Sandstorm, originally uploaded by asco.

Namibia looks like the sort of place I’d like to photograph. My mom will be going there for a few weeks next year, so maybe she’ll be able to give me some tips.

Want your weather forecast in one or two unicode characters? Go to weather.mar.cx (for location detection by IP) or add the city name to the end, like http://weather.mar.cx/Paris,_TX or http://weather.mar.cx/Paris,_France.

_DSC2454.JPG, originally uploaded by metrixcreate.

Duncan and I made tshirts with the “phone company” logo on them (no actual phone company has this logo, but it looks a lot like the logo of some random independent phone company in the 1970s.

They were screen printed, but with a plastic stencil instead of a photo-process “stencil”. I bought a book of polypropylene sheets from Dick Blick (“suitable for water color”, the cover says), and got the stencil cut on the laser cutter at Metrix. They can’t cut vinyl or other chlorine-containing compounds, as deadly chlorine gas will be produced (though in quantities that would probably be more damaging to the laser than to humans), but polypropylene works great.

My finger gateway now supports much more of the Internet. It supports some sites specifically, like Facebook (try finger cdc@facebook.com@finger.afiler.com), but it also supports sites that have per-user RSS feeds linked to from the page at sitename.com/username (e.g. finger afiler@flickr.com@finger.afiler.com). It also supports queries on sites that have RSS feeds linked from their main page (e.g. finger afiler.com@finger.afiler.com).

More finger feature suggestions are welcome!

At work, I’ve found myself SSHing into this Windows web server (thanks to Cygwin) often enough that I start to just think of it as another Linux server. And while Cygwin allows you to run Windows commands from a bash prompt, Windows commands don’t come with man pages (just /?). Microsoft has an A-Z List of Windows commands online, but sometimes I’d just prefer to stick to the command prompt. Conveniently, the documentation renders well in a text-based browser. To make these show up as man pages, you just need to have a text-based web browser installed, and have the html files named as the commands in a particular “chapter” of the manual. I picked chapter 9, as that’s not generally assigned.

apt-cyg install wget links # You probably don't have apt-cyg installed,
# so grab that or just use Cygwin's setup.exe instead
# to ensure wget and links are installed
ln -s /usr/bin/links /usr/bin/lynx # Man expects lynx for html pages
mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/html9
cd /usr/local/share/man/html9
wget -O- 'http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772390(WS.10).aspx' |\
grep -Po 'ctl00_MTCS_main_ctl.+href="\K([^"]+)(:.+>)([^>]+)(?=)' index.html |\
sed -r 's/^([^"]+).+>([^>]+)$/\1 \2/' | \
while read url name
do name=`echo ${name// /-} | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`
wget -O "$name.9.html" "$url"
done

That will get you man pages for all the commands in that A-Z list. For man pages on subcommands like “net computer”, type “man net-computer”. If you look at that list you’ll notice “net computer” but no “net use” or any of the other usual commands — of course, many of the net commands are well-documented through “net help”. If you really want to be unixy, you can dump those net help pages out to the manual too. Since they’re not formatted, you’ll want to put them in the cat9 directory instead of the html9 directory, and drop the .html extensions.

mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/cat9
cd /usr/local/share/man/cat9
for cmd in `net 2>&1 | grep '|' | sed 's/^NET//;s/[^A-Z]/ /g' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'` ; do net help $cmd > net-$cmd.9 ; done


I don’t know of any comprehensive list of commands besides the A-Z list and the net commands list. But to create individual man pages, you can do something like:

wget -O sqlcmd.9.html 'http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162773(d=printer).aspx'

This will give you a man page for sqlcmd, the command-line client for SQL Server. If you wanted to grab all the man pages for the net subcommands (instead of using the results from “net help”), do

for x in accounts computer continue file group help helpmsg localgroup name pause print sendshare session start statistics stop time use user view ; do wget -O net-$x.9.html "http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_$x.mspx" ; done
wget -O net-config.9.html 'http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_config_server.mspx'

If you’re looking for a little more Ubuntu/Debianism in Windows, try Richard’s apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade for Wndows. Got any more urls for man pages? Please post a comment and share!

A new service from afiler.com! Just finger “<twitteruser>@twitter.com@finger.afiler.com”. More services possibly coming soon.

$ finger fakeapstylebook@twitter.com@finger.afiler.com
[finger.afiler.com]
Login: FakeAPStylebook Name: Fake AP Stylebook
Bio: Style tips for proper writing. contact: fakeapstylebook at gmail dot com. No submissions, please. All material copyright The Bureau Chiefs, LLC.
Location:
Web: http://www.thebureauchiefs.com
Apr 22 16:00: For an international audience, spell the pop star's name as "KeUSDha."
Apr 22 11:30: Do not reference The Oxford English Dictionary. We speak American.
...
Apr 16 07:00: It's "for all intents and purposes." "Intensive Purposes" is the hot new medical drama from CBS.
Apr 15 16:00: Be sure not to confuse "aural" and "oral." The former is very uncomfortable.
Apr 15 14:17: Bureau Chiefs Poll: Who would you choose to perform at your son?@Ys bar mitzvah? http://bit.ly/ds489i


I made a monitor stand out of black gas pipe and fittings, compression tees, and an adapter bracket.

The compression tees (as in pipe fittings, not clothing) were an awesome find. They have rubber gaskets inside that made a surprisingly tight connection once the end caps are screwed down.

The galvanized metal fitting is a bracket made for using metal pipes for things like mounting rails and chin-up bars. The holes are 38mm apart, as opposed to 100mm on the standard VESA mount, so I made an adapter bracket. I made the adapter out of 6mm birch on the laser cutter at Metrix Create:Space though it would be easy enough to make at home — but lasering’s just so easy! I even countersunk screw holes using the laser.

I’m really impressed with the stability of the stand. I had been worried I’d need to add clamps under the compression tees to make sure they wouldn’t slip, but it turns out they’re far more solid than expected.

If I ever go completely insane and decide I need more monitors, I’m thinking I could make an X-Y setup, with two vertical bars, on which horizontal bars could be mounted. Each row could still have its height adjusted, plus this would allow an up/down tilt on each monitor.

Total cost for this was about $70, $8 of which was for the (very optional) laser cutting.

With AT&T saying that “with each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”) and plain-old telephone service (“POTS”) as relics of a by-gone era,” I thought it would be a good time to get a snapshot of the North American telephone network as it exists now. In the early 1970s, phone phreaks like Evan Doorbell and Mark Bernay started recording what they saw as the demise of the electromechanical telephone network. The switches then were crossbars and panels and steps and the like, with early computerized switches like the 1ESS just starting to appear. Now, the 1ESS is nearly gone from the network, and the North American network consists mostly of the Western Electric/AT&T/Lucent/Alcatel 5ESS (the 1ESS’s successor), the Nortel DMS-10 and DMS-100, the GTE Automatic Electric GTD-5 EAX, and the Stromberg-Carlson/Siemens DCO. A few other switches in the network, like the Siemens EWSD and the Ericsson AXE 10 have found more popularity in North America as cellular switches (and as wireline switches in other countries).

The oddball switches are the ones that really interest me, and they’ll be the first ones to disappear from the network. I’ve been told that the TRW Vidar ITS-5 and the Mitel GX5000 switches may be gone from the North American network. To see what might be left, I decided to do some digging, and I’ve come up with a list of the telephone switches (minus remotes) still in use in the North American network. There’s undoubtedly some stale data in this database, and so for rare switches, I think the numbers listed are the upper boundary — the lower boundary may be as low as 0. The list also contains the mystery “Digital Switching System”. There seems to be an awfully large number of them for it to be the North Electric DSS-1, which became the ITT 1210 — maybe it just means “unknown digital switch”?

The picture above of the GTD-5 EAX was shamelessly stolen from the site of a GTD-5 consultant, the only place I could find a picture.

Top 10 Switches

(more…)

Recently, Google Maps has started returning search results for townships (probably since Google’s change to being their own geodata provider). As I love tiny dots on the map and obscure entities, this got me excited. In some cases, the township name will even show up as a dot with a link to the township’s Wikipedia article. I think this only happens when the township also has a town with the same name inside it. Townships can be found by searching by whatever uniquely identifies them, e.g. Chilgren for Chilgren Township, Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, Laona, MN for Laona Township, Roseau County, MN, or Lincoln, Marshall, MN for Lincoln Township, Marshall County, Minnesota.

The data for these features is coming from the USGS’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database. I’ve put up a unique interface that combines that database with a few others, including databases of Canadian locations, zip codes, railroad stations, and telephone switch locations, at afiler.com/dots/. Want to see the list of every named place in Washington State? Or every place in the US and Canada named Springfield? Or even every place named Springfield in Georgia? The GNIS database lists 9 Springfields in Georgia, though only one is an incorporated city. The rest are so small, most don’t even get their name on Google Maps at any zoom level.

Dots lets you dig into extremely obscure place names, and this lets me dig up other secretly searchable Google Maps place names. Townships are called minor civil divisions by the US Census and some form of MCDs exist in 28 states. MCDs have some sort of official government function (though often small) — they include urbanized areas (cities, towns, villages, boroughs), townships, New England towns, parish governing authority districts (Louisiana), magisterial districts (Virginia and West Virginia), election districts/precincts (parts of Illinois, Maryland, and Nebraska), supervisors’ districts (Mississippi), and “catch all” entities, when nothing else applies (assessment districts, gores, grants, plantations, purchases, road districts, and unorganized territories). I’m still exploring what MCDs, other than townships and cites/towns/villages are searchable in Google Maps.

The other 22 states are divided into census county divisions instead of MCDs. These were created with the cooperation of the census and the state governments and may only be used for census tabulation or may also be used by county governments, for example, as electoral districts. MCDs are also are searchable in Google Maps. That means that you can find the census division of Early Winters in Okanogan County, Washington by searching for Early Winters, Okanogan, WA (or just Early Winters, WA, or even just Early Winters).

In Canada, Google Maps uses the census division as the county is in the US. Census divisions correspond to a county or county-like entity in most provinces where those exist. This includes BC (regional districts and municipalities), Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (counties), Ontario (upper-tier municipalities: counties, districts, regional municipalities, cities) and Quebec (municipalités régionales de comté). Elsewhere, census divisions do not correspond to local government. Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut, and the Northwest territories have named census divisions. Census divisions are simply numbered in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan (even though Alberta has some entities named “County”, they’re municipal districts and are treated like the rural municipalities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan). (Early in its history, Manitoba also had counties, though the names only persist in land records and in the name of the Dennis County Planning District. I was able to find the names and locations of counties from the 1880s in Manitoba statute books on Google Books, and used that to write up a Wikipedia article, a list of historic counties in Manitoba.)

Searching for Springfield, Canada will get Google Maps to display its most-expanded name (other times they’re shortened to City, Province or City, County, Province). Results include “Springfield, Division No. 12, MB” (the RM of Springfield, a local government unit, inside a nongovernmental census division), but also “Springfield, Woodstock, Carleton County, NB”, (a named place inside Woodstock Parish in Carleton County), and “Springfield, Swift Current No. 137, Division No. 8, SK” (a named place inside a rural municipality, inside a nongovernmental census divisions). The results from Google Maps appear mostly consistent with a search for Springfield at Statistics Canada.

For even more obscure geodata info, check out the Census’s list of county subdivision types, or their maps of MCDs and CCDs, by state. There’s also an even more obscure geographic subdivision not used by the census, the hundred, in Delaware. The hundred once also existed in the UK (where some Local Government Districts took the name of a hundred), and Australia (where they’re still used in land descriptions as as one of the cadastral divisions of Australia).

The nonexistent Argleton in Lancashire, England

From the Telegraph in the UK: “Argleton, a ‘phantom town’ in Lancashire that appears on Google Maps and online directories but doesn’t actually exist, has puzzled internet experts.” The photo is from Picasa user Mister Roy, who walked and photographed the nonexistent place in February 2009.

I’ve seen hundreds of Argletons in North Dakota. Of course, the difference is that North Dakota’s Argletons usually had, at some point in the past, a bit more concrete existence — though not necessarily that much more. Some of the places I photographed were ever only a railroad siding or post office. If they were big enough to end up on USGS topological maps in the 1970s, they’ve now secured a permanent digital existence thanks to the place name database distributed by the US Board on Geographic Names.

Dundas, North Dakota