Chewing the Cud

Another friend is married. Pictures can be found on my Flickr account. The wedding was absolutely gorgeous, completely harmonious, and, best of all, had great food! Pretty much you are guaranteed a beautiful wedding when it takes place on a mountain like Mammoth, at sunset, and with a beautiful bride. The pictures on the mountain top were not easy to take. 11,000 feet and wind chill dropping temperatures well below freezing do not facilitate comfortable picture taking, but they certainly look great afterwards. I wish the new Fendon family well in their endeavors, and I will be taking them up on staying at their place in Mammoth Lakes!

Great article highlighting the success of introducing hybrid SUVs into San Francisco and New York's cab fleets. From the article:

Fuel savings between $20 and $31 over the traditional, full-size sedan cabs per 150- to 300-mile shifts. Air conditioning cost on hot days: $5 a shift, about half the sedan-version cost. Brakes are lasting twice as long. The reason: The electric engine acts as a second braking system, taking much of the load off the conventional friction brakes, says Tom Watson, Ford Hybrid Electric Vehicle Propulsion System engineering manager, Sustainable Mobility Technologies and Hybrid Programs. Several water pumps blew at the 50,000-mile mark, a situation that's been rectified, say Watson and San Francisco cab company owners. No legroom complaints from customers, who seem delighted by the novelty of the hybrid and by doing the right thing for the planet.

Cool. I hope that this kind of performace continues well past the 100,000 mile mark. Can't wait to be able to afford one myself.

As the summer heat approaches, I wonder how our little townhome is going to fare with regards to the internal temperature. We discovered early on in the winter that the central heating unit, while maintaining a comfortable temperature, also wore a nice little hole in the bank account with the energy it consumed. Now that mild temperatures are the norm, the electric bill has dropped $80 on account of the unit being off. This is obviously a good situation for all involved and I would like to continue minimizing my consumption of power. So how does one stay cool? I want to add one of these to my place but I don't think the property owners would be too happy. I also think I would regret the decision when temperatures dropped below 50 or so. Still, the next time I'm living in a desert-like ecosystem, I will be adding a windcatcher to the homestead.

Oh snap! No posts in over a month. What could I possibly have been doing? For starters, I have been coding the last week and a half at an average of 13 hours a day. We have a pretty significant project due in a little over a week which coincides with a major refactoring effort of the codebase. The refactoring took me a week an a half while Gabriel, Ben, and Steve worked on new features and infrastructure enhancements. The next couple of days should see the melding of those efforts into the refactored codebase. The other consumer of my time has been the girlfriend. The day off I take each week is devoted entirely to her and nary a bit is processed or email read during that day. It's not that she's a Luddite or anything, but she definitely helps me reconnect with my non-geek side. Like Saturday, we are having a barbeque at my place then going to a professional soccer game. It's a no-computer day in the midst of coding insanity, and I, for one, am all for it. As May approaches, I find myself gearing up for wedding season. No, no crashing; I'm actually invited to these. Three are to take place in the next two months while a fourth occurs in November. I think I am fine with the weddings; its when the friends start popping out kids that I'll have some adjusting to do. On a geekier note, I found a site today that I think has some potential for being quite helpful in making me a better programmer. Developing Programmers is a site that dedicates itself to giving resourse, articles, tools, etc, that help a budding programmer make the transition from being a coder to being a professional programmer. I realize that I am being paid to code right now, and in a loose sense that makes me a professional. I am, however, not on par with the creme de la creme of programmers, and I want to be. I know its not an overnight process, and this site seems to be a resource that will help with that journey. The cool thing about the journey - it never really ends. No programmer knows it all, has done it all, seen it all; there's always more to learn and more to experience. That's why coding is so fun. It takes you places, rather than being a destination itself. Take, for example, my very limited experience. I've worked for a college, a "secret shopper" business, a multi-national publisher, and an association of realtors. Those are some pretty disparate fields and yet all needed code written. I am not claiming to have grokked all there is to know about how each realm operates, but my jobs have exposed me to the fields and I am more conscious of how those fields affect various aspects of life. What keeps it fresh is not knowing where the next job will come from, what industry it will be in. That is exciting. Anyway, progress and change are constants, and when you realize that, it's not so scary…

Make no mistake, the time, energy, and resources needed to ween the United States off its dependance on oil are somewhat prohibitive to that occurance happening anytime soon. However, it is heartening to see other countries figuring it out. Case in point, Brazil.

I had sushi for lunch a couple days ago with Ben and Mark. Now, I love sushi, and pretty much do what I can to eat it whenever possible. Not having had breakfast, I was particularly hungry. I finished my roll in record time and, having not silenced my tummy, began eyeing one of the last two pieces left on Ben's plate. Surely a deal can be struck where I could partake of at least one of those morsels. There was.

Want to connect to a remote server without having to type in those annoying passwords? Have you generated your public and private keys? That is a must my friend.

$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -f filename

This will create two files: 'filename', your private key, and 'filename.pub', your public key. Store the private key away (probably $HOME/.ssh) and put your public key on the remote server. Assuming you put the private key in the $HOME/.ssh directory, you need to run

$ ssh-add $HOME/.ssh/filename

and this will put your new key into ssh's knowledge.

IMPORTANT When prompted, do not enter a passphrase, or else you will need this passphrase to use the key, thus negating the purpose of the key for password-less connection. Do not use this key pairing when you need the added security of a passphrase. You have been warned. **

Now we need to setup the remote machine. This is fairly trivial using the ssh-copy-id command.

$ ssh-copy-id -i $HOME/.ssh/filename.pub user@remotemachine.com

The command should return with a success message and an ssh command to try your new key out with. If this doesn't work, RTFM!

With all the to-do and hub-bub with regards to World Pi Day (see post below), I have been on a math kick. Now, back in my youth…hmm…back in my college days (not too long ago) I got pretty fanatic about Minesweeper. I quickly found that Beginner and Intermediate were for n00bs like Boink and moved on to Expert. Having solved Expert countless times, I found myself recognizing patterns faster and found the increase in pattern recognition to correlate positively with lower completion times. Alas, I burned out prior to breaking the 100 second threshold. However, I recently (read: minutes ago) came across a website that showed me that my Minesweeper foray could have developed into a $1,000,000 pursuit, had I realized that Minesweeper is NP-complete. It was at this point in the article (a good two headings in) that things went really over my head, but the guy claims Minesweeper to be the key one of the most important proofs (or disproofs (a word???)) in the current mathematical world!!! Oh snap! Is he right? Who knows…read it for yourself and find out.

Great overview of open source software history. Any aspiring OSS developer should read this.

This report doesn't exactly break new ground, but it does reinforce common sense thinking. Want adults to have respect for the environment? Get them involved in the environment from an early age. Kind of a 'Duh' conclusion but it seems worth posting and maybe someone will take it to heart and raise a kid to respect our world.