Oh! The Huge Manatee!

How to Scare People for 10,000 Years

2018-04-07T10:47:00-04:00

In 1993, Sandia National Labs published a document that contained the following words:

The danger is still present, in your time, as
it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation
of energy.

Sandia National Labs had undertaken the task of designing a radioactive waste facility in New Mexico meant to last 10,000 years — the US Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Plant (WIPP). The contents of this facility is toxic and harmful to humans. They needed to find a way to keep people out.

They setup expert panels to help design sugh a facility. In 1993, they published their findings

First they importantly recognized that, past 100 years, there is no guarantee that there will be organized oversite of such a facility:

Active institutional controls are considered effective for no more than 100 years. (F-19)

In other words, they recognized that, past 100 years or so, Sandia National Labs may not exist. For that matter, the United States of America may not even be functioning. They therefore recognized not only a need to make the facility structurally last, but also a way to communicate to future civilizations about the dangers contained within the facility. They wanted to prevent intrusions by future treasure seekers:

Certain time periods after the end of the expected 100 years of active institutional control after closure (100-300 years, 300-3,000 years, or 3,000-10,000 years after closure) [...] were considered [...] (1-9)

Physically keeping people out for 10,000 years was considered impractical, so the teams set out instead to deter would be intruders. Some intruders, it is presumed, may inadvertently discover the site while others may intentionally excavate it. They complete there survey by assuming three different levels of technology: High (beyond 1990's), Medium (on par with the 20th century) and Low (the intruders may have regressed into a more primitive technological state). Everything from future archeaeological investigation to simple drilling for water was considered.

The teams got a little carried away, it seems. When describing how the site should be marked, one team stated:

The method of site-marking must be very powerful to distinguish this place from all other types of places, so that the future must pay attention to this site. The place’s physical structure should strongly suggest enhanced attention to itself and to its subelements. To achieve this, the volume of human effort used to make and mark this place must be understood as massive, emphasizing its importance to us. The site’s constructions must be seen as an effort at the scale of a grand and committed culture, far beyond what a group or sect or organization could do. (F-50)

It's not entirely clear what that team expects Sandia or the US DoE to be able to accomplish. The real fun comes right before that, however. When describing what the architecture of such a site should convey, they came up with this bit of prose:

    This place is a message... and part of a
    system of messages... pay attention to it!

    Sending this message was important to us.
    We considered ourselves to be powerful culture.

    This place is not a place of honor... no
    highly esteemed deed is commemorated here
    ...nothing valued is here.

    What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
    This message is a warning about danger.

    The danger is in a particular location...
    it increases towards a center... the
    center of danger is here... of a
    particular size and shape, and below us.

    The danger is still present, in your time, as
    it was in ours.

    The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

    The form of the danger is an emanation
    of energy.

    The danger is unleashed only if you
    substantially disturb this place physically.

    This place is best shunned and left uninhabited. (F-49)

Oddly enough, I disagree with the framework of their assessment. They try to call attention to the site by waving a big danger flag over it. Yet, no structure is going to last 10,000 years; it will either end up toppled over or buried. If it does somehow last, it will surely be forgotten about in the middle of the desert. And if it's not forgotten about — if responsible entities keep watch over the site — then the exercise will have been for nought anyways.

A better idea, it seems to me, is to hide it for as long as possible. Make it inconspicuous. Bury the material deep and make the entrance inconspicuous; perhaps bury that even.

However, also build a large wide antechamber over the site. Ensure that anyone inadvertently digging or drilling in the area first enters the antechamber. Put all your big scary warnings in there. I agree with some of their specifics — ensure that your warnings are foreboding but cheaply constructed.

In the end, the site was built in 1999 and is rather dull looking. You can see a few images on their website. It seems to me that they have in fact completely failed at their initial goes. Were the building abandoned today in its current state, it would be highly intriguing to future civilizations, having nothing foreboding or alarming about its structure. It's clearly of value to those who built it. Why not have a look?

The Second Amendment

2017-10-02T10:41:00-04:00

Agency will always lie with the prime actors in any violent event. I continue support providing the mental and societal support systems needed to help would-be criminals find the help they need.

However, in the absence of any political, practical, moral, or ethical system for eradicating violent tendencies, we also must look to mitigate the ease and impact of such acts. Stephen Paddock killed or maimed over 450 people at last count. To suggest that we ignore the implements with which this act took place is willful denial.

Guns are instruments of deprivation. They act to deprive life, liberty, and freedom from those they are turned against. They are the antithesis of American ideals and of fundamental human rights. This can not stand.

Guns make irrevocable, unchallenged decisions for their wielder. As an aggressor, a shooter kills the innocent. As a defender, a shooter's hasty, error-prone decisions are made permanent.

They are a threat to myself, my children, my family, and everyone that I love and care about. There is no defense against a fired bullet. No amount of hope and prayer will bring them back to me as I hold their body in my arms.

And, NO, I will not count their lives as the cost of liberty. Death is not freedom.

End the Second Amendment. End gun ownership.

(Adapted from a public social media post that I made.)

Life RPG

2017-09-27T21:00:00-04:00

I've been playing with a new app on my phone recently, Life RPG, It let's you create tasks (what they call missions) that you need or want to accomplish in your real life, such as doing the dishes, reading a book, practicing the sousaphone, etc. and assign to them virtual points based on their "difficulty", "urgency", and "fear". As you complete the tasks, you earn the points which are counted towards a virtual leveling system,

In addition, "skills" can be assigned to the tasks, so that you can see yourself progressing in various skills in your real life, a la The Sims. You can practice cooking, learn to draw, or study Sanskrit and see your progress in each of the areas recorded down with some concrete, if artificial value,

Tasks can also be assigned a duration (e.g. go to the gym for one hour), a frequency (e.g. do your laundry once a week), and a due date (e.g. file your taxes by April).

Perhaps the most interesting feature, however, are the separate reward points that you can tack onto each mission. They appear as little gems in the app. Make going to the gym worth 1 gem, Make finishing a long book 10 gems,

You can then take these virtual gems and redeem them for rewards that you create in the app. 5 gems might mean you get some ice cream. (5 trips the gym equals ice cream, yay!) Rewards can also be limited in supply. Got some new gadget or toy you want to buy? Give it a high reward point cost and save up for it!

I just started using this app and am slowly filling in missions and rewards and finding the right balance in everything. I am generally ignoring the leveling and skill portions of the app. It is the reward points that I find intriguing. I like that it introduces an artificial restraint and economy on my splurges. I no longer go and simply indulge my impulses but instead mete them out more gradually. And if I want to save up for an something expensive, (I've been eyeing a table saw), I give it a high reward point cost and must excercise restraint over a longer period of time before I can justify it.'

In the end, it doesn't appear to be a perfect solution for what I'm looking for, it has many superfluous features, but I am hoping it puts me on a good habit building path. Perhaps something better out there already exists, If so, let me know!'

Parachute Use Lacks Proper Double Blind Study

2016-12-28T12:50:00-05:00

It turns out that, as of 2003, no proper double blind study of parachute use has been conducted. That is to say that science doesn't technically have the most firm evidence that parachutes work.

This observation is, of course, made in jest.

Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

One of the people in the photo above is going to have a bad day. I think I shall cite this study more often.

2016 In Review

2016-12-21T10:47:00-05:00

I said "Fuck 2016" for the first time last night and immediately regretted it. All the springs had popped out of a lock I was re-keying, and minuscule drive pins were lost to the floor. Earlier I'd been down in my basement making my hands coarse and dry working with fiberglass insulation. I was tired, uncomfortable, and frustrated; and there I was blaming a calendar.

2016 doesn't suck. 2016 is what we made of it, and 2017 isn't going to be magically better simply because the tick of a clock rolls over to the next year.

In 2017, celebrities are going to die. Politicians are going to make short sighted, selfish decisions. Humans will do _vile_ things to one another in the name of their god, their patriotism, and their culture.

So you know what I did? I got down on my hands and knees and found the damned pins. I researched how to reassemble a mechanism that was not designed to be disassembled. I got out tape, toothpicks, and tweezers, and I fixed the fucking lock.

If you want 2017 to be awesome, then make it awesome. If there's a problem, fix it. Mourn the bad but don't let it get ahead of you.

Space Ghost Coast to Coast, 20 Years On

2016-12-15T10:12:00-05:00

Twenty years ago [...] Space Ghost Coast to Coast [...] would completely reshape Cartoon Network in its image, spawning the entirety of Adult Swim and inspiring a new generation of surreal humorists.

Transmissions From the Ghost Planet: A definitive history of Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

Picture of a Dead Man

2016-05-29T21:15:00-04:00

There is a picture of a dead man on my wall. He was not dead when the picture was taken. He was sitting near me as we both smiled happily, awkwardly, in ways that only teenagers can.

I am not a teenager anymore. Age has grown through and over my body, though I am not old. Not yet.

As the living become the dead, I feel the weight of their memory as a scar upon my past where once there was levity. Two of my classmates have passed in as many days; three in as many months; more when I count the years.

The picture on the wall contains many friends. The rest of us are quite alive and my buoyancy remains, but the weight does not get lighter. Rather, I must find new strength to carry the weight, to lift it off the earth so that it does not drag.

This may be what metaphorically makes you stronger, but, for today, the new burdens leave me tired.

Rest in peace, Matthew and Jake.

Golly What a Day

2015-02-25T12:56:00-05:00

I Stopped a Fight Today

2015-02-06T19:46:00-05:00

I stopped a fight today. I was on my way from work, at the Downtown Crossing T stop, getting on the orange line.

It was crowded and the train in the station was too full for the entirety of the would-be passengers to get on. I was following behind a woman who had a suitcase in tow. She appeared to be in a frustrated hurry, as she was making her way haphazardly through the crowd.

Near one of the too-crowded doors, I believe she bumped into someone — evidently someone of short temperment. There may have been a quick back and forth shove that I did not see. As she passed, the lady she had bumped into made an angry remark, turned, and pushed luggage toting lady.

At this point, luggage lady, yelling herself, fell into the crowd and I found myself between the two sudden adversaries. Most people in the crowded space seemed surprised or confused. I immediately stepped between them and instinctively found myself repeating, "It's not helping", towards each one in turn as they hurled expletives.

The luggage lady quickly righted herself and advanced on the shover. I found myself a pushing proxy, attempting to hold my ground between the two as they lunged for each other, each yelling insistently that the other had pushed first. I still found myself stating aloud to both, "It's not helping".

A moment later some of the other passers-by collected themselves and assisted. The situation diffused without much further clash. The luggage lady continued down the platform, more flustered than before, but with less of a crowd in her way. I continued as well, passing her further down the platform. The next train came, and I assume we all boarded separate cars.

As I sat on the train, I felt the onset of adrenaline in my system. It was neither a rush nor a high as some experience. It was simply a mildly unpleasant shakiness that I felt. I found myself wondering if I had done the right thing.

Not that stopping the fight was wrong. Au contraire, I wondered if what I was saying, "it's not helping", was in fact helping. Could I have diffused the situation more deftly? I intentionally demonstrated only modest physicalty; I had no intention of escalating the scuffle. Neither woman looked at me as I spoke, the locus of their glare focused on each other.

What could I have said that would have broken their intensity? At least one person claims to have worked to confuse their assailant, but that trick presumes the attention of the attacker. Maybe it would have worked, but it would have been uniquely awkward had it failed. And getting both women to hear me simultaneously only serves to reduce my odds of success.

I did find myself coming to the question of whether I should have interfered at all. I happened to be in a logistically optimal spot to step between them, but I could have easily stepped out of the way. I asked myself this only because I am a father now and my own safety is more paramount than ever before.

I have found myself coming to the aid of the physical distressed several times before. I've driven a drunk stranger to the hospital simply because he asked which way it was. I've helped the impaired on escalators, (a barely functioning drug addict who had scared everyone off). Recently I had a conversation with a man who, by his own accord, was suffering from withdrawl of some sort, as evidenced by the vomit he was leaving on the train floor. A favorite of mine was a delirious man who was scaring some tourists; I struck up a conversation to distract him in which he told me how magnets will protect the United States from foreign invaders. I've stood between my friends and those who look like they're about to become physically violent.

I never hesitate to do it and, to my good fortune, it's always ended well. But now I find myself asking: what if? What if the person I help sees me as a threat? What if the person I assist attacks me? It's always been my instinct to run towards these folks. It is a combination of the fact that I see everyone else running away and my own naive assumption that bad things won't happen.

I don't want to change this habit of mine. Helping people is inherently good. Good not only for the people helped, but for the public around them. My vitality has given me some assurance that the worst I am likely come away with is a bruise. As I get older, that will change. I will also start having my son by my side more frequently. I will not put him in harm's way. This is a question I believe I will find myself asking more seriously as time progresses.

Comprise

2015-02-03T12:01:00-05:00

I learned a new fact today. In place of the phrase "is comprised of", one should generally use the phrase "is composed of". Thus, the following is grammatically incorrect:

The United States of America is comprised of 50 states.

When people use "is comprised of", they usually mean more plainly "comprises". This would be more grammatical and in line with the meaning of "comprise" — "includes":

The United States of America comprises 50 states.

There is actually a relatively simple rule to distinguish this: "The whole comprises the parts; the parts compose the whole."

However, the word "comprise" actually goes a step further. To use the word "comprise" emphasizes that the statement is all inclusive thus the following would be the most correct:

The United States of America comprises 50 states, a federal district, and multiple territories.

Hat tip to Andrew McMillen for the article which put me on to this rule.

Hookback

2015-01-24T20:01:00-05:00

I released a new piece of software the other day, Hookback. It's purpose it to receive and handle webhook callback's from GitHub. I've seen several other projets that aim to do this, but they often seem inflexible or difficult to set up. Hookback aims to be dead simple.

You tell it what events to listen for on what repositories, and then you give it a command to run for those events. That's it. It can run those commands synchronousely and respond back to GitHub with the output, or it can run them in the background, so that long running commands to block the request.

As an example, I am now using Hookback to power this site. This site is published on GitHub, and when I commit and push new content to the repository, GitHub notifies this server. The server then runs the commands necessary to recompile and publish the new content on the site. It makes it very easy to get new content posted.

It's my first real project written in Go and I am really enjoying it. It took awhile to find a groove with the syntax, but it's a real pleasure to use now. I am already scheming for what's next.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or features requests for Hookback. I aim to keep it simple, but that's not to say there isn't room for improvement.

The Internship & Google

2013-06-07T16:48:00-04:00

I just returned from a company outing to see "The Internship". I had set my expectations kind of low, but was pleasantly surprised. It's not great per se but is cute. Working for the company portrayed in the movie, they give a pretty good recreation of the campus and the company backdrop. But I take issue with the one thing that they get very, very wrong about Google: the people.

In the movie, work hours are long, the people are straight-up mean, and the corporate culture is cut throat. The interns are told that their Summer program is a little more than a competition, a "mental Hunger Games" as they call it. 95% of them will not be given jobs. Unfortunately, (in the movie) this turns out to be exactly the case - the protagonists and their team end up employed but at the expense of the hundred or so other bright and capable interns.

The full-time employees are don't fair much better in the script writer's hands. The two shown most frequently are rude, over-worked, and generally mean-spirited people. The term "googley" is bandied about, but those that use it are laughed at and derided.

This runs exactly contrary to everything that I've experienced in my time at Google. Google is full of incredible people, kind people, and thoughtful people. I had never worked at a place before this where each person that I meet is universally generous and outgoing. While there are some jokes about the word "googley", no one would deny that it is a positive attribute and something that they would like ascribed to themselves.

Are my coworkers at Google smart? Yes, but they aren't braggarts. Do they work hard? Yes, but not a the expense of their own well being. Are expectations here high? Yes, but they're not unreasonable. Google accomplishes great things not by virtue of fostering a hostile environment. Google accomplishes great things by employing great people and encouraging them to succeed.

Teach Girls To Be More Like Boys? You're Making It Worse.

2013-04-30T13:32:00-04:00

An article on CNN today gets gender bias issues rather ironically wrong. My wife and I were talking about this topic the other day. She would take issue with the title of this editorial, I believe. Not because the goal is wrong, but rather because the framing presented at the very outset is inherently gender biased. I would tend to agree with her.

My own suggestion, in our earlier conversation, was that, rather than teaching "girls to be more like boys" our efforts might be better focused on making masculine traits less male. That is to say, as long as we characterize positive external traits (confidence, assertiveness, etc) as being masculine traits, they will continue to be dominated by males.

If we're going to encourage young women to take on these traits, we need to make them gender-neutral, universally acceptable traits. I am not suggesting that we rename them or some other superficial, token gesture. I am simply pointing out that, when we want a woman to succeed, we can't simply say to her "be more like a man". We need to say "be strong; be confident", without the pretenses of taking on masculine qualities.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I am a graduate of the high school mentioned in the article.

Tomato's Final Form

2013-02-27T12:11:00-05:00

In my article the other day about the states of matter of canned tomatoes, I forgot to mention one disgustingly horrible form of canned tomatoes that one used to be able to find: Tomato Aspic. Thankfully, in canned form, tomato aspic is largely unavailable these days I hope that it remains that way. (Full disclosure: my great grandmother forced me to eat tomato aspic with just about every meal when I visited her. I had never though jello could make me gag so quickly.)

For those not in the know, aspic is a form of savory gelatin. Think of it as salty jello with a hint of sour. It is vile stuff. The Wikipedia page on aspic prominently features a gelatin with both chicken and hardboiled eggs suspended within it. It was commonly used as a method to preserve food.

Tomato aspic takes the worst part of savory jello and combines it with raw tomato purée. It was a bad idea when someone thought it up and it remains a bad idea to this day. Just take a look at this loaf of congeled tomato sauce:

Thankfully, the days of ambiguous matter-state tomato were largely left behind at the end of the 1950's. For those looking for some vintage tomato recipes, however, here's a delightful layered tomato aspic conconction courtesy of Wrigley's Spearmint Chewing Gum. Ingredients include onion, celery, cucumber, cottage cheese, green pepper, and of course, tomato sauce and gelatin. I am not sure why a chewing gum company used this as an advertisement but perhaps it was because of the awful breath that you'd be left with after biting into this abomination:

Canned Tomatoes

2013-02-25T18:58:00-05:00

There are a lot of canned tomato products. I mean, seriously, it's a little silly. Last night, while grocery shopping with my wife, I was asked to retrieve a cans of diced tomatoes, tomato purée, and tomato sauce. While searching through the mulitudes of sizes and flavors, I absent mindedly swapped purée for paste and grabbed the wrong can.

What took me back as I was searching was just how little I understood about canned tomato products and why they exist in such variety. So I decided to do some investigation: what types of canned tomatoes can one find in a typical American grocery store and what are they used for.

Whole Tomatoes

Starting from the largest and working our way down, we have whole tomatoes, both peeled and unpeeled. Peeled tomatoes are the most common variant and are made by first briefly boiling them to make the skin looser, removing the skin, and then placing them into a jar or can. While not particularly appetizing by themselves, they're easily turned into other "states" of tomato. Some sources that I have found suggest that canned, whole tomatoes are of a higher quality than other, more processed varieties, with the manufacturers sending dud tomatoes off to be chopped up.

Stewed Tomatoes

A variant of whole tomatoes, stewed tomatoes have been cooked — boiled longer than a typical whole tomato. This releases the flavor and makes them more suitable for adding to many recipes. Of course, it's easy enough to cook whole tomatoes, especially if the dish you'll be adding them to will be cooking further anyways. It is common to find stewed tomatoes with added ingredients and seasoning.

Diced Tomatoes

Diced (or chopped) tomatoes save some of the labor involved with working with whole tomatoes. Fairly self explanatory, they work well in salsas and sauces where you want full pieces of tomato. On the grocery store shelf, I found plain old diced and petite diced, as well as a myriad of flavor additives such as garlic, pepper, and oregano. Hunt's website lists no less than 14 different varieties. Yes, you read than correctly, one-four - fourteen.

Crushed Tomatoes

Take your canned tomatoes and mash them up. Boom, crushed tomatoes! Typically, crushed tomatoes will be run through a strainer to remove seeds and other large chunks. They're great for sauces and chilis where you're looking and some of the texture of tomatoes without the chunks.

Tomato Purée

Crushed tomatoes still too chunky for you? Try purée. Take the same, whole tomatoes but blend them instead of just crushing them. You'll still need to strain them to get the seeds and other large chunks out. This is what foods like pizza sauce and ketchup start as.

Tomato Sauce

So far as I can tell, tomato sauce is to tomato purée as stewed tomatoes are to whole tomatoes. It's been both liquified and then cooked. It will often have seasonings added to it as well. This is different than your typical "pasta" sauces, mind you, which almost certainly have added seasonings and non-tomato ingredients and may include chunks of tomatoes.

Tomato Paste

Tomato paste is the last major variation that canned tomatoes come in (to my knowledge). You take the tomato purée or sauce from the prior categories and then you cook it more. And then you cook it more. And then some more. Tomato paste is effectively highly reduced tomato sauce that has had most of its liquid cooked off. This is used when you want to add tomato flavor to a dish without adding extra liquid to a dish. It can actually help to thicken a dish to a modest degree.

If you've made it this far, you should be pretty amazed at the various phases of matter that tomatoes can exist in. I mean, holy crap, that's a lot of tomato. I don't even like tomato all that much and I am impressed. If you start throwing in all the flavors, extra ingredients, and low-sodium varieties, the multitude of options is staggering.

A Calendar of Tales

2013-02-22T12:11:00-05:00

I love Neil Gaiman's work. So when I disovered a new collection of his short stories online, I became ecstatic. A Calendar of Tales is a collection of twelver short stories that he has written based on twitter responses to a series of questions that he posted online. I only wish that I had discovered it sooner.

What particularly draws me to his style of writing is that he exemplifies the practice of "show, don't tell" when he writes. He throws you into the first story just as quickly as the character he is introducing has been thrown in, ("disoriented", "unfocused"). Yet by the end of the tale, you understand what's happening and what's unfolding without ever being told. It's absolutely brilliant storytelling.

A direct link to A Calendar of Tales.

Why Ubuntu Has Abandoned You, and Why That's Ok

2013-02-20T08:14:00-05:00

Ever since Canonical released Unity in 2011 as the default desktop environment for their operating system Ubuntu , there have been angry rumblings from the Linux community over the degradation of desktop experience. Then, in what many took as further provocation, Canonical introduced Amazon.com "Lens" integration, allowing users of Unity to search Amazon directly from their desktop environment by default. This has been widely reviled by the community that once exalted Ubuntu as a shining example of Linux's growing maturity and adoption. Why has Canonical chosen a product path that seems to be progressively upsetting more and more of their core user base? A newly released video from yesterday should being to make this abundantly clear:

What Ubuntu Was

I am going to go ahead and say that 2008 was "The Year of the Linux Desktop". Compiz was beginning to make Gnome beautiful. Dell was shipping desktop computers with Ubuntu preinstalled. Flash and Skype, popular applications in the desktop world, both had native Linux support that worked modestly well. A quick look at Google Trends shows Ubuntu, as a search term, peaking in late 2007 and riding high through next few years. Without going into further detail, it's safe to say that, in 2008, you could pick up the phone, order a Linux based desktop computer from major manufacturer that included full warranty and customer support, plug it in yourself in your own home, and expect it to work well.

This was driven, by and large, by quality work that Canonical put in to develop a well rounded, fundamentally solid desktop experience. This is not to discredit the thousands of non-Canonical individuals and groups who contributed the open source pieces that made up the operating system, but rather I am highlighting the fact that Canonical took a bunch of reasonably functional pieces of software and started polishing them, tailoring them towards an experience that your average desktop user wanted. They made sure that hardware drivers installed themselves and that popular software was kept featureful and up to date. The baked in pretty pictures and colors into the desktop themes that had theretofore required a lot of fiddling and customization on behalf of the user. They made Linux approachable.

And Then Mobile Happened

For this effort, Canonical deserves accolades. They made desktop Linux work. Yet making a free, easy to use desktop environment is hardly a strong business model. And while Canonical was working hard to make a working desktop environment, along came the iPhone, and the computing landscape fundamentally changed.

This took time of course. While the iPhone made a big splash in the market, it took at least a little while for the full impact of their product to be felt. It wasn't until a year after its initial debut that Apple released their app store. Meanwhile, in 2005, Google had purchased Android, but it didn't release their first phone until 2008, a few months after Apple opened their app store.

And even now in 2013, five years after our "Year of the Linux Desktop", the full force of the smartphone takeover is only just beginning to be fully appreciated. Traditional mobile companies like Nokia and Blackberry now appear to be in their death throes. Google only released their popular Chrome browser for their phone in 2012. Tablets like the iPad and Nexus lines have only just started to reach wider adoption by the population in the past year or two. Companies like Mozilla and Opera are shifting strategies to help them find a place in the market. The fallout from the mobile revolution is just hitting the ground, and Canonical can't become a victim.

You Are Not Their Target Audience

And so Canonical is adapting their strategy. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, Canonical has always planned to monetize consumer Ubuntu — mobile is simply giving them the method. If you watch the video above closely, every feature that the Linux community has been criticizing them for looks like it belongs; the features look good on a mobile platform. If anything, Canonical should be praised for integrating with third-party providers like Amazon before pushing their own soft-stores, like iTunes and Play. Yes, Ubuntu comes with the Canonical supported app-store, but that's more out of necessity then anything. On an Ubuntu operating system, it is trivial to install software from other sources.

The Ubuntu users who complain loudest about the direction that the operating system is headed have never been the users Canonical intended on targeting. Prior to Ubuntu's success, desktop Linux had a niche following. When Ubuntu improved upon the desktop experience, many of those people made the switch and convinced their technologically capable friends to do the same. And as Ubuntu continues to evolve past the desktop and on to mobile, those desktop enthusiasts are now feeling left behind. That's because they are being left behind. Canonical has bigger plans for Ubuntu.

And That's Ok

Ubuntu had a really good thing going on in the late 2000's. Ubuntu wasn't perfect, but it was building an excellent foundation for an amazing desktop experience. Recently, many point out, their desktop experience feels degraded. However, I am arguing, they still are making a great desktop experience — just for a different consumer.

They are crafting the a unified consumption device; the computing experience that your parents, or your siblings, or your buddy wants. That statement probably doesn't sit well with every reader of this article, but it doesn't change the truth of the matter. When your average computer walks into an Apple store, they are not looking to purchase a highly customizable, minimilistic desktop environment with no bells and whistles. They want an entertainment device, (that they might also be able to do some work on — maybe). I actually found the above video when a graphic designer who I am friends with posted: "Sick UI! Watch all the way to the end." They're not building a system for traditional Linux users; they're building the exact opposite — a system that non-traditional Linux users want to use.

Yet building such a system in the open source world is awesome for "traditional" users, even non-Ubuntu users. The stability and software improvements that get introduced into the Linux ecosystem due to this are practically invaluable. Graphic card companies, like AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel are drastically improving the quality of their drivers, pushed by companies like Valve. Stability in desktop systems has improved by leaps and bounds as have support avenues on the web. All the changes that Ubuntu is driving in their mobile efforts are trickling into projects like Linux Mint, projects that don't have the business motives of Canonical, but do reap its benefits. Whether you use Ubuntu or not, there should be no doubt in your mind that desktop Linux stands to benefit from having a major player in market working to increase adoption.

htmlmin

2013-02-18T09:29:00-05:00

I've written an HTML minification library that's ready for release. pip install htmlmin should get you going.

This site is statically generated via pelican and I noticed that the content generated by it was not as compact as it could be. I started looking into existing HTML minification solutions and was left disappointed. I found one, django-htmlmin that left me disappointed - it relies on Beautiful Soup, Django, and other libraries, which in turn have lots of other, non-HTML dependencies such as MySQL. Furthermore, it isn't really that featureful or well designed, as I looked through the code.

htmlmin has no dependencies other than Python's builtin HTMLParser. It has features that allow you to fine tune how the HTML gets minified and allows you to easily mark up your HTML inline to demarcate non-minifieable areas. It follows the HTML 5 specification closely to account for non-closed tags.

There's still a few more features that I want to add. Specifically, I want to add a feature that allows removal of opening and closing tags where allowed by the HTML5 specification. I also want it to recognize whitespace: pre inside of inline style tags. Those will come in the next version of the software as I design tests for them.

Laurent Durieux

2013-02-13T21:21:00-05:00

Laurent Durieux's imagined movie posters are gorgeous, with all the right details to be both visually and emotionally captivating. There's a write up in Collector's Weekly from a few days ago. It looks like Mondo has had them for sale in the past.

Updates for 2013

2013-02-11T10:16:00-05:00

It has occured to me that part of the reason that I started this site was because I wanted to practice my writing. That doesn't work if I don't write!

A lot has happened in the past couple of years. I helped boostrap a trucking logistics company in early 2010. Over the summer, I left that company [on good terms] and have joined another, more well known company.

My role now involves working to help make the internet faster. I joined the PageSpeed Insights team. It's been a great team to work with and I can already see some of my changes and researching making an impact on the development. If you have ideas for the team, feel free to send them my way or, better yet, hit the team up on our mailing list.

I spent most of the weekend hacking on this site, getting my contributions to Pelican squared away, and making a few new features as well. I threw the raw content of this site up on GitHub and setup a webhook that publishes updates to the site as soon as I check them in. I'll have more details on how I did that in a future post. More importantly, I really have no excuse for not updating the site anymore. It's as simple as a call to `git push`.

Stay tuned for more!