Thursday, January 31, 2013

Jason and others on another founder's suicide

This editorial raises questions worth reading.  As one who went down into the dark side while  day-trading/blogging/working, I relate.  Make sure you take care of yourself!

BothSidesOfTheTable blog comments as well...

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Silicon Valley housing prices rising dramatically

according to Redfin.  Good for RS and other owners...

Zakir Hussain/Bela Fleck/Edgar Meyer

If it weren't sold out, I would buy a ticket!

Special note to Dore...

color photos of Paris in 1914

Paris1914.com  Recommended to Ellen, Ross, Leonard Pitt, LoriL, and all lovers of Paris.

SF Jazz Center

SF Jazz Center named its new facility for a benefactor, the late co-founder of Oracle, Robert N. Miner, who was a special person. The space is the first stand-alone building devoted to jazz.   Excerpts of the opening night concert are available online here.   Recommended especially to sadams.uk, Mark Madrid, and Ed Miner.

Most inspiring documentary I've ever seen!

Beauty is Embarrassing, about Wayne White, brought tears of joy to my eyes.  To see such genuineness and a life of pure creativity is transforming!   Watch it!  Especially for Ross, LoriL and Ellen.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Levon on a jet plane...

I placed a hold on This Wheel's On Fire: The Levon Helm Story and while listening to episodes of Fresh Air from last year came across two interviews with him, then heard a cut from his solo release, Dirt Farmer, on last night's episode of The Grateful Dead Hour...

"We are in control of the vertical and the horizontal!"

Watch that language!

Language Log is full of linguistic humor, perfect for the Linguistics MeetUp.

Stewart Brand and Amory Lovins

In Climatewire.

Amazon Deal of the Day: Best American Writing EBooks for $1.99

This Amazon offer is good only today (not sure if this works outside the States).
Bought Essays, Short Stories, Science and Nature, and Non-Required Reading.
For good measure, added Best Buddhist (not on sale).

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Updates to previous posts

Whole Foods CEO John MacKey received a lot of press in response to his "fascism" comments.
Here is an audio interview with him about his new book and his comments.

Organizing for America is the new name for the re-purposed Obama for America organization.
The focus is to build a continuous strategy and field organizations to promote Obama's policies.
Perhaps this will counter some of the Right's strong efforts along those lines for their ideology.

High stress without managing it well this week led to my first headache in three months.  Well, you can't win them all!  "More sitting practice of meditation is recommended." -- Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

Plans for our Rio and Buenos Aires trip progress well!

Nels Cline Singers in residence in Oakland tomorrow thru Saturday

at Duende

Note: Thursday: Ben Goldberg on clarinet
Friday: Josh Jones on percussion
Saturday: Zeena Parkins on electric harp

Buddhist meditation fits the Bill

Bill Clinton hitting the cushion these days...

Monday, January 21, 2013

note to self on ZOL mountall

To make this work on Ubuntu, manually call `zpool import` before
upstart gets any of the "*-filesystems" events.  Adding an exec line
for each pool to the `/etc/init/mountall.conf` file should get the
desired result:

script
  # ...
  exec zpool import -N alfa
  exec zpool import -N bravo
  exec zpool import -N charlie
  exec mountall --daemon $force_fsck $fsck_fix
end script

The -N switch matters here, and the patched mountall from the PPA is
still required.

-Darik

Chipotle coming to Santa Rosa!

Bring those calories!

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Integral Sangha

this Santa Rosa group looks very intriguing!

DJ Gilles Peterson

Thanks to sadams.uk for his introduction to the Gilles Peterson music radio show on Saturdays on BBC6!  It's like a UK/EDM version of Dore's Tangents show on KALW, a nice variation.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Unclear on the Whole Concept

In a Mother Jones interview, Whole Foods' CEO and founder reveals he thinks Obama is headed towards fascism (his word) and that climate change is good for humans.   This stuns me!  How he can invent and manage such a well done enterprise yet hold such deluded views escapes me...  No, I won't boycott, but if I had better alternatives I would switch.

Tips on moving to San Francisco

tips I agree with and find amusing...  h/t: sadams.uk

sonics

I finally got my stereo linked up to my desktop PC via HDMI!  With the sub-woofer providing kidney massages, even the low-bit-rate MP3 recordings of radio netcasts sound pretty good!  Now to hook in the DragonFly Asynchronous Digital Audio Converter and listen to some high-bit-rate shows from the Internet Audio Archive!

negatory on the Dreamliner

Guardian UK  (h/t: Dave Winer)

an interesting review of the 787 Dreamliner

ask the pilot

I look forward to riding in one some day

dream time

I dreamed I was in a large communal household, very overcrowded.  It was a Python (computer language) cult...

New WIll Self novel review by NY TImes

Umbrella.  I have read Will Self since he appeared in The Whole Earth Review.  This is a note to myself to check this out...

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

I joined Twitter and Branch

Hoping that repair and keeping my nose clean for eleven years is enough...

I want to explore branch.com...

as I predicted, a new Civil War is promoted in response to the election

Glenn Beck comments...

Brian Eno on "we don't do politics"

via Edge.org  ( a great resource, BTW)

This point was also made by Ross, who complained that we don't do anything remotely like the well-financed, well-planned and well-staffed campaigns of the Right: home-schooling materials for K-12, arch-conservative colleges and law schools, campaigning and intern training programs for dog-catcher through Senate, think tanks and ALEC, and so on.  h/t to Steve for the link, although I am a subscriber to Edge.org as well.

add a second disk to ZOL boot RAID array

note to self: (from zfs-discuss list):


Having made a bootable installation of Linux on ZFS using this HOWTO, I was slightly puzzled as to how to add a second disk to the array and make the second disk bootable. In the end I did the steps below. They may be simple to many people, but gave me a bit of trouble. I wonder if a small addition to the HOWTO to deal with the case of adding extra disks to an existing system would be of any use?

Steps taken:
------------

Boot the system with the Linux disk and the new, blank hard disk attached.

Login and run 'sfdisk -l'. This shows from the partition tables which disk is the Linux one and which is the blank one. In this example the Linux disk is /dev/sda and the new disk is /dev/sdb.

Run 'sfdisk /dev/sda -O table' to dump the partition table of the Linux disk.

Run 'vi table' and change references to 'sda' to 'sdb' (This step probably not necessary, but won't hurt)

Run 'sfdisk /dev/sdb < table' to copy the partition table of the Linux disk to the blank disk.

Run 'sfdisk -R /dev/sdb' to get the kernel to reload the new partition table.

Do 'sfdisk -l' - both disks should have the same partition table.

Run 'ls -l /dev/disk/by-id' | grep scsi' to get the disk IDs which relate to sda and sdb. Note which is which.

Run 'zpool status'. It should show that the device ID corresponding to sda is online. Also note the pool name (eg 'tank01')

Do 'zpool attach [pool name] [existing attached disk id] /dev/disk/by-id/[id of disk to be attached]-part[x]' where 'part-[x]' refers to the partition number of the partition for ZFS storage.

Run 'zpool status'. The pool should be resilvering. Wait for this to complete before reboot.

As in the howto, do 'mke2fs -m 0 -L /boot/grub -j /dev/disk/by-id/[id of new disk]-part[x]' where [x] is the partition number for the Grub partition.

Do 'umount /boot/grub', then 'mount /dev/sdb1 /boot/grub' (assuming the Grub partition is the first one).

Do 'grub-install /dev/sdb', then 'update-grub'

Shut down the system and detach the original Linux disk. The new disk should now boot into Linux.

Monday, January 14, 2013

GMail Contacts update script

I ran into some intermittent problems with labnol's script to email selected contacts and provide a link to allow self service editing of the info.  Worked for some, permission errors for others...  So far I look like a spamming phisher because I ran it four times  :-(  sorry...

Update: I think the "errors" were the message that it is not a Google script, which arises only as a tip that it was written by labnol, not Google, Inc.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Ubuntu 12.10 problems and solutions

I lost a few days to work on a fresh install of 12.10 (was running 12.04).  Notes on the experience:

  • It turns out a fast machine with an SSD can beat the lightdm startup, leaving the machine with a blinking cursor, which happens to look like a complete grub failure; this in turn led to re-installing grub and worse - bleh :-(  Workaround: add a few seconds pause before exec lightdm
  • during installation, in the hardware scan section, modprobe I915 for Intel graphics will hang; workaround: delete i915.ko  This error was due to a regression in kernel 3.7, which was 
  • installed by adding xedgers PPA to get the NVidia-current drivers... and I could not get full resolution until I added a custom xorg.conf
  • cannot get to virtual consoles: hangs until in CTL-ALT-F7 back to X  UPDATE: edited /usr/share/nvidia-current/nvidia-current.grub-gfxpayload and commented out the example rule, ran update-grub-gfxpayload, rebooted.  This may make me vulnerable to other problems, but enables virtual consoles.

TrakDot Station

TrakDot  will arrive in April, allowing us to track our luggage anywhere in the world.

email subscription added

Down at the bottom of the page you should see a link that allows email subscriptions to this blog.
Attention: Henry

HD-BaseT is here! Yes!

Amazon sells an adaptor kit

Paying attention to what is du


Du or sie is the German flavored version of an issue that took a valued friend of mine away.  She was from California, where she married an East Coast man in Silicon Valley.  When it came time to have kids, he insisted they move to Princeton, as he did not want to them to grow up with Cali ways.  "The waiters here talk to you as if you are their best friend.  Back home they just serve you and let you get on with your conversation," he said.  I miss her and wish her well.  I, on the other hand, am third generation native Northern Californian.  "Hi, I'm David and I'll be your waiter tonight!"

Good advice from Aaron Swartz

This advice from Aaron Swartz is similar to what I told myself when I was in a bad way.  It pays off.
The whole series is worth reading, as is the blog in general.

h/t to Dave Winer.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Thoughts prompted by the suicide of Aaron Swartz

(Various pointers to coverage)

While I did not know the man, his choice to do this and his connection to the development of the Net bring to mind some thoughts.

I too once suffered from depression that brought me to my knees and to the brink of disaster.  What kept me going was the sense that we can't actually end it and can't erase and start over, that we have to address the root of things.  I dropped the non-sense pre-occupations of my life, went off the Net and into therapy, took meds, and restarted my spiritual practice.  Equally important, I found the love of a good woman, who had known me for a long time, who knew my essential core to be more than what was prominent at that time.  I got to a better place, those many years ago, and continue.  I am very grateful for this opportunity and the grace that has led to a very happy and productive life...  All Thanks...

I suspect that Aaron felt that there wasn't a viable future, that the forces weighing on him were too much.  I know that was true for one of my closest friends, who also took his own life a year ago.  I wish they both had seen a glimmer of hope for something better and had chosen a different path.

Climate change talks

These talks are worth a listen.  In the early Eighties I worked in a junior capacity for James Hansen at NASA Ames Research Center.   I recently read Michael Mann's The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars and highly recommend it to understand the political battles, especially the so-called "Climate-gate".

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Amazon AutoRip loaded my library with a ton of music!

Amazon just announced they are providing mp3 versions of CDs I bought since 1998!  15 years of CD purchases now available online!

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

the book Subversives captures the history

Subversives provides superb analysis of the intertwined histories of J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and the Sixties student radical movement.  If you want to know something about Cointelpro, covert collaboration between the FBI and Reagan (from early years onward), FBI informant's early arming and training of the Black Panthers and many other aspects of our history, read this.  The inner details are revealed as a result of a long-running battle over Freedom of Information Act requests, which was ultimately won by the author.  While the book is very detailed, it does not repeat the error of Manning Marible's Malcolm X biography, which was weakened by excess personal trivial material.

I finally finished it last night!

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Chuck Spinney on the Afghanistan war mess

Getting to the root of the problem

testimony: my headaches have been cured by Alexander Technique

Since I began training in this three months ago I have only had one headache, which happened to be transformed on the spot to feeling great, not just relieved, when I was in for a visit.  I continue to go weekly and learn more.  It is enlightening to learn how much I contort and hold, to my detriment...  What a relief after a lifetime of pain!  For Marin County training I recommend Elaine Belle and John Baron.

Shoegazer rock originated in 8 Miles High?

Suggested by Sound Opinions show yesterday on NPR... It actually holds water!
Spacemen 3 spawned from the Byrds?!

The New School is the Old School: "I want my NCTV (Network Computer TV)"

Sadams.uk and others will recognize that in this.
Did you know Dirk is working on the Google Chrome OS?
I wonder if Ross could get by with this?

Science lessons on kindness

Yes Magazine article

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Happy New Year!

Best wishes for everyone!  I am enjoying DJ Krush Radio on Pandora, visiting with the love of my life (wife Sara), and preparing for a house party at Barbara and Michael and swing dancing tonight at WnY Warehouse!

Update: Great New Year's Eve party with local Linguistics MeetUp group, great party with Barbara and Michael and friends yesterday, then watched the US Open Swing Dance finals for 2012 on DVD.   Company party tomorrow night and Next Generation Swing Dance Club Saturday - an unusual bout of socializing for us!
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