Geek stuff – Page 148 – a sibilant intake of breath

Sony headphones, cont.

In response to my complaints by letter and phone, as well as sending back the broken old pair, Sony sent me a new set of MDR-EX71SL Fontopia earbuds (£25.67 on Amazon). While this is welcome, I would have preferred to have them send me a refund. On past form, the new pair will only last about three months before completely falling apart due to cheap materials and shoddy construction. My earlier complaint about them is here. To anyone considering buying Sony Fontopia earbuds: don’t. They are no longer the nice-sounding, solid things they were back in 2000 or so. Now, they are made of plastic so soft, you can literally peel it off the wires gently with your fingers. It is less tough than the brand-new shoestring licorices that you are surprised to bite into and not find toughened by months of exposure to 7-11 air and fluorescent lighting.

Rather than put the refund towards new Sony headphones, I would probably have gone with either the Shure E2Cs (£51.49) or Etymotic ER6Is (£68.51), which many people have told me are more durable and have better sound. They need to be earbuds, because I want to be able to wear them under a bike helmet and carry them virtually everywhere. While big ear-covering headphones would be great for my room, they hardly work with bikes and iPod Shuffles.

Since the replacement EX71s are new and in the original packaging, I could try selling them online somewhere, thereby generating some funds to put towards a better set. Of course, that would mean at least another couple of weeks with ear canals aching from button-shaped and unyielding hard white generic Apple headphones. What do cost-conscious audiophiles suggest?

On caffeine

Caffeine molecule Caffeine – a molecule I first discovered as an important and psychoactive component of Coca Cola – is a drug with which I’ve had a great deal of experience over the last twelve years or so. By 7th grade, the last year of elementary school, I had already started to enjoy mochas and chocolate covered coffee beans. When I was in 12th grade, the last year of high school, I began consuming large amounts of Earl Gray tea, in aid of paper writing and exam prep. During my first year at UBC, I started drinking coffee. At first, it was a matter of alternating between coffee itself and something sweet and delicious, like Ponderosa Cake. By my fourth year, I was drinking more than 1L a day of black coffee: passing from French press to mug to bloodstream in accompaniment to the reading of The Economist.

Unfortunately, coffee doesn’t seem to work quite right in Oxford. My theory is that it’s a function of the dissolved mineral content in the water, which is dramatically higher than that in Vancouver.

As I understand it, caffeine has a relatively straightforward method of operation. After entering the body through the stomach and small intestine, it enters the bloodstream and then binds to adenosine receptors on the surface of cells without activating them. This eventually induces higher levels of epinephrine release, and hence physiological effects such as increased alertness. Much more extensive information is on Wikipedia.

From delicious chocolate covered coffee beans used to aid wakefulness during the LIFEboat flotillas to dozens of iced cappuccinos at Tim Horton’s with Fernando while planning the NASCA trip, I’ve probably consumed nearly one kilogram of pure caffeine during the last decade or so. After the two remaining weeks of this term – and thus this academic year – have come to a close, my tight embrace with the molecule will probably loosen a bit.

Towel Day: a curious but entertaining memorial

Fans of Douglas Adams may appreciate being reminded that this coming Thursday, the 25th of May, is Towel Day. Created after his untimely death in 2001, the event is meant to mark his memory with good humour of the kind always demonstrated in his writing. Learning about his death was personally difficult in a way I don’t think it could have been for almost any other stranger.

For the unfamiliar, Douglas Adams is was best known as a British writer of science fiction, though much of his career was devoted to radio work. His most famous books are the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy in five parts” and the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency duo (trio if you include the unfinished segment in The Salmon of Doubt). If you haven’t read them, you are a lucky person: you have the chance to spend the next few days experiencing something exceptionally amusing for the first time. Personally, I’ve read them at least six times each – including going through most of Dirk Gently’s aloud.

On the matter of why towels are relevant, I shall quote a section from the first Hitchhiker’s book:

A towel, [the Guide] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Carrying a towel on Thursday is therefore both a way of marking your appreciation for Adams’ work and setting yourself out as the very example of a well-prepared and capable individual. Given that the world’s most interesting English-speaking people are all either present or future appreciators of Adams, you stand a decent chance of meeting some new ones if you carry the towel obviously enough.

To the many people who have already read and loved the books listed above, I recomment having a look at the lesser known non-fiction book Last Chance to See: written about a slightly mad worldwide expedition in search of endangered species, including the Kakapo parrot of New Zealand, Komodo Dragons, and Chinese river dolphins. The book has all of Adams’ characteristic wit, as well as quite a forceful conservation message. The fact that he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro while wearing a rhino costume definitely contributed to my own ambition to find my way to that lofty summit. Widely available in the UK, you may need to order the from here or wander through a few libraries to find a copy in the US or Canada.

Also worth noting is that Douglas Adams had one of the most amazing funerals possible: with the eulogy delivered by Richard Dawkins and a live performance of Wish you Were Here by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. That’s my favourite song of theirs, as well. Dawkins also wrote a touching article in The Guardian praising Adams.

Bug report thread

Found something wrong with a sibilant intake of breath or an associated site I run? Please report it here. I try to get everything operating as well as I possibly can, but there will always be oversights. Right now, when people report them, they tend to do so all over the place and it’s hard to keep track.

This covers all types of errors not directly related to a particular post: compatibility errors, access errors, formatting errors, etc.

Those who contribute here will earn fame and fortune. Well, my appreciation, at least. If you posted an unresolved issue on another post, please copy it over here.

Many thanks.

[Update: 8 October 2006] This is no longer the proper location for reporting bugs. From now on, use the bug reporting page within the Sindarkwiki.

[Update 2 September 2010] Unfortunately, due to terribly spam problems, I had to lock down the wiki. Now, only authorized users can edit it. For anybody else, please post any problems with the site on this comment thread.

Sony Fontopia headphones are very poorly made

The Sony Fontopia MDR-EX71SL headphones that I got on the 3rd of March are already broken. This is hardly what you expect from a pair that cost more than $50. The cladding around the wires is made of really cheap plastic that bunches up and breaks down: even under the kind of delicate use to which I have been subjecting them. I was warned too late about how poor their durability is. It makes quite the contrast with the pair of Fontopias I bought in 2000, and which only failed immediately before I bought these ones.

I will try to have them replaced under the warranty. Otherwise, I am soliciting opinions about earbuds that have comparably good sound and dramatically better construction.

WordPress has taken over

As you can see, going directly to www.sindark.com will not take you directly to the new WordPress blog. I encourage people to register for a user account that will let you comment without leaving you information, and perhaps let me do fancier things later.

If you want the RSS feed, it is: http://www.sindark.com/feed/ Please update your BlogLines accounts and such. There is even a feed for comments, at: http://www.sindark.com/comments/feed/

Should you want to look at it, the old blog is still available at www.sindark.com/blogger/. It probably will not be updated any longer. I will not be moving the post pages or archive pages for the moment, so Google searches leading to entries on the old blog should still work.

WordPress migration timeline

Beta period:

Finish fixing photos
Change colour of links and the search box
Generally finish tweaking template
Add Google Analytics tracking to WP blog
Find a photo upload plugin akin to the Upload Photo tool in Blogger

Release:

Shift Blogger blog to www.sindark.com/blogger
Redirect from www.sindark.com to www.sindark.com/wp/
Update any technorati style services as needed
Discontinue updates to Blogger blog
Fix internal links within WP blog

Optional:

Fix internal links within Blogger blog

If done properly, this will only really cause turmoil for the search engines, which should be able to sort it out in a few months, regardless. Relatively non-technical people who have seen the new WP site detect little difference, as it is. Is there anything else I am missing here?

WordPress migration, photo trouble

As part of the process of Blogger to WordPress migration, I really need a plugin that acts like the ‘Image Upload’ function in Blogger. It needs to be able to take a 1024×768 JPG file, upload it to my web server, create a thumbnail in one of a few sizes, and insert the thumbnail into my post as a link to the large version.

Does anyone know of such a plugin, or another easy way to do this?

Also, how can I configure WordPress to automatically mail new posts to an email account? I like having all my blog entries in my GMail account so that I can search them from within it.

Another strange and very annoying bug: on all posts that begin with photos immediately followed by a heading in bold, the WordPress version leaves an open [strong] tag that makes everything below it formatted in bold. I can fix them manually, but there are dozens and dozens.

Pondering content-management options

Increasingly, I feel the desire to be able to do more sophisticated things with this blog. For instance, I would appreciate being able to organize posts by category, as well as being able to send and receive trackbacks. I would also like to be able to host my own content management system, so I won’t be out in the cold whenever Blogger (frequently) goes down. Having the ability to establish user profiles with differing access levels also has some appeal, given the wide variety of people who read this blog, and the varied purposes for which they do. At this stage, I should probably have a blogroll, as well.

The most comprehensive (and expensive) option is to switch to MovableType, which would cost about $200 – the amount I pay for four years of hosting at sindark.com. TypePad – also from six apart – is about $50 a year. WordPress is an appealing free option, seemingly used by many of the better blogs I read. I like that it is licensed under the GPL.

The most important consideration is ease of continuity. I need to shift more than 1200 posts (not all of them obviously part of a sibilant intake of breath), along with hundreds of images. Also, any viable transfer will need to include the automatic alteration of internal links to reflect the new structure. Clearly, it’s not a project to be taken on during the middle of a term.

Has anyone made the transition from Blogger to WordPress or TypePad? If so, how difficult did you find it? Were you able to broadly transfer things automatically, or did it take a lot of manual tweaking? Also, what made you decide to switch and for what reasons are you either glad or regretful about doing so.

In the interests of fair and comprehensive reporting, I should disclose that special forces teams are already operating inside WordPress – reconnoitering and marking targets to be followed up upon later. The important thing to to have a really sound post-migration plan in place, reducing the possibility of some kind of data insurgency from posts or other components that prove resistant to being integrated into the new order.

Science fiction and positivist social science

While thumbing through a copy of Frank Herbert‘s Dune that I bought for a Pound at a used book shop, I realized the extent to which the highest ideals of strongly positivist social science can be found in science fiction. Because of the complexity of his notion of politics – and the interconnections between politics and other phenomenon, like religion – Herbert’s perspective extends somewhat beyond social science as often envisioned. Much closer to the ideal is some of the work of Isaac Asimov, which I will come to in a moment.

Dune itself can be read if an interesting (if fictional) study of politics. The Bene Gesserit notion of politics as fundamentally bound up in the structural relationships between different entities would not be hugely out of place in an American international relations faculty. The connections drawn up in Dune between transport, resources, and power are also relevant to contemporary politics. Of course, at times Dune is quite a self-aware allegory for the situation in the Middle East. I was entertained to find a discussion of coercion and consent as dual means for maintaining power in the novel. With a bit of terminology changed, it could be in a textbook on Machiavelli and Gramsci.

A better example of positivism embraced in science fiction is the concept of psychohistory: as described in Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation novels. Basically, psychohistory is envisioned as a science that can accurately predict the development of human society in the long term, and for large numbers of people. While it can’t make specific predictions about precise moments in time, it can predict massive systemic reorganizations over the course of anywhere between decades and millennia. It’s a strong endorsement of the idea that history is guided by comprehensible forces.

One interesting twist is that even with the benefit of psychohistory, the arch-positivists in the Foundation novels must still be actively involved in shaping the development of the system they examine. Also, for the predictive power to be maintained, people must not be aware of the fact that psychohistory is being applied. To say much more would spoil a number of key surprises in an iconic science fiction series, but the connections between science fiction and social science – within the historical context that spawned both – might reveal some important things about the kind of project some people understand themselves as being engaged in, as regards the world around them.

An alternative explanation is that, after spending so much time trying to force as much IR as possible into my head, I can’t see things any other way. When an eight year old boy is given a hammer, he suddenly discovers that everything needs pounding.