ExpanDrive

Last week I linked to a story in the Boston Globe Magazine about a tragic accident during the final stages of construction of a 9.5 mile long tunnel under the ocean near Boston. Part two came out this past weekend. Part 2 tells the thrilling story of the worker’s escape from the tunnel after their air supply mysteriously goes bad. There’s also a somber lesson somewhere in there about how things can go wrong when you rush to finish things at the end of a big project.

In case you missed it, here is part 1.

There’s an amazing thread on Stack Overflow titled “What is your best programmer joke?” The whole first page is full of good ones that I hadn’t heard before, but the top post is really priceless:

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”

The man below says: “Yes, you’re in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field.”

“You must work in Information Technology,” says the balloonist.

“I do” replies the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but It’s of no use to anyone.”

The man below replies, “You must work in management.”

“I do” replies the balloonist, “But how’d you know?”

“Well”, says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”

The Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant is the second largest sewage treatment plant in the US. It was built in the 90s as part of a $4 billion effort to clean up Boston Harbor. The treated water is pumped through a 9.5 mile long tunnel under the Atlantic ocean, and diffused away from shore through 55 vents space out over the last mile.

There’s an amazing story in the Boston Globe Magazine this weekend about the final steps in building the tunnel. After construction was completed the lighting and ventilation were taken out of the tunnel. A team then had to drive 9 miles down the unlighted, oxygen-less tunnel, and remove backup safety plugs from each of the 55 vents. It’s a terrifying lesson about how even a billion dollar project can paint itself into a corner.

PS: During Jeff’s bachelor party last weekend I made fun of him for claiming that the giant egg shaped containers on Deer Island were for water treatment, when they obviously contained some kind of pressurized gas. In fact, he was right and I was wrong. The 150 ft tall containers are sludge digesters.

I love the “Automata” series they’ve been working on at Penny Arcade. Gabe’s art is gorgeous, the world is imaginative, and the story is fascinating. I don’t want it to end.

The Tour Divide is a mountain bike race along the continental divide from Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico (on the border with Mexico.) It’s “self-supported”, which means that you can’t pre-arrange any outside help, though you can buy food and bike parts as you go. And it’s “one-stage”, meaning there’s no rest off-the-clock (unlike that wimpy Tour de France bike race).

This year’s winner, Matthew Lee, finished the 2,745 mile course in under 18 days. It rained on 16 of those days. There’s a great interview up on Outside’s blog. Here’s my favorite snippet:

There are certain elements you have to try not to think too much on: comfort, eating well, sleeping well, safety. All those cares are cast with the winds. You establish a new, temporary regime on day 1 and just stick with it religiously. When the alarm on your wrist watch beeps at 4:40am, you don’t roll over. not even once. you sit up, rip the sleeping bag off and suddenly you’re freezing! The only solution is to get dressed. Then the only way out is to saddle up and ride. This forced routine is the key to success. If you get up and go, the biking takes care of itself. after about an hour you start to feel okay. the soreness is masked, the beauty unfolds before your eyes, perhaps a bear gives you a shot of adrenalin.

I got to pull apart some bolts with an Instron strain tester in college, but this looks way more fun. Here’s video two and three.

Ze Frank is doing a new weekly show for Time Video. Those of you that watched The Show know that this is something to be excited about. (Those of you who didn’t watch The Show wasted your 2006, but you can make up for some of it by watching the Brain Crack episode.) So far Ze’s first two videos have had all the creativity, wit, and insight that his best commentary had on The Show.

Unfortunately, the only RSS feed I can find links not just the Ze Frank videos, but also every other boring, watered down video that runs on Time. Fortunately, we live in a world where Yahoo Pipes lets you solve this problem in about 45 seconds. Double fortunately for you, I’ve already made the pipe that filters out only Ze Frank’s videos from the Time feed. And here’s a direct link to the Pipe’s RSS feed.

PS: I’ve made analogous Pipes for Mindy Kaling on her Things That I Bought That I Love, and Dan Savage on The Stranger Blog.

As soon as I saw Menlo I knew it was going to be my new favorite programming font. Just a couple weeks ago I gave Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono a try, and it didn’t work for me, so I wondered what the difference was. You’ve probably seen the high resolution comparison already. But I don’t code in size 64 font; I program I code in size 11 font. Here’s an animation of some real code switching between Menlo and Vera Sans Mono.

Menlo is the one with the slash through the zero, while Vera Sans Mono has a dot in the zero. You can see that a lot of characters (“M”, “N”, “l”, “#”, and all the punctuation) look way too light and blurry in Vera Sans Mono, but look great in Menlo. The just look at how blurry that octothorp is in Vera Sans.

Update:

When Gruber asks, who can say no?

Here’s a comparison of Vera Sans Mon and Coda’s variant. Coda has the higher, longer underscores and the slightly lighter weight. I don’t really like how Coda is so thin that anti-aliasing kind of greys out the text. If you blow it up (or look at it with Digital Color Meter), then you’ll see that very few of the pixels are close to black.

And here is an image with all three. Vera Sans, Menlo, and Coda in that order. Menlo has the zero with the slash, so you can keep track of which is which. (I intentionally omitted a key from the image, because I wanted to focus on how the text changed without distraction.

You can download the gifs and open them in Preview if you want to page back and forth manually. It will give you each image as a separate page, and you can switch back and forth using the arrow keys. (This is also a great way to do an impromptu slideshow. Open a directory full of images, hit ⌘-A to select them all, and hit ⌘-O to open them in Preview.)

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre (六四屠殺). Consider reading the Wikipedia page, and also the page on Tank Man. The New York Times published a great retrospective with the photographers who took pictures of Tank Man, as well as a previously unpublished photo from the street.

BBC has a story about reporters being blocked from entering the square today. It includes some humorous video of un-uniformed agents blocking the cameras with umbrellas. Also, a website claims that an unusual number or Chinese social networking websites are “down for maintenance” today.

Where can I apply for this job?