It's time to green this old (White) House - again:
"During George W. Bush's two terms, workers installed three solar systems, including a thermal setup on the pool cabana that heats water for the pool and showers, and photovoltaic panels atop a maintenance shed that supplement the mansion's electrical supply. "
FactCheck.org: Education Spin:
- The high school dropout rate hasn't 'tripled in the past 30 years,' as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third[...]
- Obama also set a goal 'of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world' by 2020. But in terms of bachelor's degrees, we're nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.
Nobody listens to the real climate change experts - Telegraph:
"Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average."
"The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google "Heartland" and "Quadrant")."
"Dr Soon also described the empirical test as to whether extra carbon dioxide will produce extra warming that is conducted in Salt Lake City, and other similar cities, every winter. There, a winter CO2 dome attains CO2 levels up to 500 ppm, as compared to the present background atmospheric level of 380 ppm. Yet no discernible enhanced warming is present in the measured temperature curve for Salt Lake City. It follows that the worldwide rush to inhibit CO2, at huge cost, will have no effect on future climate whatsoever. “The role of CO2 in the climate system is just miniscule”, Dr Soon said."
"to the assembled educators -- you owe it to the next generations, who you serve, to prepare them for the world they will live in as adults, not the world we grew up in. Teach all of them the basics of journalism, no matter what they came to Cal to study. Everyone is now a journalist. You'll see an explosion in your craft, but it will cease to be a profession."
I just installed CentOS 5.2 for x86_64 under VMware Fusion 2.0.2. Most things worked without tweaking, but the mouse cursor was always offset from the host system mouse, even when VMware was running full-screen.
This post took care of the problem. If I'm reading correctly, the problem was in X11 configuration, and the fix was to use the vmmouse driver with the "CorePointer" option.
Thanks, Bradley Sepos!
PolitiFact | 8th graders are in 9th, but showing improvement, not falling:
"We considered giving the president partial credit since American students did come in 9th. But the point of his statement was that they had 'fallen' to that position and that mathematics performance in the U.S. is getting worse relative to other countries. And that's just plain False."
"...now, like Bush before him, Obama is playing the national security card to hide details of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated across the globe."
"...the proposed trade accord would [likely] criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers' communications."
No Skepticism on the Energy Gap - NYTimes.com:
"So in the end, the epic struggle over global warming, at its root, remains a struggle over how to drive energy innovation."
It presently appears that anyone on the ramp without a TSA ID is subject to fines or convictions in unknown amounts and arrest or detainment by unknown persons...
It is clear the Montrose Airport Appreciation day [...] could be a bit of an issue and the TSA suggested local law enforcement could somehow staff the escort necessities on the field. How exactly do you escort a large milling crowd?
"In short, a web hook, or "http callback" allows you to subscribe to another website's events with a URL. You tell a website, "Hey, when some event happens, send some information about it to this URL". Why? It doesn't matter, it's up to the developer to decide what to do with that information."
"A prime example is parallel sessions, which allow you to log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time. This new technology is woven throughout Stainless, from the private cookie storage system, to session-aware bookmarks that remember the session in which they were saved."
The previous post described improved support for the HTML 5 canvas. It turns out the latest betas of both Firefox and Safari also support the canvas toDataURL method.
An obvious use for this method is to let users easily copy and paste rendered depictions into other applications.
function saveToBitmap() {
var canv = $('#canv');
var img = $('img#bitmap');
img.attr('src', canv[0].toDataURL());
};
This will be useful for depicting chemical structures using HTML5 canvas: both Safari 4 beta and Firefox 3.1b2 support the HTML5 canvas text rendering APIs.
There are still rough edges, e.g. it's hard to measure text dimensions and therefore hard to position text properly. Still, it's great to see!
$(document).ready(function() {
function redraw() {
var canv = $('#canv');
var w = canv.width();
var h = canv.height();
// Let canvas know how big CSS wants it to be.
canv.attr("width", w);
canv.attr("height", h);
var ctx = canv[0].getContext("2d");
ctx.clearRect(0, 0, w, h);
var msg = "Hello, Safari text.";
var fontSpec = "24pt Verdana";
// Find out the dimensions of the rendered msg.
var e = $('<span style="visibility:hidden;font:' + fontSpec + '">' +
msg + '</span>');
$('body').append(e);
var tw = e.width();
var th = e.height();
e.remove();
ctx.save();
ctx.translate(w/2, h/2);
// Indented to highlight transformation state.
ctx.save();
ctx.rotate(-45 * Math.PI / 180.0);
ctx.translate(-tw/2, th/2);
ctx.font = fontSpec;
ctx.fillText(msg, 0, 0);
ctx.restore();
ctx.restore();
};
redraw();
});
Today I tried to install Ubuntu 8.10 on an old Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. Most of the process went well, but when I tried to login the screen went black.
Okay, sometimes it went to the default amber Ubuntu background color. No matter: I never got any windows or menus. Since I was unfamiliar with Ubuntu's key bindings, the only way out was to cycle power.
It turns out that compiz, which provides the default Ubuntu 8.10 window manager, does not like the old i845 graphics chipset.
Google eventually turned up a way to disable compiz. Here's what worked for me.
Summary
Login using a Failsafe Terminal session, remove compiz and compiz-core, then logout and log back in using an Xclient script session.
Details
Options link at the bottom left of the display.Select Session...Failsafe Terminal radio button.Change Session button.OK.sudo apt-get remove compiz compiz-coremetacity --replace &Options.Select Session...Run Xclient script radio button.Change Session.