Saturday, January 31, 2004
SSCrabble
Here's a Scrabble® game done completely in XHTML/CSS and Javascript. It includes its own dictionary and can be played offline in a browser.
Protecting your "secret blog"
Do you want to keep your blog secret? This article offers some useful tips on what to do (and what not to do) to try to maintain anonymity. The last item is worth keeping in mind:
For the record: this blog isn't secret. Even my boss reads it. (Hi Roy). And, no, I don't have a separate secret blog. It's hard enough to find the time and content for this one. (Via Scripting News)Remember that this is the Internet. Somehow, some way, someone you know just might fall upon that little secret blog. Even if you've done everything suggested above that someone might be able to read between the lines and see you behind the curtain. Keep that in mind before you press "post." This doesn't mean self-censorship should be turned to "high," because that would defeat the point. It just means that common sense should prevail.
Binary M&Ms
M&M candies have gone black and white. It's one of those "find the bag that's different" contests. There's a cash prize for the six people who find the special bags. We bought a bag -- not a winner. I was more intrigued by monochrome M&Ms than the contest anyway. To me, they're binary. Let's see I eat a white, black, white, black, black -- is that 01011 or 11010? Man, I'm such a geek. 
Friday, January 30, 2004
Nit-Picker's Guide to The Lord of the Rings
An obsessive list of differences between the Lord of the Rings books and the films. Wow.
BottomFeeder
BottomFeeder is a news aggregator client (RSS and Atom) that runs on Windows, Macintosh, Linux and a variety of different Unix platforms. It's written in VisualWorks Smalltalk which has a great runtime based development environment but also can create single-file executables that only include the Smalltalk code that is needed. Jim Robertson, the lead developer of BottomFeeder, blogs about this in reference to Joel's plea for Microsoft to provide a linker for .NET. Take that, .NET and Java...
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Exploding Whale
You find a 50-ton beached whale. It dies before you can attempt a rescue. What do you do? Load the whale onto a flat-bed trailer-truck and haul it off for an autopsy. But don't drive through town. The whale may just explode. No pictures, but you can imagine what this must have been like. Yuck.
Inconceivable!
This dialog from The Princess Bride cracks me up:
Probably not as funny if you haven't seen (or better yet read) The Princess Bride... But that's Inconceivable!Vizzini: He didn't fall?! Inconceivable!
Inigo: You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
palmOne releases update for the Sprint Treo 600
There's a ROM update for the Sprint version of the Treo 600. I'm in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" camp and my Treo 600 has been working just fine so I was going to take a pass on this. But Sprint sent an SMS message today indicating that they were upgrading their network and installing the update was required. Oh well. The update flashes the ROM and does a hard reset. I ran the installer, followed the directions and in less than 10 minutes was running fine again. I backed up to a SD card first using BackupMan and restored after the update. The main feature of this update, besides bug fixes, is that Sprint now supports normal, regular SMS text messaging.
Comments are back
Squawkbox seems to be back again. Comment away!
Please Sir May I Have a Linker?
Good rant by Joel on the massive (and changing) .NET runtime. Joel would like Microsoft to provide a linker so he can build standalone executables that can include only the parts of the .NET runtime that they use. Don't hold your breath Joel. .NET seems to be going the same route as Java -- large monolithic runtimes have become a fact of life.
Comments
Squawkbox seems to be down at the moment so you can't add comments. Sorry about that. One more incentive to use my own.
Dancing Bears
If you've ever watched the Moscow Circus, you've seen the dancing bears. As John Irving has written: "the wonder of a dancing bear is not that the bear dances well, but that it dances at all."
In his book, The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, Alan Cooper uses the term "dancing bear" for any product that in spite of its weak and clumsy design, is still a wonderful thing. Cooper uses his car's keyless entry system as an example. It's difficult to use but still useful. The benefits outweigh the annoyances.
The technology world is full of software and gadgets that are difficult to use. We put up with them because they're useful. There ought to be a label for products like this but I'm not sure that I'd call them "dancing bears". Getting a bear to dance is an amazing feat but it isn't useful. I'd apply "dancing bear" to technology that was created "because it could be" rather than because the end result is something useful. Technical bravura rather than fulfilling a need. Here's an example from the Computer History Museum: an IBM 1403 printer was programmed to "play" songs such as Raindrops Are Falling On My Head and Born Free
In his book, The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, Alan Cooper uses the term "dancing bear" for any product that in spite of its weak and clumsy design, is still a wonderful thing. Cooper uses his car's keyless entry system as an example. It's difficult to use but still useful. The benefits outweigh the annoyances.
The technology world is full of software and gadgets that are difficult to use. We put up with them because they're useful. There ought to be a label for products like this but I'm not sure that I'd call them "dancing bears". Getting a bear to dance is an amazing feat but it isn't useful. I'd apply "dancing bear" to technology that was created "because it could be" rather than because the end result is something useful. Technical bravura rather than fulfilling a need. Here's an example from the Computer History Museum: an IBM 1403 printer was programmed to "play" songs such as Raindrops Are Falling On My Head and Born Free
Folklore.org
Folklore.org is "devoted to collective historical storytelling". This is a great idea. Currently, Folklore.org is devoted to a single project: the development of the original Macintosh. Lots of interesting stuff. The Folklore website scripts are written in Python and will be made available.
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Fore sail, cheape: eBay bargains, spelling optional
This article from the NY Times explains how buyers can exploit poor spelling to find bargains on eBay. Misspellings in listings (such as "labtop" for laptop) often means few buyers will find what you're selling. This quote from an eBay "educator" is pretty funny: (Via SlashDot)
Um, Mr. Griffith, it looks like I can buy a dictionary on eBay (and I can buy a dictionery too)Jim Griffith, whose official title at eBay is dean of eBay education, teaches 40 to 50 seminars a year around the country. Although eBay points out common misspellings, he said that the most common question he gets is, "When will e-Bay get a spell checker?"
His answer? "You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary."
(Via SlashDot)
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Bye Bye COM
I never was a huge fan of COM. The basic COM model is fine but when you add all of the chrome plating needed to build a COM-based application such as an OLE2 server the complexity quickly gets out of control. Some frameworks such as MFC make it easier to build COM-based applications at the cost of carrying around a large runtime. Moving COM up the food chain to a distributed object technology via DCOM never became popular. Worse yet vulnerabilities in the DCOM RPC service have been exploited by recent virus attacks.
Microsoft is now telling developers that it's time to move away from COM and DCOM and adopt service-oriented interfaces. Not distributed objects but loosely-coupled services. The J2EE world has been moving in the same direction for a while. RMI/CORBA aren't dead technologies but exposed APIs are moving to service-oriented interfaces.
Microsoft is now telling developers that it's time to move away from COM and DCOM and adopt service-oriented interfaces. Not distributed objects but loosely-coupled services. The J2EE world has been moving in the same direction for a while. RMI/CORBA aren't dead technologies but exposed APIs are moving to service-oriented interfaces.
Spaced Penguin
Tired of smacking the penguin? (No, that's not a euphemism). How about launching Kevin the Penguin back to his spaceship using a slingshot? The higher levels get tricky.
Columbia's Final Minutes
This article on Newsday has an excerpt from "Comm Check... The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia" by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood describing the last minutes of Columbia's final flight. An incredible account of a tragic event. (Via SlashDot)
Yellow Snow
Interested in doing some winter calligraphy?. Note: this is pretty funny but some folks might consider it to be NSFW
Monday, January 26, 2004
Atom Feed
I've added an Atom feed for my blog here. No real work on my part, Blogger added an Atom feed generator. Cool.
Macintosh Turns Twenty, Apple is turning Twenty-Seven
The Macintosh turned 20 this month (officially it was two days ago). Here is Apple's original press release. A couple of things to note fro the press release. It mentions that MacWrite and MacPaint were bundled applications. Bundling these applications was key to the early success of the Macintosh. An equally important move by Apple was the subsequent release of the Apple LaserWriter which finally moved us many of away from crappy printed output. The press release also mentions Microsoft Multiplan which failed miserably on the Macintosh as well as Lotus 1-2-3 (which became Lotus Jazz) -- which also failed miserably. Microsoft Excel was released first on the Macintosh in 1985.
The other day while digging through some boxes in my home office, I found an ancient copy of Scientific American (September 1977). It has one of the first Apple ads, a two page color ad for the Apple II . (Here's the print copy). It's pretty amazing to compare the early "milestone" hardware with what you can buy in the same price range today. For comparison, here are the basic specs of the original Apple II and Macintosh compared to a reasonably configured eMac at the same price point as the Apple II.
The other day while digging through some boxes in my home office, I found an ancient copy of Scientific American (September 1977). It has one of the first Apple ads, a two page color ad for the Apple II . (Here's the print copy). It's pretty amazing to compare the early "milestone" hardware with what you can buy in the same price range today. For comparison, here are the basic specs of the original Apple II and Macintosh compared to a reasonably configured eMac at the same price point as the Apple II.
Comparing raw processor speed doesn't really tell the full story. The 6502 in the Apple II was an 8-bit processor. The early Mac used a 68000. The eMac runs a PowerPC G4 chip. The eMac could probably emulate a Classic Mac emulating the 6502 and still run substantially faster than the Apple II
1977 Apple II
1984 Macintosh
2004 eMac
RAM
4K
128K
1GB
ROM
8K
64K
Who cares?
Processor
1MHz
8Mhz
1GHz
Storage
Cassette tape
400K floppy
160 GB disk
US Price
$1298
$2495
$1299
Destructo Mode
I'm in the process of cleaning up my home office. The "process" is long overdue. I've got several large boxes of personal papers, receipts, etc. to wade through. I've also got a large collection of old floppies and CDs that I want to get rid of. I'm quickly realizing how much more work it is to collate, collect and dispose of things than it was to accumulate them in the first place. Shredding papers is tedious. Scanning through floppies and CDs for useful content and then making them unreadable is a huge pain. I think the lesson learned is to be careful what you keep.
Spirit Is Willing...
This article describes the current theory on Spirit's glitches:
I'm struck by how mundane this sounds as a software problem. After an amazing 300 million mile trip finished off by an acrobatic landing on the surface of another planet, the rover was sidelined by storing too many files in flash memory? Mundane or not, I hope they can work out the kinks and keep Spirit running.Over the weekend, scientists traced the problem over the weekend to a glitch in its flash memory. Engineers were working around the flash memory problem by telling the rover to store data in its random-access memory instead.
[Mission Manager Jennifer] Trosper said the "too many files" problem was the current leading theory for why Spirit failed last week. She said mission planners had not expected the rover's flash memory to accumulate so many data files during its trip to Mars and investigations on the surface.
"This is a new problem that we've encountered, based on having many files," she said.
During the weeks-long process of reviving Spirit, hundreds of unneeded files from Spirit's cruise phase would be deleted, she said, and controllers would keep a closer eye on memory management for Spirit as well as Opportunity. "We will be more conscious of this limit that we have," she said.
USB Flash Drive
My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive. Floppies are dead. They just don't store enough data to be useful. But what should I use for a quick backup? I can burn CDs for bulk backups but it takes time. I want something simpler. So I'm considering whether to buy a USB Flash Drive. USB support is ubiquitous and these drives don't require drivers to be installed. I found this one at CompUSA. 256MB seems like sufficient space for my needs and the drive is only $50 (after two separate rebates). Anyone out there using a USB Flash Drive and care to comment?
Free After Rebate
I still dislike rebate programs but I know that not everyone feels the same way. Free After Rebate points to stores that sell products that end up being free after you send in for a rebate. Their tag line is "The Best Things In Life Are Free (After Six to Eight Weeks)". They point to eCost.com's deal on the "Syntax USB Wireless LAN Adapter" ($29.95, free after rebate). This deal includes free shipping as well.
Bloglines for Mobile
I've been using Bloglines as an RSS aggregator for several days now. I like it. The UI is straight-forward and response time is quite good. I just noticed that there's a Beta version of Bloglines for Mobile devices at http://www.bloglines.com/mobile. I tried it out on my Treo 600. Very nice.
Friday, January 23, 2004
timeanddate.com
I was looking for a quick way to determine the number of days between two dates from a browser. I thought that there was a way to do this using Google but I can't recall if or where I saw it. I ended up at timeanddate.com. Not the slickest UI in the world but you can use the URL syntax directly. For example, compute the duration from now until April 1, 2004. You can also use this site to generate printable calendars including moon phases and holidays (and for different locales)
RSS Headlines for My Yahoo
Yahoo! has a RSS aggregator in Beta for use with their My Yahoo! service. This should move RSS syndication even more into the mainstream but the UI is nothing special so far. Bloglines is a lot better.
Kyocera Finecam SL300R
The new Kyocera Finecam SL300R is very slick. It has very little shutter lag for a digital camera. It's thinner than my Pentax Optio S4 but a little wider and taller. I also prefer the Pentax's solid body and telescoping lens over the Kyocera's swivel design. Also the Kyocera doesn't have a view finder. Steve's review includes photos of the Kyocera next to a Casio EX-Z4 which is the same size as my Pentax.
Big Fish
Filmmaker Tim Burton has had a somewhat uneven career. Some great stuff such as Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Beetlejuice and some real clunkers such as Mars Attacks! and Planet of the Apes. Big Fish is Burton's latest. Very good cast including Albert Finney, Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman and Steve Buscemi. The plot is about a grown son trying to discover the true life of his father, now dying, by reliving fantastical stories that his father told about his life. I found the early stories of the father's life to be amusing but the film finally pulled me in near the end, especially the relationship between father and son. Highly recommended.
Movie Trailers
I saw a few promising movie trailers last night before watching Big Fish
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind written by Charlie Kaufman (this Charlie Kaufman, not this one). Stars Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson and Elijah Wood. The trailer is pretty funny. Looks like another quirky Kaufman project. According to a Charlie Kaufman fansite, the movie opens on March 19th.
Dawn of the Dead is a remake of the George Romero original. Not sure why this is being remade (as Night of the Living Dead was as well). Perhaps it was from all of the positive buzz from last year's 28 Days Later. Dawn of the Dead is a cult classic, I'm not sure anyone can top the original. Trailer can be found here.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow stars Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. Very retro visuals and tongue-in-cheek dialog. This can be hard to pull off successfully. Last year's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen tried this but was laughably bad. A trailer for Sky Captain can be found here
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind written by Charlie Kaufman (this Charlie Kaufman, not this one
). Stars Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson and Elijah Wood. The trailer is pretty funny. Looks like another quirky Kaufman project. According to a Charlie Kaufman fansite, the movie opens on March 19th.
Dawn of the Dead is a remake of the George Romero original. Not sure why this is being remade (as Night of the Living Dead was as well). Perhaps it was from all of the positive buzz from last year's 28 Days Later. Dawn of the Dead is a cult classic, I'm not sure anyone can top the original. Trailer can be found here.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow stars Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. Very retro visuals and tongue-in-cheek dialog. This can be hard to pull off successfully. Last year's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen tried this but was laughably bad. A trailer for Sky Captain can be found here
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Sidewalk painter Kurt Wenner's 3D illusions
These 3D sidewalk paintings by Kurt Wenner are really amazing. More of his work, including some light-hearted and commercial images can be found here. (Via BoingBoing)
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
SpaceMonger
SpaceMonger is great for visually keeping of track of where all your disk space is going. Highly recommended.
Update: one bug to note in the current version (1.4.0): if you try to delete a directory through SpaceMonger it can crash. It seems to do the delete but then crashes when it tries to redisplay. (Via ScottWater)
Update: one bug to note in the current version (1.4.0): if you try to delete a directory through SpaceMonger it can crash. It seems to do the delete but then crashes when it tries to redisplay. (Via ScottWater)
Java Code Analyzers
The earlier in the development cycle a coding error is found, the less it costs to fix. When you use an IDE such as Eclipse, coding errors can be discovered incrementally -- a missing import statement, misplaced brace, etc. Beyond Eclipse there are static code analyzers that can help find potential coding errors and stylistic issues with Java code. Here are three such tools, all open source projects:
- PMD is a Java source code checker that can flag Java coding issues. It comes with a ruleset that you can extend by writing new rule handlers or new rules using XPath expressions. The integration with Eclipse is quite nice. One cool feature is the ability to find suspect copy and paste which will find runs of code that are identical among the Java source files in a project. The developers chose the name PMD because the letters sound good together. They have come up with several backronyms to explain the name (Via Terse Systems)
- CheckStyle is a tool to help developers write Java code that adheres to a coding standards. It has checks for Javadoc, naming conventions, usage of imports, etc. You can even write your own Checks. CheckStyle can run as an Ant task, standalone or integrated into Eclipse. Very nice.
- FindBugs was written by Bill Pugh. It doesn't come with Eclipse support but can be easily configured to run from an Ant task.
Bloglines
After using FeedDemon for a while, I've decided to give Bloglines a try. Pretty nice for a browser-based aggregator. Not sure what I'll stick with long term. I'll try them both for a while. I may try NewsGator at some poiint too but I don't spend much time in Outlook these days.
USDA: Tripe still OK to eat
According to the USDA, tripe, made from the lining of cow stomachs, is still OK to eat. Most people would probably question whether tripe was ever OK to eat. I had Tripe Soup at a Salvadoran restaurant many years ago. Cooked tripe is chewy and has a spongy texture. The appeal must be from the texture because there wasn't any discernible flavor. Clearly tripe isn't everyone's cup of tea (e.g. the phrase "that's just tripe!") but people eat all sorts of unusual foods. (Via Meat Facts)
I had Tripe Soup at a Salvadoran restaurant many years ago. Cooked tripe is chewy and has a spongy texture. The appeal must be from the texture because there wasn't any discernible flavor. Clearly tripe isn't everyone's cup of tea (e.g. the phrase "that's just tripe!") but people eat all sorts of unusual foods. (Via Meat Facts)
Television Commercials Come to the Web
According to this article in the NY Times, television commercials are coming to the web. Apparently the rapid rise on broadband connections (38 percent of US households) is a major reason that advertisers are interested in moving beyond pop-up ads.
Churchill's Parrot
Winston Churchill died 39 years ago but his parrot Charlie is still alive and swearing like a sailor. Charlie is 104 years old and her (yes, her) favorite sayings are obscenities repeated "with that unmistakable Churchillian inflection".
Update: I guess the story was too good to be true. Churchill's daughter says Charlie is not her father's parrot. She said: "I'm fed up with this story that my father taught it rude words. He only ever had an African grey parrot and it certainly did not talk" I can't help but be reminded of Monty Python's Dead Parrot Sketch. He's not dead, he's... he's, ah... probably pining for the fjords.
Update: I guess the story was too good to be true. Churchill's daughter says Charlie is not her father's parrot. She said: "I'm fed up with this story that my father taught it rude words. He only ever had an African grey parrot and it certainly did not talk" I can't help but be reminded of Monty Python's Dead Parrot Sketch. He's not dead, he's... he's, ah... probably pining for the fjords.
Flash Games
Smack the penguin (aka Smack the pingu) is great fun. My record so far is 319 (587.1 on the smaller version in the second link). (Via Ben Poole)
Test your knowledge of men's room etiquette with The Urinal Game
iSketch is a multi-player drawing game similiar to Pictionary.
Test your knowledge of men's room etiquette with The Urinal Game
iSketch is a multi-player drawing game similiar to Pictionary.
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
XPath Explorer
XPath Explorer (XPE) is a Java application that lets you experiment with XPath. You type in a URL and an XPath expression and it will displays the elements or attributes from that document which match that expression. XPE makes it easy to play with and debug XPath expressions. XPE can be used standalone or as an Eclipse or NetBeans plugin. Nice.
BBC News Quiz: The US Presidency
Test your knowledge of all things presidential in this BBC quiz. For the record, I got 8 out of 10 right. I surprised myself, I guessed on questions 1 and 3.
Manneken Pis
Several years ago, on a return trip from the Czech Republic, we had a day-long stopover in Brussels. We didn't have a lot of time so, in addition to stocking up on Belgian chocolate, we did a tour of the city center. One of the oddest city symbols in the world has got to be the Manneken Pis in Brussels. It's a small bronze statue of a little boy peeing. The souvenirs shops near the statue are full of Manneken Pis replicas including paper weights, letter openers and corkscrew bottle openers -- I probably don't need to mention which part of the statue was the corkscrew
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Change In Plans
A few months ago I mentioned in a blog entry that I was going to be doing a presentation on Lotus Workplace Messaging at Lotusphere this year. There's been a change in plan. I won't be at Lotusphere this year. Nothing earth-shaking -- something else has come up so I won't be able to attend. The session is happening and is in capable hands. If you're interested in finding out how Workplace Messaging interoperates in a Domino environment you should check it out. Note: the change in speakers happened after the official schedule was done so I may still be listed in the program. For anyone reading this who'll be at Lotusphere this year: sorry that we won't get a chance to meet this time around.
Free Logo Books
A lot of people, especially children, get their first exposure to programming through Logo. The nice thing about Logo is that it's not a "dumbed down" programming language . It's quite rich and capable of all sorts of cool stuff ala Lisp. The second edition of Computer Science Logo Style, a three-volume series on Logo, is available for personal use here (Via LtU)
NBOR and Blackspace
NBOR stands for "No Boundaries or Rules". The NBOR player (including an environnment called Blackspace™) is available for download here. I downloaded the player and spent about an hour with it. The ideas are interesting but the current implementation needs some serious polish to be useful as a product. Blackspace is a very visual environment but feels clunky. I don't feel drawn to it. Maybe I'm not the right audience: I don't see it replacing programs that I use now.
Blackspace reminds of the Morphic UI in Squeak. (Squeak is a highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation). The main difference with Blackspace to me is that Morphic has an underlying programming model (based on Smalltalk) if you want to extend it. Blackspace seems closed in that regard.
OSnews has its own review of NBOR and Blackspace that's worth reading. Also read the comments where a number of people have also mentioned Squeak and Morphic. (Via Pete)
Blackspace reminds of the Morphic UI in Squeak. (Squeak is a highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation). The main difference with Blackspace to me is that Morphic has an underlying programming model (based on Smalltalk) if you want to extend it. Blackspace seems closed in that regard.
OSnews has its own review of NBOR and Blackspace that's worth reading. Also read the comments where a number of people have also mentioned Squeak and Morphic. (Via Pete)
Danger High-Voltage!
Click on the image on this page and watch a video that shows what happens when things don't go right at a California substation. A massive arc from a 500KV switch with 2000 amps of current. The video has a surreal beauty that only hints at what it must have been like to be on the ground when this happened. (Via Metafilter)
FavIcon Generator
Here's a handy tool for generating your own favicon.ico file. Feed it an image file and it generates an appropriately scaled down ICO file. Nice.
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Cheap USB Wireless LAN Adapter
PCMall is offering a USB Wireless LAN Adapter for "free" (where free means after paying $29.95 and mailing in a rebate form). Let's see: the cheapest shipping to my address is UPS Ground for $8.24. Plus there's $0.37 for the stamp on the rebate form, plus factor in the time that it'll take me to send in the paperwork. I don't need another 802.11b adapter so this is not for me. But if you need an 802.11b adapter and are willing to put up with the rebate hassle, this is pretty cheap (but not free).
One thing to keep in mind: if you've upgraded to 802.11g or plan to at some point, you should know that an 802.11g network suffers degradation when even a single 802.11b client shares the same access point with 802.11g clients. Not really a problem for a home network unless you have significant local traffic in your home LAN. Most of us don't have Internet connections at home that are as fast as 802.11b. (Via BoingBoing)
One thing to keep in mind: if you've upgraded to 802.11g or plan to at some point, you should know that an 802.11g network suffers degradation when even a single 802.11b client shares the same access point with 802.11g clients. Not really a problem for a home network unless you have significant local traffic in your home LAN. Most of us don't have Internet connections at home that are as fast as 802.11b. (Via BoingBoing)
The Lost Ticket
My older son loves this story so I thought I'd preserve it on the web for posterity. It was Christmas time and I needed to go to Harvard Square to do some shopping. I parked in a multi-level garage. Since it was the Christmas shopping season, I had to drive all the way to the top to find a spot; six floors up. The top level is outside, not covered. It was dark, snowy and very windy. As I got out of the car a gust of wind blew the parking ticket from my hand. I watched it fly up and over the edge of the building, six stories down towards JFK Boulevard. I descended the six flights of stairs grumbling to myself about having to pay the exorbitant "lost ticket" fee when I left. I had only planned to be there for 1/2 hour; my quick shopping trip had just become a lot more expensive. When I got down to the street level I decided, despite the horrible odds, that I would look for the ticket. There was snow and muck on the street and sidewalk so I didn't expect success. But I persevered and Eureka! I found the ticket on the sidewalk. It made my day.
Flight Simulators
On Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me today they interviewed Patrick Smith. He writes the Ask The Pilot column for Salon.com. They asked him if it were possible for an amateur to land a 707 or 747 as happens in movies such as Executive Decision and Airport 1975. His response was "No". But, he said that he'd read about a study where they took someone who was highly skilled at PC flight simulators and put them in a real Airbus flight simulator. The guy was able to safely land the Airbus.
This triggered some memories about flight simulators. Years ago I interviewed at Evans and Sutherland, a company that builds flight simulator software. I was really into computer graphics at the time and E&S was doing bleeding-edge stuff. They offered me a job. I was tempted but decided that Utah was too far from family and friends so I turned it down and accepted a job at a Boston-based CAD software company called Applicon. After Applicon and a couple of failed CAD/CAE startups, I joined Prime. We built a solid modeling system called PrimeDesign for Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations. SGI workstations came with a bunch of demos that showed off their graphic capabilities. These included a slick flight simulator that allowed you to do mock dogfights between workstations over the network. Once while visiting a customer in South Carolina we found that some PrimeDesign users spent more time in mock dogfights than they did using our software.
This triggered some memories about flight simulators. Years ago I interviewed at Evans and Sutherland, a company that builds flight simulator software. I was really into computer graphics at the time and E&S was doing bleeding-edge stuff. They offered me a job. I was tempted but decided that Utah was too far from family and friends so I turned it down and accepted a job at a Boston-based CAD software company called Applicon. After Applicon and a couple of failed CAD/CAE startups, I joined Prime. We built a solid modeling system called PrimeDesign for Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations. SGI workstations came with a bunch of demos that showed off their graphic capabilities. These included a slick flight simulator that allowed you to do mock dogfights between workstations over the network. Once while visiting a customer in South Carolina we found that some PrimeDesign users spent more time in mock dogfights than they did using our software.
John Ashcroft and The Simpsons
Attorney General John Ashcroft is not only a big fan of the Simpsons but I've heard that he can do reasonably accurate renditions of the voices as well. Sure, he can do Ned Flanders but can he do Mr. Smithers as well?
Friday, January 16, 2004
The Web: A Living Lavatory
The Web abhors a vacuum. Any topic must be obsessively catalogued and put online, even bathroom topics. An ex-coworker from Iris, Damien Katz, used to run a website called liquidpoop.com (see the archive). It was "dedicated to the love and celebration of diarrhea through rhyme". Funny stuff. The site is gone now. I'm not sure if Damien lost interest, sold the domain name to the highest bidder or found more serious pursuits. Urinal.net declares itself to be "the best place to piss away your time on the Internet". It consists of user-contributed photos of urinals from around the world. These urinals in a Hong Kong restaurant are the coolest I've ever seen but a bit too public for me. These urinals from the Millennium Dome in London remind me of a building just outside of Harvard Square that has urinal-shaped protrusions at its base. They clearly weren't intended to be used as urinals but it makes you wonder what the heck the architect who designed them was thinking.
Frigid Cold
It's been really cold in Boston the past few days. Painfully cold. It's so cold that schools were closed across the state today. I can't recall a time when they closed the schools due to cold weather. The overnight low was minus 8° F with a windchill of minus 40° F. Fortunately tomorrow it's going to warm up to a 29° F. Time to break out the flowered shirts and suntan lotion
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Are You Grammatically Incorrect?
Are You Grammatically Incorrect? One of the reasons I started this blog was to force myself to write. I write more code than prose. Email and specs only count for so much, they're often laden with jargon. I'm happy to report that I got 10 out of 10 correct on this quiz. It wasn't particularly difficult but there are some traps. Next how about we do a spelling test? (Via Weblog Wannabe)
(Via Weblog Wannabe)
Just how close is that 32-bit brick wall?
After referencing Ingo Rammer's article in my own blog entry, I spent a little more time last night trying to figure out where things stand today. On the Wintel front, the 64-bit march is focused on servers. The Intel Itanium and AMD Opteron are both 64-bit options for Windows. The AMD chip has the advantage of being able to run 32-bit x86 code without an emulator. On the Macintosh, the IBM 970 (aka G5) chips are true 64-bit processors but Mac OS X doesn't exploit this to the fullest.
I found a recent comparison between dual-processor Power Macintosh G5 and AMD Opteron desktop systems. The AMD system in the test is running Windows XP Professional which is not a 64-bit OS. But then again, Macintosh OS X is not really fully 64-bit either. In both cases, the hardware can have more than 4 GB of RAM but individual applications cannot address memory beyond 32-bits. This article in OS News explains the gory details. Both the WinXP and Mac OS X kernels can address more than 4 GB of RAM but don't allow applications use it all. For some of us who run multiple memory-hungry applications this is still useful and it sounds like it should eventually be possible to use more than 4GB of RAM in desktop (and laptop) systems.
I found a recent comparison between dual-processor Power Macintosh G5 and AMD Opteron desktop systems. The AMD system in the test is running Windows XP Professional which is not a 64-bit OS. But then again, Macintosh OS X is not really fully 64-bit either. In both cases, the hardware can have more than 4 GB of RAM but individual applications cannot address memory beyond 32-bits. This article in OS News explains the gory details. Both the WinXP and Mac OS X kernels can address more than 4 GB of RAM but don't allow applications use it all. For some of us who run multiple memory-hungry applications this is still useful and it sounds like it should eventually be possible to use more than 4GB of RAM in desktop (and laptop) systems.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
And Now... Your Chicago Matadors!
I heard a story on NPR today about the Chicago Matadors. Bizarre. Like something out of the Simpsons. They interviewed Kevin Swier, a member of the group. Kevin's day job is with IBM as a pricer. I guess this is just one more example of how far IBM has come from the old stereotype of businessmen in navy blue suits and white shirts.
Postel's Law, XML, RSS and all of that
Postel's Law (named after Jon Postel) says "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". It's a guideline for protocol implementers. The guideline is to insure that interoperability is a primary concern. Accept data even when it's not 100% conformant with specs. But when you produce data make it as spec-compliant as possible.
I've been dealing with MIME content a lot recently. MIME parsers have to be extremely forgiving to avoid rejecting malformed messages. It's easy to slap together a mail message, there's often little regard for the specs. The same can be said for HTML. Browsers are extremely forgiving. They'll accept and display all sorts of malformed HTML. To some extent XML was a reaction to sloppy HTML. Writing a "forgiving" HTML parser is hard work. The XML spec makes a firm distinction: a document is either well-formed or it's not. XML parsers are supposed to reject documents that aren't well formed. So is XML an exception to Postel's Law? Mark Pilgrim thinks that there are no exceptions to Postel's Law. Joe Gregorio, Nick Bradbury, Brent Simmons and others disagree. Mark counters with a thought experiment. His main counterpoint is that the client is the wrong place to enforce data integrity.
I'm really split on this one. As a programmer I like the hard and fast well-formed rule for XML. But the XML content discussed here is RSS feeds. Many RSS feeds are a mess (my own has been broken a couple of times). As a user of an RSS reader, I don't give a hoot about well-formed XML. Just show me the feed, thank you very much.
Part of the problem with RSS is that it's often a mixture of XML and HTML intertwined inside the feed. Shoving unfiltered (and unparsed) HTML inside an XML stream will just get you into trouble. Likewise if you mix character sets. But RSS readers don't want to reject popular feeds so they've made their parsers liberal. If they don't, users assume that their RSS reader is broken, not the RSS feed. But this is the same rathole that we went down with HTML. Is this a special case or will all XML parsers need to be "liberal". Can't we just agree that XML that is not well-formed is bogus and can be ignored? No, not really. An RSS reader that's liberal and can handle "broken" feeds is at a competitive advantage over an RSS reader that rejects such feeds. And so it goes.
I've been dealing with MIME content a lot recently. MIME parsers have to be extremely forgiving to avoid rejecting malformed messages. It's easy to slap together a mail message, there's often little regard for the specs. The same can be said for HTML. Browsers are extremely forgiving. They'll accept and display all sorts of malformed HTML. To some extent XML was a reaction to sloppy HTML. Writing a "forgiving" HTML parser is hard work. The XML spec makes a firm distinction: a document is either well-formed or it's not. XML parsers are supposed to reject documents that aren't well formed. So is XML an exception to Postel's Law? Mark Pilgrim thinks that there are no exceptions to Postel's Law. Joe Gregorio, Nick Bradbury, Brent Simmons and others disagree. Mark counters with a thought experiment. His main counterpoint is that the client is the wrong place to enforce data integrity.
I'm really split on this one. As a programmer I like the hard and fast well-formed rule for XML. But the XML content discussed here is RSS feeds. Many RSS feeds are a mess (my own has been broken a couple of times). As a user of an RSS reader, I don't give a hoot about well-formed XML. Just show me the feed, thank you very much.
Part of the problem with RSS is that it's often a mixture of XML and HTML intertwined inside the feed. Shoving unfiltered (and unparsed) HTML inside an XML stream will just get you into trouble. Likewise if you mix character sets. But RSS readers don't want to reject popular feeds so they've made their parsers liberal. If they don't, users assume that their RSS reader is broken, not the RSS feed. But this is the same rathole that we went down with HTML. Is this a special case or will all XML parsers need to be "liberal". Can't we just agree that XML that is not well-formed is bogus and can be ignored? No, not really. An RSS reader that's liberal and can handle "broken" feeds is at a competitive advantage over an RSS reader that rejects such feeds. And so it goes.
Birthday Star
Tell Birthday Stars when you were born, and it will look for a star that is your age in light years away from Earth. The light we're seeing from that star today actually left the star around when you were born, and has taken your entire life to reach Earth.
My birthday star is in the constellation Hercules. It's called 72 Herculis in the Historia lestis Britannica of John Flamsteed and Edmund Halley and NS 1720+3228 in the NStars database. It has visual magnitude 5.38 meaning that it can just be seen with the naked eye under the best viewing conditions. If it's a clear evening tonight, I'll look for my star. The star is located here in the night sky. (Via Weblog Wannabe)
My birthday star is in the constellation Hercules. It's called 72 Herculis in the Historia lestis Britannica of John Flamsteed and Edmund Halley and NS 1720+3228 in the NStars database. It has visual magnitude 5.38 meaning that it can just be seen with the naked eye under the best viewing conditions. If it's a clear evening tonight, I'll look for my star. The star is located here in the night sky. (Via Weblog Wannabe)
They Say It's Your Birthday
They say it's your birthday. It's my birthday too -- yeah.
It's January 14th, bitter cold and my birthday too. Unlike Salvador Dali I don't remember my own birth "event" but I still celebrate it anyway
Back in the early days of the web (1994) I impulsively posted my birthday on a website where people could send well wishes. That year and for a few years later I received dozens of emails on my birthday. It was kinda fun but email addresses weren't spam targets back then. Ten years later I'm posting my birthday on the web again but in blog form. Will I ever learn?.
It's January 14th, bitter cold and my birthday too. Unlike Salvador Dali I don't remember my own birth "event" but I still celebrate it anyway
Back in the early days of the web (1994) I impulsively posted my birthday on a website where people could send well wishes. That year and for a few years later I received dozens of emails on my birthday. It was kinda fun but email addresses weren't spam targets back then. Ten years later I'm posting my birthday on the web again but in blog form. Will I ever learn?
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film
The BBC is reporting that there's a Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy film in the works. I've seen the BBC TV version which was low budget but pretty good. IMDB reports that filming starts in early 2004 for a release in 2005. (Via SlashDot)
One TB HD
Ah, disk space. I can't afford $1199 for a disk drive but given how quickly drive prices drop over time, I imagine we'll see drives in the one terabyte range at the $500 price point within a year. And if you're wondering just what you'd do with a terabyte of storage you just aren't trying hard enough. . (Via Andrew)
. (Via Andrew)
ZIP Code Follies
The ZIP code for our home address (along with ZIP codes in a number of other towns) was changed in July 1998. It was an irritation at the time but we made the transition. It would have been great if everyone else had dealt with the update as well.
A bunch of ZIP codes changed 5-1/2 years ago and there's still stale ZIP code data floating around. The problem is that some web sites refuse to accept our new ZIP code and only allow us to use the old one. Simple case in point: Google has a cool feature where you can enter a ZIP code as a search string and it will offer a Yahoo or MapQuest map. But it doesn't work for the new ZIP codes. For example, if I enter the ZIP code for the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA (02446). No maps. If I enter the old ZIP code (02146) it works just fine. But Yahoo Maps works fine with the new Brookline ZIP code as well. I don't mean to pick on Google the problem exists on other web sites as well. But who do I complain to? I can go web site by web site but they probably all buy their ZIP code data from the same or a small set of providers. Since ZIP codes are important for computing shipping costs and the like, you'd think commerce web sites would want to have up-to-date information. It makes you wonder about the accuracy and "freshness" of other data sources that they rely on.
A bunch of ZIP codes changed 5-1/2 years ago and there's still stale ZIP code data floating around. The problem is that some web sites refuse to accept our new ZIP code and only allow us to use the old one. Simple case in point: Google has a cool feature where you can enter a ZIP code as a search string and it will offer a Yahoo or MapQuest map. But it doesn't work for the new ZIP codes. For example, if I enter the ZIP code for the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA (02446). No maps. If I enter the old ZIP code (02146) it works just fine. But Yahoo Maps works fine with the new Brookline ZIP code as well. I don't mean to pick on Google the problem exists on other web sites as well. But who do I complain to? I can go web site by web site but they probably all buy their ZIP code data from the same or a small set of providers. Since ZIP codes are important for computing shipping costs and the like, you'd think commerce web sites would want to have up-to-date information. It makes you wonder about the accuracy and "freshness" of other data sources that they rely on.
Reading RSS feeds on the iPod
The Shrook aggregator can export RSS feeds to the iPod so you can read them there. Cool idea but until the iPod gets some sort of wireless support (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc) you can't go any further. With Hand/RSS on my Treo 600 I can pull RSS feeds down and then follow the links to the original articles using Sprint's data network. (Via Thijs van der Vossen)
Monday, January 12, 2004
Hitting the 32-bit brick wall
Ingo Rammer discusses the 32-bit brick wall that a lot of developers are starting to slam into. 1GB of memory in a development laptop is de rigeur these days. 2 GB is starting to become common. But Wintel boxes can only address 32-bits of memory so there's not much room to grow beyond that. When will the Windows environment make the jump to 64-bit architectures? It seemed imminent several years ago when Windows NT ran on 64-bit DEC Alpha and PowerPC processors as well as 32-bit x86. But those are long gone. Do we have to wait for Itanium-based laptops? When is that going to happen? Are we stuck in the modern day equivalent of the old Bill Gates' quote "640K ought be enough for anybody"?
TheOpenCD
TheOpenCD is a collection of free and open source software that run on Windows and cover the most common tasks such as word processing, presentations, e-mail, web browsing, web design, and image manipulation. Programs include OpenOffice, GIMP, Mozilla, etc. Interesting idea although I'm not sure that it's going to make much of a dent as a Monoculture Alternative. (Via Andy Todd)
Code Kata
Dave Thomas has an interesting idea on how to stretch your coding brain with practice sessions. He calls it Code Kata. He's devised a set of eighteen Kata (exercises) to try. Worth a look. (Via Andy Todd)
Crayola
As a child, I loved coloring with crayons. I'd get a box of Crayola crayons with a huge assortment of colors and spend hours with a coloring book or stack of paper. Having kids gives you license to do kid art stuff again. We recently started working with Crayola Model Magic modeling clay. It's wonderful stuff. Much better than Playdough. It's softer than real clay and it hardens into shape in 24 hours with the consistence of styrofoam. Lots of fun.
Another terrific Crayola product that we've used is Crayola Chalkboard Paint. Paint any surface and you have an instant washable chalkboard. Chalk washes off easily with water. We covered the backs of the kids' bedroom doors with this paint. Four years later it's still holding up great.
Another terrific Crayola product that we've used is Crayola Chalkboard Paint. Paint any surface and you have an instant washable chalkboard. Chalk washes off easily with water. We covered the backs of the kids' bedroom doors with this paint. Four years later it's still holding up great.
Dirkon - The Paper Camera
The Dirkon is a functional pinhole camera made of stiff paper, designed for 35 mm film. It looks like a real camera and actually works. The camera was published in a Czech children's magazine in 1979. Instructions are available in English in PDF format here. The name "Dirkon" is a play on words: "Dirka" means pinhole in Czech so this is like a pinhole Nikon.
More navel gazing
According to this link, the word "omphaloskepsis" means "contemplating one's navel as an aid to meditation".
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Gauche
I'm left handed. I don't think about it too much but it caused some minor difficulties when I was a child. It's difficult for a right-handed person to teach a left-hander how do things. For example, teaching someone to bowl or hit a baseball can be tricky. I'll probably have the same issues but in reverse; both of my sons are right handed.
My older son gave me a Page-A-Day Calendar for Left Handers for Christmas. We've been learning all sorts of left handed facts. A few examples: "Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand. The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing. There have been six left-handed US presidents: James Garfield, Harry S Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Regan, George Bush and Bill Clinton.
My older son gave me a Page-A-Day Calendar for Left Handers for Christmas. We've been learning all sorts of left handed facts. A few examples: "Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand. The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing. There have been six left-handed US presidents: James Garfield, Harry S Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Regan, George Bush and Bill Clinton.
Lego to Stop Producing Mindstorms
Lego is in trouble. It had a very bad year; a $237.6 million pretax loss, the worst in the company's 72-year history. As a result the company now plans to stop making electronics and movie tie-in products (including Mindstorms) and focus on its core mission: producing colored plastic building blocks for children. Too bad. We really enjoy building Mindstorms projects. (Via SlashDot)
Scrabble Score Generator
What's your Scrabble Score?. Mine is paltry 18. Not enough high score letters. You have to envy a name like Zbigniew Brzezinski for scoring in this game.
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What's Cool?
Mr. Ed at Hacknot asks What's Cool?. He goes on to say that cool leads us everywhere and nowhere. We often pick technologies based on how "cool" they are -- not whether they work. I don't think the blame for this can be placed entirely on developers. Often it's the project managers who are sold on "cool" technology by vendors or upper management not the developers themselves. Either way, we all need to be skeptical of new technology. Much as we all love to learn new stuff, learning is not doing. Leearning curves should never be underestimated. What problems is the new technology trying to solve? Do we actually have those problems? Are there successful projects that are similar to our own that have been developed using this technology?
What's Next?
Joel takes a skeptical look at technology journalism and how the press loves to focus on "big trends". I'll agree that many articles in the technology press are lightly edited corporate press releases and are often "force fit" into the hyped big trends of the day. Also, technology hype and subsequent backlash is highly cyclical. The big trend of today turns into "doesn't really do what was promised" six months later. But there are very few truly revolutionary ideas in software. And the press has to write about something in order to fill all of those pages.
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Made in USA
There's an old story that a Japanese town was renamed to 'Usa' so that they could stamp their exports 'Made in USA.' The story wasn't true. Probably the more surprising thing for anyone born after 1970 is that there was a time when 'Made in Japan' symbolized cheap, often shoddy goods. Today, people often say that about products marked 'Made in China'. It's hard to find a toy or piece of inexpensive electronics that wasn't made, or at least assembled, in China. But China is moving up the food chain quickly. For example, two of the fastest-growing communications-equipment makers are Chinese companies. As was the case in Japan, Chinese companies can't compete solely with low engineering and manufacturing costs. They need to invest more on R&D and develop their own attractive and innovative products.
Friday, January 09, 2004
Less Than Zero
In addition to being the title of a Bret Easton Ellis book and an Elvis Costello song, Less Than Zero is also the weather report today. It's been unusually cold in Boston the last few days. I don't mind cold weather but Boston is windy. The combination of bitter cold and wind is just nasty.
SPF
SPF (Sender Permitted From) is intended to close a security hole in SMTP which allows any connecting client to assert any sender address. This hole allows spammers to forge mail. SPF relies on information stored in DNS that specifies the set of servers for a domain. MTAs can reject messages that don't come from the domain's approved servers. Interesting idea that's relatively easy to setup. But this is going to require viral adoption to be useful against spammers. Also, SPF is effectively using DNS for authentication. DNS wasn't really setup to do this. (Via Keith Devens)
Nombrilism
Here's a handy word I hadn't heard before. Nombrilism. It means to look only at one's own navel; from the French "nombrilisme". I've used the term "navel gazing" for the same thing. I didn't realize there was a word for this. Seems like a great term for bloggers: we're just bunch of nombrilists...
Pathetic Geek Stories
Pathetic Geek Stories is a comic strip drawn by Maria Schneider, a staff writer for The Onion. If you were a little, um, ah, awkward in junior high you'll recognize a lot of this. Funny and cringe-worthy. (Via Metafilter)
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Cold Mountain
I saw Cold Mountain this evening. I haven't read the Charles Frazier novel so my response to the film is just as a film; I can't say whether it does justice to the book or not. I'd recommend the film. It's an interesting take on the Civil War told from a Southern point of view near the end of the war. The story flips back and forth between two main stories, told in linear sequence and flashbacks. There's a fair amount of onscreen carnage, including an especially gruesome battle at the start of the film. The two leads, Nicole Kidman and Jude Law are both good. There's a large supporting cast notably Renée Zellweger, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Baker and Natalie Portman. Also, in a somewhat smaller role, is Jack White of the band, The White Stripes.
100K Miles
The odometer on my '92 Corolla turned over 100K miles this morning. Not particularly high mileage for a 12 year old car. It works out to roughly 1 mph over the timespan. In comparison, the Mars rover, Spirit, travelled 300 millon miles in only seven months.
Fontifier
Fontifier turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a Truetype font. Pretty cool. I gave it a try. Within a couple of minutes I had my own handwriting font. You have to be careful to line up the character baselines and sizes and the quality of the font is limited by the overall image size but this is a neat idea.
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
What is Mac OS X?
This article is an excellent "guts level" overview of Mac OS X. I especially liked the section on Booting Mac OS X. I didn't realize that there was a Forth-based command shell under there.
I also liked this description of the relationship between OS X and NEXTSTEP in the section on the history of Mac OS X:
I also liked this description of the relationship between OS X and NEXTSTEP in the section on the history of Mac OS X:
NeXT abandoned its hardware business in 1993. Imagine if Apple had taken NEXTSTEP at that point rather than continued to waste its time on Pink and Copland. (Via Keith Devens)It would be an understatement to say that OS X is derived from NEXTSTEP and OpenStep. In many respects, it's not just similar, it's the same. One can think of it as OpenStep 5 or 6, say. This is not a bad thing at all - rather than create an operating system from scratch, Apple tried to do the smart thing, and used what they already had to a great extent. However, the similarities should not mislead you: Mac OS X is evolved enough that what you can do with it is far above and beyond NEXTSTEP/OpenStep.
Hold It
According to a Qantas spokeswoman, the TSA now requires that passengers on flights to the US are not to congregate in any areas of the aircraft. Translation: no more bathroom lines. A lot of people made fun of this patent last year. Maybe a bathroom reservation system makes sense now. Or they can just start handing out bedpans
1984 Redux
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh, Apple has posted a slightly modified version of the Macintosh TV ad that was shown during the 1984 Superbowl. If you haven't seen or read about the new version yet, try to see if you can spot what's different. It certainly must have cost them a lot less than the original ad (which was directed by Ridley Scott and had a budget of $700,000 in 1984 dollars).
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Free Smalltalk Books
Stéphane Ducasse has an online collection of free Smalltalk books and articles. Very nice. Includes the missing chapters from the famous Smalltalk Blue Book which is, sadly, out-of-print. (Via LtU)
Apple iPod mini
Apple unveiled the iPod mini today at MacWorld Expo. A blow-by-blow description of Jobs' keynote from the conference can be found here.
The iPod mini uses the same user interface as the regular iPod, and has 4GB of storage. Stores about 1000 songs. Cost is $249. It's the size of a business card, 1/2 inch thick and weighs just 3.6 ounces. Uses USB 2.0 and FireWire and can be charged from either. Unlike the regular iPods, it will come in a variety of colors (gold, blue, pink, green, and silver). Comes out next month for both Macintosh and Windows. Pretty cool but I'm not sure about the price point. The new 15 GB iPod is only $50 more than the mini and it will store nearly four times as much music. But, of course, it doesn't come in colors
The iPod mini uses the same user interface as the regular iPod, and has 4GB of storage. Stores about 1000 songs. Cost is $249. It's the size of a business card, 1/2 inch thick and weighs just 3.6 ounces. Uses USB 2.0 and FireWire and can be charged from either. Unlike the regular iPods, it will come in a variety of colors (gold, blue, pink, green, and silver). Comes out next month for both Macintosh and Windows. Pretty cool but I'm not sure about the price point. The new 15 GB iPod is only $50 more than the mini and it will store nearly four times as much music. But, of course, it doesn't come in colors
Subtly Simpsons
Wow. Someone with a lot of time on their hands is documenting Simpsons humor derived from subtleties of language, esoteric allusions, or just plain wit. Very cool. Of course now when I am I going find the time to read it all? Damn you, Subtly Simpsons!
A couple of Metafilter Links
A playable Flash version of the Donkey Kong Jr. handheld video game. Funny and cheesy.
The National Pork Board wants kids to eat more pork. How are they going to do this? Pigs In Cyberspace: Pork4Kids!. The Farm Tour shows little pink porkers marching along until the end of the tour where they disappear into a black square. Where did they go? The Onion has the answer.
The National Pork Board wants kids to eat more pork. How are they going to do this? Pigs In Cyberspace: Pork4Kids!. The Farm Tour shows little pink porkers marching along until the end of the tour where they disappear into a black square. Where did they go? The Onion has the answer.
Memory Glasses
This project at the MIT Media Lab seems like a cool idea. Memory Glasses is a "proactive, context-aware reminder system". Glasses or not, it would be pretty slick if my Phone/PDA could be context-aware (go quiet when I'm in a meeting, remind me about important events in the day as I walk from the car into the office, etc.).
Monday, January 05, 2004
What You Can't Say
Paul Graham has written a long essay on heresy, how to think forbidden thoughts and what to do about them. Thoughtful and interesting read.
I Hate Rebate Programs
It seems that nearly every gadget or software package includes a rebate form. Seems like a small thing to save $10 or more but the deck is stacked in the seller's favor. They made the sale. And you're happy because your perception is that you bought the item at the after-rebate price. But the seller is betting that you'll forget to send in the rebate form and proper documentation. And some rebate programs require that you to send in the original receipt. What happens if it gets lost in transit? I've read that a fair percentage of rebates go unclaimed (somewhere between 15% to 50%). That's how sellers can offer low-priced items through rebate programs "for free". Also, even if you go to the trouble to claim your rebate, the seller gets to keep your money for anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months.
Another program that's stacked in the sellers favor is the gift certificate. The seller does very little. They take your money and give you a "gift card". If the recipient of the certificate never redeems it, the seller pockets the money. (I've read that one-third or more gift certificates are never redeemed). If the recipient waits a few months (or up to seven years in Massachusetts), the seller wins again because they get to hold on to the money during that time.
Another program that's stacked in the sellers favor is the gift certificate. The seller does very little. They take your money and give you a "gift card". If the recipient of the certificate never redeems it, the seller pockets the money. (I've read that one-third or more gift certificates are never redeemed). If the recipient waits a few months (or up to seven years in Massachusetts), the seller wins again because they get to hold on to the money during that time.
Sunday, January 04, 2004
Blogging Links
If you blog you may want to see if you're a Blogaholic. For the record my results were in the "casual blogger" range.
I'm not looking for lots of traffic for this blog. If I was I'd consult the Big List of Blog Search Engines to get my blog listed.
I'm not looking for lots of traffic for this blog. If I was I'd consult the Big List of Blog Search Engines to get my blog listed.
Saturday, January 03, 2004
28 Days Later
I saw 28 Days Later on DVD last night. I didn't manage to see it in the theater so this was my first viewing.
When we were in graduate school, my friend Vince and I started going to horror movies. Boston had several repertory theaters where you could see films for a few dollars. At midnight they ran horror movies. During that time, I remember seeing George A. Romero's Dead Trilogy: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
28 Days Later is a horror movie with a very similar structure to Romero's films. The Zombies have been replaced by the "Infected" but the premise is the same: The remaining few human survivors struggle against unrelenting "once were human" hordes.
The first part of 28 Days Later has the main character waking up from a coma to find that London is completely deserted. This was visually impressive and pulls you in. The action kicks in immediately after that. It has some jolts but I didn't find much of it scary. The last third of the film is somewhat disappointing, especially the ending. The DVD includes two other filmed endings which were darker as well as a storyboard of a radically different third part. Apparently the first "darker" ending was in the original script but was changed just prior to release. Dark or not, I think the story went wrong earlier than that. I'd still recommend the film but don't set your expectations too high.
When we were in graduate school, my friend Vince and I started going to horror movies. Boston had several repertory theaters where you could see films for a few dollars. At midnight they ran horror movies. During that time, I remember seeing George A. Romero's Dead Trilogy: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
28 Days Later is a horror movie with a very similar structure to Romero's films. The Zombies have been replaced by the "Infected" but the premise is the same: The remaining few human survivors struggle against unrelenting "once were human" hordes.
The first part of 28 Days Later has the main character waking up from a coma to find that London is completely deserted. This was visually impressive and pulls you in. The action kicks in immediately after that. It has some jolts but I didn't find much of it scary. The last third of the film is somewhat disappointing, especially the ending. The DVD includes two other filmed endings which were darker as well as a storyboard of a radically different third part. Apparently the first "darker" ending was in the original script but was changed just prior to release. Dark or not, I think the story went wrong earlier than that. I'd still recommend the film but don't set your expectations too high.
Friday, January 02, 2004
Blogometrics
I did a quick tally of my blog entries for 2003. I posted 319 entries. Not bad for 5 months of blogging. Most entries are short -- often just a link and a sentence or two. I plan to take some time to write some longer entries in the year ahead.
Bye bye Airport
My Apple Airport started acting up yesterday (maybe if suffers from a Y2K4 bug? ). Whenever I tried to push or pull large files across the wireless connection, it would work for a while and then drop the connection. After a couple seconds it would reestablish but some software didn't tolerate this very well. I've been using the Airport with a few different laptops and wireless cards and had never seen it do this before. It wasn't restricted to files going through the Internet or a VPN connection. The same thing would happen if I copied files to a wired computer on the same network.
I'm not a hardware geek but I tried to narrow down what was causing the problem: I tried two other wireless cards, I reset the Airport, switched to a different wireless channel, etc. Nothing fixed the problem. When I hooked my laptop directly up to my router, the problem went away. All signs pointed to the Airport.
I decided that the easiest solution would be to buy a replacement. My Airport is 3-1/2 years old and I could replace it for substantially less than it cost in 2000. It's amazing how much the home networking market has changed since then. 802.11b is still prevalent but there are other options. I ended up buying a 802.11g wired/wireless router at Staples. I don't have a 802.11g card yet but it works fine with 802.11b cards -- and I can eventually go for more bandwidth with 802.11g when I need it. With a store rebate it was actually cheaper than some of the 802.11b routers.
The Airport is too cool to throw away. I guess I'll put it up on the shelf as technological "artwork".
Update: The new router had a different default channel setting. I was getting good signal strength but poor "link" quality. Probably interference from some other 2.4 Ghz signal. I switched to the channel I was using with the Airport and I'm getting better link quality than I did with the Airport.
Update 2: Miguel tells me that my Airport issues could be related to the power-supply problems reported for the graphite Airports. Here's a link that explains how to fix it or get it repaired. Unless I did the work myself, the new router is cheaper than fixing the Airport -- and it supports 802.11g as well.
). Whenever I tried to push or pull large files across the wireless connection, it would work for a while and then drop the connection. After a couple seconds it would reestablish but some software didn't tolerate this very well. I've been using the Airport with a few different laptops and wireless cards and had never seen it do this before. It wasn't restricted to files going through the Internet or a VPN connection. The same thing would happen if I copied files to a wired computer on the same network.
I'm not a hardware geek but I tried to narrow down what was causing the problem: I tried two other wireless cards, I reset the Airport, switched to a different wireless channel, etc. Nothing fixed the problem. When I hooked my laptop directly up to my router, the problem went away. All signs pointed to the Airport.
I decided that the easiest solution would be to buy a replacement. My Airport is 3-1/2 years old and I could replace it for substantially less than it cost in 2000. It's amazing how much the home networking market has changed since then. 802.11b is still prevalent but there are other options. I ended up buying a 802.11g wired/wireless router at Staples. I don't have a 802.11g card yet but it works fine with 802.11b cards -- and I can eventually go for more bandwidth with 802.11g when I need it. With a store rebate it was actually cheaper than some of the 802.11b routers.
The Airport is too cool to throw away. I guess I'll put it up on the shelf as technological "artwork".
Update: The new router had a different default channel setting. I was getting good signal strength but poor "link" quality. Probably interference from some other 2.4 Ghz signal. I switched to the channel I was using with the Airport and I'm getting better link quality than I did with the Airport.
Update 2: Miguel tells me that my Airport issues could be related to the power-supply problems reported for the graphite Airports. Here's a link that explains how to fix it or get it repaired. Unless I did the work myself, the new router is cheaper than fixing the Airport -- and it supports 802.11g as well.
Thursday, January 01, 2004
Happy Fun Ball lives!
We bought some Bubble Lights at an after Christmas sale. The lights have small red vials that bubble inside from the heat of the bulbs. They seemed pretty cool but after reading the warnings on the box, they're going back. Here's the text: 
Some of this is standard legal boilerplate but the warnings about the contents of the vials sound too much like the old Saturday Night Live commercial parody: Happy Fun Ball. Do not taunt the Bubble LightsWarning: Never leave lights unattended while plugged in.
Read important safety instructions and cautions inside (There were no instructions inside)
Vial contains Methylene Chloride. If exposed to the liquid, contact your local poison control hotline.
This product is not a toy! To avoid the risk of personal injury, fire burns, and electrical shock; it should not be placed where small children can reach it.
Do no place vials near other sources of heat such as fireplaces, heaters, radiators, open flame, or other light bulbs as glass vial may shatter.
Vials are made of glass, do not drop, crush or hit.
If vial breaks, do not breath vapors, open window and ventilate room.
If fluid gets in eyes, immediately flush with water.
Liquid inside bubble lights will stain carpeting, vinyl flooring, upholstery, and other materials.
Hot surface. Do not touch bulb while lit allow bulbs to cool first.
Do not decorate or handle while plugged in may damage bulb causing increased temperature.
Handling the coated electrical wires of this product exposes you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects and other reproductive harm. Wash hands after use.
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