood that I live in, so it needs to be an inside task. The last requirement is that it focuses on losing weight, not gaining muscle. I'm fairly sure that I'll be gaining some muscle along this process, but the goal is to drop the weight.

I have taken Saturdays to be my day off, so that I can get a little rest and not be so stressed about things, but I'm not taking it this week as I need to "make up" for the skipped day.

This week (Nov 3 - Nov 9):
Minimum: 338.0 (-0.5) (Nov 7)
Maximum: 340.0 (-1.0) (Nov 4)
Average: 339.25 (-0.35) (139.25 to goal)
Exercise Calories: 2314 on 5 days
Average Calories per session: 462.8

Exercise is hard work. It is hard to keep going to the exercise room every day, and getting on that machine and doing the exercise. It is only loosely assuaded by the fact that I can listen to music or read a magazine while I am doing it. The saddle on the stationary bike is uncomfortable, and the treadmill is annoying when it asks for my heartrate. Don't get me wrong, I am comitted to my exercise regimen and will be keeping it up for the forseeable future. I really do believe that I am improving my overall health and wellbeing doing it. Walking down the hall back to the apartment is a good feeling, and it's strangely satisfying to be all sweaty and gross. This week was fairly erratic with respect to exercise. I ended up taking saturday off mostly by accident, completely filling up my schedule with other things. Other days I would start early -- around 7pm instead of my normal 10pm, or would start an hour late. Tuesday was a particularly crappy day as half of the exercise room was tripped on the breaker and I had to resort to the horrible stepping machine and some weightlifting to get my 30 minutes in. Hopefully this week I will be able to get a better schedule going.

I am frustrated. Two weeks of dieting and exercise, and I don't seem to be losing weight. This bothers me because in the past I would have received at least a little bonus on the scale just for dieting, and I don't seem to be getting that this time. I tend to weigh myself after my workout, because there is a fairly nice physician's scale which I can use to weigh myself, and doing after every exercise is a good way to remember. This causes a problem however because I usually exercise at the end of the day. One day I may eat more and then weigh more, and another day I may eat less (or ahem, output more) and weigh less that night. It doesn't deal a good hand to my psyche to sometimes weigh more than I did the day before. I do seem to be getting a hang of guessing when I will weigh more though. I am thinking of switching to weighing only once a week, but I am afraid that I will forget, and the hacker in me wants as much data as possible on this.

This week (Oct 27 - Nov 2):
Minimum: 338.5 (Oct 31)
Maximum: 341.0 (Nov 2)
Average: 339.8 (139.8 to goal)
Total Exercise Calories: 2562
Average Exercise Calories: 427

I've been using DreamHost to host this blog and most of my persistent online activity for the past 10 months. All in all I have been really happy with them. Others seem to have issues, but I don't have any gripes. I'm only paying a paltry fee, so I don't complain too much if my server isn't five-nines reliable. However, I am starting to have a problem with one of the services available. The email support is somewhat lax. My current situation is that I am using mutt as a reader on the server itself. This requires me to SSH into the server and read the mail on there. Because DreamHost doesn't realy expect that people will have this activity (most people check their mail by IMAP or webmail) it sometimes sees my mutt process as long-running, and decides to kill it with a HUP on the SSH connection. This is pretty annoying. Also, I get a lot of spam. No, really: on a typical day, I receive over 400 spams. Currently I am using SpamBayes for spam filtering, which works reasonably well - it catches most spam at least in the unsure folder. The same problem with mutt shows up with spambayes though: it takes up too much CPU and gets killed by DH's watchdogs.

These problems lead me to this experiment. The hassle with my mail is just too large, and I hear that GMail's spam filters are reasonably aggressive and work well after you train them slightly. I have decided that I will run an experiment. Starting with November 1st, all of my mail will forward to my GMail account. I will document the spam filtering (or lack of) abilities here on Base Zero, and I'll see how it works out. I have years of data from other methods of spam filtering so I can compare.

However, this experiment isn't only going to be about spam filtering. GMail also employs some different mail models than what I am used to. The first that I am interested in is tags. GMail uses tags instead of folders, the normal way of organizing mail. This is touted as better because you can have more than one tag assigned to a email at once, and therefore orgniaze mail which should be in two categories better. For messages which are in an Inbox you just use a Inbox tag. Spam messages get a Spam tag. So I will be orgnaizing my email with tags as much as possible. The second thing which intrigues me is the idea of emails being conversations instead of threads. GMail puts related emails together, but uses a flat structure as opposed to the tree structure that I am used to. I wonder if this will confuse me because I am on a number of lists which tend to use the tree structure a lot, with many branches. I may not like some of the things that GMail does -- in these cases I will look for hacks or build ones myself which attempt to solve these problems. I am also probably going to try and do some user interface critique.

Some people are concerned about GMail and scanning emails. This doesn't concern me that much: most ISPs can scan your emails for viruses and spam nowadays anyway, webmail particularly so. I can understand the effect that this could have on some people however. If anyone reading this message would like to be excluded from the email going to GMail, just reply to this post or email me. I will oblidge by filtering your following emails to a special folder on my server. Just realize that I will only read those emails weekly at best.

GMail will not be the only Google service which gets tested by me this month. Stay tuned for more information. Until then, hail to Google, our dear and glorious leader.

Brewster's Millions

Richard Pryor and John Candy in a classic story retold many times. I had seen parts of this movie on TV or in the background and thought I should give it a try all the way through. Spending lots of money isn't quite as easy as it should be in this comedy directed by Walter Hill (48 Hours). I thoroughly enjoyed the story as much as is really possible in this type of plot. I thought that the acting was somewhat over the top and the main plot meandered a bit, but at 101 minutes it never went too far off the mark. The payoff at the end, even though it was obvious and expected, left me smiling while the credits rolled. I give it a 8.

All That Jazz

Life is not normal for Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) in this foray into the backstage of directing and coreography directed by Bob Fosse. In a setting where the only normal part of life seems to be the morning wake-up routine, a duality of mind and reality appears in the beginning. There is also a great interplay between Gideon and his daughter. I was dissappointed to continue on through the ending, which was completely flat leaving me wishing I had hit the back button on the remote and watched the first half over again. A fascinating tale of the struggle between personal and professional life turns into a disaster of an ending. It scores a 4.

After my iBook problems last week, I tried to install Debian on the thing. I have narrowed down the problem to something with the hard drive inside, because the machine seems to run fine and go through most of the installation without any trouble, but once I start using the hard drive, it completely freezes. I successfully ran the hardware test disc which came with it a couple times in extended mode, but I'm not sure that it uses the hard drive in it's tests long enough for it to exhibit the problem. The failure seems to be somewhat random in nature, occuring at different times in the install process. Now I have the unhappy decision of trying to save this laptop which is more than 3 years old, or to attempt to buy a new one. Right now I am leaning toward buying a new one.

Honeywell seems 1.5 times as long this week, mostly because I'm making up for a day which I missed a couple weeks ago. Things have settled down there in terms of software failure, so I'm back at the normal coding which I am doing. The code uses Ogre, which is a handy 3d engine, making it much easier than learning something like OpenGL, and as a bonus adding portability. I am considering building some play applicaitons with the toolkit at home just because it would be fun.

Tonight I need to build a couple presentations covering some papers which were in CVPR this year to present at a reading group at Honeywell. It would be fine except that I am completely unaware of any of the recent history of vision research, so it makes it much harder to build the presentations. I hope I can finish them in a reasonable amount of time so I can watch Eureka tonight.

The TiVo Diet is still working out as expected. I discovered that I don't really have anything to watch on Sunday or Monday of the week. I'm getting much more productive work done than I used to. One downside of the diet is that I tend to not want to just sit and veg at the end of the work day - I think it frustrates ceilingsarecool a bit because I'm always going off to the office to do something on the computer.

I recieved and watched the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip yesterday. Being an Aaron Sorkin fan, I am excited for another of his shows to broadcast. Judging by the pilot, it should be a decent show.

Sidenote: Planet Debian seems to like one of my weekend weeviews a little too much, and is regrabbing it for the front page every so often. I can't figure out why this is happening, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, in a couple more posts it should be off the RSS feed.

Labor day weekend approacheth, and myself and ceilingsarecool have secured a little getaway for ourselves. It is proving to be a nice way to relax a while before a big rush of work. I have been in all true form not updating the blog lately, so I get to give everyone a big update all at once.

The iBook problems which I mentioned in the last blog entry proved to be fatal to the machine, so I went out and bought a shiny new MacBook to replace it. Given the pricing behind most of the small laptops and the experience that I had with my iBook, I was happy with my decision. I plan to add ram (Apple's ram is so expensive) and replace the hard drive (also cheaper elsewhere) sometime before the end of the year. After I bought the new book, looking through my old receipts I discovered that my iBook is still under AppleCare so I took it in to get it fixed. The Genius Bar at the MOA store was very busy today so we had to walk around the mall and then wait for ages still. However, we successfully got the thing to freeze twice in the presence of a MacGenius(tm) so it is now off to the magic depot in the sky for fixing before I sell it used to someone. It is a nice machine and works great other than the freezing which will be fixed, and I was informed by the MacGenius(tm) that the AppleCare travels with the machine, so if it breaks in the next 8 months or so the buyer can get it fixed for free.

Honeywell this week was pretty hectic and non-normal. There was a deadline which required the working of an application I hadn't planned on having working until the end of the week, so I had to work Monday and Tuesday, putting in 20 hours before mid-week. This made it slightly hard to get anything else done, but still not bad because it means I have a little leeway for next week. The good news is that we got it done, and the even better news is that it's possible to focus on other things which I have more experience in there now.

After the weekend (which I'm sure we'll have pictures from) is the start of the new school year. This means that my schedule is being impacted a lot, and I will need to get used to classes again. With any luck, this semester will be the last time I ever take classes in grad school. I also need to start a paper next week which is due on the 14th, so it's a little tight on the scheduling end. Hopefully I will be able to pull it off, because the conference is in Italy next year and ceilingsarecool has a keen interest in going with me.

But for now, I get a little R&R time before rejoining previously scheduled overwhelming work, already in progress.

• One Year Ago: "The new place is great - even with all of the boxes it's better than the old apartment"
• ~Two Years Ago: "THEN DON'T TAKE IT ASSHOLE. IT'S NOT YOURS."

Well, I discovered last night while I was writing a blog entry that my iBook G4 is somewhat broken. After ignoring it for most of the day today, I am currently working on getting my home directory off of it so that I can try installing Debian later tonight. I think that some piece of hardware has failed, because I haven't seen OS X sieze up like this before. However, I haven't yet had a freeze occur when I am in Linux of some kind. The symptoms of this failure vary between not being able to boot (blue screen before progress bar) to booting and then freezing completely, to the point of no mouse movement, to booting and freezing partially allowing for mouse movement but no interaction of any kind. I'm trying to view this as an opportunity to install Debian now that the Airport Express works in Linux, but the type of failure is very frustrating. rsync to the rescue, to restart backups where they left off before they froze.

It seems that software isn't being nice to me lately either. When I tried to start Visual Studio .NET at work on Tuesday, it refused to start, including without a .sln being loaded up at all. This caused a complete work stoppage for me, spending about half the day trying to discover what was wrong and putting calls in to various help desks. The other half of the day and half of yesterday was spent attempting to setup a second system with the files needed for working. I think that when I return on Monday I will be in a state where I can just start working again. As a bonus, they should have my original machine (which is fairly beefy from a hardware standpoint) reimaged so I can start setting it up once more with the tools for work.

Other than the constant computer problems, I've been playing a fair amount of Battlefield 2. I've managed to get almost all of the basic badges, and I am quickly on my way to another promotion. The TiVo TV Diet is working out well, I am actually watching less TV than I planned for, mostly because I'm not really up for watching Jeopardy every day. That knocks me down to less than 2 hours a day. I seem to be getting a lot more personal work done, and watching more of my Netflix movies. I uploaded new packages for vgrabbj, codeville and bogosort. I am happy with the state of all of them excepting bittorrent, which is still a very old version due to the new license they switched to for the 4.X series. There has been some movement on that front lately however: apparently the Ubuntu people are bugging Bram and friends as well as myself about changes that the license needs. Crossing my fingers!

One Year Ago: The good part is that it does actually help you, well, get things done.
Two Years Ago: Tuesdays have now become my TV night.

Recently I discovered the (10+2)*5 dash courtesy of Merlin over at 43 Folders, and I thought that I would give it a try. The concept is fairly simple: work for 10 minutes, screw around for 2 minutes, repeat 5 times, and voila! you have filled an hour with 5/6 productivity. The first thing that I did was download a Konfabulator widget which keeps track of the time and pops up a warning box when you should be screwing around and working.

I worked for approximately 6 hours under this regime today at my Honeywell job, even though I don't use task lists as diligently as I should there. I found that tasks which I regarded as small were finishing in a snap, partly because I wanted to get them done before the next 2 minute break, and partly because if I didn't finish for a break, my mind didn't just stop thinking about the problem. It was very advantageous to think about something else for 2 minutes and then get back to the action because it was like taking a fresh start. I was using the dash to do some coding (the major portion of my hours right now) - finding bugs that normally would have me staring at the screen for a couple minutes seemed easy when I was just coming back from a break. The only issues which I had with it was when I got interrupted by Workrave rest breaks (I turned off microbreaks) or a coworker. I am definitely doing it again, the next time I have an hour uninterrupted.

• TiVo TV Diet: 2 hours - Daily Show, Colbert Report, Hustle


• A little over 2 years ago: "Things I can control: - Caloric intake - TV habits"

Serendipity is my blogging software of choice lately, but in the past I was a happy user of LiveJournal. Fortunately, now my friends at LJ can keep up to date with my current blog, because of a great event plugin which mirrors posts here on LiveJournal (configurable of course). On LJ people use markup like [lj user="jamuraa"] in order to make a handy link to the page of the livejournal user in question. I was missing that feature, so I coded up a small plugin for s9y which converts that into jamuraa. This is version 0.1, which only does the user tag. It also works in comments if you enable it. In the future, I hope to add code to detect the user type correctly (on LiveJournal there are other icons for different user types). I also probably should not hotlink to the .gifs on the livejournal servers.

To install, just unzip into the plugins/ directory of your s9y installation.

Download the LJ Markup Plugin 0.1 for Serendipity

A month between postings. Who needs regular updates? I've got a few of these weekend weeviews piled up, so I'm going to do them two at a time every couple of days. Omega Man Charleton Heston makes this post-apocalyptic world view quite the masterpiece. Considering his current stance on guns, it is easy to throw a couple of cheap shots at the movie in which he plays a gun-crazed doctor. Thinking you're the only one left in existence has got to be pretty hard on the psyche, and it shows in the character. Robert Neville (Heston's character) obviously doesn't think he's really alone, just the only one left who shouldn't be shot on sight. The rest of the human race was hit by a crappy plague, 28 days later-style. This plague apparently doesn't kill all brain functions, but only crams you into a religious sect which could only be described as luddite. Movies aren't interesting without a love interest, so Heston finds out early about Lisa (Rosalind Cash) who is keeping a set of children who are immune. Robert is also immune, and hopes to create a serum from his blood. This 70's end of the world is remarkably watchable, although it has it's moments of Action Movie. The acting is well done, although the cult of luddites is somewhat overplayed and has strange overtones of vampirism for some reason. Omega Man gets a 7. (imdb, amazon) Conquest of the Planet of the Apes As a child of the 80s, I never saw any of the original Planet of the Apes movies, and always assumed they were campy and not well done. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they actually have a plot and are interesting. This fourth movie in the series of 70s movies presents it's moral message with a generous heaping of.. it's moral message. Years after his parents travelled backward in time in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, the only talking ape left, is incognito with the circus master who raised him and comes to the city for the first time. At this time the plague which killed all pets has already ravaged the nation, humans have decided that apes are more useful as slaves than pets, and already have a large monolithic "Ape Management" section of government. Caesar gets thrown through the system when his "owner" gets brought into questioning for.. questioning the treatment of an ape. Being highly intelligent, he quickly gets snatched up for his skills by a top government official. Starting an underground resistance movement is the next step, and dominos start to fall from there. Conquest.. then degenerates into a large-cast action film, with hundreds of extras in a street-level ape vs. human fight. It's not the most interesting movie ever, but considering my expectations I can happily give it a 6. (imdb, amazon)

Three things which I do with my free time which will have some impact or change this week: Gaming, Sleeping, Watching TV.
In gaming, I discovered a list of games which are available on computer and have AI opponents. This will probably kill some productivity as it means I discovered San Juan, a card game which I simply must buy a real life copy of. The game dynamics are perfect and it's in the "learn once, play forever" category. Hope to play this at the next board gaming night. In sleep, I am attempting to change my sleeping patterns so that I am an early riser. Generally I'm a late sleeper and late riser, but as I get older, I am finding that it is better to wake up early and get things done in the morning. I feel much more productive at the end of the day. To this end I am now sleeping at 10-11pm. ceilingsarecool also appreciates the new schedule because it lines up with hers much better. In TV, I have concocted a plan to lessen the amount of TV that I watch per week. I have dubbed it the TiVo TV diet, and details are after the fold.
Continue reading "On the Varied Use of Free Time"

I upgraded my CUPS to 1.2 today, and had a bit of trouble with getting the ML-2010 to work with it. Given my other issues with this printer, I thought I would expound on how I fixed yet another problem with this semi-supported printer.
The Samsung printing uses the linuxprint system, which uses a configuration file in an XML format which isn't specified. In the default install for the Samsung linux tool, it is installed in /usr/local/linuxprinter/linuxprint.cfg with a link from /etc/linuxprint.cfg to it. My file, after being setup, looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<linux root="/usr/local/linuxprinter" system="cups">
  <option name="ghostscript" value="/usr/bin/gs-esp"/>
  <option name="address" value="localhost"/>
  <option name="port" value="631"/>
  <option name="lpr" value="/usr/bin/lp"/>
  <option name="llpr-default-printer" value="lp"/>
  <printer ppd="ppd/C/ML-2010spl2.ppd" queue="lp">
    <option name="Resolution" value="600"/>
    <option name="PageSize" value="Letter"/>
    <option name="InputSlot" value="AUTO"/>
    <option name="MediaType" value="PRINTER"/>
    <option name="JCLJamrecovery" value="RWJOff"/>
    <option name="JCLEconomode" value="PRINTERDEFAULT"/>
  </printer>
</linux>
 

I discovered the hard way that if this file isn't there, the filter which is installed (ppmtospl2) doesn't work that well. In this case, the printer queue is lp. If this file is setup correctly, you can setup CUPS yourself, using the ppd file which is referenced in the linuxprint.cfg file. If you have lost your linuxprint.cfg, I suspect you can just modify the above with the correct ppd - the Samsung package has many of them for different printers. If you don't want to go that way, you can rerun the /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config as before, but you will have to open your CUPS 1.2 server wide open while you are configuring it so that it can add the printer. Also, I had to have a printer existing in the CUPS 1.2 server in order to have the linux-config program work at all. I solved this by just adding a virtual pdf printer (using the package cups-pdf). Even when you get linux-config to add the printer, it will not add it correctly for CUPS 1.2 - the device is incorrect - so you will have to reconfigure it via the web interface and give it the ppd which is in the directory anyway.
At least I have my printer back again.

I have the pleasure to have a laser printer at home, which works great and is wonderful for printing everything from research papers to read to envelopes for sending. ceilingsarecool uses it for taking things for proofing and research. While it was a slight trouble to set up with my Linux server, but works great now. Unfortunately while it was cheap as hell after rebate, the starter cartridge that it came with only prints off about 1,000 pages. Recently it started printing very light and shaking the cartridge wasn't working anymore, so I started looking for new toner. I found out quickly that one new toner cartridge costs as much as the whole printer itself, but my searches also turned up another option: refilling the cartridge that I have already. I figured I would take the chance, because it cost around $20 compared to the $80-90 for a new cartridge.

Yesterday I got the toner in the mail - it comes in a very small bottle with a small diagram and a little topper funnel. The process was fairly easy and straightforward. All I needed for tools that didn't come in the package was a Phillips and flathead screwdriver. The steps which I had to take:

1. Setup the area - I put newspaper down all around the area I was planning to do the work. I didn't need that much space and I was very clean and didn't spill, but I still got toner on the paper I put down.


2. Remove the side of the cartridge - this was indicated to me on the diagram that came with the new toner. There was one little clip which I had to push in in order to get the side off, and I had to pry the side off slowly with a flathead.


3. Remove the toner plug - the toner plug was under the side panel I pried off in the last step, and also took a little coaxing with my small flathead. Starting at this step, I also put on a set of latex gloves so I wouldn't get toner all over my fingers.


4. Open the toner - Open the top of the cap (mine came in a little bottle) and remove the safety seal (like on pill bottles). This got a little messy on my fingers to get all of the safety seal off. I also screwed the plastic funnel thing on.


5. Pour the toner into the cartridge - If your cartridge is really empty it's not a problem to turn it over so you can put the bottle in at a 45 degree angle and then turn both the cartridge and toner bottle so that the toner is pouring out. I had to tap the bottle a little and shake them (while still together) to get the toner into the cartridge


6. Put the plug and side back on - replace the plug and screw the side of the cartridge back on.


7. Shake the cartridge to settle the toner - shake it about 3-4 times, while it's still over the paper. Some of the small dust-like particles came off for me when I shook the cartridge


8. Clean up - throw away the toner bottle and the newspaper

I was thrilled to put the cartridge back into my printer and find that it printed just as good as before. Unfortunately this doesn't work forever - eventually the fusing barrel will wear out and start producing some of those other laser printer problems like lines and repeating patterns. Everything that I have read suggests that one cartridge of mechanical parts will work for about 10,000 pages. That means that I have about 2 more refills before this one runs out. Saving $50-70 every couple of months will make a big difference in the long run. I suspect that some of the toner cartridges that you can buy on line are "re-manufactured" much like this one, or possibly slightly more complicated (replacing a drum that's broken) so they might not work for as many refills as a new one.

There are three reviews this week, because I neglected to review one which I watched earlier. I'm also trying to decide whether the links at the end are of any use, and whether it's useful to syndicate this to Planet Debian. Feedback is encouraged!

Jawbreaker

The whole premise of Jawbreaker gets laid out right at the beginning - after a opening sequence in which we see the title candy being made, a couple of girls kill a friend by surprising her and using a jawbreaker as a gag. The movie then degenerates into a formulaic nerdy girl gets to be pretty storyline. Unfortunately Jawbreaker doesn't pull it off as well as Mean Girls does, and ends up falling pretty flat. One saving grace of this movie is that it is very short at just 87 minutes. One small treat is that Rose McGowan is playing a decent role, although I do have a much older vision whenever I see her from her work on Charmed. One thing which keeps bugging me is how the movie reminds me of But I'm a Cheerleader, even though the plots and premises are very different. The soundtrack is very well done with good placement of good songs. Jawbreaker is bittersweet at a 5. (imdb, amazon)

Real Genius

I have always heard good things about Real Genius, but never saw it all the way through. Supposedly this is a tragedy. Apparently ceilingsarecool saw it before, but didn't remember a bunch of the plot. A whiz kid enters college early and starts working for a professor. The premise is setup in the first 10 minutes or so, which is that Herr Professor is really corrupt and working to provide a laser weapon to the military. This leaves ample time for the comedy in the movie to play out, as Whiz Kid gets to experience all the wild antics of college with a high-IQ twist. Lasers are used fairly extensively in the movie (mostly as part of the plot) and get a nice chunk of credits in the end. The movie unfortunately doesn't really age well with time, unless you're a fan of 80's movies. There are no less than 2 montages with music, and the ultimate 80's end-of-movie song "Everybody wants to rule the world" by Tears for Fears is playing at the end. Real Genius still is smarter than many movies you'll see nowadays, so it burns in a 7. (imdb, amazon)

Primer

Small budget films are usually interesting to watch, because either they are simple masterpieces, or they try to be way more than they can be and end up being a trainwreck which you just can't stop watching. Primer is the rare gem which found a happy medium between complex and simple. At the start, a garage business is introduced with four tech friends making a bit of money selling to hobbyists. Apparently they have some sort of deal about who gets to pick the next thing they try, and one of them wants to try something related to physics. Two decide to attempt it on their own and they create a device which apparently lowers density, or gravity, or something. Then they discover it does much more than that - it can manipulate time. Fortunately there is still much of the movie left after this. The acting is not top notch by any means, and comes off as cardboardish, but it seems well-placed in this script because most techies that I know are not the best with social skills. It's important to note that the main focus doesn't lie on the device, but on the implications and ramifications. As the movie approaches it's end, the pace and convolution increases quickly. A rewatch is in order for Primer - and even then you still may be missing parts in the giant puzzle which is laid out before you. Shane Carruth directs, writes, and produces an amazing film, especially considering the sub-10k budget. Primer scores e^2.30258509. (imdb, amazon)

Programming, windows style
I'm now in the thick of a bunch of win32 programming at my Honeywell part-time job. I don't mind it that much, but I continue to be amazed that Microsoft's IDE is still the one used most often. The autocompletion is nice, but that's about the only good thing about it. I am continually annoyed that the IDE doesn't know which definition of a function I want to use, and only seems to pop up it's hints when it decides. Add this to the fact that most win32 libraries aren't apparently setup in a way so you can put their source in the repository, and I have a lot of admin work which I'm not particularly thrilled to do. 10% programming, 90% random crap. I'm beginning to understand why the average lines of code per day is so low. I can't really complain that much though, I knew the tools we'd be using when I accepted the job.

Programming, rails style
I have been working with Ruby on Rails lately, mostly to make some new web applications which aren't released yet. Things which are possibly in the works:

• MoneyDelta - credit card and savings balance tracker - figures out how much money you are making (or losing) each day based on how the interest is actually calculated. In the end it will probably have a little graph and possibly small things you can do in order to avoid interest and how much you would save in the long run.


• DeadSimpleCMS - CMS built mostly for Diana's use. It lets you specify layouts (not done yet) and content which goes into the layouts. In a very very early stage of development, but it is actually live on a site right now. As the name would imply, the point is to be very simple.


• Gathr - scholarly conference management software. Accepts papers, assigns reviewers based on degrees of connection to avoid conflicts of interest, generally tries to make the whole conference thing easier.

I also have a couple of smaller applications which won't really go anywhere, and an internal application upgrade from php. I really enjoy building web applications in the Rails framework, and I have honed my skills at Ruby enough that I actually use it for small scripts when I get frustrated with bash. I tend to do my Ruby Coding in TextMate and with Locomotive on the iBook, although I may do some on the Debian machine soon.

Wow, a semi-regular posting.

The Iron Giant

Small town america in the late 50s doesn't know what hit it. Science fiction is in it's hayday and the nation is on a hairpin trigger when a big robot falls from the sky and is discovered by a small boy. I had heard much about this movie and everyone I knew who saw it liked it. I have to tell you: the hype is well deserved. The story is compelling and heartening, good for children and adults alike, and the humor throughout is well done. Characters are voiced well. The story obviously revolves around the giant. Most of the story is centered around keeping the monstrosity hidden, which doesn't succeed for long. The government eventually figures it out and starts shooting, and then things really get interesting. The ending was just as fun to watch as the beginning, although I think they copped out on the very end, leaving it with a light note. It would have been really nice to see it end in a bitter-sweet tone. The Giant gets a 9. (imdb)

Brazil

One of the things I remember hearing about Brazil is that it was "Terry Gilliam's Directorial Masterpiece". It certainly is at that. In the 20th century somewhere, a clerical error causes a great movie plot. A futuristic society is thrown into disarray by a simple error in typing, starting with the death of an innocent man, and then the coverup of the century. The protaganist is in a dead-end job, but seems to be perfectly fine with it, until the girl of his dreams literally walks into his life. Gilliam and his cinematographer create a beautifully blocky and dull grey industrial wasteland set in stark contrast with the beautiful dreamland. The subplots don't obscure the main line which is compelling and kept me wanting more even though it clocks in at over 2 hours. The ending was unexpected and well done at the same time, and I couldn't see it done any other way. The directors cut is the only way to go with this one, and I haven't even seen the studio cut.
Brazil is berriffic, and scores a 12. (imdb)

The gift which I bought Di last week came this Thursday - a iRobot Roomba Sage. So far we have ran it about 4 times - the first three times it's bin filled up completely, today when it was finished it wasn't even half full. The robot is really maddening to watch, because the pseudo-random walk that it uses doesn't seem like it is covering the floor that well. The roboticist in me knows better though, and the proof is in the particle-free floor which our apartment is now sporting.

It's not to say that there is no setup before turning the Roomba on - you need to clean up the floors just as you would for any low-powered vacuum, picking up pieces of deitrius which will not be picked up. The Roomba doesn't deal well with the type of rugs which we have in apartment either, so those need to be picked up and placed somewhere while it's running. After these steps, it's just turning it on and waiting basically. It easily gets to the 3 rooms which we have it vacuuming in (living room w/attached kitchen, bedroom, bathroom) multiple times in one cleaning cycle, but our apartment is not that large. After it's done you need to empty the bin and clean the brushes of hair and other debris, which takes about 2 minutes. All told I would say that using it takes about 10 minutes total interactive time.

Other than that, this week has been pretty dull actually, work and more work. Completed some code for Marsupial Player/Stage but it doesn't quite work the way I want yet. Monday went out with Di to look at couches and found a great table for the dining area. You can see pictures of it on my flickr page.

I need to install a backup system which works on Windows, OS X and Linux on the server machine, and figure out a network file system which works with all of them as well. I'm fairly sure that I am going to use Samba as the file serving capabilities. The machine has been rock-solid stable since the removal of the DWL-G520 which was providing network for it before the upgrade to a wireless bridge. I suspect that the madwifi drivers were not playing well with the amd64 architecture.