book: ibm and the holocaust

I just finished this book, you should read it too. It's actually not about IBM, but rather about power/money, information, doublespeak and corporate ethics. About how IBM, through Thomas J. Watson (CEO at this moment), ended up concluding a letter to Adolf Hitler with "My wife and my family join in best wishes for you." on July 5, 1937.

First, the side note: if like me you've been slacking during your history classes, it will be a good reminder of key people, dates, and events of nazism and WWII.

But most importantly, I hope it will surface some contradictions between what "feels right" to you and what you actually end up doing, especially at work. It's not a fun book, it's a book that will make you THINK.

IBM and the holocaust on Amazon.com

q: why does this blog call itself a "blag"?

a: because of xkcd #148:

elliott++

Chris Garneau has an amazing cover of Between the bars, admirably shot by the fine folks of La Blogothèque.

vi hart and fibonacci numbers

The worlds greatest math doodler just pushed part3 of her series about "Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant":
Liked? Have a look at Part1 and Part2.

On related news, beware:

That's all folks for today, which approximately marks the Floor(27 * 365.242198)^th day after I saw light. Wheeeeee, out there are pancakes topped with lit candles.

communicate

Great word. Let's just embolden a few letters: communicate.

remember the 10yr-old you, listening to a tree?

via BoingBoing.

build that wall

If you haven't played Bastion yet, get it now, it's a masterpiece of craftsmanship and narration. Then listen to this beautiful version of the theme, and smile:

marathon, smart "run or focus app" script for X

I wanted a way to switch between applications that would be quicker/leaner than Alt-Tab, so I created a simple script to do just that:

• run an app if not running
• focus it if already running

Combined with GNOME keyboard shortcuts, that means you're always one keypress away from your beloved firefox/gedit/terminal/<insert-your-favorite-app-here>. Awesome.

It's called marathon, 'coz it's a smart runner, and it's on GitHub. Depends on wmctrl and has a few quirks, read the README.

Byproduct of this mini-project, a handy ffmpeg one-liner to crop and trim a video:
ffmpeg -i in.webm -ss 00:00:04.10 -t 9.5 -vf crop=960:540:0:0 out.webm

parkings

“For 5000 years, we built cities around people, and they worked well. For 50 years we’ve built them around the parking lot—a ridiculous use of land, of money, and an intrusion into the intimacy of human scale. Now we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. The saving grace is that the first 5000 years might come back again.”

From an excellent article on urban planning. Food for thought for anyone living in North America, or in any of the car/parking dictated spaces on earth. Amen, Mr Cole.

Via kottke.

three thirty three

\o/ . My second marathon went viddy well: 3h33min, which is better than last year (I did 3h44min) especially considering the tough meteo conditions today (23 degrees celsius plus high humidity).

Gender place: 297/1967, category place: 37/205!
Official sportstats.ca stats here, personal stats below and here (this watch is fantastic —uh maybe a little bit too fantastic, is it saying I stopped twelve times? Well, I guess I have some regularity objectives for next year :P—):


[Note for people reading me through the RSS feed: open the page to see the embedded stats]