Focus on the focus window

I wonder if I should code stuff to bring the window I am working on the the center of my field of view, while moving other windows to the side. Again, related to more screens?

Shells tightly bound to directory?

I am noticing a pattern: I have long used emacs shell windows. But for some reasion more and more I am creating shell windows that are intended to be tightly bound to their directory. Whose name is their directiry. Where it gets confusing if I chdir in them. In fact, have had errors when I quickly type keystrokes to switch to a shell window command expecting to be in dir PROBLEM: had changed away from dir, deliberately or by accident I am beginning to wonder about DISABLING chdir in that sort of shell window. Or at least making it a bit more onerous. Why this is happening more now than in the past, I dunno. Possibly because I have more screens. --- Similar happens for xterms, but I use xterms much less often than I use emacs shell windows.

Understanding Exogenous shocks to Startups and Conditional Prophecy

http://cdixon.org/2011/12/07/growth-curves-of-startups/ 



I remember first observing this when I worked at Bessemer. For example, there was a startup that supplied services to video websites. For years, the company soldiered along, barely growing. Then, suddenly, YouTube blew up and this company took off along with it. 


As a founder, these exogenous shocks are out of your control, but you can 1) understand what exogenous shocks you depend on, 2) try to guess when those shocks will hit, 3) manage your runway so you survive long enough for them to hit.

This sounds very much related to my classification of prophecy or prediction:

There are 4 types of prophets:

(1) False prophets who are always or usually wrong, or are right by random chance. These are common.

(2) Accurate prophets, who can predict exactly what is going to happen, exactly when it is going to happen.  These are exceedingly rare.

(3) Eventual prophets, whose predictions, oft repeated, almost always eventually come true.  Here are some from the past, and some from the near future: "Computers will fit on your desk".  "Tablet computers will one day be popular." "Some day, computers will be worn, not carried, and will display on your glasses, contact lenses, directly onto the back of your eyes, or direct neural connect". Nobody with a clue will be surprised by the last set of eventual predictions coming true: the problem is knowing when, and how.  How to make it happen, and how to profit by it happening.

The final class of prophet is, I think, the most interesting, because it is sometimes attainable and more useful than anything except accurate prophecy:

(4) Conditional or contingent prophets:  they may not be able to predict exactly when something will happen, but they can make predictions about dependency graphs of events.  For example, referring to Chris Dixon's blog post "If internet video ever takes off (like YouTube eventually did) then there will be a market for video services for websites."  Or let me try: "Contact lens displays may take off (a) when nearly transparent pixels dense enough to be circa 1Mp on the size of a contact lens can be achieved, (b) when signals (whether by wire or non-wire (not necessarily electromagnetic wireless) can draw (not refresh) such pixels on a device, and (c) when a standby device <0.1W powered by energy harvesting can always run, and wake up a more power huingry device when needed).

When I helped start Intel's Microprocessor Research Lab I created several such dependency graphs.  Note: not just simple chains, since there may be more than one way at arriving at a result.

Sharing Kindles in a Family

We want to share Kindles between the members of our family - so that we can treat them as a pool of devices of different form factors, ranging from small through large.

For that matter, we often read the same books.

It looks like the only way to do this sharing is to share a Kindle account.

Since I don't want to have a credit card attached to the account my teenager logs in to, I create a second account - one associated with the Kindle, the other for purchasing books.  I can then use "give a book" to, well, give a book from the CC account to the K account.

For that matter, my wife and daughter both have their own Amazon accounts. Makes gift card management easier.  Now we must remember to give books to the K account.

Lossage: subscriptions need a credit card account.  I may arrange a card with very low limit.

If at some time we no lionger need to swap Kindles of various sizes, we may rebind.

---

It is annoying that the Kindle does not allow multiple accounts. In this, it is like the early DOS and Windows PCs, who could not understand that multiple different users might want to use the same device.

As a result of my move, I am losing the NAT router w. wifi that I have been using for the past few years.

At my new house Comcast is just giving me a cable modem.  (I may try to swap boxes, but they probably won't let me get away with it.) (This surprised me: I did not know there were naked cable modems available any more.)

So, I am shopping.  Any recommendations?

I know: I should just take one of my old machines and install the latest flavor of open source router.  But (1) I'm lazy, and just want this to work, and (2)  I don't have any machine younger than 2000 with slots for a second network card, and don't feel like shopping for USB NICs and ... and ...  (As I have mentioned before, I went almost a decade without buying a desktop PC, laptops only, although I did give in and buy a cheap desktop last year.)

The usual shopping list:

* NAT

* wifi - nice, but I have some old wireless routers that I can use.  still, it's nice to9 have just one box. (For various reasons, I don't want to use those wireless routers to connect to the net.)

Since I am shopping around, I might as well look for something that is on my wishlist:  stats.

Basically, I would like the router to keep a reasonable amount of local stats.  Enough so that I can document what percentage of the time I and what percentage of bandwidth up and down I spend VPNed to MIPS, so that I can at least deduct that from my income for tax purposes. (Perhaps if it's a high enough percentage, I can pay for more bandwidth, and get better Skype to you, Mike.)

Not necessarily a full connection log, although that would be nice if there was enough storage.

But at least 

* total packets/bytes up/down

* total packets/bytes to a few IP addresses I identify

* total packets/bytes by IP for some selection of the top few IP addresses (not explicitly identifed)

* total 1minute time intervals in which there is any traffic, and/or any traffic to those IPs identified above

* histogram of those intervals by time of day and day of week

With reasonable ability to download automatically, so that I can keep the stats on another machine.

(Lower priority: VPN in the router: I have thought about tunnelling everything from my house router to Dreamhost for 20$ a month. Mainly so that I also get VPN that I can use while travelling.  VPN in the router attractive so I don't need to configure it on Sophie and Rhonda's machines, etc.)

attributes on closing tag (pseudo-XML)

Here's an example of why I like having the ability to place attributes on closing tags in pseudo-XML.  Proper XML only allow attributes on opening tags.

I like using pseudo-XML to structure the output of a test suite. For example:

<test start "foo" >
<test start "bar">
<test "1" passed>
...
</test end "bar" passed=10 failed=0>
<test start "baz">
...
</test end "baz" passed=13 failed=2>
</test end "foo" passed=13 failed=2>

More nicely indented:
<test start "foo" >
    <test start "bar">
        <test "1" passed>
        ...
    </test end "bar" passed=10 failed=0>
    <test start "baz">
    ...
    </test end "baz" passed=13 failed=2>
</test end "foo" passed=13 failed=2>

Anyway, the basic idea is to use pseudo XML ...s to encapsulate test output.

When I translate from pseudo XML to real XML, I can use any of several nice viewers that allow sections to be opened and closed.  E.g. Internet Explorer.

Placing attributes on the closing tag allows me to do such processing in a single pass.  E.g. in a UNIX pipeline:

run-test-suite | collate-results

This is one of the reasons I like being able to place attributes on closing tags: it allows single pass processing.  Often, I am processing some other program's output.

I am fine on eventually converting to standard XML. If necedssary.

---

By the way, I do pseudo-XML, like

<test "name" passed assertions=56>

mainly because I find it more human readable than


<test name=-"name" passed="true" assertions="56">

Human readability counts, since there is not such a plethora of XML tools on the UNIX command line that I never look at the raw text.

ISO composite workspaces

Here's the thing that I really miss in the Mercurial based version control I am currently using; i.e. here is something that CVS used to do really well, that Mercurial makes a pain.

Composite workspaces.

Here's the output of a shell scruipt that goes and looks at 4 of the hg repos/clone/workspaces that I am normally working in:

/home/glew/.
        hg root: /home/glew
/home/glew/mips/.
        hg root: /home/glew/work/work.mips
M LOG
M tools/ag-mips-automation/ag-mips-automation.pl
/home/glew/mips/uarch-perf-sim/psim+stuff/.
        hg root: /home/glew/work/work.mips/uarch-perf-sim/psim+stuff
M psim-extra-stuff/diag_instruction_list_including_undefined_instructions.s
M psim-extra-stuff/parse-rtl.trace-or-ref.trace
/home/glew/mips/rtl/.
        hg root: /home/imp_scratch_perf/glew

It's not too bad - I've only made coordinated changes in two repos.  Sometimes I have made changes in 4 or 5, that are all coordinated in some sense.

Back in my CVS days I could build a composite workspace, and check them all in at the same time, with a single command and checkin message. I could even tag them together.

In Mercurial, I have to go to each repo and check in separately.

Don't say "subrepos": I am already using Mercurial subrepos: psim+stuff is actually a super-repo with 2 subrepos.  Subrepos get part of the way there, but are nowhere as easy and convenient to use as the compositeworkspaces I could set up with CVS.

---

I am reasonably certain that the above excerpt is non sensitive: it's pretty well known that I work for MIPS, on performance simulators, and with RTL.  I sanitized any product names.

---

One big reason to want composite checkins: I work better when I am keeping track in a log.  E.g. ~/LOG -> ~/mips/LOG.

(Let's skip over issues about why UNIX text files are lousy for logs.)

So nearly always I want to check in both my LOG, and my project work, at the same time.  But they are in different repos.

---

I don't make my project work a subrepo of my home directory, ~, or of my company work area under my home directory, ~/work or ~/work/work.mips, because I frequently create new ad-hoc clones, i.e. task branches.  It is a pain to have to edit Mercurial's subrepo file whenever I want an ad-hoc branch.

The nice thing about CVS composite workspaces was that, in some existing workspace, I could just say "cvs -d SOME-OTHER-CVSROOT co repo"  and it just worked.  I.e. connecting an ad hoc subrepo trivial.

In an ideal world, I might want to make the distinction

(1) clone into a new subdirectory of an existing workspace, implicitly making it an ad hoc subrepo for the workspace checking out into

(2) clone, without linking into the enclosing workspace.

---


Almost what I want:

#!/bin/sh



# Script to run Mercurial commands on tghe usual places I run them



for i in  ~/. ~/mips/. ~/mips/uarch-perf-sim/psim+stuff/. ~/mips/rtl/. ~/mips/rtl/current/.

do

 echo $i

 hg --cwd $i root 2>&1 | sed -e 's/^/        hg root: /'

 hg --cwd $i "$@" 2>&1 | sed -e 's/^/        /'

done

although "hgu ci" does not automatically copy checkin message between repos.