Flutterby™! From 2008-05-01 to 2008-05-31

Probably gathered through infected computers usage monitoring, cookie snarfing and other less than reliable means, I still thought this was interesting: Flutterby reaches: 16k people Chattanoogan reaches: 63k people "The Chattanooga Times News Free Press" reaches: 85k people "The Chattanooga Times News Free Press" reaches: 85k people SFGate.com reaches: 3.7M people

Not sure what to derive from it, yet. But I find it interesting that Flutterby rates fairly well compared to a small town newspaper. Kudos Dan.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Chattanooga ]

I now own some obscure custom PCI cards that produce tokens when given some data from an old Delphi (Generation?) application and need a Delphi uber-geek that can help me figure out how they are communicated with. The goals: 1 - connecting them to a web gateway somehow to create such tokens via the web. 2- bypassing the hardware and just creating the tokens in code.

All streets in the continental 48 United States:

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. The pace of progress is seen in the midwest where suburban areas are punctuated by square blocks of area that are still farm land

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Maps & Mapping ]

Yale Law Journal: How 'Swingers' Might Save Hollywood from a Federal Pornography Statute, on the idiocies of 2257 and the implications that it has towards more mainstream movies and their artistic content as obscenity prosecutions increase.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies Art & Culture Sexual Culture - U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2257 ]

I'm not sure what I can add to the entry over at Educated Guesswork titled Natural resistance to testosterone testing, but I'll try. It links to New York Times: Some Athletes' Genes Help Outwit Doping Test, which reports on a study about detecting testosterone doping in 55 men:

The results were unambiguous: the test worked for most of the men, showing that they had taken the drug. But 17 of the men tested negative. Their urine seemed fine, with no excess testosterone even though the men clearly had taken the drug.

I quibble with the "unambiguous" label, especially since The Economist version of the story points out that:

The result was remarkable. Nearly half of the men who carried no functional copies of UGT2B17 would have gone undetected in the standard doping test. By contrast, 14% of those with two functional copies of the gene were over the detection threshold before they had even received an injection. The researchers estimate this would give a false-positive testing rate of 9% in a random population of young men.

I'm not sure what I can add, except that it sure seems like the whole anti "performance enhancing drugs" scene is really about limiting athletic competition to genetic predisposition, and this seems like it's taking that to extremes...

[ related topics: Drugs Health Invention and Design Bioinformatics Theater & Plays New York Economics Archival ]

Anti-oxidant supplements such as A, E and Beta-Carotene could lower life expectancy:

Looking at dozens of previous studies, Copenhagen University researchers suggested these appeared to raise, not lower, the risk of early death.

[ related topics: Health ]

I've been reading stories about our military and government having bought counterfit Cisco gear, from tiered Cisco suppliers (supposedly legit). Now the normally conservative IEEE hunts for kill switches in chips. While the article is rather specific to FPGA's, it applies to everything. Add stories like: Fly robot, fly and I see bad sci-fi horror stories coming to life before our very eyes, soon. Pleasant Dreams.

[ related topics: Robotics moron ]

I *know* there are SF Bay Area readers here, anyone planning to be at the Maker Faire in San Mateo today (Sunday)? I'll be going there this morning, probably alone, and would love to meet up with other Flutterbarians. Coordinates upon request.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

Apropos of the Maker Faire, Shadow passes along a quick Wired blurb on a side-by-side tandem bicycle with 9' diameter wheels.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

Had to make a trek down to Fresno this weekend 'cause of family issues. Charlene had drive down earlier, so I grabbed the Amtrak bus over to Martinez and took the train down. On the train I got into a cool conversation with two young ladies of... well... a different economic and social background than my own, who were headed back down to Bakersfield after a visit to the Mendocino area. They called themselves "Juggalo"s, a term with which I was not yet familiar, but of which I learned something. Wikipedia reminds me that these are fans of Insane Clown Posse, a "horrorcore" rap group, with a predilection towards Faygo soda.

We had a good conversation, I gained some cred by knowing some Tech N9ne lyrics, learned about Twiztid and King Gordy, both in the horrorcore genre, and which I'll save in my repertoire because sometimes it's nice to be able to tell a 15 year old that I do kind of remember what it's like to be a teenager, and "Aesop Rock", which I'm still searching for a definitive link for, but which was my favorite of the groups I hadn't heard of before. At least played through a cell phone speaker there were some interesting lyrics there that sounded listenable. Rap and hip-hop generally aren't my thing (except when I'm driving at 2 AM and need to stay awake), but I keep finding flashes of "there is something deeper under here", and "Aesop Rock" had some of that.

One of the tasks in Fresno was trying to set up an easy to prep dietary plan for a diabetic heart patient, so on Sunday, Charlene and I spent quite a while trolling the frozen foods sections of Wal*Mart, Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. This is definitely an area we'd never normally go into, and we came out with an extreme case of "what else can we suggest?". Alas, we left my notes down there, so I can't speak definitively, but the thing that totally blew me away was that as we got to the so called "healthy" brands, quite often the salt content was off the charts, and they replaced the fat with corn syrup. In the end we came back to "how can we make other tasks easier so that there's more energy left for preparing food that might actually be nutritious".

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Food Sociology Consumerism and advertising California Culture Clowns Public Transportation ]

Where do all the neurotics live? On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps. You could also skip the article and jump straight to the five maps, although I think a little normalization by population may be in order.

It's a come-on for a book called Who's Your City, the article and maps are also at Richard Florida's blog, and a direct link to that blog, Richard Florida and the Creative Class Exchange.

[ related topics: Books Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Maps and Mapping ]

My dad sent 75 Skills Every Man Should Master via email, rather than posting it here, but it made me think enough that I put it here.

Last Friday, Charlene was down in Fresno, so I went out with the hiking gang to see Iron Man. Given the previews, I wasn't looking for too much, something engaging enough that when, inevitably, despite the potential licensing issues, they cranked up the "naaa naaa na naa naa, nana nana naa naa [beat] naa naa" I felt compelled to holler "whooo!" and throw up the horns.

What I found was something that's making me look at images of masculinity and success a little bit, and made me interested in how popular culture is playing those notions. Especially when combined with the discussion on the train, and the way those young women identified with their own tribe, it's got me asking some questions that I thought I'd answered.

More on those as the blog continues.

[ related topics: Sociology Machinery Community ]

Howl: The Zpittvar's "Clucking":

Clucking is ze combination of course of climbing and fucking but together they become something unique; they combine so perfectly that you move the experience to another level.

And, because this is video and reproducing the accent is part of the charm:

Vee remember always zat vee are climbers who fuck and not fuckers who climb.

Via Sensible Erection (where else?)

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Video ]

Six San Diego State University fraternities have been suspended following a monster drug bust. When I first saw this I thought "Fraternities dealing cocaine? Who knew?",

A member of Theta Chi sent out a mass text message to his "faithful customers" stating that he and his "associates" would be unable to sell cocaine while they were in Las Vegas for a fraternity formal, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The text promoted a cocaine "sale" and listed the reduced prices on bulk quantities.

but it was Tom who pointed out the kicker:

Those arrested included a student who was about to receive a criminal justice degree and another who was to receive a master's degree in homeland security.

Uh. Yeah. I've been thinking about the GPS vs Radar thread, and how we could work to change my impression that a teenager accused of speeding and a random police officer are roughly equally credible witnesses, and I'm surprised by two contradictory things: First, that only two of those busted were looking towards law enforcement, and second, that they hadn't made the contacts to get off.

I'm reminded of a friend whose offspring was busted at a party at college, and was offered a free ride if said offspring would become an active informant. Clearly these guys had outlived their usefulness.

[ related topics: Drugs Sociology Law Enforcement Education ]

Nigerian Scammers: It's Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay.

For Eric: A quick Marin IJ article on Robert Campbell's new book of aerial photographs of Point Reyes and vicinity. Campbell is the proprietor of Chamois Moon (legit business site, but annoying unrelated pop-up ad), and they've got some notes on the Helio Courier they fly.

[ related topics: Books Photography Invention and Design Bay Area ]

Jerry and a "Robot" play well together, plan to take over the world next.

[ related topics: Movies Robotics ]

NASA is set to announce its next big mission plan: landing on a Near-Earth Asteroid. Bruce, Willis, call your office!

[ related topics: Aviation Space & Astronomy Astronomy Heinlein ]

Nancy and I just got back from The LEAF, Lake Edan Arts Festival, a wonderful weekend of camping, dancing, music, spoken word, more contra dancing, a pot-luck with friends and naps. Lots of naps. Waking up to drums at 1am and playing drums at the drum circle until 3-ish..more naps. Waltzing on Sunday morning. Our calves ache from our camping on 'top of the mountain' (it's a good hike back and forth) and dancing and walking so much. But it was a wonderful weekend. Life is good, and we sure needed the reminder. Of special joy was camping next to a group of musicians and their friends that were as good as the main acts, and it seemed, were always playing guitars, singing and making joyful musical noise. It's not Burning Man, but it's a heck of a shot in the arm.

[ related topics: Music Nature and environment ]

Well worth a listen: This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money, on how the real estate bubble happened.

[ related topics: Economics Real Estate ]

It was a busy weekend. We made some forward progress on the front door trim, finished up a limestone and fir table for the back yard, and set up a lattice for some morning glories and other climbing flowers (although it's hard to see the lattice in front of that ugly fence in the pictures).

[ related topics: Photography Furniture ]

Found this in my travels: Religious Cartoons

[ related topics: Religion Television ]

When DVDs first came out, I had an "ewww, all the artifacts make this unwatchable" reaction. This article on a very common DVD chroma upsampling error may be 6 years old, but is interesting reading, and I'd love to see how many modern players still have the same problem.

Relatedly, the MeFi thread that I got that from also mentioned a 25 year old bug in the BSD *dir() libraries.

[ related topics: Open Source Cool Technology Video ]

I'm gonna try to follow up to my initial reaction to Iron Man. I'll try to avoid being spoilerrific, but I'm going to put it in the comments, if you still want to see this film, consider yourself duly warned.

[ related topics: Movies Sociology ]

The Jointmaker Pro Stationary Hand Saw. Wow, cool idea, looks like neat execution, puts a wood saw in a jig that lets you do extremely precise cuts.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Upgrading to Windows XP from Vista, a review.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft ]

California State Supreme Court overturns same sex marriage ban. Woot!

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology California Culture Marriage ]

The AutoGuitarHero:

"I knew the only way I was going to beat my son Alex at Guitar Hero was to cheat"

-Michael ( January 1, 2008)

So he built a device that looks at the analog video output from the Wii, does some processing with an FPGA (VHDL code is available for download), and sends controller events back to the game.

Since we're looking at line 175 and the button press can't happen until the puck reaches approximately line 212, we store the presence of the puck in a shift register clocked by VSYNC and use a tap about 6 frames later to actually press the note button.

From This entry at Bunnie's Blog, which has just catapulted into my regular reads.

[ related topics: Music Games Weblogs Video ]

Knowing that it was going to be hot this afternoon, I snuck out this morning and worked a little compost into one of the flower beds and finished up the rails on the front door entrance. I'm kinda proud of the latter.

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

Charlene needs a new laptop. Some critical features of Ubuntu have been broken on both of our laptops for the last few revs, like sleep mode, and Charlene's laptop hangs on every third boot. We're thinking we should just buy her a Dell with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, so we know it works.

Anyone got an alternative? We're not interested in paying the Microsoft tax, and we want something that's going to be hassle-free.

[ related topics: Microsoft Open Source ]

Sonofapoodle: Petaluma's doing a "Salute to American Graffiti" (which was filmed here) this weekend, and as a kickoff, yesterday morning at 4:30, they recreated the infamous "pulling the wheels off the cop car" stunt. That would have been worth getting up for. More links at http://www.standbyforjustice.com/

[ related topics: Humor Movies Automobiles ]

Double amputee runner Oscar Pistorius has won a ruling allowing him to try out for a spot in the Olympics:

The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied athletes, overturning a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations.

The IAAF had previously ruled that the carbon fiber blades that he strapped to his legs gave him an advantage. I find this interesting on two fronts.

First, this seems like a great place to look at drug use in sports. If someone else has a genetic predisposition towards better, say, blood oxygenation, or maybe a childhood disease left an athlete anemic, where does the slope start?

Second, what happens when a runner decides they'd be faster on carbon fiber and cuts off their feet in order to compete?

I think this really shows up the silliness of sport as anything other than a training mechanism: At some point it's just an arbitrary optimization of a rule set, and though it's great to cheer that on, why are we cheering on people who optimize that rule set and not other ones, like, say, stock markets?

I go back to my comparison that if people were consistent about their sports enthusiasm, San Franciscan's would riot and trash the city every time Charles Schwab had a good year.

[ related topics: Health Sports Economics ]

In 1995 Mongolia passed a law allowing people to have last names.

One of the reasons was everyone was inbreeding without knowing it. Another was it was "rough on the phone company which still organized the phone book by first name".

[ related topics: Books Archival ]

We'll be doing this regularly (and I think we're going to try to do a big one on Labor Day): Another get-together at Charlene and Dan's, this Sunday, May 25^th, 3-9. We'll provide a bunch of snacks and drinks, but we're calling it a pot-luck, mostly because Dan can't be trusted to run the grill rather than socialize, so bring something to share, although, as always, it's more important that you show up than that you bring anything, I'm sure there'll be extra food, and conversation counts.

And bring friends.

10 Mission Drive, Petaluma CA.

[ related topics: Food ]

Life imitates Second Life: Flying Penis disrupts Garry Kasparov meeting.

(Protesters in SL previously used flying penises to interrupt an Anshe Chung event, non-video here)

[ related topics: Politics Humor Aviation ]

My first rail and stile raised panels.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Woodworking ]

Simple atmospheric gas forge plans.

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

9 TSA agents accidentally doused with pepper spray at San Jose airport:

The incident happened at 10:45 a.m. when a passenger at Terminal C realized that he had a canister of pepper spray in his bag and handed it over to TSA employees at an X-ray machine, said airport spokesman Rich Dressler.

The TSA agents were preparing to put the canister in a hazardous-materials container when it somehow discharged, Dressler said.

I don't know if it's Rule #1, but "do not give the rent-a-cops weapons, lest they hurt themselves" is pretty high up there on the common sense list.

[ related topics: Aviation Bay Area moron Law Enforcement ]

Sandy Lam's "Spaceless" furniture. I'm not sure I like the execution, but the design is basically storing folding leg tables so that their top also serves as the deck surface, and using those structures as benches and tables.

[ related topics: Graphic Design Furniture ]

Portion sizes, then and now (Via)

[ related topics: Food ]

Lou Pearlman, creator of the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync boy bands, sentenced to 25 years in prison. Not, alas, for his taste in music, but for running elaborate scams to bilk investors. However, we can dream of a perfect world where "Bye Bye Bye" is worthy of a few years in the federal pen.

[ related topics: Music Pop Culture ]

On the woodworking list, a list that, believe it or not, is getting close to having a few things ticked off, is a set of chairs. We want to make them all in the same style, but we want two of them to be appropriate to us, seat height and angle, back support, that sort of thing, tailored to our individual shapes. We're still trying to decide between carved and upholstered seats.

I snitched this picture from an entry over at Renegade Evolution, it makes me lean towards carved seats.

[ related topics: Photography Furniture Woodworking ]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200...p_on_re_us/polygamist_retreat_41

A court has now found that the State of Texas overstepped the law in its seizing the children, but did not order the immediate return of the children.

At the very least it's caselaw for Texas. I think it will take more publicized overreaches by DFCS agencies before we see real legal reform on this subject.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Current Events ]

Brad reports on ten years since the birth of the word "blog".

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

I recently got a phone call from Verizon thanking me for my business, and offering a "free" additional 500 minutes as a sign of their "appreciation". I asked whether it were really free, and the caller assured me that it was. My inner skeptic wouldn't relent, so I called back later and pressed the issue, whereupon I learned that in accepting the "free" "gift" I obligated myself to an additional 2 year contract. Needles to say, I instructed them to back out my acceptance.

I heard an author interview with Bob Sullivan ("Gotcha Capitalism" ISBN-13: 9780345496133) a while ago, and am going to get it and read it. there was a sick joke in the time of my youth that ended with "that'll teach you not to trust nobody". Sadly, this has come to pass as a literal truth.

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses row on row..."

"Honest Officer, I've never seen that bag of marijuana before... But I'm sure it won't go to waste now..."

Wrong in so many ways: Customs secrets a bag of weed into a passenger's bag as a test for drug detection - but never finds it!

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

While they still maintain a great deal of censorship on hosted content, Bluehost has dealt the end-game in hosting: unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains. That means, in theory, you could host the entire internet on a single $6.95 account... Well, except for the good parts!

[ related topics: Games broadband Free Speech Space & Astronomy Net Culture ]

Green Drinks Chattanooga - An interesting social group with a twist on supporting the "Green" Agenda. It's apparently part of GreenDrinks.org. Maybe I'll make it this time (Wednesday), I keep getting invited by crazy fun friends.

[ related topics: Chattanooga ]

100% Awesome: "Secret messages" morse code quilt. Via Medley.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Fashion ]

Yesterday I did a software demo to a "competitor" and their client. The client was hostile, at first, because the competitor-sales-droid had pushed their version of our system to the client, and was touting feature X, Y and Z as products he should buy. The Client wasn't interested in X,Y and Z and did not even LIKE the ideas. I skipped it, went on with the demo, established dialogue, focused on problem A and talked about people and how they did things, paid for them, used them.. showed off the software and systems.. how things worked together. The light bulb turned on as he asked: "How do [insert certain demographic] they _____?" I replied, "They could X, Y or Z". Ding.

While I abhor the words: "Solution Provider" I just solved the problem he was just starting to realize he had instead of selling him a product. It takes a while for a meme to take germinate and sometimes you just have to use the right fertilizer.

I felt like I needed a bath. :)

[ related topics: Software Engineering Marketing ]

Back in another century millenium, Meuon and I were playing around with a real estate data and listings service (this was before the internet hit, so this was a BBS on steroids), and we underestimated just how political and protectionist the local MLS service was. It seemed like they'd do anything they could to not just protect their own data, but to keep real estate customers from correlating their data with any external source.

Charlene and I have been really happy with Redfin, and I've been watching Redfin's corporate blog with interest, to see how they deal with some of that same crap.

Today's No One's Going To Take Away Our Data, But What Can We Do With It? is look at a small corner of that political nightmare.

And while I'm looking at "the nature of the business sometimes defines those in the business", Rafe's "How the media really works" is a look at John Harris's apology that "Politico.com" is, in fact, just like every other muckracking political news hypersensationalist publication, because that's what drives traffic and sells advertising.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Real Estate ]

Sigh. Working with notYET again, specifically C#. You might think that in the byte pointer to data gotten back from a call that specifies ...PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb that b[0] would be alpha, b[1] red, and so forth, but nooooo, in fact, it's bgra.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

David Boaz in the Wall Street Journal:

But hypocrisy is not the biggest issue. The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."

They're wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.

I think that one of the scariest quotes in American history is JFK's "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country", as though, like the subjects of monarchies, we exist to serve the nation rather than vice-versa. It's a damned shame that once again those who'd use their political clout for their own personal gain are once again calling on patriotism to selfishly bleed us.

Via Cafe Hayek starting with Mark Atwood's link.

[ related topics: Politics moron Sociology Economics ]

Yow! I sat down to do some basic exploratory stuff today, stuff that's to be targeted towards Windows and C#, and wondered if Mono was up to the task. After a few hours of diddling about with reading and manipulating data, parsing XML, that sort of thing, I started to think about needing a GUI. So I tried "using System.Windows.Forms", and a basic test app worked!

Slower than all get-out, but, hey, it's Microsoft designed, you'd expect that. I've been coding with a Windows box right beside me so that I can use the context sensitive help in Visual Studio to read the documentation, because Microsoft's class library design sucks big-time, but Emacs and a good Makefile makes a really nice development environment and alternative to the hell that is Visual Studio, and the fact that I can code up stuff with real tools in a real environment to analyze and transform data, and then later move it over to the crippled platform for massaging before delivery to the client, is great.

Definitely not a first choice, but deploying to Windows isn't a first choice, and if you've got to do that it's great to use a modern sophisticated well-tested development environment rather than starting out hobbled on Windows.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Software Engineering ]

The kids by and large have to be returned. This is a full endorsement of the lower court verdict. I'm not sure how long it will be before children can be returned. I don't think that the <18 girls who are pregnant will be returned. The state is still pending their DNA tests to figure out relations and prove bigamy. So this is not the end but it is a significant precedent (in Texas caselaw anyways) wrt child custody.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080529/D90VIO000.html

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Stolen wholesale from a Metafilter post entitled "Government spending and tax levels", here's government spending as a % of GDP for the past two decades , HTML-ized by Google from this Excel spreadsheet from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Compare your country to those around the world. USAnians can look at the tail end of the Bush the elder era, check out the trend under that big spending Democrat, and watch the numbers zoom back up as those "fiscal conservatives" (*choke*, *gasp*, *snort*) took back the White House...

[ related topics: Politics Movies History moron Race Economics Real Estate ]

Must read: Heather Corinna on counseling a woman in an abusive relationship brought in for an abortion:

By my perspective, it was this level of total delusion that his words were meaningful, that his control over the woman he was married to was sovereign and that I'd recognize that which struck me first and foremost. I couldn't believe, through the whole exchange, that it was happening, that this guy could not know that he was trying to speak a language to me which was a long-dead language that even if I recognized some of the words, didn't mean shit to me.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Marriage ]