ktheory.com

I think people should have ’strong opinions weakly held’. I also think my debate/critical reasoning skill are getting weaker as I get older. So it seems like good practice to argue strongly for a weakly held opinion.

There is a stigma against people who merge late on roadways. Popular behavior dictates that one should vacate the closing lane as soon as signs announce that the lane closes in a few miles. I think those arrogant drivers rushing past rows of idle traffic are actually behaving efficiently and in accordance with Kant’s moral imperative. Those who merge at the first sign are slowing everyone down with their conformity.

Merging late is more efficient because it minimizes the duration of time when traffic is constrained to one lane. Having a 50-foot stretch of one-lane road does not slow down traffic as long as the flow of traffic is less than one car per 50 feet of road. But if all traffic merges miles in advance, 1 car/50 ft. of road is enough to cause backup. Merging late maximizes the use of available road, which alleviates bottlenecks.

Merging late concentrates the location where drivers switch lanes. This avoids drivers slowing down further while they negotiate who’s changing lanes. Drivers should understand that alternating lanes in the optimal way to merge two lanes into one, and if people use all available roadway, the lanes will be equally full at the point of merging. Since less negotiation is needed, drivers won’t need to slow down as much in order to be cautious of unexpected merging.

At Mint, I spent all day (and some of my night) building Islandoo, a social networking site with the current focus of auditioning people for the British reality show Shipwrecked.

Creating and participating in the Islandoo community is a ton of fun, especially once you chat with some new people a bit. But I warn you, it’s very addictive.

For some cool Islandoo profiles (IMHO), check out gabsy, sandhi, surferjon, laura1monkey, p_ho, and lynzers. Arrow24 & bockers met on Islandoo and are now dating.

Update 23 Oct 2006: We got a great write-up in Independent and Financial Times (sub. req.). Also, we were reviewed in Mashable and TechCrunch UK a few weeks ago.

I’m leaving arXiv.org and Ithaca, NY to work for Mint Digital in New York City. I’ll be a Ruby on Rails developer. This is how excited I am:

xkcd is my new favorite web comic. Though Achewood is a close second. (If you don’t get the joke above, it’s because you’re not a computer nerd, which is nothing to be embarassed about.)

arXiv under load due to Perelman’s Fields Medal

Tuesday morning Grigory “Grisha” Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal for his work on (proof of) the Poincaré Conjecture, one of the million dollar Millenium Prize Problems. NY Times, CNN, the BBC and other web sites point out that he published his work solely on the Internet; but they didn’t mention that Perelman’s papers are only available from arXiv.org, the web site I maintain.

I found out that Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal when I checked my email ~8:45am Tuesday morning. I had an automated warning message that the main arXiv.org server was unresponsive.
Now, if the server were a pet cat, this is pretty much the equivalent to waking up and stepping in a hairball on the way to the bathroom. I can’t even open an SSH
session to better diagnose the problem.

At this point I’m assuming some script went haywire on the server, or there’s some sort of malicious attack. I reboot the server (sadly ending over 200 days of uptime). Normally, I would call/email several supervisors to get someone more knowledgeable involved. But my boss Simeon is on vacation ice climbing(!!) in British Columbia. Paul Ginsparg, the arXiv partriach, was unreachable by phone or email at that moment. And Thorsten Schwander, a sysadmin/developer at LANL and arXiv consultant who knows more about Linux than anyone I know, won’t wake up for two more hours. I realize that if arXiv is going to work at all this morning, it will be because I make it work.

When the server finishing booting, the load average immediately spikes due to web traffic.

I turn off the web server program so that the rest of the server is responsive enough for me to work. Looking at the web server logs, about a bajillion requests are coming in for everything related to Perelman. Since last weekend, I was expecting demand for his papers, but I didn’t realize that arXiv was the only place to get them. Moreover, Perelman’s accomplishment has the reclusive genius/Cinderella narrative, so the MSM covers the story far more than they would a typical math prize.
The technical problem was that all arXiv pages are dynamically generated b/c of legacy issues. The server simply couldn’t generate Perelman’s pages fast enough to keep up with demand. My solution was to grab a copy of all of Perelman’s papers off an arXiv.org mirror, and use some redirects to send traffic from the dymanic pages to the very fast static pages.

I turn on the web server, and things hum along smoothly. People can download e-prints as much as they want. I put on my copyediting hat and post a notice on the front page (pictured above).

Total time for me to diagnose and solve the problem: 7 minutes.

In those 7 minutes, I may have done more service to the scientific community than my entire two years at arXiv. I feel that I have atoned for slacking off in Complex Analysis class.

Father: “Do you like your hot coco?”
Little kid: “Yeah.”
Father: “What does it taste like?”
Little kid: “Not like toothepaste.”

Tired: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl)

Wired: ROFL (Ruby on Rails On FastCGI on Lighttpd); rhymes with whaffle. Now we need to invent more platforms for the “Roflcopter” stack.

Everyone loves YouTube, including me. But adding a video to my favorites is too hard. It takes three clicks! And two of those clicks are clicking ‘ok’. It’s not such an important operation that it requires double confirmation: it’s not the end of the world if I accidentally add a video to my favorites list.

Please, YouTube developers, make the adding to favorites just one click, like Flickr.

ACE2006 Keynote: The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex (pdf link), via research.techwondo, defines “Ender’s Folly” as

An excessive commitment to, and a fetish of 2nd Life worlds will inflict irrevocable damage upon 1st Life worlds.

• Puns of the word ‘seitan‘

Woah, Vox is a boatload of fun. Not that ktheory.com is going away. But Vox has the new car social web app smell. The smell is the chemicals they use to treat the dashboard AJAX.)

Earlier tonight I went to see Inconvenient Truth playing at the cinema 50 feet from my apartment. But that’s not what this post is about. Standing in line for candy, I did a double- then triple-take at the man standing behind me. Finally I placed where I’d seen him: Mayor Bill Timber of Super Troopers (Google Images, you fail me, YouTube FTW).

Since I have a rather infamous history of mistaking regular people for celebrities, I took a cautious tact. My triple-take was conspicuous, and I totally screwed up my candy order from my preoccupation. (My order invovled me silently thrusting a bill at the cashier.
“Um, what do you want?”
“Huh?”
“What is the money for?”
“Oh. Um…Junior Mints.” )

So I turned and said, “You look a lot like a guy from Super Troopers. Have you seen that movie?”
He smirks and shrugs, “yeah.”
“Oh my god, you’re the mayor guy!”
Thinking quickly, I whip out my camera phone and ask if I can take a picture, “My friends will totally flip. We love that movie.”

He respectfully declined, which is probably sound publicist advice in the “don’t let cult fans accost you, especially if they can barely place you” category.

Instead he shook my hand and introduced himself as John Lloyd.

The only thing I could think to say was, “Spread it on!” (which I meant as a compliment).

I can’t decide what I like most about flip-flops: their comfort, their convenience, or their sound.

Following Mark Pilgrim’s meme…

My computer usage is somewhat unusual. I have a Linux workstation for my job, an Apple Powerbook for remote productivity (’remote’ usually being my couch, a coffeeshop, or a meeting room), and a Windows desktop for videogames. To keep my digital stuff synchronized across my three different computers (and OSes), I’m prejudiced towards using web apps over desktop apps.

Web/OS-agnostic apps

• Firefox + GMail Notifier + Greasemonkey + del.icio.us plugin + web developer + livelines + Foxmarks + HTML validator + Menu Editor + the missing Google Suggest
• GMail for personal and important work email
• Thunderbird + GMailUI for work email
• Google Reader and del.icio.us for organizing stuff to read
• Backpack Plus for organizing everything else
• Password Safe SWT for more secure passswords
• Oracle Calendar (pretty much required for Cornell employees, sigh [please save me, Backpack Calendar!])
• OpenSSH (with ssh-agent and key forwarding!) for administering other computers (PuTTY on Windows)
• keychain for better ssh-agent behavior

Linux workstation

• RedHat Enterprise Linux (Cornell has a site license, so it was “free”. If not for that probably debian or Ubuntu)
• Cyrus-imap for my mail server: keeps all my work email and a backup of my personal email
• Emacs for programming/development
• Bash, and a ton of aliases and shell scripts to save my fingers undue wear and tear

Powerbook

• iTunes + iPod Nano (yay for NPR podcasts)
• iChat
• TextMate

Windows Desktop

• BitTorrent (for downloading, um, linux distros?)
• World of Warcraft Kicked the habit. No more skipping social events to wipe on C’Thun
• SimCity 4
• The Sims 2
• Second Life
• Call of Duty 2
• FarCry

Quoth my mom:

I want to see that new movie, um, The Devil Wears Pravda.

I’d much rather see that movie.

Via PinkDome

Via Gizmodo

YouTube has videos of Stephen Colbert hosting the White House Correspondents Association Dinner: one, two, three (it’s presented in three parts). Update: YouTube removed the videos for copyright infringement. But you can watch the video (streaming RealPlayer link) on CSPAN’s site. Colbert plays the same character at the dinner as he plays on his show. And it’s devastating. While the crowd can’t laugh for fear of jeopardizing their careers, we were howling on the couch.

Props to Crooked Timber for the best blog post title: Speaking Truthiness to Power.

Update: Distler joins the Colbert like-fest adding a downloadable clip of an interview with Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard.

When sending documents to people, consider the utility of the filename in the recipient’s context. We’re hiring student employees for the summer, and if I had a nickel for every email attachment called “resume.pdf”, I’d have at least $0.60.

Naming a file “resume.pdf” makes plenty of sense for a student, who likely only has one such file on their machine. But for potential employers, the name is almost meaningless. “kirby-mcsmartypants-resume.pdf”, on the other hand, will make me think “Kirby’s a smart guy (assuming Kirby’s a guy, Kirby could  be a girl’s name) for naming his résumé in a way that’s useful for me.” Also, Kirby McSmartypants is an awesome name.

Personally, I don’t care if you put the acute accents on or not. I can swing UTF-8 or lower ASCII. Definitely don’t put accents in file names though. That breaks stuff.

Tip o’ the hat to Joel’s résumé rant and Kathie.

An older librarian in my office reads the New York Times on her computer and knows I like weblogs. Whenever there’s an article about weblogs, she prints out a hard copy and puts it on my desk.

We make small talk about the article for a minute or two, and I act flattered that she bothered to give me something she thought I’d appreciate. But while we’re chatting I’m thinking: “Why don’t you just email me the link?” (or better yet, “Why don’t you bookmark it in del.icio.us and I’ll subscribe to your feed?”)

But I don’t think I should ever suggest that. While I’m optimizing for efficiency (fewer interruptions, less wasted paper), she’s doing it for the human interaction and small talk that often segues into how youth culture is so technological, and her daughter, who’s about my age…