Brandt's Tumbling Log

"We are monkeys with money and guns."

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:14:20 -0400

“We are monkeys with money and guns.”

- Tom Waits True Confessions

Muddy Chef 2008: Hey, they cut my interview! But at least you...

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:07:00 -0400

Muddy Chef 2008: Hey, they cut my interview! But at least you get to see Solveig claiming 2nd prize :-)

"That’s right; people who refuse to show ID on principle will not be allowed to fly, but people..."

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:31:22 -0400

“That’s right; people who refuse to show ID on principle will not be allowed to fly, but people who claim to have lost their ID will. I feel well-protected against terrorists who can’t lie.”

- New TSA ID Requirement

Rails 2.1

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:18:15 -0400

Rails 2.1: Time zones, dirty, caching, gem dependencies, caching, etc

GreenRiver.org News

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:55:54 -0400

GreenRiver.org News: GreenRiver.org has a new blog! All you fanbois can follow along with your favorite newsreader. We promise to keep it interesting!

"So packed with lushly designed poetry, fiction, and essays is Ninth Letter, the biannual literary..."

Fri, 30 May 2008 14:22:33 -0400

“So packed with lushly designed poetry, fiction, and essays is Ninth Letter, the biannual literary magazine published by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, readers flipping through its two-hundred-plus pages could be excused for asking, “How would I even know if something in here was an error?” […] A couple of mistakes, however, did come to light after the issue went to press. Most notably, Travis Kurowski’s essay “Basquiat and Six Uses of Space,” which was painted Basquiat-style on mounted panels and then photographed, was published with two pages of text missing. Instead of just offering the corrected essay on its Web site (which editor Jodee Stanley did as well), Kurowski’s work was reprinted in its entirety as a chapbook—a chapbook that is, it’s worth noting, much easier to carry around and read than a fat catalogue of a literary magazine—and mailed to subscribers in early March. With a corrections policy as generous as this one, more contributors may start hoping for slipups of their own.”

- Literary MagNet | Poets & Writers

"At the end of the day, however, we are facing a much bigger, more metaphysical question than the..."

Fri, 30 May 2008 02:28:09 -0400

“

At the end of the day, however, we are facing a much bigger, more metaphysical question than the ones I have so far posed. That I can pose many others is of no consequence; either you are sick of them by now or you are scribbling down your own as I speak. The bigger question is this — how much security do we want? […]

A world without failure is a world without freedom. A world without the possibility of sin is a world without the possibility of righteousness. A world without the possibility of crime is a world where you cannot prove you are not a criminal. A technology that can give you everything you want is a technology that can take away everything that you have. At some point, real soon now, some of us security geeks will have to say that there comes a point at which safety is not safe.

”

- Dan Geer at Source Boston 2008 (via Schneier on Security)

"The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most..."

Tue, 27 May 2008 20:02:42 -0400

“

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popularopen source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader’sgoogle.load() method, your application has high speed,globaly available access to a growing list of the most popular JavaScript open source libraries including:

Google works directly with the key stake holders for each library effort and accept the latest stable versions as they are released. Once we host a release of a givenlibrary, we are committed to hosting that release indefinitely.

”

- AJAX Libraries API - Google Code

"Many people whose recommendations I would value don’t blog much any more. They put the links to..."

Fri, 23 May 2008 17:09:50 -0400

“Many people whose recommendations I would value don’t blog much any more. They put the links to articles they’ve read, or books they liked, in their Twitter feeds. If I’m not reading Twitter at that time, I miss those links. No, I don’t like blogs that are solely link feeds, there does have to be a balance, but if something’s worth recommending, why not recommend it somewhere it might live longer than a couple of hours? And somewhere I have a hope of finding again if I have a mental bookmark that you wrote about something interesting while I was busy doing something else?”

- Twitter Musings. I feel the same way. There are plenty of people who’s blogs I subscribe to but who’s twitter streams I won’t follow, and I regret that I’m missing some things (e.g. Tim’s tab sweeps) because of it.

"This is a HARDWARE problem! After playing around with removing the battery and noticing that this..."

Fri, 23 May 2008 14:22:37 -0400

“This is a HARDWARE problem! After playing around with removing the battery and noticing that this often returned functionality to the keyboard I surmised that this had some sort of physical aspect.
Sure enough, there is a section of copper colored tape/wiring exposed in the batter slot that is slightly bowed where it’s smallest.
When I depressed this with my finger tip on this portion to basically flatten it out flush against the housing; I found that all functionality was restored!”

- Apple - Support - Discussions - Unresponsive Keyboard and Trackpad …. This just happened to me last night. Given all the software problems that there have been with MacBook Pro keyboards under Leopard, it was hard to track down this information on hardware problems with the keyboard. Sigh. I’m starting to regret not sticking to my guns regarding Apple hardware. Since there’s no way to run OS X on non-Apple hardware, I guess that since my next laptop will not be Apple hardware it will also not run Apple software. Sigh. I miss running Linux on my desktop anyway. Compatibility with Adobe Creative Suite, Lightoom, and MS Office just aren’t worth the frequent disruption I suffer on this platform. Perhaps I’ll buy a “real” computer for doing “real” work, and will keep a shiny one on the side of my desk for the occasional need to run the shiny softwares.

"On May 13th, 2008 the Debian project announced that Luciano Bello found an interesting vulnerability..."

Sat, 17 May 2008 08:12:35 -0400

“

On May 13th, 2008 the Debian project announced that Luciano Bello found an interesting vulnerability in the OpenSSL package they were distributing. The bug in question was caused by the removal of the following line of code from md_rand.c

…

These lines were removed because they caused the Valgrind and Purify tools to produce warnings about the use of uninitialized data in any code that was linked to OpenSSL. You can see one such report to the OpenSSL team here. Removing this code has the side effect of crippling the seeding process for the OpenSSL PRNG. Instead of mixing in random data for the initial seed, the only “random” value that was used was the current process ID. On the Linux platform, the default maximum process ID is 32,768, resulting in a very small number of seed values being used for all PRNG operations.

”

- Debian OpenSSL Predictable PRNG Toys. Wow, this is huge, both in terms of level of embarrassment for affected Linux vendors and (more importantly) potential impact to their customers. Even I’m a little embarrassed about only having learned of this so long after the announcement, but that’s (partly) because I don’t personally run any Linux boxes these days.

Off-road: we’ve finally got the Land Rover prepared to...

Tue, 13 May 2008 23:55:42 -0400

Off-road: we’ve finally got the Land Rover prepared to tackle the environment it was meant for!

"The other day, I got an email from Edd, an OpenBSD user, claiming that Samba would crash when..."

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:28:19 -0400

“

The other day, I got an email from Edd, an OpenBSD user, claiming that Samba would crash when serving files off an MS-DOS filesystem. This was Samba built from sources and not the one from ports. Since I use myself Samba a lot and for a quite large user base, I got interested in the issue and started investigating it.

What I found out in the end is a surprise and was not expected: A bug that has been there in all BSDs for almost all the time, since the 4.2BSD times or for roughly 25 years…

”

- When seekdir() Won’t Seek to the Right Position. A great story, and a great example of what I love about the OpenBSD community. They find and fix things like this all the time.

The Body-laptop interface

Mon, 05 May 2008 23:18:34 -0400

The Body-laptop interface

"In the interim, I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to life without autofocus. BLONK! My..."

Mon, 05 May 2008 17:09:00 -0400

“In the interim, I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to life without autofocus. BLONK! My 30-inch screen helps, as does Spaces, since it’s easier to give windows their own non-overlapping real estate.”

- Stevey’s Blog Rants: Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate (FWIW after six months I still haven’t gotten used to it, but the 30-inch screen really does help. Maybe this is all just a plot to sell more display hardware?)

"Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking..."

Thu, 01 May 2008 10:16:21 -0400

“Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.”

- Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

"I love the idea of being alerted as soon as there is a new book about dogs in space, but there might..."

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:39:52 -0400

“I love the idea of being alerted as soon as there is a new book about dogs in space, but there might be a danger of some kind of Cass Sunstein-style echo chamber actually happening here, if readers only get told about the kinds of things they already like. I like to hear about books that are not like those I’ve already read. Will “Wisdom of crowds”-style filtering do that for me? I dunno. Are links that make it to the front page of Digg really the best things on the internets at that moment?”

- Steven Poole: Free your mind [emphasis added]

20 x 2 : What’s The Difference? (via JPG...

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:04:00 -0400

20 x 2 : What’s The Difference?
(via JPG Magazine). Just about the sweetest thing you’ll watch on the Interwebs this week.

Ninth Letter, an art/lit mag from UIUC, just posted the...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:00:38 -0400

Ninth Letter, an art/lit mag from UIUC, just posted the excellent video Making Basquiat, showing the process that went into publishing my brother’s essay “Basquiat and Six Uses of Space”. It’s a close-to-home example of how typography and design can respect and reflect the content of the text. (They also link to a PDF of the essay that you can read, should you have missed my earlier link to it.)

"Speaking of iCal, which proudly boasts Helvetica in miniature point sizes on the screen, it has the..."

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:18:04 -0400

“Speaking of iCal, which proudly boasts Helvetica in miniature point sizes on the screen, it has the utterly mind boggling feature that it shows you calendar information on a computer screen with everyone’s favorite 1950 typeface for print, and prints these exact calendars on paper in Lucida Grande, a computer display font from this milennium. ‘Utterly backwards’ might be an apt term for such misfit typography. With these kind of typographic failures, I truly wonder if there are still designers working at Apple with any typographic sense in their Miedinger-tainted brains at all.”

- Swiss Interface Syndrome (though I must admit the amateur typography is far down on my list of things I find offensive in iCal, quite possibly the least usable calendaring software I’ve used)