DC Metro Transit Alarm

When in Washington DC, this is the must-have application: DC Metro Transit Alarm

As everyone who rides the bus or train knows, the metro schedules are more like guidelines reminding you that the train will come eventually. The DC Metro Transit Alarm for android tells you when the train will actually arrive, so that you aren't waiting around on the platform in the cold.
Also, it is only 150k, and very functional. Very few clicks to use, and you do not have click over and over to get the alarms set.

Incentives in Medicine.

First off, I do not believe in any type of socialism due to the incentive structure. Morals and ethics are not quantifiable, so mathematically, it is completely about incentives. Everyone has a bias, especially if they say that they do not. Now, with my bias out of the way...

Reason has this on medicine:
http://reason.com/archives/2012/11/15/the-obamacare-revolt-oklahoma-doctors-fi

I know first-hand that this is completely true. My daughter arrives sometime at the end of Q1, and the OGBYN told me that the total cost would be $22k. I responded that I do not have insurance, but I could pay for all services up front. Not including ultrasounds, the total cost was:
$2800 USD
That's not including ultrasounds, that went from $300 under insurance to $125. This means that I get more than 70% off one service, and more than 50% off another.

Another thing is that even if you have health insurance, there's not a reason for a doctor to take it. I say fire all of the government compliance and paper pushers.

Satire, Inc..

One of the things that I like about Americans is that they have the ability to laugh at themselves. "The Onion" is truly America's finest news source. "China Daily Show" is truly China's finest news source, because remember, it's not the news unless it's the official news.

There is an ape with a red bottom...

There is an ape with a red bottom, but I cannot seem to find what it is. I thought that youtube would be a good way to find something from description. Well, I found the monkey, but it ended there. Consider the following picture:

That is the last screen from a mis-click actually, but it did have the red-bottom monkey. Apparently, other popular links are ape fornication, which apparently google thinks is a good time to advertise:
Chinese dating sites
Ukrainian women
Filipino dating

So boys, just remember when you are looking at that cute Chinese girl in the back of the class, from the perspective of google, she's the banner child for the Chimpy Chinky Clinky.

Edit: I still want to know what that monkey is called. :(

Steve Jobs Memorial (easter egg?) from Safari

A message from Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

Steve’s passing one year ago today was a sad and difficult time for all of us. I hope that today everyone will reflect on his extraordinary life and the many ways he made the world a better place.

One of the greatest gifts Steve gave to the world is Apple. No company has ever inspired such creativity or set such high standards for itself. Our values originated from Steve and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. We share the great privilege and responsibility of carrying his legacy into the future.

I’m incredibly proud of the work we are doing, delivering products that our customers love and dreaming up new ones that will delight them down the road. It’s a wonderful tribute to Steve’s memory and everything he stood for. - Tim

Making lines thick (or thicker) in MATLAB plots

The default line size for MATLAB is 0.5pt, which is a bit annoying when integrating graphs into LaTeX. Consider the following graph made by:

x=1:10;
plot(x,'o-');

You can thicken a line by finding the elements of the line property. Let's say that you wanted to make the line width 4pt, you would do the following:

ch = get(gca,'children'); 
ln = ch(strmatch('line',get(ch,'Type')));
set(ln,'Linewidth',4);

As you can see, the line is much thicker. Play around with getting the 'children', as there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do to help you make your graphs prettier. You can basically do everything in 'edit plots' without changing into edit mode. :)

xcode and it's damnable license!

It's not building; it's not building!
So, I installed 10.8 from scratch on my mac, and I was trying to get my code working again. Things just weren't building... Well it seems that I needed to agree to the license, and the command line license is different from the GUI XCode license. Also, if you agree to the license as a user, that doesn't mean that root agreed. :/

sudo xcodebuild -license

Solved my issues.