James Manning

I saw this pic on Fail Blog and knew it looked familiar :)

Good old Concord, NC!

ok, the subject’s overstating it, of course, but I get some people that wonder why I’m in favor of electric vehicles (which thankfully is no longer putting me in the minority it once did).  It’s really just a simple matter of decoupling producers of energy from consumers.

How many ways are there of generating the 87 octane unleaded you find at a typical gas station?  Not all that many - find it in the ground, drill it out, refine it, ship it.

How many ways of there of generating electricity?  Many more.

However, the key point isn’t really about the ways of generating electricity that we have today (although those are definitely good places to start), it’s about the unknown ways we’ll be generating electricity in the future.

Production methods all fan-in to electricity as the universal energy medium.

Consumer methods all fan-out from electricity as the universal energy medium.

Once that’s happening, we can just keep switching ways we generate electricity on an ongoing basis.  There’s no need to deal with all the headaches and chicken-and-egg production/consumption pipeline issues like we have with other alternatives (hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol, biodiesels, etc). That doesn’t mean the other forms of energy are bad - they just don’t come in a form that we already have full infrastructure for, that most of our energy is already consumed in (air conditioning, computers, most everything in a typical house), and that we have over a century of experience with. 

As of now (5:23pm on my watch), Sarah was born 3 years, 3 months, 3 days, 3 hours, and 3 minutes ago.

Seriously, who writes like this?  I’m expecting “rue the day” to show up next, in true Kent fashion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/politics/19watch.html

The amount of scrutiny the two spouses face is not commensurate — Mrs. Obama has endured far more virulent attacks by her critics — but it is somehow symmetrical.

I got a question from a co-worker about the easiest way in PowerShell to count the number of instances of a substring in a given string.

If you read FSJ you’ve probably read about how Walt MossGoatberg is infamous for posting with a ridiculous use of first-person pronouns.  I get the feeling that there’s a similar game to be found in the amount of bold tags used by Jeff Atwood. :)  I love his blog, but there certainly is a liberal use of bold tags. :)  They’ve got that whole implication of "I’m saying something profound here and you need to pay attention, mister!"

So, to put the two together, here’s a simple script that counts the number of times a substring occurs during the posts of a given RSS feed’s items.

param (
    [uri] $rssfeeduri = ‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror’,
    [string] $substringToFind = ‘<b>’
) 

$wc = New-Object system.Net.WebClient
[xml] $feed = $wc.DownloadString($rssfeeduri)
$feed.rss.channel.item |
    ft -a title,@{
        l="number of $substringToFind found"
        e={[regex]::Matches($_.description.psbase.innertext, $substringToFind, ‘ignorecase’).Count}
    }

And the output on Jeff’s feed at the moment:

# .\get-countinrss.ps1

title                                                                 number of <b> found

—–                                                                 ——————-

Don’t Go Dark                                                                           6

ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers                                              55

Markov and You                                                                          6

Exploring Wide Finder                                                                   6

Finally, a Definition of Programming I Can Actually Understand                          3

The Greatest Invention in Computer Science                                              4

Please Give Us Your Email Password                                                      7

Large USB Flash Drive Performance                                                       5

Whatever Happened to UI Consistency?                                                    4

Revisiting the Black Sunday Hack                                                        2

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held                                                            7

Designing For Evil                                                                      9

It’s Clay Shirky’s Internet, We Just Live In It                                         6

OpenID: Does The World Really Need Yet Another Username and Password?                  15

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter                                                       10

Seen via reddit, but there’s some great quotes from this 8-year-old article about the campaigning Texas governor.

http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/062800wh-bush.html

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality

…

"Ours is a nation that helped Kuwait and the Saudis, and you’d think we’d have the capital necessary to convince them to increase the crude supplies," he said.

…

Asked why the Clinton administration had not been able to use the power of personal persuasion, Mr. Bush said: "The fundamental question is, ‘Will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy?’ "

He went on to suggest, as he did in answer to other questions, that voters should simply trust him.

…

On a more serious note, Mr. Bush said that he had disagreed with the Supreme Court’s 7-to-2 ruling on Monday that upheld the reading of Miranda warnings to criminal suspects.

…

He said he would "make the case that I’m the person that can change the tone of Washington, D.C.," and added, "Just give me a chance to be the president."

You could certainly make the case that D.C. has a different tone than it did 8 years ago.

I gave my father-in-law a linksys router we weren’t using any more.  Unfortunately, since I (still, unfortunately) use my Linux box for my dhcp server, this meant that it didn’t Just Work because once he hooked it up, his computer couldn’t dhcp an address from the router.

To get around that, I needed to be able to tell him to set a static IP address so he could connect to the linksys box (at http://192.168.1.1) and enable the DHCP server.  I didn’t want to tell him to click through a bunch of UI and set values by hand - I wanted something he could copy-paste and have it (hopefully) Just Work.

I vaguely knew of netsh and it seems to be able to do what I need.  Here’s what I just emailed him to try (worked on my Vista box) to set the interface for a static IP.  The "store=active" is key since the default is to make it persistent.

netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection" static 192.168.1.3 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 store=active

I’ve only been making around $3/mo off the adsense ads on the blog, the lowest by far of my channels, so I switched back to a theme I actually like - basically no ads, but much easier for me to read :)

Of course, those of you reading this on RSS 1) didn’t know and 2) didn’t (and don’t!) care.  I’m currently loathe to stick ads in the RSS feed, despite more and more of the blogs I’m reading doing exactly that.

My parents had their 39th anniversary a couple of days ago.  Right on time, Pearls Before Swine releases a great anniversary card!

Now it likely makes more sense why marriage (and IMHO the things that go along with it) kill off genius so well!