ONLamp.com -- Tools for Geographically Distributed Software Development.
Lots of familiar stuff. Some items, such as writewith, are news to me and worth investigating, since all of my projects now involve distributed teams.
"n'Goita" is one of Aigerim's favorite words. Google didn't turn up any matches, so I thought I should create a definition page for it here.
Sometimes she says "n'Gah'ta" instead. We think this is her name for Ceniza.
National ID card a disaster in the making | CNET News.com
I wonder why those who are charged with national security so often converge on solutions which destroy the freedoms they are supposed to protect.
In a recent CNET article Mssrs Forno and Schneier summarized the Real ID national identity system system, which was approved by Congress after having been buried in a 2005 "must pass" military spending bill.
There is something in the system to worry everyone. Christians may see aspects of the mark of the beast. Jews may see reminders of sufferings they have already endured. IT types will note the increased risk of identity theft inherent in a national identity database.
... the functionality of a single database remains intact under the guise of a federated data-interchange environment.
...the very last paragraph of the 160-page Real ID document deserves special attention.,, DHS declares that states are free not to participate in the Real ID system if they choose--but any identification card issued by a state that does not meet Real ID criteria is to be clearly labeled as such, to include "bold lettering" or a "unique design" similar to how many states design driver's licenses for those under 21 years of age.
In its own guidance document, the department has proposed branding citizens not possessing a Real ID card in a manner that lets all who see their official state-issued identification know that they're "different," and perhaps potentially dangerous, according to standards established by the federal government. They would become stigmatized, branded, marked, ostracized, segregated. All in the name of protecting the homeland; no wonder this provision appears at the very end of the document.
Wired recently ran an article on probiotics. It had so many interesting observations that I've had a hard time summarizing it.
Okay, the summary is that we need bacteria in order to stay healthy.
Hacking Your Body's Bacteria for Better Health:
We assassinate microbes with hand soap, mouthwash and bathroom cleaners. But some scientists say ... all this killing may actually cause diseases like eczema, irritable bowel syndrome and even diabetes.
"Probiotics have resulted in complete elimination of eczema in 80 percent of the people we've treated," says Dr. Joseph E. Pizzorno Jr., a practicing physician and former member of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. Pizzorno says he's used probiotics to treat irritable bowel disease, acne and even premenstrual syndrome.
"After the Second World War, when our lifestyles changed dramatically, allergies increased. Autoimmune diseases like diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease are increasing," says Kaarina Kukkonen, a University of Helsinki allergy expert.
Microbial exposures early in life, scientists believe, cause mild inflammation that calibrates the body's responses to other pathogens and contaminants later in life. Without exposure as infants, researchers say, people can end up with unbalanced immune systems.
"Many of the most difficult problems in medicine today are chronic inflammatory diseases," says Blaser. "These include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, atherosclerosis, eczema and multiple sclerosis. One possibility is that they're autoimmune or genetic diseases. The other possibility is that they are physiological responses to changes in microbiota."
Microsoft has announced details of their competitor to Flash -- and to JavaScript, and to ... It's called Silverlight.
To me the most interesting thing about it is that it allows developers to build browser-side web apps using Python and Ruby instead of JavaScript.
Silverlight apps can use a subset of the .NET framework. Embedded video can run at HD revolutions up to 1280x720.
It all looks pretty interesting. It'd be more interesting if it provided a 3D API; but so far I see no evidence of that.
Sun eyes a JavaScript alternative to AJAX:
"(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems is working on Web application development technology that presents an alternative to AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a Sun official said on Thursday.
The company's Project Flair is an open-source project now in development... A version of Flair for developers to experiment with is eyed for release later this year.
Small and simple, Flair presents a 'great vehicle for experimenting with [what] I guess what you would call, sort of, collaborative object development, that kind of thing,' said Ingalls.
'AJAX sort of deals with all of the old way of doing things. It makes it simpler ... but underneath it’s still all this junky HTML, Document Object Model, CSS, all that stuff, where 30 years ago, we knew how to do that stuff cleanly with a dynamic programming language and a simple graphics model,' Ingalls said.
'Flair takes us back to that simple model and adds the collaboration [and] Web access to it,' he said.
American's imprisonment in Kazakhstan sends chilling message - International Herald Tribune:
"Despite all the Western donor money and American-financed projects aimed at reforming the judiciaries here," said Michael Hall, an analyst in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, with the International Crisis Group ... "this is all part of a bigger Central Asian trend to make their judicial systems subordinate to their presidents."
"The result is a significant retreat in America's ability to project its public and business interests in the region," he said.
"Plus, the U.S. has suffered a massive loss of credibility when it comes to talking about the rule of law and independent judiciaries in the wake of the abuses we've been hearing about in places like Guantánamo." (emphasis added)
Ancient Mass Extinctions Caused by Cosmic Radiation, Scientists Say:
"Cosmic rays produced at the edge of our galaxy have devastated life on Earth every 62 million years, researchers say."
One possibility is that organisms receive harmful doses of radiation from high-energy particles known as muons, which are produced by cosmic rays colliding with Earth's atmosphere.
"Cosmic rays themselves are not really that dangerous," said Medvedev. "They create [charged particles] that propagate down through the atmosphere—especially muons that can go below the sea level."
Russia's former president Yeltsin dies: Kremlin | Reuters:
Many Russians initially viewed Yeltsin as a hero for dismantling Communist rule. His finest hour came when, in 1991, he clambered onto a tank and raised his fist in defiance of hardline coup plotters who wanted to turn back the clock.
...in 1989 he was elected to the new Soviet Congress of People's Deputies and in June 1991 he was elected president of Russia -- still within the Soviet Union -- in a landslide.
Two months later, he faced down tanks in the Moscow streets...
From Paul Kedrosky: Twitter for Hypochondriacs:
Who is sick? is a clever idea, and similar in many ways to my 'what's going around?' idea. It allows people with symptoms of something or another -- bloody stool! sniffles! cough! muscle ache! -- to add their location and symptoms to a map.
Why clever? Because it is the data-rich beginnings of grassroots epidemiology via capturing the kinds of conversations that usually only happen in doctors' offices. You, know, 'You have a cold. That's going around'.
Technology Review: Imaging Cholesterol Buildup in the Heart: " Normally, HDL passes through arteries and attaches to low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or 'bad' cholesterol, carrying it out of arteries to the liver."
'Course that's not what the article is about. Researchers have found a way to attach markers to segments of unstable arterial plaque, using altered HDL. As a result, they can better see where unstable plaque has built up in a patient and can better identify problems which increase the risk of heart attack.
Light Therapy Spares the Scalpel and the Chemo -
Imagine you could treat cancer by taking a pill, then directing a laser light toward the location of the tumor. The growth would dissolve with no chemotherapy, and no harm to healthy tissue.
It might sound futuristic, but a select number of cancer patients already benefit from the method, called photodynamic therapy. An upgrade for the procedure could save thousands more cancer patients from the horrors of chemotherapy.
Although chemotherapy has improved over the past decade, the treatment still damages healthy tissue and causes other unpleasant side effects like nausea and a weakened immune system. The researchers hope their work will spare patients from chemo's ravages and even the surgery usually necessary to remove a tumor.
TI demos its movie projector in a phone | CNET News.com
At the CTIA Wireless 2007 show, TI is providing public demonstrations of its digital light processing (DLP) 'pico' projector, a tiny movie projector that can fit inside a cell phone.
TI showed off the components and a prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year to a few reporters. Now the company is touting a working prototype in a phone. The phone is fake, but the projector works.
I've been using TextMate for the past two years, and like it so well that I have a hard time adjusting to most other text editors. Even my old favorite, XEmacs, is now painful to use.
I recently started work on my first ASP.NET project. The customer wants the whole thing to be done with VB.NET -- another first for me.
Lots of bundles are available for TextMate, and among them is an "ASP vb.NET" bundle. Yippee! Since my Windows XP "machine" is a VM hosted under Parallels, I can develop my project in a shared folder. [Edit 2007/03/06] On the Mac side I can use the Finder's "Network" sidebar entry to connect to my VM and mount the shared folder. TextMate sees it just fine. I get to use all of the toys at once.
Almost... I think it's because of filename limitations in NTFS, but I can't check out a working copy of my subversion repository into such a shared folder -- not from the Mac side. Trying to do so fails when subversion tries to check out a file whose name contains more than one period (".").
The simplest solution seems to be to to install the excellent TortoiseSVN under XP, and to check out the working copy from Windows. In order to avoid entering my ssh password 400 times, I've also installed PuTTY and used it to generate a private/public key pair for use with the subversion server.
Parallels really makes for some head-twisting fun. Recently I attended a web meeting using GoToMeeting, running in a Parallels VM. Instead of scrambling madly to keep notes on paper, I recorded the whole thing as a QuickTime movie using iShowU, running natively on Mac OS X. Let's see, that's a screencast recorded on a Mac, of a web conference running in a Win XP virtual machine hosted on the Mac.
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says: "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory."
"Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance," Abdussamatov said.
"The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years."
N. Korea vows to denuclearize in talks - Yahoo! News: "SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea's No. 2 leader pledged his country's commitment Thursday to giving up its nuclear program amid intensifying diplomacy aimed at implementing Pyongyang's pledge to disarm."
Based on seismic readings, North Korea's nuclear test last fall might have been a dud. Could this be one reason (coming as a distant second to the prospect of mass starvation) for the North's commitment to disarmament?
When I select a file in the Finder and right click to "Open With ->", the system pauses, my backup hard drive spins up, and I get a menu showing 5 or 6 duplicate entries for, say, VLC.app.
My backup volume is often online, so it's visible to LaunchServices and Spotlight, et al. Maybe this is the root cause of my problem. But I need to leave the backup volume online because it shares a hard drive with other volumes that I need.
What to do? Is this a problem with Spotlight? With LaunchServices? Regardless of Finder misbehavior, I don't want Spotlight indexing my backup drive; it's just a mirror of my boot volume. Time for some googling.
$ sudo mdutil -s /Volumes/Backup
$ sudo mdutil -i off -E /Volumes/Backup
As of v2.0, when used with Tiger 10.4.3 or later... just add the volume to the Privacy tab of the Spotlight preference pane. We'll automatically ensure that that state is maintained, and all should work fine.
$ cd /Library/Caches
$ sudo rm com.apple.LaunchServices-*.plist
A Breath of Fresh Air: To Fight TB, Open a Window: Scientific American: "Escombe says the riskiest areas of hospitals are waiting rooms and other places where people congregate before being diagnosed. In a prior study, he and co-workers found that 30 percent of emergency department staff in a Lima hospital became infected with TB during a year."
