Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Jonas Galvez: Living Efficiently

Jonas Galvez: Living Efficiently: "Every once in a while, someone posts an article on getting things done and managing your time on Hacker News. I know because I keep track of them. I immediately think, 'recovering procrastinator'.

The reason why I think this happens is that one of first things an IT geek does when he puts order to his life and starts getting things done is... getting his personal website done and writing about how he did it. That is true for me also. I am just recovering from an insanely unproductive year, following a painful job loss coincidentally amidst but not really related to the housing bubble.

Monday, September 06, 2010

Solar System Scale Model

Solar System Scale Model: "This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles

Monday, August 02, 2010

Bike-Powered Mobile Coffee Shop

Kickstand Coffee 
It not only rocks, it rolls
Why can't we do this in Nor*Cal? Don't the foodies out here know how to peddle a bike?

Monday, March 08, 2010

Its not what you eat, its what you do with what you eat





It seems clear that thoughtful people are faced with nearly impossible choices on food. As I indicated, I think the organic/non-organic dichotomy is interesting, but far from the most important.

For me a more interesting idea is: “You are not what you eat; you are what you do with what you eat.", a notion Lustig at UCSF expands upon in video and text.  [Here is a quick summaryRobert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology]

 I'm always telling myself: "It should be possible to eat  great food cheaply." This chart suggests why I'm wrong.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle : Rolling Stone

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle : Rolling Stone

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle

Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Feb 17, 2010 5:57 AM


On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America's pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman's role in precipitating the global financial...

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Guardian Launches Search Engine for Government Data

Guardian Launches Search Engine for Government Data
The UK Guardian, ostensibly a newspaper but a major proponent for opening data held by governments to use by outside software developers, has launched some software of its own: a search engine that unearths datasets and pathways to data sets provided by governments around the world. World Government Data Search is now live.

Yesterday the UK government released its new data site, data.gov.uk, to rave reviews (including ours). The new Guardian search engine searches across the UK, US, New Zealand and Australian governments' data sites. The company also offered up a gallery of the 10 best visualizations and mash-ups built on top of government data like this.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Tibetan Technology Center

AirJaldi Mesh Router | Tibetan Technology Center

The router for their wireless mesh network...

Air Jaldi Mesh Router (AJMR) Technical Description

The AJMR is built around a SBCs (Single Board Computers) which we extract from low-cost popular WiFi devices such as Linksys’s WRT54G.
While most of the SBCs we use, utilizes a 200mhz MIPS CPU with 4Mb of Flash memory and 16Mb of RAM, we also use much lower-scale units and recently also more powerful units. We find the Netgear WGT634U, to be most suitable for our application and we are happy to see a constant decrease in it’s price. This small SBC draws less power then its bulkier cousins, features a MiniPCI slot for radio card, hosting a great Atheros b/g radio, double the flash and ram of the WRT54G and maybe the greatest feature of all is a USB2.0 port.
Most of our current development is based around this unit....

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Google the location of a plugin in Eclipse cvs » Eclipse Papercuts

Google the location of a plugin in Eclipse cvs » Eclipse PapercutsNo Comments

If you want to find the cvs location of a certain Eclipse plugin you can use Google site search using site:”dev.eclipse.org/viewsvn”.

For example if you are looking for the cvs location of the plugin “org.eclipse.e4.tools.ui” you can run the following Google search:

“org.eclipse.e4.tools.ui” site:dev.eclipse.org/viewsvn

Thanks to Tom Seidel for sharing this tip via twitter.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Redis in Practice: Who’s Online?

Luke Melia » Redis in Practice: Who’s Online?

Redis is one of the most interesting of the NOSQL solutions. It goes beyond a simple key-value store in that keys’ values can be simple strings, but can also be data structures. Redis currently supports lists, sets and sorted sets. This post provides an example of using Redis’ Set data type in a recent feature I implemented for Weplay.

Catch of the Freezer

Op-Ed Contributors - Catch of the Freezer - NYTimes.com

Published: December 8, 2009

GO local. Eat organic. Buy fresh. Those food mantras continue to make waves among environmentally conscious consumers. But — as is often the case in these climate-conscious times — if the motivation is to truly make our diets more earth-friendly, then perhaps we need a new mantra: Buy frozen.

Please say it is not so!