Politics

Middle East Friendship Chart

Slate has a great interactive chart showing friend/ambivalent/enemy status between middle eastern countries. In the interactive version you can click on each cell and see the explanation.

Examples such as:

Graphical version

Ranking friendliness

Taking a -1, 0, +1 to rank the entities it seems Iraq is the only country with a surplus of friends and the US isn’t looking as bad as you’d think:

  • Al-Qaida: -10 (friends with no one)
  • Egypt: -6
  • Hamas: -3
  • Hezbollah: -2
  • Iran: -2
  • Iraq: +1
  • ISIS: -12 (everybody’s enemy)
  • Israel: -6
  • Palestinian Authority: 0
  • Saudi Arabia: -3
  • Syria: -5
  • Turkey: -4
  • US: -1

Making it friendlier?

If we ignore Al-Qaida (no one’s friend) and ISIS (everyone’s enemy) the results become a little more positive but still not an outpouring of friendship:
– Egypt: -4
– Hamas: -2
– Hezbollah: 0
– Iran: -1
– Iraq: +3
– Israel: -4
– Palestinian Authority: 2
– Saudi Arabia: -1
– Syria: -3
– Turkey: -2
– US: +1

Technology

Game of Thrones meets Rdio

Some humorous social media advertising on Rdio

Pete s Network Rdio

Arya Stark

Arya Stark reviewed a playlist.
X
Playlist by Joffrey Baratheon
Great to hear you are dead – one less on my list.


Jon Snow

Jon Snow reviewed an album.
Shades Of Cool
Lana Del Rey
You know nothing about the lower temperatures my dear… But if you need a fur – I have a couple lying around.
Happy to help.


Tyrion Lannister

Tyrion Lannister reviewed a playlist.
Champion
Playlist by Tyrion Lannister
If they let me drink in this damn cage I would be tossing wine all over for these jams.

News · NYC

Buy or Rent?

Is it better to rent or buy?

The NY Times has a great interactive calculator for evaluating the trade-offs of buying vs. renting. It looks to cover everything:

  • House Price
  • Interest rates
  • Length of mortgage
  • Downpayment
  • Planned time to occupy
  • Future rental rates
  • Housing market expected increases
  • Taxes
  • Maintenance fees

It produces a number like:

If you can rent a similar
home for less than …
$961 PER
MONTH
… then renting is better.

Is It Better to Rent or Buy NYTimes com

Technology

Unsubscribe from cheap tickets email

I Hate Cheaptickets

I bought some tickets via cheaptickets.com and kep teething all these emails. Clicking on the “unsubscribe” link didn’t do anything. Cut & paste would show a funky URI such as x-webdoc://329FFAF9-8186-4348-9BB3-44C9C920A90F
There was some discussion on an Apple Support Community but nothing useful.
I tried it in Apple Mail, then in Gmail (using Safari) then Gmail (using Chrome) all with no luck.
Finally, I took a look at the raw message.
– In Apple Email that is:
– Raw message: View -> Message -> Raw Source)
– Just the headers (View -> Message -> All Headers)
– In Gmail:
– Top right of a message is the More -> Show Original
And noticed a header List-Unsubscribe: with a URI. Cut&Paste that URL into a browser. Presto, I was unsubscribed. w00t! Btw, be suspicious of any such URI.
Gmail also has an unsubscribe button that appears just to the right of the address.

Technology

Single Window Mode for Mac OS X

I’ve been using single window mode as recommended in this article. When you click on a window in the dock then all the other applications are hidden leaving the selected application as the only one displayed. Here is how to enable it from a console window:

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true ; killall Dock

One recent benefit is that hidden apps go into “Nap mode” to save energy. Plus, it is just nice how the screen gets cleaned up. Using ⌘-TAB switches between apps but keeps previous apps on the screen much like the usual behavior. However, as soon as you click on an app in the dock then all the others are hidden.
I liked it 85% of the time but cutting and pasting between apps and apps displaying modal dialog windows frequently got lost and difficult to figure out what was going wrong. After about 6 months I’m disabling it:

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool false ; killall Dock
Technology

Graphene: (Latest) Miracle Material

Graphene

NY Times has a gushing article about the wonders of grapheme:

  • graphene was discovered to be 200 times stronger than steel
  • so thin that a single ounce of it could cover 28 football fields
  • transparent
  • conductive
  • flexible
  • light: A cubic inch of the material could balance on one blade of grass
  • graphene could stretch by 20 percent while still remaining able to conduct electricity. Rubber stretches by 20%
  • graphene is inexpensive
Technology

Updating an AWS instance and wordpress multisite hostname

Just in case you haven’t heard about heartbleed or like comic strip explanation. Bruce Schneier has a good run down on how screwed we all are including this link to the logs of a possible exploit half a year ago.
So I figured I better update my server. First off, I’m using an AWS instance to host the web site. I’m both proud and embarrassed. The system has been up for 11 months.

$ uptime
 11:22:33 up 339 days,  9:34,  1 user,  load average: 0.14, 0.84, 0.84

Updating the software was fairly easy

sudo apt-get update {.sh}
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

But it pretty much required a reboot to make sure everything was using the new libraries.
After that was done my wordpress installation was using the wrong hostname. Here are the tables I updated. The id, blog_id and table name wp_options are somewhat specific to my installation.

update wp_sitemeta set meta_value = 'https://peteware.com/' where meta_key = 'siteurl';
update wp_site set domain = 'peteware.com' where id = 1;
update wp_blogs set domain = 'peteware.com' where blog_id = 1;
update wp_options set option_value = 'http://peteware.com' where option_name = 'siteurl';
update wp_options set option_value = 'http://peteware.com' where option_name = 'home';
Technology

Solar System to Scale

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel A tediously accurate map of the solar system

In line with an earlier post talking about the the scale of the solar system checkout if the moon were 1 pixel gives you a visceral feel for the size of the solar system.   I only made it out to Saturn.  It took a long, long time to scroll.
It makes you imagine how long an interplanetary trip would take.  There is a lot of nothing. It was so boring just scrolling for a few minutes. Just black. No air.

  • Traveling from Earth to Mars would take about seven months.  
  • Earth is at 150M km;
  • Mars is at 225M km.
  • Jupiter is a 13 month trip and is at the kilometer marker 750M. No rest stops.