Category: observations

iPod unit size converter

New times require new measurements . . .

You are 17.56 iPods tall

I like the way life looks from a bicycle

Another “cloudy, chance of sun breaks” weblog?

Who knew?

Building a Balancing Scooter

People have always delighted in the petty failures of new methods of transportation, more than other kinds of inventions. The Greek legend of Icarus may be the oldest recorded example. [Recall, his father built him wings made of feathers bonded with beeswax to escape from prison. He flew too high and the sun melted the beeswax, plunging him to his death in the ocean.] I have to say that the legend of Icarus has always grated on me since I first heard it as a boy. I probably asked my dad hundreds of questions like, “Wouldn’t epoxy glue work better than beeswax? Why didn’t they try that? Or maybe he could just spritz water on the wings to keep them cool? Can we go buy some feathers?”

In the reality of the legend, the hero invented something revolutionary and tremendously important. He made a mistake in the details, and it caused a crash. The audience is meant to laugh and smugly reassure themselves that man was not meant to fly after all. By not learning from the experiment and fixing the small flaw, they set human-powered flight back more than 2000 years.

Something to think about when next we read or hear about someone reaching for the stars . . . .

And the stuff about buildind a Segway workalike is interesting too . . . .

The question came up on the FreeBSD Questions mailing list: how do you set up commandline/non-interactive logins or mounts of Windows shares, aka samba shares?

I had this working at my last job where I was running OS X in a Windows environment, so I could do things like web traffic reports, backups and the like unattended, and the key was the .nsmbrc file, a cousin of the .netrc file. Sadly, online documentation for the .nsmbrc file seems to be scanty, but there is an example file distributed with the samba source that’s actually more useful. Look for a dot.nsmbrc file with find(1) or locate(2).

This is an actual file, redacted to remove my network-specific stuff. There are three types of entries. The default stuff describes the network/workgroup, then you can specify servers/shares, and then user login details. Also, this all works for samba 3 clients against 2.2.8a servers, but not cleanly vice versa: I’m in the process of standardizing on 3.0 and will test again to see if it works.

NB: the only keyword is “default.” The other tokens are site-specific, so SERVER, USER, and SHARE are for you to replace with what you need at your site.

And of course there are a lot more options available: these are the barest minimum that I need to make things work.

[default]
workgroup=[your workgroup]

[SERVER]
addr=192.168.2.3

[SERVER:USERNAME]
password=[encrypted password]

[SERVER2]
addr=192.168.2.1

[SERVER2:USERNAME:SHARE1]
password=[encrypted password]

[SERVER2:USERNAME:SHARE2]
password=[encrypted password]

Note that you can login to different servers as different user names as well as specify different shares.

To encrypt passwords, use smbutil: smbutil crypt and either enter the password there or at the prompt. The encryption is trivial, but as we say, a lock keeps honest people honest. Between that and the 0600 permissions on the file, you’re reasonably secure.

Test it thusly:
white:~ paul$ smbutil view //paul@red
kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext is already loaded
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The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft

I was talking to a high level person in charge of security at the Intel Developer Forum last fall, and we chatted about what Microsoft could do to fix things. He asked the right questions, and I told him the right answers, trust. Plus, throw everything you have out and start again. He didn’t get it. No, more than that, he was impervious to the things I was saying to him, the culture is so ingrained that the truth can’t penetrate it. Microsoft cannot fix the ‘bugs’ that lead to security problems because they are not bugs, they are design choices. [emphasis mine]

Interesting piece, but as the site I found it on said, I wonder if the facts bear it out. $50 billion is considerable cushion . . . and they’re pretty resourceful.

Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous

An interesting look at how ethnic ambiguity, ie diversity, is making itself felt in the casting and fashion worlds.

I’d like some way of scheduling or otherwise batching rebuilds (of pages or groups of pages). I’m not sure what other tuning options are available to me but I do know these rebuilds are a-w-f-u-l-l-y ss-ll-oo-ww.

So if there is a way of toggling a post or group of posts from “Draft” to “Publish” and making the magic happen on the server, outside a browser window, that would be useful.

One of my growing list of holiday rituals is reading A Christmas Carol. If we watch a movie version, it’s this one. So it was with some interest that I saw this on MetaFilter . . . .

God Bless Us Everyone… with Some Vitamin D? | Metafilter

An interesting parlor game among pediatricians is to determine the ailment that afflicted the character Tiny Tim from a Christmas Carol. The most likely suspects include renal tubular acidosis or a vitamin D deficiency due to excessive London industrial smog, both of which result in rickets. (This would explain why Tiny Tim needed a crutch). Given that Tiny Tim’s condition was likely curable if Scrooge paid Cratchit more money, this has inspired one right-wing contrarian to argue that Scrooge should have worked a little Malthusian magic by letting Tiny Tim die.

I have to wonder if the “right-wing contrarian” forgot that Dickens answered that question in his little book . . .

‘If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’ Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief. `Man,’ said the Ghost, `if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die. It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God. to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.’

Gosh, pardon me while I chime in on this virulent (in a good way) meme . . .

die puny humans:

The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It’s about realizing that all the really hard problems — free expression, copyright, due process, social networking — may have technical dimensions, but they aren’t technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can’t solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.

This needs to be repeated until it’s understood. Refusing to see media piracy as a failure to see a business opportunity, this whole debacle about e-voting — people go on about these as technology problems but they’re policy/legal challenges.

The Center I was working at for most of 2003 could be addressing these issues.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 21, 2003 – December 27, 2003 Archives

In the Internet age, letters-to-the-editor page editors really need to do more due diligence.

Josh turns up some “cut-n-paste” letters to the editor in support of the President’s agenda: pure astroturf. (Astroturf is how “man-made grassroots” campaigns like this are referred to: not as pernicious as ballot-stuffing, but not we need in a democracy.)