What’s disgusting you? Personally, I’m not upset with

• The tech companies who may have delivered data to the government. When someone from the government shows up with a warrant, regardless of your feelings about the nature of the warrant, you pretty much have to comply. You assume the legal process is working correctly, and you comply. And if you see any reasonable flow of warrants, you do engineering work to make sure you can comply with warrants in the future, without compromising all your other users.
• The NSA and other entities who went thru whatever legal processes exist to get various court orders. They are doing their job. And as one observer notes:

Christian Finnegan ‏@ChristFinnegan
I’m furious the gov’t is collecting my personal data! That stuff is only for Facebook! And Google! And any marketer willing to pay for it!

And I am pretty happy with

• Snowden. Shining a light on these activities is good. A brave (and perhaps naive, but still brave) man. James Fallows’ article seems sensible.
• The press. Ditto. I am very glad we have a free press that digs and digs and digs.
• The members of the Washington congressional delegation who have voted against FISA.

I am not so happy with the bulk of our elected representatives who have hollowed out the 4th amendment, who think that secret briefings of Congress is sufficient oversight, who think that the 3 branches of government can balance each other without transparency or any citizen oversight, and who now call the actions of Snowden “reprehensible”. The President right on through most of Congress are out of step with me and many Americans.

• I think I will end up loving Vagrant. I shift my work across a lot of machines and being able to bring my entire dev environment with me seems like a great thing. Really this is the way I’d like all my apps to work. In case you are not clear why Vagrant is good, here is a snippet from their site:

If you’re a developer, Vagrant will isolate dependencies and their configuration within a single disposable, consistent environment, without sacrificing any of the tools you’re used to working with (editors, browsers, debuggers, etc.). Once you or someone else creates a single Vagrantfile, you just need to vagrant up and everything is installed and configured for you to work. Other members of your team create their development environments from the same configuration, so whether you’re working on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, all your team members are running code in the same environment, against the same dependencies, all configured the same way. Say goodbye to “works on my machine” bugs.

• Rich turned me onto all the lens tests at Photozone. Awesome resource for lens data.
• More info on linux perf tools than i know what to do with.
• A bunch of nvidia gpu programming resources. How do I do the same things on Haswell? OpenCL? Some cuda-to-intel tool? llvm? I’m probably seriously confused.
• I’d like to learn more about sparkleshare

Trying to get smarter about image processing and computer vision – kind of a random walk of books:

• Digital Image Processing: An Algorithmic Approach Using Java by Burger and Burge. Mix of theory and implementation on the most basic of image processing techniques. A nice starting point.
• Mastering OpenCV with Practical Computer Vision Projects by Baggio etc. Heavy on samples, light on theory, but still useful.
• Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision by Hartley and Zisserman. Heavier on theory. You’d better enjoy math.

Also for break from tech:

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. Liked Cloud Atlas (the book, never saw the movie), and so far really liking this. Great characters and does an excellent job of placing me into Japan in the year ~1700.

Gee’s comments about ND were stupid and deserve an apology.

But Bielema? Saying nasty things about a former competitive coach, who bolted Wisconsin abruptly?

And SEC academic quality vs the Big10? Look at the USNews rankings. Northwestern > Vanderbilt. UM, Wisconsin, Illinois, PSU in top 50. OSU, MD in in top 60. Purdue, Rutgers, Minnesota, Iowa, MSU in top 75. Florida is first SEC showing (after Vandy) at 54, Georgia at 63, A&M at 65. It is kind of a rout in favor of the Big10 actually. Gee just said the truth. Might be painful and indiscreet but seems true.

• Traitor to His Class by H. W. Brands. A fine biography of FDR. The title led me to believe that it would be a little more focused on the conflict between his policies and the monied elite, but it was really a general biography of the most influential president of the last century.
• The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst. Snooty acclaim but I am giving up. The “oh my gosh they were secretly gay” idea just doesn’t do it for me anymore, you can’t carry a story on this point, it’s like trying to revolve a story around “he was secretly left-handed!”. Maybe 30 years ago this would have been interesting. Not now.
• Maske: Thaery by Jack Vance. Classic 70’s science fiction, some sort of Vance appreciation society is pulling these out of the back catalog and getting them out in e-book form. His characters seem stilted and awkward, age hasn’t treated them well, and yet a compelling tale.
• The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey. Beginning of a YA series about an alien invasion of Earth, appealing due to the shades of gray in the characters. I’d read more.
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Eh. An over-ambitious grasper stumbles his way to success. The character is unappealing and I just don’t get him. Supposed to be funny.
• The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. What a great fun book, a piece of classic science fiction that has aged very well. A blast.
• Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress. A nice concept but the story doesn’t go particularly anywhere.

I recently left my Kindle on a plane, and now I have to get a new one (or migrate to ipad or whatever, the device used is not the point).

I’ve purchased 515 books over the years and read many of them. It is a disaster getting just my unread or currently-reading books over to a new device. The “Manage your Kindle” web page has no indication of read status, I have to go through each title and figure out what to do with it. And I can’t group or organize on the webpage at all. A really terrible experience. And hasn’t improved in years. Amazon has done nothing for the core Kindle market, people that actually read a lot of books.

Annoyed. Wasting my time, Amazon.

Look at the first half of this schedule:

• Aug. 30 - vs. Navy (at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium)
• Sept. 13 - Kent State
• Sept. 20 - Virginia Tech
• Sept. 27 - Cincinnati
• Oct. 4 - at Maryland
• Oct. 18 - Rutgers
• Oct. 25 - at Penn State

You’d not be able to tell this team was in the Big10 based on this. The center of mass of this schedule is somewhere like Hagerstown, Maryland.

This guide to booting ubuntu on uefi hardware leaves me lost. I never thought I would pine for the days of the good old BIOS. Maybe I should go to the UEFI Summerfest, that sounds like a good time. Right up there with the “Root Canal Faire” and “Proctology Midnight Madness”.

Charlie Rose Interview:

Charlie Rose: How do you find a balance in all this? Father, chairman of a major company, a foundation, and then all these other ventures? How does the balance come to you?

Bill Gates: I don’t mow the lawn.

It’s like we’re twins.

So I’ve been acquiring and playing with 50-100 year old electrical lab instruments.

My latest is a reed-type frequency meter, I didn’t even know these things existed. Great admiration for the people who originally designed these things, a very clever little design. We tried a brief experiment to get it running today, but no response. We may not have been applying enough voltage, the wires in these things could probably handle 50+ amps.

I’ve also got this potentiometer, utterly crazy looking, and with controls and labels that are a mystery to me – terminals labeled E+ and E-, H and H1, L and L1, BA+, R, and a couple others. A big wonking selector switch that looks like it could transmit 50 amps, and a fine tuning gauge. I’ll be putting an ohmmeter on this thing to see what the hell is going on.

I’ve also got some more awesome potentiometers and voltmeters. As well as a variable capacitor. These things were built for the ages – massive wires, plenty of ventilation, solid wood and metal and bakelite construction. They are all amazingly beautiful.

I’m working to bond an arduino to some of these so I can use them for more mundane modern purposes. But they look great just sitting on the shelf.

• Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton. A family is shattered by a school fire, and the critically injured mother battles to protect her kids and uncover the truth around the events. Great story about the relationship between a woman and her family, tested by extreme events. The voice used in the story is a little confusing at times – I read the Kindle version, I wonder if the printed version used typography to better set apart the actions and thoughts of various characters.
• Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin. Great detective tale featuring an abrasive self-destructive sleuth. I should read more in the series.
• The Doctor of Thessaly by Anne Zouroudi. Another great detective character and story. In both this tale and the Rankin, the leads care about justice and to hell with the rules. But they go about it totally different ways. The Rankin character is a blunt rusty knife, the Zouroudi character is a judo master. Fun stuff.
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. Fascinating but challenging read about life in the Mumbai slums. Challenging because the lives depicted are so brutal, the culture so corrupt. I’m left wrung out, and having no idea how to do anything about.
• The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham. Well written and pretty crisp, a nice coverage of what the phrase “the rule of law” means, its history, and implications for today. Worthwhile.
• Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Eh. Teenage boys can be creeps, I don’t need a whole novel pointing this out over and over and over again.

In all my playing around with arduinos and raspberrypis, I haven’t really gotten into wearables. But for some reason this color sensor just seems totally cool. And then I get drawn to the lux sensor and the GPS module and accelerometer and well just about all of it. I don’t really have a great idea what to do with it – maybe tie it into OneBusAway and have something light up with the bus is near, time and gps wise?

Where am I going to buy $500 pens now? I’m devastated.

I hope they open a cupcake shop in the spot, we need more of those.

Great show last night, I feel very fortunate to have seen Prince in a small venue. A rocking show – just his current small backing band of 3 women on drums, bass, and guitar. Opened with a few classics, including a nice variant on “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man”. A lot of his new material. A nice cover of the Cars’ “Let’s Go” with a shout out to Boston. A really nice cover of “Crimson and Clover”. Along the way Prince was in great lead guitar form, and also picked up the bass at one point for a great solo.

He is a captivating performer. I’ve seen Jack White in a small venue and Buddy Guy, they both pour a lot of emotion into their guitar work, Prince is up there as well.

Everyone has written about forcing the stupid touchscreen down our throats, that annoys the heck out of me too. But maybe I can get used to it.

But moving beyond that, I just want to use a damn printer. There is nothing about printers on the home screen. When you type in “printers” it says it can’t find anything. Awesome. So I bring up the stupid f&*king charms (because menus and ribbons and taskbars weren’t good enough ways to start programs, let’s invent a whole new system, yay), choose Settings, choose “Change PC Settings”. Oh there is nothing called “printers” in this list either. OK click on devices and you can add a device, and then it tries and tries to search for devices. Meanwhile it is showing me a crappy list of devices I do have – great I have a “HL_DT_ST BD-RE WH08LS20” installed, that is good to know. Oh and I have devices called “Microsoft XPS Document Writer” and “Send To OneNote 2013”. Where are those on my desk? Those are so much more important to me than my damn printer.

I know it isn’t cool and strategic to print anymore. But people still need to f&*king print. I eventually found a way to add a printer but don’t ask me where the hell I found it.

Oh and the arduino software won’t install on it, apparently the arduino board is not trusted. To install it, you have to boot into the secret system setup mode which you get to deep in the control panel, and choose to turn off driver signing enforcement. Except this super secret startup mode hangs on my brand new machine and I have to power cycle. That is great, you certainly don’t want the most active community of tinkerers using your operating system.

Oh and I am using with dual monitors – one plain old monitor and one touchscreen. DON’T DO THIS. It sounded like a great idea, keep the new interface off in one screen in its little ghetto, and run all my real apps on the other screen. Except the touch interface is horribly confused now – a touch on my touch screen moves the pointer on my non-touch screen.

Yes I am doing perhaps somewhat niche-y things but Windows used to be good at that, damn it. It would run on anything and let you do anything. Now it is just an OSX/iOS wannabe and not very good at that.

Not in a good mood.