Like Fight Club; Except you Talk about it

Apparently, because freaking SFist covered the thing. That really surprised me.

I'm bummed, I missed this party because I've been sick and trying to recuperate. I do have the next one marked on my calendar, though.

I heard the Hells Angels came and were even kind of decent. No one died.

2.5TB

I just had some machines dropped off at my house totalling about 2.5 terabytes of storage. What should I do with that space?

Ham Radio License in a Day (by Jeremy Zawodny)

As a young teenager, I was working towards my General Ham License. I had a hard time getting to the required 13 words per minute of Morse Code proficiency and decided that programming assembly on little microcontrollers was funner. Years later they decided that you shouldn't need to know Morse Code to get your general license and dropped the requirement.

Jeremy Zawodny recently attended a crash course designed to get him his Ham License and after 6 hours of cramming, he passed with a 94%. Nice.

Ham Radio actually saved my friend's life; we were in a bad accident in the middle of nowhere and my other friend was able to use his ham radio to get an ambulance to treat said pal's head injury. As many Ham operators would say: 'he wuz bleedin' like a stuck pig. yee haw!' Or, as they used to say: ...---... ...---... aww, shucks.

Google's Magic Bus

A nice article on the commuter shuttle I take to work everyday. In fact, I'm writing this on the bus. If you're curious about the cellular to wifi gateway we use, it's a Junxion box.

Enterprise Software means never having to say you're sorry.

When I first moved to SF back in '99, I heard somebody justify their existance in the enterprise business by saying: "In the Gold Rush, the people who sold jeans to the miners made a lot more money than the miners."

That's cute but it misses an important point -- the success of a miner had nothing to do with the skill of the miner! There was either gold or just dirt.

The great thing about enterprise software was that you could burn through 10MM of venture capital, never sell a single copy, close your doors forever, and still not admit that your idea was a failure: market conditions just didn't line up. Poor you.

Wow, I have some pent-up aggression about this. grr..

Gonna print me up some spare parts.

"Made-to-measure skin and bones a reality using inkjet printers"

A computer science teacher once used to do his homework as distributed printing jobs in PostScript because he couldn't get any time on the Mathematica workstations. Now biology students can do their homework in PostScript, too.

[via kragen's del.icio.us stream]

I wondered where I put that.

"A dentist found the source of the toothache Patrick Lawler was complaining about on the roof of his mouth: a four-inch nail the construction worker had unknowingly embedded in his skull six days earlier."

Full Story

Where does Joey find this stuff?

Quake 3 Source Release Delayed

On John Carmack's blog, he says:

I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn’t the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I’m pretty sure there would be some hard feelings.

[...]

I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I won’t wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release.

That sounds like about a year to me.

Crease Crumple Cram

I picked up a new lcd display at Central Computer a few hours ago. There's one problem: it's DVI cable doesn't match my powerbooks DVI input very well. The display's DVI cable has less contact points than the dvi input.

I couldn't get the DVI cable to fit properly but after some research I discovered that the video cable industry went insane a few years ago and there are now approximately 14 million different kinds of adapters. I didn't notice this before as the only place I've switched from VGA to DVI was at work where all of the equipment works together well. Since the display's DVI cable wouldn't fit into the powerbook I thought that perhaps I needed Yet Another Adapter (which is far too common when using Apple equipment).

Just then, I remembered a scene from Seinfeld where Jerry was delivering Newman's route:

JERRY: Hey, I've been trying to jam stuff in the box, like you told me, but sometimes it says, like, "Photographs - Do not bend".

NEWMAN: "Do not bend". (Laughs evilly) Just crease, crumple, cram.. you'll do fine.

So I bent the horizontal pin and crammed it in. Voila.

Not how I envisioned my afternoon: in a van full of cagey old filipino dudes who spent all night humping the american dream. Note to self: keep camera handy.

Burnout 3

This game is causing me to crap diamonds as I fly between oncoming cars at 160mph. I really like racing games but not if they're simulations. I think Chris Crawford summed up why when he wrote: "Good games do not simulate physical reality; they mirror emotional reality."

Google Mini

Sweet. The enterprise division just released a miniature version of the Google Search Appliance. Funny, you can actually buy it from the Google Store.

I can't explain my unnatural fascination with the search applicance.

Speaking of the Google store, I just noticed that we sell a wifi hotspot finder, too.

SixApart/LiveJournal

The imitable danah boyd has some interesting thoughts on what this might mean. I really hope for the best but I worry that it might end up like mixing butter and margarine.

Besides danah's questions, I think the most painful point here will be the duplication of effort and the inevitable integration. Two development teams, two codebases, two networks, two admin teams, and one checkbook can spell trouble unless you have billions. 6A is smarter than the average cookie so I expect they'll do fine and I also realize that they did not make this decision lightly (if anybody ever does).

Also, if you're interested in building communities (or accidentally find yourself with one), you should take some time and read what danah has to say.

PyLucene

Sweet, my patches to PyLucene have been accepted with some modifications and it now understands MultiFieldQueryParser.