Friends

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080819.html

NGC 6960: The Witch s Broom Nebula

• 01:53 I'm at 1429 E Aloha St, Seattle, WA 98112, USA - bkite.com/01iAD #
• 04:55 I'm at AMF Imperial Lanes (2101 22nd Ave S, Seattle, WA 98144, USA) - bkite.com/01iFl #
• 15:33 I'm at 1429 E Aloha St, Seattle, WA 98112, USA - bkite.com/01iQy #
• 15:37 I'm at 1429 E Aloha St, Seattle, WA 98112, USA - bkite.com/01iQH #

• A fate worse than death.

• New not news: Drug firms deny pricing for profit, Labour selects sock with eyes as new leader. I think I've got the queueing system working, so they should pop out at 9am UTC (10am BST) like clockwork. Tomorrow's should be fun.

Pub on Sunday was most excellent. I believe the geek concentration did in fact reach critical mass. clanwilliam, oi luvsh ya mate!

Freda is all set to talk. She said "my daddy!" the other day when her mum brought her in to me, she says "hello," she said "cat" with the "t" clearly audible this evening ... soon we'll never shut her up.

arkady has finally finished the doll dress she's been working on in stray moments when Freda let her and got it up on eBay.

redcountess didn't get her DLA. Meh. Guess I'll just have to get rich on teh intarweb.

damned_colonial visited today and we geeked appallingly antisocially about Freebase ("your second hit is also free"). There's a Freebase meetup at the Yorkshire Grey pub in Holborn from 6:30pm on Wednesday 20th.

(Click for larger. Again with the goes-everywhere camera.)

Something caught my eye on the way to work this morning:

Looking closer:

Excuse the excessive graininess, my goes-everywhere camera is rather rough at ISO 400. And has developed a loose connection to its LCD too l-(

Lots of people retain the notion that our self-interest is not hard-wired into us in the same way that our physical attributes are hard-wired into us; many people suppose that with just the right upbringing or education, or with enough self-discipline, a human being can be made non-self-interested.

This notion is bunk.

It has no more validity than the belief that, say, a man can run as fast as a cheetah if he trains with sufficient diligence, or that a woman can grow an extra set of arms if only she tries hard enough to do so. Nurture plays a role in conditioning who we are, physically and mentally, but our fundamental phenotype and mental attributes are hard-wired into us.

link

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/08/hit_me_with_those_errata.html

Ace are re-publishing THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES as a mass-market paperback at the end of the year, and I've got a set of galleys to comb for errors. I've also got the copy edits of THE REVOLUTION BUSINESS to vet, on approximately the same time scale, so I'm running around in ever-diminishing circles right now.

If you've read THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES in the US trade paperback edition (not the British mass market paperback edition) and spotted any howlers, please leave a comment here (preferably giving a page number and some textual context so I can find the offending error). You've got until September 7th before it's typeset and printed. Thanks!

http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=4915&rss

( Dutch original )

[after detailed explanation of the communications package as a whole> In addition, however, the Committee on Civil Liberties approved a number of amendments from Syed Kamall MEP. The amendments were intended to permit ISPs to examine data traffic in order to identify violations.

The Socialist Group voted against these amendments in the Civil Liberties Committee, but they were supported by a majority and therefore were approved.

Due to the parliamentary procedures regulating the relationship between the committeed, the Internal Market Committee, which generally should have the lead on this issue, was not able to overturn Kamall's contentious amendments.

After discussions with the Socialist Group and members of his own EPP group, however, Kamall appears to have realised that his amendments contain real dangers. With the other groups, he is apparently ready to rectify matters at the plenary sitting in September, and to propose amendments which will remove the contentious elements from the definitive text which the European Parliament will approve.

In any case, I and my group will continue working to ensure that civil liberties are not put under any threat from this new legislation. I and my group will ensure that the contentious amendments do not end up in the law.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/chicken.asp

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

The dark, inner shadow of planet Earth

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080818.html

Just before the Sun blacks out, something strange occurs.

That exchange in the comments section?  That was mine.  You jerks stole my thunder by attributing my words to the clueless windbag before me.  And now my wit is gone from the original article!  I blame you, oh yes.

Perhaps their mistake was in only leaving cards, rather than also making stultifying speeches about the nature of anarchy:

Two Pembroke teenagers have been charged in connection with a series of playing cards that were defaced with threatening writing and left at stores in Christiansburg and Pearisburg -- a gesture police said the teens admitted had been inspired by this summer's Batman movie, "The Dark Knight."

Justin Colby Dirico and Bryan Eugene Stafford, both 18, admitted to leaving cards that bore handwritten messages inside the Pearisburg Wal-Mart, according to police Chief J.C. Martin.

Both were charged with conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism.

Dirico and Stafford are being held at the New River Regional Jail without bond.

DNA Lounge update wherein JESUS H. CHRIST IN A CHICKEN BASKET, HOUSTON. OVER.

Ignore That Logo Under the Tape!

To ensure that only the companies that pay millions of dollars to be official Olympic sponsors enjoy the benefits of exposure in Olympic venues, organizers have covered the trademarks of nonsponsors with thousands of little swatches of tape.

In media centers, dormitories and arena bathrooms, pieces of tape cover logos of fire extinguishers, light switches, thermostats, bedroom night tables, soap dispensers and urinals. The Taiden Industrial translation headsets in a large conference room have had their logos covered, as have the American Standard faucets in the bathrooms nearby, and the ThyssenKrupp escalators down the hall.

The International Olympic Committee says that such "brand protection" is essential for the Games to raise the corporate money that keeps them going and growing. The Games get 40% of their revenue from sponsors, with the rest coming from broadcast rights, ticketing and licensing. Sponsors of China's Games, believed to be the most lucrative ever, have contributed some $1.5 billion in cash, goods and services, estimates sports-marketing group Octagon.

The IOC says the brand-protection practices here in Beijing are consistent with procedures at past Olympics. Actual enforcement of IOC sponsorship-protection rules falls mostly to whichever city is hosting the Games, however, and by some indications no host has taken that role more seriously than China. In many cases, even products that don't compete with anything made by official sponsors are having their logos covered.

Previously, previously.

Fire conjurer, originally uploaded by Zach Beane.

On Saturday night we burned a big brushpile.

I had an odd email this weekend. Someone mailed me about a couple of minor points on my website, and then added at the end of the message that he found it curious that I hadn't written anything about religion. He said, in particular, that he thought knowing something about what I believed in that area might, in his words, ‘shed some light on an important aspect of [my] personality’.

Well, I was willing enough to answer his question in private email. It's true that I've never bothered to mention on my main website that I'm an atheist, but that's not out of any strong feeling that it's Nobody Else's Business; partly it's because I'd expect any such mention to attract too much email flamage to be worth the trouble, but mostly I've just never felt that I had anything particularly interesting or original to say on the subject. (And if I did, it would more likely be a vague musing to mention in passing in this diary, rather than something to publish on my permanent website as a Serious Essay intended to attract ongoing widespread interest.)

But it struck me as particularly strange that someone might feel their understanding of me as a person was noticeably incomplete without knowing my religion. I mean, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find there are people whose religion is responsible for significant aspects of their personality (e.g. if their personality changed noticeably when they converted). And I certainly know there are people who at least believe their religion is the most important thing about them: I occasionally come across LJ bios saying faintly nauseating things like ‘The most important fact about me is that I love God’, or ‘I'm a Fooist, and once you know that, you know everything you need to about me’. (My general feeling tends to be that if they say everything else about them is even less interesting than their religion, I'm willing to take their word for it.)

But it's always seemed to me that such people are a small minority: for the most part I wouldn't have said there was any particularly noticeable divide of personality between the various theists and atheists I know. So when I meet somebody new, I've never felt a particular need to know about their religion, beyond finding out whether or not they're the sort of person who makes an overwhelmingly big deal of it. Sometimes I've managed to know people for years before finding out that they've been a devout Fooist all along and I'd never known – and once I've blinked a couple of times, it generally alters my attitude to them not one jot.

Am I unusual in this? Does anyone else round here feel that their understanding of someone's personality is necessarily (or even usually) incomplete without some knowledge of their attitude to religion?

http://www.advogato.org/person/ingvar/diary.html?start=281

Due to an assortment of reasons, my primary "I am alone, there is no external pressure" hacking time tends to be from not-too-long after 6 am (depending on how promptly I can get up and go through the normal first-things-in-the- morning routine), until about 07:30, when it's time to finish getting dressed and head towards the train station, for another exciting day in the office.

That's also the first time period of the day when I can check my email and do a brief check on assorted web stuff. Most, if not all, of my coding is accomplished in these 45-80 minutes of the day. At times, I am surprised I get anything finished...

http://www.snopes.com/photos/architecture/largestpool.asp

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080817.html

Like the downtown area of your favorite city,

http://snafu.priv.at/interests/comp/ihateudev.html

So, on my machines there is hotplug and no udev (and, of course no dbus or hal, because they're bloat-squared IMNSHO). But how about one of the main bennies of the hal+udev frankenstein combo, which is handling of removeable storage devices? Easy, says I.

Using just hotplug this is not hard to achieve, only the standard hotplug package doesn't come with such functionality. So here's my block-device hotplug agent, which automounts and umounts devices when they're plugged in or pulled (not that you shouldn't unmount manually).

This block device handler needs to be told what devices should be auto-mounted, and who should own the stuff (necessary for VFAT filesystems which don't support file ownership). It supports wildcards and defaults, and can be told to leave things alone (for stuff where I do have an explicit fstab entry).

Simple, trivial, sufficient. The only wrinkle is that unmounting as a normal user doesn't work because there is no entry in /etc/fstab: the workarounds for this are either to install pmount or to use sudo (sudo without authentication for /bin/umount is easy:

%staff ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /bin/umount

Plop the block.agent and the example block.settings in /etc/hotplug, add execute perms to the agent, modify the settings file to your heart's delight and you're set. Share and enjoy!

netik

lilmissnever

Then lilmissnever took us to what I can only describe as a furry convention. It was a release party for an "elegant gothic lolita" magazine (all three words are false!) I lasted about 45 seconds before I had to flee. There was a pink sugar cookie decorating contest, and a seven foot tranny bunny (no, not Scotty). And this was no mere bunny mask, but a full facial prosthetic, like this.

Overheard: "I really want a fox tail? Because I already have a wolf tail?"

• 17:50 @ 15th Ave & Madison ! Helping a friend move #

http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=4913&rss

• Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness
• Face Swapping: Automatically Replacing Faces in Photographs
• Yearbook Yourself
• The Daily Show and their TiVos

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 044.

I fell behind and did this one kind of at the last minute, but I think it flows pretty well. Let's see, what can I tell you about these tracks... I guess I don't know a lot of trivia about this one. Oxygiene 23 was Die Warzau with Jane Jensen. Stripmall Architecture is the new band from Rebecca and Ryan of Halou. I saw them last week and they were great. The CD is in a cool package, too. They always do great packaging.