Behold, the world's greatest collection of "you're doing it wrong" examples.

Made these last night - Amanda has demanded an encore so they must be pretty good.

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350f. In a food processor, process a handful (about a cup) of pecans, a small handful (maybe 1/8 cup) for dried dates and about 10-12 wheat thins into a coarse meal.

Season pork chops with salt and pepper and pat dry. Dip the chops into an egg wash (one egg beaten with a tablespoon of water) and press into the crust mixture.

Cook the chops over medium heat in a pan that is just coated with a bit of olive oil for four minutes on the first side, and one minute on the second. Remove from the heat and put into the oven for about 10 minutes or until cooked through.

Let them rest on a rack under a foil tent for a few minutes and serve.

I also made a sauce with a sweet red wine and some frozen cherries and blackberries. It was good but the pork didn't need it - and they didn't last long enough to try it.

For the last year my work tunes have been provided by pandora. I had a couple stations that I had pruned and edited to my liking - to the point that I was seriously considering subscribing. I didn't mind the unobtrusive ads and the 40 hour a month limit just reminded how much I relied on it and inspired me to drop some cash their way. 

 Before I got a chance to do so, however, they switched up their ads to annoying audio ads that seem to show up every couple songs. The ads seemed to be louder than the music I was playing too. Around that time someone suggested I look at grooveshark. I had tried it before but their strange UI had turned me off. It seemed to confusing to bother with. Apparently enough people thought so that they put some good work into the ui, making it much easier to parse and understand what you were doing. Grooveshark seems to have the best mix of features compared to pandora, last.fm and lala. 

the babies didn't cry that night

though the wind was cold

and whipped through the woods where they were huddled

though the wind was cold

and flickered the torches of the men searching

a young father knew cold nights

when his baby would cry as he walked

in front of a fire that flickered in the hearth

"Put the babies to breast." he whispered

to the women crouched behind him

they put their babies to breast

so the babies wouldn't cry that night

a boy of three crouched below his mother

his brother above him suckled and warm

he was cold and wanted to ask his mother

why the men searching with torches and guns

were in their houses

while they crouched in silence behind their fathers

who watched and shivered in the cold wind

that whipped about them in the woods

And the babies full with milk

fell asleep on their mother's breast

as the men with torches

tired of their searching

and turned and walked back down the road

their torches disappeared

flickering in the cold wind

that whipped through the woods that night

this is it.

I'm hanging out at the hospital with Amanda waiting on this baby. Had a slightly scary moment a bit ago. After they started the epidural Sagan's heart rate slowed down to 100 bpm from 130. They flipped amanda over and gave her some oxygen and that fixed the situation.

We have a system in place that rewards power with power; corporations, political parties, the media all feed off each other in a vicious cycle of corruption. Change is their real enemy. In the same way that citizens (tend) to get more conservative as they age, our institutions gain more power and wealth over time and, having more to lose, become more and more intolerant of change and progress.

I really thought there was a chance -- after the orgy of corruption and excess the republicans fomented over the past decade -- that we could save this country without falling to pieces, that we could have a soft reboot and rejoin the rest of the developed world in rational conversation. It seems like that was an illusion. I don't know if we can put off pulling the plug soon.

With global climate change, rapid development draining the worlds resources faster than innovation can keep up, increasingly polarized politics, declining critical thinking and education among the celebrity addled public, the entrenchment of immortal and amoral corporations in positions of power and regulatory (and legislator) capture, corporate media drowning out all discourse with fluff and misdirection -- what hope do we have?

The only thing we have right now is the internet. This is the last tool of freedom that could keep us out of the corporate powers' hands. Google and Facebook are maybe months or years from taking that away from us. They're figuring out how to buy us off with the convenience and the social pressure of their tools and gadgets. We're letting them further and further into our private lives - even our minds. Soon the internet will be AOL again, a toy we can play with at the price our privacy and attention.

What then? At the end of history, with an exhausted planet, our bodies and minds tools of faceless corporations furiously scrambling to find the last drop of oil and ounce of water before their competitors, we'll finally get a rest. We'll never explore the stars or evolve into new and wondrous lifeforms. We'll die thirsty and hot below a yellow sun and the universe will continue its long stretch without noticing.

For some reason I hadn't been able to get any of the wysiwyg editor plugins in my serendipity install to work. It's been a minor annoyance, so I decided to figure it out tonight. Here are the steps:

1. Go to Configure Plugins and download/install the Xinha plugin. If you're lucky, it'll just work.

2. Download the Xinha package from the xinha website.
3. Drop the file you downloaded (Xinha_0.96beta2.tar.bz2 for example) in a folder of its own.
4. Run bunzip2 Xinha0.96beta2.tar.bz2 on the command line in that folder.
5. Then run: tar -xvf Xinha0.96beta2.tar

6. Copy the files extracted to your plugins folder at:/plugins/serendipity_event_xinha/
7. Refresh and hey - it actually works.

I don't know why had such issues with it before. I had uninstalled and reinstalled that plugin from the interface several times to no affect.

I bet everyone already knows this, but I just learned it and love it:

# put this in ~/.inputrc

# By default up/down are bound to previous-history
# and next-history respectively. The following does the
# same but gives the extra functionality where if you
# type any text (or more accurately, if there is any text
# between the start of the line and the cursor), the subset 
# of the history starting with that text is searched 
# Note to get rid of a line just Ctrl-C

"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[A": history-search-backward
 
# Include system wide settings which are ignored
# by default if one has their own .inputrc
$include /etc/inputrc

Good presentation from Jay Pipes about big mistakes you can make when developing with mySQL. I particularly like the point of not thinking in loops but in sets.

What every developer should know about time.

Also, a guide to GNU screen.

And finally, "I think it takes a special kind of incompetence to use the same acronym in the same place for different offsets."

I'm watching cosmos on hulu on this all hallows eve. Earlier I took the dog for a walk. She does not like children in costumes.

First we are going to do a quick introduction to the interfaces we will be using. After that we will jump right into code and examples. Please keep in mind that the collection class we are going to build is more about demonstrating the capabilities of these particular SPL interfaces then actual practical use, although you could easily turn this into a useful class.

Good clear tutorial about implementing SPL interfaces.