I love the way the Common Craft folks can so easily and simply explain something, and make it fun to boot. Via evhead.

Travel agency AAA estimates that the average cost of owning and operating a car in 2008 will be $8,121, up from $7,823 last year.

“Purchases I’m making for our cars now are all driven by a preventative mentality,” said Tony Farrell, a freelance writer in Richmond, Va., who has a 2001 minivan and a 20-year-old Honda Civic he had considered selling. “A year ago, I would have let it run ragged. Now I want that car in good working order because I want it to last.”

I am pretty fortunate that I have a job where commuting by mass transit is an option. When I worked in Tigard, taking the bus was pretty much out of the question unless I wanted to make 3 transfers and commute 2 hours each way. I’ve also started riding my bike to work and highly recommend it if you are in a position to do so.

5. “Twitter should be a distributed system.”

4. “Twitter’s downtime is a publicity stunt.”

3. “Hire better developers!”

2. “Throw more hardware at it!”

and…

1. “Ditch Ruby on Rails!”

Tracklisting:
1. Martyn - Natural Selection (3024)
2. Slaughter Mob - No Snare (Slugs In The Mud)
3. Skream - Trapped in a Dark Bubble (Dubplate)
4. Martyn - Suburbia (Applepips)
5. Geiom - Reminissin’ [Kode9 remix] (Berkane Sol)
6. TRG - Broken Heart [Martyn's DCM mix] (Hessle Audio)
7. Horsepower Productions - Hand of Death (Tempa)
8. Benny - Jahroel (Dubplate)
9. Pantha du Prince - Florac [Jus Wan remix] (Tube)
10. Martyn - Vancouver (3024)
11. Shut Up And Dance - Epileptic [Martyn's no strobe mix] (Shut Up And Dance Recs)

Download: martyn_skreamrinsefm230408.mp3

See also:
http://3024world.blogspot.com
http://myspace.com/martyndnb

I decided that I’m going to vote for Sam Adams in the upcoming Portland mayoral race. I have to say that I was a little biased, because I’ve met Commissioner Adams before (at OSCON no less) and he was really a great guy. I also like him because I feel like he understands technology, like he ‘gets it’, and I think that is ever more important these days. I did take the time to read both he and Sho Dozono’s platforms on each candidate’s web site, and while I think they would both be good leaders I have a lot more faith in Sam because he’s shown that he can be a good city leader, he puts himself on equal footing with all the citizens, he understands sustainable growth, he runs the Office of Transportation and supports public transit and cycling, and has a good sense of humility and humor.

I think I could watch this all day long.

These green boxes are new here in Portland, to give cyclists more room at the stop light. I think this is a great idea. And the video is funny too.

Tracklisting:
D-Bridge - Freedom Club (Exit)
Zero Tolerance & Survival - Cold Blood (Revolution)
Breakage - Hindsight (Bassbin)
Danny Byrd - Shock Out (Hospital)
Commix - Bellevue (Metalheadz)
Sabre - Velvet Lawn (Scientific Wax)
Zero Tolerance - Henderson’s Wife (Bassbin)
Break - Kick Back (Quarantine)
General Malice - Shotter’s Anthem (Big Cat)
Breakage - Lightweight (Bassbin)
Martyn - Twenty Four (3024)
Forsaken - Boat Noodles (Punch Drunk Records)
Pangaea - Deviant (Hessle Audio)
Boxcutter - Philly (Hot Flush)
Elemental - Raw Material (Hot Flush)

ChrisCoda-Feb2008Mix.mp3 (Right click > Save as…)

Inspired by this post in the MAKE: Blog, I made my own little Lego USB flash drive today. All it took was my Dremel, a hot-glue gun, and some willing Lego pieces. I posted photos on Flickr if you’re curious to make your own!

While there are many people who are absolutely thrilled with the news of the new MacBook Air, I’m sad to say that I’m not one of them. Upon first glance this looks like a fantastic machine, and is no doubt a remarkable feat of engineering and design. Its absolute simplicity is its greatest strength, giving way to sleek design, striking lines, and a smooth slender shape which actually gives you the impression that it’s floating. There are even some nice enhancements: multi-touch trackpad, backlit keyboard, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. But along the way, many sacrifices were made:

• No FireWire
• Single USB 2.0 port
• Headphone and USB ports are recessed
• No user-replaceable battery or hard drive
• Stock hard drive is a 4200-rpm Parallel ATA drive, only alternative is $999 more (64GB SSD)
• Base model has only a 1.6GHz processor
• Includes DVD media, but unless you already own a Mac or PC (with which you can use with Remote Disc) you have to pay $99 for an optical drive.

For the $1799 starting price, I expect a lot more from Apple. While the size and weight of such a machine are laudable accomplishments they aren’t worth that price to me. My advice to anyone who wants an ultra-portable Mac is to hang onto their money and see what happens with the next revision.

Anyway, the good part of all this is that I can watch all the old Firefly episodes on Hulu. I know that Hulu is seen as being sort-of-evil, since it’s run by NBC and a group of other TV studios, but I think it’s pretty great that they’re taking all these TV series and putting them up online for viewing. They’re about standard TV definition, and contain minimal advertisements. And once nice thing is that you can embed show clips, or even an entire show, on any web page.

I have to confess, I did see Serenity, before I started watching Firefly, and thought it was great as well. But I think that once I finish watching all 14 episodes of Firefly I’ll have to see it again, just to complete the experience.

After installing the latest version of MacPorts, and then Wireshark itself (sudo port install wireshark), I kept running into a nasty crash whenever the log would fill up enough to produce a scroll bar. Luckily I found these instructions (Thanks Anders!) which outline how to install a patched version of Xquartz. The instructions changed slightly since that fellow’s blog post, and someone posted updated instructions in the comments, but I made a slight change on them that I wanted to share.

So, to install the patched version of Xquartz so that Wireshark would run, here’s what to do:

1. Install X11 and Xcode from the Leopard disc if you haven’t already
2. sudo port install wireshark
3. wget http://xquartz.macosforge.org/downloads/Xquartz-1.3.0-apple4.bz2
4. bunzip2 Xquartz-1.3.0-apple4.bz2
5. sudo install -b Xquartz-1.3.0-apple4.bz2 /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz (The -b flag will save a copy of Xquartz to /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz.old)
6. Relaunch X11 if it is open
7. Launch Wireshark (/opt/local/bin/wireshark).

Wireshark should then run without crashing once enough output is collected to produce a scroll bar. Keep in mind that this is installing an alpha version of Xquartz, so you may want to keep an eye on http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/xquartz for any later versions that are released. Happy packet hunting!

Update 2008-06-14: 10.5.2 includes an updated version of X11 which includes Xquartz 2.1.1 (or similar) so 10.5.2, and 10.5.3 users as well, don’t need to do steps 3 through 5 above. In fact, on my 10.5.3 system I simply did a sudo port -v install wireshark and after it was complete wireshark ran without any modifications to Xquartz or X11.

Seriously? This guy doesn’t even make a proper argument. Mac OS X has long included many open source packages, and Darwin has been open source itself for almost eight years. He could have said “Leopard is a better ‘Hot Dog’ than Hot Dogs” and it wouldn’t have made any more sense. Just because it makes for cheap journalistic fodder, bashing Linux is about as lame as it gets. Not to mention that targeting Linux as a whole is way too broad for an equal comparison. If he compared it to Ubuntu or Fedora, that’d be a more apt comparison, but still a wholly incorrect one.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Mac OS X is great, and use it as my primary desktop OS. But on the server side, I think distributions like CentOS, Fedora or Debian have Mac OS X beat for flexibility and ease of administration, by far.

Is it just me, or is this a Leopard Mail quirk?

I put them in on the top rack, keys facing downward, and ran it like normal with a bunch of other dishes. Once the wash cycle was finished, I set them aside to dry, and gave them a good 5 days before even trying to reconnect them. They sure enough looked good as new, aside from some fading from use. And, when I did reconnect them, they both worked perfectly, aside from some momentary key stiffness.

At home I have an old iBook G3 that was graciously given to me by one of my former employers. It’s not fast, only 600MHz, but it was fast enough to serve my wife for at least a couple of years before I ‘upgraded’ her to my old 1GHz TiBook. Everything was great about it, except the keyboard, which stinks to high heaven. Like an armpit. Maybe that’s overstating it, but it does have a funk going on. I’ve tried some of the usual tactics (wiping it down with cleaner, vacuuming) but it still hangs in there.

So my next thought is, can I put the iBook keyboard in the dishwasher like I did the regular keyboards, and will it survive? I guess I’ll find out. Maybe I should find a spare, just in case…

But really, the main event was the technology demo and it was very cool. The concept, as I understood it, is around content and context. In your typical workflow, you create a document, then after some refinement you email it to a co-worker seeking feedback. A few dozen emails later, you either consider the document complete, or publish it, and move on. Now going back and finding the contextual discussion pertaining to that document isn’t easy. This is especially true with lengthy projects. That’s where Lunarr flips the script, pardon the pun. The central idea is that every document has two sides, the front side is where the content is, and the back side where the context lives.

So say you create a new text document in Lunarr (simple essay, sales proposal, cost risk analysis of alpaca farming, whatever) and want to mail it to a co-worker. Instead of attaching the document to an email, you attach the email to the document. That is to say, you click the document tab and it flips over, providing a simple mail form. You specify a recipient, include a short note, and send it on. They then can open the document, make some changes, and do the same in return. Each person then has their own contextual history saved with the document. And over the lifetime of the document, the context is close at hand and easy to recall.

I think this is a great concept and really has some potential. I saw some areas where they could add features — RSS feeds, Microformat detection, OpenID, Access Control Lists, Changing of Ownership/Delegation — but it’s still just an Alpha, and they are definitely taking their time refining it. Congrats to Toru, Hideshi, Brett, Anna, and the rest of the Lunarr team for all their hard work, I hope they see some real success!