A Geek, Observed

Linux pickup lines

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:23:16 -0700

Fingers that beautiful shouldn’t have to type on a keyboard like that. Come back to my place, I have an Extended II.
I’d like to emerge -auNDv my package on your command line.
Let’s get dirty and segfault together.
Is that emacs in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?
Let’s scan each other’s ports, then watch the sun come up after a sleep cycle.
I’d love to see your boot process.
I’ve checked your dependencies, and we call the same libraries. What do you say we try a little interprocess communication?

Used an online tool to rough out what I “should” be saving to put both kids through college &...

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:39:11 -0700

Used an online tool to rough out what I “should” be saving to put both kids through college & retire at 60. It says: save 3.5× my income.

“Destroys odors instantly!” + “Fresh Scent!” So why doesn’t it self-immolate?

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:07:18 -0700

“Destroys odors instantly!” + “Fresh Scent!” So why doesn’t it self-immolate?

Just stumbled across the blog of one Dan Hallock, from Washington. He’s a born-again youth...

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:07:18 -0700

Just stumbled across the blog of one Dan Hallock, from Washington. He’s a born-again youth pastor. [Headdesk.]

Getting out of Iraq: we’re on schedule....

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:39:10 -0700

Getting out of Iraq: we’re on schedule. http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.com/2010/07/us-forces-drawing-down-in-iraq.html

Via ratsoff, via reddit.

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:35:32 -0700

Via ratsoff, via reddit.

Last month: 5th coldest June on record. Today: 88 degrees. WTF Gaia?

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:58:15 -0700

Last month: 5th coldest June on record. Today: 88 degrees. WTF Gaia?

Over lunch, flipped off another driver for only the second time in my 12 years of driving. I am a...

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:21:20 -0700

Over lunch, flipped off another driver for only the second time in my 12 years of driving. I am a patient man, but he deserved it. :-P

RT @wilw: I mark the occasion of my 10,000th post on Twitter with a small and simple request:...

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:53:15 -0700

RT @wilw: I mark the occasion of my 10,000th post on Twitter with a small and simple request: please, be honest, honorable, and kind to …

RT @gknauss: I love this country, not because it’s perfect but because it isn’t....

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:53:15 -0700

RT @gknauss: I love this country, not because it’s perfect but because it isn’t. It’s constantly changing, and anyone can be the source …

There is no larger point here, but it made me smile.

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:25:58 -0700

There is no larger point here, but it made me smile.

"It is a safe rule to have nothing in our houses that we do not know to be useful or think to be..."

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:13:48 -0700

“It is a safe rule to have nothing in our houses that we do not know to be useful or think to be beautiful. We should show our love of art and beauty in our surroundings, and bring it to bear in the selection of the smallest household trifle. To have things tasteful and pretty costs no more than to have them ugly; but it costs a great deal more trouble. Simplicity, appropriateness, harmony of colour—these produce the best results. When we enter a room, the first feeling ought to be, “How comfortable!” and the second, as we glance quickly round to discover /why/, ought to be, “How beautiful!””

- “How to Be Happy Though Married,” published 1886

I was looking for the original source of the phrase “know to be useful or think to be beautiful,” which appears perhaps to have originated with William Morris. I thought this whole paragraph was excellent… though I am a tad dubious at the title of the book!

I understand renaming Mozilla Weave to Firefox Sync, but I miss the utterly beautiful Weave logo.

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:05:00 -0700

I understand renaming Mozilla Weave to Firefox Sync, but I miss the utterly beautiful Weave logo.

(via adamsdayoff)

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:08:24 -0700

(via adamsdayoff)

Best Popcorn Ever: butter, nutmeg, cheddar, gobs of nutritional yeast.

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:30:16 -0700

Best Popcorn Ever: butter, nutmeg, cheddar, gobs of nutritional yeast.

Ole Teucher: “If you [want] unlimited multitasking on devices of this category, go invent some...

Fri, 28 May 2010 14:24:34 -0700

Ole Teucher: “If you [want] unlimited multitasking on devices of this category, go invent some awesome new batteries.” — http://cl.ly/1Dz4

Adobe, Apple, Openness

Fri, 14 May 2010 09:47:40 -0700

Adobe, Apple, Openness:

Jim Whimpey:

Adobe claims Flash is open.

Apple makes no such claims. If you want to make iPhone or iPad apps you use Mac OS and Xcode, take it or leave it.

If you choose to leave it the alternative is HTML. A truly open platform for which authoring is as simple as editing text. There’s many HTML rendering engine implementations, the best few are totally open source with Apple being the major contributor to the best one, WebKit.

Adobe: not open, claim to be.

Apple: not open, don’t claim to be, contribute heavily to that which is truly open.

That sounds about right. I would like Apple to be more open about some aspects of its OS, but at least they’re not blowing smoke about it like Adobe is.

I Am A Moron

Sun, 09 May 2010 21:01:37 -0700

I Am A Moron:

Marcus Zarra:

Even when I am writing code by myself, there are actually three people working with that code.

First, there is me. I am a clever and talented programmer. I know to keep my code clean and easy to read. I try to do things the right way and I know that if old code is wrong that I am better off fixing it now then trying to code around it.

Second, there is past me. This guy is a fracking moron. He pisses me off on a daily basis as I am having to constant re-write his code. He is generally clueless and causes me more headaches than anyone else.

Finally there is the future me. This guy is smarter than I am, has seen more than I have and has done more. My goal, in addition to making sure my code works, is to make sure that my intentions are clear for him so that I don’t piss him off too badly.

Lewis's Trilemma

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:32:21 -0700

I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him, ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the sort of thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or He would be the devil of hell. You must make a choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I’m not sure it’s entirely incompatible to say that Jesus may have been a moral man; and that insight can be extracted from his work, while acknowledging that he may well have been a madman. Obviously one shouldn’t listen too hard to everything he said (I’m not planning to pluck my eyes out any time soon, thank you very much). But as crazy false prophets of the era go, he certainly had his moments of talking sense.

Rachel Maddow responds to Newt Gingrich: “Yeah Democrats, you...

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:07:14 -0700

Rachel Maddow responds to Newt Gingrich:

“Yeah Democrats, you sure don’t want to another big mistake like you did with civil rights. You sure regret supporting civil rights, don’t ya?…

“I would not have expected it, but the fight over health reform has turned out to be clarifying. Health reform is not civil rights… but this is government taking a major step to try to remedy something that is wrong in the country. We haven’t done that in a long time. Taxes have been cut and raised, wars have been ended and started, standards and rules have been imposed and they have been repealed, but when is the last time we took on — head on — a longstanding, intractable problem that was hard to fix, that was not going to fix itself? Actually doing health reform is a demonstration that government is not just for show — government is for fixing problems. We have a government not just to give people shiny high-profile political jobs so they can win popularity contests against other people who want shiny high-profile political jobs. We have government to work on problems that we have as a people, as a country, problems that aren’t working themselves out interpersonally or in the marketplace. Government is for something, we have one for a reason.

“…That’s why you’re hearing people now talking about this passage of health reform in the same breath as civil rights, as Social Security, as Medicare.… It is a call back to the same time that Medicare was created, [the] same year as the civil rights speech we led this off with. A time when Democrats behaved in a way that made clear that they thought government could do something — and the Ronald Reagans of the world, the conservatives, thought that government really shouldn’t. Ronald Reagan, you’ll recall, campaigned against Medicare, calling it socialized medicine, saying it would the the beginning of the end of freedom in this country…

“It’s clarifying, right? Some people thought Medicare was a good idea, some thought it was the end of America. We are back to that clarity of conflict again. Supporters of health care think that the reason we elect people to government is so that they can take on the big challenges, like our disastrous lack of a health care system. The Republican budget map they have put forward as an alternative to President Obama’s agenda, on the other hand, would repeal Medicare over time, it would repeal Social Security over time, privatizing it; and they’re against health reform, universally — not a single Republican vote for it is expected now. It’s clarifiying, right?

“Newt Gingrich, who would like to run for President for the Republican party in 2012 looks back on the legacy of government doing stuff, all the way back to civil rights, and suggests there’s something to regret in that legacy.”

Conservatism, of course, is not a really feature of the Republican party any more. Reagan, Bush and Bush were huge spenders, and presided over skyrocketing deficits, unfunded mandates, and economic disasters. But today’s Republicans cling stubbornly to the vitriol of the 60s and the 80s, and while they’re happy to let the government start wars and torture people, they still aren’t willing to let the government work on problems at home. Democrats, for all that they’re not very liberal and they’re not as effective at governance as I would like to see, are still willing to be dragged by the base into using the government to work toward the common good, which really is what government is supposed to do, is it not?