If you are like me, you carry in your backpack, bag or briefcase all sorts of physical stuff, other than documents, papers or magazines. You know the type: phone chargers, USB cables, power adapters, network cables, USB sticks and other small gadgets or accessories. Over time these things accumulate and it becomes harder and harder to find them and to keep them organized.
When I arrived in Switzerland nine years ago I didn't speak a word of German (much less Swiss German!), so for a while I faced a very real and practical problem. I would encounter signs on the street, and have absolutely no idea what they meant. Does this sign mean I can pass, or I cannot? "Watch your step" or "Watch for the vicious dog"? During that period, I often wished for a gadget that I could point at the sign and would give me an instant translation.
via youtube.com Incredible compilation, very nicely done. So many movies, so little time. I haven't seen even a tenth of the movies shown here (mostly I've seen the animated ones, since go to the movies more often with the girls than without).
via boston.com I am sooooo happy to be back in Mexico where I don't have to deal with snow :)
OTOH, there are some beautiful pictures here. Snow can be beautiful, but I think you have to grow with it to really enjoy it. Not my case.
Here's a cfengine bundle that I wrote for editing the sshd configuration file by passing an array with the parameters. Using an array is a very elegant way of defining the values to set. The bundle also restarts sshd after any changes are made, unless the no_restarts class is defined.
Docco is a quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator. It produces HTML that displays your comments alongside your code. Comments are passed through Markdown, and code is passed through Pygments syntax highlighting. via jashkenas.github.com Nice-looking tool for literate programming, with variants for several languages.
1. Deleted all msn/live/hotmail certificates in the folder
2. went to https://omega.contacts.msn.com using fire fox (https not http)
3. right click > view page INFO > Security Tab > View Certificate Button > Details Tab > Export Button
4. Saved the file to ~.purple/certificates/x509/tls_peers/omega.contacts.msn.com
5. Reconnected
6. Perfect via diarizing.com Like many people, I started getting certificate errors when connecting to my MSN account using Pidgin. The straightforward fix described (delete certificate, reconnect to fetch the new one) didn't work for me with Pidgin 2.7.5 under Windows 7, but this slightly-more-convoluted technique worked fine.
If you use Emacs as your shell you will have all the functionality that Emacs provides plus you get almost all of the advantages provided by the shell itself, but built into Emacs. This article is only a quick overview of all the shells: I plan on tackling each one, in-depth, later on. via masteringemacs.org Nice overview, I hadn't heard of several of the more advanced shell modes.
They look so delicate, probably because they make the Sun look fuzzy, like a comfy blanket… but have no doubts on the fury and scale of what you’re seeing here. See that little bright spot on the plume on the left, just above the Sun’s edge? That spot is the same size as the Earth
via blogs.discovermagazine.com Amazing photograph of the sun.
via feedproxy.google.com Amazing infographic. Make sure you follow the link through to the full version (the image shown here is just a small part of it).
Jaime "Kalapusa" Margary, who's given us realistic Piranha Plants, and Super Mario fungi in the past, now turns his attention to Pac-Man, presently soaking in jar of formaldehyde.
Writes Jaime:
The idea behind the video is Pac Man's final days, free from the maze (kudos if you can guess who's castle that is) and eating pellets to his heart's content in a glowing pellet forest. His dead, bloated body is found afterwards and then delivered to 8-Bit Labs.
I researched various biological features like shark eyes, reptilian mouths, obese skin and yellow tones in frogs and grapefruit. I used clay and acrylic, and animated everything in Flash.
via kotaku.com Very well done, but ew.
Today I ran into the problem that symlinks created under cygwin using "ln -s" are not understood by Windows, and of course Windows shortcuts are seen by cygwin as regular files. Happily, this is a (semi-)solved problem. For reference, this is what needs to be done:
There are still some rough edges, but by far the redesign and unification of zzamboni.org is done. With the same design you can now find my blogs (hosted by posterous.com), my project pages (hosted in github.com project repositories) and some static pages (hosted in my personal github.com pages repository, this includes the root, About and Code pages, as well as the static copy of my old blog BrT, which is the only one that retains its original design). The theme is a variation of Posterous' "Paramaibo".
via boston.com I love the fall, even more now that I know it won't be followed by a crude winter :) Still, I miss some of the Swiss scenery and traditions. Beautiful photos from TBP, as usual.
In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?
via guardian.co.uk Brilliant. Reminds me of The Ultimately Publishable Computer Science Paper of the 90s.
Por acuerdo del Dr. José Narro Robles, Rector de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, a partir del 27 de septiembre de 2010 la Dirección General de Servicios de Cómputo Académico cambia de denominación a Dirección General de Cómputo y de Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación, y el sitio Web de esta dependencia es:
via dgsca.unam.mx El final de una era. Yo comencé mi carrera profesional en DGSCA, por lo que tengo muchos recuerdos asociados con ese nombre. Sería interesante saber qué cambios funcionales vienen asociados con el cambio de nombre.
Si hubiera que reducir a la UNAM a unas cuantas cifras esenciales, tendrían que anotarse, entre otras, las siguientes: 314 mil alumnos, 35 mil académicos, tres mil 500 investigadores, 2 mil edificios, 139 bibliotecas, 56 mil computadoras conectadas en red, 18 museos, otros tantos recintos históricos, un canal de televisión y una estación de radio, una casa editora de miles de libros y de cientos de publicaciones periódicas, así como una Ciudad Universitaria que ha sido declarada por la UNESCO Patrimonio de la Humanidad. Más allá de los activos, en la institución se imparten 85 licenciaturas y operan 40 programas de posgrado, con 83 planes de estudio para maestría y doctorado, así como 34 programas de especialización con 189 orientaciones. via jornada.unam.mx La UNAM tiene aproximadamente el mismo número de estudiantes que empresas como IBM y HP tienen de empleados a nivel mundial.
Es un orgullo ser egresado de la UNAM. Más allá de los números, puedo decir, sin lugar a dudas, que mi formación en la UNAM, como estudiante y como académico, le dio a mi carrera el rumbo que sigue hasta el momento, y los fundamentos que me han permitido tener una vida profesional exitosa. Goya!
If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic. via youarenotsosmart.com We see patterns everywhere, our brain is hardwired to do it. Most of them are harmless or even beneficial. The problem is when people start assigning meaning to the patterns, as explanation of whatever they want to believe or to convince other people of (such as "vaccines cause autism", which is completely false).
Can you taste other people’s saliva, stomach acid, and tooth enamel in it? Certainly not. Will you think about it now that we’ve brought it up? Maybe. But the fact is people buy ‘em so there must be a demand. via sellout.woot.com Do I want to buy one, after reading this? Probably not.
I have written a Cfengine3 lexer for Pygments, the open source syntax-highlighter used by Gist and many other sites. It seems to work fine on all the cfengine policy files I have tested, but if you find anything that doesn't quite work as expected, please let me know. This is my first-ever Pygments lexer, so if you are an expert and can advise me on better ways of doing things, I'd very much appreciate the feedback too.
Google has launched a new labs project called Google Scribe, which essentially provides an auto-completion service. You type, it autocompletes. The following text was generated by typing a single space, and from then on simply accepting the default suggestions (pressing "Enter" every time the suggestion popup appeared). I had to stop at some point, but it seems like a good source of mindless entertainment. Also, the result varies depending on the initial seed word you provide, and also on whether you just accept blindly (Enter) or type spaces at certain places. These results also provide some insight into the training texts that were used ("I'ma let you finish...")
via liveleak.com Scary video (entertaining in a schadenfreude way). I found it unsettling that the "horizon" in the video doesn't move (as it would in a movie scene, for example, to have you notice how much the boat is moving) since the camera is moving with the ship, but you can infer the violence of the swaying from the damage it caused. /via @benthemorrison on Twitter.
Effective writers ...
Separate the writing and the editing processes. Focus on the interesting. Tap into the power of metaphor. Do adequate research. Learn from the writing of others. Write in small bursts. Read their work out loud. via ragan.com Worth reading the full article. I particularly suffer from not following #1 - I always end up losing time over editing details, instead of focusing on the raw content of what I'm writing.
via sial.org Useful article about storing both development and production configurations of cfengine using a version control mechanism. I am in the process of developing a similar setup using git, I will share it here when I get it to work properly.
One of the most useful applications I have discovered since I had to switch to Windows as my main OS is OneNote, a really great note-taking application which I use for pretty much every data-storing and note-taking need. I use a OneNote notebook as part of my GTD inbox. Today's very simple tip is how to assign a keystroke for opening my Inbox notebook from anywhere in the system. Here are the steps:
Download and install AutoHotKey, if you don't have it already (it's a really useful free application, well worth exploring). Add the following line to your default AutoHotKey.ahk file (normally in ~/Documents/AutoHotKey.ahk):
Re-run AutoHotKey so it re-reads the config file.
“What kind of establishment do you think this is?” “How dare you insult me!” “You think you can get in with that?”
It’s just after 8 p.m. on a balmy summer Saturday and I’m heading toward one of New York’s most overbooked restaurants, Balthazar, where celebrities regularly go to be celebrated and where lay diners like me call a month in advance to try and secure a reservation. I don’t have a reservation. I don’t have a connection. I don’t have a secret phone number. The only things I have are a $20, a $50, and a $100 bill, neatly folded in my pocket.
I’ve never bribed my way into a restaurant. I’ve never slipped a C-note or greased a palm. In truth, I’ve never even considered it. I’ve assumed, of course, that people do such things. I’ve seen my share of Cary Grant movies. I’ve heard—and wondered whether such old-fangled gestures would work in the high-stakes, high-hype world of New York City restaurants. For everyday diners in Manhattan, cracking the waiting list at Nobu is said to be harder than getting courtside tickets for the Knicks. But is that true?
via gourmet.com Fun and interesting (even informative!) article. Via garry/sub/posterous.
A person's own name is the single most important word to him/her; it is intimately tied to his/her identity as an individual. How you deal with people's names can have a profound effect on their impressions of you: Think about the times you've felt special when someone you admired addressed you by your name in a sincere tone; or think about the times when you've felt belittled when someone negligently called you by the wrong name, or worse, maliciously made fun of your name in front of you. via stanford.edu I've always been extremely bad at remembering people's names, and it's caused me my fair share of embarrassment during my life. While I lived in Switzerland, I was always amazed at how well people in general could remember names. I don't know if they train them for it, or if it's a cultural trait, but many times, for example, I was greeted by name by people I only met briefly weeks before at a party. By then, I could barely remember their faces! Lately I've been making an effort to consciously remember people's names, and it does have a positive effect, both on myself and on other people.
In this fan-edit you'll get to see the movie that I hope the studios bring to the big screen in a future Superman film. Please no more Lex Luthor centered shenanigans or kryptonite BS... let's see Superman face a real threat...Doomsday!
via geektyrant.com This would be so awesome. I've always wanted to see Doomsday in a Superman movie.
I recently posted a snippet to perform hierarchical copying in cfengine3. As I was attempting to integrate this mechanism into my copy of cfengine's COPBL, I realized that no additional functions or body components are needed. Thanks to cfengine3's list expansion, all you need to do is include in the existing copy promise the list containing the desired list of suffixes to try. For example:
The basic unit of work in the Pomodoro Technique™ can be split in five simple steps: Choose a task to be accomplished Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer) Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper Take a short break (5 minutes is OK) Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break via pomodorotechnique.com I'm giving the Pomodoro Technique a try today for my work. Looks like a nice way to split time, and a nice complement to GTD as a mechanism for the "doing" part of it.
The days of DIY system administration are rapidly coming to a close. Why? Because the open source tools available are just too good not to use. Presenting Bcfg2, Cfengine, Chef and Puppet. via linux-mag.com Nice overview of the Usenix 2010 Configuration Management Summit, including descriptions and comparisons of the four major open-source CM systems.
I have created a copy of the cfengine COPBL on GitHub , where I will use it as a playground for changes and additions. This is in no way endorsed by cfengine - it is just my personal copy. But if you use GitHub and want to use it, go ahead, I will try to keep it updated with respect to the original subversion repository , although it will include my changes too.
cf3-findpath2.cf Actually, this is just to test what posterous does with a text attachment.
Update: so it seems it just attaches it to the page. My suggestion, which I have already emailed to the Posterous guys, is to have the option to auto-post text attachments to gist.github.com. This would make it even easier to include code in blog posts.
Another cfengine snippet in case anyone finds it useful. This can be used to determine which NICs in the host have a certain IP address assigned to it, or match any pattern.
Here is a sample implementation in cfengine3 of the technique described in the cfengine wiki as "Singlecopy Nirvana" for cfengine2. Cfengine3 makes the technique more powerful by allowing modularization, so that you can specify both the suffixes to try, and the files to copy using those suffixes, as variables. Also, cf3's automatic list expansion allows us to write a single copy statement that will be automatically expanded into all the different values to try.
Update (2011/09/05): Updated the instructions for cfengine 3.2.0, cygwin 1.7.9, and tested them on a clean cygwin install.
Installing the cfengine community edition under Windows (the commercial version includes native Windows support) is fairly easy under cygwin, you just need to have the appropriate dependencies installed. Here’s how I did it.
The US Chamber of Commerce has apparently spent too much time watching Mad Men: in a blog post this morning, Chamber blogger Brad Peck called women’s fight for pay equity to be nothing more than a “fetish for money,” and said women complaining about their pay should focus instead on “choosing the right partner at home.” via workinprogress.firedoglake.com You couldn't make up stuff like this. Wow.
Last night I made a new release of my comic aggregator script, grabcartoons. You can fetch it from it brand new web page, now hosted by github.com instead of sourceforge.net.
Today I had to install AucTeX to use on my Win7/64 machine under EmacsW32. I found the basic instructions here: http://www.sturmnet.org/blog/2007/09/01/installing-auctex-in-emacsw32, but I had to modify them a bit (in particular, I am using tetex installed from cygwin instead of MiKTeX). Here are the commands I used:
(a friend asked me about my online setup, and I wrote the text below. Then I realized it would also make an interesting blog post, and I just copied and pasted it, with minimal editing, into an email to posterous. This is why I love posterous, it makes posting so easy)
In this post, I will explain how I use Github to version my code and Heroku to deploy it, with 2 different environments. You may also read this article that explains how to deploy your application on Heroku and this one that also explain how to deal with multiple environments
via suitmymind.com Nice article, possibly useful reference in the future.
The Misconception: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family.
The Truth: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.
via youarenotsosmart.com Another excellent article from YANSS, dispelling one of the most-commonly held beliefs in anger management.
Here are 10 big ideas from David Allen’s Getting Things Done…
1. If your day-to-day life is out of control, it’s almost impossible to think strategically or plan effectively. 2. Define what being “done” looks like.
3. Mental work has five distinct phases: Collect, Process, Organize, Do, and Review
4. Get everything out of your head.
5. Projects and tasks are two different things: track them separately.
6. Focus on the Next Action required to move forward.
7. Use the “2 Minute Rule” for small tasks.
8. Use Reference and Someday/Maybe files for things that have no immediate next actions.
9. Build a trusted system that helps you keep track of your commitments.
10. Schedule non-negotiable time for a Weekly Review.
BONUS TIP: developing an effective personal productivity system takes time and experimentation.
via feedproxy.google.com Nice overview (see the full article for details on each point), and it matches the things I personally like about GTD. Not to say that I actively practice all of them, but I'm trying to get there, experimenting different tools and options, one step at a time.
You walk into a clothing store and see what is probably the most bad ass leather jacket you’ve ever seen.
You try it on, look in the mirror and decide you must have it. While wearing this item, you imagine onlookers will clutch their chests and gasp every time you walk into a room or cross a street. You lift the sleeve to check the price – $1,000.
Well, that’s that, you think. You start to head back to the hanger when a salesperson stops you.
“You like it?”
“I love it, but it’s just too much.”
“No, that jacket is on sale right now for $400.”
It’s expensive, and you don’t need it really, but $600 off the price seems like a great deal for a coat which will increase your cool by a factor of 11.
You put it on the card, unaware you’ve been tricked by the oldest retail con in the business.
via youarenotsosmart.com You Are Not So Smart has, in a short time, become one of my favorite blogs, I find every post incredibly interesting, explaining so many of our common behaviors in a well-documented and easy-to-understand manner. The latest post is no exception, and is really something to keep in mind when negotiating prices, wages, or anything else.
Whenever you look at a firewall rule, half the time you’re going to be asking yourself, “Why is that there? Did *I* put it there? Do we still need it?” It would sure be nice if the explanation were right there, as a comment that could be version-tracked, exported into nice reports, searched on, and placed in a standard format that would be compatible with other exception entries in other tools. (Kind of like a syslog for exceptions.) It would be nice if you could mark a scanner finding as, “We KNOW it’s there. We’re not going to fix it. Just for these two machines, STOP REPORTING ON THIS.”) via layer8.itsecuritygeek.com Insightful article. I can't count the number of times I have asked myself exactly this, and hoped for a good, INTEGRATED way of keeping track of these exceptions.
of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC). Drowning does not look like drowning via mariovittone.com This is an eye-opening article for me. Not having actually watched anyone drown (fortunately), I had the impression that someone drowning would trash madly as shown on TV and movies. This is knowledge that can actually save lives! I think everyone should read this, particularly parents.
In their quest to offer a better service every day, the guys at posterous.com have released their Pages tool, which makes it much easier to use Posterous for all my online content by allowing the creation of static pages. And in a stroke of genius, they even allow pages to automatically redirect to arbitrary URLs! This makes it almost trivial to integrate multiple sites into a single, unified user experience. As a first step, as you can see above, I have better integrated this blog and my zznippets blog by giving them a common theme, differentiated only by color. I will be working on bringing much of my other online content under posterous by making use of this feature.
It is common in fiction for the bad guys to lose and the good guys to win.
It’s how you would like to see the world- just and fair.
In psychology, the tendency to believe this is how the real world actually works is called the Just-World Fallacy.
More specifically, this is the tendency to react to horrible misfortune, like homelessness or drug addiction, by believing the people stuck in horrible situations must have done something to deserve it.
via youarenotsosmart.com Very interesting article.
On the Mac, Services are a niche. On iPhone OS they’d be nothing short of a revolution. via releasecandidateone.com Very interesting idea, would be incredibly useful. Follow the link for a full description, plus a mock-up video of how it could work.
via d8.allthingsd.com Nice video summary of Jobs' appearance at D8. Favorite quote: "we've sold an iPad every three seconds since launch, so people seem to be liking them".
Today I reactivated my Facebook account just to be able to delete it completely. If you find Facebook useful, you should at least be aware of its potential privacy issues, and tune your privacy settings to a level that you find comfortable. Here are some links where you can find more information:
via mattmckeon.com This is a very good analysis, and is why my Facebook account is currently deactivated, and probably will be deleted. Contrary to Matt, I don't find Facebook very useful. Mostly it's served me to be found by people by whom I wasn't all that interested in being found, to see relatives' photos (which I can also receive through other means), to be endlessly spammed by people playing Farmville and, most usefully, to contact people whose email addresses I don't have or can't bother to remember. None of these are indispensable or irreplaceable to me.
I have a significant online presence, so if someone is interested, I'm really easy to find. I'm just not comfortable with having to keep tabs of what Facebook is doing so I can go tweak my settings every time they decide to change something.
I don’t have a solution, but at least I have a better understanding of the problem. Falling victim to a scam isn’t just a matter of not being wise to the ways of the world: it’s a matter of being caught out in a moment of distraction and of unlikely circumstance. via locusmag.com Good lesson to stay always alert, even if you think you know better.
Just for the record, the Avatar Blu-Ray DVD plays correctly on my LG BD370 player, with the latest firmware (V7.170.00.26, upgraded from the device). I get a message saying "your player may need an upgrade", then the screen goes black, but after about 45 seconds, the DVD menu appears and you can play the movie correctly.
Create a .bat file with following script:
net start MSSQL$SQLEXP_VIM
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 120 -w 1000 > null
net start vpxd
Note: for SQL Server substitute MSSQLSERVER in the above batch file instead of MSSQL$SQLEXP_VIM.
Set script to run on boot.
via communities.vmware.com In one of my VirtualCenter servers, a Windows XP machine, the VirtualCenter Server service often fails to start because it tries to run before the MSSQL server is fully initialized. This happens even when the dependencies are set correctly between the services (which is the official solution provided by VMware). The workaround is to create a startup script as shown above. I remove the redirection to nul (which means the script window shows the ping output) as a reminder of what is happening.
To make it a startup script in WinXP, click on Start -> All programs, then right-click on "Startup" and select "Open All Users". Store the script there (just name it with a .bat extension to make it executable).
Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind. via apple.com Letter from Steve Jobs about why Apple does not support Flash on their mobile devices.
via gtdtimes.com Short video of David Allen talking about the importance of the GTD tools you choose. Conclusion: the most important thing is that you choose a tool you actually use, because the moment you stop putting your stuff in it, it will stop working.
Timely for me as I rebuild my GTD toolbox and system this week.
I recently had to copy a very large file (>4GB) from a remote Windows share to my Windows 7 machine, over a very finicky connection (frequently-failing VPN over a slow Internet connection). A GUI copy didn't work because the connection dropped frequently. I tried Free Download Manager, which was the recommended tool for the download, but surprisingly, it wasn't always able to restart the download after connectivity dropped.
via singularityhub.com What a cool use for Segways - man-sized robots able to move in many ways like humans, act unpredictably and react to other robots, humans and the environment.
Since I started at my new job and moved to a new machine and OS, my old GTD setup has fallen by the wayside and I have found myself at a loss trying to keep track of things. I have found OneNote to be a very useful tool for keeping notes and reference material, and Outlook 2010 is actually not that bad as a task/calendar/email management tool.
via queretaro.gob.mx Queretaro, where I live, is abundant in free WiFi hotspots, they claim they are the Mexican city with the most coverage. In any case, it's very nice, most parks and public places or government buildings have free Internet access, and in my experience it's even not too slow.
Given all this, I predict that later this year the iPad product line will be something like: $499, 16GB WiFi $599, 32GB 3G $699, 64GB, 3G Bottom line: If you are on the fence about buying a 1.0 iPad, go with the cheapest model.
via sachin.posterous.com Interesting and useful analysis.
Trying to install Windows XP within VMWare ESX and getting the following error message?
"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer."
The reason for this is that the necessary hard disk controller drivers have not been installed.
via techhead.co.uk Useful information and links for installing XP VMs on a VMware ESX server.
