Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

I’ve been playing some scrabble lately and to improve my game, I’ve considered memorizing all the valid two letter words. [1] There are 101 words, of which about 60-70 of them fall into the category of not-obvious-to-me. So, I thought it’d be easier to just find words that are comprised of only two letter words. For example, “somehow” would be on my list because so, om, me, eh, ho, and ow are all valid two letter words. After coming up with a list of words, I could then try to form sentences that used only these words to act as a mnemonic.

I started by writing a program to generate a list of words comprised of two letter words. This ended up being pretty straight forward (hint, don’t try to chain together two letter words). Here’s a list of valid words at least 4 letters long.

There are two problems with this list. First, there are two two letter words not included: qi and ki. They’ll just have to be memorized separately. The other problem is that this list is too long. Now the problem is choosing the smallest number of (or easiest to remember) words that include the other 99 two letter words.

Unfortunately, this is the set cover problem, which is NP-complete (the reduction is left as an exercise for the reader). I ended up pruning the list a bit by hand then using a crappy greedy solution. This gave me a final list of 37 words.

Ugh, that’s actually almost as bad as just memorizing the list. Unless of course someone wants to make a few clever sentences out of this.

[1] I play using OSPD4.

I’m a big fan of tomato firmware which I’ve been running on the apartment router for a few months now. It includes a lot of the basic stuff I look for in a router (static IP addresses, traffic shaping, etc). But my favorite feature is the inclusion of Dnsmasq which allows me to set fake internal host names. Now when I type in “w” into my browser url bar, the internal wiki loads. When I type “m”, the interal music player loads. [1]

I found the documentation to be a bit confusing, so I’ll include part of our configuration. This is text copied from Advanced -> DHCP / DNS -> Custom Configuration text area in the tomato firmware admin interface.

domain=local
address=/wiki.local/w.local/music.local/m.local/192.168.50.102
address=/router.local/192.168.50.1
address=/printer.local/print.local/192.168.50.150

The first line is important: it sets the domain name for the internal network. Without that line, OSX won’t properly resolve these names.

The second line maps wiki, w, music, and m to 192.168.50.102. The computer at 192.168.50.102 already has a name (it happens to be “shake”), so these are in addition to the existing hostname. Mix in some virtual hosts and it appears like multiple services.

The third line gives a nice alias for the router itself and the fourth line contains aliases for the print server.

[1] These shortcuts actually collide with work intranet aliases when I’m VPN’ed in. In that case, I have to write out w.local or m.local to disambiguate.

Been thinking a bit about microformats and browser integration. There have been a few extensions that provide identification and handlers for microformats, but I don’t really like the UI they provide. I’m a bit skeptical about the discoverabiliy of icons in the browser chrome. Icons in the URL bar are easy to miss unless you’re looking for them.

However, when I see text that looks like contact information, I want to point at it and copy it into my address book. When I see an event, I want to be able to copy it to my calendar. These are actions invoked on the content. So here’s an example of a UI that overlays microformat detection into the HTML content area.

Maybe icons that appear on hover isn’t the right UI either. [1] Maybe there should be a glow around the microformat like focused buttons in Safari/IE7. Maybe the cursor should change. I’m not sure, but I’d like to see some more sample UIs to play with.

[1] Remember the image toolbar in IE 6? It not a good thing when all the search results are about disabling it.

Tippy 0.2 - a small update to the Tippy firefox extension. This version adds dimming text on livemarks if the page is in your history and combines the “Recently Closed Tabs” menu into the tab drop down menu.

I find that I use the Recently Closed Tabs menu quite a bit in Firefox 2 and I wanted a faster way to access it. I’m not sure the tab popup menu is the right place for it and I feel the dimmed UI is not the right indicator. However, I wanted to try using something so I could get a sense for it. Feedback welcome.

I guess I’m not the only one who hit some snags upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy. Some notes in case they help someone else.

• My window manager was unable to load any fonts. I got error messages saying, “Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset” when trying to open X apps. It turns out my fonts were in /usr/share/fonts/X11/* but my /etc/X11/xorg.conf were pointing to /usr/share/X11/fonts/*. Not sure if the fonts moved or if my xorg.conf changed.
• I tried to hibernate and when I restarted, it didn’t resume from hibernation and my swap partition was trashed. Adding resume=UUID=45acf887-ce9e-4e4e-819c-bff75afd523c to my /boot/grub/menu.lst (and using qtparted to fix my swap partition) fixed hibernation.
• The various ACPI related keys on my laptop no longer worked (e.g., brightness controls and the hibernate button). Apparently this is an issue with the panasonic laptop acpi module. I ended up downloading the source, changing one line from acpi_os_free(buffer.pointer); to kfree(buffer.pointer);, recompiling and modprobing the the module to fix the problem.

On a side note, I wish they hadn’t changed the OS_TARGET flag in the version of Firefox in the apt repository.