03.09.05

A card from Iraq

Posted in General at 10 am

This was taken from a list that I’m on, written by Jack Zaientz:

IRAQ CULTURE “SMART” (Quick Reference) CARD

U.S. military personnel in Iraq are presented with a laminated card that summarizes the rudiments of Iraqi culture, as refracted through the understanding of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity.

“The 16-panel, folded card includes information on religion, religious holidays, clothes and gestures, ethnic groups, cultural groups, customs and history, social structure and Arabic names. Also included are ‘Do This’ and ‘Don’t Do This’, commands, numbers, questions, and helpful words and phrases.”

A copy of the Iraq Culture Smart Card, newly updated in November 2004, is available here (in a very large 6.5 MB PDF file):

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usmc/iraqsmart-1104.pdf

An earlier edition from February 2004 may be found here (in a lower resolution 1.0 MB PDF file):

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usmc/iraqsmart-0204.pdf

The blog “Baghdad Dweller” last month reflected on the contents of a similar smart card that might be used to introduce American culture to a foreign visitor. See:

http://tinyurl.com/59pqs

03.07.05

Form and Field Validation

Posted in General at 8 am

Here’s a thought:

The only time a field in a web form needs to be perfectly formatted is when it’s going to be parsed by a computer system. If the field will likely never actually be used by a computer and the sub-parts will never have to be parsed, then let the user go hog wild with the formating.

Case in point: If a user is asked to enter their phone number, your server doesn’t care if it knows the which part is the area code, the local exchange or the last four digits. Let the user format those numbers anyway they want, as long as you get at least 10 digits (US) or 11 digits (US + International) or whatever the local number of digits needed are.

03.03.05

Curl Sed and Grep

Posted in General at 10 am

Below are a couple of commands that I’m using with Geektool to display the Weather forecast and the UV index for the Portland area on my desktop:


echo -n "Next Rain: "; curl -s -m 4 PUTTHEURLHERE
| sed 's/showers/rain/g' | grep 'rain' | sed 's/<br /><br />/|/g;'
| tr "|" "\n" | grep 'rain' | sed q
| sed s'/< \/b>: /|/g' | tr "|" "\n" | sed s'/\< \b\>//g' | sed q

Where it says “PUTTHEURLHERE” you would use the proper URL for your region’s forecast. In my case, for Portland Oregon it is this one and be sure to put ” backslashes in front of each of the ‘&’ ampersands.

Here’s the one for the UV Index:

echo -n "PDX UV: "; curl -s
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/uv_index/bulletin.txt
| grep -E '(PORTLAND OR)' | awk '{print $6}'

Each of the two commands should be entered on one line, without any line breaks. These can be easily modified to focus on any other NOAA region.

**Question:** Why would Ross subject himself to the horrors of sed and awk and grep in this way?

**Answer:** The UV index is good to know because of the patch of skin cancer that I got last year. I like to know if it’s going to be okay to drive with Viva’s convertible top off, or if I should keep covered up. The Weather forecast is for Viva as well. Knowing when it’s likely to rain let’s me know when I need to put her tarp over her. Oh… have you met Viva yet?

03.01.05

The Ongoing Adventures of HST

Posted in General at 8 am

Great post by Darrel on Hunter S. Thompson and “Uncle Duke”:

As the liner notes, the introduction, the photos, and the text of Hunter remind us, Thompson was and has been the inspiration since 1974 for the character Uncle Duke in G.B. Trudeau’s Pulitzer-winning comic strip “Doonesbury.” Duke’s adventures in that strip have been collected into an anthology that covers his adventures as ambassador in Pago Pago and China, college-circuit speaker, Washington Redskins manager, secret agent in Iran, drug smuggler, zombie, proconsul in Panama, and bartender in Kuwait.

02.24.05

Cool Kitchen

Posted in General at 10 am

Coolest kitchen organizer EVER:

Knife Holder

02.17.05

Fifty Years of Great Design

Posted in General at 11 pm

From the Interesting E-mails Column…

hi,

in 2005 the karmann ghia wil be 50 years old. the great german karmann ghia clubs celebrete it at the original places in germany, georgsmarienhütte. this event will be from july 14 till 17 in 2005. if you want, you have the url from the meeting at your homepage.

http://www.50-jahre-karmann-ghia.de/

tell your friends and your customers about this event. it will never be again…

Udo Dreisörner,
Karmann Ghia IG Lippe
Karmann Ghia Coupe 1956

Permissions with SMB or Samba for Mac OS X

Posted in General at 1 pm

By default the Mac some a little *too* secure for working with other people on a common file server. I’m hoping that Apple will make this easier in 10.4 Tiger. Thankfully there’s kind people who write up nice articles and point to helpful tools…

From Codebase : Articles : Workflow Permissions

“Many smaller organizations don’t have centralized file servers, relying instead on ad-hock networks of workstations using personal file-sharing. Luckily the great shareware universe provides for them as well. Michael Horn’s excellent utility SharePoints not only returns much of the lost functionality of Mac OS 9’s personal file-sharing, it also returns Groups creation and adds SMB configuration as well. Most importantly for us, it also enables the Inherit Permissions functionality of Mac OS X Server on Mac OS X Clients hosting personal file-sharing.”

02.13.05

Get your LSD On

Posted in General at 6 pm

Ah the joys of tech support:

All my neighbors around me are on it and they spend all day on the internet.

That was hilarious Bo! More, More!

02.08.05

Iterative Dialog

Posted in General at 11 am

[Some thoughts last weekend…]

Iterative Dialog

The inevitable evolution of 21st century learning

Beyond print, beyond the television screen, there are concepts regarding educational communication that most media producers are now starting to grasp. We are breaking out of the stream-based, one-way messaging and language that drives yesterday’s educational materials, both low- and high-tech alike. The frame of reference of traditional materials is to provide pre-digested chucks of knowledge, hoping that students will be able to assemble these pieces, without further direction. Delivering these pieces has improved, and today we have a variety of platforms; print, audio, animation, even the web can provide this sort of experience.

But now, thanks to the growing amount of material that has been digitized and can be found though cooperating resources on the internet, we can begin to focus on Iterative Dialog as the standard for learning and exploration. ID takes the stream information that is provided to the student and gives them the tools to reflect that stream back to the source and peers that are sharing the experience. This reflection takes the one way stream and turns it into a loop, a loop which has amplifying properties. By providing truly iterative dialog structures, communication, formulation of ideas using raw knowledge become the primary means of learning and teaching.

Beyond the subject matter at hand, ID can provide a student with strong learning abilities, enabling them to grow their knowledge using their own inner tools, allowing them to rely on the parts of processing that they feel best suits themselves. In this way we work outside of the ridged structures of learning modes that have been recognized as barriers, and place the learning directly inside the mind itself.

02.06.05

The Gift of Lift

Posted in General at 9 pm

If you were planning on getting me a forklift as a present, could you be sure to make it one of these?

Thanks.