http://cleanstick.net/planet/ Planet Cleanstick - http://cleanstick.net/planet/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_3 2010-03-09T20:48:13+00:00 ssam http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digital-journal-exclusive-pictures-and-de/ 2010-03-09T19:06:39+00:00 jasonscheirer http://8bitnyc.com/ 2010-03-09T19:05:55+00:00 jasonscheirer http://www.symbolicsound.com/cgi-bin/bin/view/Company/WebHome Sort of max for live equivalent by the look of it ... but more expensive and older. 2010-03-09T18:28:12+00:00 ssam http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/436726835 <p><blockquote>Shared by Jason Scheirer <br> I DO THIS!</blockquote> <img src="http://loldwell.com/comics/2010-03-03-snips28_web.jpg" alt="An Earful of Nothing" title="An Earful of Nothing"></p> 2010-03-09T12:09:01+00:00 http://norvig.com/21-days.html "Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan &amp; Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon &amp; Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology." 2010-03-09T01:27:21+00:00 ssam http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15636231&fsrc=rss Fascinating stuff for someone who considers overpopulation the world&#039;s greatest issue. The positives of less girls are perhaps obvious in that light, but the downside of course is that single men in for example China tend to go crazy. "A girl is deemed to have joined her husband’s family on marriage, and is lost to her parents. As a Hindu saying puts it, “Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbours’ garden.” ... In China midwives charge more for delivering a son than a daughter. ... Doctors in India started advertising ultrasound scans with the slogan “Pay 5,000 rupees ($110) today and save 50,000 rupees tomorrow” (the saving was on the cost of a daughter’s dowry). Parents who wanted a son, but balked at killing baby daughters, chose abortion in their millions." "Suicide is the commonest form of death among Chinese rural women aged 15-34 ... The journalist Xinran Xue thinks they cannot live with the knowledge that they have aborted or killed their baby daughters." 2010-03-08T23:38:08+00:00 ssam http://github.com/kfdm/gntp Send growl notifications via Python. Works on Growl for Windows. 2010-03-08T23:29:02+00:00 jasonscheirer http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/sikuli/ Interesting thing that allows scripting GUI applications by actually using images of the controls in the scripts. I like this idea! 2010-03-08T20:10:00+00:00 ssam http://www.gstreamer-winbuild.ylatuya.es/doku.php?id=start 2010-03-08T20:00:59+00:00 ssam http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/04/0258221/Using-Classical-Music-As-a-Form-of-Social-Control?art_pos=7 ./ discusses the use of classical music to scare kids away in the UK 2010-03-08T19:36:22+00:00 ssam http://www.lividinstruments.com/hardware_ohm64.php The Ohm64: looks like a shit monome imitation, but the company actually sell kits and things and are generally pretty open it seems. I fear though that each although I&#039;m sure they aim it to be a "blank canvas" controller, it&#039;s more of a "paint by numbers" controller - I don&#039;t know how to express things better than that but I don&#039;t have high hopes for their success, it being too complicated for most people and too inflexible for crazy hackers.<br> <br> I realise it&#039;s as flexible as it could be, but for some reason a bunch of pots and faders around a monome-style grid don&#039;t really inpsire me to create. 2010-03-08T19:23:53+00:00 ssam http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/12/01/the-amazing-musical-grid-and-electronic-performance-made-modular/#more-8495 Interesting stuff on monome etc. Two important lessons jump out at me:<br> 1) the grid sequencer is immensely powerful, as shown by tonematrix, monome apps etc. I really can see myself building up beats in the exact way he does in a performance. I think the key is that the score and the interface are merged. Of course, it would be nice if beats could go outside the grid, and have sensitivity, and this leads to ....<br> 2) the monome is only the first step towards 21st century computer input. It&#039;s really a shit Lemur, although its tactile non-LCD nature at the same time gives it a big "likeability" boost. I think what&#039;s most important is controllers that go beyond a 2D plane, things designed to be held or thrown or generally used for things a Lemur or hacked iPad wouldn&#039;t suit. 2010-03-08T19:16:08+00:00 ssam http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/27/1317242/Defending-Against-Drones?art_pos=2 I think this is worth saving for the future. "The US has not had to truly think about its air defense since the Cold War. But as America embraces the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, Newsweek says it&#039;s time to consider how our greatest new weapon may come back to bite us. Smaller UAVs&#039; cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles. And while Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, at $3 million apiece such protection carries a steep price tag, especially if we have to deal with $500 DIY drones." 2010-03-08T17:28:55+00:00 ssam http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/02/25/a-conversation-with-robert-henke-silence-technology-and-process/ Quite an interesting interview, he talks a bit about the technology/artistry divide in computer music. "The most exciting new music comes from young kids guys running some audio software in a bedroom, listening to the result over a shitty hi-fi and use Melodyne all the way wrong. Those folks do not read gear magazines, they could not care less about yet another mastering EQ, but create the most stunning beauty. If people talk too much about gear I usually do not expect too much good music. I am often trapped in this twilight zone between engineer and composer too, so I know what I am talking about here…" 2010-03-08T17:25:51+00:00 ssam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_airship I have spent the whole day reading about airships for some reason. There are lots of things I never knew! The British produced a number, the largest being R101 which was a classic British engineering disaster and crashed into France in 1931 (although an earlier one did make the first ever transatlantic flight). The Germans had more success and the Graf Zeppelin once flew around the world (taking 12 days) and made over 60 trips to Brazil and back. Its successor Hindenburg was the largest at 245 metres long (24m shorter than the Titanic) .. until it caught on fire over New Jersey. I had never realised how successful the airships were though in the 20&#039;s. Also interesting is that the only place helium could be obtained was from gas deposits under the USA, and their first airship used up most of the reserve at the time. The 20&#039;s must have been so much fun for crazy rich people ... 2010-03-08T17:11:58+00:00 ssam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Extraction_and_use I had never considered why helium actually had an effect on the voice. This is pretty interesting: "The speed of sound in helium is nearly three times the speed of sound in air. Because the fundamental frequency of a gas-filled cavity is proportional to the speed of sound in the gas, when helium is inhaled there is a corresponding increase in the pitches of the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract.[4][98] This causes a reedy, duck-like vocal quality which some people find amusing. (The opposite effect, lowering frequencies, can be obtained by inhaling a dense gas such as sulfur hexafluoride.)" 2010-03-08T16:46:37+00:00 ssam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_oil#1964-present "Peaking in 1999, production of North Sea oil was nearly 950 000 m³ (6 million barrels) per day. Natural gas production was nearly 280×109 m³ (10 trillion cubic feet) in 2001 and continues to increase, although British gas production is in sharp decline [20]." 2010-03-08T16:03:03+00:00 ssam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production Energy crisis solved. "Hydrogen can also be made from urine. Using urine, hydrogen production is 332% more energy efficient than using water." 2010-03-08T15:53:09+00:00 ssam http://www.businessweek.com/print/lifestyle/content/feb2010/bw20100225_403524.htm 2010-03-06T11:13:38+00:00 jasonscheirer http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/428894533 <img src="http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kytwlyIYos1qalp5do1_500.jpg"><br><br><p>Just a visiting object notation model, you know.</p> 2010-03-05T21:48:55+00:00 http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/default.aspx Hooray, has a Visual Studio plugin to let me know when I&#039;m done compiling. 2010-03-05T21:06:05+00:00 jasonscheirer http://www.mazda3forums.com/index.php?topic=157018.0 Someone else on the internet has already had every problem I will ever encounter. Thanks, internet. Thinternet. 2010-03-05T18:57:17+00:00 jasonscheirer http://www.good.is/post/your-taco-deconstructed 2010-03-04T03:30:29+00:00 jasonscheirer http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/421656190 <br><br><p><b>Alela Diane</b> - <i>White As Diamonds</i></p> 2010-03-02T07:49:06+00:00 http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/421628839 <br><br><p><b>Shearwater</b> - <i>Black Eyes</i></p> <p>Daaaaang.</p> 2010-03-02T07:25:00+00:00 https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/CommandLine Simplified add sources/GPG key for Karmic: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:&lt;repository-name&gt; 2010-02-27T00:27:37+00:00 jasonscheirer http://pypi.python.org/pypi/importlib Backport of importlib to earlier Pythons 2010-02-25T23:17:02+00:00 jasonscheirer http://www.codeproject.com/KB/COM/TEventHandler.aspx Ughhhh. 2010-02-25T22:52:12+00:00 jasonscheirer http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch I always forget this junk 2010-02-24T20:21:14+00:00 jasonscheirer http://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer A much prettier base map than most 2010-02-23T23:33:01+00:00 jasonscheirer http://metapython.org/ Here be dragons -- more evil in the family of byteplay 2010-02-23T04:06:33+00:00 jasonscheirer http://www.wamber.net/static/PyCon-2010/ Some dude&#039;s PyCon notes 2010-02-23T01:39:02+00:00 jasonscheirer http://www.valaide.org/ 2010-02-22T23:20:30+00:00 jasonscheirer http://example.com/asboorguk-cakephp-and-datagovuk/ <p>Yesterday, I wrote <a href="http://asbo.org.uk">asbo.org.uk</a>, a site which provides really basic visualisation of the UK's anti-social behaviour order data from 1999-2007. This data was recently released by <a href="http://data.gov.uk">data.gov.uk</a>.</p> <p>I wrote the whole site, wrangled the data, and deployed it yesterday afternoon, in about six hours. I've got some contract work coming up using CakePHP, so I wanted to try it out, and I wanted to see what I could do in such a short space of time. I'm quite pleased with the results. There's no analysis of the data, just presentation, but I was trying to see what I could do in the time I had, rather than develop features.</p> <p>Originally, I wanted to write a 'how safe am I' sort of application, which could offer data about the types of crime most likely to occur in a given area, but this idea was pretty much killed by the time I saw the actual data available. Maybe I don't know enough about Excel-scraping, but I considerably reduced the scope of this project because the data was such a mess - it's just not worth the time to extract information from arbitrarily formatted spreadsheets. Formatting the single table of data used on <a href="http://asbo.org.uk">asbo.org.uk</a> took about three hours, which seems like a waste.</p> <p>I was generally quite impressed with CakePHP; it's laid out in a sane way, though coming from Python some of the automatic discovery of models in the controllers feels a little bit magic, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable passing around arrays of data rather than data objects themselves, but it's not a deal breaker. I do like the layout system, something I commonly implement with blocks in Django, but seeing it formalised as part of the recommended approach to application templating is nice.</p> <p>I put the <a href="http://github.com/jonatkinson/asbo">source on Github</a>,if anyone is interested.</p> 2010-02-19T08:57:31+00:00 http://example.com/sikuli-desktop-automation/ <p>There's quite a lot of <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=sikuli">buzz around</a> <a href="http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/index.shtml">Project Sikuli</a> at the moment, so I spent time today playing with it.</p> <p>Sikuli is a GUI automation engine which uses a vision engine to identify elements on screen. In practise, it works well as a quick way to script repetitive desktop actions, without having to learn the AppleScript actions an application provides, or how to hook into a desktop accessibility framework to manipulate applications. Instead, you tell the Sikuli engine how you expect regions of the screen to look, and then how to further manipulate them with clicks, key-presses and so on.</p> <p>That is quite an abstract explanation, so here is a practical example.</p> <p>Every morning, when I sit down at my desk, I do two things: I do some basic maintenance on my Mac, and I print out my day planner sheet. This only takes maybe 5 minutes, but I need to wait in front of the screen and click the right buttons at the right time. That's pretty dull, so here's how I'm using Sikuli to automate that.</p> <p>First of all, the maintenance script. I use <a href="http://www.macpaw.com/cleanmymac">CleanMyMac</a> to perform one big system clean every morning, which requires a few steps; launching the application, scanning for files to clean, approving the list of files, running the cleaning process, then closing the application.</p> <p>My Sikuli script for doing this looks like this:</p> <p><img src="http://jonatkinson.co.uk/static/files/sikuli_clean_script.png"></p> <p>The script is fairly self-explanatory. First, it switches to (or opens) the CleanMyMac application, then runs the scan process. The script sleeps for five seconds, the searches for the 'scan finished' message, and goes to sleep again until that message is displayed. Then it performs the clean operation, and again waits for the 'clean finished' message. After this, it closes the application.</p> <p>At no point is this script passing events directly to the application, nor is it querying the application to get information about its state; it's just examining the frame-buffer and looking for patterns which are similar to those specified in the script. On the Sikuli website, they claim their vision engine is smart enough to still work even if an application slightly changes it's visual style, but I haven't been able to test this.</p> <p>This is the script for printing my day planner:</p> <p><img src="http://jonatkinson.co.uk/static/files/sikuli_pages_script.png"></p> <p>First, it closes then re-opens Pages so that it is in a predictable state. Then, the script manipulates the 'recent documents' drop-down, to open my 'Day Sheet 2' document. Notice that the script uses the 'wait' function frequently so that the vision engine isn't searching for an image before it has been drawn by the operating system. Once the document is open, we pass the operating system the &#8984;P keyboard shortcut to open the print dialogue, then click 'print'. Finally, Pages is closed, and I check my printer tray. Here's a screen-cast of this in action. Note that I use the 'Run and show each action' button to start the script. This way, you can see the vision engine matching and highlighting each element on the screen:</p> <p></p> <p>Sikuli does have some limitations; You can't copy and paste between scripts, which I think is due to how the IDE stores image region data on the filesystem. Also, scripts seem wedded to the IDE, so you can't launch a script without needing to click the 'run' button in the IDE, but as the IDE is really just a thin wrapper over an underlying Jython instance, I'm sure this would be possible with a little more digging.</p> <p>The obvious next step is to properly test how well Sikuli does deal with visual changes; using Sikuli to test web applications would be a great addition to the toolbox (and it would eliminate the problems with brittle tools like <a href="http://seleniumhq.org/">Selenium</a>), and the IDE and language is simple enough for non-programmers to take some of the burden of writing tests.</p> <p>I'm quite looking forward to the future of Sikuli. I'd like to see this visual search technology make it into more traditional scripting environments like AppleScript, though I'm not sure that'll happen any time soon, but anything which reduces reliance on bending traditional accessibility frameworks to perform in this role is a step forward.</p> 2010-02-19T08:57:31+00:00 http://example.com/django-project-base/ <p><em>"This is my project base. There are many like it, but this one is mine."</em></p> <p>Today I finally got around to putting my <a href="http://github.com/jonatkinson/project-base">Django project base</a> on <a href="http://github.com">Github</a>. I've been using this base for about six months now, and after a lot of rewrites and different approaches, it's now reasonably stable. I've been starting a lot of new projects recently, and repeatedly fixing the same small bugs in this project template, so I decided to spend a few hours this afternoon cleaning it up and making it public.</p> <p>I'm not totally satisfied with my use of shell scripts to do some of the bootstrap actions (ideally I'd use Fabric for all of these tasks), and longer-term I want to make it easier to rename the django project rather than using search/replace in TextMate.</p> <p>I know there are a lot of similar projects to this on Github, but none of them worked exactly like I wanted (I think too many depend on zc.buildout and similar), and while I'm not crazy about re-inventing the wheel, I hope there are enough other people out there who share my preferences who will find this useful.</p> 2010-02-19T08:57:31+00:00 http://example.com/headless-virtualbox-osx/ <p>When I'm developing, I try to continuously deploy to a realistic environment as often as possible. This means a Debian server running a stack as close to production as I can get. Of course, I don't deploy to the actual production servers (a lesson I've learnt many times over), so I virtualise a Debian box and <a href="http://www.debianadmin.com/clone-your-ubuntu-installation.html">clone package set</a> from the production server. Combined with bridged networking and a quick hosts file change, and I've got a production-equivalent server always available at server.local.</p> <p>Hence, I use <a href="http://www.virtualbox.org/">VirtualBox</a> <em>all</em> the time on my Mac, and I've got at least one server instance running all the time. But the Virtualbox.app clutters up the dock, and I really just want the instance available via SSH, I don't care about actually seeing its framebuffer.</p> <p>Fortunately, you can run headless Virtualbox instances on OSX. It just takes a little extra work. Assuming you installed Virtualbox in the default location, headless Virtualbox binaries live in:<pre>$ ls /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS | grep "VBoxHeadless"<br>VBoxHeadless<br>VBoxHeadless-amd64<br>VBoxHeadless-x86<br>VBoxHeadless.dylib</pre><p>You can easily run an instance in headless mode by specifying the unique name of the VM on the command line (replace "Debian Server" with the name of your VM):<pre>/Applications/Virtualbox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxHeadless --startvm "Debian Server"</pre><p>Of course, it's a pain to have to start these instances each time you boot the host system, but you can have the VM start on login by adding a LoginHook. Here's how:<pre>sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /Applications/Virtualbox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxHeadless --startvm "Debian Server"</pre><p>If you want to stop the VM, just use whatever ACPI shutdown method the guest instance provides (for a Debian server, sudo /sbin/init 0 will suffice), and the VBoxHeadless process will silently quit. If you're virtualising a graphical OS, like Windows, you should probably check the documentation to use with VBoxHeadless; you can easily specify a VRDP address so you can connect to the instance via any RDP client.</p> 2010-02-19T08:57:31+00:00 http://example.com/new-years-resolution-stop-switching-tools/ <p>Like nearly everyone else on the planet, I've spent some of today thinking about how I can do better next year. My resolutions are roughly split into two categories; tech stuff, and everything else, which makes sense considering I spend at least half of my waking hours in front of a computer.</p> <p>Since I can remember, I've compulsively tinkered with the computer in front of me; changing hardware, changing operating system, experimenting with different editors, different languages and different organisational systems. I'm a classic computing dilettante, I have a very broad knowledge and very shallow of many areas of programming and administration, but no real expertise anywhere. This bleeds into my choice of environment; I'm forever switching tools and languages trying to find the perfect tool. After years of searching, I've not come any appreciable distance nearer to that goal, so it's time to stop trying.</p> <p>From what I can tell, this is a fairly common disease among programmer types. Some may tinker with software, some with their time management system, but the problem remains the same; we are wasting time trying to perfect a system which will never be perfect.</p> <p>So, the main tech resolution I've made is to stop trying new things. This has been happening naturally over the last few years anyway, it's probably a combination of age and habit, but I'm going to endeavour to ignore new software, new methodologies and new trends in the coming 12 months. For the next year, I'm going to use the following tools, without deviation:<ul><li><strong>OSX</strong> Snow Leopard on my laptop, <strong>Debian</strong> Lenny on the servers. I already know these platforms, they're both stable, and I have no reason to try anything else. I'm often tempted to try the latest releases of operating systems, which inevitably results in a week of lost productivity. As far as I know, there is no scheduled OSX release in 2010, and no release date has yet been set for Squeeze.</li><li><strong>TextMate</strong>. I've spent about half of 2009 using Emacs, but the power of Emacs comes at the expense of distraction; the hours I've spent writing elisp to try to save myself 10 seconds here and there far outweigh the actual time saved. TextMate is stable, the next release is a long way off (in fact, <a href="http://wiki.macromates.com/FAQ/TextMate2">the TextMate 2 FAQ</a> says it's coming when we get Duke Nukem Forever, so I guess that means never), and the lack of customisability compared to Emacs means there's just less to tinker with.</li><li><strong>IPython</strong>. I've spent far too long investigating other Python Repls, and while bpython is nice, IPython and ipdb.set_trace() have become so ingrained in my muscle memory that changing to anything else isn't worthwhile.</li><li><strong>Django</strong>. I'm not sure exactly how the roadmap for Django is laid out, but I suspect the 1.2 release will be with us for most of 2010, and Django is adequate for all the work I'll be doing with <a href="http://84labs.com">84labs</a> in the next year. I've toyed with Kohana, Rails and Seashore in the last year, and none of those brought any significant benefits over Django that would be worth holding on to.</li><li><strong>Safari</strong>. Safari is the most pleasant browsing experience to use on OSX. 2009's development of the Web Inspector removed any real dependency I had on Firebug, and combined with ClickToFlash and /etc/hosts level ad blocking, I've no need to use any other browser. Thankfully, I very rarely need to test my work in other browsers, so while I'll probably keep around a Firefox installation, it's very unlikely that it'll become my browser of choice again.</li></ul><p>So, that's it. We'll see in 2011 if I'm still using this software (that's where the 'resolve' comes in), but I'm looking forward to gaining at least a week or two of productive work simply by keeping a static environment.</p> <p>Will anyone else commit to joining me?</p> 2010-02-19T08:57:31+00:00 http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/380283424 <p>I have two desktop systems, side-by-side: an Intel Mac Mini and an Intel 21” iMac. The Mini runs Leopard and the iMac runs Ubuntu Karmic Koala, and I find myself completely satisfied with the Linux desktop, and switch back to OSX as an auxiliary rather than as my primary.</p> <p>I started on Debian back in 1999. I wanted to get into Linux, but both Red Hat and SuSE were a little hard to get going for beginners, and the packages supplied were always a weird grab bag of old and new. I remember KDE 2 was awesome, but I don’t remember much past that. A friend and coworker introduced me to Debian and I was amazed at how much more intuitive it was to use. It didn’t leave me out in the cold to fend for myself, but it automated enough of the low-levels of Linux that it made the rest seem approachable. And its default configuration was super lightweight and not memory hungry at all. I was sold.</p> <p>I started using Apple hardware again six years ago, on my 21st birthday. Right at the “Apple Renaissance” for developers I bought myself a 12” Aluminum Powerbook and it got me through my last two years of college and the year and a half after it of doing research and my first full-time job. It was probably the most innovative computer I’d ever owned to that point — it had a Mini-DVI port that I could use to have a dual headed system (which was the coolest thing ever) and Bluetooth, which meant I could sync my contacts and calendars with my Sony Ericsson cell phone. I can’t tell you how many times I made it to class only because my phone beeped at me 5 minutes before lecture started. It was self contained: I could do all my C++/Python/Java work for CS courses and contract work without installing anything, it had word processors and diagramming software that handled international text for my linguistics courses, it was a perfect computing device for me at the time.</p> <p>My love affair continued because of OSX desktop software — it was a pretty face with usable apps on a standard UNIX system: cron and friends were all there for the using. It even had some new technologies that were really exciting: I still consider MDNS-SD one of the greatest consumer networking advancements ever. I could install software in an apt-like way with fink or ports. It always felt like there was a little friction there with a near-parallel UNIX system on a UNIX system when I ran these utilities, but it was good enough.</p> <p>As OSX aged, it began to diverge from the standard (notably, launchd made me take notice) and felt less open. What was once a pretty face on a standard UNIX became a slightly prettier face on an increasingly non-standard operating system. I had to re-learn the same things over and over from release to release as they began to deprecate the old tools and methods for doing things. Again, the notable example here is launchd, which replaced init.d and cron. While the Quartz window manager and rendering seemed great in 2001, the advancements in X like Cairo and Compiz have caught up feature-and-performance-wise and are open and cross-platform. Apple’s slowly adding not-so-open utilities to scrape up edge cases like GrandCentral, which is kind of an indicator that the desktop environment itself is pretty much stagnant and Apple’s innovation is going to go into other semi-proprietary technologies on top of their exisitng stack.</p> <p>Installing software is obviously much easier in OSX (discounting apt): I drag an icon to /Applications. If a title isn’t in apt, or is outdated in the Ubuntu repositories, it’s a pain to get going. But more and more apps are providing .debs (with daily builds!), or better yet, are showing up in the Ubuntu PPAs and this is becoming less of an issue. I’m also learning to live with 6 month old software: it’ll get in when it gets in, I’ll live with the features it has now. Usually the bleeding edge has APIs that are so in flux that it makes absolutely no sense to develop against them.</p> <p>So I find myself on Ubuntu. The UI is familiar and at this point it’s easier to test and deploy apps onto a Debian server using the system that is more Debian-like than the one that is not. It’s fast, it’s responsive, and while it can be idiomatic in its own right for a developer who mostly uses vi, Python and C, it’s great. I can’t really heap too much praise or criticism on it, it just is there and gets out of the way. Ubuntu sucked for stability in 2006, but it works well now. It lets me get stuff done. The new “features” like Ubuntu One that are being constantly tacked on stay out of the way and can even be uninstalled. I had to install a third-party hack to get rid of the Mobile Me account thing in the Finder.</p> <p>This isn’t to say I’ve had a falling out with the Mac: just having used it for 6 years now, it seems a lot less exciting and a lot more of a hassle to use than it used to. I’m slowly using it less and less and while I will likely always have OSX and Windows as a desktop install somewhere, it won’t necessarily be my go-to platform to get things done. So from a highly subjective point of view, I seem to be unconsciously preferring Linux to OSX to do my daily computing chores, and the trend seems to be strengthening every day.</p> 2010-02-09T18:21:09+00:00 http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/365989819 <img src="http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kur93nseAD1qza30so1_500.jpg"><br><br><p><a href="http://bunnyrockstar.tumblr.com/post/286285575/party-time-with-arctic-fox-cupcake-and-sir-hat">bunnyrockstar</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>party time with arctic fox, cupcake, and sir. hat</p> </blockquote> 2010-02-02T01:12:07+00:00 http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/365986228 <a href="http://selleckwaterfallsandwich.tumblr.com/">Selleck Waterfall Sandwich</a> 2010-02-02T01:09:58+00:00 http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/365827259 <img src="http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kx6s555y4O1qalp5do1_500.jpg"><br><br><p>Happy New Ear</p> 2010-02-01T23:32:56+00:00 http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/350357825 “That dog is insane for lasers!”<br><br> - <em>Richard</em> 2010-01-24T07:04:07+00:00 http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/349676138 <img src="http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwq31va0YW1qalp5do1_500.jpg"><br><br><p>For your convenience</p> 2010-01-23T23:10:25+00:00 http://jason.cleanstick.net/post/349402858 <p>I am way late in getting a Tumblr, I have been reading others’ for years now but had no reason to get my own. Now here I am. And this time it’s personal.</p> 2010-01-23T19:39:31+00:00 http://ssam.livejournal.com/10309.html Both of my IBM Thinkpad power adapters are now working only because of ample solder and insulating tape. I have a third, but that's disintegrated altogether.<br><br>How, after over 100 years of development can we not manufacture power cables properly? You'd think especially the Thinkpad might come with adapters and cables which could last more than a few years. 2010-01-08T00:54:33+00:00 http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/4123094713/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/4123094713/" title="I love lamp"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2585/4123094713_62a6982b2b_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="I love lamp" /></a></p> <p>At LACMA</p>&lt;/content&gt; 2010-01-02T07:33:39+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3734585664/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3734585664/" title="OFF"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2517/3734585664_ccbcdbea41_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="OFF" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3733786047/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3733786047/" title="Ante show"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2426/3733786047_575820fd59_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Ante show" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3733785285/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3733785285/" title="Azure Ray"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3261/3733785285_4b9b856259_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Azure Ray" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3734583650/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3734583650/" title="If You Fall"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2668/3734583650_d6a1a7e6e2_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="If You Fall" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3676279814/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3676279814/" title="Fuzzy couch"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2651/3676279814_9db3094eb4_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Fuzzy couch" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3675465225/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3675465225/" title="Blown out couch"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2565/3675465225_df4d5466ac_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Blown out couch" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3676277708/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3676277708/" title="I should have used a better camera couch"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2578/3676277708_86c2502796_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="I should have used a better camera couch" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3636620063/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3636620063/" title="Toulouse"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3638/3636620063_47cbfeae05_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Toulouse" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3637434398/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3637434398/" title="Better focus"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3408/3637434398_cf83344f34_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Better focus" /></a></p> <p>A mantis nymph somehow ended up on my handlebars on my ride home</p>&lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3637433582/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3637433582/" title="Mantis"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3611/3637433582_93a3145d70_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Mantis" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3636618251/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3636618251/" title="Mantis"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3599/3636618251_3c9da8487f_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Mantis" /></a></p> &lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:40+00:00 Jason Scheirer http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3924640509/ <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/jasonscheirer/">Jason Scheirer</a> posted a photo:</p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonscheirer/3924640509/" title="Yeah Yeah Yeahs"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3533/3924640509_01c4ea7974_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Yeah Yeah Yeahs" /></a></p> <p>At the Pomona Fox</p>&lt;/content&gt; 2009-11-02T18:20:39+00:00 Jason Scheirer