David McNett (Nugget)

http://defectiveyeti.com/2009/12/03/the-2009-good-gift-games-guide/

http://defectiveyeti.com/?p=3929

The 2009 Good Gift Games Guide appears in The Morning News today.

Watch this space–by day’s end I will post the 10 honorable mentions, as well as provide additional information to help you make your choices. In the meantime, you can peruse the GGGG archive here, and see the all-time top 10 at defectiveyeti.com/ggg.

http://webkit.org/blog/916/dirk-schulze-is-now-a-webkit-reviewer/

http://webkit.org/blog/?p=916

Dirk Schulze, also known as krit has done a great work on the cairo graphics context implementation, and is also the main developer behind the SVG filters implementation, which is hopefully nearing its debut, making WebKit fully implement SVG 1.1, and making it possible to represent many of the more complex features of painting in cairo-based ports.

Join me in congratulating Dirk on his reviewer status!

http://blog.ryjones.org/2009/12/03/google-dns/

http://blog.ryjones.org/?p=3888

I'm doing a terrible job at googling for an answer.. so here I am to bug you guys!

I live off Congress between William Cannon and Stassney. Is it just me or was there a helicopter circling the area around 1:30-1:45ish last night? It was keeping me awake and had me wondering what the hell was going on.

If anyone has any idea or crazy theories, I'd love to hear either. ;D

I am looking for movers for a local move (McNeil/Parmer to Lamplight/Metric).

I have mostly the normal things for moving except that I have a 52" LCD TV.
Suggestions on a good company? I've used Two Men and a Truck before and was not extremely happy with the results?
What has your experience been?

Say, how's 37th Street looking this year? I haven't been in a couple of years and I heard not as many people were participating. Is it true?

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/sprint_provides.html

Wired summarizes research by Christopher Soghoian:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with customer location data more than 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009, according to a company manager who disclosed the statistic at a non-public interception and wiretapping conference in October.

The manager also revealed the existence of a previously undisclosed web portal that Sprint provides law enforcement to conduct automated "pings" to track users. Through the website, authorized agents can type in a mobile phone number and obtain global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the phone.

From Soghoian's blog:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint's Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies' extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics -- since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

Sprint denies this; details in the Wired article. The odds of us ever learning the truth are probably very low.

people who ask "what would Jesus do?" almost invariably decide he would do what they would want to do in a particular situation.

now christians, don't think i'm picking on you. this ascribing our own values to god's will is why we have three different religions that all supposedly come from the tradition of one man. and why one of those religions split into a thousand different denominations after Martin Luther got sick of the Pope's shit. It's also a driving factor in most of the religions that have been laid down. Dogmatizing one person's differing interpretation of the unanswerable questions into a system of conformity and control.

and we don't even have to acribe malice to the schism (although there's plenty of it in church history), our inbuilt psychological biases prevent us from even seeing that we're ascribing our own values to those of the alleged almighty. Just like they prevent us from seeing that 'god' is the catchall we invented for things we don't understand or can't/won't take responsibility for. (people who kill in the name of god are not doing god's work, they're just shifting the blame)

Erik Prince, king of the corporate mercs, was CIA from 2004 until 2 months ago
(cia apparently left him high and dry when the assassination squad came to light)

so we can pretty much take all the accusations against him at face value, and have a better understanding why the multiple cases of wanton murder and war crimes were thrown out of court faster than an Orly Taitz deposition. He may cry he was thrown under the bus, but the fact he's not rotting in jail for his well-documented crimes says it all to me.

This also means Blackwater/XE should be considered a CIA front/private army, and that Blackwater is taking profit from both sides of the drug war. on the production side in afghanistan, and on the enforcement side with Blackwater mercs showing up on DEA raid teams.

today i'm letting go of something i've held onto for the last 6 months: hope of recovering my stolen bike. i just deleted the ebay saved search and craigslist-scraping-google-alert and won't be drooling over everyone else's Lemond Poprads anymore. aside from the healthiness of letting crappy things in your past go, i was talking with dark_knightly and the unfortunate truth is that if it was even recovered at this point, it would be a pyrrhic victory--i'd have a bike i loved back, but i'd owe the insurance company almost $3,000...and i'd have two of practically the same bike, because, oh yeah, the buildout of my old-new ride was completed today!

( a love story old and new )

can't wait to see mile 10,000. but for this week, i'll settle for somewhere between 10 and 100...and i'm gonna drop dylan a line and see if he wants to see what his frame turned into. if i can be in love, he can be a little jealous.

the tiny 2 gig flash drive i keep on my keychain broke (the chain loop broke off), so i ordered an even smaller 32 gig drive.

i realized on my way to work today that it will easily hold the entire Win7 virtual machine I use to connect to work from home, with plenty of space to spare for development tools.

in the future, will we even own computers?

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/letssaythanks.asp

The Xerox web site LetsSayThanks.com allows the public to send free personalized postcards to U.S. troops serving overseas.

http://www.nevdull.com/2009/12/02/if-a-pictures-worth-a-thousand-words/

http://www.nevdull.com/?p=196

…what’s a speculative simulation video worth?
This video from Youtube shows a Chinese television stations reports of the goings-on at Tiger Wood’s last week, including an animated simulation to illustrate what may have happened.
I haven’t gelled all of my thoughts on the matter. I have to assume that the people assembling speculation for [...]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/passiveaggressivenotes/~3/7ZZaLcBVnRA/

http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/?p=11859

Our submitter in Dublin, California was leaving her apartment for work one morning when she found this syntactically-challenged note stuck to the door. “I assume my anonymous complaining neighbor has the wrong apartment number because A.) My husband and I do not have children and B.) For all but one of the dates listed no one was home to make any noise.”

She adds: ” We do, however, have other neighbors next door who are quite loud, and I’ve often been woken up to the sounds of moans, grunts and something heavy slamming into an adjoining wall.” (You know, just like that part in Big where they play pinball and jump on the trampoline!)

related: down and dirty down under (dear)

BattleForge Games is having a comics sale!

ALL comics [trades, weeklies, graphic novels] are 20% off!

Mystery short boxes filled with back stock [including titles from DC, Marvel, Image, and more from 2007-2009] are only $20 each!

We are phasing out comics, so grab them while we still have them!

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/02.html

For as long as I’ve been in the industry, which is, I think, about 74 years now, the problem I’ve had with hiring programmers was not interviewing them or deciding if they’re smart—it’s been finding them in the first place.

What I’ve dreamed about is a programmer search engine.

The ideal programmer search engine would only include programmers who are actually looking for jobs. If you’ve ever emailed someone based on a resume you found through a traditional search engine, you’ve probably discovered that they’re not actually on the market.

It would only include people willing to work in your neck of the woods.

It would show you CVs right away, and, ideally, it would show you something about their programming skills besides the usual resume blahblah.

Well, OK, that day is here, and I’m like a kid in a candy store. Nom nom. Announcing the other half of careers.stackoverflow.com: the employer’s side!

Right now, there are about 928 candidates on there. That’s a start. What’s more interesting is whether there’s a candidate who meets your needs.

Let’s say you’re searching for a full time Java programmer within 40 miles of Palo Alto. Right now there are 11 candidates listed. All but one are active on StackOverflow... one even has reputation over 4000 points.

Want a bit more choice? Check the box that indicates that you’re willing to relocate. Now there are 80 matches, all of whom have the legal right to work in the states. Candidates have a lot of flexibility indicating where they’re willing to work. Even if you need a Ruby on Rails programmer in Oklahoma City, as long as you’re willing to pay for relocation, you’ve got 7 choices. You’ve got 14 choices in London (with the legal right to work.) If you think that a Python programmer could learn Ruby, you’ve got 51 choices. There are plenty of choices whether you’re hiring in Tel Aviv, Sydney, Silicon Valley, or New York. There are four programmers in Copenhagen right now. No relocation required. All of them highly qualified, actually; any one of them would qualify to interview at Fog Creek.

Stack Overflow Careers is something of a chicken-and-egg business. We have to get a big audience of programmers and a big audience of employers all at the same time, and then it’s like a junior high school dance, with the boys on one side of the gym and the girls on the other side, and for a while you just sit there holding your breath to see if anyone will dance. We invited a few hundred employers as beta testers... these were the companies that have been listing jobs on StackOverflow over the last six months, and so far, they’ve found a few dozen candidates that they liked. Once it gets to that point, we’re out of the loop, so we don’t really know how many people are actually finding jobs, but please email me your success stories and failure stories so we can keep working to make it better.

In the meantime, Jeff and the StackOverflow crew have done something brilliant: they’ve made it possible to do searches and see how many candidates match even before you have to pay. So if you want to try it out but are afraid that there aren’t students looking for OCaml internships in Houston, you can try it, and find that there is, indeed, one. So, try it out right now. There’s no obligation, and we’re happy to give you your money back if you don’t think you got good value.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/12/obscured-by-clouds.html

Ok, first of all, the iPhone 3GS is a great phone. Having used it for a couple months, it's now even more abundantly clear what a categorical piece of shit the Palm Pre was. Why did I put up with that for so long? Stockholm Syndrome?

But of course I have complaints.

1. It never seems to delete mail from the server. I'm using Pop3s, and I have the iPhone mail client set to "Deleted messages: remove after 1 day"; "Delete from server: when removed from Inbox" (and I've also tried "Seven days"). The mail client itself only shows me about a day's worth of messages, but they are never expired from the server, even when they've expired off the phone's list. I don't understand how I'm expected to keep my mail server from filling up. From earlier experiments, I do not believe that "deleting" messages on the phone does anything other than move them to a phone-side Trash folder. But if I'm expected to do that, that's just impractical. That would mean that the first thing I'd have to do every morning when I woke up was swipe away the 200+ messages that arrived during the night.

2. Since there's no sane way to delete or mark messages read on the phone, because I'm not willing to click 200 times to do it, the way I use the mail reader is to just leave all of the messages unread and in Inbox, and when I'm out and about and want to check my mail, I just read until I've seen a message that I have read already. This is stupid, but it's the only way I've found that is even remotely practical.

3. When the phone is sleeping and a notification appears (SMS, alarm, etc.) there is no way to dismiss / acknowledge that notification without typing my password to unlock the phone first. Why can't I just double-click it or something? And if I don't dismiss it, then it thinks I haven't seen it and keeps reminding me. That's really annoying. (The repeating reminders are good, the hoops you have to jump through to ack them is bad.)

4. Entering new events in the calendar is insanely convoluted. On PalmOS (and WebOS) you went to the calendar, clicked on the hour where you wanted the event, typed the event name, and you were done. Zero superfluous clicks. On the iPhone, you have to click New Event, click Edit Date, select the time off of an annoying scrolly wheel, click Done, click Edit Name, type, click Done, and then click Done again. WTF!

5. Why is there still no "iChat" on the iPhone? BeejiveIM seems to be the best option, but it kind of sucks. Constant "your screen name is signed in from 2 locations" messages. Frequent "connection reset by peer" messages. I often discover that it decided to hang up on all of my accounts, so I haven't been getting messages sent to my phone.

6. There's no "attach" button when you're sending mail. The only easy way to send a photo is to initiate that action from the Photos or Camera app (in which case the photo is scaled down to 800x600, and you can only send exactly one photo). If you go into Photos and copy a photo, you can paste it into Mail and it will send it full sized; but you can only copy one at a time, by switching back and forth between the Photos and Mail apps for each one, which is really tedious.

7. It takes too much clicking to tell it to forget a WiFi network, after you have connected to one that turned out to be useless. (Which happens quite a lot in this town.) Every "connection failed" dialog should have a "Forget this WiFi network" button on it.

8. There's no way to use a custom ring tone for SMS messages, calendar alerts, or in fact anything except voice calls. WTF.

9. Every time you sync, the music player turns off "Shuffle". WTF.

10. The whole cut-and-paste mechanism really is insanely janky.

11. The on-screen keyboard is bullshit.

Other than that, it's pretty good. It's fast, and it mostly just works.

Apps I like:

• BeejiveIM (best IM client of a bad bunch)
• Edge (like marble madness)
• Eyegore's Eye Blast (like Bubbels with spinny inertia)
• I Love Katamari
• iBART (faster than the web site)
• iSSH (the way it handles keys is very nice)
• Now Playing (movie listings)
• OpenTable
• Photoshop Mobile
• Remote (controls iTunes)
• Shazam (music identifier)
• Sol Free (solitaire)
• Taxi Magic
• Wikipanion (faster than the web site)