Tor.com's Irene Gallo gathers together an absolutely fantastic gallery of science fiction artwork that quotes famous works of fine art. I'm all over John Mattos's Mos Eisley reimagined as Picasso's Three Musicians.

Art History Through Sci Fi-Colored Glasses

Wraps rbaddeventhook so you can write fast ruby event hook processors w/o the speed penalty that comes with settrace_func (sooo sloooow!). Calls back into ruby so you don't have to write C.

% ruby demo.rb 
# of iterations = 1000000
                          user     system      total        real
null_time             0.120000   0.000000   0.120000 (  0.125279)
ruby time             0.560000   0.000000   0.560000 (  0.562834)
event hook            3.160000   0.010000   3.170000 (  3.175361)
set_trace_func       34.530000   0.100000  34.630000 ( 34.942785)

Changes:

1.1.1 / 2012-02-04

• 1 bug fix:

  • Re-releasing to fix RubyInline dependency. Old bug in hoe/inline plugin.

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/seattlerb

An 83-year-old woman with a badly infected lower jaw had the entire thing replaced with a 3D printed titanium/bioceramic replica. The surgery was performed by doctors from the University of Hasselt (Belgium) in collaboration with Dutch surgeons.

The 3D printer prints titanium powder layer by layer, while a computer controlled laser ensures that the correct particles are fused together. Using 3D printing technology, less materials are needed and the production time is much shorter than traditional manufacturing. The mandible was finally given a bioceramic coating compatible with the patient's tissue by BioCeramics in Leiden. The artificial jaw weighs 107 grams, it is only 30 grams heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it.

The operation was performed in June last year in the hospital in Sittard-Geleen. One day later the lady could start talking and swallowing.

83 year-old woman got 3D printed mandible (Thanks, Don!)

Chris sez, "My name is Chris Peterson. I run web communications for MIT Admissions and have been a loyal BB reader for years. For the last several years we have been sending our admitted students their acceptance letters in cardboard tubes. First because we sent a poster, but now it's its own thing. 2012 is the anniversary of an old MIT balloon hack, so we put a letter in all of the Early Action admit tubes telling them we wanted them to hack the tubes somehow, and set up http://hackthetubes.mitadmissions.org to collect responses. Lots of them are great, but this one, from Erin King (MIT '16) in Georgia, is the best."

16 year old girl from Georgia launches her MIT acceptance letter into near space (Thanks, Chris!)

I don't know an awful lot about fingernail painting, but this seems like a pretty straightforward painting task, and the effect is pretty awesome.

Converse Nails (via Super Punch)

delicious.com

Joly sez, "Rebecca Mackinnon discusses her new book 'Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom' (Basic Books) with Mark Whitaker, managing editor for CNN Worldwide, at The New America Foundation NYC on Feb 1 2012."

I've got a copy of this book at the top of my read-for-review pile. I can't wait. Rebecca's views on international relations and the Internet -- especially the role the Internet plays in both the struggle for freedom and the suppression of freedom in China -- are the most thoughtful, best informed in the field. Here's the site for the book.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Thanks, Joly!)

A clean rip of the CDs was a great place to begin. I took all my discs to ReadyToPlay, a service down in Palo Alto. They aren't the cheapest (I paid $1.40/disc) but they came well recommended and their website does a good job explaining how they take extra care with metadata. I was really happy with the result of their work and enthusiastically recommend them.

ReadyToPlay's setup is a few robots loading discs into CD-ROM drives with dbPowerAmp doing the ripping and conversion. They ripped to Apple Lossless (m4a); now that Apple has opened the format it seems the best choice. ReadyToPlay licenses high quality metadata from All Music Guide and other sources so album and artist names are much more accurate than I've seen from free sources. They also do some hand editing and data entry as well as careful handling of the CDs and cases. Money well spent.

ReadyToPlay got me started with a metadata schema. Just 18 genres without silly micro classification. Artist vs. Album Artist vs. Composer is a headache, particularly with Classical music, but iTunes mostly does the right thing even if Sonos is a bit confusing. One clever thing ReadyToPlay did was stuff detailed genre info into the Grouping tag, so while Autechre shows up as "Electronic" in the basic Genre I can also find it in iTunes via a search for "Techno" or "IDM" or "Experimental".

I didn't really need to edit any of the ReadyToPlay metadata, it was correct from the start. The other music was more of a mess. I'm surprised at how poorly labelled Bleep and Amazon's early MP3 sales were. It took a few hours to collapse down the genres, fix up mislabeled album titles, and try to figure out what some of these unlabeled BBC Essential Mix tracks really were. But all that work is done and now I've got a great, easy to use music collection.

Anyone want to buy several boxes of used CDs?

Stowe, VT

• Finally back home with my loved ones. #

This afternoon some friends and I will be playing this new game we really like in Yerba Buena Gardens, and you're welcome to join us.

Johann Sebastian Joust is basically like high-tech tag. Each person has a Playstation Move controller, and the object of the game is to jostle other people's controllers so that you're the last man standing. The twist is that as you play, a Bach concerto will also be playing and its tempo indicates the upper threshold for how much your controller can be jostled before you're out.

If you want to play, we'll be in Yerba Buena Gardens today at 5PM. You don't need to bring anything, we have a full set of controllers, and we'll trade off. See you there!

Derryl Murphy sez, "Drew Smith's lovely new song 'Smoke and Mirrors' needed a video, so he decided to outsource it. The result is wonderful."

So I outsourced my video to Bangalore, India. Why? Well, I figured the last thing the world needed was another low-budget singer songwriter video. Fortunately, the first Virtual Assistant I found on google also happened to be a dance choreographer. After a couple of emails and phone calls, I received this beautiful video in my inbox. Many thanks to Asha Sarella and Vishwas Avathi. I can't thank you enough!

Drew Smith - Smoke And Mirrors (Thanks, Derryl!)

Apparently inspired by the Polish parliamentarians who showed up for work in Guy Fawkes masks for the signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a US-driven secret copyright treaty), members of Bulgaria's parliament repeated the trick.

The MPs say they support copyright laws, but oppose ACTA over its possible turning into an instrument to limit freedom of speech, to control internet use, and to turn into an obstacle for the exchange of information and knowledge online.

On January 26, the Bulgarian government signed in Tokyo the international ACTA agreement, vowing to make downloading content similar to forgery of brands.

The agreement was sealed by Bulgarian ambassador to Japan Lyubomir Todorov, based on a decision by the Bulgarian cabinet taken hastily on January 11.

Bulgarian MPs Wear Guy Fawkes Mask to Protest ACTA (via Techdirt)

Michael Geist sez, "I've posted a video version of a recent talk on SOPA activism and what it means for the next generation of global copyright agreements such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership. The talk is about an hour as it also assesses the global strategies employed by the U.S. and copyright lobby groups of shifting away from WIPO toward closed negotiations (like ACTA) and domestic copyright pressure (like the Canada's Bill C-11, which is a combination of DMCA + potentially SOPA)."

Beyond SOPA: ACTA, WIPO, and the Global Copyfight (Thanks, Michael!)

Chair, with entrails. (via Blood Milk)

UPDATE: My pal Stacey Ransom found the original color photo of this fine resin/fiber piece, titled "Visual Temperature - Sofa," by Cao Hul, and posted it to her Tumblr, Held 4 Ransom.

For a while it seemed like I was going to lose my dingy but exquisitely-located office on The Main. So I was going around town, looking at offices for rent. This one was actually pretty nice, if too far downtown.

I normally try to make pictures look like what I saw, but this is a product of egregious ex post facto manipulation.

[Video Link] (Thanks, Gary!)

I heard my 14-year-old daughter and her friends talking to each other using a word-changing language game, like pig latin, but much harder for me to understand. I asked my daughter's friend to say something and I recorded it.

Listen here

She said it was called Finglish but a Google search makes me think she is either mistaken or tricking me. Can you tell me what it's called and what the rules are? I think it involves adding a lot of F's in between syllables.

Excerpted with permission from The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life, by Shimon Edelman. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright (c) 2012.

When Fishing For Happiness, Catch and Release

I was teaching a big introductory course on cognition, which, I felt, had to encompass everything that's known about how the mind works. Teaching, when taken seriously, does wonders to one's capacity for critical thinking; I realized that although the existing psychology textbooks were up to the moment on facts, they were decades behind on understanding. I ended up writing a text of my own, which I subtitled "How the Mind Really Works."

For a while, the possibility of understanding things for myself with sufficient clarity to enable me to share my understanding with others made me vaguely happy. Then I perceived that the mandate that I claimed for myself came with a rider. If I truly grasped how the mind works, I should be able also to transcend all the usual vague intuitions about when, why, and how a person feels happy and replace them with sound scientific insight.

To my dismay, I realized that I would have no peace until the possibility of happiness being amenable to a scientific--perhaps even algorithmic--treatment was given, if not a decisive resolution, then at least a fair hearing. This book is my attempt at cajoling my conscience into letting me off that particular hook.

A Journey Is Mapped Out

To forestall the crushing skepticism that people tend to develop soon after hearing about someone embarking on this kind of project, let me explain why I think it is both timely and feasible. In the past several decades, tremendous progress has been made in understanding the mind/brain. It turns out that the principles that determine how the brain gives rise to the mind are very general, are statable in a pretty concise form, and have everything to do with computation. Given that the brain is the organ with which people experience happiness, understanding the brain offers for the first time a real chance for understanding how and why happiness happens, and perhaps for developing some recipes--algorithms!--for pursuing it more effectively.

The focus on the pursuit of happiness, endorsed by the Declaration of Independence, fits well with the idea of life as a journey--a bright thread that runs through the literary canon of the collective human culture.3 With the world at your feet, the turns that you should take along the way depend on what you are at the outset and on what you become as the journey lengthens. Accordingly, the present book is an attempt to understand, in a deeper sense than merely metaphorical, what it means to be human and how humans are shaped by the journey through this world, which the poet John Keats called "the vale of soul-making"--in particular, how it puts within the soul's reach "a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence."

The fundamental insight that serves as the starting point for my story is that the mind is inherently and essentially a bundle of ongoing computations, the brain being one of many possible substrates that can support them. I make the case for these claims by constructing, in plain sight and out of readily available materials, a conceptual toolbox that affords the reader a glimpse of the computations underlying the mind's faculties: perception, motivation and emotions, action, memory, thinking, social cognition, and language. This conceptual buildup culminates in an explanation that states, in plain language, the nature of the phenomenal self and of consciousness. Readers who are interested in the details that I omit can follow the leads offered by the many notes at the end of the book.

These conceptual tools prove to be useful in making new sense of the notion of the pursuit of happiness. Quite satisfyingly, it emerges that the framers of the Declaration of Independence presaged the findings of the scientific inquiry into happiness: the dynamics of the self and of happiness is such that the pursuit itself -- the journey rather than the destination--is what really matters (hence the title of the book). This insight, such as it is, informs the book's conclusion: the seeker after happiness returns home, only to grow restless and eventually succumb to the lure of a new journey. On the basis of the understanding developed throughout the book, the following practical advice is offered as a way of summing up its lessons in seven words: when fishing for happiness, catch and release.

• write a simple, generic shader-based legacy-free scenegraph engine (basically transplant the modern parts from OpenGLContext and leave behind the old crud, then translate the core into C/C++)
• turn Sillescope into an Android app (that shouldn't take too long, I just got annoyed at the GLES limitations last time and stopped 1/2 way)
• learn Haskell (though the "Haskell for Python Programmers" article honestly left me thinking "this is dumb" much of the time)
• contribute to a game engine (maybe Ogre, maybe 0AD)
• add a GLES binding to PyOpenGL
• play with PyPy now that I have a machine that compile it
• build a basic HTML5 Canvas or WebGL game engine
• update and modernize StarPy (I think no, as I have spent the last 18 months on VoIP and Django)
• update Django-jqm with latest JQuery Mobile, provide a JQM admin interface (again, not likely, just spent the last 18 months in Django)

[Video Link]

Sonar readings show that the mysterious object is about 60 meters across, or, about the size of a jumbo jet. And it's not alone. Nearby on the sea floor is another, smaller object with a similar shape. Even more fascinating, both objects have "drag marks" behind them on the sea floor, stretching back more than 400 feet.

"It's definitely something, at least," says Andreas Olsson, head of archaeology, Swedish Maritime Museums.

Divers find large, unexplained object at bottom of Baltic Sea

In 1969, Fluxus artist/musician Takehisa Kosugi formed the Taj Mahal Travelers, an octet of Japanese musicians whose used traditional instruments like violin, double bass, tuba, trumpet, and mandolin in non-traditional ways and run through early electronic effects systems. Their compelling drone improvisations were decidedly different and, to my ears, more unsettling than the other avant-garde drone sounds of the era coming from the New York City axis of Tony Conrad, John Cale, and La Monte Young. In the book Japrocksampler, Julian Cope describes the Taj Mahal Travelers' music as "reminiscent of the creaking rigging of the un-manned Mary Celeste." The excellent Taj Mahal Travelers live albums titled "August 1974" and "July 15, 1972" have just been reissued on vinyl. I picked mine up from Experimedia in the US. Here are samples from the albums:

Here's a look at the top stories published across O'Reilly sites this week.

What is Apache Hadoop?
Apache Hadoop has been the driving force behind the growth of the big data industry. But what does it do, and why do you need all its strangely-named friends? (Related: Hadoop creator Doug Cutting on why Hadoop caught on.)

Embracing the chaos of data
Data scientists, it's time to welcome errors and uncertainty into your data projects. In this interview, Jetpac CTO Pete Warden discusses the advantages of unstructured data.

Moneyball for software engineering, part 2
A look at the "Moneyball"-style metrics and techniques managers can employ to get the most out of their software teams.

With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform
A new beta .gov website in Britain is open source, mobile friendly, platform agnostic, and open for feedback.

When will Apple mainstream mobile payments?
David Sims parses the latest iPhone / near-field-communication rumors and considers the impact of Apple's (theoretical) entrance into the mobile payment space.

Strata 2012, Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work. Save 20% on Strata registration with the code RADAR20.

When Elinor Zuke went to the checkout stand of a store in the UK to buy a pack of teaspoons, a shop worker told her she wouldn't be allowed to buy then until she presented photo identification. The reason: "because of the risk they could be used for drugs -- heroin users 'cook up' the drug in teaspoons."
Woman, 25, asked for ID to buy teaspoons as they could be used as drug paraphernalia

From Australia's McLeay Natural History Museum at Sydney University comes ... dun dun dun ... the Cyclops!

Sorry. I've got a bit of THE TRIUMPH OF MAN stuck in my head. Actually, this skull belonged to a foal, says Justin Cahill, who sent in the photos. It's part of a long, natural history museum tradition of exhibiting the weird and often grotesque, preserving them as examples of how the natural way isn't always ideal. The same forces that shape evolution can also seriously screw you up. So much of what we call "normal" is based on chance.

Nobody ever actually saw this foal alive, by the way. The skull was found in the Hawkesbury River in 1841. But there have been attempts to reconstruct what the horse might have looked like during it's brief time alive. You can see that photo after the cut:

Jeff Atwood on exactly how much attention to pay to feedback.

1. 90% of all community feedback is crap.
2. Don't get sweet talked into building a truck.
3. Be honest about what you won't do.
4. Listen to your community, but don't let them tell you what to do.
5. Be there for your community.

Punk artist Mike Kelley, a force in contemporary art for more than three decades, has died. He was 57. From the Los Angeles Times:

Writing in Slate in 2005, novelist Jim Lewis said: "I think I could walk into any collection in the world and spot the Mike Kelley piece immediately (and this despite his many imitators)... You can tell the Kelley work because it's the stuff that itches, the stuff that reeks, the stuff that looks like it needs a good bath."

Or, as Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote in 1994, "Kelley is an avatar of the power and humanity inherent in recognizing the radical impurity of human experience. His art searches out dark and soiled places where defects, fault lines and inadequacies are obvious and routine, and where failure takes on the poignant, fragile, even heartbreaking beauty that accompanies any loss of self."

Not every museum exhibit will survive untouched from your childhood to your grandchildrens'. Over time, historic and scientific accuracy, changing mores and aesthetics, and improvements in design will force some exhibits off the main stage and into the dusty storage room of memory.

But you can still love them from afar.

On this, the last day of "My Favorite Museum Exhibit" week, I'd like to include one man's tribute to a long-dismantled museum exhibit. Tom Luthman writes:

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I'd go to the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio (COSI). COSI opened in 1964, in the old Franklin County Memorial Hall, built in 1906. It closed in 1999, or rather, it moved to a new location, and most of the old exhibits didn't make the move.

One of the exhibits was THE TRIUMPH OF MAN, a leftover exhibit from the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, built by the Travelers Insurance Companies. You'd walk down a darkened corridor, and off in alcoves were 14 paper-mache scenes depicting the history of humanity. All accompanied by a recorded narration from the World's Fair. It was also sold in the gift shop as a 33-1/3 record, which we had.

Now, Luthman has put that recording to good use, incorporating it into a Flash-based recreation of THE TRIUMPH OF MAN* that will live online, long after the physical exhibit has decomposed in a landfill somewhere.

This is a really neat project and worth checking out, even if you don't have the emotional connection to THE TRIUMPH OF MAN that Luthman does. Just make sure you're someplace where you can crank up the sound and enjoy that sweet, sweet mid-20th-century triumphalism in stereo.

A virtual recreation of The TRIUMPH OF MAN

Yellow Pages Income Fund is trading at $0.18. (Via Reddit)

At Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore respectively.

I trot this Super Bowl hack out every year, but it's such a good one! From Jay:

I've noticed that a lot of people are into this whole "football" thing, which means they'll be at home (or a bar) watching the big game on Sunday. For us parents who aren't into sports, this provides a perfect opportunity to take the kids out for weekend activities, minus the weekend crowd. You'd be surprised how few people are at the zoo on a Super Bowl Sunday afternoon!

Related: How to keep your kids happy while you watch football

What? You don't have an NFL toaster?

I never met Robert Anton Wilson, but after reading him closely for years, I like to think I know him pretty well. When I went to college in the 1970s, I encountered Illuminatus!, and it had a greater effect upon me than anything I learned in class. It's impossible to minimize the impact the book had on inspiring a new generation of libertarians, although Wilson was hardly an orthodox libertarian. (He wasn't an orthodox anything). Once, summing up why he didn't vote for the 1980 Libertarian Party candidate, he explained, "I am not that kind of Libertarian, really; I don't hate poor people." The attitude of wonder and skepticism toward what we can know about the world in llluminatus! is at least as important as the politics.

Partly because of regret that I never got around to interviewing him or even meeting him when he was alive, I started my RAWIllumination.net a couple of years ago. Decades of heavy reading in all forms of fiction and nonfiction have convinced me that Wilson is a major American writer who has not received the attention he deserves. This crops up on all sorts of ways. Years before Dan Brown wrote his best seller, The Da Vinci Code, Wilson covered much the same ground in a much better book, The Widow's Son. With help from other Wilson fans, I have used RAWIllumination.net to make available articles by Wilson and interviews with him that were not reprinted in his books.

I did get to meet Illuminatus! co-author Robert Shea once, and I would point out that his "solo novels" also deserve attention; they are available in cheap Kindle editions and in free versions at the official Robert Shea site, maintained by his son, Mike Shea. All Things Are Lights, a fast-moving historical novel set in the time of Saint Louis, is a thematic prequel to Illuminatus! which I believe almost any reader would enjoy.

Fnord

[via Qt3]

Paul Reda was taken with the above 1908 ad for Miss Cora Strayer's Private Detective Agency, which was posted to the most excellent Vintage Ads LiveJournal group. A Chicago history buff, he decided to delve into the life and times of Cora Strayer, and has fleshed out a fascinating, and often tragic, timeline of her extraordinary adventures.

1898 - Miss Cora Strayer is living at 3819 Wabash in Chicago. She lists her job as "Clerk."

1902 - The first ad for her detective agency appears! It's at 5453 W Lake - a 4-room apartment with $18 a month rent. The apartment is above a tavern that was consistently being raided by the cops for its illegal poker room and bookmaking operations.

Aug 1903 - Cora is profiled in the Chicago Tribune under the matter-of-fact headline "Woman Directs A Detective Bureau". In it she claims that she originally studied law and practiced as an attorney for several years.

1905 - The first big ad in the Chicago city directory, complete with photo! Cora has moved to 3104 Cottage Grove, and a George S. Holben is named as the "Supt. of the Criminal Dept." In 1903 Holben was involved in a robbery where his landlady accused him of drugging her and stealing $750 worth of diamonds. Several weeks later, the diamonds were still missing, but Holben was not prosecuted. I don't know if Holben was working for Cora yet when this all went down.

Apr 12, 1906 - Mahala Strayer dies at age 60. Her address is on Cottage Grove not far from Cora, so I assume her and Frank moved to Chicago at some point.

1907 - Cora is hired by a Mrs. Campbell who believes that a Mrs. Harris is writing fake letters in order to make it look like she is having an affair with Dr. Harris and so she may blackmail her. Cora takes Mrs. Harris on a trip to Milwaukee, gets her drunk on $150 of fine wines, and steals the letters when she is passed out. Turns out Mrs. Campbell and Dr. Harris actually were having an affair and he performed an abortion on her. Mr. Campbell eventually killed Dr. Harris.

Miss Cora Strayer's Private Detective Agency (Thanks, Dean Keyton!)

It was raining hard and I came into work soaking wet.

My Doc Martins had that darker sheen around the toes where the water had sunk into the petrol-resistant exterior. The smell of damp and of dusty books filled my nose as I prepared for another day of work at the library. It was 1995 in Seattle. The WTO had just formed, The Oklahoma bombing went down, and Grunge was slowly decaying in an acrid smoke after Kurt Cobain's suicide. It was then, on that day, Robert Anton Wilson entered my life.

I had just got in the building, which looked like a huge Viking ship, designed that way on account of all the Norwegians who took up residence in that particular part of town. I shook the rain off of my formidable, flaming red hair when, suddenly, I was vehemently tugged behind the stacks by my coworker.

He was thirty-ish, pagan, had a long blonde ponytail and a nose ring. We would often chat together about Egypt, witchy-poo stuff, and things like that.

"You should really check this book out, I think you would really like it," he said quietly as he handed me a corpulent tome. I looked down at it and saw a checkerboard cover with dolphins jumping over a pyramid with an eye on it. Oh boy, I thought to myself. Like I'm really going to read this obviously new age tedious thing that probably is filled with cheerful advice of how to align my chakras. I humored him politely, as all I wanted to do was take off my wet jacket (which was covered in Metallica patches), took the book and said "thanks, I totally will!" as I snuck past to put my coat in my cubby. Now, it's not that I was opposed to "new age" per se, but I was heavily into OCCULT material and was very snobby about it at the time. If it wasn't older than the 1800's I didn't give a snit about it.

I had just purchased the Hermetic works of Paracelsus, and all the froofy rainbow dolphin material made me cringe as I blasted my Soundgarden tapes on my Sony walkman while walking in the rain. So, I waited until my co-worker went in the back and stealthily snuck the girthy volume onto my cart of books to re-shelve whilst turning up the volume on my headphones. Upon approaching the shelf to replace the seemingly uncouth bundle back exactly in its proper Dewey decimal order, a book directly next to it caught my eye. The cover of this book looked not unlike the covers of some of my Heavy Metal comics, which I was very dedicated to at that point in my life. Prometheus Rising was written in airbrushed chrome lettering with a hermeticy looking fellow emerging from a robot. Now I was interested. I was also a huuuuuuge Frankenstein (the novel) fan, so anything with the word Prometheus in it instantly ignited me in affinity.

As I picked up the book, I noticed that it had the same author as the dolphin book I was so hastily discarding as a froofy annoyance. "Huh, that's weird," I said aloud, which caused the patron a couple of rows down from me to glance up over his rain splotched spectacles, I guess I said it pretty loud as my sense of volume was distorted from my soundtrack. I tucked the radical, roboty book down at the bottom of my cart, and finished my shelving duties. When I went to check it out to myself, I cracked open the cover to peruse the table of contents. The first thing that caught my eye, peering through my still rain wet bangs, was:

"4. The Anal Emotional Territorial Circuit"

These words, strung together like a poem, were unlike anything I had ever come across. I knew in that moment this book was somehow going to create more space inside my mind. While I puttered through my day, I kept returning to that line and couldn't stop trying to decipher what it could possibly mean, or be referring to, and my imagination came up with all manner of explanations ranging from the indecent to the sci-fi. What was he talking about? What was "Anal emotional territory"? And how could it have a circuit? Was this some THX 1138 gay porn romance novel? What WAS this book anyway? I took the number 44 bus straight home, threw off my drenched accoutrement and collapsed on my bed with RAW cradled in my hands like a kitten. It was 4am by the time I looked up, closing the book, having finished the final, smoldering message;

THE FUTURE EXISTS
FIRST IN IMAGINATION,
THEN IN WILL,
THEN IN REALITY

I lay there, listening to the rain beating on my window in the still darkness of the early morning, and I realized everything I thought about the occult was wrong. It wasn't as serious and stodgy as I had made it out to be, nor anywhere near as foreboding. After completing my first "date" with RAW, I saw that esotericism was really, really funny and dynamic, modern and evolutionary AND ALIVE. I learned the occult isn't just in the occult, it's in everything and you can play with it and experiment and like, make stuff happen in your brain. This caused a complete do-over of what I thought magic had to be in order to be acceptable and broke a GINOURMOUS taboo circuit surrounding it in my head. I kinda felt like the green dude on the cover, like I had been released from some robotic concept of perfunctory reality I had created inside my own brain. My mind was blown. He blew my Anal Emotional Territorial Circuit into existence. That ONE little book, less than 300 pages long, lit a creative spark in my neurons that burned into a huge research trail that I would spend years following, leading me to Leary, Regardie, Hubbard, Eliot, Heisenberg and others. This single work was as a Frankenstein monster, grabbing all these dead, dismembered bits and pieces of the past together and reformulating them into a whole new living thing with thoughts and feelings of its own!

I awoke after a couple hours sleep, feeling mighty Promethean, like missing a liver or something, and blearily went into work. I walked through the rain back into the Viking ship. I checked in Prometheus Rising, placed it back in Dewey decimal order, picked up the Illuminatus! Trilogy, dolphins and all, and high-fived my pagan-pony-tailed friend as this librarian learned not to judge a book by its cover.

Fnord

Isolate is a very simple RubyGems sandbox. It provides a way to express and automatically install your project's Gem dependencies.

Changes:

3.2.2 / 2012-02-02

• 2 bug fixes:

  • Isolate hoe plugin shouldn't sandbox until the isolate task triggers. ARGH. I suck.
  • Add missing opening quotes in docs (semaperepelitsa)

• http://github.com/jbarnette/isolate

A depraved individual gouged out the eyes of all the animals on the wallpaper in the men's room of the Bollywood Cafe in Studio City, CA. And who colored in the gouges with ball point pen: the criminal (in an act of contrition), or the restaurant's owners, in an effort to repair the vandalism?

Synchronizes bug tracking systems to omnifocus.

Changes:

2.0.0 / 2012-02-02

• 2 minor enhancements:

  • Added bin/of
  • Added deprecation notices to bin/omnifocus*

• 1 bug fix:

  • _plugins should skip classes explicitly.

• https://github.com/seattlerb/omnifocus

[Video Link] Thanks Bedazzled for uploading this video of Vashti Bunyan singing "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind," and thanks Amy Crehore for posting it!

I'm happy to announce that RT 4.0.5 is now available.

This release contains a number of bugfixes and small improvements since the 4.0.4 release; a few of the more notable ones include:

• Greatly improved print CSS
• New Config option - HideResolveActionsWithDependencies removes actions such as Resolve from the action menu on tickets with outstanding dependencies
• New Config option - AutocompleteOwnersForSearch allows admins to force an Owner autocompleter in the Query Builder
• New Config option - NoTicketInterfaceForApprovals redirects users to the Approvals interface if they visit an Approval ticket in the regular RT UI
• Improved Simple Search documentation and new 'any' keyword for any status
• Improved case insensitivity in the User and Custom Field Autocompleters
• new --enable-ssl-mailgate configure option and rt-mailgate options to assist with setting rt-mailgate up to talk to your ssl enabled RT server
• More improvements to email quote detection to handle Outlook quoting
• The CreateTickets action now supports adding Groups as Watchers
• httpurl_overwrite no longer inserts spaces into your URLs
• Added NBSP as a search column in the Query Builder
• Maintain Approved/Denied state in the radio button on past Approvals
• Fixes for Bookmarked ticket searches
• Bugfixes for OverrideOutgoingMailFrom and sending bounces
• More consistent ordering of Articles
• Improvements to menu internals, including fixes for Search collections and localization of key names
• Preserve Content-Disposition when redistributing mail
• Improved PGP handling for .asc attachments with misleading content-types
• By default, RT's session cookie will not be available to javascript
• Allow Charts to be grouped by Told.
• Test and localization cleanups.

I'm also pleased poor ol' Blosxom kept up; the last time I got a lot of traffic was a mess. Back then I died at a pathetic 4qps; this time I hit 10x that without breaking a sweat. The key thing is using Apache's threaded worker MPM instead of the horribly obsolete prefork MPM. I now have 1000 server threads to serve all those parallel fetching, socket-camping modern web browsers. Even better would be a proper non-blocking server but Apache's worker MPM is still labelled "experimental" and I don't want to deal with some other HTTP server right now. I did go ahead and switch some images to inline data: URLs; should be an improvement.

1. Beautiful Buttons for Bootstrap -- cute little button creator, with sliders for hue, saturation, and "puffiness".
2. CMU iPad Course -- iTunes U has the video lectures for a CMU intro to iPad programming.
3. Inspiring Matter -- the conference aims to bring together designers, scientists, artists and humanities people working with materials research and innovation to talk about how they work cross- or trans-disciplinarily, the challenges and tools they've found for working collaboratively, and the ways they find inspiration in their work with materials. London, April 2-3.
4. Facebook's S-1 Filing (SEC) -- the Internets are now full of insights into Facebook's business, for example Lance Wiggs's observation that Facebook's daily user growth is slowing. While 6-10% growth per quarter feels like a lot when annualized, it is getting close to being a normal company. Facebook is running out of target market, and especially target market with pockets deep enough to be monetised. But I think that's the last piece of Facebook IPO analysis that I'll link to. Tech Giant IPOs are like Royal Weddings: the people act nice but you know it's a seething roiling pit of hate, greed, money, and desperation that goes on a bit too long so by the end you just want to put an angry chili-covered porcupine in everyone's anus and set them all on fire. But perhaps I'm jaded.

Lately, I've been trying to wrap my brains around how the PyPy translation toolchain works--in preparation for my PyCon plenary talk. I'd planned to do some blogging about it, but have become suddenly inundated with work. So, in it's place, I present a screencast of the January 12, 2012 Chipy talk I gave about it. If you're like me, and have wondered what PyPy is doing under the covers, you might find it interesting. Enjoy!

I hope to say even more at PyCon. See you in a month!

Yesterday I ended up buying a new desktop PC, as my current laptop is almost on it's last legs. The new PC will enable me to more easily record my desktop for video tutorials and use virtual machines for various platform-specific testing. I am currently in the process of setting up all the partitions and software. The PC is also 64-bit, where I am more familiar with 32-bit machines, so this is going to be an interesting adventure.

The PC sports a rather nice Nvidia GeForce 315 GPU, so perhaps I might be-able to get into some OpenGL programming using Python. I hope to record my learning progress of OpenGL and Python on this blog for others can learn with me. For the record, I have very little experience in 3D programming, so look forward to some interesting Python 3D programming sites in the Bookmarks page.

The Nvidia GeForce 315 also supports Nvidia's 3D vision technology, so as soon as I am able to obtain a 3D-compatible monitor(any 120Hz monitor will work), I hope to use Python and OpenGL to create some interesting Stereoscopic images.

Unlike my laptop configuration which has the entire drive dedicated to Debian Linux. This new PC will have a Windows 7 partition, alongside my usual Debian partition. This will allow me to try out various Windows-based Python libraries, and to compare performance in both Linux and Windows.

Since the PC supports a nice GPU, I hope to get around to learning Kivy soon, as this Python toolkit looks very promising, especially for Android tablet development.

minitest provides a complete suite of testing facilities supporting TDD, BDD, mocking, and benchmarking.

"I had a class with Jim Weirich on testing last week and we were
 allowed to choose our testing frameworks. Kirk Haines and I were
 paired up and we cracked open the code for a few test
 frameworks...

 I MUST say that mintiest is *very* readable / understandable
 compared to the 'other two' options we looked at. Nicely done and
 thank you for helping us keep our mental sanity."

-- Wayne E. Seguin

minitest/unit is a small and incredibly fast unit testing framework. It provides a rich set of assertions to make your tests clean and readable.

minitest/spec is a functionally complete spec engine. It hooks onto minitest/unit and seamlessly bridges test assertions over to spec expectations.

minitest/benchmark is an awesome way to assert the performance of your algorithms in a repeatable manner. Now you can assert that your newb co-worker doesn't replace your linear algorithm with an exponential one!

minitest/mock by Steven Baker, is a beautifully tiny mock object framework.

minitest/pride shows pride in testing and adds coloring to your test output. I guess it is an example of how to write IO pipes too. :P

minitest/unit is meant to have a clean implementation for language implementors that need a minimal set of methods to bootstrap a working test suite. For example, there is no magic involved for test-case discovery.

"Again, I can't praise enough the idea of a testing/specing
 framework that I can actually read in full in one sitting!"

-- Piotr Szotkowski

Changes:

2.11.1 / 2012-02-01

• 2 bug fixes:

  • Improved description for --name argument (drd)
  • Ensure Mock#expect's expected args is an Array. (mperham)

• https://github.com/seattlerb/minitest

Video of the discussion between Jack Bogle and Paul Volcker, moderated by Kathleen Hays, host of The Hays Advantage on Bloomberg Radio, from the January 31, 2012 John C. Bogle Legacy Forum at the Museum of American Finance in New York.

Hello ladies and gentlemen! I'm happy to announce my 3rd e-book called "Perl One-Liners Explained." This book is based on the "Famous Perl One-Liners Explained" article series that I wrote over the last 3 years and that has been read over 500,000 times!

I went through all the one-liners in the article series, improved explanations, fixed mistakes and typos, added a bunch of new one-liners, added an introduction to Perl one-liners and a new chapter on Perl's special variables.

Table of Contents

The e-book has 111 pages and it explains 130 unique one-liners. Many of one-liners are presented in several different ways so the total number of one-liners in the book is over 200.

The e-book is divided into the following chapters:

• Preface.
• 1. Introduction to Perl One-Liners.
• 2. Spacing.
• 3. Numbering.
• 4. Calculations
• 5. String Creation and Array Creation.
• 6. Text Conversion and Substitution.
• 7. Selective Printing and Deleting of Lines.
• 8. Handy Regular Expressions.
• 9. perl1line.txt
• Appendix A. Perl's Special Variables.
• Index.

What are Perl One-Liners?

Perl one-liners are small and awesome Perl programs that fit in a single line of code and they do one thing really well. These things include changing line spacing, numbering lines, doing calculations, converting and substituting text, deleting and printing certain lines, parsing logs, editing files in-place, doing statistics, carrying out system administration tasks, updating a bunch of files at once, and many more.

Perl one-liners will make you the shell warrior. You'll be able to do all these tasks in seconds. No kidding!

Let's take a look at several practical examples that you can easily do with one-liners. All these examples and many more are explained in the e-book.

I have also made the first chapter of the book, Introduction to Perl One-Liners, freely available. Please download the e-book preview to read it.

Example 1: Replace a string in multiple files at once

perl -p -i.bak -e 's/Config/config/g' conf1 conf2 conf3

Suppose you have 3 configuration files, and you discover that you made a mistake and need to replace all occurrences of Config to config. This one-liner does just that. It executes the s/Config/config/g that replaces all occurrences of Config with config on all lines. And since you're smart about it, you always do -i.bak to make backup files in case something goes wrong.

I explain the -i, -p, and -e arguments in the e-book in great detail.

Example 2: Generate a random 8 character password

perl -le 'print map { ("a".."z")[rand 26] } 1..8'

This one-liner generates and prints a random 8 character password. It uses the list range operator .. operator to produce all strings from "a" to "z", which is the alphabet. Then a random letter is chosen by rand 26 and this operation is repeated 8 times.

Example 3: URL-escape a string

perl -MURI::Escape -lne 'print uri_escape($string)'

Here we use the URI::Escape module from CPAN. It exports the uri_escape function that does URL-escaping.

You can install this module from CPAN by running perl -MCPAN -e'install URI::Escape' on the command line.

I have this one-liner as an alias actually for both URL-escaping and unescaping URL-escaping as it's such a common thing to do:

urlescape () { perl -MURI::Escape -lne 'print uri_escape($_)' <<< "$1" }
urlunescape () { perl -MURI::Escape -lne 'print uri_unescape($_)' <<< "$1"; }

Then I can do this in the shell:

$ urlescape "http://www.catonmat.net"
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.catonmat.net

$ urlunescape http%3A%2F%2Fwww.catonmat.net
http://www.catonmat.net

Very useful!

Example 4: Print all lines from line 17 to line 30

perl -ne 'print if 17..30'

Here we use the binary flip-flop operator .. that becomes true when the input line number is 17, stays true while the line number is less than or equal to 30, and then becomes false. Combining the flip-flop operator with print if makes it print only lines 17-30.

Example 5: Remove all consecutive blank lines, leaving just one

perl -00pe0

I included this one-liner here in the examples just to show you how funny and obscure one-liners can get. This one-liner deletes all repeated blank lines from the input or from the given file. It does it by enabling the paragraph slurp mode through -00 command line argument, which reads the input paragraph-by-paragraph, rather than line-by-line, and prints the paragraphs. This way any number of blank lines between the paragraphs get ignored.

I explain this one-liner in more details in the e-book.

As I hope you can see, knowing how to write one-liners is very useful. It was one of my top priority tasks through the years to become very efficient in the shell. Literally every day when I'm programming, I have to do all kinds of data processing tasks, changing files, verifying output, doing quick calculations, parsing data, etc, and knowing Perl one-liners makes it really fast to get things done.

Now that I have written this e-book, you can become very efficient, too. Enjoy!

Book Preview

I prepared a free book preview that contains the first 13 pages of the book. It includes the table of contents, preface, introduction to Perl one-liners and the first page of the second chapter.

Buy it now!

The price of the e-book is $9.95 and it can be purchased via PayPal:

After you have made the payment, my automated e-book processing system will send you the PDF e-book in a few minutes!

Tweet about my book!

Help me spread the word about my new book! I prepared a special link that you can use to tweet about it:

What's next?

I really love writing about programming and I have planned writing many more books. The next few are going to be a book on mastering vim, a practical guide on how to be anonymous on the web, and the catonmat book.

Enjoy!

Enjoy the book and don't forget to leave comments about it! Ask me anything you wish and I'll help you out.

Also if you're interested, take a look at my other two e-books. The 1st one is called "Awk One-Liners Explained" and the 2nd one is called "Sed One-Liners Explained" They're written in a similar style as this e-book and they teach practical Awk and Sed through many examples.

Finally, if you enjoy my writing, you can subscribe to my blog, follow me on Twitter or Google+.