Oh man, oh man. I can't believe the level of my geekiness sometimes, but I have to share this. Pi seems to have so many numerical combinations contained in its string of numbers. For example, My birthday, 07171982, was found at position 116,728,043 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. My zipcode, 63146, was found at position 135,918 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. My street address, 12394, was found at position 8,831 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. Want to search some of your numbers? Check out the site. Also, there are some interesting analyses and fun facts concerning Pi and its value. Update: As tomorrow is World Pi Day, I thought I'd add an article or two covering various parts of Pi, like its history and general background. Happy reading and happy Pi Day.

New plant to be built in the next 18 months in Claypool, Indiana, that will effectively double the United States' biodiesel production capabilities. From the article:

The project, which was announced last year, combines a soybean processing plant with a biodiesel production plant. The facility will crush nearly 50 million bushels of soybeans a year, producing more than 1 million tons of soybean meal for animal feed and 80 million gallons of biodiesel.

Hopefully biodiesel pumps will start springing up here in St. Louis, providing me with incentive to actually trade in my car for a diesel.

Need more detailed information about your *nix system than you'll actually ever use? /proc contains a bevy of information that can help you diagnose problems or just learn more about your system. Where does one begin though? Part one in a series of articles on /proc on the Linux Forums begins the process of developing your *nix and /proc foo.

LAMPPP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Python/Perl) was recently deemed the most secure open source software package by a government-backed study.

/In the analysis, more than 17.5 million lines of code from 32 open-source projects were scanned. On average, 0.434 bugs per 1,000 lines of code were found, Coverity said. The LAMP stack, however, 'showed significantly better software quality," with an average of 0.29 defects per 1,000 lines of code, the technology company said./

This video is crazy. So much for the 'white men can't jump' theory. This guy has crazy ups.

The second car in my garage would have to be one like this one. Granted, this article is more about the people involved in creating the car, but still, 0-60 in 4 secs and 50 mpg and runs on biodiesel. Come on, that would be awesome!

Who doesn't love Calvin and Hobbes? How many times have you been in a situation where you think, man, this is just like a Calvin and Hobbes strip? Okay, so I've never transmorgified my clones into worms, but hey, it's good to be prepared in case that need should arise, right? Say, however, that you had an issue and wanted to see how Calvin would approach it. Or that you remember a strip that you loved but can't find it. Well freaks,  get a life! Or search for it on the Calvin and Hobbes Strip Search (haha) Engine! That's right, a keyword-searchable database of C&H strips for your browsing pleasure. w00t!

Damn, I want one.

I've had some lull time the last couple days and decided to put it to good use and put some new things on the site. What resulted from that hackery is the webcam image and the flickr images on the sidebar. So, the low down on what is occuring - the webcam image comes from my webcam, using a program called camorama, which then uploads the picture to my web server. Once your web browser has loaded the image, it checks back periodically with the web server to see if a new image has been uploaded. If so, it updates the image. On the administrative side, I have an AJAXed caption field that allows me to update the caption of the webcam pic, which will then be picked up by anyone with the site open the next time their browser looks for an updated image. It's nothing ground-breaking but I like it. The Flickr plugin (FAlbum) itself is really great. I added the little button to the right of the heading so that users can pull new random pictures. It goes back to the server and uses the plugin to pick another set of pictures. The animations of the images are provided by the scriptaculous javascript library. Again, there is nothing too ground-breaking about what has happened, but I like it and its my site, so there! Hehe…Seriously though, nothing here is static. Have an idea to improve something? Let me know in the comments. Or email. Or telepathy.

First, to catch some up, a definition: epigram: n.

1. A short, witty poem expressing a single thought or observation.
2. A concise, clever, often paradoxical statement.

From a list of programming epigrams, I liked these two a lot: 35. Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught not to. So it is with great programmers. 116. You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.