| Gardening, Week 10 |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|11:58 am] |
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All things considered, the garden has been pretty successful. (Almost) everything is still alive and growing pretty well. The casualties so far have only been two broccoli plants, one of which I'm pretty sure was uprooted by Amélie (the other died for reasons unkown). It looked like the squash wasn't going to make it, but an increase in its waterings nursed it back to health.
Speaking of which, when you read about people over-watering online, do not believe them. It is a trap. As near as I can tell, the Internet and I have very different opinions on what constitutes "wet" soil, so watering only when the soil is dry does not work. My plants all get a healthy amount of direct sunlight and through trial and error (mostly error), I've found they need a generous amount of water every day.
Squash
 Squash, it turns out, cannot be over watered. This one's soil always felt quite damp, so I only watered it every few days. It grew fine for the first few weeks but once it started to bear fruit the leaves started yellowing and dying. The Internet gave conflicting advice on the watering of squash, with many sites suggesting it should only be watered every two or three days. False. This guy needs plenty of water every day. After I started giving it ~.2 gal/day, its leaves greened up and it is now growing significantly faster than ever before. About 50% of the leaves in the photo have developed in the last two weeks. Squash are supposed to sprawl out to ~10ft, but given the late start and that this one is potted I'm sure it will be much smaller.
Tomatoes
 Early on the tomatoes exhibited "leaf curl," which apparently is a common symptom of over-watering. Maybe. Apparently many varieties of garden tomatoes just have a tendency to curl, and it doesn't materially affect the plants. But, at first I backed off the watering since the leaves were curling, which was again a bad idea. The plants themselves haven't grown very fast (relative to the Sungold plant on the next block), and many of the fruits are growing very, very slowly. I've upped their watering and they seem to be doing well, though I won't know for sure if that has helped until later in the season.
Despite having far fewer fruits, the Green Zebra (pictured) is on track to produce first. The Sungold, however, has 3-4x the flowers (50+), so it will probably produce the larger yield. I also didn't get tomato cages until just a few weeks ago. Those are much easier to put in the pot when the plant is small; whoops!
Sunflowers
The sunflowers are getting huge. The biggest are around 4ft tall at this point and they grow ~1"/day. They've been the hardest to mess up. They seem nearly impossible to kill (as long as I give them some water), only growing faster or slower based on the amount of care they get.
I planted them in 3 groups of ~6. A few in each group failed to take root after sprouting so I had to sow new seeds in their place. These new plants were growing a few weeks behind its siblings and thus generally crowded for light. Interestingly, they've raced taller, faster, at the expense of a thiner and weaker stem. A few of them needed steaks to stay upright, but as they've got more sun they've grown stronger.
Broccoli, Spinach, and Lettuce
 The side garden has worked out okay. The spinach bolted really early (~week 6) and was eaten; it really should be in a place that doesn't get too much direct sun (or perhaps pulled and re-sown frequently?). The lettuce is ready to be eaten, just as soon as my housemates or I actually make a salad at home. It turns out they grow really big and need to be quite far apart, I'd say 24" or more. The broccoli seemed to flower early and produce small heads, but Mike said they were good. They're very delicate plants, I'm not sure I'd grow them again without an, e.g. flower bed where they would be more protected.
Corn
 The corn is definitely the most anticipated crop of the yard. I read online that they need plenty of water, at least 1"/week. False. They need more. I carefully gave them 8gal/day (which works out to 1"/week) and they remained healthy but many were growing very slowly. The ones in sunken portions of the garden (where water tended to pool) grew noticeably faster than the others. I've at least doubled their water (now using the hose, so not sure of the exact amount), and they are all growing much faster. The bigger ones are now growing between 0.5-1"/day. I think the corn will come in later than the early Aug I was anticipating.
A ridiculous number of poppies grew naturally with the corn (the orange flowers). I've left them in because they look nice, but periodically thinning them to keep them from overcrowding the corn. Over three thinning sessions, I've probably pulled 100lbs of poppies. They grow like weeds, but at least they look nice. The bees really love them. I water before I leave for work and will routinely see ~50 bees hopping from flower to flower.
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| May need a 4th roommate |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|10:04 pm] |
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Looks like one of our roommates is moving in with her b/f at the end of July. Barring us moving out, we'll be looking for a new (preferably female) 4th roommate. Give me a shout if you or someone you know would be interested in being a roomie in our house. |
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| DNS poisoning FAIL |
[May. 18th, 2009|11:05 am] |
Today when I noticed some web sites were rendering as blank pages or other odd behaviors. When slashdot.org suddenly exhibited the same symptoms, I started to look into it.
( Code follows here... ) |
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| Adventures in Gardening |
[May. 3rd, 2009|12:07 pm] |
My housemates and I started a garden in the front yard last week. We tore up sod along this stretch of the front sidewalk and planted corn and sunflowers. It very clearly used to be a garden before as we found probably 30+ onions growing the in grass we pulled up.
Our neighbor has sunflower plants in their yard, so I'm fairly confident they'll sprout, but I'm a little concerned about the corn. Apparently corn doesn't like to germinate in soil temperatures below 65℉ so we may just end up with a fallow patch of dirt. :( So we'll need a backup plan in case this corn patch looks the same next weekend.
This Saturday I dug up a section around the tree in the front yard to plant more edibles. It too wasn't always unweeded grass, as evidenced by another 20 or so onions (with much bigger bulbs!) I managed to pull out of the grass clods. That probably gave me another 30 sqft or so to fill with plants; fortunately Erin was working at City People's yesterday so I could go bother for recommendations. :) We picked out a few starter vegetables and now I've planted all the scavenged onions (we'll see if they survive, I think I tore up their roots), mixed salad greens, spinach, and broccoli. I also picked up two tomato vines and a squash plant for planting elsewhere.
I'm a little concerned about the Broccoli though. It apparently needs full sunlight and as you can see from the photo, the neighbor's tree is still shading the whole area by noon. I may have to move them to a more hospitable location. If the corn hasn't shown by next Saturday, I think I'll move them into the patch along the sidewalk.
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| Unit Fail |
[Mar. 27th, 2009|11:42 am] |
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/coaltoliquids.html
Glasser's new production method allows them to set a lower limit on the amount of energy that would be needed to transform solid coal into fuel. The very best possible CTL process would require 350 megawatts of input to make 80,000 gallons of fuel; the current process uses more than 1,000 megawatts.
Where's the t! |
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| None of us is as dumb as all of us |
[Mar. 3rd, 2009|11:43 am] |
Courtesy Paul Krugman's excellent blog and Media Matters, ABC has shown it's journalism department to be functionally illiterate.
To make a long story short, Emily Friedman, the author, wrote a wonderful alarmist article showing off her inability to understand the basics of income tax and general incompetence as a journalist. She found several other equally retarded high-income earners to support her in her inconceivable thesis: by making LESS income, you'll take MORE home.
She and her subjects somehow think that by making under $250k/year, they'll avoid Obama's "tax increase." That somehow they'll take much more money home if they make $249,999.00/year vs. $250,000.00. What they don't understand is that taxes are (in economics terms) marginal, the tax only applies to the last dollars of your income, not ALL the dollars. So the folks she interviews pay the same low rate all the way up the the $250k mark, the higher tax rate is only applied to the dollars they make above $250k.
The attorney she interviews is at least smart enough to not get herself named; who would trust a lawyer in a real court case that's incapable of reading and understanding the basics of her own income taxes. |
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| Today's Republican Sack o' Shit |
[Feb. 26th, 2009|11:09 am] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wrexen had an excellent reaming of Bobby Jindal for his remarkably stupid response speech to Obama (would provide link were it not a locked post). If you haven't read any of the coverage, you should. There's quite a few gems in his speech, but notably the governor of Louisiana takes Obama to task for irresponsibly spending money on volcano monitoring. A governor from a state at great risk of natural disasters can't come up with a better example of wasteful spending than preventing disasters in other states? Srsly?
Apparently Dave Schultheis, some douche senator in Colorado, felt like Jindal was hogging the sack o' shit spotlight because he had to take it to the next level today. (http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/feb/25/gop-lawmakers-comments-hiv-promiscuity-cause-uproa/)
The money shot:
Sen. Dave Schultheis, of Colorado Springs, on Wednesday opposed a bill requiring pregnant women to be tested for HIV so that if they are infected their babies can be treated to prevent the virus's transfer.
"This stems from sexual promiscuity for the most part, and I just can't go there," he said.
"We do things continually to remove the consequences of poor behavior, unacceptable behavior, quite frankly. I'm not convinced that part of the role of government should be to protect individuals from the negative consequences of their actions."
Yes, let's give babies HIV because their moms are sluts and must be taught lessons. Wow. |
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| The current political landscape |
[Feb. 9th, 2009|11:36 am] |
If you haven't read anything about the bullshit dogma the Republican party and their media outlets have been pushing, read this great article on the Daily Kos and in the NY Times opinion piece they link to. In short, everything you've heard them say recently about stimulus and federal spending flies in the face of scientific research, historical record, and common sense. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Paul Krugman said it best: "There isn’t much room for bipartisanship when 87.8% of the other party is totally irresponsible."
I live in a liberal enough district that I think just about every position I can vote for already swings Democrat, so the lesson for me is mostly academic. |
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| Metaclusterfuck: Composing the incomposable in Ruby |
[Dec. 16th, 2008|01:35 pm] |
It really is just great working a "young" language language. Especially if that language is Ruby. It's so meta that anyone can make pseudo-language changes and it's so underdeveloped that there's still opportunities to fix broken stuff that other languages solved long ago. Great!
Today's problem is with Ruby's module inclusion structure. At least modules are neat, but their methods only appear on instances of the base class. Often a module wants to include some class methods as well, leading to this ill-conceived but better-than-nothing pattern:
module M2
def self.included(base)
base.extend(ClassMethods)
end
module ClassMethods
def klass_meth
STDERR.puts("A classy method")
end
end
def meth
STDERR.puts("Intant method")
end
end
class Foo
include M2
end
Foo.klass_meth() #Prints: "A classy method"
included(base) is a hook that get called when the module gets included in class Foo and executed as soon as the include line is read by the Ruby interpreter. It works great, except it doesn't. See, modules can be composed, but these class methods cannot. Observe:
module M2
def self.included(base) #base is module M1 now, not class Foo!
base.extend(ClassMethods)
end
module ClassMethods
def klass_meth
STDERR.puts("A classy method")
end
end
def meth
STDERR.puts("Intant method")
end
end
module M1
include M2
end
class Foo
include M1
end
Foo.new.meth() #Prints: "instant method"
Foo.klass_meth() #ERROR: no such method
Whoops. It compiles just fine, but adding module M1 now breaks any code that relied on the class methods from M2, at runtime. Awesome.
But there is hope, we can get meta. What as I, with no language theory training, make our lives easier in a way which in any other language would leave me recompiling gcc for the next 2 hours.
module DependencyLoader
protected
def append_features(base)
@dep_modyools.each { |mod|
base.send :include, mod
}
super(base)
end
def dep_include(modyool)
@dep_modyools ||= []
@dep_modyools << modyool
end
end
module M2
def self.included(base)
base.extend(ClassMethods)
end
module ClassMethods
def klass_meth
STDERR.puts("A classy method")
end
end
def meth
STDERR.puts("instant method")
end
end
module M1
extend DependencyLoader
dep_include M2
def meth
STDERR.puts("instant NOODLES!")
super
end
end
class Foo
include M1
end
Foo.new.meth() #Prints: "instant NOODLES!" then "instant method"
Foo.klass_meth() #Prints: "A classy method"
Now we have a drop-in substitute for include called dep_include. Huzzah! dep_include does what you expect by including module M2 on the base class before including M1. Given that most folks writing modules are going to use the ClassMethods pattern from the top of the example, dep_include is almost always what you want. Unless you really want the class methods on your module. But you don't. Use dep_include.
Conveniently, metaprogramming in Ruby shares its description with that of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. |
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| Leftovers! |
[Nov. 28th, 2008|12:04 am] |
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...At my place tomorrow (Friday) starting at noon! |
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| Site Goes Public Today |
[Oct. 23rd, 2008|03:12 am] |
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Allyall is out of private beta as of, oh, 40 minutes ago. We also got a nod on a few of the local blogs. There will be much needing to be done tomorrow. |
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| OH NO THEY DIDN'T |
[Oct. 2nd, 2008|05:38 pm] |
Qwest is hijacking my DNS. I am unhappy. Whereas before I could `ssh <somehost>` and it would search my DNS path to find my server. Instead today I get Connection Refused. A ping quickly reveals it's because now it tries to connect to one Qwest's f**king "help" servers. Even better, their prominent opt out link was broken; I had to click through the question in the FAQ to actually turn it off.
Safari gives me this:
I'd care less if I had a choice in ISPs 'cause I'd already be on the phone canceling service. And who says net neutrality is a bad thing? |
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| Introduction to the Meltdown |
[Oct. 1st, 2008|11:19 am] |
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CNN ran an excellent article explaining Credit Default Swaps (CDSes), the main reason AIG failed. If you're wondering what the hell is going on and how a corporation can go from being worth billions to suddenly bankrupt, this article is for you. In short, the amount of money on the line due to CDS contracts is ridiculous and dwarfs the GDP of the entire country. |
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| Free Stuff |
[Aug. 9th, 2008|04:49 pm] |
I'm cleaning out my stuff in preparation of moving. The following items are going on craigslist free if they are not claimed by you:
Software:
- Command & Conqueror: Generals (Windows)
- Rise of Nations (Windows)
- Age of Empires 2 (Windows)
- Age of Empires 3 (Windows)
- Office 2004 (Mac)
- Office 2003 (Windows)
- Virtual PC 7 with Windows XP Professional (Mac) x2
- Virtual PC 7 (Mac)
Hardware
- Dell Desktop PC, PII 300Mhz, 256MB RAM, 2x10/100 Ethernet, 2xPCMCIA
- Samsung CDMA Phone, in box (Sprint)
- Mini ITX Case (dead mobo included w/256MB RAM if you want it)
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| OMFG Crooked STILL RIGHT NOW!!!111!! |
[Aug. 1st, 2008|11:47 am] |
I was working and the band (usually terrible and annoying) in the park was playing some wicked banjo. Then I was like, "I know that song, Lulu Gal, Crooked Still does it." Then I looked on their web site and they are totally playing today in Occidental Park!!!!!
Update: Concert was awesome. And they have a new album, Still Crooked, available on iTMS and CD. |
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