Doug Landauer: Radio

Masthead photo ideas

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:50:10 GMT

For some time, I've wanted to set up my own weblog in such a way that it would have a set of "masthead photos" that would rotate throughout the year, with possible constraints -- some holiday-specific, to be run for N days preceding, say, valentines, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc; some simply related to the season; and some just nice pictures. Some sources:

black bg with Xmas-lit boats
Anticip___ation
Somehow, the China Cove lit-up arch gotta be there
stuffed puppies
Ben's photo of trail tread from a segment of the John Muir Trail

For awhile, I've had some mock-ups of some of these on one of the URLs that lead to my home Mac, when it's awake, but those addresses appear to be broken at the moment. [Edit: my dynamic IP address changed, and I didn't notice, and I don't have any automatic update for it set up. So these banner shot test designs (minus Anticip___ation, but plus Lake 10,199 even though it's not my photo) are at http://zia.mine.nu for now, whenever my Mac is up and running.] Unfortunately, it appears that some folks at Google had a similar idea (themes for their personalized homepages), so once I get mine deployed, it'll look just a bit less original. Oh, well -- at least they'll mostly be my own photos.

virtual server

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 07:57:32 GMT

Cool, that was easy — now I have my mac running both the new site and a virtual server for experimenting, the latter addressed via my old dyndns site zia dot mine dot nu. Now to locate that layout/CSS that I came up with a few weeks ago. Downloaded liftweb, but haven't really had the time yet to try deploying something using it.

Fixing Steve Yegge's rants

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 04:04:35 GMT

I am among many who find Steve Yegge's rants quite entertaining, but who also find them long enough to print rather than read online. The problem with this is that there's a bug somewhere, in the CSS, in Mac OS X, or in Firefox, whose result is that printing one entry out leads to one page containing only a useless header page, one page of content, cut off as it falls off the page, and one useless page of comment entry form. With some help from Eric Meyer and a bit of binary debugging, I tracked it down to a CSS property that says

   overflow: hidden;

which makes me suspect that Firefox is doing exactly what it was told to do -- hiding the "rest" of the page(s) because the entry overflowed what would fit on one (printed) page. Since I don't really grok javascript, greasemonkey, or hoodwink'd yet, I wrote a shell/ruby script to fix the rants to make them printable. Finding the things to fix is made vastly easier by the excellent Firebug plugin for Firefox, which is roughly a WYSIWYG CSS editor and validator for remote web pages. Anyway, meanwhile, here's that script. It's brittle, but works for today:

#!/bin/sh
# Later, make it ruby -i.bak

# That first one is really the only thing needed to fix the printing problem.
# (Which was that it would only print one page of the rant.  S.Y. could
#  work around this bug by publishing normal-sized blog entries, but
#  I'm not holding my breath.)  The other gsub lines remove the sidebar
#  and widen the main text.
ruby         -p -e 'gsub( /overflow: *hidden;/ ) {|m| "/* #{m} */" }'      
                -e 'gsub( /width: *67%;/, "width: 95%" )'                  
                -e 'gsub( /width: *25%;/, "width: 0%; display: none; " )'  
            "$@"

Sorry, I can't do much about the content, but I find them entertaining enough that I'm not tempted to try. :-) Usage: save the page, and then run this script with the name of that saved file as an argument.

Broken record

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 18:45:11 GMT

Whee! This posting today breaks my personal record of number of days in a row making reasonably interesting weblog postings. (Was 32, today's is #33.) So for today's meat: here's the explanation of the Morse code thing of a couple of days ago: put the codes in "number of symbols order", so E and T (. and -) are first, IANM are next (.. .- -. and --), and so on. And note my ordering: consider the dots to be zeros and the dashes to be ones, and put the letters in binary order. Now to make a mnemonic out of that, just make up sentences in such a way that the next letter in the sentence that isn't already assigned a meaning gets the next available meaning. One complication is that four of the four-symbol patterns are not used. That's what the exclamation marks mean in the "Have Fun! I will!" part. Those mark two of those omissions. (The other two, ---. and ----, follow Z and can thus be ignored.) So why does this add up? If we have enough bits to count up to 31, the four missing patterns should leave 27, but we come out even with 26 letters! Where's the missing missing pattern? Answer: The question is kind of like the missing dollar in the old hotel-room change puzzle. The question is misleading, and the answer has everything to do with leading zeros. In fact, four bits should get you sixteen choices, not 31 nor 32. But we *hear* the leading zeros, so we count from zero again at each length, giving us

     2 (e and t) +
     4 (i a n and m) +
     8 (three-signal ones) +
     16
     --
  == 30.  Minus the four skipped patterns is 26.    
       --.-  .  -..  :-)

Home Sunset

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:22:15 GMT

] /RU/Home-sunset.jpg"> [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "my_gimages" hasn't been defined.] /RU/Home-sunset-thumb.jpg" align=left alt="2002 sunset, home in ben lomond"> Now that I'm on a roll, aiming (apparently) to break my posting-days-in-a-row record (don't worry, it's only in the low thirties), I look at my referrer stats once in a while. They're dominated by google searches for various nicknames from various cities, due to my city nicknames page. But I kept seeing this one home sunset photo that I shot in 2002 showing up. Weird, why would this nice but relatively obscure picture, that I hadn't really thought about for years, be referenced, on average, once or twice a day via google image search? The question didn't bubble up to being interesting enough to pursue until today. So ... I ran the google image search for home sunset. Whaddaya know, that shot is (currently) the first result shown. An inadvertent case of SEO, I guess.

Radio Out Of Space

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 07:52:41 GMT

Yikes, I guess I just ran out of space (40 whole Megabytes) on the Radio Userland server. Must be time to move onto a modern blogging/content management system. For now, I took the 8 Mb of images and moved them over to got.net, but a lot of links will eventually need to be updated, so older images will be broken for a while. Meanwhile, I tried to fix an extremely minor problem with my Radio U. desktop display -- it refuses to show the goofy little orange question marks. They are teeny GIF images, that live under the Radio U. folder, in www/system/images/qbullet/help.gif . The file itself exists on my disk, in the right place, and it seems to be valid (looks fine in Preview) and have the right permissions, but the Radio desktop simply won't display it. I had a symlink in /Applications , that pointed to the "Radio Userland" directory, and was named "Radio%20UserLand". Radio wouldn't accept that. Then I tried to move it out of the way and make it an (old-style Mac filesystem) Alias. Haven't had to *be* root on any Mac OS X system in a hell of a long time. (I'm sure there's some command-line "make alias" command, but I hadn't the patience.) Anyway, because I was denied write access in /Applications, I had to sudo to move the old "Radio%20UserLand" symlink out of the way, and then do some funkiness to make an alias. (For the record, it's Command-Option-drag to the desktop, then rename the alias to the name I wanted ("Radio%20UserLand"), and finally sudo mv to move it back into /Applications . And after all that? It still didn't work. Boo. Maybe if I really rename the directory to have the percent stuff in it. Nope, then Radio won't start up at all. Oh well, guess I'll live with it a while longer.

Blogiversary whooshed by

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 06:09:37 GMT

Yep, my five-year blogiversary was Tuesday, and I didn't even notice. I even posted something! (The overall chances of that would have been worse than ten to one, last year!) Oh, well, I guess time flies when you're having fun.

quarkup and quirkywiki in Scala

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 07:59:39 GMT

A couple of years ago, I came up with yet another wiki markup syntax. I called it "quarkup". I intended (and, I suppose, still do intend) to use it in a home-grown wiki + weblog setup that I'd like to write in Scala. I wrote a quarkup-to-HTML translator in Python, as one of my first fully test-driven developments. It was fun to do and it worked out well. So now I'm translating it into Scala. I start to get a feel for three different kinds of changes I have to make.

I have to be explicit about a variable's type sometimes. Overall, this is an improvement. Sometimes, it leads to a radical simplification of the function I'm working with, because giving the type a name makes it more clear to me what that function is doing.
Some missing features (e.g., the lack of optional parameters) have also led to minor simplification.
Some stuff remains slightly painful (so far, what hurts most are string manipulation and literal array creation).

That simple triumvirate of "def", "var", and "val" is IMHO a brilliant distinctive feature of Scala. The "var"/"val" distinction is like a lightweight form of Haskell's heavyweight way of separating mutable state from pure (or assign-once) values, or of Java's heavyweight "final" keyword.

Year 2007, new domain name

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 06:59:10 GMT

Ooh, my GIGO posting stats are pitiful:

Year	Nr posts
2002	373
2003	127
2004	83
2005	65
2006	28

(Numbers are approximate, and are based on my manually-maintained GIGO Table Of Contents.) Hope I can beat 2006 this year. Hope I don't do it due to unfortunate circumstances. Other New Year's Intentions (sounds better to me than Resolutions): lose weight, exercise more, and put something worthwhile on my home webserver. I got my last name dot us, except with the last name "i18n"-ified, as in: Ell six are dot us. I won't link to it until there's something there. Anyone know of a cheapo low-power "wake-on-net-request" linux-based firewall/router/web server? I heard about one from ASUS last year, but online reviews led me to decide that maybe they'd be getting better. Got the year off to a good start by spending the weekend in Monterey. Went to a kinda fun gala event at the Monterey Bay Aquarium on New Year's Eve.

Fourteen lazyweb years later

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:51:51 GMT

The lazyweb may be cool and ultimately all-powerful, but here's a reminder that it only works on its own timescale ...

My 1992 request (a google groups link to a 1992 posting I made to the USENET group rec.arts.books):

direct
tinyURL preview lets you see the target URL first

So ... 14 years later ... in 2006, the framework ... finally shows up, that will possibly (by 2009?) become populated by the summaries I envisioned.

wikisummaries.org

I guess I oughta add that Ghostway one.

Interest inversion

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 06:56:07 GMT

Here's a weird result: to some extent, the more interesting and prolific a weblog writer is, the less of their stuff I'll read. It's not consistently true, but happens more often than I'd like. I get busy. A few non-bloglines days pass. I come back, and wham! Too many hundreds of unread things. Examples:

O'Reilly Radar -- stuff I remain interested in, but just too much of it.
Dave Pollard -- Dave's postings are so well-written, thoughtful, and feel so much more real-life important than most of what's out there, that I feel like I really ought to read each one. But they are also so thought-provoking that I need to set aside time to think through implications and applications ... and I just don't end up finding the time. So those stack up, but I can't bring myself to just hit the catch-up thing.
Jon Udell -- thought provoking like Dave's, except with a tech bent that has me itching to try out many of the ideas he writes about. But, again, no time for that.

By contrast, folks who write shorter entries, and write one or fewer of them a day, tend to be quick and easy to catch up on in the interstitial time. Most of the Python-, Ruby- and Haskell-related weblogs that I read fall into this category. Despite my continuing strong interest in programming languages, LtU is getting too prolific. In a similar kind of irony to my main point here, their improved server interface and performance may actually hurt the community. A few are just lost causes, no way would I find the time to keep up with them. I have a bloglines category "Too Much" that has these three feeds in it:

Erik Thauvin -- too many postings, and each one contains way too many interesting links
BoingBoing -- just for fun
James Robertson -- (nice redesign, by the way. I hadn't seen the site itself in months).

My google and weblog presence summary

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 06:47:41 GMT

So, at my recent reunion, I told Cloe that she could just Google me. She asked "what would I be looking for?" So I figured I'd summarize a few of the things one can get to by Googling for me. Today, the top result is the most popular single entry I ever posted to my weblog -- my suspicion about one possible reason for the 0xCAFEBABE magic hex string that starts every Java .class file. http://radio.weblogs.com/0100945/2002/04/19.html (I'll shorten my weblog links like this: http://tmp.i.am/2002/04/19.html but that redirector pops up some ads. If you don't have a decent popup blocker, just substitute http://radio.weblogs.com/0100945/ for the "http://tmp.i.am/" part of the URLs below.) If you're new to weblogs in general general and/or Radio Userland weblogs in general particular, and/or my weblog in particular particular, click on the "About Me and GIGO" link. That gets you to http://tmp.i.am/about/about.html which tells a little about my weblog and me. Two of the other local links on any of my weblog pages are "GIGO TOC" and "stories" http://tmp.i.am/stories/BlogTOC.html#today The TOC is the Table Of Contents, which I maintain manually because Radio Userland lacks a table-of-contents feature. I am pretty careful to make up relatively decent titles for my weblog posts, so one can read through there to get an idea of what I write about. The "stories" link, http://tmp.i.am/stories/ leads to some of the longer pieces I've written, and a couple of silly other imported things. As with most weblog things, they're listed in reverse chronological order. They include

Psychopathia Dyschronialis -- a humorous faux-treatise on the illness of losing track of time.
Long Trails in North America -- a list of most of this continent's long-distance trails that I know of. A Google search for long trails north used to bring up this page as the top result. It's now slipped to second.
Job Search Ideas for the recently Laid Off -- when I was out of work for 7 months in the ickiest part of 2001/2002, I kept track of the job search strategies that I tried. Once I was again employed, I wrote up this page. So ever since mid-2002, it has been the top Google result for Job Search Ideas. Perhaps I should try selling Google-ads on it, but it really doesn't seem to get all that many hits, despite its should-be-advantageous location.
City nicknames -- here's where the hits are. Easily ninety percent of the page views of anything on my Radio site are views of this page. Today, it's the top Google hit for city nicknames, but it usually trades places with the Trivia Asylum page that you'll see up there. I suppose I ought to just redirect it to wikipedia, though a few of my humorous contributions there probably wouldn't survive.
'Long Walks' Books -- books about long walks their authors have taken.
Tahoe trip report, July 2001 -- a true trip report, all in limericks. 'Nuff said.

Finally, here are a few of my other web presences, about which I may choose to write more details later:

http://zia.pycs.net/ -- in New Zealand
http://scruzia.blogspot.com/ -- had to make an account here in order to comment on another blogger blog.
http://dal.i.am -- redirects to my pages at my last dialup ISP, got.net.
http://homepage.mac.com/landauer/ -- On Apple's "mac.com". Slow servers long and ugly URLs. It was the guys from NeXT, and their WebObjects software, that ended up in charge of this part of Apple, and they never "got" the importance of user interface, nor did they ever realize that the URL is part of the user interface, no matter how much you wish it weren't.
I really ought to clean up the front page here.
Anyway, there is a pix/ subdirectory there, and a bunch of further subdirectories with photos in them. An index of sorts named "unlinked.html" lives in that pix/ directory, but I have a policy of not ever making any true links to that whole URL. I don't really know why anymore.
http://scruzia.spymac.com/ -- notable only for the puppy pix.

On LtU, Flickr, del.icio.us, and a few other places, my user id is scruzia.

The impertinence of all things

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 06:58:46 GMT

Hmm ... The impertinence of all things ... has a nice ring to it. Inspired by one of Mark Pilgrim's comments on Sam Ruby's entries (here and here) about Apple's Podcast specifications. Or should I spell that "aPplE"? I guess they won't care.

Random June links

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 22:42:36 GMT

Welcome to June. Here are a few random links, mostly via del.icio.us/popular ...

Royal de Luxe: Monster Mega Marionettes
http://www.nantes.fr/ext/royal_de_luxe_2005/ [via Ned Batchelder]
Lots of handy HTML entities: http://www.cookwood.com/html/extras/entities.html
Sean Barrett: Lots of interesting stuff ... http://www.nothings.org/
Constrained writing: a jabberwocky version sans "e"!
( See also http://tmp.i.am/2002/08/14.html . )
Haskell Tutorials: http://www.haskell.org/~pairwise/ Especially Eric Etheridge's tutorial aimed for C Programmers.
Another HCnAR to read.: (HCnAR == Haskell Communities and Activities Report)
This one is the 8th Edition, from May 2005.
http://www.haskell.org/communities/
Much ado about dependent types and Epigram on LtU: A couple of papers to read:
- epigram tutorial
- lesson 3 in boilerplate-scrapping (generic programming in Haskell with GADTs).
van Roy's CTM, Oz, Erlang: These may be rising in personal importance for me: van Roy's CTM, Oz, Erlang, and constraints-programming; or more intense web/ajax stuff; or maybe even more advanced C++/boost/ootl work.
JHC Haskell Compiler: It may be that the JHC discussion at 'pub.comp.jhc@ofb.net' will be of interest, if I can get a yammer.net account, and figure out gale. JHC might be too young yet, though. Noticed ex-colleague Tessa Lau's name (hi!), due to her PyGale library. http://wiki.ofb.net/?GaleFaq . Ok, so I got onto yammer.net; it took overnight to get a password assigned.
(A paraphrased quote (Thoreau?) comes to mind: "Distrust any discussion group that requires new client software.")
Of course, that may just be the price these days of keeping ahead of spammer scum.
Programmers need to learn statistics ...: ... Or I Will Kill Them All

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/programming/programmer_stats.html
It's worth reading at least up through Zed's dialog with the "blind man on a planet with no sight".
Lifecycle of Bloggers: Funny and too true "Lifecycle of Bloggers" rundown.
http://www.minjungkim.com/?p=2675
Project warning signs: Perceptive list of warning signs that you're being offered work on a bad project.
JPublish and Aquarium: ... and "FreeEnergy" are web frameworks based on an idea very similar to what Scala can do with its "Modular Formatting" as seen in Burak Emir's scala servlet how-to doc/examples. FreeEnergy is a name like Ajax, for the synergy of how PHP's "include" statement combines with PHP's environment to allow modular, somewhat structured HTML page building. jj Behrens was part of the inspiration for that, and then he went on to create Aquarium, a Python web application framework implementing this idea. Meanwhile, Anthony Eden created a similarly-inspired Java version called JPublish.

More sparklines codes

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 06:42:04 GMT

Building .png-file sparklines in Ruby, from scratch is the very first page I've seen that inspired me to post a del.icio.us bookmark with the tag wow. Joe Gregorio and Sam Ruby both said "wow", too.

Wikis, Facets, Categories, Tags

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 05:26:25 GMT

A big discussion has been going on at work, about Wikis and whether they threaten some of the company's products. And now that I have DSL, I've been experimenting with turning my home machine into a server. Not much to make public yet. I have a basic webware running, but it's already a little frustrating how much you have to do in order to control the URLs. Apache's mod_rewrite is not the friendliest of interfaces, even for those of us who have been familiar with regular expressions for nearly thirty years. I have long been attracted to the sort of tag based (aka "faceted") classification that Kim Burchett describes and exemplifies in the Diamond Wiki, so I deployed that on my server ... It Just Worked. Ultimately, I think the best organization for a weblog will be to have five to fifty top- or 2nd-level categories, and then just tags/facets for anything less broad. It's been interesting to mess around with del.icio.us to see collective ways of organizing these kinds of things. I managed to snag a three-letter subdomain of "mine.nu" from dyndns.org last month, so I now have three mighty short URL namespaces that I currently have control over: tmp.i.am, dal.i.am, and the zia one that I just mentioned. When I combine that with my three-character date stamp, it will be pretty cool. Does Mac OS X have a "sleep" mode that lets it wake up if there's a request from the net? Or are there routers that can do that sort of thing?

Invisiblogging

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 06:23:18 GMT

Sorry, lately, what little blogging time I have has been spent on Pyscerocha, my internal weblog at work. Readership has been inexplicably high there. Eco-stuff (Dave Pollard's excellent writings, and the Green world-changing site); Christopher Allen's recent Evolution of social software history, etc. And, of course, a subset of the LtU postings that refer to any of the five Pyscerocha languages. It's time to get the Scala exercise coding back on track.

Zillions of puppy pix

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 07:40:23 GMT

So I signed up for a spymac.com account, mainly for the disk space. My Radio UserLand space (only 40 Megabytes) is 75% full, and my mac.com account (100 Mb, I think) is 80% full (and my goodness do their servers suck). But then, so do spymac's, although maybe they'll suck a little bit less. So the free weblog there has one entry in it so far, and probably won't get many more because it isn't clear whether you can even put links in it, let alone any other HTML formatting. Lame. But free. And besides, it's my fourth weblog and it's clear that I don't dredge up the bandwidth for two very consistently, let alone three. Fifth, counting the old editthispage one. Sheesh.
Anyway, replace the "blog" in the spymac blog's URL with ddR_Pups and you'll see the advertised Zillions. Well, a hundred twenty something. Or so. MaryBeth, my nephew Ben's mother, made this cool stegosaurus sweater for Penny. Penny loves it. (She has very short fur and likes to sleep under blankets when it's cold.)

More fun with referrers

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 06:56:05 GMT

The presurfer... http://presurfer.meepzorp.com/ boynton http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com/ is actually from the City of Chromatic Dissolution, formerly known as Bareberp. I'll have to add that one. Mentioned in a couple of entries. And there are huge bundles of links at codewolf.com. I had not encountered that one until it linked to my city nicknames page. I'm not worthy... or, at least, my 56k dialup is not worthy ... lots of video links there. Oh, yeah, I made it up into the Radio UserLand top 100 tonight. Whoopppeeee. #98.

The Pepys Project

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 01:11:47 GMT

The Pepys Project is getting moved and resurrected. (Maybe it should be called the Phoenix project, now that the Firebird/Firefox browser is two names beyond that.) Some of us learn things visually, some are more verbally oriented, and some learn by doing. We humans also have varying storage systems in our brains. My wife can remember the outfit she wore to the first day of kindergarten (that would have been around 1961), while I can't remember what I wore yesterday, except that I'm likely wearing it again today. Some of us remember things by location. I may not remember whether I got that <product> two weeks, two months, or two years ago, but I'll invariably remember exactly where I was when I got it. I suspect that /\\ike, the guy who runs the Pepys Project, is like me in that respect. The project lists a bunch of weblogs, and categorizes them (roughly) by location. It formerly lived at http://pepys.akacooties.com , but that address is being decommissioned. So, anyway, I just added GIGO and zia to the project.

Hey, cool, a huge list of names

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 05:56:05 GMT

Found amongst my meager list of referrers is this meta-list of Names. The link there (way way down somewhere in the middle) is a link to my City Nicknames page, which is way overdue for an update. Actually, from the occasional perusal of my referrers list, I'd estimate that the city nicknames list accounts for about 90% of the hits for this entire weblog. It's pretty sad, really.

Pyscerocha

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 15:37:12 GMT

I created a weblog inside the intranet at work. Its name is "Pyscerocha". This here GIGO entry is an example of a kind of reverse search that Google makes possible: the title of this GIGO entry is currently a google unique link, so I can write an entry in the Pyscerocha weblog (on the intranet) and tell folks that the only outside-world things that mention that word are my outside-world weblogs. This technique is a generalization of "reverse ego surfing", apparently first demonstrated around 1997. Oh, the other visible entry that mentions Pyscerocha is here on my zia weblog.

My 2nd Blogiversary

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 06:54:19 GMT

My 2nd Blogiversary has come and gone. My second year had around a third as many postings as the first year did. Sorry 'bout that. Extenuating circumstances ... (Yipes! In my first draft of this, I misspelled Blogiversary as "blogaversary", but Google set me straight: Blogiversary wins by a score of 4930 to 702. I imagine those numbers will change.)

Navigationism

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 07:45:14 GMT

By the way, those of us still on dial-up appreciate the subtle navigation feature on that Textism article that I mentioned a few minutes ago. It's a bunch of pages, with "next" links, and you start to wonder how the heck many of them there are. If you're paying attention, you'll notice that one of the dots in the line of dots at the top of each page is darker than the other dots in that line. It so happens that there are 93 dots in that line, and that the last entry in the story is entry number 93, http://www.textism.com/writing/?id=93 . I'm confident that you can do the math now.

GIGO Changes

Tue, 23 Sep 2003 22:10:18 GMT

Meanwhile, here at GIGO Central, I finally upgraded from Mozilla 1.2beta to 1.5rc1, and the Radio Userland input editing window suddenly turned into the "WYSIWYG" version. I didn't like the results of that (among other issues, I couldn't easily figure out how to enter a link), so I turned it back off. And I've finally been running an aggregator (NetNewsWire) some of the time now, so I finally see the value in having the title link of each weblog entry be a self-link. So I have turned that preference on. The fact that I'm using NNW more sorta makes my two-D blogroll/portal a bit less useful, though.