vim has a bad habit of chewing up a ton of CPU if user backgrounds it, closes their terminal window, or gets disconnected from the net with a vim session open. I see this every now and then on birdhouse - a vim process consuming 90% of CPU and owned by a user who’s not even logged in. Looked around for a solution for this apparently not uncommon problem on shared servers and didn’t come up with much, so wrote a quick shell script to dispatch justice when necessary: the vim reaper. Must be run as root, most likely via cron.

Reasons Why I Love My Wife #213:

Deep in the code when an urgent message arrives from the home front:

I noticed that you threw away a shampoo bottle the other day. Are you anti-reduce, reuse, recycle? I didn’t know this about you when I married you.

I am jarred out of my complacency, forced to shift gears. Pleasantly lolly-gagging in a garden of functions and arrays when I’m suddenly slammed into another reality, F2F with the 3Rs. It stings. But in a good way.

The things you learn from your three-year-old’s books…

Who knew that an orangutan’s favorite food was onions? Now I can’t get the fact out of my head (having been exposed to it about 200 times in the past year).

Now I learn that dragonflies can fly at speeds up to 60mph (no one is quite sure how), and can fly backwards too (probably not at that speed). And that they’ve been around since early dinosaur times. Only there was a variety then called Meganeura that had a wingspan of 30 inches (imagine a swarm of yard-wide insects smacking you in the forehead while trying to picnic down by the tar pits).

I really enjoyed the Golden Books phase — they make me feel warm — but things are getting interesting now that toddler-hood is behind us. Damn that happened fast.

Going through all kinds of conflicting feelings about Gates’ philanthropy vs. his legacy as a business predator. MS hater David Pogue sums up the internal conflict many of us are feeling in his NY Times blog:

It’d be one thing if he were retiring to enjoy his fortune, or if he were using it to buy football teams or political candidates. But he’s not. He’s channeling those billions to the places in the world where that money can do the most good. And not just throwing money at the problems, either — he’s also dedicating the second act of his life to making sure it’s done right…

At pseudorandom, Frank Boosman puts the conflict many of us are going through eloquently:

I, too, have found it hard to reconcile the contradiction between Gates the businessperson (whom my friend Mike Backes was, I believe, the first to call “a wolf in nerd’s clothing”) and Gates the humanitarian. Given his company’s poor track record of innovation (quick, name something Microsoft invented), and its predatory behavior, it would be all too easy at this point to dismiss as posturing (or worse) anything Gates does. But what he’s doing can’t be dismissed. Everything I’ve read about his charitable efforts — every single thing — suggests that he’s doing great works, using his money to address big problems, and involving himself deeply in the process. It’s a profound transformation, and if he keeps it up, he will leave a staggering legacy.

Keep in mind that Boosman was a suit and brain trust at Be, Inc. — a company hit hard (some might say killed) by MS’ predations (cf: He Who Controls the Bootloader).

Pleasantly surprised this morning when I found a message in my inbox floated from Dylan Tweney’s blog. I had checked the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” box when leaving a comment there a week ago, not thinking much of it. Turns out Dylan is using the excellent Subscribe to Comments WordPress plugin, which fills a real hole — I would never have thought to return to the site to see whether there were follow-up comments (I only do that when a good argument is in progress :).

The plugin is now installed here as well.

FWIW, the post in question is re: a pair of amazing videos of Stevie Wonder throwing down on Sesame Street, 1972 style. One of them complete with talk box, a la Frampton.

P.S. I now know the difference between a talk box and a Vocoder.

My WPBlogMail script has been revved to v1.1. Two bug fixes: Will now handle special/funky characters in post titles without munging them to HTML entities (which look really bad in plain text email :), and now safe against instances where other installed plugins (such as a mail contact form) echo header content before wpblogmail has finished.

Technorati Tags: mail, rss, wordpress

Just two months after doing a bunch of work to get the J-School’s web site unblocked in China, where censors had kindly blocked the entire server rather than just the China Digital Times domain, I’ve just learned that all of Birdhouse is now similarly blocked. We host a few China-related sites here, though to my knowledge none of them are hard-core political.

As if the censorship itself isn’t bad enough, the “block entire server IP” methodology is so grossly overreaching and unnecessary that it almost seems like an intentional attempt by the censors to punish not just the domain operator but also the host — inconveniencing dozens or hundreds of other innocent domain operators on the same shared server just to make a power point — and possibly to force the host to start saying “no” to people who want to operate China-related sites.

Time to start allocating more IPs…

A rake, a mastery of kite aerial photography, and a whole lot of grace. Flickr set.

Past threads about Pro-Nuke Greens have gotten me thinking hard about my life-long opposition to nuclear power. The arguments are strong. But I just spent some time immersed in Paul Fusco’s multimedia photo essay Chernobyl Legacy, and it’s very hard not to come away thinking, “It’s not worth it. We can’t take this risk.” Incredibly intense, moving, gruesome. Fusco narrates about how “they” assure us: “Yes, we made a mistake, but we’ve got it all figured out now. It won’t happen again.” But things that humans make can — and do — wear out, break. Maybe I’m just having an emotional reaction. But we weren’t there. We didn’t / aren’t living through the aftermath of Chernobyl. I somehow don’t think you could come up with any argument in the world to convince these people that humans should ever play with nuclear power again.

via antiweb

On the way to tonight’s Garden of Memory performance at the gorgeous Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, where Matthew’s ashes live, got talking with Miles about the wisdom of using hay bales as housing construction material, started telling the tale of the three pigs. Got to the brick house part and he interrupted me: “Daddy, I know this story much better than you, so why don’t you just CALM DOWN and let me tell it.” He then proceeded to regale me with a version where the pigs lit the brick house on fire to keep the wolf away.

Inside the columbarium, hot day evening gold sunlight filtered through stained glass and ferns, reflecting against a thousand glass cubbies containing ashes and memories. Everyone knows someone who has died, this night is to remember. In small rooms: black and white films projected through gauzy sheets to cello accompaniment; a 20-ft. long 4-string guitar run through bank of effects playing alongside marimba, motion detectors speeding up and slowing down quotes from Rumsfeld after start of war; a gorgeous hand-built harp with built-in turntable, all hand-carved and elegant, computer-controlled bells at your feet going off in poetic non-rhythm, hand-cranked zither singly sadly from next tiny room, small hand-made banjo w/sticks and rubber bands plunking with choir of punk rock angels, Dan Plonsey playing two alto saxes simultaneously beneath a tarp like musical ghost, children’s musical toys scattered and free for audience participation. Outside, Bucky Balls rigged with aluminum tubes - climb inside and chime away.

Somewhere along the way, Miles becomes aware of what we were here to remember. Never thought I would be discussing death and dying so soon with him, but lately he’s been fascinated. Learns for the first time why his young friend has no father. Then asks if he can see pictures of Matthew dying. “No, but we can go home and see pictures of him alive.”

On the way home in the car: “Daddy, I just ripped a toot.” Laugh so hard I almost lose my lane.

Bre Pettis creates a Rube Goldbert project from twigs and vines, rocks and fern branches, in the middle of a forest. Sticks and stones. Final product looks deceptively simple, though you can imagine how hard it must have been to get everything working.

Wired covers the Test Tube Meat story. Short version: hamburger in two years, steak in 10 (steak requires better alignment of muscle fibers and the ability to recreate blood vessels running through). Stuff being grown without scaffolds in 1mm sheets, which can then be stacked to create thicker cuts.

The “yuck” factor: “But it’s not natural!” And how natural is it to stuff 10,000 chickens into a metal shed, snip off their beaks and pump them full of antibiotics and hormones? How natural is it for cows to eat corn? (which is pretty much all factory farmed cows eat, much to the detriment of their livers).

This research strikes me as a great leap forward in human consciousness. I hope that one day we’ll view factory farming as a barbarism of the past.

Previously: Lab Meat. See also Meat-Growing Robots (WTF?)

Technorati Tags: animalrights, food, meat

Used to be that stock photos cost a couple hundred bucks or more. Used to be that photographers could make good money in stock photography. But now millions of people have (more or less) high-quality digital cameras and broadband internet, sites are finding ways to leverage the public’s massive image database.

In The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired follows a stock photographer watching his business being undermined (if not decimated) by the rise of sites like iStockphoto, where the public can contribute images to sell — at prices ranging from $1 to $10, rather than the more traditional $400.

Of course all of the images at iStockphoto are by “amateurs” rather than pros. But browsing the collection, it’s clear that there are thousands of images there that most web/print designers would consider to be “good enough.”

Aside from the fact that most amateurs will never earn enough from a site like this to pay the rent (or even buy a bag of groceries), I’m curious about what kind of revenue the site itself can make with margins that low. As brilliant as the idea is, seems like usage would have to be extremely high to make it sustainable.

And there are 100% free alternatives out there, such as the Creative Commons collection at Flickr. stock.xchng is another. Other royalty-free or low-cost image sources you guys know about?

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, photography, stock

The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions.

Surveillance cameras designed to catch red light runners have a significant back-fire effect: Driver fear of getting tickets by racing through the yellow causes more people to slam on their brakes at the last minute. Result: More traffic accidents overall, not fewer. Popular Mechanics:

Likewise, red-light cameras in Portland, Ore., produced a 140 percent increase in rear-end collisions at monitored intersections, and a study by the Virginia Transportation Research Council found that although red-light cameras decreased collisions resulting from people running traffic lights, they significantly increased accidents overall.

It gets better: Because traffic light surveillance is a huge revenue opportunity for cities ($32 million in revenues for Washington DC alone), and because people tend to have more violations when yellow lights are shorter, there is suddenly a financial incentive to decrease the yellow light duration. City planners tempted with Faustian deal: More revenue at the expense of more accidents. What red-blooded mayor could resist? One Maryland area apparently saw yellow light durations in one area drop from 4 to 2.7 seconds after installing light surveillance. Imagine that.

In the Svalbard islands, floating halfway between Greenland and Norway in the Arctic ocean, researchers have begun construction of a vault designed to house seeds of all known varieties of the world’s crops, in the event of global catastrophe — a Noah’s Ark for the plant world.

The vault’s purpose is to ensure survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change; and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. At temperatures of minus 18C (minus 0.4F), the seeds could last hundreds, even thousands, of years. Even if all cooling systems failed … the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing …

The vault is eventually expected to house some three million seeds. And in case any smart-alec seed thieves get bright ideas, the place is crawling with polar bears.

Question: If nobody knows where the Svalbard islands are now, how the heck do we expect the few Mad Max humans who survive to figure out where they are, or how to get there? Oh, wait - Svalbardians will probably be the only survivors anyway, so they’ll be all set.

via antiweb

Technorati Tags: biology, doomsday

Father’s Day ferry trip to Musee Mechanique in San Francisco, “one of the world’s largest privately owned collections of mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade machines.” Astonishing to learn just how much engineering prowess went into some of these, long before anyone had ever envisioned a programmable EEPROM. And how some of the machines had held up to decades of use with minimal maintenance (others had been completely restored). Kind of surprised that Miles was frightened by a lot of these - not like him. Behold the power of antique animatronics (Flickr set).

The collection was recently moved into a warehouse near Fisherman’s Wharf from its original home at the Cliff House, and the new environment seemed drab, kind of trashy, and unbefitting of this incredible collection.

Speaking of Devo, little-known fact about Mark Mothersbaugh: He’s been creating a mixed media postcard every day, for over 30 years. Originally created as personal diaries, they’ve become an obsession, and now go on tour with him. The postcards combine media and styles freely — painting and illustration, found objects, backing materials. Some gorgeous, some insane, but these seem to have very little scent of the kitsch of late-model Devo. Selections from the 2006 set are displayed online; not sure where to find the rest of the archive.

One of my hosting clients — who is on a dedicated server — recently reported a strange problem: Some readers of their site were getting truncated downloads on MP3 files. Eventually we nailed the problem down to users of FireFox on Windows and Mac. FireFox for Linux was fine, and other browsers were fine as well.

After a testing splurge and much hunch following, we were able to eliminate upload methods, MP3 encoding tools, and MIME types as potential culprits. But neither I nor the data center are having any luck figuring out what actually is causing it. Google ain’t helping. Here are two links to bit-identical files on two different Linux servers:

One version on Birdhouse
Another version on Newwest

In both cases, the file is 5497828 bytes, permissions are the same, the MIME type is the same (and correct), and the file command reports:

StupidMistakes.mp3: MP3 file with ID3 version 2.2.0 tag

Both were put in place with wget from the same source. But if you’re using FF Win or Mac, the second link will appear to work, but give you only a few seconds of audio.

Theories welcome.

OK, the reason for the Time Forward poll: A physorg.com piece on South America’s indigenous Aymara, who visualize the past in front of them and the future behind, indicating that even some of the most primal and seemingly universal metaphors are still human or linguistic constructs.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time. Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

The article mentions in passing that roughly half of English speakers will answer the question about a meeting being moved forward two days from Wednesday as “Monday,” the other half “Friday.” My small sampling seems to support that.

The other question is how 2000 daily visits to this site can yield only 21 respondents in two days; maybe I need to do another poll on why people don’t take polls.

via Weblogsksy

Teenagers’ latest weapon in the fight to do SMS in the classroom: stealth ringtones. Based on the principle that people lose their auditory sensitivity to higher-pitched tones as they grow older, kids have been loading up phones with what are essentially dog whistles. Ironically, the technique was spawned by a device called the Mosquito, which was designed to drive teenagers out of stores while leaving adults unfazed. The stealth ringtones backfire when used in the presence of an adult who hasn’t yet lost (all of) their high-tone sensitivity. Techdirt has more.

A .wav sample of the tone can be “heard” here — totally silent to me.

Technorati Tags: ringtones, sms

Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. Mini poll:

There is a (minor) point to this poll, but I want to collect some data first. And no, this doesn’t mean I missed a meeting (it’s not even work related).

Dylan Tweney comes out against Technorati’s rel= tagging scheme, and the requirement that tags be visible on the page (I’ve been irked by this requirement, but have gone along with it while waiting for something better to show up).

The problem with “microformats,” which Technorati is pushing pretty hard, is that they seem to be no more than poorly implemented metadata standards. … And encoding content as part of a linked page’s URL? How much more inflexible can you get? This is supposed to be an improvement over META tags?

This gets to the meat: “You want to make metadata visible? Write a browser plugin that lets you view META tags.”

Precisely. Data isn’t exactly “meta” if it’s right there on the page, is it?

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes harvarddems.com, official web site of the Harvard Democrats:

From events with top Democratic Party officials, to campaign trips across the country, to weekly policy discussions, the Harvard Dems is the place to turn for political dialogue on campus.

Had no idea Devo were still touring. No, didn’t go, but recently got an earful about a recent show at Oakland’s gorgeous Paramount theater. Saturday, sifting sand through back-stop-sized sieves at the preschool with some other dads (found two gold-painted rocks, a spent pacifier, numerous toy boats, rockets, plastic animals, and mercifully few cat dookies — the dues of belonging to a co-op), learned that one of the dads was a friend of Mark Mothersbaugh, and had been there with camera.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a band staying together as long as the music holds up — Neil Young and Crazy Horse just keep getting better with years, e.g. — but there is always the risk of looking ridiculous if you hold too tightly to the past as years go by. Even if Devo did create the look to begin with, somehow the flower pot hats and hazmat suits don’t have quite the impact when wrapped around middle-aged paunches. Still, dude said the music sounded tight, and I’m as much a sucker as the next guy when it comes to living in the past.

The shots of bassist Jerry Casales show him apparently trapped in a very Devo-lved looking contraption; as it turns out, the apparatus is there to keep his very bad back aloft and in line.

After 2.5 yrs, my original cell phone is battered and bruised, not to mention way too thick to fit in a pocket. Wanted to take advantage of Sprint’s 15% discount for UC Berkeley employees, and wanted a halfway decent camera in a phone. Yesterday finally sprung for a Samsung A-900.

First of all let me say I’m in love with this phone. The form factor is excellent, display is brilliant, reception is keen, UI is intuitive, camera is much better than the VGA on my old LG. I also love that I can now mount the phone on my desktop via USB and drag images into iPhoto.

My gripe is with the virtually forced upsell to the data plan. I’m in front of a computer, what, 12 hours a day? I have absolutely NO need for web access on a phone. But I’m also interested in creating custom MP3 ringtones. iTunes makes the first part easy — get info on a track, set start and end points for a 30-second selection, pump up the volume, and re-encode as AAC. Use Cmd-R to find the newly created file. So far so good. I’ve got some Bo Diddley, Beefheart, Godley & Creme, and Mike Watt samples ready to go.

With the phone mounted on the desktop (FAT 16 filesystem), I see a friendly little “MEDIA” folder. But oops, it’s write protected. Posix permissions look wide open and it’s not locked. Looks like it should be writable, but no dice. Capitulate and decide to consult the 248-page manual, which covers every nuance of every function. Not a single mention of any ability to put media onto the phone from a computer. Why not? I’m about to find out.

Start scanning the BBs (Howard Forums is supposedly “the place” where phone geeks hang out) and discover I’m not alone. Seems the only way to get my custom ringtones onto the phone is to upload them through an online service like FunForMobile. The service makes easy (and free) work of it, but of course you have to connect your phone to the internet to use it. And you’ll pay $20/month for the privilege.

Excuse me, no. DSL is now available from SBC for $15/month, and Sprint wants $20/month for data service for a damned phone??? I guess for people who are rarely near a computer and need remote web access, the price might be justifiable, but not for me.

Whatever. If the market will bear it, then I suppose it’s a fair price. I don’t have to subscribe to data services if I don’t want to. My objection is not that an add-on service I don’t want is available - my objection is that there’s no way to get my own content onto the phone without paying the ransom, even though it attaches to my computer just fine*.

So take your choice: Either purchase commercially available ringtones that expire in 90 days for $2.50 a pop, or create your own ringtones for free but pay $20/month to get them onto the phone. It’s an obnoxious racket. Are other carriers this greedy, or is it just Sprint?

* I do have one complaint with the USB connectivity: When I try to unmount the phone’s storage volume from the desktop, the Finder says I can’t because it’s “in use.” But if I use the phone’s “Disconnect from PC” option, the Finder throws one of those “Improper device removal” errors — “Please unmount before disconnecting.” So there’s no way to elegantly unmount the storage area.

Update: Learned at the Sprint store today that while it’s no longer possible to get images off the phone on a pay-as-you-go basis (you need the full data plan to do that), it is possible to download pay-as-you-go, which means you can just pay by the kilobyte to transfer in custom ringtones, which makes the whole thing a bit less annoying.

Technorati Tags: cell, phone, sprint