Topics discussed at lunch with mitya000 today:

• Why squirrels can climb 50 times their own height in seconds and humans can’t
• Sugarhill Gang vs. Eric B. & Rakim and the history of hiphop
• Untranscribable drumming performed by Dave King with his other band, Happy Apple and his similarities to Art Blakey.
• Time stretching historical speeches and reversing them to make eerily bizarre music
• Wiring up an entire field of potatoes to power electronic devices
• Wiring up a huge mound of mash potatoes to power your house
• Alternate histories of what used to be where Primo 360 is now (Endangered Species Taxidermy Shop, Zimbabwean Popsicle Stand, Candy Shop Specializing in Lebanese Chocolate, etc)
• Esoteric Cisco router errors
• Where is Ralph Nader now?
• Emulating a disfunctional relationship between a cigar-smoking, British Tiger Hunter and his sheepish wife who is obsessed with quilting

In other news, my cheap as used Sun Type 6 keyboard that I bought on Ebay finally arrived. I think I may have finally achieved promulence.

The iTunes Music Store managed to add three more Esbjorn Svensson Trio CDs. The CD “From Gagarin’s Point of View” was previously out-of-print and cost nearly $40 to buy used on Amazon. The other two albums that were released are “E.S.T. Plays Monk” and “Winter in Venice”. Another weird thing that I noticed today was the recommendations on iTMS. I listened to a couple of the recommendations and was turned on to Charlie Hunter’s “Natty Dread” from the list. I think I like it so much because it sounds very similar to Stanton Moore’s (mostly unnoticed) solo albums.

I’ve always wanted to hear a Dutchman do this.

I just got some RX’d some new aural data to the main audio unit. The latest infinitely excellent additions include “Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned” by The Prodigy, “Bach - The Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin” from Gidon Kremer, Beck’s “Guerolito”, Bill Frisell’s “The Willies”, and Brad Mehldau’s “Places”. All of these recordings are top notch, and I can’t believe I just added these into heavy rotation at HQ today as this is mostly old data.

Apparently, I’d been living under a rock for the past five years, but I didn’t even realize there were kids out there making hardware using GAs. I went to Korea House with this one last night and he set me straight. It’s kind of neat to think that you can make a cluster of computers produce a chip by evolving hardware to meet some conditions. While I think that doing an FPU this way would be effectively impossible using conventional hardware, what if quantum computers were used? I haven’t worked out the math yet, but it should be possible. I should note that I became kind of obsessed with GAs for a while when I was in college. I solved the famous N-Queens problem using one as an undergraduate, and was fairly amused by not understanding how they work, but seeing that on average they’re faster than conventional exhaustive solutions. It’s interesting to think of designing hardware this way, but I think it could scare some people to think of computers automatically designing hardware. Don’t be scared though, the process isn’t all that automatic.

I managed to solve one of the three problems that I talked about earlier by using teh G00gle. Apparently, you can use this script to mirror email to Gmail from a Berkeley format mail file. The command-line invocation is highly-bizarre, but it seemed to work on two out of the three mail files that I tried. So, I just mirrored all of my email from 1999 to 2001 to Gmail as a test, and it worked. Now, I’ll have a completely searchable mail archive indexed automagically. This had the by-product of syncing all of my old email to my Powerbook as well. So, now everything is anywhere I could possibly need it, backed up, and highly accessible. Before I put all of my old email in GMail have to go in with Mutt and manually find everything on a per-folder basis. I still have two problems left to solve: (1) Forwarding all sent mail from Mail.app to Gmail automatically using sendmail configuration foo, and (2) Getting all sent Gmail on to hudge.

I was infinitely proud of this last hack on OS X that seems to work. I wanted to send email from an arbitrary wireless or wired IP address from Mail.app. So, here’s what I did… I issued this command to route port 25 from suudsu to hudge!

sudo ssh -L 25:localhost:25 hoyhoy@hudge

Hudge is where involution.com is hosted and runs a mail server. So, I redirect my Powerbook’s port 25 to hudge, and configure Mail.app to use localhost as it’s outgoing sendmail server over an encrypted link via SSH I’m syncing my Powerbook to Gmail’s POP access (over SSL). Involution.com’s mail (*@involution.com) that is not stopped by Spamassassin, Bogofilter, DCC, or my custom virus notification and unreadable character set filters is forwarded to GMail if it’s not something that was sent from within gmail, and mails sent to hoyhoy@example.com are forwarded back to hudge which implicitly creates a backup. Also, I setup Mutt to BCC sent mail to GMail so it’s included in the archive. The only one that I haven’t figured out is how to make Mail.app BCC sent mail to Gmail, and how to make GMail send it’s sent mail back to hudge. I know there’s ample sendmail foo to be messed with, and I imagine it’s possible to replicate based on the fact that it knows when an email is coming from the Mail.app MUA and tony@involution.com, it is safe to mirror that to my user account on hudge. Similarly, I think I can actually hack Eric S. Raymond’s “fetchmail” program to download emails that I sent from GMail over POP3, and only grab any email that I didn’t send to myself, and archive it on hudge. These are automatically in Mail.app because it syncs to GMail POP3, and sent email is part of what’s downloaded. So, basically, I’m left with emails I sent from Mail.app only being in Mail.app, and email sent from GMail only going to Mail.app and not hudge, but everything else is mirrored everywhere. I used to keep Outlook running on Windows too, but I’ve since stopped being part of that whole scene about four years ago. I transferred all of my Outlook email over to Berkely format and use pine to look through it, on the rare occassion I need an email from before 2002. If only I could somehow get all of that imported to GMail, but that’s another story. Someone needs to write a GMailFS driver to where I can simply drag .eml files or entire mbx files and have them import.