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- Personal Saving Rate, January 1959 through January 2009 from the St. Louis fed
- The same data as a Numbers spreadsheet (zip) and Excel spreadsheet, with annual averages
Caligula's Giant Ship
Like any good geek, I have a naming system for my computers and associated devices. Real systems — which I define as those that run SSH — are named after Roman Emperors; things that are computer-like but don’t run SSH are named after Roman generals.
I have also taken to naming each of the disks attached to a machine after a land mass somehow connected to the Emperor it is named after. My main desktop is Caligula with the disks Capri, where Caligula lived under the care of Tiberius, Mauretania, which Tiberius annexed, and Germania, where Caligula accompanied his father on military campaigns as a young child. When I got a USB drive for keeping off-site backups, I needed to name it and though ships of the Roman Navy would be appropriate. What a pleasant surprise to find that Caligula had built a ship to transport the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square which when it was found in the 1950’s was named Caligula’s “Giant Ship”.
DIY R-Strap
After seeing the BlackRapid R-Strap mentioned on Photojojo I knew that I wanted one for greater convenience when walking about with my camera. I hate neck straps because they get in the way when you aren’t using them and make you look like a fat tourist when you are. I might as well break out the khaki shorts and Hawaiian shirt. Aside from the not-exactly-cheap $50 price tag, I figured that and R-Strap was something I should DIY.
My version of the R-Strap is a simple affair, consisting of the plate off my Manfrotto ballhead and some gear from the climbing section of REI. To begin with, I got myself a 2 foot long, 18mm runner which I wear like a bandolier. To this, I attach a simple locking carabiner - I just chose the smallest and cheapest one. I thought about using chintzy keychain carabiners, but then realized I’ll be hangning thousands of dollars of gear off of it and went with the slightly more expensive real thing.
Finally, I tied a small loop of nylon cord to the D-ring on my tripod plate, to which I clip the carabiner. If your tripod plate has a large enough ring, you could clip directly to it.
Track Day Diary
If you’re into cars, a weekend at the racetrack is as good as it gets. The local chapters of car clubs (BMW CCA, PCA, FCA, SCCA etc.) rent a track for the weekend, organize instructors from member volunteers, and allow you to Drive Like You Mean It on a real racetrack while teaching you to be a much better driver. Track weekends are variously called Driver’s Schools, High Performance Driver Education (HPDE), or simply track days. The weekends aren’t cheap — the NCC BMW CCA I used to drive with charges $430 and the GGC BMW CCA $525 — but are worth every penny. Your first time can be quite daunting, since it’s hard to know what to expect or how to prepare. Hopefully this overview of my most recent day with the Golden Gate Chapter at Infineon Raceway will be helpful.
Inspection
Two to three weeks prior to the track day, I get my car inspected by a mechanic I trust. They usually charge an hour of labor, but if you’re lucky you can get it thrown in with some maintenance you require — ask other club members. All clubs I know of require an inspection to ensure that your car is in tip top shape for being pushed to the limit. Common to all such inspections is that you have sufficient brake pad material left (more than half the pad) and that the brake fluid has been changed within the past six months. Other than those two specifics, most cars in good condition won’t need anything special done to work on the track, especially your first time.
Packing
On the Thursday before my track weekend, I start packing. I have a track/autocross box that contains paper towels, windshield cleaner (Stoner Invisible Glass), a quart of oil, a good air gauge, duct tape, the manual for my car, a couple of common wrenches, a torque wrench, a breaker bar and a bottle of white liquid shoe polish. Every day at the track I will use the glass cleaner to keep my windows super-clean, the air gauge to set my tire pressure, and the torque wrench to check my wheel bolts. I often end up adding a bit of oil throughout the course of the weekend and I’ve found the duct tape useful on a few occasions to fix that stupid plastic undertray on my E36.
As for the shoe polish, it’s one of the best tools for adjust air pressure. Simply put a bit of shoe polish on the sidewall of the tire and onto the shoulder block of the tread; when you get off the track, see where the polish has disappeared and adjust the tire pressure accordingly.
Additionally, I pack my portable air compressor (though most tracks have air available), a couple of towels, my helmet, and tech inspection form — the last two being a absolute requirements, since you can’t drive without them.
Personal stuff I bring includes a cooler filled with lots of water, some sandwiches, apples, and energy bars. Being something of a photographer I bring along my camera, since hot cars driving on a racetrack makes for good pictures. I also toss in some reading material and the Eagle Scout in me requires a bag with a complete change of clothes. If you’re coming home each day (which I do, since the track is only about an hour away), you probably don’t need the extra clothes, but do bring a sweatshirt and jacket, even if the forecast is for highs in the 80s. For those of us who live in urban areas, we aren’t used to being up at 6 in the morning — it can be pretty cold then. Also, unlike that NASCAR crap, you will drive rain or shine and in cold weather, always with the windows down. It won’t be a fun time if you’re cold.
Friday
On Friday, I come home from work, pack all of my gear into the car, and head to bed around 10PM. I won’t actually get there until 11 and probably won’t fall asleep until later still, but since I have to leave the house at 5:30AM to get to the track by 7, I make the effort to get a good night’s sleep. Why 7AM? The drivers meeting will be at 8AM, the instructors will do ride-along intro laps thereafter and the track opens at 9AM. All track events require everyone to attend the drivers meeting and, like the rest of the day, things run a very strict time table. Renting a track is very expensive and everyone wants to make the most of it, so be on time and build yourself some extra cushion, especially if it’s your first time out.
To The Track
United States Personal Savings Rate
Americans aren’t good at saving money. The average amount of disposable income—income less taxes, not to be confused with discretionary income—saved has dropped from 11% in the 1980s to 1% before the start of the current recession. A graph is appropriate here:
I’m not some anti-materialist nazi, but that downward march is the increased confusion that Americans have between “wants” and “needs”. Sure, real wages have decreased over this time period, but not nearly at the rate that savings has slumped.
The uptick for 2009? That’s the just-released data for January of this year which pegs the rate at 5%, up from 1.8% in 2008 and 0.5% the previous year. August of 2005 even featured a rate of negative 2.7%, a feat matched only by the -0.2% rate in 2001. Though I would generally argue that people thinking about their future rather than instant gratification is a wonderful change, increased saving isn’t what an economy needs to break out of a recession.
Sources:
fawk
There are a lot of old-school Unix commands that can be strung together to form miniatures programs a solution where one doesn’t already exist. Often times, they’re great for nothing more than trimming the output from command line programs to make ocular searching easier. awk is one of these great little text processing utilities, though I usually find myself using it in only it’s simplest fashion: to print a specific record from a line of input.
Caligula:~$ df -h|awk '{print $2}'
698Gi
298Gi
190Gi
That awk command, '{print $2}', is more than a bit cumbersome to type, so I keyed up a quick function in my .bashrc to make performing this quick operation easier:
Caligula:~$ df -h|fawk 2 698Gi 298Gi 190GiAnd the function:
function fawk {
first="awk '{print "
last="}'"
cmd="${first}$${1}${last}"
eval $cmd
}
Caps Lock to Control in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10)
I’ve written this post before, but things have changed since the 7.04 Feisty Fawn release, so it’s worth an update. In recent releases of Ubuntu the Gnome Control Center has made it easy to simply click away the unneeded caps lock key, turning it into whatever you want. I wanted to try KDE 4.2 a few days ago and found no way to turn off the caps lock key. From my previous post, I knew that it’s easy to add a line to the xorg.confwhich will turn the caps lock into another control, but when I opened the file on my Ubuntu 8.10 machine, I was surprised to find very little in it:
Section "Files" EndSectionSection "Module" Load "glx" EndSection
Section "Monitor" Identifier "Configured Monitor" EndSection
Section "Device" Identifier "Configured Video Device" Driver "fglrx" EndSection
Section "Screen" Identifier "Default Screen" Device "Configured Video Device" Monitor "Configured Monitor" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Virtual 1680 1050 EndSubSection EndSection
If you come from a long line of Linux use, this is a very odd X config indeed since it lists no input devices, but such is the magic of HAL which takes care of all that for you. The option to turn you caps-lock key into a control is set in the keyboard’s InputDevice section. The above-listed stock Ubuntu 8.10 xorg config doesn’t have an InputDevice section, nor does it have the associated ServerLayout block. The following can be appended to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "keyboard"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
InputDevice "keyboard"
EndSection
With that, you will now have a caps lock key no matter what window manager or desktop system you use. I love the caps lock as a control because I use vi extensively and make use of ^f & ^b, which move up and down pages, and ^e & ^y that move the buffer’s view up and down without moving the cursor. I’m sure emacs users will appreciate this change as well, since they use control alongside 6 or 7 other keys whenever they want to do something.
SSH Tunnels and Bouncing
I have a workstation at my office, drewble, that has a non-routable IP address. Our network is setup such that, even from the VPN, I can’t access that machine directly — I have to go through one of our dev servers to get to it. Obviously, having to hop from one machine to another is a bit cumbersome, but as with many thing, this can be alleviated with some simple Unix magic. A simple alias in my .bashrc makes the bouncing simple:
alias drewble="ssh -f -N dev1 -L 9999:drewble.genius.local:22; ssh -D7070 -p 9999 drew@localhost"
The first SSH command in this alias goes to the dev server, dev1, setting up a forward of the local port 9999 to the SSH port, 22, on my workstation, drewble, found via its zeroconf hostname. The -f options causes SSH to background after logging in and -N means that SSH won’t run any commands after loggging in; I only care about forwarding ports. The second command utilizes the tunnel setup on port 9999 to get me to the workstation, setting up a dynamic tunnel on port 7070 which can be used as a SOCKS proxy by things like my web browser.
Mac::iTunes::Library
Though I use Last.fm it’s not a perfect representation of my listening habits. Between the occasional server downtime, not uncommon in the Audioscrobbler days, I wanted to be able to get some accurate statistics about my music library. It’s easy to create smart playlists to find the number of songs you have of each genre or by each artist in your library, but much more interesting is to see what you actually listen to the most. There are a number of artist whom I only have a limited collection of, but enjoy quite a lot. DJ Miko being a great example - 10th by number of tracks, but a strong 3rd by playcount. I just can’t get enough of those Eurodance beats. Conversely, Scooter is a prolific producer, but a long way from my favorite artist.
Genre-wise, I’ve got a lot of trance, but apparently end up listening to Ska more. Is that really true? Well, it is by playcount, but I should probably to a listing based upon playcount times song length; Trance tracks tend to be lengthy, especially if you count the numerous DJ mixes I have. By this same token, I’d venture a guess that the average song length of my library, 5 minutes 13 seconds is on the longer end of the spectrum. Finally, the ratio of songs to artists is a quite reflection of whether a library is represented by an encyclopedic collection for each artist (high ratio) or a schizophrenic mix of singles (lower ratio). I have no idea what an absolute scale for this number is, but I’d love to hear results from others.
Also, my library has grown quite a bit:
Number of tracks: 10737 Total size: 85605.68 MB Average size: 7.97 MB Total time: 38d 23h 3m 0s Average time: 5m13s Ratio of songs/artists: 4.576726342711Most popular artists, by number of tracks: 137 ATB 118 Scooter 116 blink-182 115 Armin van Buuren 111 Paul van Dyk
Most popular artists, by playcount: 1585 blink-182 1279 Goldfinger 873 DJ Miko & Mini Me 837 Less Than Jake 753 Big D and the Kids Table
Most popular genres, by number of tracks: 1627 Trance 1219 Dance 1073 Ska 628 Rock 583 Vocal Trance
Most popular genres, by playcount: 8448 Ska 6334 Dance 5328 Trance 2846 Punk 2723 Rock
It’s certainly been a while since I started this project and the module that I spun off of it has been around for a good while. I’ve compiled the script into a PAR that should run without needing Perl or any modules on any 64 bit Mac OS X machine. From a terminal:
wget http://dinomite.net/2009/01/itunesstats chmod +x itunesstats ./itunesstats ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml 5
If that doesn’t work for you, you can simply install Mac::iTunes::Library with CPAN; CPAN might require configuration but, except for mirror selection, the defaults will work:
$ sudo -H cpan -i Mac::iTunes::Library
With the module installed, you can download and run the example script.
Details on the code: The module allows you to parse the iTunes XML library which is generated by iTunes every time the library changes. iTunes itself uses a binary file to manage your music and the XML is only generated as a courtesy. Thus, my module can represent a library and the items within it in full, but I only have a parser for the XML and provide no way of emitting a new XML library. brian d foy has a module that is able to parse the binary iTunes - as long as it’s version 4.5. For the uninformed, we’re on iTunes 8 these days. Updating that module might be my next project.
Air Travel with Lock Picks
For the first time a few months ago I traveled by plane and brought lock picks in my carry on luggage. After having read this article about sneaking lock picks in the extension tubes of rolling luggage, I wondered what would really be required to just sneak picks through. Though flying with lock picks isn’t illegal the TSA agents are not known for their accurate knowledge of the rules concerning air travel. I really wanted to have picks at my destination so that I could do a seminar on picking; I didn’t want them to be taken away by an overzealous agent.
Lock picks don’t have that much mass so I figured if I removed all of normal metal, including my belt, that I’d get through the metal detector OK with the picks in my pocket. I tried this tactic on the trip to my destination and was successful. After removing my belt, I just put my four picks & three torque wrenches in my shirt pocket and waltzed through the metal detector to no notice of the TSA agent. That was easy.
The return trip was equally uneventful, though I used a different method - I simply put my picks into the bag that I put through the X-ray. Again, this was of no interest to the TSA; either they didn’t notice or they know what picks are and that it’s OK to carry them. I’ll assume the former.
Long story short: you can easily sneak a few picks through in your pocket if you have no other metal on your person. Odds are you can get some through the X-ray machine without any hassle, as well.
What's so good about Amazon?
Why do so many people rave about Amazon’s recommendation engine? I bought a Canon 40D from Amazon only a few months ago, have looked at various accessories for that body, and have a Canon lens on my wishlist. Why are they recommending me a Nikon battery?