I get and send a lot of email. Many of the emails I send are responses to emails I received. When I respond to email I almost always quote the email to which I'm responding, and when I do my email client (mutt) inserts a line like:

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 11:40:25AM -0600, Justin Chapweske wrote:

Knowing the time of the original message and the time of my reply provides enough information to track my response times to email. I used the inbound message ids to make sure only the first reply to an email was counted.

A chump bot (http://www.w3.org/2001/09/chump/) sits in an IRC (Chat) channel and remembers any URL (web addresses) that people say. It displays them on a web page for later reference. I spend time in #infoanarchy on the freenode network (freenode.org) where someone runs a chump bot whose output is visible here: http://peerfear.org/chump/

A wiki is website anyone can edit. Every page has an edit button on the bottom which anyone can press to edit the page. They grow organically and are great for group collaboration. Some friends and I set one up and track plan most of our group activities using it. The most famous wiki is http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WikiWikiWeb

Some friends and I just threw a huge party with a Dystopian future theme. I wanted to have a hand scanner at the door because biometrics scare the hell out of me. I started out with grand plans involving laptops and real scanners and all sorts of things like that, but as time drew short I resorted to trickery.

We ended up with a stainless steel cylinder (trash can). Atop it was supposed to be a black glass sheet against which palms could be pressed, but I accidentally shattered that while working on it the night before the party. I ended up using some black foam core board with a white palm on it that looked okay.

I run a lot of mailing lists on mailman, http://www.list.org/, servers. Most all of these lists are configured so that only list subscribers are allowed to post messages. I do this because these lists get a lot of spam messages that I don't want to get through to all subscribers.

Unfortunately, when a non-subscriber posts they're not automatically rebuffed, but instead I, as the mailing list administrator, get an email asking if I want to approve their message anyway. If I don't answer that question I get get a reminder every 24 hours. The reminders can be turned off, but there are some of mailman's questions that I do want to have brought to my attention (ex: subscribed posters who have exceeded maximum message size, etc.).

I got permission from Derek Tonn at tonnhaus design to use his map on the site, and I got the new site fully setup at http://mpls-watched.org. With all that done I figured it was time to send out press released and fired them off to the Strib, City Pages, Rake and Skyway News. Who knows, maybe one of 'em will run something.

When I wasn't sure if I'd be able to use the tonnhaus map, I was trying to figure out ways to make my gathered location data still useful. As mentioned I took some GPS points to test the theory that the map was to scale. I then marked those same four points on the tonnhaus map and calculated the X and Y pixel/degree ratios for each of the six ( (4-1)! ) runs.

It took most of a weekend to do it, but there's now a nice website for the Minneapolis Surveillance Camera Project at http://sarinity.com . I'll be moving it to its own domain eventually, but that'll be a week or so.

The look is entirely owed to the Open Source Web Design site, http://oswd.org. I love being able to just go snarf a well coded template for a new project. Those people are doing a real service.

I got the surveillance camera location reporting stuff working tonight. It's amazing how easy Perl's CGI.pm can make stupid little web input forms. I'm sure I'll think of some other fields that I want in the data before this thing goes live, but for now this should do nicely: https://ry4an.org/surveillance/report/

The map I'm using is nice, but doesn't include all of downtown, and I still haven't heard back from its creators about getting permission to use it. Since I might have to change maps in the future (or might want to expand project scope) I'm hoping to store the camera locations as GPS coordinates rather than as useless pixel locations.

Target Corporation is donating a quarter million dollars to the city of Minneapolis, which city council rapidly accepted, to install 30+ police monitored security cameras. I'm not able to articulate why stuff like this scares me as much as it does, but I just get a queasy feeling when I think of government surveillance of the citizenry.

The ACLU has found that police cameras do not yield any significant reduction in crime, and there are many documented instances where police cameras have been used to illegally and inappropriately infringe on the privacy rights of citizens. That said, I think keeping camera counts down is a losing battle. Most people just can't get worked up about privacy rights in general and security cameras specifically.

At Onion Networks our CVS repository has a lot of symlinks that need to exist within it for builds to work. Unfortunately, CVS doesn't support symbolic links. Both subversion and metacvs support symbolic links but neither of those are sufficiently ready for our needs, so we're stuck with creating links manually in each new CVS checkout.

Sick of creating links by hand, I decided to write a quick shell script that creates a new shell script that recreates the symlinks in the current directory and below. A year or two ago I would have done this in Perl. I love Perl and I think it gets an undeserved bad wrap, but I find I'm doing little one-off scripts in straight shell (well bash) lately as others are more inclined to try them out that way.

I'm trying not to have all the projects and ideas posted to this list be computer related, but I guess that's where I expend most of my creative energy. I bought a Mimio electronic white board (http://mimio.com) cheap on eBay ($40), and while the Windows software for it is reported to be quite good, the Linux software options ranged from vapor to unusable. I did, however, find some Perl code that handled protocol parsing (the tedious part), so I started with that.