January 2009
On the Street....On Tonal, Bowery →
December 2008
WatchHappy new year everyone!
via (Lee’s shared items), via (Astronomy Picture of the Day)
2008 in photos, part 2
April 2008
We bought a new, king sized bed:
We rode our bikes down to the lake:
Jacqui made some pillows for her parents:
…and a purple dress:
I made a creepy face:
Jacqui made a green skirt:
We rode in April Chicago Mass and then saw Margaret Cho:
We got Ars stickers made:
May 2008
Got a new shirt:
Jacqui made a red dress:
I got in an...
My 2009 Resolution
Same resolution I make every year: “Be better than you were last year”
2008 in photos, part 1
January 2008
I bought a bunch of argyle stuff:
We went to Macworld 2008 in San Francisco:
We threw an Ars Technica / Gizmodo party at Macworld:
Jacqui started sewing:
We had a birthday dinner for Jacqui at Cafe Iberico:
..and Jacqui got a MacBook Air:
February 2008
I finally got my own laptop again (Jacqui’s old MacBook) after my old one was crushed in...
My Year in Cities 2008
San Francisco, CA *
San Jose, CA
Mountain View, CA
Little Rock, AR *
Austin, TX
Boston, MA
New York, NY
Wichita, KS
Not much travel for me in 2008. I didn’t travel in 3 different months: April, August, and November! Dopplr says my air travel released about 4,800 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere :(
via Kottke and via Amit
One or more nights were spent in each city. Per...
Byron's Dutch Oven Recipes →
Can’t wait to start using my dutch oven.
Remember good Dutch oven food, just like fine dining, is all about quality. Keep this in mind when creating or preparing your own outdoor Dutch oven recipes. Always remember ‘You get out of your Dutch oven what you put into it’. In other words, if you want your food to be the best it can be, then be sure to use the best ingredients...
smallcode
→
smallcode is “an educational wiki where you can share your programming tips and contribute to research projects”
Peeling Away the jQuery Wrapper and Finding an... →
If you haven’t poked around under the hood of jQuery, you might not be aware that when you pass the jQuery function an expression or DOM element it places these elements (or, possibly a single element) into an object, and then this object is returned so that it can be chained. Without getting into the details of chaining, the fundamental concept to remember is this: Most jQuery methods...
Gunpowder Is Okay to Bring on an Airplane →
Putting it in a clear plastic baggie magically makes it safe:
Mind you, I had packed the stuff safely. It was in three separate jars: one of charcoal, one of sulphur, and one of saltpetre (potassium nitrate). Each jar was labeled: Charcoal, Sulphur, Saltpetre. I had also thoroughly wet down each powder with tap water. No ignition was possible. As a good citizen, I had packed the resulting...
What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About... →
Overall, this is an fairly well researched article, I would normally expect a lot less from a newspaper article. Unfortunately, the author bases much of his argument on a single nugget, that text messages are transmitted in a control channel, and does not fully investigate or explain what that precisely means. Because the author did not dig deeper, the article loses a lot of meaning and falls...
“If you think other industries don’t have shit jobs, you’re deceiving yourself....”
– Joel Spolsky responding to a programmer wanting to change fields because he thinks the entire industry is as bad as his crappy job. (via marco)
Back from Kansas
Jacqui has a nice roundup of our brief time spent in Wichita on her blog. We spent a few days with the family, saw the new baby, did the Christmas thing, and hung out with David and his fiancée at The Anchor.
While there I got some cool gifts. My favorite is a toss-up between this cooking implement and a pair of Klipsch speakers for my desk.
The pot is a cast iron dutch oven that was...
Scrapy - open source web crawling in Python +... →
Sounds like a pretty neat project if you need to pull down and process a lot of content from the web.
I wrote something like this for an extremely specialized purpose when I worked at T-Mobile and without Twisted. You could feed it a bunch of URLs which the application knew how to process. It was multi-threaded and mostly just poked through a data warehouse site and extracted a whole ton of...
Trooper Says Election Delayed Alaska Drug Case →
Small town America needs their painkillers!
WASILLA, Alaska — The mother of Bristol Palin’s boyfriend sent text messages discussing drug transactions less than a month after the young woman’s mother, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was nominated as the Republican vice presidential candidate, according to court documents filed this week.
There’s probably a few bugged out...
Chimp in Japan Gets Popcorn Machine for Xmas,... →
I know some of you might be tempted to get gadgets as Christmas presents for your pets, so here’s a tip: Chimpanzees don’t like popcorn machines. Don’t say we never help you out! […
Users and the admin →
That's not Change.gov Michelle Malkin can believe... →
Excellent reporting by Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica’s Law & Disorder journal. You should be reading this journal!
The first, which Malkin wrote about this weekend, involves the General Service Administration’s approval process for .gov domains. It appears that the initial application for the Change.gov domain was turned down because GSA generally requires narrowly...
Jupiter's Largest Moon Going to the 'Dark Side' in... →
This is so cool. I had no idea that the Hubble telescope was capable of such high resolution captures.
This movie shows Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, as it ducks behind the giant planet. Astronomers combined a series of images taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make the 18-second movie. The 540 movie frames were created from...
Public →
What John doesn’t excerpt from Erica’s book is her stern warning about using such frameworks. This comes directly from the same chapter about how using the CoverFlow framework:
Some of the nicest bits of iPhone programming are included in the public iPhone frameworks but not in the SDK. Apple’s unofficial policy on this is clear: You can use these items in your programs, but...
RIP Chicago School of Economics: 1976-2008 →
Barry Ritholtz doesn’t seem to be a big fan of the CSoE:
Its long overdue. From the efficient-market theories, to the concept of man as rational profit maximizers, much of the edifice that is was the Chicago school of economics is based on a foundation that is false, disproven or otherwise questionable…
…[I]f there is one silver lining in the entire collapse, its that...
Chicago School of Economics →
Friedman Would Be Roiled as Chicago Disciples Rue Repudiation
At the University of Chicago, once ascendant free-market acolytes are finding themselves in an unusual role: They’re battling a wave of government intervention more sweeping than any since the Great Depression as the U.S. struggles with the worst recession in seven decades… “We all wandered the hallway thinking, How could this...
On the Street....The Right Fit DB, NYC →
I am so excited about the new enlarged image size. Please email me if you are having any difficulty viewing the new images. Make sure to include your browser information.
Katamari iPhone: Fixed! →
One word: Jawesome. I bought the janky original version. It was so bad I could barely beat the first level before time ran out.
More importantly, though, the game’s crippling framerate issues have been magically solved. You’ll still get a slight stutter when you level up, but actual gameplay is now as smooth as butter, and the speed of your katamari at higher levels has also been...
Tor hardware privacy adapter →
The janus team have published a preview of their new privacy adapter. it’s a small two port router. you just plug it in-line between your computer/switch and your internet connection. it will then anonymize all of you traffic via the tor network. you can also use it with openvpn. the hardware appears to be a gumstix computer mounted to a daughtercard with two ethernet ports. it will have a...
Help Test jQuery 1.3 Beta 1 →
With the addition of the capability-detection and some liveQuery updates, jQuery has released version 1.3 beta 1:
The jQuery team has been working hard on the new release of the jQuery library and it’s ready for some in-depth testing! jQuery 1.3 is not ready for production use yet but we need help to weed out any bugs that might’ve snuck through.
Music I listened to in 2008
Jack’s Mannequin - 969 plays
Forever the Sickest Kids - 684 plays
Air - 498 plays
Boys Like Girls - 472 plays
The Starting Line - 470 plays
Cartel - 399 plays
M83 - 397 plays
Girl Talk - 389 plays
Zero 7 - 370 plays
New Years Day - 356 plays
Hit the Lights - 346 plays
Boards of Canada - 320 plays
Daft Punk - 309 plays
Damone - 281 plays
Julia Nunes - 270 plays
T.I. - 240...
This American Life 370: Ruining It for the Rest of... →
Vaccinate your children.
When they decided not to vaccinate their son against measles, two San Diego parents thought they were making the best decision for their child. But when the 7-year-old came home from an overseas trip suffering from the disease (pictured at left: measles virus), his family’s personal decision became a whole community’s problem. The resulting outbreak infected 11...
Octopuses give eight thumbs up for high-def TV →
She suspected previous efforts to show movies to octopuses failed because their sophisticated eyes were too fast for the 24-frame per second format of standard-definition video. “They would have seen it as a series of still pictures,” said Miss Pronk, who had success using high-definition, operating at 50 frames per second.
As of #5985 jQuery advocates feature detection... →
As of changeset #5985 (what will ultimately become 1.3), jQuery no longer uses the jQuery.browser object to adjust functionality based on the browser’s UserAgent. The jQuery team has also deprecated this method of doing browser detection and now advocate functionality detection as they now do in the core.
This detection takes place in the new jQuery.support object. The idea is that...
Django 1.0.2 documentation as a nearly- 800-page... →
These are pretty meaty pages too. When you’ve got 800 printed pages of documentation, you should be able to make some good conclusions about a software project.
By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United... →
Perhaps it’s possible that the United States is the only country enough enlightened enough to ferret out the “inaccuracies” in the text, but somehow I’m not convinced:
By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food, by which the Assembly would “consider it intolerable” that more...
