Well. This happened.

It certainly didn’t not happen.

A lot of people forget, or never knew, that the first wireless-networking-enabled, 802.11x compliant computer¹ was the iBook.

A lot of people also forget/don’t know that the name Wi-Fi, what we now consider the canonical name for wireless networking, wasn’t coined by the IEEE or engineers that created the protocol, but rather a brand consultancy hired by the Wi-Fi Alliance. In fact, the name AirPort was used by Apple months before the Alliance unveiled their chosen name of Wi-Fi. You could make a strong argument that the “real” name of the 802.11x protocols could in fact be AirPort.

Either way. Such a cool video. Vintage Steve showmanship. The hula hoop is just a perfect sell.

(via MG Siegler)

Years ago, I discovered a show on Hulu called Three Sheets¹. A show I had never heard of, on a network I didn’t know existed, hosted by a guy I had never seen before.

It was brilliant. The host, Zane Lamprey, manages to do something that you don’t really see done in other travel shows²; he manages to completely immerse himself in local drinking customs and hangover comfort food. In the US, we don’t really have a strong food-and-booze culture. We like booze, and we like food, but we don’t really have that much of an identity around it. The closest thing to “American” cuisine is take-out Chinese and fast food burgers. But when you go to other countries, food and local booze are hard-wired in to the local culture in a much different way. They’re integral to the way a lot of people live their lives and partake in local customs, and should be integral to anyone visiting that wants to get a real taste of the local experience. And this show captured that in a way that I don’t think any other show has managed to capitalize on, all while gussying the experience up with a drunk host that just takes the entertainment factor in to a whole new zone.

Anyway, Zane Lamprey is trying to kickstart a new travel/drinking show called Chug, which sounds like it will be more of a spiritual successor to Three Sheets than his other show (Drinking Made Easy) was.

Looks good.

I didn’t realize that Lambert’s was a multi-location business, until I saw this video and then went to their website.

We have a Lambert’s very close to me, the Foley, AL location, which is around a 45 minute — 1 hour drive from Pensacola. It’s not uncommon for people here to make the drive out to Foley for dinner at Lambert’s; the food is actually quite good.

Their liver and onions are fantastic.

No, I didn’t abandon you again.

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic. I took leave from the lab so I could focus on school, because I’m winding up my undergrad at UWF[^1].

Needless to say, I’ve been very busy and haven’t had time to write. Last week was UWF’s Scholar’s Week, which culminated in the Student Scholar’s Symposium, where I had two different posters that my name was attached to. Presenting one poster at a conference is draining enough, having to manage two posters with judges visiting both was a different story. The team that I worked with in the physics department (a project about lasers) took home an award, and in the CS category I took home an award for my project Wernicke. Maddening hard work, but it paid off.

This week, final exams. I graduate on Saturday.

Soon after, back to normal.

You may have caught whiff of Rob’s name when his Soylent concoction bubbled in to the media for a while (see this Vice interview as well). Since that time, he continues to discuss and share his insights in to the world of nutrition. It should be noted, as Rob will tell you himself, that he isn’t a doctor.

One little chunk of the article that jumped out at me:

I purchased this tomato at a farmers’ market in San Francisco. It cost me 60 cents, which is about half the price of a supermarket tomato, and contains 25 calories. That’s 2.4 cents / calorie. By comparison, a double cheeseburger from McDonald’s costs 99 cents and contains 440 calories, which is 0.225 cents / calorie, more than an order of magnitude more cost effective. It would cost me $130/day to live on supermarket tomatoes, $65/day to live on farmers’ market tomatoes, and $6/day to live on cheeseburgers. It’s no wonder the poor eat poorly.

Food for thought.

Revenue up, earnings down, iPads still growing, iPhone growth slow.

Nothing unexpected, nothing that couldn’t have been drawn out if you had paid attention to Apple’s guidance for the quarter, yet Apple-doubting writers made claims of terrifying collapse leading up to the call and will probably figure out a way to churn out some FUD pieces after the call.

We all know that, no matter how hard we may try, sometimes we do need to use quick fixes, hacks and questionable techniques in our code. It happens, whether we like to admit it or not.

[…]

Whilst this isn’t ideal, we have to do it from time to time; all of us.

The real problem, though, is that we rarely go back and tidy these things up. They slip through the cracks, get ignored, go unnoticed, and stay for good. This we do not have to do.

The idea behind shame.css is that you keep a specific file, called potentially shame.css, where all of your hacky !importants and magic numbers and fiddly stuff go to live. This obviously works best with CSS preprocessors so you don’t have an actual 2nd stylesheet called “shame.css” linked on your sites.

Anyway. I like the idea. Good thoughts.

Yesterday on Reddit, user stealer0517 posted the following link, The actual leaked 6:07 version of “Get Lucky”!, which linked to a SoundCloud track that remixed what was available of “Get Lucky” from the commercial with Rick Astley’s classic 80’s ballad, “Never Gonna Give You Up”. It was a catchy remix, a funny troll, and I made a tweet propagating the joke because I was bored and thought it was a clever remix.

Today, I received an email from Twitter informing me that Web Sheriff had issued a DMCA takedown notice to me and several other people who had made tweets pointing back to the SoundCloud track, which is also now missing. The claim was that we were linking back to, and I quote, “[…] downloads of unreleased track DAFT PUNK - “Get Lucky”.”

This doesn’t read to me as a complaint about whether or not the use of the background track was acceptable. This seems to me that, in spite of what Wikipedia refers to as “human auditing”, somebody at Web Sheriff isn’t doing their job and genuinely thought the linked Rickroll was a leaked Daft Punk track. There is no argument about Fair Use here, because the complaint has nothing to do with the remix itself.

I’m obviously not going to contest or counter-notice. It’s not worth my time; it was a silly joke tweet. But this is fucking stupid.

Here’s a nerdier link for the real software geeks out there; a quick discussion of Maybe.

There’s a good chance that a lot of people have never really encountered Maybe. During my hiatus from writing here, I spent a lot of time studying and becoming super interested in functional programming, specifically Haskell, which was my first time encountering the “Maybe” construct; effectively a tactic for elevating null-checking in to a language’s statically checked type system instead of introducing a certain aspect of fragility in to the runtime. It’s a pretty eye-opening take on the idea of an invalid/garbage/failed value, and I have to say much nicer to deal with than nullity.