When: December 1, 5:30-7:30 PM
Where:  Suite 133G University Square

This workshop will be an opportunity to share ideas, suggestions and information to explore the location for a greenway and bike path connection between the Carolina North campus and the Main UNC Campus.  We are seeking a pathway that is not located within the Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. roadway and that avoids steep grades where feasible.  It may include existing or planned greenways for a portion of the route.
There will be a brief introduction by Town and University staff about existing conditions between the two campuses.  Staff will also share some examples of the kind of opportunities we’re seeking for new routes through the neighborhoods or using portions of the existing and planned greenway system.
The majority of the workshop will be spent in an open session, focused on gathering input from the participants, including students, residents, technical experts, advisory boards and community groups about approaches to connectivity.
We’re looking for your ideas, suggestions, opinions and information, so please come prepared to tell us what you think!
If you have a question for the Town, call The Town of Chapel Hill Planning Department at:
(919) 968-2728.  If you have a question for the University, contact Jill Coleman at Nancy.Coleman@facilities.unc.edu
You may also send comments to Carolinanorth@townofchapelhill.org or check the website for more information: http://www.townofchapelhill.org/index.aspx?page=900

Please attend!

I just called Congressman Price’s office. The details of the Why of that call are for another blog post. The How is what I’m really interested in right now. I got an email blast from Lessig about H.R. 801, and in it there was a phone number for the Congressional switchboard. I was looking at that email in my phone and realized that the phone number was a link I could click, and suddenly I was making a call. I know this is something that people with blackberries have been doing for quite some time, but I had such a powerful AHA moment when I placed that call that I had to share it. What happens when everybody who has a phone can do this?

carl malamud poster

Inspired by this article via a tweet from Paul, I’d like to cast a vote (so to speak) for the the nomination of Carl Malamud for head of GPO. Yes We Scan.

Thanks to Mr. Malamud’s advocacy, government officials are starting to ask if the federal government is really doing all it is supposed to, to make government transparent. Last week, Senator Joe Lieberman sent a letter to the policy-making body of the Federal Court system “requesting proper compliance with the E-Government Act of 2002 on transparency and privacy issues as they relate to court documents,” addressing two problem Mr. Malamud had identified.

If we really do want change, it behooves us to push for Malamud.

I’m using Protégé for a class, and sadly the installer isn’t smart enough to install system-wide, which means I would have to cd to the install directory and issue ./run.sh to start protégé. Sub-optimal. Here’s the original run.sh:

#!/bin/sh

java ${CMD_OPTIONS} -Xmx200M -Dosgi.clean=true -DentityExpansionLimit=100000000 -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 -jar org.eclipse.osgi.jar

And my better one:

#!/bin/bash

pushd /home/<myuser>/Protege_4.0_beta
java ${CMD_OPTIONS} -Xmx200M -Dosgi.clean=true -DentityExpansionLimit=100000000 -Dfile.encoding=utf-8 -jar org.eclipse.osgi.jar
popd

This means that I can now go into my ~/bin and make a symlink to the run.sh as ‘protege’. Having done that, I can Alt-F2 and type ‘protege’ to start protege. Huzzah! Note that on some systems you may not have to replace sh with bash, but on Ubuntu sh is actually dash, which does not have pushd and popd.

Hopefully this will be useful to someone else installing Protégé on a Linux-based system.

My family has been going to various animal shelters about three days a week for some time. Today my parents got a puppy. I want to call him Captain Kazumi, but I’m not sure the name will stick. He’s 10 weeks old. Sorry for the awful cell phone pic, btw. Also, Happy New Year.

My final project for my CMC class this Fall was a research proposal, and it looks like it was a good enough first draft that I’ll be meeting up with some folks to beat it into a form that I can talk about publicly with some confidence. Once I get to that point I can start dreading the IRB process. Yaaay!

…from one of my logwatch fortunes. Just had to share:

Q:     An English mathematician (I forgot who) was asked by his very religious colleague: Do you believe in one God?
A:     Yes, up to isomorphism!

Q:     What is a compact city?
A:     It’s a city that can be guarded by finitely many near-sighted policemen!
– Peter Lax

I just had a funny conversation with a friend about why In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Amnesiac are both great albums with several songs that don’t stand well on their own (at least not on the first listen), and their release dates (Aeroplane in 1998 and Amnesiac in 2001) meant that the former was loved and the latter… not so much. Once Napster and all the rest had sufficiently permeated the culture, people were first exposed to an album not as the assembled whole but through the individual song downloads, and some of the songs just didn’t seem worth downloading, so people came to the conclusion that the album, taken as a whole, was crap. Clearly there’s more going on here (expectations, packaging, etc.), but I think my point stands. What’s funny, though, is that my friend was simply SHOCKED that Aeroplane was released in 1998. She thought it was much, much more recent. This is an album she’s heard all the way through maybe four or five times. I think her words were, “I don’t think I could have appreciated Neutral Milk Hotel without first hearing a lot of Sufjan Stevens.”

It says a lot about Aeroplane that it doesn’t strike her as being a decade old. Come to think of it, last year I was totally stuck on OK Computer. I think I’ll continue my tradition of getting stuck on albums that are 10 years old. Anybody care to recommend some great albums from 1999?

Daily Show Shenanigans. Probably NSFW for you:

A couple of quick thoughts on the above video. Firstly, why is the death of the newspaper business as we’ve known it since the mid 1980s a bad thing? Secondly, <3 the Intarwebs.

Tarus Balog lives just up the road and manages the team that maintains OpenNMS. He has a great post on his blog about the book Predictably Irrational. Check it out.