cygwin and gnupg

I upgraded my installation of cygwin from v1.7. to 1.7.5.  Doing so broke gnupg (v1.4.9, the version that comes with cygwin).  Others have encountered this too.


  $ /usr/bin/gpg --decrypt foo.txt.gpg
  gpg: can't lock memory: Permission denied


My solution - use the native Windows build of gnupg downloaded from gnupg.org.
I had to copy the config over from ${HOME}/.gnupg to ${USERPROFILE}/.gnupg.


  $ /c/programfiles/GNU/GnuPG/gpg --decrypt foo.txt.gpg

  You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
  user:


Problem solved.  I will wait till the cygwin distribution gets everything together.  In the meanwhile, I can get on with with my work.

Canon camera repair

Props to the Canon repair center in Virginia. I recently shipped a broken DSLR to them. Within an hour of receiving it, they sent email with a quote. (Deduced from the timestamp on their email and the Fedex delivery notification.) I responded that evening with the online payment (and rebuffed their attempt to upsell by declining an upgrade.) The camera was fixed and shipped the very next day. Quick and efficient service. Good show!

CGI on lighttpd

Installed lighttpd on an Ubuntu box over the weekend. Enabling CGI turned out to be a non-trivial exercise just because the online documentation was a bit confusing. The simplest config that will work is:

  server.modules += ( "mod_cgi" )
  $HTTP["url"] =~ "/cgi-bin/" {
    cgi.assign = ( "" => "" )
    alias.url +=  ("/cgi-bin/" => "/some/path/to/cgi-dir/"
  }

Thoughts on being Agile

Attended the 2010 Michigan Agile and Beyond "mostly free" conference on Saturday, March 13. There was a strong turnout - close to 400 people showed up on a rainy, blustery Saturday. Turned out to be wonderful day for being indoors.

A lot of attendees were unfamiliar about Agile (with a capital A - ie. use of any formal agile methodology, separate from agile the adjective - you can do the former without necessarily achieving the latter) and were there to get a better idea of what it was all about. A lot of questions asked during a panel discussion on "real-world" practice tended to reflect that - "what about large teams", "what about architecture", "is test-driven development realistic", "what about fixed-price bids?" All of these questions are valid, and the answers are often the same regardless of what the development methodology is. Coordination with large teams is always hard, exponentially so with increasing size. Power-point architecture doesn't work very well regardless, and the implementation phase always throws up previously unknown issues. Etc.

This theme continued during a lunch-time conversation with a couple of acquaintances from Ford. We have complex systems, and work with other teams that may not be agile. It requires longer analysis. The DBA team works with a 5-day SLA. Can't keep changing the database. I adopted the Socratic method, asking a series of questions that allowed them to question some underlying assumptions.

One of the speakers made a great point - to make it work, where it is adopting agile all the way concept to development, you need buy in from the very top and the very bottom. It will not fly unless both are absolutely committed.

There is an engineering aspect related to agile practices. But it is not all about making programmers work faster or just improving the development process. The iterative nature of agile is about enabling better decision-making by allowing course corrections sooner rather than later and by accommodating inevitable change.

Java on FF3.6 and Chrome

Both Firefox 3.6 and the Chrome browser require a minimum JRE version of 1.6.0_10. Simply install it and you are good to go. As of writing, the latest version is 1.6.0_18.

Copy or move?

Windows XP shows this dialog when you drag files from a zip file to a folder. Is it asking for the difference between copy and move (in which case the yes/no options have no meaning)? Or is it questioning the standard Windows function of dragging files from one window to another?

Google Calendar sync broken!

Google calendar sync stopped working all of a sudden. Gives a spurious "please connect to the internet error". Others have had the same problem. It does not even generate any logs for me to look at. :(

Best capers of 2008

A blog entry on wired.com with a list of seven great crimes from 2008.   Some interesting ones:

1. The robber that lured decoys to the crime scene by advertising for construction workers on Craigslist.  He made off with $400,000 stolen from an armoured car but was caught a month later through a tip-off.
2. An Eastern European website selling stolen identities that turns out to be a sting operation.
3. The guy who wrote a script to open 60,000 new brokerage accounts to harvest the few pennies they deposit to verify bank accounts.
4. The thieves that reprogrammed ATMs to think they were loaded with $1 bills instead of $20s, and managed to steal $13,000 before being caught.
5. The gang that duplicated thousands of Citibank ATM cards and stole $2 million, only being caught because of a traffic stop.

These may not be the biggest crimes in terms of size, but are interesting primarily for their hack value.

Olympus not very helpful to their customers

I have an old Olympus VN-960 digital voice recorder. Wanting to use it after quite some time, I dusted it off, popped new batteries into it, and went online to download the latest drivers so that I could copy the recorded files onto my computer. Unlike every other company in the world that makes hardware, Olympus will not let you download the software without paying $20 for the privilege of doing so. The only reason that I can think of for doing so is to try and shakedown the customer whenever they can. Shame on Olympus for not making the drivers freely available online!

It is telling that the internet is closer for me than a CD with software stacked in one corner of the room.

Financial engineering

Another world chess championship

Anand and Kramnik have begun a match to contest the world chess championship.  The first two games were drawn, the second one in what looked like a sharp position.  Live coverage available from the official site if you can find the link.

Blackberry trackball

My Blackberry Pearl trackball stopped functioning after about 18 months. I was disappointed by its quality. However, there is an inexpensive replacement available from Amazon. It is very simple to remove and replace.

USENIX proceedings freely available

USENIX has decided to make their conference proceedings freely available to everyone. This is an important step towards free dissemination of knowledge. Congratulations to USENIX for taking this step!

Wiimote hacks

A Carnegie Mellon grad student has demonstrated some interesting applications using the infra-red camera on a Wiimote and bluetooth to connect to a PC. The applications include a virtual whiteboard and virtual reality display.

Libraries live!

Libraries are not losing relevance, at least not in the U.S. According to a PEW study on information searches for problem solving, more than half of Americans visited a public library in 2007. The biggest users were the from the 18-30 Gen Y group. 68% of visitors used computers at the library, 65% used them to access the internet while they were there, and 62% used them to check library resources. Interestingly, usage of libraries is highly correlated with "high" access to internet (ie. broadband). And libraries are effective: 88% of users found a lot or some of what they were seeking. By contrast, 53% of those who did not use libraries found a lot or some of what they were seeking.

F#

F#, Microsoft's functional programming language, will be fully integrated into Visual Studio. Ars Technica has a nice description of what F# is and the advantages of functional programming.

Firefox 2.0.0.8 unstable on Windows

If you have not installed the Firefox 2.0.0.8 update on Windows, wait for a bit. It keeps crashing. Mozilla recognizes the problem and plans an update soon.

Digitizing content and the Open Content Alliance

The NY Times published an article today about how several large libraries have rebuffed offers from Google to scan their collections, aiming for broader distribution of their content by preferring to go with the Open Content Alliance. The OCA has recently reached an agreement with the Boston Public Library to scan content, and will be scanning 136,000 books from the Library of Congress. This content will be indexed and made available through the OCA website and Yahoo!

It is laudable that several institutions are trying to make their content available to the widest possible audience. They are standing on principle, disagreeing to cede complete control to a private entity.

Google, IBM and cloud computing research

Google and IBM recently announced setup of a data center for access to students to work on cloud computing. They expect to setup 1,600 processors by the end of the year. This should be a fantastic resource for students to build and run some large applications.

Google has published a bunch of research that has gone into building their applications. In particular, MapReduce - a programming model based on functional programming - allows programs to be automatically parrallelized. According to Google, "a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines."

Anand wins!

Vishwanathan Anand is the world chess champion. He won the championship tournament played in Mexico City in September 2007. A hugely satisfying result to a never-perfect system for determining who gets to be called world champion.

Anand won the 14-player double round-robin tournament with a score of +4. He was +3 in the first half of the tournament, but only a half-point clear of Gelfand. Both Kramnik and Gelfand lost round 9 to give Anand a 1.5 point lead. He was two points clear ahead of the field after round 11, and coasted to the win from there on.

It remains to be seen if FIDE can sustain a fair and well-run world championship system. Hope springs eternal. And at least for the next year or so, Anand can savour the view from the top...