http://dinomite.net Musings without prejudice Tue, 07 Oct 2008 05:51:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (H.R. 1424) was a good thing for rum lovers: SEC. 308. INCREASE IN LIMIT ON COVER OVER OF RUM EXCISE TAX TO PUERTO RICO AND THE VIRGIN ISLANDS. (a) In General.--Paragraph (1) of section 7652(f) is amended by ... http://dinomite.net/2008/a-good-day-for-rum/ It's always interesting to see what keywords debaters drop to get their points across. To analyze tonight's debate between Biden & Palin, I grabbed a transcript from CNN that was posted shortly after. The transcript listed each speaker's name (Biden, Ifill or Palin), followed by their first sentence ... http://dinomite.net/2008/word-frequency-in-the-vice-presidential-debate/ Best known for their eponymous debut album, Dune is a mid-90's techno outfit whose music incorporates many of the styles endemic to House and Dance at the time. Expedicion is a good exploration of the style, featuring lots of fast beats throughout, a bit singing vocals and even some ... http://dinomite.net/2008/old-techno-album-reviews-dune-expedicion/ I listen to some podcasts daily that have annoying messages in them that never change. With a bit of research, I came across the MP3::Splitter module on CPAN which has somewhat confusing documentation but provides a method mp3split() that pulls specified pieces of a file. You provide mp3split() ... http://dinomite.net/2008/splitting-mp3s-in-perl/ After a new challenge, Saving Time was posted a few weeks ago, I'm finally getting to another round of Code Golf. As usual, my preferred language is Perl; don't read below if you don't want hints! My first draft grabs the hour and minutes using capturing in a regex, then ... http://dinomite.net/2008/code-golf-saving-time/ I gave this post a vague title because the control of federal lands, such as National Parks, National Memorials and National Forests, is a surprisingly complicated issue. Tracts controlled by the federal government arise from disparate processes and are controlled by a number of different agencies including the National ... http://dinomite.net/2008/united-states-federal-lands/ Since he was mentioned on The Daily Show a few weeks ago, Rick Ross has quickly become my favorite rapper. The king of repetition, Ross hails from Miami and makes much of his activities trafficking drugs despite allegations that he worked for the man during part of his life. ... http://dinomite.net/2008/rick-ross-financial-success/ The other day I wanted to diff a pair of files on two different hosts, stg1 and stg2. Normally, I would do so by copying on of the files to the other host, or grabbing them both onto my workstation with scp; "there must be a better way," I ... http://dinomite.net/2008/shell-command-substitution/ After getting access to some new machines, I noticed that SSHing too them was excruciatingly slow, taking 5-10 seconds to ask for a password and no faster using keys. I pulled open the global SSH config file, /etc/ssh/ssh_config on my Ubuntu machine and found a couple of GSSAPI things ... http://dinomite.net/2008/speeding-up-ssh-logins-in-ubuntu/ While looking through the audio from the last hope, I stumbled across Johnny Long's talk entitle No-Tech Hacking. I saw this talk a couple of years ago at ShmooCon and re-watched it via the above Google Video link and it's just as good as the first time. Anyone ... http://dinomite.net/2008/no-tech-hacking/