ExpanDrive

“Gary” directed by Clément Soulmagnon, Yann Benedi, Sébastien Eballard, Quentin Chaillet (the French like to have a lot of directors). It’s 7 minutes long and spectacularly beautiful. You’re going to want to click on the link and watch it in HD on Vimeo, rather than in the embedded player. I don’t speak French, but it really didn’t hold me back.

Also, a testimonial of the Kiva system in action at Zappos. The pod lifting mechanism is a screw jack. When lifting or lowering a pod, the robot spins on the floor at same speed as the screw, but in the opposite direction, to keep the pod from rotating. I can’t tell for sure, but I think that the robots are guided primarily by barcode stickers on the floor, and that the lines and circles are just tire marks.

When I’m wailing on a project in bash, I frequently find myself wanting to cd back to the project root. Since we use git, this is the same as the git_root directory. So I wrote a bash function that looped through the directories in the current path and found the one that contained the .git/ directory.

Luckily, I thought to ask on #git if there was an easier way before I posted my script (because no one likes to look like a noob on their own blog). It turns out there’s a one liner. I’ve posted it here, with a little padding so that I can feel like I made a contribution.

function gr {
    ## If the current working directory is inside of 
    ## a git repository, this function will change
    ## it to the git root (ie, the directory that 
    ## contains the .git/ directory), and then print
    ## the new directory.    
    git branch > /dev/null 2>&1 || return 1
    cd "$(git rev-parse --show-cdup)".
    pwd
}

On my way home yesterday I discovered a little excitment on Memorial Drive in front of Trader Joe’s and Micro Center.

This is not a joke. The Gmail team has enabled an “Undo Send” feature in Gmail Labs. There’s no black magic or voodoo; it just holds onto your message for five seconds in case you want a panic take-back. After that, the email is gone and un-recallable, just like normal.

I rarely use the Gmail web interface, but I’ve thought about writing a Mail.app plugin to do this for years. I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to scramble into the “Sending…” folder and delete a message before it escapes. I’ve never once pulled it off.

The following blog post discusses the penultimate and proceeding episodes of Battlestar Galactica. It will “spoil” pretty much the whole series, so don’t read it if you don’t want that to happen.

This show has gotten boring. It’s not as bad as the last season of the Sopranos, but with a few more episodes I think it could have gotten there. With the exception of the two mutiny episodes, I feel like I could have skipped the everything since the supernova at the “Eye of Jupiter” and not missed anything I care about.

I watch Battlestar Galactica because it directly addresses two of my favorite themes: humanity on the brink of destruction, and the inevitable and probably fruitless struggle between humans and artificially intelligent robotic beings of our own creation (cf,M. Shelley, I. Asimov, F. Herbert, W. Gibson, J Badham, J. Cameron, L&A Wachowski).

But there’s been almost none of that. The last season has been spent mostly on forced drama. That episode where Ellen Tigh came back was the worst. First, they could not have picked a character I care less about to be the final “Cylon”. Then they spend two episodes following Ellen while she’s catty and manipulative. Were the writers worried they were losing the daytime soap demographic or what? And then there was a whole episode about Starbuck’s imaginary piano teacher. The third to last episode is not the time to introduce new imaginary characters.

Worst of all, no robots!

Boring stuff. At least there’s hope that the finale will be exciting.

Outstanding Questions:

Is anyone else confused about the species status of the “Final Five Cylons”? I mean, they’re human, right? Because it sounds like they and the humans both came from Kobol. And they invented robot slaves, just like the humans, who destroyed their civilization, just like the humans. They were never robots. So why does everyone keep calling them Cylons?

I don’t understand how the Skinjobs came to control the Cylon Empire. So, the original Centurions from the first war (call them, Cent 1.0s) wanted to make fleshy beings, the Final Five found them and offered to give them the technology they needed to grow Skinjobs in a vat. And then the Cent 1.0s let the Skinjobs take over? It’s like Skynet takes over the world, reverse engineers a new type of human, and then lets the new humans turn it off and take over. That just doesn’t make sense.

Remember when the Rebel Cylons gave free will to their Centurion 2.0 slave beings? That was by far the most interesting plot element of the last season. It seemed clear that the writers were paving a way for the Cylons to be overthrown by their own robotic slaves. But hardly anything has happened since then. There was a brief shot of a Cent 2.0 looking discontent while cleaning up a bloody mess, and there was that brief scene where Baltar tells a Cent 2.0 that he’s clearly at the bottom of the hierarchy. Moreover, all of the dangerous Centurions are on the rebel Cylon Baseship with the human fleet, so they either have to turn on the humans (which would be unsatisfying), or sacrifice themselves to attack the Brother Cavil base (which is implausible). So either the writers have painted themselves into a corner, or they’re just going to abandon my favorite thread.

Some well-respected and some not-so-well-respected weblogs are linking to predictions about Apple’s iPhone OS announcement tomorrow. These predictions are sourced by the same person who said this about the original iPhone:

It’ll be coming out in January …All phone providers… Small as shit… Two batteries… Slide keyboard… Touch screen on the “outside”.

Predictions are valued asymmetrically. If you predict correctly you will treated as prophetic. On the other hand, if you predict incorrectly you will not be held accountable, regardless of how wrong you are.

I resolve to make more public predictions.

I’m lucky to have a job I’m passionate about. (Maybe some day I’ll tell the story about how I ended up here at ExpanDrive.) But I haven’t been passionate about all my jobs: taxi driving, retail, food service, construction, and grad student. In this video, Mike Rowe, the host of Discover Channel’s Dirty Jobs), argues that rather than finding work you’re passionate about, you should bring you passion to your work.

(Warning: Contains a verbal account of lamb castration.)

If you want the quick version, or if stories that involve you can read a shorter, less awesome essay Mike Rowe published at Frobes.com.