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Friendly reminder - have you set your clocks to the correct time? Including the ones that your operating system uses? There are dire predictions that things will go wrong on this, after all.
So I got authentication working today, and put down the unrestricted part of the project as well. I’ve almost got all the functionality introduced. After finding out how to go about creating defaults, even of things like user accounts, things are almost to the point where they actually do what they’re supposed to do consistently. Still have one more thing to introduce (got to figure out how I want to go about automatically generating new books in a series), and then I have to learn the syntax and requirements of the authorization plugin. If I can get authorization to work properly and set up all of that stuff, then I hope everything works out like it’s supposed to on the big freaking test, where I go through all of it to make sure everything points to the right places and does everything right. If all of that works, then I get to smile and relax, because then I know my project works. After that, it’s just adding on stuff that makes it work better and look cooler. Which will probably have impact on the grade, but I’d rather have an ugly working app than a pretty broken one. Progress is being made (and the plugins really, really help speed this along), although it seems to be a rather slow-moving object. (That said, if you had told me at the beginning of the semester that in the space of a half-week or so that I’d be close to a complete app, I’d have looked at you funny. So I suppose I’ve learned a lot over the semester. (I still have no idea whether my code is pretty or not. But pretty is a secondary concern at this particular moment.)
Beyond that, there are those other assignments, too. They’re going to start requiring attention, and so the more work I do now, the less I panic about the work later. At least, theoretically.
So, now links, rather than woes and worries. A gentleman took the splitting of property in half from his divorce to a high degree, cutting the house in half and forklifting his half away. He must have really wanted what was in that half.
The peanut butter and salmonella recall widens. All the material all the way back to 2004 is now suspect.
The Nintendo DS is getting an Opera browser. Following the bigger cousins such as Wii, and possibly going “neener neener” to the PSP, the DS will now become a mobile computing device. I see this as being a very good move for Nintendo, and a lot of DS owners rejoicing. Something a bit more expensive than the DS browser is a mod to make a Tablet Macintosh. With as much as people like Macs, especially for Photoshop and image manipulation, it’s a wonder that Apple hasn’t made official tablet-type computers themselves. Maybe this will be the next step past Intel-type architecture?
Osama bin Laden turns fifty today, and Cenk Uygur says that it's been a good year for him. An editorial from the Wall Street Journal takes a similar sort of line in praising the "politically incorrect" values of Ms. Hirsi Ali, who would like to see Islam pay homage to its roots, but use reason coupled with the Prophet when making moral and ethical decisions, and for the West to stop being so multicultural and saying “Well, we don’t agree with their calling for the death of people who make fun of the Prophet, but they can do so”.
On the newly-minted committee on energy independence and global warming, Tara Lohan says that with one exception, the Republicans have put climate change skeptics on the panel. This is the nature of bi-partisanship, I suspect, and it’s not necessarily all bad to have the check person or two to provide a grounding to reality, but it looks to be more of a combative gesture than one trying to find a good way.
In follow-up from a previous linking The Washington Times reports the military said that it deleted images from journalists because the journalists might have captured things differently than they originally were. The AP disputed that assertion, saying that their freelancers were trained properly and working from a proper distance. I still would like to know what they were taking pictures of.
After Mr. Bush’s visit to a site of Mayan ruins, some of the priests will perform a purification ritual to remove "bad spirits". I wonder if some Americans aren’t going to want to do the same to the halls of government after Mr. Bush leaves. Others may be worried that State-sponsored terror, against others or their own citizens, is on the rise and that Mr. Bush is only contributing to this rise.
Tickling the brain, perhaps in finding patterns where there are none, or continuing to keep alive a precursor to Seldon’s psychohistory are the Black Boxes, apparently human-influenceable random number generators. I have a sense of deja vu about this, like I’ve seen it before, all joking aside. Still, even if humanity is skewing the results before they happen, there’s nothing yet about how such data could be used in a useful predictive manner, trying to pinpoint where, when, and how the object of influence is going to appear and neutralizing it. Or, as the case may be, the problems may still happen, but we need a good psychohistorian to detail the path of least barbarism and then let the right people make the right decisions. If such a device were running while the Mobius Strip experiment were running, I’d like to see what sort of results started coming out of it.
In helping celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Star Wars, the United States Postal office is making post boxes into R2-type units. I suspect a lot of Star Wars fans will proudly declare that those were the droids they were looking for. Star Trek fans may already be reveling in a Finnish parlimentary candidate's decision to offer his campaign points in Klingon.
The Walt Disney Corporation's newest animated feature, "The Frog Princess", will feature the company's first African-American princess. The matter of the animated film may or may not be interesting, but what struck me as odd is that I had to think a bit, and realized that this really was the first African-American Disney princess. Is it the first animated Disney hero that’s African-American, too? (I want to say no on that, but I’m not wholly sure.) Still, even though we know it’s filling a marketing niche, I wonder why Disney didn’t start rushing to fill out all the niches they could once the Princesses line was launched (if not before).
Office culture is changing at U.S. Cellular. After getting fed up with the volume, "no-email Fridays" were instituted, and the change has done some good. It even led up to adoption of a “no-meetings-Friday” policy as well. Volume of e-mail is down, and people are talking and walking to each other more. I also wonder whether the corporation’s employees feel less stressed and are getting less work, because the management also has to get to know their subordinates on no-email days.
Making Memory may be significantly cued to smell, according to upcoming research. A burst of rose while learning, and then delivered in sleep at the point where memories are written appeared to assist significantly in memory formation. Maybe what we need is less of sleep tapes and more of sleep scents. The caveat on it is that just burning incense in your room while studying and then while sleeping may not actually help with memory formation - punctuated bursts of smell seem to be the key.
Albert Mohler confronts the possible future where homosexuality has some genetic markers and options to possibly change those markers to heterosexuality. He does raise some interesting points about how “pro-life” and “pro-choice” could be reversed in this case, with the Right optioning choice to eliminate the genetic homosexuality strains (or to eliminate the babies that show the tendency) and the Left arguing that babies who could be predisposed to homosexuality should be allowed to live. Mohler eventually says that Christians shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out there are genetic markers, and that they shouldn’t feel bad about choosing to eliminate those factors in their own children and campaigning for others or governments to adopt a similar position. It’s the “love the sinner, hate the sin” option, and he considers homosexual behavior to be sinful. I hope, if those factors are discovered, that scientists will determine that potential homosexual behavior is not something to be screening for, nor something to work on correcting, because it’s not something that could potentially kill or cause a poor quality-of-life for the child. I can see screening for Down Syndrome and other markers like that, but as much as some parents would like homosexuality to be screened out of the populace. I can’t see it as something that scientists would agree needs to be eliminated.
The following Flickr photo set reminds me much of the style of Chick Tracts. Except it’s not nearly as hostile to everyone else... it’s about how to incorporate yogic practice into your daily life. But I do get a very Tract sort of vibe off it. It might be the translation, though.
I’m not sure what I can make of the following New York Times article. It details how life in the United Kingdom for many youth and teenagers, well, sucks. (The U.S. is next-worst, according to the UNICEF survey, lest anyone pat themselves on the back.) I don’t think the article gets at any sort of cause or porposed solution to the problem, just acknowledges that this situation exists, and that people are trying to fix it, but it isn’t working. From what little I can gather out of it, though, the solution being utilized is to place additional restrictions on youth, restrictions that are largely ignored. It sounds like the solution is asking a group that’s clearly getting on the disenfranchised end to willingly police themselves and follow the system that’s not providing them with any incentive to do so. Maybe I’m just not reading this right. Or maybe it’s late and I don’t have a clue what’s going on.
Remember - change your clocks to the correct time. And patch your OS to make sure that it does the same, please. You don’t want to have your alarm go off an hour after it should have.
And I remind the viewing audience of one of the Significant Rules of Blog Commenting, or Attempting to Convince Others of the Rightness of your Cause: Thou Shalt Not Spam Anonymously. It invokes Bad Things.
So I got authentication working today, and put down the unrestricted part of the project as well. I’ve almost got all the functionality introduced. After finding out how to go about creating defaults, even of things like user accounts, things are almost to the point where they actually do what they’re supposed to do consistently. Still have one more thing to introduce (got to figure out how I want to go about automatically generating new books in a series), and then I have to learn the syntax and requirements of the authorization plugin. If I can get authorization to work properly and set up all of that stuff, then I hope everything works out like it’s supposed to on the big freaking test, where I go through all of it to make sure everything points to the right places and does everything right. If all of that works, then I get to smile and relax, because then I know my project works. After that, it’s just adding on stuff that makes it work better and look cooler. Which will probably have impact on the grade, but I’d rather have an ugly working app than a pretty broken one. Progress is being made (and the plugins really, really help speed this along), although it seems to be a rather slow-moving object. (That said, if you had told me at the beginning of the semester that in the space of a half-week or so that I’d be close to a complete app, I’d have looked at you funny. So I suppose I’ve learned a lot over the semester. (I still have no idea whether my code is pretty or not. But pretty is a secondary concern at this particular moment.)
Beyond that, there are those other assignments, too. They’re going to start requiring attention, and so the more work I do now, the less I panic about the work later. At least, theoretically.
So, now links, rather than woes and worries. A gentleman took the splitting of property in half from his divorce to a high degree, cutting the house in half and forklifting his half away. He must have really wanted what was in that half.
The peanut butter and salmonella recall widens. All the material all the way back to 2004 is now suspect.
The Nintendo DS is getting an Opera browser. Following the bigger cousins such as Wii, and possibly going “neener neener” to the PSP, the DS will now become a mobile computing device. I see this as being a very good move for Nintendo, and a lot of DS owners rejoicing. Something a bit more expensive than the DS browser is a mod to make a Tablet Macintosh. With as much as people like Macs, especially for Photoshop and image manipulation, it’s a wonder that Apple hasn’t made official tablet-type computers themselves. Maybe this will be the next step past Intel-type architecture?
Osama bin Laden turns fifty today, and Cenk Uygur says that it's been a good year for him. An editorial from the Wall Street Journal takes a similar sort of line in praising the "politically incorrect" values of Ms. Hirsi Ali, who would like to see Islam pay homage to its roots, but use reason coupled with the Prophet when making moral and ethical decisions, and for the West to stop being so multicultural and saying “Well, we don’t agree with their calling for the death of people who make fun of the Prophet, but they can do so”.
On the newly-minted committee on energy independence and global warming, Tara Lohan says that with one exception, the Republicans have put climate change skeptics on the panel. This is the nature of bi-partisanship, I suspect, and it’s not necessarily all bad to have the check person or two to provide a grounding to reality, but it looks to be more of a combative gesture than one trying to find a good way.
In follow-up from a previous linking The Washington Times reports the military said that it deleted images from journalists because the journalists might have captured things differently than they originally were. The AP disputed that assertion, saying that their freelancers were trained properly and working from a proper distance. I still would like to know what they were taking pictures of.
After Mr. Bush’s visit to a site of Mayan ruins, some of the priests will perform a purification ritual to remove "bad spirits". I wonder if some Americans aren’t going to want to do the same to the halls of government after Mr. Bush leaves. Others may be worried that State-sponsored terror, against others or their own citizens, is on the rise and that Mr. Bush is only contributing to this rise.
Tickling the brain, perhaps in finding patterns where there are none, or continuing to keep alive a precursor to Seldon’s psychohistory are the Black Boxes, apparently human-influenceable random number generators. I have a sense of deja vu about this, like I’ve seen it before, all joking aside. Still, even if humanity is skewing the results before they happen, there’s nothing yet about how such data could be used in a useful predictive manner, trying to pinpoint where, when, and how the object of influence is going to appear and neutralizing it. Or, as the case may be, the problems may still happen, but we need a good psychohistorian to detail the path of least barbarism and then let the right people make the right decisions. If such a device were running while the Mobius Strip experiment were running, I’d like to see what sort of results started coming out of it.
In helping celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Star Wars, the United States Postal office is making post boxes into R2-type units. I suspect a lot of Star Wars fans will proudly declare that those were the droids they were looking for. Star Trek fans may already be reveling in a Finnish parlimentary candidate's decision to offer his campaign points in Klingon.
The Walt Disney Corporation's newest animated feature, "The Frog Princess", will feature the company's first African-American princess. The matter of the animated film may or may not be interesting, but what struck me as odd is that I had to think a bit, and realized that this really was the first African-American Disney princess. Is it the first animated Disney hero that’s African-American, too? (I want to say no on that, but I’m not wholly sure.) Still, even though we know it’s filling a marketing niche, I wonder why Disney didn’t start rushing to fill out all the niches they could once the Princesses line was launched (if not before).
Office culture is changing at U.S. Cellular. After getting fed up with the volume, "no-email Fridays" were instituted, and the change has done some good. It even led up to adoption of a “no-meetings-Friday” policy as well. Volume of e-mail is down, and people are talking and walking to each other more. I also wonder whether the corporation’s employees feel less stressed and are getting less work, because the management also has to get to know their subordinates on no-email days.
Making Memory may be significantly cued to smell, according to upcoming research. A burst of rose while learning, and then delivered in sleep at the point where memories are written appeared to assist significantly in memory formation. Maybe what we need is less of sleep tapes and more of sleep scents. The caveat on it is that just burning incense in your room while studying and then while sleeping may not actually help with memory formation - punctuated bursts of smell seem to be the key.
Albert Mohler confronts the possible future where homosexuality has some genetic markers and options to possibly change those markers to heterosexuality. He does raise some interesting points about how “pro-life” and “pro-choice” could be reversed in this case, with the Right optioning choice to eliminate the genetic homosexuality strains (or to eliminate the babies that show the tendency) and the Left arguing that babies who could be predisposed to homosexuality should be allowed to live. Mohler eventually says that Christians shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out there are genetic markers, and that they shouldn’t feel bad about choosing to eliminate those factors in their own children and campaigning for others or governments to adopt a similar position. It’s the “love the sinner, hate the sin” option, and he considers homosexual behavior to be sinful. I hope, if those factors are discovered, that scientists will determine that potential homosexual behavior is not something to be screening for, nor something to work on correcting, because it’s not something that could potentially kill or cause a poor quality-of-life for the child. I can see screening for Down Syndrome and other markers like that, but as much as some parents would like homosexuality to be screened out of the populace. I can’t see it as something that scientists would agree needs to be eliminated.
The following Flickr photo set reminds me much of the style of Chick Tracts. Except it’s not nearly as hostile to everyone else... it’s about how to incorporate yogic practice into your daily life. But I do get a very Tract sort of vibe off it. It might be the translation, though.
I’m not sure what I can make of the following New York Times article. It details how life in the United Kingdom for many youth and teenagers, well, sucks. (The U.S. is next-worst, according to the UNICEF survey, lest anyone pat themselves on the back.) I don’t think the article gets at any sort of cause or porposed solution to the problem, just acknowledges that this situation exists, and that people are trying to fix it, but it isn’t working. From what little I can gather out of it, though, the solution being utilized is to place additional restrictions on youth, restrictions that are largely ignored. It sounds like the solution is asking a group that’s clearly getting on the disenfranchised end to willingly police themselves and follow the system that’s not providing them with any incentive to do so. Maybe I’m just not reading this right. Or maybe it’s late and I don’t have a clue what’s going on.
Remember - change your clocks to the correct time. And patch your OS to make sure that it does the same, please. You don’t want to have your alarm go off an hour after it should have.
And I remind the viewing audience of one of the Significant Rules of Blog Commenting, or Attempting to Convince Others of the Rightness of your Cause: Thou Shalt Not Spam Anonymously. It invokes Bad Things.
