Author: shacker

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SanDisk: Profligate Wastrels

Huge Sandisk What’s wrong with this picture? Hint: It’s not the loafers on our mystery model. Size of CompactFlash card: 1.5″ square x .25″ thick. Surface area of impenetrable plastic container: Unaccountably vast. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this kind of packaging waste makes me feel ill. Clearly it serves no purpose other than to make the product stand out on the shelf. SanDisk marketing droids, listen up: If I see your product on the shelf alongside a similar product in less wasteful packaging, I will choose your competitor’s product, even if I have to pay a bit more for it — just to send a message. And don’t even get me started on the difficulty of opening this kind of container, which has become inexplicably ubiquitous. Seriously, it’s a mystery – how can this much technology go into making the package “pretty,” so little thought go towards even the slightest shred of environmental awareness, and so little concern be granted the poor consumer who has to figure out how to open the damn thing? I just don’t get it.

I feel like Andy Rooney.

Music: Ray Charles :: I Wonder
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Crude, But Effective

Yesterday birdhouse once again had all server CPU cycles consumed for a while by a comment spam blitzkrieg. A dozen customers with MT installations, some of them very high-profile, all getting hit by 100 or more simultaneous CGI requests, all of which are trying to do database lookups to check for moderation or spamminess status… resource madness. Now looking into apache-level protections against this kind of mass marketing denial-of-service attack, but meanwhile, I decided it was time to implement something I’ve been threatening to do for a while — hacked out a little shell script that stores paths to files commonly hit by the comment and trackback spambots. When run, it renames those files out from under the bots. When the flood is over, run it in reverse and it names them back. Yes, this means that legit comments and trackbacks are also disabled during that period, but at least the server stays responsive. When the spambots’ requests return 404s, they shoot their wads quickly and go away. Related discussion in the MT forums.

Music: Gregory Isaacs :: Give Me Land
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Water Main

Watermain Not two weeks after a giant eucalyptus crashed outside my office door, today I suddenly hear a great gushing sound. Step outside and I’m in the shower. Workers removing the stump with a crane had pulled up a watermain, and a geyser shot up 40 feet in the air or so. A river flowed down into next building (my office was spared), and workers scrambled for 10 minutes to control the gush. Snapped a handful of pics and made a quickie slideshow.

Update: Got a kick out of the post on this at CalStuff, where they refer to me as “Professor Scot Hacker.” Professor? No idea where they got that information. Then the author goes on to say “go start a blog! They are fun and easy …” By that I guess he means “fun and easy to be wildly inaccurate.” 36 hours after writing the author to let him know I was not a professor, he hasn’t changed it. Then he calls me “Hackler” in a P.S. at the end of the entry. Sheesh.

Music: AIR :: Biological
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Cosmic Craigslist

If you post to craigslist in the next few months, you’ll notice a new checkbox at the end of the submission form:

– ok to transmit this posting into outer space

According to their press release,

craigslist … announced plans to offer its users the opportunity to have their postings transmitted trillions of miles beyond the confines of the Solar System. … craigslist announced the ambitious plan after CEO Jim Buckmaster won an auction on eBay for the first private communication to be transmitted into deep space by Deep Space Communications Network, of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

On his own blog, Newmark reminds users that “we can NOT retrieve or cancel craigslist ads beamed into extrasolar space. (It’s been requested.)”

Via Newsosaur

Music: John Fahey :: The Transcendental Waterfall
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Banana Slug

Miles Slug Miles found a banana slug in Tilden Park, sat watching it scoot for a long time, then made a little bridge for it to crawl under, a technique no doubt borrowed from the parallel universe of his choo-choo obsession. “Here you go, bana sug!” Stroked it gently. After treating it with care and sweetness for the longest time, he suddenly stood up and, without warning, stepped on it — hard. Amy shrieked, and suddenly he became very frightened, unsure of what he had just done. A child encountering his own power to hurt. Amazingly, the slug slithered away under its own steam. But later, over dinner, he became very sad and worried when the topic came up, seemed like he was going to cry. An opportunity to talk about life. All of these things so confusing and fascinating to a toddler. Phonecam image, love the fishbowl effect.

Music: Ronu Majumdar, Ry Cooder, Jon Hassell And Abhijit Banerjee :: Hollow Bamboo
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Google Maps Walking Tour

Google Maps is the coolest thing to happen to online maps since… online maps. But their basic location and navigation capabilities just scratch the surface. Thrown in GPS data, XML wrappers, and some simple animation techniques, and the possibilities crack wide open. Paul writes:

“Here’s an interesting combination of GPS, Google Maps and Flash (with cellphone GPS and photos to come in the future): A Google Maps walking tour of Keene, NH.”

Jon Udell (who created the walking tour) asks: What will we be able to do when there are millions of people walking around with GPS-enabled phones? And he answers himself: “We’re going to use them to collectively annotate the planet.”

Music: Bjork :: Oceania
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Ride the Snake

Tub no longer draining. Did I let a Thomas the Tank Engine ColorForm slip down the hole at end of one of Miles’ baths? Nope, they’re all accounted for. Borrow a snake, unscrew the drain insert, snake won’t make it around the bend. Into the abyss — under the house on belly like a lizard, dirt in hair. Looks like once-upon-a-time workmen busted up the old tub with a sledgehammer — a great pile of foot-long jagged steel shards beneath the tub. Unscrew hose clamps from the rubber collar that conjoins downtube with S-curve. Jam snake into place, crank, crank, sweat, crank, cuss, crank. Feel like I’m getting nowhere, back it out, LO! : Massive wad of wife hair, eight inches long and as wide as the drainpipe itself, comes slithering out into my hand. A solid pound of hair and slime, paydirt! Re-assemble, slither back out, test from up top, scour the tub, leave hair prize out on display for all to enjoy.

Hard to describe why a job like this is so rewarding; perhaps it has to do with spending so many hours in front of a screen every day — getting your hair in the dirt and your hands in the goo is strangely satisfying. Life is rich.

Music: Bow Wow Wow :: Uomo Sex Al Apache
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Intelligent MIDI Sequencing with Hamster Control

If you want your kid to go to Cornell and create a hamster-controlled MIDI device, the trick, apparently, is in making sure he has access to both a Habitrail and a Heathkit AO-1 Audio Oscillator construction set.

Guided by inputs based on hamster movements, Markov chains were used to perform such beat and note computations. In culmination, 3 simultaneous voices were produced spanning 3 octaves and 3 rhythmic tiers. Each voice was controlled by two hamsters: one that was responsible for adjusting the rhythmic qualities of the melody and another that modified the note sequence. With all of these elements in combination, an output was produced with very musical qualities. All of this was implemented using an Atmel Mega32 microcontroller, distance sensors, a HamsterMIDI Controller, and 6 hamsters.

I don’t pretend to understand all of this, but the output is lovely – some fusion of Philip Glass and Twink.

Thanks baald

Music: Half Man Half Biscuit :: Irk The Purists
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What Would Jesus Drive?

Tectonic shift? Probably not, but it occurred to me recently that there was a sort of cultural/political musical chairs going on. Pro-nuke Greens! Pro-environment Christians!

On one hand, a growing cadre of pro-nuclear Greens — a notion* that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago.

On the other, an apparently growing swath of pro-environment Christians. This makes so much sense to me – without being a Biblical scholar, I’ve always thought that the teachings of Christ pointed in important ways to environmental sensitivity; so the preponderant alignment of Christians with the profoundly anti-environment Bush administration has always seemed unsettling. It does make you wonder: What Would Jesus Drive?

OK, not a tectonic shift, but evidence that religious and political generalizations are always bound to fail… and to surprise.

* I swore I’d never use the word “notion” here, but there you have it.

Music: Musci – Venosta :: When A Dolphin Saves A Baby