Konstantin Othmer, CEO of Core Mobility, is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. Our interview ended only because the camera was full, and Kon had a company to run. We could have listened to him talk for 12 hours. In the person of Konstantin, I found the prototypical Valley entrepreneur, a person whose unbridaled brilliance led him from professional poker to Apple Computer to General Motors to venture investing in Japan to the helm of Core Mobility. Konstantin spoke about the Valley spirit, hard work and the culture of a good startup.nullnullnull

Konstantin Othmer on the Valley Advantage — TechDrawl

Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio - Audible debug messages for Catalyst.

Added espeak support for linux and put they on CPAN.

Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio - Audible debug messages for Catalyst. - search.cpan.org

Nicholas Kristof
Nicholas Kristof describes the endocrine disruptors in the water that are causing genital malformations in male animals and humans. (05:44)

Nicholas Kristof | July 1, 2009 | ColbertNation.com

I just created a simple trait for the Catalyst::Log that uses OS X's 'say' utility to log error messages to audio, such that the computer will say them to you. My eyes tire of reading through 100s of lines of debug output, so now sometimes I will have the computer simply talk to me.

Its not in CPAN yet, but its simple enough:

-------

package Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio;

use Moose::Role;

sub speak
{
my ($self, $txt) = @_;

return unless $txt;

system("say $txt &") if $ENV{'SPEAK'};
}

1;

-----

In MyApp.pm, after setup():

Moose::Util::apply_all_roles(MyApp->log, 'Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio');

----

In a controller: $foo='bar'; $c->log->speak('Hello world, the value of foo is $foo');

---

If ENV 'SPEAK' is set, it will talk to you. Works like a charm. mst/t0m told me how to do it. Will get around to CPAN'ing it this week. Anyone aware of a cross platform library that will do this kind of speech stuff? There is no reason to stop here if this is useful to people - could play tones depending on state, warnings, etc.

Audio Debug Logs for Catalyst: Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio

Want to learn about databases without the tedium? With its unique combination of Japanese-style comics and serious educational content, The Manga Guide to Databases is just the book for you.

Princess Ruruna is stressed out. With the king and queen away, she has to manage the Kingdom of Kod's humongous fruit-selling empire. Overseas departments, scads of inventory, conflicting prices, and so many customers! It's all such a confusing mess. But a mysterious book and a helpful fairy promise to solve her organizational problems-with the practical magic of databases.

In The Manga Guide to Databases, Tico the fairy teaches the Princess how to simplify her data management. We follow along as they design a relational database, understand the entity-relationship model, perform basic database operations, and delve into more advanced topics. Once the Princess is familiar with transactions and basic SQL statements, she can keep her data timely and accurate for the entire kingdom. Finally, Tico explains ways to make the database more efficient and secure, and they discuss methods for concurrency and replication.

If Billy wrote a script for The Hentai Guide to Web Security, I'm sure we could find someone to illustrate it. Just imagine having SQL injection explained by a school girl and a tentacle monster....

The Manga Guide to Databases

D. Graham Burnett and Jeffrey Andrew Dolven:

Irony is a powerful and incompletely understood feature of human dynamics. A technique for dissimulation and "secret speech," irony is considerably more complex than lying and even more dangerous. Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes. And yet while major research resources have for forty years poured into the human sciences from the defense and intelligence community in an effort to gain control over the human capacity to lie (investments that led to the modern polygraph, sodium pentothal-derived truth serums, "brain fingerprinting," etc.), we have no comparable tradition of sustained, empirical, applied investigation into irony. We know very little about its specific manifestations in foreign cultures; we understand almost nothing about the neurological basis of its expression; we are without forward-looking strategies for its mastery and mobilization in the interest of national defense. This project-a sustained three-year, three-pronged, interdisciplinary investigation, drawing on social scientists, engineers, and neurobiologists--will position Lockheed Martin for field leadership in a crucial new area of strategic and commercial growth.

H.P. Lovecraft:

From the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

Justine Cooper:

What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.

We do quite a good business with the more affluent residents of South Central. They, at least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.

John Gray:

The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.

On Barbara Kruger:

By using familiar images and text from modern advertising, she forcefully exposes the misleading and aggressive lies of pop media. Her works involve humor and irony, though they are often disturbing at the same time.

Recently, ubernoir on Decius:

An accusation that I have heard repeatedly leveled at Americans is that they have no sense of irony. I think I might bookmark [a post by Decius] as Exhibit A in my case for the defence.

Marc Siegel:

We live temperature-controlled, largely disease-controlled lives.

And yet, we worry more than ever before.

The ironic cloud