Martin Fleischmann, of Fleischmann-Pons cold fusion fame, passed away August 3rd. (LAT. NYT.)
(No matter what you may think of Fleischmann, he doesn’t deserve to share a post with that scumbag Powell.)
Archive for August, 2012
Obit watch: August 13, 2012, part 2.
Monday, August 13th, 2012Wow.
Monday, August 13th, 2012I have not been paying much attention to the Olympics, but some of the images from the closing ceremony in this photo gallery are stunning.
In particular, the ballerina cum phoenix, translucent octopus bus, and pretty much all the fireworks related images knocked me off my feet. I wish someone could explain the Pet Shop Boys to me, though.
Obit watch: August 13, 2012.
Monday, August 13th, 2012Gregory Powell, one of the two Onion Field killers, is dead.
Officer Ian Campbell was unavailable for comment.
Edited to add: Longer obit in the LAT. Karl Hettinger was also unavailable for comment. But Big Joe Wambaugh did have something to say.
We’re getting the brand back together.
Monday, August 13th, 2012Headline in the HouChron:
Well, actually, I don’t miss that Monte Cristo, because there’s a food trailer on South Congress that makes a better one than Bennigan’s ever did. (I can’t find it online, but it is located in the same lot as Crepes Mille, which does an awesome panang curry crepe.)
Anyway, the gist of the HouChron‘s piece is that certain well-known brands are coming back to the city:
- There’s a new Bennigan’s at Westheimer and Dunvale.
- There’s a Del Taco somewhere on Westheimer, and the owner has plans to open “40 more”. I haven’t been to a Del Taco in years; there was one near my house in the early 1980s.
- Steak ‘n Shake is expanding, and gets their own separate article. I’m sure Roger Ebert is delighted, but as a food critic, he should stick to reviewing movies.
- “Shoney’s On the Go, a counter-service version of a traditional Shoney’s restaurant, is open at 12350 Westheimer.” I think we ate at Shoney’s a few times on family vacations (or am I confusing Shoney’s and Big Boy?), but I never really caught the bug. (Huh. It looks like there’s an actual Shoney’s near San Antonio, but the nearest Big Boy is 1,052 miles away according to Google.)
- Totally unrelated to food, but Gulf Oil is making a comeback as well. There’s one fairly near my apartment, and they have decent prices. But that particular station has rebranded itself so many times (mostly just generic gas, though they were a BP station until the great oil spill, at which point they dropped that like a hot potato) that I don’t trust them.
Thank you, Captain Obvious!
More things I did not know.
Thursday, August 9th, 2012Chain of causality: one of my cow-orkers was bitten by a dog (not seriously) which led to a discussion of The People’s Court (which, when I was watching it, seemed to be dominated by dog and dog-bite cases), which led to a discussion of Judge Marilyn Milan, which in turn led us inevitably to Wapner and Rusty the bailiff.
From the Wikipedia entry on The People’s Court:
Patty Hearst, Chessman, Manson and the Onion Field? Rusty must have had some great stories to tell.
The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Wednesday, August 8th, 2012HFC-22 is a common coolant used in things that require cooling, like air conditioners and refrigerators.
The process of producing HFC-22 yields another gas, HFC-23, as a waste product.
The United Nations has a system that rates gases based on their atmospheric effects.
The result? Companies that produce HFC-22 are making it like it is going out of style, so they can produce HFC-23 as a waste product. Then they destroy the HFC-23 so they can get “waste gas credits”. Then they sell the “waste gas credits” on the open market. Step 4: profit.
More:
August 8th updates.
Wednesday, August 8th, 2012Longer Marvin Hamlisch: NYT, LAT.
Speaking of obits, noted astronomer and pioneer of radio telescopy, Sir Bernard Lovell, passed away on Monday.
There was an update to the Sheri Sangji story while I was on vacation that I wasn’t able to blog. Luckily, Derek Lowe was on the case. For those of you who don’t remember the story, Ms. Sangji was working with t-butyl lithium in a UCLA lab; the substance, which catches fire when exposed to air, spilled, Ms. Sangji was severely burned, and died 18 days later. The university and the primary researcher, Dr. Patrick Harran, faced felony charges.
While I was gone, the charges against the university were dropped. Apparently, UCLA made a deal with the prosecution. The charges against Dr. Harran still stand.
But then it gets weird. Dr. Harran’s defense team is trying to discredit the OSHA report on the accident, based on the accusation that the author of the report participated in a murder when he was 16 years old and failed to disclose this to his employers. I’m not sure at this point if it was actually established that the author of the report and the murderer were the same person, but the author resigned his position anyway.
This is intended to be a short update. The Derek Lowe blog entry linked above has a longer summary, including links to various other sources; I commend it to your attention.
Banana republicans watch: August 7, 2012, special “blood in the streets” edition
Tuesday, August 7th, 2012The “Blue Line” runs from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles. That’s about 22 miles. (The Houston METRORail is 7.5 miles long, just for comparison.)
It would be nice to know what the accidents per mile traveled figure is, and how that compares to other systems. There’s no miles traveled figure in the LAT article. And finding information on METRORail crashes is nearly impossible these days; the transit authority doesn’t release that information, and the Houston-area bloggers who were maintaining counts have all moved on to other things.
In other news, the California city of Fullerton is considering shutting down the Fullerton PD and contracting out police services to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. You may remember the Fullerton PD from the beating death of Kelly Thomas (graphic image at that link):
But folks say it isn’t about Kelly Thomas, it is about the money:
Obit watch: August 7, 2012.
Tuesday, August 7th, 2012Noted art critic Robert Hughes.
A/V Club obit for Marvin Hamlisch. I expect fuller obits in the daily papers tomorrow. (I did not know, until I read it in one of the current obits, that Hamlisch was an EGOT recipient, and one of only two people to receive a Pulitzer Prize in addition to the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards. Richard Rodgers was the other one.)
The NYT is also reporting the passing of noted film critic Judith Crist.
Obit watch: August 6, 2012.
Monday, August 6th, 2012This was on FARK’s entertainment tab over the weekend, but I wanted to make note of it here as well.
De’Andre McCullough, one of the pivotal characters in David Simon and Ed Burns’ book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
I’m not sure what else I can say about this, other than to recommend the Simon and Burns book if you haven’t read it. There’s a surprisingly decent discussion going on in the FARK comments thread.
And for what it may be worth, here’s De’Andre as Lamar in “The Wire”:
Edited to add: I couldn’t pull this up before, but David Simon has a nice post on his blog.
Lessons learned.
Monday, August 6th, 2012So…somebody I know was having problems with their netbook running Ubuntu.
The somebody in question decided (for good and sufficient reasons) that part of the problem might be due to them having done several upgrade installs of recent Ubuntu versions which left cruft on the system. This somebody thought the best thing to do was to make a backup of /home, reformat the box, and reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 from scratch, blowing away all the existing data and partitions.
Which they did.
The somebody in question had a MySQL database on the box that had somewhere around ~2,500 records in it. It was a fairly simple database, probably overkill for MySQL: one table, a few columns.
It turns out that MySQL doesn’t store databases in /home. MySQL stores databases in /var/lib/mysql by default, and the somebody in question never changed the default. (This vaguely makes sense if you think about it; after all, MySQL is intended to be a multi-user database, so why would you store databases under an individual user’s home directory by default?)
The somebody in question found this out after blowing everything away. And, of course, the somebody in question only backed up /home.
Fortunately, the database isn’t that important, and much of the data on it can be recovered from older .CSV files that were used to import the data into MySQL.
But next time, the somebody in question is going to backup every damn thing, not just /home.
The somebody in question is also going to try to get out of the habit of making assumptions about where things are stored.
Hmmmmmmmm.
Friday, August 3rd, 2012In the DEFCON 20 day 2 notes discussing the ADS-B presentation by Renderman, I alluded to some work on using USB TV tuners to pick up ADS-B broadcasts.
I did a little more research on this earlier today, just to satisfy my own curiosity.
Holy cow! I’ve been wanting to mess with software defined radio, but the $1,500 cost for hardware is a bit discouraging. This looks like an excellent way to get started for about $20 instead. The necessary software is linked from the rtl-sdr page, and you can even get a script that will build gnuradio with the proper components.
Yow!
Edited to add 8/4: We are not amused. In the past two days, we have been to Fry’s. The shelves at Fry’s were almost completely stripped bare of USB TV adapters. We have also been to three different branches of Discount Electronics; none of them had any of the listed adapters. We have checked Google, and all of the adapters listed with the E4000 tuner do not appear to be available from vendors in the United States. The only adapter on rtl-sdr’s list that we were able to find was the Ezcap EZTV645 DVB-T Digital TV USB 2.0 Dongle with FM/DAB/Remote Controller which DealExtreme sells. However:
- There are conflicting reports as to whether this is the one rtl-sdr is talking about, and whether this one has the E4000 tuner.
- There are a lot of reports that DealExtreme is slow in shipping; as in, a month or longer.
I’ve ordered the Newsky TV28T that’s listed on the sysmocom site (linked from the rtl-sdr page). With shipping, it came out to 23.30 euros, or about $28.86 in dollars. That’s still well within my price range for tinkering with SDR. I’ll update when the device gets here.
In the meantime, if anyone has any GNURadio or general SDR tips, advice, or suggestions, please feel free to leave them in comments or shoot me an email. Contact addresses are in the usual place.
(And thanks, Borepatch.)