Archives January 2009

Jo Hovind Update

Kent Hovind’s weblog, normally devoted to imaginary conversations, now has a bit of news: Kent’s wife Jo was sentenced at the same time as her husband, to a year and a day. Her sentence was stayed pending the outcome of the appeals. Well, the appeal has gone nowhere, so she is now in prison in Marianna, FL. At the minimum-security satellite camp of FCI Marianna, to be more exact.

Science’s Rightful Place

In his inaugural address, president Obama said,

We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield
technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its
cost.

The hive overminds at Seed are
asking the obvious follow-up question,
“What is science’s rightful place?

They’re only soliciting answers from scientists, but I can still give
my reply here.

Read More

Mark Your Calendars

informs me that time_t (the number of seconds elapsed since Jan. 1, 1970, the standard measure of time under Unix) will be 1234567890 on Feb. 13 2009, at 18:31:30 EST, or 23:31:30 UTC.

Back on Sep. 8, 2001, when time_t rolled over to 10 digits, we were braced for a mini-Y2K. I don’t expect anything to happen this time, except for a bunch of Unix geeks hoisting beers.

Who Flubbed the Oath?

If you watched Obama
take the oath of office,
you probably noticed some hesitation and fumbled words. No doubt this
will become the next thing on which to attack Obama: that he flubbed
his oath.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=274_VdeckAU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

As far as I can make out, the transcript goes like this:

John Roberts: I, Barack Hussein Obama
Obama: I, Barack
Roberts [over]: do solemnly swear
Obama: I, Barack Hussein Obama do solemnly swear
Roberts: that I will… execute the office of President to the United States faithfully
Obama: and I will execute…
Roberts: the o— faithfully the pre— office of President of the United States
Obama: [over] the office of the President of the United States faithfully
Roberts: and will, to the best of my Ability
Obama: and will, to the best of my Ability
Roberts: preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States
Obama: preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States
Roberts: so help you God?
Obama: so help me God.

Article 2, Section 1
of the US Constitution gives the president’s oath of office as:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

So it looked as though they both deviated from the script (though
Greedo shot Roberts flubbed first), moving the word
“faithfully” out of its place, and adding “so help me God” at the end.

Slow News Day

CNN just gave a list of the coldest and hottest inauguration days.

I’m so glad to hear that the fighting in Gaza has ceased, that Europe has heating gas again, that no one is blowing anyone up in Iraq or Afghanistan, and generally that it’s such a slow news day that there’s nothing to do but fill air time with inauguration trivia.

PS: Dear Mr. Obama: please don’t fuck this up.

Answering XKCD


The answer the character is looking for is

osascript -e "set volume output volume 100"

Of course, much like the character in the original strip, I first tried ssh-ing in to the laptop where I have this defined as an alias (nope; it’s asleep), ssh-ing in to the other Mac to see if I’d copied the alias to all Macs (that one’s asleep too), looking through backups (nope; laptop backs up to a directly-attached disk (see “it’s asleep”, above), and the other Mac’s backups came up empty), grepping through my home wiki and other notes to see if I had written this down anywhere (bupkis).

I had to wait until I came home and had physical access to the laptop to wake it up and read my .cshrc.

Continuity at the Onion?

Today’s Onion includes the story
Spider Eggs Hatch In Bush’s Brain“.
This would be unremarkable, except for the fact that last week, the
Onion Radio News had the story
Vice President Cheney Seen Dragging Egg Sac Through West Wing“.

Is the Onion introducing continuity between stories? Has this formerly
resolutely short-attention-span publication yielded to pressure to
introduce story arcs? Stay tuned. Unless this turns out to be a
coincidence, in which case just forget it and go about your business.

Google Maps and Metro: So Close, and Yet, so Far

Google Maps
now has a feature that allows you to specify whether you want driving
directions, or for public transportation.

This sounds great, but if you ask for
directions
from the College Park Metro station to the Metro Center Metro station,
it says to walk a mile and a half to the Riverdale MARC station (what?
Not the College Park MARC station?), take that train down to Union
Station, and walk another mile to Metro Station.

So all in all, just a wee bit pointless.

LOLcale

If you’re writing
Engrish,
you should probably set $LANG = en_CN.UTF-8, right?

Cleaning a Nokia N810 Keyboard

Posted in hopes that it’ll help someone somewhere:

A while ago, I spilled lemonade on my N810’s keyboard, then accidentally closed it before I could wipe it clean. I did what I could, but over the following days, the keyboard increasingly started making squeaking and crunching sounds. So I thought I’d take it apart to see if I could clean it.

It turns out that the keyboard just comes off. If you raise the stand bar (the one you need to raise to insert an SD card or open the battery cover), you’ll see three holes in the front (four, actually: the smaller one is the microphone). The three holes hold hooks that hold the keyboard in place.

Slide out the keyboard, and use a small screwdriver to push the hooks in. Lift the keyboard up a bit, and then pull it out. You’ll be left with the metallic keycaps, looking down at the actual sensors.

I washed the keycap assembly with water and a sponge, let everything dry, snapped the keyboard back into place, and presto! Good as new. the keyboard doesn’t feel crunchy anymore. Happiness ensued.

Oh, and you probably want to remove the battery before doing anything else.