Original Cin

Found CRON-O-Meter, a diet tracking program the other day, and so far I like it. It gives me the instant feedback on my diet that I like so much, without most of the annoyances of NutritionData.

The program uses the same USDA database that everyone else under the sun seems to use, but allows adding new foods. Even more importantly, you can take a food in the database, change its values, and make a new entry out of it, something that I desperately wanted on several occasions when using NutritionData. So, if you have a piece of salmon that just has a mystery coating on it that adds some calories, getting that into CRON-O-Meter is a matter of starting with the entry for the right type of salmon and adjusting it; while not every food can be dealt with like this, it’s still helpful for lots and lots of things.

The visualizations of CRON-O-Meter are less razzle-dazzle than NutritionData, but they’re “good enough” and don’t require selectively loading a buttload of flash; I can live with plain old bar charts and pie charts, and you could ever argue that these are superior, time-tested charts that are easier to read than NutritionData’s triangle. NutritionData, unlike CRON-O-Meter, has always been a bit of a nutritional nag, complaining indiscriminately about relatively high levels of fat and sodium on a food-by-food basis. I know I shouldn’t anthropomorphize computer programs, but NutritionData seems shrill and nagging about EVERYTHING. As I once joked — “Sugar has sugar in it? I had no idea.”

I’m not yet certain if CRON-O-Meter is smart enough to have any sense of “Net Carbs.”

CRON-O-Meter also has a sense of time, and will happily act as a food diary for a while. NutritionData requires daily “clearing” to use its tracking on a day-by-day basis.

It looks like it’s possible to share nutritional information from CRON-O-Meter with others. I have no idea how this works.

As the name indicates, CRON-O-Meter was designed with Calorie Restriction in mind, but I don’t see any reason you couldn’t use it for basically any reasonable diet.

Installation on my Ubuntu system was a bit awkward. The “Linux” download link is a shell file that has comments to download the MacOSX version and unzip it in the same directory. The zip utility that comes with Kubuntu, Ark, insisted that this archive wasn’t valid, although I managed to open it up just fine with the command-line unzip. All said and done, I managed to get an entry in Kickoff that I click on to launch CRON-O-Meter just like any other program, even though it took me a few minutes (Hint: Working directory matters). I’m guessing Windows installation is easier, actually having an executable setup.

I recently moved into a new apartment, and that meant getting a new Internet connection. This is the first time I’ve set up a permanent high-speed connection that I’m not sharing with anyone else for my computer. To complicate things slightly, Windows isn’t working right now on Lelouch (my laptop), and Kubuntu is all I have.

I used pppoeconfig to set up my intial connection, and was pleased that it more or less “just worked” right away, so I was surprised when I rebooted, ran pon dsl-provider, and it didn’t work.

By playing around with pppoeconfig, I managed to figure out that it runs pppoe -A -I eth0 when it says “looking for access concentrator” or something like that. From what I gather from Wikipedia, this is the discovery phase of PPPOE, and either the DSL modem or my ISP expects it for every single connection.

So, I ultimately came up with this script to connect to the internet:

#!/bin/bash
pppoe -A -I eth0
pon dsl-provider
sleep 2
plog
echo "Press any key to continue..."
read -n1

Mind you, I only have a really, really vague sense of what pppoe -A -I eth0 actually does, so there could be some inefficiency or problem here that I’m not aware of (in other words, your milage may vary). But it works. The last four lines are because I’m nosy and like to see what going on.

There’s a lot of misinformation about the Lexmark x4270 under Ubuntu, with a lot of pages simply claiming it doesn’t work. This is not correct; the printer works just fine (as far I can tell, I haven’t tested color printing yet) using the Lexmark Z42 CUPS driver. While I’m not aware of any way to get the _scanner_ to work, the fax and copier should also work standalone, of course.

I’m currently trying to lose weight, so I’ve been keeping track of calories online with NutritionData. It’s been one of my favorite websites for years for looking things up, but I didn’t realize they had such a nifty tracking system. Can I admit that I think it’s fun to see how everything in my diet changes all at once every time I enter a new food? What’s more, this has already helped at least a little bit:

• Nutritiondata alerted me to the fact that I was getting much, much more saturated fat in my diet than I should have been.
• As long as enter Omega-3 and Omega-6 for (at least some!) custom foods, I actually have some idea what their ratio is
• Nutritiondata’s also let me know that I’ve been getting lots of vitamin A, which is a good thing once in a while, but not something you want to do every day.

There also some annoyances – most of the data in the ND database comes from the USDA; I often find myself entering nutritional labels for foods. But with so many users, I’m sure I’m duplicating the work that many, many other people have done before. If there were ever a more obvious case to apply a crowdsourcing philosophy to a website, I don’t know what it is. For some reason, I can’t share the labels I enter with other website users, and they can’t share with me. Why?

My diet was messed up by 3 hours of website downtime. A local app would be better. (I was going to ask why there isn’t a Gnutrition program, but it turns out there is and that’s exactly what it’s called. I might give it a try later.)

Nutritiondata should probably take a hint from the Advocates for Self-Government and change their nutritional/filling grid into a diamond, with very nutritional, filling foods at the top (I realized a week ago or so that I can do this with my goal grid).

Finally, and bizarrely, every new day involves clearing the old data out completely. There is no archive. I’ve just been jotting down notes in a tab-delimited text file. I understand why they might not want to store a bunch of what-I-ate for years and years on end, but they can’t hold onto information for, say, a week or so?

I was at the Chicago Wordpress Meetup last weekend. You can see a picture of me listening to people talk about the awesomeness of Wordpress on the Meetup site: I’m at the far left, in the black sweater.

I decided to give the Slax “Kill Bill” Edition Live CD for a spin on my laptop the other night.

I am impressed with how far Desktop Linux has come. At precisely the point in history when an open platform is required for the future of computing, it seems that two decent choices are available: the partly proprietary but still nice Mac OS X, and Linux.

First of all, the KDE interface actually looks decent now. Not great, but decent. Much better than any shell I’ve seen from Microsoft or otherwise for Windows XP. Most of the confusion I’ve seen with various X Windows, Window Managers, and KDE settings being redundant or incompatible with one another in the past have been ironed out. The system doesn’t automatically recognize that I have a “Wide-format” screen on boot-up, so things look stretched, but fixing this is just a matter of right clicking an icon and selecting the right setting. The boot time is atrocious (I’d guess slightly more than 5 minutes), but this has nothing to with the fact that it’s Linux/KDE, and everything to do with the fact that it’s running from a CD.

One thing I’ve never managed to get right with Linux is getting onto the internet, and it seems I’m still having trouble with the Wifi card built into the laptop. I’ll post an update later.

After installing WordPress here on the previously redirected nic.dreamhost.com, I had been considering trying to use it to run the blog at http://fancruft.com, which is really just an ugly way of displaying some entries from my Lavos MySQL database.

I suppose I’m glad I didn’t even have a chance to start. Today, just about everyone with WordPress 2.1.1 was scrambling to upgrade it after it was revealed that intentionally malicious code had been placed in it. I’d encourage people to read the original announcement.

I like the WordPress front-end. It shows that someone understands how people want to interact with software. But, after a problem this sever in the underlying PHP, how can you take Automattic’s (not so) subtle dig at PHPBB: “Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated, and always got your server hacked?”

Why, yes, I think I’d like to NOT have my sites owned by the mob’s spam division very much, thank you.

I recognize that the fact that this was discovered in days, rather than months, is a testament to the “many eyes” theory of Open Source, but an intentional backdoor placed in software by a third party is about as bad as it gets.