Flutterby™! From 2013-12-01 to 2013-12-31

Animating Snow - For those of us not into realistic rendering, we forget the amount of math and computer power it takes to simulate a snowball, and the testing to get the parameters just right, so that we think it looks right. Awesome glimpse of what it takes.

[ related topics: Graphics Mathematics ]

The failure of CRM: Kaiser Permanente has my freakin' medical records and still seems hilariously off target with what they send me.

That thing where you leave a cutting board too close to a burner, and "Disco Inferno" comes up on the music rotation "...burn, baby, burn."

[ related topics: Music ]

RT Kieran Healy ‏@kjhealy

I for one am shocked to find the ASA engaged in self-serving rent-seeking in the name of its members, and of science. (link).

DHS agent cites private medical history to deny disabled Canadian woman entry to the U.S..

[ related topics: Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Séralini Threatens Lawsuit In Wake Of Retraction Of Infamous GMO Cancer Rat Study.

In a stunning development, the editor of the Food and Chemical Toxicology, A. Wallace Hayes, sent the French scientist a letter dated November 19 saying that the paper will be withdrawn if Séralini does not agree to do it voluntarily. In either case, evidence of the discredited paper will be expunged from the journal’s database.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Law Databases ]

MeFi user jenkinsEar points it out:

The NSA needs terrorists and bad guys in order to succeed- the real existential threat to the NSA is not Al Quaeda, but Congress- and, like Hoover before them, there's a pretty strong likelihood that they are spending more time monitoring the source of their funding than their ostensible targets.

[ related topics: Politics ]

File under issues that are going to have to be addressed for VMT and similar systems to be implemented: Records show SunPass over bills truckers, wherein an automated tolling system seems to be miscounting axles.

RT Samuel Hulick ‏@SamuelHulick:

If you asked a web designer to invent a sport, they'd spend 90% of their time on the field & uniforms, 10% on the rules, 0% observing play.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

You know what's great about Open Source Currency? You can fork it. Starting to hear rumbles about Litecoin, another Bitcoin-like currency.

[ related topics: Free Software Currency ]

Misleading names dept: All these packages from Amazon Fulfillment, and still I feel empty inside.

[ related topics: Books ]

A Bitcoin like currency but where the calculations themselves had actual practical value would be vey cool.

[ related topics: Currency ]

High quality machine work, and wood working, exposed:

Making Fletcher Capstan Tables - The making of the these is incredible. much more complicated than I expected.

Blastoline Decoliner - a hand made "automotive" sculpture by Blastolene

[ related topics: Movies Work, productivity and environment Furniture Woodworking ]

In light of the news that Jeff Bezos has announced that Amazon is going to be experimenting with deliveries by drone (though I've no idea how they're going to navigate octocopters through the FAA system...): Yoni Applebaum posts "A Day's Shopping Delivered By Airplane" from a 1919 newspaper, reporting about a New York Department Store:

[ related topics: Books Photography Invention and Design Aviation Current Events Journalism and Media New York ]

While the rest of y'all are waiting on Amazon Drones, I'm betting this one will be practical sooner: http://www.waterstones.com/blog/2013/12/introducing-o-w-l-s/

[ related topics: Books Weblogs ]

PhysicsJS: A modular, extendable, and easy-to-use physics engine for javascript.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Just gonna steal these links from JWZ: Electricity, Poop, and That Bastard Edison:

• San Francisco's secret DC grid, on why San Francisco still has a large PG&E run 250v direct current grid.
• San Francisco's combined sewers. On a sewer and stormwater system that was largely abandoned (as JWZ notes) "... some time between the Romans and the London cholera die-offs in the 1800s."
• A rare look at the tunnels under San Francisco. For you urban-ex people.

[ related topics: Cool Science Weblogs Bay Area California Culture ]

RT Columbina ‏@EccentricFlower:

Explaining to other people why they're wrong all day long makes me crabby. BE LESS WRONG, OTHER PEOPLE.

Any NSA employees in your holiday plans? Be able to debunk their talking points before you go! http://dissenter.firedoglake.c...-family-friends-during-holidays/

[ related topics: Sociology Work, productivity and environment ]

NuViz - Helmet based HUD

A Heads-Up Display like that might make it worth wearing a helmet with a chin bar for bicycling...

[ related topics: Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

e-Volo VC200 is a 18 rotor multi-copter built human size. There's video of the maiden flight of the e-Volo VC200 (YouTube), though it doesn't have a human payload in this flight.

[ related topics: Movies Aviation Video ]

RT Michael Fleming ‏@michaelkfleming:

TIL this existed and its pretty cool. http://www.transbaycable.com/ Check out pic of underwater cable laying buggy http://www.transbaycable.com/about-the-cable/cable-laying/

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Robotics Embedded Devices ]

RT Gian D'oh ‏@GianDoh: "As both a pacifist and a Beastie Boys fan, I conscientiously object for my right to party." https://twitter.com/GianDoh/status/405061577780363264

Oh, look, it's that time in the news cycle when we look at Time's U.S. vs foreign covers. Isn't this like every 3rd month?

[ related topics: Current Events Pedal Power Bicycling ]

By about the 15th "Cyber Monday deals extended" email, vendors start to sound just a teeny bit desperate...

A little musing on what the jets following Santa along with NORAD tracking might mean, from @paplikaplik http://paulpalubicki.com/2013/...-the-last-flight-of-st-nicholas/

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Witness in “no-fly” trial finds she’s on “no-fly” list too. Looks like the DHS is deliberately manipulating the no-fly list to prevent evidence from being presented.

Hopefully the judge is willing to dig in this one, and we can start laying around some felony obstruction of justice types of charges.

[ related topics: Law Law Enforcement ]

Booker, Hemming and the “forced caesarian” case: a masterclass in Flat Earth news is a deconstruction of Telegraph: Christopher Booker: 'Operate on this mother so that we can take her baby’ — A mother was given a caesarean section while unconscious - then social services put her baby into care.

[ related topics: Law Current Events ]

So I suppose this is noteworthy only if you think back to how vigorously various intelligence community apparatchiks denied it: Washington Post: The Switchboard: NSA is collecting 5 billion cellphone geolocation records a day.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Community ]

Dear @nomorerack: Sending a "we miss you" email when my last product from you was delivered last week feels kinda clingy...

King James Programming - Posts generated by a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Run by Michael Walker (barrucadu)..

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

More reason to avoid Amtrak: Citing nonexistent policy, Amtrak workers haul away Portlanders' bikes:

Amtrak apologized Tuesday to a Portlander traveling through Texas who said train workers woke her up and yelled at her for having a folding bicycle as carry-on luggage — something the national rail service allows.

[ related topics: Machinery Trains Pedal Power Bicycling Public Transportation ]

The Onion: Nelson Mandela Becomes First Politician To Be Missed:

... he could not predict who might be the second politician to be missed by humanity, but confirmed there were no viable candidates anywhere out there right now.

[ related topics: Politics Food moron ]

Thinking about how documents have gone further on the continuum of being a discrete item to being an interconnection of fragile processes.

So remember when VeriFone was warning us off from the eeeevil Square because the dedicated hardware kept your credit card info safer?

Credit card fraud comes of age with first known point-of-sale botnet. Yeah, not content with skimmers, the fraudsters have gone straight to infecting the hardware.

[ related topics: Archival ]

Brad Smith, General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Microsoft: Protecting customer data from government snooping

If true, these efforts threaten to seriously undermine confidence in the security and privacy of online communications. Indeed, government snooping potentially now constitutes an “advanced persistent threat,” alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks.

Via ZDNet: Microsoft: US government is an 'advanced persistent threat'

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Privacy Weblogs Microsoft moron Law Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

RT Your Life Coaches ‏@LIFECOACHERS:

Be the abyss people stare into.

The Flutterby.net web site is a set of Wiki markup files in a git repo, and some Perl to turn 'em into HTML. All evidence of reality to the contrary, I'm pretty convinced that the future isn't web apps, so I've been on the lookout for tools like this:

http://zim-wiki.org/

Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Invention and Design hubris ]

On the opportunity costs of Bitcoin:

Earlier this year, Bitcoin became the world's largest distributed computing project, eight times more powerful than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined. That is a huge amount of computing power that could be used for other projects like research into genetics, or searching for extraterrestrial life, or modeling weather and the climate, or a huge number of other endeavors.

[ related topics: Weblogs broadband Bay Area Current Events Currency Education Global Warming ]

Piner High School's "Make" class builds big trebuchets: http://extracredit.blogs.press...piner-highs-make-class-goes-big/

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Why aren't phone app permissions easily editable? Why can't I change those permissions on the fly?

More evidence that JavaScript and CSS do more to hurt user experience than help it: http://tabcloseddidntread.com/

Realization slowly dawns: when designers seem to be working to undermine user experience, it's likely that I'm the product, not the user.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Late bloomer: Today I learned that an astragal is a specific molding profile, not a female comic book character.

[ related topics: Books ]

NY Times: Unarmed Man Is Charged With Wounding Bystanders Shot by Police Near Times Square:

An unarmed, emotionally disturbed man shot at by the police as he was lurching around traffic near Times Square in September has been charged with assault, on the theory that he was responsible for bullet wounds suffered by two bystanders, according to an indictment unsealed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Wednesday.

I hope this gets smacked down pretty damned hard. "Now look what you made me do" is pretty much textbook abuser.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Enforcement ]

Bloomberg: Shanghai Orders Cars Off Roads as Pollution Exceeds Scale. See, especially the picture.

And then remember that London's "Great Smog" occurred in 1952, and reports suggest killed around ten thousand...

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Woodworking ]

There are legitimate uses for 50 calibre belt fed machine guns and for JavaScript. Consider carefully which end of both you'd want to be on.

[ related topics: Guns ]

"Lacking a court order and the convenience of a penal institution, the most reliable if not the only way to diagnose a case of psychopathy is through a triumph at the ballot box" http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn#.UqXUYEPUKC0

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law ]

When are they gonna start charging for zing again? This free crap is getting old.

https://twitter.com/bmagnanti/...410011915327254529/photo/1/large

(Note the date. And I tried to go find the source for this, didn't have luck, would love to credit/link-to or something the original prescient artist.)

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture Net Culture Archival ]

The NSA and GCHQ have been playing online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, looking for nefarious communications while leveling up.

Which finally gives us a reasonable explanation: Leeroy Jenkins was an NSA agent sacrificing himself to thwart terror...

[ related topics: Games Movies ]

http://gifpop.io/ lets you print up to 10 frames of animated lenticular goodness from a multi-frame GIF.

[ related topics: Animation ]

RT Eliza Bayne ‏@ElizaBayne

I really cant stay/Baby its cold outside/I've go to go away/Baby its cold outside/This evening has b../IT PUTS THE LOTION IN THE BASKET

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Hey, look which telecom duopolies are conspicuously absent from this list: http://reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/

Searched Google, discovered "My Little Piggy - Bacon is Magic" is a thing. Faith in humanity restored.

[ related topics: Clowns Food - Bacon ]

That thing where "Hey, can you put in a warning dialog box" becomes "learn niggling details of some obscure billing process."

Oh, look, the billionaires took SF for $5.5 million. Surprise! (not): http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...cisco-5-5-million-in-5050201.php

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

So Dan & TC's bandwidth bet still hangs out there over our heads, but I find it amusing that a thread on a mailing list I'm reading suggests that you pay the extra for an online backup service to get the "mail me a hard drive" option, because the net is too slow for restores...

[ related topics: broadband ]

Politico: The Last Taboo:

... We were left wondering why a man who served 16 terms in Congress and who bravely came out as gay all the way back in 1987 felt the need to hide his atheism until he was out of office. Was it really harder to come out as an atheist politician in 2013 than as a gay one 25 years ago?

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Sexual Culture moron ]

If the promised IoT hasn't materialized in 3 decades, maybe the current attention to the possibilities of it is a bit of a bubble?

Spurred by far too many "Internet of Things" and "Machine to Machine" in my Twitter feed, and an exchange between @Columbina and @Medley which led to http://www.mondaynote.com/2013...net-of-things-look-it-must-work/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

French cyber security agency says that they forged certificates for Google due to human error.

http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/en/the-...tion-of-an-igc-a-branch-808.html

The Certificate Authority (CA) system is so totally the wrong way to do trust...

NSA is using Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking.

According to the documents, the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are using the small tracking files or "cookies" that advertising networks place on computers to identify people browsing the Internet. The intelligence agencies have found particular use for a part of a Google-specific tracking mechanism known as the "PREF" cookie. These cookies typically don't contain personal information, such as someone's name or e-mail address, but they do contain numeric codes that enable Web sites to uniquely identify a person's browser.

[ related topics: Spam Consumerism and advertising Net Culture ]

I admit, we're having to try pretty hard these days to make my ironymeter twitch, but this pegged it: The White House Blog: The United States Releases its Second Open Government National Action Plan.

This administration. "Open Government". Bwahahahahaha!

ROFL.

Giggle.

Snort.

[ related topics: Humor Weblogs moron Race Real Estate ]

Wall Street Journal: Lobotomy for World War II Veterans: Psychiatric Care By US Government:

The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals.

[ related topics: History moron California Culture Economics ]

The Adventures of Dairy Carrie: Sometimes we are mean to our cows:

Undercover animal rights videos like to show cows being yelled at and hit, having cattle prods used on them, being drug along the ground or being lifted with skid loaders or other heavy equipment. I will fully admit that I have done every one of those things.

And why that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

[ related topics: Health Civil Liberties ]

Over on Farcebook, Larry posted a link to The Gospel Side: David Kinnaman is wrong: How the church really lost the millennials & what we can do to keep the next generation. I wanted to copy my comments from there over here and expand on 'em a bit.

I've been sucked into the scheduling committee of our square dancing club. It's currently dominated by a bunch of advanced dancers who are questioning how we're catering to slower learners. I think there's a parallel here in trying to figure out an institutional identity that scales, rather than providing discrete steps where we're essentially catering to a different demographic and personal need at each level.

Also interesting: This weekend I spent an hour or two talking with the former long-time (ie: decade+) president of a local square dancing club that failed. They had a bunch of teens involved right up until the very end, and one of his observations was that it was great to be passing along a passion to the next generation, but... they were a net economic drain on the club, which is fine, except that they also disappear come college, and given the normal cycle of college, early career, have kids, and then have time for a hobby some time mid-life, subsidizing them was subsidizing square dancing a decade or two in the future, not growing the club over the next few years.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Weblogs Marketing Education Pedal Power Bicycling Economics ]

Co-worker is debugging a Ruby deployment, reinforcing that if your development environment doesn't involve C and an ICE, it's too abstract.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment ]

"You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the phones." --Hannibal Lecter does tech support.

I am not a TV watcher, but found Marc's musings on the evolution of the tech informative: http://marcspag.com/technology...ing-the-cord-our-plan-of-attack/

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television ]

Valero on Washington in Petaluma has the world's slowest diesel pump right now. Less than a gallon a minute.

Saw "Word of the Year noms" headlines. Took me a moment to realize they meant "nominations" and not "nom nom noms"

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

While the U.S. is making great strides towards marriage for all here in the states, they seem to be making weddings of any sort hazardous in other areas of the world.

Yemeni officials say a U.S. drone strike has killed 13 people who were traveling to a wedding.

[ related topics: Sociology Marriage ]

ITU standardizes G.fast for up to 1gbps over copper pairs, coming circa 2015. Assuming that there are actually still any ISPs around at that point, or whether the duopoly will have killed off any actual Internet and replaced it all with cable TV. Unfortunately:

The drawback with G.fast is that it will only work over short distances, so 1Gbps will only be possible at distances of up to about 100 meters. The technology is being designed to work at distances up to 250 meters, though transmission speed is slower at that distance.

which means we're back to exactly the problem with fiber: Most of us are out at a mile or two from the CO; we still need to run boxes out into the neighborhoods, which is where Comcast and AT&T are using their entrenched monopoly status to keep us constrained to uVerse or Xfinity.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Current Events Work, productivity and environment Television Net Culture Trains ]

Salon article talking about a "hedge fun". I'm not alarmed now, but do wonder if it really is just a spring clean for the May queen.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Dear non-profits: Really, it isn't hard to check for duplicate email addresses and only send me one of each appeal an hour...

Thanks, Shawn!

Edit: Google claims it was an accidental release and they're not doing this. Grrrr. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...ndroid-shortly-after-adding-them Which makes me wonder what the value is in encouraging us to over-privilege apps.

EFF: Awesome privacy features in Android 4.3. I know I'll be way more likely to try various apps if I can install them without giving full-on access to privileges they don't need, and toggle that on later if I decide they really do need them.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Free Speech ]

You know what pisses me off about the future? We have all of this "big data", "Customer Relationship Management" and "Targeted Advertising". Privacy advocates are all up in arms over how much information about us vendors are gathering, and somehow the web is showing me ads for Home Depot, or Comcast, but in Spanish.

And I have to have friends send me links to ads like this: an ad for "Naked" brand Australian condoms.

[ related topics: Privacy Technology and Culture Movies Consumerism and advertising Television ]

Chris Christie announces resignation of Port Authority Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni.

Baroni is the scapegoat for the decision to close some lanes on to the George Washington Bridge into New York City, a move that's widely viewed as a political retaliation against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, N.J.

A view that's been reinforced as internal memos and details have leaked about Mr. Baroni's power struggles with Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design moron New York ]

The Santa Brand Book:

... Avoid familiarity. Don't use the over-familiar and paternalistic 'Father Christmas', if only because it anagrams to 'the rich Mr. Fat-Ass'.

Don't miss the graph of fattiness vs beardiness.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books ]

We've been plotting out the built-ins for the office for a while now. We know we're going with a cherry look, we got a bunch of cabinet doors off of Craigslist we're going to use, and I'm building a ship model to integrate into the look of the place.

So I saw Wooden Boat Forums: Weird Request: Help Me Design a Boat Themed Study and dug in, to find probably the most practical advice I could:

If you want to make it truly accurate, you should probably allow a thin coat of mildew to grow over everything, build the deck beams 2 inches shorter than the top of your head, and occasionally have someone sneak up behind you and throw you into a bulkhead.

But Wooden Boat Forums: True Beauty Comes from Within does have some boat interior porn with referencing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Graphic Design Boats Machinery Community Woodworking Home Improvement ]

At Hopmonk for the Cabaret Caliente Twisted Holidays benefit for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

[ related topics: Burlesque ]

Grace Hagen - Illusions of the Body, some interesting figure study photographs that look at the difference posture can make...

[ related topics: Photography ]

I have been trying to figure out what I'd use a 3d printer for. I think 4chan has answered that question: http://gizmodo.com/7-reasons-n...ve-4chan-a-3d-printer-1481160758

[ related topics: Graphics ]

Metaphone: The NSA Three Hop. In which a crowd-sourced study of phone metadata reveals that there are some huge nexus phone numbers, and the NSA reassurance that they only browse 3 levels out from people of interests are meaningless because these nexus numbers mean that we are all within three levels of contacts.

Errata Security: How we know the 60 Minutes NSA interview was crap. In which it is pointed out that whatever technobabble was spewed during that interview, in fact we're still very much back to "Trust us".

An NSA Coworker Remembers The Real Edward Snowden: 'A Genius Among Geniuses', also corrects some misconceptions about NSA security.

Eros Blog: Sex Toys And Infosec is a bit of an expansion of the widely passed around Charlie Stross: Trust me (I'm a kettle) note that now that everything, including a Russian tea kettle, has a WiFi interface, everything is a virus transmission vector.

Everything.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs virus Graphics Mathematics ]

Saving Mr. Banks Is a Corporate, Borderline-Sexist Spoonful of Lies.

Why does it matter that Saving Mr. Banks sabotages its supposed heroine? Because in a Hollywood where men still pen 85 percent of all films, there's something sour in a movie that roots against a woman who asserted her artistic control by asking to be a co-screenwriter. (Another battle she lost — Mary Poppins' opening credits list Travers as merely a "consultant.") Just as slimy is the sense that this film, made by a studio conglomerate in a Hollywood dominated by studio conglomerates, is tricking us into cheering for the corporation over the creator. ...

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies Art & Culture Television ]

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings: Stop Being Cute and Clever. On discovering why some predictive search code in an AngularJS framework was amazingly slow.

Code Rant: Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?. Yes, even in these modern times it seems that people have never read Mythical Man Month.

AngularJS from an Ember.js perspective.

Google Python Style Guide.

[ related topics: Writing Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Douglas Adams Python ]

The Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition. In which success is measured by the ratio of bytes of error message spew to bytes of the input file.

Having now seen an ADJ LED MegaBar light controlled via DMX, I suspect I will never buy a conventional light fixture again. #IoT

First Sex Doll Launched into Space Reaches New Heights, Then Blows over Nevada

HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Dec. 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- CNV.com Inc., one of the world's largest distributors of adult products, successfully launched an inflatable doll named Missy into space. The doll launched from Burton Creek State Park, just west of Lake Tahoe using a 4.5-pound balloon filled with about 300 cubic feet of hydrogen. The doll achieved an ascent rate of approximately 1,400 feet per minute, with its flight path taking it directly over Lake Tahoe, Carson City, and then over the deep desert as it climbed to over 100,000 feet above earth.

(Hat tip to http://www.researchbuzz.com/ )

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Nature and environment Invention and Design Aviation Space & Astronomy Current Events California Culture ]

Finally, San Francisco postcards for San Franciscans.

Via JWZ, who has made a similar postcard.

[ related topics: Weblogs Bay Area California Culture ]

National Legal and Policy Center asks if GM will repay the $10 billion cost of the bailout.

GM CEO says "nope":

Asked whether GM should pay the difference between the amount the government provided the company and the return from the sale of the shares, Akerson said the "die was cast" by Treasury when it decided to take shares. For GM to make up for any shortfall could result in lawsuits from other shareholders. Those investors expect the company to resume paying a dividend for the first time since it exited bankruptcy in July 2009.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Law Currency ]

Two from the "my faith in humanity has been completely, utterly razed" file:

Yottaa - Give Your Users The Experience they deserve. Why? What did they ever do to you that justifies this?

Ensuring a personalized, responsive solution that adapts to visitor context and user actions improves engagement and increases mobile and web conversions. ...

And WSO₂. I'm... Just... What.. The API page promises:

Extend the reach of your business to mobile devices, customers, and partners by establishing and API-centric and Service-Oriented Architecture. A forward-thinking architecture will include ...

And it then goes on to list the things the "forward-thinking architecture will include", but there is, of course, no indication that their forward-thinking architecture will include those things.

I need to go take a shower. And drink. Or something.

[ related topics: Architecture ]

Surviving The Internet on Low Speed DSL.

I've actually been thinking about this a bit recently. The high speed fiber gambits of various ISPs have seen tremendously low uptake because there just isn't enough to do with it, unless you're interested in self-hosting. And most ISPs take a dim view of self-hosting because they want to charge you extra for "business class" services.

But even more, as I watch the creeping issues with malware and viruses and privacy invasions (are you sure nobody's been watching you through your laptop webcam recently? Really sure?), I wonder if we're going to look back on this network, even with NAT and the firewalling we've got, as we look back on promiscuous unprotected sex in the late '70s and early '80s.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Movies broadband Net Culture ]

Annals of Internal Medicine: Enough Is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements (Guallar, Stranges, Mulrow, Appel, and Miller).

In conclusion, β-carotene, Vitamin E, and possibly high doses of vitamin A supplements are harmful. Other antioxidants, folic acid and B vitamins, and multivitamin and mineral supplements are ineffective for preventing mortality or morbidity due to major chronic diseases.

I'd like to dig into a few aspects, I believe I have found that a B-complex can help me when I'm having trouble focusing or thinking, but the general trend on mortality here is interesting.

[ related topics: Health Beer Currency ]

Email subject: "Last chance to save 33%". Yeah, likely because the next email I get will offer me the chance to save 40%. #getabusinessmodel

I think pageviews should be a verb. "We pageviewsed the shit out of that customer." [guys in jackets and ties high-five each other]

Giggle: The Google+ Hippo.

[ related topics: Humor ]

Shadow passed along: Gou Miyagi does not skateboard how most people skateboard (Video)

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

It's the 17th anniversary of CSS: A good idea in theory, but poorly implemented and used to unleash all sorts of horror on the world.

Edward Snowden's 'open letter to the Brazilian people' – in full (someone copied it on Facebook)

Foreign Policy: Tone-Deaf at the Listening Post: My day at the National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade.

... This official also hoped that the Obama administration would crack down on these reporters, saying, "I have some reforms for the First Amendment." I honestly do not know whether that last statement was a joke or not. Either way, it's not funny.

RT Ron Wyden ‏@RonWyden:

Pretty astounding when a fed. judge says "James Madison...would be aghast" while describing a surveillance practice http://www.wyden.senate.gov/ne...bulk-collection-of-phone-records

NSA collection of phone metadata likely in breach of fourth amendment – read the judge's ruling.

[ related topics: Politics Law Current Events Civil Liberties Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Make sure you're running GPG 2+ or 1.4.16+: [Announce] [security fix] GnuPG 1.4.16 released:

The second attack is more serious. It is an adaptive chosen ciphertext attack to reveal the private key. A possible scenario is that the attacker places a sensor (for example a standard smartphone) in the vicinity of the targeted machine. That machine is assumed to do unattended RSA decryption of received mails, for example by using a mail client which speeds up browsing by opportunistically decrypting mails expected to be read soon. While listening to the acoustic emanations of the targeted machine, the smartphone will send new encrypted messages to that machine and re-construct the private key bit by bit. A 4096 bit RSA key used on a laptop can be revealed within an hour.

Details of the attack at http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Sports Pop Culture Cryptography ]

Note: Even if you're a government agency, if an employee claims to be a CIA secret agent you should probably let them pay their salary: EPA's leading expert on climate change and highest paid employee convicted on fraud charges for claiming to be a CIA agent:

To explain his long absences, Beale told agency officials -- including McCarthy -- that he was engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan. At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan.

And, yeah, there's the appropriate pull-quotes of hand-wringing about "how did we not have oversight for this?", but... yeesh.

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Global Warming ]

With 18 month product cycles and "Dutch auction"s standard when buying technology, can sales and discounts still motivate consumers?

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

RT Neil Gaiman @neilhimself:

...and my Google+ profile is "suspended because it impersonates someone". It was set up for me by Google. I am puzzled by this.

I'm just giggling over this because it wonderfully encapsulates so many different aspects of identity and philosophy. The persona I project to each different social media site is slightly different, so is each one of those personas impersonating another one? What makes Neil Gaiman's Twitter persona the canonical one? etc...

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Philosophy Neil Gaiman ]

Happy marriage study abandoned as husband becomes depressed:

Researchers at the University of Aukland in New Zealand were hoping to test whether the key to a happy marriage lies in bowing to the whims of a partner and giving up the need to ‘always be in the right.’

[ related topics: Invention and Design Sociology Current Events Education Marriage ]

So we've established that vitamins and supplements don't help you live longer, turns out that abstaining from alcohol makes you die younger. Uh oh.

Of the 1,824 study participants, only 41 percent of the moderate drinkers died prematurely compared to a whopping 69 percent of the nondrinkers. Meanwhile, the heavy drinkers fared better than those who abstained, with a 60 percent mortality rate. Despite the increased risks for cirrhosis and several types of cancer, not to mention dependency, accidents, and poor judgment associated with heavy drinking, those who imbibe are less likely to die than people who stay dry.

Time article on the study, which is Late Life Alcohol Consumption and 20-Year Mortality in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research Volume 34, Issue 11, November 2010.

Via JWZ.

[ related topics: Health Theater & Plays ]

Want to Fight Allergies? Get a Dirty Dog

More than a decade ago, U.S. researchers reviewing the health records of children with pets—dogs, and, to a lesser extent, cats—discovered that the kids were less likely to develop allergies and asthma than other children were. Other epidemiology studies in Europe have supported this connection, not just with pets, but with livestock as well. In 2010, Susan Lynch, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that dogs who partly live outdoors shuttled environmental microbes into the house, some of which were also found in the human gut.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Nature and environment Bay Area Theater & Plays Current Events California Culture Education Dogs Real Estate ]

Cyclist injured in Stony Point Road collision:

Christopher Wright, 48, was southbound on his way to work in Petaluma around 6:20 a.m. when he collided with a southbound Nissan Altima, driven by Jose Sotelo, 57, of Santa Rosa, said CHP Officer Kimberly Lemons.

Okay, so guy was cycling along and ran into the back of a car. Bike hits car, that's news.

The bike suffered damage to the rear wheel and the Altima suffered moderate front-end damage, including a broken windshield. ...

Wait! What?

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Sports Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling ]

RT R Winston Kappesser ‏@RonaldKappesser

@mikesonn As someone who takes his Christianity seriously, I am frustrated by people who make it about preserving mid-century US culture.

[ related topics: Religion Sociology California Culture ]

It's okay to keep programs secret from citizens if keeping those programs secret serves the interests of the security state. From the Liberty and Security in a Changing World: 12 December 2013: Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies:

... A program of this magnitude should be kept secret from the American people only if (a) the program serves a compelling governmental interest and (b) the efficacy of the program would be substantially impaired if our enemies were to know of its existence.

[Bold emphasis mine]

Via EFF Statement on President's Review Group's NSA Report and an @trevortimm tweet.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Free Speech Software Engineering ]

Was trying to make a Mickey Mouse pancake, ended up with a Totoro pancake.

RT Ian Simpson ‏@IanTLS:

Brain cancer incidence versus number of wireless subscribers in the US. http://pic.twitter.com/3tVsjomMXD

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Wireless Robotics Embedded Devices ]

RT Jake Davis ‏@DoubleJake

Irony: you can't register to apply for a career at the NSA if your password exceeds 12 characters. http://pic.twitter.com/CfiUHkQzcP

I need to make sure that Flutterby doesn't have a length limit on passwords, because the back-end sure doesn't. And if your back-end does, it's an indication that you're doing security terribly horribly wrong.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Interactive Drama Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Looking more and more likely that the NSA has dirt on U.S. public officials and is using it... NSA-Israel bombshell bolsters whistleblowers' claims about NSA spying on US government officials.

[ related topics: moron ]

BMJ: Christmas 2013: Food For Thought: Laughter and MIRTH (Methodical Investigation of Risibility, Therapeutic and Harmful): narrative synthesis:

Conclusions Laughter is not purely beneficial. The harms it can cause are immediate and dose related, the risks being highest for Homeric (uncontrollable) laughter. The benefit-harm balance is probably favourable. It remains to be seen whether sick jokes make you ill or jokes in bad taste cause dysgeusia, and whether our views on comedians stand up to further scrutiny.

[ related topics: Food ]

NASA - Jewel Box Sun. A little video showing what the sun looks like through various different filters. Really cool.

And I've been thinking about how modern imaging and excess compute might be leveraged to build some cheaper solar imaging solutions... Nothing concrete yet, but...

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy Video Java Photovoltaics ]

"agile" software development is also an exciting business opportunity! You can recruit become a trainer and build your downline!

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Penguins. Your argument is invalid.

Anyone with an opinion on the Duck Dynasty guy who hasn't also weighed in on the David Guth/University of Kansas thing can just shut up.

[ related topics: Education ]

I have, occasionally, been known to make gingerbread houses, or to help kids to make gingerbread houses.

Optimus Prime out of gingerbread. Your holidays are complete.

(Title snitched from the Reddit thread)

[ related topics: Children and growing up Real Estate Food - Cake ]

Cable Industry Finally Admits Caps Not About Congestion, After Insisting For Years Caps Were About Congestion quotes NCTA's Powell: Usage-Based Pricing About Fairness, Not Capacity: Says principal purpose is to monetize high fixed costs.

But he pointed out that the cable industry had to spend a bunch of money on its network before the first customer was signed. So, for a business that requires "enormously high" fixed costs -- digging up the streets, put the wires in -- and operational expense, "it is a completely rational and acceptable process to figure out how to fairly allocate those costs among your consumers who are choosing the service and will pay you to recover those costs."

In other words, they're trying to create an externality to subsidize low usage customers.

We need to find ways to break the communications duopoly.

[ related topics: Quotes broadband Current Events Consumerism and advertising Currency ]

Canada supreme court strikes down all restrictions on prostitution:

The supreme court of Canada struck down all current restrictions on prostitution on Friday, including bans on brothels and on street solicitation, declaring that the provisions unconstitutionally violated prostitutes' safety.

Additional article at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com...ostitution-laws/article16067485/

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Heinlein ]

Anyone got suggestions for an Android IRC client that works through a proxy so it can continuously track conversations w/o always-on?

The Food Lab: The Science of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies. In which J. Kenji López-Alt bakes over 100 batches of cookies to develop a favorite, and tells you about the process of learning which ingredients, added how, do what.

[ related topics: Food Chocolate Education ]

A great little intro: The DFT “à Pied”: Mastering The Fourier Transform in One Day.

An oral history of Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back.

... If you look at Dolly Parton at her peak, a lot of white guys were like “daammn!” At the same time, when I did casting calls for videos, curvy women wouldn’t show up. They thought they didn’t have a chance. ...

Read all the way through. It gets hilarious and very culturally telling when they talk about shooting the video.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Birds Race Video ]

More evidence that the "big government"/"small government" rhetorical split doesn't mean anything in practice:

MEI’s study examined government spending in Canada, Quebec and the U.S., dating back to the Pierre Trudeau, Robert Bourassa and Richard Nixon administrations respectively. “In all three cases,” reads the report, “it is actually left-wing governments that most reduced the relative size of government.”

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Hannah Werdmuller: Tall, Dark and Emotionally Unavailable (Soundcloud Audio).

[ related topics: Music ]

RSA took $10M from NSA to prefer NSA seed generators in BSafe. I don't trust anybody any more. Time to go back to scratching on clay tablets. http://www.reuters.com/article...curity-rsa-idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Warning: Sending "Wine Country Gift Basket"s with "Sonoma" branded products that are not in fact local to Sonoma County may trigger mockery.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

Autistic Self-Advocacy Network 2013 Joint Letter to the Sponsors of Autism Speaks http://autisticadvocacy.org/20...o-the-sponsors-of-autism-speaks/

[ related topics: broadband ]

Ugh. StackExchange and Google results. There is undoubtedly a blog which answers my question, but I'll never find it for the idiocy noise.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Wait: Why does one article use "trafficking" and "selling themselves" to refer to the same people? http://www.sfgate.com/crime/ar...nd-child-trafficking-5080256.php

[ related topics: Children and growing up Bay Area ]

RT Brilliant Ads ‏@Brilliant_Ads

Brilliant ad for a Swiss bookshop. pic.twitter.com/qUOOkEmT6b

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

Thinks the bandsaw is a scroll saw...

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

Charlene handed me a piece of poster board and said she wanted the Christmas cards in a sleigh

[ related topics: Photography ]

Not everything happens furry reason. Some things happen hard exoskeleton reason.

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Legal challenge questions reliability of police dogs, reports on a lawsuit in Nevada over a U.C. Davis study testing the false positive rates of drugs and explosives sniffing in police dogs, in which a run without any samples was tested:

But of 144 runs, that happened only 21 times, for a failure rate of 85 percent.

Although drug-sniffing dogs are supposed to find drugs on their own, the researchers concluded that they were influenced by their handlers, and that's what led to such a high failure rate.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Law Current Events Law Enforcement Gambling Dogs ]

Carl's Jr could be more specific

[ related topics: Photography ]

Grab a shovel, we're gonna evenly distribute the future.

When we coo over design we are acknowledging mediocrity. Truly great design is invisible.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

A little thank you to the trucker who put on his blinker and made the left lane slow down right before the speed trap we couldn't see.

The real question is why we care what a bunch of inbreds who achieved their station by birth, not ability, think. Alan Turing finally pardoned, in least apologetic apology ever: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/his...d-Royal-pardon-by-the-Queen.html

[ related topics: History ]

“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I defected from the government to the public.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron ]

"... to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!"

RT Steve Silberman ‏@stevesilberman

If you missed it: Boy Scouts handing out pizza to gay couples waiting for marriage licenses in Utah. http://goo.gl/3t7oNh

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Sociology Marriage ]

Thinking about regular processes reports on my attempts at #CorpselessChristmas, but don't want anyone to confuse silence with a confession.

Rosemary lemon lamb, roasted veggies with a sherry vinaigrette, toasted quinoa with sage, out of the oven in 7... 6... 5...

Windows Updates Bedtime Story.

[ related topics: Weblogs Microsoft ]

Cryptographer Adi Shamir Prevented from Attending NSA History Conference:

So what is the bottom line of this whole unhappy episode? Clearly, no one in the US is trying to see the big picture, and the heavy handed visa bureaucracy you have created seems to be collapsing under its own weight. This is not a security issue – I have been to the US close to a hundred times so far (including some multi-year visits), and had never overstayed my visas. In addition, the number of terrorists among the members of the US National Academy of Science is rather small. As a friend of the US I am deeply worried that if you continue to delay visas in such a way, the only thing you will achieve is to alienate many world-famous foreign scientists, forcing them to increase their cooperation with European or Chinese scientists whose countries roll the red carpet for such visits. Is this really in the US best interest?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Cryptography Conferences ]

RT Josh Weinstein (@JElvisWeinstein): "I'll probably turn in early tonight. I want to make sure all three ghosts have enough time to do their whole spiel."

So the towel on the handles doesn't keep the fridge from closing

[ related topics: Photography ]

We can't make the yuletide gay, all we can do is show it love and acceptance however it wants to be.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Dominican arepa (the sweet dessert corn cake, not the thick stuffed savory corn cake) in the oven.

[ related topics: Food - Cake ]

So, wait, is #CorpsefreeChristmas just about December 25th, or all 12 days through Epiphany? This could be harder than I thought...

Cross-dressing man caught on Newark runways, which is notable primarily because the guy managed to accidentally evade all sorts of perimeter alarms:

The PA [Port Authority] has repeatedly declined to provide details on how much it has paid manufacturer Raytheon for the system, but insiders put the tab at well over $300 million.

When you wonder where your government dollars are going, realize that a good portion of even the funds earmarked for transportation are being funnelled into the pockets of corrupt defense contractors in the name of "security".

[ related topics: Aviation moron ]

Anatomy Of A Con: How The Public Was Scammed To Build Candlestick Park.

In 1957, Harney sold back 41 acres of the parcel he had purchased from the city in 1953 at $2,100 an acre. The 1957 price the city paid to Harney for its own former land was $65,853 an acre. That's a crisp total of $2.7 million.

A good article on how funnelling money through a non-profit, and various other machinations, allowed San Francisco to push a whole lot of public dollars into private coffers.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Currency Real Estate ]

Duh moment: one could build an archive with a random key that required enough computing power it could only be decrypted after death.

Always the last to know: A neighbor of mine was apparently busted with 3 lbs of cocaine http://petaluma.patch.com/grou...ewsltuspatc00000001&newsRef=true

[ related topics: Drugs Law Enforcement Pyrotechnics ]

Stemming largely from a talk I gave at an early Personal Clouds gathering, my Twitter feed is full of optimism about #IoT, the "Internet of Things" (and "M2M", which I've remarked on before).

And for a while I shared that optimism. There are so many places in my house where little improvements could make life more pleasant. I've probably remarked before on how a slightly smarter bathroom light switch could allow some heuristics to make me do a little extra work before turning on the bright setting in the middle of the night. I'm still not totally happy with our off-the-shelf fan+thermostat controller solution. On the "I'd like to get to it some day" list is RFID or smart phone activated front door locks so that when we come home with arms full of groceries it's easy to get in.

However...

A couple of years ago I dug an irrigation system into the yard. The promise is that you can set the computer and walk away from it. The reality is that you have to continually monitor the valves to make sure that they haven't exploded, that the solenoids aren't stuck, that the gaskets haven't worn out or mis-seated, and if they have, you have to take the parts down to the hardware store and hope that they still have fittings that work, and that you won't have to re-plumb because someone decided that the in-feeds weren't working as female threads, and now they have to take male threads.

Overall that project has probably saved time, but the maintenance load it added in return is non-trivial. And Charlene still ends up doing a lot of tuning of the irrigation by hand. Set it up and forget it? No.

We have a Toto Carlyle II toilet. We got it specifically because it was set up to take the Toto Washlet seat (which we've also added). The problem is that the Toto float valve assembly sometimes sticks, and the real problem is that nobody carries Toto replacement parts. The toilet is pretty darned good for the water usage, but...

We were also early adopters of Compact Fluorescent Lights. They're great, except that despite all of the hype (and that they're allegedly supposed to still give off 80% of their rated light output at 40% of their expected lifespan) if you don't run around and change them every two years you end up wondering why the hell the house is so dark.

The Nest thermostat sounds great, until, well: RT Matt Haughey ‏@mathowie

My house was w/o heat today because my Nest thermostat's internal battery died. Silicon Valley, always innovating new ways to ruin xmas.

Similarly, over the years friends have spent a lot of money on X-10, or what-have you, and...

The problem is that with every change we make we introduce additional maintenance load. We have additional systems that need to be checked for failure (and anyone who's worked in systems operations for a company with a sizeable quantity of servers can talk to you about dealing with the deluge of alerts that come from monitoring). We have additional systems that need regular maintenance.

And it takes quite a bit of effort to install technology in a house. Crawling through insulation, reworking wiring, all of this is a pain in the tail.

In a world where it's totally reasonable to see service life of decades (paint jobs, roofs, most plumbing and electrical), we're introducing products with lifecycles measured in tens of months. And we're doing so with protocols that don't have any promise of interoperability with previous generations, when the wave of the future comes through again in two years we're back to opening walls and re-wiring.

And for those things that don't, we're out replacing batteries.

Although I was initially optimistic, I now expect that the "Internet of Things" will have the same legacy as all of those in-home intercom systems that were standard in new subdivisions back in the '80s. Over-priced gadgets that get abandoned for the tried and true.

So the big obstacles we need to overcome for the Internet of Things to come about are:

• Reliability. X10 was notorious for not working. Irrigation valves are pretty established, and I still have a few fail every year. I want to know that I'm going to get decades, not months, out of my new toys.
• Monitoring. There are a gazillion people wanting to sell you the "Operating System for the Internet of Things", and it's great that you can point-and-drool your way through scripting operations, but what's the Munin? How do you manage failures?
• Speaking of "how do you manage failures?", what's the fallback? In response to that Matt Haughey ‏tweet someone suggested manually tying the wires together. Actually, this makes sense, and if I re-mount our thermostat (unlike the Nest, ours just uses a couple of AA batteries that get replaced every few years) I'll probably put in a toggle switch so that when the thermostat fails at an inconvenient time we can easily turn on the heater (and, probably, another toggle switch that takes the thermostat out of the loop so that we can more easily turn it off). In the case of the light switch applications I've got, there needs to be some sort of centralized controller making decisions based on what other lights are on or off and what time of day it is. How do we wire up the fallback so that even when the house server crashes I can have light in the bathroom?
• Security models. A year or two ago we thought that partitioned spaces, NATting routers and the like, was enough. Now we're discovering enough viruses running on embedded devices that it's plain that we need better network monitoring to proactively partition networks and watch for traffic that shouldn't be there. And we now know that NSA workers are using the network to stalk ex-spouses; how do you feel about the possibilities that someone else knows how your house is configured?
• Upgrade paths. How do I assure myself that the Saturday crawling through the insulation in the attic won't have to be repeated every year or two?

The problem is no longer cheap switches or sensors, we're going to have to think beyond the simple technological problem if we're going to actually have such a thing implementable.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies broadband Robotics Invention and Design Law Work, productivity and environment Sports Net Culture Boats Embedded Devices Currency Archival RFID Real Estate ]

Popehat: Burn the Fucking System to the Ground:

I could keep myself up all night and into tomorrow by listing different groups of royalty and the ways they scam the system.

…except "scam the system" is a misnomer. I am not listing defects in a perfectable system. I am describing the system.

[ related topics: moron ]

Video surveillance of downtown Houston to expand:

Officials say data is not kept to determine if the cameras are driving down crime.

How the fuck do you spend $18M without collecting data to see if it's effective? How the fuck does the federal government end up funding this sort of thing without demanding that such data be kept?

Via /..

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography moron Current Events Law Enforcement Video ]

Among the problems with face-to-face conversations vs email is the lack of an audit trail [Insert eye roll and resigned sigh here].

"Dan, can you draw a picture of my motorcycle?"

[ related topics: Photography ]

Square Dancers: Don't have speech recognition working yet, but Caller's Angels runs under WINE on Linux! http://www.hiltonaudio.com/compsoft.htm

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Wines and Spirits Work, productivity and environment ]

LiMux - the IT evolution - An open source success story like never before. On Munich's migration to a Linux, KDE & OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

One of these, and perhaps the toughest job of all, turned out to be the switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice/LibreOffice. At some point during the planning phase the administrators had to acknowledge that they had never previously had a clue how many individual macros, templates and forms were crucial to the daily work of the city's departments. When the migration team started to make lists, more and more of these Microsoft-specific add-ons popped up, with nobody remembering who had programmed them and no information about how they worked. Project representatives started to call them U-Boote (submarines), since they seemed to appear from nowhere. A typical problem started with an employee saying: “I don't know, all I am doing is hitting STRG+SHIFT+F4 all day.”

[ related topics: Free Software Humor Microsoft Open Source moron Law Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]

A friend on Facebook put up http://www.pressdemocrat.com/a...131226/articles/131229697#page=0 with the pull quote:

“Santa Rosa looks at itself as a small town, but it has big-city issues that aren’t being addressed,” Sampson said.

And I responded:

“I was shocked,” Dawson said. “That’s not how we behave out here. We police ourselves.”

Uh. Yeah. That explains the lack of litter and the respect for the artwork that I see demonstrated regularly along the Prince Memorial Greenway Trail, right? I mean, I don't want to sound all conservative asshole or anything, but "...If anyone was messing with me, he would have stepped in." suggests the guy was a part of a violent subculture, and “We had different priorities; I wanted more success” says that we have a population that's made some lifestyle choices.

I understand that there are people who come from backgrounds that don't give them the skills to integrate into our society, and I understand that there are those who suffer from anxieties and other medical problems that similarly make it a struggle and challenge to hold a job and keep a household together. I know some of those folks (some of 'em are Facebook friends), and I sympathize with their plight and think that society should be doing more to support them.

But my cursory reaction to what I see along the Greenway and the Joe Rodota Trail as I bike to work in the early hours is not so much "these people need help" as "these people need discipline and tough love".

Okay, maybe I do want to sound all conservative asshole.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Heinlein Bicycling ]

Yet another city screwed over by the corporate welfare that is professional sports: Cincinnati Stadiums Bury County Government in Debt:

The tax relief hasn’t materialized as pledged, said Todd Portune, a commissioner in Cincinnati’s Hamilton County. Instead, the county government is grappling with annual stadium expenses totaling at least $43 million this year, including debt service, county documents show. Residents have seen a public hospital sold, mass-transit investments postponed and little private development near the stadiums that didn’t involve additional public subsidies, Portune said.

[ related topics: Politics Todd Gemmell moron Current Events Chattanooga Public Transportation ]

Jalopnik: Automotive predictions for 2014 based on real data analysts use. They're all great, #7: "Subaru will offer a line of Outbacks with mountain bikes permanently welded to the roof."

[ related topics: Fabrication Bicycling ]

The Treason of Benjamin Franklin:

The case I’m referring to has nothing to do with WikiLeaks, Assange or Manning. Called the Hutchinson Letters Affair, it began in December, 1772 when Benjamin Franklin, who was in England at the time, anonymously received a packet of thirteen letters. They were reports by Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, to Thomas Whately, a leading member of the British government. In the letters, Hutchinson made some damning comments about colonial rights. Even more provocative, Hutchinson recommended that popular government be taken away from the colonists “by degrees”, and that there should be “abridgement of what are called English liberties”. Specifically, he argued that all colonial government posts should be made independent of the provincial assemblies. Finally, he urged his superiors to send more troops to Boston to keep American rebels under control.

[ related topics: moron Law Civil Liberties California Culture ]

Facebook’s so uncool, but it’s morphing into a different beast:

As part of a European Union-funded study on social media, we are running nine simultaneous 15-month ethnographic studies in eight countries. What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young are moving on to cooler things.

Via The Guardian: Facebook 'dead and buried to teens', research finds.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Sports ]

Developmentally disabled adult unfettered on an Android tablet on my home network+malware DNS filtering = lots of ribbing at ISP work. Sigh.

[ related topics: broadband Work, productivity and environment Handicaps & Disabilities ]

laugh at grad students: http://lolmythesis.com/ Summing up years of work in one sentence.

A Metafilter entry reminds me that manufacture and import of 60-watt and 40-watt incandescent bulbs will end on January 1^st, following the phase-out of 75 watt incandescents in 2013 and 100 watt in 2012.

I know we whined about 'em back in 2007, and I'm sick of replacing the damned things every year 'cause they get dim so fast, but it'll be interesting to see what we get to replace them in 3 applications where CFL and LED bulbs won't work:

1. Lava lamps.
2. Easy Bake Ovens
3. For putting in microwaves!

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Archival ]

Slate.com: A Texas bar banning gay two stepping shows why gay bars still matter.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Television ]

On this day in 1945, Congress recognized Christian Socialist Francis Bellamy's "Pledge of Allegiance". "Under God" wasn't added 'til '54.

[ related topics: Religion Politics ]

Kickstarter for Kung Fury, "the most epic 80s adventure this world has ever seen".

Kung fu cops with fast cars in Miami, riding dinosaurs. What's not to love?

[ related topics: tolkien Law Enforcement Bicycling ]

An open letter to the makers of The Wolf of Wall Street and the Wolf Himself, from Christina McDowell, the daughter of one of his former accomplices.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Whenever I drive through Yolo County I kinda feel like I'm letting the place down when I stay safe, same and sensible. #YOLO

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Mark reports that the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager for Mac OS X is a must for running the Android emulation when doing development.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Sports Macintosh ]

Bunnie's Blog: On Hacking MicroSD Cards. SD cards achieve their amazingly low price, cheaper per gigabyte than buying the stand-alone flash, because they do some amazing juggling to manage bad blocks internally.

The embedded microcontroller is typically a heavily modified 8051 or ARM CPU. In modern implementations, the microcontroller will approach 100 MHz performance levels, and also have several hardware accelerators on-die. ...

And, of course, there are ways to upload your own code on to those processors...

[ related topics: Weblogs Robotics Theater & Plays Embedded Devices Clowns ]

Shadow sent along Wired: The Most Amazing, Beautiful and Viral Maps of the Year.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Using Emacs to help build an image classifer to set up reference data for an OCR system.

Always disappointed when driving down California's central valley that there isn't an Eloi in close proximity to Turlock...

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Taking Amtrak home, leaving Charlene with the car in Fresno and absolutely destroying our gallons per passenger mile stat for this trip.

[ related topics: California Culture Travel Automobiles Trains Public Transportation ]

Der Spiegel: Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit suggests that the NSA is reading Windows crash reports to learn information about targeted machines. I haven't dug into all of the associated documents yet, but CNET: NSA reportedly planted spyware on electronics equipment says that they also detail exploits in firmware of various embedded devices [Edit: Here's that article]:

According to the report, the NSA has planted backdoors to access computers, hard drives, routers, and other devices from companies such as Cisco, Dell, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and Huawei. The report describes a 50-page product catalog of tools and techniques that an NSA division called ANT, which stands for Advanced or Access Network Technology, uses to gain access to devices.

I don't know where the rabbit hole hits bottom, but all of those thoughts I had about further network connecting various aspects of my house have completely lost any appeal.

And as Larry points out in linking to IT firms lose billions after NSA scandal exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, yes, the Snowden documents exposed the perfidy, but IT firms, and I suspect consumer electronics firms, are going to lose billions or trillions because they lied to us, that Snowden revealed that evil is a good thing.

[ related topics: Weblogs Microsoft broadband Robotics History Current Events Consumerism and advertising Embedded Devices Real Estate ]

Yay! Connecting trains were only 20 minutes late! On the bus home to Petaluma.

[ related topics: Machinery Trains Public Transportation ]

Reminder: Always re-install your own operating system from scratch on new hardware that you buy. I don't know what we're going to do about BIOS exploits, though. NSA is intercepting laptops ordered online and installing spyware on them.

The latest report, this time via Der Spiegel and based on internal NSA documents, reveals that the NSA, in conjunction with the CIA and FBI, has begun intercepting laptops purchased online in order to install (quite literal) spyware and even hardware on the machines. The NSA terms this “interdiction.” Agents divert shipments to secret warehouses, carefully open the packages, install the software and/or hardware, and send them on their way.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Dolphins ‘deliberately get high’ on puffer fish nerve toxins by carefully chewing and passing them around. Now you know why dolphins have that smug smile thing goin' on...

[ related topics: Erotic Nature and environment ]

So I made this off-hand comment on Friday, but thought it deserved a little expansion, especially in light of Jack William Bell's comments on the "NSA interception of hard goods" entry.

A. is Charlene's developmentally disabled younger brother. Earlier this year, we found a deal on a cheap Android tablet, and got it for him for Christmas. We also loaded a bunch of games and other apps on to it, but because we had trouble gauging what he would and wouldn't be able to use, and because many games and apps use an in-app purchasing or advertising supported model and don't have a for-pay option, some of those were free apps.

And it's 4.1, not 4.3 where the parental controls were implemented, so he has unrestricted web browsing along with these free apps.

I work for the ISP that we use at home. Said ISP has policies which try to disassociate IP addresses from user accounts, but I have a static IP address which overrides most of those protections. And said ISP also maintains a blacklist of malware sites for their primary DNS servers, by default domain names associated with the worst offenders will be redirected to an internal web page which tells you that the domain is blocked, and that you can switch your name servers if you want to work around this...

... or provides a form where you can request unblocking of a given domain.

On Friday I'm sitting in my cube and one of the ops guys wanders by and says "the most interesting tickets are being generated by something coming from your IP address...", and we look, and we see a few tickets where the form fields have HTML and BBCode with links to findyourinsurer.com and myedguide.com and the like, sites advertising cheap car insurance and solutions to erectile dysfunction (why people interested in erectile dysfunction drugs might also need cheap car insurance is left as an exercise for the reader).

And we go look in the server logs for that blocking machine, and we see referrers from scammy toolbar sites, lol.searchpin.us and www.searchbar.me, with a user agent of:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0"

I quickly call Charlene, she hasn't run Windows recently, so I assume it's some cross-site-scripting exploit that A.'s triggered on the Android tablet, and either Chrome or the Android browser on the tablet is doing wonky things with the user agent.

Except that as I dig through the logs for my web site, which I know we browsed with Chrome, at least, I don't see any hits from that user agent.

So the best guess at this point is that one of those free apps is posting spam. Or something else on my network was infected. Or...

I need to put a new hard drive in my house server and do some admin work on it, and in the process I want to put in some monitoring. A logging DNS proxy. I suppose that in terms of being truly paranoid I'm behind the curve, but before we left on Saturday morning I turned off the house server, and need to think about better firewall strategies.

And then I need to think about how I can start to build a net architecture that knows something about what data is flowing where, so that we can find anomalies. And think more about going back to paper.

The tablet is now with A. at his house, and on someone else's network so it's no longer my problem and will be difficult to diagnose, but it is making me paranoid.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Games Microsoft Health Spam broadband Open Source Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Heinlein Automobiles Architecture Handicaps & Disabilities Archival Real Estate ]

Cash machines robbed with infected USB sticks. Physical security still matters.

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python ]

Reason: America's Internal Checkpoints is about the 100 mile strip around the edge of our country which has essentially become a rights-free zone. But I found particularly interesting that that dogs are now being used as "probable cause" and an excuse to drag people from their cars and tase them.

Because...

Explosive- and drug-sniffing dogs' performance is affected by their handlers' beliefs: UC Davis study finds detection dogs may exhibit the "Clever Hans" effect.

“It isn’t just about how sensitive a dog’s nose is or how well-trained a dog is. There are cognitive factors affecting the interaction between a dog and a handler that can impact the dog’s performance.”

— Lisa Lit

ie: If a handler wants the dog to alert, the dog will alert. This is important to keep in mind as we are asked to serve on juries where police dogs may have been used to establish grounds for an initial search.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Theater & Plays Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Dogs Archival ]

Groped passenger gropes back.

Dear TSA, the violence against the American public who travel every day for whatever reason they want or need to is unacceptable.

Time to get some gas struts and break out the Sawzall, I'm inspired

[ related topics: Photography ]

That dragon that always faces you illusion you've seen flying around. How to make it: http://www.moillusions.com/dragon-illusion/

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Apparently some free Android app we downloaded is also a spammer: http://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/18925.html

[ related topics: Archival ]

My Little Velociraptor: http://briannacherrygarcia.tum...le-raptor-by-briannacherrygarcia

More trash, toys and shopping carts than usual strewn across the Rodota Trail.

Architect Santiago Calatrava sued by Valencia Spain for their crumbling opera house. I mean, starchitect's gonna build ridiculously ugly building with maintenance issues. It's what starchitects do.

The real question is who the hell signed off on that monstrosity in the first place? Sue those people.

[ related topics: Architecture Real Estate ]

Cut off by a woman in an SUV talking on a cell phone. The stereotypes write themselves.

[ related topics: Humor Wireless ]

In the Times Higher Education, Alan Ryan reviews The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.

[ related topics: Books Education ]

Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst: Would NSA surveillance have stopped 9/11 plot?.

As documented above, however, the government missed multiple opportunities to catch al-Mihdhar, and the failure was one of information sharing inside the U.S. intelligence community. Since we can't run history backward, all we can say with certainty is that it is an indisputable fact that the proper sharing of intelligence by the CIA with other agencies about al-Mihdhar may well have derailed the 9/11 plot. And it is merely an untestable hypothesis that if the NSA bulk phone collection program had been in place at the time that it might have helped to find the soon-to-be-hijackers in San Diego.

They're spending our tax dollars stalking exes and making our computing less secure, and not doing the job they're actually tasked with doing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Software Engineering moron Heinlein Community ]

• Dropout Jeep isn't an SUV that didn't finish school, in which Larry ponders that the NSA apparently has exploits that take full control of iOS devices, and by extension there are probably similar exploits for Android and Windows Phone.
• Upon 2020: 2014 — The Year of Technology Backlash?, in which Johannes muses about the NSA revelations and how we trust technology.

However...

My growing disaffection with "the Internet of Things" transcends that I no longer trust all of the devices around me, and extends into them also requiring a hell of a lot of additional cognitive load. A friend on Facebook recently listed all the devices in his life currently screaming about firmware updates, and between his car, assorted kitchen appliances, entertainment systems, lighting... it was a pretty huge list of things that aren't offering that much convenience in return.

And I think this extends to other computing. I've been pondering recently that in the decades since I shipped my first app we have all sorts of frameworks and resources that, in theory, should help us ship that app faster, but those frameworks add cognitive load in ways that don't necessarily make it easier for us to deploy applications. Sure, we don't have to do our own windowing occlusion calculations or rebuild our own B-Trees, but that just means we end up debugging weird driver code or problems in additional abstraction layers or just end up shipping with bad JavaScript interactions (hellooo, Facebook).

There's a philosophical shift here that we're on the verge of, that I think can be a good thing. Maybe the whole NSA has pwned your tech world realization can help be a catalyst towards some of those shifts.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Weblogs Microsoft Nature and environment Net Culture Automobiles Machinery Philosophy ]

"It was only after Snowden's revelations and the uproar in response to the disclosures that Obama began to seriously probe his own administration's policies."

Hee hee hee: Dell's Twitter Account Apologizes For The 'Inconvenience' Of Helping NSA Install Spyware. Or why you shouldn't use auto-responders to manage your customer interactions on social media. Here's the tweet thread in question, and a screencap.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Personal Lubricant ]

Julian Sanchez: Lord Camden on NSA Surveillance. On how the "founding fathers" and framers of the Constitution were envisioning exactly the current scenario when they wrote the 4th Amendment.

[ related topics: Law Civil Liberties ]

Apple flatly denies helping the NSA put in backdoors. Which I think means one of three things:

1. Apple is lying.
2. The NSA is using other exploits, which means it's likely related to how iOS is being cracked in other contexts and the NSA is pretty damned cocky.
3. The NSA is lying internally.

That last one... That last one is pretty damned plausible. Which makes the "defund them, shut them down, and replace the administrators with trustworthy people" even more the right answer.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]