spatten

If you're using AWS Elastic Load Balancer, then the quick fix is:

1) Select the load balancer you want to edit 2) Click the "Listeners" tab 3) Click "change" under the "Cipher" column for the HTTPS row 4) Select the most recent pre-defined security policy, from 2015-02.

This should get you an A on SSL Lab's test[1]

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

I'm confused by the caption under the photo (and I live in Vancouver, right next door to Victoria):

> Victoria MP Murray Rankin: "I heard 10 gunshots at least and huddled with colleagues under a desk."

It feels like a mistake. Anyone know what this refers to?

I did a bit more reading, and found this crazy and scary graph. It's under "Uranium-232 Series Activity" near the bottom of this paper[1]. It shows that gamma ray output from U-238 increases > 5x a year after U-238 is first refined, and stays higher than originally was for >100 years.

It's due to the decay products of U-238 (and their decay products) all producing radiation that adds up to more than the original's.

I never would have guessed that.

[1]: http://www.wise-uranium.org/rup.html

So it's now almost 30 years after Chernobyl, so if I read this naively:

> When this photo was taken, 10 years after the disaster, the Elephant’s Foot was only emitting one-tenth of the radiation it once had.

the Elephant's foot will currently have 1/1000th of the original radioactivity it had right after the disaster, and 10 years from now it will be down to 1/10,000th. At that rate it would be indistinguishable from background radiation within a century or so (just guesstimating here, but that's a lot of powers of 10 -- I'm probably being pessimistic).

I'm guessing that this is wrong, though, and that the radioactivity from longer half-life radionuclides will eventually start to dominate and the "effective half-life" will be much longer.

Does anyone have any idea how long it will be until Chernobyl blends into the background radiation?

We (mostly my cofounder at Leanpub, Peter, but I've done it once or twice) do the same thing when talking about "the rise of serial fiction via fanfiction" to a publishing audience.

We show them the "books" page of fanfiction.net[1] and then note that the numbers there are the number of stories written in each book's universe, not the number of readers or views or anything like that. Go look if you haven't seen it, it's amazing.

[1]: https://www.fanfiction.net/book/

True, and cool (I hadn't heard of zero-crossing before, thanks!) but an FFT gives you the ability to do interesting things like chord recognition.

I may have to play around with the code here and see if I can get it to pick out multiple notes being played simultaneously, and maybe get it to measure how fast I can do chord changes (like Justin Sandercoe's "1 minute changes" practice method[1]).

[1]: http://justinguitar.com/en/BC-115-1MinuteChanges.php

Interesting. My take on it is slightly different: it feels like a necessary condition of economic progress is that you trust that you will get to keep the fruits of your labours.

The way this happened in our history (I'm assuming that it's not the only way) is through institutions like The Old Bailey and the codification of laws and the visibility into the not always completely fair, but always getting fairer, application of those laws that they provided.

If you're interested in the main thesis of this article -- that the reason that our attitudes to violence declined steadily was due to a feedback loop "feeding the output of the Old Bailey the day before to the input of the Old Bailey the day after.", I highly recommend "The Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker.

The end of physics has been predicted many times. I remember reading an article in Sci Am about the end of physics a few months before starting my physics undergrad in the late 80s.

The exciting thing is that it has often been followed by huge breakthroughs -- if I remember correctly, the last time it was widely believed that we had it all figured out was at the turn of the 20th century, just before Quantum Physics and General Relativity were discovered.

I'm still patiently waiting for string theory to die and us to start working on something that we can actually do experiments on.

No, it definitely doesn't do that. I use the `limit_posts` option when I'm writing a single blog post, and then have a "rake deploy" task that re-generates the site fully (without the `limit_posts` option) before rsyncing it up to the server.

I guess I should put the full Rakefile up on that post. Here are the relevant parts:

    desc "generate and deploy"
    task :deploy => ['jekyll:generate', 'deploy:deploy']
    
    namespace :deploy do 
      task :deploy do
        `rsync -r _site/ #{USER}@#{HOST}:#{DEPLOY_DIR}/`
      end
    end
    
    namespace :jekyll do
      desc "start the jekyll server in auto mode"
      task :server, :num_posts do |t, args|
        num_posts = args[:num_posts]
        cmd = "jekyll --auto --server --pygments"
        cmd += " --limit_posts #{num_posts}" if num_posts
        puts "running #{cmd}"
        exec(cmd)
      end
    
      desc "generate the site one time"
      task :generate => :clean do
        `jekyll --no-auto --pygments`
      end
    
      desc "remove the generated site"
      task :clean do
        `rm -rf _site`
      end
    end

Funny, I looked at the same tech stacks and came to exactly the opposite conclusion.

I want to be able to write on my computer, in Markdown, using the tools I want (I blog in either Emacs or iA Writer, depending on whether I want to be in "programmer brain" or "writer brain"). I guess I spend enough time in Markdown that I don't need to preview that much, so I don't find the switch to the browser and reload the page cycle especially frequent or onerous. Definitely less onerous than the click preview and wait for it to load cycle I had on WordPress.

Having to log into a browser and type into a crappy little rich text editor would lower my (already extremely low) blogging frequency to non-existence.

But hey, that's my choice -- you should use whatever works for you. I'm just glad that we have the plethora of options.

If your jekyll generation time is getting too large, you can limit the number of posts it generates like this:

    jekyll --limit_posts 3

It makes your site feel like new again :) I made this into a rake task which I blogged about here:

http://scottpatten.ca/2011/11/speeding-up-jekyll-generation....

We're having troubles on us-west-1b.

I really can't remember, but we were all in shock at the time. My vague recollection is that he was trying to protect his brother. People react strangely in situations like that.

I saw a tug-of-war disaster happen once. I was working at a summer camp, and we had a giant tug-of-war with around 50 kids / side at the end of every two week session. I was refereeing and the rope snapped right in front of me. Sounded like a gunshot.

There was one serious injury: the first kid on the left side had his arm broken -- it was bent to a 45 degree angle, but luckily didn't break the skin. Nothing else, though, which was extremely lucky. Someone could easily have lost an eye. Heck, I could have seeing as I was standing right where it snapped.

I remember that the kid was from Mexico and didn't speak English at all. I think he was eight or nine. He was freaking out, and I figured out that he was asking if they would have to remove his arm. His older brother was refusing to translate anything for me, so I had to reassure him in my non-existent Spanish. (I'm Canadian so we learn French, not Spanish)

That was over 20 years ago, but that post sure brought back the memories.

50 pages? Ship it already!

Seriously, though, if you think it'll save someone some time or effort, it may be worthwhile to hit the publish button instead of waiting.

(I'm a cofounder of Leanpub, so I'm kind of biased, and being flippant here. Feel free to ignore me if it's not ready)

The gems have probably been updated by the developers of the gem.

The data used in the article contains a list of the versions being used in production by real app, not the latest versions released by the gem developers.

If you want http://learnyouahaskell.com/ packaged up, why not just buy the ebook created by the author?

Thanks, it's fixed now.

Thank you. That makes more sense now.

I'm guessing that tons of people will run into this. I bet a blog post would get you some traffic... :)

True, but it's extremely useful when you're terminating SSL on Amazon's Elastic Load Balancer and want to know if they've fixed it yet or not.

Or, another example, when you want to know for sure that you've restarted your webserver and you weren't doing something stupid like running a version of nginx that was statically linked against openssl.

I'm totally confused by this. I'm running ubuntu LTS 12.04 and did

    sudo aptitude update
    sudo aptitude upgrade openssl

and then ran

    openssl version -a

and got the same results as you. How can it be built on January 8th if the patch was just made today?

[EDIT] running

    sudo aptitude upgrade

upgraded properly and now I'm getting a version that was compiled earlier today. I'm guessing I needed to update another package as well. Probably `libssl`?

Wouldn't that mean that x-rays move faster than light (well, light in a vacuum) when they're in something other than a vacuum? Doesn't sound quite right.

This spurred me to think about how you could detect X-rays, though.

X-rays get absorbed really quickly in things like water, so it'd be pretty hard to sense them directly with an eye like ours, but I can imagine a sensory apparatus on the skin or behind a thin transparent (to X-rays) layer that would detect them.

Another cool option would be to take advantage of all of the free electrons that an x-ray creates as it bounces around getting absorbed in a solid or liquid. If you had a sensory apparatus that consisted of a conductive liquid with a voltage across it, you'd generate a current whenever an x-ray hit. This is similar to how things like geiger counters work, although I doubt an animal would be able to generate enough voltage to create an avalanche effect amplification.

I bet there are other ways, but that's two off of the top of my head.

I ran into the same thing.

Turning the developer console on displayed the text for me, but I'm really not sure why.

If you're senior or a team-lead or involved in hiring, I don't see why you wouldn't (I don't think it says that he's their peer in the post).

Yes, sorry about that. The images are fixed now.

My fave this year is definitely Atomic Brawl: http://atomicbrawl.com/ -- it's a collectible card game played on a game-board, so it's kind of a cross between chess and Magic The Gathering.

I spend way too much time playing it :) Hit me up for a game if you want to try it.

Two ways to do it are short stories or serialization. If you look into how Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, they definitely had a feedback loop going.

I'm not sure, but in section 4.1.2 of the PDF, it says:

    Beautiful landscape will be displayed in the cabin

I took this to mean that there would be windows.

I agree about not wanting to look outside, though. I've travelled on the shinkansen in Japan (which go ~ 1/3 of the speed that the hyperloop is planned at) and it was really hard to look out of the windows for any length of time.

Hey, co-founder of Leanpub here. There is lots of great advice in this thread, and the comments about Leanpub have made my day. I just wanted to say that you should feel free to shoot us an email at hello@leanpub.com if you have any questions.

Good luck, whichever route you choose.