Minutes ago, there was a magnitude 6.4 earthquake in California — 11 km NE of San Simeon. That was one big quake. The building shook for over a minute.
Chanukah in Santa Monica
I just received a rather amusing MP3 in my email today: (I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica (1.7 MB) Turns out it’s a Tom Lehrer song from 1990. Check out the lyrics. The Yom Kippah rhyme is a bit of a stretch, but I guess that’s what they call poetic license. 🙂 Related: check out […]
Happy Holidays from Angrybot
You have received a special Non-denominational Winter Holiday Greeting from Angrybot.
DBM text export formats
DBM-style flat files are great, but sometimes it’s hard to deal with binary formats. Being able to have data in a textual format can be very handy for transferring between different platforms, modifying in your favorite editor, crunching with standard tools like grep, etc. There are a couple of text-friendly DBM export out there, each […]
Introducing Chomsky
Stuck in bed this weekend with a cold, Ariella bought me a copy of Introducing Chomsky, 2nd Edition. Between naps and feeling sorry for myself, I managed to read the entire book. Since I’ve already read a few of Steven Pinker’s books, the first half of this book (Chomsky’s theories on linguistics) seemed a little […]
I want Fetch Art for Windows iTunes
I want the equivalent of Fetch Art for iTunes for Windows. I’m not sure how easy it would be to write my own. Apple seems to provide a iTunes Visual Plug-ins SDK for Windows but it’s not clear if there is a generic plug-in architecture for things other than visualizations (i.e. audio formats or generic […]
mod_deflate for Apache/1.3
Zawodny thinks he needs mod_gzip but in fact he’d probably like mod_deflate for Apache/1.3 better.
UC Teaching Assistants Strike
Ariella and 10,999 other University of California teaching assistants will strike on Thursday. Although Los Angeles has had its share of labor disputes recently (the MTA bus strike was settled a couple of weeks ago and the Ralph’s/Vons/Albertson’s strike/lockout has been going on for 8 weeks now), this thing is gonna be statewide. TAs from […]
Test post from Emacs
I’m playing with weblogger.el to see if it’s possible to post to MovableType from emacs-21.2.1. It only sorta works for me, and I had to install a few external dependencies (xml-rpc.el and url.el) to even get the thing running. Oh well. Not ready for prime time yet I suppose.
Off-Roading at Hungry Valley
I went off-roading today with Rob and Dan at the Hungry Valley State Vehicular Recreation Area. We were out in the 4WD practice area for all of 15 minutes when Rob decided to get us stuck in the mud: Some other brilliant guy tried to get us out, but he got stuck even worse: A […]