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.

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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