Flutterby™! From 2012-12-01 to 2012-12-31

Petaluma Tomorrow, a local clean government advocacy group, has reported itself and paid the fine for violations of a campaign ordinance that it helped get enacted.

Well done, Petaluma Tomorrow.

This last city council campaign was interesting. Sometimes I wish we had the money for candidates to collect better data at the local campaign level. We had a weird situation where one organization settled a lawsuit with a developer, the settlement involved contributions to several other organizations. One of those other organizations turned down the contribution, and I suspect that a few of the other ones didn't was bad for a few candidates.

[ related topics: moron Currency ]

At the NASA AMES Research Center for a 4H robotics class. The acronym NARC makes the hippy in me unsettled.

[ related topics: Robotics Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Gear trains

[ related topics: Photography Machinery Trains ]

Interesting observation from yesterday's workshop: "I know they've stopped learning when they go all Star Wars".

[ related topics: Star Wars Space & Astronomy Education Aviation - Helicopters ]

Willow Haven Outdoor: 11 Ways A Condom Can Save Your Life. Or even more reasons why your go bag should always contain a few condoms.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Val Systems: To take "Zombie Nouns" seriously, you must've had your brains eaten. On bozo NYT columnists and TED speakers (well, okay, a specific one) trying to sell books.

Ain't nothing like exploiting the collective dysmorphia of a nation to push your quarter-baked usage decrees.

[ related topics: Books Currency Aviation - Helicopters ]

BTW: Anyone know what was happening w/2 police cars & staged EMS at the top of Olive about 10AM today?

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

BBC News: Euro 2012: Tournament football and domestic violence

Research by BBC News has found there was a surge in domestic violence reports to police during the 2010 World Cup.

Figures obtained from police forces across England under the Freedom of Information Act show that when England beat Slovenia, nationally the rate per 1,000 people of domestic violence reports increased by 27%.

I think there's the basis for some real research to be done here, this seems kind of light, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if there's a strong link between domestic violence and professional sports.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Current Events Monty Python Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Sports Currency Government ]

Among yesterday's projects, house numbers are up and mailbox is painted black.

[ related topics: Photography Real Estate ]

John McAfee is giving progress reports on his attempts to evade Belize authorities

In an email to The Associated Press, McAfee confirmed a posting to his website that described in what appeared to be joking tones how he had avoided authorities by mounting a distraction.

Being a fugitive from justice: U R DOING IT WRONG!

Of course the real crime is that it took a murder for law enforcement to take an interest. If this were a fair and just world we'd have enacted laws against the malware masquerading as "anti-virus software" that made him rich long ago.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama virus Software Engineering Current Events Law Enforcement Government ]

The Atlantic: The Insourcing Boom:

In the midst of this revival, Immelt made a startling assertion. Writing in Harvard Business Review in March, he declared that outsourcing is “quickly becoming mostly outdated as a business model for GE Appliances.” Just four years after he tried to sell Appliance Park, believing it to be a relic of an era GE had transcended, he’s spending some $800 million to bring the place back to life. “I don’t do that because I run a charity,” he said at a public event in September. “I do that because I think we can do it here and make more money.”

Turns out that if you get the designers closer to the manufacturing process you can use the insight of people on the line to not only make the products easier to assemble, but in the process use less material and be more reliable.

You mean drawing up some doodles, emailing them overseas to be manufactured, and then marketing the hell out of the results isn't where the value really is? Who knew?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing Consumerism and advertising Marketing Currency ]

UK police cite case in which corrupt officer and excessive data retention policies meant the deaths of two people as reason they should be able to retain data longer.

[ related topics: Weblogs Law Law Enforcement ]

Would love to see more behind this animated gif of a bicyclist with a ring around his bike that lets him roll forward. Thanks, Shadow!

[ related topics: Animation tolkien Bicycling ]

Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy fame) takes on Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinitch (D-Ohio) and the anti-vaccine Congressional hearings that just assaulted Alan Guttmacher from the NIH and Colleen Boyle from the CDC.

I won’t go further into details, because this shameful travesty of truth and medical health goes on for an hour. On Forbes.com, Steven Salzberg wrote a fantastic article about this Congressional farce. I strongly urge you to read it, since Salzberg brings the hammer down on the Congresscritters who think they know more about science than the scientists who actually devote their lives to this topic.

[ related topics: Politics Health Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Seanan McGuire: The Fairy Tale Survival FAQ.

Whoever thought XML was a good format for data transmission should be flogged. There has got to be more code devoted to massaging XML into useful data structures and formats than is actually devoted to the XML itself.

Chromatic's I Stopped Parsing XML Thanks To XML::Rabbit is a good start, and this is a good tool to use XPath to tie XML to Perl Moose objects. XML::Rabbit isn't not perfect, there'll be much frustration with XML namespaces as you get that worked out, but it is making my life far less annoying than it could be right now.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Perl Open Source hubris ]

A little insight from Dave Winer:

Everyone on the net is busy. All the time. I was riding the LIRR the other day from Queens to Manhattan, and everyone around me was staring into the screen of their smartphone, tapping, typing, clicking. I watched the faces. They looked like the people sitting around in the system lab at the UW Comp Sci Dept in 1978. Same damn thing. Except now instead of a handful of misunderstood geeks, now it's everyone.

BTW, they didn't look "engaged" or entertained, or even aware of what they're doing. Most of the time we spend pecking and nibbling at stuff on the net we sort of wish there was something more interesting to do. But there isn't, so we keep nibbling and pecking.

[ related topics: Dave Winer Movies Bicycling Public Transportation ]

Saving Private Manning - Andrew Cohen - The Atlantic:

Pvt. Manning is no hero to me. But the treatment he allegedly endured by his military captors-- without yet being found guilty of anything-- is deeply troubling for what it says about the Obama Administration's core values as the war on terror enters its second decade. The power of Manning's tale of woe isn't just that this physical and psychological abuse allegedly happened to him. The power is that the allegations he raises have been raised consistently recently by less famous criminal defendants all over the nation. These stories, taken as a whole, suggest America's arc of justice is bending away from respect for basic human rights.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality History Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

Cartograms with d3 and CartoJSON. States scaled for area by assorted population data. Cool.

Brilliant: sweet ipomoea: My Cat is a Bus. A costume for a cat of the catbus from My Neighbor Totoro. Follow-up: My Cat Gone Viral.

Via Violet Impudence

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Public Transportation ]

Feudal Security is an article by Bruce Schnier, and he nails some complex thoughts I have, but could not express as well as he has.

Are you an Apple Serf or a Google Serf?

[ related topics: Apple Computer Weblogs Cryptography Archival ]

A proposal that states might find it economically reasonable to subsidize adaptive cruise control adoption rather than funding additional road capacity.

Missing from the Syria chemical weapons coverage: cited sources. Way too much nebulous "we" and "they".

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Guns Conspiracy ]

Residents of a neglected neighborhood in Cairo built their own highway exit.

From a planning perspective, the explosion of unmarked, dirt-mound highway exits is a nightmare. But while the community-made infrastructure may not be as sleek or environmentally conscious as some urbanists would have it, there is no doubt that the residents of 20th Street have responded to limited mobility and connectivity in a way that demonstrates true community resiliency. In a way a parklet never could, 20th Street’s DIY intervention demonstrates the power of grassroots action to reshape urban infrastructure.

Web designers, check out The 967 Grid System.

RT Rene Ritchie @reneritchie on the Twitter/Instagram break-up:

Twitter doesn’t want eyeballs on third-party clients. Instagram doesn’t want eyeballs on Twitter. No one cares what the eyeballs want.

(Via Dave Winer). And the eyeballs don't care enough to pay for their own web presence.

Lesson there?

[ related topics: Dave Winer ]

Nerve Magazine: Talking to Strangers: Reykjavik, Iceland. As ‏@genehack said:

The first entry in this Talking To Strangers is fantastic http://bit.ly/TMussi (possibly NSFW link there) "

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Erotic Sexual Culture ]

From LA Weekly : LA's hit-and-run accident rate is 400% higher than the national average. Apparently getting arrested for such is extremely unlikely. One solution suggested is giving illegal aliens driving licenses, as if getting deported is a worse fate than being convicted of felony hit and run.

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture Bicycling Government ]

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) introduces bill which weakens Congressional authority on debt, then ends up filibustering it.

[ related topics: Politics ]

"The Albee Agency" is using made-up testimonials.

Google tries to coerce SFPD bike theft workshop attendees into writing Google+ reviews.

[ related topics: Writing Current Events Bicycling ]

So Daniel tried to cut out the first guitar template, then realized he needed a do-over

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

It may be a goof-d up template, but we can see the potential to be unlocked!

[ related topics: Photography ]

And the second template is being cut with much more attention to detail

RT @brennen:

Twitter pretty much only shows me ads that make me want to be mean to the people responsible for them.

I've noticed this with ads on... well... a lot of sites. And, oddly, a lot of sites that should know a lot about me. Starting with Facebook and Twitter, and moving down through the ranks.

One of the problems with Facebook and Twitter is that I'm already following the vendors I know about that I want to hear more from (and in Facebook's case, it's trying to restrict the information flow from them to me in order to extort ad dollars from them), but in so many of these cases the ads are so amazingly off-base that it's worse than having untargeted ads.

And while I'm ranting about "social media" trends: Next person who brings up "gamification" as a new concept gets a good hard smacking and an introduction to Toastmasters.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Journalism and Media Television ]

Inspiration, and specifically called out for Charlene: Bike chain Christmas ornaments

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Honolulu after Pearl Harbor: A report published for the first time 71 years later:

For the first time, I felt that numb terror that all of London has known for months. It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you. It’s the helplessness and terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death.

(Via MeFi)

And London reminds me that if you haven't seen Bomb Sight: A map of bombings in London, you should.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

RT Andr Zerozero ‏@andr00

Today's software engineering word is "farpotshket." This is a Yiddish word meaning, "broken, because someone tried to fix it."

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Just took a Microsoft blind "whose search results are better, Bing or Google" thing. Google won.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Handicaps & Disabilities ]

When dealing with a lot of entities on the net, you are impressed with how web savvy they are, how they "get it' and make it easy to download and install their products, And then there are entities like Oracle. It took some weird rituals to download and install their "InstantClient" for Linux. partially because I am on a slow connection. Cached cookies for "accepting terms", an extra login procedure, slow downloads and login timeouts had me downloading a file, and then clearing my browser to go through the steps again and again. That I could not do a wget or use other methods to get these files (CLI server only) from behind a firewall easily turned this into an exercise in frustration. That there were no decent 'readme' files for installation, and poor instructions on their website (for Ubuntu/Debian)... made me really appreciate the effort most of the FOSS world does to make their stuff easy to install.

Some notes: You might need to do an "apt-get install libaio-dev", and instead of screwing with environment variables and such wierdies so sqlplus and PHP's oci8 client works in Apache, Ijust copied the lib* files to /usr/lib. Bad practice for supporting multiple Oracle versions but works really well. Then a 'pecl install oci8' worked beautifully.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Nature and environment Databases ]

Glue up for the neck pip inlays. Purpleheart and Maple.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Testing fretboard pip inlay techniques before Daniel wakes up

And fret board pip test fitted and glued. I think it'll work with a few tweaks.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Cuting fret notches prior to finishing fretboard

[ related topics: Photography ]

Fret board.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Daniel drilling out switch cavities

[ related topics: Photography ]

The Dan helps Daniel guitar building project thus far, in one place. http://www.flutterby.net/2012-12-09_Guitar_Building

[ related topics: Music ]

Jake takes advantage of the Highway 1 closure to give us aerial shots of coastal Sonoma: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g25F8R3fl8

[ related topics: Movies ]

A little friendly advice, ogr2ogr every shapefile, had this observation:

ogr2ogr this is the opposite of photocopy degradation ;)

Presumably because shapefiles are the sort of extreme environment that causes fast evolution for the geographic data that survives each generation.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Happy Birthday to (the long-deceased, but you knew that because you know who she is) Ada Lovelace!

Article on DARPA funded UAVs mentions:

...precise long-range delivery of small payloads into difficult-to-reach environments.

The picture has a robotic arm, presumably for carefully placing those grenades through the window in question.

[ related topics: Robotics ]

Paul Palubiki: Expired. On what Wired Magazine has become:

Going through the first issue made me somewhat sad, but not really from any sense of nostalgia. It was a painful reminder of how much the magazine has changed from a weird, dangerous, avant-garde magazine from the future to basically PC Magazine with a goatee and cargo shorts.

Yes. Hell, Boing Boing is now pimping bimboxes. Even "gamification", ie: stealing ideas developed decades ago in contexts like Toastmasters to get you to pay someone else to care for your Tamagotchi, appears to be over. Maybe there's something to the "Maker" movement, but that's largely what our grandparents' generation called "Hobbyists".

I'm seeing a slight resurgence in the home-made sex-positivity areas, but in general it feels like this culture, tech and otherwise, is stuck in this tremendous malaise. Where's the transgression? Where's the "fuck the status quo, let's make some noise and change things"? Have all the punks been assimilated?

Or have we all become so accustomed to the shiny now that we're living in the future that there's no future left to envision?

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology California Culture ]

Dear non-profits: It's great that you're doing A/B testing, but could you normalize your email list so you're not sending me both A *and* B?

Cool: This is how you shut down your MMO's servers for good: Glitch's graceful exit.

Seeing the press push for "Django Unchained" and keep wondering what Quentin Tarintino has to do with Python and web development.

[ related topics: Monty Python Python ]

Routed truss rod groove, neck angle cut

[ related topics: Photography ]

Another from last night, glue-up of the replacement peghead

[ related topics: Photography ]

Nancy (dang it, her blog seems to have gone missing) forwarded along Tynan's Gear Post 2012: Zen Edition, which had some good recommendations. The recent flight to Ohio reminded me of why I used to carry a super tiny ultralight laptop, and we have taken to throwing ear plugs into every available mobile space so that I have a prayer of enjoying music when we go out, and I'll have to track down his recommendation for the Hearos Extreme Protection plugs.

[ related topics: Religion Music Weblogs Aviation Space & Astronomy ]

25 GPU cluster can crack every standard Windows password in 6 hours.

It achieves the 350 billion-guess-per-second speed when cracking password hashes generated by the NTLM cryptographic algorithm that Microsoft has included in every version of Windows since Server 2003. As a result, it can try an astounding 95⁸ combinations in just 5.5 hours, enough to brute force every possible eight-character password containing upper- and lower-case letters, digits, and symbols. Such password policies are common in many enterprise settings. The same passwords protected by Microsoft's LM algorithm—;which many organizations enable for compatibility with older Windows versions—;will fall in just six minutes.

In case anyone's wondering, Flutterby passwords are stored as SHA512 hashes. Of course we submit them (and the cookie which identifies you) via unencrypted HTTP, mostly because I don't think the modern CA system actually makes HTTPS all that secure.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Law ]

The PostGIS-users mailing list just had an announcement from Jack Varga for the GeoNames for PostGIS utility which grabs the GeoNames database and updates your local database appropriately.

If using geonames you may find this useful. Checks timestamps, downloads most current, creates database (includes schema), indexes, clusters, and assigns ownership. Documentation included. Currently only grabs US postal codes but easily adaptable to grab any country's postal codes. Makes a nice foundation for a simple location based service.

The email suggested that you could combine this with the Indexed Nearest Neighbour Search in PostGIS to do something like find the 10 nearest hotels to Boulder:

SELECT name, fcode FROM geonames WHERE fcode = 'HTL' ORDER BY geom <-> st_setsrid(st_makepoint(-105.27997,40.01789),4326) LIMIT 10;

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Databases ]

The Guardian: Fragmented world: what two years of traffic data teaches you about mobile. It's shocking how much web site traffic iOS and Apple devices account for in this, until you scroll down and see the breakdowns by individual device: Then it's really shocking.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Weblogs ]

The Atlantic: How Do Millennials Like to Read the News? Very Much Like Their Grandparents

Here's another surprise. Young mobile readers don't want apps and mobile browsers that look like the future. They want apps that look like the past: 58% of those under 50, and 60% of Millennials, prefer a "print-like experience" over tech features like audio, video, and complex graphics. That preference toward plain text "tends to hold up across age, gender and other groups." Pew reports: "Those under 40 prefer the print-like experience to the same degree as those 40 and over."

Also links to Pew Research Center's Project for Excellent Journalism: The Demographics of Mobile News, which says:

One area where younger users distinguish themselves involves advertising in the tablet news space: 18-to 29-year-old tablet news users touch or click on ads when getting news to a far greater degree than older generations: Fully 25%, versus 12% of 30- to 49-year-old tablet news users and 7% of 50- to 64-year-old users. On the flip side, though, mobile news users 50 and over are more likely to have paid for some kind of news subscription.

[ related topics: Music History Space & Astronomy Current Events Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Graphics Marketing Video ]

Documentation refers to Relationship::ManyToMany as "m2m", and I think "that's a stereotype that's not necessarily true".

Peg board clamped up to neck, which is mounted to the milling sled.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Zero Dark Thirty: Can a movie that relies on fabrications to generate support for war crimes still be considered great?

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design History ]

How a web site you just visit, without filling out any data, can identify you and send you a personalized email. And does.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Baltimore Feminists prank Victoria's Secret.

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

Hardly surprising, but interesting to see quantified: Duke University: Study: All-White Jury Pools Convict Black Defendants 16 Percent More Often Than Whites.

Juries formed from all-white jury pools in Florida convicted black defendants 16 percent more often than white defendants, a gap that was nearly eliminated when at least one member of the jury pool was black, according to a Duke University-led study.

[ related topics: Education Race ]

Amazed at how many people around me think today's XKCD is only them. Maybe scale it up? http://xkcd.com/1146/

The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History:

But every once in a while, something really stupid happens on Wikipedia, and by once in a while I mean every single goddamned day, and occasionally it’s so “really stupid” someone thinks they have to summon me like I’m Odin and Ragnarök just popped out of the Advent calendar. “Do something”, they say, or maybe something more along the lines of “You should see this”, because if you’re Ralph Nader what you really want to do is witness car crashes.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles Archival hubris ]

http://www.flutterby.net/2012-12-12_Guitar_Building

[ related topics: Music ]

Whoah: Lamello Invis MX joinery system. Embedded nuts and bolts, the bolts spin via a magnet device you place next to the wood the bolts are embedded into, so you can make hidden bolt connections. Freaky.

[ related topics: Robotics Current Events Embedded Devices Fabrication Woodworking ]

Well worth a read: Wired: A Eulogy For Occupy.

A well written celebration that talks about all the reasons I cynically dismissed the movement from the beginning.

Guitar dry fit.

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Guitar glue up. We are stoked.

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Firefly - drone shot video of night skateboarding in San Francisco. Via Ünnecessary Ümlaut, which also links to the "making-of" video.

What shocks me most about this is how quickly shots that were formerly expensive crane, or even crane + computer compositing, operations have become normal. It was like "oh, we go from looking at the skateboarder to looking down from the top of a building. Yeah, that's kinda cool."

Bonus: Shooting human shaped targets with a paintball gun mounted on a hexa-copter

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Bay Area California Culture Machinery Embedded Devices Guns Video Joss Whedon - Serenity / Firefly ]

Anil Dash: The Web We Lost.

I note that his comments are provided by Facebook Social. Sigh.

For Charlene: Orca pod swimming under a group of kayakers (YouTube video).

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Embedded Devices Video Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Daniel machining the neck back flat

[ related topics: Photography ]

And lo, it came to pass that a guitar appeared in the wood

[ related topics: Music Photography Woodworking ]

Aaargh! I screwed up the fret board. Take 2. But here's the guitar cut out.

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Not entirely sure what californiakingtides.org is trying to accomplish, but assume it's 4" narrower and 4" longer than a regular king tide.

Mostly trolling the soccer fans in my Twitter feed: MTB vs Football http://www.zapiks.com/mtb-vs-football.html

[ related topics: Sports ]

Awww, this has got to be the cutest venomous primate species evarrr! Researchers discover an adorable (yet scary!) species of slow loris..

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

QOTD: "Petitions are pretty meaningless unless they're backed with torches and pitchforks of one kind or another." - MeFi user dunkadunc

[ related topics: Quotes ]

Louisiana's Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal makes the case for over-the-counter birth control.

He did so in a subscription-only Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Of course something I didn't think about: Remember the hubbub when various allergy meds went over-the-counter, and it meant that suddenly they weren't covered under various insurance plans? What's the rest of the proposal here?

[ related topics: Law Fashion Economics ]

Amelia Earhart's prenup:

The publisher George Palmer Putnam proposed to Amelia Earhart six times before she agreed to marry him. First, she served him a letter detailing “some things which should be writ before we are married.” She would not be faithful: “I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly,” Earhart wrote.

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

The Economist: The lottery of life: Where to be born in 2013.

Via Sensible Erection, in which "spike48" notes:

As a Canadian, I have to say that there are some relevant considerations which haven't been taken into account, including how fucking cold it is in half of the countries in the top 10.

[ related topics: Current Events Gambling Economics ]

Ho. Ly. Shit. Current estimates are more than 25 dead in an elementary school shooting in Newtown/Sandy Hook Connecticut. Newtown is where I went to high school.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events ]

Baltimore issued speed camera ticket to motionless car.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Automobiles Java ]

Dear USNO time broadcast: WTF? (Just before 5PM PST on Dec 13th)

[ related topics: Photography ]

Daniel got the new fretboard inlays done. More his aesthetic than the first.

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design ]

Larry passed along this 10 shot repeating crossbow (YouTube video) as something to build in the shop when we were done with the guitar. He may be right.

[ related topics: Music Weblogs Movies Video ]

Unexpected: the very hards oily Comatillo fretboard drinking in the polyurethane

[ related topics: Photography ]

Time to route the pickup cavities and shape the body

[ related topics: Photography ]

Earlier: Layout with the hardware.

[ related topics: Photography Graphic Design ]

Fret board glue-up.

Take 2: Fret board glue-up.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Pictures to current guitar status at http://www.flutterby.net/2012-12-15_Update

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Did a little more shaping this morning while Daniel's out partying...

[ related topics: Photography ]

W3Fools.com is a response to the misinformation that W3Schools is inflicting on the web.

W3Schools has put a lot of effort into positioning itself at the top of search results and, despite our efforts (such as the PromoteJS initiative), appears to be there to stay. Other, better resources already exist, but none of them are capable of overcoming the inertia that W3Schools has built up over the years.

We believe it is W3Schools's responsibility to disseminate accurate information—and if they refuse, we hope that this document will help dissuade others from promoting or linking to W3Schools as an authoritative source of information.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Seriously considering rolling my own Linux distro using embedded libraries, to get rid of the Gnome and KDE memory sucking crap.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Parade Magazine: Ken Jennings Unveils the Truth Behind the Myths Parents Tell Kids. Posted primarily for the irony of Parade Magazine actually destroying myths, for once.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health ]

Discussion in the work kitchen about the excessive boot times on the toaster oven...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Shoes Community ]

aside to the "3d changes everything" crowd: Any competent machinist can build a firearm. We don't need 3d printers, just a lathe and a mill.

[ related topics: Graphics Woodworking ]

Preventing background tabs from wasting your computer's resources.

Direct link to the Firefox add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...x/addon/suspend-background-tabs/

Hat tip to Mark Hershberger.

[ related topics: Weblogs Open Source ]

Daniel contemplating the stain while it dries

[ related topics: Photography ]

Clem passed yesterday. Life's scoreboard: Clem: ∞;+ Cancer: 1

Many knew him and were proud to call him friend. Explorer of the world, life and people, he will be missed by many. He (and Pam) taught me about overcoming fears, forgiveness, friendship and love while exploring caves, burning man, and enjoying life. Among many other wonderful things, he married (as officiant) Nancy and myself.

Goodbye friend.

[ related topics: Burning Man Sociology Marriage ]

Reading the Perl6 advent calendar, seems to be about how Perl6 lets you implement your own APL variant. Not convinced this is a good thing.

Perl6: Because C++ didn't go far enough when it let you shift your filehandles left by a string.

Bunch of home-grown mushrooms for dinner last night

[ related topics: Photography ]

Charlene and I decided to go over budget and procure a case

[ related topics: Photography Law ]

Some howlers here, both good and bad: Poynter: The best and worst media errors and corrections of 2012. Get at least as far as the "Best Headline Error.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media ]

New Statesman: Laurie Penny: This strange neo-Victorian desire to save prostitutes and porn actresses:

For a law that claims to be designed to protect women, Proposition 35 looks surprisingly like every other law in the history of sexual and social conservatism crafted to protect the clean-living middle classes from more "corrupt" elements of the community by sending in the police and taking away their livelihoods. The elements of class suspicion at work here shouldn't have to be spelled out.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Community Currency ]

Email from an optometrist says "Having trouble viewing this email? Click here". Surprisingly, takes me to a web page of the same content.

NPR has a rundown of some of the most egregious errors made by the media as the Newtown shootings unfolded.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Over on a Twitter conversation about the awesomeness that is XML::Rabbit, John asked me what I didn't like about Moose. And to tell you the truth, I'm not totally sure. My observations so far:

• I believe, though I could be mistaken, that $row=MooseObj->new(%{$sth->fetchrow_hashref}) is substantially slower than $row=$sth->fetchrow_hashref.
• I also have the impression that I've been bitten by versionitis and features in older vs new Moose, such that I'm reluctant to attempt it in places where I may need to deploy on older machines.
• I know that I've gotten confused and wrapped in knots while attempting to set up additional typing stuff, specifically for trying to do automated wrapping and unwrapping of geographic types for storage in SQL.

I know most of these are misconceptions and issues in my understanding of the system, my hope is that by putting them here I can get a little better conversation than 140 chars at a time allows.

[ related topics: Web development John S Jacobs-Anderson Content Management Invention and Design Databases ]

Numerous emails from local bowling alley, suggesting all the different groups to take bowling. Family, kids, etc. No mention of skinheads.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology ]

If markets are good prediction mechanisms, then by definition economic events like recession are becoming harder to predict

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Economics ]

Going through Flutterby.net for the year overdue holiday letter. Dang, we fit a lot of activity into our lives.

You have been able to Herp Derp YouTube comments for a while now, but if you run a Wordpress blog and want to offer this option to your readers, rather than making them run a browser plug-in you can herp derp all the Wordpress comments. You can try this out at JWZ's announcement: I have herped all the derps.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

MarkV has some Mayan calendar date code. Coordinating time zones to figure out the exact end of the world is left as an exercise...

Top 10 legal drugs linked to violence.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Law ]

Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy) chooses the best astronomy images of 2012

[ related topics: Health Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Out of context overheard in the next cubicle observation of the moment: "Google knocks out the colons no matter what you do".

fooyeahcode - A little collection of cool unix terminal/console/curses tools.

A couple good reminders there. I suppose I shouldn't have been shocked that there are binaries for "cowsay", I was even more shocked to discover the versatility by running cowsay -l...

[ related topics: Sports ]

From BoingBoing: The creepiest science story of the year: A women gets a stem-cell based antiwrinkle treatment, grows bones in her eye socket! Yick.

[ related topics: Cool Science Health ]

PenisPans.com - one woman's attempt to use a penis shaped baking pan she got at a bachelorette party. Also of note, Amazon sells "Naughty Penis Titty Cookie Cutters", although any enterprising person knows you can make cookie cutters with tuna fish cans and pliers. Might be a little small, though...

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture ]

The problem with any SciFi teaser that includes "find out who did it and why": the plausible answer is always "Anonymous" and "for the lulz"

New York Times: Once Proudly Web Only, Shopping Sites Hang Out Real Shingles:

Most retail stores have to carry each item in a range of colors and sizes, a significant cost, but Bonobos does not, instead using the Web site as its virtual back room. Customers do not leave the store with merchandise; instead, the employees place an online order that is delivered to the customer, often the next day.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment New York ]

I wanted to believe that we lived in a world where eagles snatched small children, but it was fake: http://blogue.centrenad.com/20...atched-by-a-royal-eagle/?lang=en

[Edit: Just in case your social media feed hasn't been deluged by this and you have no idea what I'm talking about: http://youtu.be/CE0Q904gtMI ]

[ related topics: Children and growing up Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

The New Yorker's obituary for Robert Bork:

Richard Nixon appointed Bork the Solicitor General of the United States, and in that post Bork showed that he lacked moral courage as well as legal judgment. In 1973, Nixon directed Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. Richardson refused and resigned in protest, as did his deputy William Ruckelshaus. Bork, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, had no such scruples and thus served as executioner in the Saturday Night Massacre, to his enduring shame.

[ related topics: Ethics Invention and Design Law Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Pyrotechnics ]

EFF announces 'The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents'.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Free Speech Currency Furniture hubris ]

RT Danny O'B ‏@mala

The 1st rule of FOIA Club is that information regarding FOIA Club is exempt from disclosure pursuant to 5 U.S.C. Section 552(b)(4),(5),(6).

Hat tip to Columbina

http://jameshetfieldsoundboard.com/

Setting the frets

[ related topics: Photography ]

Hardware set in place

[ related topics: Photography ]

Looking at the neck

[ related topics: Photography ]

Am reviewing a powerpoint from a product manufacturer, about their software, and as I squint a litttle and read between the lines (and based on private info) realize this is a 100% current buzzword compliant vaporware product that might be built if you buy it. The problem is, it's from ACME*, and ACME* is huge entity worth lots of money, so the potential customer believes either/both:

• a - it's an actual product.
• b - they can create/deliver it.

In fact, they are a decent manufacturer of a fairly standardized commodity product, and they'll hire someone to build this (currently) vaporware system. But it's a darn hard thing to compete against. It does "everything". of course it does. It'll look like the last one I just hacked to make work, lots of unexplainable errors, an unusable interface direct from the "IDE of the day" toolkit and a fubared embedded Oracle installation. * - name changed

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Currency ]

The Atlantic: The Secret History of Guns:

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment California Culture Guns Conferences Woodworking ]

Pain over speed bumps in diagnosis of acute appendicitis: diagnostic accuracy study, BMJ 2012; 345 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e8012 (Published 17 December 2012) Cite this as: BMJ 2012;345:e8012.

Daniel jamming on the new guitar, minus a string and a lot of tweaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...0IQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

[ related topics: Music Movies Invention and Design ]

From Shadow: Fifty Shades of Takei. George Takei reads Fifty Shades...

[ related topics: Movies ]

Do Economists Lie More? Raúl López-Pérez and Eli Spiegelman (PDF)

... However, subjects’ major is predictive: Business and Economics (B&E) subjects lie significantly more frequently than other majors. ...

The Atlantic: Research says studying economics turns you into a liar.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Economics ]

An article about the expansion of the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank national marine sanctuaries:

“This is a good day,” Woolsey, the 10-term Democrat from Petaluma, said at a news conference in Washington, D.C. announcing the expansion plans. “At long last, we're on the road to giving these waters off the Sonoma County coast the protection they need and deserve.”

Is it just me, or is "...on the road to..." just about the worst metaphor someone could use for environmental protections?

[ related topics: Current Events Community Conferences ]

And the mass exodus from the company IRC channels must mean that the holiday party is starting...

The great thing about OAuth is that now we don't know if our password was compromised or an app is abusing its privileges... Sigh.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Decided I'm just going to wait for the after-Christmas sales to get my Holiday Cheer.

The storm has installed little decorative fountains in our intersections

RT Tara Calishain ‏@ResearchBuzz:

Gangnam style reaches one billion views: http://buff.ly/UYz8fR 4 minutes, 13 seconds x 1 billion in Wolfram|Alpha: http://buff.ly/UYz8fR

A "screw it, we have the energy, we'll pull the permits later" day: Replacing wiring all morning, now off to holiday parties.

First, run to the hardware store before they close, so we have the parts to truly celebrate Christmas tomorrow.

New England Journal of Medicine: Association of Coffee Drinking with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality:

Specific causes of death were also examined. After multivariate adjustment, coffee appeared to be inversely associated with most major causes of death in both men and women, including heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Given that Christmas is a holiday celebrated with lights, it makes sense that we're replacing lighting circuits today...

Anyone out there know if LED outdoor floods turn on instantly in < 50F weather? Hate that CFLs take 10 minutes to warm up and turn on...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

If your mythology doesn't have a special hell for people who blow in insulation over knob & tube wiring, I will not worship your deities.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Retrieved from http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/p...ures/daily/curr.p.anom.daily.gif [edit: From http://www.cnrfc.noaa.gov/climoData.php ]. It does kind of show what our December has been like...

[ related topics: Photography Global Warming ]

Q&A with Devops Borat:

Borat: In startup we are outsource Big Data to Oracle. In return we are give them all profit from web site but we get small cut of it back plus we can able find way of make more money because of Big Data Analytic they are provide. Is good strategy, I recommend.

All NoSQL database are look very good on single server and on vendor press release but nothing is work after 6 month of real world usage. Is when you are need of hire creator of NoSQL database which fortunate is not hard because all creator already have consulting company by now. Is cost lot of money so I recommend follow same strategy as Big Data outsource.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Currency Databases ]

Apropos of the guitar building, Shadow sent along Soundslice: 100 Riffs (A Brief History of Rock N' Roll), in a single take.

[ related topics: Music ]

The intrusiveness of the ads on Twitter and Facebook underscores how many vendors want to get in touch with us that we really wish couldn't.

Backup Brain: How do they even survive?. In which Tom talks about following doctors instructions and trick questions.

Landing at SFO from an Airbus 380. Interesting to watch 'em head across the Golden Gate and SF, down the peninsula, turn over Moffett Field, back up.

[ related topics: Movies Aviation Bay Area ]

Fodder for Dan & Todd's Bandwidth Bet: Internet connected TVs are used to watch TV, and that's about all.

Via /..

[ related topics: Games Technology and Culture Movies Todd Gemmell broadband Television Net Culture ]

http://www.notcot.com/archives...ee-universal-construction-ki.php

As a kid, how many times did you want to mix and match your various construction kits better? I drilled holes in Lego's to attach Erector, and glued up all kinds of things. This kit (3d printer not included) aims to make product licensing lawyers cringe and scream, but is a great example of the power of being able to 'make' you own things easier.

[ related topics: Graphics Lego Mindstorms Machinery Fabrication Archival Model Building ]

Last night decided to rewire two lights. Midnight, decided to take today and rewire all the lights. Removing all the knobs and tubes.

Facebook ad fail: accidental click led to my browser being unable to find www.savings.att.com. Yep, no savings there!

Moving browser tabs to work: Over on the Chugalug mailing list, Meuon recommended "gitk" as a GUI front-end to git, and if Meuon is recommending anything remotely GUI-ish it's gotta be good. Also, a better "git log" alias to colorize git output.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment ]

And the lighting circuit is back on, K&T excised, replaced with NM. A few features missing, but we can add those back in as we have energy.

We put the old Tone-Pros bridge in the milling machine, and totally screwed it. We then built this.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Hard to hear over all that clipping, but intonation much better with new bridge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...4fU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design ]

Uhhhh...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Census based dotmap showing a dot for each human (in USA), per Census data. It looks a lot like a negative image of the USA lit up an night.

Trying again vwith the "Uhhh"

[ related topics: Photography ]

Guitar pic

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Music Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Okay, we're calling the guitar "done". For now: http://www.flutterby.net/2012-12-30_Guitar_Finished

[ related topics: Music ]

Well worth a read: Larry mentioned FactCheck.org: Gun rhetoric vs gun facts. With gun murders at the lowest level since 1981 and gun ownership at very high levels, how do you tease apart the various statistics (and made-up hogwash) in the current renewed debate over gun control after the Sandy Hook Elementary/Newtown shooting spree?

[ related topics: Mathematics Guns ]

The Google+ "add-to-circles-back" screen doesn't seem to have bio/profile beyond name. Name is not sufficient identity. Sigh. G+ fail.

Whoah: Brython: Python in the browser.

Given that and some of the integration and compilation abilities, this could be a good argument for giving Python another try!

[ related topics: Monty Python Python ]

Pertinent to my interests: Alma Flamenca - The Art of Making. A 3 minute video on making a flamenco guitar, too much video of playing, not enough video of guy taking off curls of wood with a chisel, but a few really nice money shots in there.

[ related topics: Music Art & Culture Currency Video Woodworking ]

A few more guitar building pictures that didn't get uploaded in progress: http://www.flutterby.net/2012-12-31_Guitar_Wrap-Up

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

We are getting closer to the technology for things like auto-focus contact lenses: a one-molecule motor spinning on a one-atom bearing. Damn!

[ related topics: Nature and environment Cool Technology ]