Why are software development esitmations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? →
Easily one of the best answers on Quora ever.
Twenty-Five Things Learned From Opening a Bookstore →
“Under no circumstances should you put the sex manuals in the free baskets. Parents will show up.”
Satellite View of Air Traffic Patterns →
My what busy airspace you have!
The State of the Union →
Interactive display that lets you watch the speech, while viewing the text, and with some facts given disputed or verified.
Watching Apple win the world →
David Heinemeier Hansson, or DHH as he is known, nails what yesterday’s stellar Apple numbers mean. I also switched in 2002, and have done my fair share of evangelizing. It isn’t so much a vindication as it is a validation.
These cars are unbelievably fast. The action starts about 55 seconds into the video. (via: Laughing Squid)
Let The Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future is Here →
This will completely change the landscape of personal transportation.
Why iPhones Are ‘Made in China’ →
We simply don’t have the workforce nor the cultural willingness to do the work.
Weekend in Kansas City
CommentsSibylle and I just had a fantastic weekend in Kansas City. We took in Yo-Yo Ma’s appearance with the Kansas City Symphony Saturday evening, spent the night in a wonderful hotel near Country Club Plaza, treated ourselves to a late night snack at Cheesecake Factory, visited some of our favorite shops in Leawood and Overland Park, and attended a Stanislav Ioudenitch piano master class.
It all started on Tuesday when I discovered that Yo-Yo Ma was going to be performing in the new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts with the Kansas City Symphony. We were stunned to discover that there were still tickets left. Exactly two seats for the Saturday evening performance.
Knowing that the drive home is two long hours in the dark we started looking around for a place to stay. We choose the Courtyard by Marriot on J. C. Nichols Parkway and were delighted with our room and the entire experience there. The hotel was originally apartments, and the hotel has preserved much of the 1920s charm in the building. There are still milk closets in the hallways that allowed milk delivery while maintaining peace and privacy in the apartment. Our room, while cozy, was clean and wonderfully inviting.
The concert with Yo-Yo Ma was exquisite. When I was a child, perhaps 10 or 12 years old, my father took me to see him and Emanuel Ax play. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have seen him play live twice. The Dvořák Cello Concerto performance was very good. His encore performance of the Sarabande from the D Major Bach Cello Suite was simply superlative. After the performance we treated ourselves to a late night snack at Cheesecake Factory. We each had an appetizer and a piece of cheesecake. We returned to our room around midnight completely satisfied with our evening.
Sunday we had a long lazy start to the day that included the breakfast buffet in the hotel. Around 11:30 we headed south to Leawood and Overland Park to visit some of our favorite shops. Sibylle found two sweaters and I got a chance to visit the Apple store and drool over the iPhone 4S I’ll be getting in a couple of weeks when I am eligible for an upgrade. We also shopped at Whole Foods, picking up a small lunch there too.
Park University north of Kansas City has an excellent music department including Cliburn Gold Medalist Stanislav Ioudenitch. Sibylle learned that he was giving a piano master class at UMKC on Sunday afternoon, so we timed our shopping to allow us to return to central Kansas City to attend. Even a beginning cello student can learn many things from a well presented master class.
We packed a lot in to two days (especially since Sibylle had her normal Saturday lessons prior to our departure Saturday afternoon) and enjoyed every moment of it. Recently we almost forgot about a cello recital in Manhattan and had to rush to the hall. The spontaneity of that evening managed to make it better. Our trip to Kansas City this weekend had that same air of spontaneity, and it too has been wonderful.
Install Specific Homebrew Formula Version
CommentsEarlier today, while trying to get a new Jekyll plugin to work, I was getting errors regarding libiconv. Without thinking about my actions I decided that I needed a newer version and so I removed it via Homebrew.
$ brew remove libiconv
And then I installed it again,
$ brew install libiconv
This fixed the problem I had getting the dependencies for the plugin to work, but it broke my Octopress installation. Badly. Whoops.
A quick search on Google turned up this set of instructions on Stack Overflow which fixed my problem, quickly and easily.
First you search the cache of previously installed formulae using the git command. This command assumes you are at the root of your Homebrew install, typically /usr/local.
git log -S'1.13.1' -- Library/Formula/libiconv.rb
In my case I previously had version 1.13.1 of libiconv and needed it back. This command will show you the commits containing that version number. There should be two, one where it was added and one where it was removed. Here are my command results:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 | |
The commit I was interested in is 08c9206b03af57fa57fcc9278d83150fb38b393d. The next commands create a branch with that commit, runs the brew install command (now against the previous version), and then return us to the master branch. The final command is option, leaving the branch in place maintains a history of what’s happened.
± git checkout -b libiconv-1.13.1 08c9206b03af57fa57fcc9278d83150fb38b393d
Switched to a new branch 'libiconv-1.13.1'
± brew install libiconv
==> Downloading http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.13.1.tar.gz
File already downloaded and cached to /Users/mark/Library/Caches/Homebrew
± git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
(The brew install libiconv output has been truncated for brevity sake.)
Now I have two versions of libiconv installed under /usr/local/Cellar/libiconv, 1.13.1, and 1.14. My Octopress instances are happy again, and the new plugin I am experimenting with also works.
A momentary carelessness saved by Git.