Cataclysmic Mutation

I use Emacs as my usual mail client, currently with notmuch, but occasionally with Gnus as well. One of the really nice features to get working with any Emacs mail client is BBDB integration. BBDB, the “ubiquitous Big Brother DataBase”, is an address book for Emacs. It can do quite a few things, but I mostly only use it to autocomplete addresses when I’m sending mail.

Both my personal and work accounts are now hosted through Google Apps, and especially with an Android phone, Google Contacts is by far the most sensible place for my contacts to call their canonical home base. However, this introduces a problem – Emacs doesn’t want to play nicely with Google. There are tools, most notably the “Little Brother DataBase” (LBDB), which has connections to all sorts of data providers. However, (a) I never managed to get the UI for LBDB to be as nice and seamless as BBDB is, and (b) having to query a remote server to tab-complete an address introduces a really annoying delay.

There are a few tools out there that claim to write BBDB records from Google’s data, but I had very poor luck with them. They were fairly hard to get running, and typically left me with files that BBDB would choke on, perhaps due to character set issues (I have numerous Icelandic and other international colleagues with “interesting” characters in their names and addresses). Most of them seem to be quite old and unmaintained as well.

With that in mind, I wrote “Charrington”. The name is perhaps a little bit indulgent – Charrington was the member of the thought police in Orwell’s “1984″ who turned Winston and Julia in to Big Brother. He kept Big Brother in the loop…get it? Huh? Like I said, it’s a stretch.

In any case, you can grab the code from Github and give it a spin. I’m sure there are plenty of bugs aside from the ones I already know about, so if you run into any problems, let me know.

In light of the recent discussion around science writing, I decided to try a little experiment. I had an opportunity to submit a position paper to a workshop in my field recently, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to try a more informal approach to writing. Position papers are always a little weird by their very nature, and the lack of hard data to present means you have a bit more flexibility in your prose, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I got the reviews back today, and it was fairly mixed. The paper was accepted (barely), which is actually probably appropriate. I don’t think it was a really strong paper, and the scores seemed to me to be about exactly where I would have put them myself. So in that sense, writing informally didn’t seem to hurt me too much. However, there were several negative comments as well specifically singling out “informal” language, which was a little disappointing I guess.

Oh, and as a throwaway joke, I used the word “embiggened” in the paper, obviously a reference to the famous Simpsons neologism, which at least one reviewer complained about. The complaint was simply that it “isn’t a word, perhaps the author meant ‘enlarged’”, which probably indicates that the reviewer didn’t get the reference. No one else mentioned it at all, so it’s hard to say if it went unnoticed or was simply viewed as a perfectly cromulent word for a scientific paper.

I have to make some clean-ups for the camera-ready version, and there was enough push-back that I’ll probably rewrite some of the “worst” sections in a bit more standard scientific jargon.

I have no idea why, but Matlab suddenly stopped working on my laptop. It was fine, and then it wasn’t, crashing just after flashing the splash screen with only the message “Fatal Error on startup: Internal Error: Failure occurs during desktop startup. Details: Failure loading desktop class.”

Running with the -nojvm flag worked, so the problem was, like every Matlab problem ever encountered since the dawn of time, a Java problem. I use the Awesome window manager (and occasionally Xmonad), and there are lots of known issues with Java applications in oddball window managers, but I had fixed all those before, and a quick test showed that it crashed under Gnome too.

I hadn’t used it for a few weeks, and I’d ran a couple of system updates since then, so presumably the problem was some incompatibility between the JVM Matlab uses and my installed set of libraries, probably glibc. I still have no idea what the underlying problem was, but telling Matlab to use my system JVM instead of its bundled one fixed the issue. To do that, stick the following in your profile somewhere.

export MATLAB_JAVA=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk/jre

I recently bought a new laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad x220, and retired my Macbook Pro. There were a lot of reasons for this, and maybe it’s worth a post talking about that, but this isn’t that post. This is all about my experience with Lenovo’s support and warranty service.

First of all, and this should definitely be right here above the fold in big bold lettering, Lenovo took very good care of me. I was, through no fault of Lenovo, but also through very little fault of my own, in a position to have to request service outside the bounds of what I was actually entitled to, and they came through with more than was even asking for. That said, the process was a little bit…err…interesting.

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“Gee, I need to download the Flickr app for my phone”, he thought, stupidly. “Let me just take the phone out of the case, remove the battery cover, pull the SIM card, reboot the phone, connect to the VPN in the US that I pay $80 a year for, delete the data from the Market app, download it, disconnect from the VPN, put my SIM card back in, put the battery cover back on, and put my phone back in the case.”

I like Android, I really do. But this shit has to stop.