RogBlog

With the aid of a couple of helpful blogs (here and here), I have managed to get command-line email-sending capability via sendmail going, at least as long as I’m on UCSD campus:


$ sudo postfix start
$ sudo postconf -e myhostname=
$ sudo postconf -e relayhost=


And sendmail just works now! Pretty cool, eh?

UPDATE: it’s a bit tricky to get Bcc: effects with sendmail, but I’ve found a way to do it. Specify all the addresses that you want to receive an email as arguments of sendmail, and then include an explicit From: line in standard input. For example:


*** Filename: sendmail.test ***
To: Jane Doe
From: John Doe
Subject: bcc test
(put what you want here)
*** End file sendmail.test ***



$ sendmail abc@def.com vw@xyz.com < sendmail.test


The January 2010 LSA preliminary program is available online, and UC San Diego has another strong showing, with nine presentations overall.  This compares favorably with UC Davis (4), UCLA (5), and UC Santa Cruz (6) and we’re just behind MIT and Stanford (10 each), Maryland and Johns Hopkins (11), and UMass (12).  Once again UC Berkeley is at the top, though, with 16 presentations!  Congratulations UCB!

In fact, given the current UC crisis, it’s worth noting that UC schools taken together have (co-)authors on 42 presentations total, out of (from my estimate) 333 oral presentations + 85 posters = 418 presentations in all.  That means that the University of California has had a hand in over 10% of the scholarly output in the premier annual scholarly meeting for the scientific study of language. Nothing to shake a stick at.

Since switching from PC to Mac three years ago, probably the single most annoying user-interface feature on Mac has been the loss of flexibility in using Tab and Shift+Tab to move focus: to buttons and menus in web browsers, and between buttons in pop-up dialogue windows.

Thanks to Tony Spencer, I am now able to do this!  It’s a simple setting: in System Preferences, select Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts.  At the bottom of the window there will be a button for changing Full Keyboard Access from Text boxes and lists only to All controls.  Selecting the latter will give you full flexibility of changing focus with Tab and Shift+Tab.

One other crucial tidbit: on pop-up windows, when you have moved focus to a non-default button, in order to select that button you need to press Space rather than Return/Enter.

Amazing that it took me three years to figure this out…!

Here are some slides that I wrote on the current UC budget crisis — what it is, how we (and the state of California) got to where it is now, why you (the student) should care, and what you can do about it.  My goal is to be informative rather than polemic — the underlying issues are complex.

Over the past several weeks there’s been a lot of talk in the media and at the University of California about the origins of the current budget crisis.  One of the prime suspects has been Proposition 13, which passed in 1978 and capped real estate taxes by limiting appreciation of the base for property taxes (the “assessed value”) to 2% per year.  I spent a bit of spare time this week quantifying how much this cap has actually cost California.  Using data from Los Angeles Almanac (http://www.laalmanac.com/economy/ec37.htm), we can visualize this loss within San Diego:

The black line is actual median housing prices in San Diego since 1982; the dotted magenta line is the appreciated assessed value of a home that was median-price in 1982. The area between the two lines is the value of the home that was immune to taxation due to Proposition 13.

Prop 13 also capped property tax at 1%. Dividing the area between the two lines by 100, we find that the state has lost $31,220 (not accounting for inflation) in property tax on a median-value home over the last twenty-seven years. (Because most of the rise in housing prices happened recently, inflation isn’t so important; the inflation-adjusted figure is $40,000 in 2008 dollars.)

Now for the caveats:

1. This estimate is probably biased upward by the fact that Prop 13 inflates housing prices — in an alternative reality with out Prop 13, people would have less incentive not to sell houses they’ve held onto for a long time, which would increase supply and presumably push prices down.  It’s hard to know the size of this effect.
2. The median home sale price isn’t the right statistic: it’s based on a different set of homes every year, whereas the correct statistic involves changes in prices to a fixed set of homes over time.  I don’t know how to get data for this correct statistic, however.  I believe that the effect here is most likely to bias the estimate downward, because between 1982 and 2006 (thus excepting the recent downturn), the set of homes being sold was probably becoming an ever lower-quantile sampling from among San Diego homes.  This is because there was lots of new property being built and sold, but it was being built disproportionately in lower-cost regions (=far from the coast), and catered largely to families who were being priced out of the booming market.

If you use LaTeX for linguistics paper writing, and use the tipa package for IPA and the linguex package for formatting examples, you may occasionally encounter the problem of odd formatting of examples.  Just be sure to call \usepackage{tipa} before \usepackage{linguex}, not after!

Who says it doesn’t happen?

First Black Mayor in City Known for Klan Killings

I boggled…

(http://nytimes.com/, 12:51am 22 May 2009)

A newly declassified CIA report states that waterboarding was used 83 times on Abu Zubaydah and 183 times on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.  In 2007, John Kiriakou stated that waterboarding was used only once on Zubaydah before he began to talk.  It doesn’t take more than elementary logic to conclude that either waterboarding doesn’t work well, the CIA was torturing its prisoners unnecessarily, or John Kiriakou made up lies to tell on national public television to get the CIA and the Bush Administration off the hook.  Or, of course, more than one of the above.

Sad times we live in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html

Here’s a shout-out to Nathaniel Smith’s xpra. I’ve managed to get it working with a remote Debian server and my Mac laptop as a client. I have at least the following packages installed in support of xpra (all installed using MacPorts):

• python25
• python26
• py26-pyrex
• py26-gtk
• xorg-libXtst
• py25-gobject
• py25-gtk
• py25-nose
• py26-nose
• xorg-libXdamage
• xorg-libXcomposite
• xorg-libXtst
• xorg-libXfixes

No guarantee that all of these are really necessary. I suspect that all the py26-* packages are necessary because it seemed that I needed py25-gtk even after installing py26-gtk.  On the other hand, there is no py25-pyrex.

I currently run OS X 10.5.6 and my TeX distribution is TeTeX from MacPorts.  I recently found out that my pdflatex is generating A4 paper by default, even if I use the letter option with \documentclass.  Solution: call texconfig-sys and choose Paper -> Letter.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to write locally to my home directory — I set TEXMFCONFIG to $HOME/Library/texmf but texconfig-sys didn’t seem to care.  That’s unfortunate, but I am the only user of the computer so I just set it locally.