Flutterby™! From 2006-06-01 to 2006-06-30

According to Samizdata , the makers of the rock abrading tool on our twin Mars Rovers have their offices a few blocks from the WTC. Bits of metal from Ground Zero are now busy exploring the red planet.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy WTC/Pentagon attacks ]

This one's for Bryant: Over at Digital Warfighter, there's a Reimagining Superman entry that's kind of fun.

I was loaned The Assasination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome, I'm mid-way through chapter 4. It's one of those histories written with an acknowledged bias and slant (as anything with "...A People's..." in it would be), but one of the annoying things is that the book is full of passages bemoaning the mainstream historian's interpretations of events:

Modern writers like H.H. Scullard say that Gaius "unwisely formed a body guard of friends" that "provoked' the optimates into killing him.

And, of course, I want to grab the author by the shirt collars and in a loud voice inform him that history is always written by the winners in such a way as to recast the tale into a myth which supports the historian's culture, get over it and get on with it.

I bring this up because I think it's kind of cool to see people re-cast myths in ways that have evolved none-too-subtly over a human lifespan.

[ related topics: Books History Sociology Writing Comics ]

While we're re-imagining things, the Rt. Rev. Hasty, who just started Will Work For Cheese - The Disney Cast Member Wannabe, forwarded me Re-Imagineering:

A forum for Pixar and Disney professionals passionate about the Disney Theme Parks to catalog past Imagineering missteps and offer tenable practical solutions in hopes that a new wave of creative management at Imagineering can restore some of the wonder and magic that's been missing from the parks for decades.

I know I've seen this before (maybe via Mark or Jeff), and thought perhaps I'd linked to it, but I don't see it now.

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Invention and Design History ]

David Recordon's email to the Yadis mailing list says:

About 52 minutes in Brion Vibber's tech talk at Google he mentions how they are planning to support OpenID within the next month. Very cool!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7747790812939045407

I'm not willing to wait 52 minutes, but... I've been doing some work on a MediaWiki recently, and I'm impressed. Integration of OpenID would give a platform for exploring some things that I'm distinctly not happy with in Flutterby's current Wiki implementation.

But I've been resisting PHP, despite Meuon's repeated attempts to suck me in to it, and for my personal playing I'm always interested in ways to not encourage monocultures. Does anyone out there have suggestions for a relatively developed Wiki engine in Perl, TurboGears or Ruby on Rails?

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Video ]

Charlene's nephew recently got married to a German woman, and he mentioned that Doppelkopf is a very popular card game over there, but one that he's still trying to get the hang of. Charlene and I have sat down and tried to analyze two open-hand rounds, and I think we're starting to get a handle on it, but...

You'd think it'd be an easy matter of taking trumps. My first thought was "oh, this must be some German thing where lots of beer is what makes it hard". However, the three levels of point indirection, taking the trump, whether that trump will contribute to your game, and then how to turn that contribution into how many points you take for the game, make optimizing a given play non-obvious. Jeanne and Janine are also learning this, a few more games and we'll sit down and try to play it closed-hand with them.

[ related topics: Games ]

Reality is stranger than... well... pretty much everything: Police: Grandparents Ordered Hit on Family:

Police said they initially offered $100 to an undercover sheriff's deputy to kill their son's wife, their 10-year-old granddaughter, two step-grandchildren, ages 14 and 16, and the family dog.

Okay, so the hundred bucks was supposed to be a downpayment, and it's pretty much a given that if you approach a prospective hitman he's going to be an undercover sherriff's deputy, but... well:

"(The deputy) said, 'You want me to kill everyone, including the dog?' They agreed," Mysinger said.

This whole thing stems from trying to keep them from testifying against their son on child molestation charges, but... well, I can now tell Charlene that in the context of her biological mother there are families out there that are more screwed up.

[ related topics: moron Sociology Current Events Law Enforcement Dogs Marriage ]

I linked to Polyface Farms in the review of Omnivore's Dilemma, but didn't dig much into it. crash pointed out Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal (pdf) and extracted the text from it. Well worth a read.

One of the things I've wondered is if someof the extreme apparent economies of scale we see, from Wal*Mart to ADM aren't really only profitable because there's bias in our legal system to support the big players. Joel Salatin offers some convincing examples of this in the agricultural industry, and there (and elsewhere) makes a good case that government health and food safety regulations compress both the top and the bottom; that they bring everyone down to a level slightly above shyster, and while they may raise the lowest level just a bit, they remove a lot of choice and a lot of opportunity for quality for educated consumers.

All the more reason to be sending regular missives to your legislators.

[ related topics: Health Food Law Consumerism and advertising Civil Liberties ]

Jeff alerted me to the news that there's a monster rock slide blocking route 140 into Yosemite. I've found one picture of it, and it's something to be aware of if you were hoping to get into the park from the south side, or if you're planning anything in the Mariposa region that requires uninterrupted power, 'cause it looks like it may take out a major transmission line there.

[ related topics: Current Events Yosemite ]

FDA asks restaurant industry to shrink portions to combat obesity:

The report, requested and funded by the Food and Drug Administration, lays out ways to help people manage their intake of calories from the growing number of meals prepared away from home, including at the nation's nearly 900,000 restaurants and other establishments that serve food.

You know what? This one's easy. Instead of spending more money lobbying fast food joints to decrease their portions and charge us the same amount of money, how about simply reducing the huge government subsidies which make fast food possible at such ridiculously cheap prices. Remove the billions of dollars a year in subsidies that go to corn that make "chicken" nuggets cheaper than a healthy meal and, guess what, all of a sudden healthful food won't be the more expensive option.

Of course this means reworking farm and agricultural policy, something that's never been done without giving even more money to those leeches at ADM, Monsanto and Cargill, but if we're ever going to stop the "if I can get away with it it must be right" kleptocracy that our legislators seem to be gleefully promoting, we need to pick specific battles and harp on them.

[ related topics: Politics Health Food moron ]

Darwin claims another one: Corvette slams into mausoleum:

After the black convertible followed a second sports car into the spacious Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on Mission Boulevard, police said, the car skidded out of control and crashed into a mausoleum at 9:17 a.m., opening a pair of crypts as mourners at a nearby burial ceremony looked on in horror.

[ related topics: moron Automobiles ]

Just to encourage more free stuff sent to me. Ages ago I mentioned getting a free "Gachuck" clipper from TheClipStore.com in the hopes that I'd pimp it here, and I think I've mentioned it a couple of times, at least one as a solution to something totally office-unrelated.

It sat in our drawer for a while, we re-used the clips that came with it, and recently we seem to me using it for more and more stuff. While we do use it for paper, I'm also finding that it rocks for holding plastic bags, like for chips or frozen berries, closed. So I just ordered a whole bunch of refill clips. We haven't been blazing through supplies, and the clips are still not cheap, but in terms of things that get put in the "pens, scissors and other stuff" drawer that get used, this little tool does indeed get used, probably more often than the conventional stapler.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Work, productivity and environment ]

Two mindless films we've watched recently. Last weekend we were in the video store, trying to choose between five or so, and ended up with Proof, a movie adaptation of a play written by David Auburn with Gwyneth Paltrow, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles. A well acted and directed play that seemed a little week in the screenplay, like many things that use mathematics as a background it sometimes seemed like the conceit ran a little thin. If I was able to drop any complaints about that, however, it was a great look at sanity, family relationships, and how we can become confused about the boundaries between lucidity and hallucination. Especially apropos given some of the struggles that Charlene's been facing.

We enjoyed it, I think Charlene enjoyed it more than I did, but I kind of felt like that had ended up being my choice. So yesterday evening after a hard weekend of felling trees (I wish I'd gotten video, we had one that was leaning over the house and a shed on an eroding bank, and we were concerned that any attempt to drop it was going to take out buildings, but we need to fix the shed anyway, so we emptied the shed just in case, I cut a wedge, and put a fifty or sixty foot tree within inches of where I wanted it) and swinging a hammer (towards making it so we aren't just concerned about the contents of said shed), Charlene suggested Match Point.

So we got Match Point, an "erotic thriller" directed by Woody Allen. I'm not much on the "erotic thriller" genre, I have trouble finding people sexy when I know that the story demands that one of them kills one of the other of them, but it started strongly enough. Chris Wilton (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers ) is an ex tennis pro turned instructor at an exclusive club, does the usual social climbing thing, and... yet... I'm not wanting to write a full review, and I don't think I can treat it fairly without doing either that or offering spoilers, but I started dozing off after the umpteenth time I watched that character, who has been almost mechanically effective in accomplishing his goals, be completely unconvincing in showing me why he'd exhibit the specific stupidity around which the movie turns. I suppose that any story which posits that much of life revolves around luck is going to have this sort of flaw, that the turn of the tale will be around things that the protagonist allegedly can't control, but it just didn't work for me.

So, Proof was worth a brain-dead evening looking at family insanity and how we can come to question our own because of expectations, Match Point left me dozing off.

And, yes, this means that we didn't see District B13 or An Inconvenient Truth this weekend.

[ related topics: Erotic Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Movies ]

Up until now when those ghostly apparitions of the Son of God appeared on food (like fish sticks) it's been... well... an Act of God. No longer: The Jesus Pan lets you "Put the image of Jesus RIGHT ON FOOD!"

Holy images have been popping up all over... A grilled cheese sandwich with the image of the Virgin Mary sold for over 17-hundred dollars on Ebay.

- JesusPan is made from durable steel and topped with a non-stick coating.

- JesusPan is perfect for holiday meals

- Jesus Pan has been featured on Tonight Show with Jay Leno!

[ related topics: Religion Humor Food ]

What do you do if you think you'd be better as Chairman of the Federal Reserve than Ben Bernanke? Well, if you're R. Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia Business School at Columbia University, you... make a music video to the tune of "Every Breath You Take" to state your case (Direct YouTube link).

Edit: dexev points out that it isn't really Hubbard, although Hubbard did enjoy the gag.

[ related topics: Politics Humor Video Economics ]

Lovely little video, I wish I had the time and energy to put together displays like this one. :-)

[ related topics: Video ]

Interesting article on the stagnation of Sweden's welfare state:

These policies, and the fact that Sweden stayed out of two world wars, meant that the economy yielded amazing results. Sweden was rich: In 1970 it had the fourth-highest per-capita income in the world, according to OECD statistics. But at this stage the Social Democrats began to radicalize, with coffers filled by big business and heads filled with ideas from an international leftist trend. Social assistance was expanded and the labor market became heavily regulated. Public spending almost doubled between 1960 and 1980, rising from 31 percent to 60 percent of GDP.

This was also the time when the model began to run into problems. From 1975 to 2000, while per-capita income grew by 72 percent in the United States and 64 percent in Western Europe, Sweden's grew by no more than 43 percent. By 2000, Sweden had fallen to 14th in the OECD's ranking of per-capita income. If Sweden were a state in the United States, it would now be the fifth poorest. ...

[ related topics: Economics ]

Mark Pilgrim: When the Bough Breaks:

And so forth. In fact, I spend the vast majority of my time using these and other open source applications (Carbon Emacs, Colloquy, Audacity, Seashore, Python, and a variety of command-line tools). Why keep running them on an operating system that costs money and restricts my rights and my usage?

Mark talks about why he's dropped the Mac for Ubuntu Linux. Since my Linux laptop died, I've been making do with the Mac, but as I look at installing various applications and go through the hassles of running stuff that isn't official Apple (but should work better, I hate iTunes and I'd far rather have xmms on this box), it's just a pain in the ass to install stuff here. Is it in /usr/bin or /Applications, why is the shipped version of that library so ancient, and on and on.

After the umpteenth time of something not working, and not knowing where to start on fixing it, I too am thinking "why not just work on the platform that all of these apps I'm using were initially developed on and for?".

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Open Source Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

I enjoy browsing Ideas in Food because I adore their aesthetic sense and presentations, but every time I read through a recipe or a description of them preparing a food I think "wait, is that dessert or the entree?". Lots of use of sugars, savory custards, that sort of thing, all of which leave me thinking "that's just waaaay too calorie dense for me, and definitely for Charlene or most of our guests".

But it was reading through their recipe for onion glass, thinking about other things that thickened up at 200°F or so, and suddenly thought "wait, flax seed makes a nice cracker when you cook it like that..." Hmmmm... I may have to try that.

And, on another note, I'm waiting with bated breath for the tomatoe crop to come in this year, 'cause slices of really good heirloom tomatoes, partially dehydrated, stacked with white bean pesto and arugula (props to the Millenium cookbook)... well... brings down the house.

[ related topics: Food ]

Jay linked to Kung Fu Monkey's memorial day post, about what it means to "support our troops". Go read it.

[ related topics: Politics ]

A little distracting video for y'all: Some beautiful precision R/C airplane aerobatics.

[ related topics: Aviation Toys Video ]

'cause Nancy and Gary like Disney and I seem to remember that Mark Dalrymple dabbles in balloons: some pictures of pretty spectacular ballooon sculpture.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

I'd been planning on volunteering to run a rest stop for the 2006 Marin Century / Mt. Tam Double, last night Charlene and I ended up with the Pine Mountain stop (the first stop on the double) and I am sharing the job of coordinating volunteers.

So, if you're in Marin and want to hang out with some really cool people putting on a really fun party for the day, you should volunteer! Besides the event itself there are a number of other perks I'll be glad to fill you in on.

And, if you're looking for a gorgeous day in gorgeous country, register to ride! The 50k has a reasonable hill in it but almost anyone can do 36 miles and the rest stop in the middle of that will be open late into the night (because it's also the last rest stop on the 200 miler), so even if it takes you a few hours extra to get to mid-way there's no real rush.

On the other hand, if you're up for the longer rides the support will be superb, the end of ride food sounds great, even the T-shirt is one you'll want to wear!

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

Okay, I've seen this on a whole bunch of weblogs... bla bla bla another optical illusion bla bla bla black and white bla bla bla spanish castle ... until Dave linked to it this morning and I finally said "oooh kaaaay, I'll go see what the fuss is about."

Yeah. You gotta try it. Big Spanish Castle optical illusion.

[ related topics: Physiology ]

I don't know if I'm going to get to the movies this weekend either, got some monster projects here at the house, but Pixar's Cars is opening. More to the point, One Man Band precedes it. Mick LaSalle (whom I take with a grain of salt) isn't overwhelmed with the movie:

Here we have, for example, a young hotshot hot rod, Lightning McQueen (voice of Owen Wilson), who wants to win a great race. Great. In a 10-minute short, there would be nothing to think about. But in a 116-minute movie, questions seep into the mind: Why does he want to win? To have groupies? To eat in nice restaurants? To go on great vacations? The poor thing is an armless, legless, cumbersome creature, inhabiting a lonely landscape in which no real connection is possible. Antonioni should have made this movie. Or Tod Browning.

None of which is going to stop me from seeing this film in the theater. However, he also says:

However, condense all its delights and "Cars" is still no equal to "One Man Band." That four-minute short gives "Cars" a tough act to follow.

One Man Band is the short before Cars, and although I never got over there to see it, I've heard really good things.

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Movies Graphics ]

So sore. Built forms for foundation for shed. Poured foundation, meant lifting and pouring 70 60lb sacks of concrete. Built most of said shed. Sore.

Last year the New York Times startled the nation with a claim that China was graduating nearly 600,000 engineers every year, and India some 300,000, against only about 70,000 for the US. These figures have been used by many people as a call to action to do something, anything to keep up our end of the innovation process.

Unfortunately, the figures are bogus. According to NPR (audio only), researchers at Duke began calling engineering schools in all three nations, and got a very different answer. First, the US graduates 137,000 engineers each year, and India about 100,000. China probably gets about 300,000, from a population more than thrice that of the US. The figures are pretty fluid, though. Beijing announced that they wanted 600,000 engineers a year, and the provinces found them, even if they had to include refrigerator repairmen and moterbike mechanics. US students also get a much better education than their Chinese counterparts. I think this is a bit like the terrible time when Japan was going to leave us in the dust and take over the world, just beofre their real-estate bubble burst.

Also noted: the researchers had a very hard time getting accurate figures from India. If wasn't from government paranoia like in China, but rather that the Indian schools just didn't know. It's intriguing that such innovative people can exist in a state of such administrative chaos. I sometimes think that India won't take over the world until they get organized, which means we're safe.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Invention and Design Journalism and Media Education ]

Via Rev. Clem: Websites as Graphs - Interesting data visualization tool. I fed it Flutterby.com and got:

Statistics show that drinking Coffee offsets alcoholic liver cirrhosis. The site also has summaries regarding caffiene/coffee and diabetes as well as other interesting factoids.

[ related topics: Health Mathematics ]

Congrats to John on the announcement of a December launch date for a project in progress.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson ]

Two interesting entries over at Strip Mining for Whimsy:

• butterfly wings. or, you know, grapeshot. whatever. puts a little world perspective on the U.S. Civil War war between the states.
• they say it's overfarming turned the middle east into a desert is about some of the dynamics that are causing continued conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

[ related topics: Politics History Sociology ]

Way back in 1998 I noticed PerlFS and it's been on my radar since.

In the intervening years the concept has expanded into Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE), which lets user programs create different data views that can be seen through the filesystem.

Elf reports that one such extension lets you mount your iPod and view it by different categories. I don't have an iPod or time to play with such hacks right now, but I can see that I need to get my Linux laptop fixed, 'cause that's where the cool technologies are happening.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Cool Technology Linux ]

Just pimpin' the fine folks at Ward Street Cafe 'cause a customer came in complaining that he actually had to look at a phone book to find the page. And, oddly, Eric doesn't see it in his search results, he only sees my previous entry, but I get their page above mine. Weird.

[ related topics: Food ]

Venture Capitalist humor:

Our reasons for passing on these investments varied. In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, whom we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains. In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year's Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet. Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies -- our "anti-portfolio" -- whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working.

[ related topics: Humor Work, productivity and environment ]

Interconnectivity reaches new heights as Gizmodo shows an outboard USB hub with 31 outlets. Imagine the possibilities:

1. Using your laptop to run coffee-warmers for a state banquet at the White House!
2. Running enough gooseneck fans to divert a hurricane!
3. Clustering a bunch of these USB powered manicure buffers and drilling a tunnel under Lake Michigan!

I'm sure you-all can come up with others.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Cool Technology ]

Violet Blue went to the Sex in Videogames conference, and you get this fun rant:

It's like there's this whole big room that is human sexuality. And for the sex + video games developers, the lights are off and it's dark. But instead of looking for light switches, they'd rather use flashlights.

[ related topics: Games Sexual Culture Conferences ]

In the construction work I've been whining about I've run into something I need to explore more: The portions of the supplies I bought came from Fairfax Lumber, Jeanne buys from Home Despot.

The products at Fairfax Lumber cost a little bit more. However, for instance, the nails that Jeanne are hot-dipped galvanized and have a tendency to bend, the nails I bought are electroplate galvalized and seem to bend far less when we're driving them in. The 2x4s from Home Despot are fairly wet, the 2x8s I bought from Fairfax Lumber seem to be well dried.

More to the point, I don't think I saw the option of dip galvanized nails in Fairfax, and the lumber they delivered was the luck of the truck, so in several ways I think there's a core level of quality that those guys provide, I'm not sure whether or not the option of buying the good stuff at Home Despot exists, but as an ignorant consumer what I really want in a vendor is a system that keeps me from making bad decisions, not one that makes it easy for me to shoot myself in the foot, and harder in the long run for me to acquire the better products.

There was another run for materials yesterday and, sure enough, we ended up with a flooring material that has warnings about not being for applications where the temperature drops below 55°F, and the Home Despot guy told them that vapor barriers must go outside the studs (This latter point is an ongoing bone of contention, code compliance and general good practice put the vapor barrier inside the studs and insulation when using a permeable insulation like fiberglass and the building isn't actively cooled most of the time, but there's a lot of lore in the building community about this that's flat out wrong, leading to a lot of moldy houses).

What I don't know about this is how much of what I'm seeing is reinforcement of my pre-existing prejudices, but... How do I help people to see that shaving immediate pennies at the expense of longevity of the projects, wages in the local community, and longer time to project completion isn't worth it?

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Community Real Estate ]

An excerpt from an internal email, I don't want to get too in-depth because... well... as should be obvious from this response we're discussing how open as a company we should be, but I'll excerpt a small bit that I responded to:

As I sent this out, I realized it might be nice to have an internal blog for just such idea swapping. Could even be an external blog if just constraining the dialogue somewhat, but internal would be freer.

A conversation to have is one about how constrained the dialog should be. Part of what Scoble has done for Microsoft is giving it a human face, not just in his own weblog but by encouraging various developers to get out there and talk about their jobs. The boundaries are still being decided, but occasionally now it's possible to see who fixed a particular bug, and for some of the long-standing bugs the discussions about how these finally came to the attention of the person who could fix them, and the process by which the problem was solved, can be interesting.

Not so interesting that I have a particular example to point you to, but interesting enough that I've read through a couple of them.

It's a trade-off, between presenting a human face to potential customers, and in so doing acknowledging that there may be flaws and imperfections in the company, and that sometimes competitive advantage may be compromised, or presenting a polished shiny face. The advantage of the former is that it's more interesting and may bring more eyeballs to the process, we just have to figure out if they're the right eyeballs.

I think Doc Searles and the rest of the Cluetrain gang are full of hoohey in many ways (although they manage to get a lot of attention and appear to make a reasonable living at it, and Doc has done a bunch to help out some of my favorite tech causes), but markets are, indeed, conversations, and we need to choose whether those conversations are going to be had in the stilted formalism of conventional business, with trade show booths and four color glossies that have been through committee, or informally in the heat of the process.

I prefer the latter, but I also realize that I am distinctly not a market sample, and I understand that while there are opportunities in the informal, there's been a language developed for these processes over the years, and there are a lot of customers who are very confused if the form of the communication doesn't match the expectations of the customers.

Think of it as the difference between the expense account lunch with the marketing guy and the shared beer in the bar after the show with the developer. The question is: do you want the drunk developer more visible in your marketing efforts? Surprisingly, the answer may be "yes".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron Consumerism and advertising Beer Marketing Economics ]

crasch had a link to two essays that are worth a quick read:

• Principles of the American Cargo Cult
• Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?

[ related topics: Sociology ]

This one's making its way around the world, and while it may be a little rough on the facial bits and head movements, overall I was impressed: Bobby Standridge's animation of a digital drummer playing Rush's YYZ.

[ related topics: Music Animation Movies ]

Two gender stereotypes to get your morning started: Women's brains react surprisingly fast to erotic images. Using external electrodes (Hey, we can duplicate the experiment at home!), researchers found that:

Erotic images elicited neuron firing within 160 milliseconds—about 20 percent faster than occurred with any of the other pictures. The stimulation then branched out to different brain regions for erotic images compared to the others.

Interesting, 'cause it's been a little while since I've looked at that stuff, but I thought the frequency responses you'd be looking at with EEGs are slow enough that claiming "160ms" is pushing the believability of various signal processing techniques.

Second, New Scientist is reporting that PET scans of women during orgasm show remarkably low levels of brain activity. I got this from Elf who titled his post "Must. Not. Snark!", he got it from this post, which snarks.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Physiology ]

Bill Gates is leaving his day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft. I wrote this on the Chugalug mailing list:

On BillG leaving MS, though, he's been saying this for years. It's part of why Ballmer's had such a strong leadership role since 2000. As much as I like to be a Microsoft detractor, I think part of what we're seeing in terms of flat stock, struggles with the XBox, and security to the point where there's just been a published remote execution exploit bug that involves the lowest levels of the TCP/IP stack in the newer (2k+) versions of Windows, is that Bill Gates really is a brilliant business person and a pretty amazing leader, and he's going to be very very hard to replace in that role.

It's easy for those of us in the trenches to poo-poo the effects of the generals, but they really do have an effect on a company. I recently found myself wondering why the managers I've felt most productive under aren't those who rise to the tops of organizations, and I realized that there's a disconnect between what I see as productivity and what makes a company successful. I may bemoan the marketplace which rewards those other traits, but there's no shame in acknowledging that some people manage to take advantage of those systems very effectively.

Personally, though, I think that Bill Gates had to do something to take the attention away from the real Microsoft news this week: Scoble's leaving Microsoft.

[ related topics: Microsoft Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]

A completely computer illiterate friend of mine, to whom I gave a computer ages ago, deleted some files. Not having dealt with the "how do I get back deleted files from a Windows system" for... oh... probably a decade and a half, I said "danged if I know", so she lugged the computer off to Techs To Go. For a hundred bucks they recovered her files, gave her back the computer, but by the time she got it home, all it did was beep when she turned the power on.

Us computer folks know that that means that during transport the video card or the RAM worked itself loose, and you open up the computer and re-seat the cards, but when I tried to describe that process to her she... well... wasn't comfortable with it. So she called Techs To Go back, and they're sending someone out this afternoon at no additional charge to do just that.

I thought service like that, where the computer was working in their shop and it's clearly a failure during transport, deserved a little shout-out.

Speaking of shout-outs and freelance computer techs: Chris, whom I run into around Marin occasionally, do you need/want some free advertising here?

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

I took this picture last night on the Niwot Loop Trail through the Open Space just up the street from the new condo. Colorado is an amazing place...

We're trying to fit into a smaller kitchen but also get some better organization going on. I currently have 38 jars of spices and probably another dozen in baggies. Large spice racks seem extrordinarily expensive. I already have several mixed-sized jars but it would be nice if they were uniform... Any ideas? I've tought of building a rack and buying a bunch of jars but that's not really any less expensive than buying a pre-assembled rack (about $150 through Amazon for 48 jars).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Photography Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Real Estate ]

I'm writing Maya exporter, and I've come up against a roadblock. Maya has at least 941 different node types, and in a perfect world I guess we'd support them all, along with all of the additional features and rigging that popular plug-ins provide. However, the thought of writing the code to support the additional 920 or so node types along with building test cases and double checking the results isn't appealing, especially when I'm pretty sure that very few Maya modelers in the film industry have ever used the "Mountain" node (I kid you not, and, no, I don't know if it's parameterizeable into a molehill). Moreover, I'm sure that between Mel and usual plug-ins, I'd be even further from supporting what's really needed if I embarked on that path.

So what I'm looking for is a sample of how Maya models get rigged in different studios and different industries, eg: games vs film. What nodes get used, how they get used (do you ever have a hundred inputs to a PointConstraint?), how much gets kicked off into Mel or other techniques rather than being implemented inside the primary expression graph.

If you can point me towards a credible resource, or are a Maya jock who understands rigging, I'd really love to chat.

[ related topics: Games Movies Software Engineering Graphics ]

In a few months M$-Vista will be released, and no system I own will run it well, if at all. My dev station is a 2.2ghz AMD, Matrox Dual Head,512mb ram machine circa 2003 running RHES4 Linux. My main 800Mhz Laptop is quite happy running Kubuntu Linux, and I have a 2.4ghz HP running WinXP. And a few months after Vista is released, I'll have to buy a machine to run it well so I can test code and interface on it. I'd rather spend that money on a Mac just for the experience, but no-one's paying me for Mac things.

My point is: there is a lot of really nice hardware about to hit the market cheap. I'm hoping for a synergy of lots of "2nd class hardware" and very end-userable Linux distro's like Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Or at least, the geeks will be sucking up some nice hardware for playing around with weird stuff.

My other hope: Most people say: "Enough!". For most of the business people I run into, the current state of computer usability for what they need is pretty darn good. Spreadsheets don't take 20 minutes to recalc, Word Processors work really well... e-mail and web interfaces work..

What will Vista give you that you are missing, longing for.. that it will actually deliver?

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Spam Open Source Coyote Grits Work, productivity and environment Sports Macintosh Currency Economics ]

ChattBike.com had a Sunday AM ride that looked do-able, 35 miles at 15-20mph. First I rode down to Coolidge Park from Signal Mtn (Fun!) and then met the CBC crowd (nice people, welcomed us obvious newbies without jersey's, shorts with gel pads and titanium road bikes). The ride started off well, Joe (a friend from work) and I kept up until St. Elmo. I got a cramp on my left leg. They set a decent pace, but keep to it more steadily than I had attempted to previously. We bailed. Which lead to the next adventure, after walking out the cramp, we had heard the Incline Railway was allowing bikes...

The ride up Lookout Mtn was fine, roll the bikes on the platform at the lower end of the car with 1 wheel holder for one bike. At the top in became obvious this was a facade for Chattanooga becoming a Bike Friendly Community because there was no way to safely get the bikes off. Carta workers had to lunge from a grass bank, onto the elevated track, and extricate the bikes at great risk, with obvious OSHA-ish violations. We then carried the bikes and onto the road. No ramp, platform or safe practical means of getting them off the rail car.

The ride DOWN was.. well.. [big grin] best amusement park ride ever.

[ related topics: Coyote Grits Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Chattanooga Automobiles Community Trains Bicycling Public Transportation ]

One of the problems with the whole "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" thing is that after your makeover women may think that you look fabulous, but they'll have trouble believing that you want to date them. Rachel Kramer Bussel looks at issue (hat tip to Brad).

(Bahahaha! The topic picker chose "Rocky Horror Picture Show"...)

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Clothing ]

I'm in love: we hates software (Thanks Genehack).

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

QOTD: Matt Kubilus on the Chugalug mailing list:

The above instructions were pulled from 'Windows 2000 Server' by Minasi. Okay just tested this with 2003 Server. Cannot logon afterwards, so probably a bad idea on Windows 2003 Server.

[ related topics: Quotes Microsoft ]

As many of you know, I've recently managed to escape the event horizon of the black hole that is Chattanooga. By some estimates - I managed to do it by entering the black hole and emerging in an parallel universe. A place where there are four different farmers' markets to choose from every weekend. A place where I can walk to a local grocery store and find a mix of organic and conventional foods. A place where I can ride a bicycle and not feel like I'm risking my life. A place where the sun shines 340 days out of the year. A place where "Where do you go to church?" is replaced with "What outdoor activity are you into?" or "Where do you practice yoga?"

A long time ago, Dan told me that he'd never move back to the Southeast. Despite the fact that he has many great long-standing friendships there and he could easily live on 1/3rd the income, he just couldn't give up the quality of life he enjoys in Northern California. I'm quickly realizing the same thing...

Oh, despite all the concern expressed by friends before I moved, I haven't found the cost of living here to be any higher than Chattanooga. I pay $75 more per month for my condo but heat and water are included. Produce is cheaper AND Colorado doesn't put sales tax on food. Granted real estate prices are at the higher end of Chattanooga (but no where's near Northern California). And I will see a hit from the Colorado income tax. But there are real jobs here. IBM and Seagate have major facilities within 1/2 mile of my condo.

The only thing that's missing is decent pizza. For those of you in Chattanooga, be forewarned, Lupi's makes some of the best pizza in the country!

[ related topics: Religion Politics Coyote Grits Food Theater & Plays California Culture Chattanooga Pedal Power Bicycling Economics Real Estate ]

While it may indeed be true that "Happiness is a warm Uzi", it's also pressurizing a copper plumbing system with upwards of twenty new solder joints and discovering that the only leak is where there wasn't quite enough tape in one of the screw-on valve connections.

Puzzlement, however, is rewiring the 220v dryer hookup and getting shocked, even though the breakers were clearly off. I think the cause was a floating neutral, and I immediately yanked the fuse block before going further.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

What with all of the projects (1, 2) going on around here, I haven't been out biking as much as I'd like.

A few days ago I met Charlene in Fairfax, managed to average 20.8 MPH there, and so thought I was doing okay. This morning I rode the Pine Mountain Loop with the Marin Cyclists and... normally I'm able to hold my own. Not lead, but not be embarassingly behind the leaders. This morning I was slow. Not the slowest, but one person whom I normally outclimb was breathing down my neck. Saturday's Tollhouse Century could hurt a lot if Rob's in better shape than I am. And it's been just about a year since we've ridden together and I've no idea where he is relative to that.

So: Being able to sprint the 7 miles into Fairfax is not indicative of my continued ability to do sustained climbs.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Bicycling ]

If I had just a little more time I'd write up a web app to do volunteer tracking for the Marin Century/Mt. Tam Double. First thought was to use Google Spreadsheets, but apparently they only support up to a hundred lines (and we'll be coordinating more than that). I'm putting MediaWiki on another domain, which might help us keep people and contacts organized, but won't help us with things like "show us all of last year's volunteers who haven't yet been contacted" or "show us all volunteers scheduled for time overlapped tasks".

Anyone know of event organizing software?

[ related topics: Community Bicycling ]

Because watching parents squirm in response to northern European sensibilities is fun: Pee&Poo - plush toys and kids' clothing.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Clothing ]

When TC procured Flutterby.net for me, his (not so subtle) hint was that I use it for a more personal site. Let this domain continue down its path as a community, toss the links here, and go back to journaling on the other site.

I know what I'd like to do, but that involves a few months building a content management system the likes of which the world has not yet seen (see my snippet manager musings). However, I've got a bunch of people, time and money resting on my ability to ship code that's not a web app, so that'll have to wait.

So I threw MediaWiki in a subdirectory, locked down the security a bit because I saw using it as a tool to help us with our event organizing, and then tried to pump a whole bunch of data into it.

So I grabbed the Python Wikipedia Bot framework, and... after trying to track down the various errors and issues when attempting to point it to something other than Wikipedia.org, I finally gave up and slapped something together with Perl's WWW::Mechanize.

There are things about MediaWiki that are really well done, but it seems like the intent of the software is to put the interface issues more in the forefront, and what I want is a content manager that is built around the notion that I'll want to let programs and alternate interfaces talk to it more. I understand why it's evolved to be what it is, but it'll take more than a crowbar to make it do what I'd really like.

[ related topics: Content Management Perl Open Source Software Engineering Community Python ]

Michael Pollan responds to Whole Foods' open letter to him regarding The Omnivore's Dilemma(which I raved about).

And along those lines, Omega-3 fatty acids may be a panacea to all sorts of ills, but we're running low on fish.

(Both via Rebecca's Pocket)

[ related topics: Food Michael Pollan ]

Yes, you've undoubtedly seen this elsewhere by now, but: "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell" could soon join "you're getting a set of cement loafers" or "Guido and the boys are going to have a chat with you" in the list of threats you don't really want to hear: Dell laptop explodes and burns at Japanese conference. I'm betting that it was actually an after-market battery.

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics Conferences ]

Those of us who've been around a little too long remember hearing about a young Bill Gates in the 70s throwing a tantrum and pissing off the entire MITS community when people were copying his BASIC language... And now we have this admission:

Swisher: But those were stolen, correct?

Gates: Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes.

[ related topics: Humor moron Community ]

I took some more pictures of the horses on the Niwot Loop Trail. I'd love to get some more feedback as I might enter one in a juried exhibition. Please look through them and and comment on the one(s) you like the best. Comment here if you like or on Flickr.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Grrrr... Ignore this.

I'm down in Sanger a day early 'cause it worked out that way, this evening I'll head to up to Clovis to ride the Tollhouse Century portion of the Climb to Kaiser. But I needed some net access, and I'm reduced to a Starbucks. Oh well, but we make the best of it. So I try to pay for the wireless and I keep getting "bad password". Okay, so I go to "recover password" and get "can't do that for this account". It's been quite a while since I used wifi at a Starbucks, I could see that they may have deleted my account, so I sign up for a day pass. "User name in use".

Uhhh... Yeah. So, T-Mobile, as an occasional user you're going to make me make up a new user name every time I end up trying to use your network. Yeah. That's going to make me a more likely customer how?

[ related topics: Wireless moron Consumerism and advertising ]

I broke down and upgraded to a Rans V2 F26 today. Had a short ride. Wow, almost as different as going from my 'mountain bike' to the Quetzal C105. Added my clip pedals, and played around in the neighborhood. It climbs hills much better, and screams downhill. Disk brakes are nice, you feel like you can actually stop at speed and on slopes. Hopefully I'll get some long rides in this weekend and next week.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

On Friday the forecast for Saturday in California's central valley included record highs and a really bad air quality index. Friday evening I rode the fifteen or twenty miles from Sanger to Clovis, the starting point of the Tollhouse Century, even though it was somewhere between 105°F and 110°F in the shade (and an oven thermometer on concrete read a lot higher than I want to consider). I started out holding a nice 20MPH pace, for about 9 miles, sucking down copious amounts of water, but I was generally very conscious of the different colors of asphalt, dark new pavement was very uncomfortable, and the wind definitely didn't feel cooling.

In that tenth mile I suddenly realized that I was shivering, and there wasn't any sweat on my skin. I took that as a signal to go stand in the shade for a while and pour the water bottle (which now had warm water in it) over my arms and head and let that evaporate off while sucking as much out of my Camelbak as I could get down..

When I got to Rob's house, we were both in agreement that even though it was all downhill, there was no real glory in dropping from Shaver Lake back into the Fresno valley and then hammering out the miles from Millerton back to Clovis. Especially since then we'd just be down in the valley which would be uncomfortably hot until after dark.

Thus yesterday we did an abbreviated version of the Tollhouse Century, the hardest bits: I did a meager 60 miles (Rob did a little bit less because I was in front of him and missed the rest stop in the town of Shaver Lake, had to backtrack a bit), but we did well over 7k feet of climbing, to an altitude of a little over a mile, with some portions as steep as 20% for about half a mile. Finishing out the century would have been mostly a long coast downhill (although not down highway 168, so there'd be no record setting descents), but it would have been dropping into record-setting heat in the hottest parts of the day.

Instead we hit the rest stop at 11:00, met Lisa, Charlene and others all went out on Rob's boat on Shaver Lake and spent the rest of the day lounging in the shade on a beach under the trees, swimming over to a creek flowing down a huge slab of granite, and just generally enjoying the high mountains. I didn't feel like wakeboarding or jumping off big rocks, although both were an option.

Here's a Fresno Bee article on the Climb to Kaiser, noting that we shared parts of the road with the Rumble to the Summit, but much like the sentiment expressed by the cyclist interviewed in the article, despite the noise I'd rather share the road with those folks (who don't take up much room and understand the issues of traveling on two wheels) than with some of the other sorts of traffic prevalent no those stretches.

The route up from the foothills into the mountains was really beautiful, I'd love to come back and re-visit this climb in more reasonable weather (even though we were going through a full load of water in between rest stops), but no regrets on the shorter day.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Nature and environment Boats Bicycling ]

I should have listened to Larry a little bit more: how to make a thermostated waterbath for sous vide for under $150 points out that off-the-shelf controllers for thermostats aren't all that expensive, certainly quicker and easier than trying to build my own with microcontrollers and random thermocouplers, and I've got a couple of applications (tempering chocolate, building an electrostatis smoker, and then I've started thinking about processes for making things out of carbon fiber...) that'd benefit from some simple temperature control.

[ related topics: Food Chocolate Embedded Devices ]

Elf says:

Birthday announcements are one thing, but anniversary announcements always feel a bit cheesy.

Therefore, on the topic of "one thing": Happy 38^th to me.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Aargh. I've seen a couple of weird flakinesses with the Flutterby server. I think it's related to enabling the PHP module in Apache, and I should probably upgrade to Apache 2 at some point so that I can forestall all of the "are you running the latest version?"-ness. But, 'til then... Don't know what's going on, but if y'all see a pattern, can you help point it out?

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Open Source Sports ]

A Christian perspective on why the legal notion of marriage is outdated: Ekklesia, "a think-tank and news service that promotes radical theological ideas in public life" asks: Abolish marriage - What future for marriage?

What is called ‘marriage’ today is essentially a civil contract which can be dissolved or re-entered as many times as necessary. Superimposed on that is a Christian ideal of lifelong fidelity which many accept as ‘a nice idea’, but which is not what they are really choosing, and whose basis in a community of faith they often do not understand or accept.

[ related topics: Religion Sociology Law Current Events Community Marriage ]

According to the Guardian, living Trivial Pursuits answer Boy George has been sentenced in New York to community service for "wasting police time." (?!) The singer complains that having to rake leaves in Central Park is a waste, and presenting a charity concert would be a better use of his talents. Actually, the court's sentence is pretty charitable, since listening to such a concert would surely be punishment for the hapless audience.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Pop Culture New York ]

David Chess linked to slides from a GDC 2002 presentation on AI in Halo. Interesting reading, among the insights is that play-testing revealed that players interpret non-player-character (NPC) increased hit-points and damage dealing as "smarter". But David Chess's commentary notes:

Major insight here is that the opponents in computer games aren't supposed to defeat you, they're supposed to make you feel like the Governor of California. More or less.

Various events are conspiring to drag me back towards thinking about computer games, and I'm realizing that I'm actually not terribly interested in going there, mostly for this reason. Games can be puzzles that make me think, games can be things that help mebuild reflexes, games can be venues for social interaction, but when games are substitute friends... well... I'm not doing myself any favors by participating in them, and I'm not sure I'm doing the culture around me any favors by offering up more of such entertainment.

Page 19 also talks about things to avoid, one of 'em being subtlety:

By the time we shipped we had made it so not only does _every single_ Grunt run away _every single_ time an Elite is killed

but they all have an outrageously exaggerated panic run where they wave their hands above their heads they scream in terror

and half the time one of them will say "Leader Dead, Run Away!"

I would still estimate that less than a third of our users made the connection

[ related topics: Games Sociology Artificial Intelligence ]

Doc Searls had an extensive quote from and commentary on a reply by Kent Newsome to an earlier exchange:

In sum, most businesses don't trust their employees enough to allow them to blog.

Well, yeah. And most businesses don't trust their sales guys to develop software. People specialize, but more to the point the language of the consumer is only the language of the software developers or the engineering department when the consumer is a software developer or an engineer. Interfaces between departments are hard enough, interfaces between producers and consumers are even tougher, especially since there's little incentive on the consumer's part to ask for clarification if there's something there they don't understand; the consumer can always just go to your competitor who is speaking their language.

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment ]

In Boulder and Denver, this happens to be Walk and Bike Week. And tomorrow is Bike to Work Day. With over 100 places to grab a free bite to eat in Boulder alone, tomorrow will mark my first longer ride on the BikeE RX. I've taken a few longer spins and got many of the bugs worked out - tire pressure, air shock pressure, locks, bags, etc. But this will be my longest yet - about 15 miles each way. Rather short by Dan's standards...

[ related topics: Coyote Grits Food Work, productivity and environment Bicycling ]

I've just started my PhD research and having found myself, once again, writing code as the "meat" of my work. This time, it looks like it's going to be Java. I'm looking for some pointers on dev tools, books, and advice (even if it's "Java sucks, try this instead"). See the first comment for more details...

[ related topics: Software Engineering Writing Work, productivity and environment Java ]

From the archives of the Guardian comes a story from June 295h, 1945. It relates discoveries of experimental superweapons the Germans never had a chance to deploy against the Allies. The details of the "jet-propelled submarine" or new poison gasses are lacking, but the prim, almost Victorian writting is charming to hard-bitten 21st century news consumers. It also foretells the fascination with Nazi technology that continues to this day. Hell, I sometimes think they should rename the History channel the Hitler channel and be done with it.

The strangest part of the piece is the date. While congratulating themselves for stopping Hitler before these terrible devices were unleashed, they are unaware that in 5 weeks the most unpleasent novelty of them all was about to be dropped on Japan, changing war forever.

[ related topics: Invention and Design History Current Events Dictators ]

Last night I met up with the CBC crowd for a Wednesday night beginner ride. Suprise! The leader was none other than WarKitty! Had a nice ride, to St. Elmo and back, but I discovered being clipped in, with one loose cleat on a shoe, in stop and go traffic, is embarrasing (Plop). Gotta tighten up my cleats today.

[ related topics: Shoes ]

A few weeks ago Mark Hershberger noted that "we might desire things that don't make us happy", using bicycling and eating a donut as examples. Since I've been biking and have been known to eat the occasional donut, this struck a chord, and I've been meaning to write something on the notion, but yesterday Rafe had a link to Clive Thompson's summary of a study by some Columbia University researchers that claims that in the long run we regret virtue more than vice. Repenting Hyperopia (PDF) might be worth a look, although I'm heads-down and won't be reading anything extended for a few days.

But it does take me back to an old answering machine message I used to have that quoted Helen Rowland, from A Guide To Men back in 1922:

The follies which a man regrets the most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

[ related topics: Quotes Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

If you're a reader of Flutterby there's a pretty good chance that this guy has had an influence on you: Jim Baen died yesterday.

[ related topics: Books ]

Evidently, in Tennessee, dressing up like forest animals and playing musical instruments inside a Holiday Inn makes you a terrorist!

Walker has testified that as many as 40 protesters stormed into the hotel, chanting, singing, banging on drums and even dancing.

And even DANCING!

Here's another take from the protestors' perspective. Evidently, the sherriff's deputy "assigned to the terrorism task force" also happened to be National Coal's CEO's neighbor.

I'm still trying to find a copy of the video...

[ related topics: Music Current Events Chattanooga Travel Video ]

Meuon knows far more about extending digital radio links than I do, so my first inclination would be to ask him what works, but I don't know if he's played with cell phones. We're just on the edge of coverage, depending on how the clouds configure themselves (and perhaps whether there's a truck parked down the road) we can have a choppy conversation in the house, and usually there's a small spot out on the deck which works fine.

Among other things, the Do-It-Yourself Wireless Antenna Update appears to have some links to cell phone extenders that I'll want to investigate... in a few days when I have some more time.

[ related topics: Wireless ]

Since I'm gonna try to somewhat follow the Tour de France (note subtle goatse reference in graphic design of the page) this year, and it kicks off tomorrow: Top contenders removed from the Tour de France in doping scandal:

[Ivan] Basso, winner of the Giro d'Italia, and [Jan] Ullrich — the 1997 Tour winner and a five-time runner-up — were among more than 50 cyclists said to have been implicated in a Spanish doping probe that has rocked the sport for weeks.

From my reading of this and several other stories it looks as though Ullrich was pulled by his team, and not by race officials.

[ related topics: Sports Graphic Design Bicycling ]