Class is now done.  My last final exam was yesterday. More than any previous semester, I used a wide variety of computing tools to finish my work in class.  Here are a few of the ones I put to use:

Posted for future reference

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I really don’t like blogging about this kind of thing, but the battle between my stomach and my conscience often leads to a win for the conscience.  The United States should be a world leader in moral capacity and ethical treatment of even the vilest of characters.  Somehow, we failed at that role between 2002 and 2007.  FireDogLake reports:

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I liked this article by John Sviokla about why people are willing to work for nothing: it’s a different economy altogether.  Once a person has left the ground-level of income-for-survival and is flying in the upper stratosphere of meaning, purpose and contribution it makes little sense to desecrate that higher ideal with a token payment in dollars.

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Wow.  Just in case Github wasn’t already the coolest social site for coders, it now has “issues”—a bug tracking area for each software project.  And it gives everyone the ability to vote for the issues they most want fixed!

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This New York Times article talks about the malleability of intelligence and the recent evidence that shows IQ is not quite as genetic as was once thought.  Anyway, this little snippet kind of blew me away:

Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.

I’ve always suspected that there is a gentle progression toward a more educated, intelligent society.  But I thought it was only visible on the order of thousands of years.  If true, this claim by Prof. Nisbett will require me to update my views.  I suppose if you consider education as the factor that has improved our IQs on average (rather than genetics), that claim makes sense.  We are better organized today, in spite of the disaster that is No Child Left Behind.  In any case, I hope we can continue this upward trend in education so that children 100 years from now can look back on my youth and remark that I must have been mentally retarded

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This adventure took longer than I expected, so I am posting what I’ve found here for others.  The goal is to create a CD with a custom icon for Mac OS X, with one caveat—it needs to be created on a Linux system.  The software to use on Linux is called “cdrtools” and includes a command-line tool, “mkisofs”.  You can also install cdrtools on the Mac (using the MacPorts system) for testing purposes with “sudo port install cdrtools”.  Here’s the recipe:

mkisofs -hfs -r -V ‘My CD’ -o mycd.iso mycd/

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When I first heard about the attempted spying on our US infrastructure and subsequent early discovery of the infiltration, I thought “Oh, whew, good thing we caught them.”  But on second thought, Robert Graham has a good point: is this another one of those Bush-era “few facts and government officials said” stories?  Could it be part of a PR campaign to convince us that we need to give the president power to “switch off the internet” so to speak?

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Here is an update from Ron Paul on the “Audit the Fed” bill I mentioned a few weeks ago.  We have about 39 cosponsors to the bill now which is very encouraging.  I hope that if you also want to see increased transparency in government you’ll take a moment to encourage your congressperson or senator by writing to them.

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