Digital Journalist Callie Shell follows Barack Obama’s journey to the white house in a remarkable set of photos with captions.
Keep clicking Show More Images at the bottom of the page — there are quite a few.
This fine post is courtesy of SimpleBits‘ link.
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Just read an excellent article about how bookmakers have a monster stake at getting Election races right and therefore are right very often. Check it out here at the Huffington Post.
Oh and you Yankees can’t bet your election by law, so don’t try it.
Right now betting on Barack you have to bet $7 to win $8 and a McCain win comes in at $6.80 for every $1 wagered… those are some long odds. Further, Betfair Predicts has Obama at 92% to 8% by the gambling masses.
Source: Rand’s Twittter Feed
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Mint Hot Chocolate
Thanks to Lindsay for the info on this fine drink which I did not know about.
Drive to your nearest Tim Hortons, ask for a hot chocolate of your favorite size with a mint tea bag in it. My local places charge the same price as a standard hot chocolate. The result is a very, very tasty mint hot chocolate which does not appear on the menu.
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I’m a pretty voracious reader when I’m not working until I’m exhausted every night (which has been the case recently). I figure one good idea is worth FAR more than the price of a book, so here’s the current lineup:
Currently Reading:
Personal Development For Smart People – I love reading Steve Pavlina’s blog which is filled with , and thus this book buy was a no-brainer. Go read the blog, go buy the book.
Scheduled to Read:
Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die – Inspired by The Tipping Point, the authors offer an entertaining, practical guide to effective communication. Their study is couched in terms of “stickiness” — that is, the art of making ideas unforgettable. Sounds like a book I can absorb something interesting from and gets good reviews.
Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t – This one is by the same author as Built To Last – Jim Collins. Researching companies that made the leap from good to great, Collins supposedly has identified a few internal traits in the businesses that are unique. I don’t expect this to be a great book honestly, but I do hope to learn something that might help down the road. Note: still haven’t got around to this one yes I know it’s a repeat.
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In Canada, we don’t get the notable tax break that the Americans do – the ability to write off mortgage interest. Now, that’s not to say we can’t backdoor the system a bit and make it work (see: The Smith Manoeuvre) but the Americans get to do it by default and thus usually can buy far more house for their dollar and get to save money in it.
Yes, this heavy borrowing for and on their houses is exactly what has got them into that whole ‘credit crunch’ when the market died but that’s another story. But for us, the Canucks, our primary solid tax deduction is our RRSP.
So, you make $60k a year, you contribute $10k to your RSP, and you pay tax on $60-$10=$50k of income. That’s easy enough. Now we’re getting this neeto little thing called a tax-free savings account. No you can’t deduct it from your income — BOOOO — but yes you can keep the interest it generates tax-free. So you slam up to $5k of after-tax dollars in per year and can earn interest which you don’t need to pay tax on.
Should a Tax Free Savings Account be contributed to instead of your RSP? No chance (note, i’m not a financial advisor so please don’t take my advice without doing the numbers for yourself). RSP contributions give immediate tax relief on that amount at your marginal tax rate. That’s some sweet tax deferral goodness. This is just a great place to put money that’s safe and accessible. In today’s wild equity markets, many people should find that pretty attractive.
Tax free savings accounts are available in January 2009 at your favorite Canuck bank or virtual bank like INGdirect.ca.
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I was lucky enough to catch the rear end of dot-com bubble 1.0. At the time, I was 20 and worked for a neeto little startup company which merged into another well funded startup which grew its cash burn rate like wildfire (all typical and expected of the So-Cal dot-com). Living in Colorado at 20 was… good for me. Being away from home, from school, making a decent living for myself and working my ass off (I’ll talk about the dot-com sleepover in another post) gave me a bit of perspective. In the end I was compensated as an employee on salary but also granted the revered stock option which by the way was the one of the primary reasons most people worked for dot-coms at all — the opportunity to GET RICH QUICK because investors didn’t value dot-coms like regular companies anymore.
Stories from the Valley would come up daily on the news on how Joe Programmer retired at 25 cashing in on his start up stock options. However, obviously not all companies made it to IPO. You as a programmer are gambling that your company is going to be one of those companies that goes bonkers on the Nasdaq before the whole thing blows up.
Some of the less gamble-happy types figured out that a small piece of many companies might be better than a big piece of one company — diversification in stock options. You diversify your RRSP/401k don’t you? Why not your chances of getting rich? These guys would join a company, stick around until their first options vested then take off with them and go to the next job. Given the mania for tech people at the time, the next job undoubtedly paid more than the last and these people ended up overpaid and more importantly diversified in their “cheap” lottery ticket-like stock options.
I was a little late to the dance, a little too young, a little too naive to really take advantage of what happened in those crazy days. Yes my dot-com company is still alive, but no it won’t make me rich. I learned the diversification lesson though.
Look for opportunities to diversify income and stop being reliant on single income sources (Jobs) — you risk everything at once and are at the whim of another. Companies grow and shrink, investments (especially at this time in our world economy) grow and shrink, and in the end nothing is for certain to work out.
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Recently, we noticed that our VSFTP FTP server was showing times which were different than that of the file itself. It turns out that VSFTP will convert times to GMT by default.
Per the VSFTPd man pages, the fix is to add the line
use_localtime=YES
to your /etc/vsftpd.conf file.
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About 5 years ago, I started working with a great little company in a niche market. The company has a good desktop software product, and my role was to help build their online business up both technically and business-wise.
The company’s primary product is written in Omnis, a very stable rapid application development environment supporting multiple platforms. The primary developer of this product at the time decided that Omnis supported OpenBase DB best and so that was the best way to integrate with the website.
The first challenge was to see if Omnis could integrate with the Perl DBI on Linux. Of course, no DBI module existed for it but OpenBase does support JDBC with a nice plugin for it and Perl has a DBD-JDBC bridge so that was the solution. It worked. The bridge threw off a few warnings but generally I got my queries there and back, and it all worked in relative harmony. OpenBase even included my DBI->JDBC->OpenBase instructions in their documentation. The thing worked!
We had a live connection to an app running Omnis Studio using their DAM (Data Access Module). We also had apps in the field running Omnis7 with live connections to this database (this wasn’t my idea nor did I like it).
Then it started to happen. Openbase started to crash. I bring up netstat to show open connections, and an Omnis user instance had unleashed a few thousand connections upon poor OpenBase bringing its running database down without crash logs. It was just gone in an instant. Then I had to restart the OpenBase instance manually, which was an ordeal as it means having to kill off all existing Omnis connections successfully else the OpenBase server would crash again instantly. This happened on weekdays, this happened on weekends, this happened over and over. I was a slave of the OpenBase reboot. Was it bad code or bad DAM’s from Omnis7/Omnis Studio that allowed it to unleash OpenBase denial-of-service destruction? I don’t really know as I’m not an Omnis programmer. What I do know is that it didn’t work well enough to run a good production system in our case.
Tread carefully if trying to combine Omnis’ DAM and OpenBase DB — it may work for you, but didn’t work for us. That OpenBase would die without error codes, that’s a bad thing. That Omnis releases a hellfire of connections under some condition, that’s a bad thing. This won’t be a problem I try and solve, I’m just happy to put it behind me.
Full disclosure: I ran OpenBase versions 8.x and 10.x on Debian — a theoretically compatible but unsupported OS by OpenBase. Omnis instances included Studio and Omnis 7 (versions unknown at this time) using respective OpenBase specific DAM’s all operating from Windows platform.
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Mark Cuban, famous dot-com rich guy and owner of the Dallas Mavericks is a pretty interesting guy.
In this excellent post, Cuban lays out his point of view, compares non-dividend paying stocks to baseball card collecting and generally rips on the system. A worthwhile read.
Picked up this link from Shane.
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The situation presented to me was as such:
Proposed Solution:
Tunnel FROM the co-location into a server which has SSH available at our office IP address (the firewall allows outgoing, not incoming tunnels).
#!/bin/sh
createTunnel() {
ssh -f -N -L19922:OFFICEEXTERNALIP:22 -ROFFICEINTERNALIP:3310:COLOMYSQLSVRIP:3306 tunnel@OFFICEEXTERNALIP
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
echo Tunnel to Office created successfully
else
echo An error occured created a tunnel to Office RC was $?
fi
}
ssh -p 19922 tunnel@localhost ls
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
echo Creating new tunnel connection
createTunnel
fi
The Problem:
OpenSSHd on the office’s server was not allowing me to bind to its non-localhost IP (192.168.1.x) and would bind it back on 127.0.0.1 loopback. Our windows users COULD tunnel into this office server and then loopback but PuTTY is goofy sometimes and we dont want them doing a few steps to get access to the server.
The Solution:
After searching around the Interweb, I came across a little entry (took a while to find) that needed to be added to /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
GatewayPorts yes
And it works!
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