Recently I was working on an application for ICRA2006 and I needed to output some data to be read by Excel. This would seem like an easy problem, just output in CSV and Excel can open the text just fine. Unfortunately Excel has one of the most backwards implementations of international character support that I have ever worked with. Being nieve to this, I simply tried UTF-8. I was greeted with multiple strange characters in the place of my normal umlauted and tilde-d letters. A quick search turned up that when Excel reads a CSV, it assumes that it is in ASCII or . However, you can import the CSV as a text file and select it as unicode. This is where my real pet peeve is: You can't select the character set of a CSV in Excel. You have to rename the file as a .TXT file and go through a wizard, basically spelling out that yes, it is comma separated and yes, this is the data I want to import. There's one drop down box which specifies the character set. Of course Unicode is supported there.

In the search for a solution to this problem which didn't involve a 10-step process for the customer, I discovered the Unicode marker which is supported by Wordpad, but amazingly, does nothing but add a bit of garbage in Excel. The sad part is that I can be almost certain that the next version of Office will continue to have this problem. My only hope is that somehow the XML format will be open enough to just create a native Excel file.

Life has taken a turn for the busy lately, which means of course that this space loses a lot of content. Things have slowed down a bit now. Things which were taking up my time before were being basically one of the only technical staff for ICRA2006 (with one other who helped enormously), a new job at Honeywell Labs, and actually getting some research done on my thesis.

ICRA2006 was basically amazing and horrible at the same time. The amazing parts: meeitng people who are famous (a.k.a. "respected in their field"), eating a ton of fancy food on the dime of the conference, being at the first conference of my academic career. The horrible: working 18 hour days, being the go-to guy for practically everything, painful feet from walking most of those 18 hours. All in all, the amazing outways the horrible by a long shot. I also couldn't make it to DebConf6 because of it, and it was in a country that I might have actually made it to this time. Next year I guess.

The new job at Honeywell is going decently. We have a target in July which is probably going to have me pulling long hours. The best thing about the new job is of course pay-related though - I am going to be consumer-debt free by the end of this year. I hope that I can finish the nameless financial web application before my finances improve enough that I don't need it anymore.

I have narrowed in on my thesis more, which is an improvement at least. Now I need to actually write papers and do research while avoiding too many duties in other areas. I've got a couple of blog postings in the queue which should show up soon, and hopefully I will re-enable myself on Planet Debian.

I also bought a present for our apartment, and she hasn't guessed exactly what it is yet. This is me taunting Di a little.

I recently bought a Samsung ML-2010, which is a nice laser printer for home use, and tried to set it up on Debian, only to discover that Samsung wasn't hip to my architecture, namely amd64/x86_64. It's no matter, their printer drivers still work, but you have to hack around a bunch of their checks. I'm documenting them here because I'd rather not forget when I reinstall, and it's probably useful for others to know about it. Step 1 - Install the necessary packages - In my case all I needed to install was ia32-libs, because I already had all of the other packages needed installed. The samsung tool uses cupsys, so you may need to install the cupsys package and it's dependencies. Step 2 - Unpack the driver - Get the driver from Samsung and untar it, producing a directory called "image" Step 3 - Hack around the glibc detection - The setup program is "smart" and tries to detect if there is a GLIBC with a high enough version. The bad news is that it uses the wrong version, because it is not familiar with the ia32-libs positioning of it. Luckily, it uses a script to do it's dirty work, so I just changed scripts/test-libc.sh to this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Test the Libc version and make sure it is > 2.0
#
exit 0

Mostly because I know that we meet the requirement of glibc > 2.0. Step 4 - Run the setup program directly - The setup script (script.sh) doesn't like to run on x86_64 architectures, because of it's architecture checking. This is annoying, so looking into script.sh, find the program that it runs and run it directly, that is, run ./setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/glibc-2.1/setup.gtk as root (it will be putting things in /usr/local). Step 5 - Add your printer to the setup utility - run /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config and add the printer. It's pretty straightforward, and actually follows the docs which Samsung gives out from here on.

A couple weeks ago I was going to lunch and met up with one of my friends who I hadn't seen in a while. I had to wait for her to finish her TAing job, in the same lab that I once taught in. I was surprised at my reaction - I wanted to jump right into the room and start helping out. I restrained myself, but it gave me a good reminder of what my actual goal is in grad school. I want to be a professor - I wasn't sure when I started here at the U of M, but after two or three teaching sessions I was certain I was going to teach. It probably helped that it was a class which I have a good amount of experience teaching, being one of the classes I helped with for 3 semesters. Lately I've been trying to remember why I am going through with it all in order to get the Ph.D, and seeing that class was a good reminder. It makes me think that I might want to request a Teaching Assistant job every year or so just to keep me on the right track towards something. Unfortunately, I think if I want to finish in a reasonable amount of time, I will need to focus 100 percent on the thesis before long.

Throughout the last couple of years, I've had some bad decisions. I decided to start using my credit to work for me, and to buy things which I couldn't afford. Partly this was because I had a horrible ex, who I thought I should do things for, and partly because of just living outside of my means for a certain period of time. The long and short of it is, I've gotten myself into a bit of credit card debt. I'm not in any big trouble, just needing to pay it down so that I can get on with using that money for other things. There is a couple of web applications that I have in the works which will help me remind myself, but that's neither here nor there at this point. So, I have all of this credit at high interest rates, surely there is someone out there that will look at my credit and finance it at a lower rate, make some money off of me, right? I'm thinking that what I need is a consolidation loan - something to lump together my credit card debt and give me one monthly payment. What I call this, is debt consolidation. Thinking we are in the age of the internet, I type "debt consolidation" into google and give it a try. This is my first mistake. Apparently "debt consolidation" doesn't mean that you are consolidating your debt, it instead means that you are going into what I would call debt negotiation. This means you decide of your own volition that you are going to stop paying your bills, and try to negotiate with the credit card companies to pay off your debt at a fraction of your actual debt. But I don't know this, so I nievely fill out a couple of forms at "debt consolidation" sites. This gets pretty long, so I put in a break. Read on, MacDuff. The Scam The first people who got in contact with me were some people from Credit Solutions. Let me be clear on this: I'm not making broad generalizations about the company here - I can only speak of my own experiences. The person who I got on the phone went through a whole spiel, "explaining" how it works. He was very high-pressure and very fast talking, just from the start I didn't want to buy anything from him because he seemed like a used car salesman who decided that it was better to make money from nothing than from goods. Here's the explanation he gave me: You've probably been paying your cards down already, so you've paid 70-100% of the cost of your original loan. You stopped paying your cards, wait 3 months, and then they start negotiating with their "powerhouse lawyers". Then they negotiate you to pay your debt at 40-60% of the current balance, and the credit card companies get to take the remaining 40% as a tax loss. Now is when the math gets strange. The man on the phone attempted to say that this meant that the credit card company got 140% of the current balance. This doesn't make sense to me, especially because I'm a smart credit card consumer, and most of my debt is on 0% APR promotional rate cards. This means that they have made at most 3% of the balance from me, based on balance transfer fees. The man on the phone tried to dance around the issue, saying that they actually will get the 40% tax loss and that means they'll still get 140%. 140%? This doesn't make sense - 60% plus 40% is 100%, not 140%. Lets add to this that a tax loss is not the same as profit: a tax loss only gets you like, 30% of your loss. At this point, I've decided that I'm being taken for a ride already, but I ask how it works anyway. Here's how this particular company is setup: I pay into a savings account (of my own), automatically deposit around $200 a month, and they take money out. For the first three months, they take the WHOLE amount. After that, they take half the amount, and leave the other half. They then start negotiating with your creditors, and when they make a deal, they tell you "pay them now". In the end, they take 15% of the settled cost of your debt. On $6k settled debt, this is another $900. I really didn't want to do it now, mostly because of the high cost. The man kept coming back to my objections with "you can't borrow your way out of debt". Of course you can't borrow your way out of debt. That's stupid. I wasn't planning on borrowing money and then ending up with less debt. I was planning on borrowing money so that I'm not paying so much in order to have the debt. Apparently he thought I was an idiot, because he kept repeating it to me. He sent me a little packet of stuff, which laid out the whole plan. After that, he gave me a call back. This is when I got really defensive. I asked him point blank: "What is the worst thing that can happen to me if I go with this plan?" His answer: "You stop paying your bills." On the surface, this is true. The worst thing that can happen is that I stop paying my credit card bills. He neglected to mention the fact that ceasing payment on my credit cards would ruin my credit, cause insane fees for lateness, and possibly send me to forced arbitration with the creditors. Every creditor that I have ever had since 2002 has had an arbitration agreement, which basically would end up in garnishment of wages. The Scum About a week after my first bad experience with a debt "consolidation" company, I got a second call from a completely separate company. They introduced themselves on the phone as "Christian Financial Services" or some such. Basically the same deal, but this was a low-pressure sell instead of a high-pressure sell. He was much more reasonable, and talked me through the whole thing at my own pace, taking his time to lay everything out that I could understand it. It was basically the same deal, 15% and they negotiate for you, but they set up an escrow account instead of you doing it yourself. When I asked the same "worst situation" question, he gave me a realistic outlook, and this company is in a much better standing. If the creditors don't like their negotiation and take you to arbitration, you actually get representation from their company to help you out. I was almost willing to do it. Then I went and looked at their actual company online, and discovered that they are a chamelon of some sorts. They were originally called something similar to "USA Debt Consolidation" or something otherwise patriotic. Apparently they decided that God could be on their side, at least it's good advertising. What good company has to change their name to get religion on their side? A good company would not need to change it's name. The Sweet Some people have gone with these companies, and they have actually negotiated with the creditors in order to pay off your debt at a fraction of the price. If it happens, that's the sweet part of this. Just given an example of $10,000 credit card debt, it is possible to pay around $6,000 and have all of your debt paid off. It's basically saying that you can spend money that you won't have to pay back, ever. There is some hit to your credit rating in the short term, but in the long term, it starts going the other direction. The hard part is finding a company who will do this and who you like. I had an even harder hurdle to surmount - I don't really believe that it is ethical to do this. I spent the money, I should pay it back - that's the deal I made with the company when I signed up for the card. To me, I need to go through with paying them back. Luckily, I came into this with a decent credit rating, and will probably go out with a similarly decent one. Right now, I am a prime target for anyone who wants to give me a large loan at a decent rate - if I can pay less for the money I spent, I'm savvy enough to do it. The Alternative There is one other option which I looked into, and will represent the only company that I will link through this diatribe: Consumer Credit Counseling Services or Money Management International are truly non-profit and have good word-of-mouth from anyone I have talked to. They will not negotiate to settle your debt, but they will work with the creditors to get lower percentage, and help you through your budget. The couple of talks on the phone that I had with these people were very productive, and I got some stuff in the mail to help me out. You pay down the entirety of your debt. The downside is that you get a good size hit on your credit rating. My Choice In my position, I decided that I was on a good track myself already - I'm paying off my cards smartly, taking the highest APR out as quickly as possible. On my current plan, I will be completely debt-free in 3 years, less if I get some windfall of any sort. One of the bonuses of having a good credit rating is that people are willing to loan me money at promotional rates for some amounts of time. When my promos run out, I play financial musical chairs and get the lowest rate on all of my money. That's just for me though, to each his own. The most important part in all of this is that I got control of my budget, and started living within my means. My punishment for living outside of my means for so much time is that now I have to live well within my means. I have to live within the means set upon by having to pay a large chunk of each paycheck to the creditors. Once I'm outside this, it will be much easier for me to have lots of happiness and savings.

So this weekend is Trivia weekend, which means that my clock gets inverted for a couple days at least, as I tend to be on the "night team". Right now it's the beginning of hour 40, of which I've been around for about half. We just found out we're ahead of the team on the other side of the city. Hooray! Holy Hell. Audio Speed Round.

Okay, something bugs me, and it's somewhat irrational, and somewhat rational. I totally hate really long URLs needed to "verify" that the sign-up is valid. There are more than one type of these, sometimes they are required to continue into the site, sometime just for extra features, but they are more often that not, very long. Now, I don't like long URLs in general in emails, because there are many services which allow you to shorten them for public use. Recently I signed up for 30 boxes and they sent me this monstrosity:

http://30boxes.com/signup.php?action=finishSignup&d=aSDFJKLa43da
safjdAL5RLKj4afjrafa45J5kljtyTGJrALKJgFKLsaj5klJ4jkljakljdkalflk
fASJKjdfa4r23890fdfjskl342390fakjlei309dk390ujkal39032kd03j9djd9

Okay, so lets look at this rationally for a bit. How many unique strings can they have from that huge behemoth of an identifier. There are 145 characters. They are using the entire uppercase (26), lowercase (26) and numbers (10), so there are a total of 62 unique symbols for each spot. That gives us a total of 62¹⁴⁵ different strings. That's

78848779858160540639233408124436328679807474352650645474403652978
77812230999983634922053904324829205441837830921209410767866820350
39259149646534571887966722870103317751633817974743087029882020930
78213775489032524047364643001443429901072761743321026356976812032

different combinations. In scientific notation, thats 7.8 × 10²⁵⁹. Just for comparison, the entire number of atoms in the universe is high-balled at 6 × 10⁷⁹ (on this page). That's more than a googol of identifiers for EACH ATOM, EVERYWHERE. Isn't naming each atom once enough? Then you would only need 45 characters, which would nicely fit in one line of my email client if you just shortened your "finishSignup" to "fS" and action to "a". As a bonus, it also saves you approximately 117 bytes of bandwidth per email. UPDATE: Apparently it has ALL the information, in addition to being completely too long. I replaced it with random crap.

Everyone would like to be more interesting. While this seems like a broad statement which can't possibly be true for all people, I am confident that it is true for most. Even if you aren't a person who is driven by social interaction, if asked "would you like to lead a more interesting life?" most people would answer with a yes (ninjas and pirates need not apply, I think). There are very easy ways to make your life more interesting - you can volunteer somewhere, change your habits, or go out and party all the time. Unfortunately, some of these things aren't interesting to you, and they may be downright boring. So an ideal way to make your life more interesting would catch not only other people's interests, but yours as well, raising the whole world's interest level. The device today which garners the most attention is, arguably, the TV. It sits ensconced in the middle of almost every living room in America. We watch TV so much that there's a considerable market for devices which make it easier to watch, either by time shifting or space shifting . If we're guaging the interest of people just by what gets the most eyeballs, the TV wins hands down. So if you want to be more interesting, and whatever's on the TV is the most interesting thing around, it stands to reason that you should emulate what you're watching. I'm not saying you bust into a hospital and start performing surgery just because you like ER, or start having saucy affairs with the other families on your own personal wysteria lane, but people can make small decisions which make things more interesting. This is all a long-winded and round-about way of coming to my point, however. In most TV shows, the TV plays a very small role, if any at all. How many times do you ever see a TV screen on a sitcom? Almost never. They are always off screen, obviously not interesting enough to put on camera. There's no "watching the tube" show, in which everyone watches the TV. It's because that's boring. This suggests that if people want to be more interesting, they should just reduce the amount of TV watching they do. In most shows on the tube, the only reason they watch TV is because of some specific purpose relating to the other, non-TV-watching. things which they are doing. Also there are very few if any big screen TVs on TV - I would bet someone that I've never seen even a 35 inch screen ever on TV. Smaller TVs and a minimal amount of TV watching make for more interesting lives.

Last weekend I moved all of my websites from my expensive dedicated server solution to a shared server solution. So far everything has been working out great - the transfer of files went fine, and some of the automatic services that are setup for you, such as automatic secure webmail which is always nice to fall back on when you're at say, a public kiosk or something. The switch saves me approx. US$720 a year, which is going to be great for my finances. However, I'm always wary when I move to a new place that something is going to be horribly wrong, so it's watch-like-a-hawk time. One of the consequences of moving to the new server is using IMAP for reading mail. I am amazed, shocked and appalled that I didn't discover this earlier, but mutt has a caching mechanism, which increases the joy of reading both large Maildir mailboxes and IMAP mailboxes. To enable, just put set header_cache="/path/to/some/directory" in your .muttrc file - things go 10x faster after the first cache. In the same spirit of switching for a new year, I decided to switch my finances up a little bit. I'm currently migrating to using the StackBacks system for managing finances. This is the budget for the generation of consumers who would rather carry around a debit card than a bunch of cash, and is especially good for weaning yourself from credit cards. At the same time, I'm switching banks from a national chain to a local credit union.

Recently I have started a new diet: the No S Diet. The concept is very simple: no sweets, snacks, or seconds (except on days which start with S). I started around the holidays, which actually wasn't hard at all because holidays count as S days (they're "Special"). However, I didn't really get into it that much until recently. I can't really tell if it is working yet, because it doesn't have strict weighing guidelines like the previous diet, but I feel like something has changed in my life. There is a bunch of text on the page about why it works, but the basic concept is that you should be forming habits which are healthy. It is much easier to get into a healthy habit if it's not hard to remember what the habit you're trying to reinforce actually is. It makes it much easier to feel guilty when you fail in enforcing the habit as well, because you can't make complicated excuses ("this is okay because I excercised off those calories"). The No S Diet also has the bonus of being easily combinable with basically any other diet you can think of, unless that diet specifically requires you to eat sweets. I'm thinking of combining it with the hacker's diet, which definitely appeals to my accountant side. The problem I had with the previous attempt at the hacker's diet still exists, unfortunately - I still don't have an easy way to keep track of my calories. I am considering dropping a few bucks on a calorie counter database for my new Palm, which may help in that regard. I have noticed that most of the things which are now being termed as "lifehacks" are actually just habit-forming. The No S diet is a habit for eating, Getting Things Done is a collection of habits for todo lists and projects, and Early Rising is a habit for sleeping and waking up. These are not new ideas, they are just smashed into the new fad: improving your life through good habits. The accountant in me wants to do more than just that, so I am thinking of making a drupal module or two to keep track of my progress (and subsequently broadcast it to the world).

This is definitely some of the geekiest humor that I have ever read. Funniest site I stumbled upon all day. That is all.

College is not the launching pad for a job. It's the launching pad for the rest of your life. High school is a mini-jail with strict standards that everyone must live up to. College is when you get to make your own choices. This is the sentiment behind this article. I agree with it on principle, but not completely on content. Computer Science in the past 7 years has gone through an evil transition - almost all of the Colleges out there shifted to a Technical style curriculum because that was what was in demand. While TAing the introductory classes here at the U of M, the most common complaint was that they weren't learning things which will be useful in the future. The classes are taught in Scheme, for reasons that I completely agree with - the students would rather have them taught in Java, because that would be useful in the market when they leave college. What were they missing? The knowledge that programming concepts are what make good programmers, not language skills. Students want cookie cutter code which solves the problems that they are given. That is why people are lambasting the teaching of Java: people aren't learning hard thinking concepts. In my opinion, college is not supposed to teach you the skills you need for your job - instead, you are there to learn your specific learning style. This will allow you to learn anything you need for your job. Most jobs which exist in the Real World™ aren't looking for people from a specific major, they're looking for experience. I also share the views that you don't need to get perfect grades - the effort required to get an A over a B+ or a B is not worth it for the slight bump in your GPA, and you will have much more fun in college. Meeting friends in college is just as important as your actual classes. The Real World ™ calls this "networking". Choosing your major in order to get a job is also such a crap shoot otherwise - you're betting that in 4 years, the market will need the skills that you learn in a major.

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous! You drink everyone under the table.

Your Social Dysfunction: Paranoid You show pervasive and unwarranted suspiciousness, and mistrust of others. You are overly sensitive and prone to jealousy.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

I honestly don't see how some of the questions are relevant. Meh.

Today is a bunch of quickies about random stuff.

Sleeping.. ..and subsequently waking up. I have been trying out the advice of How to Become an Early Riser recently, after discovering it about a week ago from some people. I had been sleeping from about 4am to noon or 1pm, depending on the day. I decided to go all out and set my alarm clock for 5:30am, never to be reset again. It didn't work out the first couple days, but after three days of getting up on time, my body is definitely adjusting well to it, and I get a bunch of work done in the morning before I head off to work at 9. Debian packages-arch-specific vgrabbj finally got out of packages-arch-specific hell and is building on almost all architectures. I think the addition of a new person to the team maintaining packages-arch specific helped a bunch, because shortly after I emailed the new maintainer movement occurred after two months of nothing from the other two. I don't know if they had to actually check out the package itself efore removing the line, but it seems like something as simple as removing one line from a file in cvs shouldn't take that long. Planet issues For some reason, the posts from my blog which are syndicated to PlanetDebian are showing up on the planet 2 times for every post I make. If anyone has some insight as to why, and whether it's a problem on my end, I'm all ears. Diana Diana makes me happy like a bright sunny day after a long cloudy winter week.

Yesterday I needed to get a simple task done: scan a piece of paper so that I could email it to someone. Simple enough, as there is a scanner available for use in the grad lab. When I arrived, the lights were turned off and the lab vacant. Walking up to the machine with the scanner attached, I was surprised to see that the screen was locked. This annoys me to no end, and got me thinking about the thought processes of people when they choose open resources. Economics tells us that scarce resources are more valuable. The problem with this is the hoarding of resources - obviously the person who locked the computer was not using the unique resource attached to it, but if economics guided his decision would this be the correct answer? I would like to think not - it is far more valuable to use identical resources which were available (other M$ computers) while leaving that resource available for use by others. This seems to reverse the normal economic idea - you should use the resource which is the most abundant which suits your needs, allowing the scarce resources available to be used by others. Sidenote As it turns out, the user of this locked computer had left the computer locked for a considerable length of time. I left at 9, returned at 11, and returned again at 1 and there was no sign that it had even been used. I got tired of waiting and rebooted the computer, which I justified by the fact that you're not supposed to lock computers for long times in the grad lab. This particular student I do know, and he has taken some of the exaggerations about grad school a little too far - I'm pretty sure he sleeps in the building most nights, which just shouldn't be done IMHO.

I have noticed a new trend in my shopping habits lately: I will ask for help from a "sales associate" much faster than I did previously. This could be a product of the instant-gratification culture, but I really don't have much patience with floundering around a store trying to find what I need, especially if I have done all of my research earlier and show up at a store with just one thing in mind. I will go to great lengths to find a live person because even if I spend 3-5 minutes trying to find help, they will most likely be able to help me right away. That said, I won't just grab the first employee that I see in the store, I will actually make a reaosnable effort at finding the item first. After getting help, I can look at my handy palm pilot and see if there's anything else in the store that I need. I have noticed that Target is especially good at having random people walking around the store doing things that are quickly dropped in order to help a customer. In addition they have these nice little buttons sprinkled around the store that you can press and the entire floor staff gets paged notifying them that you have a question. I prefer this to the "pick up the phone" approach, although that is also available in some stores. The worst store by far for this strategy that I have come across is Home Depot. You sometimes have to walk a very long distance before you find anyone, and then when you do, they just point you back in the direction that you came from and said that someone over there can help you. If there was someone over there, I wouldn't be asking over here. I wonder if they just think I'm too stupid to read the HUGE SIGNS which state what is where in a Depot.

Well, I've switched blog software. WordPress is great, but recently I've been wanting to develop more things to put on the page, and the model that drupal uses is much easier to handle and seems much more flexible. The developers seem to have much more open source mindset - I don't know why, it's just a perception thing. It gives me much more control over which articles which go to different syndication places, like the LiveJournal feed and Planet Debian. Drupal also makes it much easier for users to setup their own feeds for categories, if some people are only interested in say, the book or movie reviews. I also made a new theme which is pretty minimal. I'm hoping to add more features in the near future. A short list, which is probably not comprehensive:

• Book Reading/Review Sidebar
• Movie Review Sidebar
• A little color, possibly some icons
• Revamp the TrainSched page

I was actually very surprised, that this changed - I used to be worth nothing. I wonder what changed?