Here’s an excerpt:

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 65,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Today, I went to one of my favorite sites, seeking for articles to read and here is what I found:

Web Reading Experience

If you click on the picture to have a better look, you will notice 8 levels of information, most are irrelevant to the article, before you can get to the article’s contents (which I call the “meat”). Worse yet, a pop-up dialog jumped into my face and cover most of what little text left, leaving only 6 (yes, six) complete words for my reading enjoyment. Not that I was reading from a tiny netbook screen: my browser spans almost the entire 1920×1068 display–a good size by today’s standard. So, the net effect? When I click on the article, instead of being able to read it right away, I have to do two things: dismiss the pop-up dialog, then scroll down to see more text. The reading experience is simply terrible.

For the website designers out there, if you read this post: step back and start thinking about your visitor’s experience. In the above example, I did not count, but guessed the whole screen contains about over 200 words in various sizes. Of those, 6 complete words belong to the article I want to read, that’s about 3:100 signal-to-noise ratio. For now, I am going to use readability, which gives me what I want: the “meat”.

When I encountered such a thread, I usually read the first message, which is important, then discard the rest. I wish there is some sort of mail rules which detect this condition and discard all, but the original message.

As for those who sends out the original announcement messages (if you are reading my post), I wish you sent via Bcc, which effectively prevents reply-alls.

When coding in Python, we need a way to store configurations and
settings in a file, then be able to access them in the code. Our
requirements for accessing these settings are:

• Simple to learn and use — We would like to target novice coders
• Easy to understand
• Hierarchical of settings

References

• ConfigParserShootout wiki page lists a number of choice
  for configuration file managements

The Options

Currently, there are a few options for accessing configurations files,
some of them are:

• INI file format
  • ConfigParser module
  • ConfigObj
  • INITools
  • cfgparse
• Straight Python code, via the import mechanism
• YAML file format with yaml module
• HierConfig
• JSON
• Vinay Sajip’s config module
• tconfpy

In the following sections, we are going to discuss the advantages and
disadvantages of some of these.

ConfigParser

Advantages

• Library comes with Python installation, no need to install it
• Ability to specify a default section
• Low learning curve

Disadvantages

• Not zero learning-curve as with straight Python code method
• No hierarchical of data: the default data layout is just one layer
  deep: A configuration file consists of one or more sections and each
  section contains one or more settings.

ConfigObj

Advantages

• Simple to learn: the configuration is a two-dimensional array: one for
  each section, and one for the settings
• Round-trip: read/write from/to files
• Many other features

Disadvantages

• Need installation

INITools

This tool is abandoned, so we only mention here for completeness.

cfgparse

Advantages

• Round-trip read and write
• Many features
• Ability to specify a default section

Disadvantages

• Need installation
• Not simple to use
• Higher learning curve than other INI solutions
• INI file can without section header, which is non-standard

Straight Python Code

Advantages

• Natively supported: We don’t need any module to parse
• Low learning curve: The users do not need to learn another
  configuration file format
• Versatile: This file format supports all kind of data types: integer,
  string, dictionary, array, …
• Simple usage: The users only need to make sure that the settings file
  is in the same directory as the script

Disadvantages

• No “default” mechanism as in INI
• Cannot merge different settings files into one
• No simple mechanism for dynamically load configuration files. For
  example, the ability to specify different configuration files from the
  command line

Conclusion

Of these solutions, we prefer the the native, straight Python code for
its simplicity, ease of use, and zero learning curve. In the next posts,
I will discuss the straight python code solution in details.

This morning, I made a call using the Supertooth to my brother and I did not notice any complains from him, so I guess that’s the Supertooth is not permanently back in service.

In the past, I have been flirting with BSD several times, and ended up abandon BSD for Linux. This time is no exception. Before going into the bad parts (at least for me), I would like to state that PC-BSD 8.2 is an excellent OS. The installation is smooth and trouble-free, unlike my previous encounters. The default KDE window dressing are attractive and clean looking. Overall, applications are fast.

There are a few things that I subjectively found not up to my taste; again, the keyword here is subjectively. The default shell for PC-BSD is csh, but my choice is bash, so I changed it at installation time. PC-BSD uses KDE as its primary window manager; personally, I like gnome better. The default installation includes Tcl 8.5, but it is called tclsh8.5, without any softlink to tclsh at all. I had to create that soft link myself. On most Linux systems and on the Mac, the shell is called tclsh, simply enough.

Now, comes the things that drove me nut for the two days I ran PC-BSD. First off, after installation, I ran software update. After reboot, I logged into KDE and found a screen with just a wall paper, nothing else. I tried alt-tab and saw a bunch of applications in the task list, but none of them is visible. I tried to fix it for two hours and finally gave up and ended up re-installing the OS from scratch.

I then left my laptop unplugged and went to sleep as it was late. The next day, I turned on my laptop and found that the battery was drained, so I plugged the power cord in and turned on the laptop. I thought the laptop was in hibernation; but it booted up as if it was turned off. That means I lost my works from the previous night (a couple of C++ files). I thought PC-BSD should have hibernate the system when battery went down. Furthermore, the power saving should have sleep, then hibernate the system, in order to save battery in the first place.

Worse yet, once booted up, I could no longer connected to my WIFI access point. Fast forward until the afternoon, I gave up my hope and gave up on BSD one more time. I was going to try Fedora 15 next.

Besides these annoyances, there are a few things about PC-BSD that I don’t like. On my 1.66GHz core duo laptop with a 40GB SSD, my Linux Mint 11.04 boots up in about 38 seconds. Fedora 15 does it for about 48 seconds. However PC-BSD took its sweet time to about 2 minutes and 37 seconds.

The default Linux Mint installation allows to use the right- and bottom edge of the trackpad to scroll. Fedora 15 allows to choose between using the edge or two fingers. However, PC-BSD does not allow to scroll using the trackpad. I am sure, eventually I will find out, but I wish they offer scrolling in the default installation.

These are a few things that prevent PC-BSD from becoming my primary OS. I hope that PC-BSD 9 will be much better. When it comes out, I will give it another try.

In Linux Mint, the default font and background color for tkcon is terrible. I want to change that to something easier to read.

The Solution

Here is my ~/.tkconrc, which fixes it by choosing a better font and background color:

set ::tkcon::COLOR(bg) ivory set ::tkcon::OPT(font) "{Liberation Mono} 10"

Discussion

The default font in Linux Mint is terrible: it is hard to read and pixelated. I found the Liberation Mono font works best for me; your mileage may vary. Also, the default background of gray is somewhat dark and drepressing, therefore I changed it to ivory, which is an off-white color (at least on my old laptop).