From the why-kids-need-to-understand-natural-selection department: Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good.

Unlike these traditional cleaners, antibacterial products leave surface residues, creating conditions that may foster the development of resistant bacteria, Levy notes. For example, after spraying and wiping an antibacterial cleaner over a kitchen counter, active chemicals linger behind and continue to kill bacteria, but not necessarily all of them.

When a bacterial population is placed under a stressor – such as an antibacterial chemical – a small subpopulation armed with special defense mechanisms can develop. These lineages survive and reproduce as their weaker relatives perish. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is the governing maxim here, as antibacterial chemicals select for bacteria that endure their presence.

Blatantly stolen from BoingBoing.

As you probably know, I’ve been planning a wedding. Or, more accurately, sitting there watching as Kerri plans the wedding. I could say that’s the reason I haven’t posted in 19 years, but really I’m just lazy and out of ideas.

I went to get my suit tailored last night. It’s awesome. I’m going to look like this:

But fatter.

There are a couple of cool new technology releases today:

Google Gears is a browser extension providing a set of Javascript APIs for offline web applications.

Review Board is a web based code review application from the folks at VMWare. No CVS support (yet), sadly.

Andrew Bird makes some excellent music. And this rendition of Why, recorded live on March 21, 2007, is particularly great:

I’ve been sitting on this for a little while, but Ankit Solanki wrote an Emacs Markdown mode, which includes syntax highlighting, a while back. He even used my buffer preview function!

Me: man, I’m going to be such an awesomely ornery old man

Andrew: you’re already an awesomely ornery young man

Me: exactly!

Andrew: all you gotta do is get old

I got an email today from Amazon Web Services saying that the S3 (Simple Storage Service) prices will change on June first. Now S3 will be even cheaper:

Storage

$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer

$0.10 per GB – all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded

$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded

$0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB

Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests

$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests

$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

*No charge for delete requests

Storage and bandwidth size includes all file overhead

I really need to stop dragging my heels and start backing up my backup server to S3.

It looks like these prices will lower the overall cost for transferring large files (I’m not sure yet what “large” means in this context). Transferring a lot of small files will increase the overall cost.

Kerri and I finished watching an American Experience episode about the Summer of Love this weekend. The main point of the program was that the Summer of Love in San Francisco was a great countercultural success at the beginning but eventually failed because there were too many people doing drugs and freeloading.

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It occurred to me that simply saying that druggies and freeloaders showed up isn’t quite enough to explain why the whole big experiment failed. The Hippies wanted people to be able to do drugs and get stuff for free (the Digger soup line and the Free Store are good examples of this). The problem wasn’t that people were taking the things offered to them, it was that there weren’t enough people creating. Plenty was being sucked out of the system they created but not enough was added back in.

We can think of it as a sort of user created content system. Since the Hippies weren’t creating new wealth in the form of money, they needed to do so in the form of food, goods, etc. But when everyone is stoned instead of contributing to the community the whole system consumes itself in very short time.

I just upgraded to version 1.99 of Capistrano, the remote deployment tool most commonly used for Rails projects. This is a prerelease of Capistrano 2.0 and installed easily with the following commands:

sudo gem install highline
sudo gem install -s http://gems.rubyonrails.com capistrano

Highline is a new (at least on my machine) dependency for Capistrano and needs to be installed separately because it isn’t present in the gems.rubyonrails.org repository. Following the upgrade instructions I ran capify . in my local working copy to upgrade my recipe setup. I then ran cap -f upgrade upgrade:revisions to upgrade the remote revision tracking files. Sadly, that didn’t work very well and I was greeted with a mostly unhelpful little error:

* executing <code>upgrade:revisions'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-1.99.0/lib/capistrano/configuration/namespaces.rb:175:inmethod_missing': undefined local variable or method `deploy_to' for #<Capistrano::Configuration::Namespaces::Namespace:0x69e8a8> (NameError)
</code>

It took a little looking about, but I figured out how to fix it: just run this command:

cap -f upgrade -f Capfile upgrade:revisions

All better.

Kerri and I went to see Grindhouse at the Kendall Theater last night. It was a fantastic romp – completely over the top – and I came out wanting more.

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If you’re not familiar with the concept of Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino teamed up to create a B-movie style double feature and show both films, along with some terribly wonderful “fake” trailers (a number of which may turn into real films), as one.

The first feature, Planet Terror, is a zombie flick written and directed by Rodriguez. There’s tons of blood and gore, bad acting and unrealistic action, all of which makes the film great. Everything – from the bubbling flesh of yet-to-be zombies to the fountains of blood (somewhat reminiscent of Kill Bill vol. 1) when people (and zombies) are shot – is completely over the top and makes Planet Terror the most fun hour and a half I’ve had in a movie theater in a long time.

The second movie, Tarantino’s Death Proof, is a completely different beast. It tells the story of a crazed stunt man (an excellent Kurt Russell) and how he uses his car – a stunt man modified, “death proof” vehicle – to hunt down and kill seemingly innocent women. There’s a lot of dialog and back story in Death Proof and a lot of exciting action and it all contributes to the suspense and surprise of the final moments of the picture.

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The trailers that sit before and between the movies are excellent as well. Machete, what Rodriguez calls a “mexploitation” film, is about a double crossed Mexican gun for hire who takes revenge on his ex-employers. As soon as I saw the trailer I wanted to see the whole movie, which Rodriguez will be releasing direct to DVD at the same time as the Grindhouse DVD. Thanksgiving is a take on Halloween and is hilariously creepy.

If you haven’t seen Grindhouse yet, please do. Despite the three plus hour running time the films move fast and are tons of fun.