Philly Airport

I was waiting in the Philly airport's new A West international terminal wing, watching Metropolis on VCD, when a gentleman tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I had network access. It turns out he was on his way to Amsterdam from San Francisco and was appalled at the lack of wi-fi bubbles and the general lack of knowledge of what the hell a "bubble" was. I told him that I didn't have network access, but I hadn't really checked, and if he had a moment I could fire up KisMAC and check out the local traffic. Unfortunately for us there really was nothing all around, and we ended up chatting for a while. He had recently acquired a 17" Powerbook and was eager to show it to me. He was also into photography (described himself as "moving into professional") and had a Canon G5. We showed each other photos we had taken and he complemented me on several of my photographs - the Bosque del Apache, Crystal at the wall at the meteor crater, one of the VLA shots - and told me I had a very good eye for framing and composition. He even encouraged me to enter some of my photographs into contest!

In any event we talked shop for a while and exchanged contact info, and promised to keep in touch. I showed him Rendezvous and booted in to Panther to show him Expose and the new finder running on a live box.

After he left I gave Crystal a call but couldn't reach her, so I left her a voicemail instead. Then it was time to board my flight!

Linkdump

ElectricTao : Linkdump :: squirt gun : firehose

Stile Project : WoundGallery :: Bud Light : Jack Daniels

Circles and circles...

Smart Crow

A New Caledonian crow builds a tool to accomplish a certain task. What's amazing is that the tool is made from a material that the crow would never encounter in the wild, raising interesting questions about "the evolutionary preconditions for complex cognition".

Open Source PKI

Always been curious about keys, certs, certificate authorities, X.509, and the like, but have been afraid to ask? I stumbled across this site - it's very comprehensive and thorough. (Plus 10 points to Gryffindor for linking to several python crypto packages.)

Sql Injection How-To

From the recent slashdot thread about spam, this comment details how to do a basic SQL injection attack against spammers with hoakey "remove me" web pages.

Readline and Mac OS X

So, after much woe, I have finally gotten readline to work on OS X (10.2.6). There are several other places advertising how to make this work (such as the readline-0.0.0 project and undefined.org's readline-0.0.1) but I've not had any luck. Finally I took the readline-0.0.0 package, figured out why it wasn't compiling (it was missing the readline headers), bundled up the missing headers (which I found in Fink) and edited the setup.py. It works!

Instructions:
1. Download readline-0.0.0.withheaders.tgz; extract; enter the directory
2. run the command: "sudo /usr/bin/python setup.py install"
3. You're done! If you have any problems, please email me and let me know!

Jacko on jailing music fans

Michael Jackson is "speechless" about the idea of putting music fans in jail just for downloading music: "It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail."

=> absurdness(RIAA) > absurdness(Neverland)

California Democrats

(From John:) Unaware that a live microphone was broadcasting their words around the Capitol, Assembly Democrats meeting behind closed doors debated prolonging California's budget crisis for political gain.

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg said if the budget crisis were extended, it could improve chances for a ballot initiative that would make it easier for the Democrats to raise taxes by lowering the threshold for passage from two-thirds to 55 percent.

Krishnamurti and meditation

From an essay by David Bohm, noted quantum physicist, about Krishnamurti:

...Krishnamurti has observed that the very act of meditation will, in itself, bring order to the activity of thought without the intervention of will, choice, decision, or any other action of the "thinker."...

Read full entry...

Philosophical Kissing

A hilarious page about other philosophies of kissing besides the "platonic kiss". (link courtesy of Brad, who has posting privs but never uses them)

Politically Correct Scots Gaelic

Apparently no language is safe from the PC language police. The Scotsman on Sunday reports that gender-neutral and age-sensitive terms are making inroads into Scotland's mother tongue. Most distressingly, Scottish language authorities seem to be borrowing from English when they can't find or construct an appropriate word from Gaelic roots. It seems to me, though, that the creation of new words is a sign of a vital language--perhaps this is good news for Gaelic-lovers after all.

Berkshire and the Pro-Lifers

This article incenses me. It's fine for the woman to be unhappy with part of her employer's dividends going to pro-choice charities. It's fine for her to ignorantly ignore the portion of the dividends going to pro-life charities. What pisses me off is this:
For her part, Coughlon is "just delighted with the decision." But she says she won't be satisfied until the man she deferentially refers to as "Mr. Buffett" stops donating to pro-choice causes. "Now," she says, "the focus is on him."

Abortion stops a beating heart. Wait... so does sushi.

The Magical Theremin

Arguably one of the coolest instruments ever, the Theremin was designed by Leon Theremin in the 1920s. You can buy your own as a kit from PAiA or a fully-assembled Moog version.

Two videos

Two videos. First, Tokyo Breakfast, a blast from the past. Then, a truly incredible video of Tetris nirvana.

Terraserver pics

TerraServer has expanded its database of satellite/aerial photographs of the United States, and it now has pictures of most of my former residences:

238 East Fairview St., Oak Ridge, TN
3109 Stokers Ln., Nashville, TN
Sunrise Apartments, Hixson, TN
7520 Middle Valley Rd., Hixson, TN
Low Rise 6 and 7, Ithaca, NY
296 Birchwood Drive North, Ithaca, NY (not built yet in this photo)
211 Kennedy Drive, Malden, MA
21 Converse Ave., Malden, MA
14 Summer St., Malden, MA (I pretty much lived here...)
700 Warren Rd., Ithaca, NY

Some other locations of note:
20 West Canal St., Winooski, VT - Crystal's apartment
Hixson High School

Trust Big Brother?

What if Big Brother can be hijacked? Easily? Repeatedly? The next time someone tells you they are willing to let the government take away some privacy because it gets them security, refer them to this article.

Carnivore and PC Anywhere

From a Cringely article:

The DCS-1000 or Carnivore system is apparently rife with security defects, starting with the fact that it is a Windows 2000 box exposed to the Internet, typically not behind the firewall, at the ISP and remote-controlled from the FBI office using PCAnywhere. The data it captures are downloaded insecurely in the PCAnywhere session. In fact, the FBI admitted that some significant e-mail intercepts concerning Osama Bin Laden were "contaminated" and were not legally usable (the technician reportedly was ordered to destroy all the intercepts) due to technical problems with the box.

...The fact that Microsoft was chosen just this week by the Department of Homeland Security to provide $90-million in software for the agency's 140,000 desktops and servers does not make me feel any safer.

WozNet

Wozniak's big idea. Sounds cool, and at $25 a pop, it would be very useful for tracking pets and young kids.

Ward 57

I wonder if Bush had any thought about these guys when he proclaimed "Bring it on!" with his cocky, trademark chimpanzee smile.

We frequently forget about the wounded in combat, our attention tuned only to the "body count". It's sombering to reflect on the lifelong suffering these wounded soldiers will have to endure.

Stargazing

Last night I attended a Friday night observing session at Fuertes Observatory for the first time in three or four years. It was sponsored by the Cornell Astronomical Society (of which I was once a member), and I found out about it through the listserv (which I had just recently joined).

Given that it is a Friday night in the middle of the summer, I did not expect too many people to show up. When I arrived at the observatory (9:30pm), there were at least 50 people there already. Fuertes is not a large building, and this was effectively a mob. The telescope dome room itself was packed, the classroom downstairs had a dozen or so people loitering around, and the observing deck outside the building was as packed as a dance floor.

Read full entry...

electric sheep

A distributed screen saver for drawing cool flame fractals: Electric Sheep. (Thanks to Ben Kwa for the link.)

"You're a pimp, Harry."

While I was searching for the brilliant Sinfest strip with the above quote, I came upon this list: 10 lines from Harry Potter 1&2 that can be improved by substituting the word "pimp". Funny read. Any suggestions for lines from books 3, 4, 5 or suggestions for other words?

Expression-level binding in Python

Cool little python trick, gleaned from "Functional programming in Python":

>>> list_of_list = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
>>> [car_x for x in list_of_list for car_x in (x[0],)]
[1, 4, 7]

This is meant as an analogue for the Haskell construct:

list_of_list = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]
firsts1 = [car x | x <- list_of_list] where car (x:xs) = x

Blind leading the blind

As the subject line says.

Authentic Reality

Philip K. Dick is awesome. Trogdor-level airwolf. Below is an excerpt from a faux interview by the guy at frontwheeldrive.com, using real statements from PKD. He just made my quotelist with his statement about power and motives; the emphasis is mine.

PKD: The two basic topics that fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?"

Q: But people have been hashing out these puzzles for millennia. Isn't the shifting nature of reality just good fodder for science fiction?

PKD: The problem is a real one, not merely an intellectual game.

Q: How so?

PKD: Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

Q: Most of these people aren't trying to rule the world, though. I don't buy that big conspiracy view. People just want to make a buck.

PKD: I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power.

Q: But if people's motives aren't so bad, what's wrong with them using virtual technologies to spread their messages?

PKD: The bombardment of pseudorealities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly. Fake realities will create fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- you can have all of them, but none is true.

Kitten Hate

A quick refresher for all those who have forgotten. Kitten Hate (not to be confused with BonsaiKitten)

Thanks Mr. President!

Lies, damned lies, and statistics... If only these numbers were a lie:

Better than batboy!

An infant with four legs, three hands and three kidneys: yahoo story

Sing-a-long!
"Every sperm is sacred,
every sperm is great,
except for all the bad sperms
that cause us to mutate..."

New layout

I've just updated the main electrictao page to be a combination of the blog and my "personal" site (that used to exist at electrictao.net/peter). The layout is 100% hand-crafted CSS, and the biggest known issue right now is that, for some reason, Safari doesn't render it correctly. (But both the XHTML and CSS pass the W3C validation pages!)

Update 7/14: I've fixed most of the problems Safari has been having, and the layout looks good on my two most-commonly-used browsers: Opera and Safari.

Hard sci-fi

Greg Egan writes some hard sci-fi. The one story I'm reading right now, Border Guards, involves a game called "quantum soccer". So far it reads more like an attempt to fictionalize an introductory quantum mechanics text, but maybe it will morph into something more literary as the story progresses. (The somewhat pretentious hypercube applet on his main page doesn't bode well, but I can hope.)

Great CSS Primer

As the header says. link

The Liberation of Sesame Street

Dr. Fun is pure genius!
More evidence of its greatness.

Tranquility Bay

Three words: Holy. Effing. Shit. How out-of-control would my kid have to be before I sent him to Tranquility Bay?

Tranquility is basically a private detention camp. But it differs in one important respect. When courts jail a juvenile, he has a fixed sentence and may think what he likes while serving it, whereas no child arrives at Tranquility with a release date. Students are judged ready to leave only when they have demonstrated a sincere belief that they deserved to be sent here, and that the programme has, in fact, saved their life. They must renounce their old self, espouse the programme's belief system, display gratitude for their salvation, and police fellow students who resist.

1000 years of music

Richard Thompson (of Beeswing fame) has a CD entitled "1000 Years of Popular Music". Looks interesting!

Perl CGI holes

Here is a doc with some awesome and hilarious ways to exploit Perl code. I'd like to hit Movable Type with some of the hacks in here!