fiddle2: Something completely different, since 1998.
2008-07-25 10:26
It's a class war, stupid
This is why you need to pay careful attention when you hear about John McCain claiming that he's going to "look at entitlement program" waste as a means of solving the budget crisis, or when you tune into the debate about the "death tax." We are in the midst of a political movement to concentrate private wealth into fewer and fewer hands while at the same time placing more and more of the burden for public expenditures on working people. If that sounds like half-baked Marxian analysis... well, shit, what can I say? That's what's happening. Repealing the estate tax (the proposal to phase it out by the year 2010 would save the Walton family alone $30 billion) and targeting "entitlement" programs for cuts while continually funneling an ever-expanding treasure trove of military appropriations down the befouled anus of pointless war profiteering, government waste and North Virginia McMansions — this is all part of a conversation we should be having about who gets what share of the national pie. But we're not going to have that conversation, because we're going to spend this fall mesmerized by the typical media-generated distractions, yammering about whether or not Michelle Obama's voice is too annoying, about flag lapel pins, about Jeremiah Wright and other such idiotic bullshit.
Just a touch on the sensationalistic side, and certainly a biased, albeit accurate, essay, this kind of critique will most certainly be ignored by anyone who has influence necessary to correct the outlined problems. The bit about our country's insolvency is particularly urgent, in my opinion, but is currently either ignored or completely unknown to the public in general. It's entirely possible that within my lifetime we'll have a significant number of American economic refugees to other countries as the government moves well into the realm of a working capital deficit (based on the GDP). Seriously! Our GDP is about $13.86 trillion and our current national debt is about $9.53 trillion. Our current debt is damn near 70% of our GDP. That's some scary shit. Meanwhile, people cast votes for national office based on trivialities like stem cell research.
2008-07-22 10:33
Dear
Parallels,
We've been together for a long time, but I think we both know that inertia is the only thing keeping us going now, and has been for a while. You were really nice at first, and I enjoyed how special you were. You enabled me to do things I hadn't ever been able to do before. At first, I was really excited to have you since you had a great reputation and my friends liked you so much. We were a great couple, but there are some things that novelty can't mask forever, and it's about time we face our differences.
(more...)
2008-07-19 22:31
Recently, I wanted to play a short .aiff file as a little alarm every 15 minutes. On the Mac, however, there isn't a built-in analog to the
play command that ships with most Linux distros. I did a
quick search and came up mostly empty, except for a little app called
PlayBufferedSoundFile written by
Kurt Revis, an apple engineer, intended as a code example for using CoreAudio. Unfortunately, the API has changed such that the technique used in the code example is deprecated, and the code doesn't even compile anymore.
Fortunately, Kurt turned me on to a code example that's included with the new version of Xcode that does exactly this.
The dev tools come with sample code for a tool called "afplay" that can probably do what you want.
Open this in Xcode:
/Developer/Examples/CoreAudio/Services/AudioFileTools/AudioFileTools.xcodeproj
Build the "afplay" target and there you go.
"There you go" indeed. Thanks, Kurt.
2008-07-17 12:39
I was installing Zend Platform on our development server today, and got an error for which I couldn't find very much information.
Our development server's configuration matches our production server's config as much as possible (as it should), and I've locked down our production server pretty hard, which includes a disable_functions directive of "dl, shell_exec, exec, system, passthru, popen" in php.ini in order to prevent PHP scripts from running external executables or making system calls.
Evidently this doesn't jive well with Zend Platform, but there's no documentation about why.
So, for the benefit of the intarwebs, the following functions are not to be included in the disable_functions directive if you wish to use Zend Platform:
The other directives I was using are apparently okay (not that Zend bothers to mention it anywhere).
2008-07-15 13:59
Microsoft's Ballmer Opens Up to Partners
Will we encourage people who want to do open-source development to do it on top of Windows? Yes, we're proud that the best PHP system in the world is actually the one that runs on Windows today, not the one that runs on Linux.
WTF is he talking about?
No, really; I can't at all figure out what he's talking about. I don't really know what would constitute a "PHP system", and I certainly can't offhand guess what the "best [one] in the world" is.
2008-07-11 10:29
Critics Say Army Recruiters Using Technology To Target Adolescents
According to army recruiters the technology creates a life-sized combat zone.
The experience takes approximately a half-hour and participants can drive vehicles and shoot machine guns on their mission.
Up to 50 players can use the simulator at one time.
"They get an actual like pre-convoy briefing just like anybody in the Army would be getting prior to going out on a mission. Once the mission is done, then they also get a post briefing," explained David Boe, Director of Public Relations for the Duluth Air and Aviation Expo.
Awesome. I wanna play.
2008-07-07 09:28
The Grand Negus of The Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers speaks.
I received the following message a few days ago...
Dear Travis,
Was that you who recently wrote the following about our site?
[quoted blog post]
If so, and if you're interested, I'd like to try to clear up some of your misunderstandings about our work. Write me.
Sincerely,
Gerry Rzeppa
Grand Negus, The Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers
Curiosity and unwillingness to let such an opportunity slip by, I offered for him to fire away, as long as everything said was fair game for publishing. To be fair, I did give him a heads-up that he was facing an uphill climb. I dutifully reminded him "that you engaged me in this conversation, so it's on you to convince me that your philosophy isn't naïve and the resulting programming language/environment isn't useless for practical purposes; this is my current opinion."
Round 1
(more...)
2008-07-02 13:28
Scott Brown's Nostalgorithm for Pop-Culture Sensations
According to our formula, the proper release date for this X-Files movie is 2018 — not 2008.
Interesting, but what he overlooks is that an early release and an optimal release are not mutually exclusive. Aside from the fact that you can just wait ten years to watch the movie, it makes sense from a studio's financial POV as well. Most of the profits on a movie are from post-theatrical release (currently, this means DVD) properties, which means the financial take of the X-Files movies will be less influenced by poor performance at the box office as long as the DVD sales are strong (either now, or ten years from now). What they have now that they won't have ten years from now are actors. Probability of the interest (and ability) of Duchovney/Anderson to participate in this movie decreases rapidly with age. So, we have a high urgency to make the movie for logistical reasons, and the financial incentive is compatible with an earlier-than-optimal release. By these powers combined, we have the movie now.
