Sean’s Mental Walkabout

NBC Edits SNL Bailout Skit Following Legal Concerns Over “People Who Should Be Shot” Chyron
Interesting. This is one of the reasons you should be watching SNL live, because the archives have this editted out. Revisionist history wins the day.

Dynamic Periodic Table
Just because it’s awesome.

Dutchess Wine Trail - Discover the Premium Wineries of the Hudson Valley
Our local wine trail

Storm King Art Center
Giant Art on 1000 acres of beautiful land

Viscount Wines & Liquor
Wine tastings every saturday. It’s like an amusement park for adults.

Dutchess County Tourism
dutchess county tourism page

Stanford CS Ed Library
If you or a friend are trying to cut or re-cut your teeth on basic C stuff, I found this site years ago that’s actually quite good. Especially as they don’t seem to teach pointers in college any more.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: Table of Contents
For whatever reason the GNU.org docs here suck, and this has always been my reference page for this.

Quick Reference Cards
A bunch of great quick reference cards for various technical tasks.

Advanced Search—The Tree Guide at Arborday.org
In case you are looking to plant a tree, and want to find the right one for your area

Giles Bowkett: Lightbulb Joke: Bad Ruby Programmers
If you follow things in the community, it’s pretty funny. It doesn’t change that I love ruby and ruby on rails, but it’s still funny.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Rail trails upgraded | PoughkeepsieJournal.com | Poughkeepsie Journal
We were just out on the harlem valley rail trail this weekend, good to finally know what’s holding up the section 4 upgrade. Can’t wait for the dutchess trail to open, as that’s about 3 miles from our house. b

» Identi.ca, Twitter, and posting between the two » as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge
Pretty good post on the whole space. This really seems like the entire space is going to need to go open before too long.

puppet - Trac
I keep hearing good things about puppet. I’m trying to figure out if this would save me any time on the scale of servers that I have to deal with. Plus, bonus, it’s written in ruby.

Openmublog - Identi.ca
The distributed nature of openmicroblogging looks pretty interesting

Popularity: 1% [?]

[Fly on the Wall] Garbage collection - (37signals)
“Taking out the trash takes more energy than you think”

Couple survives jolt from bolt | PoughkeepsieJournal.com | Poughkeepsie Journal
Yes, the saturday storms were that crazy around here

Book Review: Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It”: Page 1
Sounds somewhat interesting, though I’m not sure what else would be in the book that would make it valuable to read.

Popularity: 12% [?]

The house monitoring project has made a little bit of progress, as I’ve now got data being collected into a rails app using backgroundrb, and can get that data back out into very pretty graphs with gruff.  (I also looked a little bit a sparklines, but that’s specifically for graphs without labels.)
 

We’re running above target temp as it’s the weekend, so the wood stove is on.  As is the furnace fan to spread the heat through the house.  I’m overloading the values for heat on an fan on to be either the bottom of the graph or a specific small value.  I need to sort out a better way to put that into the graph, which may require some hacking on gruff itself.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I definitely don’t have this anywhere near I like it, but I did manage to just dump out a bunch of info from my thermostat and turn off the fan with this script:

I need some nicer symbolic constants for state setting, and pull together a rails site just to keep track of thermostat data over the course of the day.  All this code is going on my newly registered rubyforge project.

Popularity: 17% [?]