I thought this might be a cool idea for a story: who lives in shipping container communities on boats and at port?  What kind of relationships and norms form under such fleeting conditions?  Could this ever be economically feasible if shipping a container from China to the US costs $8000?  Any ship carrying house containers could carry freight beneath them, but I guess the only way it could work is if passengers were willing to pay as much or more than their weight in freight was worth.

I also started thinking about how this might work in space.  Rotating container bays for simulated gravity?  Completely self-sufficient shipping container space homes?

svn st | grep "^?" | sed s/?[[:space:]]*// | xargs rm -rf

Use with care, obviously. If there’s a more concise method, please let me know.

And here’s how you might use similar commands to apply fmresolve to all conflicted files, and then resolve them.

for f in $(svn st | grep "^C" | sed s/C[[:space:]]*//); do fmresolve $f; done
svn st | grep "^C" | sed s/C[[:space:]]*// | xargs svn resolved

The only real “gotcha” is that ActiveRecord::Base overrides some of Object’s methods, so you need to delegate those to the adaptee as well. I just delegated them all, though there may be some unforeseen consequences in this, I don’t know.

Anyway, here’s my solution: a model adapter module:

#
# Module for ActiveRecord model adapters.
#
# Usage:
#   class YourModelAdapter
#     include ModelAdapter
#     alias :your_model :adaptee # optional
#     
#     def initialize
#       @adaptee = YourModel.new # required!
#     end
#     
#     def some_attribute
#       do_something_different
#     end
#   end
#
module ModelAdapter
  attr_accessor :adaptee
 
  def method_missing(method, *args)
    if @adaptee.respond_to? method
      @adaptee.send(method, *args)
    else
      raise NoMethodError, "#{self.class} hasn't implemented #{method}"
    end
  end
 
  # Redirect calls to public methods in Object to the adaptee
  Object.methods.each do |method_name|
    define_method(method_name.to_sym) do |*args|
      @adaptee.send(method_name.to_sym, *args)
    end
  end
end

• adds to GoodReads library based on a photo of a bar code and/or ISBN
• page-based annotations based on photo or entry of page #, including word-lookups, favorite words, or just random notes
• maybe you could print out a bookmark with a barcode for a given book, and when you want to leave a note for the book your reading, you use your iPhone to scan the bar code first

I usually have a bookmark and pen by my side as I read, and I keep note of cool or unknown words, choice quotes, or whatever thoughts occur to me while reading.  I don’t think the iPhone can really serve as a replacement (too thick, too expensive), but it might make for an interesting way to enhance social reading sites like GoodReads, Shelfari, or LibraryThing.

• where does it come from?
• why does flow in summer?
• is it really safe for children?

Package Management

# Finding Installed Dependent Packages
apt-cache rdepends --installed packageX
 
# Installing Individual .deb Packages
sudo dpkg -i package_file.deb

Trust not to aptitude…

Sometimes aptitude does silly things, like install X11 when all you wanted was ImageMagick. Try apt-get as well to see if it doesn’t have a different set of deps (this is true of ImageMagick as of December 2008).

Answer

First of all, not all of California has a Mediterranean climate. A Mediterranean climate is one in which summers are hot and dry and winters are mild and rainy, similar to the regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea. These conditions exist in CA from about Cape Medocino south to Baja, and east to the Sierra Foothills.

To understand why the climate is Mediterranean around here, you first need to know a basic fact about global climate. The equator receives more direct sunlight than other parts of the planet, which causes the air there to heat up and rise. The planet is spinning on its axis, so when air rises, it gets delfected north or south [uh, why?]. The rising air loses pressure, cools, and expands, losing the water vapor it gained at the equator in the form of equatorial rain. High up in the atmosphere, this dry, expanding air spreads out in all directions and falls back to Earth, and the air moving north and south falling around the 30th latitudes. In falling, the this dry air increases in pressure and heat again. Dry, warm air, falling around 30°, right where the Earth’s major deserts are … not a coincidence.

SO. Mediterranean climates occur on the poleward borders of these 30° desert zones. Basically, when I said the equator receives the most sunlight, what I meant was the region of the Earth that receives the most perpendicular sunlight, which oscilates between the tropics as the tilted planet revolves around the sun. So in the northern summer, the region of falling, warm air shifts north as the region w/ the most perpendicular insolation approaches the Tropic of Cancer. This pushes the hot dry weather up in to the Bay Area and beyond. In the winter the opposite happens, and we get cooler temperatures and rain.

So why isn’t the southeastern US similar, given that it’s at the same latitude? Uh, still working on that, though I imagine it has to do with oceanic gyres…

References

• “Ideal gas law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” 3 Aug 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_Gas_Law>.
• “Mediterranean climate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” 3 Aug 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_climate>.
• Schoenherr, Allan A. A Natural History of California. University of California Press, 1995.
• Skinner, Brian J./ P. Dynamic Earth An Introduction to Physical Geology 4th Text Only No CD. John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2000.