Zach Rose

"Construction was subsequently halted for almost a century, because the Pisans were almost..."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:12:02 -0400

“Construction was subsequently halted for almost a century, because the Pisans were almost continually engaged in battles with Genoa, Lucca and Florence. This allowed time for the underlying soil to settle. Otherwise, the tower would almost certainly have toppled.”

- Leaning Tower of Pisa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Brooks (no relation) argues that Americans are a uniquely entrepreneurial people. A nation of..."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:37:00 -0400

“Brooks (no relation) argues that Americans are a uniquely entrepreneurial people. A nation of immigrants, ‘America’s vast success might be explained in part by our genetic predisposition to embrace risks with potentially explosive rewards.’ Citing an array of polling data, Brooks argues that 70 percent of Americans embraces this free-market and entrepreneurial vision of their country. But 30 percent prefers a more government-centric, European-style vision. The battle, Brooks concludes, is between the 70 percent, trying to reclaim the country, and the 30 percent, which is now expanding the federal role on an array of fronts. […] The weakness of the Brooks and Ryan approach is that their sociology is off a bit. America is not a nation of risk — embracing pioneers. It is a nation of heroic bourgeois families who want to thrive within a secure social order. The economic debate is not as Manichaean as the culture war since most people are split down the middle and because it’s easier to compromise on money than on life.”

- Op-Ed Columnist - The Growth Imperative - NYTimes.com

mikehudack: thedailywhat: xkcd.

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:13:05 -0400

mikehudack:

thedailywhat:

xkcd.

danielsexton: (via priscillaing) Tabor Robak at Appendix Space...

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:56:16 -0400

danielsexton:

(via priscillaing)

Tabor Robak at Appendix Space last night. So good.

"By 2018, the machine should be ready. Scientists then would spend the next decade or so trying to..."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:19:32 -0400

“By 2018, the machine should be ready. Scientists then would spend the next decade or so trying to create bursts of power of up to 500 megawatts for several minutes at a time, and experimenting with the plasma gas.”

- ITER, a Clean Energy Fusion Project, Promises Unlimited Electricity - NYTimes.com

"More recent work had demonstrated that significant savings in the required laser energy are possible..."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:02:00 -0400

“More recent work had demonstrated that significant savings in the required laser energy are possible using a technique known as “fast ignition”. The savings are so dramatic that the concept appears to be a useful technique for energy production again, so much so that it is a serious contender for pre-commercial development.”

- Fusion power - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The possibility of unlimited clean energy within my lifetime is something I think about daily. (Desalination of sea water, climate change reversal, space travel, an explosion of food production, etc.)

I got to work with fiberglass today. It’s like toxic paper mâché.

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:57:01 -0400

I got to work with fiberglass today. It’s like toxic paper mâché.

Trucks: joshua-roses-computer:newproject joshuarose$ script/server=> Booting...

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:53:23 -0400

Trucks: joshua-roses-computer:newproject joshuarose$ script/server=> Booting...:

joshua-roses-computer:newproject joshuarose$ script/server
=> Booting Mongrel (use ‘script/server webrick’ to force WEBrick)
=> Rails 2.2.2 application starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000
=> Call with -d to detach
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server
** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:3000
** Starting…

Now go to http://localhost:3000 in your web browser. Follow these instructions to make a blog.

If you want, go here to get a basic grip on Ruby, the general-purpose programming language you’re using. Even if you’ve never programmed before, the language itself isn’t very surprising.

The somewhat weirder part will be typing little bits of code that tell Rails, the framework, what you website is supposed to do. If you type in everything like they tell you to, you’ll be fine. But if you’re interested, you can get a basic grasp on relational databases and the model-view-controller pattern on Wikipedia.

In short, Rails is designed to make websites that take in, store, manipulate, and spit out data. That data can be anything, but most of the time it’s just pieces of text. The idea of sensible programming is to keep data bundled together in useful structures. For example, a blog post is a cluster of things including at least a title, a body, and the time it was published. If you want to get fancy, your posts can have things like a status (draft or published) or even comments (which might even have their own structure).

If you REALLY want to know, this business of storing data in useful structures has been thoroughly tackled for a long time by different technologies. Databases store structured data on hard drives, which are huge and cheap, but slow to read, write, and manipulate. Programming languages, particularly object-oriented languages like Ruby, solve many of the exact same problems as databases, only in memory. This means that small amounts of logic and processing can be done at a more useful speed. The idea behind Rails is that since these technologies are solving the same problem, it’d be nicer to just describe everything in Ruby and let Rails automatically translate that into database requests.

Anyways, don’t worry about understanding everything right away. Learn by doing.

Photo

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:10:05 -0400

"Jack showed how you could walk up to an ATM, break into it using a common universal key, and then..."

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:22:38 -0400

“Jack showed how you could walk up to an ATM, break into it using a common universal key, and then use a universal serial bus (USB) stick to load a rootkit, or hacking software, that could compromise the machine’s security. On stage, he showed how he could run a program that could talk over the machines and get them to display “jackpot!” on the ATM screen and then spit out bills.”

- Guy hacks an ATM machine at the Black Hat security conference. He says he was inspired by Terminator 2. (Via VentureBeat) (via dbreunig)
I hope he used an EeePC and a ribbon cable.

mikehudack: aatombomb: Talk about your mixed results.

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:51:18 -0400

mikehudack:

aatombomb:

Talk about your mixed results.

(via betac) The cookbook is James...

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:49:31 -0400

(via betac)

The cookbook is James “how-about-another-stick-of-butter” Beard’s American Cookery.

Portland represent.

Mijndert's Weblog: [Mac] Get started with Ruby on Rails

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:38:41 -0400

Mijndert's Weblog: [Mac] Get started with Ruby on Rails:

joshtrucks:

This is part 1 in a series I’m going to attempt.

There’s more ways to install Ruby on Rails along with Apache and MySQL on Mac OS. You could either use the Bitnami Rubystack or compile a lot from source using MacPorts. I’m going for the latter due to it giving me more flexibility.

…

Hey Josh! Yeah, you need Xcode. I can send you a disk if you need it. Then get MacPorts. Other than that, try opening Terminal and typing these commands:

rails newproject
cd newproject
script/server

Then open your web browser and go to http://localhost:3000. There’s a good chance this will work. Let me know how it goes.

As of today, my parents have been married for 30 years.

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:23:13 -0400

As of today, my parents have been married for 30 years.

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Fish in a barrel

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:49:00 -0400

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Fish in a barrel:

Apple came out with updated Mac Pros and iMacs today. I’m an iMac man myself, so that’s what I checked out. Looks nice! Of course, The League of Internet Commenters is busy finding flaws and comparing it to similar offerings from Apple’s competitors. Hardware isn’t my strong suit, but I know half…

Motorcycle websites suffer from same problem. The loss of sexiness is astounding.

I suspect that the cause of this is that websites are envisioned to be an all-access representation of an entire company, rather than a set of pages that do something specific, like sell me a motorcycle.

Photo

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:28:06 -0400

The Democratic Party of Oregon has a new website. The “About the Party” page is a list...

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:53:47 -0400

The Democratic Party of Oregon has a new website.

The “About the Party” page is a list of officers and staff, and the 2010 platform is available only as a PDF. Sigh.

"The Library of Congress, which has the power to define exceptions to an important copyright law,..."

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:47:00 -0400

“The Library of Congress, which has the power to define exceptions to an important copyright law, said on Monday that it was legal to bypass a phone’s controls on what software it will run to get ‘lawfully obtained’ programs to work. […] In addition to the decision on jailbreaking, the Library of Congress also granted an exception to artists who remix copy-protected video content for noncommercial work, and renewed its approval for cellphone owners to ‘unlock’ their phones or lift controls that restrict use to one particular wireless carrier.”

- Exemption Will Allow ‘Jailbreaking’ of iPhones - NYTimes.com

I had no idea the Library of Congress had power like that.

(via mailer-demon)

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:25:17 -0400

(via mailer-demon)

bg5000: This video of lightning slowed down 300x is amazing....

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:09:04 -0400

bg5000:

This video of lightning slowed down 300x is amazing. Fucking lightning, how does it work?