Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Saw this today:

today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2005-07-07T140454Z_01_N06702090_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-SCIENCE-MEAT-DC.XML

The best part:

…scientists could grow cells from the muscle tissue of cattle, pigs, poultry or fish in large flat sheets on thin membranes. These sheets of cells would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked to increase thickness and resemble meat.[emphasis mine]

Actually, I don’t think this is such a bad idea. It’s just a way to get processed meat without having to go through the intermediate stage of having to grow an actual animal. Then there’s less waste, since you don’t have to grow bones, beaks, and hair. And then there’s less temptation for the processors to try and stretch the meat by grinding up skin and such. So, even though I’m sure the organic-food-types would recoil in horror, I actually think this might be a Good Thing for the average person’s diet.

Found this today on Lifehacker:

It’s a great hack for Google Maps: the Google Pedometer. But it’s not just for walking. It works for bike rides, too. For instance, here’s last Saturday’s ride to the Encino Velodrome as plotted on the map: see the route

Note that the final calculated mileage of 60.9 agrees pretty well with the 61.<mumble> measured by my bike computer.

Now, if only this could be combined with Bike Metro’s route service to give elevation data, it would be perfect.

Tonight I went outside and had a look at Venus and Mercury. They are very close together, and I figured that they would probably fit within one eyepiece field on my telescope. So I got out the telescope and set it up in the front yard. I was able to see both planets at the same time, so I thought I’d try some more duct tape astrophotography. I taped the camera directly to the eyepiece and set it on no-flash mode. Then I set it on a ten-second delay and just shot a few pictures to see what would happen. And here it is.

Found this on Len’s blog. I’m always in favor of contributing to the Advance of Science.

Every so often I poke around in the logs for my web site and see what people are looking at and where they came from. Today I noticed something funny. My statistics for this month said that the number three search string was ‘Ramones’, and looking at the logs showed that I was coming up in an image search. I went to see the Ramones live once, back in 1980, but I certainly don’t have any pictures of that. I’ve also been to see the Ramones dead a couple of times. My picture comes up on the second page of the search results. It’s from the day I rode over to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with the bike club and we visited Dee Dee Ramone’s grave and also the memorial to Johnny Ramone.

But the picture that comes up in the image search is of a squished crayfish. Why that picture? There are ten pictures with that blog entry. None of them have any alt text. How did the Infinite Wisdom of Google select that picture over the others?

Try the search

I’ve read that Google is God. Maybe there are some things Man was not meant to know.

I got mentioned in a column in the Pasadena Star News on Sunday:

link to the story

“With California’s barrage of earthquakes, and even a tsunami warning last week, the Web site of the Pasadena office of the U.S. Geological Survey has been working overtime.

And it overloaded briefly Thursday.

Within minutes of the magnitude-4.9 earthquake that struck in the middle of the day near Yucaipa and shook all of Los Angeles, hundreds of thousands of people were pointing and clicking on the USGS site.

The number of hits peaked at more than 4,000 per second five minutes after the quake, said Stan Schwarz, system administrator for the USGS Pasadena office.

The system became overloaded and went offline shortly thereafter, but was up and working again about 45 minutes after the quake.

The largest number of hits came from the “Did you feel it?’ map, which doesn’t exist on any other site, Schwarz said.

The USGS’s new tool, which color-codes the likelihood of aftershocks in the next 24 hours, only registered about 6,000 of the 250,000 hits during the peak.

Schwarz said the site gets about six months’ worth of average traffic during the hour immediately following any earthquake that people in Los Angeles can feel.

And, he said, the peak time has gone down, probably as a result of more broadband Internet connections. “It used to be five or six years ago, the peak traffic on our Web site was 10 minutes after the earthquake,’ he said. “You could practically set your watch on it.’”

Ever since the Hector Mine Earthquake in 1999, I’ve made a little side project out of studying the traffic surges our web servers get after earthquakes. As a sysadmin, it’s largely a matter of self-preservation, since I hate it when they go down.

Note also that the reporter spelled my name correctly. This is unusual, but when she asked how it was spelled, I told her, “it’s easy – it’s spelled just like ‘Schwarzenegger’, but without the ‘enegger’”. She just laughed, but I figured that anyone in the newspaper business in California knows how to spell ‘Schwarzenegger’ now.

Note to self: I set up natd on Moe today so that Lucinda’s Mac can connect out to the Internet. To do this, I had to recompile the kernel, with these new options added:

options IPFIREWALL
options IPDIVERT

Then I had to add the following to /etc/rc.conf:

gateway_enable=”YES”
firewall_enable=”YES”
firewall_type=”OPEN”
natd_enable=”YES”
natd_interface=”dc0″
natd_flags=”"

And voilà. It works. Now Itunes can see the Apple music store and Cathy can load up her ipod with all manner of stuff.

Have I mentioned recently that FreeBSD rocks?

Yesterday I was reading Slashdot and I saw an article about a guy who gets a million spams a day and how he deals with it. I don’t get anywhere near that much spam, but I get enough to be mightily annoyed by it.

One of the things he does is to implement greylisting, which is a really clever way to discourage spam. I looked, and they have it in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, so it was easy to install on my mail server.

I’ve been running it for 24 hours now, and the spam has been cut down by something like 95%. It’s a miracle I tells ya…

Note to self: (Anyone else reading this won’t be interested unless you’re trying to burn files to a CD under FreeBSD 5.3)

I went to burn my pictures from the tattoo convention to a CD, and it failed. Just one more thing broken by the OS upgrade.

Had to reinstall the sysutils/cdrtools port to get the ‘mkisofs’ program. The ‘burncd’ program comes with FreeBSD, but I had to change the device name. I also had to change the permissions on /dev/acd0. I put a ‘perm’ entry in /etc/devfs.conf for the future.

mkisofs -L -R -o output.raw Raw
burncd -f /dev/acd0 data output.raw fixate

Also, to mount the iso image file, use mdconfig:

mdconfig -a -t vnode -f output.raw
mount -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /mnt

Cathy’s car had been in the shop this week, and I picked it up after work today. So I was driving home from work today. It felt very weird. I actually actively prefer riding my bicycle.

Anyway, I saw this car with a vanity license plate that said “TCP GRAM”. Now, I have one that says, “IMA NERD”, and I thought that this one might very well be another computer geek. But no, it’s a grandma whose grandchildren’s names begin with “T”, “C”, and “P”. But I still thought it was funny, and I wouldn’t have been able to get the picture if I’d been on my bike.