March 27, 2009
“Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday blamed the global economic crisis on “white people with blue eyes” and said it was wrong that black and indigenous people should pay for white people’s mistakes.”
I’m usually all about blaming whitey for most troubles, but maybe this is a bit much. From the Financial Times, by way of a colleague.  (My eyes are green, and probably bloodshot by the way.)

Creme That Egg! (via allonewordplease) — a Rube Goldberg contraption can make pretty much anything better.

March 12, 2009
“The file system is not “truncating” files. The application is truncating the files, or is constantly overwriting the files using the rename system call. This is a fundamentally unsafe thing to do, and ext3 just happened to paper things over.”
Theodore Ts’o in a bug comment on how data loss can occur on Ext4. Knowing how the file system works is what separates real programmers from people that hack things together (i.e. people like me).  By way of Jeremy Zawodny.
February 15, 2009

Count files in subdirectories

find . -type f -print | awk '{ FS="/"; print $2; }' | uniq -c | sort -n

There’s not an easy way (as far as I know) to get a summary of how many files are in each subdirectory of a given parent directory, so I came up with this one-liner.

February 9, 2009
“Customer: ‘You’re part computer?’
Me: ‘Yes sir, I am a cyborg.’”
Not Always Right. I always wanted to say something like this when I worked tech support.
February 8, 2009
Flickr: The Far side Reenactments Pool

by way of Jeff Atwood.

February 4, 2009
I LEGO N.Y. - Abstract City Blog - NYTimes.com

A few lego bricks can illustrate the world.  By way of my mom(!).

February 1, 2009
Flickr: In Numerical Order

Number-themed pictures posted in numerical order.  Something greater than or equal to 1512 is next.

January 30, 2009
Taking photos of police officers could be considered a crime in the UK

From the British Journal of Photography, by way of Paul Buchheit.

January 26, 2009
Gizmodo: Cable Action Figures

They’re not really made out of ethernet cable, it’s higher gauge stuff.  But still, cool.  My colleague thinks we shoudld attach cockroaches to them and use them as our minions.