Happy Music, Happy Feet...

Via my cousin Mike D.:



I was panting myself by the time they were finished...

She Lives Way Down the Street!

Very funny sermon, via my mom:

Shameless Plug...

For my company.  Our marketing folks just posted this little movie about our upcoming Winter 2011 release (coming in early February).  There are no technical details here; it's just setting the scene for them.

I love it that we do things like this movie!

Winning the Future...

As many others, including Sarah Palin, have observed: Obama's State of the Union theme “Winning the Future” is the wrong phrase to describe his leadership, but it's the right acronym.  The graphic is already viral...

Awesome.

She's Back!

Rachel Lucas is posting again, albeit only occasionally.  Here's one destined to be a classic: “Noodles that are Wrong”.

I go to work with a smile on my face on those days when Rachel has a new post...

M78 (in Orion)...

Jeez, it never looked like this in my telescope!  From APOD, of course...

Holey Moley!

It's like Christmas for geeks!

Sometimes, You're Just Amazed...

Just over a month ago, Frankie joined our little development team.  She keeps a blog that I think of as part of her recovery plan – recovery from a profoundly sad event in her life a couple of years ago (I'll let her tell that story through her blog).  The blog is called “Hope Rising”; a title that is hopeful in and of itself.

Well, this morning I visited her blog for the first time in a few days, and found this beautiful post.  The paragraph below was just one of several that I stopped and reread a few times:

My pursuit of hope introduced me to what I have come to call the space in between. The place in my life where what was is gone and what will be has yet to be revealed. It’s the place where the only road available is the one forged with decisions and consequences of my past and my only power is in choosing the demeanor with which I walk it. For me that road was letting go of Arielle and walking that road in pursuit of hope was my spoken choice.

Arielle is the subject of the sad event. The post this comes from is all about Frankie being ready to run in her first half-marathon – which she did on the next day.  That's her at right, crossing the finish line.

I'm proud to know you, Frankie.  And I'm looking forward to knowing you better...

Found Emu...

Seen on a piece of chipboard posted along side Lawson Valley Drive this morning on my way to work (at 4 am!):

Found Emu

Heh!

Update: added photos

Industry, Meet Statist...

TigerHawk explains, very clearly, how the Obama administration's failure to understand how capitalism works is wrecking our industrial jewel: the pharmaceuticals.  Read it and weep.  Then vote these assholes idiots out of office at every possible opportunity.

For the children.

And yourself...

Minimum Wage = Recovery Roadblock...

If it's not obvious to you why the minimum wage (at any level!) is a problem, then read Warren Meyer's excellent piece in Forbes.  Meyer, by the way, is the blogger at the always-interesting CoyoteBlog...

These Really Work!

Via my mom, who says she verified the following on Snopes:

Amazing Simple Home Remedies

1. Avoid cutting yourself when slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold the knife while you chop.

2. Avoid arguments with females about lifting the toilet seat by using the sink instead.

3. High blood pressure sufferers – simply cut yourself and bleed for a few minutes, thus reducing the pressure on your veins. Remember to use a timer.

4. A mouse trap placed on top of your alarm clock will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snore button.

5. If you have a bad cough, take a large dose of laxatives. Then you'll be afraid to cough.

6. You only need two tools in life – WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and should, use the WD-40. If it shouldn't move and does, use the duct tape.

7. If you can't fix it with a hammer, you've got an electrical problem.

And the daily thought:

Some people are like slinkies – not really good for anything, but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.

Yup, this is the kind of home I grew up in. Does that explain anything for you?

So You Think You're a JavaScript Whiz?

Try this mind-bender!  What does this JavaScript expression do, if executed in a browser?

($=[$=[]][(__=!$+$)[_=-~-~-~$]+({}+$)[_/_]+($$=($_=!''+$)[_/_]+$_[+$])])()[__[_/_]+__[_+~$]+$_[_]+$$](_/_)

The answer can be found here, once you give up trying to figure it out...

New Memory Technology...

This sounds very promising: a new semiconductor technology for non-volatile memory with the speed of volatile RAM.  Unlike some other, more exotic methods proposed over the years, this one doesn't require any advances in fabrication technology...

Alternative to OS/X Terminal...

In alpha right now.  It has some interesting features...

Public Key Cryptography Invented Earlier than We Thought?

Ask anyone interested in cryptography about public-key cryptography, and the names of Diffie, Hellman, Murkle, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman will quickly arise.  They're the inventors of the concept of public-key cryptography as most of us know it.

Well, maybe not.  If this article is accurate, apparently the British government developed public-key cryptography independently and several years earlier than the six listed above.  The narrative sounds plausible to me, though of course I have no personal knowledge of any of it...

Wow!

Via APOD, this video of a spectacular meteor from 1992:

Morning Walk – Now with Coyotes!

Miki and Race are with Debbie in Arizona, getting ready to compete today.  So this morning I just had Mo'i and Lea to walk.  When I went into our living room to get ready to take them out, I noticed that our outside patio light, which has a motion sensor on it, was already turned on.  It takes a fairly large animal (dog sized) to make it turn on, so of course that got me to wondering what was out there.

Mo'i and Lea are our two oldest dogs, the least able to defend themselves.  So I walked out first by myself, with a flashlight, to see if anything was still hanging about the yard.  I shined the flashlight all around, and didn't see a thing.  Whatever it was that tripped the light seemed to have hightailed out of there.

So I went back inside, leashed Mo'i and Lea, and we went for our usual morning walk.  But when we got to the bottom of our driveway, I heard a couple of preliminary noises and then ... the unmistakable sound of a pack of coyotes howling.  And these were close!

I had the flashlight with me, but wasn't using it.  I fumbled for a moment and turned it on, aiming it at where the sound appeared to be coming from.  Just to the left of the beam, three pairs of glowing eyes – a kind of greenish orange color, moving up-and-down as they howled.  The three were about 150 feet (50 meters) away, alongside and outside the fence around our yard.  They didn't act aggressively in any way – but neither were they shy. 

We turned back toward the house, and the coyotes stopped howling.  Mo'i and Lea seemed completely oblivious to all of this, acting just as they normally do, and paying no attention whatsoever to the racket the coyotes were making.  What does this mean?  I'm guessing it means that having coyotes about is no news to them, as they smell them all the time.  But that's just a guess.

I hustled them both back inside, as I didn't hear the coyotes any more, and the glowing eyes had disappeared.  Most likely they were headed away, but just to be on the safe side, I got the oblivious dogs back inside. 

We see coyotes around our neighborhood on nearly a daily basis, so it's not particularly surprising that we saw them this morning.  The bits that are unusual is to see them quite so close to our house, and to hear them howling from so close by – and most especially, to actually see them howling.  We have a self-filling waterer in our back yard, and we have all sorts of wildlife that comes to it for water (especially at night), so my guess is that we have guest coyotes in our yard quite frequently, though we don't see them...

Just Fiddle Around With It...

Through both work and play, I've dabbled in several kinds of engineering: software, electrical, mechanical, thermal, concrete, and audio.  Probably a few more I'm forgetting at the moment, too.  One thread (of many) that runs through all of them: one of the best (and most enjoyable) ways to learn about something is to play with it.  By which I mean: to experiment, and actually try different approaches.  In other words, to just fiddle around with it.

With software in particular, this is generally pretty easy to do.  One can simply write little scraps of test code, run them, and observe the results.  But certain kinds of software are more difficult, because they are parts of more complex systems.  JavaScript running in a web browser is a great example of this more difficult soft of fiddling.  jsFiddle is an interesting attempt to erase that difficulty...

Commentary on Palin...

Suddenly there seems to be a lot of commentary on Sarah Palin.  Specifically, why the left hates her with such a passion.  Here are three takes on that (one of these via my brother Mark D.): one, two, and three.

One thing that occurred to me as I read these: “Sarah Derangement Syndrome®” is a pretty darned good diagnostic for unthinking progressivism.  That is, if you're trying to gauge how well informed someone is (politically), and whether they think of themselves as progressive, the answer to a single question (“What do you think about Sarah Palin?”) is probably all you need...