Since nitrogen is such a good insulator, you can dunk your hand into a bucket of liquid nitrogen for a second or two, and as long as you make sure you don't touch the sides, you will be just fine.
As it flash evaporates from the heat of your hand, it forms a protective layer that slows the heat loss quite a bit.
I did it back when I was in high school, and visiting a collage physics lab. It feels strange, like a cold wind blasting your hand.
I wasn't that impressed by Jolt Espresso - it had a large lift, but it wore off too fast.
In my opinion, the one true energy drink is the Thi version of Red Bull, in the small brown glass bottles. It's powerful and cheap ($0.65 or so a bottle), so you can keep going for many nights for not much money.
$14-$15 for a blank DVD? Where are you buying them from? Even Apple sells them for $5 a disk, and Meritline sells cheap bulk packs of DVD-R disks for less than $1 a disk.
It sounds to me that either Roxen or Caudium might meet your needs.
Both are multithreaded web servers, which are very good at producing dynamic content. They have a very nice macro language built in (RXML) and support scripts written in the language Pike (which both servers are written in as well). Both also support embedded perl scripts, as well as java servlets, and fastcgi scripts. It also has very good database support, and support for dynamic image generation.
I haven't used Caudium myself - it is a fork of the Roxen 1.3 codebase, and I had already started using the new 2.x features before the fork happened. It is GPLed, and is available here
Roxen is available in two forms, a free GPLed version (available here) and a commercial version which includes content management features (Demo available here).
The new versions of Roxen are bundled with a MySQL install which the server uses for storing configuration data, caching generated images and pike/rxml pcode, and for storing internally managed user databases. It also works well with PostgreSQL as an external database.
Php support in roxen is a little tricky. Recent versions of PHP can be compiled into a module that can be merged into pike, allowing both Roxen and Caudium to execute PHP scripts inside of the multithreaded main process. This is still buggy under Roxen, but I understand that it works well under Caudium. Personally, I compiled php as a fastcgi, and used Roxen's fastcgi module.
He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)
He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier/. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).
Most of the Linux zealots that I know are sticking with Linux. The people I know who switched to OSX come from the following groups:
Previous Mac users
Old NeXT junkies
People who just want one machine that does everything
I guess I fall into the second and third groups. I was never really a macintosh fan (although, I really liked DeBabelizer, especially in batch mode, preforming a complex operation, with different file shares for the input and output spools... but I digress), however when the graphite ibooks came out (first with DVD and firewire support) I figured I would pick one up. In the worst case, I could just use it as a portable DVD player. I had used NeXT systems from time to time (and I used a NeXT slab daily) so the idea that the next mac OS was NeXT based sounded cool, so I ordered one of the beta cds.
After playing with OSX for a while (Hey look - they forgot to remove all of the NeXT copyright info!) I discovered that the tools I used the most (Roxen, Pike, PostgreSQL) all ran great under OSX! I started using it as a portable development system.
Shortly After I set up a wireless network, I realized that I never sat down at my Linux workstation anymore, and would just log into it remotely from the laptop all the time, so I pulled the monitor off it, and stuck it in the closet with the servers.
Just pick up a few cases of this stuff (I usually saw it for $0.70 or so a bottle at the local Oriental Mart) and the caffine problems of your staff are solved.
This stuff was vital for my schedule of sleeping for 6 hours every other night when I was in grad school. I still have a dozen or so bottles lying around that I give to people who think they can handle caffine. So far they have all bowed down to the fury of the real red bull.
That's why I didn't call it a hot backup, but a live backup - I've heard different things meant by hot backup (ranging from how you described it, to backing up with only a brief shutdown ). I think marketing people have siezed on that phrase, and use it to describe some random feature of their products so that they can lways claim to have it.
I've only heard the term live backup describe the following: You can dump a consistant set of data without needing to take the database down, or interfere with other processes.
pg_dump accomplished this. You get a consistent dump because each database is dumped in one transaction, and does not see the effects of other transactions going on in the system.
Live backups under PostgreSQL are easy. For a small database, just run pg_dumpall > backupfile and you have taken a consistant snapshot of all databases on the system without bringing any database down, or blocking any reads or writes.
If you have a more complex system, you probably want to use pg_dump itself on each database, rather than the wrapper script, so you can chose the dump format that best suits your needs.
My work cell phone has a simple number - if you make one up for my area code, you've probably got it.
Some woman gave her credit card company a fake phone number before she skipped town, leaving a large bill piled up. The fake number she gave them was my cell phone number.
Those bastards were calling a couple of dozen times a day demanding to speak to whatever her name was, and assumed that I was trying to trick them when I kept trying to tell them I had no idea who they were talking about. Every time I tried to explain what was going on, they would just keep yelling, threatening, and swearing. If I hung up, they would call back within 60 seconds.
It was made worse, because I work nights, and have to be reachable in case of emergencies via that cell phone.
Eventually they stopped calling after a month or two - I guess they managed to track her down.
What are you doing using normal decimal types for storing currency amounts? Use a currency or numeric type so you know for sure how much precision you will have, and can avoid rounding errors. Databases provide these types for a reason. Use them!
Then again, MySQL might have left these "useless features" out, along with Referential Integrity, subqueries, transactions, and most of the other features that make a data store a database...
Apple's QT streaming server is free and open source, and runs well on both Linux and FreeBSD. You can download a precompiled version from here and the source code from here or by checking it out of their public CVS server.
For some time I've been working on a contingency plan for the event that I might end up unemployed. A major part of it is this trip - just under 6500 miles covering many places I've been before, or would love to go to. I estimate it would take about 3 months to do properly, so that I could enjoy everything I could without having to rush through it.
I figure camping along the coast of Lake Superior by Wawa would be a great start.
I've spent many a week off in the summer camping there, and never run out of things to see. [Pictures/Writeup of a recent trip].
After that, it would be a westward run along highway 1 accross the canadian shield towards Clagary, Banff, and Jasper.
I probably would dip towards the south as I approached Calgary, to pass through Fort Macleod so that I could visit the Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump again, before I lingered for a couple of weeks around Banff and Jasper. I have only been in this area twice, once about 9 years ago as part of the last long road trip I took with my parents, and last year with a friend [Pictures]. The Banff and Jasper parks are amazing. The Icefields Parkway is Breathtaking. I could probably spend every summer out here for the rest of my life, and never get bored or stop discovering new things.
When it was finally time to move on, I would push on to the west coast, and gradually wander southward along the coast from Vancouver, to Los Angeles. I intend to try out a small chunk of this part of the run in July, taking a week to drive between Los Angeles and SanFrancisco (and back) with my brother.
After this, everything gets vague. I could swing south, and see Mesa Verde for the first time since middle school, take the central route and revisit Dinosaur National Monument, or swing to the north and rexperience the solitude of the badlands. I probably wouldn't decide until I reached LA.
I went to high school with Dave when this was going on. (I graduated from Chippewa Valley High School in 1994). I can tell you that the following facts are true.
He was in Boy Scouts (I was in troop 371 with him)
He was always into strange experiments, from making thermite, to building large batteries to give people shocks.
At one point in high school, he became very interested in radioactive decay, and the reactions that can transform one isotope into another.
Shortly after that, he started showing off many giger counters, bits of metal with radiation symbols etched into them, and other items when we met for lunch.
He knew chemestry pretty well, although he was not always that careful. (he used to reclaim silver from discared film for extra money)
As we both messed around with electronics, I gave him a catalog from a slavage yard with crates of dozen of different items that had been left out in the rain. They were selling dead smoke detectors for really really cheap.
He brought in a opened Americum container from a smoke detector to lunch one day. At this point, I stopped sitting near him in class, and at lunch, and started calling him "Glow Boy".
About a month into my Freshman year at college, I got a phone call from him. He said that he had just been raided by the EPA and the NRC, and that he needed to know what the name of that salvage yard had been.
Now, the rumor I heard for how he was caught was the following:
He had to move his experiments somewhere besides that shed, so he filled the trunk of his car with the material. On his way to school, he had to drive over a railroad crossing. Apparently there was some sort of radiation sensor by the track, and it started tripping twice a day, always at the same time.
The other rumor I had heard, was that he had given up, and had given most of the radioactive material to a friend who wanted to keep experimenting shortly before he was raided.
No, but he showed me some strange looking burns once. He wanted to know if I thought that radiation exposure could have caused them.
Also, when he brought in a giger counter one day, we were messing around with it during lunch . I noticed that it did give a higher reading when he, rather than one of the other people at the table, was using it.
You said: Umm, if I remember properly isn't this an 'urban legend' like the jet powered chevy impala? I thought that this was just an urban legend that people told...
I reply:
Nope - the facts at the core of this are true (I went to high school with Dave, and was in his scout troop as well). He found a place that was selling crates of smoke detectors that had been left in the rain, and bought hundreds of them to crack open for the radioactive material.
As I recall, I kept calling him "Glow Boy" and telling him that his nuts would fall off if he wasn't careful...
You said: "He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning."
I reply:
I went to high school with Dave when this was going on, and I was in his scout troop as well.
I never saw him bright orange at a scout meeting, but I did see him looking like a carrot shortly after he graduated. He didn't get into artificial tanning until after he graduated.
I've had an eyemodule for several years now, and I've taken several hundred pictures with it. It was great to leave it plugged into my visor, and know I always had a camera on me if I came accross something I wanted to show to other people.
I picked up an Eyemodule 2 a little while ago, and I've only taken a couple of dozen or so pictures with it. While I love the built in lens cap, and the higher resolution is nicer under optimal circumstances, under low light levels the eyemodule 1 works better, as the eyemodule 2 is easy to blur.
First the tool - xtail. It's wonderful for watching a bunch of system/web logs on one terminal window.
Next, two basic tips:
control - \ sends SIGQUIT rather than SIGINT as control - c does. Useful for killing programs that do something besides exit when they get SIGINT (such as xtail).
kill -ILL Simulates an illegal instruction - useful for killing tasks that ignore kill -KILL. I had to use this all the time to kill hung opnet and comnet simulations back in my networking class several years ago.
One last thing, to address a major peeve I have with many scripts I find:
Always use random names for temp files. Even if you don't want to use mktemp, please do something as simple as appending.$$ to the end of the file names. While this may not prevent someone trying to force a race condition, think of what would happen if two copies of your script were started at the same time if you didn't ensure that different instances of your script are using different temp files...
The way I used to show people 300-N-8-1, and the way I viewed the White Roses file was the following:
Take the phone off the hook
go to class
get back
check to see if the phone has stopped beeping, but still has power
hit ATA in telix, as I hit play on the stereo, and hold the phone up to a speaker.
If you don't own a copy of Peace and Love, Inc. the text file of 300-N-8-1 is included on the data disk of Don't Be Afraid.
Or, if you are really really lazy, you can read 300-N-8-1here.
INSOC rocked when it came to hiding cool things on their cds. 300-N-8-1 was cool, White Roses was a blast to complete, and the chili recipe on the CD+G track of Information Society tasted great.
Remember, you can increase the range by putting an antenna at both the base station, and the remote station. You might want to consider using an omnidirectional at the base, and a directional at the remote if you really need to push the limits.
I'm as annoyed at that "Upgrade to QuickTime Pro!" box as you are, especialy since I own Final Cut Pro 3
My copy of Final Cut pro 3 came with a quicktime pro registration code. It was on the same sticker sheet as the code for Final Cut Pro 3 itself. Are you sure yours didn't come with one?
Slashdot Mirror
Since nitrogen is such a good insulator, you can dunk your hand into a bucket of liquid nitrogen for a second or two, and as long as you make sure you don't touch the sides, you will be just fine.
As it flash evaporates from the heat of your hand, it forms a protective layer that slows the heat loss quite a bit.
I did it back when I was in high school, and visiting a collage physics lab. It feels strange, like a cold wind blasting your hand.
I wasn't that impressed by Jolt Espresso - it had a large lift, but it wore off too fast.
In my opinion, the one true energy drink is the Thi version of Red Bull, in the small brown glass bottles.
It's powerful and cheap ($0.65 or so a bottle), so you can keep going for many nights for not much money.
$14-$15 for a blank DVD?
Where are you buying them from?
Even Apple sells them for $5 a disk, and Meritline sells cheap bulk packs of DVD-R disks for less than $1 a disk.
It sounds to me that either Roxen or Caudium might meet your needs.
Both are multithreaded web servers, which are very good at producing dynamic content.
They have a very nice macro language built in (RXML) and support scripts written in the language Pike (which both servers are written in as well). Both also support embedded perl scripts, as well as java servlets, and fastcgi scripts. It also has very good database support, and support for dynamic image generation.
I haven't used Caudium myself - it is a fork of the Roxen 1.3 codebase, and I had already started using the new 2.x features before the fork happened. It is GPLed, and is available here
Roxen is available in two forms, a free GPLed version (available here) and a commercial version which includes content management features (Demo available here).
The new versions of Roxen are bundled with a MySQL install which the server uses for storing configuration data, caching generated images and pike/rxml pcode, and for storing internally managed user databases. It also works well with PostgreSQL as an external database.
Php support in roxen is a little tricky. Recent versions of PHP can be compiled into a module that can be merged into pike, allowing both Roxen and Caudium to execute PHP scripts inside of the multithreaded main process. This is still buggy under Roxen, but I understand that it works well under Caudium. Personally, I compiled php as a fastcgi, and used Roxen's fastcgi module.
QuickTime Broadcaster will stream AC3 audio without video without any trouble, if that is what you want.
He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)
/. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).
He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier
- Previous Mac users
- Old NeXT junkies
- People who just want one machine that does everything
I guess I fall into the second and third groups. I was never really a macintosh fan (although, I really liked DeBabelizer, especially in batch mode, preforming a complex operation, with different file shares for the input and output spools... but I digress), however when the graphite ibooks came out (first with DVD and firewire support) I figured I would pick one up. In the worst case, I could just use it as a portable DVD player. I had used NeXT systems from time to time (and I used a NeXT slab daily) so the idea that the next mac OS was NeXT based sounded cool, so I ordered one of the beta cds.After playing with OSX for a while (Hey look - they forgot to remove all of the NeXT copyright info!) I discovered that the tools I used the most (Roxen, Pike, PostgreSQL) all ran great under OSX! I started using it as a portable development system.
Shortly After I set up a wireless network, I realized that I never sat down at my Linux workstation anymore, and would just log into it remotely from the laptop all the time, so I pulled the monitor off it, and stuck it in the closet with the servers.
Just pick up a few cases of this stuff (I usually saw it for $0.70 or so a bottle at the local Oriental Mart) and the caffine problems of your staff are solved.
This stuff was vital for my schedule of sleeping for 6 hours every other night when I was in grad school.
I still have a dozen or so bottles lying around that I give to people who think they can handle caffine.
So far they have all bowed down to the fury of the real red bull.
That's why I didn't call it a hot backup, but a live backup - I've heard different things meant by hot backup (ranging from how you described it, to backing up with only a brief shutdown ). I think marketing people have siezed on that phrase, and use it to describe some random feature of their products so that they can lways claim to have it.
I've only heard the term live backup describe the following: You can dump a consistant set of data without needing to take the database down, or interfere with other processes.
pg_dump accomplished this. You get a consistent dump because each database is dumped in one transaction, and does not see the effects of other transactions going on in the system.
Live backups under PostgreSQL are easy. For a small database, just run pg_dumpall > backupfile and you have taken a consistant snapshot of all databases on the system without bringing any database down, or blocking any reads or writes.
If you have a more complex system, you probably want to use pg_dump itself on each database, rather than the wrapper script, so you can chose the dump format that best suits your needs.
My work cell phone has a simple number - if you make one up for my area code, you've probably got it.
Some woman gave her credit card company a fake phone number before she skipped town, leaving a large bill piled up. The fake number she gave them was my cell phone number.
Those bastards were calling a couple of dozen times a day demanding to speak to whatever her name was, and assumed that I was trying to trick them when I kept trying to tell them I had no idea who they were talking about. Every time I tried to explain what was going on, they would just keep yelling, threatening, and swearing. If I hung up, they would call back within 60 seconds.
It was made worse, because I work nights, and have to be reachable in case of emergencies via that cell phone.
Eventually they stopped calling after a month or two - I guess they managed to track her down.
What are you doing using normal decimal types for storing currency amounts? Use a currency or numeric type so you know for sure how much precision you will have, and can avoid rounding errors. Databases provide these types for a reason. Use them!
Then again, MySQL might have left these "useless features" out, along with Referential Integrity, subqueries, transactions, and most of the other features that make a data store a database...
Compuserve created the GIF format, but Unisys holds the patent on LZW (the compression used by GIF).
Apple's QT streaming server is free and open source, and runs well on both Linux and FreeBSD.
You can download a precompiled version from here and the source code from here or by checking it out of their public CVS server.
For some time I've been working on a contingency plan for the event that I might end up unemployed.
A major part of it is this trip - just under 6500 miles covering many places I've been before, or would love to go to.
I estimate it would take about 3 months to do properly, so that I could enjoy everything I could without having to rush through it.
I figure camping along the coast of Lake Superior by Wawa would be a great start.
I've spent many a week off in the summer camping there, and never run out of things to see. [Pictures/Writeup of a recent trip].
After that, it would be a westward run along highway 1 accross the canadian shield towards Clagary, Banff, and Jasper.
I probably would dip towards the south as I approached Calgary, to pass through Fort Macleod so that I could visit the Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump again, before I lingered for a couple of weeks around Banff and Jasper.
I have only been in this area twice, once about 9 years ago as part of the last long road trip I took with my parents, and last year with a friend [Pictures]. The Banff and Jasper parks are amazing. The Icefields Parkway is Breathtaking. I could probably spend every summer out here for the rest of my life, and never get bored or stop discovering new things.
When it was finally time to move on, I would push on to the west coast, and gradually wander southward along the coast from Vancouver, to Los Angeles.
I intend to try out a small chunk of this part of the run in July, taking a week to drive between Los Angeles and SanFrancisco (and back) with my brother.
After this, everything gets vague. I could swing south, and see Mesa Verde for the first time since middle school, take the central route and revisit Dinosaur National Monument, or swing to the north and rexperience the solitude of the badlands. I probably wouldn't decide until I reached LA.
Now, the rumor I heard for how he was caught was the following:
He had to move his experiments somewhere besides that shed, so he filled the trunk of his car with the material. On his way to school, he had to drive over a railroad crossing. Apparently there was some sort of radiation sensor by the track, and it started tripping twice a day, always at the same time.
The other rumor I had heard, was that he had given up, and had given most of the radioactive material to a friend who wanted to keep experimenting shortly before he was raided.
No, but he showed me some strange looking burns once. He wanted to know if I thought that radiation exposure could have caused them.
Also, when he brought in a giger counter one day, we were messing around with it during lunch . I noticed that it did give a higher reading when he, rather than one of the other people at the table, was using it.
You said:
Umm, if I remember properly isn't this an 'urban legend' like the jet powered chevy impala? I thought that this was just an urban legend that people told...
I reply:
Nope - the facts at the core of this are true (I went to high school with Dave, and was in his scout troop as well). He found a place that was selling crates of smoke detectors that had been left in the rain, and bought hundreds of them to crack open for the radioactive material.
As I recall, I kept calling him "Glow Boy" and telling him that his nuts would fall off if he wasn't careful...
You said:
"He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning."
I reply:
I went to high school with Dave when this was going on, and I was in his scout troop as well.
I never saw him bright orange at a scout meeting, but I did see him looking like a carrot shortly after he graduated. He didn't get into artificial tanning until after he graduated.
I've had an eyemodule for several years now, and I've taken several hundred pictures with it. It was great to leave it plugged into my visor, and know I always had a camera on me if I came accross something I wanted to show to other people.
I picked up an Eyemodule 2 a little while ago, and I've only taken a couple of dozen or so pictures with it. While I love the built in lens cap, and the higher resolution is nicer under optimal circumstances, under low light levels the eyemodule 1 works better, as the eyemodule 2 is easy to blur.
Next, two basic tips:
One last thing, to address a major peeve I have with many scripts I find:
Always use random names for temp files. Even if you don't want to use mktemp, please do something as simple as appending
- Take the phone off the hook
- go to class
- get back
- check to see if the phone has stopped beeping, but still has power
- hit ATA in telix, as I hit play on the stereo, and hold the phone up to a speaker.
If you don't own a copy of Peace and Love, Inc. the text file of 300-N-8-1 is included on the data disk of Don't Be Afraid.Or, if you are really really lazy, you can read 300-N-8-1 here.
INSOC rocked when it came to hiding cool things on their cds. 300-N-8-1 was cool, White Roses was a blast to complete, and the chili recipe on the CD+G track of Information Society tasted great.
Go for a Handspring Visor, and an EyeModule or an EyeModule 2.
They both include a nice time lapse feature, which keeps the pda powered down as much as possible to avoid draining the battery.
Yep - really easy too - they all should have a n type port on the back that the antenna plugs in to.
I use a decent $67 8db omnidirectional at my base station, although, if you need longer range you might want to look at this $109 24 db directional.
Remember, you can increase the range by putting an antenna at both the base station, and the remote station. You might want to consider using an omnidirectional at the base, and a directional at the remote if you really need to push the limits.
I'm as annoyed at that "Upgrade to QuickTime Pro!" box as you are, especialy since I own Final Cut Pro 3
My copy of Final Cut pro 3 came with a quicktime pro registration code.
It was on the same sticker sheet as the code for Final Cut Pro 3 itself.
Are you sure yours didn't come with one?