December 2009

"I've written a command-line tool for migrating journal entries from any LJ-style server to any other LJ-style server. This tool needs testers. It should run on any system with a recent Python installed. That means OS X out of the box, most Linux distros, and any Windows system where the user has installed python."

""Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies. They know they're doing a good job. You can't say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don't trust anybody," Sela said. "But they say, 'So far, so good'. Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you've spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable"

"Lady GaGa - Bad Romance vs. Human League - Don't you want me."

"Democrats, at the time, didn't launch an assault against the Bush administration, and we didn't see Al Gore condemning the White House. It simply didn't occur to Democrats in 2001 to use the attempted mass murder of hundreds of Americans to undermine the presidency. Eight years later, Dick Cheney believes his principal responsibility is to destroy President Obama -- the man Americans chose to clean up the messes Cheney left as a parting gift after eight years of abject failure. "

"President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered."

"Frecency is a score given to each unique URI in Places, encompassing bookmarks, history and tags. This score is determined by the amount of revisitation, the type of those visits, how recent they were, and whether the URI was bookmarked or tagged. "

"Our good friend Drizzy has been hard at work converting the DROID Android 2.1 ROM over to the HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1 and his dedication has paid off. YES, You did read that right. Drizzy has also made this DROID rom from Android 2.1."

"Not only are you paying for a DRM infested file that will only play on a couple of devices and getting files which aren't optimized for the portable devices they're supposed to be designed for, you have to wait several weeks to get the same movie found on the DVD. Unless you're looking for video files that are more restricted than DVDs and not optimized for your portable device you're better off doing your own encoding. "

"This hearty stew offers rich flavor at the approachable price of about $2.48 per serving. Warm pieces of naan bread make the perfect accompaniment. "

"A high-fiber stew for the slow cooker with lentils, mixed vegetables, peanuts, and tomato sauce. "

"While Link can move a single pixel at a time, in any direction, the longer he continously moves in any direction the more he gravitates toward aligning himself with the underlying grid of the screen. The tile grid for LoZ is 16 tiles wide by 14 tiles high (including 3 tiles for the status display at the top of the screen). Each tile is 16×16 pixels. Link operates on a half-tile grid, though (32×28 tiles, 8×8 pixels each). As Link moves, if he’s not currently aligned with the half-tile grid, he is adjusted, one pixel at a time, toward the closest correction. As a result, if Link is 4 pixels off alignment he’ll line back up with the grid after moving 4 pixels."

"I almost never actually visit the Facebook web site: I follow it through a feed reader (in my case, NetNewsWire) along with all of my other feeds. "

"The point I am trying to make is we’re getting a little crazy with our architectures. These days, we write PHP just like Java, but it’s not Java. It works completely differently, and we shouldn’t try to force patterns that aren’t necessarily the best fit. You don’t need all that. Just write good code."

"Git and Subversion can work together in many ways. Previously, we showed how Git users can work with a project primarily managed by Subversion. In this post, we describe one way to handle the converse: Google Code acts as a stable read-only Subversion mirror of a Git project. In this model, patches are first applied to the central Git repository and exported to Google Code later."

"Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as 'hot zones'. Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. Cinching to the left or right edges of the screen will resize the window to fill exactly half the screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side (splitscreen). Cinching to the top edge of the screen will resize the window to fill the entire screen (fullscreen). Dragging a window away from its cinched position will restore the window to its original size. "

"git The Lean Mean Distributed Machine By Chris Wanstrath anyway, i want to talk a bit about git today"

"It is perfect for anyone short on space (like a dorm room – but you never heard that from me), or anyone who wants to get their feet wet with home brewing."

"Carbonating tap water to make seltzer is easy, fast, and absurdly inexpensive with my improvised apparatus. All that is required is to place CO2 (carbon dioxide) gas in agitated contact with chilled water for a few seconds. In this essay, I'll show you how it is done with easy-to-find parts and common PET (polyethylene terephthalate, sometimes called PETE) soda bottles. I'll also explain the kinetic chemistry of why it works so well. And in the second half of this essay, I'll explain how I progressed from this improvised apparatus to installing a complete soda fountain in my home. "

"The heart of Ares is its visual drag-and-drop interface builder. The interface builder makes it simple to build complex layouts that adapt to orientation changes and support multiple webOS devices. The visual debugger in Ares goes far beyond the debugging tools previously available to webOS developers, and Ares’ code editor (based on the pioneering work of Mozilla’s Bespin delivers a great experience. Even in beta, we think you’ll find Ares to be the most complete and efficient environment for building webOS apps."

"I'm wanting to brew up a holiday spiced ale, but not in the typical "winter warmer" style. I'd like to use my Brown Ale as a base, and add orange peel, corriander, ginger and cinnamon in small amounts. I don't want to overpower the brown ale base, but have a decent amount of aroma and flavor from the spices. Here's what I'm thinking, please take a look and let me know what you think: "

Got a really late start, but I am brewing a batch of brown ale tonight. Watching little flakes of hop dance in the boil

"MCLIDE is a double-clickable, stand-alone development environment that connects to a Lisp either locally or through the network. It's like a combination of Slime with a modern GUI based IDE."

"Unplugging the dongle to my Logitech MX 1100 and then swapping my modifier keys worked. Just be sure to open the modifier keys window first."

"The problem turned out to be related to the wireless USB hub for Logitech’s MX Revolution (and others?) mouse. If you unplug it before you change the Modifier Keys the changes do take effect. You can then plug the Logitech USB dongle back in and everything works fine. I tried every combination of plugging my keyboard into my computer but the Logitech dongle was plugged into the back of my display so I didn’t think to try it. Michael Richardson figured it out."

"Can’t make it to a meeting thousands of miles away, but wish you could? Need to be two places at once? Perhaps you need the telepresence robot from Anybots. This weekend while attending Singularity University’s second Curriculum Planning Meeting (CPM2) we had the pleasure of bumping into QA, the telepresence robot from Anybots. Below is our short review of the robot, followed by an exclusive Singularity Hub video interview of Anybots engineer Benjie Nelson showing off the robot."

"The greatest musician to sing about Hanukkah since Adam Sandler."

"So the three of us made a pact: We will walk to California one day. Maybe not this summer, maybe not next summer; but by the gods and all that is holy, we are going to walk across this country."

"We live in an age where people are starving in the midst of abundance and our greatest enemy is our own testosterone driven urge to control our territory and our environments."

"Capitol, you’re a bunch of goof-balls. This lawsuit is the tactical equivalent to pooping on someone’s birthday cake."

"I need to be clear here: If you have Firebug installed you are probably not getting fast Javascript. Firebug doesn’t have to be active on your current page. If you have the grey icon on your status bar, you have probably disabled the JIT."

"However, I don't refer to commonly used shortcuts that a noob would find cool. I am talking about a seasoned unix user (be she/he a developer, admin, both, etc), who thinks (s)he knows something 99% of us never heard or dreamed about. Something that not only makes his/her work easier, but also is COOL and hackish. After all, vim resides in the most dark-corner-rich OS in the world, thus it should have intricacies that only a few privileged know about and want to share with us."

"Yet what the media has failed to grasp is what 4chan can tell us about where we're headed. The Chans aren't the freak sideshow of the Internet. They are the heart and soul of the Internet. And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us. At this point there should be little doubt that the Internet is mutating the human species into something completely different. Therefore it's instructive to look at the most extreme, freebased forms of the Internet to see where we're going -- and 4chan is that freebased version of mankind's new drug of choice."

"Often, web applications will prompt the user to select a file, typically to upload to a server. Unless the web application makes use of a plugin, file selection occurs through an HTML input element, of the sort . Firefox 3.6 now supports much of the W3C File API, which specifies the ability to asynchronously read the selected file into memory, and perform operations on the file data within the web application (for example, to display a thumbnail preview of an image, before it is uploaded, or to look for ID3 tags within an MP3 file, or to look for EXIF data in JPEG files, all on the client side). This is a new API, and replaces the file API that was introduced in Firefox 3."

"Amazon EC2 Instances currently cost $0.10 USD per hour to run plus bandwidth charges (which for standard web browsing will be negligent). This gives Amazon EC2 the potential to be an incredibly cheap on-demand proxy server. Finally you only pay for what you use rather than paying an extortionate monthly rate."

"After reading Simon Willison’s post on Node.JS, I decided I’d give it a try myself. Today I released node.websocket.js"

"After our short demonstration of what you can do when you put XMPP inside the browser, we wanted to demonstrate that it works equally well in a mobile browser."

"This adapter fits over the cigarette lighter plug on the DC power cords and ends in alligator clips in order to connect a CPAP directly to a battery. A DC power cord is needed in order to use this adapter. "

Need this for my backup machine. "The new replacement chambers for Remstar and H2 Heated Humidifiers now come with 2 flapper valves, a lid and funnel. The humidifier will work with Remstar series machines. "

Need this for my backup machine. "The REMstar Integrated Humidifier is for use with Respironics CPAP systems including REMstar Auto, Pro, Pro2, Plus, Liteweight, Bipap Pro2, Bipap Auto, and the new version Bipap-ST. The humidiifer moistens the air delivered by the Respironics CPAP device."

"CPAP.com is proud to bring you the smallest, lightest (2.5 lbs), CPAP battery pack on the market. "

"This is a 6 foot long cable that connects a DC-compatible CPAP machine to any 12 Volt battery source."

"CPAP PRO is not a cpap mask. It has no straps, no headgear, and no annoying apparatus. Invented by a sleep apnea patient that hated his standard mask, CPAP PRO has been the solution for thousands of CPAP sleep apnea patients that now enjoy a healthy night's sleep without the difficulty and hassle of a traditional CPAP mask or BiPAP mask."

"These alternate-universe, time-warped re-imaginings of our Mac apps make for great collectables. They’re incredibly detailed and perfectly crafted. And we think you like them, even though we realize the intersection in the “Panic Fan” and “Atari 2600 Fan” venn diagram may be very, very small. "

"This has been a while in the making, but here it is - the Rusty Venture Soundboard! If you like it, please Digg it - thanks. "

"The book aims to provide a modern approach to information retrieval from a computer science perspective. It is based on a course we have been teaching in various forms at Stanford University and at the University of Stuttgart. "

"Make Magazine editor and publisher Dale Dougherty has just announced Maker Faire Detroit which will take place July 31-August 1, 2010 at The Henry Ford Museum."

"11 years ago I blind-pitched Wired magazine an ill-defined article on Rand. In response, they asked me to write an "interview" with her, where I would come up with all of the questions and then cobble together her answers from things that she had written and said (she died in 1982)."

"The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. Preparing printable text using a word processor effectively forces you to conflate two tasks that are conceptually distinct and that, to ensure that people's time is used most effectively and that the final communication is most effective, ought also to be kept practically distinct. The two tasks are The composition of the text itself. TThe typesetting of the document. "

"Spatial indexing is increasingly important as more and more data and applications are geospatially-enabled. Efficiently querying geospatial data, however, is a considerable challenge: because the data is two-dimensional (or sometimes, more), you can't use standard indexing techniques to query on position. Spatial indexes solve this through a variety of techniques. In this post, we'll cover several - quadtrees, geohashes (not to be confused with geohashing), and space-filling curves - and reveal how they're all interrelated."

A universal stylesheet for IE6 that doesn't look like complete ass, no matter what the site.

"When you bind a "live" event it will bind to all current and future elements on the page (using event delegation). For example if you bound a live click to all "li" elements on the page then added another li at a later time - that click event would continue to work for the new element (this is not the case with bind which must be re-bound on all new elements). "

Gee, ya think? "God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour. Believers subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs on controversial issues. "Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs," writes a team led by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

"I generally think of it as business logic, HTTP translation layer, and templates, rather than as model, controller and view, respectively."

"Many Web developers think in MVC, the design pattern that describes Web development frameworks from Struts to Rails to CodeIgniter. What I’m finding lately, though, is that it’s not incredibly intuitive. ... The other day I was thinking about another acronym that’s relatively new to me — ETL. It stands for Extract, transform, load and is DBA jargon for the process of migrating data from one data source to another. But I think that for reports in particular, it describes how you should organize your code pretty well."

"The problem is that no one quite knows what to look for when dealing with Internet Explorer’s plugins. Plugins in IE are ActiveX-based, so there’s no single API for them all—each has its own method of returning, for example, version information. What this basically means is that while Firefox and other browsers are putting all of their plugin information in one handy place, Internet Explorer is jealously guarding its plugin-related secrets. It’s like the Dick Cheney of browsers. And we are, um, the Information Security Oversight Office in that analogy. Er… let’s just jump right in with some working detection cod"