Unregistered voters in Travis County have until Monday October 6, 2008 to register for the upcoming presidential electons. Register online here.

You can verify your existing voter registration here.

If you have moved or changed your name, you can update your registration here.

Early voting starts Monday Oct. 20 and continues through Friday Oct 31. Here's the full list of early voting locations.

I got some cool fan mail for my Sound Switcher...

I finally found a cheap ($20) wireless router that has built-in QoS (quality of service) support, it's the Airlink AR430W. With QoS, you can set up rules based on service type (http, etc.) or by IP address, so you can say "traffic from computer X should always get priority over traffic from computer Y", or "game traffic should get priority over web traffic", etc.

I just set it up over the weekend, very straighforward, great features, good web admin tool, signal strength is better than my previous D-Link.

Fry's does special pricing on the AR430W from time to time, lowest I've seen is $20. I know people out there spend $50 or $60 on the Linksys WR54GT (or whatever) but I don't want to learn nerdy details about what patch, version, blah.. is required to enable this or disable that, and the Linksys seems to require this. I might be totally wrong, but the small amount of info I found suggested the Linksys does not offer plug-and-play QoS, whereas the Airlink does.

Atlassian just announced "personal licenses" for Jira, pretty cool. There are some limitations of course... no support, 3 users max. But otherwise you can set up and use your own instance of Jira, even Enterprise, all for free.

Well, after a few days of rumors, Lance is officially un-retired and will return to professional cycling in 2009. There's a blog entry with video clip on his website. He doesn't say much, so we don't know which team or any other details really. One rumor said he would rejoin Johan Bruyneel at Astana, but that has been denied by Astana team leadership. My guess is he's going to fund a brand new team centered around the LiveStrong foundation.

I've been an OS X user for about 6 years, and I've noticed a change in the past 6 months or so: Apple software is starting to suck.

It's not terrible, definitely more "good" than "bad", but relative to itself a year ago (or longer), Apple software has really taken a turn for the worse. My guess is with increased popularity they've lost focus on what's really important for good software.

I think it's the same pattern that affects most musicians who make that transition from "nobody" to "big star" - the first album is amazing and blows people away, the 2nd or 3rd one is alright, then every album after that just plain sucks. Dave Matthews, Sting, Ben Harper. Or maybe it's more of a gentle transition, several albums are great, then somehow everything turns to suck (Paul Simon, Van Halen). Anyway, I think that's happening to Apple now.

When I left Windows for OS X in 2002, it wasn't because I could buy TV shows through iTunes. Instead, I was leaving an unstable OS (Windows) with inconsistent UI and insane usability patterns, and moving to a stable, fast OS that was simple, intuitive and powerful. Unfortunately I now have several examples of instability and un-usability across several Apple software products. I think I would have been hard-pressed to come up with a list like this with OS X 10.3 or 10.4, but sadly it took ~10 minutes thanks to Leopard 10.5. I could probably take a little more time and come up with more. It's like Sammy Hagar just joined Apple to replace Steve Jobs. Depressing.

Best. Ringtone. Ever. It's the theme song from Arrested Development.

I just discovered that string comparisons in MySQL ignore trailing whitespace in strings, CHAR, and VARCHAR fields (but not TEXT) - in short, use "like" instead of "=" for literal string comparison.

The strings 'a' and 'a ' (same thing followed by single space) are considered equivalent by MySQL, because trailing whitespace is ignored. But leading whitespace is significant, so 'a' is not equivalent to ' a'.

Why?

This is the kind of subtle, no-idea-until-you-discover-it behavior that makes Perl suck, and I'm disappointed that MySQL has behavior like that, too.

Principle of least surprise, anyone?

mysql> select 'a' = 'a ';
+------------+
| 'a' = 'a ' |
+------------+
|          1 | 
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select 'a' = ' a';
+------------+
| 'a' = ' a' |
+------------+
|          0 | 
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Using LIKE is a workaround.

mysql> select 'a' like 'a ';
+---------------+
| 'a' like 'a ' |
+---------------+
|             0 | 
+---------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I guess McCain is going to win Ohio
Missing votes spark lawsuit Columbus Dispatch Politics

I've just discovered something enormously entertaining - digging through the "missed connections" section of craigslist personals. If you haven't seen it, it's like... I guess I can't really compare it to anything I've ever seen, but here's an analogy: "missed connections" is like putting a message in a bottle, throwing it in the ocean, and hoping it finds its way to one specific person.

Here are some highlights from the "women 4 men" section.

This one is pretty mushy. Assuming the guy found it, what the heck would he do? "Damn baby, I know things didn't work out between us, but I did not know you cried for 3 days. And then you ate a Kashi bar! Clearly, I have done you wrong, and for that I am sorry."

This is just the epitome of pointless. Every dork who thinks he's hot, or likes blondes (or both) will write back to her.

This one is just stunning... just go talk to the guy!

In 1986, the Cray 2 supercomputer was the first computer to calculate 1 billion floating point operations in a single second - 1 gigaflop.

In 1997, the Intel ASCI Red became the first computer to calculate 1 trillion operations - 1 teraflop.

Now, in 2008, the IBM Roadrunner became the first computer to calculate 1 quadrillion operations - 1 petaflop - in a single second.

I think it's difficult to wrap your head around how large a number that is. Take a million, already a very large number, one thousand millions is a billion, one thousand billions is a trillion, one thousand trillions is a quadrillion. That's a petaflop. 15 zeroes.

1,000,000,000,000,000

Increasing calculation speed by a factor of 1,000 has happened every 11 years. If that trend continues, we'll see the first exaflop-capable computer in 2019. Another 11 years later, in 2030, we'll see the first zettaflop - one million petaflops. 21 zeroes.

Supercomputer sets petaflop pace

The toilet on the International Space Station has been fixed, and Hillary Clinton is finally giving up.

I just ran a manual cleanup of non-English language packs from my Applications directory. Removing the additional language junk saved 2.62 gb (yes, gigabytes) of disk space. Update: I ran it on /Library, too (same steps as below, just modify step 2), freed up another 1.1 gb, bringing the total disk space to 3.72gb.

Size of "Applications" before: 6.41 gb (6,220,745,877)
Size of "Applications" after: 3.79 gb (3,879,507,421)

Note: the following tip will permanently delete non-English language support from everything in your Applications directory. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm just pointing that out. If, for some reason, you need to recover the addtional language support (maybe you're learning Hungarian?), you'll need to re-install the application(s).

Here's what to do:

1. Open Terminal window
2. Run this: cd /Applications
3. Run this: find . -name "*.lproj" ! -name "English.lproj" ! -name "en*.lproj" -exec rm -rf {} \;

I wrote about this before -- Removing language support from OS X applications (to free up disk space) -- but just re-ran it on my current computer so made another post with current data.

Got a question about vim pattern matching that I had to look up, probably worth sharing.

Say you have the following text, and you want to modify the quoted things, so you start with this:

And want to end up with this:

Run this:

I expected ".*?" to work (valid Perl regex syntax?), but ultimately found ".{-}" worked with Vim (and don't forget to escape the "{" and "}" characters, so \{ and \}).

This keeps showing up in the news, today noticed a link to Te Papa, the museum in New Zealand where the squid is being inspected. Lots of photos and info there. Also found this link with more stuff: Colossal Squid.

I finally got Leopard to mount my home server. Never had any problems with Tiger across multiple machines, but Leopard didn't work. All I want to do is mount the volume...

I could connect directly, so I knew everything was accessible:

smbclient //1.2.3.4/public

Anyway, here's the magic that worked for me, from Terminal:

mkdir /Volumes/public
mount -t smbfs //1.2.3.4/public /Volumes/public
open /Volumes/public

The mount prompts for password, you can specify a different user if you need, too.

Can't stand the new Dock in Leopard, found this to remove the huge slab of white behind the icons:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Then either logout, or quit Dock through Activity Monitor.

Does anyone make food using Red Bull as one of the ingredients? Like, chicken pasta with Red Bull sauce, or maybe snickerdoodle cookies with Red Bull. Surely someone has tried some stuff like that.

I think this is an untapped market, especially for the raver party crowd. You get hungry partying all night, right? But what can you eat? How about a nice piece of Red Bull cake to go with your Red Bull + vodka. Or maybe bar peanuts dipped in Red Bull.