| User: |  kitty_tape |
| Date: | 2009-07-13 16:36 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  aggravated |
Eclipse can be infuriating. It is giving me an error saying that some type does not exist (it does). When I try to fix the error by creating the type, it fails because the type already exists. Yet even after this, it still insists the type doesn't exist.
1 comment | post a comment
There's nothing like getting two items, one in Amazon's frustration free packaging and one not, to make you appreciate the frustration free packaging even more. Fortunately I only ended up with a scratch from the unfriendly packaging this time.
1 comment | post a comment
The mistakes in our genome make a stronger case for evolution than the bits that are right. In essence, a common designer may have designed different creatures with the same "right bits", but why would an intelligent designer have put the same mistakes in two independently designed creatures?
I like the analogy with cheating. If two papers have the same mistakes (misspellings, odd grammatical errors, etc.), it is a pretty safe bet that one was copied from the other or they were both originated from a shared source.
11 comments | post a comment
| User: | kitty_tape |
| Date: | 2009-07-08 14:06 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
FYI, Game Day will officially be at Mark's. If that is relevant to you and you don't see the friend locked post with the location information, comment here and I'll get the info to you.
post a comment
After much fumbling, I figured out how to convert a pile of JPGs into a video. The magic line was this:
convert -delay 20 -resize 800x600 IMG_{1840..1922}.JPG ~/foo.mpg
where -delay is a number in centiseconds (so 20 is 5 fps).
The thing is, Ubuntu's install of ImageMagic (which provides convert) doesn't come with mpeg2encode, which is what it uses to make mpg files. I had to do this:
$ wget ftp://ftp.mpegtv.com/pub/mpeg/mssg/mpeg2vidcodec_v12.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf mpeg2vidcodec_v12.tar.gz
$ cd mpeg2
$ make
$ cd mpeg2enc
$ sudo cp mpeg2encode /usr/bin
Then convert it worked happily.
1 comment | post a comment
Please reply by end of day.
Would you go to game day if it were temporarily relocated to the home of a friend in Redmond?
One of my college friends is having a house warming party w/ games and what not this weekend. He has expressed an interesting in merging our game day with that event. I think it would be fun, but I want to know what my wonderful friends thing.
13 comments | post a comment
| User: | kitty_tape |
| Date: | 2009-07-07 09:34 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
Gmail's out of Beta!
3 comments | post a comment
This weekend! Yay! ::grabs everyone he can reach and drags them to Faire::
Steve
5 comments | post a comment
Dan Murrow is a mighty friendly man
He's big and round like a bear
He hugs his friends and his friends hug him
Anytime, anywhere.
His patients would come for therapy
To drive their blues away
And sooner or later they'd feel a lot better
Cause this is what he'd say:
Chorus:
I want a hug when we say hello
I want a hug when it's time to go
I want a hug 'cause i want you to know
I'm awfully fond of you.
I want a hug--what a wonderful feeling
I want a hug--to feel you squeezing
I want a hug--it certainly seems like
The natural thing to do!
But when the head of the hospital heard about it
He got all annoyed
Cause hugging is sexual sublimation
According to Doctor Freud.
You can beat 'em down, you can hide 'em away,
You can keep 'em quiet with drugs,
You can strap 'em and zap 'em with electroshock
But you better not give 'em a hug.
Chorus
So the boss says, "Dan, clean out your desk--
Your conduct is lax and lewd.
Any deviation from standard medical
Practice can get us sued."
Now, Dan don't feel too bad for himself
He's really kind of proud.
But he's sorry for the people who are locked away
Where hugging ain't allowed.
Chorus
Steve
1 comment | post a comment
mew0422 and I are trying to sort out our data-storage needs. She has a laptop, I have a desktop. We want some NAS and we want a good backup solution.
It looks like Apple's Time Machine is entirely client-based and so can use any mountable storage, be it a Time Capsule, a USB HDD, or something else.
With that in mind, it seems like we'd be best to get non-Apple NAS—something upgradable and it shouldn't need to be a Wi-Fi server itself. (Recommendations?)
Here's what I'm thinking: I am inclined to use the JWZ Backup Solution for my computer, possibly rsyncing to NAS in addition to swappable drives. mew0422 would use Time Capsule to backup to the NAS box.
The only thing left is how to back up the NAS drive (financial files, shared media, etc.) Any thoughts?
I hate IT.
1 comment | post a comment
Even though the expected "0" on a voice menu to get to a real person doesn't work, the programmer realized that if the person on the phone bangs zero half a dozen times, you should probably connect them to a person. ::didn't really expect that::
Steve
11 comments | post a comment
The heat seems to have turned my cat into a small rug.
3 comments | post a comment
I couldn't have said it better:
"Political humor always falls a bit flat to me. It seems that the point of it is to present politics as a big farcical circus, which seems to me a little like waving a magic wand over a tophat and miraculously transforming it into a tophat." (From my LJ friends page, unattributed since it was flocked. The author is welcome to attribute him/her self.)
Steve
post a comment
"Combat operations the past few months have again highlighted terminal performance deficiencies with 5.56x45mm 62 gr. ... These failures appear to be associated with the bullets exiting the body of the enemy soldier without yawing or fragmenting. This failure ... can also occur when the bullets pass through only minimal tissue, such as a limb or the chest of a thin, malnourished individual, as the bullet may exit the body before it has a chance to yaw and fragment."
AFTE Journal 33(1) Winter 2001, pp 11-28
"Thin, malnourished" people suggests a different approach to winning (how about nourishing them?).
Steve
1 comment | post a comment
From the We should have put it on the registry department. The DB Fletcher Capstan Table:
3 comments | post a comment
Be warned that a lot of book summaries will be coming in the near future. I have a 2 month backlog of 8 books that I need to write summaries for.
Finished Slow is Beautiful: New visions of community, leisure, and joie de vivre by Cecile Andrews. In this book Andrews motivates the idea of the "slow life" and discusses some way of slowing down your own life.
The central claim of this book is that the "fast" life does not lead to happiness. The constant chase after more money, more status, and more stuff decreases happiness rather than increases it. Some people find the fast life satisfying, but it is increasingly clear that the universal emphasis on the fast life is harmful to individuals and communities.
Andrews supports this claim with an overview of some of the recent research on happiness. This research supports the conclusion that the things that make us happy are the things that we have less time for in our overworked, over scheduled lives. For most people happiness comes from spending time with people they care about, participating in activities where they can achieve a state of flow, and having enough free time to do these things.
Andrews concludes that we need to slow down our lives to make room for the things that make us happy. She gives a number of tips for this, but she also emphasizes the importance of social change to allow more people to choose to slow down their lives. Andrews realizes something that much of the happiness literature misses: in American society today, slowing down your life is a privilege that few can take advantage of. Even those financially able to work part time have a hard time doing so in the career of their choice because many careers do not offer part time opportunities (part time software engineers are few and far between; I have heard stories of lawyers who were asked to leave their practice when they asked for a "part time" 40 hour week). Those who can find part time work that they find interesting usually have to sacrifice health care. Andrews recognizes that slowing down society (or at least giving all of its members the choice to slow down) will more than individual life changes.
Despite all the good things about this book, I can only give it a middling recommendation overall. The parts that were on topic were quite good. However, Andrews would occassionally go off into a political rant that was, as often as not, only tangentially related to the topic at home. These political rants rarely added to the discussion. Even reading this in April of 2009, the frequent criticisms of George W. Bush seemed dated. Sadly, these digressions were frequent enough to seriously detract from the quality of the book.
This book is a valuable read, but you have to be willing to leave behind the dirt and take home the gems.
3 comments | post a comment
| User: | kitty_tape |
| Date: | 2009-07-01 16:49 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
FYI, by popular demand, we will have game day this month. =)
6 comments | post a comment
| User: | kitty_tape |
| Date: | 2009-07-01 12:51 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
Anyone have a steam carpet cleaner I can borrow?
4 comments | post a comment
|
