Space4Commerce by Brian Dunbar
Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "bdunbar" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
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06:54 pm
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Right-tighty lefty-loosey
When one is lefty-loosing a lug nut one ought to really be darn sure he's lefty-loosing and not righty-tighting.
Because after you sweat those things down with a lot of muscle and some foot action in the bargain it's a bear to lefty-loosey 'em again.
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11:20 pm
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The regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself
It started in California. Then it just growed.
An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”
The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.
The can on the left was bought last year. Had the other one for a few years. The new can has a complicated capspout with controls - a switch to lock back when you want to pour, a button to mash make the gas come out. Release the button and the (for lack of a better word) safety resets. It is annoying. It does not feel cheaply made, exactly, but I wonder how long it will last.
Some boating forums have suggested drilling a hole and putting a tire stem in there and using the screw top as the way to close the hole. Great idea. Just what I wanted to do with my Saturday afternoon, hacking the gas can to make it work exactly as well as it did three years ago, before government wrecked it.
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02:24 pm
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Taco Seasoning
Taco Seasoning.
You know what that is - it's a packet of stuff you buy at the store, toss in the ground beef, and you've got taco meat.
Still buying it at the store? Cut it out. Just stop - it takes so little time to make, it's so easy, that I am now embarrassed that I ever bought it from the store.
Here.
1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp paprika
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp black pepper
Mix. Dump into your ground beef. Store if needed. Do I need to tell you 'in an air-tight container'? Didn't think so.
Taco-friggin-seasoning. Have a nice day and happy Cinco de Mayo.
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02:16 pm
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Bulk Food - Peter Watts and Laurie Channer
It's a few years after we learn to understand Orcan . . .
Well, no one expected the whales to be such assholes.
Awesome short story.
Bulk Food - Peter Watts and Laurie Channer
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01:59 pm
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To protect and serve
Cops arrive to help a guy in distress, won't take 'I'm fine, go away' for an answer, shoot his ass dead. That'll learn him some manners: open the damned door next time, like a good subject.
Later a Grand Jury says 'no problem, dude, free to go'.
"If I knew that there was a man coming to my house with the fixed intention of doing me good, I would run for my life." ~Thoreau
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06:34 pm
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America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can b
Here Randy's got another hangup, something that's been slowly dawning on him as he stands on the beach beneath Tom Howard's concrete house: the perfect freedom that Tom's found in Kinakuta is a cut flower in a crystal vase. It's lovely, but it's dead, and the reason it's dead is that it has been alienated from its germinal soil. And what is that soil exactly? To a first approximation you could just say "America," but it's a little more complicated than that; America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places. Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta. The closest outpost is really not that far away: the Filipinos, for all of their shortcomings in the human rights department, have imbibed the whole Western freedom thing deeply, in a way that has arguably made them economic laggards compared to Asian countries where no one gives a shit about human rights.
Neal Stephenson 'Cryptonomicon'
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07:00 am
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Shocked, shocked I am . . .
The Administration's top man for Terrorism: We're thought about the drone strike thing and the shit-can-the-due-process-thing. Much to our surprise, everything we've been doing is cool.
Paul Krugman: Shoveling money onto the fire hasn't worked yet. We need to shovel more in. Also, I have a new book out.
Elizabeth Warren furiously paints herself as a prole, is actually the 1%. Also she's indian Native American. Oh wait, she's a prole in her heart, where it counts. She feels your pain.
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10:37 pm
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Validate executable exists in shell
Like this!
#! /bin/bash
command_validate() {
command -v ${1} >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo " WARNING: I require ${1} but it's not installed. Aborting." >&2; exit 1; }
}
command_validate passwd
exit 0
Is that cool, or what?
Via the always helpful stackoverflow.
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06:35 pm
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Door knob
A thing I knew before today but never really thought about:
At a cost of $3.00 each, it is cheaper to buy a used door knob from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore than to pay a guy to re-key a lock for which you have lost the key.
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05:54 pm
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Any other form of existence doesn’t interest me.
I'm doing up thing at work that features a little shell scripting, a lot of Kermit: glue to do a thing with free tools that the big expensive EDI application can't do for itself.
After hours of gazing at complete but scattered kermit docs, examples, source code, I was able to very carefully type the meat of my script.
rename /replace:{{}{\%6-\%7}{^}} \m(filename) \%4
This is the watershed. It's all downhill from here.
Now the shell script can iterate over a text file, pass variables to the kermit script which contains that painfully wrought line above.
kermitget.sh ftp.blah.com user password destination store prefix date-time
And all kinds of crazy Turing-stuff will happen.
A three-line function will call a 20-line Kermit script, process hundreds of customer names, thousands of files. Data flies into EDI which sends it to JDE which turns into orders, requests. Things get built, shipped. We make money.
Stuff happens.
"Meaningful Work or Death. Any other form of existence doesn’t interest me."
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