Bob Zubrin’s not enamored with NASA’s Mars proposal:
The kindest thing that can be said about this quintuple rendezvous plan is that it is probably the unplanned product of the pathology of bureaucracy, rather than the willful madness of any individual. For a fifth of its cost, NASA could fly five simple direct sample return missions, each of which would have (at least) five times its chance of mission success. So it’s hard to imagine any sane person inventing it on purpose.
Terra Terminal Emulator. For people who rebel against learning to use Screen. We’ve come a long way from the ADM-3A.
I’ve been meaning to post this: it’s a discussion of each position in the Apollo-11 era Mission Control room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Lots of pictures.
I got a new phone. It’s about a zillion times better than my previous one (column 3 vs. 6 in this chart). But it’s not powerful enough to keep Facebook from sucking:
I quit using Linux (except as a file server) almost 10 years ago, so I completely missed the Desktop wars. Apparently KDE and Gnome won, with Gnome winning the part of the Linuxphere known as Ubuntu. Which leads to all kinds of out of date help pages telling you how you used to administer a Ubuntu system (“From System Administration choose Disk Utilities”). Along with a fair few pages complaining how Gnome 2 was better, or Gnome 3 was bad but 3.6 fixed most of the problems, or whatever.
As may be. I’m a crusty old bearded Unix user, from the era of Window Managers rather than Desktop Environments. (Well, CDE begat KDE, so I guess there were Desktop Environments even back in those days, but I never worried about them.) For me, it was a big deal (with no small amount of editing config files) to move from FVWM to WindowMaker.
So what do I do? I don’t know. But I’m thinking about Xubuntu and XFCE. How’s that for rebellion? You say you want a revolution!
Today is November 12. Sixty-seven years ago, at 10:04 pm, Saturday November 12, 1955, lightning struck the Hill Valley town clock tower. Bad for the tower, but good for Marty McFly, who used the 1.21 gigawatt burst to power him back to the 1980s.
How did the mutation that prevents lactose intolerance become so widespread so quickly?
Joss Whedon endorses Mitt Romney.
Camile Paglia endorses Jill Stein. And Revenge of the Sith. Really.
Additional evidence for the grandmother longevity hypothesis.
A recent conference asks if programmers can be artists. If so, they should start with processing.
Learn Git with the Git Immersion guided tour.
Tweak Unity with unsettings 0.08 and get rid of those pesky web results!
A new version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (co-op edition) has been released.
On the other hand, if you’re fighting the headwinds of history, here’s a guide to installing Windows 8 with just an upgrade license. (Microsoft is fighting the headwinds too, and won’t let you easily make a clean install.)
Google Ngrams are now even awesomer.
In twenty years the number of planets outside our solar system has gone from zero to almost a thousand. But now there’s an exoplanet next door:
It turns out there’s more than one way to smash the earth and build the moon.
Concerned about Genetically modified organisms? Worried about all the land mines scattered all over the world during the past century? Maybe you can pick which one worries you more: a GM mouse has been created to detect land mines. (Apropos the above, consider this piece on GMOs and pesticide use.)
My last post on rbenv mentioned some things you need to do to get ruby to build on Mountain Lion. Here are a few more things.
This guy Jacob Swanner didn’t want to use either Xcode or gcc. He just used the Xcode command-line tools, with a CC environment variable, thus:
$ CC=/usr/bin/clang rbenv install 1.9.3-p194 $ rbenv global 1.9.3-p194
That won’t work with older versions of Ruby, however, as I mentioned before.
I noted he is also a Homebrew user. I’m not yet ready to go there, although macports gets more and more frustrating with each OS release. (I’m not alone.) (But that’s a subject for some other time.)
And, for convenience, here’s another Homebrewer’s notes on how to get ruby building again with Mountain Lion
I used to use rvm to manage my ruby environment, but the latest hotness seems to be rbenv. Here are some tips about using it. They’re aimed at me, because by the next time I need to use it, I’ll have forgotten. But you can read them too:
One of the things you want is rbenv-build:
Installing ruby-build as an rbenv plugin will give you access to the rbenv install command.
$ mkdir -p ~/.rbenv/plugins $ cd ~/.rbenv/plugins $ git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git(Note the assumption you’re using git. I don’t know what people who prefer mercurial are supposed to do.)
This will install the latest development version of ruby-build into the ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build directory. From that directory, you can check out a specific release tag. To update ruby-build, run
git pullto download the latest changes.
But that won’t work with Mountain Lion. So you’ll need a version of ruby that can be built with clang.
$ rbenv install 1.9.3-p125