firehose

What Do You Think Cable News Doctor? Could It Be Both? 

HOUSTON — The sheriff of Houston's Harris County has adopted a sweeping policy designed to protect and guarantee equal treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender inmates, including allowing transgender individuals to be housed based on the gender they identify with instead of their biological sex.

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Des Hommes et des Chatons is a Tumblr blog that collects photos of sexy men and cute kittens in matching poses. See more of the funny (and occasionally spot-on) photos at Des Hommes et des Chatons.

images via Des Hommes et des Chatons

via Snap!, My Modern Metropolis

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sfcrazy writes "In a surprising and unexpected move, Google and its partners have removed the recently launched HP Chromebook 11 from shelves. Users were complaining about the issues with the trackpad and performance of the laptop." Specifically (as also reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer), some of the laptops have been reported to overheat.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rstevens:

The “FUCK THIS.” ice scraper is the definition of a delightful, inexpensive holiday gift. 

#stockingstufferideas

rjmarvin writes "Microsoft today announced a web-based development environment for app creation to complement Visual Studio 2013, called Visual Studio Online. Microsoft Senior V.P. S. Somasegar says the new web-based IDE is designed for quick tasks related to building Windows Azure websites and services. Microsoft will be releasing the Visual Studio Online Application Insights service in a limited preview to show developers how to deploy and perform in conjunction with Visual Studio 2013's new features."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's like Instagram, but with half of it missing, no filters, a worse name, and the possibility of profiting Justin Bieber.

Rob Ford signed shirts emblazoned with “Ford Nation” incorporating the automaker’s logo at an event yesterday. This did not make the American automaker happy.

Ryan Shapiro's technique is so effective at unburying sensitive documents, the feds are asking the courts to stop him.

submitted by throwawayaccount0333 [link] [2 comments]

Man, boy die after shooting on New Orleans bridge WNYT (AP) NEW ORLEANS - A man and a 7-month-old boy have been fatally shot in an apparent ambush on a New Orleans bridge. Police spokesman Frank B. Robertson III told The Associated Press that someone opened fire on the 25-year-old man Wednesday ... and more »

samis-fitspiration:

ask-msfortune:

hobgoblinhero:

1871house:

Strawberry Short Snake

OH MY GOD NO

THIS IS TOO ADORABLE

AND THE PUN IS KILLING ME

looksss delisscioussss

“So thanks a lot, anti-vaccine parents. You took an ethical stand against big pharma and the autism your baby was not going to get anyway, and, by doing so, killed some babies and gave me, an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman, the whooping cough in the year 2013. I understand your wanting to raise your own children as you see fit, science be damned, but you’re selfishly jeopardizing more than your own children. Carry your baby around in a sling, feed her organic banana mash while you drink your ethical coffee, fine, but what gives you denialists the right to put my health at risk”

- I’ve Got Whooping Cough. Thanks A Lot, Jenny McCarthy.  (via thenewrepublic)

ANIMATED: Jordan Lynch is cheating, showed up at your house with a PS4 controller

The Rules

1. Conflicts are not permitted.

2. A note should merge at the property level. (If you change note text on your day phone and a note’s tags on your night phone, both phones should get both changes.)

3. Real time determines which change wins.

4. A client doesn’t have to be up-to-date before it can push changes to the server.

5. The order of calls to the server must not matter.

6. It’s not important to keep a history of changes.

It’s not Like SCM

With SCM, changes have parents and children. SCM systems work wonderfully and we developers rely on them, but that model doesn’t fit here. I don’t care if change B descends from change A — the only thing that matters is that change B happened later in real time (wall-clock time).

This rules out Lamport clocks. They have their uses, definitely, but not in this case.

(I also rule out vector clocks, because the system would need to know about all the clients for a given user. Clients may come and go, which would make using vector clocks rather challenging. Even if I could use them, I’m not sure they’d enforce the real-time-wins rule.)

Last-Writer-Wins (to Server) Won’t Always Work

One simple way to make this work almost all the time is to say that the last change the server receives is the winner. (Many APIs work that way.)

The problem with that is when you make changes on your day phone, but it can’t connect to the server, then you go make changes on your night phone — then your day phone finally connects and overwrites the changes you made on your night phone. That violates rules #3 and #5.

Put another way: real time wins, but that has to be the real time that a person made a given change, not the real time that a change made it to the server.

How Merging Works

A note has a few properties that can change. (Text, tags, attachments, sortDate, archived status.)

For each of these properties there’s an additional property: a modification timestamp. (As in textModificationDate, tagsModificationDate, etc.) Those timestamps are set on the client: they’re the real time the user made that change.

Merging happens on both server and client, and it always happens the same way: when comparing a property, it compares the modification date for that property. The later modification date always wins.

This means that changes can arrive on the server and on clients in any order, delayed by any amount of time, and merging will always give the same result.

Why You Suddenly Feel Frightened

To the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing you could add a ninth fallacy: client clocks are accurate.

They’re not. You can’t rely on them. But if you can’t rely on client clocks being accurate, how can this system work?

I’ve had some advice on this.

One idea is to have the client check the time against a Network Time Protocol server (or the sync server, which is probably simpler). If the time is off by some substantial amount, then let the user know that syncing may not work correctly, and that they should turn on setting the time automatically on their device.

Another idea is to get the time from the sync server, compare it to the client time, and calculate an offset to use when creating timestamps. That should allow the client to create accurate-enough timestamps.

I like this second idea best. Given a server that reports its time with each call, clients get plenty of opportunities to recalibrate. (The offset calculation would have to take into account the duration of a given call. I’d probably just assume that the server date refers to a date duration-of-call / 2 seconds ago. Close enough.)

There would also be sanity checks. Is a calibrated timestamp way in the past or the future? Is a new calibrated timestamp earlier than the existing timestamp for a given property or earlier than the last date reported by the server? (It’s not allowed to be.) Easy stuff.

The worst-case scenario is a client where the time keeps changing wildly. But, with frequent recalibration and sanity checks, even this rare case should work fine.

Failure

Syncing is, like baseball, a game of failure. This system accounts for all of these failures:

1. Temporary network failure.

2. Temporary server failure.

3. Client clock failure.

4. Temporary failure to get a client up-to-date with sync changes.

5. Temporary failure for a client to send sync changes.

Once the failures clear up, everything will sync, and the result will be exactly the same as if there were no failures. (Note that client clock failure can be permanent and it will still work.)

How to Evaluate a Syncing System

I think a good syncing system has four attributes:

1. It does what the user expects.

2. It’s efficient.

3. It resists failures.

4. It continues to work.

I might add #5: it’s as simple as possible (though not simpler). Bugs are less likely when there’s nowhere they can hide. Achieving 1-4 is easier when the system is not complex.

What I like about this system is that it comes down to date comparison, and it’s hard to get simpler than that. Easy to write, easy to debug, easy to maintain.

Here’s a fantastic follow-up post from Owen Lett (the man who brought you this neat fantasy transit map of Victoria, BC) in response to yesterday’s tutorial about point type in Illustrator.

There’s a lot to like about this approach, especially the integrated type point and station marker (two overlaid points define both elements and both can be placed simultaneously) and the use of paragraph styles (an often-overlooked feature in Adobe Illustrator) gives the ability to quickly change things if required later on. The downside is the need to adjust margins via the tedious Character palette, although is that actually any worse than manually nudging with arrow keys?

pw3n:

This post is in response to Cameron Booth’s Point Type Label tutorial on his rather excellent Transit Maps blog. I’m writing this here because it feels a bit more efficient than bombarding him with a few dozen tweets.

I too use point type for labels on transit maps. But I also like to integrate paragraph and character styles wherever possible. I do this because, in theory, it makes it easier if I decide much later that I need to make a broad sweeping change (like choosing a new typeface or updating the character colour).

What I’ve also found is that by adjusting indents and baseline shifts, I can place the text point right in the middle of a station dot or at the intersection of two gridlines (see the second and third pictures for example; I’ve also shown how it can work for different station markers). If you’re using Smart Guides, everything should snap nicely into place.

Here’s a sample set up, which you can see in the first picture:

• A character style for the basics, such as font family, size, leading, tracking, colour. I made a second style for a terminus station which is the same as the base, but with bold weight.
• A number of paragraph styles for a variety of station type alignments. Here I’ve got a map with lines at 45 degree angles, so I’ve eight styles and named them after compass directions.
• I made one bonus style to show how you can set one up for text that’s been rotated (and yet the text point remains in the middle of the station marker).

Now the whole point of Mr. Booth’s post was to show that Illustrator doesn’t actually align text precisely; some manual adjustment is necessary to get everything looking optically correct. He moved each label manually. My method doesn’t solve the problem of requiring some adjustment. But now instead of moving each label, you leave the label in place and adjust the left or right paragraph indent (see last picture).

There are some downsides to this technique  The primary problem I run into is with multiple line station labels. If the label has a positive baseline shift, then you’re going to need to update the baseline manually or create a new paragraph style. And then you might start to end up with an unwieldy amount of styles.

Another downside here is that manual adjustments override the paragraph style. So if you update the style at a later date, it may not affect something you’ve adjusted manually (it depends on what you’re updating).

Lastly, there is the issue of Illustrator itself. Its paragraph and character styles palette just isn’t that great, especially compared to InDesign. I don’t blame it; Illustrator is meant for… illustration. But having spent years building books in InDesign, you really notice what’s missing in Illustrator’s style options. InDesign has so much more; you can create keyboard shortcuts for specific styles, you can have styles based on other styles, you can reorder the styles. Illustrator does well, but I often find myself frustrated with it.

Is this an ideal solution? Not entirely. it is very mathematical, so to get everything looking perfect you’re still going to need to do a lot of eyeball adjustments. However, I find it’s a good way to get everything set up initially and keep things consistent throughout a project.

reidoriginals:

Do you think the Olympic sponsors would get the message if enough people shared this photo?

Doubtful, but sure as hell worth a try.

NIU-Ball State is so beautiful, it's taught animals and humans to live together peacefully.

MACtion is amazing. Right now 9-0 Northern Illinois is playing 9-1 Ball State, and it's all embracing the MACtion spirit, in that the score is 27-27 in the fourth quarter thanks to no defense and lots of silliness.

MACtion is so magical, it's given dogs the ability to understand how awesome touchdowns are (GIF via Guyism).

GOOD DOG

Yes, that's NIU's live husky mascot, Diesel, high-fiving after a TD. We souped up this beautiful moment in canine-human relationships:

MACtion is magic, y'all.

Washington Post

Prosecutors received case of sexual assault allegations involving Winston on ... Washington Post TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — An assistant state attorney says prosecutors in Tallahassee did not receive information about sexual assault allegations involving Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston until Tuesday. Tallahassee police investigated Winston in ... FSU's Winston investigated in sexual assault complaintTampabay.com Prosecutors received Winston case on TuesdayMyFox Austin Jameis Winston's Heisman Hopes Contingent On Sexual Assault InvestigationForbes ESPN all 268 news articles »

A call from the Hay-Adams Hotel this past spring reporting that a Secret Service agent was trying to force his way into a woman’s room set in motion an internal investigation that has sent tremors through an agency still trying to restore its elite reputation.

Every 11 years, the Sun's magnetic poles reverse themselves. That has big implications for satellites, global communications and even astronaut safety.