Well, I spoke too soon; the 737 is not so bad when it comes to changing tables. We were on a 757 today and found that it had no baby changing tables on board.

This is not of general interest, but for anyone who wonders, A320 lavatories have better baby changing tables than 737 lavatories. If your baby is under five or six months, it probably does not matter, but the 737 table is really short. This somewhat redeems the A320 for me.

Version 0.2.1-r2, a maintenance release, of the Geneagrapher is now available.

A test in Geneagrapher 0.2.1-r1 was broken by new information added to the Mathematics Genealogy Project. This release fixes the test, but does not change the functionality from version 0.2.1-r1. Existing installations need not install this release.

For more information, please see the Geneagrapher page and the Geneagrapher 0.2.1-r1 release announcement.

Netflix announced a split of the streaming and by-mail movie subscriptions last week. The announcement led to an uproar of dissatisfaction with the move, and I saw many comments accusing Netflix of greed.

My opinion is that Netflix certainly mishandled the announcement since it gave no explanation for the changes, but many seem to forget that Netflix is dependent on publishers to provide it with streaming content, and these publishers motive, means, and opportunity to negotiate much higher rates when contracts expire (as long as they can see that Netflix has the profit to support the hike).

That view is confirmed in “Netflix’s vanished Sony films are an ominous sign” by analyst Michael Pachter, who estimates that the cost of Netflix’s streaming contracts will increase from $180 in 2010 to almost $2 billion in 2012. The increase in streaming contract costs must play some role in the plan changes.

I also expect that Netflix wants to start weaning customers off of DVDs since the cost of that service is much higher for Netflix than streaming — at least until content providers raise costs beyond some threshold.

This is a report on the funniest internet comment I have seen today.

In the comment section of an article about an indecorous argument between two U.S. Representatives there was a post by an apparent future opponent of one of the elected officials (most ellipses are mine):

Help me defeat …, come to my town hall rally this Saturday July 23rd from 1pm to 4pm at … located at … We need to bring true … values back to congress and in district 20.http://…

Later in the thread was this hilarious response:

Hahaha…campaigning on a newspaper message board? Was Craigslist down or something? You should put up some “guitar lesson” fliers up at the local mall to see if you can attract some more support. Maybe you can sneak in frame behind the local “on location” weather guy with a poster or something. Hahaha…I’m an indie from CO and have no dog in this race, but this style of politicking is pretty rich! Good luck.

I just read Meteorite hunter: My two months in an Omani jail. It is an interesting interview about a meteor-hunting trip in Oman that ended in a prison sentence for Michael Farmer. His comment on risk jumped out at me.

Do you regret your last trip there?
No. We have had adventures there that money can’t buy. Those of you who have never taken a risk cannot understand that those of us who gather these stones that fill museums and collections around the world knowingly risk life and limb. Those who are unwilling to take a risk usually gain little.

The single picture I have posted of Michael on this blog is not entirely indicative of his appearance, so I will probably add a few more images for balance. For now, though, there’s this video.

I just started looking at distributed data processing platforms. There is, of course, the Apache Hadoop project, but I have also come across HPCC Systems, a system used by LexusNexus Risk Solutions, and Disco, a system developed by Nokia Research Center.

"LexisNexis Takes On Hadoop With Open Source HPCC". http://t.co/jaGW2aK

June 22, 2011 10:01 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@DavidAlber

David Alber

Disco: data analysis platform with MapReduce, implemented in Erlang. Jobs are written in any language (often Python). http://t.co/avr4fGV

June 22, 2011 10:12 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@DavidAlber

David Alber

At the end of this link is a page with a picture of Earth from Mars captured by MER Spirit.

I decided to do an experiment to verify that Blackbird Pie is caching tweets locally. If it does not, then it makes more sense to stick with Lifestream for everything or to use screen captures.

Try clicking on the date to verify the tweet is actually deleted.

For more context on what this post is about, see “Site Revamp, Again — Now Embedding Tweets“.