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Archive: November 9, 2024
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Hey, ChatGPT, based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what my life looks like:
Astounding ... and fascinating ...
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Archive: November 25, 2023
Archive: November 25, 2022
Archive: November 25, 2021
Archive: November 25, 2020
Archive: November 25, 2019
Archive: November 25, 2018
Archive: November 25, 2017
Archive: November 9, 2016
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Yesterday, the American people sent a strong signal. They didn't vote for President-elect Trump or the Republican party, and they didn't vote against Hillary Clinton. They voted for change. They did not like where we were headed, and they said so, loudly.
In 2008 after Barack Obama was elected President, the Democratic party controlled both houses, 29 governorships, and 27 state legislatures. But in the four elections since the Democratic party has moved further to the left and left America in the middle. Now Donald Trump has been elected President, the Democrats have lost both houses, and they are left with only 18 governorships and 12 state legislatures. *That* is change you must believe in.
I didn't see this coming. I don't like Donald Trump. But I am delighted that the era of liberal policies, free-spending big government, victimology, and sanctimonious political correctness may be brought to an end. We have serious problems and we need serious solutions. We cannot expect our government to provide those solutions, we can only hope that they get out of the way. Obamacare is only the latest in a long serious of fiascos where the government attempts to manipulate a market, and causes incredible damage. (For an earlier example, see the government's subsidy of subprime loans via FNMA and FDMC, which caused the disastrous housing bubble of the mid-2000s.)
I would guess that 75% of you, my friends and readers, are more liberal than I am. Many way, way more. (You are great friends for all that.) Same for the bloggers I follow (great bloggers), my Facebook and Twitter feeds, etc. Since last night there has been a vast outpouring of anger and frustration and denial. It will take time to understand what happened. But I hope those who are angry and frustrated will take that time.
This was not about race, not about gender, not about multiculturalism, not about trivial considerations of social correctness. You and I, we live in a bubble. We cannot easily identify with those who cannot find work, who see their towns shrinking, their kids growing up worse off than they were, the way of life they love slowly eroding. But that is reality for millions of people, and those people voted for change. They are Americans of all races, genders, and cultural backgrounds (check the stats, Trump received more minority votes and more support from women than Mitt Romney). They want to make America great again.
Let's work together and make that happen. We learn from the past, take all the best ideas, and move forward. I am not angry or frustrated, I am excited and energized. It is a new beginning, let's make the most of it!
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Archive: November 25, 2015
Archive: November 25, 2014
Archive: November 25, 2013
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 Do you understand bitcoin? If not, or even if you do and just want to learn more, check out Wired's Bitcoin Survival Guide. I've gone from thinking it's a weird fad to thinking there's something to it to thinking it seems to be getting traction. It reminds me of much of the backstory for Neal Stephenson's classic Cryptonomicon, the desire for a currency which doesn't need a central administration to regulate it or establish its value. Long term this would be pretty compelling; short term, we'll see if the [in]stability of bitcoin holds up.
At right, a bitcoin "mine" in action, from the collective hallucination of currency, which is a nice reference.
For more, you might enjoy Bitcoins Bitcoins Everywhere, from Brad Feld, which has a bunch more links...
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 A quiet day of coding, in which I discovered a brand new way to develop C++ for Linux, Eclipse CDT, and used it to create a whole bunch of new bugs :)
I love this: Russell Beattie on writing and blogging: that weird background process. "Since I stopped posting to Twitter and Facebook and start blogging long-form again, I've been 'blogging in the back of my mind' more and more. Do you do that?" Yes, yes I do! 
Scott "Dilbert" Adams wonders What if stupid people organized? (I'll avoid the snarky comment that maybe they already have :) Personally I would rather see the pendulum swing the other way...
 Today SpaceX almost launched an SES satellite into geostationary orbit... this is 22,000 miles from Earth, nearly ten times as far as the 250 miles to the International Space Station which has now been reached by SpaceX rockets several times. Punch line: delayed to Thursday. But check out this comparison of SpaceX's mission control to NASA's... a few more laptops and a few less binders :)
From kottke: some intellectual jokes. Here's my favorite: "What does the "B" in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? Benoit B. Mandelbrot." Reminds me of the excellent self-referential: TLA.
Way useful: how to force Facebook to grab the best image from your page. The punchline: <meta rel="image_src" href="posts/...">. You will also want this link to Facebook's "debugger", which shows you exactly what they see.
 Ohio State University's marching band is pretty awesome; check out this tribute they did on the anniversary of the Gettysburg address. Wow. For more OSU coolness, here's a classic tribute to classic video games.
 The average NFL game has 100 commercials and 11 minutes of action. After watching this weekend, I can believe it. A strong argument for Tivo :)
But did you catch last night's Denver / Patriots game? Wow. Those were some amazing 11 minutes!
An interesting debate, of interest to me: Android vs IOS development. Aka, for which platform should you develop first? IOS in the US, Android elsewhere, apparently, but there are also some interesting technical trade-offs, including Xcode vs Eclipse, and Cocoa vs Java. That there isn't a clear answer makes the whole thing more interesting.
 And finally, so I can find it later: Basic Javascript for the impatient programmer. A beautiful overview by Axel Rauschmayer, who often posts interesting "expert" articles about Javascript as well...
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Archive: November 25, 2012
Archive: November 25, 2011
Archive: November 25, 2010
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Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
 This morning I woke determined to get in a longish ride as a pre-turkey / stuffing antidote. Yeah, it was kind of cold (50s) and yeah, it was windy (20s), but off I went. The strong wind was blowing due South, so I decided to head North... and kept going through Westlake and Thousand Oaks and Moorpark and through Grimes Canyon until I ended up in Fillmore. At which point I turned around and rode the South wind home; nothing nicer than a tailwind behind and a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with my family ahead.
 It was a good solid ride, perfect for thinking thankful thoughts. And a nice respite from worrying about the future.
I hope you are having a wonderful day, spent quietly and peacefully with those you love...
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Archive: November 25, 2009
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Yesterday was one of my long before-dawn to after-dusk days, whew. Productive but I was too tired to blog :) And today I slept in, took it easy, coded for a while, hung out (all my kids are home!), and it was not productive at all, except in mental health.
Cyclelog, 11/24: Kessel run, 20 miles. Max windy.
Cyclelog, 11/25: Rockstore, 28 miles. In the moonlight. Beautiful.
(BTW 14 days in a row now... and not getting easier...)
 This morning my kids' school Oaks Christian had their annual Grandparents Day. It was really corny but really nice. They had a little concert - Meg played! - and the highlight was when one of the teachers asked the auditorium full of grandparents "how many of you served in WWII?" A fair number of hands went up. Wow. That was sixty-five years ago. Imagine - just try, because it is hard - imagine what those people have seen in their lifetimes...
 If I asked you to name the most successful software distribution mechanism of all time, what would you say? Of all time. You would say - you would have to conclude, after reflection - that it was Apple's iTunes App Store. I don't even know what you would say was in second place. And yet, all the blogospheric punditry insist on 1) criticizing Apple, and 2) making all kinds of suggestions for improvement, and 3) criticizing Apple for not listening to suggestions for improvement. If it isn't broken, don't fix it, especially if it is the most successful effort of all time! Sheesh.
Yay. In fact double or maybe triple yay. Embracing the obvious: Nuclear Power is Now Okay. "'Nuclear power - long considered environmentally hazardous - is emerging as perhaps the world’s most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.' Considered by whom, exactly? Well, by the green activists who never had a good explanation for why nuclear power wasn’t the solution to the hysteria they were creating over global warming and to the more realistic concern about lessening our dependence on foreign oil." The longer I live, the more things I've believed all along are being embraced by others :)
 Parenthetically, you guys know I often do a ride I call my Kessel run, from Dana Point harbor down along the beach to Camp Pendleton. This takes me right by the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Every time I ride by it, I think; man, we should have these everywhere. And no, my fingertips are not glowing :)
 Windows 7 report: I am fully migrated and happy. I am getting used to (and even liking) the new taskbar, and new alt-tab behavior. I am enjoying the better handling of images and thumbnails, and minor performance improvements everywhere. I like that I can sleep/unsleep and dock/undock with confidence. Compatibilty has not been an issue. The whole thing was a non-thing on which I will no longer report.
The numbers game: valuing Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Oh, and AOL (shortly to be spun out as, well, AOL) is fighting a downward spiral, as it struggles to get back in the game. Less than ten years ago AOL was bigger than Yahoo and Microsoft, and Google was not even in the conversation.
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reasons to carry a camera
how great are these?
[ received from my Mom, thanks! ]
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candidate for ZooBorn of the year
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I know just how they feel
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I think this is my favorite :)
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WTF picture of the year
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sharing is good
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Happy Thanksgiving! |
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Archive: November 25, 2008
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Rain! It never rains in California, but girl, don't they warn ya, it pours, man it pours...
... and presently, it is raining in more ways than one ...
 I used to like clicking my One Year Ago button a lot, but since I hardly did any blogging last year it hasn't been too interesting. Two Years Ago same thing. But Three Years Ago I was blogging, and I like my Happy Thanksgiving note from that time. Worth rereading in this time:
 My glass is actually overflowing.
Odd that I notice that so seldom.
Wow.
Powerline notes History makes way for Obama-worship at the NYTimes. It is definitely true that "the paper of record" is rather forgetful and lazy when it comes to their own record.
Related: Poll shows most consider web most reliable source of news. Ya think? It definitely isn't the NYTimes anymore, if it ever was...
Ann Althouse ponders $7.7T. That is a big number; "half the value of everything produced in the nation last year." Wow.
ScienceDaily reports Global Warming Predictions Are Overestimated. "A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions... The findings are significant because soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined." Huh. Could Al Gore possibly be wrong? [ thanks, Gary! ]
 Inhabitat has more on the Better Place deal with Silicon Valley: California to become the electric vehicle capital of the US. "Recently the cities of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States! This groundbreaking development heralds a nine-step plan that includes everything from buying fully electric vehicles for all government transportation to expediting the approval of charging outlets throughout the bay area, including those located on the street. The creation of this essential infrastructure marks a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuel." There is much to do, but it will be way cool if it comes to pass... I especially note the inclusion of Los Angeles and San Diego in the galactic plan. The key to adoption will be economics; if they can make electric cars as cheap as gas, they have a chance...
 TTAC has pics of the new Porsche Panamerica, their first four-door. Well, I don't think it is as ugly as some, but it's no threat to the Maserati Quattroporte, is it? The whole 911 design just doesn't really lend itself to a bigger car...
 Autoblog gets ahold of a Tesla, and does a review... great car, but I do not like it in orange. That color should be illegal.
Great News: CNN reports Cancer Rates Fall. "Rates of new cancer diagnoses and deaths for U.S. men and women have both fallen for the first time, according to a new report from leading cancer and medical research organizations. The annual report, published online Tuesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showed the simultaneous drop in overall cancer incidence and mortality for the first time since reporting began in 1998, the study authors said." Excellent... I'm sure we'll hear more about this.
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Archive: November 25, 2007
Archive: November 25, 2006
Archive: November 25, 2005
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Random notes while drinking coffee this morning. First note: I love coffee. A lot. Second note: it is a beautiful day. Really gorgeous. I think I am going to use it for my annual brush with death: putting Christmas lights on the house. I was going to do that tomorrow, but today seems perfect.
An increasing number of my neighbors are hiring firms to put lights up for them. I am not going to criticize them for this; many of them are older than I am, or have never put up lights before, so I understand and support this. But I just want to say, there are very few activities more satisfaction-inducing than putting lights on your own house. All through December, every time you drive up to your house, and see that wonderful warm glow, the sense of satisfaction returns. I recommend it highly to everyone. (Providing, of course, that you don't fall off the roof :)
I need to be rather ruthless with myself over these RSS items I've saved to post about. Currently I have about 200. Do you want to read about 200 old and odd things that I've collected? No, you do not. I might just dribble in the most interesting ones, though. While commenting on current events, you know.
 I often have posted about SpaceX, the latest in a line of interesting and successful companies founded by Elon Musk, who was my boss for a brief while at PayPal. (Elon founded a company called x.com which merged into PayPal, and ended up as PayPal's CEO - for a time. Yes, he likes the letter X.) SpaceX aims to be a private supplier of space transportation, at first for satellites, and later for people, and given Elon's track record and personal resources you cannot bet against them. I've enjoyed their periodic progress reports greatly, and now they are on the cusp of a great moment: their first launch, from a Pacific atoll named Kwajalein. It was originally scheduled for today but has been postponed last-minute by the Army until tomorrow. Elon's brother Kimball has begun a blog entitled Dr. Evil's Island about the launch experience; do not miss it!
FuturePundit has Objections to Multi-generational Space Exploration. Personally I don't think the moral issues matter much. This will happen, it is only a matter of time. Insisting that travel to anywhere take only one human lifetime is a pretty artificial limit.
Have I mentioned reddit.com yet? I like it. A lot. But their RSS feed is links-only, so you have to actually visit every site. Kind of a step backwards. I find myself filtering heavily based on entry title - it is all you have to go on - and so am probably missing stuff. So be it. Still worth it :)
 Suppose, as Gerard Vanderleun did, that you had to find the license plate at left in a 2.5 gigapixel panorama. How would you do it? Brute force would work, but it might take a while. And for a human it would be boring, although computers don't get bored. You could scale down the license plate to a teeny picture, and scale down the image by the same amount, and then find possible matches of the teeny license plate in the smaller panorama, and then check them at full resolution. That would be faster and less boring, and this technique is the key to pattern recognition in Pathology, too. Of course Pathologists don't know exactly what the license plate looks like, and they have two orders of magnitude more pixels...
One of the important things that happened during my blog-posting holiday was the introduction of the videoPod, aka iPod video. We all knew it was coming, and now that it's here, wow, it's cool. (Although I must say the Steve-note was a bit disappointing.) Of course content for the little thing is still lacking; the major Hollywood studios have not signed up to deliver their content. Yet. In the meantime Mark Pilgrim shows us how easy it is to rip a DVD for viewing on an iPod. Think people won't do this? (Even from their Tivos?) And share the results? Then you haven't been paying attention. This genie is not going back in the bottle. [ via Boing Boing ]
And we do have video podcasting, in fact, we had it before we had the iPod video. I personally think this is even nichier than audio podcasting. At least with audio podcasts you can listen to them in your car, or while flying, or something like that; kind of like the way people listen to the radio (another thing I don't do). But when are you going to devote time to watching a video podcast? It better be really interesting and/or really professionally done, preferably both, if it is going to get my attention. (On this I disagree with Russell Beattie, who I link here to give you the contra point of view.)
If you're going to have an iPod video, naturally you'll want to connect it to your TV, right?
 I think Tivo has officially jumped the shark. If you look at their current product lineup, they do not have any models which support HDTV. None. Now I happen to be in the market for an HDTV; I am tired of watching ESPN and realizing that I could be watching ESPN-HD. I have made the considerable investment in understanding the difference between 720p and 1040i, and between plasma and DLP. (In case you're wondering, "the answer" is 1040p DLP. At least today.) So why doesn't Tivo support HD? I have no idea. I only know that my next TV is going to be HD, and therefore my next DVR is going to support HD, and therefore it will not be a Tivo. Rats. (I actually think it will be a Moxi, now from Motorola, as offered by Adelphia.)
Apropos, Matt Haughey reviews the Comcast HD PVR: "the good outweighs the bad but after using a TiVo for so many years, the Comcast box just barely works enough for me to keep using it". That's what I'm afraid of, I'll love HD, but hate the GUI of the box. I want everything, and I want it now!
One more apropos, back in August I saved a link to an Engadget story about a 71" Samsung DLP TV. Wow, I thought, that is the TV for me, even if it did cost more than $7,000. Now three months later I'm considering buying a 72" Toshiba DLP TV which is less than $5,000. Now that's progress. The biggest challenge is all the cabinet editing necessary to get Shirley to accept this monster device as part of our household :)
Jeff Atwood, whose every post seems worthy of a link, considers Undocumentation. This is so true, and I hate dislike it intensely.
 Let me leave you this morning with Rendezvous, a one-take 10 minute movie shot from the bumper of a Ferrari blazing through Paris in the wee hours of the morning, ending with, well, a Rendezvous. Excellent. The initial 200+mph run up to the Arc d'Triomphe is heart stopping. Apparently now, nearly thirty years after the movie was made, Google maps has been used to map the drive. Also excellent. [ via Ottmar Liebert ]
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Archive: November 25, 2004
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 Do you blog? Have you noticed an increase in "referer spam"? I have. Seems like every day now I get about three sites which come along and "link" to every page on my blog. It's become annoying, because I really enjoy looking through my referral logs, it's one of the best ways to find cool new blogs. Anyway this morning I decided to do something about it; I wrote a little spam filter for my server logs.
{
What's all this about? Well, every time someone requests a page from my server, it causes the server to write a log entry into a file. As part of the request, there can be a "referer", which is the address of the page from which the request was made. If the request was a result of a link, the referring page will be the page which contained the link. If site X has a link to me, and someone clicks on that link, the log will have the URL of the page on site X.
Unfortunately there are dirtbags out there who exploit this as a means of publicity; they make bogus requests to my site giving the URL of their site as the referer. Of course their site doesn't actually link to me, they just want me to go check out their site. It is a very lame way of publicizing a site because 1) the only audience for the referers is a site's webmaster and 2) if s/he does visit the referred-to site they'll already have a really low opinion of the site operators.
}
So, what to do? Well, I'm already piping logs through a filter, the great little [free] program called cronolog. I just added another filter to get rid of referer spam. Here's my new ErrorLog entry (in Apache's httpd.conf):
ErrorLog "| /var/log/httpd/w-uh.com/reffilter.ksh | /usr/local/bin/cronolog /var/log/httpd/w-uh.com/%Y/%m/%d-error.log"
This is all one line. The webserver passes each log entry into the reffilter.ksh script (my new invention), which then passes each entry on to cronolog (which writes the entries into files named for the current year and month). The reffilter.ksh script processes every log entry as follows:
- If the entry doesn't have a "referer", pass it through.
- If the entry's referer is my site, pass it through. This happens a lot; links within the site, and links from pages on my site to image files.
- If the entry's referer is not a well-formed URL, pass it through. A lot of search engine
robots and RSS feed readers give a bogus URL, these are actually nice to have, so I leave them.
- If the referer is a well-formed URL which is not my site, I retrieve the page from the URL. If this fails, I pass the referer through. I don't mind having referers which I can't access (because they're password protected, or from an email system, or whatever). No referral spammer would give a bad URL.
- If I was able to retrieve the page, I scan it to find the reference. If there's a link to my site, great, it was a legitimate referral, and I pass it through.
- If there's no reference to my site - aha, I caught you. I piss on you from a great height, and silently remove the referral from the log entry before passing it through.
So far this morning I have filtered 13 spams. Very satisfying. Yes, it is an odd way to spend Thanksgiving morning. But then, I am odd, so there you are.
BTW, yes, "referer" is misspelled. Someone at NCSA spelled it wrong at time zero, and now we're all stuck with it. You've got to love that.
P.S. If you would like my little script for your own use, please shoot me email, I'm happy to share.
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Archive: November 25, 2003
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WSJ has a nice op-ed for Thanksgiving: Our Soldiers, Our Thanks. I agree with the sentiment 100%. I remember reading somewhere (I can't remember where!) that the U.S. makes lousy teenagers, but great young men and women. That's for sure.
 To the surprise of nobody, Valencia, Spain, has been selected as the next venue for the America's Cup (in 2007). Olé!
Newsweek has the first review of LOTR III. It is really positive, I can't wait (December 17th is the release date). "The Return Of The King is a sure contender for best picture. More than that, it could be the first franchise ever that didn't, at the end of the day, let audiences down--either because of laziness, pretension, greed or other phantom menaces. This is an especially poignant possibility at a time when we can all still smell the smoke from the wreckage of The Matrix." Oh, and if you're a LOTR fan, you might enjoy this interview with Peter Jackson about LOTR gaffes.
Scoble posted an interesting rant about retail sales of computers. "The retail industry seems to be giving up the fight. Everything inside the store screamed 'we know you're gonna buy a Dell anyway.'" This seems very true of most stores - certainly Best Buy, which Robert is primarily writing about, and Circuit City. I think CompUSA hasn't quite given up, and Fry's hasn't. And of course Apple and Gateway have their own stores. On the whole I think a better buying experience would be in every manufacturer's best interest, but it is expensive. Home entertainment manufacturers have pretty much given up, except at the extreme high end.
 The connected PDA notes audible.com now supports the Treo 600. Now you can listen to books on your phone! [ via Ottmar Liebert ]
Here's an interesting technical article complaining about recent changes at Google which have apparently caused many sites' ratings to drop. Of course the target audience for the "Search Engine Guide" is sites who are trying to [falsely] boost their ratings. Personally I've noticed an increase in Google-search traffic to my blog lately, but I'm not doing anything to cause it. Maybe that's the secret!
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Great Lakes ice cover developing; earliest in over 40 years
