Thank Goodness for the Judiciary (again)

Oregon judge knocks down part of Patriot Act:

"SEATTLE (Reuters) - An Oregon judge on Wednesday ruled that two provisions of the Patriot Act violated the U.S. Constitution's protection against unlawful searches and seizures.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled in favor of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer wrongly arrested by the FBI in 2004 for possible ties to the Madrid train bombings, who challenged the secret searches of his home and office.

The judge said the amendments made by the Patriot Act to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to conduct searches and monitor American citizens without probable cause, which is typically required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

'The defendant here is asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning. This court declines to do so,' Aiken wrote in her ruling."

Stucco color matching for fun, if not profit

This summer I've bought two buckets of stucco patch for the house. I can't seem to hold a color chart up against the wall and have any chance of picking the right color.

Today I finally realized the digicam could do most of the work.

1. Tape the color chart to the wall.
2. Take a picture.
3. Import it into iPhoto.
4. Create a new OmniGraffle document.
5. Create a big rectangle.
6. Set its fill color by sampling the wall color from the imported photo.
7. Create a bunch of little rectangles.
8. Lay them out over the "wall" rectangle.
9. Set their fill colors by sampling the swatches in the photo.

You don't even have to do any white balance correction. Everything in the photo should have its color skewed in roughly the same way.

Seempuhl. Wish I'd thought of this about ten dollars ago...

Marching Morons

Getting ready to launch a glider at Kamuela/Weimea, Island of Hawaii. 1182 on Flickr.

The war on terror looks so often like a war on civil liberties. Our airports showcase the problem: law enforcement does its job literally and vigorously, enforcing "the law" without regard for whether enforcement is warranted or the law is even constitutional. Vision Aerie's experience at Kamuela airport is just one more example.

And when it turns out that the enforcers have over-reacted? Admit no wrong. Note the good fortune, of those detained in error, that law enforcement has shown such great self-restraint.

Canon Scanners, Spotlight and OCR

When I scan receipts and invoices with my Canon LIDE 600F, OS X's Spotlight somehow, magically, is able to find them based on their text content. But I'm just scanning the documents, not running OCR software on them.

For example, this morning I scanned the receipt for my new MacBook, so I could send it in for a shipping rebate. Just for grins I then did a Spotlight search for "MacBook". There it was, near the top of the list.

mdls showed that "MacBook" didn't appear anywhere in the file's metadata. And the filename, "File0001.PDF", certainly didn't match. Yet somehow mdfind identified it as a match.

Searching for the string "MacBook" in the PDF turned up nothing. (Granted, I used 'strings -a' to extract the strings, and that command is ASCII only.)

Google, and David Creemer, provided the answer. Creemer also showed that the text in "CanoScanned" documents is selectable in Preview.app.

What's going on? It seems that the CanoScan Toolbox application is automatically performing OCR when it finishes scanning documents. For more info see zachary.com : Easy and cheap PDF Document Management (with OCR) on Mac OS X.

Synergy kudos to Canon and Apple!

Water consumption in Santa Fe

Future Water, part 1: A big straw:

"Despite growth, the citywide annual demand for water is lower now than it was in most of the 1980s and '90s. Residents used 9,600 acre-feet last year. That compares to nearly 12,000 acre-feet in 2001."

The area's estimated population: 80,000, growing at 20% per year.

Maybe it's okay that I don't water the lawn :)

Jon Udell: Discussing the re-invention of air travel with Ed Iacobucci

A conversation with Ed Iacobucci about the reinvention of air travel --
This article by Jon Udell ties together several items of significance to me: Eclipse Aviation; the Santa Fe Institute and the BIOS Group (now part of NuTech Solutions); complexity theory, Free Flight, general aviation and Byte Magazine (may it rest in peace).

Viking ship resurfaces under Merseyside boozer | The Register

From
The Register -- too funny:

"A team from Nottingham University [...] believes it has rediscovered [...] an intact Viking boat under a Merseyside pub - originally unearthed in the 1930s [...], but quickly reburied because [the builders] feared 'an archaeological dig would disrupt their work'."