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Terrence Parr of jGuru fame has posted a cheat sheet for Unix skllls. If you only take one thing away from it, you should remember that “Everything is a stream”.

Recommended as a jump start or refresher covering the basics and then some.

Fox Sports and Major League Baseball are doing some interesting things with video as discussed in the MLB press release “Latest technology enhances playoffs”.

If you’ve watched any of the playoffs or World Series coverage, you’ve seen the “red box” illustrating where in or out of the strike zone a given pitch is. Now you can read just how they did it. As the press release points out:

It’s not about radar guns. It’s about video at 30 frames per second, triangulation involving three ballpark cameras, and software on three computers in the corner of a TV truck outside the stadium’s loading docks.

And they do this on every pitch, to every batter, fast enough to display the pitch tracking information during the live broadcast after any pitch they want to analyze. Very cool.

PS Go Cardinals!

I read “The Edible Planet” in the October National Geographic Adventure magazine with great interest. As a longtime hiker and outdoorsman, I’ve often wondered how one could best prepare various wild greenery but never tried the dandelions, cattails, or acorns I come across on a regular basis.

Something else about the article moved me to blog about it, however. National Geographic seems ignorant at best, hostile at worst towards wildlife conservation through hunting. This same apparent bias has been bothering me since Adventure premiered in 1999 (I’ve been a subscriber since issue #1 and a National Geographic magazine reader for decades).

The opening at the top of the story starts:

Hunting may seem a little old-fashioned, but gathering never goes out of style

Hunting does not seem old-fashioned to me. In fact, it seems more important and urgent than ever. We as a society need to embrace hunting just as we have fishing (which is really only “hunting” of water creatures, after all, assuming you eat what you catch).

Why? Because hunters and fishermen pay for most wildlife conservation and much wild lands management.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Pittman-Robertson Act excise tax on guns, ammunition, and related hunting gear contributed $294,691,282 to state conservation programs in 2005 alone. Throw in the Dingell-Johnson taxes on fishing equipment and motorboat fuel and outdoors people contributed more than $523 million to conservation in 2005. Since P.-R. was instituted in 1937 and D.-J. went into effect in 1950, hunters and fishermen have paid more than $10 billion towards wildlife conservation programs. This money is used to buy and conserve habitat for wildlife, edible plants, and all of us hikers, mountain bikers, climbers, rafters, hunters, and for that matter everyone else in the U.S., too.

States rely on this funding to pay their wildlife and wild lands conservation bills. In fact, in most states the agencies charged with such conservation receive no general state funds at all; they are almost completely reliant on P.-R. and D.-J. funds plus hunting and fishing license fees.

This doesn’t even include sweat equity and money that hunters give by way of world class conservation organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, the National Wild Turkey Federation, and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (whose biggest conservation partner by number of acres conserved, by the way, is The Nature Conservancy).

Hunters paid for the restoration of whitetail deer. And wild turkeys. And elk, and bears, and cougars, and the list goes on and on. Very little of America’s wild patrimony would exist today if it weren’t for hunting and fishing. If we want wild lands and wild creatures to enjoy while outside on our great adventures, we need money to pay for their conservation. And this money comes from hunting and fishing. It’s just that simple.

Hunting isn’t “old fashioned”, it’s a modern and future imperative.

The good news is, the majority of Americans seems to understand this and support hunting (click here for details from a recent survey). I would love to see National Geographic Adventure catch up with the rest of us and cover more wildlife conservation, hunting, and fishing stories along with the “traditional” (”old fashioned”?) outdoor adventure sports such as hiking, climbing, and kayaking.

Please leave a comment to let me know what you think.

We’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now, but here’s yet more evidence that smartphones with a little ’s’ are leaving PDAs (remember those?) in the dust. Key stats:

• During the first six months of 2006, PDA+smartphone shipments grew 57% versus first half of 2005
• Shipments totaled 42.1 million units
• 34.7 million of those units were smartphones, versus approximately 7.4 million PDAs

That’s right, 82.4% of all “mobile computer” devices sold from January through June of this year where phones, not PDAs. Not surprisingly, the article goes on to note:

The last stronghold for PDAs is North America, which is the only region where they outsold smartphones. In fact, North America accounted for 45 percent of worldwide PDA shipments during the first half of 2006. On the flip side, Japan prefers smartphones more than any other region, accounting for 33 percent of shipments for the first half of the year.

And my favorite bit as a former employee and current NOK shareholder:

Nokia owns half of the smartphone market and was responsible for 42 percent of PDA and smartphone shipments during the first part of 2006.

If I worked for Palm I’d really be praying that the Treo 680 gains some mass market traction RSN.

George Gilder provides a glimpse into the power requirements and infrastructure scalability issues involved with Google and other peta-scale Web services in “The Information Factories” published in Wired 14.10.

The array of costs and issues involved may seem insurmountable by any new business trying to ramp up and compete. But as Sun’s Andy Bechtolsheim notes when interviewed for the article, the game is over “Only if no one changes the game” (italics for emphasis).

Right on, Andy! Kobayashi Maru.

bit-tech.net has published an article looking at widely known sources of text and video open source intelligence (OSINT).

It’s very interesting to see both the good and the bad uses of Internet technology in reporting, reviewing, remixing, and even fighting modern wars. Sobering in many ways.

Recent contract work has presented me with an offer for permanent employment that I can’t refuse.

I have accepted a position as a Product Manager for Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc. (DRSI). While the company is headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, I’ll be able to work the majority of the time remotely, much better in line with family commitments than my previous full time position.

DRSI is doing very interesting things. Watch for more from me and the team via our site, and of course I’ll continue blogging my own personal take on all things techie via BillDay.com.

A contract I’ve been working on the last few months requires careful time keeping and reporting. I’ve tried several tools, including both Web-based and local apps, and read through various suggestions from Om’s Web Worker Daily and elsewhere.

After lots of searching, I’ve settled on the simplest solution: A script described in a July Lifehacker post entitled “Quick-log your work day“. I’ve made a few simplifications for what I need from Cowboy_K’s QuickLogger Plus et voila, time tracking to automagically rotated log files. I normally write my own bash scripts and run them in Cygwin, but this little Visual Basic script does just what I need so why mess with a rewrite?

You might be asking “Why did you go the non-Web app route?”. Answer: I need to be able to log activities whether I have a net connection or not. For example, while working on a plane. Quick Logger Plus meets my needs, no muss no fuss, and its simple output is imminently parseable should I need to massage it into another format, post it online, or do some other kind of post-processing down the road.

Recommended.

Interesting news: “Nokia unveils Bluetooth rival“.

OK, maybe “Bluetooth’s little brother” would be more accurate than “rival”. Or should that be “Bluetooth and WiFi’s love child”? Or maybe “Bluetooth’s Mini-Me”?

Whatever it is, you can read David Berlind’s early analysis in his ZDNet blog here. Hopefully Nokia Research will be posting details soon.