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.

Validate executable exists in shell

Like this!

#! /bin/bash
command_validate() {
command -v ${1} >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo " WARNING: I require ${1} but it's not installed. Aborting." >&2; exit 1; }
}
command_validate passwd
exit 0


Is that cool, or what?

Via the always helpful stackoverflow.

Door knob

A thing I knew before today but never really thought about:

At a cost of $3.00 each, it is cheaper to buy a used door knob from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore than to pay a guy to re-key a lock for which you have lost the key.

Any other form of existence doesn’t interest me.

I'm doing up thing at work that features a little shell scripting, a lot of Kermit: glue to do a thing with free tools that the big expensive EDI application can't do for itself.

After hours of gazing at complete but scattered kermit docs, examples, source code, I was able to very carefully type the meat of my script.

rename /replace:{{}{\%6-\%7}{^}} \m(filename) \%4

This is the watershed.  It's all downhill from here.

Now the shell script can iterate over a text file, pass variables to the kermit script which contains that painfully wrought line above.

kermitget.sh ftp.blah.com user password destination store prefix date-time

And all kinds of crazy Turing-stuff will happen. 

A three-line function will call a 20-line Kermit script, process hundreds of customer names, thousands of files.  Data flies into EDI which sends it to JDE which turns into orders, requests.  Things get built, shipped.  We make money.

Stuff happens.

"Meaningful Work or Death. Any other form of existence doesn’t interest me."

Instructions on Friday the Thirteenth - Max Wolf Valerio

Instructions on Friday the Thirteenth   -   Max Wolf Valerio

Fall asleep with your contacts on

dream of forests lit up with light bulbs

And the thirteenth floor

        disappears –                  an elevator floats inside the liquid tower 

                  wake up again           and again            under     

                        scrolling stars – 

 

And there is a Catskill eagle . . .

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

~Bruce Lee

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

~Moby Dick

You got your programming in my systems administration

You've got Puppet.  You got your emacs.  This is how to make them play nice together.

Get puppet-mode.el here.

Edit .emacs like so

(when
(load
(expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/puppet/puppet-mode.el"))
(package-initialize))

(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.pp$" . puppet-mode) auto-mode-alist))


And voy-la - .pp files are now pretty and tab correctly automagically.

Fuck .... fuck ... fuck .. fuck fuckfuck!

RT @tjic: RT @anthropocon: Look kids! A real live SPACESHIP. You'll be able to go watch it rot in a MUSEUM. #Inspiration

I did not love Shuttle.  Too big.  Too expensive.  Too government.  Too design-by-committee.  Not enough mission.  Too much 'we have a space station to justify the Space Truck that justifies the space station'.

Those wings ... those stupid wings.

And now it's all gone and we're paying a platoon of bureaucrats astronauts to train to ride to space in another country's ships in fucking Soviet designed rockets.

I am an optimist.  I believe what will come next, SpaceX or Blue Origin or whatever, will be better, will be the start of the real space age.  Spaceships and industry and bases and people in the high frontier forever and ever amen.

I do, I do, I do.

But I did love the idea of her.  An actual space-ship.  American-friggin-made.  Up like a rocket, glides home like a prayer.  Manned missions to space, an expression of the best of what we are as a civilization.

I'll miss that gorgeous complicated expensive beautiful fragile flying machine. 

You'll never see her like again.


See also here.

Vobis non me dux

We need a little more of this:

... better yet, give him the real reason: "Well, I need a magazine with thirty-three rounds in it because f&#$ you, Ed." Seriously, where does he get off thinking how many "bullets" are in my magazines is any business of his? Vobis non me dux, Ed; you ain't the boss of me.

Don't Tread On Me.  Vobis non me dux.  Same thing, different verse

Cereal

I said "I'm going to Wal-Mart - anyone need anything?"

"Cereal," said the children.

"Hmm.  I bet I could make cereal .."

"No!" the littlest one cried.  "Food poisoning!  We'll never eat cereal again!"

Drama queen.  He ate one piece of bread from my first batch.  It was not good.  I've gotten better since.

How hard could it be ...

The goal is to make the dough extremely thin with areas of near transparency. You may notice that you are in effect making one huge bran flake at this point.

Seems to meet my standard for manufacturing at home: cheap, easy, quick, repeatable.  And you only need to add raisins to produce the acme of breakfast cereals.

The only solution is to do more of the same that has not worked in the past

[Obama] added, “I personally, and my administration’s position, is that legalization is not the answer.” Drug operations could come to “dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint,” he said, and “could be just as corrupting if not more corrupting then the status quo.”

Obama Says Legalization Is Not the Answer on Drugs