Posts

• Ubuntu keyboard tweak

  I make XKB tweaks in Ubuntu Linux to get my keyboard configured the way I like.

• Back to the Garden

  God and the Devil cross paths in the early nineties.

• So goes the Murga

  The Murga is a choral work with brief interludes of dialog. The chorus of about a dozen members, plus a choral director and a rhythm section of three make-up the complete complement of performers.

• Marketing

  How is it that we've arrived here, where surfaces have greater significance than substance?

• Deconstructing an Ad

  A young woman, college age, is hurrying along, as if she's getting away with something.

• At Andover Airport

  It's amazing how similar. Through all of the changes, these two resemble each other.

• WBreeze.com on AWS

  I’ve been serving WBreeze.com from a Linux server hosted at Linode. The trouble with doing so is that I have to maintain the server and software installations. This is one too many chores for me; so, instead I’ve chosen the chore of moving the site to AWS.

• An update to Davenport

  I’m trying to spin-up a new instance of socelect.org and need to compile the Davenport library for it.

• The Disappeared

  On the main street, 18 July, that runs east to west from the old city to the city’s largest park, tens of thousands came out to walk silently (or at least with a murmuring whisper) in memory of the disappeared.

• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

  How do we break free from our stories, our reenactment, and get back to the world?

• The four enemies

  This is a rough summary of a path described by the Yaqui Native American known as Don Juan, and related by a young anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda in "The Teachings of Don Juan".

• Where is Brisa

  So where is Brisa? Where has she been? To London? To visit the queen?

• Brisa launched

  Brisa has launched again after three months in the boat yard. We launched for the first time with the new name. As such, there was a ceremony to introduce the boat to Poseidon, ruler of the seas. The ceremony involves pouring perfectly delicious champagne into the ocean. You can guess that we shared a little with the god. Otherwise we wouldn’t know how perfectly delicious it was.

• Indemnification clauses

  You agree to these things forever, for the rest of your life or the life of the corporation, regardless of whether you continue to be a customer.

• Montevideo in the rain

  This city is always beautiful, with its tree lined streets, uneven sidewalks and decorative facades to be found on any block.

• Rooftops

  There’s something about these rooftops. And the streets. And the light. The mix of construction materials, textures, natural greenery, fabrics. Sound and smell might have something to do with it. Surely. Hopefully for you, not too much. You can’t have those. You can have these few photographs. Montevideo. The neighborhood of Palermo. But that might be unnecessarily more specific. Or not.

• Spin Training

  Anyone messing around with aerobatics will eventually surprise themselves with a spin. Sometimes sooner, often later. The scary kind we call "aggravated". The kind that spring like a tiger from out of nowhere to pin you down with their hot breath in your face, ready to rip out your throat and tear open your rib cage.

• The Thermal

  How could the boat be in an island of calm with wind all around? "It must be something wrong with my perception," he thought.

• El viejo ... y el mar?

  Aquí hay una escultura y una poema por Guillermo Gómez Mac. Here is a sculpture and a poem by Guillermo Gómez Mac.

• Wandering home

  Brisa, currently “Thinkabout”, is a Westsail 32, thirty-two foot, double-ended, heavy displacement, cutter-rigged sailboat. She was built as a kit by the Westsail corporation in Costa Mesa, California (a southern part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, near the coast, adjacent to Newport Beach) in 1979. She has hull number 748. She is currently lying in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico.

• Two buildings

  Here’s a description of two beautiful buildings, both hotels, in the town of Loreto, on the southern Baja peninsula (BCS) in Mexico.

• WhatsApp privacy policy

  Recently we explored the WhatsApp TOS. We were planning to get beyond WhatsApp, but the TOS were long. We’re splitting it up instead. This time we’ll paraphrase the WhatsApp privacy policy. It’s boring. But I’ll bet you’ll be surprised.

• Island humor

  It isn't my practice to tell jokes, but I really like this one.

• Baja sea birds

  Watching some sea birds on the western shore of the Sea of Cortéz

• WhatsApp TOS

  There is very little here in Uruguay that isn't mediated or facilitated in some manner via WhatsApp. WhatsApp is ubiquitous here. The bank has a WhatsApp number they will answer. The health insurance company. The phone and internet company. If you want a group to work-out with, they're on WhatsApp.

• The Skinner box

  We have diverted our social instincts into, like, this weird Skinner box.

• The Chakras

  The chakras are areas of our bodies lined up along the spinal column. Visualizing these areas, we can identify concepts and examine of our thought patterns and behaviors from different points of view.

• Liberty for all people

  Let’s propose a goal. The goal is that every last person on earth be free to succeed, to realize their potential.

• Por Boston

  Acá en los primeros días de Setiembre me encuentro en Boston, donde viví hace cuarenta años . Estoy acá para hacerme un hisopado para detectar coronavirus antes de viajar a Uruguay.

• de que

  Here is a song, "de que" written in 1973 by the popular Uruguayan musical artist, Alfredo Zitarrosa, with a translation in English.

• Two traveler scams

  Two ways you might lose your luggage to con artists when traveling.

• How we are complicit.

  This is an editorial about us, about how we have been complicit in undermining Democracy in the United States. It made rounds among a circle of friends and family, and found its way to me. I'm reproducing it here with permission.

• Los Veleros Idem

  Al norte extremo del estado de Nueva York en los Estados Unidos, en el lago que se llama Upper Saint Regis (St. Regis Superior), viven los veleros Idem.

• Pa'l que se va / For him who goes

  Pongo acá las letras de un canción por Alfredo Zitarrosa, "Pa’l que se va". Here’s a translation of a song by Alfredo Zitarrosa, "For him who goes"

• El Polonio

  Ví una película en cine.ar titulada, "El Polonio". Todos los paisajes son de Cabo Polonio.

• Por debajo de la superficie

  Como extraño a Uruguay

• My COVID vacation

  My COVID enforced vacation started when I abandoned La Paz in Baja California Sur to head to Portugal, where I was turned-back from their recently closed border and sent packing to the United States.

• Cambio de clima

  Así es como me siento en esta primavera del norte, adentro de la belleza que es la naturaleza.

• Politica colectiva

  Cada vez estoy más convencido de que la negociación colectiva pide cosas equivocadas.

• Mi cobijo

  Afuera una brisa ligera mueve las frondas y los brazos de los pinitos. Hay arboles coníferos con aguja de pino perenne. Los arboles crecen derechos y altos. Crean un toldo arriba y un suelo suave abajo.

• Caught Between Borders

  This is a very long description of my experience attempting to enter into Portugal a few days after the European Union had shut its borders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a story about how the rapid shutdown of normal life caught one person out.

• Generosidad

  Riesgos compartidos

• Los Chakras

  Los chakras son áreas de nuestro cuerpo alineados a lo largo de la columna vertebral. Visualizando estas áreas, podemos identificar conceptos y aspectos de nuestros pensamientos y comportamiento.

• El Camino Creativo

  Cada persona, cada ser humano tiene su propuesta y sus obras para crear por el mundo en su vida.

• Ashes of Truth

  A couple of months ago, I listened to a pod-cast from Hi Phi Nation about a disagreement between the documentary film maker Errol Morris and philosopher Thomas Kuhn. The podcast is called, "The Ashes of Truth"

• Test with Emoji

  Emoji. They're everywhere these days. If your application takes user input, guess what? You're going to get them.

• C to R

  Earlier this month I wrote about wrapping routines in C for calling from Ruby. A month later I'm writing about having C code called from the R statistical programming language. I didn't expect to be here.

• Speaking up

  You are ten years old and in the fifth grade. Some of the other kids in your class have taken to picking on you. It's sport for them. They like to do it.

• C to Ruby

  Having a C implementation of Davenport's algorithm, the next step was to make it usable from Ruby. Recall that [socelect.org](https://socelect.org) is served-up using Ruby on Rails.

• Cocaína Querida de Europa

  Escuché que un gran cargamento de cocaína vino a través de Uruguay hacia los mercados Europeos, y que Uruguay debería pararlo para proteger a los pobrecitos de Europa.

• Implementing Davenport

  By now, having read the previous post, you have an idea what excites me about Kemeny orders and Davenport's algorithm. What I felt was missing was a good implementation.

• Davenport's Algorithm

  Davenport's algorithm, developed in the early oughts by Andrew Davenport in the math department at IBM TJ Watson Research center in Yorktown Heights, New York, provides a practical way to compute a Kemeny-Young preference ranking from some number of individual preference rankings.

• POUI

  POUI, pronounced "Poe'wee", is an acronym for "Partial Order User Interface." The goal of the interface is to make it possible and intuitive to sort a list of alternatives into a partial ordering.

• Socelect.org

  The first fully functional version of socelect.org is now published, up and running.

• Fútbol Decisions

  Over the past week I’ve seen two penalty shootouts in the quarter-finals of the 2019 Copa América.

• To the moon

  This year, July 20, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing.

• Goodbye myFltTime

  In 2011 I started a project for pilot flight time logging and called it, “myFltTime.com”. The idea was to do something I knew, and try to build a software as a service (SAAS) product that would bootstrap into a sustainable business.

• SCCM and Git

  There are files in our software systems that we desire to have under source control, but which we never edit. These are source code configuration management (SCCM) files such as Gemfile.lock, npm.shrinkwrap.json, or db/schema.rb.

• Keeping minitest Dry

  Here’s a test written with minitest as extended for Rails. It is from the open source Rails project, IACCDB.

• Coroutines

  Have you ever wondered how a construction crane grows with the building? Well, I have. Here’s how it works.

• Your Professional Pedigree

  I was a LinkedIn early adopter in 2007. My profile there was very complete and well connected. In April, 2017 I got freaked-out about privacy and an update to LinkedIn terms. (What about them in particular I don't recall.) I deleted my account.

• The Dispossessed

  When I read about the death of Ursula K Le Guin in the New York Times, at the end of January, I thought how agreeable she sounded, remembered that I hadn’t found her books accessible when I first encountered them as an adolescent, for whatever reason, and decided to try reading one of them again.

• Why I'm not on Facebook

  I don't use these programs because they leak information about who your contacts are, whom you talk with, when, and how often, to invisible, unaccountable third parties.

• Merging migrations

  In Rails, the file db/structure.sql or db/schema.rb (depending) captures a snapshot of the state of the development database after a migration, when you run the db:migrate or db:schema:dump tasks.

• Git merge v. rebase

  I’ve been looking into the git merge v. rebase endless theological debate. It comes up over and over. But I’ve only ever gotten into trouble trying to rebase. Not getting all wrapped up over how my commit history looks and just merging has given me fewer issues.

• RSpec have HTTP status upgrade

  When upgrading a project to the Rails 5.2 pre-release we started to see some deprecation warnings in our RSpec runs. The warnings were as follows, and occurred wherever have_http_status(:success) or have_success_status and the like were used in tests.