Thursday Miscellany!

Things to think about as we roll into a holiday weekend (because let's be honest, most of us are already kinda there):

• The White House has admitted that their drone strike program killed four Americans - one target, three "collateral damage." As violations of civil rights and civil liberties go, it doesn't get any worse.


• Is the United States running black ops in Syria? Probably. And given how brutal the rebels have become, that's not a good thing.


• The oil choke collar yanks again. The more dependent we are on oil, foreign or otherwise, for our transportation energy needs, the worse our economy will be.


• You can tell when someone died by checking their brain clock - unless that someone was depressed. Corollary: depressed people essentially live in a different time zone from non-depressed people.


• Remember the teenage girl from Florida who was arrested after her science experiment went awry? Well, the good news is that all charges have been dropped. The better news is that she's going to space camp.


• Want to get involved in open source development? Not sure where to start? Start with OpenHatch, a boot camp for would-be open source novices. It won't teach you to program, but it will teach you how to get involved if you already have some skill.

Note to #GoogleCode users - consider using #SourceForge for downloads

Today, Google Code announced that they were following in GitHub's footsteps and cutting off file downloads for project hosting. We are being asked to Use Google Drive instead.

Frankly, I think this is unfortunate on Google's part. I understand why they did it, and for me, as a developer, the minuses ("why should I have to use my Google Drive space?!?") aren't that obnoxious compared to the benefits I get from Google Code and GitHub. None of my binaries are that huge, and I don't foresee a situation where I have to make available enough old versions of my binaries to fill up more than a few gigabytes of my Drive. Nonetheless, this move is already upsetting quite a few developers, and I can see one good reason why: Google Drive is messy. It requires me to consume, conceptually speaking at least, two different Google services for source and binary. And a Google Drive gets full of miscellaneous crap quickly (or at least it has in my case).

Which is why I found it interesting that SourceForge has reached out to developers:

Roberto Galoppini May 23, 2013 at 12:40 PM

SourceForge welcomes Google Code open source developers, to distribute downloads from our open source platform.

We serve over 150 Million+ downloads each month, reaching 42 Million+ unique visitors. We help tiny projects as well as whales like Apache OpenOffice to distribute their downloads via our worldwide mirror network.

By distributing your releases at SourceForge you’ll get a complete download analytics, and the opportunity to tap into a large open source community. We already serve other ecosystems by offering their hosted projects our download facilities, including Githubbers.

As a trusted partner for open source we're glad to help. https://sourceforge.net/publish/?source=googlecode

[Disclosure: I work for SourceForge]

This is interesting enough that I'm considering deploying my old, broken Minichess program via SourceForge for giggles, just to see how it works. Of course, it's still messy, but this way the source isn't taking up space on "my" Google Drive.

I-5 Bridge collapses near Mount Vernon, WA - two cars in the river

For the Love of Pete....

MOUNT VERNON, Wash. -- The Washington State Patrol says the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River at Mount Vernon has collapsed, dumping vehicles and people into the water.

Trooper Mark Francis said the four-lane bridge collapsed about 7 p.m.

Francis says he has no idea how many people are in the water or whether there are any injuries or deaths.

He did not know what caused the collapse.

Maybe Trooper Francis doesn't know what caused the collapse, but I think we can take a reasonable guess as to the chief contributor to the collapse - a backlog of $1.6 trillion dollars in infrastructure maintenance that we should have been working on for the last decade. Instead, we spent more than that on tax breaks for the rich, bailing out "too big to fail" banks, and two optional wars. You know, priorities.

(Note: Mount Vernon is about an hour north of Seattle by car. Map)

EDIT Quoting KOMO news, italics mine:

Bart Treece with the Washington State Department of Transportation was unsure when the bridge was last inspected.

"All of our bridges in the area are pretty old," he said.

Washington state was given a C in the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2013 infrastructure report card and a C- when it came to the state's bridges. The group said more than a quarter of Washington's 7,840 bridges are considered structurally deficient of functionally obsolete.

BTW, That C- is a better grade than the D+ the ASCE gave to the US as a whole in that same report. Oregon, for its part, gets a C- overall and a C- for transportation.