Remember last time I set up a windows machine? Well I found myself doing it again and doing it in a hurry. I’m pretty psyched I got something up fast that’s pretty usable. Major change: Keybreeze.
Cygwin: install everything, add cygwin/bin (etc) to your path, point “my documents” to ~
Dexpot: It gives you Expose, multiple desktops and an improved alt-tab. Can teach you German
Keybreeze: This one is big. Hands down, this beats all the other Windows launchers I’ve seen. I’m still waiting for the deal-breaker failing that all the Quicksilver wannabes have. If, like me, you are scorning your Windows machine for lack of QS, there is hope.
Windows Registry: remap caps lock to ctrl
Python: I found it a lot easier to just to download the newest python, scipy and numpy for Windows rather than compiling scipy and numpy in cygwin.
I think I’m going to bind Windows-c -x and -v to copy, cut and paste to make the OS switch less jarring. I’d do this as a Dexpot macro rather than figure out how to do this in the registry
Expandrive just came out and Jon had a hand in it. It lets you mount ssh servers are local drives. It’s neat, you should try it. It’s $29 to keep—soon to be $39 no doubt. But when Cheetah comes out, Apple should have bought it and it will be included. Apple needs this. “Connect to server” works like shit.
Being atheist, nihilistic and all that, kinda puts a person on bad footing in terms of holidays. They’re all sort of arbitrary. Like the whole calendar. Random month length is really stupid, just like putting the leap day not at the end of the year. I know, December already has 31 days and February was made the bitch of a couple too many Roman emperors. At this point in human history, changing the calendar to something sensible would be harder than convincing the United States to switch to metric.
Oh Netscape, it’s sad to see it’s come to this. I remember when you were new and fantastic and way cooler than Kermit or TurboGopher or even Mosaic. It was through you that I learned about awesome things like jpgs and gifs.
Have you guys heard about this?! Basically, there is a bus full of poison that is going to fall out of the sky and we have essentially no idea where. So we’re going to say “to hell with orbital debris” and try to blow it up.
This year, I think I’m going to put my IRA contribution into bonds. At least, I don’t think I’m going to keep my 90/10 spread. “Why,” you might ask, “when Vangaurd target 2045 is so safe and consistent?” The answer is because my brother-in-law, Brian, told me to.
The “guns kill” is where you get to show how good of a pilot you are. Missiles… eh. The guns kill is what you are really going for. Not only that, the system is recording video so if you can hold the guns on the other guys helmet for 8 seconds, you can show him later. The problem is that the bullets are supersonic and you can’t see them. So to help aim, you’ve got these tracers on your HUD and it’s just like in a video game.
I just retired my venerable Motorola E815. It was pretty beat up. Utilizing 1) the “new after two”, 2) online discounts and 3) selling my soul for another two years, I got the LG enV VX9900 for free. I’m hoping it lasts until someone (e.g. Google) has a phone standard (i.e. OS/API) and Verizon lets such phones on their network.
Looking out over a snowy Cambridge right now, I see total gridlock. A few cities, most notably London (and New York to some extent) are trying to fix the problem by implementing a “congestion tax”. I think it’s a great idea. I think it should be dynamically priced and implemented anywhere where it could be made to work logistically (e.g. any highway that already has a toll system).
This article is painfully retarded. I mean that literally, like, an article with a learning disability. The lack of technical awareness, the oversimplification, the mealymouthed nostalgia – it’s stunning that an online magazine would publish such a thing, but extremism in defense of the counterintuitive is no vice, right Slate?
If you don’t know about the Darpa Grand Challenge you should read about it a little first. You can probably find some good videos if you look. MIT entered for their first time this year and did remarkably well: 4th. 40 started, 11 qualified, 6 finished.
I was minding my business in the lab when a Macbook fell in my lap. It’s not like I’m going to throw it out. So I’m putting all the sweet stuff on there. Except I don’t know what all the sweet stuff is. I know Quicksilver and Texshop, but that’s about it. Could you guys (after the obligatory jokes/sarcasm) tell me what the other indispensable apps are? I’ve got the Leopard, I think… Whatever the new one is called. Well, I’ll have it in “about and hour and 52 minutes”.
In particular, I’m hoping there is something like Cygwin’s install-the-kitchen-sink option that makes the command line into something that could pass for a real unix prompt. Actually, I’m hoping for something like apt. But barring that, a kitchen-sink option would do.
Somewhere between Absolute Clubhouse and Game On, they materialized out of the mob, like some phishing scheme come surreally to life. Except this time, the Nigerian millions were real.
“Are you two alone? Or are you meeting people inside?” one asked.
“Uh…”
Seconds earlier, Game On’s line wrangler had promised swift and brutal relegation to anyone allowing people to cut.
“Would you rather go to the game?” they continued.
Bella almost said “no”, but by then the tickets were out.
“Take them. Go as a guest of the studio.”
By this point I had them in my hands. Sure enough, the back of the ticket was stamped “COURTESY OF FOX”. The man handing them out seemed bona fide enough, with his sport coat, walkie-talkie and lap-dog looking intern.
“Oh, no way” said a girl behind us in line.
It could still be a scam. Would finding out be worth the 45 minutes we’d already invested in line? To ask the question is to know the answer, and seconds later, we were certifiably the luckiest pair of the 38,805 on hand for ALCS Game 7.
The tickets said $95, but lord only knows what they were actually worth. Why hadn’t Fox just scalped them? Probably some sort of contractual obligation – or as atonement to Red Sox fans for producing Fever Pitch. I guess it could also be general karma restoration for foisting Fox News upon the world.
Every game at Fenway since god knows when has been sold out, but on this night, the stadium felt the full weight of a (probably well above) capacity crowd. Every sub-code, Wilson-era doorway, ramp and staircase slowed progress two a crawl. Beer lines were immense – probably because no one had intentions of missing even a second of what promised to be the sensational end to an exciting series.
We got to our seats just as a local girls’ dance troupe was finishing up its routine (the first of about 30 times we’d hear “Shipping Up to Boston”), and from there it was pretty much non-stop mayhem until the first pitch. Even though Row 15 is waaaay back there in the Grandstands, the seats still weren’t bad, and the rowdy and talkative SROers just behind us more than made up the the loss of the jumbotron.
First three innings were insane. Stand up and shout. Sit. Base hit. Stand up and shout. New batter, stand and shout, then sit down. Two strikes, stand and shout. Etc. It was like some bizarre Catholic megachurch, and considering all the praying that’s gone on in Fenway over the years, a kneeler wouldn’t have been out of place. Dice-K was near-perfect through two outs in the third inning, and the fans were really giving it to a struggling Westbrook.
“Weeeeeest-Broooook. Weeeeest-Broooook”
As the game went on, though, Matsuzaka got sloppier, Westbrook tightened down, and the score got closer. While on a bathroom/beer/panini break in the 4th, there was palpable tension, with fans (or rather, the few full-bladdered or empty-bellied enough to be pulled away from the game) and servers alike glued to the TVs as they watched struggling Red Sox starter. For a while, the game became a duel of inning-ending double-plays.
Okajima came in for relief in the 6th, protecting a razor-thin Sox lead. While there was plenty of shouting and screaming later in the night, for pure, jubilant explosion, it was hard to beat the crowd’s reaction to the almost-didn’t-get-it double-play that lead into the 7th inning stretch.
From there on out, though, the game was pretty much a party. In the bottom of the seventh, the fans got to watch Julio Lugo sac bunt, which is such a double bonus. Pedroia made it all a moot point at the next at-bat, and it was damn cool to watch the entire grandstand crane awkwardly forward to try and catch the last little bit of his homer as it bounced off the top of the Monster.
Okajima kicked off the 8th with two consecutive base hits, but all nervousness was allayed as the the Fenway sound system boomed out the first rumbling strains of “Wild Thing”. Between Papelbon’s 98 mph cheese and Youk’s Off-The-Coke-Bottles homer (which I could see none of, I might add) the crowd was certain of a win, and chanting “hey hey, goodbye” before the the 9th inning even began.
“...good times never seemed so good.”
I’ve read far too many Greek myths (and seen far too many Red Sox games) to engage in such hubris, and top of the 9th was about as nervous as any well-padded three outs can be. The Sox pulled Manny, bumped Ellsbury to left and put Coco Crisp in center, and not a second too soon – the inning’s first and last outs were pretty exceptional catches on hard-hit flies. Brayt called during the game’s final batter and got a decent audio picture of the final 15 seconds, probably just ahead of the TV delay.
Afterwards, there was a few minutes of unrestrained celebration and a wicked lot of camera phones, followed by the slow, trickling departure of those fans still concerned with catching the T. A decent sized crowd hung around to watch Papelbon pour beer on the AL Eagle and dance jigs, while Ortiz made up for a pretty lackluster performance by pumping the crowd, starting a wave and telling the fans how awesome they are.
Things started to settle down, the players went back inside, and so we left, passing two cops in riot gear at the doorway on our way out. The streets had pretty much cleared, but I still had to talk my way past two lines of cops on Comm Ave to get back to my bike. No one got shot, which was nice, and the crowds seemed well behaved, minus a tossed bottle or two. Then the Sox went on to sweep the World Series, and, to be honest, it seemed like a far, far less exciting couple of games.
Is the subject of the most recent “Speaking of Dartmouth” email. After reading it, all I know is that 1) it has something to do with the board of trustees and 2) I’m supposed to be mad about the lawsuit.
The lack of substance was pretty troubling. It reminded me of all the constitution mailings I got. i.e. a power grab. I can see Joran’s point that such power grabs are not necessarily bad for the college, I just don’t like when people try to manipulate me.
So with a little effort you can find out that the issue is the following. The alumni elect half the board of trustees. The board votes to add more seats to the board. Should half of those new seats be elected by the trustees or not? Jim thinks no, most of the alumni think yes.
Does anyone know how this problem came to be? If half of the board is responsive to the alumni, how could the other half manage to push such a thing through? And if there is dispute within the board, it should certainly be resolved within the current membership as opposed to after one side has granted themselves extra votes. So it would seem, I too advocate an injunction. I imagine that such would not severely “harm” the college or if it did, I hope it wouldn’t be “immeasurable” nor be too much of a “distraction … to the students faculty and staff”, or be “wildly expensive”.
Geocaching is the “sport” where you go “online:http:/geocaching.com” and look up some GPS coordinates, and then go to them looking for the hidden treasure. Yeah it’s dorky, but it’s my type of dorky. I’m into it.
I like to explore and people generally hide the stuff in interesting places, many of which I wouldn’t have found on my own. Most are relatively tame, but some are pretty adventurous. I think I might start hiding a few of my own.
But I don’t have a GPS.
This isn’t as much of a problem since I found Mapfinder. Mapfinder will overlay the relevant USGS topo map on top of Google Earth. Since you can also map the geocache on GE, all you’ve got to do is print it. If there are decent terrain cues, with a USGS quad (7.5’) I can orienteer with nearly identical precision to a cheap GPS—better if there is heavy tree cover.
Here are my complaints about Geocaching so far:
They use DMS and,
They hide stuff too well since…
They don’t appreciate the limits on GPS’s precision
Universal Transverse Mercator, is a locally linear coordinate system1, where you can simply read off the meters to target to the east and north. As in I’m at
0270400E, 4939200N and I want to get to
0270450E, 4929150N, then I should just walk
50m E and 50m S.
On a map, UTM makes a square grid that equally easy to use. The trouble with UTM is that it is local and approximate. Around here (from about Hanover to the tip of Maine and from the coast to past Quebec city), our reference surface is 19T. It is difficult to calculate distances between places with reference surfaces of different longitude (but not the same longitude1). There is an average length distortion of like .05%, but near the edges it is more like .5%.
1 The linearization is made by projecting the ground or “datum” (e.g. the WGS84 ellipsoid, the NAD27) to a reference surface. This surface is a segment of a longitudinal “cylinder”, parallel to the ground at the center of the region. It’s radius is chosen to minimize the average longitudinal distortion. Cylinder is in quotes because it’s cross section is the same as the cross section of the datum which is slightly elliptical. This fact means that it is surprisingly complicated to recover latitude from a UTM position.
Degrees, Minutes, Seconds, on the other hand is globaly exact. You have the angles made by you, the center of the earth, the axis of rotation and Greenwich England. You are standing exactly above the datum at point they are telling you. But to figure out how far away anything is, that is going to take trigonometry… Trigonometry and a book about datums… And Matlab would help.
The fact that the geocaching community uses DMS is indicative of that most of them just set a waypoint and follow the arrow. It is more fun if you also have some idea of where you are in addition to the GPS.
People think that because of all those significant figures in their GPS that they can bury a film canister and expect someone else to find it. You’re out in the middle of the woods with a $100 device receiving signals at like -160 to -180dBW! From space! You’re going to have to wait a long, long time before you can have centimeter accuracy.
What they could do is give a reference so that you can make an ad-hoc differential signal correction. For instance if there is something obvious nearby, like a stake, and they gave their measurement of both the stake and the cache, you could measure the stake, compute the difference and then add that to their measurement of the cache to get a much better estimate of where you will find the cache. And if they gave the measurement for the stake and cache in UTM, someone like me could probably just do it with a compass.
