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.

FreshDirect!

FreshDirect just let me sign up with my address.

Hooray for getting food delivered to my place after ordering over the web!

Another One Bites The Dust

As of this week, I have finished watching all 12 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel.

And yes, it was all worth it.