“Stormtec Stormbags”

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I was dismayed to discover that the utility room in our new house does not have a drain in it, one of its very few shortcomings. If the water heater ever leaks (as happened in our previous house once already), it will be a major problem — there’s nowhere for the water to go. There is a bathroom right next door to it, with a drain in the floor, but that floor is higher than the one in the utility room. And unfortunately we rarely have any reason to visit the utility room, so we might not notice a leak until it has done some damage.

It might be a good idea to have one or two of these handy items sitting around the water heater for when that happens. They would contain the leak until we noticed it and could deal with it.

I still have to work out some way to alert us to the problem though. For now I’ve scheduled a weekly reminder to check the room, but I’d really prefer a better solution.

“Zoom for audio enables you to hear a single conversation in huge crowd”

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How long do you think it will take for this to be adopted by intelligence services worldwide? 😉 So much for hiding conversations from electronic eavesdroppers by holding them near running water.

(My guess: they’ve already got it. I could be wrong, but it’s an obvious idea to any science guy — or hard science fiction buff — so I can’t believe that they’ve never thought to try it.)

“Boston firefighters get oxygen masks for cats and dogs”

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Happy Hallowe’en! And to celebrate, here’s a story about a different kind of mask — one that firefighters can use to keep Fido and Fluffy breathing while they’re being rescued from a burning building.

In the last few human generations, cats and dogs have gone from working cohabitors of our land, to beloved family pets, to members of the family. I know several people who treat their pets as their children, and GoddessJ and I have been known to do that ourselves, with our felines. This is just the latest manifestation of that progression.

Intelligence

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I was somewhat surprised when I read that people are getting more intelligent, on average, every decade. (Here’s more evidence of it.) But it makes sense… no matter what the cause, more people are learning how to think better all the time. And more people believe they can be smarter, from seeing smarter people around them, which has been shown to increase both the willingness to learn and intelligence itself.

Where will this trend take us? The Technological Singularity that futurist Ray Kurzweil believes in may well lie on our path. It’s impossible to predict, from this side of it, what the other side might look like. But we do seem to be headed in that direction, so it’s something that we should be thinking about.

Project M, and Date Handling

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First, for those of you who know and care about it: after seven years of work, the theory for Project X is successfully finished! (Hurray!) However, I haven’t found a simple — but not too simple — use for it so I could prove that it works. I’m not sure I’ll be able to commercialize it any time soon. On the plus side, I’ve thought of several small non-desktop-computer applications where it would be critical; on the minus side, the devices that it would go into (especially with the kind of computing power necessary for this) aren’t yet out of the labs, and likely won’t be in the next five years.

So I’ve started development on a new series of programs. The first is a “better mousetrap” that not only scratches a couple long-time itches of mine, but should be of interest to a lot of other people as well. I’ll refer to that as “Project M” on this blog from here on, and I won’t be giving away many details about it until it’s released.

One of the things that Project M is going to need is good date handling. It’s going to be used with lots of other programs and in lots of different countries worldwide, and it has to understand the dates and times for each country properly. Much of the heavy lifting for date/time handling is taken care of by the Boost.Date_Time library, but one thing it doesn’t do is tell you what time zone the current system is set to.

I was flabbergasted by this omission. Knowing the time zone that you’re in is an absolute requirement for converting times between different zones. But when I dug into it, I saw why: because it’s a hard problem. So the library author punts: you, the developer, have to tell the library what time zone it’s in, and then it will take care of everything else for you. Not necessarily all that difficult, but doing it in a cross-platform way required quite a bit of research, thought, and experimentation (which is why there was no blog entry yesterday, I was too busy working on it).

I can’t really fathom why Linux developers haven’t settled on a good standard for this. The OS knows what time zone the system is in, but it’s all but impossible to get it to divulge that information portably. Different distributions all have different ways of doing it, and most of them are ridiculously indirect.

What I ended up doing was writing code for the system that Ubuntu uses (hopefully shared by other distributions as well), and writing a fall-back method for everything else. The fall-back code uses standard C library calls to fake it. It’ll work fine for any country that ignores the insanity that is Daylight Savings Time (DST), and in any country that shares the politically motivated and apparently randomly-changing dates that DST begins and ends in the US, but will only somewhat work in other places that use DST. Without knowing the actual location of the system, that’s the best I can manage.

Hopefully Linux distributions will decide on a standard method of discovering the system time zone. Until then, there’s inevitably going to be a lot of pain and confusion when it comes to dates and times.

“Groin stretches: Marks & Spencer makes men ‘2 sizes bigger'”

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I certainly hope that these were intended as a gag gift. Most guys go out of their way not to walk around with that kind of silhouette, outside of a bedroom.

The only person that I can remotely imagine that a guy might want to impress that way is a potential sex partner. And in most cases, if she notices at all, I doubt she’ll be overly impressed by a fellow who appears to be in need of immediate medical attention because he’s taken an entire bottle of little blue pills.

On the other hand, this is pretty much the only “male enhancement” I’ve ever heard of that would definitely work. 😉

“Yet another thing to worry about – Toasted Skin Syndrome”

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Just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about already. 😉

For the record, I sometimes use my Apple MacBook Pro on my lap, occasionally for extended periods, and have never suffered from Toasted Skin Syndrome. But then, like almost everyone, I’m smart enough to move it when it gets uncomfortably hot, even if I’m deep into a programming problem at the time.