blog.arithm

The attempt at a top kill appears to have failed as experts predicted:

It would also appear that the live feed is actually a considerably more mild leak — more palatable, I suppose. A fake. Like the cleanup workers BP had bussed in for the president.

Enough is enough. Boycott BP.

John Perkins, reformed Economic Hitman, just posted this animation from Studio Joho to his Twitter feed. It’s brilliant.

And yet very little talk of gold on this continent…

With the new version of Cygwin, SSH suddenly doesn’t seem to phone $HOME anymore.  Which is usually going to be set to something like c:\Users\<username>.  In general Cygwin is supposed to look at $HOME first and then use alternative home settings, such as /etc/passwd.

The quick fix is to make sure the relevant entry in /etc/passwd matches what you have in $HOME.

Chris just implored his corner of Twitterspace to post more blog entries, so here goes.

You know that ponderous-seeming institution that overshadows everyday American life? The one that controls the currency supply by printing as much of the stuff as it possibly can? The one that grows the economy by encouraging the U.S. populace to dig itself into a Mariana Trench of debt? You know.. the Fed. The dreaded Fed.

Well, although Ron Paul’s attempt to audit the Fed was recently derailed by Chris Dodd and his cadre, Senator David Vitter has brought the bill back.

And it appears there will be a vote tomorrow. Dr. Paul is encouraging those who want to see the Fed brought back under some semblance of control to contact their senators with the following three points:

1. Support a standalone vote on S. 604 (the original Audit the Fed bill)
2. Oppose the overall Dodd bill
3. Support the Vitter amendment when the vote comes

In other words: Tell your senator that you would like the Federal government and the Federal Reserve to reveal where our money has been going, what’s been done with it, and how exactly we have managed to arrive at this particular economic precipice.

I guarantee the revelations will be more powerful than a Michael Bay summer blockbuster.

Normally I don’t read technical interviews, but the Register’s interview with BrokeP is fascinating. Kelly Fiveash asks great questions and doesn’t pull any punches.

Apparently TPB has “become this HAL entity that kinda runs itself”.

Maybe it can explain to the record labels about how they’re completely doomed.

Ira Flatow had an excellent interview this last Science Friday with Cape Wind’s Jim Gordon and Denise Bode of the American Wind Energy Association. Cape Wind finally has the go-ahead to complete America’s first offshore wind farm on Nantucket sound.

Here’s the interview:

Cape Wind Project Moves Forward

Be sure to listen to the callers. Having just learned about the escalating disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, I couldn’t help but come away from the interview with a feeling that the show had been professionally “hit” by the oil lobby. Or maybe it was disinformation orchestrated by the Institute for Energy Research of which Denise warns. Or perhaps those were actual angry NIMBY Cape residents pretending to have more noble concerns.

Either way, I wasn’t buying it. Jim deflected the arguments with the nonchalance of over-learned routine.

Congrats to Cape Wind.

You’re sweating away deep in the bowels of some framework when suddenly you realize: “Wow, I actually kind of need to use Windows Explorer here.”

Thus begins a frantic thirty seconds of double clicking through layers of folders.

Rob has an awesome little bash shell script that will open Windows Explorer to whatever directory in which you happen to be.

I’ve named it “explore”. So now if I need to pop a gui while thirty levels deep in an app, I just issue a simple $ explore command.