Acme SAC

Acme SAC. A programmer's editor, shell and user interface expressly designed to make you feel less intelligent than you thought you were.




I skimmed Acme: A User Interface for Programers. Unix terminal windows are really teletypes and are an archaic way of talking to a computer - no argument there. Gotta be a better way - preach it! Basic concepts, explanations, check.





I fire it up at work. Hmm - it needs a proxy to communicate outside the corporate firewall - half the demos and 'isn't this nifty' stuff in the readme are elsewhere! And where do I set a proxy up at? Okay, wait till I get home, then. It comes with a shell - awesome. Or not so much - the shell seems to live in it's own weird little world and I can't get to my files to see them. No wonder when I open a new window with a valid path it tells me I'm full of poo. And so on.

And the point of an editor, shell and so on that won't let me at the files I already have are what?

I can't tell if what I'm looking at is a learning curve that looks like a sheer wall ninety miles high or some kind of practical joke played on an unsuspecting world by minanthropic computer nerds from AT&T.





A long, long time ago I joined the Marines. I was introduced to what was then the brand new M16A2. Guys in the fleet were running around with clapped out 'A1s and we got weapons right .. out .. of .. the box.

The training material was geared to teaching guys who had been shooting the 'A1 about the new and improved A2. Half the introductory material was going on about the differences. They were selling the weapon.


If it's Mattel, it's swell.


I didn't need to be sold. I didn't care that a weapon I'd only seen on TV had feature X and was replaced by feature Y and why it was so much better. Just teach me how to shoot the weapon I've got, and stop wasting my time with bullshit.



A better rifle. And a better looking rifle.

As the M16A2 training material, so Acme SAC.

What I need are not reams of theory and endless mailing lists of smug hyper-smart computer guys running vast arrays of Plan 9 and Inferno networks giving me a long back story on why this is the greatest thing since sliced cheese. I don't want to learn how to tear the motor apart - maybe later, but not now.

Now, I want to get in and drive. How to find the friggin' files I was working on pre Acme SAC. How do I get it to talk through a proxy. Can I use it to SSH to another system - 'cause I think that would be pretty nity. Can it be a better editor than TextMate?

Just a tutorial that is designed with your average ordinary guy, is all I'm looking for.




Please?

George Orwell diaries - in blog form

Interesting!

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is
publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008,
Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until
October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the
entries were written.

Episcopal Suicide Bombers

Noah explains how we know that the recent bombings in Pakistan were not the work of Episcopalians.

No way it’s Piskies - they actually got something done. There wouldn’t
have been bombings, just Exploratory Commissions on Suicide Bomb
Planning, with sub-committees on Vests, Explosives, Nails and Other
Fasteners (’screw’ is heteronormative), Enhancing the Experience (rat
poison, etc.), Integration of Suicide Bombing into the Millennium
Development Goals. Then there’s the indaba groups, where all
present will talk about how the Commission affects them, how they feel
about the difference between various different targets and methods, and
all will engage in active listening, as we learn to ‘live into the
Suicide Bombing’ together with the creative tensions of how we see
Suicide Bombing differently, but are part of the same Murderous Drive.

You have to be precise

At Dinner

Hey, Younger Monkey - want another helping of chow?

Yea, please.

You have to say 'yes' or 'no'. 'Yea' 'naw' 'yup' 'nope' 'nuh-uh' ... don't convey what you mean with clarity. They're not precise [1].

(eye roll) Yes, please.

Thank you!


Later That Night

Did you wash everything when you took your bath?

No.

Hey - you know you're supposed to wash everything[2].

Well. I didn't wash my skin on the inside or my blood or my bones.

Wha?

Daddy. You have to be precise.

Then he smiled - a nice smile - and brushed his teeth.


[1] Some of you will accuse me of being a nit picky wretch. And you would be right. All I can say is that you were not present for a truly monumental tongue lashing on this subject from the company gunnery sergeant when you were eighteen and reporting to Infantry Training School. Stuff like that has a lasting impact.

[2] He has this thing going on where he misses great chunks of his body when washing. So that he'll have clean everything else and muddy elbows. Or a grubby neck. He's eight - but I'd prefer a clean child after a bath not one with a grimy neck.

Classical music with shining eyes

Yes, I wrote 'classical music' in the title. No, don't look at me like that. Shut up and watch this:

Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes. (YouTube)

Or go to www.choralnet.org, then click on Music & Passion with Benjamin Zander.

H/T Billy Ockham
Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.

Nerd Achievments

I have a very vivid memory. We're at my Grandparents house in Fort Rock. My Aunt, sitting at the kitchen table shouled "I won!". She'd spent a few hours with a deck of cards at solitaire and ... she'd won. A minor victory but good for a few cheery moments.

Well ... I won!




That's Civilization II, running on the medium-hard level. I don't usually play it to completion but there we are.

Got the mother-lovin' spaceship to Alpha Centauri while having my shins kicked by some aggressive and advanced Mongels allied with low tech but annoying Vikings.


And yes, Fort Rock is about as deserty and sage-brushy as it looks in those pictures. Helluva place to grow alfalfa if you ask me.

Arr Matey

She had a box of, oh, at least a hundred of these on the counter.


Two Ounce Vial


Guess who wandered by and decided they'd make a most excellent hidden treasure?


Miscreant and all around Boy.

Not one or two vials. All of them.

He and his friend did a truly righteous job hiding them. Some by the pond, some along the fence, some in his friend's sandbox. Dozens and dozens of years from now people are going to dig these up and wonder "what they hey?"

Google Lunar X-Prize

Michael Laine passes this along from ISU

I am at the International Space University (www.isunet.edu) this summer, and we have to do a group project... Mine is an assessment of the Google Lunar X Prize, and some of its potential outcomes. To that end, could you please use your network(s) and ask people to come to this link, and respond to our survey.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ebBzH_2bOoybbNVWyJVjvuZQ_3d_3d

It should take less than 5-10 minutes, It's not very deep or time consuming. But we think it will be pretty useful to the Foundation, and to many of the competitors.

Of course you will have access to the report and the survey results when we are finished. The 'meat' of the report will be about 100 "actionable recommendations" to a variety of stakeholders (Foundation, competitors, space agencies, private space sector, etc.)

If you do send it out, please email me back and tell me which lists you posted it to, and a bullet point description of who the target of that list is.

Feel free to pass this along to whomever you think should see it.


Thanks, my team and I appreciate it.

Take care. MJL
Michael J Laine

Not many people read this blog. No, it's true! But some do, and if they tell six people and if those six tell six more .. copy, paste, pass it along.

And I know that some actual smart people [1] from SpaceX wander by, and XCOR shows up in my referrer log now and again. So who knows?


[1] Yes, their rockets blow up and this might be proof of that funny old saying about how to make a fortune in space launch [2] - but they are still in business. And XCOR has attracted investment [3] - way to go! They're doing something right out there.

This is not (I think) some kind of fad like on-line pet foot stores but the beginnings of the real-deal commercial space-age.

[2] How do you make a small fortune in the launch industry? Start out with a large fortune.

[3] Desert Sky Holdings Makes First Institutional Investment in XCOR.

A Thing I DId Not Know This Morning

You don't need two eyes for depth perception. No, I knew that - what I did not know was that there were terrestrial examples of that. Behold, the mantis shrimp

Each compound eye is made up of up to 10,000 separate ommatidia of the apposition type. Each eye consists of two flattened hemispheres separated by six parallel rows of highly specialised ommatidia, collectively called the midband, which divides the eye into three regions. This is a design which makes it possible for mantis shrimp to see objects with three different parts of the same eye. In other words, each individual eye possesses trinocular vision and depth perception.

Comment of the Day

by miriam

I think our gaming group is pretty much all anti-obama. We might be gullible enough to buy AD&D 4.0, but we’re not buying “yes we can”.

Cooking with onions

Cut a red onion into rings. Wrap in a twist of foil. Pour vodka into the twist. Keep pouring until it's full. Wonder why you even have a bottle of vodka - who in the house drinks this stuff? Wrap a second layer of foil around the twist because there is a leak in the twist and vodka is leaking onto the counter. Briefly ponder the wisdom of cooking with something that smells like edible lighter fluid.

Place on the grill next to the burgers. Cook until done. Mmmmm-mmmm.

.

Madness

1. "We don't care. We don't have to - we're Oracle."

2. Never ever never go down the road of buying into an Oracle Solution - this way lies madness!


The Madwoman of Chaillot is the story of a modern society endangered by power and greed and the rebellion of the "little people" against corrupt and soulless authority.

Paws

Nobody I know ..





But boy-howdy look at those paws. Also ...




Awww.

Alligators

Posting a (slightly edited) comment from Soni's blog. Because I do want to post something here every day and I don't feel like fooling around. I've got stuff to do.

This ... was my day. My entire day.

My latest true love at work is a whacked bit of enterprise software. The application keeps data in MS SQL Server 2005. I need to extract data from it’s db that the application won’t let me get at in the way I want. It can produce HTML or PDF reports at the click of a button but I can’t script that function and parsing the data in HTML is a PITA anyway.

I want it generated by script in ASCII, bitches. Then I’ll slam it into our documentation wiki. Eighteen times a day if I want to. Because I can.



So I install the sql command line tool. Except that 2005 (unlike 2000) installs in a locked down mode. So I need to run the tool to expose the db to the command line tool ..

Did I come here to drain a swamp .. don’t recall .. wow look at that alligator!


Productivity Monster

The configuration tool is .. not .. installed in the Start menu. It does not appear to be on the server at all. This appears to be a once-in-a-lifetime kinda deal so extraordinary that MS’s technet is silent on the subject.

Well … TechNet says in a distant way .. just run the tool. It’s not there? Oh, g’wan - you’re not looking hard enough.

Meanwhile the work that I had to set aside to tend to this is piling up. And it’s the ‘fun’ work wherein I play with Unix boxes and *nix applications that certainly have their failings but the operating system getting … in … my .. way is not one of them.


This is not our server room - but the equipment looks familiar.

Thug

Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."




Tom Matzzie: "Shut your mouth or I'll release the hounds."

If the recipients act in a way he disapproves of — namely, donating to certain conservative or Republican causes — Matzzie and his new nonprofit group, called Accountable America, will unleash what the New York Times describes as “a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives.”

Not just a gross violation of manners and civil discourse - it's also against the law. See 42 U.S.C.§ 1985(3) ..

if ‘two or more persons conspire to prevent by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner, toward or in favor of the election of any lawfully qualified person as an elector for President or Vice President, or as a Member of Congress of the United States; or to injure any citizen in person or property on account of such support or advocacy.’


Threatening people in the name of saving the Republic. Nice piece of work there, Sluggo.

New Dog

This is Wispy.



She followed my wife home from the rescue shelter a few weeks ago.

Ain't she just a bundle of cute?

The pain and the agony

I noticed today that (wow all of a sudden - how funny) that I no longer can edit 'things' in my Ruby on Rails sandbox application.



I hear you, Troi.

Anyway after slogging around the code ... why hey, it's because I introduced RESTful_ACL which broke things in a weird and so-far unknown way.




The difficult half of troubleshooting is knowing where to start. So it's all smooth sailing from here on in.




What?

Closing Time - Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz

Closing Time - Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz
Caitlin Talmadge

Link. (PDF).

Summary: Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, with mines. A US-led coalition of Naval and Air forces could demolish their air and naval forces, then clear the mines.

What a world, where we gotta fret over crap like this.

Blastwave - what the heck?

Hey!

All assets of Blastwave.org Inc. are frozen until further notice. All Solaris(tm) related open source software work and services are cancelled.

All websites, documents and binary software packages that bear the mark Blastwave or Blastwave(tm) are no longer available until further notice.

Questions may be directed to 416 - 798 - 3410.

Wed Aug 6 14:28:24 GMT 2008

I use those packages! Put 'em back!

The World's Worst Stripper

Not a lot of actual .. stripping going on, really.

NSFW. Not very ... eh. Words fail me. Click at your peril.

I've seen worse. No, I'm not a regular patron but when you're 20 and overseas in the service .. you go see the show, at least once. I went back, now and again.

In this case myself and few other Marines found ourselves in the midst of the sad, run-down collection of strip clubs and bars outside Camp Foster. Just a pale echo of the glories in Kin-ville, a few miles up the road. The only redeeming quality these places had was they were within walking distance of Camp Foster.

When the best thing you can say about a place is that it beckons to Marines so down-and-out they can't scrape up cab fare ..

On a weeknight. The week before payday. Two so-so Filipinas - and you have to hunt long and hard to find a so-so Filipina - were sort of .. not gyrating, just kind of waving their arms around. Like dorky kids in junior high school they were kind of .. dancing but not dancing. Moving, to be charitable and to abuse the positive notions of that word.

About as sexy and inviting as watching grandma shuffle around the kitchen heating up last night's meatloaf.

Via MAV.

iNo!

You know what's fun about having a bird that can make a sound like this: iNo!

Saying this to him:

'Charlie, you have bats in your belfry.'

iNo!

It's all in the timing, really.



Not our cockatoo - I've yet to see him do this while I have a camera.

RESTful_ACL

I was staring at this problem - I want to have control over bits on a webpage, by user and lo! Someone has already done most of the hard work for me: RESTful_ACL.

RESTful_ACL is a simple Access Control Layer for Ruby on Rails. It restricts access on a fine-grained level to any RESTful MVC stack. While the ACL structure and engine are provided by this plugin, the implementation is fully up to the user. Every application is different and everyone likes to setup their User / Account / Role resources differently; this plugin will allow you to do your thing and keep that thing locked down.

Please see the wiki (http://github.com/mdarby/restful_acl/wikis/) for more information.

Awesome. And the creator, Matt Darby, manfully resisted the urge to call it 'ACTS as ACL', which is a good thing.

A World Split Apart

A World Split Apart

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand.

Read it, here.

That just ain't right

Mr. Obama wants to cut us all a check for a thousand bucks, flensing the oil companies for the dough.

I'm against stuff like this in principle, but if Uncle Sugar wants to send a few bucks my way .. well I'm not going to send the check back, now am I?

I dunno about the supply and demand stuff - I'll leave that for the guys that attended college - but the numbers in this just don't seem right.

There are 209 million of us eligible for this money. Not counting overhead that is $209 billion dollars worth of checks being sent around.

According to some smart guys at ISRIA profits for the oil industry in 2007 were $155 billion [1]. I see a shortfall of $54 billion.

Hell, I'm not even sure some of the companies in the report are even American. BP - in't that British Petroleum? Royal Dutch Shell - hell, I didn't even know the Dutch still had a monarchy, let alone a big friggin' oil company. You learn something new everyday.

So ... yeah. I dunno where it's all going to come from - maybe ExxonMobil can take out a payday loan or something from the Cash Store.

[1] HTML version of the PDF, here.

Hat tip Boots & Sabers

Knowledge is obvious and lame in retrospect

I learned something today with Ruby on Rails that was daunting and full of 'wow' before I dug into it - and indeed I approached the learning curve with some trepidation.

And after the fact it's all so easy and lame that I wonder what the big freakin' deal was.

Ain't it always the way?

Falcon I launch set for this evening

I know what I'm doing this evening ...

Hawthorne CA – August 2, 2008 - Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has scheduled the launch of the Falcon 1 Flight 3 mission for Saturday, August 2nd. The launch window will open at 4:00 p.m. (PDT) / 7:00 p.m. (EDT) and remain open for five hours. If launch is delayed for any reason, SpaceX has range availability to resume countdown through August 5.

Lift-off of the vehicle will occur from SpaceX's Falcon 1 launch site at the Kwajalein Atoll, about 2500 miles southwest of Hawaii. Falcon 1 launch facilities are situated on Omelek Island, part of the Reagan Test Site (RTS) at United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific.

SpaceX will provide live coverage of the Falcon 1 Flight 3 mission via webcast at: www.SpaceX.com. The webcast will begin 30 minutes prior to launch and will include mission briefings, live feeds and launch coverage from the launch site at the Kawjalein Atoll, as well as a special video tour of SpaceX facilities by Elon Musk, CEO and CTO.

Update: Failed to reach orbit - the stages didn't separate. Not great but like the man said, rocket science is easy, it's the engineering that's tough.

Burke's Law of Metadynamics

Burke's Law of Metadynamics

In the course of the chat, Burke came up with approximately the following statement, which has stayed with me since:

"Systems dump excess energy in the form of structure."

It may not sound like not much, but it's rather profound. It essentially says that a system operating in surplus won't stay so, but instead will act to build up its own structure at the expense of the surplus. Looked at the right way, it's a nutshell explanation for the existence of life - an eruption of structure in response to excess solar energy.

I doubt the meat of the statement was original with Burke, but given his gift for a turn of phrase, the formulation may have been. At any rate, I've never seen it elsewhere. It keeps coming up in my own thinking and writing, so I've decided to memorialize it as "Burke's Law of Metadynamics" for reference by myself and anyone else who cares. The 'Burke' is obvious, the 'metadynamic' sets it aside from rules that operate within dynamic systems of fixed structure; it is a statement instead about the malleability of structure.

It's been long since I've done ecosystems work, so that's not the reason it keeps coming up. Experience has show me that the statement applies equally to human organizations and systems, particularly if you substitute 'wealth' by analogy to 'energy'. In that form it's a more succinct statement of several of John Gall's Laws of Systemantics.

rejection: a series of slips and falls

rejection: a series of slips and falls
by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

not good enough
not tall enough
not proud enough

not strong enough
not long enough
not efficient at all

the measurements are coarse
the analysis is off
the passion is feeble
the feeling is false

the oceans are polluted
the guns are loaded
the schools are bookless
the woman is wearing pantyhose

the excuses are many
the reasons are few
the verbs are passive
the solutions futile

there is nowhere to go
no redemption, no future

there is nowhere to go?
no redemption, no future?

the eyes are round
the tongue is parched
the bosom is resounding
inside beats the heart

the muffled timpani
that refuses to dull itself
it survives the low-flying
machetes, the beheading
machines that swing
so close to the surface

the obstacles are insurmountable
the choices are few
faith is flagging
hope doesn't know what to do
doesn't know what to do
doesn't know what to do

she comes up from her cross-legged
meditation, with a piece of chalk,
she draws the frame of a door,
a curve of a knob, she invites herself
to please just knock

Mixtape - July 31, 2008

New mixtape.

Includes a very kick-ass song - Vantastic - from a duo called 'The Superfantastics'. Alas, I dipped into Folkie Town, indeed all the way past Folkie Town into Filkville. Sorry about that - skip it if you like.

But I think I redeemed the set with some Scott Miller and Yoko Kanno.

And what did I do today?

I pondered the mysterious of life and the funny ways that people choose to attack a problem.

Like, why, given a task to get data from A to B, with the option of doing 'stuff' to it in the process, they choose to park the connection data in a database. Maps, settings for how the server talks to which and who is connected. Queries written in a proprietary language (close to but not quite SQL). All stuffed into a database.

This feels wildly sub-optimal. Was this state of the art ten years ago? What were we thinking?

Now, yes, I can see why you would want to store transaction data in a database. Although for as much use as we put that data to we might as well send it to /dev/null.

Which Windows ain't got but there you go.


But I also had fun - I downloaded Openadaptor and fired up the examples.

From the tutorial

briandunbar_localhost_~/openadaptor-3.4.2/example/tutorial:java org.openadaptor.spring.SpringAdaptor -config step04.xml
INFO [main] Loading XML bean definitions from class path resource [org/openadaptor/spring/.openadaptor-spring.xml]
INFO [main] Loading XML bean definitions from URL [file:step04.xml]
(snip)


Now fire up the included test.html page



Enter a dollar amount, push enter and it writes xml data to the file location defined in step04.xml.

The best part - to me - is that this is a solution that scales in a way that (say) a Visual Basic written application can't.

Define a new connection in xml. Mount it on an NFS share so you can run it from multiple servers. Launch it from shell. Schedule it with cron. Get hardcore and use an enterprise scheduler. Run the proc in the background if it's going to take a while. Stuff like this is what unix is good at.

Of course, the chances of this making it from my laptop (or even my hip-pocket develoment server) to an actual Project are slim to none, but there you go.

Presidential Advice - make sure your tires are properly inflated

Make sure your tires are properly inflated.

I can't wait for the weekly televised broadcasts from the Obama White House:

• "Simple Repairs for Refrigerator Leaks That Will Save You Money"
• "Weatherproofing! Keep the heat in the house and money in your bank account."
• "Have You Checked The Filter On Your Car?"
• "Watch Your Speed! 55 saves lives and it's good for the Environment."

Via.

Fog with a Bite

Yes, China, you can host the Olympics and maybe have clean air so the competitors won't fall down and die. But you'll have to pretty much shut down the entire region to make it happen.

Drastic efforts to curb pollution include pulling half of Beijing's 3.3 million vehicles off the roads, closing factories in the city and in a half dozen surrounding provinces, and halting most construction in the capital.

Some 300,000 heavily polluting vehicles, such as aging industrial trucks, have been banned since July 1.

Even after doing all that it may not do you a damn bit of good.

'Our job is to decrease the pollution as much as possible, but sometimes it is very common to have fog in Beijing at this time,' Du said.

It's fog, with a bite to it; pollutants interacting with sunlight. Nothing to worry about. Unless you to run a few hundred meters very very quickly.

In which I bitch and moan and forget how good I really have it

So .. it's like this. My new best friend is an Enterprise Application Integration server. Written in Visual Basic [1].

I'm digging around to see why it's suddenly decided to flood an ERP application server: how does it talk to that server - what's the logic?

I found something worse than Visual Basic - I found that underneath it all the thing is using batch files to transmit XML files to the server. Lame batch files.


xmlcopy.exe very_critical.xml jde-server-005.yourcompany 6004 200


That's it: 'command file - server - port - timeout'.

I've got nothing against batch files, honest. I love batch files, for what they are, in the same way I like a boot to the head - a simple, direct way to accomplish certain tasks.





My ire was aroused when I poked around two connectors, found 22 batch files, each identical to the sample above, changing only the filename. I've got a bunch more connectors to survey.

If I want to change the destination .. or the port .. or the timeout .. of this one process I've go to edit a few dozen files per connector.





Whoever invented the idea of variables ... he died in vain.

Leaving me with some really tedious and boring crap to tidy up so we can live with this outdated gimpy excuse for Quality until the funds can be signed off and management approval gotten for a new EAI tool.




Yeah, I know - someone call the Waambulance. Sucks to be me with a job I love and working indoors and all that. At least I'm not the guy driving the airplane - talk about a day to harsh your mellow.


What I'd like to fool around with is Openadaptor.

It was written - and the development is still directed - by a bank. A German bank. Which was, sure, established in 1786 which make it a sort of Puppy as far as European banks go, but, hey, they've got spunk. The software developed by those guys outta be solid.



[1] A minority of you will skip ahead - the story from here is inevitable and well-known to anyone who has worked in IT for longer than a week.

That's not to say you can't write quality applications in VB. Just that ... like seeing a second Lieutenant with a map and compass .. it's rarely a sign that good things are ahead.

Quack

Presented without comment.

Semi-Random Linkage: Startup ideas, Shirky's Law and Fred Wilson

Paul Graham - Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund.

We don't like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. So we're trying something new: we're going to list some of the ideas we've been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn't anticipate.

Having ideas is the easy part - execution is hard.


The flip-side of that argument ..

I’ve heard hackers brag that they could have built Twitter over a weekend. Underlying this boast is a misunderstanding of what is truly impressive. Coming up with Twitter required only a small amount of technical knowledge. The hard part was the social insight to realize such a tool would be useful. This is a social insight the bragging hackers didn’t have.

That insight is just as important as building the tool.


And this ..

Fred Wilson wrote two articles in the last few days about globalization and its effect on the Internet. When Union Square Ventures raised its most recent fund, Fred told investors “The Internet is getting more global, more mobile, more social, more intelligent, and more playful.”

I wish the internet was getting more playful- nothing more serious (I've found) than a Malaysian floor manager who can't ship product because The Cow has tripped over The Extension Cord and The Server Room has no power.

Or, just maybe, my sense of humor does not cross the language barrier so good.

Applebees - aspiring to mediocraty

Applebee's - aspiring to mediocrity in Wauwatosa.

It's a long tail of woe and not worth telling. It's enough to say that Applebee's is about ten miles of bad country road.

It's not just the Wauwatosa branch (6750 W. State Wauwatosa, WI 53213), our local version has similar issues, and has since they opened.

Ain't no reason to darken their door when similar chow and better service are just blocks down the road.

NASA at Fifty

From the Economist: NASA at 50.

America's space agency has reached middle age. Will it now recapture the glory of its youth, or dwindle into decrepitude?

Funny - I saw NASA yesterday after work, at at Rosenthal Chevrolet. He was looking at Corvettes.

I predict a wild fling with a floozy, much money expended in an attempt to recapture glory days of the 60s and domestic trauma. In the end, Mrs. NASA is going to end up with the house, NASA will be batching it in those low-rent apartments by the river and his children will be in therapy.

Sad.

Optimism

Beaton has an ear for dialog ..

Flunky: With all due respect, Sir - we have no supplies left.

Napoleon: We live off the land!

F: The Russians have burnt everything in their retreat.

N: It all depends on how you look at it! Yes, here is a delicacy!

F: A burnt stick.

N: A finely cooked branch! You have no taste for international cuisine.

Sunglasses

My sweetie.



What is that in front of her face? Her cell phone.

Why is it there? When Brenda took her picture, she was trying to hide her face and drive.

Instead of spoiling the picture, she just made it adorable.

(I dig those sunglasses, babe.)

Americans: the greatest desperados, the sternest Puritans

Joseph Bottum wrote ...

Americans swing to such extremes: the greatest desperados, the sternest Puritans.

Click the link to read why. Also - a short passage from Moby Dick.

I dunno if he's right but it sure feels that way.

O God of Earth and Altar

O God of Earth and Altar

by G. K. Chesterton:

O God of earth and altar, Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter, Our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us, The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us, But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches, From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation Of honor, and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation, Deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether The prince and priest and thrall,
Bind all our lives together, Smite us and save us all;
In ire and exultation Aflame with faith, and free,
Lift up a living nation, A single sword to thee. Amen.

Wal-Mart considered not-so very harmful

Mark Perry has links, facts, figures ..

Myth: According to Robert Reich, Wal-Mart turns “main streets into ghost towns by sucking business away from small retailers.”

Reality: The popular belief that Wal-Mart has a significant negative effect on the size of the mom-and-pop business sector of the United States economy is statistically unfounded.

He's special

About my youngest ...

I knew that my youngest, Cian, was a special child from the moment he was born. He has proven over and over again during his little guy life. He is the one that used to bathe in the dog water bowl. He was the child that would put his face into a plate of spaghetti and suck up the noodles. He was the one that invented the penis airplane. [1]

It should be no surprise that he comes home from church on Sunday with a handmade card for his Dad and myself. It was in my favorite color, green. He's a very thoughtful and insightful child. On the outside is handwritten "Thank you Mom and Dad" and on the inside "For not giving me up for adoption."

I died laughing. Only Cian.

[1] Don't ask.

I made you a mixtape

I made a mixtape. Which might be the most egotistical thing I've done all day, thinking that what I like you might want to hear.

And yes, the first track is from a science-fiction television show. I happen to think that the song - 'Storming New Caprica' works as a fine bit of standalone music.

Of course when I listen I know that the piece is from a scene that features a few hundred thousand tons of space-going aircraft carrier/battleship popping out of hyperspace 100,000 feet AGL, falling at terminal velocity, spitting out fighter planes through the shock wave, hull burning (clearly this is not a maneuver the builders never even thought about when they laid down the keel) and just before it goes WHAM into the ground it jumps with a nifty *pop* back into space ...

YouTube - Galactica Falling With Style

So .. yah. Enjoy. Thanks to Erica for showing the site.

What does ITAR stand for?

ITAR stand for . . .

It
Takes
Another
Resource

Jesus Hector and his Disciples in a side car - if you wanted to design legislation that would get in the way you could not do a better job.

The State's killer app is not really violence but the ability to get in the way and screw things up.

Sons of Martha - take it to heart!

Why am I still up at 05:30? I neglected my Kipling ...

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a
little before the nuts work loose.

You cannot half-ass complicated stuff like Oracle Application Server. Woe.

Now, where's the coffee?

Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.

Cockatoo Vocabulary Report

I walk by. He does his chirp-cluck-string-a-word-thing at me.



I reply "Blah blah blah blah".

Why not? The information being exchanged is not verbal, it's information: 'hello - got a grape - boy I love grapes' and I reply 'hello - I'll get you one later'.

I'll tell you why not. His vocabulary now includes

blah-blah-blah-BLAH-blah-blah

We've got seventy more years of this.

Must be boring as snot in New Zealand

You New Zealand People must be really terribly horribly bored.

( Maybe you're like me after Battlestar Galactica went into hiatus until 2009: what could you possibly do on Friday night until the last half of the last season resumes sometime next year? )

And yes, a great big juicy smooch to you, too, SciFi Channel. {Asstards.} ) )

But, yes. Some poor wastral clicked here from Selenian Boondocks. Which is weird because Jon is about a thousand times more interesting than I am. Or at least his blog is. He works for a company that's building actual rockets. They've got a workshop and tools and all that good stuff. They even turn the rockets on once in while. They're flight testing hardware.

How fucking awesome is that shit, hunh? I mean gawd-damn.

So this guy - or gal - clicks in and then spends the next hour ( and nine minutes ( and seven seconds )) clicking through the blog archives. I'm not Lileks, Twain or Faulkner. I'm nobody. This stuff is just not that amusing, nor consistantly on topic about anything to be interesting to anyone for more than a few minutes.

All I can think of is that y'all New Zealanders must be really bored. So come on back, y'all, for a daily dose of krep blog.

Carry Permit Holders are ...

Psst - pass it on: Carry Permit Holders are

300 times less likely than the general population to commit a crime. A Texas study found that CCW holders in that state were "5.7 times less likely to commit a violent crime, and 14 times less likely to commit a non-violent offense."

Which you'd expect, if you know the details needed to obtain a carry permit in most jurisdictions.

Attention S4C visitors from outside the United States: you're welcome to kibitz, criticize, bitch, moan or whine. Commentary is always welcome!

But do recognize that what we're talking about a right that is written into the charter of the United States. You might not like the idea of rednecks, yahoos and other ordinary citizens with weapons but .. until the Constitution is formally discarded, it's as much a part of this country as free speech, separation of church and state and the right not have troops billeted in your house.

If you must, think of it as a peculiar national quirk. Everyone's got 'em.

Ipsos Custodes

The really interesting South Bend Seven comments on this picture ...

Tell me with a straight face that staring down the business end of an M1 Abrams would not fill your heart with dread. (And you pants with something even less pleasant.) You know what would scare me the most about this scene? That the crew has casually stashed a cooler on top of their vehicle. Not only will they unload serious Old Testament firepower, but they plan on breaking later for frosty beverages. It's a true badass that can level half a village in the morning and still be ready for a picnic in the afternoon.

To be fair to the crew - it's probably bottled water in that cooler. The Marine Corps has gotten seriously uptight about booze in the past decade or so. It's probably a good thing - a beer now and again is not bad but the culture we had of 'drinking to excess because you're young and you can' wasn't exactly good for anyone except the bar owners and floozies in Kinville.

His main point is spot on.

I don't like government sponsored violence, but to be perfectly honest I like the idea that there are big scary men with big scary weapons ready to reign down truly biblical amounts of destruction on people who might try to harm me and my neighbors. It's ugly, but somebody has to be ready to do it.

Gonads

Paul Harvey said it, I endorse the sentiment.

"Gonads are useful for their purpose, but they are no substitute for brains."

That is all.

wav format audio file, here.

Knockin' on heaven's door

The cooler perched on the turret adds a jaunty touch, I think.

From the always perky http://militarymotivator.blogspot.com/

Fists of Fury

Man takes matters into his own hands, assaults criminal, puts criminal in hospital.

Waiting for cries of outrage in 5 .. 4 .. oh did I mention he used his fists and not an e-vil firearm? 3 .. 2 ...

Criminals feared the day Chuck Norris came to town ..

Dear Lazyweb - An Answer

I asked

What I (think I) need, then, is a way for a plain-jane html page to refer to a common source for the header and footer. A single file to change and bam all my complexity goes away.

The answers were

Use frames. Suck it up and use PHP. Use a touch of Ruby [1]. Use make and C to take the source HTML and turn it into 'real' HTML.

The actual answer combined the last two items and lay in the tool I was using to make the web site in the first place. It's called nanoc. Whazzat?

nanoc is a tool that runs on your local computer and compiles Markdown, Textile, Haml, etc. documents into static web pages, ready for uploading to any web server.

It's written in Ruby, natch.

Long story short - see the tutorial for details - tag a page's YAML file with the bits specific to that page. In my case I have a unique title for each page

title: "The About Page"
header: "yes"

call it out as a partial in the layout file

snip
<% unless @page.header.nil? %>
html-goes-here
<% end %>
snip


What's going on here is that every page has a title (not shown above) - but not every page may get a header or footer.

Compile and bam - nanoc generates valid html and dumps it into the output directory. gzip, sftp, and you've got a website.


[1] Out of scope but interesting is that the more I dabble with Ruby the more it seems that Ruby can be utilized in the same way PERL is now - a scripting language for doing odd chores in situations where shell is too limiting. This is not a world-shaking insight or even a new thought of course, but it pleases me.

A Joss Wheden Show that Fox Network Can't Screw Up

Joss Whedon has a new show. And no way in hell can Fox Network screw up ... Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Because it's on the internet. Free. For one week only. As Ezra said ..

The plot (without spoilers) is very simple. Supervillain wants to be taken seriously and join the Supervillains league. He also loves the beautiful girl in the laundromat. It’s hard being a supervillain. If you are a Jossverse fan, a musicals fan or just a goofy side project fan, Joe Bob once again says check it out!

Not just cowboys - singing cowboys. And a supervillain.

Act I - streaming right now.
Act II - July 17.
Act III - July 19.

(The server appears to be timing out - you might want to check out YouTube if you just gotta have it.)

Dear Lazyweb

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm building a website. I'm trying to avoid a complicated kind of thing - just 'a bunch of static html pages'.

One of the first things I did was code a header and footer. Cut - paste to other pages and we're good to go. You know where this is going, don't you Lazyweb?

Now there are more pages than I thought there would be, based on the design spec [1]. Okay no problem - cut - paste the header and footer code to the new pages. Except that what was 'simple' if tedious for two pages is now becoming lame as the problem space scales. And the footer and header will change so I'll have to edit 10 .. or 12 .. or 15 files to execute a single change in the header ... this way lies madness!

Of course I'm inserting a '300' related graphic here. Wouldn't you?

What I (think I) need, then, is a way for a plain-jane html page to refer to a common source for the header and footer. A single file to change and bam all my complexity goes away. [2] [3]

So: static html, load up an element common to the website. How 'bout it, Lazyweb?


[1] design spec in this case being 'conversation with my wife' over dinner.

[2] I wish. But at least I've reduced the number of complex things.

[3] I know how to do it with PHP, but I'm trying really hard to avoid that - my hope is to turn the job of 'creating pages' over to someone else (Hi Sarah) and she doesn't know PHP. Plus PHP seems like overkill for the task. [4]

[4] It does seem like I'm heading into the realm of needing a CMS, doesn't it?

I do not think he said what you heard

You know how Prime Minister Maliki said it was time to negotiate a timetable for withdrawal of US forces from Iraq?

He didn't say that.

The prime minister was widely quoted as saying that in the negotiations with the Americans on a Status of Forces Agreement to regulate the US troop presence from next year, "the direction is towards either a memorandum of understanding on their evacuation, or a memorandum of understanding on a timetable for their withdrawal".

That was the version of Mr Maliki's remarks put out in writing by his office in Baghdad.

It was widely circulated by the news media, and caught much attention, including that of Mr Obama.

There is only one problem. It is not what Mr Maliki actually said.

What he actually said was: "The direction is towards either a memorandum of understanding on their evacuation, or a memorandum of understanding on programming their presence."

Italics mine.

Actually, it's more complicated than that. Why is it complicated? The governments of Iraq and the US are negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).

Details at the BBC story above, analysis at Belmont Club.

The Great Debate By R.S. Gwynn

The Great Debate

By R.S. Gwynn


I say we must have change.
Our changes will consist
Of things you may find strange.
I have a little list
Of things we plan to change.

I too say we should change,
Change but not too much.
We’ll simply rearrange
Some agencies and such,
Which means we will have change.

Of course by “change” I mean
(And, please, make no mistake)
Not a sweep that’s clean,
Not change for change’s sake,
When I mean “change,” I mean.

I’m glad that we agree
That changes should be few,
No more than two or three—
Changes by me, not you.
It’s nice that we agree.

You’re twisting what I said.
You’re mangling what I meant.
The polls say I’m ahead.
I should be President.
You’re mangling what I said.
You’re twisting what I meant.

The stabilizing fins did it for me

Well, that and this pic from here ...



Hours after I read that I am still chuckling. Yes, I am easily amused.

Via.

Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.

Customer complaint - well played: Part II

Hey, Laurie from Dreamland Comics? When you're caught doing a sock puppet

If you go to Google and put in “Laurie” and “Dreamlandcomics”, you get hits.

Laurie’s last name on this site matches the last name of the owner of Dreamland.

Then we looked at a “whois” query to see who registered and owns Dreamlandcomics.com, we looked the street address of the the store, and we looked at the shipping address that Laurie used for the HeavyInk shipment [1]...

Concede. Give up. Chalk it up to lessons learned. Declare victory and go home.

Because you can't win, you can only make things much, much worse by coming back to the scene of the crime and making a stink and calling people 'retards'.

Keep it up and the first hit in Google is going to be the HeavyInk thread and you'll look like yokels. Forever. Not a threat, just the way the world works.

Kudos to Tyler for the last line in that thread

P.S. — We prefer learning disabled.

[1] D'oh!

Customer complaint - well played

Mr. Corcoran of Heavy Ink handles a customer complaint with grace.



You'd think a person running an online store (that's Dreamland Comics of Schaumburg, Illinois), of all people, would know that full disclosure is the way the game is played.

A Vibrant Culture of One

L. Shane Carlson wrote

Vibrant cultures want something; exhausted cultures don’t. And what do we actually want, today? For a thought experiment, imagine hearing this on tomorrow evening’s new shows:

The Vatican announced today that it will soon begin colonizing the planet Mars. Many parts of the mission remain unclear, but the plans to launch the first rocket from a pad on the island of Malta appear definite, with a tentative launch date in July 2010. The goal will be to establish a colony capable of sustaining itself within 20 years, with the long-range aim of completing the terraforming of Mars within 100 years. Accompanying the initial group of 142 Catholic settlers on the 297-day flight will be a priest and an auxiliary bishop from the diocese of Rio de Janeiro.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1116

I'd say

• They've got a lot of engineering to do to make a launch date of 2010.
• So that's what Burt Rutan is up to.
• 'Add To Shopping List' *Click*
• Honey, you did say you'd follow me anywhere.
  

and

• Hey, Father Flanigan? I've been meaning to speak to you about converting ...

A thing I did not know this morning - Bull Sharks

Bull sharks (carcharhinus leucas) cavort in fresh water. I knew that but not this ...

Until the 1970s, researchers thought the sharks in Lake Nicaragua were a separate species because there was no way for the sharks to move in or out. It was discovered that they were jumping along the rapids just like salmon. Bull sharks tagged inside the lake were later caught in the open ocean.

The thought of a seven-foot long shark (females get up to twelve feet in length) leaping rapids like a salmon ..

.. fish are friends, not food ...

well if that doesn't make your day, I don't know what will.

Homage To A Government

Homage To A Government

Philip Larkin
England, 1969

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

Obstacle

Hmm.

The imperatives of the present are an inconvenient obstacle to heaven. The needs of the near future, even more so.

resolve by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

resolve
by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

it used to depress me
that love over time falls away

like fast-food hamburger wrappers
or used band-aids, torn from
their practice, decaying in the sun

i used to want love to last forever
or else like a piece of plutonium,
glowing hot in its chamber, dangerous
and worthwhile

it'd be kept in the
same way: metal cases armed
by two security guards, a key
in the lock, the rod jostling 'round

now, i get that love is meant to
be survived, not possessed, experienced
like sunshine, like a breeze of the ocean,
sand upon the skin.

none of these last forever
but they do return
when you seek to find them

so is the certainty of love
locked in the frightened human body
reaching out, hands flailing,

not knowing which way to turn.

Blood looks real pretty in the twilight all dark and shiny

As I sat outside in the twilight, splicing a power cable for the pump in the pond, I thought to myself, self

... all that Skin So Soft you slathered on [1] really made your hands slick. If your cutting hand slips it's going to hurt ...

And you know what? I was right.

[1] Skin So Soft makes excellent bug repellent.

A film - and firepower - full of awesome

We saw WALL-E. It is a film full of awesome. How full?

Watching the lead character go about his business, I forgot it was a cartoon and just fell into the story.

He's a trash compactor. She's on mission and packs a kick-ass gun. Can they find true love?
And where can I buy a gun like the one EVE carries?

I suspended my belief so hard I was able to ignore great huge chunks of back story that made no sense. Until the lights came up.

That's an impressive bit of story telling.

Keillor Brand Sour Grapes

I was listening to NPR this morning and 'Prairie Home Companion' came on. Hunh, I thought to myself, Garrison Keillor is, all things considered, a charming humorist when he sticks with his 'humor in everyday America' shtick.

Hello everyone, and welcome to blah theater in beautiful somewheresville. Happy Birthday, America: we're in poor shape, but we'll get better.

Gah - he can't make it past the opening without dispensing sour grapes.

In which I propose new unit of classifcation: A passel of Cliff Clavens

A passel of Cliff Clavens: A group of individuals delivering a meaningless trivia of suspect value or veracity.



What we have here is 'Cultural Context'.

Usage:
The members of the school board are a passel of Cliff Clavens.

The X Studies department at UW? A passel of Cliff Clavens.




Add it to your vocabulary, make John Ratzenberger a happy man.


First known use of the phrase, here, by ElamBend.

Saturday Cat

Dude.



You don't have to drink. You choose to drink. Get some help.

Note - not my cat. You're lucky if you ever get to see him, unless it's dinner time.

Rodger Young

Shines the name of Rodger Young ...

"Come back here!" The Lieutenant shouted. "It's suicide." The young private ignored the lieutenant's concern. If someone didn't knock out that enemy gun, the entire patrol would probably die. "Come back Private Young....THAT'S an ORDER!" The lieutenant shouted again.

For a moment the young private paused, turned to look back at his lieutenant....and smiled. "I'm sorry sir," he said. Then he smiled again. "You know sir, I don't hear very well." And then Rodger Young turned away from his lieutenant to continue crawling forward.

Rodger Wilton Young - wikipedia.

Young, Rodger W. - Medal of Honor citation.

How-to Revision-Stamp Your Rails Apps

It's the little things that make me happy. Like a nifty technique for automagically revision-stamping a Rails application.

Capistrano, after it exports an application from an SCM repository (such as a Subversion repository), writes an extra file to the application’s root directory. The file is named “REVISION”, and, as you might imagine, it contains the revision number that was exported. Displaying this information in your application’s UI is straightforward. Here’s the addition I made to a view partial that is displayed on the application’s home page:

Click the link for the rest. I love stuff like this. Also this ...




Fort Rock in Lake County, Oregon. My grandparents lived near here for a few years, raising alfalfa, then selling and servicing irrigation equipment.

Small Town

You know you live in a small town when the lead item on 'Channel 5 News at 10' is a live broadcast from the Fourth of July [1] fireworks show.

"And the fireworks keep getting bigger and better as the show goes on! Now back to you, Jim."

Why yes, yes they do. In other news, the longer you stand in the rain, the wetter you get. [3]

Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.

[1] Only in the big city of Appleton would they do the Fourth of July show on the 3rd. On a Thursday. In the smaller [2] cities of Menasha and Neenah we're doing our show on the 4th, as God and George Washington intended.

[2] And clearly superior.

[3] On the other hand, it sure beats hearing about a triple-murder drive-by shooting, or the shenanigans of our Elected Officials.

Marine Logic

As an approach to life it lacks nuance.



But once you get going, stuff happens.


From the always awesome Military Motivator.

Deer and Dog

What kind of dog is that?



He's a Catahoula. They need about 8,000 acres of ground to roam around in, they're smart as a whip. In other words - a lot of work.

This one liked to snooze away the hot summer days submerged in the horse trough, only his nose poking up out of the water.


Awww ...




I didn't take this - I just found it squirreled away on my hard drive. Clearly Momma Deer thought that the blossoms matched her fawn well enough. Never mind that they're on someone's front porch.

Hero

We've got this guy. He and his partner commit armed robbery at a Subway.

A 71-year old man - who at the time was being forced into the bathroom - drew his weapon and shot them both. Got one in the head, the other in the chest. The latter fellow ran for his life, and was found by police hiding in the bushes.

The dead dude's grandmother is upset.

He should not have taken the law in his hands," said Rosa Jones, Gadson's grandmother.

Well, spit and hellfire, Mrs Jones - it's not like the law was right there keeping Mr. Lovell safe, was it?

Her husband, Ivory Jones, also condemned the media for its portrayal of Lovell's actions.

"I don't condone what they did, (but)

Well thank God.

I definitely don't condone the news people making him out to seem like they're making a hero out of this man because he shot somebody down," he said.

Fair enough. As an official non-new people, then, I'll announce (as if anyone cares) that

To all who shall see these presents, greeting:

Know Ye that Mr. John Lovell of Plantation, Florida, for the actions taken June 25, 2008, is a Hero and shall have all the accolades, respect and honors that said office shall enjoy.

Given under my hand this day, July 2, 2008.

r/s
Brian Dunbar

........

S4C also wishes to tender their condolences to Mr. and Mrs. Ivory Jones, for the loss of their grandson. We also extend these condolences to Mr. Arrindell's friends and family.

Requiescat in pace.

Dear Workstreamer

Dear Workstreamer,

Letter redacted per request.