And I've never been one to let the carrier.. drop
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Sheer's LiveJournal:
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| Saturday, July 11th, 2009 | | 10:59 pm |
| | Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | | 2:23 am |
| | Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | | 10:24 pm |
| | 7:13 pm |
Random thoughts from scripting (perl)
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. Here’s a couple of nifty tricks from today’s scripting adventures:
1) This one is sort of obvious in retrospect - but, if you’re processing a long list of items and want to show a status indicator, this works rather well:
for($i=0;$i<10000;$i++) {
print "$i\r" if(!($i % 100));
}
I’ve always used the !($i % 100) trick, but never the \r, which returns the carriage to the beginning of the line.
Also fun is:
$|=1;
@spinner = (”|”,”/”,”-”,”\\”);
for($i=0;$i<10000;$i++) {
print $spinner[($i % 4)] . "\r";
select(undef,undef,undef,0.1);
}
2) moving a byte: handy constants to memorize are 65280, 16711680, and 4278190080, which are the second eight bits, the third eight bits, and the forth eight bits, respectively. You can do ($value & 65280) >> 8, ($value & 16711680) >> 16, and ($value & 4278190080) >> 24, respectively, to get at bytes two, three, and four. The reverse operation is even easier: $b1 + ($b2 <<  + ($b3 << 16) + ($b4 << 24); | | Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | | 7:04 pm |
| | Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | | 4:56 pm |
Funding for candidates dependant on their campaign promises
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. So, I had a idea that might be a little hard to implement, but would bring some honesty back to the democratic process.
I think individual donors should be allowed to specify which campaign promise led to their donations for a candidate. Then, if the candidate failed (by a impartial observer) to at least attempt to live up to the promise, they’d have to refund the donations. This might literally mean they couldn’t run the next election cycle, because they would be too far in the hole to their donors.. but it would be a way of making sure that politicians “stayed bought”.
The problem with the current situation is that a politician can promise anything they like - and them completely forget every any promises they want after they get to office. If they upset the majority this way, they might not get reelected - but if they just upset a minority - making promises to that minority to get them extremely motivated in getting the pol elected, and then ignoring the promises after their election - nothing bad will happen to the pol, even though they’ve behaved dishonorably.
(This is partially in response to this article - I’m disappointed, but not particularly surprised. Supporting rights for LGBTs is just not a centerist thing to do, and Obama is playing to the center, probably in the hopes of getting reelected. (says the Sheer, who is clearly not a expert at politics)
Personally, I’d rather he didn’t care about the next term - that would show that he was a truly honorable politician, willing to do the right thing on every issue even though it cost him 4 years in office*. But that’s also too much to ask for, as well I know. I guess I can always hope that after he no longer has to worry about reelection - assuming he gets reelected in 2012, and the world doesn’t end - he’ll deliver on his earlier campaign promises
* = of course, then I’d also want him to be honorable enough to bow out in favor of a Dem candidate who could win | | Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | | 1:13 am |
ArcGIS 9.3 unix port
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. Probably I just missed them all, but I did a fair amount of searching trying to find other users reviewing the ArcGIS 9.3 unix port, trying to decide if I should run ArcGIS on unix or Windows.
Well, I’m here to say, stick with windows. The unix port uses enormously more CPU to achive the same goals. It’s built on a porting platform called MainWin, which seems to have been written to allow porting developers to avoid having to do too much work when porting a product from one OS to another, but doesn’t seem to have given much thought to, for example, efficiency. I would guess that ArcGIS on Unix uses about 5 times the CPU - and GIS is usually pretty CPU-intensive, so this is a Very Bad Thing.
Also, a lot of functionality that works well on windows, such as starting and stopping services, deleting services, etc, works poorly or not at all on unix. ( caveat: I didn’t try installing the patch, and I didn’t try 9.3.1 - this may have all been fixed).
The unix port also definately has a ‘we didn’t feel like actually porting the application’ feel to it - processes show up with names like ‘dllrunner {hex-guid}’ and ‘arcsoc.exe’. While it’s sort of amusing watching the opposite of Cygwin happen, it doesn’t give one warm and fuzzy feelings that a lot of effort was put into taking advantage of the operating system’s native strengths.
The unix port also seems to have reletively bad process isolation. When one process is off generating cache tiles, other completely unrelated services will become unusable.
I do give ESRI props that they bothered to try and make a unix port. I just wish they had done it in the traditional way of actually porting the code / writing support libraries for unix to replace any key windows-OS functionality, instead of by slapping it in a win32-replacement framework and calling it a day.
On the *good* side - migrating the services from a unix server to a windows one took very little time, and was smooth and painless. | | Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | | 9:26 pm |
nostalgia..
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. So, I’ve been reading about assorted musical instrument technologies that were old before I was born. I can’t remember how I got started, but the best find this time was the optigan, a 70’s era sample-playback organ that worked by storing the music optically on a disk - sort of like analog film soundtrack, only laid out like a record. Truly funny. I also got interested in the Mellotron - and reading about same - and the Hammond B3. (My ultimate studio would probably have a B3 sitting right next to a Yamaha C7 baby grand. Since I can’t afford either one, I use electronic versions instead). I learned lots of fun things about the innards of the B3 at the Hammond Wiki, including that most B3s (apparently the instruments I’ve played were atypical) have a startup sequence involving holding down a start switch until the tonewheel assembly gets up to speed, and then switching over to the run switch to let the synchronous motor take over. By the way, I still think that Boston’s ‘Walk On’ album is the final word in awesomeness when it comes to the B3. And by the way, yay mechanical tone generators!
I also read about the Ondes Martenot, a rather impressive little synthesizer for it’s day - I especially like their idea of using different speaker configurations with unusual things in front of them (gongs, sympathetic resonators) to change the character of the tone. I drooled a bit over the mighty Wurlitzer theater organ (they just don’t have enough places where a amataur can try these things out!), got a good laugh out of the Wurlitzer side man. (I’ve got to meet this Pea Hix character, if only I can convince him I’m cool enough to be worth hanging out with ;-)), and just generally enjoyed a nice bout of nostalgia for electric instruments that were old before I was born.
Those of you who follow this blog regularly will remember my nostalgia-fests over The Set, a old TV repairman’s successful endeavor to restore the first-ever NTSC TV receiver to operation, and of course my ongoing fascination (some day I’m probably going to buy one) with the CED Videodisc format. For those of you who missed out on that last one, it’s a example of geekery gone wrong at it’s finist - it was a competitor to the VCR that stored video on a disk that was read by a mechanical (or quasi-mechanical, since ideally the pickup never touched the grooves) playback head.
I also, along the way, discovered 8 track heaven, which among other things lists bands that are still releasing their works on 8-track tape. As in those clunky cartridges with a continuous loop tape inside. Oddly tempting, that..
I wonder what interesting bits of nostalgia I’ll come across next? Anyway, thanks to the authors of all those sites for keeping little bits of our geek history alive.
Oh, yeah.. I remember one thing I wanted to whine about: Geocities is shutting down, AOL hometown already has. AOL hometown - what AOL did with the free web pages hosted by all the ISPs that it absorbed in the early 90s - had many thousands of fascinating pages. All gone. AOL pulled the plug with less than a month’s notice. Jason Scott from textfiles.com did a good job of describing the carnage and also suggesting a solution that may help prevent future carnage. | | Monday, June 8th, 2009 | | 11:32 pm |
| | Saturday, June 6th, 2009 | | 3:11 am |
Yaaay!
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. So, after years of begging, grovelling, and whatnot, Lucasfilm is publishing a new Monkey Island game. Well, actually, they’re publishing the original game, remastered, and allowing Telltale Games (those fun guys who brought you Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People With A Really Long Title) to publish a new monkey island game, but anyway, they both seem to have the right voice actors. Hopefully Murray will put in a appearance in the new MI series as well - there are going to be 5 of them, in monthly increments, just like the Strong Bad games. We’ll see if they manage to keep the humor value MI is so famous for - in any case, I’ll definately buy copies. (Among other things, I’ve already mastered the art of getting Telltale Games to run, since I played SBCGFAPWART)
I’ve discovered this since I am for some reason unable to sleep at the moment. It’s getting a bit frustrating. | | Friday, June 5th, 2009 | | 8:59 pm |
Horrible
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. According to a variety of newspaper sources, including this one, a mob beat and seriously injured a man that police had listed as a possible suspect in a rape case. Nothing bad happened to the crowd - in fact, they were given a reward by the father of the girl.
Even if the man had been found guilty, every member of that mob should have been doing time - it’s not okay to physically attack people. But it’s especially not okay to attack people who haven’t been found guilty, based on the fact that the cops have identified them (probably using some very questionable techniques) as a possible suspect. It terrifies me that the lynch mob isn’t all cooling their heals on assault charges. It says horrible things about the world we live in - including that we don’t actually believe in innocent until proven guilty and we do believe in vigilante justice.
Is there any way that the cops in question can be put in jail for failing to do their jobs? | | Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | | 8:48 pm |
The collapse of California..
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. So, California, having discovered itself broke, refuses to raise taxes (even though the state taxes are hardly what I’d call crippling.. compared to the federal taxes, I don’t even *notice* my state taxes) and instead is turning off everything .. wasting hundreds of thousands of man hours of work in the process - closing parks and letting them decay, turning off welfare, closing prisons, firing the cops and the firefighters.. Remind me again, why aren’t we raising taxes instead? I wouldn’t begrudge California another thousand or two on April 15, and I can’t imagine there are many that would, especially if they kept the wonderful services like nearly-free higher education, free beaches, world-class firefighting service, excellent highway system , and whatnot. Who’s objecting so mightily to them raising taxes? It’s not like they’re using the money to *bomb* people - Especially if they agreed not to use the money for more war-on-drugs sorts of idiocy.
On the other hand, California is apparently not the progressive paradise that I like to think it - they did vote yes on Prop 8. Maybe we should move to New England? 
However, all you libertarians, this is your chance to see how the libertarian model actually works out - or doesn’t. My problem is that I’m libertarian on Federal government, but socialist/green on a state level. | | 2:45 pm |
Cop Cams
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. So, my friend Clint is always posting on Facebook about various abuses of power that the police get involved with - and there are quite a lot of these. As most of us know, power corrupts, and carrying around a gun and a badge seems like a pretty clear case of having some power. After many discussions with Clint and some brain-wracking, I’ve concluded that there is a technological solution that, if it doesn’t eliminate police abuses of power, would at least curtail them somewhat.
Cops should carry video cameras - tiny, unobtrusive, built into their uniforms, badges, or something similar - that stream video in real time over the cellular data networks to their dispatchers and to a DVR. The recorded video should be cryptographically signed such that removing a single frame or series of frames would be a significant challenge. In addition, the dispatcher should have the ability to crank up the res, activate IR illuminators, etc to improve image quality at the cost of bandwidth and cam battery life for cops that are currently actively engaged in some sort of incident i.e. arrest.
This would have several good effects:
1) If a citizen accused a cop of abusing their power, or for some other reason we ended up with a cop vs. citizen debate, there would be a video log of whatever happened that would help decide who was telling the truth
2) Dispatchers could evaluate the current situation of any cop much better than they are able to with a voice channel - they could decide how much backup to send, and what types of units - if a cop were injured and unable to call for backup (i.e. had a heart attack or a stroke) they could see that the cop was down and call the appropriate assistance onto the scene
3) ‘Black screen’ - the video channel would also serve as positive confirmation that dispatch was still in contact with the cop in question, something which isn’t always clear with conventional analog cop-radio equipment. (Of course, by now, they’ve probably gone to digital links everywhere anyway ;-))
All of the technology to do this already exists and is in use in many other industries. With widespread deployment and use of existing data RF nets, these cameras could be extremely cheap - $200ish per cop, plus $50ish per month for the data service is my guess. As the budget crunch is felt, more and more cops may be sent out solo instead of in partnered teams, making communications with dispatch much more important. Also, right now there is a negative feedback circuit going on where the cops are clearly (by news reports) abusing their power more and more, which leads to the citizens being more hostile to the cops because they don’t trust them - which leads to the cops feeling more justified to abuse their power - and so on, and so forth. I think knowing that the cops had video that would be shown to the judge in case of a lawsuit or arrest, and that they were accountable to people besides their cop-structure that seems inclined often to protect them at the cost of citizens, would help the cop-citizen relationship considerably. And I really do think that it would make the cops safer, besides, so aside from the additional cost - which isn’t that large in the grand scheme of things - it seems like a win-win. | | 2:05 pm |
Green laser pointer!
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. Yes, finally, there is a affordable ($20) green laser pointer - for sale at CompGeeks. Also, I just got mine, and I highly doubt this is only a 5mW laser - I have a calibrated 5mW green laser that I paid $500 for, years ago, and this is *way* brighter. I don’t have a power meter, or I’d check it, but by eyeball I’d guess it to be in the 20-30mW range. | | Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | | 1:19 pm |
Gay rights, drug law reform, health care reform..
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. Sometimes I get discouraged - I see so many broken things, so many cases of people oppressing other people for profit or “because God told me to”, and I just want to give up and curl up in a little ball and hide.
But, this story reminds me that things are actually getting better. In 1974, race officials tried to bodily remove a runner from the Boston marathon.. because she was a woman. In 1967, you couldn’t marry someone who wasn’t of the same race you were. And in 1920, you couldn’t vote unless you were male.
I look forward to the day when our children, or grandchildren, look back at capitolism the way we look back at slavery - when people are mostly puzzled by our refusal to let gays marry - when people have designed a government that can’t turn on it’s citizens and lock them up for “moral offenses” like recreational drug use - things that don’t hurt anyone else, and in many cases don’t even hurt the offender.
——————
A thought, by the way, for all of you resisting nationalized health care - a nationalized phone system brought you the transistor. Right now it’s very much not in the economic interests of the powers that be to cure diseases - they can make far more money treating them. But - if you measure in terms of wealth of humanity as a whole, instead of wealth of particular stockholders, clearly every infectious disease known to man should be eradicated. Human health care needs many Xerox parcs, many bell labs - groups of brilliant people who are encouraged to create the best things they can, with the wealth of the race as their primary interest rather than the wealth of a individual company. | | Sunday, May 17th, 2009 | | 11:14 am |
Indigo Girls
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. So, me and Kayti went to see the Indigo Girls last night. It was at the House Of Blues in Anaheim, and it was neat seeing that many IG fans togeather in one place - it was like a little pocket of sanity in the middle of the repressive right-wing world that is O.C.
Sadly we had to leave before the end, but they did play many favorites including ‘Get out the map’, ‘Shame on you’, ‘The wood song’, ‘Power of two’, ‘KiD fears’, ‘Land of Canaan’,'Hammer and a nail’
Next week: Jimmy Buffet | | Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 | | 2:16 pm |
More help for Google
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. As you’ll recall, earlier I posted a definition of caughterfy for Google. Now I’m going to help with related keywords, since it’s clearly a irregular verb: That poor cat is suffering from caughterfication, I caughterfied Allie, She caughterfies the cat, He is caugherfying his cat right now, Allie was caughterfied yesterday, Allie will be caughterfied tomorrow.
Coming up next: pronunciation guide. Then I’ll publish a book of 100 cat words. | | Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | | 6:27 am |
The BBS bootstrapping process
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. So, I continue to telnet into nonmundane.com 23 every day or so - I’ve posted a few messages - I *think* I’m the only one who has. I suppose I should also go check out nonmundane.org, to be fair But it just doesn’t have that old-skool bbs feel to it. I gather I’m the only one who’s entranced by same, though | | Monday, May 4th, 2009 | | 1:33 pm |
Me on facebook
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. so lately on facebook I’ve been a bit over the top about espousing my particular flavor of utopia. I don’t have any idea why, but lately I’ve just been really irritable. Part of it probably has to do with changing my sleep schedule, but I don’t really think that that is all of it. I actually think that a lot of what I wrote was pretty good stuff (though the people who had entries I was commenting on generally disagreed - some of them even seemed unhappy that I was wasting their time) although I did several times in one of the argument commit the communication sin of assuming I knew what the other person’s side was. (I’m going to try to stomp down hard on that tendancy, because it definately decreases the chances of successful communication, and I hate it when other people do it to me, and it’s just generally bad.) | | 11:37 am |
[relaying article from Clint]
Originally published at Never been one to let the carrier drop. You can comment here or there. According to this article, the house is going to vote on a bill from CA rep Sanchez which will allow people to be placed in prison for up to two years for writing blog entries that “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner.*
Look, basically, you have power over our lives, we write about the bad things you do in our blogs - which you don’t have to read - and you send us to prison? I’m sorry, but that’s just awful. Also kind of puts a dent in the 1st amendment. Sadly, I don’t live in Orange County any more, so I can’t write Sanchez and tell her how nuts I think she is. Well, I can, but she wouldn’t pay any attention because I don’t get to vote her out. Pity. But I can write my reps and tell them I disapprove, and I will.
I don’t like hate speech.. I pretty much hate Encyclopedia Dramatica, for example.. but I believe everyone should be free to post whatever they want on the interwebz. You don’t like it? Don’t visit the page. Censorship is bad, mmkay?
*** Update ***
Actually, apparently it applies to everyone - it’s a reaction to this - and a attempt to prevent cyberbullying. I don’t think laws are the right solution, I think educating people about the wonders of not browsing to a site where people are flaming them, educating people about how horrible/assish other people can be, and encouraging depressed 13 year olds to spend time with real people instead of myspace ones is probably the right solution. Anyway, I still don’t like the bill, but it also doesn’t look like it’s going to pass, hence, I’m not going to worry about it. |
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