scrap pad

scifi music video

old finder scripts

removing dock icons

web page capture

social network profile as a business

beyond bands. TwitterLit posts the first line of books to twitter with an amazon associate link... I wonder how much money they make from this? (via slackermanager, "TwitterLit is genius")

also, twitter is a social networking site.

facebook

paper music video

chart

I made a chart, which basically represents the flow of every IM conversation I have that is longer than five messages:

update: multiple people have told me this chart makes no sense. which is kind of the point. even if it weren't ugly and confusing, it would still make no sense.

JPG 2.0 magazine

our data?

usps stamp prices

learning to wipe?

google maps street view

Facebook platform

hiking water filter

favorite applescript

I use this applescript at least eight times a day. it goes:

choose color

It brings up the system color picker. As of today I also have applescripts for bringing up the character palette and keyboard viewer (all launched via launchbar and a few keystrokes.)

hiking stove

pinhole camera

choosing ads

Snow Mountain

gps unit

queerbie

whales

augh bears

new glasses

just installed

cheap fancy glasses

rearranging the menu bar

SymbolicLinker

drobo

nice US data for GIS

item.

gzip unzipper for windows

Prairie Dog

path button in the finder

repurposing silly web apps

heard on NPR

HUD database

old walkman

annoying

I am getting a new Google search results layout that is too wide for my Firefox window:

update: the width is fixed now, but I still prefer the old gradient-free layout, where the search types weren't in the "account" header. eh.

generic housing logos collection

• hands offering up a house
• H with a roof on it
• city skyline with an acronym on it

book

not

funny, or sad?

the request was "put this name on the photo of the children on a jungle gym." so I practiced my housing-logo-cliché vocabulary. It goes over a photo of children on a jungle gym, which Ben says makes it (or me?) "morally bankrupt."

comic

free pretty icons

minimum wage

hearing and age

bathroom signs

when I have $$

processes

webcam for skype

audio visual rental in sac

bike commute month

grown ups and sex

psych

Bike Auction

oooh/aaah

read/write S/FTP in the Finder

business cards

distance between geographic coordinates

I did this by converting the spherical (ish) longitude and latitude coordinates to vectors, finding the angle between the vectors, then finding the arc length based on that angle and the Earth's radius. It involved conversion between spherical and rectangular coordinates, dot products, and the arc length formula. Because doing this more than once by hand stinks, I fed a space-delineated list of longitudes and latitudes to this php script:

<?php

// $text_coords = "longitude1,latitude1 longitude2,latitude2 ...";

$coords = explode(' ', $text_coords);

$last_lat = NULL;
$last_long = NULL;
$total_dist = 0;

foreach ($coords as $co) {
  list($long, $lat) = explode(',', $co);

  if ($last_lat !== NULL) {
    // calculate distance, add to total
    $a_lat= deg2rad(90-$lat);
    $a_long = deg2rad(360+$long);
    $a[0] = sin($a_lat) * cos($a_long);
    $a[1] = sin($a_lat) * sin($a_long);
    $a[2] = cos($a_lat);

    $b_lat = deg2rad(90-$last_lat);
    $b_long = deg2rad(360+$last_long);
    $b[0] = sin($b_lat) * cos($b_long);
    $b[1] = sin($b_lat) * sin($b_long);
    $b[2] = cos($b_lat);
    
    $angle = abs(acos($a[0]*$b[0] + $a[1]*$b[1] + $a[2]*$b[2]));
    $total_dist += 6378.1 * $angle;
  }
  
  $last_lat = $lat;
  $last_long = $long;
}

printf("distance in kilometers: %s\ndistance in miles: %s\n", 
  $total_dist, $total_dist/1.609344);
?>

The space-delimited list of longitudes and latitudes just happens to be the way paths are stored in KML files. The point of this whole exercise was to find out how far I biked Monday morning: 19.7 miles, if my math is any good. For distances this short, factoring the curvature of the Earth is pretty silly; I'd tell you how silly, but not tonight.

notes after finding out how silly: if the points are close together (mine are less than half a mile apart), the straight line between them is basically indistinguishable from the arc between them. But after converting to rectangular coordinates, it's easier and makes more sense to calculate angle and arc length.

notes after talking to Evan: yes, the Pythagorean Theorem is a easy and fairly accurate way to find the distance between points using their latitude and longitude (rather than converting lat and long to sperical coords), but you have to find an approximate factor of degrees longitude to miles in a particular latitude, and it only works for that particular latitude (and the corresponding latitude on the other side of the equator). And good luck finding the distance between far away places.

comparison from friday night

the awesomeness of census file 1 (SF1)

new strain of feminism

"Although these actions are incredible, they marginalize the majority of women who are unable to, or just don't particularly care to, achieve such things. Fortunately for the less impressive among us, a new strain of feminism has emerged in which mundane activities are championed as proud, bold assertions of independence from oppressive patriarchal hegemony."

from Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does in a "Mother's Day" edition of The Onion.

acronym

side effects

keychain ugh ugh

I have an encrypted disk image for which I know the password. When I try to mount it, it doesn't prompt for a password, it just shows a dialog saying "the disk image failed to mount" because of an "authentication error." This morning I/the Apple Genius deleted my default keychain. Is there a way to get it to prompt for my password, or did I lose the encryption key (and hence all access to the dmg) with my default keychain?

solved it: went to the Keychain Access app's preferences and hit "reset my keychain." then the dmg requested a password, as usual.

hijacking color

organizing knowledge

portlandmaine.tv

dream from last night

just remembered an awesome dream: I was going traveling again, but only for three weeks, and with a much smaller bag. It was all quick decisions and rushing, getting in the airport line and wondering, "where am I flying to, again?" I was flying into Dublin, same as before, but then thinking about going to France and possibly eastern Europe. During the dream I was aglow with the adrenaline of not having plans, thoughts of vegetables in France and of finding a companion in the hostel to go with to Prague.

getting a job here in Sac, reason 1: I'd have the money to quit and go travelling. soon.

for my windows computer at work

tag-filing

useful to know

condiments

Panama Canal

future reference: useful python libs

job title

usps commemorative

hex number, everywhere

debug JS in IE

illegal!

Jon Stewart, being serious

Jon Stewart on Bill Moyers Journal. Jon Stewart talked about coverage of the Virginia Tech killings:

I was following the internet headlines all day and there was this enormous amount of space and coverage devoted to Virginia Tech, as there should have been, and I happened to catch a headline lower down which was: 200 people killed in four bomb attacks in Iraq. I think my focus on what was happening here versus this peripheral vision, this thing that caught my eye, and I felt guilty for not having the empathy for their suffering on a daily basis that I feel that I should.

(quote from the last 1/8th or so of the clip, which is longish.)

AMI stands for

more shp -> kml

shapefiles in google maps