Tutorial on getting started painting a modern army
Benjamin Bratton: Why don't the bright futures promised in TED talks come true?
I really like this talk. It is not an anti-TED talk but more of a bitch-slap, wake the fuck up kind of a talk. The most poignant comment I have read is "It says that our complacency is unsustainable in the long run." Read the comments on (UK's) The Guardian's site too.
A Common Core study group
I have two boys going into public high school next year and I am concerned. When I first heard about the Common Core educational standards I was hopeful that they would establish an appropriate bar for both educating our children and, in part, evaluating their teachers. Since then I have heard, read, and seen far more opposition to the Common Core than support for it. I think it is time for me to understand the Common Core for high school. And for this I need to read and understand it. Doing so alone and without guidance and/or interpretation is mostly likely impractical. In the past I have benefited from using a study group to understand our state's budget. I think I need the same here.
If you are interested in creating a Common Core study group please contact me either via Facebook, email at andrew@andrewgilmartin.com, or telephone 401-441-2062.
Installing Java 6 on OS X Mavericks
Today I decided to make some effort to get Java 6 running. If this machine were Linux or Windows I would not have this issue. The Java packages for these operating systems use the standard Java distribution and configuration. Not so with Apple's Java. It seems like a mess to me when I compare both the standard distribution's file and directory names to Apple's and even between Apple's OS X Java 6 and Oracle's OS X Java 7. Clearly, I am not an Apple developer.
Apple's Java 6 package can be downloaded from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572.
I don't really need Java 6 to run, I only need Java 7 to compile and run like Java 6. And for this I only need to configure the existing Java 7 javac and java commands correctly. I am glad of this as I have no confidence that Apple's Java 6 installer will leave my existing Java 7 installation working. I will need to cheery pick what I want from Apple's Java 6 installation package ... and hope for the best. And hoping for the best is acceptable as, after all, this MacBook Pro is a development machine and so it can be a little rough and idiosyncratic.
I used the shareware tool Pacifist to extract the JavaForOSX.pkg sub-package to my ~/lib/ directory. (Pacifist is very easy to use and so I could skip understanding pkgutil.) I renamed the installed root directory from "JavaForOSX Folder" to ~/lib/jdk1.6.0 and fixed the permissions.
My builds are handled by Ant and so I need to tell the javac task to use Java 6 for source and target, and to point the bootclass to the Java 6 jars.
<path id="java6.bootclasspath">
<fileset dir="${env.HOME}/lib/jdk1.6.0/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Classes">
<include name="**/*.jar"/>
</fileset>
</path>
<javac source="1.6" target="1.6" bootclasspathref="java6.bootclasspath" ... > ... </javac>
The compile now works. Have not yet tried to run, however. Running is for another day.
Shane Koyczan
Not that many really good ideas worth spreading?
My Facebook friends have been turning on TED and TEDx for a bit mostly because they have been pulling talks that don't fall within the traditional notions of science. I can't say I blame them -- friends and TED/TEDx. Especially when few people really understand that TED and TEDx are difference conferences altogether and TED/TEDx does not respect that many in their audience are rational, spiritual beings. For example, pulling Sheldrake's talk is really unfortunate as his is an interesting perspective on Eastern and native peoples spiritualism in Western science clothing. (Others that were pulled seem to me to be little more than entertainment presentations. That is, I don't care.) With that said, TED is a business — they sell conferences — and so they can edit (not censor, only governments do that) as they want. The challenge is for another conference organization to build the same name recognition as TED but in areas TED fears to tread. Let's look for them and support them.
In the end, however, I think what might be happening is that there simply are not that many really good ideas worth spreading!
Non-NISO duration standard
- Shortly is less than 17 mins or 29 mins.
- In-a-bit is less than 29 mins.
- Half-hour is 30 to 50 mins.
- In-a-while is about 1 hour.
- Later is about 2 hours.
Too little skeuomorphism!
I find iOS 7's UI boring rather than utilitarian and/or minimalistic. I am, frankly, surprised at my reaction to this utilitarianism as it is something I have wanted for some time. How I have it, I think Apple went too far in removing the skeuomorphism.
I am Geordi LaForge. Really!?
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Using a compound index to reduce lock timeouts with MySql 5.5
update t1 set c1 = ? where c2 = ?
create index i1 on t1(c2,c1)
Chain of Command and the storm in a tea cup.
I took down my post about my objection to having advertising in the opening pages of the Chain of Command rules book. While I continue to object to having advertising at the front of a paid product I now know better that my expectations are quite different (even quaint) than the general expectations of both rules buyers and rules publishers. If you want to know more about how this played out, then see the thread on Too Fat Lardies Yahoo! group (this is a private group so you must join to see postings).
Clipping my magpie wings & I healing my crow wings.
I deactivated my Facebook account. I deleted my Instapaper account. I deleted my (RSS reader) goread.io account. I deleted my Delicious account. And others are going sooner than later. I am tired of have all these virtual stacks of unread stuff scattered around my virtual desk. I have enough physical stacks of unread stuff that really needs my attention -- and is, more often than not, deserving of that attention. I am clipping my magpie wings and I am healing my crow wings.
Developers and Depression
Developers and Depression from Confbots on Vimeo.
If your presence doesn't work, neither will your words.
GNU Screen cheat-sheet
SCREEN
starting screen
named
screen -S name
within sudo
script /dev/null
screen -S name
disconnecting
^a d
reconnecting
screen -x foo
screen -x user/foo
listing
screen -ls
$HOME/.screenrc
hardstatus alwayslastline "%w %= %H "
defscrollback 10000
multiuser on
addacl user1
addacl user2
addacl userN
help
^a ?
WINDOW
new window
^a c
^a : screen
title window
^a A name
^a : title name
close window
^a k
^a : k
using ^d at the shell prompt will close end the current shell and so close the window.
select window
^a number
^a : select number
select next window
^a backspace
^a : prev
read-only window
^a : chacl * -w number
read-write window
^a : chacl * +w number
REGION
new region (aka split)
^a S
^a : split
select next region
^a tab
resize regions (equally)
^a : resize =
close region
^a X
^a : remove
close all regions except the current region
^a Q
^a : only
SCROLL-BACK
view
^a esc
page back
^b
page forward
^f
finished
esc esc
END
See http://aperiodic.net/screen/start for an online manual.
Getting OS X to use the application you want to open a document type
I had a little problem where Chrome was not the default viewer for XML documents on my Mac. Using the "Open With..." dialog to select the application to use with the document did not stick. In the end I used the duti utility, eg
duti -s com.google.chrome text/xml alland this seems to have worked. Will see if it continues to work after a reboot.
The other problem is what are the applications, UTIs, or MIME types that can be used? The command
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -dump | grep ...can be used to investigate. Further, I found a reference to AllApplications which will also help.