Monthly Archives: November 2010

Two Bad Cars

Posted on November 30, 2010 by luke

At Taco Bell today, a real side-by-side comparison of two hot cars: some loser’s Boxster and my own bad Acura Integra. Behold: What were they doing at Taco Bell? Slumming?

Posted in Life | Tagged acura, boxster, cars, integra, porsche, taco bell | Leave a comment

Bruce Schneier weighs in on security theater: Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of … Continue reading →

Posted in Life | Tagged gwot, schneier, security, security theater, terrorism, tsa | Leave a comment

Google Docs on Mobile Devices

Posted on November 27, 2010 by luke

This is cool: you can now edit your Google docs on your mobile devices. I’ve become quite the fan of Google Docs. That whole cloud thing beats emailing a spreadsheet back and forth between me, the church secretary, and the … Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged docs, google, googledocs, iphone, mobile, office, phone, spreadsheet | Leave a comment

irb with readline on mac using rvm – vi keystrokes

Posted on November 20, 2010 by luke

One last whack at this problem. I just got email from a reader of this blog. (Well, technically, a reader of Google, which reads everything, so I shouldn’t feel too impressed with myself.) Anyway, he found my blog post and … Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged irb, mac, readline, vi, vim | Leave a comment

Black Friday – Mac Office 2011

Posted on November 19, 2010 by luke

I’ve been trying to decide whether to upgrade my old copy of Office. The problem with Office is that I only use Word. I’ve pretty much switched from Excel to Numbers, and Keynote is so good that it’s been years … Continue reading →

Posted in Life, Technology | Tagged black friday, mac, microsoft, office 2011, software | Leave a comment

When the Livin’ is Good!

Posted on November 17, 2010 by luke

I came home from church tonight and found the kids watching The Empire Strikes Back, so I had to join them to watch the conclusion. Mr. Rico isn’t as much of a Star Wars fan as me, however. He was … Continue reading →

Posted in Life | Tagged cat, empire, rico, star wars, tesb | Leave a comment

Palin piece in NY Times Magazine

Posted on November 17, 2010 by luke

I found the NY Times Magazine profile of Sarah Palin pretty interesting. Here’s one of the reasons: In truth, few are underestimating Sarah Palin anymore. In that endearing manner of the Beltway echo chamber, the prevailing narrative of Palin in … Continue reading →

Posted in Life | Tagged nytimes magazine, palin, politics, profile | Leave a comment

irb with readline

Posted on November 16, 2010 by luke

I might have posted too soon yesterday. My irb incorporates readline now, but it appears to honor only emacs keybindings. Bummer, huh? I used to be an emacs user, so I can get by for now, but I’d really like … Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged .inputrc, debugging, irb, readline, ruby, vi | Leave a comment

irb with readline on mac using rvm

Posted on November 15, 2010 by luke

On the Mac, irb doesn’t come with readline baked in. But you can fix that with $ rvm install 1.8.7 -C \ –enable-shared,–with-readline-dir=/opt/local Kudus: Plataformatec, who uses Homebrew and thus /usr/local rather than /opt/local.

Posted in Technology | Tagged homebrew, irb, mac, macports, readline, ruby | Leave a comment

Google Refine

Posted on November 13, 2010 by luke

A while ago, Google bought the company that made Freebase, a tool for making sense of messy data. Earlier this week, they released a 2.0 version of that software, now renamed Google Refine. Watch the videos to see what that … Continue reading →

Posted in Life, Technology | Tagged analysis, awk, datamining, google, perl, refine, ruby, screenscraping, sed | Leave a comment