Frag!

I suspect some sort of xss exploit caused that last post... deleted.

Birthday meal?

Yes, that IS a birthday meal.


And I'm putting you on Notice:

I'm jealous.

Echoes of Challenger & Columbia

In another finding, the panel reported that flight surgeons' medical opinions were not valued by higher-ups. Several senior flight surgeons told the panel that officials only wanted to hear that all medical systems ''were `go' for on-time mission completion.''

Network Neutrality starts in the...

I just got kicked out of an internet cafe called Cyber Cafe in Kolkata's Lake Town neighborhood for using the built in windows software Microsoft Remote Desktop to connect back to my computer in the states. This from a computer running XP with all updates turned off with only IE 6.

I was put on the phone with their "Engineer" who told me that if I was going to use his computers, I could only use programs on his computer.

Umm. Ok.

I decided not to argue network neutrality with him, or explain that his network was incredibly insecure, and just got my refund for Rs. 70 for the remaining 9 hours of my ten hour committment.

A pity too, as it was costing me $.20/hr to connect to the internet.

I'm going back to metered GPRS based internet access at $.0013/kb.

Good enough for email, anyways.

--
Sent via mobile.

overload

Watching Namesake on the plane's overhead TVs enroute to Kolkata while admiring the beauty of Afghanistan at dusk from 37000 ft on American Independence day.

Isaiah Washington out of Grey's Anatomy

So I read this while watching NETWORK, which was somewhat amusing.

But seriously, Isaiah thinks that he should get points for being shut down for bigotry?

Come on...

 

 

Sent to you by satadru via Google Reader:

 

 

Isaiah Washington out of Grey's Anatomy

via digg on Jun 09, 2007

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," Washington said in a statement released through his publicist, Howard Bragman, without elaboration.

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Visit the original item on digg
• Subscribe to digg using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

 

 

Robot lawnmower kills Danish man

This wouldn't be an issue if the lawnmower had been 3law compliant.

 

 

Sent to you by satadru via Google Reader:

 

 

Robot lawnmower kills Danish man

via Engadget by Nilay Patel on May 31, 2007

Filed under: Robots

In what we surely hope isn't the opening salvo of the robot insurrection, a 45-year old Danish municipal worker was tragically killed by an industrial robotic lawnmower this afternoon, after the unit tumbled off a slope and onto the poor fellow doing his job. Although we've seen quite a few robotic lawnmowers, we're not too familiar with the RC-controlled Dvorak Spider 01 unit the man was using; our only hope is that this is, of course, an isolated incident.

Continue reading Robot lawnmower kills Danish man

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Visit the original item on Engadget
• Subscribe to Engadget using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

 

 

Die Hard viral marketing/graffitti

Die Hard viral marketing/graffitti
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

Outside my front door.

--

Sent via mobile.

Lloyd Alexander died

In case you missed it...

I really liked the Prydain Chronicles.

Zoe

Zoe
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

Ephraim's dog Zoe sleeping on one of our sofas.

MobilecampNYC

MobilecampNYC
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

Intros @ MobileCampNYC

MobileCampNYC

One of the Great things about living in NYC is the existence of interesting conferences you hear about the week of.

With OS X & Linux set to invade the phone space this year, people twittering and facebooking from their phones, this feels like a good time to talk mobile.

cat and turtle

CuteOverload had this today...

Today's random number is

I've been trying to seed a new random number generator with the text of posts from digg.com.

Over the last day or so, the function keeps coming up with this:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Weird that...

Die Hard - Music Video

In Soviet Russia...

I keep reading about the Rove Administration putting Political Minders in every department, to ensure compliance with "The Message" - to the tune of the CDC not having postings filled abroad because they haven't had people approved by the powers.

Does this not sound a little bit Soviet? Didn't some of us grow up hearing about "political officers" in every Soviet Institution?

Perturbing, no?

Your Forces Have No Power Over Me Here

Stephen Hawking weightless.

How Burritos get to NY from SF.

The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel

Idlewords is usually brilliant, but this bit is better than most.

His tagline is good too: "Brevity is for the weak."

Posner on Cooperatives

I found this interesting.

As Becker points out, abolishing the favorable tax treatment of ESOPs would permit a market test of this form of corporate governance. (In confining my discussion to cases of governance, I focus on situations in which, as in United Air Lines before its bankruptcy, or the proposed reorganization of the Tribune Company, the ESOP owns all or a controlling amount of the common stock of the corporation.) I believe that it would usually flunk the market test. Granted, the ESOP has an advantage over the conventional worker-owned firm: the value of a firm's capital stock is the discounted present value of its expected future earnings, so that a worker who owns ESOP shares has, at least in his role as part owner, the same horizon as the corporation itself, rather than the truncated horizon of the worker in a conventional worker-controlled firm (a cooperative), who cannot benefit from anything the corporation does after he retires and who consequently has no financial stake in maximizing the corporation's present value.

Best Asbestos Ad Ever

Thanks Consumerist!

The Long Tail as Applied to Regional Jets

Regional Carriers are going to be Frakked.

Banned UN Speech

Human Rights at the UN.

Bjork Tix

I walked by the Apollo today and asked what prices were going to be.

The guy said:

Who?

Hexagon at Saturn's North Pole

Weirdness.

Whedon on Crack

Or something like that.

Best Buy Acquires Speakeasy

Dear Speakeasy Partners,

Today is an historic and exciting day for Speakeasy.

I am pleased to announce that Speakeasy has been acquired by Best Buy, an innovative and growing Fortune 100 company and top consumer electronics retailer in North America. This is a significant milestone for our company as our new relationship will help us realize our goals of becoming the No. 1 provider of voice and data solutions to small businesses. It is important to note that though Speakeasy will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, we will continue to operate as a standalone, independent operating division with headquarters in Seattle.

If this turns out like the Geek Squad qcquisition, you can write off Speakeasy. Speakeasy has always been known for their technical competence. (Though the 6Mbps rut over the last 6 years has been worrisome - there's been no technology that could be deployed for higher speeds in that period?) On the other hand, I do wonder what the support of a larger organization might do for fighting the Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers.

socat on OS X 10.4.9

As it turns out, you can get socat 1.6.0.0 working in OS X 10.4.x.

I used this:

./configure --disable-ext2 --disable-tun --disable-libwrap --disable-readline

Do add -lresolv to the LIBS line in the resultant Makefile. Otherwise you will get a _res_9_init linking error.

I ran make like this (the -lresolv gets around a _append_history linking error):

CFLAGS="-L${prefix}/lib -lreadline -lresolv" make

That seemed to work, at least on the powerpc side. I've had no reason to try it on the intel side yet.

Thanks to what's left of darwinports for getting me started.

And FYI, the proper way to do port forwarding of http from an internal server to an external server with socat is this:

socat -d -d -lmlocal2 \
TCP4-LISTEN:80,bind=internalip,su=nobody,fork,range=10.0.0.0/8,reuseaddr \
TCP4:externalip:80

Drop that in a startup script, and you don't have to mess with natd or ipfw, especially useful when you don't want your configurations overwritten by OS X Server's GUI management tools.

Coldstone Creamery Not so Straight from the Farm

I have as of recently been enamored of Coldstone Creamery's Sweet Cream Ice cream.

I looked up the ingredient list today on their web site.

Freshly made from all natural ingredients without corn syrup it is not:

SWEET CREAM

ICE CREAM CREAM, NONFAT MILK, MILK, SUGAR, CORN SYRUP, GUAR GUM, CELLULOSE GUM, CARRAGEENAN, MONO & DIGLYCERIDES, POLYSORBATE 80, AND ANNATTO EXTRACT

Why Posner is a great judge, and why he will never be nominated for SCOTUS

"And a country that consumes but does not produce intellectual property may be better off refusing to enforce intellectual-property rights.And finally a poor country may not be able to afford the kind of legal infrastructure required to enforce complex property rights. This can create a chicken and egg problem, if the absence of such rights keeps a nation so poor that it cannot afford the necessary machinery of enforcement."

Just poison I tell you.

;-)

The AMA, Militaries, & Torture

The American Medical Association Code of Ethics already bans the involvement of doctors in Capital Punishment.

The AMA Code of Ethics also has a chapter on the involvement of doctors in Torture.

Apparently, doctors are currently involved in the torture of captives of US forces.

Here's a question for the intarwebs:

Are there AMA sanctions for violations of the AMA Code of ethics for doctors working under the Aegis of the US military?

If so, would involving yourself in situation where somebody was tortured be sanctionable?



EDIT: As Cy points out, membership in professional organizations for doctors is optional.



This stems from one of Andrew Sullivan's posts here.

Couldn't Handle the Truth

From here.

Sacked US attorney inspired blockbuster

Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent

March 26, 2007


ONE of eight US government prosecutors sacked for alleged poor performance in the latest White House scandal was the inspiration for the Tom Cruise character in the hugely successful Hollywood film, A Few Good Men.[emphasis mine]
David Iglesias, the basis for the character in the film played by Cruise, led a court martial defence of one of three men who, under orders, roughed up a fellow marine who wanted to get out of Guantanamo Bay.
The case became the stuff of Hollywood legend after another attorney working on it gave the facts to her brother, Aaron Sorkin, who used them as the inspiration for his play and, later, a screenplay.

A Few Good Men gave actor Jack Nicholson what has become one of the most famous lines in 20th-century film history: "You can't handle the truth."

Mr Sorkin went on to create award-winning shows including White House drama The West Wing. Mr Iglesias's career path also traced a stellar course, until he was sacked in December as attorney-general of New Mexico.

As a result, the 49-year-old lifelong Republican has hit the headlines again in a case that has rocked the White House.

He, along with seven other leading prosecutors from across the US and appointed by the President, were told to go as part of an orchestrated plan on the part of the White House.

Mr Iglesias was installed as New Mexico's lead prosecutor in 2001 and alleges he is the victim of a political witch-hunt, a White House-led purge of prosecutors who either went too hard in pursuing corruption investigations against Republicans or were too soft on Democrats.

While the attorneys-general are appointed and serve at the request of the president, they "have a long history of being insulated from politics" once in office, Mr Iglesias said. "I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the (White House's) attorney-general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure.

"I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political."

While irrefutable evidence of a political witch-hunt has yet to emerge - the Democrats in Congress are planning to use their subpoena power to compel sworn testimony of top White House officials - the shifting story from the Bush administration on why the firings took place has troubled both sides of politics.

The (Oval) Office

Bye Bye Gothamist.

I finally pulled the plug on reading Gothamist today.

One too many snide posts on billboard beaver shots in the last several weeks.

I'm not opposed to snide, but either go all out and declare your intentions of becoming an asshole, or call 1-888-STFU-LOL, as they say.

Gridskipper is still interesting though, and stays on my list.

Somebody Else Read Hatchet!

I remember the book from middle school.

Boy Scout found alive...

One of Michael's favorite books a few years ago was about a boy whose plane crashes in the wilderness, and how that boy survives on his own, his father said.

''I think he's got some of that book in his mind,'' Auberry said. ''In my fantasy, when they find him, he'll be making beef jerky somewhere or something like that. He's got a lot of resources to draw from.''

Once again folks, literacy gets you to all of the wrong places...

I still like Keillor

Say what you will about Prairie Home Companion, or Garrison Keillor's commentary on marriage after his own three marriages, his column about gay marriage (for which he was excoriated) seemed to be typically tongue in cheek.

He has issued an apology.

Thanks for clarifying, but some of us got it the first time.

A map of Human Genetic Function

This may be one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

(Discovered from this article.)

Clicking on Viral Protein to see the genetic material you have picked up from a virus... amazing.

Introducing...................the Apple iRack

Thanks Cy.

Darkon

A LARP Documentary. I want to see this.

747-400 vs hippy car

Basement Jaxx - Take Me Back To Your House

There are dancing bears.

Arcade Reality

Best Treo Game Ever.

Orwell on Euphemism

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.

I do not remember reading this essay before. It is brilliant.

Thanks to Guy...

MUJI is coming to NY!

This is fantastic news... I've been waiting for this ever since I read Pattern Recognition.

MUJI.

ESC 2007 | Switzerland | DJ Bobo - Vampires Are Alive

The creation of this video entails one of the worst combinations of music and money in the entire history of either.

Cavemen sitcom being worked on,

Supposedly an ABC pilot is in the works.  I hope this works out.

Yulia & Laura

Yulia & Laura
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

ComicCon Saturday.

Fillion as James Tiberius Kirk?

The Register suggests that Nathan Fillion (Serenity, Slither, Firefly, Angel, Drive) would be a better Kirk in the next Star Trek Movie (an original series prequel) than Matt Damon.

I for one could be easily convinced...

Besides, isn't there a rule that important Trek actors need to be born in the Commonwealth?

Fillion is from Edmonton.

Best Comic Ever

Some Music Should Not Be Used In Food Commercials

For instance, Wendy's commercial for the Mozzarella Lovers' Bacon Cheeseburger uses The Violent Femmes' song Blister in the Sun.

Some might think this is disturbing...

reliant robin

Why don't they show Top Gear in the states? A fantastic, fantastic clip...

Shades of Cake or Death?

Sweden's Penal Code lists the penalty for Murder 1 to be "ten years or life" imprisonment.

I bet they have a lower murder rate too.

And don't get me started about their gini coeff.

Robo Cat

Designing for Traffic

I went to the Museum of the City of New York's Robert Moses exhibit.

Robert Moses is arguably the single man respponsible for what NYC is today. He built several tunnels, bridges, Lincoln Center, and was a major backer of bringing the UN to NYC (beating out Philadelphia).

He also suggested several multilane freeways through Manhattan, across Canal, connecting the Holland Tunnel & the Brooklyn & Manhattan bridges, across Manhattan at 30th st, and even a non-freeway extension of 5th Avenue down through a newly former Washington Square Park, via Fifth Avenue South (neé West Broadway) and down to the new Canal St freeway.

Tony noted that the exhibit was completely crowded with people.

Perhaps if there had been an overhead expressway to alleviate congestion at a Moses Exhibit...

Haggard Now ``Completely Heterosexual''

So says the AP article.

Truly, it must be a miracle.

Err, or magic.

Ok. I'm done now.

Haggard Now ``Completely Heterosexual''

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 6, 2007

Filed at 9:59 a.m. ET

DENVER (AP) -- One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is ''completely heterosexual.''

Deepa's Groundhog Day Cake

Deepa's Groundhog Day Cake
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

YUM.

Singingfish?

Has anybody heard of this site?

It seems like a decent place to find music, with download links too...

Mo Star Trek Mo Problems

The beneficence of a roommate on the occasion of the holidays has resulted today in my acquisition of an entire collector's set of every Star Trek movie DVD.

Do I face the the collection end forward with Shatner, or end forward with Stewart.

Vexing, vexing problems...

Which science fiction writer are you?

I am: Gregory Benford A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Hello Soekris

After a week of successfully setting up an OpenBSD router connecting three subnets, I got sick of the complexity of configuring the Linux firewall I have at home.

So I have ordered a Soekris net4801. It is a device based upon an older processor design, but you really don't need much in the way of power to handle the bandwidth given to you by most American Internet Service Providers in NYC. (I'm looking at you, Time Warner Cable of NYC).

I'm hoping to drop OpenBSD 4.0 on it when it arrives, and transition the linux machine to the apartment backup server.

OpenBSD's pf may not be as easy to setup as a point and click firewall based off of a web GUI, but the configuration is A flat plain text file, which is pretty easy to read and modify, and backup for that matter.

Compare that to the four or five files used by shorewall or the many other Linux firewall programs. I did try to get an old port of OpenBSD's pf to linux working, to no avail. Somebody should really get that working.

Not me.

40th Anniversary of the first NASA deaths: Apollo 204

There are two good articles that have come out on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 1, nee Apollo 204 "mishap", in which Roger Chafee, Ed White and Gus Grissom died. The articles discuss the losses of the vehicles & crew of Apollo 1, Challenger in STS-51-L, & Columbia in STS-107.

Forty years later, pad tech recalls Apollo fire

NASA must fight the forgetting


Also:

The Columbia Timeline: STS-107

Google Reader

I added my reader feed to the side.

You might not care...

But it is the closest you're going to come to a lincoln blog from me these days.

Piston Power

Piston Power
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

Il Hwa

Korean Ginseng



Found in Chinatown...

My favorite Pho place is closed

My favorite Pho place is closed
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

"for renovations" the other sign says...



--

Sent via mobile.

Problems with the iPhone

Tactile feedback on the LCD is NEEDED. Aside from the lack of
openness on the device (which keeps it from being a proper smartphone
- the whole you get to install your own applications on it), typing
on a screen is annoyingly slow. I'm not so sure you can really
create muscle memory properly there.

Nuff said?

This really shouldn't be too hard to implement these days.

Just have another layer immediately above the lcd, perhaps beneath a
sheet of plastic, that moves slightly when an electric signal is
applied, for instance piezoelectrically.

so you draw a raised ridge around each virtual key, and you pop the
center of the key up slightly when it is touched long enough to be
pressed.

Is that too much to ask for?

Linux Boots on the Treo 680

<5>Linux version 2.6.17-hnd0 (satadru@debian) (gcc version 4.1.1) #11
Mon Jan 8 16:31:26 EST 2007
<4>CPU: XScale-PXA270 [69054117] revision 7 (ARMv5TE)
<4>Machine: Palm Treo 680
<4>Memory policy: ECC disabled, Data cache writeback
<7>On node 0 totalpages: 16384
<7> DMA zone: 16384 pages, LIFO batch:3
<6>Run Mode clock: 208.00MHz (*16)
<6>Turbo Mode clock: 312.00MHz (*1.5, active)
<6>Memory clock: 208.00MHz (/2)
<6>System bus clock: 208.00MHz
<4>CPU0: D VIVT undefined 5 cache
<4>CPU0: I cache: 32768 bytes, associativity 32, 32 byte lines, 32 sets
<4>CPU0: D cache: 32768 bytes, associativity 32, 32 byte lines, 32 sets
<4>Built 1 zonelists
<5>Kernel command line: init=/linuxrc root=/dev/mmcblk0p2
<4>PID hash table entries: 512 (order: 9, 2048 bytes)
<4>Console: colour dummy device 80x30
<4>Dentry cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 3, 32768 bytes)
<4>Inode-cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
<6>Memory: 64MB = 64MB total
<5>Memory: 61988KB available (2292K code, 493K data, 88K init)
<7>Calibrating delay loop... 311.29 BogoMIPS (lpj=1556480)
<4>Mount-cache hash table entries: 512
<6>CPU: Testing write buffer coherency: ok
<6>NET: Registered protocol family 16
<4>spurious IRQ for DMA channel 0
<4>spurious IRQ for DMA channel 1
<7>irda_init()
<6>NET: Registered protocol family 23
<6>NET: Registered protocol family 2
<4>IP route cache hash table entries: 512 (order: -1, 2048 bytes)
<4>TCP established hash table entries: 2048 (order: 1, 8192 bytes)
<4>TCP bind hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
<6>TCP: Hash tables configured (established 2048 bind 1024)
<6>TCP reno registered
<4>NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.97 (double precision)
<6>Initializing Cryptographic API
<6>io scheduler noop registered
<6>io scheduler anticipatory registered (default)
<6>io scheduler deadline registered
<6>io scheduler cfq registered
<4>Corgi Backlight Driver Initialized.
<4>pxa2xx-fb pxa2xx-fb: machine LCCR3 setting contains illegal bits:
00300000
<4>Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 53x29
<4>SA1100/PXA2xx Watchdog Timer: timer margin 60 sec
<6>pxa2xx-uart.0: ttyS0 at MMIO 0x40100000 (irq = 22) is a FFUART
<6>pxa2xx-uart.1: ttyS1 at MMIO 0x40200000 (irq = 21) is a BTUART
<6>pxa2xx-uart.2: ttyS2 at MMIO 0x40700000 (irq = 20) is a STUART
<4>RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize
<6>loop: loaded (max 8 devices)
<6>pxa27x_udc: version 21-Jul-2005
<5>USB cmd disconnect
<6>mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
<6>ts: Compaq touchscreen protocol output
<6>input: pxa27x-keyboard as /class/input/input0
<6>wm97xx: version 0.61 liam.girdwood@wolfsonmicro.com
<6>SA1100 Real Time Clock driver v1.03
<6>Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.11rc4 (Wed
Mar 22 10:27:24 2006 UTC).
<6>pxa2xx_ac97_reset: cold reset timeout (GSR=0x0)
<6>wm97xx: detected a wm9712 codec
<6>input: wm97xx touchscreen as /class/input/input1
<4>wm97xx: setting adc sample delay to 333 u Secs.
<6>ALSA device list:
<6> #0: pxa2xx-ac97 (Wolfson WM9711,WM9712)
<6>TCP bic registered
<6>NET: Registered protocol family 1
<6>NET: Registered protocol family 17
<6>NET: Registered protocol family 15
<6>IrCOMM protocol (Dag Brattli)
<4>drivers/rtc/hctosys.c: unable to open rtc device (rtc0)
<6>mmcblk0: mmc0:80ca SD01G 992000KiB
<6> mmcblk0: p1 p2 p3
<4>VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
<6>Freeing init memory: 88K

linux on the Treo 650

Thanks to BobofDoom on #shadowmite on efnet, I got top running on the
Treo 650.

Way way cool.

Allen Looking Out Over Harlem

Allen Looking Out Over Harlem
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

from the bow of the building.