Sunday, August 31, 2003
Comments
Okay, I'm impatient. I was going to wait until I rehosted this blog to a permanent home, but I want comment support now. I tried out Squawkbox.tv. It worked okay but their main web site was very slow and I got a Java stacktrace page after I registered. Maybe they were just having a bad night but I decided to bail out.
I'm trying out enetation instead. I know Ned had mixed results with enetation but, hey it's free. And, as I said, I'm impatient; perfection isn't required for a temporary solution. And everything about the web is ephemeral anyway, right?
Added note: enetation seems to be busted right now. The only one able to post comments here now is me which is kinda pointless. They're working on it. Free isn't what it used to be. Sigh.
I'm trying out enetation instead. I know Ned had mixed results with enetation but, hey it's free. And, as I said, I'm impatient; perfection isn't required for a temporary solution. And everything about the web is ephemeral anyway, right?
Added note: enetation seems to be busted right now. The only one able to post comments here now is me which is kinda pointless. They're working on it. Free isn't what it used to be. Sigh.
Kibo and Usenet
While thinking about the incestous nature of blog to blog references and trackbacks, I rememebered the Kibo cult from Usenet. This started around 1987 when getting onto the 'Net (Usenet) was a matter of begging someone for a feed. Except for email, Usenet was all about newsgroups. Newsgroup content flowed between systems using a simple replication model. A news article flowed from its source site to all other sites via UUCP, usually over slow dialup lines.
The Kibo cult was simple: if you used the word "Kibo" in a newsgroup posting, a reply from "Kibo" would appear. Despite the fact that "under the covers" Kibo was simply James "Kibo" Parry running grep over the content of all of the newsgroups and posting a response, it seemed like an amazing trick at the time. Now we have Technorati and Daypop to do the same thing for bloggers.
The Kibo cult was simple: if you used the word "Kibo" in a newsgroup posting, a reply from "Kibo" would appear. Despite the fact that "under the covers" Kibo was simply James "Kibo" Parry running grep over the content of all of the newsgroups and posting a response, it seemed like an amazing trick at the time. Now we have Technorati and Daypop to do the same thing for bloggers.
Flypaper-like rentention?
I got back from vacation and discover that Ned has mentioned my blog. Cool. Sorry that there was nothing new to read for a while. Some folks have said that my memory is like a sponge, I think I like the flypaper analogy better.
Diver Ed
In Bar Harbor my older son and I took our second trip on Diver Ed's boat cruise. Ed is hilarious, he seems to be channeling John Belushi as a scuba diver..
. He'll take you out on a two-hour excursion in Frenchman Bay on his converted scalloping boat, the Seal. He wears a a dry suit and dives with a video camera to show and collect a wide variety of sea creatures for the kids to look at and handle when he gets back on deck. He's got great stories and visual descriptions of each species for the kids and makes the whole experience a lot of fun.
. He'll take you out on a two-hour excursion in Frenchman Bay on his converted scalloping boat, the Seal. He wears a a dry suit and dives with a video camera to show and collect a wide variety of sea creatures for the kids to look at and handle when he gets back on deck. He's got great stories and visual descriptions of each species for the kids and makes the whole experience a lot of fun.
Back
Vacation was terrific. Exactly as it's supposed to be -- less stressful than "real" life. And I "really" mean that. Travel is stressful, travel with small children, even more so. We had a relaxing time, despite the long driving distance between home and where we stayed. And in my idle moments, I came up with a lot of blogging topics. I'll try to purge them as quickly as I can.
Friday, August 22, 2003
Going quiet
We're going on vacation in Maine. Go read those other blogs while I'm away 
Screensavers redux
I made a bad assumption that there was only one Eye Bee, M screensaver. It turns out that there are at least two. The one at the link I provided has the name "Rebus IBM" whereas the one I've been looking at on my Thinkpad is called "IBM Win95 Saver" and the screensaver executable is called IBM.SCR. They have different animation sequences. I haven't found the latter one online anywhere.
Update: The "IBM Win95 Saver" screensaver can be found here.
Update: The "IBM Win95 Saver" screensaver can be found here.
Thursday, August 21, 2003
My next cell phone
Like a lot of people, I need to carry a cellphone. Our second son has a seizure disorder so I need to be reachable, even when I'm not in my office or at home. I've also carried around a PDA of one type or another for years . It was a little irritating carrying around two devices so I was keen to try out a combo cellphone/PDA. I finally found somethng that met my needs. I bought a Handspring Treo 300 last November. I'd read Dan Bricklin's positive reviews of the Treo 180 and was looking forward to getting something with a color display. The Treo 300 replaced a Nokia phone and Palm Vx that I'd had for a couple of years. I had some reservations about the carrier (Sprint) but, after some initial difficulty getting the Treo activated, I found that Sprint's coverage was far better where I live than AT&T had been. In addition to doing everything that my previous phone and PDA could do, the Treo 300 has some wonderful features. Being able to download email and browse the web using Sprint's data network is great. I really like the keyboard for data entry, it's a lot faster than graffiti, especially when used for email and the like. My only dislikes are that the phone is little wider than I'd like and I'm not that keen about the flip cover -- it requires two hands to answer a call unless I'm using the ear jack. The good news is that the next model from Handspring, the Treo 600 looks like it will meet my needs even better. It's smaller, slimmer, faster, has a more "solid" feel, has a brighter screen, no flip cover, etc. It also includes an SD/MMC expansion slot and built-in camera. So I guess I need those now too. . It's supposed to be available from Sprint later this year, likely to be November.
. It's supposed to be available from Sprint later this year, likely to be November.
The Trouble with Checked Exceptions
This is great. Two discussions on checked exceptions, the first on Artima, the second on LtU. Both discussions were sparked by an interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#. (C# does not have checked exceptions).
I've used languages with checked exceptions (e.g. Java) and languages with unchecked exceptions (e.g. C++). They're both imperfect but for now, I prefer checked exceptions. I mostly like the model in Java where you have exceptions declared as part of a method signature. I really dislike the C++ model whereby not saying anything about exceptions in a method signature meant, "this method could throw anything". The major downside to checked exceptions for me is that changing the exceptions that a method throws will break the method signature.
The checked vs. unchecked exception debate will rage on because there's no "right" answer. Anders makes some good points but I still think there's value to checked exceptions. This reminds me of the debate we had years ago between raising an exception when an error occurs vs. returning an error code. The latter was deemed, by some, to be a more "nature and consistent" model and made the calling code look "cleaner". Most C-based APIs use the error return code model (in lieu of having a real exception handling model) but you rarely see this approach taken in languages that support exceptions (checked or unchecked).
I've used languages with checked exceptions (e.g. Java) and languages with unchecked exceptions (e.g. C++). They're both imperfect but for now, I prefer checked exceptions. I mostly like the model in Java where you have exceptions declared as part of a method signature. I really dislike the C++ model whereby not saying anything about exceptions in a method signature meant, "this method could throw anything". The major downside to checked exceptions for me is that changing the exceptions that a method throws will break the method signature.
The checked vs. unchecked exception debate will rage on because there's no "right" answer. Anders makes some good points but I still think there's value to checked exceptions. This reminds me of the debate we had years ago between raising an exception when an error occurs vs. returning an error code. The latter was deemed, by some, to be a more "nature and consistent" model and made the calling code look "cleaner". Most C-based APIs use the error return code model (in lieu of having a real exception handling model) but you rarely see this approach taken in languages that support exceptions (checked or unchecked).
Eye, Bee, M
Paul Rand designed the IBM logo. He also designed the logo for NeXT Computer and a whole lot of other famous corporate logos as well. What I didn't know was that he designed the whimsical Eye Bee, M logo that I see in the animated screen saver on my Thinkpad. I've always thought it was rather cool, now I know why. You can download your very own copy of the screensaver by clicking on the image below.
Definitely Not Microsoft Bob
Thanks for the link and kind words, Sylvain. Welcome back to the US!
More Google Calculator fun
Mark Pilgrim has discovered that the Google Calculator can answer the ultimate question. Now that's geeky! Ben Dyer has found even more features.
The Gender Genie
"Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. Read more about the algorithm at nature.com".
Clever idea but not too successful so far -- it's only been correct 44.6% of the time. I submitted three samples, all by male authors (including me). It said "Female" each time. At least the response is funny "Well, he writes like a girl". According to Koppel and Argamon, the algorithm should predict the gender of the author approximately 80% of the time.
Clever idea but not too successful so far -- it's only been correct 44.6% of the time. I submitted three samples, all by male authors (including me). It said "Female" each time. At least the response is funny "Well, he writes like a girl". According to Koppel and Argamon, the algorithm should predict the gender of the author approximately 80% of the time.
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Mitch's misdirected rant
I look forward to trying out Chandler. I also like and respect much of what Mitch Kapor has written and created. And, point of fact, a big chunk of my career has been working for the company (in its various incarnations) that he created. But Mitch's recent rant about his DSL provider is misdirected. They disabled port 135 traffic so his Outlook client can't talk to his Exchange server any longer. I won't jump on the bandwagon and tell him he should be using Lotus Domino instead but he should be using a VPN for a whole bunch of reasons, Exchange or not. Sure, disabling port 135 is a crude cudgel but don't shoot the messenger. Anyone pushing packets over the Internet needs to assume hostile intent by others. And just because the code is free, doesn't mean that open source projects won't be attacked
Typeface Wrestling
Helvetica vs. Arial. "Take the role of Helvetica, and let Arial know we don't need its type around here". (Via dangerousmeta)
Tuesday, August 19, 2003
Comments
I want to add support for comments. I spent a little time looking around and I'll probably try out dotcomments as soon as I move to a hosting service that supports PHP.
Open Range
I saw "Open Range" last night. I'm not a big fan of Westerns but this was quite good, especially in constrast to most of the movies I've seen recently. Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall were both very good, even as relatively "stock" western characters. Michael Jeter was terrific in a small part as the town blacksmith. He'd done good work in other films; The Fisher King comes to mind. He also appeared on my younger son's favorite show: he played Mr. Noodle's brother, Mr. Noodle on the Elmo's World segment of Sesame Street. Sadly, he died earlier this year.
Killbots
A Lotus Notes reference in Futurama. "My Killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun!". Cool.
Monday, August 18, 2003
Some geeky stuff I want to look at
The W3C CSS Validation Service. It's written in Java. The CSS analog to HTML Tidy, I guess.
Yet another blog publisher called pMachine Looks like it uses PHP and MySQL. Guess I should also learn more about LAMP as well.
Yet another blog publisher called pMachine Looks like it uses PHP and MySQL. Guess I should also learn more about LAMP as well.
Thursday, August 14, 2003
Terak and Perq
My recent post about Delphi and Pascal got me thinking about UCSD Pascal which got me thinking about the first personal computer I ever programmed on. It was a Terak 8510 that could run DEC RT-11 or UCSD Pascal. I think I still have a few of the 8 inch floppies lying around from the Terak. I learned a lot while hacking away on that system. It was my first exposure to raster graphics display tricks, Pascal, PDP-11 assembler, TECO, etc. Compared to the time share systems of that time, it was nerdvana.
A year later I got to work on a Perq which was, more or less, a commercial version of the Xerox Alto. The Perq was very cool, the first personal computer to support 3M (one mega-byte of memory, one mega-flop of processing power and one mega-pixel of display bits). 3M seems puny now but when the Perq was designed, even the idea of a "personal" computer seemed like a distant goal.
A year later I got to work on a Perq which was, more or less, a commercial version of the Xerox Alto. The Perq was very cool, the first personal computer to support 3M (one mega-byte of memory, one mega-flop of processing power and one mega-pixel of display bits). 3M seems puny now but when the Perq was designed, even the idea of a "personal" computer seemed like a distant goal.
Speech Accent Archive
The Speech Accent Archive contains a large selection of audio clips (currently 264) of native and non-native English speakers reading the same paragraph. Even the variations among the native English speakers are interesting, especially the point at which you think "Ah ha! there's the accent". It let's you appreciate how hard it can be to "fake" an accent -- many actors overdo accents, especially "Boston" accents. (One comes to mind: Rob Morrow's horrible accent in Quiz Show). Subtlety is required to get it right.
As an added bonus, I got to hear 264 different ways to pronounce "Bob" ;-)
(via Metafilter)
As an added bonus, I got to hear 264 different ways to pronounce "Bob" ;-)
(via Metafilter)
Paycheck
Movie trailer for a new John Woo movie "Paycheck" is on apple.com. It's based on a Philip K. Dick novel. Ben Affleck plays an electrical engineer who's hired to reverse engineer some top secret technology and wakes up one morning unable to remember anything about his job. Hmm, John Woo, Ben Affleck and Phillip K. Dick sounds like a bad combination. If the movie is as bad as the trailer it might be so bad it could be fun, I guess. The memory loss plot line has been done before -- including Total Recall (also written by Phillip K. Dick) and the most excellent film Memento. Paycheck is supposed to come out at Christmas. Save your money and buy a copy of Memento on DVD and watch it again (and again, and again...)
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Ultra Fractal and Delphi
Wow. Pretty pictures. These were created using Ultra Fractal. I downloaded an evaluation copy and played with it for a while. I don't have the patience to do anything really cool with UF but exploring is fun. It's pretty easy to generate something for a screen background.
I looked at UF a little more carefully and discovered that it's written in Delphi, a Pascal derivative with OO extensions. I've never written anything in Delphi. The last time I wrote anything in Pascal was on an Apollo workstation in Apollo Pascal. It had lots of extensions over the base language. All serious Pascal compilers had to support extensions since the base language was really just for teaching programming, not for writing "real" code. For people who couldn't stomach C/C++, Pascal was a reasonable alternative, albeit with lots of different dialects. Funny thing is, Anders Hejlsberg who helped create Turbo Pascal and Delphi at Borland was the creator of C# at Microsoft (which is clearly in the C/C++ camp -- as is Java).
(Ultra Fractals link via Metafilter)
I looked at UF a little more carefully and discovered that it's written in Delphi, a Pascal derivative with OO extensions. I've never written anything in Delphi. The last time I wrote anything in Pascal was on an Apollo workstation in Apollo Pascal. It had lots of extensions over the base language. All serious Pascal compilers had to support extensions since the base language was really just for teaching programming, not for writing "real" code. For people who couldn't stomach C/C++, Pascal was a reasonable alternative, albeit with lots of different dialects. Funny thing is, Anders Hejlsberg who helped create Turbo Pascal and Delphi at Borland was the creator of C# at Microsoft (which is clearly in the C/C++ camp -- as is Java).
(Ultra Fractals link via Metafilter)
Cleaning house
I've been on vacation for several days, ending today. All spent at home working on home projects. It's a nice contrast from real work My Dad was helping out and it's great fun checking off project after project from the list. We cleaned and reorganized the garage. We dug out all of the weeds between the stones in our cobblestone driveway -- discovering in the process that the driveway was actually a foot or more wider than we thought. We replaced the incline motor on the treadmill. Put up some shelves. I bought a wet/dry vac and cleaned out all of the accumulated gunk from the windows and breezeway areas. Lots of odds and ends. It's amazing how far behind you can get when you don't have the time to spend on these things. (Two active kids at home will do that sometimes ;-). In some cases we'll hire someone to do work around the house -- especially anything involving plumbing but it feels great to accomplish things and learn a new skill in the process. My Dad has always been fearless about diving into projects -- I learn alot from him everytime we work together. Thanks Dad!
Fun with Google
In addition to all of the other bells and whistles available via Google search, you can also use Google as a calculator. For example: 45 * 93. You can also do base conversions such as 0xdeadbeef in decimal. Kinda neat. But my favorite Google hack is Google sets. Very cool.
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Buildings of Disaster miniature replicas
Now exactly who would want to buy minature replicas of various disasters, including the Oklahoma City Federal building, the collapsed Texas A&M bonfire tower and the O J car chase? (How does OJ qualify as a building of disaster?)
Saturday, August 09, 2003
Digital retouching of models
The amount of retouching on this photo is surprising. And this one is even more amazing. In both cases, the original photo was fine in isolation but the effect when you roll over the image is startling -- and a little disturbing when you consider the types of changes that were made at the behest of the art director. (via Metafilter)
Thursday, August 07, 2003
Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?
"Can you tell a coder from a cannibal? Try to work out which of the following spent their time hacking computers and which preferred hacking away at corpses instead." For the record, I got 7 of 10 right.
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Telephone Exchange Names
This is an old one but I want to hang onto the reference. I still remember my parents' old phone number as UNion 9 9097. And, no surprise, someone has recorded old exchange names on The Telephone EXchange Name Project. They even verify that UNion was used in my home town. Cool.
Primate Programming
Figured out where Ned gets all the free time for blogging. Two words. Primate Programmers. Only kidding, Ned
I smell a technorat...
Hey Technorati ratted me out. And I was just playing around here. No real content here, move it along. Anyway, not sure I like Blogger all that much so far but it's about the content, right? Now I just have to have somethng to say. Okay. I'll try.
Monday, August 04, 2003
Haven't played with this in a long time. Let's give this a try. Ned always has something interesting to say. Where does he find the time?
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