guide to problematical library use

Oh the Confluence LaTeX plugin bone is connected to the... JVM bone!
and the JVM bone is connected to the... Crowd bone!
and the Crowd bone is connected to the... keystore!
and the Confluence LaTeX plugin bone is also connected to the... TeTeX!
and the TeTeX bone is connected to the... a 32-bit syscall!
and the 32-bit syscall returns EOVERFLOW when the filesystem is over... 2TB!
and the TeTeX bone needs to be... recompiled!
but in the meantime the Confluence temp directory bone needs to be... moved and symlinked!

Paging Rube Goldberg; Rube Goldberg to the white courtesy phone.

In case anyone's keeping track, that's one RT ticket in, one Atlassian support request, 2 hours of research and debugging, a bit of strace, a CSW bug, and a hack in a directory tree; but now it works.

When you're a novice in a field and you're coming to enjoy the field and acquire its core skills, you may encounter a problem, precisely analogous in its formulation to something you find trivial in another field, that here seems impossible—or just unreasonably difficult, or solvable but only by doing violence to the idiom of the field. You're frustrated, of course, but, recalling that you're a novice, you decide to ask for help from the wiser and more experienced, or maybe just bitch that it can't be done in the hope that someone will show you up.

They scoff: "of course it's possible; you just..." and it's something you've tried, and you show them why it doesn't work. They laugh it off: "well then you just..." and again. Perhaps a few more times. And ultimately they concede that you're right, there just isn't a way to do it.

You are disappointed, of course, that there isn't a good solution; and you're satisfied, of course, that you weren't mistaken, and that the people who were telling you you were were wrong. Even upon reflection, you can't tell which predominates.

I am naming this feeling "haskell".

SIPB types and thermodynamicists alike will be glad to know that I have acquired a drinky bird for my office. I spent some time last week trying to arrange a water dish for him at just the right height using only objects on my desk, but apparently the indoor weather here is not quite right to keep him moving at any kind of respectable pace.

I fixed this just now by perching him on top of the external hard drive attached to my Mac. The waste heat from the drive keeps him going, no water required; in consideration of this Stirling achievement, I have dubbed him Tantalus. (I have not yet dared to put a water glass right next to the open drive vents for maximum authenticity.)

With the drive asleep, he "drinks" perhaps every couple of minutes. If I keep it busy, on the other hand, he gets 3-6 (somewhat chaotic) rpm.

Human beings are a disease, a
cancer of this planet. You are a
plague. And we are...

May I just say that this page is pure hilarity?

If my hypothetical wife came into the bedroom wearing these, I would burst out of the closet in a clown outfit and uglies would be bumped, I tell you what.

via chipuni and vito_excalibur (who has lively discussion)

- blogger comes out as female
- "He Must Be Joking" (FSP is someone I've already been reading for a while, and is worthwhile for several different reasons)

Less enragingly, Mesopotamian humor from the Onion.

In case you're wondering why cyclists might be a tad aggressive and irritable from time to time, a major contributing factor is that police do not enforce the law when the victim is a cyclist.

- San Francisco police, presented with a license plate photo and two witnesses to felony hit-and-run by a driver against a cyclist, are completely disinterested.

- If I ride from home to work, a distance of about 4 miles, I will witness 10-20 traffic violations by motorists and 5-10 by cyclists. ( cyclists get cited; motorists don't )

- maru_mari's bike was stolen from Davis Square last night. This involved a group of people hanging around for at least several minutes sawing away at her cable lock in plain sight in a high-traffic area. A witness called the local police. The local police made a note and forwarded the call to the transit police, who did not respond.

(For those not familiar with the area: Davis Square is a principal business district of Somerville and I doubt there are ever not 2-3 cops within a couple of blocks.)

One of my minor life goals is to replace all 150 of my Livejournal interests with interesting numbers. Got 7 so far.

Ones I share with other people:

∞ is infinity
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 is a number that is illegal to possess in the US
28:06:42:12 is Darko's Constant
4:8:15:16:23:42 was a fun half-season show that I think is in its, what, 8th season?

Ones nobody else has gotten into yet:

4726340 is the Sun bug ID requesting Tail Call Optimization in the JVM
567-68-0515 is Richard Nixon's social security number, which is what you should give when anyone asks you for a social security number when it's none of their damn business

and 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368e9 ("e9", meaning "x10^9", is because the limit on the length of interests prevents me from putting all nine zeroes on the end) is the size of the Monster Group, which is the largest finite simple group outside of the infinite families of simple groups (sporadic group). (By the way, the complete classification of simple groups is one of the more astonishing results in mathematics. Everyone should learn enough mathematics to learn (a) how astonishing it is and (b) how it was done; then nobody could ever be unhappy for long.)

The lack of interest in Nixon's Constant surprises me: that one's been going around since he was President, if not before.

The next couple of numbers I want to add have been problematic: I'd like to add Chaitin's Constant Ω and the 5th Busy Beaver number Σ(5), but since the former is impossible to compute numerically and the latter would take an absurdly long time, I would have to represent them by their symbols, and you can't put uppercase Greek letters in your interests.

Anyway, if you've got any interesting numbers, feel free to share them.