Bun-bun and Dogbert

The similarity between Bun-bun of Sluggy Freelance and Dogbert of Dilbert just struck me tonight.

Reading Anathem

Finally reading Stephenson's Anathem. Slow start--learning curve is steep for some, so it requires some commitment to get through the opening chapter. I think it's just his reputation that got folks to move past that point. I have been enjoying it, but it's big enough for inconsistencies to start to bug me. One of the devices in the story is a chemical called allswell that appears to be a mild euphoric/anti-psychotic. The problem I have with it is that all people living outside the cloisters consume it, as it is in all their food. Yet, even with that, there is still violence, smuggling, and illegal border crossings. In other words, it is a plot device that is inconsistently applied.

Cold Brewed Coffee

I came across a foodie blog entry about cold-brewed coffee, and thought I might give it a try. I had tried cold-brewed tea in the past. This was especially handy for green tea, which becomes rather nasty when steeped too long in hot water. Similar claims were made for cold-brewed coffee, that it is not bitter like hot-brewed, and has lower acidity. Claims on caffeine content varied all over the place, though, as I googled cold-brewed coffee. My dentist nags me about the acid in coffee etching my teeth, so this by itself made it worth a try.

Now, it's not so hot around here that I need iced coffee, so my plan was make some cold-brew, and then heat it in the microwave. I added 1 1/2 cups of coarse ground coffee to 6 cups of water, stirred, and left it in the fridge for about 24 hours. Then I filtered, first with a sieve, then with a metal coffee filter. Paper filters got clogged up too fast.

To look at, the coffee looked a little watery. Also, I guess because I am used to bitter coffee, it tasted kind of weak. So, in spite of recommendations to use a 1-1 dilution, I microwaved a full strength cup for a minute, and added my usual cream and sweetener. I would have to say that while I don't see much reason to change to cold-brewed from a flavor perspective (I'm not a coffee gourmet), I definitely got an enhanced caffeine kick this morning. This may be the first time I have felt a caffeine buzz in twenty years.

Science Gaps in Firefly

Over the last few weeks we have been catching up on Firefly and Serenity, the Joss Whedon "Sci-fi" series. Why the quotes? It's fine entertainment, good story telling, but on the second time through the movie, there are a few points that bother me more now than they did the first time around. Yes, they do the "no sound in space" thing right, but:

1. This is really a "space western". It is a western seasoned with some sci-fi elements.
2. The distance between planets is, literally, astronomical. How do they get from planet to planet so quickly? Not even mention of a device to traverse those distances.
3. There is a scene where a region of space is described as "Reavers' Space". Are you going to tell me that there are enough Reavers to populate the whole space around a planet? That's a lot of cannibalistic psychotics to feed.
4. And while we are on the topic of Reavers, operating space ships and running raids together sounds a bit beyond perpetually berserk killers. What keeps them from attacking each other?

Proliferation of programming languages.

Maybe it's just me, but lately I'm feeling a little bewildered for our apparent need to keep inventing programming languages and frameworks. A short list, just consisting of my use, exposure, and/or interest: Machine Language, Assembly Language, Basic, Pascal, Lisp, C, Fortran, PERL, Python, TCL, C++, Java, Javascript, Spring, Ruby (on Rails), Smalltalk, Groovy, Grails, Trails, Erlang, Haskell, Scala, Clojure. Makes it challenging for someone with a short attention span to stick to one language long enough to get things. done.

Step aside yourself.

Anna Quindlen, in Newsweek, thinks baby boomers should step aside for younger people. I am not one, but I still disagree. For one thing, the perception is really dated. It presumes advancement based on seniority alone. Where is that true anymore, other than unions and academia? For another, it presumes that the younger folks are as productive as the ones they want to replace. I tell you what, in a competitive marketplace, if my company can replace me with a younger model that does more and better, and that they can get away with paying less, how long do you think I will last? Youth has its abilities. There are other abilities that come with experience. Finally, especially in light of the recession, a lot of boomers have no choice but to keep working. Maybe they need to work to just keep eating. Maybe they need it to finish putting their kids or grandkids through school.

Please, it's not right to ask people to lay down and die just to make room.

Time for the tinfoil wallet, now

Wired Online has a piece on remote reading of RFID chips. Think credit cards and door badges. It includes a link to a manufacturer of wallets lined with conductive material.

Google apps for client documents?

Over on Slashdot someone posted a question on whether he should accede to his lawyer clients' desire to just use Google Apps for docs and email.

I have been a system administrator and a security consultant. There's a couple of questions one needs to ask oneself before making such a move:

1. How bad would it be for me if one of my documents or emails became public? Or, specifically, they got into the worst possible hands? What's my risk?
2. What are the likely consequences to my service provider if that happens? What's their incentive to keep my data secure?
3. What measures are available to me to secure my data? What will it cost me to secure my data?
4. Who has access to my data?

I don't even talk about threats, here. Whatever they may tell you, your service provider is a big black box to you, and you don't know about all the holes in that box.

As a system administrator, I had access to any data on our systems. Temptation.

Information security is about making your data cost more to access than it is worth to the person trying to steal it.

Finding a job is work.

Business insider says the same thing I do about finding a job. Make finding a job your job.

OCR on PDF

Today I needed to take a PDF doc that consisted of a scanned book and convert it to text, to make it searchable. I used Craig Taverner's ruby script and it worked like a charm, once I changed the script to use the right tesseract path.

Motorola H700 Headset Pairing

Just in case someone else finds this useful:
We had trouble getting Motorola H700 headsets (we have several) to pair after a while. With multiple mobile phones in the house, we often mix and match headsets with phones. After searching on google, I tried the following, that seemed to work:

1. make sure the phone is ready to pair
   
2. With the boom closed, hold the call button on the headset until it flashes purple
3. flip open the boom
4. tell the phone to find devices

What's the best first programming language.

Just got through this article on Infoworld via Slashdot. It basically discusses opinions on what is the best programming language to start with. I'm of the contention that it doesn't matter so much, what matters is if the programming language lets the new programmer do something they think is cool. If a teenager is really into some MMORPG that has a scripting language, that is what they will learn. If you earn your bread and butter crunching numbers in Excel, you've got motivation to learn VBA. It's like human languages, you normally learn only what you "need";.My daughter got pretty good with LOGO, which they taught at school, because she got to use it to draw pictures.

Another pet peeve phrase

"Focused like a laser." "Laser-like focus." I could live with it if it weren't so heavily over-used. It gets to a point that a hackneyed phrase actually detracts from the point one is trying to make.

Firefox and Proxies

Seems not a very happy combination. I use a secured proxy to access internal websites at work from home. However, I don't want to go through that same proxy to access sites on the public internet. My system runs Ubuntu 9.04. For a while, I was running two parallel browsers, one using the proxy, and the other not. (Konqueror and Firefox). But Konqueror has issues with some of the websites. I gave a try to writing a proxy-auto-config file. And it worked. On everything except Firefox. So now I'm using FoxyProxy, which was the first proxy I came across, and seems to be doing the job. If this doesn't work as planned, I'll just install a proxy server to do the job.

The Definitive Guide to Grails

This book, by Graeme Rocher and Jeff Brown, gets a big FAIL for already being out of date. My goal in picking up a tech book is to get the cookie-cutter stuff in the tutorial to work right away, and then work my way deeper, explore the capabilities, and extend as I need, later. Examples started breaking in chapter 2, in the tutorial.
On the one hand, Grails is evolving quickly, so it is understandable that the book gets out of date. On the other hand, dropping $45 for a book where the basic tutorial doesn't work in six months means it's a bit premature to be writing books on the subject, that sort of content should probably be in a wiki that gets updated as the project evolves.