It's not the heat ...

Hot.  Sultry.  Sweaty.  Humid.  So hot the rabbits ain't gonna run and the dog ain't gonna hunt.  How humid is it?  Don't ask.  August in Texas finally found me up here in Wisconsin in July.

Only good thing about riding a bike to work is that I don't have to climb into a car sealed up and baked in the sun.

Did I mention it's hot outside ...

Master Funnery Sergeant

Who is this? Who the f*** is it?

Not just a phoney-fake Marine but a phoney-fake Marine who got to jump out of airplanes.  And not just a phoney-fake Marine who can parachute but one who got himself a Special Warfare insignia.  And an EOD badge.

And not just a phoney-fake parachuting Marine/SEAL/EOD man but a phoney-fake parachuting Marine/SEAL/EOD man who can't arrange his shooting badges correctly or assemble his cover correctly.

Jesus Christ and Saint Peter in a sidecar.

You know - you just know - this guy is sitting at home after work.  He has no friends.  None, zero, zilch, nada.

I feel sorry for the guy.

Via Terminal Lance

Cloud Go Boom

A storm knocked out amazon's cloud service last night (2012-06-29) [1].  A whole lot of stuff on the internet got whacked.  Especially annoying was Netflix - I wanted to watch a movie, and couldn't, for about five minutes.

It used to be that, for an organization, to experience this kind of disruption you needed your own data center.  You had to pay out big bucks for servers, disk drives, electricity, staff.

Now all you gotta do is pay a lot of money to someone else.  Progress!



Which isn't to say that I'm against the notion of 'cloud'.  For some applications, it makes sense.  For some organizations it's ideal. 

But if you're gonna do it, you gotta recognize that you're outsourcing something real important, that the cloud provider is not nearly as interested in your data as you are.

And sometimes they're going to pull a fumducker and leave you hanging.


[1] I'm sure we're going to find out, in time, that it wasn't something simple like 'ran out of fuel for the generators' but a really-truly cascading error that jumped out of the fourth dimension to whack them hard.  We've all been there.

Ideal Workspace

Ideal: browser - Terminal - emacs [1] [2]

In virtual desktop 2 is email, virtual desktop 3 is for other stuff.

It does not stay this tidy, but this is the ideal.[3]

Your mileage will vary.


[1] Really, aquamacs.
[2] Yes, emacs has a shell.  Several of them.  They're just not as good as iTerm2.
[3] As-of right now.

bizlog.sh

BizManager from GXS is an okay tool for EDI.

But it lacks any but the most rudimentary reporting on how much traffic one is sending.

What I need is a breakdown by date/hour of what kind of traffic I'm sending. 

I asked the vendor.  Reply: Have-not-got.  We'll-get-back-to-you. 

Annoying.

Bash to rescue - here.

Run that sucker for a few days, then do this on the output ...

cat *traff*txt | grep as2o | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep as2i | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftps | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftpu | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftpd | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'


And presto: data you can hand to your project manager and say 'this is how much krep the EDI tool handles.'

Things I would like to do with my operating system

... that I should be able to do, [1] but can't.  Maybe I just don't know how.

What: Focus on an application window in Space1 [2].  Input a keystroke,  send it to Space2.

Why: I have a window -  an email, a pdf - it's in the wrong space.  I need to refer to it while I doodle around in another virtual window.  I don't want it here, I want it there.  I want it there now, I don't want to wait while it makes a long trek left or right across three monitors to the next space.

Okay I could restack spaces so they are on top of each other, not side to side.  Still: keystroke, bamspiceweasel, done.


What: From terminal [3], send input to browser.  'Enter' 'Next' or 'Page Down' 'Page Up'.  Slap text into an input box [Enter].

Why: Terminal is where I work. Stuff happens in term.  Twitter.  The company phone book from a shell script.  I edit text there. [4]  The web browser, when I'm working, is a reference.  It contains how-to guides.  Tutorials.  Knowledge base stuff from vendors.

The browser is a television.  I want a remote control.


[1] Linux or OS X need only apply.
[2] Wiki: Spaces (Software)
[3] Do I really need to footnote this?
[4]  I play iTunes from terminal.  It rocks.

S4C Novel of the Month

Zoe's Tale is the best book John Scalzi has written.  Ever.

Wraps up all the loose ends from the Old Man's War series.  And brother, there were a bunch o' them.

It is supposedly a YA novel but ... naw.   It's just good.

Joe Bob sez check it out.

P.S.  I still want a Brain Pal.

A treat for your soul

Just Because ...

Darth Vader Wearing a Kilt on a Unicycle Playing Bagpipes (YouTube)

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Vote for Gary Johnson because he won't have a f*cking kill list

Gary Johnson: I Will End the War in Afghanistan and Bring Our Troops Home Now. Unlike President Pepsi and his challenger Governor Coke, Johnson means it.

And he won't have a f*cking kill list, neither.  Go, sign.  Doesn't mean a damn thing, but it's fun, costs you nothing, and it's a way to protest.

And they've solved the 'innocent bystander' problem that has dogged earlier drone strikes.  If they get blown up, they were bad guys.  Automatically!

There is a bit from Full Metal Jacket where a door gunner is murdering women, children, who were out in a paddy, working.  He yells to Joker "If they run, they're VC.  If they stand still, they're well disciplined VC.  Ha!"

This is now national policy.

If this pleases you, if having a shadowy cabal do evil in your name makes you happy, then by all mean, please: vote this krep-head in for another four years in office.

On the other hand, if this kind of thing makes you sick to your stomach, if it bothers you in the slightest, then you have choices.

Doing nothing about evil is to condone it.


"Hey, hey, BHO, how many kids have you killed today?"

None, they were all bad guys, because, bystanding.

"Oh."

Tab Clearing

How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome.

Uncle Sam pays the bills for companies to privatize space.  As it should be.

The Privatization of Outer Space

Space Exploration: A Closing Window?

The Hardware Startup Movement.  Hardware startups are hard because - capital.  Now .. not so much.  Maybe.

Speaking of Iraq .. Belmont: Friday Follies.  The one sense in which these two videos are alike is that they depict a policy failure. Both record how immense organizations became sidetracked into pursuing in goals which had nothing to do with any rational objective.

Peter Thiel's Rise to Wealth and Libertarian Futurism.

Walking a directory tree with PERL.

NET::FTP : Recursively search FTP directories (was: Net::FTP Problem)

Why, yes, I took a dive into the PERL pond this week.  How did you guess?

Why I use Perl: Reliability.

Modern Perl.

Compiling and running scripts in Emacs.

Free Bach Recordings.

China: The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over the protection of citizens ... causing rampant gun ownership.   I am failing to see the problem here.

Of Boobs and Glasses

Welcome to the Future Nauseous

pv - Pipe Viewer

Tab Clearing

Our new Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske: "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them."  Well golly however did we get that idea into our silly heads.


The US Code on GitHub.  320 mb of text.  Maybe we've got a few too many laws.


pv - Pipe Viewer - is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline.


Predictably, Catholics were not amused, and Muslims threatened to kill lots of people.


Hardware Startup Movement

Tally-ho on Dragon

Audio from Mission Control;

"We copy. Tally-ho on Dragon!"

Tally-friggin-ho.  Welcome to the actual space age.

No Coke - Pepsi

Mihm's Charcaol Grill - pretty good food.  They've got this on their menu board

WE DON'T SERVE COKE.  EVER.

Because, the nice lady behind the counter said, when the original owner opened, he choose RC.  The Coke rep told him if he didn't choose Coke he'd go out of business.  That would have been 1958.

A half-century of institutional grudge.  I respect that.

Right-tighty lefty-loosey

When one is lefty-loosing a lug nut one ought to really be darn sure he's lefty-loosing and not righty-tighting.

Because after you sweat those things down with a lot of muscle and some foot action in the bargain it's a bear to lefty-loosey 'em again.

The regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself

It started in California.  Then it just growed.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

The can on the left was bought last year.  Had the other one for a few years.  The new can has a complicated capspout with controls - a switch to lock back when you want to pour, a button to mash make the gas come out.  Release the button and the (for lack of a better word) safety resets.  It is annoying.  It does not feel cheaply made, exactly, but I wonder how long it will last.

Some boating forums have suggested drilling a hole and putting a tire stem in there and using the screw top as the way to close the hole.  Great idea. Just what I wanted to do with my Saturday afternoon, hacking the gas can to make it work exactly as well as it did three years ago, before government wrecked it.

Taco Seasoning

Taco Seasoning. 

You know what that is - it's a packet of stuff you buy at the store, toss in the ground beef, and you've got taco meat.

Still buying it at the store?  Cut it out.  Just stop - it takes so little time to make, it's so easy, that I am now embarrassed that I ever bought it from the store.

Here.

1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp paprika
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp black pepper

Mix.  Dump into your ground beef.  Store if needed.   Do I need to tell you 'in an air-tight container'?  Didn't think so.

Taco-friggin-seasoning.   Have a nice day and happy Cinco de Mayo.

Bulk Food - Peter Watts and Laurie Channer

It's a few years after we learn to understand Orcan . . .

Well, no one expected the whales to be such assholes.

Awesome short story.

Bulk Food - Peter Watts and Laurie Channer

To protect and serve

Cops arrive to help a guy in distress, won't take 'I'm fine, go away' for an answer, shoot his ass dead.  That'll learn him some manners: open the damned door next time, like a good subject.

Later a Grand Jury says 'no problem, dude, free to go'.

"If I knew that there was a man coming to my house with the fixed intention of doing me good, I would run for my life."  ~Thoreau

America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places

Here Randy's got another hangup, something that's been slowly dawning on him as he stands on the beach beneath Tom Howard's concrete house: the perfect freedom that Tom's found in Kinakuta is a cut flower in a crystal vase. It's lovely, but it's dead, and the reason it's dead is that it has been alienated from its germinal soil. And what is that soil exactly? To a first approximation you could just say "America," but it's a little more complicated than that; America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places. Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta. The closest outpost is really not that far away: the Filipinos, for all of their shortcomings in the human rights department, have imbibed the whole Western freedom thing deeply, in a way that has arguably made them economic laggards compared to Asian countries where no one gives a shit about human rights.

Neal Stephenson 'Cryptonomicon'

Shocked, shocked I am . . .

The Administration's top man for Terrorism: We're thought about the drone strike thing and the shit-can-the-due-process-thing.  Much to our surprise, everything we've been doing is cool.

Paul Krugman: Shoveling money onto the fire hasn't worked yet.  We need to shovel more in.  Also, I have a new book out.

Elizabeth Warren furiously paints herself as a prole, is actually the 1%.  Also she's indian Native American.  Oh wait, she's a prole in her heart, where it counts.  She feels your pain.