Josef “Jeff” Sipek

I just came across this… a new SMTP RFC (5321). I wonder what changed - I wish they did the change bar that IBM uses in its documents. :/

After moving to Michigan, I had to get license plates for my car of course. This being my first car that I own 100%, I decided to splurge a little bit…

Yesterday, I forgot to mention that I got myself a copy of Hamlet….in the original Klingon:

It’s been a month today since I moved to MI. Time flies! I know, I have been neglecting this blahg a whole lot, and I promise to try harder :)

Here are some photos of stuff from the past few days…

I like bread. This one even looks tasty:

A couple of days ago, I got myself a can of Spam. Unfortunately, it turns out, the can’s seal got compromised, and the insides look quite uneatable:

Today, I was doing some more grocery shopping, and I couldn’t resist but get some drink worthy of a warrior:

(Yes, that’s a 40th anniversary of the IBM S/360 mug.) It’s hard to identify the contents of the mug, so here’s a photo of the bottle:

That’s it for today’s what’s-Jeff-up-to post.

Today (well, technically yesterday), I decided to go explore Ann Arbor with my camera. Here are many of the photos I took - minimally edited for your viewing convenience.

It was a sunny day; not many people around - quite strange actually.

The Lurie bell tower is a hard to miss feature of North Campus. It has 60 bell clarion.

Unfortunately, I did not have a tripod with me, so the source images for this panorama weren’t as good as they could have been as I was forced to hand-hold them. You can see the Duderstadt on the left, the Lurie tower next to it, then you have the CSE building, the Dow, and then the EECS building. I will probably go back with my camera and a tripod to take some good panorama source material.

I’ve climbed up the bell tower at Trinity church in NYC enough times, but not even once did I consider the fact that a bell tower could have an elevator. Well, the Lurie tower does!

And another shot of the tower, from the other side now.

Then it was time to head to Central Campus and explore things there. By the bus stop, I noticed these two guys…

Once on Central Campus, I didn’t have to go far to see this sign (which I saw few days ago, but didn’t have a camera with me then). It just reminds me of XKCD far too much.

The university runs a bunch of buses to get the students between the North and Central Campuses, as well as the hospital that is located right between the two. My understanding is that they are called Magic Bus. I can’t help but wonder if it is in any way related to The Who song…

A fountain…pretty self explanatory. I took a bunch of photos with different exposures to see how each would look.

The Rackham Graduate School building. I actually took enough for a panorama shot; I’ll create it and upload it some time later.

This sign was above a door to a shop of some sort, that was on the second (possibly third) story of the building - you know, the kind that has a enough of the building’s ground floor for a staircase and nothing more. I do not know what it is that they deal in, but something tells me that I’m not going to go check it out.

Edit: I did some searching on the internet, and it seems it’s a smoking-related supplies shop.

Few minutes later, after being surprised by a stream of people that did not seem to end for at least 15 minutes (after a few minutes I realized that it was the result of people pouring out of the football stadium after a game), I ran into Bruce hanging out with his juggling buddies. Well, before I ran into them, I took a bunch of photos for a high dynamic range photo. I haven’t done the combining … yet.

Then I headed off toward North Campus. Since the buses were full of the crowd I mentioned before, so I decided to go on foot. On my way there, I saw a parking lot for bikes:

Few minutes later, I noticed a sign by a parking lot:

Just a few dozen meters later, I got distracted by an entrance to an arboretum. I entered, and not long after, I noticed this sign. It’s actually nice, they have a bunch of trails that are quite manageable in a wheelchair (I haven’t tested it myself), or with a stroller - more on that in a bit.

Almost a mile of walking later, I came across a more "vehicle" friendly path. There was even a nice rest area.

I wouldn’t have taken a photo of the rest area if it wasn’t for this label on one of the railing-type things:

After exiting the arboretum, I had to walk past the hospital. Since it is a major one, they had helipads - I counted 3 in total. They were all fenced off, with these assertive signs all around.

Then, I found a pretty sweet spot to take a photo of the hospital. Unfortunately, as I already mentioned, I did not have a tripod. I tried anyway, hand-holding the shots. When I got home later, I tried to combine them to get higher dynamic range. It turned out ok, not great, but ok. The following are the 5 source images (left 3, and first 2 on the right), and the resulting HDR image on bottom right.

Here’s a larger version of the resulting HDR. The ugliness with the clouds is because they moved enough during the 20 seconds I spend on taking the source images.

Since I had the app (qtpsgui or whatever it is called) all loaded, I tried to tone-map the HDR image. Here are the two I liked the best.

Some walking later, I got back to North Campus. Here’s another view of the Lurie tower.

You may have noticed this already in the panorama, if not, then surprise! There’s a 9-10ft ground to tip Rubik’s cube in front of the Duderstadt. It doesn’t actually work, but as far as I know, the base allows it to rotate - one degree of freedom is a good enough start, no?

I ended my exploring with a shot of the spiral staircase in the CSE building. Definitely a great place to have a sword fight!

It’s been a couple of days already, but I should mention it just the same…

On Tuesday (August 26), I drove to Ann Arbor with the intention of living there for the next n years - however long it takes to do a PhD in Computer Science. The drive was mostly ok. Going through NYC was a bit slow, but still manageable. NJ was better, but there were still too many cars on the road. Once I hit PA, things were great…I-80 has just the right amount of curves, there are mountains, trees, and other things to look at. I stopped for gas near Allentown, PA because of the Billy Joel song. The couple of hours driving in OH were dreadful. It was the most boring part of the 10.5 hour trip. Do you know what you can see in OH? Fields! That’s it, nothing more. Just fields to your left, and fields to your right. The road has a slight turn every so often, but nowhere near enough to keep the mind busy. Also, since there are only fields, you actually get some pretty nasty gusts of wind that are really annoying. The drive in MI was much better…turns, etc. One thing that really amused me was a road sign saying “Prison area Do not pick up hitchhikers” or something to that effect. Unfortunately, I was busy driving to take a photo of sign.

647 miles total. 10.5 hours (30 mins spend on food and gas).

My apartment’s layout is something like this:

I actually have the left-right reverse…entrance is upper right, balcony is mid left. It’s quite big for my purposes. I still need to work on the furnishing and all. (I don’t like shopping for things, so I’ll just do a demand-purchases…when I need something, I’ll go and get it. I am thinking a recliner would be nice :) ).

As some of you may have noticed, my blahg has been down for about 2 days. The reason is, I upgraded my system, and php4 packages broke. I just installed the php5 packages, and things seem to work again.

Although I’m filing this under the “rants” category, don’t get fooled. The rant is about UIs in general, with Audacity being the exception.

Here’s what happened…I was going to save the recordings of my radio show to my computer, and I noticed that the first hour recording started about 4 minutes after I took over aether. That meant that I needed to get the previous hour, and cut whatever short portion into a small file and keep it along the 3 1-hour long mp3s.

For audio editing, I tend to use Audacity. It works well, it’s rather intuitive, etc., etc. I did the cut, and I was going to export it as an mp3 (to keep the file format consistent with the other 3 hours of audio, otherwise I’d make it an ogg/vorbis). Audacity let me chose the new file name, the new format, but then when it was about to start the actual encoding, this dialog popped up:

This is absolutely brilliant! And I mean it; I’m not being sarcastic as I usually am. Normally, one of these scenarios happens…

• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at start (if at all), and disables export to that file format
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, forcing you to abort the encoding, potentially closing the application, to installed the codec, and redoing whatever you did and trying to re-export
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, making you look through numerous preferences windows to find the one you care about - if it even exists
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, making you trying to figure out which environment variable (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LD_PRELOAD, etc., etc.) will make the linker do the right thing, and make the application find the .so

All are sub-optimal. Asking the user for the path to the .so, while not the newbie-friendliest of things, is really the best thing the application could do. This way, if the .so isn’t installed, the user can install it anywhere - system wide or in one’s $HOME - and then point Audacity to it. If the .so is installed but Audacity couldn’t find it, you can manually point it in the right place.

I use Debian, so installing libmp3lame was a matter of making sure I have the Debian Multimedia source in my sources.list, and then running a quick aptitude install to get it on my disk. If you are using a less privileged distro (or if you don’t have root access to install it system-wide), you’ll have to quite possibly go to the project’s website, and grab a copy there. Audacity’s UI designers haven’t failed you there. A convenient way to go to the website to download the .so is right there.

Overall, seeing this dialog didn’t make me agitated that Audacity wants something I don’t have installed, but instead it made me write this post about something that makes sense, but people fail at doing things like this.

This is a follow up post to Wordpress sucks from a week ago.

I decided to try to figure out some more category names, and then it hit me…my site is crawled from time to time by The Wayback Machine. So, I searched, and found a copy from November 2007. Not the latest, but quite new enough to have all the categories I had. A little while later, my blahg is back to its former glory. And there was much rejoicing.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to upgrade my Wordpress install. Every single time I upgraded it, I have no problems whatsoever. So, this time around, I didn’t make a backup of the DB tables. Well, that was quite stupid of me. I copy over the new files (2.6 release tarball), and run the upgrade script. Poop! I lost all the category labels and descriptions. Gah! Absolutely, not fun. I have 40 categories, and now they don’t have any labels. Well, not anymore, I’m trying to figure out which category id was which category (sometimes not as easy as it should be). I got some, I’m not sure about some. If you had links to any categories, they’ll still work. If you had links to any posts, they’ll still work. Things will just look a bit disorganized if you look at the list of categories on the website, or if you look at which categories a post belongs to.

Please send any and all hate mail to the Wordpress developers for breaking an upgrade from one stable release to another.