headbonk.com

What in the world is the director of one of the biggest government science agencies going around making statements that are completely ignorant of science?

I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.

What about the millions of human beings that will be displaced when sea levels rise? What about the increases in Insect borne diease? What about all the negative impacts that scientist, many in his own agency, have predicted? What about Florida?

Interesting that NASA’s cape canaveral is one of the places that will be under water.

LA Times

Wired Science

I’ve been pretty excited about the new canvas tag ever since I first read about it a few months ago. For that matter, I’ve been pretty excited about the whole WHATWG proposal for (X)HTML 5. My day job doesn’t leave me much time for recreational hacking, but this weekend I cobled together this simple demo

Little graphical hacks like this is what got me into programming waaay back in the day writing in Basic on my Atari 400. Atari Basic was an easy way to learn programming and see visual results easily. This motivated me learn vector math and simple wireframe 3D rendering… A whole career ensued…

Now it seems that todays equivalent of hacking basic is hacking Javascript.

I stumbled on this today while looking for something else… It’s actually pretty cool. Upon taking a quick glance at the list, there’s a number of apps that sound pretty useful to me. I’m suprised at how many things are being developed specifically with the purpose of running off a memory stick. There’s even a task launcher that is specifically designed to run programs off a usb stick.

Handy programs to put on a USB stick. at SnapFiles.com

I’ve used Snapfiles to find good freeware/shareware since they were called WebAttack. I still like that name better.

I just noticed that PuttySSH is conspicuously missing. Putty supports running from a usb stick, and an SSH client is definately a must for a traveling application suite.

I really like this one from Boing Boing today:

Here, Bullet
If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you've started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Boing Boing: Here, Bullet: poetry from a US infantryman in Iraq

When the democrats won big in November, I didn’t think much about the fact that Nancy Pelosi would become speaker. If anything, I thought it was cool that she was from the Bay Area. I always got a chucle when I heard the right wingers try to scare people with “San Francisco Liberal”.

It wasn’t until last night’s coverage of the first day of the 110th congress and hearing Nancy Pelosi’s acceptance speech upon being elected speaker that I realised what a big deal it is that she is the first woman to hold that job. If Bush and Cheney die in a plane crash, Nancy Pelosi would be president. That is the closest a woman has been to the presidency ever. You go girl!

But then again… It’s pretty f’d up that this is even a big deal at all. How many other countries have female heads of state? This is probably why it never occured to me that this is a big deal at all. It shouldn’t be but it is. Makes you realize how backward we are in the US.

The 1.0 “Final” version of my favorite music player musikCube was just released. It’s slick and a nice improvement on an already feature rich, easy to use player.

The question now is whether this will be the final version that is ever resleased. Seems like Casey, the main developer is has grown tired of working on it. Seems he only finished it because it was his senior project and he had to finish it in order to graduate. (Kudos to his professors). Not clear if he is going to continue developing it or give it over to the rag-tag group of developers wishing to continue the project.

Anyways, it’s still a pretty great music player and it’s worth checking out:

List of Bush administration officials that have been forced to resign due to some form of corruption, scandal, or indightment:
TPMmuckraker December 4, 2006 07:11 PM

Going up against big Pharma is probably going to be one of Nansi Pelosi’s biggest challenges. Robert Reich has a great write up on the issues for medicare and makes a good argument for bargaining for lower drug prices.

Well, big suprise… I never got anywhere with the horde bounty. A number of people submitted binary only VMs just like I said I didn’t want to do. When I mentioned it on the dev list, some of the major horde developers really liked my idea to make it script based instead of a one-off. The only real obstacle that I ran into was configuring Cyrus. Also it really made it clear to me that horde really needs an installer / updater script. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a clean way to update a horde install that has local modifications.

Basically after that, a number of other projects took over my summer - most notably building a fence in my back yard (which isn’t finished either).

Ok, so I got this blog and I never really had anything to say on it, or more like never felt like spending the time to say it. Then I recently volunteered to take on some work for an open source project I use all the time and follow closely. So I figure this blog is a good way to keep a journal of updates on the work.

Really, I’m worried that I may not really have the time to pull it off. I’m sure I’m not the first developer to promise something to an open source project then flake on it. It may not be so bad. Though it was definately a bad idea to take this on the week before E3.

Here’s what I’m in for:
Making a virtual machine image to demo horde.

Right now, this is what I’ve definately decided upon:

1. This image will be based debian stable (sarge) netinstall, with a minimal configuration.
   - It’s what I’m most comfortable with + the debian folks are real sticklers about stability.
2. Rather than just deliver a binary image back to the project that will go out of date as soon os horde or debian gets upgraded ( which do you think will haped first?), I want to deliver a script plus a tarfile that can recreate the virtual image from it’s dependancies. I find that I keep having to start over when I screwup. Rather that retyping those commands into the shell everytime, I’d rather just edit a shell script. Another possibility down the road is to actually create a custom debian installer image that can re-create a horde demo install on a vurtual machine or any old piece of hardware the user has lying around. That is an advanced technique however, which will be left for extra credit.
3. The mail server will be Cyrus. It is easy to setup under debian and suports most of the features we want to show off/utilize in this image in a single package.
4. I’m not a mail guy. I’ve never really configured a mail server other than the sequence of yes/no questions I’ve answered related to this during a debian install. I do have very knowledgeable people I can call on for backup. Right now, I’m just focusing on learning Cyrus so I can can get both horde and cyrus configured to their mutual benefit.