Ocean robot 'plans experiments' : The Gulper AUV, using an embedded software engine called 'T-Rex', can navigate autonomously, and make planning decisions about how best to schedule its task list of experiments.
That A.C. Newman, he has an enviable work ethic. New TNP album is due May 4th! I presume that's a USA release date.
Rather excitingly, the recording sessions featured St Vincent , Will Sheff , and slightly less excitingly, the Dap-Kings horns , and Zach Condon . The album title is 'Together'.
The New Pornographers are due to play this year's Primavera Sound, although I suspect I will be giving it a miss this time around.
I can't believe it's taken me this long to figure out, but PhotoBooth is amusing for babies.
IPL 2010 to broadcast live on YouTube : Google to be exclusive broadcaster for two years. The times they are a changin'.
Misa Digital Guitar MIDI controller : No strings, plastic molded body, 24 frets, touch interface, linux kernel, open source software stack.
Jellyfish Are the Dark Energy of the Oceans : fluid drag from animal motion could be as responsible as wind or tides for mixing the world's oceans.
Octopus snatches coconut and runs : Amazing video footage of tool use by octopuses.
There's a handy little command line tool nestled away inside Apple's system WiFi framework.
Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport
It doesn't come with a man page, but --help will print a usage guide.
Leopard introduced a number of system level changes to font handling. There's a system daemon, fontd that handles runtime font registration. Some of the new features that are implemented include on-demand font activation, on a per-application basis and system font-protection, which guards against removal or disabling certain fundamental system fonts.
There's a couple of situations where you might need to interface with the font registry database. Sometimes the system font caches can become garbled, and require a manual flush - before leopard these could be easily found under /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS - now they're squirreled away under /var and managed by fontd. Font protection might stop you from legitimately manipulating certain font files; in a prepress environment you might need to replace one of the magic System protected fonts with a custom version.
There's a command line utility provided, called ' atsutil ' which offers a user interface to these features. It has a fine man page .
To purge the font caches, which will fix persistant text rendering problems, you use the command atsutil databases -removeUser
To display the list of System protected fonts use the command atsutil fontprotection -files .
To globally disable the font protection feature, use the command atsutil fontprotection -off . Re-enable it with the -on switch.
Don't remove system protected fonts , unless you are replacing them with a workable substitute.
marinetraffic.com : for those moments when you find yourself in need of a realtime interactive map of all the transponder-equipped shipping on the seas.
Executed Offenders : The Texas department of Criminal Justice seemingly publishes the last statements made by all its executed criminals.
Shark bite prompts surprise birth : I spend a greater than average amount of time in Aquariums, I suppose, but I'm never likely to see anything like this.
I can't ever remember the name of the Debian package for the library manpages , I often have the same trouble recalling the names of the OpenSSL development packages in Debian.
The openssl binary and man pages are in the openssl package.
The SSL shared libraries are in the libssl package. Similarly, the SSL headers and library man pages are in the libssl-dev package.
Now I can google bing for it.
As usual, beatworm.co.uk is the last site with the news.
The baby finally came. We have a daughter. She's called Ada. I love middle initials, I enjoy my 'M' so much that I thought she might like one too, so she's Ada May. Her birthday is the 23rd of October. She came one day early.
Lots of people have spotted the connection to the proto-programmer and feminist icon , or the programming language that took her name. Truth be told, these are excellent associations, but supplementary; the original inspiration came from a pop song I was very taken with. It's got Sufjan Stevens on piano, you know.
These photos are all taken at the "Woah dude, I've got a baby!" and "troops of admiring relatives" ' phases, and are a few weeks old. We're currently at the "Oh bugger, she actually isn't going to sleep for more than 30 minutes in 24 hours" phase, and photo-ops have been pushed far from mind.
Anatomy of Japanese Folk Monsters : How-it-works style cutaway manga depicting monsters from Japanese mythology
Back at the start of the summer, I went back to Barcelona, for a second visit to the very wonderful Primavera Sound festival. I travelled with the rather pregnant Mrs S., and (Uncle) Danny came along for the latter half of the stay, and also joined us for the festival.
Barcelona is still a marvellous city, and Primavera is still my favourite rock festival. While we were out there, Barcelona FC won the champions league . I can't pretend that I have any sympathy, interest, or even understanding of football, but I really enjoyed the electric city-wide atmosphere on the day; silent, tense and concentrating, as countless viewers watched the televised match, suddenly punctuated by sighs and unison cheers as chances were missed, and goals won; culminating in the riot of celebration erupting from every door and window onto the streets when the final victory was realised.
The festival was another success. The personal highlight, for me was the chance to finally see Lightning Bolt , unusually for them, an on-stage performance, that was one of the most exhilarating live shows I have ever seen. Shellac , playing again on the same ATP stage as last year, as good value as always, another chance to see Oneida , and sample some of the "heritage" acts, giving it some legend, like Sonic Youth , Throwing Muses , and Neil Young . A suprisingly energetic Michael Nyman band set in the indoor auditori was an unexpected highlight, as were a couple of new-to-me performances from Andrew Bird , and Gang Gang Dance . I was amused by Sunn O))) , but sadly unable to persuade either of my companions to stay and watch more than ten minutes of their set.
More disappointing were Marnie Stern , who I'd been looking forward to seeing again, seemed to be suffering from terrible sound and equipment problems, Deerhunter transforming a great album into a weak coldplay-lite live experience, an uninspired and frankly routine Art Brut performance, and a generically dull Jarvis set.
It turns out that I edited and uploaded my photos to flickr shortly after returning to the UK, but what with all the busying and rushing around re-organising and home renovating, I seem to have forgotten to switch the set to public, at least until now.
Dodgem Logic : Alan Moore is preparing to launch a new "underground magazine", with a mixture of content, including comics, and an intriguing sounding eight-page swappable insert for "local content"