Bob Congdon

How smart is an octopus?

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Last weekend we visited the Seattle Aquarium. One of the attractions is the Giant Pacific Octopus tank. When the octopus is really active, as he was this day, he moves quickly around the large glass tank and glass tunnel using his arms to explore the walls, even extending them above the water level.

They're also pretty clever. Watch this video of an octopus unscrewing the lid of a glass jar and consuming the crab inside it. After watching that, I think I'll take a pass on trying my hand at octopus wrestling.

BillG has left the building

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:30:00 GMT

This afternoon we had a party at work for our interns. It was in the atrium, an open area that extends up through all five floors of the building. As you probably know, today was also Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft. And his office is in the same building. When people heard that Bill was heading for the elevators for his last trip home from the office, the entire atrium area erupted in loud cheers.

When I worked for IBM, I wondered whether many IBM employees would recognize a photo of the company's founder, Thomas J. Watson, who had stepped down as chairman more than 50 years earlier. More than likely they would recognize his name but probably not his face. If Microsoft has the longevity of IBM will its employees recognize a photo of Bill in 50 years?

JSqueak

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Dan Ingalls has released JSqueak, a Squeak interpreter written in Java. It's roughly 5000 lines of Java. The download includes a Smalltalk image. Running JSqueak with this image on my MBP felt like déjà vu. It reminded me of learning Apple Smalltalk on my ancient Macintosh Plus.

Note: The Apple Smalltalk screenshots in the link are actually running in Mini vMac on a Macintosh. That's a 68k emulator running an interpreted language inside a virtual Mac running on an Intel Mac. Aren't VMs cool?

19 stellar cinematic one-scene wonders

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:30:00 GMT

The A.V. Club has a list of 19 stellar cinematic one-scene wonders. First, and by far the best, is Alec Baldwin's performance in Glengarry Glen Ross. Although not a one-scene wonder, Baldwin's over-the-top "I Am God" speech from Malice is quite a highlight as well.

Another one-scene wonder that I think is missing from this list is Quentin Tarantino's bizarre Top Gun Monologue from Sleep With Me.

Random Rules: Jonathan Coulton

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:45:00 GMT

The Onion AV Club interviews Jonathan Coulton by putting his ~~iPod~~, er MP3 player in "shuffle" mode. Clever interview format.

Coincidentally, I just added Coulton's Washy Ad Jeffy to my music collection.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Hilarious abridged script of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's full of spoilers in case you haven't seen the film yet. And it reads like a Mad magazine movie satire:

CATE BLANCHETT: Pryvet, Harrison. I am evil Soviet. You vill help me find Moose and Squirrel, yes?

HARRISON FORD: Holy Christ, youâ��re not going to talk like that the whole movie are you?

CATE BLANCHETT: Da. You vill help locate MacKuffin now.

...

JIM BROADBENT: Sorry Harrison, but the government thinks you might be a Soviet. Apparently someone rented â��K-19: The Widowmakerâ�� and panicked.

HARRISON FORD: Bullsh*t, nobody saw that movie.

Ha. Well I saw K-19. Pretty good film but Ford's Russian accent was worse than Cate Blanchett's

The Happening

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:30:00 GMT

Remember the ending of Poltergeist? Carol Anne is rescued by her parents and then the whole house starts to heave and come apart. Right at that moment the teenage daughter arrives home in a car. She sees the chaos and screams: What's Happening?!?!?

I watched M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening this evening and had to suppress the urge to shout the same thing at the screen. Not because of supernatural events or a convoluted plot. It's just that the film is so shockingly bad.

M. Night Shyamalan has written and directed some terrific films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village). It's hard to believe that he wrote and directed this one. Terrible script, mostly horrible acting. And the twist? What actually is happening? No point spoiling it but it just didn't translate into something menacing. There are a few moments of drama here that work, especially at the beginning but they're few and far between. And there are several scenes where the audience laughed because the action on screen was just so bad.

If you're still planning to see The Happening maybe you'll find it more enjoyable than I did, even if only in a perverse way. If you plan to skip it, check out Christopher Orr's movie review. It's laden with spoilers but is much more entertaining than the film itself. Orr makes an interesting comparison to Spielberg's War of the Worlds (a much, much, much superior film). I was also reminded of 28 Eight Weeks Later but only because the two films end in the same locale.

Update: I forgot to mention that like Alfred Hitchcock's trademark cameos, Shyamalan usually makes an appearance in his films. In The Happening he plays Joey a voice on the telephone. Yup, he literally "phoned in" his performance.

Happy Mac

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:30:00 GMT

The hard drive in our family MacBook died on Saturday. Initially I thought that it was fixable but attempts to repair or reformat the drive failed. Then I noticed an ominous clicking sound when the drive tried to spin up and realized that it was gone. Fortunately we signed up for extended AppleCare so it was covered. A trip to the Apple store on Sunday almost had us walking out with a new hard drive but they didn't have an appropriate one in stock. It was sent off for repair and shipped to our house on Wednesday. No expense for us and the replacement drive is somewhat larger than the original. The MacBook is happy again.

Overall our experience with Apple was terrific. We scheduled an appointment online at the Apple Store. The tech who looked at it was pretty sharp. We got a tracking number for the repair as well as the package when it was returned.

And fortunately we had a backup of the entire drive. SuperDuper was a life saver. Not only does it do incremental backups but it will create a bootable backup drive which can be used if the internal drive dies. Unfortunately the last backup was a few weeks old so we lost some data but not much.

The lesson learned was to set up a schedule and backup more frequently. While it was disappointing to lose a hard drive after only a year or so of usage, losing the photos, videos, music and documents stored there would have been heart breaking.

System Proxy for Firefox and Thunderbird

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Firefox on OS X does not read proxy settings from System Preferences. You have to manually configure them. A co-worker showed me a fix. System Proxy is a Firefox extension that adds a "Copy proxy settings from Mac OS X" option to Preferences. Works great. The extension also works with Thunderbird but I haven't had a need for that yet.

Seattle weather: Colder than Siberia!

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

According to the Seattle Times, yesterday's high temperature in Seattle (58°) was three degrees colder than the Siberian city of Tomsk, Russia. That's got to be a first.

As much as I'd like to see it change over to Summer here, I still prefer this to the 90°+ temperatures and high humidity that's been the norm on the East Coast this past week.

Beet Red

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Speaking from recent personal experience, Terra Chips should put a warning label on their bags of Sweets and Beets:

May cause red poop!

They're tasty but contain a lot of Betanin which is used as a food dye. Apparently if you eat enough beets, they can make your pee red as well.

Random thoughts while walking the dog

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Dog walking has got to seem pretty odd from the dog's perspective. You, the alpha of the pack, lead her around but then stoop to pick up her poo, put it in a bag and carry it home. Maybe that's why she spends so much of the walk seeking out other dog leavings. On the off chance that you might want to take them home as well.

Why do we say Pacific Northwest? We don't say Atlantic Northeast. Northwest should be sufficient.

And what about with Midwest? Mid, fine. West, not so much. The geographic center of the continental US is in Kansas, a midwestern state. Even if you account for Alaska and Hawaii, the geographic center is in South Dakota, also part of the midwest. According to Wikipedia, the term Midwest has been in use for over 100 years and replaced "Northwest" and "Old Northwest". Clearly these terms evolved as the country expanded westward. It's 2008, can't we drop west and just say Mid or Middle now?

Kill Dash Nine

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Is it sad that I was cracking up watching the CS rapper? Lyrics (along with a parental advisory warning) can be found here. And in case you're wondering what kill dash nine means.

LinkedIn Architecture

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:00:00 GMT

Lots of good details on the architecture of LinkedIn from two sessions at JavaOne 2008 last month. They cache the entire LinkedIn network graph of all 22 million members in memory in a "Cloud" server. The cache is written in C++ and uses 12 GB of memory. And they have 40 of these Cloud servers.

All of the rest of their code is in Java. One bullet on the slides about why they liked using Java caught my eye: "Near-excessive use of generics". Interesting. A lot of people find Java generics to be pretty weak since they're implemented using type erasure where type information is only available at compile time. That does give you type-safe containers but would that be "near-excessive use"?

Flash Frozen Fly

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

A large fly snuck into the house and was buzzing around in my office. It was too clever to land for more than a moment. I've never mastered the Ninja move of snatching a fly out of the air so I looked around for something else to use. I spotted a can of compressed air. Inverting the can and aiming the spray at the fly caused it to drop to the floor, flash frozen. I put it outside and a few moments later it flew away. Apparently flies (and bees) can survive being frozen as long as it's not too cold or for too long.

Wii Fit

Mon, 26 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

We've had a Wii Fit for a few days now. The package includes the Wii Balance Board and the Wii Fit title. Other Wii titles such as We Ski are coming out that also use the board. We're all having lots of fun with our "little white thing that you stand on". Nintendo is going to sell a lot of these.

Vince Mira

Sun, 25 May 2008 03:00:00 GMT

I was skimming reviews about this weekend's Sasquatch Music Festival and found this one about Vince Mira. He's a 16-year-old Federal Way high school student who sounds like Johnny Cash. He performed as the opening act for keynotes at MIX08 a couple months ago and was amazing. I thought he was a Vegas act; I didn't know he was a Seattle local. Take a listen, or better yet watch.