Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The Simpsons Movie
Saw the Simpsons Movie tonight.At one point, while watching Itchy and Scratchy in a movie theater, Homer asks his family "why are we watching this when we could watch it on the television for free?" Good question. Well it's great to see these characters on the big screen. And what took so long anyway?
It's very funny including a few things that they couldn't do on network television. Four out of four D'ohs from me.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Simpsonized!
Lots of people are posting personalized Simpsons avatars created from The Simpsons Movie website. I tried that for a while and then noticed Simpsonize Me. It works from an uploaded photo. After a few failed attempts and a little tweaking, here's what it gave me:
Sunday, July 29, 2007
How'd You Do That?
Right after fixing a WiFi issue on my wife's laptop, I was reading the Sunday paper and saw this comic. Pretty funny.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Everybody Dance Now
Hundreds of prison inmates at Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines practice their "Thriller" routine. Is this considered cruel and unusual punishment? (Via Gawker)
Thursday, July 26, 2007
retweet
retweet is a blog that tracks Twitter Bots. There are auto-reply and announcement bots. Auto-reply bots such as forecast will respond to a request (e.g d forecast seattle, wa). Announcement bots send out regular updates (e.g. the bot wxseattle sends out Seattle weather reports).
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Elvis Lives
I bought some candy from the vending machine this afternoon. (Yeah, bad. At least I don't have the horrible temptation of free snacks as we had at Iris).
Unwrapping my Reese's cup, I took a bite. Chocolate melting... mixing with salty coarse ground peanut butter... and... What's that weird sweet flavor? I looked at the package. It's a Reese's Peanut Butter and Banana Creme Someone got banana in my chocolate and peanut butter.
I guess I didn't look too closely at the package. The front of the wrapper also has a drawing of Elvis.
So how does it taste? Meh. I wanted peanut butter and chocolate. Banana creme just doesn't belong.
Unwrapping my Reese's cup, I took a bite. Chocolate melting... mixing with salty coarse ground peanut butter... and... What's that weird sweet flavor? I looked at the package. It's a Reese's Peanut Butter and Banana Creme Someone got banana in my chocolate and peanut butter.
I guess I didn't look too closely at the package. The front of the wrapper also has a drawing of Elvis.
- The 30th anniversary of Elvis' death is coming up (August 17th)
- Elvis loved Grilled Peanut Butter and Banana sandwiches
- Elvis ate mass quantifies of junk food
- We love junk food
So how does it taste? Meh. I wanted peanut butter and chocolate. Banana creme just doesn't belong.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and Tumblr
I've been playing with Twitter a bit this past week. I signed up a few months ago but didn't really see the point. Now that I've connected to a few friends with Twitter, it's more fun. I like the SMS integration. The experience is somewhere between blogs and IM chats.
Yesterday I got a Pownce invitation and signed up there as well. And today I signed up for Jaiku and Tumblr too.
I doubt that I'll have the time and inclination to invest in all four sites. I did find an article on a way to post on Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr at the same time. The author posts to Pownce which then feeds into the other three. But Pownce doesn't have mobile support yet. I wonder if there's an easier way to do this?
Yesterday I got a Pownce invitation and signed up there as well. And today I signed up for Jaiku and Tumblr too.
I doubt that I'll have the time and inclination to invest in all four sites. I did find an article on a way to post on Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr at the same time. The author posts to Pownce which then feeds into the other three. But Pownce doesn't have mobile support yet. I wonder if there's an easier way to do this?
Microsoft Surface
Earlier today I got a chance to play with Microsoft Surface. This system had a 30-inch diagonal surface built into a table top. The surface wasn't slippery like plate glass; it has a very slight texture to it. Interaction is through a multi-touch interface (similar to the iPhone) but you can use other objects besides your fingers. For example, you can use your fingers to paint on the surface but you can also take a paint brush, "dip" it into a color well and then "spread" paint on the surface.You can also interact with the surface by placing objects on it such as smart cards, phones, cameras, etc. A photo organizer used a smart card to access your photo albums on a site (e.q. Flickr) that could then be moved around on the surface.
One of the demos was a video puzzle where you placed transparent Lucite squares on the surface. Each square contained an embedded chip so that the surface could detect its location and orientation. So you could physically move and reorient the squares and on the surface while a appropriate portion of the video played under each one.
All very cool. The first generation of these devices will be expensive but I expect that we'll see a variation of this technology at home as well.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Walk Score
Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. It calculates walkability based on distances to nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. In other words, a measure of whether common services are within walking distance or not on a scale of 0 to 100.
Our current house is in a purely residential neighborhood. Except for the local elementary school, nothing is less than 1-1/2 miles away. Walk Score gave us a 6 out of 100, only slightly better than Bill Gates house in Medina.
Our old house in Arlington, MA did quite a bit better, 46 out of 100. No surprise, Arlington is much denser and the neighborhoods are a mixture of residential and commercial properties.
Going back through my old addresses, the best score I found was when I lived in the Coolidge Corner neighborhood of Brookline, MA. My apartment there scored 91. (Via Matt)
Our current house is in a purely residential neighborhood. Except for the local elementary school, nothing is less than 1-1/2 miles away. Walk Score gave us a 6 out of 100, only slightly better than Bill Gates house in Medina.
Our old house in Arlington, MA did quite a bit better, 46 out of 100. No surprise, Arlington is much denser and the neighborhoods are a mixture of residential and commercial properties.
Going back through my old addresses, the best score I found was when I lived in the Coolidge Corner neighborhood of Brookline, MA. My apartment there scored 91. (Via Matt)
Run Run As Fast As You Can
When Shrek The Third came out, McDonald's Happy Meals included talking plastic toys from the film including The Gingerbread Man (aka Gingy). If you pushed his button, he would say something about his gumdrop buttons. We weren't exactly sure what he was saying. But whatever it was, it got pretty annoying after the button was pushed over and over — as kids tend to do when they're bored.
As with a lot of small toys in our house, Gingy went missing. Apparently the dog found it and decided she could catch the gingerbread man. I found her on the floor of our family room happily chewing on his head.
As with a lot of small toys in our house, Gingy went missing. Apparently the dog found it and decided she could catch the gingerbread man. I found her on the floor of our family room happily chewing on his head.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
You Look Just Like...?
I saw a link to a page on MyHeritage.com that claims to use facial recognition technology on an uploaded photo to find your celebrity look-alikes. Here's my first attempt:
Let's try again with a different photo:
Let's try again with a different photo:
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Broken Windshields?
In Massachusetts it was pretty rare to see someone driving around with a cracked windshield but I've been noticing quite a few broken windshields here in Seattle. Not just a small crack — one that extends fully across the driver's side. Washington State doesn't require annual car inspections like Massachusetts. That could explain some of the difference but I haven't noticed substantially more say, broken taillights, here than I did in Massachusetts. In fact, cars out here tend to be in better shape. The winters are milder and they don't use salt on the roads so there's little rust. What else could explain the difference? Are windshields here more likely to get damaged here? More stones thrown by semis perhaps?
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Calvin Urine Trouble
While driving to work this morning I noticed that the car in front of me had a Calvin sticker on the back window. You see these a lot, primarily on the back window of pickups with Calvin urinating on the logo of some other brand of pickup. Juvenile and dumb. But this Calvin was relieving himself on the symbols of three popular religions. What's up with that?
I loved Calvin and Hobbes. It was a very funny strip. How did the strip become the inspiration of all of these "Angry at something? Have Calvin pee on it" stickers?
By the way as I passed the driver of the car with the sticker on the back, I noticed that he looked just like a character from Repo Man: the guy driving the '64 Chevy Malibu with the alien in the trunk:
Yup, Repo Man is one of my favorite films.
I loved Calvin and Hobbes. It was a very funny strip. How did the strip become the inspiration of all of these "Angry at something? Have Calvin pee on it" stickers?
By the way as I passed the driver of the car with the sticker on the back, I noticed that he looked just like a character from Repo Man: the guy driving the '64 Chevy Malibu with the alien in the trunk:
J. Frank Parnell: Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was full to bursting. The next day - nothing. Swept away. But I'll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.
Otto: Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?
Parnell: Not at all. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people - leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It's so small, no one knows it's there until - BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad. That's what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he's well again.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Beautiful Code
I just got a copy of Beautiful Code published by O'Reilly. The book contains thirty-three essays by programmers that describe how they found beautiful solutions to difficult problems.I recommend this book if you enjoy reading code-intense essays written by smart people like Brian Kernighan, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Douglas Crockford and Jon Bentley. At the moment I'm reading Tim Bray's essay Finding Things.
Beautiful Code isn't typical summer reading fare. Although the pleasant-looking cover art may fool some people into thinking that you're reading a novel, your tech-savvy friends will probably notice the O'Reilly logo in the corner. Okay, so slap a Harry Potter dust cover on it and read it anyway.
Speaking of Harry Potter... Jim Dale Knows How At All Ends.
Monday, July 16, 2007
New Tacoma Narrows Bridge
As I mentioned in a post last year about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a parallel twin bridge was under construction. The new bridge officially opened yesterday.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
iPhone Observations
Fourteen years ago next month, Apple introduced the Newton at MacWorld Boston. It went on sale the same day. I waited in line and bought one for $700. Adjusting for inflation, $700 in 1993 would be $1000 today. In comparison, $599 for an 8GB iPhone is a bargain.
As Walter Smith points out on his blog, it's easy to draw parallels between the release of the Newton and the iPhone but there's one big difference. The iPhone is more of an evolutionary product than the Newton. "Smart" phones have been around for a while. The iPhone is Apple's entry into the "smart" phone market much as the iPod was Apple's entry into the music player market. The Newton was defining a new category of device which is a much tougher sell.
When the iPhone was released two weeks ago I didn't wait in line and buy one. It was tempting but I've owned more than enough first-generation gadgets (such as the Newton). I currently have a Treo (it's my third). It works pretty well although I'm not sure whether my next phone will be a Treo or not. Palm has let the Treo line stagnate since the 650 came out a few years ago. I may eventually get an iPhone or possibly something else. I'm willing to wait for the right device.
Note: If you ever used a Newton, you ought to remember Walter Smith's name. He built the NewtonScript language that developers used to build Newton applications. NewtonScript was a prototype-based language, inspired by Self as was JavaScript.
Walter's name has also been in the press recently. He's one of the three founders of Jackson Fish Market. It's a new Seattle-based company that is creating "handcrafted software experiences". Their first project is a free service called They're Beautiful that allows people to send virtual bouquets of flowers to ne another.
Update: just for fun I did an animated morph from a Newton to an iPhone. The relative sizes are slightly off but pretty close. Take a look at this photoset on Flickr that shows the Newton and iPhone side-by-side. For example see this one.
As Walter Smith points out on his blog, it's easy to draw parallels between the release of the Newton and the iPhone but there's one big difference. The iPhone is more of an evolutionary product than the Newton. "Smart" phones have been around for a while. The iPhone is Apple's entry into the "smart" phone market much as the iPod was Apple's entry into the music player market. The Newton was defining a new category of device which is a much tougher sell.
When the iPhone was released two weeks ago I didn't wait in line and buy one. It was tempting but I've owned more than enough first-generation gadgets (such as the Newton). I currently have a Treo (it's my third). It works pretty well although I'm not sure whether my next phone will be a Treo or not. Palm has let the Treo line stagnate since the 650 came out a few years ago. I may eventually get an iPhone or possibly something else. I'm willing to wait for the right device.
Note: If you ever used a Newton, you ought to remember Walter Smith's name. He built the NewtonScript language that developers used to build Newton applications. NewtonScript was a prototype-based language, inspired by Self as was JavaScript.
Walter's name has also been in the press recently. He's one of the three founders of Jackson Fish Market. It's a new Seattle-based company that is creating "handcrafted software experiences". Their first project is a free service called They're Beautiful that allows people to send virtual bouquets of flowers to ne another.
Update: just for fun I did an animated morph from a Newton to an iPhone. The relative sizes are slightly off but pretty close. Take a look at this photoset on Flickr that shows the Newton and iPhone side-by-side. For example see this one.
NextStep Lives On
Andrew recently sent me a link to Reviving the NeXT, a blog post about getting an old NeXT station running again. It reminded me of how much I loved that old hardware. I owned a NeXT station for a few years and had a NeXT cube in my office from the day I started at Lotus in 1990 until I left Iris ten years later. After Improv was cancelled, I used it less and less but it still worked. When I left Iris, I passed it along to another ex-Improv developer.
When I joined IBM in 2001, I inherited another NeXT cube. It still worked but the screen was a little dim — no surprise, it was more than 10 years old at that point. One day the IBM auditors came through our offices to verify their inventory records. Old Lotus hardware wasn't in their system. One of them saw the black cube and asked "Is that a computer?"
When I left IBM in 2005, I had to leave the cube behind. I'm not sure whether someone else is using it now or if, God forbid, it got "recycled".
Since then I've considered picking up an old cube or NeXT station but my home office is already too cluttered with old hardware and too many books. And although NeXT hardware was pretty spiffy for its day, it's a couple orders of magnitude slower than today's hardware.
So I decided to try the next best thing — get NeXTStep / OpenStep running under a VM. I'd read a few stories of people getting OpenStep running under Parallels on Intel Macs, so that's where I began. Other people have gotten OpenStep to run under VMWare and Virtual PC on Windows but since I'd been using Parallels on the MacBook recently, I started there.
I followed advice I'd found online. The first time I tried to boot the OS, it hung during initialization. I tried several different approaches, all with the same result. So close...
A few people had mentioned that you had to disable Intel VT-x support (which I had done) but no mention of Acceleration Level which was set to High. I changed it to Normal and the OS booted to the login screen! It runs quite well. The mouse acceleration feels a little high but otherwise it's very usuable. If you're used to OS X, OpenStep will feel familar. Not as slick but familar.
The only thing I'm still struggling with is network configuration. NeXTStep never had support for DHCP so you have to hard-code a static IP address. I've done that but haven't found the right combination of settings for the router and name resolution IP addresses. And when you screw something up, it can hang on startup. Which makes Parallels 3.0's snapshot feature very useful.
Here's a screenshot of OpenStep running on the MacBook. If you click on the image you can see NeXT Mail is open with an email from Steve Jobs from April 1, 1996.
I've got NeXT Developer tools installed as well as the OS. In the screenshot, Interface Builder is running. If you do Cocoa development for OS X, some of the class names in the window in the lower-left corner should be familar.
Sadly, I don't have a copy of Improv for NeXT that can run here. Improv was only released for NeXT hardware (i.e. 68k). A quick-and-dirty port was done for NeXTStep on Intel many years ago but I don't have a copy and I'm not sure whether it would run on OpenStep 4.2 or not.
What's Next? I'm not sure. It was mostly a trip down memory lane. And while OpenStep under Parallels is fast enough to use for developing NeXT apps, there's not much call for those these days.
When I joined IBM in 2001, I inherited another NeXT cube. It still worked but the screen was a little dim — no surprise, it was more than 10 years old at that point. One day the IBM auditors came through our offices to verify their inventory records. Old Lotus hardware wasn't in their system. One of them saw the black cube and asked "Is that a computer?"
When I left IBM in 2005, I had to leave the cube behind. I'm not sure whether someone else is using it now or if, God forbid, it got "recycled".
Since then I've considered picking up an old cube or NeXT station but my home office is already too cluttered with old hardware and too many books. And although NeXT hardware was pretty spiffy for its day, it's a couple orders of magnitude slower than today's hardware.
So I decided to try the next best thing — get NeXTStep / OpenStep running under a VM. I'd read a few stories of people getting OpenStep running under Parallels on Intel Macs, so that's where I began. Other people have gotten OpenStep to run under VMWare and Virtual PC on Windows but since I'd been using Parallels on the MacBook recently, I started there.
I followed advice I'd found online. The first time I tried to boot the OS, it hung during initialization. I tried several different approaches, all with the same result. So close...
A few people had mentioned that you had to disable Intel VT-x support (which I had done) but no mention of Acceleration Level which was set to High. I changed it to Normal and the OS booted to the login screen! It runs quite well. The mouse acceleration feels a little high but otherwise it's very usuable. If you're used to OS X, OpenStep will feel familar. Not as slick but familar.
The only thing I'm still struggling with is network configuration. NeXTStep never had support for DHCP so you have to hard-code a static IP address. I've done that but haven't found the right combination of settings for the router and name resolution IP addresses. And when you screw something up, it can hang on startup. Which makes Parallels 3.0's snapshot feature very useful.
Here's a screenshot of OpenStep running on the MacBook. If you click on the image you can see NeXT Mail is open with an email from Steve Jobs from April 1, 1996.
I've got NeXT Developer tools installed as well as the OS. In the screenshot, Interface Builder is running. If you do Cocoa development for OS X, some of the class names in the window in the lower-left corner should be familar.
Sadly, I don't have a copy of Improv for NeXT that can run here. Improv was only released for NeXT hardware (i.e. 68k). A quick-and-dirty port was done for NeXTStep on Intel many years ago but I don't have a copy and I'm not sure whether it would run on OpenStep 4.2 or not.
What's Next? I'm not sure. It was mostly a trip down memory lane. And while OpenStep under Parallels is fast enough to use for developing NeXT apps, there's not much call for those these days.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Fun with Base64
One of our test cases generates mismatched data types and values and expects exceptions to be thrown. But a particular type and value combination didn't produce an error. The specific case was using a boolean value as binary data. In XML we handle binary data as a Base64-encoded strings. In this case, the code treats a boolean literal as Base64-encoded text. If the boolean literal is true, it's effectively doing this:
byte[] decoded = Convert.FromBase64String("true");
byte[] decoded = Convert.FromBase64String("true");
Which produces a byte array [182, 187, 158]. Trying to decode the boolean literal false throws an exception.
Let's see: using Base64 we're encoding each three byte chunk to four characters and padding with = if given less than three bytes. So true is a valid Base64 encoded string whereas false is not. More generally, a sequence of alphanumeric characters (also with + and /) that's a multiples of four characters long is a valid Base64 encoded string too.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
1-18-08, Cloverfield and Ethan Haas
Apple Trailers has an interesting trailer that it refers to as 1-18-08 (watch it here). The trailer has been shown in theaters before Transformers. It's a J.J. Abrams film with the working title of Cloverfield (to be released on January, 18, 2008). Digging around a bit, there was speculation that the film is connected to the viral game Ethan Haas Was Right. Abrams has said that there's no connection.
The game is pretty clever. The videos shown after you solve each puzzle hint at a story line. But what's it for? Digging around a bit more, looks like it's for a game called Alpha Omega. (Note: if your looking for hints to solve the online game, see this entry on JayIsGames.com).
The game is pretty clever. The videos shown after you solve each puzzle hint at a story line. But what's it for? Digging around a bit more, looks like it's for a game called Alpha Omega. (Note: if your looking for hints to solve the online game, see this entry on JayIsGames.com).
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
iPhone in a blender
Will It Blend? does the iPhone. It's amazing how long the screen stays on while it's getting battered. It's a pretty rugged device.
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