After talking and watching a friend drive stick last night something clicked, and driving stick became a whole lot easier. I’d been driving around most of the weekend (I bought my first manual transmission car last week) and was getting gradually more comfortable, but I think it wasn’t until last night that I had my fun/scariness crossover threshold. Shifting into first is much easier when you put a lot more gas into it. My technique can still use work, but it’s becoming much more natural. Last night I got into this sort of state where I wasn’t even thinking about it. I think that’s good.
Vision Quest – Utterly fascinating.
According to a printout Dobelle hands me, the price tag for curing blindness is now around $115,000:
- Visual Prosthesis System: $100,000
- 1 miniature camera mounted on eyeglasses
- 1 frame grabber
- 1 microcomputer
- 1 stimulus generation module
- 2 implanted electrode arrays with percutaneous pedestals
- 3 sets of rechargeable batteries and 1 charger (customer is responsible for replacement batteries as needed)
- 5-year full warranty (not including travel or freight)
- 5 years of annual follow-up examinations in Portugal (not including travel) unlimited telephone consultation
- Evaluation of patient: $2,000 psychiatric evaluation/all other testing
- Hospital expenses: $10,000
- Miscellaneous expenses: $5,000 airfare to Lisbon, hotel and food for one week (2 people) miscellaneous (such as taxis)
Also in this month’s Wired, Hacking Vegas, an article on MIT card sharks, and Professor X, an article on the Alexander Shulgin, the chemist that reintroduced MDMA to the world. (it was first synthesized by Merck back in 1912)
Taking a minute to veg out from work here…
So, I’ve survived my first /.ing. Still a lot of hits coming in, about 1 or 2 ever few seconds, but nothing too bad. Interesting seeing the /.ing happening first-hand. I don’t think the server ever buckled, as I had a pretty reasonable throttle policy (50req/30s, set to 40req/90s to spread the love to some mirrors). Surprisingly few redirects though. About 1300 last night and 2700 this morning. So far, my servers kicked out over 60GB and still going. Some stats, brought to you ‘grep’, ‘wc’, and (what would we do w/o you) ‘|’, approximately:
- 17,000 hits on the index page
- 11,000 hits on the flash presentation
- 1,000 hits on the MP3 file
- 160 hits on the tarball (for those who “want it all” I guess)
In any case, while this is all well and good, I just wanted to mention how much I love Apache. Creating a weighted redirect was trivially easy. It was just a matter of creating a custom error document and creating a little php script w/ a switch that would generate a random number from 1-100 and redirect w/ a Location header as appropriate (so, if $i<40 would redirect 40% of the excess load to a specific mirror). The only thing that would have been more slick is if mod_throttle passed the exact URI in the REDIRECT_ERROR_NOTES, which would allow more exact redirections (by default, it only passes the policy name).
While the feedback overall has been positive, I swear some of these guys sending me email on this free_culture are 15 year olds. Total flashbacks to slides on mjd‘s Mailing List Judo.
You’d think that “Special Agents” would have better things with their time these days, but who knows? – FBI releases advisory about 802.11-spotting “wardriving”
I didn’t even know there was a slashdot.jp
w00t! Now that Mozilla has marquee support, I can finally view web pages as they were intended to be seen by their authors.
So I come home from dinner with a friend (mmm, Pantry… steak..) a little while ago to see all kinds of referers coming from /… It’s official, I’m being /.ed. On the bright side, mod_rewrite seems to be working like a champ. My server load is at 0.01 right now.
This Snapple Breakdancers commercial is great. Ads.com doesn’t have the selection that Adcritic used to have, but hey, it’s free and still around. That counts for something.
There’ve been some people bitching about the free_culture presentation being in Flash. As if simply by it’s format it’s somehow ickier or inferior. Now I’ve bitched about the difficulties of putting the thing together because of the technical weaknesses that Flash still has, both in its tools and design, however what gets me is these people that are dogmatic about it.
“You should use SVG. Sure you couldn’t actually do it since the tools and players aren’t there, but you should have done it anyways because it’s better.”
Or even better yet, you should spend your time contributing to that project instead of actually doing what you need to get done
. (Obviously you should do this because the person posting this is much too busy and has more important things to attend to… like bitching on other message forums no doubt.
Now, it’d be nice if there were some alternatives to Flash, if only for competition’s sake, but while SVG has some neat potential, it’s nowhere near prime time. From a purely format/technical perspective SVG is better than SWF in almost ever single perspective (see: Comparing .SWF (Shockwave Flash) and .SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format specifications), but from the viewpoint of actually getting anything done (not to mention seen)? Forget about it
And what about SMIL? I don’t know, you tell me? What about SMIL?
In any case, the source files are online. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.