Things I Would Like To Organize, But Am Unsure If Anyone Would Participate

• Charity Beard Growing Contest. None of this whimpy just the month of November stuff. I’m thinking something closer to Whiskerino, except with an entrance fee that get’s split between the winner(s) and the charity of their choice. Start October 1st, Ending on May 1st. Prizes for Longest, Thickest, and Worst Beards. I have no expectation that I’d actually be able to win this.
• Miracle Fruit Dinner Party. Probably get the tablets as the fruit apparently doesn’t ship well. I’d supply the regular tasting items like lemons, limes, grapefruit, vinegar, cheeses, pickles and baker’s chocolate, and I’d ask all my guests to bring something else to eat or drink while under the influence of miraculin.
• Anaglyph Party. I’d get a huge pile of the red-blue glasses and assemble a collection of anaglyph movies. Maybe do this as the same time as the Miracle Fruit? I totally stole this idea from a metafilter comment.

So… is anyone interested in any of these?

Five uses for a soon to expire RSA Token

1. Lottery ticket number generator
2. Toddler toy
3. Hammer testing device
4. Wobbly table leg shim
5. Blog post fodder

48 hours with the G1

In order to silence Ben’s nagging, here are my thoughts on the G1 after about 2 days.

Pros:
• Browser works well. No multitouch, but the interface is quite usable. No flash, but embedded youtube videos can be opened in the youtube app from the browser. I wrote this blog post in the browser.
• Hardware. Feels solid, but not a brick. The keyboard slides out with a satisfying thunk.
• Copy/Paste. Doesn’t work everywhere, like on random text in the browser, but the browser will copy phone numbers and urls.
• Android Market. Blows away the app experience on Windows Mobile 5, and I guess very similar to the iPhone experience, but definitely feels more.. wild west. There are some really odd apps out there. More on these in another post later.
• Notification pulldown. This is the biggest UI innovation of Android. Background apps let you know they have something to show you, yet don’t get in the way of what your doing.

Cons:
• Bluetooth. It has it, but I can’t seem to pair with the handsfree in my car. None of the apps can interact with it either. I hope this is near the top of the android dev teams list
• Occasional Slowdown. Sometimes the system hangs momentarily when you change between a lot of apps in a short period of time. This is most likely some apps saving state and shutting down. Very minor issue.
• Battery Life. Could be better, but I’ve had much worse.

Android Ponies

I’m really liking what I’ve seen of Android, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have one by November. Everyone seems to have a list of the announced apps they want to use but I’d like to find replacements for the following apps I’m pretty happy with in the Windows Mobile world.

1. SSH client. right now I use PocketPutty, but development seems to have staled, so I doubt there will be any quick port to Android. ConnectBot looks promising.
2. Flickr uploader w/ geotagging. Shozu is pretty awesome on Windows Mobile and Symbian, and they recently came out with an iPhone app. The Android devs have a sample app called Photostream to view Flickr photostreams, but it doesn’t appear to have upload capabilities.
3. a podcatcher. I currently use Egress for Windows Mobile, which used to be my feed reader of choice as well, but I think google reader has taken over there and I just don’t bother with most feeds on my phone anymore. Google reader + google gears on android will be pretty killer. but I’d still want way to grab all my podcasts.
4. Twitter client. TinyTwitter is doing a bang-up job on windows mobile and java phones. Twitterdroid looks promising and was recently open sourced.

So, since the majority of the geeks reading this already have iPhones, what useful apps are guys using that I should hope to find ports for an Android version? (that last sentence is horrible, but you get the gist.)

Proliant Blade running RHEL5, you’ll need a cma.log rotation script

No one seems to have written a log rotation script for the Proliant Support Pack logs that are stored in /var/spool/compaq/cma.log, so I thought I’d throw mine up here in case someone else needs one. put this in a file called “cma” in /etc/logrotate.d/

/var/spool/compaq/cma.log {
compress
missingok
size=100M
postrotate
/sbin/service hpasm restart 2> /dev/null > /dev/null || true
endscript
}

That’s it. this will be picked up by the daily cronjobs and keep things from getting messy. if you want to test your config without doing any changes, run logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.conf which will output the work it plans on doing. If your big log hasn’t rotated in that example, run logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf which force the job to run. those 6 gigs of logs are now a tidy 39 megs.

Why American Education is Failing: Not Enough MacGyver

Meg is teaching her third graders a unit on energy and needed an example scenario to test their knowledge of what happens to heated particles, namely that they expand to take up more space. She had a test question that was worded very oddly and involved how far capillary action would draw fluid up a straw if the water was cold or hot. She asked me to come up with an alternative thought experiment she could use to retest her students. My original thought was to eliminate water from the equation because of it’s tricky phase change/density issues and instead ask a question involving a steel pipe and a steel ball that just barely fits through the pipe when both are at room temperature. She decided that was too complicated. The experiment she came up with involved two measuring cups with 1 cup of room temperature water in each. One is heated, but not boiled, the other cooled, but not frozen. What difference would be observed between the two measurements after this temperature change occurred? She was looking for the warm cup to measure slightly more, and the cold cup to measure slightly less. Turns out some tricky parents decided to ACTUALLY TRY THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT and found there was no change. Perhaps the water got below 4 degrees C and started down the odd shift that water has that causes ice to float, perhaps the warm cup wasn’t boiling, but enough evaporated to prevent any noticeable change, perhaps there was a change but kitchen variety measuring cups aren’t exactly graduated cylinders.

This is why I hate thought experiments involving water. (also: lead, uranium, neon and silicon also do some tricky things when cooled so they should remain out of the realm of third grade thought experiments) Here is my original thought experiment:

You are a secret agent and need to plant an explosive to blow up an enemy facility. Due to a mix up back at headquarters, you weren’t given the normal remote controlled detonation system for your explosives. Instead, you were sent a self-lighting welding torch, 6 inches of steel pipe 1 inch in diameter, a steel ball that just barely fits inside of the pipe and a pair of barbeque tongs. Without your remote controlled detonator, the only way to set off the explosives is by pressing the half inch wide button on top of the explosives, but that doesn’t give you any time to escape the explosion yourself. Using only the supplies you received how can you set off the explosives without blowing yourself up? Explain your solution in terms of adding energy to particles and what happens when a heated item cools over time.

If a parent actually helps a kid actually try the experiment they should win just for having the needed supplies.

When I’m Elvis Rich: America’s National Pastime Plus Little People

When I’m Elvis rich, I’m going to start an American League Baseball team composed of all little people, and a really good normal sized pitcher. Lets call them The Anaheim Munchkins. As long as my pitcher can manage a few no-hitters against the other normal sized teams, the rest of my team’s impossible to hit strike zone will rack up massive points from walks.

This of course will start a (short) arms race where other teams in the league try and find similar small strike zones. The Atlanta Gnomes and Boston Leprechauns will surely follow. The only problem will be when the Munchkins make it to the World Series and don’t have the pinch hitter rule anymore and our pitcher with the huge strike zone becomes a (big) liability.

Mantle Cat

Mantle Cat

Originally uploaded by jrishel.

this picture explains a lot of the odd noises we’ve been hearing at night.