From the January 7, 2009 New York Times article, “Data Analysts Are Mesmerized by the Power of Program R”:
“I think it addresses a niche market for high end data analysts that want free, readily available code,” said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”
Anne Milley, you’re doing it wrong.
New York Times: MTA Sells Brooklyn Subway Station Naming Rights To Barclays
Dear New York City government,
Please don’t sell our city, like some other bloke did to his.
Thank you kindly,
Eric
This past weekend, Leah, Casey, Molly, and I attended the second session of the 2009 American Craft Beer Fest held in Boston. It was a beer lover’s dream: 75 American craft breweries offering unlimited samples of 300 of their finest beers (at 2 ounces at a time). This is the place in a beer lover’s dream, a place where the last rule about the event was “Respect Beer” with a capital B, a place where one of the most distinct differences between America and the rest of the lot was celebrated, and a place where being a hot Asian girl ______________ .
Below is a list of the beers we sampled. Italics indicates that it was really damn good. Admittedly though, I don’t think there was a beer that I wouldn’t mind having again.
To play off of the recent meme over on Planet Ubuntu, I’d like to reiterate how awesome my ISP, Natural Wireless, is:
Bruce Schneier pointed out a great essay, “Why No More 9/11s?” by Timothy Noah on Slate. It’s long, but worth the read.
The essay is divided into eight parts that discuss the various theories as to why there has not been a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11:
I. The Terrorists-Are-Dumb Theory: 9/11 was a lucky shot, being a big-time terrorist is hard.
II. The Near-Enemy Theory: It’s easier to attack the closer enemy (Iraq, Afghanistan) than far (US soil).
III. The Melting-Pot Theory: The US has been more successful in assimilating Muslims into society.
IV. The Burden-Of-Success Theory: It’s hard to do better than 9/11, so don’t.
V. The Flypaper Theory: It’s easier to attack Americans in the Middle East than in the US.
VI. The He-Kept-Us-Safe Theory: Part of why George Bush will be considered the worst president in United States history.
VII. The Electoral-Cycles Theory: (Non-)Correlation of terrorist attacks with US electoral events.
VIII. The Time-Space Theory: Applying rational-choice theory to terrorism.
My new daydream for my future. Maybe I should start wearing sweater vests.
I just want to give a public shout out to Brookfield Properties for being cool with us geeks bringing our foldable bikes into One New York Plaza.
The midtown offices would probably have none of that
Next wish: provide centralized bike parking. Or at least non-rotating doors that actually open.
I’ve started to use ratpoison on my netbook. I’ve made a script that displays a menu of power-related actions and the current state of the battery. Here is a screenshot:
[discharging 58%]
SLEEP
HIBERNATE
REBOOT
SHUTDOWN
LOCK
The script uses ratmenu to actually display the menu and uses dbus to send signals.
By no means an authoritative or ranked list.
I’ll come up with more another day.
I decided I wanted to take five minutes today to implement a simple idea I’ve had for a long time. When I get home, I typically eat dinner while reading news in my RSS reader and I’ve found less and less time to write my own posts. I simply wanted to be able to bookmark the things I found interesting and have them automatically appear as a weblog entry.
Part one was getting the data from Delicious, which is the obvious choice for bookmarking. They make it really easy to get all bookmarks made on the last day of activity with a given tag with their posts/get function. To get all bookmarks I made today with a tag of “viewed”, I simply ran:
$ curl 'https://minusnine:password@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/get?dt=2009-04-07&tag=viewed' > todays.xml
which saves an XML form of the posts.
Transforming the XML into a list is a trivial task but I saw two approaches: sed would do nicely for the crufty old sysadmin in me, but XSLT satisfies the young whippersnapper in me.
The XSLT is very simple and elegant:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/posts">
<span>Posts around the web that I found interesting today:</span>
<ul>
<xsl:apply-templates select="post">
</xsl:apply-templates>
</ul>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="post">
<li>
<a href="{@href}">
<strong>
<xsl:value-of select="@description"/>
</strong>
</a>: <xsl:value-of select="@extended"/>
</li>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Combining these with xsltproc:
$ xsltproc posts.xsl todays.xml
yields a cut-and-pastable post. The next step is to pipeline these (also trivial) and upload it to my Wordpress installation.