Got this one from “JWZ”. He just finds the neatest things.
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That’d be awfully neat to see in real life. However it would be awful to be STUCK there in real life.
Cocktail is a neat application that provides a nice GUI to many of the features most CLI-afraid users want to do but don’t want to use the Terminal for.
Stumbled across this link from Cincom SmallTalk’s blog. Needless to say as a rather ignorant American on geographical borders I ended up making about 30+ mistakes placing the countries in the right place. But at least I learned a bit from trying to match up the countries to the right spot.
I think my saddest moment is completely botching up which continent Libya is on. But I won’t make that mistake again.
I found the following blog post interesting. Here’s a story of someone overengineering their project then finding the thing creaked along and spending lots of time learning how to optimize and cut away unnecessary things that were built. I’m sure there are many other anecdotes of people building gigantic amounts of infrastruture for something that really doesn’t need it. How did that saying go? Using a sledgehammer to swat a fly?
Personally, I like building small things first and observing them before I start committing myself to gigantic projects.
I just tried downloading and installing the SVG Viewer that is supported under OS X in the hopes that Safari might support it but no go. *sigh* C’mon Adobe update the viewer so it runs on other browsers for the Mac already.
I wasted more time fiddling with SVG to work than actually viewing the content I wanted to see. What a waste of time. I ended up viewing the JPEG version since it was:
It seems that from the end user standpoint there is only one way to work with anything that comes out of the W3C. Wait at least 3-4 years before things actually start working rather than hearing tons of excuses on why it isn’t widely supported. I can think of another example where I watched from the sidelines for years and now it’s finally actually in widespread use.
The New York Times has an interesting artcle on Solar
Panel Usage in Japan.
Seems the Japanese government has put in the right conditions to
get consumers more warmed up to installing them in their homes.
Wish the U.S. would get its act together on this issue but I don’t
see that happening anytime soon. I’m pretty sure the standard answer
is ‘Let the Market Decide’
Seems according to this report (Courtesy the BBC) they’ve sonar scanned the whole lock ness and can’t find a darned thing. Guess that takes the fun out of believing in the Loch Ness Monster. fooey. I still wanna believe
If you’re interested in more Loch Ness fun here’s some more links (also courtesy BBC):
Loch Ness Web Cam
More on Nessie from the BBC
The Legend of Nessie
I’ve posted some thoughts on “Growing Into and Out of Technology”. Interesting trends. Some people that get technical burn out or just don’t want to deal with certain aspects of it. My first reaction was to respond ‘You are copping out’. However, on reflection I shouldn’t say much since I really don’t want to know how:
There’s a lot to know in this world. Sometimes you can only focus on some parts of it. So perhaps the people that got burnt out have a point. They want to be doing other things with their computers, not doing things to the computer so they can just have a running computer system.
Sheesh. The WindowServer just bit the dust on my PowerBook. That was the weirdest experience. I wonder how many other people have watched their WindowServer die on them. First, I’m typing then I see the little swirling circle at the bottom of the screen as if the computer is about to reboot. Then the screen goes blue and then I’m watching as the Desktop slowly rebuilds itself sans all of my running apps. Wonderful. Then again I’ve had similar situations with Windows doing the exact same thing when Explorer just dies and needs to be kickstarted back to life.
For the geek inclined here is a log courtesy of /var/log/system.log:
Jul 25 11:43:39 basho crashdump: Crash report written to: /Users//Library/Logs/CrashReporter/WindowServer.crash.log
Jul 25 11:43:39 basho WindowServer[167]: Received fatal signal (11) at PC 0×90004288; exiting
Jul 25 11:43:39 basho mach_kernel: IOHIDSystem: doKickEventConsumer msg_send returned 268435459
Jul 25 11:43:39 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: task_set_exception_ports() failed: (os/kern) invalid argument
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho crashdump: Crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/???.crash.log
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: exception_raise() failed forwarding exception: (os/kern) invalid argument
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: newport: 2803 originalport: b07 thread: ffffffff task: a1b exception: 1
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: mach_msg() reply failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Jul 25 11:43:42 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: task_set_exception_ports() failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho crashdump: Crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/???.crash.log
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: exception_raise() failed forwarding exception: (os/kern) invalid argument
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: newport: 2803 originalport: b07 thread: ffffffff task: ffffffff exception: 1
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: mach_msg() reply failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Jul 25 11:43:43 basho /usr/libexec/crashreporterd: task_set_exception_ports() failed: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Jul 25 11:43:44 basho crashdump: Crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/???.crash.log
I have to agree with the poster of this link. The word ‘rightsizing’ in regards to cutting down numbers of employees at a corporation is really amusing. If you ask me rightsizing would be something like closing the salary gap between the absolute top management and the lowest paid employee. But that’s just my opinion.
Seems JPL has a Solar System Simulator Website. Some of the pictures in the Art Section are really neat. I’ll have to spend more time exploring the site.
Kudos “Celsius1414″ for pointing the link out!
Just flipping through some job sites and saw this. At those competitive rates might as well work a job at McDonald’s.
Summary:
Someone builds a system to monitor changes to postings that are available in
RSS News feeds and another person gets quite upset about this.
The poster of the link I’m linking to thinks that this type of monitoring is mean spirited. However, if you read the discussion the debate goes back and forth. Frankly, I find it all confusing. My general thoughts are if you are going to utter something in a medium that can be tracked be ready to live with the consequences. On that note, I shiver at the lives movie stars and politicians must have.
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