“Some teams have formed and started to meet. Oth­ers are still seek­ing lead­er­ship. If you would like to join a team, click on the action item below. If you are inter­ested in being a cham­pion for other actions or want to lead a team, con­tact Tony VanDerworp.”

“The reten­tion and attrac­tion of tal­ented, cre­ative peo­ple is a prin­ci­ple resource that grows a suc­cess­ful regional econ­omy enhanc­ing the qual­ity of place over the long term. While the Ann Arbor region pro­vides a vari­ety of hous­ing, there is a seri­ous gap in pro­vid­ing afforable places for tal­ent to live. Res­i­dents that are just start­ing their career have lim­ited afford­able hous­ing choices in the City of Ann Arbor. The tal­ent work­force prefers vibrant places to live which are also in close prox­im­ity to pub­lic transit.”

via Nic McPhee

“For years, stu­dents with print dis­abil­i­ties have strug­gled to have access to instruc­tional mate­ri­als in the field of Sci­ence, Engi­neer­ing, Math­e­mat­ics, and Tech­nol­ogy. For stu­dents who can­not read ordi­nary print, under­stand­ing com­plex equa­tions and for­mu­las is a daunt­ing chal­lenge, most often addressed with the aid of a human reader. This inter­ven­tion strat­egy, how­ever, is fun­da­men­tally lim­ited and does not pro­vide true access to the student.”

“Again these are just named scopes. You can chain them together, call meth­ods off of them, etc. What’s great about these named scopes is that they do NOT use the :include option, mak­ing them much faster. Instead they cre­ate a LEFT OUTER JOIN and pass it to the :joins option, which is great for per­for­mance. To prove my point here is a quick bench­mark from an appli­ca­tion I am work­ing on…”

“The sec­ond, and maybe more sur­pris­ing, claim is that after decades of strug­gle, mod­er­ate and lib­eral Chris­tian­ity is expe­ri­enc­ing an unex­pected renewal in North Amer­ica. Many peo­ple now refer to this ener­gized clus­ter as “pro­gres­sive” or “emerg­ing” Chris­tian­ity. I have come to think of it as beyond exist­ing cat­e­gories of conservative-​​moderate-​​liberal. Instead, I refer to it as gen­er­a­tive Chris­tian­ity. In con­gre­ga­tions and as indi­vid­u­als, peo­ple have stum­bled into mean­ing­ful spir­i­tual prac­tices and a renewed sense of social jus­tice with­out know­ing, per­haps, that these new dis­cov­er­ies have long his­to­ries in the Chris­t­ian tradition.…”

“Back to Sam’s ques­tion. Few authors pub­lish in true xhtml mode, fewer still include inline svg images in their xhtml, and fewer still include titles or descrip­tions in those images. But in the­ory, you can imag­ine a sit­u­a­tion where a web author pub­lishes in true xhtml mode, and the author includes an inline svg image within an xhtml page, and an end user is using a browser that sup­ports true xhtml, and that user is using a hypo­thet­i­cal screenreader-​​of-​​the-​​future that imple­ments sup­port for the <title> and <desc> ele­ments within inline svg images within xhtml pages, and that user stum­bles across that page. It’s the­o­ret­i­cally pos­si­ble, there­fore you have to do it. Period. End of discussion.”

“Met­ric Fu is a com­pi­la­tion of sev­eral tools to help find areas of code that could be improved. In this episode I show you how to setup this tool on the railscasts​.com source code.”

Except, god­dammit, that RealPlayer sucks.

” The U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS) pro­vides infor­ma­tion to the pub­lic and to policy-​​makers con­cern­ing the cur­rent use and flow of min­er­als and mate­ri­als in the United States econ­omy. The USGS col­lects, ana­lyzes, and dis­sem­i­nates min­er­als infor­ma­tion on most non­fuel min­eral commodities.

This USGS dig­i­tal data­base is an online com­pi­la­tion of his­tor­i­cal U.S. sta­tis­tics on min­eral and mate­r­ial com­modi­ties. The data­base con­tains infor­ma­tion on approx­i­mately 90 min­eral com­modi­ties, includ­ing pro­duc­tion, imports, exports, and stocks; reported and appar­ent con­sump­tion; and unit value (the real and nom­i­nal price in U.S. dol­lars of a met­ric ton of appar­ent con­sump­tion). For many of the com­modi­ties, data are reported as far back as 1900. Each com­mod­ity file includes a doc­u­ment that describes of the units of mea­sure, defines terms, and lists USGS con­tacts for addi­tional information.”

“The solu­tion on an idea that should be appar­ent, but maybe not to most. Sim­ply, that the own­er­ship of pro­duc­tive assets (essen­tially, those assets that gen­er­ate goods/​services that can be sold) is vastly supe­rior to own­er­ship their finan­cial deriv­a­tives (stock funds, retire­ment accounts, etc.) — we once were a nation of entre­pre­neurs, now we are a nation of inden­tured servants. ”

“The com­pa­nies I selected were foreign-​​based cor­po­ra­tions, which have increased their div­i­dends for at least five con­sec­u­tive years. I tried cre­at­ing a diver­si­fied list of for­eign stocks, in order to avoid putting all my eggs in one bas­ket. I also tried to select com­pa­nies with rea­son­able div­i­dend pay­outs, sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­els and com­pa­nies show­ing earn­ings over the past year.”

“Let your feet expe­ri­ence some real relief with these truly inter­lock­ing, tes­sel­lated con­crete pavers. Each paver is part of a one piece puz­zle.
Make your own with a qual­ity polyurethane mold. No prior expe­ri­ence is nec­es­sary. Each mold comes com­plete with instruc­tions on cast­ing, col­or­ing, cur­ing, and installation.”

“This was pro­posed to have been fol­lowed by a third Phibes movie, The Brides of Phibes or Phibes Res­ur­rec­tus. It would have had Phibes pro­tect­ing his secret of eter­nal life from a group of Nazis whom he would kill off one by one. His wife would also be brought back to life.”

“One of NKill’s objec­tives is to cat­a­log every ref­er­enced pub­lic machine or net­work. Start­ing with all .com, .net, .org domains, www.DOMAIN, mail exchange records, name­servers, etc. and grab the ver­sion ban­ners of the soft­ware they are running.

Nkill will be really use­ful for pro­fil­ing a tar­get dur­ing a secu­rity assess­ment because IP4 trans­forms are hard to per­form with­out a data­base. Given an IP4 address, shitty sites like domain­tools will tell you which vir­tual hosts are shar­ing the same address, that’s it and they will charge you a fee for that infor­ma­tion. They won’t tell you which organ­i­sa­tions (domains) are trust­ing this IP address for their mail, name­servers, etc.

With NKill, when a new vul­ner­a­bil­ity is dis­cov­ered (e.g. IIS, post­fix, apache, php…) we can instantly known which domains are vul­ner­a­ble; you can pull that infor­ma­tion for a whole coun­try and we can also mon­i­tor how long it takes for peo­ple to react and patch their boxes.”

‘Through the years, The Real­ity Club has had a sim­ple cri­te­rion for choos­ing speak­ers. We look for peo­ple whose cre­ative work has expanded our notion of who and what we are. A few Real­ity Club speak­ers and/​or Edge pre­sen­ters are best­selling authors or are famous in the mass cul­ture. Most are not. Rather, we encour­age work on the cut­ting edge of the cul­ture, and the inves­ti­ga­tion of ideas that have not been gen­er­ally exposed. We are inter­ested in “think­ing smart;” we are not inter­ested in the anes­the­si­ol­ogy of “wis­dom.” The motto of the Club is “to arrive at the edge of the world’s knowl­edge, seek out the most com­plex and sophis­ti­cated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the ques­tions they are ask­ing themselves.“‘

After hear­ing sev­eral tes­ti­mo­ni­als recently.

Me: “Solv­ing inter­est­ing prob­lems” well involves a fre­quent iter­a­tive dia­log between the tech­niques, inter­me­di­ate results, and the prac­ti­tioner. Agility, in other words.