cobolhacker.com

This is funny:

Marisa Mayer, Google’s vice president responsible for everything on the search page, says that ‘it’s possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money’ and the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky,’ button reminds you that ‘people here have personality.’ Web usability expert Jacob Nielsen says the whimsy serves another business purpose: ‘Oh we’re just two kind of grad students hanging out and having a beer and having a grand old time,’ not you know, ‘We are 16,000 people working on undermining your privacy.’”

Everything on google.com is there for a reason, and that reason is to make money. When you are a publicly traded corporation your only mission is to make money. I knew Google was bent the moment they agreed to censor search results in China.

Via /.

Here’s a director who’s figured out where Blizzard got the inspiration for all the crazy dances World of Warcraft avatars can do. What’s a MMORPG computer game without dancing? They even appropriately orient the characters with their living counterparts, and that’s not the easiest thing to do with machinima.

There is, in fact, a whole community out there dedicated to the art of uncovering these secrets. My current theory is when they were developing the game, Blizzard hired motion capture artists (eg. underemployed drama students) put them in mo-cap suits, showed them music videos and said, “Imitate!” Not quite Andy Serkis, but still effective work.

Finally, I can sleep knowing where the girl Night Elf got her moves.

Everybody has a recipe for the “angry pasta” and I have mine. It’s fast, tasty and easy to make. And unlike most of the recipes for Arrabiata floating around the Internet, I’m going to tell you exactly why I make this the way I do.

Bob’s Fast Arrabiata Pasta
version 8

Makes four medium-sized bowls. Takes around 20 minutes to prepare.

In addition to the usual kitchen hardware you will need:

• a Peking pan, wok, karahi or large sauté pan

You will need the following ingredients:

• 500ml of ground, un-salted Roma tomatoes or similar plum tomato (18 oz)
• 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 cup of chopped onion (about half of an average sized one)
• 1/4 cup of chopped carrot
• 4 average-sized cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 tsp of finely chopped oregano
• 1/2 tsp of finely chopped basil
• 1 medium-sized dried cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp or so of sugar
• 2 tbsp or so of Parmesan cheese, preferably freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano
• 400g of penne pasta (or any noodle, really)

20 minutes to make… doesn’t it take hours to make a pasta sauce? Not in a sauce pan it doesn’t. A Peking pan is ideal. This is nothing more than a wok with a flat bottom (or a fry pan with deep, curved walls). We are going start this as a soffritto, which extracts flavour from the ingredients fairly quickly.

Fresh ingredients are always preferable, but I find that fresh tomatoes do not work well in this recipe because they simply aren’t being cooked for long enough. The sauce comes off like more of a salsa. You can cook them long enough in the pan, but then the sauce takes more like an hour to cook. Anyway, most of the tinned, crushed tomatoes you get at the grocer work well here, though you can make your own (see below). As for spices, oregano dries fairly well, but if all you have is dried basil don’t even bother with it. The cayenne pepper sounds scary, but in reality it yields less than half a teaspoon of flakes when crushed up. The reason we use dried cayenne is because fresh cayenne has a tendency to make the sauce a little too… angry. As an alternative, you can use a teaspoon of mild red pepper flakes or two tablespoons of a fresh mild red chili (like an Anaheim). And as for the carrots… trust me. Carrots are good in pasta and good for you too.

To begin, start the process of boiling the pasta water. Chop up the onion and the carrot. Heat up your pan. When it is hot, put in the oil and throw in the onion and the carrot. Cook them slowly, on a medium-low heat, stirring frequently so the carrots don’t burn. Finely chop up the garlic. About halfway into being cooked (maybe 5 minutes), the onion will become less white and more clear. This is the time to throw in the rest of the ingredients except for the sugar and cheese. As soon as the garlic starts to go a little golden at the edges (this will take only a minute or two) dump in the tomatoes, leaving the heat where it is. The heat from the pan will warm the tomatoes quickly and the sauce will soon start bubbling. Soon after this, the pasta water is going to boil, so drop in your pasta.

Cook the sauce on medium for maybe 15 minutes, stirring frequently, as it will bubble furiously if you don’t. If it looks too thick, add a bit of water. Give it a taste. You may find the sauce needs some sugar, but not always; this largely depends on who made your tomatoes. If you cooked your own tomatoes (see below), you almost always need to add the sugar. The amount is a guideline only. You can stir in a bit at a time as the incorporation of sugar into a sauce is pretty well immediate. Don’t worry about salt — we’ve got that covered.

That’s it, the sauce is done. If your timing is on, your pasta is done too. Plate the penne, dump on a heap of sauce and top it with the cheese. The cheese is the only source of salt in this dish and is important to the flavour we’re after so don’t be afraid to use it generously — like a heaping teaspoon per bowl. Hey, it’s cheese, nothing wrong with that.

Variations

Mushrooms are good in this. Add one cup of chopped ones along with the onion. You will need another tablespoon of oil.

This sauce is easily turned into a blush sauce by mixing in a quarter cup of table cream right at the end.

Turning this into a ragù is also easy. Take 400 grams of ground beef or pancetta and simply cook it along with the onion and the carrots. When the meat is close to being cooked, add the rest of the spices. When the meat is cooked, add the tomatoes. The ragù will have more volume and I find takes closer to 30 minutes to stew in the pan.

Making Your Own Tomato Sauce

If you are really hardcore, and want to impress the heck out of your dinner guests, you can make that 500ml of tomato sauce from scratch. It is easy, but takes around 45 minutes. You will need:

• a blender
• a pot
• 10-20 Roma tomatoes (or other fleshy plum tomato)

The reason the number of tomatoes varies so widely is because the size of tomatoes varies so widely. Ultimately, we are after 500ml of cooked tomato so err on the side of having too many.

Some time before, put the tomatoes in the freezer. They will keep there for years if packaged well. When it comes time to actually use them, pull out the tomatoes and put them into a big bowl. Nuke them in a microwave until they are soft (10 min or so). This will produce mushy tomatoes (some will be hot!!) and a fair bit of juice. Their skins should come off easily. Pull off the skins making sure to keep as much of the pulp as you can. Discard the skins. Blend everything else in the blender until smooth. The pre-tomato sauce will be pinkish in colour and there will be a fair bit of it, well over a litre in many cases. It will smell like fresh cut tomato.

Pour into a larger pot, bring it to a frothing boil then back off to a medium heat. Let it gently boil away, uncovered until it is cooked, a process that will take around 30 minutes and make your house smell like Italy. Sometimes a dark red scum will form on the top. If there is a lot of it, scoop the excess away with a spoon. The sauce will have the following attributes when cooked: its colour will change from pink to deep red, pretty well all of the froth will go away, and it will be reduced by maybe half, becoming the consistency of a thick tomato juice. A taste test will confirm that it no longer tastes like fresh tomato but like a cooked tomato sauce. Measure off the what you need and store any extra as it will keep for weeks and can be used for all kinds of stuff.

The price tag for America’s war in Iraq is about to pass the trillion dollar mark. The number is mind-boggling, when you think about it. The CBC is running a sly little feature about what they could have purchased instead.

Me, I’m perplexed by it all. Why the hell are they still there? Why did they go there in the first place? Iraq wasn’t even the country that attacked the U.S. on 9/11. If the Americans weren’t wasting all this time on Iraq, Afghanistan would be well on its way to being sorted out by now.

Perhaps the saddest part of all is the lost opportunity. The Apollo Program, one of the greatest, most audacious, most inspiring feats in human history, cost around $135 billion in today’s dollars, about a tenth of what they are going to waste in Iraq. I’ll bet a manned mission to Mars would be less than one trillion dollars too.

I’m starting to get a little worried about Facebook and maybe you should be too. It would seem that privacy takes second place to their attempts to monetize your personal data and relationships. I was going to write an article about it, but Jesse Hirch at the CBC has already beaten me to it. Give it a read.

Users who were afraid that Facebook was one big scam to collect people’s information to sell to advertisers have had their suspicions confirmed. Facebook has also responded by saying there is no way to opt out of this system…

Emphasis is mine. I was content to let Facebook use my personal info to better target ads at me (though I found it interesting that as soon as I confirmed that I was married, the ads on my homepage became predominately ads for dating services). But letting other groups use it too? I don’t think it is anyone’s business but mine what I read on the Internet. Previously, all they could do is link it to the IP address of your computer. With Beacon, they can link it to your real name. You put your real name and truthful details about yourself into Facebook so your friends could find you, didn’t ya? I did. It would seem that marketers now have access to that information too.

Here are some other articles to contemplate. [1] [2]. The second is particularly galling — Facebook using your image to endorse someone else’s product without paying you. Of course, you agreed to that when you signed up:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

It’s not that I mind sharing things with the world (I am a blogger, after all), but I am starting to become increasingly leery of people making money off of the details of my life and not giving me a cut. These new features over at Facebook are basically that.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Lest we forget.

I wasn’t alive when any of the big wars were fought, but I know what the costs were. In the past century as many as one hundred million people have been killed and countless more scared because of our wars. The reason we observe the tradition of Remembrance Day, or Armistice Day, ANZAC Day, Volkstrauertag, or Memorial Day so that we will not forget the horrors behind us. Otherwise we are doomed to face those same horrors again.

Is it boredom? Inspiration? Art? Who knows? You have the old used pieces lying around and then an idea hits.

One old TNT2 Ultra with crapped out fan + one crazy-big northbridge cooler with crapped out fan = one working, passively cooled TNT2 Ultra. And it looks neat too! All it needs is some LEDs.

Of course the heatsink is so large it blocks the three slots next to it, but whatever.

mod and photo by Codesmith.

Being able to do anything you want in a virtual world lends itself to such odd sports like dlido attacks and beating up cartoonists. Scott Adams recently made an appearance in Second Life and asked his fans to come on down and kick his virtual nuts. They obliged. You can watch the spectacle of Adams’ avatar getting kicked in the balls again and again thanks to Youtube.

I don’t entirely understand Second Life. A game like Word of Warcraft I get — some people pass the time playing bridge, WoW players pass the time killing virtual bog monsters. But Second Life has no bog monsters, no quests and no puzzles. Just people wandering around goofing off. A form of socializing, which is good, just an odd way of doing it. At least you don’t have to smell your friends, which is a bonus some days.

#2 Top West has been making strange noises for weeks now. It has always made odd noises… whatever. But the noises have changed markedly in the last couple days and the room has been cold. Something is wrong.

Let me first try to help you understand the building FCP is in. It’s around fifty years old and the mechanical systems are all around the same age. The old maintenance guy used to keep it all running with spit, bailing wire and prayer, but he’s retired now. I could call the new maintenance guy but he’s a licensed HVAC technician and always in demand. It will be days before he gets around to us.

#2 is the furnace for the storage room upstairs and I have an interest in keeping it working. While there’s nothing particularly valuable in the room there’s a fair bit of historical kit up there, plus it serves as my personal office. I can’t have it freezing, now can I? It’s Canada, winter is coming… it’s not like the building is well insulated. Besides, these days I, along with Mr B, have become the unofficial caretakers of the building. Dealing with this kind of thing is sort of my job now.

I have something of an affinity for detecting unhappy noises from machinery (perhaps related to what I do for a living, but maybe not). These new squeaky, slicing noises are definitely bad. I’ll bet the fan belt needs replacing. There’s a bunch of replacements up in the furnace room. Yeah… the furnace room.

The furnace room is on the second floor of our two story building, right next to the storage room. I’ve got a key and I have to go in there now and again to change the filters on the furnaces. It’s an odd room, maybe 15 feet wide and 20 long. Four large furnaces and a water heater have been stuffed into it and the duckwork for it all comes in and out of the walls and floor like tentacles. It is lit with a single, dim lightbulb. To access any one piece of machinery involves lots of hunching and shimmying past giant, rumbling furnaces and their boxy air returns. It hasn’t been cleaned in fifty years.

#2 Top West is at the back and it is most definitely making odd noises. Opening up the hatch at the back reveals something worse than a worn belt. The drive pulley is broken, the v-belt has slipped off and is making an attempt to drive itself on part of the motor shaft. Explains why the room is cold. Without the tension of the pulley the motor is barely able to keep the fan spinning. I’m amazed the system even continues to function, albeit in a reduced state, but the more pressing matter is fixing it. We’ve got replacement belts, but we don’t have replacement pulleys.

Ah. Except that we do. When the Accountancy of Borg (I’ll explain this one day) took over the upper east half of the building they put a new HVAC unit on the roof and disconnected #1 Top East in this room. I had always thought it was lazy of their people to not remove the unused furnace but now I’m thankful. It’s the same model. It has the same drive system.

In the dust and dirt of the furnace room, on my hands, my knees and sometimes my back, I slowly rob #1 of its drive pulley and transplant it into #2. I take its filters and drive belt too. The process takes about an hour and kicks up so much dust in the room it becomes hard to breathe. I turn on #2 and it cycles up right away and gets down to work heating the upper west side of the building. It’s now so quiet you can barely tell it’s running.

Pulleys don’t fail all that often. It’s an odd failure, actually, but I think I know why. When I got the pulley on to the motor shaft I spent a bit of time (on my back in the dust) making sure the belt was straight and lined up true with pulley on the fan. This is essential with a belt system as it keeps the wear even. After I screwed the drive pulley down I realised that it was around a half centimetre off from where it was before. The last pulley failed because the belt wasn’t on straight. Every time the furnace ran it was putting extra force on the left side of the pulley and it eventually broke it. Years ago someone fucked up and here I was fixing it.

Warm air flows into the storage room. My landlord doesn’t know it, but I just saved him about 150 bucks. I think I owe him rent for this month, but I think that can wait until tomorrow. Today’s been a good day. A good day.

I have a certain need to watch V For Vendetta right now.