Flutterby™! From 2009-05-01 to 2009-05-30

Wall Street Journal: There Is No Such Thing As Nuclear Waste. (Via)

[ related topics: Economics ]

Hooray, the first of May!

• Exploding a 2 liter soda bottle in a trash can, Forest had had a mis-fire and wanted me to blow this one up.
• Mel Brooks once said that "tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die". On that note, I present a kid trying to fire a bottle rocket out of his ass. I laughed in the "ow that's gotta be painful" and "bet he's not trying that again any time soon" way.
• The iSnort, virtual cocaine for your iPhone.

[ related topics: Drugs Dan's Life Video iPhone ]

Sugar Stacks - visual indications of how much sugar is in things.

[ related topics: Food ]

Fred On Everything When he is good there is none better.

Passing The Torch

A very nice young lady came over and tried to sell me tickets to Costa Rica night, if that is what it was. Ooooh, she said, it was going to be fun. We would wear costumes and there would be piñatas and it would be a Latin American Experience, oooh.

I was courteous. In times of trial, I call on deep reserves of character. I didn’t tell her I would prefer to spend the evening removing my lungs with a ball-point pen. Nor did I explain my idea of a Latin American Experience: standing at the Gavilan Bar in Guadalajara, hooking down Jose Cuervo and swapping war stories with my crazy friend Tom the Robot.

But I quit. Character only carries you so far.

And the corporations took over. Everything became tranquil, slant decided at corporate, don’t make waves. The fluorescents hummed narcotically, like paper shredders destroying evidence. Sterility flowered. Libel and character assassination fell into disfavor with publishers

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Robotics History ]

Merck pays Elsevier to start "peer reviewed" journal to publish positive papers (More, requires registration) (Hat tip).

[ related topics: Health ]

How Lehman Brothers Got Its Real Estate Fix is the current crop of too little, too late looks at the financial system collapse, in this case looking at the reign of Mark A. Walsh in Lehman Brothers commercial real estate dealings. One thing jumped out:

MR. WALSH grew up in Yonkers, the son of a lawyer who once served as chairman of the New York City Housing Authority. He attended Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle; the College of the Holy Cross, where he majored in economics; and, finally, the Fordham University School of Law.

Now we don't expect lawyers to actually have any ethics, and I could actually add 1 and 1 and not get 3, so I wasn't an investor in any of these schemes, but I think it'd be worth an investor's while to go back to the College of the Holy Cross and sue the living pants off them, because anybody who certified that this guy knew anything about economics seems like they'd be as culpable in his misdeeds as he is.

[ related topics: Ethics Law Education New York Economics Real Estate ]

This morning I rode down to Novato, and it was raining cats and dogs. While I was sitting in Marvin's with Phil waiting for Dave, my cell phone started buzzing. I think it got wet enough to short something out. I'm waiting for it to dry out, but we were planning on re-upping our contracts and getting Charlene a new cell phone so that she'd have Bluetooth pairing for the new car, and something with good audio quality (Charlene wears hearing aids, and both of us generally think the cell phones we have suck, though Charlene's Nokia (that used to be mine) less so).

We looked at the Pantech BreEZe, amazing audio quality, and it'd be perfect for "just another cell phone", but we also looked at the iPhone, and it's seductive...

In comparison to the BreEZe, the audio quality of the iPhone sucks. I mean, it's not as bad as my crappy LG, but it ain't great. We read in multiple places that the Plantronics headsets have the best volume and quality, but that the iPhone's Bluetooth support is pretty buggy and lame (although there's some talk about much of that being fixed in the forthcoming 3.0 release).

The way we're thinking going is to get to iPhones, wait for the third phone on our plan to come around and, if the iPhone audio quality doesn't work for Charlene get a BreEZe when our third line rolls around (Forest currently has our third phone, he'd get the Nokia), and she can just swap the SIM card back and forth between the iPhone and the BreEZe.

So, here's where I open up the floor to the iPhone lovers and haters: Is there a Blackberry we should look at? Is there a Nokia with a web browser and a plan that just works? I think primary use cases will be looking stuff up and, probably, some sort of blog/journal/life update, with occasional minimal email, and Charlene and I really want a shared calendar. Oh, and if its there I'll probably use it to listen to podcasts.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Wireless Music Weblogs iPhone ]

Modern Pied Piper Cheats Death, in light of that link about Merck & Elsevier collaborating I thought this paragraph was worthwhile:

After his ninth heart surgery, Mackie's doctors had him on 15 different medicines. But the side effects made life miserable. So one day he quit taking all 15 and decided to spend his final days doing something he always wanted to do.

And he's spent his days giving away harmonicas.

[ related topics: Health Archival ]

I had seen this somewhere else, but Chris pointed to this Guardian article on Susan Fiske of Princeton's findings with MRI brain scanning that men respond to pictures of scantily clad women and tools in similar ways:

Researchers used brain scans to show that when straight men looked at pictures of women in bikinis, areas of the brain that normally light up in anticipation of using tools, like spanners and screwdrivers, were activated.

So when the bluenoses try to block porn on the net, look out, that's just a step down the slippery slope towards banning Bridge City Tools.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Fabrication Woodworking ]

Saturday was World Naked Gardening Day, but I had rain gear on and it was still cold and uncomfortable, so I don't feel too bad about learning about it late...

[ related topics: Nudity Education Gardening ]

Okay, yes, I'm now an iPhone fanboy, although it pisses me off that buying an iPhone is largely buying a conduit for iTunes to sell you crap (and up until this point I'd avoided putting iTunes on my Vista64 computer, alas that freedom is no longer and I expect to see processes from Apple sucking down 75% of my available compute at random times in the Task Manager). And it also pisses me off that a lot of the good software out there just assumes that your iPhone is unlocked. I guess it's to be expected that all the real innovation is happening outside of Apple's control: Let 'em make hardware, but keep them the hell away from the software.

Anyway, so far I've avoided jailbreaking the device. I've purchased GPS Log and got syncing with Google Calendar working on my phone, although not yet on Charlene's. And as I figure out how to restore the contacts (the process of setting up the Google Calendar sync nukes them), I'm going to put in some custom ringtones so I know when I should be interrupted.

Thus: How to make free ringtones from your iPhone.

[ related topics: Apple Computer iPhone ]

Whoah. Freaky. I'm unable to click on the sidebar links on Flutterby.net in Firefox 3.0.10. Opera & IE both work. Any suggestions on how to tweak the CSS or pages to let me do so?

Got it: The <div> that contained the content and the heading, which is invisible, was extending over the sidebar. Still not a very pretty design, but at least it works.

(Taking steps towards being able to update from the iPhone)

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

There was once this in-production movie called "Winston" that I've mentioned a time or two here. When we lived out in Lagunitas they were filming in Forest Knolls and Fairfax and Nicasio, and a few evenings we went down to stand way back and watch take after take while the crew bustled around, and we chatted with Jeremy Zajonc, the line producer of the show, a few of those evenings.

That film became Touching Home, with Ed Harris, Brad Dourif, directed, produced, and acted in by Noah and Logan Miller, west Marin local boys. Their mom lived in a shack in Fairfax, and their dad, the subject of the film, lived in a shed out in Woodacre and then in a Scotch Broom grove out nearer to where we lived in Lagunitas. I'm not totally sure of the timeline, but it's likely that I gave him a ride while he was hitch-hiking home from drinking in Fairfax before he died in the Marin County jail.

The way they tell the story, during post the editor wasn't a morning person so they worked from 10:30 AM to 10:30 PM, but the Miller brothers are morning people, who got up at 5. By the time the film had gotten to editing they'd pitched the process of making the movie so many times, and the pitch always went from the beginning up to wherever they were in the process at that time, that they used that spare time to just start writing. The result is their book Either You're In, Or You're In The Way. I read it. Damn good "pull yourself up" story, decent in the tearjerker category, and the local valley boys could use a little help getting to bestseller status. Go buy it and read it.

Last night we went to see them talk down at Book Passage, got the two copies we'd already bought signed by Logan, Noah, and two more copies because this is a book about West Marin and the area we know, and it's also the type of story that some folks we know should read. Tonight we're going down to The Rafael to see Touching Home for the first time. It's (long) sold out, but they've also got this event called Bookstock 2009 that's gonna happen at AT&T Park down in San Francisco on June 6^th. To get two tickets, buy the book at a participating retailer. We'll be taking the ferry in and back.

Some clips from the movie with a little narrative by Noah and Logan at In Or In The Way, here's the longest clip from Touching Home I've found, a few updates over at Tumbler, Bookstock Twitter feed, Miller Brothers Twitter feed.

Buy the book. See the movie. Help get the movie a distribution deal.

[ related topics: Books Movies Nature and environment Bay Area Writing California Culture ]

Mr. T and Will Wright join forces to battle Nazis in South American rain forest:

We think we speak for the entire internet when we say nothing, and urinate on ourselves.

Hat tip.

[ related topics: Games Net Culture ]

Low-Tech Magazine, including an article on the Kalakala art deco aerodynamic ferry, wooden steam powered submarines of the 1800s, and only idiots travel by train.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Machinery Trains Public Transportation ]

London sees rise in terror stops:

The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.

65 arrests, for an arrest rate of .035%, and you'll notice they use "arrests" and not "convictions", which seems like a pretty convincing argument that the London police are using terror as an excuse to harass random citizens.

(Topic picker chose "Monty Python", I'm half-tempted to let that stand...)

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement ]

This evening we're going to look at a truck that was advertised on Craigslist, a 1991 Ford F-250 that's got a claimed 36k miles on it. The story is that the guy's grandfather bought the car, drove it for a few years and 28k miles, it's been sitting in a garage for 8 years, and then they put another 9k miles in the past 3 years. They want $3.5k, the '91 F250 has a number of recalls on it that probably weren't fixed in that time when it wasn't being driven, so there could be some pros and cons. And back-of-the-envelope says this truck would cost about $.15/mile in gas versus a new 1/2 ton truck at $.10/mile. So I figure that since we're going to be up in Cotati this afternoon we may as well look at it, but I'm not sure it's the right vehicle for me.

[Edit: Didn't get the truck.]

However...

Apparently there's a attempt by Congress to implement a "cash for clunkers" program that'd give you $3,500 if you have a vehicle that gets less than 18MPG (the article says "car or light duty truck" and you trade it in for something that gets at least 4MPG more, $4,500 for something that gets 10MPG more. The official EPA fuel economy web site doesn't give me a "search for cars with less than 18MPG that'd qualify" feature, but I'm kind of wondering if there isn't the opportunity for some Craigslist speculation here...

[ related topics: Politics Automobiles Economics ]

Had some meetings recently with TVA and at some point you realize the world is fractal in nature and they are a fractoid of the government as a whole:

And my favorite solution to the problem is: Much less government. Much MUCH less government.

Side note: Duke, TVA and other large providers are posting numbers that heavy commercial and industrial power demand is down by 10-20%... The energy crisis may be postponed due to a shrinking economy.

[ related topics: Chattanooga Energy Monitoring ]

Apologies for the wackiness and outages. I think we're back to normal now.

The author of Crowded Head, Cozy Bed has pointed out that:

PSA: May is National Bicycle Month and National Masturbation Month. Please be safe and celebrate them one at a time. Thank you.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Stars and Stripes: Operation Serve and Tell: Servicemembers encouraged to blog

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

A bunch of good giggles: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (Hat tip, and hat tip).

[ related topics: Humor Software Engineering ]

Design Blog List, also publisher of Furnitude, is giving away a Doug Stowe box made of hickory and persimmon with walnut accents. Doug Stowe's page and Wisdom of the Hands blog

[ related topics: Weblogs Graphic Design ]

This evening's hacking: It's beta software, so I suppose I shouldn't really tell you, but its initials are GPS Log version 1.3, which should hit iTunes early next week, and it's one button to take a short trip this afternoon and dump it with pictures into a KMZ that Google Earth can display. Need a little more hacking to show you that data over an embedded Google Map, but that's mostly a matter of Flutterby.net blog software infrastructure, the KML stuff is easy.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Robotics Software Engineering Travel Embedded Devices Maps and Mapping ]

Today's hike up Temelpa as rendered in Google Maps with GPS Log LITE. I'm beta testing the version that should hit the servers in the next few days, which is why this is the LITE version, which is why the pictures are clustered around 5 markers on the map, but the coolness about the beta test is that it was one button press to upload this to Flutterby.net.

As I get further in this, and start logging more densely (if the iPhone will do that well) I want to use these tracks to automagically tag my other photos, If the iPhone won't do that well, maybe I'll toss a GPS logger in the pack and use the GPS Log iPhone app to figure out metadata about the trackpoints.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Nature and environment Maps and Mapping iPhone ]

Keeping Abreast of Pornographic Research in Computer Science. Cute, but not too much: Pointing out that the "Lena" example oft-used for image processing examples is the top 5 inches of a Playboy centerfold image, and then looking at more recent attempts to automatically detect explicit content in images.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Graphics ]

Anyone got a simple "given a min and max latitude and longitude, pick a zoom range for Google Maps"? I know what Eric's answer is: "use OpenLayers", but I haven't gotten there yet...

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Of course no Internet would be complete without an Anagram Server. Flutterby anyone?

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

By the way, the SUID bit has no effect when set apps that you think are CGI but are actualy executing via mod_perl.

[ related topics: Web development Perl Open Source ]

So the outage this morning was (apparently) boneheadedness unrelated to this, but...

I have this Perl app, and I wanted it to detach and run in the background under certain circumstances. So I set it up to:

system("setsid sh -c './bin/myapp.pl \& :' > /dev/null 2>\&1 < /dev/null");

except that the arguments I reinvoked it with re-spawned the app thinking it needed to detach.

It was exiting cleanly after that call, so it wasn't like I was using resources or anything, it wasn't a while(1){fork();} situation, it was just this rapidly changing PID that I couldn't get a handle on to kill. So I rebooted the machine.

Then I went to kill off the process on my local machine and realized I could temporarily rename sh, and in fact now, duh, I realize I can just temporarily rename ./bin/myapp.pl.

Anyway, thanks, Meuon, for whatever you did to get the machine to reboot after my Ubuntu upgrade goofiness that apparently left it in a state where it wasn't booting...

[ related topics: Perl Open Source ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-_RHRAzUHM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD8DGIYJdfU

[ related topics: Birds Video ]

So there's this budget crisis in California. Some say it's that all of the mandates of the Propositions have tied legislators' hands on budgeting issues, so when revenues dry up there's nowhere they can cut, it's all been pre-allocated to specific programs which seemed like a good idea at a time. This is one of the problems with direct Democracy.

After grumbling for quite a while, our legislators and gubernator have decided to put this dilemma up to the people in the form of a bunch of propositions on a special election. Here's the problem, the Official Voter Information Guide summary description of Prop 1A:

Changes the budget process. Could limit future deficits and spending by increasing the size of the state "rainy day" fund and requiring above-average revenues to be depositied into it, for use during economic downturns and other purposes. Fiscal Impact: Higher state tax revenues of roughly $16 billion from 2010-11 through 2012-13. Over time, increased amounts of money in state rainy day reserve and potentially less ups and downs in state spending.

Do they think we're stooooopid? So, great, by making sure that our legislators are more fiscally responsible over the long-term, it ups our immediate revenues. Uh. Yeah. So how's that happen exactly? Digging deeper, we find that it (overly simplified) ups income tax, the vehicle license fee, and reduces the amount of decision making power that the legislator and governor have, which got us in this problem in the first place.

Now I'm not necessarily against Prop 1A, but the summaries in the voter guides are all written like they're trying to put one over on the voters. Prop 1D claims that it:

Temporarily provides greater flexibility in funding to preserve health and human services for young children...

(emphasis mine) with a

Fiscal Impact: State General Fund savings of up to $608 million in 2009-10 and $268 million annually from 2010-11 through 2013-24.

So we're gonna preserve all those good things for kids and save half a billion bucks this year and a quarter of a billion bucks thereafter? That's great, but how's that gonna work, exactly?

I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about the specifics of these Propositions, but the way the voter guide's written I have this "c'mon, we dare you to be stupid enough to vote for these" vibe, and I can't figure out what the politicians are trying to say.

[ related topics: Politics California Culture Economics ]

A few days ago I had the realization that a command line is interacting with a computer using language, and a mouse was the equivalent of pointing and grunting. I further commented that a Mac lacked a right-grunt, which was slightly unfair, but as I immerse myself in the iPhone experience, I'm having this sense reinforced.

[ related topics: Language User Interface Macintosh iPhone ]

How IMAX is diluting (and possibly ruining?) their brand.

Will trade Wife and her Son for Van or work truck

Think about it. A good van is not bad.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Machinery Marriage ]

Maybe it's expectations. Maybe I should be amazed that I have a full-color web browser in my pocket (although I was accessing internet maps from a PDA back in the y2k timeframe) and not frustrated by all the little quirks and half-finished crap that seem to plague this device, but:

• Charlene's iPhone needs a new screen. It's got color fringing and minor jigglyness. There's a trip to the Apple store and some hours, perhaps days, without a phone. Guess we'll need to get another phone for backup (Forest got the Nokia, the LGs both died (nobody mourned the latter)).
• The JPEG images in any way I can get them off the device have no EXIF data. WTF? You don't have to store much, but how about creation date/time?
• The paternalistic "Apple knows best" attitude. There's a lot of cool applications out there for the iPhone. Most of them require jailbreaking your iPhone. The cool apps which don't are hobbled by the fact that it apparently takes weeks to get an update through the iPhone store.
• All the apps which take a meaningful amount of time to do something, which seems to be everything that'll batch upload photos, also appear to tank if the screen saver kicks in. So photo uploading is a "keep tapping the screen" process.
• The prevalence of non-useful error messages. And if an app is killed because some sort of exception, it'd be nice to know, rather than "Oh, look, I'm back at the apps screen, I wonder what happened?"
• Battery life. Although it's better (ie: actually usable untethered) if you turn off WiFi.
• iTunes. I was going to leave it at that, but: Good Deities what a steaming pile of annoying UI decisions.
• A useful search in iTunes: Find "App Store" on the left side of the iTunes home screen, then "Power Search" over on the right side. That big "Search" box on the upper left of the application window is useful only if you're looking songs from the latest third string auto-tune user.
• Hey, they're all web pages anyway, how about letting me access them from Linux?
• Bookmark sync options in iTunes: IE and Safari. Firefox? Opera? Bzzzt. Thank you for playing.
• Auto-correction. I have yet to have this do the right thing. It's wrong often enough that I can't just keep tapping after I make a keyboard mistake, because it'll take longer to correct that than to just go back and fix what's there.
• Not all text fields allow cursor repositioning. Huh.
• That loud shutter sound and image that freezes for a moment when you take a picture? Yeah, not actually your picture, that'll be taken some short but apparently random time later, leading to images of sidewalks and parking lot stripes if you don't hold the camera up for a fairly long-time afterwards.

The web in my hand is very cool (although I did have this 8 or 9 years ago with the Palm Vx and OmniSky back). The digitizer rocks. The screen is... well... for reading any amount of text, I actually preferred the old monochrome LCD on my Palm Vx, but that may be mostly font choices and sizes.

I'm not quite ready to take it back, but the experience is marred by crap that just has rough edges. I expected better.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Interactive Drama User Interface Photography Open Source Invention and Design Travel Net Culture Typography Graphic Design Maps and Mapping iPhone ]

A few notes on iPhone apps:

• Still impressed by GPS Log App, hoping 1.3 hits the servers soon! I've been using the beta LITE version for a week now, liking the new upload features, but getting tired of waiting on Apple.
• PhotoUpLink: Fail. Lots of crashes.
• Multi-Photo Email: Semi-fail. Lots of crashes.
• FTP Picture Upload: So far, success.
• The Weather Channel® iPhone app beats the living daylights out of the weather info that comes with the iPhone.
• Google Earth iPhone has none of the features that'd actually make it useful, but is a damned cool tech demo.
• Ad Hoc Helper: Why doesn't the device ship with this functionality?

[ related topics: Apple Computer Photography Invention and Design Machinery Maps and Mapping iPhone ]

A sign of getting some bullshit publicity is: Every business consultant and marketing expert in town contacts you and wastes 3-5 minutes of your time. I want to establish how not do so based on these experiences:

• Don't use an @yahoo.coom or @aol.com e-mail address.
• Don't have a website that says: Copyright Yahoo.com on the bottom.
• Don't have/promote a website that just shows your hostgator cPanel login screen.
• Don't send e-mail that is just a word document with bizarre fonts and layout and little meaningful text.
• Don't claim to have done work that I know was done by someone else.
• Don't claim in-depth technical marketing knowledge about my industry based on what you misunderstood from my website.
• Don't tell me you can introduce me to a potential large client... for a fee (not a commission, that's ok).

[ related topics: Spam moron Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Television Marketing Graphic Design Copyright/Trademark ]

I've got a basic 20MHz analog oscilloscope I got for a job where I built my first stepper controller, and I've got a nicer 25MHz scope that a friend gave me, but I was recently loaned a nice 100MHz digital scope. Not only does it occupy a lot less space on my desk, the "Run/Stop" button is a different world, as are the on-screen cursors that let me measure regions. I'm gonna have trouble going back... Hope I don't have to.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery ]

If I pop my head up, all kinds of fun people show up. including a former customer in the payment processing space. They are looking for good coders for a new project in the payment processing/fraud alert "space". In the vein of my last rant, here is the how/why they are having problems hiring talent:

• Pro/Plus:: Previous business did very well, got sold to big payment company for big bucks, owners bought property in Bahamas.
• Con: Previous Business was a soap opera, owner divorced husband and married partner she was fooling around with while in business.
• Con: Paid micro-bonuses to staff when closing down, seems they don't want to work for them again.
• Con: Hire cheap coders in India to create new system
• Con: In Java (Server Side)
• Con: Windows Clients in.. You guessed it: Java
• Con: Yep, it "meets spec", but needs to be rewritten
• Con: It's hosted at RackSpace, company is 100% virtual.
• Con: They think a virtual company is a good thing.

It's 1999 all over again.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft Invention and Design Software Engineering Space & Astronomy Sociology Work, productivity and environment Marriage ]

Holy crap does that bring back memories: Crispy Gamer comic looks at the history of Star Trek games.

And while I'm mentioning comics, in light of "moot" of 4chan winning the Time Magazine "World's Most Influential Person" poll, Crispy Gamer has a little public service announcement.

And, today's Sinfest takes an obvious but still funny look at profanity.

[ related topics: Games Star Trek Comics Net Culture ]

I realized that I haven't touched on Touching Home since we've seen it. I really enjoyed Noah and Logan Miller's Either You're In Or You're In The Way, it's a great "pulling one's-self up" story, funny, inspiring, and both fulfilled nicely, captured the tear-jerker moments of a hugely stressful and hugely emotional (especially since the movie is autobiographical) undertaking and left me wanting more.

I had extremely high expectations for the movie. And it was a good movie. It opens with a helicopter shot down to the tree above the little church in Nicasio, and even though I knew that line producer Jeromiah Zajonc's father is famed helicopter cinematographer Bobby Z (Robert Zajonc) I had a moment of "holy crap this is an amazing look for a cheap indie film".

I had that sense a lot. There were a few places where the editing suggested that they're still learning their craft, but the fact that they storyboarded the whole thing shows, there are a number of shots that are stunning and striking.

The story follows two guys who've been trying really hard to make it in baseball minor leagues, but have flunked out and gone back to Northern California to fall back on what they grew up with. Their dad is a violent drunk, compulsive alcoholic, and the story is about their relationship with him as they try to figure out how to pick themselves up and get back in the game.

I expected a total tear-jerker and didn't get it. Charlene thinks its because we don't see why they love their father so much, even as they know that a relationship with him will get in the way of their dreams, but that may be tempered through the eyes of a jaded adult who's resolved a lot of her bad parenting issues. Perhaps there's a bit of editing or a scene or two that could be inserted, but I also think that if the film has a flaw it's that it plays as very real, and sometimes powerful doesn't have to mean instant impact.

As I think about ways to describe it, the best comparison I can come up with is Tender Mercies. Ed Harris captures the subtleties of a man whose compulsions have overtaken him very compellingly. Brad Dourif plays the developmental disabilities of his character very believably, not overly broad. The Miller brothers get caged frustration dead on. It's not redemption film, it's not an against all odds, the film doesn't end with the brothers getting their dreams fulfilled; just, maybe, another chance.

The other thing that impressed me is that they managed to show that they know baseball, solidly and from the inside, without making this a baseball film. The whole film was like that, these are guys who write (and film) what they know and get the details nailed, without leaving in anything that's extraneous to the story. The acting is all real (and they used a lot of non-actors for the side roles), not a broad Patrick Stewart moment in the film (not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not this style), without being wooden.

So I don't think it's an Oscar winner, but it was certainly two hours well spent, and we're going to see it again at Bookstock on June 6^th (We've still got 3 tickets if anyone else wants to go). I hope they manage to pick up a good distribution deal, it's hard to categorize this one as it's a little to adult and raw to make a good TV movie, and it ain't the summer blockbuster. But it's one I could see a time or two more, if only because they've shown already gorgeous West Marin from some spectacular new angles, and I can't wait to see what they come up with after this.

[ related topics: Movies Star Trek Bay Area California Culture Sports Aviation - Helicopters Winston ]

Hmmm... I'm considering returning the iPhone and getting a Blackberry (Larry mentioned the Curve, the Storm isn't available on AT&T apparently). It looks like there's a chance that it'd actually sync with Linux, it apparently has battery life (Charlene's car broke down in Woodacre yesterday, and her battery indicator was dropping fast enough that I had to set up the tow logistics), and the API doesn't appear to be crippled. Comments? Suggestions?

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Automobiles Handicaps & Disabilities iPhone ]

One topic of discussion on this morning's bike ride: $150 24 MHz USB logic analyzer.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Cool Technology ]

In NJ the source code for the DUI Machine they use was unmasked

Some of the things they found:

Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed. Then the fourth reading is averaged with the new average, and so on. There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings.

The diagnostic routines for the Analog to Digital (A/D) Converters will substitute arbitrary, favorable readings for the measured device if the measurement is out of range, either too high or too low. The values will be forced to a high or low limit, respectively

If the airflow is slower than the baseline, this would result in a negative flow measurement, so the software simply adjusts the negative reading to a positive value

Range limits used when out of range values are found, etc. etc. The best is that three of five lines of C code have errors according to Lint. Ahhh nasty fellow that Lint.

You gotta wonder what the source looks like in all the stuff they convict us with.

Ziffle in Mayberry where all C code passes Lint first time.

[ related topics: Ziffle Interactive Drama Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering ]

Dolores Labs: The Programming Language with the Happiest Users (Hat tip).

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering ]

Just too cool: a photo of Space Shuttle Atlantis against the Sun. Remarkably, the shot was taken from the Earth!

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Current Events Heinlein ]

Despite Eric's cautions, I'm now the proud owner of a 1997 Mazda B4000 pickup truck, 113k miles. About time, given that I had three trash cans and assorted other stuff strapped to the roof rack of the Maxima for my early morning dump run.

Now we'll see what all I missed when I was going over it.

[ related topics: Automobiles Machinery ]

Maybe this Greater Depression is having some great unintended side effects. Meet 'Generation Sex', the teens leaving former taboos in their wake

But among the sexually active, stories abound of games at the edge, like "lipstick parties", also known as rainbow parties. "The girls all wear a different shade of lipstick," says a high-school teacher at a school where a female student was caught trying to organise one such party.

"Guys have to get as many shades as possible on their dicks. The girls will line up on their knees and the guys will go around the group getting different coloured rings so it looks like a rainbow on their dicks."

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Games Sexual Culture ]

GPS Log v1.3 hit the iTunes app server today, so when I took a walk down to Aqus Cafe to clear my head I played with it a bit, and then hit the "upload" button, resulting in this. I need to play with the display a little bit, and probably break out the KML below the map as body text. It's not, for instance, obvious that the pushpins have data attached to them.

Here's the KMZ directly in Google Maps, and a direct link to the KMZ for Google Earth or what-have-you.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Belgian bodybuilding event canceled after bodybuilders fled when anti-doping officials showed up. Say what you will about professional cycling, at least the competitors in that sport have the will to stand up and take their self-incrimination with honor.

Also seems like an enterprising bodybuilder could win even with a moderate physique just by showing up...

[ related topics: Health Current Events Sports Bicycling ]

Holger Berndt has written a geo-tagging email source plugin for Claws mail:

The surprising (and somehow scary) result is that it works on a surprisingly large number of mails (in my quick test, almost half of the time), and if it does, it's oftentimes quite accurate, with deviations sometimes as small as 2 or 3 kilometers.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Hmmmm... RipDev InstallerApp lets you install apps that normally require a jailbreak, from Cydia or wherever, without jailbreaking your iPhone, for $7. Might be a way to get Locatable installed cleanly.

[ related topics: iPhone ]

Why Dollhouse struggles and Fringe soars, comparing Joss Whedon with J.J. Abrams.

[ related topics: Joss Whedon - Serenity / Firefly ]

Sociological Images: How Can You Tell If You're A Prostitute?

It’s subtle and confusing, isn’t it? When is it legitimate for women to take money or accept drinks? What about the customers— why is there no distinction amongst them? They take out their wallets in all kinds of situations— and that’s considered fine— except when they position themselves as victims of predators…

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Sad story of Every American - Financial Journalist has a Base Salary of $120k but is waiting for the foreclosure to happen.

I thought I knew a lot about go-go mortgages

And more interesting commentary on the article;

Everyone you write about makes more than you. Most of the people you know make more than you. And you come to feel that shopping at the farmer's market, travelling to Europe, drinking good coffee, are minimum necessities. Your house is small, your furniture is shabby, and you can't even really afford to shop at Whole Foods. Yet you're at the top of your field, working for one of the world's top media outlets. This can't be so.

Looks a lot like Affluenza

[ related topics: Writing Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Economics Archival Real Estate ]

Who says you need long lenses to do spectacular astrophotography: Time lapse of the glactic center of the Milky Way rising over Texas Star Party (Via)

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

There have been some recent reports about the Four Corners monument being in the wrong place. The National Geodetic Survey recently issued an official statement clarifying the issue. It's interesting to note how legal descriptions interact with technical accuracy:

Indeed, the monument marks the exact spot where the four states meet. A basic tenet of boundary surveying is that once a monument has been established and accepted by the parties involved (in the case of the Four Corners monument, the parties were the four territories and the U.S. Congress), the location of the physical monument is the ultimate authority in delineating a boundary. Issues of legality trump scientific details, and the intended location of the point becomes secondary information. In surveying, monuments rule!

[ related topics: Politics Law Current Events Gambling Global Warming ]

Sometimes, paying your dues in the old BBS and low bandwidth internet days pays off. I'm checking some interfaces for low bandwidth situations, did a little tuning, allowing the CSS and JS and 2 small images to cache, and now the changing part of these web app interface pages runs from 4kbytes to 12kbytes of data transfered per page. Total pages are < 40kbytes. If I tell the system to drop their logo on low bandwidth connects, I'm really rocking on bursty bad cell phone and 14.4k pots modem uplinks. And sometimes, that is still important.

Stupid pet tricks include:

• Putting all the CSS and all the JS in a single file (one each), so they downloads once and stay cached.
• Cleaning out redundant CSS (Much Thanks to Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug)
• Testing with iptraf and sniffit running on the client. It's kewl looking at a web page as low numbers of "packets".
• White space? Who needs CR's or LF's or extra spaces in HTML if it doesn't render.

And darn, it's even working on MSIE in Vista,

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Wireless broadband Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Sports Net Culture ]

Tesla motors worth half of GM:

Tesla, thanks to Daimler's 9 percent stake, is valued at $550 million. GM sold 8.35 million vehicles worldwide in 2008; its market value as of Thursday was $1.17 billion, based on the closing stock price of $1.92.

"It's sort of amusing," remarked Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard.

[ related topics: Gambling Economics ]

Whither Eucalyptus? iPhone developer makes app to search and display texts from Project Gutenberg, Apple is apparently holding it up because you can find the Kama Sutra with it.

Regretting I bought the iPhone...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Weblogs iPhone ]

We're not making it to the party, but Nancy and I wanted to say: Congratulations! Dan and Charlene.. 1 Year! WooHoo!

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918), Canadian Army

[ related topics: War ]

Sam Maloof, notable American woodworker, dead at 93.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

This TED talk with Mary Roach describing 10 myths about orgasm has been floating around, and I thought it wasn't nearly as entertaining as it could be, but luckily Digital Citizen has summarized (Via MeFi). #1 is that male masturbation appears to begin in utero.

So there's that old line that "the only intuitive interface is the nipple", and at least one time I brought that out I was informed by someone with La Leche League connections that, in fact that's false. It appears that the only intuitive interface is... well... the joystick.

[ related topics: User Interface Sexual Culture Video ]

Your daily dose of YouTube gymnastics bad-assery.

[ related topics: Sports Video ]

Dang, I was a bad host: Spent the whole time talking to people and completely missed a few folks and still would have loved to spend quite a bit more time talking to everyone I talked to. Thanks to everyone (especially family members who traveled quite a distance to get here, and my sister Sara and Charlene's sister Athena who quietly made sure the food tables stayed stocked). I had a blast, my Mom says she counted about forty people at one point.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Games By Email Dice-O-Matic Mark II.

Currently, GamesByEmail.com uses some 80,000+ dice rolls for play in games like Backgammon, Gambit (a RISK clone), W.W.II (an Axis & Allies clone) and others. To generate the dice rolls, I have used Math.random, Random.org and other sources, but have always received numerous complaints that the dice are not random enough. Some players have put more effort into statistical analysis of the rolls than they put into their doctoral dissertation.

So, of course, he built an automated die-rolling machine to solve the problem. The video is well worth watching.

Via crasch. 100% awesome, especially since I'm playing with motion control this morning.

[ related topics: Games Current Events Mathematics Video ]

The Rumpus.net: The Girlfriend Experience, Sex Work in Perspective, a look at Steven Soderbergh's new film from the perspective of a sex worker, mentioning Sex, Lies and Videotape and Before Sunset. I now totally want to see this film, but the essay is well worth a read on its own:

... Two hours later, my friend is trying to describe why the film was so empty. He talks about the cheap metaphor. How he hates when movies about prostitutes try to make the point that all relationships are transactional. He thinks that’s bullshit. There’s an anger in his voice. He’s with his girlfriend. She doesn’t know if he’s ever been with a prostitute, and neither do I. But if I was a gambler, and I am, I would bet he has. ...

Via.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Movies Sociology Writing ]

Tinfoil hat time: The police officer who killed an unarmed demonstrator in West Berlin in 1967 and kicked off a strong anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian streak that's helped mold West Germany into its current socialist liberal bent turns out to have been a Stasi spy...

This gives me hope that someday in the mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan we'll discover evidence that reveals the true motivations of Dubya and Cheney. Via.

[ related topics: Politics moron Law Enforcement ]

Argh. Charlene and I are involved in the COTS Family Connection program. One of the agreements of the program is that we can give time and advice, but no money or goods.

Yesterday I was asked to look at our family's computer. The first hint that things were likely to be very very wrong was that I saw Limewire on the computer. It's got a couple of extortionware systems, I can manually configure the network interface to work, but that doesn't do anything for IE which is still trying to dial out or set up a VPN or do anything but use the TCP/IP interface which is working from the command line. Something's replaced C:\Windows\regedit.exe with an app that claims that my administrator has denied access to the registry. It's a bad scene.

Can't get to http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ from it. I'm sure the original disks are long lost to history. The "no money or goods" rule kind of precludes me from just going and buying some sort of software to bail this system out, and I'm not even sure that such software exists.

I'm still pondering whether to undertake the educational process of putting Ubuntu on the computer and making it usable for them again.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World.

The 39-year-old office worker was charged under the 2003 Protect Act, which outlaws cartoons, drawings, sculptures or paintings depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Scary.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Art & Culture Civil Liberties Comics ]

Darkest Africa may become brighter. Monkeys genetically modified to glow in the dark have been found to be able to reproduce AND pass on the glowing gene.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Bioinformatics Bizarre ]

Yesterday Phil and I went over to the airport (Petaluma Muni, O69) and ate some ice cream while we sat on the deck at the cafe watching the flight line. We were sitting next to some guys who were finishing up their briefing for a flight down to the Central Valley somewhere, a briefing that included taking off with a 7 second separation and flying in a diamond formation, there was some discussion about who had smoke and when and how they were going to use it, and the details of how they were going to peel out of the formation at the remote end, a "crisp east coast break" which involved pulling back to 15° for 3 seconds, then rolling out (the alternative was a "west coast break" which was demonstrated by a hand swoosh that was... well... fabulous).

At any rate, I realized that there's a certain confident swagger that looks silly on a 20 year old wearing a T-shirt, but that's inspiring when seen on a guy north of 65 in a flight suit...

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Aviation California Culture ]

Charlene's car came in yesterday, so we went up to pick it up and finalize a few details (fog lights have yet to be installed, etc). Some day I'm going to pay the premium to buy a beat up AMC Pacer from a dealership just so that I can have the joy of lots of well coiffed employees walking by and telling me how good the car looks. Or at least try to.

We now have 4 cars. Hopefully that'll be back down to 2 shortly. The two teenagers we've offered the cars to have declined, reminding me of that exchange from The Sound of Music

Captain von Trapp: It's the dress. You'll have to put on another one before you meet the children.

Maria: But I don't have another one. When we entered the abbey our worldly clothes were given to the poor.

Captain von Trapp: What about this one?

Maria: The poor didn't want this one.

I'm becoming a Bluetooth headset user. On the one hand I love the convenience of the Bluetooth headset, on the other hand the historical users of headsets have been assholes. I think that this is at least partially the medium, yes, people who talk on cell phones indoors are assholes, and sometimes I am one, but with the headset there's no indication at all that the communicator is having a conversation with anything but air. There's a set of social cues that have yet to evolve there.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Wireless Music Work, productivity and environment Automobiles Clothing ]

I've created a Github archive for the Perl modules that run Flutterby.net, much of which is derived from the Flutterby.com code. Lots o' refactoring, boilerplate denials of responsibility, etc, and much of it will change as I have time, but if you want some stuff to parse and manipulate text and HTML there are some tools I find useful in it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Perl Open Source ]

The first of the swallowtail caterpillars that Charlene took from the fennel in the back yard into the classroom so that the kids could see its transformation has gone from chrysalis to butterfly.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Butterflies Photography ]

Dreamhost: Broken Browsers Part Two, a little musing on HTTP over SSL and why HTTPS certs are badly broken:

Nowadays, buying a secure certificate is an entirely automated process: one that only requires you to have access to an email address @ the domain you’re buying the certificate for. All a secure certificate is telling you nowadays is that:

• Your data was encrypted between the browser and the server.
• The owner of the domain you are connecting to dished out $100 to some authority “trusted” by the browser!

Yeah, I noticed the silliness of which domains Firefox trusts, and the brokenness of changing the certificate authorities, recently when I was getting massive security warnings while browsing some subset of the FAA's site.

Hat tip to Hanan Cohen.

[ related topics: Weblogs Cryptography ]

Observation OTD, Hanan Cohen asks:

What's the difference between porn and news? Why do people pay for online porn but don't pay for online news?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Journalism and Media ]

How much lead is in your lipstick? We've stopped using balsamic vinegars on the basis of the lead tests, seems like there are lots of places that need looking.

[ related topics: Fashion ]

Two whines about "German" engineering.

First, hey, Volkswagen, it's great that you show off that fancy cool Bluetooth system, and we were quite surprised to discover that despite what our dealer told us the Bluetooth got installed at the factory, but it'd be nice if the one you showed off on your cars was the same thing that we got. The one you showed off had a lot of cool features, the one we ended up with was bare-bones, which is fine, but you have to answer on the phone. Just a single button somewhere would be awesome, but this doesn't appear to have one. So the headset ends up more functional.

Second, the Brill 380 ASM electric lawnmower, seems like a really good idea, when it works it's fantastic, however... Every time I use it I have to fix the switch on it because something's gone wrong, so I've finally yanked their switch and put something else in line, but the other issue is that you have to have another mower anyway because no matter how quiet and nice this one is, if you let the grass grow just a little too long it chokes.

Grrr... Looking for a corded electric rotary mower now.