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onion
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aviationtoolbox
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flightaware
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also
During half an hour of goofing around on our synthesizer (though that’s interesting too), I managed to eke out enjoyable (or at least recognizable) enough noises that Eric awarded me with a proposed name for my act: “Airship Disasters Music Band”. Someday, I’ll leave the computer business for music, and I’ll use that name. You heard it here first.
For those of us who started their hacker careers in the 1980s, documentaries like Jason Scott’s Get Lamp and BBS are a pure sentimental pleasure. They cover technologies we grew up with, participated in, which gave us our impetus in the field. Their authenticity separates them from a routine TV show: the interviews are given by the real people who built and championed all that great early home computer stuff. However, Jason is a talented enough to weave them into stories that are interesting to non-specialists too. My dear lady wife has enjoyed whole chunks of the BBS documentary.
The documentaries are CC-licensed, so you can watch/try them for free. If you like them, toss some bucks Jason’s way and get the disks.
 claim: When convinced he’s right — which is often — he turns his head at the podium to the right and left, gazing above his audience into the near distance…
in fewer words: “Obama’s teleprompters make him look haughty” |
Upstairs, just after bath time for the brats, after some hallway chatter about protons and density, then:
`Enough talking about the periodic table, put on some clothes!’.
If this article quotes Ted Ts’o correctly, we have a problem.
Read more...I’m flabbergasted at the ease of upgrading a live fedora system between versions. This is not supposed to work, especially with lots of customized public/service processes. Yet, a ‘yum update’ from Fedora 11 to Fedora 13, live, worked almost with out a hitch.
Well, there is always postgresql, breaking updates since (before) 2007.
Headline: Obama’s new mission for NASA: Reach out to Muslim world
In other words: Charles Bolden pulls a great practical joke on al-Jazeera. I think…
Find this wonderful little track on youtube and play it while reading the following.
Read more...Last night, I renewed my IFR privileges for another two years, after passing a flight test with my friend Charlie Rampulla. One mistake I made may be interesting reading for other pilots.
Read more...Sweet words heard recently around the house:
(Eric, frequently): “My whole life is a hug.”
(Stuart, pleasantly surprised): “I just can’t believe my eyes!”
(Juimiin, midnight): “Come closer.”
Having just seen the aforementioned, I’m not sure yet whether it was a good movie. But it was definitely not a good little kid movie.
Read more...This wee blog is almost six years old, spanning some five hundred ruminations. Egads, will he ever stop, you ask yourself? Has he ever written anything worthwhile?
Read more...I’ve owned quite a bit of Dell computer hardware over the years. My main home server is a now-discontinued Dell PowerEdge 2900 box, with plenty of RAM and disk. It has been completely solid, and I expect will do the job fine for another few years. There was only one upgrade still worth doing: the processors.
Read more...Saturday morning, our family had the misfortune of running out of sufficient groceries for a big breakfast, so opted to try a new nearby restaurant. It was full, so we were prepared for slower service. But what we got was slower than slow. It was slow enough that all four of us had to eat up time by drawing, because to talk would have meant to grumble. My humble contribution:
What a way to find some mirth in the gaza ship fiasco.
insult: Paul McCartney: “After the last eight years, it’s good to have a president that knows what a library is.”
in other words: “I sure wish I had multiple college degrees like George W. Bush, instead of just grammar school.”
If you have fifteen minutes to spare, read this essay about connections between modern western appearance-mania and clear-headed eastern brutality.
Always trying to help, but remaining invincibly ignorant about the wisdom of the market, observe multiple instances of a government in spasm trying to take over private industry, and imposing a pricing model by fiat.
Read more...Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Read more...When you have a sudden back ache possibly caused by muscle spasms due to recent overload, and if your lovely wife offers her weight as an inaccupressure sitting treatment for the region, politely decline. It may save you the debilitating escalation of said pain for the next 16 hours.
During last night’s return flight from KCMH, there was a brief air-traffic-control “teaching moment”.
Read more...The markers are ten minutes apart, representing just under nine hours of solid driving. Someone must really like it.
Approximately half of my handful of readers may remember a certain event about, oh, fifteen years ago. June 7, 1995 to be exact.
Read more...Here in southwest Ontario this afternoon, there was an unusual weather pattern. Looking straight up, one could see clouds moving in opposite directions. It was like an animation in a planetarium (remember those?): standing still, but the whole upper hemisphere rapidly shifting/rolling, with some smaller foreground objects moving in other directions. This is the first time I noticed this in a natural steady-state setting.
Read more...Pithy commentary from my colleague Roland McGrath, regarding placing complexity into debugging tools vs. penalizing everything else.
[14:57:49]yeah, well, we’re silly. we let the compiler people make the right optimization decisions and then don’t degrade them to make writing debugging tools easier but instead work on making debugging tools work with optimal code. solaris is big on hyping how fabulous their debugging tools are because they quietly constrain them to working in the easy cases by degrading the compilations.
“Faisal Shahzad’s Motive Shrouded in Mystery,” ... It must be terribly frustrating to the jihadis: we’re completely upfront about our goals and rationales, and they still don’t take us seriously. What do we have to do?
More here
Our 5.4-year-old little guy took part in a regional music competition the other day. People who know him will not be surprised that he stood out.
Read more...Limited time offer!
I blame this development on Weird Al.
This service is a great idea. It’s a newish free problem-tracking system for concerns in one’s municipality. One can use it to report “streetlight out on the corner of X and Y”, and if one’s city has employees who monitor the list, the problem’s resolution can be tracked publicly. Many cities already use this to some extent.
This unfortunate disaster made me wonder whether such an event is possible as a form of assassination.
Read more...This fine document serves as the master copy of where private airplanes may land within the US for customs clearance purposes. It is delightful for reading on paper, but not helpful for geographical flight-planning purposes. Say, this humble canadian wants to visit the Shenandoah Caverns: where best to land to clear customs? Good luck answering that one by just looking at the CBP document, unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of towns within a few-hundred-mile radius of any random point.
As I have found no other web site with this data, I’ve started a wee google map where some of the CBP-staffed airports are graphed. The map is currently open to public edits, so is just aching for a transcription slave to fill in the other airports and contact info. Please help! I hope eventually airnav.com or ourairports.com or runwayfinder.com or some other aviation-oriented community database site, or even the CBP itself (gasp!), will supplant this.
If this announcement is not a joke, then Sony’s move would turn off the most accessible machine on which one can develop/test software on the powerpc architectures. For fans, or conscientious programmers who wish to test the portability of their code, this means that ppc is becoming ephemeral. It is not worth $severalK to buy an IBM box, and simulators may or may not be good enough. With linux distributions also dropping powerpc, there will be less and less software to run on the thing in whatever form. IBM must be thrilled. Intel might feel some schadenfreude, but then again the ia64 was never a hobbyist platform.
Sony, you suck.
Every budget season, almost every lower level of government whines and moans about how it needs some sort of handout from a higher level of government. This sucks, and here is how you can see it sucks too. The key is to ask “Why should X pay for Y?”, where X is some sibling place and Y is some supposedly threatened local expenditure. It only sounds rhetorical.
Read more...3.3-year-old Stuart has started asking some challenging questions. They are not only difficult to explain to someone at his level in general, but also requires us to study some to brush up on the respective areas.
Read more...There is something you need to know about the person calling himself with first name Leslie, Lester, Len, Les, Lesley, Steve, and/or Stephan and last name Lankovich, Lonkovic, Rankovic, Lokovic, and/or Lonkrovic.
Eric insisted I publish this today. It has something to do with this video.
Read more...My humble brag(*) responding to AOPA’s airplane/car naming coincidence article(*) refers to this pair of beasts.
Now you know.
(*): AOPA member-only links. Pieces transcribed below the fold.
Read more...Here in Ontario, the provincial government last year started our own super subsidized solar microgeneration program – $0.81/kWh “earned”, if generated from a rooftop photovoltaic panel, which is about ten times the value of that same electricity flowing the other way, purchased from the grid. I’ve been tempted to jump into it, just on the charming theory of personal backup power in case the grid goes down. (I will leave aside whether such a subsidy makes any economic or environmental sense.)
But for the scruple-free, it provides an opportunity to maximize profit using this European technique:
A German aristocrat of my acquaintance has figured out that the price he will be paid for the output of a solar panel is so high compared with the price he will pay for his input of normal electricity, that he is thinking of rigging up powerful arc lamps to shine on solar panels on his extensive roof.
UPDATE: Someone’s actually tried this scam.
OK. I’m stumped.
What the heck are the sheep talking about at the end of this sesame street classic?
UPDATE. Ah, this Andrews Sisters song.
A broken piece of the household forced us to entertain a visiting salesperson. It went avoidably badly.
Read more...30 minutes of Reagan from 1964. No teleprompter. Multiply his numbers by 5-10, and he’d be right on today.
The family went on a brief swimming outing this afternoon to shake our fist at winter. One of the boys and I took a moment to look at the renovation in progress at the recreation centre. Two dozen steel columns have been erected and bolted to the concrete foundations for the new hockey arena. The sight of the mighty machines lifting those parts always swells the heart of a technical person.
As we were watching, two middle-aged ladies came out of the open part of the building. One took a big puff of her cigarette, and said aloud: “Wow, look at all those long columns, standing up so straight. It makes me so excited just looking at them.”
I said only “There’s a joke there, but I’m not saying a single word.” with as straight a face as possible, and headed into the building.
Behind me, the lady cracked up. She was still laughing out loud when we got out of aural range.
Consider a prized camera, being borrowed by a 3 year-old for some unsupervised roving photography all around the house. (Like his brother, he’s been self-sufficient on computers and cameras since about age 2.5, so this is not unusual here.) Listen for the shutter clicks all around as the brat roams. Relax and get back to work. An hour later, notice the camera, its job now finished, sitting someplace. Note with horror how its lens cap has gone missing.
Read more...I am a recent customer of Flashpass, a little software package to partially automate the US Customs data reporting necessary to fly to/from the USA in private aircraft. Flashpass is basically an XML editor that assembles all the personal information required by the USA government: passport numbers, full names, birthdates, home and away addresses, trip dates.
Now comes from the same outfit an online version of the tool, where a web browser is the client. The application and the all above data is presumably stored elsewhere. On the lobo-labs computers. In Mexico.
What could possibly go wrong?
Yesterday, a brief flight from Buffalo, NY, to Toronto had an excess of drama. Even music from the intercom — sesame street silly songs — was not funny.
Read more...Today was unusual. Due to no fault of my own, I was a hero five separate times.
1) taking a hangar mate for spontaneous evening flight in GXRP
2) winning a raffle at elementary school’s movie night to have a comfy couch, so my family could sit there instead of on comfy mats on the gym floor
3) winning another raffle at same event, closely guessing the number of chocolate kisses inside bottle
4) sharing said chocolate kisses with every kid in the movie night event – 30ish young ‘uns
5) giving audio-visual technical advice to the school staff to bypass crappy wires and allow the movie to proceed with sound
Such run of public luck is unlikely to reappear, but I promise I will advertise only better ones in the future.
This is making me want to watch TV again, just a little bit.
Stuart, aged 3.1, noted today that he has a “funny looking” body part, right there below his nose. We looked at it really close, and determined that yes, he has a funny philtrum.
Time’s passing rubs itself in one’s face in all sorts of ways. This morning it was the brats’ show of “appreciation” after I built a little foam/mat house for them in the basement. They moved in right away and dumped a bucketful of toys.
Since this house was larger than usual, I was able to squish in and see what was going on. I told them them about the times long ago when I and my brothers played with cardboard forts on an apartment balcony, shooting waterguns in the summer. But not for long.
ERIC
Go away please.
FRANK
Why?
ERIC
Because you’re too old.
STUART
This is for kids only. Two kids. Zero adults.
FRANK
(moping, withdraws)
I was doodling around with our home synthesizer, with the brats and woman in the next room over. After fifteen minutes with my uneducated fingers, the wife comes over, and says
Hey, that sounds like boring elevator music. Try something more exciting. (Like what?) Like some baroque, with a twist of classical.
Yes, I am married to someone who thinks “baroque, with a twist of classical” is more exciting than modern elevator music.
Lucky me.
Whom is one to trust on the efficacy and means of terrorist interrogation? People who do it, who know,, or whiny torture shriek monkeys?
Wow, lefty intellectuals caught introspecting.
It it’s serious, it’s tragic. If he’s joking, it’s not very funny…
3.0-year-old Stuart comments:
Your bum is too fat. It is monstrous.
As our third novelty item today, witness the headline Bogus Lawyer, Doctor Tries to Visit Fort Hood Massacre Suspect Nidal Hasan.
OK, don’t get excited, it wasn’t some vigilante who almost managed to shortcut the legal process and kill the guy.
But read the article to the bottom.
Hasan is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the Nov. 5 shootings. He is undergoing rehabilitation for paralysis.
Yes, you read that right. The mass murderer is undergoing rehabilitation, at taxpayer’s expense no doubt.
So perhaps the intruder wasn’t a vigilante, just an auditioning death panel adviser wannabe, looking to cut medical system costs by talking the good Mr. Nasan into declining the rehabilitation services. Better luck next time.
For years, people complained during the W. years about preemptive military action, endangered civil rights, the terrorism-inducing inhumanity that is the USA, all of which was counter-intuitively (to them) effective in keeping the bad guys away from the homeland. The same ones are starting to crow that it is inevitable that some bad guy will get through and cause major terrorist damage. And when that happens, by golly we shouldn’t blame anyone — especially current government leaders — since, you see, it was inevitable.
The reasoning looks sound — if you ignore time. Yes, eventually, some guy is likely to successfully exploit one of the many weaknesses of the system. But the failures don’t have to happen on this guy’s watch. One can fight them by reacting to what they’ve tried, predicting what they’ll try next … smart and willing people can put up a fight.
But what does Mr. Security suggest? To roll over: all those new security measures and evolving counter-tactics are all a stupid game we should stop playing. Maybe they bad guys will just leave the “playground” and go home to shag some goats. Right. Or else they will succeed in an attack against weakened defenses, in which case it sure wouldn’t be our chief-executive pal’s fault, since it was inevitable.
Brilliant.
Headline: Chopstick pierces tot’s brain through nose
Cultural trivium:
Chen said Li’s neurosurgeon was perfect for the job since he had extensive experience with surgeries involving chopsticks lodged in eyes, foreheads and necks.
