Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 12

Is John McCain a terrorist?

John McCain, a victim of war who promotes war, was photographed with a kidnapper in Syria.

Worth A Thousand Words « The Dish

How fucking marvelous that in a classically impulsive and dumb trip into Syria, McCain may have unwittingly been photographed next to a known multiple kidnapper of Shia pilgrims. Hey, he’s our multiple kidnapper. Soon, we may have our own Sunni Jihadists too!

Is kidnapper Mohammad Nour a terrorist? If so, did McCain just provide “material support” for said terrorist? Even if he did, don’t count on the DoJ to pursue it. Check out the analysis from Cato and decided for yourself.

Did John McCain Provide Material Support for Syrian Terrorists?

Unfortunately, the Washington authorities have routinely misused the concept. In separate context, the federal government denied refugee status to a teen deemed as providing “material support” for Colombian communist insurgents who murdered his parents because he was forced at gunpoint to bury some of their victims. A Liberian woman was deemed to have provided “material support” for guerrillas who had raped her because she was forced at gunpoint to cook for them.

If the rest of us are vulnerable to extreme interpretations of the law, then lawmakers who approved the law should be subject to the same legal risks. Consider Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has been campaigning for war in Syria, just as he previously promoted war most everywhere else around the globe.

 

Hacker News thread about side projects for sale

The best part?

Sneaky. You made yourself a list of free ideas right here. 

Yay! “Free ideas” that … didn’t work out, have no market and are now eagerly flipped for peanuts. Sneaky indeed

But as is also pointed out, many of these projects put the blame of failure on lack of marketing funds. That does seem to be a big hurdle to jump with these little projects. All the little viral successes might make you think all you need to do is build something and the fans will start showing up. In the real world, people don’t see mystical messages on the scoreboard at Fenway.

Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell? | Hacker News

If you have any side projects that you’ve built and that you no longer have time for, list them here and let’s see if others want to buy it from you.

SMBC’s Falling Problem

There’s some nice inspiration for parents to be had from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal today.

Windows no longer #1 OS

If you count tablets as PCs, and if you count Android a free OS, then I guess you can say that the majority of PCs sold now run on free software.

Mark Shuttleworth Marks Bug 1 – ‘Microsoft Has Majority Marketshare – As Fixed

It had to happen one day – and today is as good as any, right? The infamous Bug #1 has been marked as fixed by Mark Shuttleworth.

Cleaning up failed multi-part uploads on Amazon S3

This problem hit me, too. I backup stuff with s3cmd every night. I kick off a sync at 2AM and kill the script at 6AM. For a while, I had one large file that could not finish. I built up a lot of orphaned file fragments. My monthly S3 bill kept growing and Amazon reported more and more storage being used, but if I used s3cmd to add up all the files, it was way below. It took awhile to sort it out because Amazon’s tools a somewhat primitive–and I think they discouraged third parties from developing tools for analyzing usage by changing formats frequently.

Anyway, now I’m cleaning out incomplete multi-part uploads every night using the technique described below.

Cleaning up failed multi-part uploads on Amazon S3

I’ve recently been using sc3cmd to back up a lot of data to Amazon S3. Version 1.1.0 (currently in beta) supports multi-part uploads. It has borked a few times half way through large uploads, without properly aborting the operation server-side. This meant that the parts uploaded so far were not removed from the server, and that’s bad because Amazon charges for this storage.

s3cmd doesn’t currently have any way to list or abort interrupted multi-part uploads, which meant I had to figure out some other way to do it. It turned out to be quite simple using Python and the boto library:

Dogmantics

Since we’ve got a new puppy in the house, we’re quite focussed on helping her learn how to live comfortably with us. I found Dogmantics intriguing.  The philosophy in a nutshell:

1) Training by rewarding desirable behaviors so they will be more likely to occur in the future, while preventing reinforcement of behaviors that are undesirable.

2) Interrupting and preventing undesirable behaviors without physical or psychological intimidation, as well as rewarding an alternate response (training a behavior you find desirable in it’s place).

3) Taking an animal’s emotional state and stress levels into account.

4) Socializing and teaching an animal to cope with his environment using reinforcement.

5) Using a marker to train, whether it be a clicker, some other noise-maker, your voice or touch, or a visual marker. Or, on the other hand, not using a marker, and instead for example reinforcing an animal by feeding a treat directly to his mouth.

6) Employing humane, effective, respectful training based on the latest scientific evidence.

It’s the non-aggression principle applied to dogs.

Dogmantics Dog Training | Progressive Reinforcement Dog Training

Emily Larlham is an internationally renowned dog trainer and artist who resides in Malmö, Sweden.

Emily combines her artistic background and training skills to come up with creative, fast and reliable ways of training and modifying behaviors.  Her passion is using Progressive Reinforcement Training to solve behavior problems in dogs as well as teaching highly complex behaviors and tricks.  Emily created the term Progressive Reinforcement Training to describe a non-violent way of training animals that involves no forms of physical or psychological intimidation.

Costs for building prototypes

Over the past couple years, I’ve been serving as CTO for several startups that are now seeking funding. This overview of cost to build an MVP is about right. It might be shooting low for more complex projects if the team can’t agree what’s truly minimal. Also, I’ve only ever heard bad stories about hiring offshore teams to build prototypes.

How Much Does It Cost To Build An MVP? – Forbes

An MVP (minimum viable product) is defined as the smallest possible thing you can do to prove a set of hypotheses about a business idea, according to Lean Startup theory. There are different kinds of MVPs, depending on the business idea that you have.

Related articles

Minimum Viable Product: A Guide

Cognitive dissonance as game mechanic

Again, Dwarf Fortress pokes it’s ugly head up to beg “come play me”. And I keep asking myself, how important is it that I embrace loss?

But also, we’ve been playing Skyrim, which offers its own moral choices. I’ve played Grand Theft Auto. It’s like watching a gangster movie, and I can view the atrocious behavior of the main character as drama. If you join the Thieves Guild in Skyrim, you can expect to steal stuff. This kind of bugs my kids. It really bugs them if they accidentally harm an innocent–even though they know they can reload. Part of me wants to comfort them–it’s just a game afterall. And it’s a nice feature of the game that you can call do-overs. We use it as a context to argue about what’s right. It’s similar to many arguments during D&D games of my youth without the stupefying baggage of Gygax’s alignment system.

In life and drama, the following formula applies. Step 1: find two opposing beliefs held by your target. Step 2: bring that opposition into full consciousness. Step 3: be entertained.

Born to Lose

Another game that has attracted attention in recent years is Dwarf Fortress, famous for its motto that “losing is fun.” In the game, you work to oversee an entire fortress of alcoholic dwarves, each with his or her own appearance, emotions, relationships, desires, skills, beard-grooming standards, and – eventually – gruesome deaths. In an e-mail interview, Dwarf Fortress’s creator, Tarn Adams, told me, “It’s important that people learn to embrace loss, or the world can’t be enriched by their passing.” Only by seeing how easy it is to accidentally drive a dwarf mad, leading them to throw themselves down a well, or how easily a poorly planned fort leads to war-wounded dwarf veterans dying without medical care, can you come to value their individual lives. The death of a dwarf is both tragic and common, which makes a dwarf’s survival against the odds worth celebrating. At the same time, if they live long enough to gain titles and to name their weapons, it is that much worse when the inevitable dragon attack cuts their life short.

 

Apollo Robbins in New Yorker

Good profile of Apollo Robbins. Especially cool due to the Penn & Teller reference.

Adam Green: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins, Pickpocket : The New Yorker

A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”

The importance of sleep

This isn’t an excuse for why I haven’t posted in a month. It’s just the oldest item in the queue.

Sleep: Everything You Need To Know — The Healthy Life — Medium

We spend one third of our lives sleeping, it’s crucial for muscle recovery, fact retention and preparing the body to operate at full speed the next day, sleep is one of the most important things when it comes to day-to-day happiness. From students studying late into the night reducing the amount of information they retain to athletes sleeping in warm and loud environments missing out on crucial muscle and immune system recovery.