Target Corporation is donating a quarter million dollars to the city of Minneapolis, which city council rapidly accepted, to install 30+ police monitored security cameras. I'm not able to articulate why stuff like this scares me as much as it does, but I just get a queasy feeling when I think of government surveillance of the citizenry.

The ACLU has found that police cameras do not yield any significant reduction in crime, and there are many documented instances where police cameras have been used to illegally and inappropriately infringe on the privacy rights of citizens. That said, I think keeping camera counts down is a losing battle. Most people just can't get worked up about privacy rights in general and security cameras specifically.

At Onion Networks our CVS repository has a lot of symlinks that need to exist within it for builds to work. Unfortunately, CVS doesn't support symbolic links. Both subversion and metacvs support symbolic links but neither of those are sufficiently ready for our needs, so we're stuck with creating links manually in each new CVS checkout.

Sick of creating links by hand, I decided to write a quick shell script that creates a new shell script that recreates the symlinks in the current directory and below. A year or two ago I would have done this in Perl. I love Perl and I think it gets an undeserved bad wrap, but I find I'm doing little one-off scripts in straight shell (well bash) lately as others are more inclined to try them out that way.

Road Rage Races are an idea I came up with a few years back that I'm trying to resurrect. I've updated the website (https://ry4an.org/rrr), and tacked on a new tag line: "Light travels at 299,792,460 m/s. Immaturity travels at 5 mph."

In a Road Rage Race the competitors start out in a centrally located parking lot in the Twin Cities area. They then race to one of five previously agreed upon destinations selected randomly at the time of the race start. The hitch being that this is done during the height of the evening rush hour keeping top speed in the 10 to 20 mph range.

I'm trying not to have all the projects and ideas posted to this list be computer related, but I guess that's where I expend most of my creative energy. I bought a Mimio electronic white board (http://mimio.com) cheap on eBay ($40), and while the Windows software for it is reported to be quite good, the Linux software options ranged from vapor to unusable. I did, however, find some Perl code that handled protocol parsing (the tedious part), so I started with that.

Amphetadesk (http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/) is a great RSS feed reader. I use it to track 20 or so different news sources a day. However, I mostly subscribe to feeds that include copious content, and once I determine there are no new entries on a feed I still have to scroll down fifteen screens worth of old content to see the top of the next feed.

To speed the process I make a quick 5 minute template hack that provides a "jump to next" link in the title banner of each entry and a corresponding anchor in each title. Since the jump link is always in the same place relative to the start of each new feed listing, I'm able leave the mouse in one place and check the top of each feed w/ just a series of clicks. Like I said handy, but trivial.

Half Bakery (http://halfbakery.com) is a website where people can post poorly thought out ideas so they can be commented on, criticized, and (occasionally) praised by total (and generally snarky) strangers. It's a clique-y place that's often unkind to new arrivals, but I was lucky enough to get generally favorable reviews for a few of the ideas I've posted there. Here are a some of the entries I've created there in the past.

I was eating outside a few weeks ago and saw a sign for the 2nd Annual Cabanna Boy Contest at a local bar. I wisely decided not to enter the contest, but then started to wonder if they had called their first one the 1st Annual Cabanna Boy Contest. That's pretty optimistic. I then started wondering how likely it is that a 1st Annual leads to a 2nd Annual to a 3rd Annual. Being a modern geek I figured google would know the answer if I asked right.

Text to speech programs do okay on words they know, but on longer words not in their 'dictionary' they have to sound them out phonetically which seems to be a really hit or miss operation. I wonder if one could hook up text to speech software and a polygraph sensor together to monitor the listeners reaction to the words being read.

I know I cringe when I hear something mis-pronounced and surely something in my mental wince is externally measurable. If the software detected a negative reaction to the way it pronounced a word it could try an alternate pronunciation the next time. Granted it would be a highly iterative process -- requiring many listeners for a each text sample so that the most-favorable response for each word can be found, but how many people listened to Harry Potter as a book on tape.

My good friends Luke (http://justlooking.recursion.org/) and Gabe (http://twol.dopp.net/) are working on a project that archives mailings lists to blogging software. Essentially something that subscribes to lists and gateways to posts in a blog. I politely told them the idea didn't make sense to me and instead advocated just putting a blog-look onto existing mailing list software. This is my attempt to put my money where my mouth is.