2009-07-02
Chicago ‘burb ditches red light cameras, no safety advantage
Schaumburg, Illinois has decided to say no to red light cameras after
experimenting with one at a busy intersection for several months. The
police chief is recommending the removal of the one that was installed
and that the city avoid putting up any more, citing no advantage in
safety.
The experiment lasted 4 months and resulted in 10,000 tickets and $1
million in revenue. Holy crap! That’s about 83 tickets and $8,300 per
day.
At the end of the article there is an interesting note:
A person “familiar with the matter” in Schaumburg says the city
largely decided to get rid of the camera due to complaints from
out-of-towners who wanted to shop at Woodfield Mall, and Schaumburg
didn’t want to ruin its image of being a “suburban shopping mecca.”
Whatever the reason, I’m glad that red light cameras won’t be taking
over Schaumburg.
2009-07-01
The Git Parable is a long (but mostly easy to follow) story
describing the concepts behind git.
The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation
of a Git-like system from the ground up. Understanding the concepts
presented here will be the most valuable thing you can do to prepare
yourself to harness the full power of Git.
True.
2009-06-29
Here are some notes for myself that may halp to debug Windows networking
issues when a computer has multiple NICs.
Useful commands:
> ipconfig
> route print
> route /all
> route -?
How to set a custom metric for choosing which NIC is tried first:
Open the “Network Connections” control panel.
Right-click on the secondary network connection and choose
“Properties”.
Highlight “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” and click “Properties”.
Click “Advanced…”.
Uncheck “Automatic metric” and enter a value for “Interface metric”.
And remember, the most important thing is to be prepared to get
frustrated.
2009-06-25
Stoned wallabies make crop circles
Those are some words I never thought I’d see together. Via reddit,
of course.
2009-06-24
After my post on Blue Jeans Cable, I got curious about cables
for digital signals. I wrote to Blue Jeans:
I’ve heard many times that digital signals are “all-or-nothing”, so if
there were errors, they would be easy to see. Doesn’t that mean I
should buy the cheapest possible cables and if I don’t see any errors,
I’m good to go?
Within a day, I got a reply:
That is correct, bit errors are extremely obvious, so if you hook up a
digital cable and get a signal, you are getting a perfect signal,
whether you spend $5 or $500.
-Jeff (BJC)
It’s nice to get confirmation from a reputable source, especially when
the answer means that I may very well buy from another company.
In fact, I recommend Monoprice for cables for digital signals.
Monoprice has a good reputation and lower prices than Blue Jeans.
Quality is probably lower as well, but that doesn’t really matter in
this case.
2009-06-18
Readability is a supercharged version of my Make Page Narrow
Bookmarklet. It gets rid of everything on the page except for the
main content, which goes in a column with user configured width and font
size. It greatly improves the readability of nearly every webpage.
2009-06-11
Here’s an interesting observation regarding the order of quotes and
punctuation marks in written English. I use the reversed style and
and have been for some time. I started doing it just with technical
stuff, like shell commands and function names, but now I do it with
everything.
A response to that post points out that hackers have favored this style
for a long time.
Via reddit.
2009-06-10
I have a new goal in life. I should probably start on a smaller
scale, like this. Hopefully a friend will learn too so we can
play a game.
And once I accomplish that, I’ll try the reverse.
2009-06-09
The next version of NetNewsWire is likely (95%) to get Google Reader
syncing. I’ve been wanting this feature for years!
