Posted on by lhl

Iraq Body Count:

The B-2 bomber carries sixteen 2’000 lb. JDAM bombs. If all goes 100% as planned (the bomb does not fall outside of its specified margin of error of 13 meters, and the GPS guidance system is not foiled by a $50 radio jammer kit, easily purchased), then here is what one such bomb does :

  • everyone within a 120 meter radius is killed;
  • to be safe from serious shrapnel damage, a person must be at least 365 meters away;
  • to be really safe from all effects of fragmentation, a person must be 1000 meters away, according to Admiral Stufflebeem.

The B-2s will be used upon targets within Baghdad.

Posted on by lhl

Mike’s Message:

As Bill Maher said last week, how bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein?

It’s not all snark, but there are some great zingers, as well as some genuinely thoughtful points. Worth a read.

Finally, we love France. Yes, they have pulled some royal screw-ups. Yes, some of them can be pretty damn annoying. But have you forgotten we wouldn’t even have this country known as America if it weren’t for the French? That it was their help in the Revolutionary War that won it for us? That our greatest thinkers and founding fathers — Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. — spent many years in Paris where they refined the concepts that lead to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution? That it was France who gave us our Statue of Liberty, a Frenchman who built the Chevrolet, and a pair of French brothers who invented the movies? And now they are doing what only a good friend can do — tell you the truth about yourself, straight, no b.s. Quit pissing on the French and thank them for getting it right for once. You know, you really should have traveled more (like once) before you took over. Your ignorance of the world has not only made you look stupid, it has painted you into a corner you can’t get out of.

More pro-france: Maciej compares French vs American school lunches at Idlewords, Dinekes’ Anthropology Blog: The Case for the French

Posted on by lhl

RowBoat has an post rating mechanism, which seems like a good idea, but well, in practice doesn’t work that well. The first problem is that you have to read the link before you can really rate the post, but when you follow the link you either leave the page, or make a new tab, and then have to go back and find where it was linked from to rate. The second is the rating isn’t actioning via remote scripting or anything, it reloads the entire page. The latter is easily solvable, but the former isn’t quite so. My first thoughts were to use a bookmarklet or sidebar, but you’d need some dedicated readers to install those. Surrounding frames are out of the question because… er, they suck, and … well, that’s about it for options that I can think of offhand. Next page (I’ve been spending the past while now clearing out my browser/blogging queue – this is why I shouldn’t blog).

BASH your head in

Posted on by lhl

BASH has no do while looping, so you have to do something fugly to write a one-liner that will run a command until it finishes successfully (run it first, then loop):

mirrormusic; until [ $? -eq 0 ]; do mirrormusic; done;

This is required when I’m rsyncing because my POS Linksys cable modem intermittently causes SSH to die with a ‘Corrupted MAC on input.’ error.