Jade's weblog Archive

Gendersaur definition

A man named Harry Crouch coined a term recently: gendersaur. I've changed its meaning slightly to refer to those who want one gender or the other to predominate, or those who think that the other gender is to blame for everything.

07:05 PM, 30 Sep 2004 by Jade Rubick Permalink | Comments (0)

Fixed error while upgrading Postgres backport to 7.4.3 - 7.4.6

2004-09-23 20:08:14 [11723] FATAL: could not open configuration file "/var/lib/postgres/data/pg_hba.conf": Permission denied

Fixed with chmod o+r /etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf

This seems to be necessary every time I upgrade postgresql from apt-get.

11:24 PM, 23 Sep 2004 by Jade Rubick Permalink | Comments (0)

StraightTalk [straighttalk.ourfuture.org]

From the site:

The public is beginning to recognize—with increasing clarity—that the policies of President Bush and the right wing are simply failing America. That's why the right wing's rhetoric seems to be growing more divorced from reality every day.

They invoke "security" even as their catastrophic war of choice in Iraq makes American and Iraqi citizens less safe. They talk "opportunity," but practice tax cuts for the few and pay cuts for the many. They parade "compassion," even while our country suffers a record increase in poverty and job loss.

The right wing can't hide their dismal failures forever! Help cut through their smoke and mirrors, and pave the way for progressive solutions that genuinely serve the American people!

01:17 PM, 23 Sep 2004 by Jade Rubick Permalink | Comments (0)

Using sonar to help blind people 'see'

The night before last, I was thinking about my grandfather, who has gone blind in the last couple of years, and was struck with an idea: what if you took a small sonar system, hooked it up to a handheld computer and two earphones, and created a computer program that would encode the sonar signals into a meaninful map of the physical world around you?

I imagined what a huge difference this would make for the blind around the world, I imagined how it would be developed, and even how the business model would work. I named my 'company', thought through its development. I imagined the engineering and design problems that would be faced: ''what information would be important to convey and what to ignore? How long would it take to learn? etc...'' I wasn't able to sleep for about 3 hours after I went to bed.

Ah, but a simple Google search finds that I am not the first to think of such an idea. Alas.

I wonder if someone has come up with a device that reads text to blind people? Scans the world ahead and reads out any text encountered. I'm sure there is. :)

11:58 AM, 14 Sep 2004 by Jade Rubick Permalink | Comments (1)

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