Tuesday Miscellany!

• Snowden revealed to us that our emails aren't safe from Big Brother. But did you know that they're not safe from Big Oil, either?


• Speaking of which, the US House is set to vote on an Amendment to gut funding for the NSA's data mining program.


• As Detroit declares Chapter 9 bankruptcy, another US city grits its teeth and sells its memorabilia to avoid the same fate: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania


• The Works of Aleister Crowley is now available as a facsimile reprint. Nice as this is, it does press the point that the process of editing the Crowley material seems to have suffered from scope creep and other delays.


• If I was single and could marry software, I'd at least ask Homebrew out on a date. (Yes, I'm the kind of geek who uses the terminal on his Mac.)

A letter to President #Obama about Larry Summers

Mr. President,

It's come to my attention that you're likely to appoint former Harvard Provost Larry Summers to the chair of the Federal Reserve.

You know, the notoriously sexist, neoliberal Larry Summers.

Could you please stop paying attention to what the Beltway morons "think" and just appoint Krugman to the Fed, like you should have in the fucking first place?

Thank you.

Signed,

A disgruntled Democrat who voted for you in two primaries and two generals.

Things I’ve learned at #OSCON so far.

Originally published at Finding God in a Dog. You can comment here or there.

Scala: This language allows many programmers to write the same code faster than they would in Java. And if they ignore readability and maintainability, they can go even faster.

Hadoop: A slow-as-molasses query engine might not look impressive, but multiply them by a hundred and look out. By the way, we forgot to mention that you can buy a Hadoop setup on the cloud. Insert Beowulf cluster joke here.

Chef: We do configuration management. In Ruby. But we’re not Puppet. Honest.

Apache Drill: If you need to query Oracle, DB2, Hadoop, SQL Server, JSON, XML, and a bunch of Mickey Mouse MS Access databases sitting in Accounting, simultaneously, this will do it. Note future tense. By the way, we could really use developers.

Coreboot: If you had just come to our tutorial, you would have gotten maximum geek points and a new Chromebook.