Living history meeting set for Old Abilene

http://www.abilene-rc.com/index.cfm?event=news.view&id=442A335F-19B9-E2F5-4664108E736F47C8

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Abilene Reflector-Chronicle
Wednesday, Mar 10, 2010

Historic Abilene Inc. will sponsor a living history meeting at 2 p.m.... [more]

effective date March 13th, 2010 02:15 /tags/

http://qrtime.com/

effective date March 13th, 2010 02:12 /tags/

+Compiz+Nvidia

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/CompizFusion

If you ran nvidia-settings, then your xorg.conf lost some info. To fix your compiz window decorations (titlebars) with an nVidia graphics card, run

sudo nvidia-xconfig —add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24

then re... [more]

effective date March 9th, 2010 01:52 /tags/

All societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others.

Notes on What is living and what is dead in Social Democracy
from the New York Times. Aside: What are we going to do when NYT is no longer able to inhabit its obsolete position in our culture?

effective date December 30th, 2009 23:37 /tags/

tug, tug, tug

See this note to myself:

3320
/Added by Matt Platte 235 days ago/
In case we forget

Those were the bad old days. I’ve finally gotten around to installing Phusion Passen... [more]

effective date December 29th, 2009 21:12 /tags/

No, no, no, it's not Jap and Shem's new boat!

Take a look at the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror: [HST22_lg_web.jpg]

It’s got a certain, fixed diameter (2.4 meters). If you send violet light (400 nm) at it, it takes 6 million wavelengths to get across it, meaning it can resolve an... [more]

effective date December 11th, 2009 20:02 /tags/

Hello? Is this the Middle School? I'm the new transfer student...

This, in a shared partial, lets one edit articles (with or without existing titles) of different types (ActiveRecord Single table inheritance). @formobject is the object type; each object has a corresponding controller.

effective date December 7th, 2009 23:18 /tags/ ruby

So it's not just me!

I’ve been trying to maintain my ignorance of the Tiger Woods Apology or whatever. My main line of defence is to avoid U.S. Media as much as possible: no TV, no commercial radio (this includes NPR whose holiday wishes come to you courtesy of Union Carbide, wrapp... [more]

effective date December 7th, 2009 22:36 /tags/

May the attention you save be your own

Last night, after probably too much coffee, there was a problem with moving things around in the Box Auction. In this case, the Ancestry gem was moving a node just fine, but its descendants were staying where they were; becoming oprahns.

Eventually I got to the code (see screenshot) wh... [more]

effective date December 1st, 2009 00:56 /tags/

In case I need to do this again (and again)

Hanna makes gems’ documentation much better: the layout is less obtrusive and the method finder is most helpful indeed.

But I forget how to “install” it as the default RDoc template.

From github.com/mislav this:

effective date November 27th, 2009 19:15 /tags/

Breadbox has been getting some sorely needed attention of late. Tonight’s development session (not online yet) sees the webcam image uploader almost regaining full functionality.

If all goes well, teh SWF file... [more]

effective date November 24th, 2009 03:30 /tags/ flex

Giles says

Basically, git loses track of its remotes from time to time, and git fetch refreshes its memory.

effective date November 18th, 2009 12:24 /tags/

Teabaggers Lament

A fundamental error is seldom expelled from philosophy by a single victory. It retreats slowly, defends every inch of ground, and often, after it has been driven from the open country, retains a footing in some remote fastness. The essences of individuals were an unmeaning figment... [more]

effective date November 13th, 2009 20:57 /tags/

Notes on practical landscaping

See how the square slabs turn and overlap, creating a curve yet with all straight lines everywhere.

In the cut-away drawing there’s the case for a ton of gravel. (Click the picture to biggify.)

I wish I’d gotten prices on the 4-inch solid concrete blocks. They’... [more]

effective date November 4th, 2009 02:13 /tags/ landscape

sensible and affordable

Julie Lansky writes in Change Observer

When Dan Austin, a writer, filmmaker and cycling enthusiast first met children in a Cambodian orphanage in 2006, he wanted nothing more than to give them a t... [more]

effective date November 1st, 2009 17:52 /tags/ bike

Last night was Halloween

In Rubymine, if the Rails Console and IRB tool icons are greyed out, perhaps it’s because IRB isn’t installed yet.

effective date November 1st, 2009 15:33 /tags/ rubymine

Not for faint-hearted ordinaries

Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil’s “Georgics”, read... [more]

effective date November 1st, 2009 04:13 /tags/

Emptying out the slop bucket again

Yes. Every time, I have to look up the incantation for changing mailboxes. Here it is:

imap://mail.example.com

Next it asks for a username (mailbox) to open,

Username at mail.example.com: aimless@example.com

That’s because of the way Dovecot handles multiple ... [more]

effective date October 31st, 2009 15:13 /tags/

a game

Given a four-letter word, re-arrange the letters and send it off to the next person on your email list. You can change (replace with a different) one letter. No duplicate words allowed, no proper names, etc.

When there are over 100 words, how does one check for duplicates? Each potent... [more]

effective date October 21st, 2009 14:56 /tags/

AutoRake is missing. Conspicuously.

Sphinx gets started by rake thinking_sphinx:start which brings a new wrinkle to my /etc/init.d/ playground – rake tasks.

As I’m already on retrograde distraction watch for today, I’m going to note its absence and move along…

effective date July 3rd, 2009 20:53 /tags/ rake

Detective is hard work!

(Type) VANDALISM
(Address) 300 BLOCK OF S 28TH ST
(Details) S BROKE V FISHING ROD INTO PIECES
...

effective date June 15th, 2009 19:06 /tags/ crime, silly

3.attempts => :easier

Having been here before with ferret & ultrasphinx, getting Thinking Sphinx to work is fairly straightforward.

The first TS use is as a filter for bog articles (see the ‘filter’ box above).

effective date June 15th, 2009 16:38 /tags/ sphinx, rails

Still installing...

Sphinx’ installer makes a couple of directories in /usr/local/var

matt@blacksmith:~/sources/sphinx-0.9.8.1$ sudo make install
[sudo] password for matt:
Making install in src
make¹: Entering directory `/home/matt/sou... [more]

effective date June 13th, 2009 21:32 /tags/ sphinx, rails

Sometimes one needs to step away from the keyboard

Trying to get ‘search’ implemented here at Triopticon. First try was ferret/aaf. Had troubles getting DRb to play nice on my server; might be related to single table inheritance, might not.

Moving right along to sphinx/ultra. Hm. Wants mysql-devel and what do I have on Edi... [more]

effective date June 13th, 2009 19:52 /tags/

What's the environmental impact, Kenneth?

(Type) THEFT/LARCENY
(Address) 700 BLOCK OF N 27TH ST
(Details) PR OBS TO CONCEAL ITEM AND [more]

effective date June 12th, 2009 19:29 /tags/

Sounds like a Rule of Thumb, doesn't it?

Over at A List Apart is a story about the game Werewolf (a.k.a. Mafia).

The description reminds me of Poker meets Musical Chairs at a Dutch Auction but, then, I haven’t played it yet. The ALA article suggests Werewolf is a good training regimen for peopl... [more]

effective date June 11th, 2009 17:27 /tags/

Satire: all you'll ever need

After a long-ish quiet spell, Despair, Inc, hits another one smack in the chest.

effective date June 11th, 2009 17:11 /tags/

An electric pusher

Some guy has built a little trailer to pull behind his PT Cruiser. Trailer has a battery and drive train. Once the rig is rolling, the trailer is turned ‘on’ and helps push the PT Cruiser along the road.

effective date June 9th, 2009 16:19 /tags/

Whoa, an article on the Internet about the Internet!

Social CRM is more about expanding the relationship with the customer through new means, especially via social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It is about empowering the customers to have more control over the conversation, and engaging on ... [more]

effective date June 6th, 2009 23:43 /tags/

Finally, a real hello world use case

I want to do something special at the beginning of a visit to www.triopticon.com session.

It’s done.

I started by learning about using Rack as a filter but eventually I could see that wasn’t going to fit very well.

My next approach was to check the session for ... [more]

effective date June 6th, 2009 14:50 /tags/

no, you do it

class User :user
end

Now you can refer to @customer.name and @customer.email to retrieve and set values for those attributes directly. Pretty nice, huh?

Yeah, nice stuff from effective date June 4th, 2009 16:50 /tags/

a one-liner

1-line CSS Grid Framework but more better than this exercise in recursion are some of the author’s other CSS excursions.

effective date June 3rd, 2009 03:29 /tags/

They're everywhere!

Know Privacy studies web tracking devices – Googlebugs dominate the environment of course.

effective date June 2nd, 2009 13:50 /tags/

Some guy wrote an example

United Mindset (which is a cool name and an admirable attitude) describes how to get up and running with Flex – RubyAMF – Rails.

In exploring this, I find that [more]

effective date June 1st, 2009 17:16 /tags/

I'm doing it wrong

A while back I figured out how to put a Git repository on my server. I’m pretty sure I was doing it wrong then – because at the time I didn’t know anything useful about “bare”.

So I’m trying again, reading along with [more]

effective date June 1st, 2009 04:22 /tags/

A tutorial without any of the steps you'll need

I want to make a Flex video player that is controllable by Javascript functions that, in turn, are built by Rails.

The purpose is to explore the communication between Flash player and the wrapper HTML, so let’s start off with a [more]

effective date May 30th, 2009 19:35 /tags/

Stylin' the web

Yeah, triopticon.com is using Typogridphy (TG) for the basic structure. TG’s typography is pretty okay except for the basic font-size:62.5%. That’s really tiny! I’d like to bump that up to 90 or 100 percent but then the em-based column layout goes all crazy-big.

I g... [more]

effective date May 30th, 2009 16:50 /tags/

From the slightly irreverant Which Pope Am I? page at NewHumanist:

Pull your socks up!

You are an amalgamation of those pesky anti-Popes Clement VII and Benedict XIII

Okay then. My portraits:

effective date May 27th, 2009 17:43 /tags/

Yes! Monospace in the input tags.

Four score and this one doesn’t get monospace because it’s not an input, it’s a textarea. Good. Nice.

effective date May 23rd, 2009 18:10 /tags/

No, I don’t actively use all of these. I use a lot of ’em, though. DataMapper and Merb are two that I have yet to dig into.

$ gem list —local

• LOCAL GEMS *
... [more]

effective date May 18th, 2009 04:37 /tags/

fvv m x ter m

Named
Numeric
Color name
Hex rgb
Decimal

aliceblue

#f0f8ff

240,248,255

antiquewhite

#faebd7

250,235,215

aqua

#00ffff

effective date July 16th, 2008 /tags/

Ed Miller's the name; gas is his game

Lincoln’s Bag Lady gave him the titles. 

effective date July 15th, 2008 /tags/

ad hoc, ergo propter hoc

Cargo Cult linguistics.  The title, above, made me laugh till the tears rolled.
-from The Last Psychiatrist

You’re Mister Stevens?

The Lawn of Unintended Consequences – Mike the Mad Biologist.

effective date July 3rd, 2008 /tags/

rain city digest predicts what I’ll want to do in a few days — my first git server activity.

The Git Server: Next was to create a —bare copy and transfer it to my git server at slicehost. First the clone.    git clone —bare ~/work/adobe adobe.git&n... [more]

effective date June 28th, 2008 /tags/

not as unusual as you'd think

I remember doing this a few times, and seeing it done a few times, in the 1960’s. And didn’t Sky King on Saturday morning teevee have a plane, a jeep — and horses?

effective date June 12th, 2008 /tags/

ssh is approximately equal to friction in physics: always there, ready to trip up the unwary

Problem

bash: line 1: git-upload-pack: command not found
Context
I’d made a new folder on Edison for June development. Instead of being confident, I wanted a new Git repository in June (I’m 99% brand new to Git).  Okay, that seemed to work well enough. ... [more]

effective date June 4th, 2008 /tags/

sigh. another odd idea.

Notary as in trustworthy authority. 
Proxy as in we’ll host your originals. Or maybe just an original reference document plus a checksum via the public API.
Together they provide a badge of certitude that this is the original check-summed image... [more]

effective date June 4th, 2008 /tags/

Fully embracing Acrobat.com

This began as a comment over here:
http://scienceblogs.com/digitalbio/2008/06/teaching_in_the_digital_world_1.php

Perhaps (probably!) I got it backwards.  General purpose business tools are simply inadequate, and we all agree about that, but it’s the biology [more]