Category Archives: Pals
The Fish that Fell in Love with the Moon
Once upon a time, there was a fish that fell in love with the moon. While other fish swam in water warmed by the sun, our fish waited for the cool moonshine and the rise of his beloved moon.
He loved the moon and everything about her. He loved her delicately laced surface, the white light she gave off, her changeable waxing and waning.
One night our fish decided to seek out his love. Continue reading The Fish that Fell in Love with the Moon
An explosive tale about airport security
I really really dug this post about carrying gunpowder through airport security.
You can’t create a secure airport that is worth traveling through. The solution isn’t to figure out every possible way that people can attack airports and prevent those… That’s an insolvable problem. A better way is to find people who are trying to hurt us and deal with them in a legal, just way.
People who are trying to hurt us face many of the same problems we do. They need networks, support, materials, etc. They also recruit and are looking for moral support.
These seem like much richer avenues of investigation.
In The Name of Science!
Sometimes a revolution begins with a simple idea. Â Edwizzle has such an idea.
We demand video in the name of science!
The NYC Government IT has given up.
My buddy Ian has a great post about his experience trying to find out if he had to move his car. Seems the DOT updates this info on Twitter rather than putting it out on their own website.
Now that’s just crazy, but I know why. Sam used to work for the city and I’ve heard some stories about trying to get things done there. Â The municipal IT department is paid below average wages, there are no negative incentives like being let go, and they are given no positive incentives like promotions or bonuses. Â IT at the city seems to be a job that you take and show up for until you collect your pension.
So it isn’t that this is a bad strategy, it’s just that the city is so completely incompetent at IT that they can’t even put in a CMS. Therefore, private sources have built really good communication tools that are actually working. It sucks that the city can’t do IT, but it is good that they are doing what it takes to help people know. Twitter is a single point of failure, it falls over all the time, but at least it has RSS feeds and it’s open for anyone to read. I think the city should do better, I just don’t know that they can.
How Ning made me a chump and how you can avoid it
The problem with Software as a Service is you don’t own it.
You get it for free, but you don’t have a stake and you don’t have negotiating power. Â Instead, try to work with services that give you an exit plan or that have the safety stamp of an aGPL license. 1
Who cares?
Let me back up and tell you a story about a social network I created. Â Two big-time development bloggers, Jeff and Scott, were writing posts back and forth about how what colors they liked in their text editors and what fonts they used.
I’m not kidding, this is important in a job where most of what you do is sip coffee and type.  I’ve certainly killed some time messing about with how I color my  source code. Continue reading How Ning made me a chump and how you can avoid it
- The Autonomo.us project has a great list of alternatives that either AGPL or CC or something you can use. Â Check out this guide to replacing what you are using now with services that keep you free. (back)
How to make money from market volatility
A friend recently wrote me about a strategy he heard for exploiting market volatility. Â I get these questions sometimes because I’m in finance, and because I’m in finance let me be up front. Â I’m not giving you financial advice here. Â I’m not an advisor, I’m not competent, you should probably close this page now and burn your computer. Â Past performance has no correllation with future performance, as everyone should have learned in, oh, 2008.
That said, let’s have a little fun with these ideas. Â To paraphrase my pal’s email:
Apologies in advance for what I hope is a not-too-complicated financial question. So you ever heard of something called volatility drag? Something to do with how over time double- and triple-leveraged ETFs always lose money. I found an investment opportunity that uses this principle to make money.  The pitch I heard says that the strategy is sound and has data to back it up since the 90s.  I find it hard to believe that something that automatically mints you money (admittedly at a “watching paint dry” pace) exists, yet it seems so from what I can tell…
I hadn’t heard of volatility drag before but it was fun to learn about. Â Under the fold: Â Charts! Definitions! Sage Advice! Links to books!
Continue reading How to make money from market volatility
My Best Books of 2009
I like to read.
Here are the best books I read this year.
Nonfiction
Born On A Blue Day & Embracing the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammet
Yes, it’s two books, but it’s really about the same subject. Daniel Tammet is an autistic gay savant synesthete. He won the unusualness lottery. The first book is his life story and the second is a tour through what he’s learned about the human mind. An amazing amount of good neuro and cognitive science in here, presented in a clear, non-technical way. You can read more about it in my earlier review.
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright
It’s brilliant. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, examines all of human history through a single lens, in this case win-win games.
The thesis is that human life and all progress comes about as a series of non-zero sum interactions, games where both parties win.
It gets a bit repetitive some times – when a story begins you can start predicting how it will end because there is only one theme in the book, but it effectively demonstrates the idea and shows you the impact throughout history and applications for the future
Authentic Happiness : Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman
When I was a kid, my answer to “whaddya wanna be when you grow up” was always “Happy.” 1 I had noticed how often adults didn’t seem to be happy and how often they weren’t doing anything about it. Seligman is no snake-oil guru, he’s a past president of the APA and an experimental psychologist who worked on some of the great experiments of the 20th century. His explanations of happiness are based on actual study and experimentation and the recipes for success seem to match up with my personal experience. While I haven’t read his book on Learned Optimism, I’ve heard similar praise for it.
Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater
Pure poetry. Laura uses the structure of foundational experiments in social psychology to raise deep questions about medicine, free will, obedience, and the ethics of experiments that involve conscious beings.
I’ve reconsidered long held ideas because of this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough for people who are unfamiliar with how brains work but don’t want to wade through the dry details. Where Daniel Tammet is explaining the big picture, Laura is giving you the impact of these experiments.
If Mary Roach wrote about psychology, but actually had something to say, she might write this book.
Worth reading just to learn what happened to the subjects after the Milgrim experiments in obedience to authority.
The Complete Manual of Woodworking by Albert Jackson
I’m just a beginning woodworker, but this is a great resource.
It’s full of huge, gorgeous shots of wood, cuts, examples and tools. It covers the wide range of methods and materials with great detail but remains accessible.
Reading this book is also worth it for someone uninterested in actually doing any woodworking. It shows you how the furniture and tools around you are made, how the character of wood shapes the architecture of the things around you. I certainly look at my kitchen cabinets with new eyes. You’ll find out why in this book.
Fiction
Litttle Brother by Cory Doctorow
Loved this.
Sent it to my dad. Recommending it to everyone. It’s about how smart courageous kids deal with adults giving up on freedom after a terror attack.
Well written, fast paced, and filled with real characters – something the SF genre doesn’t always get. This isn’t far future fiction, this is about right now.
The technology is all homemade and usable. Heck, they even have DIY instructions for elements of Little Brother up on instructables. Doctorow is a smart thinker about the problems of security, terrorism and politics. He’s an editor on the wonderful BoingBoing blog and is kind enough to provide you free electronic copies of Little Brother under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. That means you can give it away and make new things with it, but you’ve gotta make those shareable, give Cory credit, and share your results under a CC license.
Get it, give it to a kid, and hope.
Crystal Nights and Other Stories by Greg Egan
Greg Egan can’t stop writing things I enjoy. I’ve read so many rehashes of the same ideas and Egan never does that. Every story contains at least two ideas completely foreign to me. He piles them on into a delicious meal in each story. What’s in there: completely alien life 2, the ethics of evolutionary algorithms 3 , and a hundred other things you’ve never thought about, all packaged in exciting, well plotted stories.
Egan is consistently the best hard SF writer working.
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories by John Kessel
This is a little bit of weirdness that I read on my new Droid phone. It’s a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 story, so you have no excuse whatsoever for not reading it. The stories are good and whip-smart.
If you’ve ever read a certain Flannery O’Connor story, you’ve got to read this for the perfect “Every Angel is Terrifying”. Set right after the O’Connor story ends and tells you just what happens next in the smartest way. Â “The Red Phone” was a delightful story of phone sex, romance, and telecommunications for the deaf
I also enjoyed a series of stories about a matriarchy on the moon. Each story opens up more and more thought into the society – a lovely little bit of world building.
The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson
This is a bit of a complement to Crystal Nights. Egan’s book is full of bright sharp ideas and this one has warm comfy stories with great characters.
Beautiful little short stories that interconnect at strange tangents. Strange booksellers, impossible books, and the first story I’ve read where information visualization plays a powerful part in the story.
I’m looking for more from this author on the basis of these stories.
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
Wonderful. A beautiful classic noir mystery set in a place where bodies are a commodity and life is cheap and possibly permanent.
Sex, death, betrayal and crime for the cyber set.
This is SF for those who thought they didn’t like it because all of the flashy SF ideas are just layered onto a really strong closed room mystery, but one that couldn’t have been done in any other setting. To check out if you think science fiction is stupid but you love Lawrence Block or Robert Parker mysteries.
Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
I finished this book 24 hours after picking it up, and didn’t read anything else till I had finished. It’s fantastic.
Fastest book I’ve read since Palahniuk. Similar style and rhythm – full of secret knowledge about medicine and mobsters, great amounts of violence, pain, and gross-out.
It’s a book paced like a punk song about a hitman who becomes a doctor. Yes it’s a cliche to have a hitman who gets found by the mobsters he flipped on, but I couldn’t care less while reading this. It’s fun and furious and a damn fine read.
Bringing Something to the Party
I just noticed that Paul Carr has released his new book, “Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore” as a Creative Commons BY-NCÂ licensed download for the US. And the, um, rest of the internet.
I’m going to read it on my hot new Droid phone, but there’s only a PDF version and an HTML version. I want ePub format, so I converted it. You can download the ePub version of “Bringing Nothing to the Party” here.
It looks like Paul has put a CC-BY-NC license in his blog post, but has put also ND in his text. He’s also been thankful for a derivative work before, so I think he really means BY-NC. Regardless, if he asks me to take down the ePub, I will. You gotta make sure CC licenses actually match up with what you want.
How to Migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
ordpress.com is great. They’ve got a great freemium model that allows anyone to get hooked up with a blog with the swiftness. I’m a huge fan, but of course there are limits in what you can do when you don’t have your own hosting. Â They have limitations on plugins and themes and so on.
I recently helped my friend Tove Hermanson migrate her thoughtful fashion blog to her own hosting. I recommended she choose Dreamhost, as I’ve had a great experience with them.
We had a few setbacks when we did things out of order, so I’m writing up a short guide to doing this so it will be easier for other folks. If you still are unhappy after following this guide, you may need a different hat.
First things first, you will want to export information out of your old blog. Log into your blog and do the following:
- Note your theme so you can install it at your new hosting 1
- Note what plugins you are using, and any widgets or whatnot you’ve got on your blog.
- Note your link structure. How are your posts organized? You definitely want this so you don’t break any old links to your content.
- Log into your blog at wordpress.com and export your blog contents to a file.
- Get your images. WordPress.com says that you can import your images and such at your new blog, but we didn’t see the full sized images getting downloaded. Hence, I’ve written a script to get all of your full sized images from your wordpress.com blog.
- Download and install Python and BeautifulSoup.
- Use my python image spider to collect all of your images from your blog and put them into a neat little bundle for you.
- Do a find and replace on your export file to change all your img tags from “yourdomain.files.wordpress.com” to “yourdomain.com/oldimages”
- Buy your domain and hosting. As before, I really like dreamhost, as they are cheap, cheerful and easy to use. For a personal site, those are the factors that matter.  Clicking those links will give me a 10% kickback, but I’d recommend them even if I didn’t get a taste. 2
- Switch your domain nameservers to point to your new hosting. Â When you are buying your hosting, they will have instructions on how to do that. Â The place where you bought your domain name will also have a way for you to switch where your nameservers point to. Â If you are using dreamhost, you’ll be using NS1.dreamhost.com, NS2.dreamhost.com and NS3.dreamhost.com.
- Install wordpress at your new hosting. If you’ve chosen dreamhost, they will do it for you.
- From your control panel choose “Goodies”
- Click “One-Click Installs”
- Advanced Mode (It isn’t all that advanced>) and follow the instructions.
- Log in to your new wordpress installation and import your blog export file
- Configure your themes, widgets, url structure and so forth through the wordpress settings.
- Use an FTP client like Filezilla or FireFTP to upload your “oldimages” images folder to your server, right under your new domain’s root directory.
- Take a look at the new blog and test! You should be good to go.
That seems like a lot, but you can probably accomplish all of this in an hour or two. You’ll spend some time waiting for DNS changes to propagate, but it should be fairly seamless. The key is to extract all of the information you need from your old website domain before you change your domain url to point to your new hosting. We made a few mistakes doing that and it just takes forever to switch back and forth.
Good luck, hope these instructions help!
- Tove had Chaotic Soul which seems to have major problems and differences between the official version and the one wordpress.com uses. (back)
- You could always register with dreamhost without my referral as well. (back)