go .gov!

 data, government, philosophy  Comments Off on go .gov!
Feb 262012
 

In 2009 the US government (thanks to Obama) did a remarkable thing by releasing a ton (perhaps a Library of Congress worth of tons) of data: http://explore.data.gov/ Much of the data is in CSV/JSON/XLS/etc formats.  The Seattle gov has done similar local data efforts, much through the same underlying architecture: http://data.seattle.gov/ Socrata seems to be behind a lot of the more open stuff: http://opendata.socrata.com/ A few interesting visualizations of […]

command line perl posting to WP

 code, perl, tech  1 Response »
Feb 172012
 

After looking at about a zillion different options I ended up with Leo Charre’s WordPress CLI CPAN package for uploading posts… and after a bit of tinkering got it to work with 3.x WP.  However… it didn’t support tags, which I really needed for the project I’m working on.   This handy pointer to how to do it to java saved my bacon: it turns out that making a very […]

what’s up, mac?

 dinosaur, security  Comments Off on what’s up, mac?
Feb 152012
 

Why don’t any of the host configuration checking tools work on the mac?   CIS, Bastille, ossec (they don’t do conf checking on mac, plus they claim to check CIS compliance on other platforms and don’t), etc.  Just want something simple to run that would check the basics, try to crack a password or two, show SUIDs, file permissions… don’t make me have to write it myself ;(

 Posted by at 10:10 pm on February 15, 2012

Time Traveling with Lou

 dinosaur, music, rememberance  Comments Off on Time Traveling with Lou
Feb 112012
 
Time Traveling with Lou

In 2009 Joe Viglione wrote A Study of Lou Reed’s Berlin and Rock & Roll Animal Albums; in it he said: Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner were as potent a duo as Keith Richards and Mick Taylor, and the four make-up the “Golden Era” of both The Rolling Stones and Lou Reed, that period when the recordings were beyond magical…. Lou’s 9/1/73 show still rates as numero uno in my book, […]

Standing outside a broken volunteer with money in my hand

 charity, philosophy  Comments Off on Standing outside a broken volunteer with money in my hand
Feb 102012
 
Standing outside a broken volunteer with money in my hand

So I’m walking down the street and get stopped by an effervescent volunteer who claims to come from UNICEF.  Now… come on, who doesn’t like unicef?  All around good people who have done good things for kids for a long time, as far as I can tell.  But they/she was pressing for a $x per month donation/membership kind of thing.  After declining that I asked about a one-time donation on […]

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