Belated post

• Bet On America -

  The evidence for our nation's downward spiral isn't sufficient to rule out the very opposite possibility: that the United States will become, in purely geopolitical terms, even stronger in coming decades. The mistake we make is not so much overestimating our problems, but underestimating the problems of our potential rivals. We think we're the only country with decline-and-fall issues.
  
  I'll wager that many of the toughest challenges for Americans in the future won't be associated with our geopolitical decline, weakness or decrepitude. No: Our challenges will be the unimagined consequences of our many successes.

• A travelogue on East St Louis
• Predictions from the year 1900 - a must read
• ASP.net Chart Controls
• The economics of Scientology

On productivity

For the programmers out there - did any of you know about this feature (code snippets) of Visual Studio? Somehow I didn't. If not, it's the best 14 minutes you'll spend today

Friday link clearing

• Sarah Silverman, Obama, and the Jewish vote - not safe for work, but worth watching
• Small Banks are doing fine it seems
• Israel asked Bush for permission to bomb Iran, and it seems Bush refused! Good. No point in throwing away all the gains in Iraq
• Making money twice - worth reading
• Who serves in the military? Well worth reading.
• Jetpacks!
• The difference between Sunni and Shia in short form
  
• And this little nugget - via Ezra Klein

  Dear American:
  
  I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
  
  I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
  
  I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
  
  This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
  
  Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
  
  Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

  
  

David Friedman speaks at Google!

About his new book, Future Imperfect. Here is the video. All of my tech nerd readers should watch this, for the global warming moment alone if nothing else.

Your Monday reading

• Visual Thesaurous
• SchellingPoint.com
• Reporter gets shot, keeps reporting
• An alternative to business requirements
• The Pop vs Soda map
• David Friedman on Bob Barr
• An interview with Bob Barr
• An Asian rant about Europe, which had the memorable quote

  Heaven is a place where the police are English; the chefs are Italian; the car mechanics are German; the lovers are French and it's all organized by the Swiss. Hell is a place where the police are German; the chefs are English; the car mechanics are French; the lovers are Swiss and it's all organized by the Italians

Advances in child management

A wonderful technical acheivement

Conflict follows device that drives away teen loiterers
A wall-mounted gadget designed to drive away loiterers with a shrill, piercing noise audible only to teens and young adults is infuriating civil liberties groups and tormenting young people after being introduced into the United States.

Such wonderful times we live in.

Friday links

• Everybody kills Hitler - quite good
• Interesting bit by David Friedman on public education
• Bob Barr might be running for the LP nomination, that would be strange
• The best cartoon I've seen in quite some time, everybody check this out...
• The ocean is cooling... - Global warming enthusiasts are sounding more and more like defense lawyers.
  

Throwing stuff to the wall

Via Marginal Revolution, here comes today's quote of the day

Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don't overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.

The market is a discover process after all.

X-Sql, welcome to the Blogroll

I have recently discovered that my friend Naim has recently started blogging about software matters and such at http://xsqlsoftware.blogspot.com/

Welcome to the blogsphere!

I'm amazed at my self control

There's a digital infrared thermometer for sale for the amazing low price of $38, and I haven't bought it! It's surprising really.

Tuesday night rapid fire

• Robert Kaplan on private military contractors
• John Robb on private military contractors - one thing he doesn't mention (and I don't think he has mentioned it before) is that there could be many, many problems with highly trained combat forces under no particular command, they would make quiet a crime crew. It's unlikely with the current stock of PMCs, but it might be with the next generation.
  
• Solar Power is becoming a vested interest
• For some reason validator callout extenders won't work with a custom validator with the standard Visual Studio code, but it works with this code.
• Nazi War Criminal was found in Metro Atlanta. Why must events like these be the only time Atlanta makes national news?
• Building a tree fort as an exercise in project management
• DNI on leaving Iraq
• A client of mine was in the AJC today, I did the Atlanta Arrangements site late last year.
• Secret Geek has a nice post on the Principles of Scale
• Tyler Cowen on income inequality. I wonder if anyone is actually worried about this. No one seems to be, but everyone thinks everyone else is scared stiff. One thing to bear in mind is that the bottom is fixed at zero
  

A cool ASP.net feature

If you're getting strange ASP.net errors like "Padding is invalid and cannot be removed", check out this entry on CodingHorror.com.

Free tech stuff

I have a perfectly good scanner and laser printer (black and white) which, alas, are not Vista compatible. Does anyone in the Atlanta area either of them?

Friday round up

Sorry for the light blogging, work and the house hunting process have been quite draining on me.

Anyway, Here is your recommended reading for today

• The Economist has a great read Iraqi Kurdistan, or as it will soon be known, Kurdistan.
• The absolute minimum you should know about Character sets and Unicode
• Russia Tests "Dad of All Bombs". It's good they're keeping themselves busy. Money Quote: " Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment"
• Megan McArdle on why we haven't been attacked since 9/11. Personally I think it's a lack of talent/money/motivation on their part, plus a host of supporting factors
  
• The view from the top of the world
• I'm surprised this hasn't come back to life among the many Bush conspiracies.
• There's this from Craigs List

  Sushi Model: Willing to act as display showcase as sushi is displayed placed on body for patrons to eat off of.
  • Model preferable of Asian ethnicity
  • Height requirement: 5'6'' to 5'11''
  • Slim built; clean and body shaven
  • Will wear bottom with pasty/string bikini top or topless
  • Compensation: $200/3 hours

• Don't you just love it when support for Microsoft Products is done using commands only they know? Check this out (which did work for me)
  

What I'm reading while uploading...

• Hardcore Troubadours - a bio of the Old Crow Medicine Show
• Catalogs of Data Visualization on Coding Horror
• Minorities become the majority in 10 percent of U.S. counties - which has the interesting quote

  In northern Virginia, Teresita Jacinto said she feels less welcome today than when she first arrived 30 years ago, when she was one of few Hispanics in the area.

  "Not only are we feeling less welcome, we are feeling threatened," said Jacinto, a teacher in Woodbridge, Virginia, about 20 miles southwest of Washington.
  ...
  "I think across the board all of us feel like we're not welcome," said Jacinto, who was born in the U.S. and volunteers for an advocacy group called Mexicans Without Borders.

  Perhaps it's because she's feeling unwelcome because she's advocating an unpopular cause?

• The Old Crow Medicine Show on AT & T Blueroom
• Green Fakers on Radar. The celebrity excuses are funny.
  

Cell phone advice

I'm thinking of getting a Blackberry 8700G. Does anyone know anything about this phone? I would like to use it as a secondary internet connection as well as a phone/pda.

Quick link round up

• Long range acoustic devices
• The Agitator has a list of questions that should be asked of all presidential candidates, well worth reading
• Ward Churchill has been fired.
• Black straw lighting from the Strobist and Lighting Mods.
  

The cyber-crime map of the world

Check out this article in Forbes.

3 random link

• Meaningful advances in battery technology
• A 24 inch monitor for $229. My, how the prices have fallen
• China executes ex-drug chief for graft

  China executed a former drug and food safety chief on Tuesday for corruption in an unusually swift sentence which will serve as a warning amid a series of health scandals that have stained the "made in China" brand.

  Can you imagine that happening in the US? I can't.
  

A thousand curses upon Comcast Broadband

I've been getting 90% packet loss on all upstream traffic all day, which pretty much kills any and all productivity on my part. The tech support couldn;t do anything and had to schedule a service appointment for Thursday.

Does anyone know if you can get DSL without a phone number?

Sony VAIO customer service - an exploration

Jane Galt vents most eloquent on her frustration with the Sony Corporation, specifically Sony Vaio tech support. Short version; it's lame.

In the post she states

So instead, I'll try to change the cost-benefit analysis. With your help, I'd like to make this little incident as expensive for Sony as possible.

Let's remind Sony that sometimes, the dumb bitches have blogs. And friends with blogs.

So if you're reading this, and you have a blog, if you wouldn't mind linking to this post, preferably with the words "Sony VAIO customer service" in the link, I'd appreciate it awfully.

Sure, it's revenge. But revenge has positive social uses. If it gets expensive enough to screw over their customers, they'll stop doing it. To all of us.

We'll see what happens. It creates an interesting exercise in feedback, i.e. an advancement in the first of of the OODA loop.

That would be a good company to start - a service that monitors the blogosphere for mentions of a product and somehow differentiates the positive and negative threads so one could track the source and find hidden problems with the business process.

Quick Friday roundup

• E-Snailer - Write a letter on the internet
• High Trust Societies
• Fair and Balanced Radio - by Radley Balco
• Better and better car batteries. From Wired. We probably need at least one generation more of advancement before plug-in hybrids are feasible.
  

An interesting Vista fact

You can't use four gigs of DDR RAM on 32 bit installations of Microsoft Vista. I recently got another two gigs (it's very cheap right now) and was disappointed to see that Windows was only registering 3,326 megs. I do some research and find that 32 bit OS have a max of 4 gigs total memory it can use, and that includes sound cards, video cards, (everything) as well as sticks of DDR.

More details at CodingHorror.

Two things worth reading

• A DIY guide to building your own CNC machine (for about $600)
• Interesting thoughts on Global Warming
  

Friday round up

• A look at where the I-Pod is made, it's pretty much all of East Asia
• A nice look at Electronic Medical Records
• Coming Anarchy does math
• Get your postal mail over the internet! This would solve a lot of problems for me actually.
• 72 year old Marine beats crap out of 27 year old pickpocket.
  

Why must everything involving hard drives take forever?

I've been running a checkdisk for the past six hours. No fun at all. And I find out last night that my hard drive doesn't work with Vista. Totally funless.

SkyNet

An interesting vision of what it might look like.

Yet another FireFox tip

Type about:config in the address bar, filter by cache, and change the value of browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to true. It speeds up the browing experience by quite a bit on ssl sites, particularly if they use Ajax.

Two firefox tips

While doing some reseach, I discovered that the "leak" is acually a costly feature (aren't they all). It has something to do with cacheing closed tabs.

Anyway, to fix it, just follow the instructions on this LifeHacker page. Also, I've heard good things about about Tab Mix Plus.

SQL Server Errata

As everyone should learn from my 3 hours of Sql server frustration... Sql Server returns different values when you run a CheckSum on the same text for varchar and nvarchar data types.

The above probably isn't interesting to any of my readers, but should I forget it later I can find it again.

Monday link roundup

• An in-depth examination on how to build an energy efficient house
• Robot snipers in Israel
• Strobist begins Lighting 102
• No one thinks seriously about alternative energy. Check out this post from TreeHugger "New Battery Pushed Prius to 125 MPG". It's a great idea and invention, but it's a plug-in hybrid. The motion is coming from the power grid. Granted electricity is usually more efficient than gasoline, but that's like saying that a diesel engine gets infinite mileage because it doesn't burn any gasoline at all.
  

Sunday link round up

• A creepy collection of suicide notes
• Google used this camera to create their new "Street View" feature (which is not in Atlanta, yet).
• Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin explains why the lessening of racial majorities is a bad thing for diversity. Really.
• There's a new, free version of Refactor! specifically for ASP.net. It's pretty cool. When I installed it it deleted all of my toolbox snippets in Visual Studio, so be careful about that.
  

Thursday link roundup

• Ala. Officials Probe 'Monster Pig' Saga

  State wildlife officials said Wednesday they want to know how the huge hog dubbed "Monster Pig" got into a fenced hunting preserve where it was chased down and shot to death by an 11-year-old boy.
  ...
  weighed 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet, 4 inches from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail.
  ...
  Jamison was hunting with his father and the guides on May 3 when he killed the giant pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

• Are you a good liar?
• Microsoft Surface
• Popular Mechanics how to videos
  

A retort I didn't say

While I was in Borders today I overheard someone say "I wish they'd just get what they have right instead of coming out with something new". I think she was talking about Microsoft Vista. I thought, "That's what they're doing, they're just adding a new skin and saying it's new." The the "fixed" features create other problems because that's just the way technology works.

Random Thursday links

• How to fix the Microsoft Home Page
• Robert Conquest's 3 Laws of Politics

  1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
  2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
  3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

• More Stirling Engines how to guides - this one looks a bit better than the last one I posted. Here is another one.
• The top 100 web apps for freelancers - mine is not on it, yet.
  

A needed innovation

Last night I spent about seven hours trying to get a particular Microsoft web product to work, only to discover at the end of a long search that you simply couldn't make it work that way. I was trying to update the error message dynamically and have it appear in the VCE

It would be quite handy to have a list of things that a product CAN'T do, it would save so much time trying to prove negatives. Perhaps that should be a new site idea.

Monday link roundup

• A useful post from CodingHorror.com on interface friction
• Al Gore, like Ann Coulter, seems to be a mac person
• A blog for women! And one of the editors might be someone I went to high school with.
• Kuler! The Adobe web color harmony tool - via this site
• Co-Mapping (mind mapping software) looks cool
• Properly bashing ethanol
• HiddenUnities and PurposeSlog have posts on the Wire and 24. I helpfully added the Shield in the comments. All excellent programs, though 24 is basically a commercial for the cell phone industry, not torture.
  

Firefox tip

(via CodePoet) To speed up Firefox

Open Firefox, type about:config into the adress bar, filter on "v6" (this should easily find the ipv6 setting)
Right click it and choose "toggle" and the FOX is back in business.

It works quite well.

The Civil War in time lapse format

Coming Anarchy has an awesome time lapse animation of the Civil War, it's one of the best animations like this I've seen.

Wind Power in Popular Mechanics

Popular Mechanics has an interesting article on Wind Power on their site. Sadly, it makes it seem unworkable on any kind of large scale. It would be quite handy on a small to medium scale though.

Local cooling

I sit here at four in the morning, listening to Woodie Guthrie trying to restore a database that a client accidentally deleted the day before launch (yay me). And it's 54 degrees outside. In Georgia, in the middle of May. It seems unnaturally cold lately.

I wonder if there's a site somewhere that tracks local temperatures and plots, plots a yearly average and indicates if that is lower than average or higher. If not, that would be a cool AdSense supported project...

How does the West expect to win...

When we have judges like this

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is," he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms "Web site" and "forum." An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: "I haven't quite grasped the concepts."

A cool idea

ThinkCycle.org - an open source community for machines.

Quote of the moment

Via CodePoet, and from this page

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. (Nathaniel S Borenstein)

and

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

and

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)

Monday link roundup

• It's Wiretap the Internet Day - what have we come to in this country. Sigh.
• Entrepreneurial Adages - All quite true. in particular

  Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible -- small budgets give big focus

• Battlefield spy-bot - really cool
• Tribal Minds
• The indispensable Col. Patrick Lang has an outline of what a diplomatic solution to Iraq might look like. I would read all of it. Webbed version of the outline is here.
  

Blogger is back!

It's been hanging on posts for the past few days. Now it's working again for some reason.

xSQL is a cool Sql Server tool

I've been using xSQL for a good while now and I think it's about time to give it the Moody Loner endorsement. While it does a lot of things, I mostly use it for copying databases between servers where I have different permissions (doing that using the built-in tools is quite problematic) and it's saved me countless hours of tweaks and cutting and pasting.

It's run by cool people too. Check it out here http://www.xsqlsoftware.com/

Friday Rapid Fire

• European Solar Power - with an array of mirrors instead of photo voltaic panels
• CogMap - an online organization chart maker, pretty cool, very Ajax-ey
• SilverLight - Microsoft's Next Big Thing has it's first (that I've seen) user generated application. And I just learned Ajax...
  

Thursday rapid fire

• In camera photo tricks that get you around Photoshop
• Business 2.0 magazine fails to back things up with disastrous consequeces
• Getting fat can mean that men are committed to a relationship, among many other things
  

A cool flash embedder

The best Flash embedder I've seen actually. It's called SWFObject.

Science and truth

Via this episode of BloggingHeads, I came across an interesting article about the philosophy of science, specifically that of Thomas Kuhn. Money Quotes:

Scientists, as Kuhn describes them, are deeply conservative. Once indoctrinated into a paradigm, they generally devote themselves to solving "puzzles," problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn calls this "mopping up." But there are always anomalies, phenomena that the paradigm cannot account for or that directly contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored. But if they accumulate, they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.

Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn asserts that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative event. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants and then bashes them over the head.

In other words, science advances funeral by funeral.

On the first day of my Advanced Macroeconomics class in 1994 the professor (I forget his name, I think that was the last class he taught before he retired) said that we should think of the truth as "the consensus of informed opinion".

In other words, for practical purposes, the truth is the state of the art, as of right now, and we should expect it to change over time.

Interesting developments on carbon emissions

It would seem that there has been some progress in developing an actually useful way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Essentially it's a giant vacuum that sucks the CO2 out of the air. It gets around several problems, most notably geography (the devices can be anywhere). While there is energy expended in the proccess, the main guy has the interesting observation

The real issue, says Lackner, is not the energy consumed but the CO2 emitted. He estimates that for every ton of CO2 he captures, he'll generate another 0.4 ton. But because this process will take place at a plant, where emissions are concentrated relative to air, it will be easily captured.

Pair it up with nuclear power and you've got an even bigger net decrease.

One item not mentioned in the article is that it is possible to start this on a small scale without any public/government consensus on the topic. Any meaningful consensus, particularly an international one would most likely be ineffective, slow, corrupt in implementation and captured by special interests from the start.

The above remedy is able to be done by quite a few people with little public input and delay. The Sierra Club, Richard Branson, Wal-Mart, whoever, could just set them up as much as they wanted. It doesn't get around the free-rider problem, but it does allow private virtue to be accomplished.

For the record, I'm still a skeptic on global warming, but the technology is fascinating.

Snipers and robot armies

After reading these two articles (here and here) about new forms of sniper scopes, I have to wonder, why aren't robot armies in the field right now? Granted, all of the shooting must somehow involve a human, but I would imagine that remote operator could be anywhere. We've had unmanned aerial vehicles for years now, and those fly, which would seem to be much more complicated and expensive.

Random links

• Remove the web developer and the web gets developed
• Term of the day "Fever Swamp - A political website or mindset that is prone to wild accusations and is especially susceptible to conspiracy theories."
• An excellent post on conspiracy theories
  

The funniest thing I've read today

From this Popular Mechanics article on flying cars

Recently, NASA scientists discovered that most people love to play video games but hate to die in fiery airplane crashes