The amazing thing about crashes is that you can see them coming...
Now we’re about to see the U.S. government crash, for the same reason.
Waxman topples Dingell for key panel chair - Yahoo! News:
"Rep. Henry Waxman — a liberal ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi — has wrested the chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee from veteran Rep. John Dingell when the new Congress convenes in January."
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google | Photodoto:
"LIFE has released over 10 million images on a new hosted image service from Google and in Google Image Search. They claim [...] that the collection contains ‘some of the most iconic images of the 20th century.’
LIFE is selling fine art prints (in partnership with Qoop it seems) of the collection and the photos are only available online as 1 megapixel scans."
Outstanding.
From President-elect Obama promises “new chapter” on climate change | Change.gov:
The Global Climate Summit is a "2-day event arranged by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to break gridlock on the issue ahead of next month's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland."
President-elect Obama posted a short video expressing enthusiasm for the summit:
"...too often, Washington has failed to show the same kind of leadership. That will change when I take office."
I'm evaluating FlexBuilder 3, and have just installed the Flex Builder 3.0.2 update. All of a sudden I can't debug my AIR project.
The error dialog displays a lengthy message which ends with:
error while loading initial content
*-app.xml file and change the namespace (2nd line) to 1.5:
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5">
Prophesy of economic collapse 'coming true' - New Scientist:
Changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with [the predictions in "Limits to Growth"] of collapse in the 21st century, says Turner.
According to Herman Daly of the University of Maryland, Turner's results show that we 'must get off the growth path of business as usual, and move to a steady state economy,' stopping population growth, resource depletion, and pollution."
"United Airlines will become the first US carrier to demonstrate how next-generation technologies could save more than two thousand gallons of fuel and cut up to 55,000 pounds of carbon emissions on a single, trans-Pacific flight."
Within minutes of landing, United will calculate and publish the actual savings realized on this flight.
...in 2002, [the UN] adopted a new theory that shocked many demographers: human population is leveling off rapidly, even precipitously, in developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to follow...
The world's women... had fewer kids because they moved to town.
Cities are population sinks-always have been... A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion...
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated.
This Yahoo! News article has me wondering again about the pros and cons of the Pickens Plan:
"Billionaire T. Boone Pickens expects to know within 100 days of Barack Obama taking over as president in January whether the U.S. government is going to adopt part of his ambitious and controversial energy plan.
The plan calls for an eventual overhaul of the power grid and Pickens is also betting on huge growth in wind power. But he said, as a start, the United States can move toward using natural gas in trucks as well as more renewable power."
It seems pretty straightforward that electric vehicles beat CNG vehicles almost 2:1, even using existing NG power plants. If the US upgraded its NG power plants to be 60% efficient, instead of 39% efficient, we would have 54% more TWh, or even better, use less 35% less NG.
[The I.C.C.] sought — and received from Congress — broader authority under the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, in order to restrict the activities of truckers [emph. added]. This allowed railroads to survive under new economic conditions, despite truck competition that was more efficient for various kinds of freight hauling.
Since 1980, through technology and innovation, the railroad industry has improved locomotive fuel efficiency by over 80%.
Because I keep forgetting: In TextMate, you can toggle the selected text from lowercase_with_underscores to camelCase by typing Control-Shift-Minus (^_).
When the lights go on at the New York Times, our work can start:
"But the Times is attracting an all-star team of information architects, interactive graphics designers, programmers, and media producers. And according to Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter, these folks are increasingly collaborating with reporters to marshall complex information in ways that make the newspaper’s stories deeper and more open to independent analysis and interpretation."
From Ed Taekema's weblog, a reminder[1] about how to create a web server in one line of Python:
python -c 'import SimpleHTTPServer;SimpleHTTPServer.test()'
http://localhost:8000/) it will by default serve index.html; if index.html doesn't exist, it will give you a directory listing. Also, the server will provide only those files residing in or below the current working directory; e.g. http://localhost:8000/../ resolves to the default document.file:/// URLs. This would be handy as a jqUnit test, as well.Back in January I posted about Leopard, 'ls -l' and extended attributes. The gist was that my man pages were out of date, so they didn't explain what the @ character represented, in 'ls -l' output.
Some threads on the Apple discussion boards have investigated why the man pages don't get updated. The conclusion is that Leopard installs a lot of gzip-compressed man pages without deleting the corresponding uncompressed man pages. (It may be that this is true only for upgrade installs.) A recommended workaround was to scan through the man page directories with a shell command, re-locating all uncompressed man pages which had corresponding compressed man pages.
I decided to be cowardly in doing this. Here's a Python script which moves each uncompressed man page only if it is older than its corresponding gzipped man page.
The script must be run with superuser privileges, e.g. sudo python mv_old_man_pages.py
It processes all of the man pages under /usr/share/man, moving old, uncompressed man page files to ~/tmp/old_man_pages.
I would post this to the Apple discussion forums, but it's really overkill. The short shell scripts already posted should work fine, if you ignore the harmless error messages and process each man/man* directory manually.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"Remove obsolete uncompressed man pages on an OS X Leopard system."
import sys, os, logging
def candidateOldManPages():
os.chdir("/usr/share/man")
for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk("."):
for f in filenames:
if f.endswith(".gz"):
fOld = f[:-3]
if fOld in filenames:
yield os.path.join(dirpath, f), os.path.join(dirpath, fOld)
def findOldManPages():
for p, pOld in candidateOldManPages():
s = os.stat(p)
try:
sOld = os.stat(pOld)
except os.error, info:
# Some man pages may be broken symbolic links
logging.warn("Can't stat (%s, %s): %s" % (p, pOld, info))
if os.path.islink(pOld):
yield pOld
else:
if s.st_mtime > sOld.st_mtime:
yield pOld
def mvOldManPages():
topDestDir = os.path.expanduser("~/tmp/old_man_pages")
for relpath in findOldManPages():
dirname = os.path.dirname(relpath)
filename = os.path.basename(relpath)
destDir = os.path.join(topDestDir, dirname)
if not os.path.exists(destDir):
os.makedirs(destDir)
logging.debug("mv %s %s" % (relpath, os.path.join(destDir, filename)))
os.rename(relpath, os.path.join(destDir, filename))
def main():
"""Mainline for standalone execution"""
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG,
format="%(levelname)s: %(message)s")
mvOldManPages()
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()