Daniel Von Fange

Helio Courier.

A few pictures of a Helio Courier doing crazy things.

Traffic Waves.

Traffic Waves - Fascinating experiments on breaking up traffic jams.

Ambush.

Probably the one of the lowest forms of skunk around. Setting fire to buildings, and then shooting at Firemen and EMT's.

"Police said the shooter began firing rapidly at authorities the moment they arrived". Rapid fire, poor accuracy (just one EMT hit), and yet the article calls the rat a "Sniper".

Enough fire watching.

Okay. Enough fire watching. I'm headed off to Zzzz Land. Looks like the watching students are thinning out.

Still smoke..

Looks like the fire is still going.

And the fire truck vanished.

And the fire truck just left the intersection

Fire truck.

A fire truck just parked on the intersection outside the presidents office.

Watching the fire.

You can see on this webcam students watching the fire from the steps of the Clemson Tilman building.

Fire at Clemson.

It looks like there is a fire going on at Clemson. You can see it on one of the webcams.

[Update: By 6:23am the next day, news about the fire is finally on the web.]

Hebrew.

I'm thinking of learning Hebrew. It looks irresistibly like code.

So far I have acquired a Hebrew "Old Testament" and learned three letters so far. Time will tell how if I manage to allocate enough time to learning it, since at present it is merely a whim. :)

BusinessWorks upgrade crawls.

My Dad's company is upgrading to the new version of their accounting package, BusinessWorks. To convert on a duel xeon workstation just 3.5 megs of accounting data to the new version format, has taken more than an hour - before we gave up and left it to run overnight!

We did not believe the converter program when it ordered us to "Run this at the end of the workday. May take more than ten hours to complete." I just don't understand how you can spend HOURS converting three floppy disks work of data. I just really, really don't understand it.

Every night one of the websites I coded downloads about 50 megs of data on 50,000 homes. It does several different data transformations (rearranging about 30 items per listing, and doing some other data lookups), imports it into a mysql database, and indexes the data - in about one minute on a cheap PIII 800.

I really, really don't understand a time measured in hours for 3.5 megs of data. But then, this is from the company whose home page says:

Neglect.

Sadly I've been neglecting this blog. About a month ago I set myself up an "internal" blog at the company I volunteer at. I've been posting there multiple times a day, and ignoring this one. I need to only post "internal" stuff over there, and keep the generally applicable stuff out here.

Okay. So that's what I will do.

Thinking.

The reasons for my decision to quit were myriad, but central to the decision was the realization that there are two kinds of companies:

Good ones ask you to think for them.

The others tell you to think like them.
---Monkeybagel

Manageing Sysadmins.

Pumas on Hoverbikes - Notes on managing sysadmins (via Decafbad)

Basecamp.

Basecamp does look like a cute way to communicate with customers. The price is reasonable as well. I just saw that they have a free plan with support for only one active project - I must have missed that one at first. Eventually, I'll give it a try.

An Indian adventure.

At the end of spicy supper at an Indian restaurant we were given little zip-lock bags with very tiny, very brilliant seeds inside them. My brothers and I had not encountered these before and were somewhat at loss.

"Are we supposed to eat them, or plant them in our garden?"

"I don't know. But, you sure don't want to get pulled over by a policeman with these in your car."

(Everyone tries some)

"Hmm. Like licking a 2×4."

"Like licking a treated 2×4."

They were good, but very, very different.

MRTG & rrdtool.

rrdtool is a really fun toy to play with. Too bad it is painful to use, unlike the simple mrtg. One attempt to make rrdtool easy to use, is cacti, a web based control panel that sets up and maintains graphs for you.

(Needless to say, I've had the need to graph things over the past few days.)

Colloquy.

I tried out Colloquy, a gorgeous OS X IRC client, and liked it greatly. I am way to fond of looking at how pretty the text can look.

Via decafbad

Great teams.

The "President of the Internet" has written a great article on The Art and Science of a Great Team. I've lead an incredible team before (although it was "only" a computer game team ) and what Dan James says rings very true. In fact I was going through writing this post, and commenting on each individual point. Unfortunately, it just looked like "exactly", "same with us", and "we did that". Instead, let me ask a question.

I was a part of a great team before starting my own great team. Several of the people that were on my great team, started their own teams that turned into great ones. I wonder if "teams" are hereditary. Dan, were you a part of a great team sometime before you started silverorange?

Probably the most controversial statement is that "you can't make it happen". Why not? I know you can't get a team by declaring that you have a team, but a person who has been on a great team before can probably create a situation that a great team can form in. When you know how a great team acts, you can act in that way yourself.

I said I would not just say, "Yeah, that's true", but here I go.

"By putting a team up on a pedestal at the start you are placing expectations on a team that ruins the creativity, the wonder, and the fun." - This one seems counter-intuitive, but is true. I had to leave my "Team" because I did not have that much time for computer games. Later on the team decide to reform. They deliberately choose a different name, so that no one would have expectations and they would not have anything to "live up to" while they were becoming a team. They now have another outstanding team.

Code Ethics.

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a ``DestroyBaghdad'' procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a ``DestroyCity'' procedure, to which ``Baghdad'' could be given as a parameter.

---Nathaniel S. Borenstein

Or he would add a Destroy() method to the City class...

Password for installs?.

The Mydoom virus underscores one key difference between the two systems. OS X comes with a default setting that requires a login name and password before it allows any new software to be installed on a given computer. With this default, no Mac user needs to worry about inadvertently clicking on e-mail attachments carrying virus software. -- BusinessWeek

You only need to enter a password to install certain programs, not all. And you don't have to enter any password to run a program.

Not everything in OS X is secure. The relatively short length of the passwords for accessing individual accounts isn't a good thing

That was fixed a while ago. I think.

Don't believe everything you see in print. ;)

Explosives.

A few years ago I was reading a rant on why the LAV III was a Bad Thing and why RPG's were Good Things. When I realized I could pull up causalities by type, it got me curious about what is killing us.

Here's a graph of US deaths to hostile action since 05/04/03. Out of a total of 254 deaths, 112 of them were from just IED's and RPG's.

(Of course casualty numbers in this war are on a different scale than some past wars. For comparason: If the allied troops were to continue to die at the rate of allied deaths in Iraq last month, to be somewhere near the deaths of the French during the battle of Verdun in the first world war, would require to conflict to continue for another 375 years!)

Knowing causalities.

In past wars, guessing wrongly at the number men the enemy has lost has resulted in some really stupid strategical decisions. It's amazing that you can pull up an exact count (even drilling down into by day, or cause) of allied casualties in the second gulf war.

Spin man.

We journey farther afield, and the famous fort of Douaumont is pointed out. The storming of Fort Douaumont, gunless and unmanned, was a military operation of little value. A number of the Brandenburgers climbed into the gunless fort, and some of them were still there on March 6th, supplied precariously with food by their comrades at night.

They were practically surrounded by the French, whose Headquarters Staff regarded the whole incident as a simple episode in the give-and-take of war. The announcement of the fall of Fort Douaumont to the world evinces the great anxiety of the Germans to magnify anything concerning Verdun into a great event. It should also cause people to apply a grain of salt to German official communiques before swallowing them.

-- Lord Northcliffe

(In actuality, ten german soldiers climbed into one of the most modern French fortresses, and captured it. Even though the fort was under fire, most of the garrison was in the lecture room. It was estimated that the French lost 100,000 men trying to retake the fort.)

War Posters.

If I were a soldier, World War One would be, I think, the last war I would want to be involved in. Recruiting messages that say the army is "fun" or a "good education" drive me nuts. So much disconnectedness between the message of this poster and reality.