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Various sources are reporting an 8.2 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia on the same fault line as Decembers 9.0 quake that led to deadly tsunami's throughout the Indian Ocean.
I'm rising to a dare here (you know who you are) where I was asked my opinion on FoxBlocker. From my perspective, it's a misguided attempt to help a certain group of people control their world (with political feedback) in the same way other groups often try to use government control.
I'm not a fan of Fox (outside of NFC football) and most friends know that (everyone does now). The various Fox news properties do seem to go beyond the call to shape and control the news and opinions they pass along. Established as an old fashioned type of network (broadcast with all the rights and responsibilities that go along with it) only 20 years ago, Fox seems to work very hard to rewrite the rules in new ways. That's not a bad thing, but does deserve attention. The really hardline opinion seems to happen on the cable side of the organization where the rules are wide open, which seems right to me. The alternative is cable censorship, which has lots of fringe support with the idea that each side will be able to eliminate ideas they find reprehensible by totalitarian rule. That one side or the other will lose badly is always overlooked and is the single biggest advantage of an open society.
I see little difference in a drive from the liberal side to limit and quarantine conservative ideas and opinions from Fox (does it block all Fox properties?) to a general conservative TV and radio disposition to denigrate any (and every) kind of liberal concepts.
Except for one thing.
Being liberal generally means being broad-minded, open to new ideas but (this is important) not limited by authoritarian attitudes. This is probably the biggest problem people have with conservative media; a complete lack of empathy and consideration for the other side.
All the same, emulation isn't a solution.
A report in the Malibu Times indicates that there may be yet another long term closure of Kanan Road between Agoura Hills and Malibu.
Not everyone agrees that it's the fastest way down to PCH, but most acknowledge that it has the best view by far during the decent. On a decent day you can see Santa Barbara and Santa Catalina islands and on really clear days I'm certain that I've seen San Clemente Island (it's mostly behind Catalina). I suppose that similar views are available on 23 south (I've heard this), but if you're driving, you'd be dead if you looked (the road being rather narrow and very twisty most of the way).
This is pretty amazing: Why FedEx calls it 2 Day Service. [via Ted's Radio Weblog]
I'd always heard that FedEx is able to more efficiently move packages by sending everything through its hubs but three trips through Newark and two through Memphis seems a bit crazy.
This weeks Acorn has an article titled CVUSD math curriculum criticized that delves into Everyday Mathematics.
I don't know, one way or another whether it works or not.
I do feel that math is fuzzy, at least in terms of human perception. I've tried to explain approximation to both of our older kids and neither of them ever got it (such a pity). There are times when I feel like we need to yank the damned calculators out of their hands and make 'em do a year with slide rules just so the picture becomes a bit more clear. Perhaps it's just me, but that darned device gave me a gut feel for numbers, logs and any number of mathematical relationships that never become apparent with a chip. Maybe I spent too much time looking at the things, but the slide rule seemed to be a visual representation of mathematics; once you groked why it looked the way it did, everything else falls into place.
If you read this far and are sniggering because of the title, remind me of days long gone... it could have been worse. Alternative titles included:
Before wandering off to find the real definition of decimate, take a moment to consider what you perceive to be the meaning.
From the usage section:
Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group.
When I heard the original definition a couple weeks ago (probably on History Channel) I scribbled down (ok, typed) a note (one among many) to check it out. In retrospect, the true (original) meaning is obvious.
The Language Corner has an interesting attack on modern usage. I'll just blame the media, they're responsible for everything these days.
I use PGP/gpg so infrequently that when I want to do something somewhat complicated, it winds up taking a long time as I wander about here and there... and fiddle.
Today I needed to export a key (both public and private keys) that I'd generated in gpg so that I could import it into PGP. It shouldn't have taken an hour to do (but it did). All I needed to do was to make sure I knew the key name:
gpg --list-keys 'Key Name'
and then to export:
gpg -a --export 'Key Name' > export.pgp.asc gpg -a --export-secret-keys 'Key Name' >> export.pgp.asc
The import into PGP afterward was painless.
I ended up working from home yesterday which worked out for the best. Sometimes it's all about being in the right place at the right time.
We'd planning on taking Jon out for a birthday dinner but because I worked from home, we were able to go out earlier and get him back in time to get a good night of sleep before his trip back east today. He and Sarah left this morning and are now at his grandfathers house, Easter surprise intact.
Yesterday afternoon, just seconds after I'd stepped out the shower, I got an interesting call. Sarah was on the phone, insisting that I had to look out the window (which direction? east!) to see a wonderful rainbow. I looked, saw a pretty string of colors, dressed hurriedly and wound up running up and down the stairs looking for my camera.
Eventually, I caught a few shots before it disappeared. I just wish I could have captured more.
It really was beautiful.
Welcome to spring, where everything this year is as wildly alive as I've ever seen it. Our seemingly endless rain has taken the day off but it seems reasonable that it'll be back.
I'd read somewhere earlier this week that the county community college system was going suspend horticulture courses and today we learn that Janet Wall has stepped up to fund the program for another year. As Colleen Cason points out, this seems like absurd step for a county with a growing horticulture industry and a long term, county wide commitment to retaining our agricultural history and attachment. One wonders, where are we focusing the funds if not on industries that are actually important in the county?
Perhaps administrators have fallen under the kool aid long passed around that we live in a high tech corridor. Certainly, we have some industry leaders (it's pretty hard to ignore the likes of Amgen) and if you hope for it long enough and often enough, it might come to pass, but not without educational commitment. The driving force behind the Boston, San Jose and to a lesser extent, Austin tech zones are the local universities, the companies which grew out of them and an accelerating feedback loop between the two. Looking at the east county, the driving force isn't particularly high tech. Home prices in the last six years have been driven mostly by expansion of Amgen and the relocation of Countrywide (a financial services firm) on top of the usual factors.
I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't endeavor to build a solid technology base here, but we do need to be somewhat realistic about where we are on the growth path. And while we grow our new technology based identity we need to maintain and nurture our current agribusiness economy.
I had a 'holy crap, I'm dead moment' this morning.
I was in a rush to get out the door after sending out an agenda and iCal was crashing every time I tried to start it. Off to the web for instant support where the forum entry on macosxhints, iCal crashes on startup was all I needed to get back in action. I left 10 minutes later than I'd planned and wound up in a snarl because of a motorcycle accident in Simi.
Before I start slamming iCal, I should mention that there are a lot of things I like. It looks beautiful. It imports vCal data very nicely. Day long event items and perpetual meetings are very easy to add.
On the other hand, where's the validation?
I'd done no vCal imports in the last week or so, leaving it to iCal to have created the munged data in such a way that it could no longer deal with it. In effect, it ate a big chunk of my calendar and developed severe indigestion. Once I'd removed it from the gut, I was able to feed it back in and have the calendar digest it properly. This isn't how Mac applications are supposed to behave. Do the right thing, tell me before I'm in trouble. I suppose the recovery process is mostly automatic, so why not have the app do the right thing and try importing?
I have two bigger gripes while I'm at it.
For years, it's been easy to add repeating todo items to popular Mac calendars. Best of luck with iCal. I used a script. Why can't I add a repeating todo if I can have a repeating event?
And my favorite. What the hell were they thinking when they created the iCal alarm notification UI? If the application is running, any action (and in some cases no action) causes the iCal application to surface from behind where I banished it. The only solution is to quit the damned thing so I don't have to see it popping up all the time. It's also a mouse biased nightmare. Did they ever look at Palm Desktop (based on Claris Organizer, an application once sold by Apple... I'm betting not)? The solution implemented by Palm (perhaps Claris before them, it's been too long) was a dialog (similar to that used by Apple) that allowed keyboard input. I'll acknowledge that Apple has done a better job on the focus issue, but keyboard ain't in the vocabulary. I just want to be able to type 11 and enter, to delay the alarm by eleven minutes the first time it comes up. Enter or return to dismiss it entirely. A three minute delay? Umm, sorry, not in our popup. And the way it keeps track of time? I select repeat in one minute at xx:51 and some seconds and it's back at xx:53. Where did you learn to add?
To say the alarm notification sucks is to be too kind.
This map is by no means complete, only showing places I've lived for some period of time (on land) or experienced some kind of significant personal event. It definitely falls into the category of personal annotation the planet.
This map is based on DIY Map, a flash based application for mapping annotated XML meta data. I'd done the mapping more than a month ago and decided to update it last week which caused some grief as the XML markup had changed considerably. Yes, it makes a whole lot more sense now than it did, but it was a PITA.
I'll get around to finishing my tour of the world some other time...
A very good friend has discovered some kind of neat new toy and he's been introducing me to Farsi as it is written. Given that he's a very private person, I'm a bit torn about naming him, so I won't (public writing about even mildly personal information throws up these issues from time to time — lots of fodder for the sociologists and lawyers). Some will know him, some will not. It matters little in the end.
There's a wonderful flow to many (if not most) words and even names. It just looks so loose and fluid. Like many eastern scripts, it brings up images of high quality paper, quill and ink along with a steady and well practiced hand. Unfortunately David, or the Hebrew version (da-vod, if I've got it right; which often as not I don't) isn't exactly a flowing thing of beauty, but it's mine and I'm happy to have it.
I know some people with wonderful, nearly example level cursive handwriting. My Mom's shorthand was a thing of beauty (and I sometimes wish I'd learned it). It does seem to me that these kinds of abilities are dying out. One could argue that the western move to print things also moved us toward our current relatively boring, easily engineered vector based type. It's easy to read and reproduce, but no longer visually impressive.
And the rest of us?
I can only speak directly to what I know. My own writing skills have declined appreciably. It's a sad, sad thing. I used to be able to do relatively precise lettering at about a 7 point font... now I can barely scrawl on a white board.
And my children? Oh my! It's a good thing they've grow up in a world where most of their actual wrist and ink based writing will be based on scrawling a signature somewhere. Anything more in depth is probably asking too much.
That's the term Jon Udell used for his five-minute walking tour of Keene, NH. I like it! [via Tim Bray]
After dinking around for a while at Google Mapping, I get 90% of it (the bookmarklet data loading trick is both inspired and sick).
javascript:(
function() {
window.name = 'receiver';
var remoteWin=window.open('','','resizable=yes,width=223,height=337,left=508,top=122');
remoteWin.document.write('<html><body>');
remoteWin.document.write('<script src="http://www.gnik.com/maps/google/load.js"><'+'/script>');
})();
What's not apparent is the encoding of the point data which looks like this: gu|nEvlsqUClBMbBCfAMt@Vt@g@lAc (and so on, lot's of @'s in there). The first bit looks like a signature of some sort and then... jibberish. Even without a GPS, I've got lots of Geo coordinate data lying about (I got a bit carried away a couple years ago) and the rest is relatively easy to find with sources like TerraServer. Next step? Figure out how to encode the points (path data I guess).
If a picture truly is worth a thousand words then I think the screencasting concept (homebrew multimedia if you will; live and static pictures along with words, written and spoken) is wonderful and the new sideline of mapcasting is going to be a very interesting endeavor that many will do all by themselves. I hope Jon also expands on how he's creating the flash content. I know how to capture on screen actions into a movie, but have no idea how you go about down sampling that into a flash movie with a lower frame rate (oops, missed it, he's already done so in Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Making of the Movie). He leaves us with this interesting thought:
Screencasting is a cool way to tell stories about software, and that's reason enough to care about it. But when the focus shifts from the software itself to our software-mediated social and political and economic lives, the true significance of the medium becomes clear.