Month: April 2003

you are what you eat, and as much of it

Fortune.com – Magazine – We’ve Got to Stop Eating Like This

The broader point is that human diets are eminently changeable; they change all the time, and there is nothing inexorable about the national drift toward bloat. There is also nothing immutable about the swill that people buy in supermarkets and restaurants. A generation ago it was almost impossible to get a good cup of coffee in America. Yuppies fixed that. Beer too.

What will it take to transform our diet on a national scale? The problem is huge and depressingly simple: The U.S. food industry provides about 3,900 calories per person per day (the figure is for 2000, the latest available). Allowing for waste and losses in cooking, the USDA estimates that the average American consumes roughly 2,750 calories per day — a full Big Mac beyond its recommendation of 2,200 calories for most children, teenage girls, active women, and sedentary men. Of course, diet and exercise are matters of individual choice, but cultural circumstances — car travel, post-industrial jobs, passive entertainment–push us collectively toward eating more calories than we burn. So do the roughly $4.5 billion a year the food industry spends on advertising and the $50 million a year it spends lobbying in Washington, D.C.

I have been convinced for a while that the key to weight loss is portion control: I hear too many people say the reason they like some diet or other is because it allows them to eat large portions without guilt. So where someone might eat a large plate of pasta, they now eat a small mountain of protein, instead of a more sensible amount, or even two eaten at intervals.

I was drawn to this story by the idea of the quality of the food and how the kids palates changed to. I’m skeptical of the idea that kids only like junk foods. The fact is kids like anything that tastes good, and it’s hard to beat junk foods on that score.

[ . . . . ] the market’s logic suggests that if food companies are to grow, so must we. In a way it’s a mirror image of the problem of overfishing: Each restaurant and food company has an incentive to get more stuff onto our plates; an individual company, like an individual fisherman, has no interest in cutting back for the benefit of a species. Only in this case the species that suffers isn’t swordfish. It’s us.

Puts it in perspective, doesn’t it?

abandon all hope, ye who enter here

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell – The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers) Very Low
Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) High
Level 2 (Lustful) Moderate
Level 3 (Gluttonous) High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) Low
Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics) Very High
Level 7 (Violent) Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) Moderate
Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous) Low

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

Thanks to Josh for this one.

lazy man’s file backup

Put this script on your crontab:

#!/bin/sh 
/sbin/mount_smbfs //username@server/share /Volumes/share 
cd ${HOME}/Documents/ 
find . -mtime -1 -a \! -type d -exec cp -rp {} /Volumes/server/username/Documents/ \;

It mounts a server share that you know gets backed up, finds all your files that got touched today, and copies them to your directory on the share.

Set it and forget it.

command line smbfs mounts

I got this working and thought it worth putting down here for my own memory, and perhaps to help someone else.

It’s possible to mount Windows (a/k/a CIFS or samba) shares on the command line. You need to create a .nsmbrc file (not unlike a .netrc file), and populate it like the one below. This is handy if you want to copy files to a file server that gets backed up regularly, but doesn’t require you to be logged in to or have it mounted.

To hash the passwords, use smbutil: 

bash-2.05a$ smbutil crypt password
$$178465324253e0c07

Then replace the uppercased bits with stuff that really exists, and replace the password hashes with the ones you made. 

bash-2.05a$ more .nsmbrc
[default]
workgroup=WORKGROUP
username=USERNAME
[HOST:USERNAME:SHARE]
password=$$password
[HOST:USERNAME:SHARE2]
password=$$password
[HOST2:USERNAME:SHARE]
password=$$password

And then just mount your filesystems as needed: no need to use su, even. 

bash-2.05a$ df -k
Filesystem              1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s9             78143056 12793924 65093128    16%    /
devfs                          95       95        0   100%    /dev
fdesc                           1        1        0   100%    /dev
                       512      512        0   100%    /.vol
automount -fstab [404]          0        0        0   100%    /Network/Servers
automount -static [404]         0        0        0   100%    /automount

Now you don’t see /Volumes/www . . . . . 

bash-2.05a$ mount_smbfs //pdb2@mars/www /Volumes/www/
kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext is already loaded
Filesystem              1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s9             78143056 12793924 65093128    16%    /
devfs                          95       95        0   100%    /dev
fdesc                           1        1        0   100%    /dev
                       512      512        0   100%    /.vol
automount -fstab [404]          0        0        0   100%    /Network/Servers
automount -static [404]         0        0        0   100%    /automount
//PDB2@MARS/WWW          26627736  1736436 24891300     6%    /Volumes/www

Now you do . . .

one for the wishlist

Apple – iPod

The new super-slim iPod once again redefines what a digital music player should be. It’s lighter than 2 CDs, can hold up to 7500 songs, and downloads music at blazing speeds. Now you can take your entire music collection with you wherever you go.

. . . . . if Amazon.com had the new ones on their site yet.

tell it to the judge . . . . in Romania

Anonymous bulk email software for online advertising!

This Agreement will be governed by the laws of Romania, without reference to rules governing choice of laws. Any action relating to this Agreement must be brought in the federal courts located in Romania, and you irrevocably consent to the jurisdiction of such courts.

I found this site in my referer reports: I don’t see any mention of my site on their pages, so I’m wary of what that could mean.

I’m curious about their “list of proxies” which, according to them, is updated daily. It seems that getting hold of that list would be one way to nip spam in the bud, as Barney Fife would say.

Mosaic is 10

NCSA – The Future Frontier: Computing on NCSA Mosaic’s 10th Anniversary

On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will host five of the nation’s leading technologists to explore the future of computing and networking. This panel discussion will celebrate the 10th anniversary of NCSA’s release of Mosaic, the world’s first freely available graphical Web browser. Mosaic spurred a revolution in communications, business, education, and entertainment that has had a trillion-dollar impact on the global economy.

I remember seeing Mosaic when I was doing desktop support, and getting my first exposure to the internet, TCP/IP and UNIX. Mosaic was so new but it was obvious and easy to use. A true disruptive technology . . . . as noted here, the industry segment it birthed will be worth 6.8 trillion dollars by 2004.
Continue reading “Mosaic is 10”

ahead of its time or out of touch?

Business 2.0 – Web Article – Management by Blog?

“It’s only a matter of time before we have a blogging system that’s able to measure the intellectual climate of employees, that can get at the sorts of questions that managers need to know the answers to. What do people think of the new parking garage? What are smart people talking about? What’s on their minds? It’s a great, nonintrusive way of seeing what is happening in your organization.”

[ . . . . . ] Many employees might feel that such a system is akin to management eavesdropping on water-cooler discussions.

Such systems are not for every company, and they’re far from widespread. And such success depends entirely on an individual firm’s culture. If the company personality is too buttoned-up or secretive, a blog initiative will either fail to take off (there’s nothing lonelier than a blog that doesn’t get updated) or deteriorate into something unhealthy. The internal blogs that succeed will be safe, clean, well-lit virtual places in which diverse opinions are welcome and ideas — not people — are judged. Companies should always explore new ways of getting messages out and new tactics for fostering idea-exchange among the staff, but right now the blogging action is almost exclusively for external readers.

I think there’s merit in this idea but it depends on what employees are allowed/encouraged to record for public consumption.

Even if a constellation of weblogs were created but limited by ACLs (access control lists) to internal users only, it would be a good knowledge sharing tool for cultures that don’t already have one.

Thanks to Wade for this one.

a web of knowledge

University Week – Vol. 20, No. 21 – Workers seek information from people they already know, study shows

The study by UW Information School professor Raya Fidel and assistant professor Maurice Green will be published in the journal Information Processing and Management.

“The human side of information-seeking is so important,” Fidel said. “This shows that companies would benefit from encouraging richer social connections.”

That could mean offering free cafeteria lunches once a week, or installing small kitchens where employees can “bump into” colleagues. Support meetings for people who do similar jobs, known as a “community of practice,” also can expand connections, the researchers said.

“But richer social connections do not result from management dictates — that doesn’t work,” Green said. “Provide a variety of incentives to the rank and file in order to encourage and support them as they make those connections.”

Another idea I had hoped to put some effort behind in my job, but it’s a difficult venue. Architecturally, there’s too much segmentation/stratification, and culturally, it’s like no place I’ve ever worked.

I think the ideas put forth here make a lot of sense. They have worked in other workplaces.