Flutterby™! From 2010-02-01 to 2010-02-28

Giggle: How San Francisco deals with a Westboro Baptist/Fred Phelps protest.

("God Hates Retweets" on the bottom of this page wins.)

[ related topics: Religion Humor Bay Area Civil Liberties California Culture ]

Bruce Schneier on CNN points out that the Chinese hack of Gmail happened because of a backdoor put in for U.S. law enforcement agencies. Via Shawn.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Cryptography ]

Science Daily: Barefoot Running: How Humans Ran Comfortably and Safely Before the Invention of Shoes.

My experience wearing my Vibram 5 Fingers shoes has convinced me that shoes as we've known them up to now are largely a failure of technology, or at least evidence of insufficient technology. One of those failures is that I don't wear 'em when it's this wet and cold outside, but between these and Birkenstocks, the idea that we need less padding rather than more in the soles seems pretty solid.

[ related topics: Current Events Sports Shoes ]

Arggh!! Tomorrow is the primary election in Illinois, and I got 3 robocalls in one hour from various people running for state comptroller, and two circuit court judges. Does anybody know it these calls are effective? It seems to me that an advertising method that pisses people off so much would end up being counterproductive for the advertiser. I guess the question, though, is what equals counterproductive? I never listen for much more than 5 seconds of one, so sometimes I have no idea which candidate is being promoted. thus, I can't conclude that since Honest Nowicky doesn't use robocalls, I should support him instead of Chicken-in-every-pot Przcinski. And is the Annoyance Quotient a fair way to determine the government? When I was a kid they used to pass out emery boards for your fingernails with the hopeful's name; at least those had some utility after the election. And of course, here in Chicago we have another electoral curse: (pdf) Fake Irishmen.

[ related topics: Politics moron Consumerism and advertising ]

Holy crap, these people vote? Pew Research Test Your News IQ. Take the quiz to see the results, it's pretty easy (I got 12 out of 12), the results are disturbing.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

I think a large part of Dopp Juice: Genders and Drop-Down Menus is complaining to the wrong people: Dating web sites don't ask for your gender because they care, they're asking because their users care, and if your gender can't be fairly easily categorized, then you're probably not sifting through the masses trying to find that closest match because in the more open world of the Internet the fringe often finds it easier to cluster.

However, the overall point, that race and gender are getting harder to categorize and identify, is one worth pondering.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

Some pictures from Sunday's bike ride.

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling ]

An abstinence only sex ed program that works? This appears to be the first study which shows one doing so. From the abstract for Efficacy of a Theory-Based Abstinence-Only Intervention Over 24 Months:

The participants' mean age was 12.2 years; 53.5% were girls; and 84.4% were still enrolled at 24 months. Abstinence-only intervention reduced sexual initiation (risk ratio [RR], 0.67; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.48-0.96). The model-estimated probability of ever having sexual intercourse by the 24-month follow-up was 33.5% in the abstinence-only intervention and 48.5% in the control group. Fewer abstinence-only intervention participants (20.6%) than control participants (29.0%) reported having coitus in the previous 3 months during the follow-up period (RR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.90-0.99). Abstinence-only intervention did not affect condom use." ...

I haven't read the full text (it's there, it requires registration), but the NPR story says that this is very much not a traditional "abstinence until marriage" program, and that it focuses on how sex fits into "goals and dreams for the future".

So rather than preaching it offers the choice as a way they can have control over their lives. Hmmm...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Marriage ]

Journal of Experimental Biology: Bees Recognize Faces Using Feature Configuration. Pictures of human faces, as distinguished from pictures of non-faces. Via this article, which links to this New York Times article and this report on a previous study, which was pointed out to me by Jaimey Walking Bear.

[ related topics: Cool Science Nature and environment ]

This morning I was driving to pick up a friend to take her to an appointment at the UCSF dental clinic, and I heard about this. Then Reka linked to it: Women dying from pregnancy related issues may have tripled in California over the last decade, and there may be a similar rise nationally.

That's 95 women out of an overall human population in California of under 38 million, so it's nothing like car crashes or people dying from smog leaking into the Central Valley from the LA basin, but a trend like that deserves a little look. One doctor thinks it may be related to labor induced before term, which doubles the chance of a C-section:

On average, a C-section brings in twice the revenue of a vaginal birth. Today, the C-section is the single most common surgical procedure performed in the United States.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health California Culture ]

I've got a problem. I'm on the City of Petaluma Technology & Telecommunications Advisory Committee. One of the things that I'm interested in is promoting more open data. The folks in the city's IT department are strong believers too, every time I go poking through DataSF or PortlandMaps I get to thinking "heck, Petaluma has more of their data online".

One of the problems, however, is that a lot of the data is hosted in ways that aren't necessarily easy to mine. Petaluma buys a lot of drop-in software, some of it is hosted elsewhere. Often the problem with getting data out of the city is that the processes aren't computerized, or where they are they're not published in an easy to mine format.

I'm starting to write some Perl to convert what is available online to a form that I hope mine some of that data. I've written some bots to datamine Accela Citizen Access, draw building permits on a map. I've extracted voting records from Granicus hosted meeting minutes, so that I can look for voting patterns (oddly, I haven't gotten much excitement for that data set...). The latest hack, and one that might actually have some interest, takes meeting announcements and dumps them into Twitter.

Tim at the city is, rightfully, reluctant to take these hacks under his wing. He's got limited budget and limited staff and doesn't want to take on more responsibility without an economic justification or a clear directive from the town council. He's also worried about my projects pushing support load over on his department; the city's gotten phone calls requesting support and clarification and such that stemmed from a third party pothole tracking database. And they're a Microsoft shop, which means that they're not always able to be out there on the bleeding technology edge.

The upshot is: I'm happy to host and run these on my own machines. I want to make these processes as reliable as possible so that I'm an ally to Tim, Trae et al, rather than yet another yahoo spawning support calls for systems that aren't theirs. If I can build reliable systems, I can build trust and work towards getting some publicity on the city web page. However, I'm not a sysadmin. I'm a coder with a different sort of release process who sometimes dabbles in continuous deployment and sysadminnery as a hobby.

Any of you sysadmins out there have suggestions on some reading for building and running robust systems? How should I set up test procedures so that I catch when apt-get upgrade causes Moose to decide that name is now a reserved member name and some obscure Perl script that I never thought to check the return from because it's been working flawlessly and has no real failure mode decides to spew trash? What's the best practice for a process that deals with an email that may only be sent once a month, making the test cycle rather long? How do I best track all the cron jobs and interconnected email addresses and web spiders so that when I'm moving some system to another machine I get everything?

Does this book exist? Or is that list about the best run-down on where to start building such systems you know of?

[ related topics: Books Microsoft Perl Open Source Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Maps and Mapping Databases ]

Investment bank Lazard Inc.'s bonuses so big they wiped out Q4 profits, almost wiped out the full year's profits:

Lazard Chief Executive Kenneth Jacobs, who took over from the late Bruce Wasserstein last fall, argued that he had no choice but to pay his people to protect and build the franchise. ...

They'll make it up on volume?

[ related topics: Economics ]

Slate has a nice slide show of architectural near misses. The problem is often some designer pushing the design to the limits of the technology, and then a foot farther. Frank Lloyd Wright is in here, with his fabulously cool but troubled Fallingwater House, to say nothing of his notorious leaky roofs. There was also a design at the Art Institute School in Chicago, where the visionary architect made a stairwell that was 10 feet wide at the top and the bottom, but only 5 feet wide at the middle landing. thus, he created a bottleneck on a fire exit. How the city inspector let him get away with it I don't know, but they eventually corrected the problem.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Architecture - Frank Lloyd Wright ]

Wired UK: Carl Hart: The Drug Data Pusher.

The article is marred by a couple of flaws, as Topspin has pointed out to me before amphetamines != methamphetamines, but it's a look at a guy who's doing studies on addiction using actual drugs in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

Another take on the IPad: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/i...weekinreview/04ipad/blogSpan.jpg

Global warming and my acquiescence to the California lifestyle make this extremely unlikely, but should I live somewhere where snow remove is necessary, I'm getting a Sno Wovel (Via Rafe).

[ related topics: Cool Technology Global Warming ]

Interesting: Combatting bribes with a zero Rupee note.

[ related topics: Currency ]

Perhaps the most intriguing idea for political communication in many a moon: The Peace Blimp. Take a look at the suggestions for what message the Dirigible of Love would carry. My favorites are "Who is John Galt?" and "We have always been at war with Eastasia."

[ related topics: Politics Objectivism Aviation History moron ]

I'm sure some of you with a little more background on this can correct me, but if I have my history right, once upon a time, on a site called 4chan, there was a channel called /b/ in which people posted pictures. I've never delved there, but I'm told that many of the pictures pushed... shall we say... the bounds of propriety.

In response to some of this, the denizens of said channel created a mascot, named "Pedobear", who put his seal of approval on those images which could be interpreted as exploiting children. (Some say that this occurred on a predecessor called "2chan", I'm having trouble finding a serious history that I feel comfortable linking to).

I've only seen the later secondary effects of Pedobear, who is occasionally tossed into a thread to gently tell people that they're being tasteless or creepy or something else with regards to the sexualization of children.

Pedobear has come a long way. In fact, a Polish newspaper has just printed a picture of Pedobear as one of the Vancouver Olympic mascots. Apparently last July, Michael R. Barrick was mucking around with images and thought he spied a similarity in artistic styles, that image made it to the first page of Google Image search, and the rest is history.

Hat tip to MeFi.

It's frankly kind of surprising that he(?) showed up in the winter Olympics first, I'd expect womens' gymnastics would be the first event covered, but there's probably a Pedobear friendly contingent at ladies' figure skating.

[ related topics: Children and growing up moron Journalism and Media Art & Culture Sports Net Culture ]

Rudolf Amman is looking for more references on link attribution in the early (ie: pre 2k) weblogs.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Philip Greenspun has a good rant on the crash of Colgan 3407 and autopilots and software reliability:

How come the autopilot software on this $27 million airplane wasn’t smart enough to fly basically sensible attitudes and airspeeds? Partly because FAA certification requirements make it prohibitively expensive to develop software or electronics that go into certified aircraft. It can literally cost $1 million to make a minor change. Sometimes the government protecting us from small risks exposes us to much bigger ones.

[ related topics: Aviation Software Engineering ]

While following claims that Alabama gubernatorial candidate for the GOP, Roy Moore, wants to execute homosexuals [via @rockyroxyro] (which, troubling as the actual statement is, still seems to me to be a pretty subjective interpretation), I found this other bit in his concurrance to D.H. vs. H.H. plenty disturbing enough (emphasis mine):

I write specially to state that the homosexual conduct of a parent -- conduct involving a sexual relationship between two persons of the same gender -- creates a strong presumption of unfitness that alone is sufficient justification for denying that parent custody of his or her own children...

You also may remember Roy Moore as the former Chief Justice who was removed from office earlier in the decade for refusing to take down a monument to the Ten Commandments that had been placed on display in his Alabama courthouse.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Politics Sexual Culture Law Enforcement ]

Elf Sternberg: What went wrong at ${Job Sept’09-Oct’09} points to Gwaredd Mountain: Game Development in a Post-Agile World which points to Microsoft's data showing that "test driven development" increases development from 15-35%, all three are worth reading on the hazards of side effects in your software development methodologies.

[ related topics: Humor Games Microsoft tolkien Software Engineering moron Heinlein ]

Buy, Buy, American Pie (YouTube). Thanks, Jeff!

[ related topics: Movies ]

Repurposing CD ROM drive motors for R/C/ helicopters.

[ related topics: Music Toys Aviation - Helicopters ]

Hey, children of the '80s: Want a shot of nostalgia with just enough giggle that you can call it ironic? Want it to rock, hard? Rock Sugar, "Because Pop Rocks". Hair metal medleys that distill the '80s into 13 tracks so awesome it burns. Check out Don't Stop The Sandman on YouTube. And if you wondered where you've heard that voice before, lead singer Jess Harnell was the voice of Animaniac's Wakko Warner.

[ related topics: Humor Music Video ]

Quote of the Day: "An epiphany late last night: the more I've reinvented myself, the more myself I've become." -- Gloria Brame

[ related topics: Quotes ]

"Comcast says new name Xfinity is a signal of innovation". I think it's an acknowledgement that senior management drove that brand so thoroughly into the toilet that the only thing left to do was ditch the whole thing and start over.

Ever since "Comcastic" became a synonym, complete with rolled eyes, for "freakin' disaster".

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

There's a blog post over on GovLoop that you probably can't read because it's one of those walled gardens, but it asks Do Decreases in Child Abuse Explain Decreases in Violent Crime?, and references Crime in America.net asking why violent crime rates are falling (they toss increased cell phone mix, aging population, and increased abortion in the "correlated but not necessarily a cause" mix) and Crime in America.net reporting on the big drops in child sex and physical abuse.

Just more to toss in the "why is society safer today?" mill: It ain't necessarily just the increased access to pornography.

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events Law Enforcement ]

The dangers of government intervention in the economy: the owner of a local copy shop tweeted:

Thinking of hiring another employee but should I wait until the government comes up with some tax incentive for small businesses? Not sure.

Talk of a bailout could be slowing the recovery... By the way, that copy shop is Santa Rosa Copy.

[ related topics: Politics Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Dang it, Eric has me beat: Boulder ranks 1st, Petaluma 5th, in Gallup survey "well-being" index.

[ related topics: Bay Area Sociology Current Events ]

Okay, seems like he's recovered from the slashdotting: Bunnie investigates MicroSD problems that they were having on a Chumby production run. Starting with some suspicious silkscreening and continuing through dissolving the plastic carrier with nitric acid and acetone.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Embedded Devices ]

Ah, Australia. Where the men are men, with repressive patriarchal conservative attitudes: Exhibit the first: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (:

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the "excuse" that "all" young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families.

Then we have Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson stating that computer gamers are more of a threat to him than biker gangs:

"I feel that my family and I are more at risk from gamers than we are from the outlaw motorcycle gangs who also hate me and are running a candidate against me," he said on ABC TV's Good Game.

And, of course, the ongoing threat to build a firewall that supporters(!) are comparing to the one China runs, to block "pornography".

Inevitably the list of over 2,000 websites was leaked last year to wikileaks.org and was found to contain such objectionable content as online poker sites, a travel operator, a dentist and Wikipedia pages as well as fetish, satanic and Christian sites.

And, I'll bet, probably a lot of pages on reproductive choices and women's health, as these sorts of lists inevitably do.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Technology and Culture Free Speech moron Sociology Law Current Events ]

French judge issues an arrest warrant issued for Floyd Landis

...for allegedly hacking into the computer system of the French anti-doping agency's laboratory, the agency's president said Tuesday.

I went back and forth on Landis 'til I read the article on page 11 News of the California Association of Criminalists - Fourth Quarter 2007 which details the many procedural errors the lab made, at which point I went from "who knows?" to "sounds like the guy was set up and framed".

This sounds like more of that.

(Re-reminded of these articles by an SE entry)

[ related topics: Privacy moron Current Events Sports Bicycling ]

I missed the Super Bowl party I was going to go to this year because I was sick. I did, however, watch a few of the commercials online. I was speechless at the "Dodge Charger is for spineless pussy-whipped wimps" commercial. Here's a response.

[ related topics: Movies Sports ]

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World. Some notes by the Coverity developers about lessons learned from their code analysis tool.

I learned my lesson pretty well back in the day, even when I knew more than Lint I was (eventually) convinced that for the sake of the sanity of my coworkers and employers I should just conform to what it wanted. Later I had an opportunity to run some code through Coverity and was impressed: even with dodgy constructs where I was fairly sure the code was doing the right thing, I found that rewriting to make the static analyzer happier generally led cleaner and more readable code. But I remember being a young turk, and totally understand some of the social pushback they've gotten for their tool.

Thanks to Mark Hershberger for the pointer to the article.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Metrigear is making a bicycle power meter using a sensor inside a Speedplay pedal.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

The arrival of a new DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is always an occasion fraught with idiocy and hilarity. Elf Sternberg points out one such in the "binge eating disorder".

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

In his recovery from the slashdotting yesterday, Bunnie did something that ended up with me finding some older entries in his RSS feed: This collection of a whole bunch of videos of FANUC robots in action is pretty amazing. I haven't delved too much into the FANUC robotics USA website, but I did watch a few of the videos, this one of devices sorting and arranging sausages and pastries is a good place to start (if you get bored, skip ahead to where they're seeing and arranging different colored muffins into packages).

[ related topics: Robotics Food ]

I'm always a little leery of commentary that claims that artistic efforts in some country presage future horrors, like Dr. Caligari being a predictor of coming Naziism. Styles and fashions get absorbed by the ruling clique and their propoganda, and vice versa. I once saw an interview with Hitchcock where he told of doing some work in Germany in 1924 on a production of Die Nibulungen and he had the heros of Valhalla raising their arms in a salute to Siegfried. As he said, he didn't have any inside information. Even so, this collection of Japanese poster art from 1930 to 1941 does begin to take on a tinge of disquiet as the years progress. Some of the later ones, for example, feature the flags of their puppet states like Korea and Manchuria. Even so, some nice work here.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture ]

Oh, this is rich: Pennsylvania's Lower Merion School District bought laptops for all students, student is suing because apparently the district was snooping on students with the built-in web cams. From the complaint (PDF):

On November 11, 2009, Plaintiffs were for the first time informed of the above-mentioned capability and practice by the School District when Lindy Matsko, an Assistant Principal at Harriton High School, informed minor Plaintiff that the School District was of the belief that minor Plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the School District.

I really really hope that some students got undressed in front of those web cams and an enterprising DA decides to put school administrators away for a good long time for posession of child pornography. Probably way too much to hope for, but hopefully there'll be some good and hard criminal charges here.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture moron ]

Wednesday evenings, the awesome folks over at Tara Firma Farms brought Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms fame, to the Institute of Noetic Sciences campus just south of Petaluma for dinner and a talk.

It was a great evening. Had some good conversations, met some of the same folks I'd run into at the Viva Cocolat potluck last month, really enjoyed the evening. And the venue is nice, I'll be looking towards more events there.

Joel's talk was well done. He pointed out that aerobic composting as we know it and practice it was developed by Sir Albert Howard in the 1920s in India, that those who whine that sustainable agriculture is an attempt to "take us back to the 1800s" are missing that the goal is to reduce the externalities of the economics of agriculture, not give up all of the great things that front loaders and automated seed sewing systems and stainless steel and cheap hot water have brought. He pointed out that reliable solid state electric fence systems really didn't happen until the 1980s, and he wasn't pushing to get rid of any of those things.

He further pointed out that widespread ecological damage from agriculture had happened on huge scales long before Monsanto, ADM and modern chemicals.

And, he quipped: "If it wasn't food before 1900 we shouldn't eat it. I'm so glad hot dogs were introduced at the 1890 World's Fair."

I wanted to slap the basics up here, I need to think a little more about the stuff I wasn't so keen on, and do a little more research on his assertion that based on measurements of biomass that various folks have done in and around operations like his, that in fewer than 10 years we could sequester all the atmospheric CO2 generated since the Industrial Revolution.

[ related topics: Cool Science Food Economics Global Warming ]

Why anti-porn net filters at the workplace may be a bad idea:

Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

(Aside: I did a "view selection source" and "copy" to grab that paragraph. Why were they using <em> tags rather than <cite>?. I mean, if you're gonna go semantic, go semantic, but if not: stick to <i>)

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

The Esquire article on Roger Ebert is worth a read, as is Ebert's on musings on his blog about that article. Privacy, impending death, community, what matters and doesn't, all heavy stuff dealt with thoughtfully.

[ related topics: Privacy Weblogs Community ]

Robo Ant A-Pod - Impressive robot ant. A serious demonstration of control systems.

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Threatened with legal action from the IOC for mentioning that a competitor on the unnamed marketing event that's currently happening in Vancouver who won her event happens to use their goggles, one sports equipment maker responded as best they could: Uvex: Blonde we like wins Downhill (Last name rhymes with "Bonn")

[ related topics: Law Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

A few weeks ago the young lad across the street brought over a book of science experiments and asked if we could do some. I happened to have some hydrochloric (aka: muriatic) acid, so we dissolved the zinc out of some pennies and made hollow copper shells. But I realized afterwards that we were throwing away the best part! So today we tried again, but put balloons over the beakers, tied 'em to the end of a 10' piece of PVC pipe, and let the kids wave 'em over a fire 'til the hydrogen lit. Video here.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Pyrotechnics Video ]

Bruce Schneier has the finalists in his competition for a replacement TSA logo. I want a polo shirt with the #3 logo embroidered on it.

[ related topics: Weblogs Cryptography Clothing Archival ]

Dean's Garage reposts Modes and Motors, a 1938 publication from General Motors Styling Section. One thing that stuck out:

A great many people frequently ask: “Why didn’t you do that two years ago?” or “Why don’t you do this or that now?” The answer lies in the nature of progress itself.

Progress in artistic design, as in most other things, is evolutionary. Advancement comes in logical sequence-it would not have been possible to jump, for example, from a 1934 design to the current one without benefit of the experience that came in between. Each year new knowledge and new skills are added to what was known before. In the constant striving for better products there can be neither hurrying nor holding back.

I like to think there was a time when it was worth keeping the old stuff around. When repair was cheaper than replacement. We all bemoan the loss of that time, whether it was fictional or real, but this is a really strong look back into a time when it wasn't obvious that the world was rushing forward. I'm not sure mileage is getting better, but by any other standard we can look at cars this year and see improvements in safety, in performance, in materials, over last year. In 1938 the changes over 4 years were couched as "artistic design".

And the fact that nobody can justify changes in automobiles over the past half decade as "artistic design" also says something...

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Invention and Design History Automobiles ]

XKCD on the dedication of sysadmins

A short video with sound from Australia: A Russian cargo plane gets airborne, just barely. The photographer's final comment is priceless.

[ related topics: Aviation Video ]

Hanan Cohen tweeted this as the "best hospital sign ever". It reads:

Northampton General Hospital

Family planning advice

Use rear entrance

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health ]

OMG! Want: Debra pointed out the "Hello Schröddy" T-shirt. A pink shirt with a picture of a box on it with the "Hello Kitty" ribbon on it.

[ related topics: Clothing ]

An intriguing look at Tokyo from a new angle: Hello Damage has a picture collection of business establishments in the Yakuza-run Shinjuku district. However, these are not hostess-bars, massage parlors for horny salarymen, or brothels. Instead they are the small businesses that service the vice industry and its workers, including all-night neon sign repairmen, walk-up champagne stands, and tax accountants who will make your return look legit.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Devil's Panties nails my experience of the past few days.

I just got back from a users conference and saw a thing that makes me cringe: an engineer using excel to read in huge very nested XML files, and then use a macro that cut and pasted the data from one sheet, to another, to make it a simple one line per data reading spreadsheet, so that he could export it as a CSV, so the billing system would read it. A little over 10k records, 4 times a day, and it has to be run by a human, at least once a day. The macro takes an hour plus to run.

I replaced it in under 100 lines of simple basic perl, gave him the perl code and a link to ActiveState Perl for Windows. He e-mailed that to his IT staff... and they won't let him install Perl, and now he's in trouble for even asking to. His work laptop is locked down hard. The director of IT has e-mailed me legalese to fill out before he'll even talk to me about it and is accusing me of subverting his organization (I am).

All because I sat next to this nice guy at the conference while he parsed these files for his employer while in a lecture and I felt his pain.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Microsoft Perl Open Source Work, productivity and environment Conferences Woodworking ]

Want: Powerhouse Dynamics eMonitor per-circuit minute-by-minute electrical monitoring. Via this blog entry (they apparently sell it, or will shortly), courtesy of Jaimey Walking Bear.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Designing User Interfaces for Business Web Applications - This is a nice overview with good suggestions for business a web based business app, rather than a web design overview. I need to review this weekly.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]