Seattle relieved to lose its high-tech toilets

August 17, 2008 at 11:53 AM | categories: seattle | View Comments

City officials have finally gotten rid of five high-tech self-cleaning toilets that cost Seattle $5 million — but sold online for just $12,549. The city installed the modernistic stand-alone toilets four years ago, hoping they would provide tourists and the homeless a place to do their business while downtown. But the automated loos became better known for drug use and prostitution than for relief. USA Today

Oh you clever headline writer you. It's rather unfortunate that these didn't work out. I remember seeing similar public toilets in Paris. This is a huge problem in downtown Seattle. It is difficult to find a public restroom anywhere, much less if you look like a transient. Living downtown, I have found a couple of strategic places that I can just jump into the bathroom without a code, or having to make a purchase, or being scrutinized before using it (and no I'm not telling where they are). The one truly open to the public restrooms exist in the downtown Seattle Library. The last time I walked in there, there were multiple homeless men practically camped in the bathroom, trying to wash up. One was shaving in the mirror. I have a lot of sympathy for their situation, but it was also a very uncomfortable place to be. There has to be a better way.

BMW GINA Light Visionary Model: Premiere

August 15, 2008 at 12:48 PM | categories: video | View Comments

Project Euler and Prime Factorization

June 20, 2008 at 10:16 AM | categories: python, programming | View Comments

I have been doing some of the exercises at Project Euler lately. Project Euler describes themselves as:

A series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

It has been a lot of fun to code these up in my language du jour, Python. There are a couple of problems that Python's built in libraries have made trivial. I have to admit the most enjoyable part for me is having problems that require efficiency in algorithm. For the simpler problems, I usually just quickly hack together the "naive" brute force method, figure out that it doesn't scale and then start investigating how I can fix it. Doing this, you will exercise your mathematics, computer science and programming skills, something that a lot of programming doesn't do. I convinced my girlfriend to work with me on one of the exercises, and of course she picked one of the Prime Factorization problems. The naive brute force algorithm would not be an option for the large composite number given, so we ended up hacking together a Sieve of Eratosthenes. Ultimately, we got a version working, but it was still pretty inefficient, only returning the answer in about an hour. An optimal version should be able to do it within seconds. Obviously there is some "refactoring" to do.

Upgraded Wordpress to 2.5 with SVN

April 21, 2008 at 09:36 PM | categories: wordpress | View Comments

So my Wordpress got compromised again by spammers, I've upgraded to the latest and greatest and instituted new protection mechanisms as well as tracking Wordpress by SVN to make upgrades more painless. Some stats: You have 125 posts, 2 pages, 11 drafts, contained within 63 categories and 2 tags. You are using WordPress Default theme with 3 widgets. This is WordPress version 2.5. Akismet has protected your site from 24,837 spam comments already, and there are 446 comments in your spam queue right now.

A real solution to PowerShell SSH Remoting

March 30, 2008 at 11:05 PM | categories: windows, security, microsoft, system administration | View Comments

Can't wait for us to ship PowerShell Remoting? Want remoting to use SSH? Why wait for us? /N software has just announced a beta of their NetCmdlets V2.0 which provides PowerShell remoting over SSH today! They've had this for a while and V2 updates (and improves) the usability of the cmdlets as well as adding a bunch of new and exciting commands. For example, chances are that you won't ever see Microsoft ship the [get/send]-s3 cmdlets but /N software V2 does. :-)

http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/03/27/powershell-remoting-using-ssh.aspx My blog post from 2006 is currently the #1 Google Result for PowerShell SSH, but finally there is a good solution out there from /N software. It also supports S3. Very cool :)

Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life

March 27, 2008 at 11:13 PM | categories: science, video | View Comments

Interesting video... Feels strange to see CompSci intersecting so close to Biology.

ZFS Source Tour

March 20, 2008 at 12:33 AM | categories: solaris, software engineering | View Comments

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/source/