MaisonBisson

Facebook Connect went down hard tonight. HuffPo reports that their site was redirecting to a Facebook error page, even when people weren’t attempting to log in.

Yep. Busted third-party JavaScript brings portions of the Internet to its knees: huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/fac…

— Kent Brewster (@kentbrew) February 8, 2013

It makes me more comfortable with our decision to strip so many 3rd party javascripts from GigaOM during our last redesign.

What happens to voting data after the election is over? What happens to all those certified results by polling place? How is it that there’s so much coverage leading up to and on the night of the election, but this guy seems to be one of the few sources of historical voting data? Amusingly, I found it linked on the Library of Congress’ website!

There’s some very old sources from E. Bowditch J. McConnel, who wrote some papers on voting patterns up to the 2000 election. The Census Bureau reports in detail on who registered and voted (including age, race, education, sex, marital status, veteran status, and more), but not how they voted, and not by geography.

OpenSecrets.org has political contribution stats by zip code (interesting: my last ZIP Code in NH contributes considerably less than my current zip code). Their data is based on the disclosure files managed and distributed by the Federal Election Commission.

Perhaps I’m just looking in the wrong place to find party aggregated registration information or vote histories by county or ZIP code?

svn diff -x "-bw --ignore-eol-style" is your friend when somebody decides to change the end of line style and strip all trailing whitespace from the files in your repo.

A bunch of searching the web for things related to setuid and shell scripts lead me to this answer in Stack Exchange:

Perl explicitly supports setuid scripts in a secure way. In fact, your script can run setuid even if your OS ignored the setuid bit on scripts. This is because perl ships with a setuid root helper that performs the necessary checks and reinvokes the interpreter on the desired scripts with the desired privileges. This is explained in the perlsec manual. It used to be that setuid perl scripts needed #!/usr/bin/suidperl -wT instead of #!/usr/bin/perl -wT, but on most modern systems, #!/usr/bin/perl -wT is sufficient.

There was a comment on that answer suggesting the situation had changed recently, but the Perl docs assure me it still works.

Here’s a sequence of unbelievable things:

1. Yes, despite a lifetime in Subversion, I’m really this new to git!
2. I’m going to link to Livejournal in this post!
3. Git really doesn’t have an equivalent to svn cp filename!

I spent a surprisingly long time reviewing the man pages and surfing the internet to confirm this, but git really assumes you’ll never want to copy a file with history. Here’s that Livejournal link I promised, where markpasc has similar complaints — from 2008, no less.

I was looking for a way to copy a file with history because I needed to break a single file into multiple pieces. In my Subversion days I would have done a svn cp old-file.php new-file.php. From there I could prune old-file.php and new-file.php down to what I needed while preserving the full history for all the code that remained.

Or perhaps I’m missing something?

My iMac screen is dark and isn’t lighting up like I expect it to when I tap the keyboard. I can, however, SSH into it and see what it’s doing when not responding to me.

I found GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent running, this FAQ item vaguely tells me it’s part of Chrome, and that if I try to uninstall it without also uninstalling Chrome it will simply “be reinstalled after a few hours.”

Two instances of PTPCamera are running. This may be related to Picture Transfer Protocol used in some cameras and has caused more than a few people to ask why it’s running.

com.apple.iCloudHelper is using a lot of CPU (100% of one of the cores). Googling for it reveals other people inspecting their systems while the screen refuses to awaken. I’m guessing it’s related to, um, iCloud and syncing, but the interwebs don’t say much more about it and killing it didn’t fix the problem.

I wondered if the GoPro-style action camera market had already become saturated back in January, now I’ve learned that Sony apparently doesn’t think so. At least one imagines that’s the conclusion they came to before deciding to join the competition with a camera of their own. They call it the Action Cam, and it clearly takes its design cues from Contour.

What does Sony offer to stand apart from the established players? 120 frames per second at 720p, WiFi, and SteadyShot is what they’d say, though SteadyShot takes the angle of view from 170° down to 120°. It doesn’t do meaningful still photos or timelapse.

It releases on September 24 for $270 if you’re still interested.

Via tweet: claw arcade games are not skill games, rather, the claw strength is randomized and is often only strong enough to successfully grab the prize in one attempt out of 18, or 800. Operator manuals linked in the Quora answer explain the different modes and odds.

String cutting games, however, can be defeated with lasers!

apiGrove is an API management tool by Alcatel-Lucent. It proxies APIs (presumably those you built and host, though the example is for Twitter) , supports authenticated access, throttles to help manage demand, usage logging and reporting. More info @apiGrove, hat tip.

Seth Godin on what to obsess over:

What are you tracking? If you track concepts, your concepts are going to get better. If you track open rates or clickthrough, then your subject lines are going to get better. Up to you.

It’s long something I’ve believed: if you measure it, you will attempt to maximize it, even if the metric is something you’d rather minimize, like CO2 emissions.

GoPro’s HD Hero 2 action camera is everywhere, so perhaps we’ll all be used to the fisheye’d images it produces soon. On the other hand, there are software solutions to rectify the image to rectilinear. Vimeo user Peter iNova has a few videos demonstrating his Photoshop action sets to straighten out an HD Hero’s output.

A person could probably significantly improve performance by giving up on Photoshop and building a video filter based on the Panotools image manipulation library.

My real interest is in correcting still photos, so some of the Panotools derivatives can help me out of the box. LensFix is a classic, but the developer has closed up shop for the time being. A little more searching led me to PTLens. Twenty five dollars buys the plugin, and a few moments with each photo will get rid of the fisheye effect.

The GoPro cameras aren’t among the list of supported cameras, but that looks like it can be resolved.

Bendy horizons are interesting a few times, but I hope soon I’ll be able to straighten them out. And, given that some cameras do this in firmware, perhaps the next GoPro camera will have the feature built-in.