[Wed Mar 27 14:25:07 CDT 2019]

This morning I wanted to make a couple of minor changes to my GNU Screen configuration, and ran into some difficulties. In particular, it's not easy to find good documentation on how to configure the status bar at the bottom of the application (what it's referred to as "hardstatus" in the configuration file.) The syntax used is quite cryptic. In the end, though, I managed to find a couple of good resources. One of them is the document titled Understanding GNU Screen’s hardstatus strings, and the other one is the list of string escape characters from the GNU Screen documentation itself. With the help of both of these, I managed to change the default color for the active tab, as well as the color being used to display general system information. I wanted them both to be a bit more subdued than what I had. In the end, here is the string I'm currently using:

hardstatus string "%{.kW}%-w%{.bW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %{..W} %Y, %M %d %C%a "

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[Fri Mar 8 10:43:51 CST 2019]

More on the i3 window manager. First of all, as the user who posted this, I also ran into issues with the Firefox browser showing a very distorted image. The solution, as one of the users explains, is simply to resize the window to full screen mode (in my case, I use the $Mod+f hotkey), and then use the same hotkey to return it to normal mode.

Onto something a bit more elusive now. Something that has been annoying me quite a bit pretty much since I started running i3 is the fact that the windows often show titles that I find too long, complicated, and junky. Instead, I'd like them to show just the name of the app and nothing more. After all, a key reason why I run i3 is to keep things simpler and leaner. Well, as it turned out, I'm far from the only i3 user who wants to do this. If you search around, many other people have asked about it and, as far as I can see, either nobody offers a solution, or they do so in a pretty cryptic manner. Today, I even found this Python script that supposedly helps. However, in spite of the fact that I installed all the needed Python modules, it fails to even run. So, I continued reading the documentation and... lo and behold, the i3 FAQ itself documents the solution. Simply add something like this to your i3 configuration file:

for_window [class="Hexchat"] title_format "IRC"
for_window [class="Gnome-terminal"] title_format "Terminal"
for_window [class="Remember The Milk"] title_format "Remember The Milk"

That's all it takes. {link to this entry}

[Mon Mar 4 16:43:48 CST 2019]

While reading a reassessment of Bob Cringely's 2018 technology predictions, I encountered the following interesting thoughts on the state of AI:

Paul Saffo says that communication technologies historically take 30 years or more to find their true purpose. Just look at how the Internet today is different than it was back in 1988. I am beginning to think this idea applies also to new computing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). We’re reading a lot lately about AI and I think 2018 is the year when AI becomes recognized for its much deeper purpose of asking questions, not just finding answers.

Some older readers may remember the AI bubble of the mid-1980s. Sand Hill Road venture capitalists invested (and lost) about $1 billion in AI startups that were generally touted as expert systems. Alas, it didn’t work for two reasons: 1) figuring-out how experts make decisions was way harder than the AI researchers expected, and; 2) even if you could fully explain the decision-making process it required a LOT more computing power than originally expected. Circa 1985 it probably was cheaper to hire a doctor than to run a program to replace one.

But now, approximately 30 years later, AI has come back to life. Part of this is simply Moore’s Law. One million dollars worth of 1985 computational power costs less than a buck today, making those software experts way cheaper to run. A second reason for AI’s resurgence is the availability of huge online data sets. Over the past 30 years nearly all the information that formerly resided on paper was reduced to electrons making true machine learning possible. This can’t be over-emphasized. Anyone my age remembers when early search engines indexed thousands of web pages, not billions. Highly technical data generally wasn’t available online in any volume but now it is. The third major reason for AI’s resurgence is today we don’t even try to pick some doctor’s brain to build an expert system, instead empirically deriving skills directly from the data. Taking this one step further, we are moving to a system where we don’t even start with a question, just the data, allowing cloud-based systems to find what’s learnable from the data. That’s allowing AI to come up with its own questions and it’s the emerging trend on which I am trying to focus this prediction.

We’re getting to the point where AI should begin to organically suggest approaches that will help us improve medical outcomes. The big low-buck solutions like immunizations have for the most part already happened. Future gains will have to come incrementally, often one gene at a time. But that’s just where AI should shine, mining medical gems from all that data in our smart phones, fitness trackers, and home DNA tests.

Thirty years into AI, it’s time to start seeing significant rewards from this approach in many fields, not just medicine.

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[Mon Mar 4 15:52:32 CST 2019]

No matter how much one loves the world of high-tech, it should be pretty clear by now that there are quite a few reasons to worry about current trends. For example, yesterday we could read on Slashdot that Amazon had decided to remove anti-vaccine documentaries from Prime Video in response to a CNN inquiry. Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with the so-called anti-vaxxers (or, at least, I disagreed with most of their points), but a world where the likes of Amazon and Google can make a decision like this and censor content that someone deems not really illegal (heck, not even offensive!) but simply wrong... well, that world worries me. The way I see it, if the Government cannot censor but these behemoths that truly control significant chunks of our media content these days can, we are no better off. {link to this entry}

[Fri Mar 1 15:26:29 CST 2019]

Two interesting articles on the topic of symbols in the Linux kernel: Introducing Linux Kernel Symbols, by Stephen Zhang; and The Kernel Newbie Corner: Kernel Symbols: What's Available to Your Module, What Isn't, by Rob Day. Both provide a very simple introduction to the concept. I just had to use them as documentation while helping a customer with a kernel symbol issue. {link to this entry}