My 2009.

Personal — December 31, 2009 at 6:50 pm

bicycles1

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ninj0x/3749898579/

Thursday2

http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlie_cravero/3556470077/in/photostream

boston3

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beantown/3439594937/

craft beer4

http://www.flickr.com/photos/forklift/3267289921/

disaster5

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alinssite/4175517381/

bahn mi6

http://www.flickr.com/photos/umami88/33620171/

buses7

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelcr/2149129662/

(loud) music8

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wicks/2192531042/

(searching for) companionship9

http://www.flickr.com/photos/isolano/438509016/

warm bed10

http://www.flickr.com/photos/windysydney/2313779184/

brooklyn11

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sethw/278250870/

vegetables12

http://www.flickr.com/photos/docman/5053155/

postcards13

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ocherdraco/3296009/

darkness14

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cosmic_spanner/3743184586/

  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 []

Excerpt from “Understanding Linux Network Internals”

Coding,Geekery,Linux — December 30, 2009 at 6:24 pm

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 news items.

Personal — December 30, 2009 at 5:00 am

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?

Please support Creative Commons

Geekery — December 29, 2009 at 9:10 pm

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.

Updated links

Personal — December 28, 2009 at 9:30 pm

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.

XSLT for OPML to XHTML List

Coding,Geekery,Linux — December 28, 2009 at 8:45 pm

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"?></p>

<p><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"></p>

<pre><code>&lt;xsl:template match="body"&gt;
    &lt;ol&gt;&lt;xsl:text&gt;
</code></pre>

<p></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></p>

<p>

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

</p>

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

<p>

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

Schneier on Terrorist Plot

Geekery — December 26, 2009 at 6:29 pm

The below is from from Schneier on the terrorist plot. Normally I don’t lift posts in their entirety, but this one is just logical:

Chechen terrorists did it in 2004. I said this in an interview with then TSA head Kip Hawley in 2007:
I don’t want to even think about how much C4 I can strap to my legs and walk through your magnetometers.
And what sort of magical thinking is behind the rumored TSA rule about keeping passengers seated during the last hour of flight? Do we really think the terrorist won’t think of blowing up their improvised explosive devices during the first hour of flight? For years I’ve been saying this:
Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.
This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

This is something that makes me excited.

Personal — December 8, 2009 at 9:25 pm

Moving Mountains – Lights And Shapes (Official Video) from Gregory Dunn on Vimeo.

One day soon, I promise I’ll post something with original content.

This is dedicated to bdotdub

Random — December 4, 2009 at 10:47 pm

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. | Eric Garrido