Lucas is getting pretty large. At his 1 month checkup he weighed in at 9lbs 11oz. So he’s putting on about 2 ounces per day. I expect him to be 200 pounds in 4 years.. He’s still pretty cute, he likes to work out his facial muscles so he has all these funny faces that I’d like to attribute to some emotion, but that might be giving him more credit than he deserves. Several people think he looks more like Tracy than me, aside from his massive biceps of course.

Here’s some urls, article and web sites I’ve read about that are interesting.

From Patri: Game theory and politics

From Best of the Web 2.0: Digg.com a new social tagging and news finding site for interesting news. This is kind of my replacement for slashdot since slashdot started to suck. I like the digg spy which is like a realtime view of what people digg.

This guy is sick: Look at this Contract of wifely expectations.

A random blast from the past: From Eric Taylor who used to work for UM like myself. He has an interesting essay on Reforming the US military.

Humor for programmers: The Daily WTF

Last night’s Battlestar Galactica episode “Downloaded” featured a sort of role reversal in that we got to see Cylons as the featured characters. One of the things that makes the Cylons in the new BSG much more interesting than the old BSG is that instead of being a pure and simple evil, they are complex, humanized evil filled with inner conflict, turmoil and individuality. On the other hand, the original BSG was just plain dumb, so there’s not really any good comparison. Simple evil characters, like those in horror movies just aren’t that interesting.

I saw a presentation on Solaris 10’s Zones virtualization today, and I came away somewhat unimpressed. They use a different model than other virtualization products like Xen and VMWare. Their model is to re-use the same kernel among all zones(each zone is an instance of the OS more or less). The process id space is shared between all processes, but the IP port space is not.

Compared to the other models, this means that you can run a lot more virtual machines because you only need memory for all the processes run in each zone. With VMWare and Xen, you need to allocate a large contiguous block of memory which is as large as the amount of real memory you want to emulate. ie if you have 3 virtual machines which each wants 512MB of memory, but in each VM the kernel and processes require only 50MB of memory in the Solaris Zone model, you only really need 150MB of memory(3*50), but in the VMWare and Xen models, you’ll pretty much need 1546MB(3*512) of memory.

However, the drawback of the zones model outweighs the benefits to me. The major drawback is you can’t use different kernels or OSes between the virtual machines. There are some other oddities, like they claim the global and local zones can have different user ids and password files, but a user in the global zone which has the same userid as a user in a local zone can act as that user in the local zone. I’d prefer a completely hidden virtual machine abstraction.

I had a dream last night that Darth Vader was sleeping with another man. And when Darth was unmasked, he was James Earl Jones not Hayden Christensen. I see fan film spinoff potential here. Brokeback Star Wars.

Lucas has an amazing appetite. It’s between %50 and %100 more than the high end of what most baby books say he should be eating. It adds up to more than 30 oz. a day, which is more than 1/4 of his body weight for an 8lb baby. We aren’t concerned about overfeeding him yet, but if this lasts a while, we might be.

I’m impressed with both Dreamhost and Gallery 2.0. I had an old Gallery 1.x with all my photos on chen.net which was hosted by Funkware. I moved everything to Dreamhost, but I didn’t want to re-install Gallery. Dreamhost has a one-click install process for Gallery 2.0, so I figured I’d try it out. It was technically several more steps than one click, but it went very smoothly. I was even more impressed with how well the upgrade of my 1.0 Gallery went, about all I had to do was to specify the location of my old files and it took care of almost everything. Lots of new features in Gallery 2.0, and more importantly a lot more extensibility so it can use all sorts of plugins and modules.

Oh and Google completely reamed my PageRank. This happened a month or two ago, but I was just mentioning it now because I was completely looking for a blog post from a few months ago and I was totally unable to find anything despite hitting the keywords and the title pretty close. Yahoo found the post immediately. Thus we can conclude that Yahoo is now the superior search engine based on my sample size of one.

Ugh. Another lost post. This time it was firefox that crashed on me.

I like the idea behind Prosper.com quite a bit. Like HedgeStreet it provides an innovative person-to-person financial service, in this case personal lending. Prosper.com will handle all of the loan servicing, including credit checks, payment schedule, and potentially getting a collection agency to make sure debtors make good.

For borrowers, you request a loan and provide some information including your credit history and then tell the system how much interest you are willing to pay.

Then lenders bid down the amount and price they are willing to loan to you. If a borrower with an excellent credity history requests $10k at %6, you might have a dozen lenders offer $1k each at %5. Then the system would take the lenders and potentially consolidate them into a single loan at the highest rate required to satisfy the sum total of the loan. eg. If the bids were $5k at %3, $2k at %4, $3k at %5, and $7k at %6, then the first three bids would be accepted because they have the best rate(for the borrower). The rate would be %5(highest of the bids) if I understand it correctly.

There are a couple cool things. First you can(and definitely should) diversify your lending power to mitigate the risk of a single bad borrower. And on the borrowing side there is a reputation system(defined by joining a member of a group) which helps lower the borrowing rates that people might have to endure otherwise due to bad credit or something like that. I’m still a bit fuzzy on the borrowing group system.

Anyways, this business model is great. Completely scalable, highly leveragable, no marginal cost. Prosper.com charges a %1 loan origination fee. They also currently limit loans to 3 years and $25k, but I’m sure they’d expand that if they are successful.

It also presents interesting opportunities for enterprising individuals. Borrowing and lending currently require a person who is a U.S. resident with a bank account and a social security number. However I could see some Chinese kid getting his cousin who is a US resident to set him up an account with a few hundred dollars and then start arbitraging loans. Of course the %1 commission is going to eat into it, but it can’t be that hard to make sure you’re doing better than that. Reminds me of the old banker’s 3-6-3 rule. Borrow at %3, lend at %6, golf at 3. I admit I’m tempted to leverage my good credit to try doing some trading here, but I’m too lazy to actually follow through on it.

I was able to move over the domain name to dreamhost.com successfully. I think everything looks good, but send me email if anything looks more broken than it used to.

Yesterday there were new screenshots of KDE4 and also Nat showed me this Touchscreen Interface. It’s hard to get excited about KDE4 when you see something as cool as that touchscreen stuff. The one danger of a touchscreen UI like that is that it requires a lot of movement to do it. It would tire your arms out to work on that all day.

I’m seeing a lot of URLs from You Tube lately. It’s a pretty good service from what I’ve seen. It’s very web 2.0, user-created content, tagging, viral networking. I wonder what their bandwidth bills are like though.

No one has yet to voice an opinion on the resemblance of Lucas to either parent.

Just looking at these stats and you can tell I am an excellent dad:

Number of times I dropped baby: 0
Number of time I let baby bash his head against something solid: 0
Number of diapers changed: many

It’s statistical proof of excellence in parenting. Numbers don’t lie.

Tracy’s parents will be in town tomorrow for more than a week to see the new baby. Meanwhile, we’re pleased that Lucas is a relatively quiet baby, not a lot of fussiness.