What evidence could I present to you that would make you change your mind?

He emphasized that an open-minded person should be able to answer this. However, blind faith in something probably isn’t going to allow for one.

Personally, I find comfort in the scientific method and transient truths based on empirical evidence.  Why is it so bad to reevaluate beliefs based on new evidence?  Is it an issue of stubbornness?

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast is available on iTunes.

This entire post, with the exception of adding the hyperlink, was created with WordPress for iPhone. The photo feature is very nice, allowing you to add photos from your Photo Library or take new ones.

This is precisely what I have wanted, and I think it will greatly increase my number of posts. Even if I want to do some touch-ups from a desktop browser before I publish a post, it will be waiting for me as a draft.

UPDATE: I also discovered that it has a helpful recovery feature that can recover changes to a post that were not uploaded/saved properly before the application was closed.

Because I’m a proud papa, here’s a picture of Zeke sleeping…

The number one feature that I think is very important, is the easy no-hassle upgrades. When I see that there is a Tomato software update with the help of Google Reader, I simply download the file and upload the contained .bin file to my router. I don’t need to reconfigure any settings, unlike all of the other firmwares that I’ve used in the past. Having to reconfigure a crap ton of settings with a software update is not acceptable in my book.

Brilliantly, Tomato incorporates bandwidth monitoring right into its web interface. When I used the DD-WRT firmware, I had to get Cacti installed on a separate Linux box to achieve a similar goal, and it wasn’t nearly as convenient. With Tomato, I just configured it to save the bandwidth data to a CIFS/Samba share on my Linux server (for sack of size and not wanting to burn out my router’s NVRAM by saving all of the data there). The bandwidth graphs make use of AJAX and SVG, which work well and look pretty cool.

Multiple DDNS (dynamic DNS) client configurations can be entered, so I can have both DynDNS and OpenDNS updated if my public IP address changes. Friggin’ brilliant…

Last but not least is the GUI. As I mentioned before, its web-based like other firmwares, however this one has a clean and fast interface. AJAX is used to give it some nice on-demand features. My favorite is when I’m selecting a channel for my wireless network and it actively scans and displays the strongest SSID neighbor for each channel.

I think I’m going to donate some money to Polarcloud.com for this incredible product. The only feature that I’ve been slightly missing with Tomato is a VPN server. With DD-WRT, I used the PPTP server and was able to remotely connect my laptop into my home network from anywhere on the Internet. I did have some security concerns with it, so I’m not sure that I’d still be using the VPN configuration, but it would make a nice addition to Tomato’s great feature set.

Now go out and install Tomato on a compatible router near you…

For quite awhile I’ve wanted to develop an evolution simulator. The problem is that there would be so much involved in this, it’d be nearly impossible for me. I try to ignore the fact that no scientist has done it, maybe it’s that no one has had the vision. Most likely it’s entirely impractical.

In the simulator, I’d love to to see a diverse existence of lifeforms that interact with each other and their environment. Below are a few features that I think would need to be part of the simulator:

• Inherited traits
• Mutation of the traits (or the “genetic” material)
• Natural selection (simulated, of course)
• Environmental factors like geographic isolation
• Speciation

Here are a few simulators that are interesting, but not nearly to the level of sophistication that I’ve wanted:

• Evolution Simulator-Java
• Evolites - not sure about this one, haven’t tried it yet.
• Spore - a game by Maxis which looks awesome, but I’m skeptical that it will actually involve evolution. To coincide with Darwin Day, today they announced a release date of September 7th, 2008.

Obviously, there’s a long way to go on this one. From my perspective, this application would need a lot of intelligence. Maybe I should start a SourceForge project and start recruiting!

• 5 stars: my favorite songs at the given moment - these are usually ones that I could listen to over and over again
• 4 stars: great songs
• 3 stars: good songs
• 2 stars: mediocre songs - ones that I want to hear infrequently
• 1 star: songs that I don’t have any interest in listening to again, or tracks that I wouldn’t want placed into a music mix, like a stand-up comedian or skit from Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.
• 0 stars: not rated - doesn’t mean I don’t want to listen to it, but I just haven’t listened to it at all or enough to rate it

When I first started rating my music, my rating spectrum was much more symmetrical. I quickly realized that I needed more variation for the music that I liked, and I’ve been using this modified rating structure since. After the break, I’ll discuss some smart playlists I’ve created.

As you’ll see below, some of my playlists build upon one another. I’ll discuss them in the following order: Good New Music, New Selections, Good New Selections, Automagic Mix, and Highly Rated Mix.

Good New Music

In this smart playlist, I have the following criteria:

What I’m doing with this playlist is trying to capture music that is new to me and I already enjoy. I’ve added the comment rule as a way to get rid of an old song that I just added to my iTunes library. I just need to add the %old% tag to the comment field of a song to keep it from entering the list.

New Selections

I’ve found a number of situations where I got some new music, but didn’t really listen to it much at first. Later, I release I want to listen to the CD but it’s no longer in my Recently Added playlist. For these instances, I have the “New Selections” playlist, which is static and not smart. I can add the tracks to this playlist and be sure that they’re tranferred to my iPod.

Good New Selections

As you might assume, this playlist builds off of the previous one. It’s goal is to capture the songs I like from the New Selections list. This smart playlist has the following conditions:

Automagic Mix

This playlist is my favorite because it incorporates my favorite music at the moment and the fresh music that I like. I find myself listening to it at least once a day. As the 5 star songs get old, I simply reduce the rating. Here are the conditions:

Highly Rated Mix

This playlist is a good revolving list of great songs. As you can see below, it includes the 4 and 5 star songs that I haven’t listened to in some time:

That concludes the example playlists. You may find that certain aspects of this configuration don’t work for you. I realize that people can have very different music listening habits. If anyone has some iTunes techniques that they enjoy, please share them in the comments.

I did some searching and found this guide which describes hplip, a tool developed by HP for linux and their printers. The tool seemed to be installed but gave me an error that the GUI was missing. I had to run the following as root to install the necessities:

yum install hplip-gui PyQt 

Then, as root, I ran hp-setup. This will take you through setting up the printer. Mine was already listed, so I actually ran hp-toolbox and deleted the existing one. Then I ran hp-setup again and recreated it with the desired settings. After that the printer was accessible from the Macs!

To get it accessible in Windows, I just had to install Bonjour for Windows (from Apple). Then the Bonjour Printer Wizard found the printer. The first time through I tried the latest HP driver for Windows that I had installed, but that didn’t work. Doubtful that it would make a difference, I tried the Generic Postscript driver and it actually worked! So now my network printer is working again.

I have a feeling that Fedora 8 has better Bonjour support (if Fedora 7 had any), so that could also be part of the solution. Hopefully this experience helps someone else!