automaticable

from kottke:

Here’s the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”

What do you think? It’s a tough question, especially because of how it is worded.

I read this a few months back and at first I got it wrong, along with a slew of other people, including professional and amature pilots alike. This question became so popular that Mythbusters picked it up and (after a few delays) just aired an episode dedicated to this question. I missed the episode, but the event was liveblogged by Jason Kottke fantastically. Don’t read the post until you’ve spent some time thinking about the problem. Talk it out with a friend. The debate will surprise you. Before you read up on the outcome of the Mythbusters’ experiment, take a look at the original post linked at the top of the page and sift through the comments for a while. It is really interesting to see the different theories.

One of the best parts about this, I think, is that even though the Mythbusters have “proven” how the plane may or may not take off, there is still HUGE debate about it on the Mythbusters forums.

On a semi-related note, do you think it is as ridiculous as I do that someone liveblogged a TV show that almost everyone has access to? I understand that it was for his own amusement, but this just shows how much blogging has changed since its inception.

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I live with 11 roommates in a 3-story house on a college campus that’s probably about 100 years old. This is our landlord’s second year here– he’s young, excited about property ownership, lives on campus, and is very accessible.

Or at least, that’s how it seemed when we signed the lease. Since then, we’ve had nothing but problems. Our pipes froze last night, so we don’t have hot water (and thus, no washing machine or dishwasher). My roommate’s bed has bedbugs. The deadbolt on our front door is broken and the door handle is falling off. The thermostat on our water-heater is broken. Our house is half-painted in a single coat of primer. Our ceiling leaks. And our landlord never answers our calls.

So the moral of this story? Well, make sure you know the whole story before you sign the lease. Ask the previous residents if they had trouble. Make use of the tennant union on your campus. Make sure your lease is well thought out and includes any maintenance requests. Take pictures when you move in. Put everything in writing.

So, the FDA passed a bill last night officially declaring that cloned meat is safe to eat. Now, I live in a house with my fair share of vegetarian / organic-eating roommates, so this caused quite a stir. Therefore, I’d like to offer my own thoughts…

So the controversy over cloned meat is multi-level: is it really safe, does it hurt the animal, does it have the potential for health risks, etc. Well the fact of the matter is, we’ve been doing things like this for a long time, and it’s never been a problem. Genetically engineered foods have been on the market for decades, and there is no scientific evidence that shows them to be harmful. And cloned meats are even less likely to cause a problem, because no DNA is actually being modified, just reproduced.

The way that the whole process works (from my understanding), is that a prize-cow is chosen, and DNA is extracted through blood cells. Through chemistry magic, the DNA is coerced into an embryo, and inserted into a female cow. It gestates for a while, and then finally, out pops a baby clone. Now, the clone isn’t actually used for meat– that would be too expensive. Instead, it’s bread with other fine steers, and the offspring are used for meat.

So this brings me to the point on animal treatment. The new clones are the most expensive cows on the farm, and thus treated like kings. As far as the cow that produces the clone, the process is comparable to artificial insemination, which has been going on for years. So, you can expect PETA to be all over this one– but it’s nothing new.

Then, the quality of food. The meat that hits our grocery stores isn’t going to be any worse or more dangerous than what we have now. There’s no new DNA being introduced, and what you’re eating is a naturally-born cow. In fact, if anything, there’s less chance of disease, because the offspring will be more uniform across the board. If they test one hamburger and it’s disease free, chances are the rest will be too.

So I guess the last thing to consider is the future– how does this bode for our future, the farmer’s future, and the future of cows as we know it (as we know them?). From the consumer perspective, we can expect cheaper, higher-quality meat. As the process is perfected and universally adopted, the cows will be cheaper to produce, and they will be selectively bread for prize cows every time. This brings us to the farmer; with new technology, he can expect bigger, healthier cows that he can sell for a higher profit. And as for the cows, each new clone will be selected for higher immunity against disease and to be healthy, happy cows. All in all, it’s a win-win-win situation.

PS: You actually have nothing to worry about just yet; although the FDA has deemed clones safe to eat, the Department of Agriculture has asked for a further ban on cloned meat, for at least 2 more years.

PPS: Check out that sweet graphic above. I made that using GIMP in Ubuntu– cool huh?

Ok, so I know when I say “Call to Action” I realize that my blog readership really consists of about, 3 people. So, this could really be rephrased “Hey guys, got any ideas?” Anyway, back to the post…

So one aspect that I find lacking on the Gnome desktop is widgets– Windows has them with Google Desktop or the sidebar in Vista, and Macs have them natively. But on Gnome, all we have is a program called gDesklets. Now, the problem with gDesklets, is that its inventory of widgets is so robust, it’s unusable. Because it’s open source and it’s been around forever, the repository of widgets is dated, most of them don’t work, and there’s no way to rank them based on popularity or usefulness.

Even after a few searches online, it’s hard to find any resource that has details on what the “best” gDesklet widgets are.

So here’s my “call to action”– can anyone find a list of the best gDesklet widgets available, or even a different program to replace it? I’m looking for something that’s open-source, integrates well with Ubuntu, and is easy to use. The winner will get a prize of my choosing…

(photo from flickr)

I recently read an article from HowToGeek about finding and replacing formatting within Microsoft Word documents. This is useful for laying out your document, but also reminded me of a tip my roommate passed me about stretching your research paper to make the length cutoff.

Of course, everyone knows the obvious tricks– extra line spacing, character spacing, bigger fonts, wider margin… But it’s these obvious tricks that your English teacher knows too, and she’s not going to buy it. However, my roommate suggested using this selective formatting technique to search for all your periods, and replace them with a size-14 period. Simple as that. Each period doesn’t add much, but you can image how many periods you might have in your average paper. Similar, bump up the size on your commas, hyphens, and apostrophes. Of course, this hint also applies to OpenOffice.

(photo from flickr)

In a few days I am going to be switching gears at the advertising agency I work for and move into the interactive media department, specifically working on SEO for our various clients. Other than what I have read in passing over the last few years I know very little about SEO, so I’m sure it is going to be an informative and exciting journey into the new department.

As more and more software and services become free online through open source and web 2.0 methodologies, everyone from student programmers to CEO level business people are going to need to know how to make money off of what they provide for free. Advertising is going to be a great way to create a profitable business and still keep products and services free, and properly implemented SEO is one way to increase those profits.

I want to take this opportunity as I learn about SEO to share some of the intricacies and processes that I stumble upon and share them so the every day person can get a handle on just how much goes into achieving great search engine optimization. This should be a unique view into SEO since I am learning from scratch, so the information will be as interesting and new to the reader as it is to me.

Here’s to starting fresh in a brand new department and bringing you along for the ride!

A friend and I have been working on a software project called Wosaic, that is due for its first beta release pretty soon, and I’m pretty excited about it.

Wosaic is basically a software utility that allows you to make mosaics based on your own digital photos. It’s released under an open-source license, so will be free to download as binary or source. Right now, we can draw sub-images from either Flickr or Facebook– pretty cool stuff. Click on the image above to zoom in and see the power of it.

We’re hoping to have our first preview release next week, but you can always grab the code from the project website. Click on the image above to enlarge it and see the power of Wosaic.

Wosaic on Google Code

I recently came across a neat tool called YouGetSignal. It does a reverse-DNS lookup, which basically tells you what websites are hosted from the same IP as another. Not particularly useful in my case, but fun nonetheless.

I decided to do a reverse lookup for Google, because I recently read an article about some obsure domains that Google owns. Indeed, the list came up with lots of obscurities, such as
http://abnamrobankgroup.net/
http://chessforcar.com/
http://fergusonclinic.com/

Amongst others. It was suggested that these might be useful for people behind a proxy that blocks google.com. This sounds feasible, but I’d think that any proxy that blocks google.com would block domains from the same IP as well. Of well. The most important part of this information is that I found my own personal Google domain:

http://scott.wegner.svc-1.google.com/

Recently I started using a service called RememberTheMilk. Their website is dedicated to helping you manage your to-do lists. The premise is simple, but they do a very good job with it. I use Google Calendar to sync and keep track of most of my scheduling, but I wanted something more task-oriented, for things that don’t have a real due-date. I’ve also tried Lightning integrated in Thunderbird, but the downside there is that there’s no online integrate. For me, RememberTheMilk works.

The reason why they’ve won my vote is how robust they’ve made their service. You can have multiple lists organized in tabs, for which you can have unlimited tasks. Each task can be tagged, recurring, have a due date, priority, notes– you name it. It’s full options, but without being complicated. The interface is very Web 2.0, which brings me to the real kicker– integration. They’ve set it up so you can access your lists from just about anywhere– on-the-go with your PDA, on your Google homepage, and even through Gmail and Google Calendars. This is what really won my heart. For something as simple as to-do lists, they’ve really done it right, and kept it simple at the same time.

There are many music players that offer the functionality to wakeup to a song or playlist– both on Linux or Windows. But with each option I’ve tried, I’ve never been really happy with the results. For such a simple task, it always seemed overly-complicated. Also, the main downside I found in using a media player plugin, is that you’ll need to have the player running for it to actually work in the morning. Below I describe how to create your own music alarm clock, using only command-line utilities found on most Linux distributions. It uses quite a few different tools, and the tutorial will hit on quite a few different concepts. So, without further adieu…

1. The first thing you will need is to create a playlist. I used Rhythmbox, since that’s where I store all of my music anyway. Create a playlist with songs you’d like to wake up to. When you’ve got enough, save it in .m3u format, somewhere where you’ll find it later. I put mine in my home directory.
2. Next, we’ll need to make sure we have all the tools for the job. We’ll be using cron to schedule our tasks, amixer to set our volume, and mplayer to finally play our music. To make sure you have each of these installed, issue the following command:
   

   sudo aptitude install cron alsa-utils mplayer

3. Next, we need to actually add the scheduled task. First I’m simply going to give you the commands, and I’ll explain what’s going on afterwards. In a terminal, enter the command:
   

   crontab -e

   Note: this will open your default text editor, which if you haven’t set it, will probably default to vim.

4. Go to the end of the page by pressing Shift+G. Then start a new line pressing “o”. Once you’re there, type in or paste the following line:
   

   30 7 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/amixer set PCM 35\% && /usr/bin/X11/xterm -display :0 -bg black -fg white -e /usr/bin/mplayer -shuffle -playlist ~/.alarm-playlist

5. Press “ESC” to stop typing. Then enter the command “:wq” (no quotes) to save and quit. If everything went well, you should see the line:
   

   crontab: installing new crontab

Cool, you’re done! Now, let me explain what all that was, so you can go back and customize it on your own. Remember, any time you want to learn more about a command, you can use the “man” command. For example,

man crontab

to learn about crontab.

So first of all, we used “aptitude” to install a few packages from the Ubuntu repositories. This is probably familiar to you, or you may be using “apt-get”. They are basically the same, but “aptitude” has a few advantages– you should switch to using it if you haven’t already.

Then, we used “crontab -e”. Cron is the name of the task scheduler in Linux, and this command opens up our own personal “scheduled task list”. You can always use “crontab -e” to edit your tasks, or “crontab -l” just to view them.

Now, on to that crazy line I had you type in:

30 7 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/amixer set PCM 35\% && /usr/bin/X11/xterm -display :0 -bg black -fg white -e /usr/bin/mplayer -shuffle -playlist ~/.alarm-playlist

Each entry in your personal crontab has the following format:

minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week command

So, in our case, our “minute” is 30, “hour” is 7, day-of-month is * (any), “month” is * (any), “day-of-week” is 1-5, and “command” is… the rest of that. This basically means that we’ve scheduled our command to execute at 7:30 am on Monday through Friday. Changing these options should be self explanatory. Now, let’s pick apart our “command” one part at a time.

/usr/bin/amixer set PCM 35\%

First thing to note, is that it’s a good idea to use full paths for any command you execute from cron. To find out the full path to a command, use

which {command}

In this case, we’re using amixer, which is a utility for changing the volume on your computer. I set mine to 35% to wake up to, but you can use anything. Also note here that we can’t use simply “35%”, because cron uses ‘%’ as a special character. Therefore, we preceed it with ‘\’.

Next thing to notice is “&&”. This essentially strings two commands together– it won’t start the next command until our first one has finished. So, onto our next command:

/usr/bin/X11/xterm -display :0 -bg black -fg white -e …

This is actually another compound command. xterm is another terminal that we are going to launch our music alarm in, so we can easily shut if off in the morning. We set all sorts of parameters to make the terminal look nice, but the important one is following the “-e”: that’s the command we will run in the new terminal:

/usr/bin/mplayer -shuffle -playlist ~/.alarm-playlist

Ahhh, finally, this is where we finally play our music. mplayer is a command-line music player with a very basic interface, and easy controls. You can run this line in a normal terminal now to make sure it works. We use the parameters “shuffle” to randomize our playlist, and then “-playlist …” to tell it what to play. Make sure you change “~/.alarm-playlist” to your own location.

And we’re done! At this point you should have a fully-functioning music alarm clock. Now go back and tweak it out with preferences that work for you.

Bonus: Move the alarm clock command to a shell script, and keep increasing your volume every minute or so.