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.
Shampoo Bottle
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.
Meganeura
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.
Conflicted Over Philanthropy
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).
Subscribe to Comments
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.
WPBlogMail Revved
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.
Blocked in China
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…
Rake Art
A rake, a mastery of kite aerial photography, and a whole lot of grace. Flickr set.
Chernobyl Legacy
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
Garden of Memory
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.