Quick New England Rudis family update.

Winter seems to be wearing quite thin on all of us. Kids are more than just a tad cranky and Mary & I are more than just a bit wiped. It appears we grew a bit soft in Seattle and are eagerly awaiting sunnier days and warmer temperatures. Thankfully, both Mary & the kids get a break or two in February and I head out west in March to catch up with my Seattle work-team (plus, am *so* looking forward, more than words can express, to seeing @wygle [& the WL4], @joeday, @dustindk, @krombein, @thejedi, @jsorge, @jfriend, @froissart, @aai, @harlemaniac, @geissen and a host of others).

Tori kicked butt in school this past quarter and Jarrod is also doing really well. Ian is as adorable as ever and is as scary-smart as his brother. We are really missing Liz (no one to Catan with :-) after her visit in December. Mom is as ornery as ever and the cat seems to be the only content one of the bunch of us.

Be sure to check out Jarrod's new place to post his Lego creations and keep watching for updates. Once it's less hostile out, we'll start posting pix again :-)

Forgot to disable auto-post from the NotObvious blog.

Catch the original over there

Apologies for the auto-post from the NotObvious blog...am disabling it today.

NB: I made it all lower-case to help emphasize the repetitions and I counted all "America|America's|American|American", etc as "america".

Larger version is also there if you click on the image.

Via @shpigford :

Original blog post from Don Miller

Lots of folks seem to have difficulty with converting apache mod_rewrite rules to nginx format.

If you are trying to get the Urli URL shortener working under nginx, the following singular rewrite rule should work, provided you have not installed it under a subdirectory:

                if (!-e $request_filename) {
                        rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 last ;
                        break ;
                }

Unless you explicitly comment out or modify the logic in check_htaccess() in application/libraries/urli.php, you will also need to ensure a dummy (or real, in the event you need to quickly switch back to apache) .htaccess file exists at the root directory as well.

A while back I wrote something for Dropbox users on OS X called Dropbox Cache Cleaner. It was early in the life of the now infamous file sharing/syncing service and they had an effective but rudimentary method of caching deleted items in the event you really needed them back. The trouble was that it could consume large amounts of disk space without you even knowing it.

Figures on government spending and debt (last six digits are eliminated). The government's fiscal year runs Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.

Total public debt subject to limit Jan. 22		12,245,872
Statutory debt limit					12,394,000
Total public debt outstanding Jan. 22			12,302,465
Operating balance Jan. 22				   142,454
Interest fiscal year 2009				   383,365
Interest fiscal year 2008				   451,154
Deficit fiscal year 2009				 1,417,121
Deficit fiscal year 2008				   454,798
Receipts fiscal year 2009				 2,104,613
Receipts fiscal year 2008				 2,523,642
Outlays fiscal year 2009				 3,521,734
Outlays fiscal year 2008				 2,978,440
Gold assets in September				    11,041

UPDATE: fixed link to Gabe's article thx to Daughter Prime

Tori & I saw The Book of Eli this past weekend. While it was not perfect, it was a really good movie. I don't want to ruin any of the plot beyond what the trailers have already given away and was going to post my impressions of it from a different perspective, but Gabe Taviano already said most of what I would have written. Since there are already enough agitated electrons on the Internet, I will just encourage you to give his post a read and also to go see the movie.

This will only mean something to a fraction of the folks who visit, but RDN (and all the sites hosted on the server) are now 100% switched to the nginx web server. Anything wonky over the next few hours/days should be attributed to this change and pls drop a note in the comments (if they still work) or to my e-mail if things do begin to look strange.

Originally shared by @wygle :

The Department of Homeland Security publishes an ~daily Open Source Infrastructure Report which contains a summary of open-source published information concerning significant critical infrastructure issues (and not just IT security related). You can subscribe to e-mail alerts to be notified when they are available (they do not publish on weekends or holidays) and are in PDF format. While the information is sometimes a bit dated (by a day or two), I have found interesting/useful data in almost every report. It definitely belongs on your quick-scan list for the day.

There is, unfortunately, no "permalink" to the latest published report and - while PDF is an acceptable means of distribution - it means having a PDF viewer installed or available, which may not be the case on all systems.

I came up with a solution to both of these issues by creating a bookmarklet that always links to the current day's report (so it will not work if there is no report for today or the report has not uploaded yet) and turns the link into a Google PDF Viewer document, so you can see it in virtually any browser without the need for a PDF plug-in and without having to download it to your local system.

The bookmarklet has been tested with IE 7, Safari 4 & Firefox 3.5 and you just need to drag the link below to your bookmarks bar. Drop me a note in the comments if you encounter any errors or have any enhancements to it.

Today's DHS OSIR

Hulu has the "original" Cap' movie made back in the 80's. Good. Times. (Hulu link kick in after the jump)

A fellow Twitterer: @mckeay - posted a link to this trailer from the impending Star Blazers (a.k.a. Space Battleship Yamato) movie!!!

If you know Japanese, then the official movie site might be useful to you. Keep watching it for regular peeks into movie stills and info.

TrekWeb has some additional details (so does Collider) and FanBoy has some vid cap stills and commentary.

io9 kinda regurgitates info from other sites (or vice-versa).

For current info, you can always follow the Wikipedia page which will no doubt be updated pretty religiously.

I've been waiting over 20 years for this.