If you also found that funny, you are a nerd that spends a lot of time inside emacs or vi.

“Boomerang kids: 85% of college grads move home,” blared a headline on CNNMoney.com. “85% of college grads return to nest,” echoed the New York Post. “Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad,”said Time magazine’s website.

Recently, the 85 percent figure emerged in the presidential campaign, in an ad from the Republican group American Crossroads that blames President Barack Obama for the boomerang.

We rated the claim False, but as we dug into the number, we found the media had repeated it with little scrutiny. Journalists were content to copy a number from other news reports without verifying it — or even asking when the survey was conducted.

If the reporters had looked deeper, they would have found some oddities about the firm that claimed to have conducted the survey, a Philadelphia-area company called Twentysomething. The company’s website had an impressive list of staffers, but when we checked on them, we found several who either didn’t work for the company or appeared to be fictional.

The whole story is even weirder than you might imagine, and cane be seen over at Politifact. Moral of the story, news without public citations is suspect.

With all the crap wikipedia gets on accuracy, they are quite good about creating a culture of “citation needed”. We need more of that.

Gnome-do isn’t just a launcher for programs, it’s an actions engine. It has support for Pidgin buddy lists, an I even wrote an NX launcher for it. I didn’t really want to give either of those up, so I started trying to figure out how to add those to Unity’s launcher itself.

Unity lenses, the plugins that support results, are written in either vala or python. Given that I’m trying to reflex my python muscles now, I decided that was my way in. After a few false starts I found the One Hundred Scopes project, which is an attempt to build a whole set of Unity lenses to add functions and examples for the world.

The wikipedia example is a good starting point. It gives you an idea of how to build a custom search and return results. That enabled me to build a basic launcher that fed up file urls for launching nx sessions, and I created an pushed unity-lens-nx that implements that.

But, pidgin is a little harder. There is no file to open for pidgin, this is about communicating with another program over dbus, and catching the action to do something else with dbus. Fortuntately through the help of David Callé I figured it out. Also, once I had it I found some good tricks (and a couple of undocumented dbus methods) here –  https://github.com/gregorl/Unity-Pidgin-Lens which I used as inspiration.

The net result is unity-lens-pidgin.

2 key MHVLUG people online right now

Super + b and search you buddy list. It only displays currently online buddies, and available buddies are preferred over unavailable ones. You can get it via ppa here.

There is plenty more to do. The search results should be smarter, especially taking into account most recently contacted buddies, which means integrating with zeitgeist or something equivalent. Ideas floating around there. I’d like to do some overlays with status icons, just to give a visual clue on either protocol or current status state.

If anyone else wants to help, or has their own ideas, I’d encourage you to join in on the conversation. The One Hundred Scopes community is pretty cool, and I’m happy to make their vision a little closer to reality.

Human performance, by this account, does not often fit the bell curve or what scientists call a normal distribution. Rather, it is more likely to fit what scientists call a power distribution.

…

Aguinis said the bell curve may describe human performance in the presence of some external constraint — such as an assembly line that moved at a certain speed.

“If you had a superstar performer working at your factory, well, that person could not do [a] better job than the assembly line would allow,” Aguinis said. “If you unconstrain the situation and allow people to perform as best as they can, you will see the emergence of a small minority of superstars who contribute a disproportionate amount of the output.”

At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.

Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.

Just imagine these cropping up all over the US landscape. What a wonderful way to build both community and sustainability.

If APIs are ruled copyrightable, this would break all kinds of interoperability that we take for granted today. As always, groklaw has the best coverage of this legal action.

No.

The Avengers, and the build up to it, was about a different way that Marvel made movies. Just go look at the directors from Iron Man, Thor, and Avengers. These are independent film directors (really high class ones), that focus on story first. Guess what, if you make a compelling story, people like it. I know, amazing principle.

So rule #1 of production houses, fund Joss Whedon. The rest is pretty negligible after that.

	1 million	Highest estimated time until the red supergiant star Betelgeuse explodes in a supernova. The explosion is expected to be easily visible in daylight.[11][12]
	1.4 million	Gliese 710 passes within 1.1 light years of the Sun, potentially disturbing the Solar System’s Oort cloud and increasing the likelihood of a comet impact in the inner Solar System.[13]
	10 million	The widening East African Rift valley is flooded by the Red Sea, causing a new ocean basin to divide the continent of Africa.[14]
	11 million	The moon Phobos collides with the surface of Mars.[15]

Makes you think in a slightly longer time frame than what’s for dinner on Tuesday.

This is a totally awesome clock made of 180 RGB leds. It’s running off an Arduino, and the source code is available for the clock. Beyond being open and programmable, the thing is gorgeous, and now hangs in my office at work.

There is something really rewarding about being involved in a great kickstarter project. There is so much communication between the creators and the backers, and you really do feel like you are co-investing in someone’s dreams to make something awesome happen.

Today I just backed my 4th kick starter project, which is a coop Zombie game. They have been blowing through stretch goals, so really can’t wait to see all that’s provided with the final game.

Recent research hammers this home, showing that our performance drops when we try to perform both encoding tasks (experiencing what’s around you) and response selection tasks (capturing stimuli) at the same time. So next time you have a big meeting, ask yourself whether you’re better off 1) as an active, fully engaged participant; or 2) frantically scribbling down comprehensive notes for later use, while ignoring critical room dynamics that can turn meetings on a dime — non-verbal cues, power postures, and nuanced changes in tones of voice.

Make sure your taking notes, or recording the event don’t prevent you from actually experiencing the world.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which for all intents and purposes is the standards body of the Internet Protocol, has declared that “IPv6 is no longer considered optional.”

This has been coming for a long time, but because we have a generation of technologists that have been hearing IPv6 for ever, and it not materializing, people blow it off. No more.

As an interesting side bar, there was a great talk from Radio Free Asia last week at the OpenStack conference, and one of his challenges was not being able to get enough IP (IPv4) addresses in offices in Asia. Human rights software already needs to be IPv6 capable, otherwise you can’t install it in the locations you need it.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

-commonly attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I saw this most recently in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s testimony to Congress. I think it applies very broadly.

People aren’t machines, and actually react very poorly to detailed mindless instructions. But give them a goal, a vision, something they believe in and think they can do, and you’ll find that you only need to do minor direction to accomplish those goals.

Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinkertoys together? Now you can — and much more. Announcing the Free Universal Construction Kit: a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.

I mean wow, just wow.

Version 2012b-0ubuntu0.11.10:

* New upstream release 2012b:
- Update DST rules for Chile (LP: #948328), Armenia, Samoa, Cuba,
Falkland.
- Fix historic DST rules for Canada.
- Add leap seconds for June 2012.

This is why you need to apply updates regularly, and make sure you are on a supported distro. I’m very curious how mobile is going to handle this, as this will be the first leap second addition any of the major Smart Phone OSes has ever had to deal with.

But I posed as a return question for everyone to think about what their Google footprint was. If you search for your name, what comes up? how much of that is you?

“Sean Dague” in google returns: About 652,000 results (0.14 seconds). I am sure 99% of that is me.

Page 1 is (in order): my blog, my twitter account, my linked in profile, my directory entry in android market, a comment I wrote on greenmonk blog, my github, my old (long dead blog), my quora account, my meetup profile, my CPAN account. Some of that is current and used, some of it isn’t so current, but because google ranks the communities important, it bubbles up.

If you start going through pages you’ll see contributions to projects I’ve done, bugs filed, mailing list posts, presentations at conferences, retreads of my listings in twitter and android market on 3rd party sites. A public life on the internet that dates back to about 2001 (there may be earlier stuff, but that’s when I started being consciously active in the open source world).

I can live with that, it’s a reasonable picture of who I am, that future friends, associates, employers can all use and see for background. The amount of content I put out on my blog means that it will remain hit one for my name. It also means that I’m always on the front page of “Dague” in google as well. Having an uncommon name is actually an incredible boon in the 21st century if you want to build a reputation. Something that I hated as a kid, is something I’m very pleased about now.

Much like your credit score, your google footprint isn’t ever completely in your control. But you can be very deliberate about putting out content, in code, comments, emails, blog posts, public social network artifacts, which will shape that footprint to be some representation of you.

Take a minute today an look at your Google footprint, and see what picture the internet gets of you.

I’d love to hear stories, challenges, or completely new ideas in comments, so please post. And just think, that will also add to and shape your Google footprint.

White listing the Tray

I have a number of apps (RedShift GUI and an IBM firewall thing being prime examples) that minimize to the system tray. Under default Unity this means there is no UI for them. So I’ve done a broad white listing all all applications in the tray. It definitely looks a little uglier now, but at least it works.

Alt Tab

The default alt tab behavior drives me nuts, because it collapses 2 chrome windows into a single item. So you can’t quickly use it to flip between 2 browser windows. This is provided by the Unity compiz plugin. Fortunately you can just load up one of the other compiz switchers instead.

Run ccsm (Compiz Config Settings Manager) and scroll down to the Window Manangement section. You’ll want to enable “Application Switcher” and configure Next Window (All windows) key stroke there.

If there are other questions you think off, please just ask in comments, and I’ll update the post with the answers.

Late today I worked out a Thunderbird RSS issue I’d been having for years (at least 5). It’s the kind of problem that I come back to every six months or so, and this time it got triggered because someone closed the bug I filed.

It was a really good feeling. On the way home the thing that came to mind was just the phrase: “never give up, never surrender“.

On to the next problem.

This year, things are different. While there are still a few things I’m going to do to the website, I’m diving into a brand new space. The PFP, like many organizations it’s size, is largely run by lots of disconnected spreadsheets. A for instance, asking a question about who attended both key fundraising events last year requires hours of effort, as those attendee lists are in completely different formats in different places. So the focus is going inwards, and we’re going to see how much better we can make this with CiviCRM.

CiviCRM is an open source customer relationship manager that attaches to an existing Drupal (or Joomla or WordPress) installation. It can handle donations, membership management, event planning and ticketing (including online payment). It was not where I started the investigation, but when I finally came across CiviCRM, and ran it through it’s paces, I was quite happy with what I saw. I’m also really impressed by the development community, who has been super helpful. I’ve gotten a couple of minor patches in already (and working on some more major ones).

This is going to be a really interesting journey at many levels. To do this right I’m really learning how the internals of a small non-profit works, and how we map the concepts across. We’ve got some good check points in place, and I think reasonable goals on what functionality I can get online this year. It’s probably a 2 year journey before we really take full advantage of what it can do for us. I’ll be writing about this journey here, and also talking about it very regularly at our Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup. So if you are in the area and are contemplating implementing CiviCRM, or have and could share, come out and find us.