Little Mr. YTMND

If you, like me, are a frequent flyer at YTMND, I think you will appreciate this thing.

What City Are You?

According to this thing (super high-fives to Lisa)

You Are Austin

A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. You're totally weird and very proud of it. Artistic and freaky, you still seem to fit in... in your own strange way. Famous Austin residents: Lance Armstrong, Sandra Bullock, Andy Roddick

What American City Are You?

That's kind of interesting, because I like Austin a lot. I am also a little bit country, and definitely weird as heck.

A Drum Beats In The Distance...

I have, thus far in life, dealt with the following operating system flavors, varieties, distros, whatever you want to call them (in order of my use of them, oldest first)

• CP/M
  
• MS-DOS
  
• Lisa Office System
  
• Mac OS (Classic)
  
• Slackware
  
• OS/2 "Warp"
  
• Caldera (ugh...)
  
• Windows NT 4
  
• Red Hat
  
• SuSE
  
• Mac OS X
  
• Windows 98
  
• Windows 2000 WS/Server
  
• Windows XP
  
• Fedora
  
• Windows Server 2003
  
• Gentoo
  
• Windows Vista (various CTPs)
  
• Ubuntu
  

And I have to say that of all of them, the easiest to set up so far has been...

Ubuntu

No kidding. Considering what you have to do to sysprep/image a windows box; how sucky RPM is in general; how much of a pain in the ass it is to build up a Slackware system in to any kind of decent LAMP box; how long it takes to compile a Gentoo box from scratch (not to mention hand writing all your config files) and finally how totally beholden to Apple you are if you go the OS X route, Ubuntu seems like the right blend for a customized system. I had MythTV (not exactly the simplest piece of software to get running) practically out of the box. It just about boiled down to issuing a sudo apt-get install mythtv command line. Right now I'm installing the prerelease Dapper Drake on a virtual pc. Mark Shuttleworth is cool.

Labels Are Cool

Whew. I just spent all day hacking on a Zebra label printer. I threw together a quick winforms app that you can check out. Or not. The worst parts were the ZPL, which is like impenetrable line noise (see below) and the crappy windows API interop stuff I had to do to print from .NET. The ZPL code I used as the basis of the labels is here:

^XA~TA0~JSO^LT0^MMT^MNW^MTD^PON^PMN^LH0,0^JMA^PR2,2^MD6^JUS^LRN^CI0^XZ
^XA^LL0253
^PW456
^BY2,3,30^FT26,78^BCN,,Y,N
^FD>:65A9D973F08E>59139^FS
^FO,34^FS
^FT11,136^A0N,28,28^FH\^FDINTEROCITOR^FS
^FO,31^FS
^FT12,236^A0N,25,24^FH\^FDDell OptiPlex GX620^FS
^FO,24^FS
^FT11,30^A0N,20,19^FH\^FDProperty of the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy^FS
^FO,31^FS
^FT12,171^A0N,25,24^FH\^FDFor Help: (319) 335-8649^FS
^FO,31^FS
^FT12,202^A0N,25,24^FH\^FDE-Mail: pharmacy-helpdesk@uiowa.edu^FS
^PQ1,0,1,Y^XZ


Pseudoscience

To quote Del:

"Everybody loot the store, get your canned goods..."

I posted the following rant over at Salon, in response to this rambling mess of an article by Alan H. Goldstein. I hate to come off as reactionary, but not only is Goldstein's piece seemingly alarmist and arrogant, it is horribly written. If you are going to make unconvincing arguments and try to pass them off as immutable human destiny, at least try to write in a clear style that doesn't make you sound like a kook. My response is cross-posted below:

Quick, everyone, let's go back to the caves and draw pretty geometric pictures on the walls with pieces of carbonized wood!

The author's sole real argument, buried under pages upon pages of solipsistic gibberish, is that because we "will soon" have the ability to exchange electrons with living systems, we must quickly discover what this will mean, look like, how it will affect carbon-based life, and we must do this before we even know what we are dealing with- or else. I hate to bring it to the author's attention, but my Blackberry is currently radiating microwaves in to every cell in my hip at a density of about 3.6 watts/Kg. The author's scare-use of arbitrary and meaningless scaled-up power densities in microvolts across tiny areas scaled to millions of volts across two-dimensional planes (not volumes or masses) is meaningless- a true consideration of power density would take amperage (thus watts) in to account across a three-dimensional volume. Better yet, it would use the accepted SAR measure of watts per kilogram. Electrical, electromechanical, optoelectric, radio frequency and other systems are constantly in contact with biological material. Mutation doesn't just happen without a specific system of evolution in place which allows it to happen. And "physio-chemical damage" doesn't just constantly happen whenever electrons are excited in a biological system. An example would be this: you don't get a tumor from being subjected to an MRI.

All this is beside the larger point, which is that humans have evolved with our technology (in many ways, we are our technology) since the first bone weapon was used to slay the first prety Kubrick-style. There is no reason to beleive we will not continue to evolve with our technology, not be destroyed by it (barring any unforeseen catastrophes such as nuclear holocaust or Bill Joy gray goo scenarios.)