At work, I was finally privileged to receive a MacBook Pro back in November. Man do I love it!

One of the nice things about using the same OS at work and at home is that I exploit some of the hidden power features more consistently. One such feature on OS X is Apple’s Spotlight, the built-in desktop search service. Even better, Spotlight is easily accessible through LaunchBar, so I don’t even have to remember another key combination for search. Command-Space plus a few keystrokes gets me to web search or desktop search.

Once upon a time at work, they allowed us to have Google Desktop on Windows, which is the best desktop search I’ve ever experienced. Spotlight isn’t nearly as nice, but it works sufficiently, especially on indexing my Thunderbird e-mail. That’s where every other desktop search tool I tried, Mac or Windows, failed miserably. Indexing and searching my e-mail is pretty important, since I like to use mail for information trapping.

When migrating this blog, I decided to go casting about for a new favicon. While I probably haven’t been officially anointed a hacker, I definitely advocate the old time hacker ethic, and appreciate Eric Raymond’s use of The Glider cellular automata as “the” hacker emblem. So I’ve adopted for Mass Programming Resistance.

Besides I figure I have enough hacker cred from providing a patch for g++ 1.9, using Linux since 0.94 (a.out vs ELF binaries, fun!), and living in Emacs for 30+ years.

Recently got a chance to purchase some new music through the iTunes Music Store and Amazon MP3s.

• Evol Intent Us Against the World
• Counterstrike Back From the Grave
• Derrick Carter Fabric 56

The first two are straight up Drum ‘N Bass DJ mix efforts. 70+ minutes of hardcore riddims and tweakin acid. There’s no point looking at the track list. You just get on the train and ride the beat.

Derrick Carter’s Fabric effort is straight up Chicago House, featuring tracks from venerable names such as DJ Sneak, Cajmere/Green Velvet, and Roger Sanchez. I was surprised how well Sanchez’s My Organ held up, although I’ll always remember it as part of Little Louie Vega’s United DJ’s of America mix from way back in ‘94.

At $10 a pop for the electronic download version of each, I can recommend them all, if you’re into this style of music.

I’ve got to give a lot of credit to Discogs.com for now clearly highlighting DJ mixes. Makes my music hunting life a bit easier.

Way back in August, I proclaimed my excitement for the 2010-11 Barclay’s Premier League. While I couldn’t follow as closely as I would have liked over the winter, I’ve gotten back into it over the last few weeks. And the race has certainly become compelling!

As of a month or so ago, Chelsea, the previous champion, looked dead. Despite starting off the campaign on fire, the Blues had fallen well behind Manchester United. Apparently they had a serious mid-season swoon. Similarly, my rooting choice, Arsenal’s Gunners, sort of flamed out, showing a little too much youth. Plus they got jobbed in the Liverpool match.

Meanwhile, Chelsea had awoken and closed to within 6 points of ManU to start this weekend. The Blues got a bunch of breaks (a.k.a dubious calls) in their match against Tottenham Hotspur and eked out a win. On the other hand, Arsenal rose up and knocked off Man U at home. Chelsea closes to 3 points and plays at Man U next Sunday. Good stuff!!

Not to mention the UEFA Champions League semi-finals conclude this week. One thing I didn’t realize about top flight football in Europe is that the major powers are all playing multiple competitions simultaneously. Makes for more big matches.

So I’m liking WordPress as a blogging content management system. Some of the upsides:

• Upgrading from the Dashboard. Earlier this week I upgraded my installation with one click. This WordPress release was a security update so ease of keeping up to date is commendable.

• Theme support is great. Easy to install and easy to switch between. Having a hard time finding free, nice looking, blog oriented themes but there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

• Works well with MarsEdit. My standard workflow hasn’t been interrupted at all. In fact it’s been supplemented since MarsEdit understands WordPress pages. Wish Markdown support wasn’t a plugin but a part of the WordpPress core.

• Looking forward to using shortcodes to embed syntax highlighted code snippets.

The switch seems not to have seriously busted anything. About the only 404’s I’m seeing on the new site are for images. Images that shouldn’t even be linked to from an external site. And occasionally there’s an old permalink that didn’t get translated correctly. Those are easy to fix though.

The various search bots are visiting the new site, being bounced through old urls into the new site using HTTP redirects. I used the fairly brute force method of leaving the old static MovableType HTML files in place, but putting Php code in them to generate the HTTP redirect. Some Python fu was needed to automatically rewrite the statics pages and generate the right destination URL. That was fun hacking though. I’m gonna pat myself on the back for ingeniously avoiding linkrot.

Best of all I ran essentially the same process for New Media Hack. Now my old writings have a fresh coat of paint and are searchable.

Update: Spoke a little too soon, as I had some incorrect permalinks in the imported posts. Did a quick search and replace, bulk delete the old posts, and then reimported. Probably need to do a post by post examination.

Okay so I bit the bullet and investigated what it would take to port Mass Programming Resistance from Movable Type to WordPress. Turns out it was less painful than I thought it would be, although it took a few tries. That’s what occupied my March and early April.

Also decided my tenure at RimuHosting was getting a little stale. Thanks to the recommendations on Hacker News I’m giving Linode a twirl.

There’s still some nits and splinters I have to be careful of, but I’m feeling confident enough to pull the switch. So there probably will be some breakage around here. People subscribed in a feed reader may suffer the most.

You have been warned.

Well over two years ago, I blogged about kicking the tires on various Lisp implementations. At the time, I observed how modern machine performance had blown past the “inefficiencies” we saw back in the 80s to mid 90s.

Fast forward to last week, mid-February 2011. I’m stuck in a not-particularly captivating conference, with a relatively new Macbook Pro, dual core Intel i7 and 8 MB of memory. What’s a Lisp nerd to do, but check out how the new ride rolls. So I grab and install every Lisp and Scheme implementation under the sun, since I’ve got so much idle time, and quickly whip out a recursive fact function in all of them.

Wow! All I can say is that I was blown away by the performance observed running a few micro-benchmarks. When a Common Lisp compiles to native code and can do (fact 1000) in about a millisecond, you’re cooking with gas.

That prompted me to revisit the Lisps on my measly old, circa 2008, bottom of the line, white Macbook. Even if it’s an order of magnitude slower, we’re still looking at hundredth of a second performance. In doing so, I discovered the fabulous Quicklisp project, which makes installing Common Lisp packages butt easy across a number of implementations. Turns out there’s the nice LISPBUILDER-SDL package, which makes the cross-platform multimedia SDL library available within Common Lisp.

The above screen capture is an example from LISPBUILDER running in SBCL. If you squint close enough at the lower right, you can see the frames per second, FPS, reading. That’s a 30.29.

A compiled Common Lisp on a pokey old Macbook can easily do 30 FPS of graphics rendering. And here I am struggling to get Python up to the pace of processing.

I’ll have to get substrate implemented in SBCL just for comparison and we’ll go from there.

Given my disappointment in the current state of MovableType, I gave WordPress a little more consideration. I can overlook the Php implementation, but I was a little worried about preserving my old URLs. Some rudimentary investigation indicates that WordPress’ pretty URLs option, some creative metadata extraction from MovableType, and a little scripting could get the job done.

So I’m ready to bite the bullet and give the migration a shot. This is going to be a long term project though, so don’t expect any major changes around here soon. In fact, I’ll be working a test run on a virtual machine just to be safe.

Bonus. This also might be a way to get the New Media Hack content into a modern blogging system as well.

Six Apart has pretty much swirled down the drain. While I managed to successfully shift from MovableType 4.x to 5.x, it wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Development seems to be stagnating a bit. Might be time to switch to a new blogging platform.

The only problem is that the options are pretty limited. WordPress would be the obvious frontrunner, but I’m really not into maintaining anything based upon Php. Plus, I’d need to figure out how to import all my old content. Could switch to Posterous, but I really like hosting my own site and using MarsEdit.

After WordPress, everything else seems marginalized, although maybe I need open my aperture.

Sigh.

You might be asking, why the big celebration for getting some goofy Rube Goldbergian mail filtering process working. Basically my information trapping routine had fallen down and keeping tabs open in browsers was my version of bookmarking. At one point, I had about 4 standing Chrome windows open with double digit tabs in each window. Not to mention a few squirreled away in Safari tabs.

After I got my mail based link stashing working yesterday, I ripped through those browser tabs. 40+ links parked, with a little excerpt for each one, remotely accessible and searchable in GMail, yet indexed locally thanks to Thunderbird and Apple Mail. Took maybe about an hour, including time to select, cut, and paste the excerpt text.

Now my webtop feels much less cluttered.

I finally, Finally, FINALLY, solved a long standing conundrum that had been vexing me. The nut of the issue involved mailing links from myself to my own GMail account, using a + address, e.g. bmd+notes@example.com. I have a GMail rule to automatically file such messages into a folder. This worked great until I would mail a link from my MacBook, through MailHop. Then the message wouldn’t get autofiled, and would sort of disappear.

Initially I blamed MailHop for not forwarding a message with the same to and from addresses. Not true. Messages were getting through to GMail. In fact, once I poked around in the “All Mail” folder, there were my little self-notes.

So why wasn’t GMail running my dang filter?

Turns out I had Thunderbird set up to add a copy of the message to the “Sent” folder. So when my message was delivered through SMTP, GMail was smart enough to reconcile the incoming as already existing in my message store. Ergo, this wasn’t a new message.

And GMail only runs filters on new messages.

The quick solution was to simply turn off Thunderbird’s filing of outgoing messages. Then my links messages got autofiled. GMail was even smart enough to recognize that I sent the mail and stash it in the “Sent Mail” folder. Only problem is that if I actually sent mail to someone else, e.g. crossjam@example.com, I wouldn’t have a record of the sent mail. Through a combination of Thunderbird Bccing myself and another GMail filter I juryrigged a solution. I think.

Of course, if I just used Google’s SMTP for all my outbound mail, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. It’s what I do on my iPhone. But it’s the general principle of not having Google slurp up all of my communications, and besides I like the MailHop guys.

Whew!

One nice thing about Amazon’s Kindle is that it’s not a singular device but a multi-device platform.

This past Saturday, I hopped on the Metro to meet my Dad for the Wizards vs Celtics basketball game (Wiz Win! Wiz Win! Go home Massholes! Clap, clap, clapclapclap). There’s a pretty long ride from Northern VA into downtown DC. Traveling light, I didn’t bring the Kindle, but I was lamenting it’s absence.

The lightbulb finally went off. I realized that I had my iPhone 4, with the Kindle App installed. Synced my farthest location in Rudy Rucker’s Software and finished it up before I reached the Verizon Center.

And Calibre definitely makes it easy to get free books onto the Kindle, not to mention Amazon’s built-in e-mail transfer service.

Although they really need to let users customize the standby images displayed when the device is “off”. Or at least let you set it to blank. I can only take so many literary giants.

Gnu Emacs tastes great.

Python’s virtualenv tastes great.

Aaron Culich’s virtualenv.el takes two great tastes and makes them taste great together.

I know this one is a bit late but I have to get if off my chest.

The collegiate bowl football system is completely corrupt and the bowl season completely sucks. If it wasn’t for the pageantry and rivalries of the regular season, I probably wouldn’t tune in. My overriding thought during the BCS Championship game, which I constantly channel surfed out of, was “Get this over with, so I can go to bed!”

What makes me say this? To wit the evidence:

• Who’s dumbass idea was it to hold the BCS championship game 9 days after New Years? Used to be when New Years Day was done college football was done. I could see an exclusive evening showcase on New Year’s Day. I could see the following Monday as a fill in for Monday Night Football. A week later? That’s bull!

• 37 days of non-game action for the “student athletes”. Don’t ever buy that BS when a university president says they’re worried about a playoff “unnecessarily extending the season.”

• Other than the Rose Bowl, all the other bowls are exposed as dubious exhibitions. Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl? C’mon! And The Grandaddy of Them All is putting its tradition on thin ice with its routine disruption of the Pac-10/Big-10 matchup. The BCS has managed to uniquely ruin the other bowls in the way a playoff couldn’t.

• Not apples to apples, but Rich Rodriguez violates NCAA rules and keeps his multimillion $$ paycheck, gets fired, and keeps his multimillion $$ buyout. Bruce Pearl lies to the NCAA, keeps his job, keeps his multimillion $$ paycheck, and only has to sit out a few games. Terrelle Pryor, while working for no pay, unloads a bunch of excess gift crap, gets a 5 game suspension, and his head coach strongarms him into not considering a lucrative compensation year and competing in a future earnings deflating season. Guessing Tressel didn’t get a fine.

• Cam Newton’s dad attempts to pimp him out and somehow it’s not a violation.

• Bowl directors making high six figure salaries.

• “This is for all the Tostitos”. I’ve noticed Brent slipping as well, but really, that sentence was the punctuation on the crappiness of the whole system.

Not that it actually matters, with ESPN rolling in the ratings.

Ahhhh, that feels better. When’s The Big Game next year?

So Verizon announced today that they’ll be carrying Apple’s iPhone, starting in early February. No biggie, looks like almost exactly the same product. Even though DC is the home of Verizon, I feel no urge to switch carriers. Hopefully it’ll relieve some pressure on the AT&T network.

But I’m slightly chapped that the Verizon iPhone is enabled to act as a mobile WI-FI hotspot. Our fine friends overseas have always had this capability, but it’s sort of lame AT&T can’t turn this on. Point Verizon.

Well at least until they announce their gouging 3G data plans. Still, this might put a little heat on AT&T. As I said, that would make the dang thing pretty close to perfect for me.

Update: I was in error about iPhone mobile hotspotting in Europe. Verizon’s iPhone is the first appearance of the capability in the Apple product. I was thinking of tethering, which AT&T eventually made available in the US. According to the Boy Genius Report though, perfection may well be nigh.

Today I Learned (TIL) about GeekTool, a Mac OS X preference pane that allows an enduser to float data on the background. Images, the text of files, and most importantly, the output of shell scripts can feed GeekTool.

I stumbled upon GeekTool looking for a desktop clock for my new work MacBook Pro. For some reason, I have a hard time locating the menu bar clock, but I want something a little less transient than the Dashboard widget.

Being a UNIX guy, writing scripts to create ambient information flows is appealing. It’s a bit more complex, and less aesthetic, than iStats Menus, but way more flexible. Flexible like a sawzall.

Hat tip to Judi Smith

Typically, for whatever reason, January is a slow reading month. If I’d actually had even a half decent pace, some of these past years I might have been able to read 40+ — 50 books in a year.

Thanks to my new Kindle, looks like that might change. Of course to baptize the device, I had to read a classic, and what better than William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Per usual with every read, my opinion of Case lessens, but I’m struck by how relevant and timely the vision still is. This time around the Panther Moderns vs SenseNet scene is eerily reminiscent of Gnosis busting Gawker’s chops, the various Anonymous/4Chan hacks, and WikiLeaks. Complete with overboard response by various authorities.

But today I also completed reading Charle’s Stross’ The Fuller Memorandum, third in the Laundry Series. New Year’s vacation made some available time, but on public transit the Kindle is so convenient there are a plethora of reading opportunities. The other nice thing about the Kindle is that, presuming you’ve stocked up, as soon as you finish a book, there’s another one handy to begin.

Despite the promising start, I’m going to put myself on a modest 30 book target for the year. I will say the Kindle definitely agrees with me, although it suffers from the gravitational pull of the iOS touch interface. I often find myself trying to “swipe” on my Kindle. But once you get into a page clicking groove, man does the text get chewed up.

“Scarcity brings clarity,” is a phrase I’m fond of. I try not to use it in writing as it’s a bit shopworn. I keep the sentiment in mind though, when I’m mentally complaining about various constraints at work.

Curious as to who coined it, Google’s Eric Schmidt got my original attribution. Looking a little deeper, Sergey Brin put “scarcity breeds clarity” into the 2008 Google Founders’ Letter to investors. That seems to be the origin, although Marissa Mayer pops up in a Business Week interview with brings and a dateline a few weeks ahead of the Founders’ letter.

Guessing Sergey came up with it, or heard it somewhere else, and popularized it within Google before putting it in the letter.

Just curious.

Speaking of gadgets, after all that angst over what smartphone to get, I finally picked up an iPhone 4 in mid-September 2010 (Correction, late October). Despite dancing with the bleeding edge Android models, I got the JesusPhone (apropos Stross) mainly because I wanted to stay with AT&T.

That’s right, stay with AT&T. I’m not a huge voice user. Coverage in the DC area is pretty solid. And I wanted to fold my plan and my wife’s plan into a family plan. Prying her off off AT&T would have been more trouble than it’s worth. The choice has worked out well. Our combined plan totals about $90 a month, which isn’t a huge cost savings but now I have 2Gb of 3G connectivity a month and 200 text messages.

And the iPhone makes a great ubiquitously available, interstitial computing device. Each one uniquely kitted out with a passel of apps, they create their own pocket universes, the 3G connectivity making wormholes across space and time.

Now if they’d just get around to enabling a mobile hotspot feature, the dang thing would be perfect.

Don’t know what happened, but in 2010 I turned back into a gadget nut.

January 1, 2010 all I had was an iPod Nano, a bottom of the line MacBook, and a crappy old cell phone.

As of January 1, 2011 I have general access to:

• an iPod Touch 3G

• an iPhone 4

• an iPad (Christmas gift to my wife)

• a well provisioned MacBook Pro (work laptop)

• a Kindle 3G

• Updated: a 43” HD Television

Heck, I even broke out my old PSP to play Lumines after the iPhone version pissed me off.

We’ll see how much time I get on the iPad. My wife has taken to it pretty well. But I should have quite a bit to say this year about the iPhone 4 and the Kindle.

Miiine! All mine!

I’M BACK! D’ya miss me?

So’s Mark Farina with lucky 7 in the Mushroom Jazz series. Well almost. He’s taking pre-orders. Of course, like a fanboy, I went for the collector’s edition.

And the limited edition Mushroom Jazz 7 t-shirt.

The atoms are supposed to ship on November 9th. Hope the bits are released a week from tomorrow. Really looking forward to what he comes up with this time around.

On the blogging front, the time off was good. And now I’ve got plenty to talk about.

Victory!! It was an ugly 91 point to 66 point victory, but I’ll take it. Ugly? With a 25 point spread? I had to sweat out the Monday night game against the Green Bay defense and kicker. Yeah, it was a slim probability of defeat, but weirder things have happened.

Tom Brady did a great job as usual and the Titans’ Chris Johnson returned to form. Their combined 51 points were enough to buoy the mediocrity of the rest my team. No other players made it to double digits.

My opponent had a similar day, except only Tony Romo overperformed. Ray Rice made double digits, but underperformed.

Thanks to another underwhelming week, I’m giving up on Calvin “Megatron” Johnson. I was sort of suspicious when I drafted him as my first wide receiver, but thought the Lions might be better this year. Matt Stafford’s nursing another injury, the Lions look bad again, and Johnson has had three bad fantasy performances. See you on the waiver wire buddy.

I learned my lesson last season. Cut bait on name brands quick, before they cost you a game.

I’m a believer in meta is murder for blogging, but I’ll take a brief minute to violate the rule in this space.

My posting streak actually ended!

At first, I thought this past weekend was the death knell. I’m Mr. Mom for a while with my wife out of town on business travel. On Saturday, I lounged around watching college football, then went to an evening affair held by some family friends. My little guy got to run around a bit in the dark and burn off some energy. By the time I got home it was midnight. C’est la vie!

Subsequently I felt a distinct lack of motivation on Sunday. Ergo, I mentally declared the streak officially ovah.

However, now looking back at the Mass Programming Resistance archives, I apparently didn’t post on September 6th. I’d originally intended to end the streak on Memorial Day, but deluded myself into thinking I’d shot past that day.

If my math is correct, I’ll have to really comb the archives to make sure, I put in 191 days straight. Not bad considering holidays, work crush, and the general random intrusions of life. Time to start a new one … maybe after New Years.

Okay, I’ve gotten sucked in to EC2. Signed up for my account. Launched an instance or two. Thought I correctly uploaded my key pair but apparently that failed. So I can’t ssh into the instance.

Having fun though. I’ll get this yet.

Update. Success. Figured out I needed to log in as ec2-user.

Took a little time off in the afternoon and attended Amazon Web Services AWS Cloud for the Federal Government event. Local. Right off the Metro. Free. What’s not to like? I wasn’t exactly the target audience, being a technologist and a long time AWS observer, but I enjoyed the presentations and learned a thing or two.

Werner Vogels is a long time hero of mine. Did a productive stint in academia and then moved to the world’s pre-eminent online retailer. And not just as some high ranking engineer but as a director and then quickly rose to CTO. I’m not sure if he gets his fingers dirty building systems anymore, but the successful direction and management he’s provided AWS is astounding.

His talk at the event was mostly summary and sales pitch for someone like me. I was hoping he’d get a little more into the roadmap for AWS, but he ran out of time. Still enjoyed his presentation. Reminded me yet again that elasticity and utility pricing in computation are two rreally powerful, reinforcing concepts.

The customer presentations and panel were also quite good, especially Tom Soderstrom, the CTO of NASA JPL, and Michael Wood, the Director of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the guys that brought you Recovery.gov.

P.S. You gotta love an Internet CTO who was an early blogging adopter and who’s really into hip-hop.

P.P.S. Obtrivia, James Gosling (or one of his co-authors) has an L. L. Cool J quote in The News Book. One of the earliest computation/hip-hop mashups that I know of.

Link parkin’: Gensim is a Python framework for vector space modeling. This means taking a corpus of text documents, where document means any bag of symbols from a fixed vocabulary, turning the documents into a vector representation and then discovering latent structure within the corpus. Good for unsupervised document analysis.

I’ve been wondering for a long time about the specific implementation of a vector space model algorithm known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation or LDA. The only LDA implementations I’ve seen previously are in C++ and Java and I can’t seem to grok how they translate the LDA math into code. Maybe the Python version in Gensim will be a bit more illuminating.

The above YouTube clip was pretty much my week in a nutshell. Except the Titans even lost on top of it all.

Hopefully this is CJ2K’s worst stat line of the year. And it was truly awful. 34 rush yards? 19 receiving yards? 1 lost fumble? 0 TDs? Brutal. Given that Chris Johnson is a must start, my team basically can’t win if he has awful fantasy output like this.

Tom Brady wasn’t particularly helpful either with 2 picks and a lost fumble. My kicker and defense also were below projections for the week.

On the positive side, thank goodness Brady filled up Wes Welker’s stat line. Also, Calvin “Megatron” Johnson produced this week. But it’s tough to win with only those two.

The only upside is that I was off my optimal lineup by only 2 points. And still would have list by 14.

Update. Apologies for tweaking with the feed.

I’ve long been an admirer of Amazon’s Web Services products, but not a big user. Recently I’ve been thinking of doing some tinkering with EC2, S3, SQS, and the like. Given the current popularity of the platform amongst developers (or maybe my misguided perception of said popularity), I thought there’d be more books on the topic.

Amazon itself is surprisingly thin, with only about three to five titles that I can find which are on topic. The only O’Reilly book, Programming Amazon Web Services is over 2 years old. It’s probably sufficient to get started, but a lot has happened on the platform in that time.

Seems like there’s an interesting opportunity here.

The intersection of blogging and journalism was an emphasis of my last gig. Since I’ve moved on I’ve pretty much avoided thinking or blogging about journalism. Just callin’ it part of the past life.

But recently a few background cycles have gone to the topic and I thought I had a little epiphany.

Blogging has developed into a fundamentally emotional medium. By emotional I mean that to be an effective blogger, not even high profile, you generally have to show passion or have a point of view. The consensus is that the best bloggers bring that to their writing. Even those coming from traditional journalism have to migrate away from the typical objective, inverted pyramid of the print newsroom. TV, most people would agree, has an emotional bias due to its reliance on visual images. Audiences are being conditioned to expect this type of emotional content on the Web.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being emotionally driven, but that makes the medium somewhat in opposition to our stated principles about journalism. Dumping objectivity, non-partisanship, and rational discourse, all intended to help dampen the damaging aspects of the non-rational, leads to radicalism of all sorts. Emotional responses have a somewhat checkered past in the history of mankind.

If true, this is a troubling thesis as the Web becomes more and more interconnected with our social and cultural lives.

Just thinking out loud.

With the migration of Mass Programming Resistance, I finally downloaded the latest MarsEdit 3 release and put it to the test. For me, it’s a very evolutionary step, since I primarily use Markdown for formatting and don’t have heavy media needs. The scheduled media attachments feature is probably the biggest addition for me. Post editing can now function completely offline.

Still, the fit and finish seems like a notch above, and nothing busted. And while it’s probably because I’m using MovableType 5, posting seems much zippier. I’ll give MarsEdit 3 a little credit there.

Oh, and I anted up the $14.95 for the upgrade. Support your friendly indie Mac developer.

Okay, so I think that college football on Friday is blasphemous. (Thursday is only criminal) Make room for the high schoolers why dontcha! And the football usually sucks. I mean how many Conference USA football games are actually worth watching in any given year?

But the beloved Golden Bears are playing Nevada tonight. So I have to watch. At least make it worth my while Shane Vereen.

Addendum. Also, it’s a little odd to see Pac-10 games regularly on ESPN, other than those involving the University of Spoiled Children and/or Nike University.

Update. Well Shane Vereen tried to make it worth my while. Unfortunately, the defense, with an assist from Kevin Riley, didn’t. Cal gets smoked 52-31.

One of the pleasures of finding the living Strictly Rhythm site was discovering the availability of Tony Humphries Strictly Rhythm Mix Vol. 2 for purchase from the Defected Store. This was one of the earlier DJ mix CDs I ever bought and it still sounds great to this day.

I’ve got a lot of mixes of Strictly Rhythm tracks, but this might be the most enduring of them. The key is that it doesn’t overdose on the high profile Strictly Rhythm hits. Humphries’ mix is mainly a lot of solid mid-level tracks that most house DJs would know, but wouldn’t call classic. River Ocean’s Love & Happiness might qualify but after that, you’ve just got good old thumping tracks. I’ve got a particular fond spot for M & M’s So Deep, So Good, the Banji Boys Love Thang, and R. B. M.’s Latin Flavor.

The mix is also illustrative of the peak of Strictly Rhythm’s “Wild Pitch” era, ala D. J. Pierre. Lots of hard beats, not nearly as austere as acid house, but having many of the same synth lines. Trancey but with a lot of danceable energy. Plus a lot of Latin flavor.

Good stuff, and it’s been kickin’ in my iPod Touch recently.

Link parkin’: python-dateutil looks to be fairly mature, but parsedatetime seems to handle a wider variety of date expressions.

VICTORY!!

Doom Patrol rolled this fantasy weekend, racking up a league leading 142.5 points. Chris Johnson, Tom Brady, and Wes Welker were the big performers, each going for over 20 points. Everyone else on my team, including my kicker and defense, went for double digits. Except for Calvin Johnson, who was robbed.

The great thing about this win is that I used the optimal lineup, so there were no points left on the bench.

The scary thing about this win, is that my opponent left Arian Foster and Pierre Thomas on the bench, who scored 42.3 (yes you read that right) and 16.1 points respectively. His optimal lineup would have beat me, so in some sense I benefit big from an opponent’s mistake. Then again, it’s really hard to sit the Falcon’s Michael Turner who was on his roster, so it’s not clear that any reasonable person would have played that optimal lineup.

Onward and upward. This coming week all of my players face tough defenses, so getting a victory will be a bit of a challenge.

It’s been well over 4 years since I officially pulled out of Chicago at the end of my previous gig. That was the last time I used a desktop machine on a regular basis. Oh sure, I’ve still got the Dell box running the latest Ubuntu server edition, but that machine’s stuffed in the basement of the townhouse. I generally ssh into it, and the only time I use the attached monitor is when I’m upgrading the distro.

I don’t quite know what that really says but it seems like a sign of something. I’m not in the nerd top 1% but I’m up there. In college, I built a computer out of wire, chips, and breadboard. I programmed it with switches. The only output it had was blinkenlights.

That was some of the most fun I ever had.

There have been a few times since where I’ve thought, “Wonder what I can get at the low end of the desktop market.” Now I’m not sure I’m even interested, although a Mac Mini is a little tempting. Only because I could probably afford a good laptop in addition to a used Mac Mini or micro-PC. Still, I’m probably much more inclined to get just a 15” MacBook pro, like a lot of the folks on The Setup.

What it really says is that mobility has trumped all. The laptop is the briefcase of our era. Soon that might be the pad.

Reminds me, I need to get around to buying an app phone.

On this inaugural NFL Sunday, I thought I should check in with the results of my office league’s fantasy draft, even though I know you don’t care.

As defending champion, I was expecting to have no luck with my draft position. Just planning on the fantasy gods to screw me. I was pleasantly surprised to see my team’s icon come up in the number one slot. Makes drafting a bit easier. For posterity’s sake here’s the results.

1. (1) Chris Johnson (Ten - RB)

2. (16) Tom Brady (NE - QB)

3. (17) Calvin Johnson (Det - WR)

4. (32) Cedric Benson (Cin - RB)

5. (33) Dallas Clark (Ind - TE)

6. (48) Wes Welker (NE - WR)

7. (49) LeSean McCoy (Phi - RB)

8. (64) Ronnie Brown (Mia - RB)

9. (65) Brett Favre (Min - QB)

10. (80) C.J. Spiller (Buf - RB)

11. (81) Philadelphia (Phi - DEF)

12. (96) Jeff Reed (Pit - K)

We’ve only got an eight team league, so there’s plenty of depth on every team. Number in parens is the overall draft position in our league. There’s some pretty solid free agents available, so I expect we’ll see a lot of matchup plays over the course of the season. Defense and kickers I always deal with week-to-week myself.

I was pretty happy with the results, even though I’ve already dumped a couple of guys before the season started. Tom Brady, Chris Johnson, and Dallas Clark are no-brainers. I feel really strong at running back with Cedric Benson, Ronnie Brown, and C.J. Spiller, plus I dumped LeSean McCoy for Arizona’s Tim Hightower. That basically makes for 4 #1 running backs alongside Chris Johnson.

I’m a little worried about my wide receivers. We’ll see how Wes Welker holds up, and Calvin Johnson is playing for the Lions. I may have to trade a couple of backs to get a really consistent wideout.

I’m feeling pretty good about this year. This draft was definitely way better than last year’s. Doom Patrol has a fighting chance from the get-go.

George Packer, of The New Yorker, perfectly expresses what often keeps me up at night:

Nine years later, the main fact of our lives is the overwhelming force of unreason. Evidence, knowledge, argument, proportionality, nuance, complexity, and the other indispensable tools of the liberal mind don’t stand a chance these days against the actual image of a mob burning an effigy, or the imagined image of a man burning a mound of books. Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives up.

What tools do we have these days to counter Teh Crazy?

Way back when RSS aggregators were the new hotness, Bloglines was one of the earliest large scale, commercial, web based feed readers. This was even before Google Reader.

Of course as a feedophile, I jumped on the platform and greatly enjoyed the service. It had its quirks, but at that point the bar hadn’t really been set.

Then Google Reader came along, and put an end to that relationship.

A combination of Google browser user interface fu and Bloglines just running aground with technical glitches after being purchased by Ask did them in.

Now it looks like Bloglines has pretty much completely dribbled away the significant launch lead it had and sizable chunk of its audience as well. TechCrunch has the exclusive that Ask has finally decided to shut down Bloglines. I won’t be in mourning but this’ll be one more thing I can remind the youth of the ‘Net about in my dotage. Kids, once upon a time there was another aggregator besides Google Reader. And it used frames! Not that newfangled AJAX stuff.

Picked this up from O’Reilly Radar. Steve von Worley’s Data Pointed looks like an interesting take on data science:

The Data Pointed recipe? One part magazine, with original, longer-format articles that document our in-house research endeavors, and two parts blog, chronicling interesting developments from elsewhere within the field of data art and visualization. Combine, add a pinch of comedy and half a thesaurus, pressure cook until tender, and bon appétit! To receive updates fresh-and-hot, please do subscribe to the RSS feed, follow on Twitter, or fan on Facebook.

Consider me subscribed.