Technology
gregladen | October 9, 2010Not that you would ever muck them up, but just in case:
Get a terminal somehow (alt+F2 if you must). Type this in:
gconftool-2 --shutdown
or
gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
(or, both if you like)
Then,
rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
pkill gnome-panel
that sounds like a lot of violence and killing and stuff, but it should work. Both of your panels will reappear like magic. If not, go here and complain because this is where I learned it!
cevans | October 8, 2010
In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.
If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself idiomatic English as well as educating itself in human affairs. Paging Vernor Vinge, right?
NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would -- cumulatively, over…
gregladen | October 7, 2010The command line is a great place to get weather information. Here, I discuss one cli-app for current conditions and forecasts, in the larger context of why you would ever want to use the command line anyway.
There are several ways to use your computer to check the weather. One is to use the Nakob Weather Rock method. Suspend the computer using a rope from a tripod of sticks. If the computer is swaying, that means it is windy. If the computer is wet, that means it is raining. And so on. Like this:
That is a very amusing way to tell the weather, but it is not convenient because your…
gregladen | October 5, 2010This is the first in a series about using the "command line" in Linux. It is also about knowing when to use a gui instead. But before going into any of that we need to understand what is meant by a "command line" application. You'll find that as we explore that idea, a lot of things that are not really true 'cli' (command line interface) apps arguably count as cli, including menu driven console based apps and even gui apps. This will be controversial.
Let's start with some basic definitions. If anyone has any problems with any of the following just let me know. Consider this a first…
gregladen | October 1, 2010In the latest version of Ubuntu, the development community decided that they needed to look more like a Mac, so they randomly decided to move the window controls (to close, maximize, minimize etc.) a window, to the left (incorrect) side of the window rather than the right (correct) side of the window.
In order to fix this "feature" here's what you do.
Run gconf-editor (enter that phrase into a terminal). Find apps, then metacity, then general, then within that find "button_layout". Double click on that.
It will say "close,minimize,maximize:menu"
Change that to "menu:minimize,maximize,…
illconsidered | September 30, 2010Most of us interested in climate science understand the uniqueness and importance of deep ice cores. It is truly a remarkable record of many aspects of past climate including dust, methane, sea level proxies and carbon dioxide.
The video below (a YouTubed TED Talk)is a very fascinating look at what it takes to retrieve one.
(warning, the last 3 or four minutes are a Rolex commercial)
Cheers to Thingsbreak for posting it where I could see it!
sastyk | September 23, 2010There are a lot of inherent contradictions in my life - and for the most part, I stand with Emerson and his claim that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Periodically someone throws at my claims that we're going to have to radically reduce our fossil fuel usage "but you are writing this on a computer" as though the fact that there's an underlying hypocrisy to this that undermines my claims. And there is a kind of hypocrisy, in the adolescent sense of the term - but the reality is that it is impossible to live in this world and the one that is coming without being a…
gregladen | September 16, 2010I would hope not, but in fact there seems to be no effective mechanism in place to keep in check a not insignificant number of Google engineers who have full access to everyone's gMail contents and other private information. And, there is always David Barksdale.
David Barksdale was one such engineer. He fell in with a group of teenagers via a technology group, and used his powers to access pretty much anything he wanted to taunt and play with them like some kind of eight grade bully might taunt and play with "The Sevvies." Although there is a certain sexual overtone to what Barksdale did on…
gregladen | September 14, 2010I've been using Dropbox for several months now, and I still like it. I have it installed on two computers, a desktop and a laptop. I recently wiped the desktop's hard drive and installed an entirety new drive and system, then I installed Dropbox, and all my files (which were stored on Dropbox) mysteriously appeared on the new installation. Not really quickly but not a lot slower than if I had used some kind of backup system, and with zero effort.
Dropbox is an off-site backup and sync program. You install the app and link it to an account (which is free for smaller amounts, a reasonable…
pharyngula | September 14, 2010So Slashdot ran a short article on the rise of religious search engines — customized web search engines to return preferred sources to fit one's personal superstitions. I can't say how true that is, because the examples they gave, such as the Christian SeekFind page, has collapsed under the sudden weight of a multitude of geeks overwhelming their database.
This isn't the Christian world anymore. We live on Nerd World. And I for one welcome our new aspie overlords.
drorzel | September 13, 2010I needed a band-aid this morning, and when I was getting it out, it occurred to me that there are some subtle details of packaging technology that pretty clearly mark this as the future, not the past. I'm not sure when the transition was, but if you're around my age or older, you can probably remember the useless little red strings that used to be an integral part of the band-aid packaging. In theory, you were supposed to pull on the string, and use it to tear the paper wrapper around the bandage, but in practice, the damn thing always just pulled straight out of the package, and you ended up…
drorzel | September 10, 2010When Kate and I were walking Emmy last night, we were talking about the historical development of relativity. As one does, when walking the dog. I mentioned a couple of the pre-1905 attempts to explain things like the Michelson-Morley experiment, and how people like Lorentz and FitzGerald and Poincare were on the right track, but didn't quite get it all together.
Kate asked about what it would've been like to be a physicist working at that time, when both relativity and quantum mechanics were being born, trying out new approaches and not really knowing whether a given approach would turn out…
gregladen | September 9, 2010Microsoft says Teh Gay is "inappropriate." The corporate computer giant and evile empire banned a kid from having an X-box account because he listed the name of his home town in his profile, and happens to live in Fort Gay. The people of Fort Gay are not putting up with this. When challenged, Microsoft made up some fake story about how this happened, said they were sorry, and agreed to reinstate the child's account. As long as he not list his home town as Fort Gay. Which part of "you are a bunch of bumbling morans" do they not understand? And these are the people who are in charge of…
gregladen | September 2, 2010This is interesting: Drupal has released a new code of conduct for their community. It has five points:
* Be considerate
* Be respectful
* When we disagree, we consult others
* When we are unsure, we ask for help
* Step down considerately
The fucker stole the whole thing from Ubuntu, as it turns out. How dare they!!!!111eleventy!!!
Gmail just got like skype, sort of.
Five days after the announcement of Voice and Video Chat service in Gmail for Debian-based Linux distributions, Google unveiled a Gmail phone call service for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Rather than having…
drorzel | August 29, 2010I am planning to buy a telephoto lens for my camera. From time to time, I want to take pictures of the various critters Emmy chases in the back yard, and that would be a whole lot easier if I didn't need to get so close to them. And, of course, I strongly suspect there will be outdoor sports in SteelyKid's future, which will demand some zooming for action shots.
My camera is a Canon Rebel XSi, their entry-level DSLR model. Back when I bought it, I flagged this telephoto lens based on a recommendation in some "DSLR essentials" article or another. It still seems like a reasonable choice, but I…
drorzel | August 12, 2010My parents are in the Caribbean at the moment, and threatened to send me cell-phone pictures of white beaches and blue water. They were thwarted in this by the fact that I still have a cheap LG flip phone with no camera. Our calls from home are exclusively made using a landline phone.
You can see the reason why in the picture at right. This was taken in our living room the other night, and as you can see, we get barely one bar worth of signal in the house. This is fairly typical-- there are a few spots in the house where it rises to two bars, but an intermittent "no signal" is fairly common.…
gregladen | August 11, 2010I don't use OpenOffice unless I have to, but sometimes I have to and it's nice to know that a PDF importing extension is available. But there are some tricks to using it, which are nicely addressed here.
One problem related to the extension, but it is not the extensions fault, is that Oracle bought Sun, and thus "owns" the extension, and is messing with it in a bad way. From the cited source:
That is why free desktop users should be disturbed that Oracle, the new custodian of the extension, is not making it available for downloading. Not only is this situation a possible violation of the…
cevans | August 10, 2010
Greetings from the People of Earth from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
I made the above video, Greetings from the People of Earth, to open the World Science Festival 2010 panel "The Search for Life in the Universe," which featured personal hero Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, and Steven Squyres.
In 1977, taking advantage of a fortuitous alignment of planets, NASA dispatched two spacecraft named Voyager into space. These probes, now the farthest human-made objects from Earth, carry with them a unique recording, the Voyager Golden Record. Compiled by a team under Dr. Carl Sagan, the Golden…
gregladen | August 9, 2010Oh sure. Like I'm going to click on THAT!
All I did was to plug in a USB memory stick.
gregladen | August 6, 2010On Thursday, Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Operations, blogged on the official Google Blog (which, funnily enough, is just some blogspot blog, but whatever) that Google would no longer be developing Google Wave. Key elements of the technology are OpenSource so they may continue to be used and developed but Google itself is phasing out the project.
When Google Wave had been out for about five months, I noted that I did not like it much because at the same time, I was in the process of moving towards more basic text for day to day tasks, and Google Wave, which allows someone else to…