March 2010 Archives

Life Optimizer recommends developing curiosity to be more successful. I'd add expanding your knowledgebase by becoming curious about disparate areas. But that's just this Paki bloke's impression.

Although iTunes was voted best podcast manager, it doesn't work with every mp3 player, specifically, for me, it doesn't work with the Nexus One, which blows. Enter, the Lifehacker-featured middleman. It's free, GPL-licensed, open-source and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I fired up Google today and Firefox greeted me with "peer's certificate has been revoked" every few seconds. I love my browser and search engine to bits, so this would not stand. How to solve it -- went to Preferences/Advanced/Encryption/Validation ad turned it off -- and everything seems to work fine again.

Our mates at Lifehacker link to NumberQuotes, which puts statistics into perspective. For instance, entering 1500 into the box, yields that 1500 credit cards laid side to side would be as long as 1.42 American football fields.

This past week, I have been working on my own framework for logging messages -- it's still a little buggy. But, there's a new build anyway.

Edge rails is the recommended development environment for Ruby on rails. But before following the instructions, do note the following things you'll need to perform:

1. Do not create the vendor/rails directory yourself, instead let git do so, lest you get an error
2. You'll need to upgrade/install a few gems, including perhaps the system itself, which is upgraded using gem update --system:
   

   %   sudo gem install thor
   %   sudo gem install bundler
   %   sudo gem update --system
   %   sudo gem install bundler
   %   sudo gem install rack
   %   sudo gem install rack-test
   %   sudo gem install memcache-client
   %   sudo gem install i18n
   %   sudo gem install erubis
   %   sudo gem install rack-mount
   %   sudo gem install arel
   %   sudo gem install text-format
   %   sudo gem install mail
   %   sudo gem install rails
    

3. Now, you can run rails and it will generate the application as ruby vendor/rails/railties/bin/rails application . without issue.

Well, that was fast. Police Chief Gascón, who yesterday insulted minorities, has now apologised for his comments, reports SFist.

I don't know where Americans dig up these people, but SFist reports that newly appointed police chief George Gascón has angered residents by making derogatory comments regarding this city's Yemeni and Afghan communities. I wonder what chief Gascón thinks of his tax dollars going to send missiles into Yemen and bomb Afghan wedding parties or if he can even locate Marjah or Majz on the globe. The larger question, which I'd love to get an answer to, is the reports on our war in Afghanistan always claim we destroyed hamlets like Marjah, but doesn't mention the destruction reaked on the larger cities like Qandahar or Kabul.

Continuing my quest to find apps for my new mobile, Lifehacker shows us appBrain, which seeks to manage your apps and make sure they are up to date.

SFAppeal says that rents are dropping and are expected to drop further, with the average 1-bedroom costing $1700/month, down from $1900/month in October. I do wonder if The Gateway has reduced its rent from the past July, when it was $1900/month for a studio.

Mint tells us how to save money by eating produce in season. What is the season for cheese and why does Whole Foods no longer carry raw milk products?

I added the ability to have multiple streams, each with their own levels and posted the source code after the flip. This will be incorporated into the next release, which I'll put up for download at Sunday night.

Google Voice's blog says they've sped up the experience on Android. Now that I'm getting a Nexus One, I'll have to check this out.

Dr. Cole seems to have gotten rather annoyed with the Zionists trying to damage his reputation and has posted an entry saying that Jerusalem is not Israeli. They are:

1. In Intenational Law, Jerusalem is occupied territory.
2. Israeli governments have not held a uniform view on this.
3. Romantic nationalism a basis for a real estate claim does not make. Am I to believe that the old testament God is an estate agent and a rather selective one at that?
4. It was founded in honour of the ancient God Shalem, it does not mean city of peace
5. The Jewish people were not building it 3,000 years ago.
6. If historical claim and building the city constitutes a claim to it now, the Muslims have the best case, as they ruled it for 1191 years.
7. The Temple was built during a period of history, that the Jews did not control Jerusalem.
8. The preset day Palestenians are the descendants of the ancient Jews and therefore have every right to reside in Jerusalem.

Mint writes on rising airline fees in the United States. Ok, so are we all going to go the way of Ryanair and charge for the use of the restrooms?

So, Edward, again I have to ask you, what is so communist about George Galloway?

Nathan Yau teaches us what types of charts people can interpret most easily. Its conclusions are that people are able to interpret scatter plots best (simple and then complex), followed by bar charts, pie charts, bubbles, heat maps, and news maps. Funny, I find heat maps easiest to understand. Maybe it's the actual data charted?

Dumb Little Man teaches us how to add time to the day. Namely, they are:

1. Drop one of your goals.
2. Ditch an unwanted commitment.
3. Learn to delegate.
4. Get better at saying "no". I have the opposite problem, I don't say "yes" enough. sigh.
5. Make your happiness a priority. Saving the best for last, there's nothing wrong with being selfish.

Mostly changes under the hood, rearranging the package. The more hacker-types amongst users will have noticed that there are two classes -- PersistentModel and PersistentGUI -- that seemingly don't do anything. They are there for future enhancements. At this point, they don't do anything. When they are actually activated, I will put up the relevant source code after the flip. But yea, the archive has been updated.

Lifehacker suggests banning pyramid charts in the interest of clarity. How about banning all charts? They don't give as much detail, they are difficult to produce and distribute, and aren't easy to index by search engines. Yes, I know Google has Image Search, but the quality of results is just not up to snuff as the web search.

Racker hacker illustrates the difference between various Unix signals. Signals allow for processes to trigger events within themselves or in other processes and form one of the keystones of Unix interprocess communication. Signals are sent using the kill command, which is a thin wrapper around the kill system call. The two most signals that are addressed are SIGTERM and SIGKILL. I know the manpages I've linked to are NetBSD, but the signals are available on any POSIX-compliant system, meaning Mac OS X and even Microsoft Windows supports them.

Lifehacker carries the news that the kindle is coming to the Macintosh. My thoughts are that this is a continuation of the effort to bring the Kindle everywhere, on all platforms, all mediums, and all methods -- I hear Jeff is working on an implantable chip after all, which would be inserted into the person's skull and every time the person thinks of a book, the first chapter is automatically beamed to the brain.

All kidding aside, Amazon brings their ebook reader to the Macintosh. Horribly cool.

I'm going to come up with a graphic for this, but makezine reports that you can be identified by the germs you leave on a keyboard. It doesn't look like the authors have actually performed the studies they outline in their abstract, but I don't have access to the entire paper.

Lifehacker says that reducing the amount of detergent I was using until I was using a mere 1/8th of the recommended amount. Everything from towels to t-shirts came out smelling fresher and more comfortable. and goes and links to the New York Times to lend more credence to their views. The article does contradict what mummy likes to make us do, which is to prerinse dishes before putting them into the dishwasher. Personally, I prefer putting my knives in blade-down, so I don't get cut when removing them, but that's just the way I am.

Wise Bread publishes seven laws of negotiation. Life is nothing more than a grand negotiation. Don't believe me? Sure, everyone's life isn't as exciting as the characters on Spooks or 24 -- I'd like to posit that nobody's life is as exciting and nobody's negotiations are that critical -- but, even if your role is not to save the world from nuclear disaster or London from drowning, it's still negotiation. The top 7 is:

1. Come prepared.
2. Be polite.
3. Don't make the first move -- I do disagree with this one, as the first number presented is an anchor, so it should be in your favour and often-times unrealistically so.
4. Time it right
5. Get Creative
6. Flash the cash.

Boris Johnson thinks the way to secure the 21st century for Britain is to mandate the teaching of Latin, a language spoken by noone aside from a bunch of old guys who sleep with children in churches. So, in the honourable gentleman's opinion, the way to claim the 21^st century for Britain, is not to teach Hadoop, Bigtable, and nutch, but to focus on the classics. Grand, Boris, grand.

I've enhanced the blog metrics script. It now does hostname lookups using BIND. Yes, realistically, it ought to be using Net::DNS, but that's left for the future. Another future enhancement is an actual graph illustrating what page gets the most hits. I'd also find it useful to know how many people come to my blog from my ATOM and RSS feeds versus Google.

I noticed the No Agenda shownotes would not show up in iTunes. Turns out that mevio has a bug in how it handles Apple's podcast specifications, specifically, the summary tag which is:

shown in a separate window that appears when the "circled i" in the Description column is clicked. It also appears on the iTunes page for your podcast. This field can be up to 4000 characters. If is not included, the contents of the tag are used.

Handed the chap a 20 bill, and got back 15. Walked in to a noisy bar and got the bartender's attention. Ordered a glass of wine. Here's where the stars get lost: a glass of wine is 6 ounces and made of blown glass, lead crystal, or hock glass. The glass this was poured in was 3 ounces AT MOST, and disposable. Also, they charged an exorbitant amount for it ($6) and the wine wasn't very good either, but I suppose that's normal for this sort of pub.

The crowd's where this joint holds its own. People are EXTREMELY friendly. I chatted up almost everyone, which is normal, but getting everyone to respond in a friendly manner is not. No one was in a bad mood, everyone I talked to was a great conversationalist.

They don't serve food, drinks are overpriced and underserved, but the crowd is grand.

The New York Times magazine has a guide to better teaching. I have several friends who are employed as teachers or professors. While the list is geared to grade school students, building a more talented pool of college entrants will make the professors' lives easier too.

This is U2s Everlasting Love. Probably the best version of the song I've heard.

One of the callers on George Galloway's radio show read out a poem, which I thought apt for our times, so I'm reproducing it here:

Lifehacker notes that GSM power consumption is less than CDMA. Of course, for me, I prefer GSM, so I can use the same phone in the United Kingdom, where GSM is the only technology available.

I found out about the existence of the finalize() method in Java. This is how I'm going to clean up the old log files from Reminder. I've updated the distribution with the new class. The source code for the class is, as usual, after the flip.

Credit Card Outlaw writes that Expedia may be stretching the truth a tad in their text adverts. If it were me, I'd notify the FTC using their stated procedure. But, it's not me and I'm pretty sure that the outlaw isn't going to see this.

A little reminder to go through the Guardian's Terms of Use before embarking on my next data-driven project.

Another Reminder update. I realised that, if I send several messages over the wire, only the last one gets copied to the clipboard. Well, no more, now if you have multiple message windows open and you click on one, it's text is copied to the clipboard. If you want to change what's on the clipboard, you just click another one. The source file to do this is available after the flip. Props to Freenode's ##java for helping me figure out WindowAdapter.

Ok, if you can't play it, I sampled Mitch from the March 5^th, 2010 episode of the Now Show slagging off Argentina.

I heard, on the jython podcast's latest episode, of a replacement for jythonc. After the flip, I've edited Dan Cheahs jythonc replacement, compile.java, to add per file output and use the system-wide, platform-independant temporary directory, as denoted by the java.io.tmpdir property.

Kassourri alerted me, via Twitter that I'm listed as a contributor to commons math. As the Glaswegians say, eat your heart out!

I noticed that Marissa Louie, CEO of Ad-Village, a company with which I was previously involved, but left because she had decided she wanted more from me than I was prepared to give, retweeted that she was working with ValenciaPR. I caught this and decided to give Ms Valencia a friendly warning that Marissa is not what she seems, to which I got a somewhat snarky response and then rudeness. Not being one to let bygones be bygones, I responded in kind. After an hour, I sent her an apology, and am reproducing our entire email exchange after the flip. Conclusion, anyone who asks me for a PR recommendation, I'm definitely not recommending this ingrate.

TSAs blog proved today that they are wholly and unequivocably unfit for purpose by mispelling the IATA airport code for Ft. Lauderdale (it is FLL, not FFL). Of course, this isn't the agency charged with making up the airport abbreviations, just the one in charge of ensuring we remove our shoes on the ground, take off our jackets, and perform other hystrionics to ensure we won't be blown up.

From Programmable Web comes the news that Transport for London has gone Web 2.0 and done a Google Maps mashup. It is indeed an oversight that Google does not give the world's greatest city fair treatment with transit directions and timings. One could excuse the lack of timings as To rely on a train in Blair's Britain is to engage in a crapshoot with the devil, to quote that most quotable of British politicians, Boris Johnson.

After the flip, I list code, that will soon be incorporated into Commons-dbutils, to generate XML from an RDBMS table.

According to that sage of all and sundry, Beavis, there are too many numbers, our mates, at Lifehacker, link to a piece by Nathan Yau, a doctoral candidate in statistics, on how to interpret numbers. I hope this helps people understand the numbers that permeate our world.

From Mint:These days, many of us are doing some serious head scratching when it comes to credit scores, partly because there is a lot of false information swirling around. How can you move forward with your financial life if you're muddled with misconceptions? Read on as seven more myths are debunked, leaving you with the "real deal" credit information you need when purchasing a home or taking out an auto loan.

1. Checking your credit will lower your score
2. Shopping around for a loan willl lower your score
3. If you don't use your credit card, you'll lose it. I do disagree with this, because my Wells Fargo credit card was closed due to lack of use. It was only reopened when I rang them and threatened to file a report with the better business bureau.
4. Cosigning a loan does not affect your score
5. It's impossible to dispute an entry on your credit report
6. After marriage, your credit scores are merged.
7. Credit counselling services hurt your score. Turning to for-profit debt settlement agencies does, however.

I was reading a piece regarding the Substance of Style: How the Rise of Asthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness and decided to check the price on Amazon for fits and giggles and, 'lo and behold, the price for the bargain paperback is the highest of all editions offered, for both the new and the used versions of the book. ¿wtf? indeed.

My favourite British broadsheet (and one of my favourites worldwide), the Guardian, announces a politics API. Query responses are in JSON-only, but other than that, it seems good (I wish it would output ATOM as well, but maybe that's coming). It's open-access, simple, and it works. Other outlets (you listening, Qatar Foundation?) would do well to follow.

Cuban-American CNN presenter Rick Sanchez, who was born in Cuba, wasn't aware what 9 meters is in feet.

Lifehacker highlights Hippo remote which turns a $399 iPhone into a $2 remote control. Well, not quite $2, as it is a universal remote. I have (and love) my Harmony 880, even though it sometimes infuriates me with its sensitivity. Actually, it does a subset of what the Logitech does -- it only controls PCs and Macs. Bleh...

I see patterns in everything, even when it's actually entirely random, like flight departure delays from London. Five Cent Nickel illustrates the patterns inherent in credit card numbers. In other words, you're only as secure as 19-digits, between 0 and 9. According to Keepass, at best, this makes for a little less than 50% secure password. Looking at my (cancelled) visa card, number 4264299607826717, let's see what it said about me:

Local weblog SFist calls burgers "culinary crack". So, I'm guessing I'll have to try Serpentine, Chez Maman (apparently the favourite of Mr. Kasman, who wrote the piece), Pearl's Deluxe Burgers, Houston's, and Nopa. My favourite burger thus far is to be found at Barney's. Where's that review, SFist?