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Benjamin C. Wiley Sittler
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| Новый сайт метрополитена |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|11:32 am] |
Харьковский метрополитен сделал новую версию своего сайта
Вот http://www.metro.kharkov.ua/
Поставить бессмысленные флешовые часы ума у них хватило, но как всякие ламерюги, они забыли сделать элементарное - прописать A record для домена metro.kharkov.ua. Впрочем, мне пофигу, тем более, что я практически не пользуюсь их услугами, потому как трамвай дешевле. Более того, после того как стоимость проезда на трамвае увеличится, тут же увеличится и стоимость проезда на метро, потому как в инфляционном цикле повышения цен трамвай идет на пол периода позже, чем метро, поэтому трамвай будет дешевле почти всегда
Ну а в далекой перспективе, я думаю, наш славный горсовет совсем ликвидирует городской рельсовый транспорт, так как в нем маршруточное лобби представлено сильнее
Место для удара головой здесь ------------------------------------> |
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| version control buddhism |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|08:00 am] |
The Git community in general seems somewhat opposed to the idea of documentation. I mean, yes, there are man pages, but they're ... interestingly sparse, and I'm sort of surprised that github doesn't have a link to a tutorial prominently displayed on the site (somewhere after you sign up, at least).
It's oddly Zen, but in that sort of annoying way where you get hit on the head with a stick a whole bunch. |
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| Interview with me for Linux Magazine |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|10:16 pm] |
There's an interview with me by Jeff Layton[1] up on Linux Magazine's web site today. It's about, predictably, file systems:
Linux magazine interview with Valerie Aurora
I was surprised to learn that answering an interviewer's questions was somehow far easier than writing an article directly. Often people think that because my articles are easy to read, they are correspondingly effortless to write. Oh, no. No no no no. But having an interviewer draw me out made writing almost pleasant and enjoyable!
And if you think the title is a little overblown - it describes me as both "evangelist" and "thought leader" - you should have seen it before I begged Jeff to tone it down a bit. :) Other than the overly complimentary introduction, I think he's done a great job as an interviewer.
If you'd like to read interviews with actual Linux file systems thought leaders, check out Jeff's interviews with Chris Mason and Theodore Y. T'so.
[1] Not to be confused with Jeff Layton the Red Hat file systems developer. |
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| Bleh. |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|07:09 pm] |
I went in for a nonstress test this morning and spent 10 hours in labor and delivery, because it took a long time for the doctor to be sure I wasn't really in labor. (I was having contractions 2-5 minutes apart for a while, and it turns out that I'm already dilated to 3cm or so.)
Total waste of a day.
Babies fairly soon, I suspect. |
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| For the RPG fans; non-gamers can skip this post |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|02:16 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  curious | ] |
The setting: oWoD, Mage: The Ascension.
Imagine, if you will, a Horizon Realm such that everyone who enters it has an automatic extra dot of Mind while they're there. That is, if you're already a Mind mage with two dots, now you have three; if you're a mage with zero dots in Mind, now you have one; if you're Kindred/Garou/Fae (oh good grief...)/mortal/whatever, you also have one dot in Mind. (If you had no Arete score before, you have a temporary Arete of 1 that can only be used for Mind effects, and it disappears when you leave the Horizon Realm.) If you have a way to affect someone/something outside the Horizon Realm -- say, with appropriate Correspondence/Spirit magick, or a werewolf opening some kind of Umbral portal or whatever -- you can. (So, yes, you can sense the emotions of someone outside the Horizon Realm if you can get a lock on them, for whatever that means. Handwave it.)
What would that be like? |
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| Мiжмережа буде величною i гiпертекстовою |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|09:53 pm] |
То, что протокол TCP/IP устарел, ни для кого не новость. Английские Украинские учёные разработали ему замену под рабочим названием Е6:
http://bit.ly/197TtQ
(начало статьи на стр.4, на украинском языке, поэтому москали нашего ноу-хау не поймут и не смогут украсть)
Хотя на самом деле нам с россиянами надо не враждовать, а сотрудничать. Вместо того, чтобы использовать разработанный американскими военными жыдами TCP/IP, надо допилить Векторный Гипертекстовый Укррусфидонет, основав его на нашем украинском протоколе Е6)
Пiтнiю в очiкуваннi! Це е вибiр нацiонально та расово вiрний! По дроту бiжить етернетiвська чарунка! |
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| i finished reading heinlein's "the puppet masters" today |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|12:19 am] |
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A receipt, found between pages 214 and 215 in Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters":
Sno-Isle
Mill Creek
8/11/2005 3:40:42 PM
- PATRON RECEIPT -
- CHARGES -
1: Item Number: 39067035863799
Title: The looking glass [illegible]
Due Date: 9/1/2005
2: Item Number: 39067029322312
Title: Rocket ship galileo
Due Date: 9/1/2005
3: Item Number: 39067031568987
Title: The puppet masters
Due Date: 9/1/2005
Mill Creek 425-337-4822
------ Please Keep This Slip ------
-----------------------------------------
That's here.
The first page of the book says
SNO-ISLE REGIONAL LIBRARY
MAY - - 2002
and has a blue stamp, saying WITHDRAWN. I have no idea how it ended up halfway around the globe.
Next up on the reading list: Friday. |
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| MacBook Trackpad |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|10:43 am] |
The new trackpad on my MacBook is driving me nuts.
The old trackpad had a trackpad surface and one big aluminum button to annoy the folks who say they refuse to buy a mac until it gets two buttons. They're separate surfaces and it's easy to tell whether your finger is on the button or on the trackpad.
The new trackpad is a single touch-sensitive surface that also registers clicks when you press down on it. It's a button *and* a trackpad. In OSX the lower quarter of the trackpad is treated as button surface. If you slide your finger around the top of the trackpad the pointer on the screen moves, but if you slide it around the bottom of the trackpad it doesn't, because you're on the "button" part.
The problem is that the border between button and surface is no longer clearly defined. I tend to rest my left thumb on the 'button' while I mouse around with my right index finger, and if my thumb strays too far up the surface suddenly it's in 'trackpad' territory and the surface starts thinking that I'm doing a two-button pinch-zoom gesture. This happens all the freaking time. Searching around for a solution I've noticed that it bothers other people. I finally found some hacks to disable the bug feature.
I have two constructive suggestions for how to fix this. First, let me disable the pinch-zoom effect in System Preferences → Trackpad. Second, put a tiny ridge on the trackpad defining where the border is. Not huge, but even the tiniest quarter-millimeter ridge would give my thumb enough of a boundary that I could keep it from running away.
Protip: for all you "I will never own a mac until it has a multi-button mouse" people, the control panel lets you designate the right side of the surface as mouse2, not that the rest of this post is expected to instill confidence. |
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| Things that make me turn off the radio |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|09:50 am] |
Overheard during a Think Out Loud discussion of health care reform: some guy (a guest, not a caller!) suggesting that [schools?] should
'notify parents of their children's height, weight and body mass index, so that they can be empowered and take charge'
Can you name all the reasons why this is a horrible idea?
This entry was originally posted at http://tim.dreamwidth.org/2455.html. Please comment there using OpenID. |
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| random and wonderful terry pratchett quote i want to save |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|02:12 am] |
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"What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right." |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|03:10 am] |
Okay, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tdj, I may be going to bed angry, but I got a great belly laugh in from the following, linked from one of the comments in the post about Dembski:
And now I sleep. |
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| F91w & Teller |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|10:14 am] |
I went to TAM7 this weekend. It was the sort of event that lends itself less to an event report - "the following things happened" - and more of a bunch of interesting conversations and experiences that gave me food for thought that will probably end up as posts here.
I went to the Penn & Teller show on Saturday night where one of their pieces was a metal detector act with a message about the trade-off between the certainty of losing civil liberties with the questionable efficacy of security checks. I appreciated the message and I think it's an important issue that the public is well-served by discussing although I don't necessarily agree with the whole message.
P&T are also TAM attendees, so on Sunday I saw Teller and gave him a F91w watch since they'd done a big civil libertarian bit. He didn't know the significance and was kind enough to let me give him my five-minute schpiel about Ramzi Yousef and Bojinka, how some Afghans ended up in Guantanamo, and the terrorist wristwatches that military CSRTs cite as a reason for their continued extrajudicial detention. The whole thing seemed to be both totally off his radar and right up his alley (pardon the mixed metaphor) and he accepted the watch, put it on, and let me take this picture.
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| and speaking of pirates... |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|08:46 am] |
or more to the point sailing ships... my not qute 21 year old cousin arrive in the harbor on this
 
on the 19th. I must say it make me want to sail. She's on a semester abroad Biology/sailing trip from Hawaii to SF. Of course I have had my own neat stuff. My Hawaii trip involved training with on of Bruce Lee' students in a Martial arts intensive. Temple, hiking, one-inch punch technique, enlightenment experience and kite-flying. :)
Still, after seeing the Pirate movie over again while packing... I want to play on a sailing ship!!! |
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| Progress report |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|02:25 pm] |
Chording glove pattern prototype, version 1, three fingers and a thumb left to knit:
I am making this up as I go along, thus there are a few irregularities that I will correct in the next version when I take my notes and turn them into a proper pattern. I realized halfway up the index finger that I'd failed to knit a solid line up the thumb side (for mounting the thumb switches) like I'd planned to, and that ugly-looking line right across the palm was an experiment that didn't quite work out and that I couldn't be arsed to go back and fix. (The fishnet pattern is made by knitting two stitches together, then making a hole by bringing the yarn to the front, over and over again. The cool spirally pattern comes from having each row of holes offset from the next by one stitch, which was obligatory when I was making increases for the thumb; I forgot to alternate when I started going up for the thumb side of the palm.)
All in all, though, I'm quite happy with how it's turning out, especially since a couple of experiments succeeded -- you can rib lace after all! -- and some things that I was worried would look stupid, like the solid fingertips (for stability, and to have a place to anchor the switches), look okay after all. Since this is an attempt to figure out a pattern, I'm making this out of plain cotton, and will wire it up by sewing 30ga wire through the knit stitches (the thicker "lines" that you see on the glove), but I still want to figure out a way to work the wiring into the pattern itself, because it will look cooler and I am stubborn like that.
Barring anything weird happening, I should have the complete standalone USB keyboard glove working sometime this week. I have my wire-wrap sockets now, and have soldered in half of the discrete components (the ones I had spares of, by way of a test run); I'm going to hold off moving the rest of the circuit from the breadboard until I have the glove finished and the switches mounted and wired, but the actual wiring-up shouldn't take more than an hour or two.
I'm kind of tempted to set up an Etsy shop and sell these, though I'm not sure how much would be a fair price. The actual knitting probably takes about ten hours (spread out over a few days, since my hands get sore quickly), and the soldering goes fast; the parts are less than $20 total. Any thoughts? Would you buy one? |
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