"Somebody asked George H.W. Bush Monday about the criticism of his son's handling of Hurricane Katrina, and the former president said that the critics ought to tell it to his wife -- and that they ought to don a flak jacket before trying. But this morning, it's Barbara Bush herself who might want to think about some protective clothing, at least metaphorically speaking.

The former first lady toured the Astrodome Monday, and along the way she opined that many of the refugees from New Orleans were so poor to begin with that they ought to be pretty happy with their temporary digs in Houston. "What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas," Barbara Bush said in comments first aired on the public radio program "Marketplace" and reprinted by Editor & Publisher. "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

In the midst of that last line, you can hear the former first lady chuckling."

There just aren't words, really, to say how tactless that was.

Yes there are: C U N T

Barbara Bush on those lucky refugees

At this moderated forum, I will answer questions dealing with information design. Others can then extend the discussion. I will try to answer questions that have general interest or where I have something to say. Not all questions will be answered, usually because I don't know the answer.

Edward Tufte, the Mozart of Data Visualization, answers your questions...

Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

With OmniGraffle, it's as easy as dragging and dropping to create flow charts, org charts, network diagrams, family trees, project processes, office layouts - anything you can think of that can be represented by symbols and lines.

OmniGraffle knows what makes a diagram different from a drawing, so it knows how to help you make superior documents quickly: it keeps lines connected to shapes even when they're moved, it provides palettes full of objects for you to drag and drop, and it can magically organize diagrams with just one click.

This is the best diagramming software on Planet Earth. It boots Visio in the pants.

The Omni Group - Applications - OmniGraffle

This book celebrates escapes from the flatlands of both paper and computer screen, showing superb displays of high-dimensional complex data. The most design-oriented of Edward Tufte's books, Envisioning Information shows maps, charts, scientific presentations, diagrams, computer interfaces, statistical graphics and tables, stereo photographs, guidebooks, courtroom exhibits, timetables, use of color, a pop-up, and many other wonderful displays of information. The book provides practical advice about how to explain complex material by visual means, with extraordinary examples to illustrate the fundamental principles of information displays. Topics include escaping flatland, color and information, micro/macro designs, layering and separation, small multiples, and narratives. Winner of 17 awards for design and content. 400 illustrations with exquisite 6- to 12-color printing throughout. Highest quality design and production.

UberBook.

Edward Tufte: Books - Envisioning Information

Here's one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

Pathetic.

Killed by Contempt - New York Times

Alacra provides access to more than 100 premium commercial business databases that contain financial information, economic data, business news, and investment and market research. Alacra provides the requisite information in the appropriate format, gleaned from such prestigious content partners as Thomson Financial™, Barra, The Economist Intelligence Unit, Factiva, Mergerstat� and more.

This place has the worst, slowest loading, piece of dogshit web page ever. In fact, I had trouble memeing them because their index page contains no text. Fuck their webmaster.

Still... useful source of information, albeit expensive.

Alacra Business Research

public final class Math
extends Object

The class Math contains methods for performing basic numeric operations such as the elementary exponential, logarithm, square root, and trigonometric functions.

Good to know.

Math (Java 2 Platform SE v1.4.2)

JFreeChart is a free Java class library for generating charts, including:

* pie charts (2D and 3D);
* bar charts (regular and stacked, with an optional 3D effect);
* line and area charts;
* scatter plots and bubble charts;
* time series, high/low/open/close charts and candle stick charts;
* combination charts;
* Pareto charts;
* Gantt charts;
* wind plots, meter charts and symbol charts;
* wafer map charts;

www.jfree.org - JFreeChart

Nagios� is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

Nagios is like those expensive visual SNMP monitors... but its free.

Nagios

So these are my notes on setting up Nagios 1.2 on Mac OS X Server 10.3.5. If nothing else, it'll add to the Google Database. Nagios, for those unfamiliar with it, is an open source network monitoring application, ala Intermapper, or Lansurveyor. (Although if you don't know what Nagios is to begin with, you're going to want to check out the Nagios site before you do all the work I talk about here.) Note, this is not with MySQL support compiled in, since that's going away in favor of an n-tier structure. There are a few requirements for Nagios, namely zlib, libpng, libjpeg, and GD lib. if you have current versions of them already, you're golden. otherwise, follow the appropriate steps (If you're installing this on a stock Server setup, you don't have them). You also need Apple's Developer Tools, otherwise you have nothing to compile with. All of this is from my experience installing this on a G4 Tower running Server 10.3.5 and now into the breach...

Nagios is great. Here's how to set it up on OS X, instead of the typical Linux.

bynkii.com's Network Notes: October 2004 Archives