High tech wizardry and breathe new life into the industry

I have found myself with a Fujitsu Lifebook P7230. I suppose it's a fine subnotebook. It's very very light, very very small, and doesn't run Mac OS X. Or does it?

I've casually followed the hackintosh movement since Apple first announced the switch to intel chips. I've been eyeing the MSI Wind or Asus eeePC as possible replacements for the iBook, but they are fairly underpowered for some of the things I do (graphics editing, video editing). And I don't want to go back to linux. While I spent a lot less time keeping linux up and running than I did on Windows, there still was a lot more time on computer maintenance than I liked. And getting it up and running was a bit of a hit-or-miss effort back when I was a full time linux user (late 90's to mid 2000's).

I played with Ubuntu on the lifebook for a few days. Install was painless and all the hardware worked fine. The interface was a bit more polished than last time I used linux, but still a far cry behind the cohesiveness and 'it just works' ness of OS X. The main things I do on my computer at home are centered around digital media or python coding. Linux has tools for both of those that are adequate, but they are just that: adequate. For their many shortcomings, I still find iTunes and iPhoto to be the best tools for managing music and pictures. With over 100G of music and 10G of pictures, the tools simply have to work. The linux window managers haven't improved much. Again, still better than Windows but not by much. Video production on linux is simply not worth the effort for me. As far as coding, most of the open source editors just plain suck. They're either resource hogs like the mozilla based ones (the browser is a super crappy editing environment, even Microsoft figured that one out) or eclipse (java sucks memory and cpu out of all proportion to what is being done even under the best of circumstances). These are not problems unique to linux. The very best web IDE ever was HomeSite, whose brutal death at the hands of Adobe was a truly depressing event. The second best is the very capable TextMate, which only runs on OS X.

After many unhappy experiences with installs and upgrades I finally hit upon a winning setup. I have a 14GB base partition, an 8GB restore partition, and the rest is user files. In the highly likely event that I must reinstall due to bricking it during an upgrade at least all my home directory is safe. I also moved Applications and Library off to the user partition so I'd have room for the XCode and iLife installs (more on that later). Softlinks are your friend.

What I selected in the install process using a Kalyway ...

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I watch my television, almost lost my mind**

On this day in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded. I was in class watching on TV, like hundreds of thousands of other kids.

My reaction was informed by my extensive reading of sci-fi and the daily paper (San Jose Mercury News, in my case). I had developed not only a healthy skepticism of all official pronouncements, but the seeds of a lifelong bent towards ridiculing the more reactionary elements of our societey. I went to a private school where most of the student population were mini-Reaganites who knew little or nothing about why the held the views they did, only that they believed whatever their parents told them to when it came to issues of politics and social policy. I was a policy geek even then.

In my best imitation of one of the 'cool' jocks in my class I blurted out "It's a Soviet conspiracy!" which I was told was incredibly insensitive* and inappropriate. And yet I heard on talk radio on the way home that same theory being seriously proposed and expounded upon. "It's a Soviet conspiracy" became one of my go-to smartass comments for at least the next 4 years after that. Even now I sometimes still use it with people that I think will get the underlying humor/cynicism.

*I was a 15 year old boy. Insensitive and inappropriate are de riguer.

** I've been informed that my choice of titles is also insensitive and inappropriate. Possibly true, I'm still that same 15 year old boy in some ways.

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Don't worry baby there's nothing to fear

A few notes from the blogosphere:

• Orac notes a truly ironclad study disproving a link between mercury and autism as well as the sad story of the death and illnesses reported over the weekend amongst children who were not vaccinated. The study is also nicely covered by Dr. Steven Novella at Neurologica.
• John Whitfield has another entry in his fascinating Blogging the Origin series in which he writes about reading Darwin's Origin of the Species for the first time.
• Brendan O'Kane takes the NYT to task for their story on Chinese hip-hop. I'm following more and more Chinese music so I have a special interest in this.

Thought for the day: If your whole position on a particular issue can be summed up in a bumper sticker then it’s time to worry -Jeremiah Jenne

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What can I say I have a rat for a pet

So happy Chinese New Year!

• Danwei has front pages of the some of the Chinese major dailies.
• Fool's Mountain blogs about the Year of the Ox
• China Smack has some entertaining commentary on some college students hopes for the new year.
• CNReview has a great Food Map of Spring Festival
• And Danwei also has a nice bit on the CCTV Gala

Unrelated: "Subtlety is always worth the trouble" is my new personal motto.

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I can make mistakes just fine by myself

Let's say you had marked all the posts on your wife's blog as 'unpublished'. And let's say you really, really, REALLY, didn't want to walk through all those posts to find the mere 50 or so that she wanted to be republished. I didn't find any obvious way to do it through the wordpress interface nor in any documentation with a cursory search.

As it turns out: not that hard. If you want to update all posts in a category in wordpress just follow these basic steps (assuming WP 2.3 or greater).

• Log in to your handy sql prompt and type the following line
  select term_id, name from wp_terms;
• You'll want to note the term id (48 in my example) as you will use it when you type the following line
  select term_taxonomy_id from wp_term_taxonomy where term_id=48;
• Use that term_taxonomy_id (52 in my example) in this handy little line
  update wp_posts INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships on wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id set wp_posts.post_status='publish' where wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id=52;

Voila. Now all the posts in category 48 are now published, and no others are. The deprecating of category in favor of terms seems to me needlessly complex, but PHP apps tend to go that way.

Also, if you've never been able to fully wrap your head around joins, Atwood's Visual Explanation of SQL Joins is a must read.

UPDATE: I've gotten a few emails on doing it all in one big multiple inner join statement. Yes, if this were something I were going to do on a semi-regular basis I'd make the extra effort to turn it into a whole repeatable process. This being a one off event, it didn't seem worth the extra effort.

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Sayin' "Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi"

Comment is superfluous.

Obama Action Figure

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Going up to the big house

From China Daily:

Tian Wenhua, the former chairwoman and general manager of Sanlu Group, the firm at the center of the tainted milk scandal, received life imprisonment on Thursday in north China's Hebei province.

It's interesting the contrast here where executives who steal hundreds of millions of dollars, oversee environmental devastation that kills and injures thousands of people, etc etc are rarely even prosecuted let alone sentenced to anything more than a few months in a luxury prison. This isn't to say the approach China takes in prosecuting corporate crime is necessarily better, but it's important to understand that there must be real consequences for CEO's et al. Something in between our approach of "Oh, no problem, here's a 50 million dollar golden parachute" and their approach of "Life in prison, or in some cases execution" there is a sensible balance.

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We're all the same

Obama's speech was good, but Lowery was possibly better. I particularly liked his closing

when black will not be made to move back, when brown can stick around, when yellow can be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right

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Cold Coffee and Cocaine

So there's a recent survey that's making the rounds of teh intarwebz which is being misrepresented by the media. The survey itself is a good one though it suffers a pretty core design flaw and makes no such bold claims as 'coffee causes hallucinations*'. They certainly posit a link between 'high caffeine users' and increased likelihood of hallucinations. I don't expect any of the news networks to understand even the most basic scientific precepts like 'correlation does not prove causation', especially since most of them are busy firing all their science writers and assigning science news to whoever happens to be free at the moment. Which I'm sure will lead to some high quality reporting.

The core flaw of the survey is that it's a survey. This is not a study or clinical trial, they simply asked college students about their caffeine usage and then assessed indicators for stress and experiences of hallucinations. These being college students, controlling for use of medications (prescription or recreational) would seem to be advisable. The authors put forth a very credible explanation of what may cause the link (caffeine exacerbating the effects of stress, already known to cause hallucinations). Two other possibilities mentioned by the fine folks at The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe are that caffeine intake at such high levels could cause sleep disorders, also already known to cause hallucinations, or the possibility that the underlying condition that makes someone prone to hallucinations also causes them to consume large amounts of caffeine. I consider that a least likely candidate of the four proposals at hand, but not completely unreasonable.

On a related note, the most recent episode of SGU (#182) features an interview with Michio Kaku who does a great job of explaining theoretical physics in a way that even I can understand. I still don't necessarily buy concepts like the multiverse or 11-dimensional universes or even string theory without actual testable hypotheses, but at least I have a much firmer grasp on what the theories are and why they're considered good candidates. *I realize that's not the exact wording in this article, but it's tough to link to a radio or local nightly news broadcast, the two places where I encountered it asserted most strongly.

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It's ca ca ca cold outside

So something I'd not considered before, and I suppose I'd not even noticed until this winter: piercings get cold fast. Just walking from the car to the building my nose and ears (even when covered with winter cap and scarf) HURT around the piercings. Damn they hurt a lot. How did I not notice this in previous winters? Is it really THAT much colder here? Or am I just old?

Song referenced in the title of this post is the wondrous Fa La Freezing by My First Earthquake. I highly recommend checking them out.

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Now baby what you done with your hair

Everytime I hear Sanjay Gupta I can't help but seeing Sanjaya in my mind. And hearing the Soup's "Sanjaya" voice over. But that's not why I am not thrilled with this choice.

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She's my only true love, the one that I dream of

And today is her birthday, so go wish Mae a happy birthday!

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Let me tell you about some of the things I'm going through

Just a few of the things I'm reading around teh intarwebs while getting back into the swing of things.

The Stranger regrets a few things.
I was only made aware that there was such a thing as an HIV-denial movement this year. Even more moronic than the 9-11 conspiracy theorists.
Who knew Bigfoot was shy?
A nice essay on the ultimate differences, or lack thereof, between China and the U.S.
The always amusing Skeptico with the Golden Woo Awards
Producers of Expelled admit they lied to participants about their 'documentary'.
Better predictive ability than Sylvia Brown. Not that that's saying much about someone who has success rate of zero.
Remember Jack Abramoff?
Interesting thread asking why Malthus assumed linear growth for food production. It seems to me that while not exponential it could certainl increase faster than strict linear just as a result of industrialization.


Also note: archives are now working. I've known for months what the problem was (a missing / in a model) but been to busy to actually doing anything about it. Just clicky on the left over there and peruse some of my brilliance from earlier days. 2005 appears to have gone missing from the backups.

UPDATE: do not blog while distracted by inscrutable new process documentation. There are now links. This all makes way more sense. And yes, I now know that the archives fix broke rss. I'm sure I'll have that fixed by June.

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They're fishing in the kitchen but they haven't caught up to me

There is a particular stage of exertion where every muscle aches, you're exhausted both physically and mentally. It is without question a great way to go to sleep. Just laying down in that state to drift off is such a relief.

When I worked at Great America it was a frequent part of my weekends, as that's when I'd work extra hours at the Redwood Amphitheatre often clocking 2-3 20 hour days over the course of the weekend loading and unloading trucks and setting up lighting rigs and raising speaker stacks etc etc. Turns out that hosting a New Year's/Birthday Party with a dozen kids under 5 is also a good way to get to that state...

Groucho: All right. It says the first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the first part of the party of the first part, shall be known in this contract - look, why should we quarrel about a thing like this, we'll take it right out, eh?

Chico: Yes, it's too long anyhow. Now what have we got left?

Groucho: Well I've got about a foot and a half. Now what's the matter?

Chico: I don't like the second party either.

Groucho: Well, you should have come to the first party, we didn't get home till around four in the morning. I was blind for three days.

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