I just want to say that this sequence of blog posts by Niall Cooling is a great, detailed discussion about mutexes and semaphores.

• Part 1: Semaphores
• Part 2: The Mutex
• Part 3: Mutual Exclusion Problems

This is really well done.

Empire State Of Mind – Forest Hills State of Mind with Billy Eichner and Rachel Dratch:

(via Gothamist)

This is mostly for my reference, to document a fucking sick night with Glassjaw, Thursday, and United Nations.

Mu Empire:

John Lennon:

Tip Your Bartender:

Ape Dos Mil

Pink Roses

Pretty Lush

Siberian Kiss

Babe

Autobiography of a Nation

Signals Over the Air

Revolutions in Graphic Design

And DIllinger Escape Plan played even after the projection screen was dropped and the house music came on:

De La Vega Museum: recommended. I even received my change in $2 bills.

This was down the street and kind of beautiful:

bicycles¹

Thursday²

boston³

craft beer⁴

disaster⁵

bahn mi⁶

buses⁷

(loud) music⁸

(searching for) companionship⁹

warm bed¹⁰

brooklyn¹¹

vegetables¹²

postcards¹³

darkness¹⁴

1. IRO Bike 012 copy by Ninj0x, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
2. thursday_01 by charlie_cravero, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
3. Downtown Boston *E#1 by castevens12, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
4. On Tap by forklift, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
5. The Phillips ICU monitor by Alin_S, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
6. bahn mi by u_m_a_m_i, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
7. December 22 2007 by seaworthy, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
8. At last, my meditation room awaits by A-Wix, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
9. Love is companionship by isolano, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
10. On My Bed by windy_sydney, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
11. Riding Over the Williamsburg Bridge in the AM by Seth W., licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
12. Morocco, vegetable-market by docman, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
13. Postcard Board by ocherdraco, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]
14. Into the darkness… by cosmic_spanner, licensed under Creative Commons [↩]

I’m currently reading Christian Benvenuti’s excellently written Understanding Linux Network Internals from O’Reilly which is helping to shore up my knowledge about how the networking stack is implemented in Linux. It’s a fantastic read so far, on course to match Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love, one of my all-time favorite books.

The following paragraph from Benvenuti’s book really made me step back and take a look at the bigger picture:

A device driver can also disable the egress queue before a transmission (to prevent the kernel from generating another transmission request on the device), and re-enable it only if there is enough free memory on the NIC; if not, the device asks for an interrupt that allows it to resume transmission at a later time. Here is an example of this logic, taken from the el3_start_xmit routine, which the drivers/net/3c509.c driver installs as its hard_start_xmit function in its net_device structure…

That passage is just brilliant. Count the occurrences of jargon there!

I guess i should read more arXiv papers to better understand how much larger the world actually is.

Some things around the internet today:

• The Ten Worst Muppets – I honestly don’t know all of the Muppets, but as a geek and someone who used to wear sweatervests, I resent that Dr. Bunsen Honeydew is listed as number eight. Dr. Honeydew has inspired generations of once-normal children to aspire to be inventors, engineers, and wear lab coats.

  Dr. Honeydew in action:

  Amusingly, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s archnemesis, as shown above, lives on in Rob Dobi’s recent acquisition.

• Rep. Peter King (R-NY) Wants Military Tribunal For Plane Terror Suspect – Ergo Peter King only ever wants the Constitution applied when he deems it fit and proper. That clause has never been included in that document, no matter how much posturing politicians wanted it.
• XBMC 9.11 came out today and looks super awesome. Congrats to the XBMC team! I’m readying my box for it now.

Wednesday is Thursday (and Dillinger Escape Plan, and United Nations(!), and Glassjaw(!)). I’m super excited, especially after this post from Thursday:

thursdayband: Thinking up some surprises for the holiday set list!

I seriously have to finish an entire day of work with this anticipation?

The Twitpic Terms of Service currently reads:

By uploading your photos to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your photos on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites

All images uploaded are copyright © their respective owners

I sent the following to the generic email address publicly available, even though Twitpic a service I only use as a content consumer, not as a content producer:

From: Eric Garrido
To: support@twitpic.com
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Please support Creative Commons
Reply-To:

Twitpic,

Please consider supporting Creative Commons by allowing new users to
specify to license their content by default under one of the available
licenses, and specifying per-work that a CC license may or may
not apply.

Creative Commons makes for a more useful internet and should be
actively encouraged where there is a democratized content creation
arena.

Please consider making the internet even better by allowing your
users the choice of Creative Commons.

Thanks,
Eric Garrido

Creative Commons is an organization that has published a set of standardized, but evolving, copyright licenses intended to increase content sharing on the internet. As a content producer, you can choose who can use your work and in what manner. For example, this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License which allows normal people to repost whatever I’ve written as long as it is used non-commercially and they cite where the content came from.

Creative Commons is basically a legal democratizer for the internet. It allows you to share the content you’ve published publicly, since all content is immediately covered under a strict copyright law unless otherwise specified.

Please think about publishing your own work (on Flickr, your blog, or elsewhere) under one of the Creative Commons licenses.

Using my nifty XSLT posted below, I’ve updated my sidebar links to reflect what I’m actually reading these days. I just pruned down my subscriptions: I had like 30 cycling blogs that were good, but time consuming. (How many pictures of Chinese girls on bikes do you really need to see in your week?)

Not all of those I read are below and to the right for other reasons.

Also, if anyone knows of any good links I might like or blogs of our friends, send them to me.

• Ars Technica – More edited than slashdot, but less good content.
• tongue but no door (dot) net – Todd and Tony (mostly), who are friends from Bard (and are now doing super awesome things)
• bdotr – Benny’s tumblr. Oooh. Pretty pictures.
• Bike Blog NYC – Happenings in the NYC Cycling scene.
• Brooklyn Bike And Board – Cool bike shop in Brooklyn.
• but we’re the best – Marisa, who needs to write more.
• Casey – Casey’s blog
• NYT City Room Blog – Inside gossip about my island.
• DreamHost Blog – My webhost’s hilarious blog.
• Events at the New York Academy of Sciences – They have awesome super-nerdy events all the time, often free.
• FinalGear.com News – The best way to get torrents of Top Gear.
• Linus’ Git Repo – A great way to keep up-to-date with Linux kernel changes and hot topics.
• Gothamist – NYC Survival Guide.
• I sleep with my hands across my chest – Jenn, who needs to update more
• John Napiorkowski’s Perl Development Blog – Cool Perl developer who has interesting things to say.
• Just a Theory – Another cool Perl developer who has interesting things to say.
• mollyclare.com – Molly, who is amazing.
• Musings of an Anonymous Geek – A sysadmin/sysdev guy.
• NewYorkology – Random posts about New York
• bwong notebook – Benny’s notebook.
• Nullsleep | Jeremiah Johnson – Nullsleep’s tumblr. Former boss, current badass.
• NYCLU – Events Feed – The local ALCU chapter’s events.
• nylug-announce – The New York Linux User Group’s events.
• OkTrends – OKCupid’s Statistics Blog.
• Pacific Standard Blog – A cool bar in Brooklyn.
• Perlsphere – a collection of Perl blogs.
• Schneier on Security – All hail god Schneier.
• Secret Science Club – Monthly geeky meeting in Brooklyn.
• Slashdot – The Holy Bible (that is updated every day!).
• SMBlog — Steve Bellovin’s Blog – An awesome security researcher at Columbia.
• steady footing – Laura’s tumblr.
• The Five Year Plan – Allison’s blog.
• The Sustainable Cyclist – Sustainability + Cycling = win.
• Thursdizzle – Best band in my entire head.
• Tree Lobsters! – Amazing webcomic about lobsters in trees!
• Varun’s Blog Feed – Varun, my brother.
• Whitney Live Blog – Whitney Live events.
• words via jon – Jon, who ____. (I forgot what I meant to say in the initial post, but Jon is also a great guy).
• xkcd.com – best web comic ever.
• xkcd blag – best web comic ever’s blog.

The following some XSLT sufficient to transform an OPML file into a list, ready for you to edit and post:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  exclude-result-prefixes="xhtml xsl xs">

    <xsl:template match="body">
        <ol><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
            <xsl:for-each select="outline">
                <li> <a href="{@htmlUrl}" ><strong><xsl:value-of select="@text" /></strong></a> - your text </li><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </ol>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

It isn’t 100% complete, but will get you a list of the form:

<ol>
    <li><a href="URL"><strong>Title</strong></a> - your text</li>
</ol>

In a sane interface to an operating system, you can run the following to produce transformed output, given the XSL above and an OPML file:

$ xsltproc extract.xsl google-reader-subscriptions.xml