jason thurber's blog

A very interesting article, well worth reading the whole thing: n o l o g o . o r g

At the end of our meeting, I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant was sold despite the workers” objections. “There are two choices,” he said, looking me in the eye and smiling kindly. “Either we will set the factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside of it. But it will not be privatized.”

Found this on William Gibson’s blog.

Rory Blyth – Neopoleon.com

The best security in the universe is to not have an application to break into in the first place.

If you go to empty the trash in OSX and get a message like:

The operation cannot be completed because the item
filename is locked.

Just open the terminal, cd to ~/.Trash and run the following command:
find . -exec /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a l {} \;

This will (should) recursively unlock all the files in your Trash directory. It’s pretty safe because, well, you’ve already put these files in the trash… what’s the worst that could happen. Depending on your privileges you may need to sudo this.

Found this on the MacFixit Forums.

From www.sajjadzaidi.com, who in turn got it from http://geocities.com/warmarketing:

“Of course the people don’t want war… that is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s Deputy Chief and Luftwaffe Commander, at the Nuremberg trials, 1946

Coolest inventions of 2003 (Time.com)

An article by Bush Sr. entitled Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam that was yanked from Time’s website for some reason or other…

An interesting “future-documentary”-style article entitled How China surpassed the United States (I’m sorry that I don’t remember where I saw the original link to this).

A pretty cool blog that Alex pointed me to. I can really relate to this comment on the Apple Store:

Problem is, now when I walk into the store, my cash spending reflexes kick in and I can’t get out of the store until I plunk some cash money at the register

Some interesting (and impressive) reading from the JoinArnold website:
Schwarzenegger Details Specifics of Environmental Action Plan… Some highlights:

Good Stuff!

Two great comics from MacHall:

I really like the style of this comic… recommended by the fine “gentlemen” over at PA.

Here is a great article about being a Car Salesman (entitled appropriately enough, “Confessions of a Car Salesman”). It is absolutely accurate (I sold cars over a Summer in Los Angeles at two different Ford/Lincoln/Mercury dealerships and everything he said was right in line with my experience).

Saw this over at Lockergnome Bytes (not Locker-Byte Gnomes), which in turn pointed to an article at BaselineMag. Apparently a guy named Scott Painter is starting a Build-To-Order car company in Los Angeles. What an awesome idea.

I was somewhat disappointed by this comment, as it strikes me as irrational (particularly when it’s followed by a similarly “E-Level” description of the advantes of “web-services” as offered by .NET):

[Chief Information Officer] Lele has largely ruled out using Unix, saying he would like to think ahead.
“The preconceived notion is that the network will run Unix, but I came to the view that this is a unique opportunity, so why take something that’s decades old?” says Lele.

But I was impressed by the vision:

Build-To-Order’s specialty will be assembly. Painter has divvied up the car into 13 modules such as interiors, chassis, panels and braking systems. Each will be pulled together by a supplier, such as Johnson Control or Dana. Each supplier’s factory will sit around a cross—the assembly line—which resembles a street intersection. And each of those suppliers’ factories may in turn be ringed by parts vendors that supply components that arrive minutes before being used in, say, a transmission.

It’s also sorta cool that they’re considering using E.piphany…

Here (Bruce Eckel’s Blog) is a great artice entitled “The Ideal Programmer”. Some good snippets:

…the most fundamental concept in computing … the “DRY” principle (“Don’t Repeat Yourself” – which includes but means more than “don’t write the same code twice in more than one place.” It means: “there should be one authoritative repository for each concept in a program.”) – is practically ignored (and perhaps not even understood) by a large percentage of programmers.

5% of the programmers are 20 times more productive than the other 95% … there’s the idea that the majority (probably that other 95%) of programmers don’t read books on programming, and perhaps only have the language manual at their desk

Might want to add it to your subscription list.

Some timely humor over at Penny Arcade. I can only excuse my behavior by saying “I didn’t actually buy the book” (which is hardly mitigating).

More good stuff from around the blogging world:

I always knew this was going to happen. I always knew that skepticism and science were mere psychological decorations and vanities. Deep in our alligator brains we all know that the world is just chock full of evil and monsters and sinister forces aligned against us, and it is only a matter of time until they show up. Evolution know this, too. It knows what to do when the silent terror comes at you from out of the dark.

When 50 million years worth of evolutionary survival instinct hits you all at once flat in the gut at 200 mph it is not a pleasant sensation.

Without volition I screamed my battle cry (which is indistinguishable to the sound a little girl makes when you drop a spider down her dress (not that I’d know what that sounds like,) and lept out of bed in my underwear.

Cool article about behaviors that dogs have developed from living in close proximity to humans for thousands of years.

Dr Miklosi said: “Looking at the gaze or engaging in eye contact is a typical human signal, so dogs could be said to be using a behaviour that is analogous to ours.”

They should have compared the ability of dogs, wolves and academic programmers to react to facial queues. I think the dogs still would have won!

Which reminds me of the joke:
“How can you identify an extroverted engineer?”
“He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you…”

BTW – Found this article over on bitweever.

I thought this was cool. Real Mini’s!

Not sure what’s wrong with me, but I thought this (ISO 9000) was really funny.

No, what our tribe needs is a clear mandate lest we be dragged into the sediments of Floridian illegitimacy and the concomitant self-induced terror attacks needed to superglue the crown to the pate de coup d’etat. We must drudge up from the toxic sludge of history the ancient traditions that echo dimly in the hollow skulls of our ancestors and resonate along the beer-soaked corridors of our medulla oblongadadavida.

(NOTE: You should really sound out that last word.) Reminds me of a bit of HST.

ExplodingDog.com

Found here

Thanks Alex, this (it’s flash animation) kicks ass! You really need to watch the whole thing to absorb the sheer quality of stupid goodness…

After an interminable wait (a year? more?) Old Man Murray is back online! An interesting side-note is that Slashdot’s link to the site has never been removed or modified… very up to the minute, that Slashdot.

Anyway, the first three paragraphs of this are probably the thing most worth reading on the site (it’s fairly offensive, if you don’t like it you’ll hate the rest of the site).

This article starts out good and just gets better.