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This web page is pretty unorganized. It doesn't really represent me or my life particularly well. But then the problem with that is if I spent all my time putting stuff about me on a web-page, it would probably really eat into my time and bore you. The poorest section here is my projects. Only very small and simple files have made it up there so far. There are few useful tips about flash or any of the other kinds of programming I do.
ebaY
I sometimes run an auction or two. These were sold recently.Aug182008
All over the news
Jenni's contributions to the story, and multimedia piece are all over the news. Yay, Jenni!Aug22008
Frustrating
I had some choice complaints, reasonable ones, about the iPod touch and iPhone. I would go into them in more detail but I'll keep it brief.- Oddly the Google transit planner for Chicago couldn't render a map. Maybe this is why Google maps links all link out to the custom maps app.
- I have Wi-Fi only sometimes, but when I do, why can't I update my pod cast subscriptions.
- If I download 25 minutes of a 1 hour pod cast MP3 using the browser and it disconnects because I move out of range, why can't it resume the HTTP/1.1 transfer when I come back into range 10 minutes later
- Syncing is not right. Yes I can sync my contacts 2 ways, I can even sync music and app "purchases" (free apps mind you) made on the device back to the host at home. But the host at work cannot sync new free apps onto the device without deleting all the existing apps and their stored settings and putting all the existing apps back along with the new ones. The same holds true for pod cast subscriptions and other free content; it's from one host iTunes installation only. For no good reason mind you. I understand that purchased music might not want to be synced to multiple hosts... though you can redownload it on an authorized host, but come on... free content like podcasts and free apps? The apps don't even work on the hosts.
Now on to what's actually frustrating me — not my iPod — my swingline stapler. Listen Milton wasn't totally out of touch with reality. He had good reasons for not wanting to move, for keeping his stapler, getting a paycheck, and watching squirrels. But somewhere some how, he's been misquoted. Google says that 2160 people/pages believe Milton thought the squirrels were married (Ergo He's a complete nut and burnt the office down because he's crazy), while only 968 people/pages realize he thought they were merry (Ergo He's in touch with reality but has a lot of pent up rage and gets pushed too far and copes highly inappropriately). Yeah, he mumbles the line, but just think about it.
Aug12008
Swiss National Day
Okay I missed the official party in NYC on the 28th of June because I was in Chicago. But hey it's Swiss national day, so I have to just say it's always a fun day for me.Jul142008
Bastille Day
Some how I didn't even realize it was Bastille day until I left the office and someone mentioned they were going to a French bakery that made special treats today. Now I had other things planned so I didn't actually make it there, but it was still fun.May112008
Bad Idea
This might be a bad idea.
Apr222008
JSSSON
Just for fun, I took the sss format that I proposed and I thought, well, maybe people really don't want to write a parser, so what if it was represented in JSON? Well, it's a minor change but it does bring the size up to almost as large as the rss91 format (albeit with the extra slash code in there). But seriously, given that most people will want to encapsulate this object into a more verbosley named object, the code for doing so would be just as long as parsing the sss directly in JavaScript.Jan92008
A small success for LN-T3242H source code
Today, after a gentle reminder, Samsung emailed me this url: http://www.samsung.com/global/opensource/ which doesn't yet contain all the different products that use open source code from Samsung, though it would be a fine place to put it all. I am a little worried though that it's not actually fully compliant; the tgz contains, busybox-selp.1.1.3.tar.gz selp_glibc-2.3.3-4.0.1.tar.gz SELP_vmlinux_Kernle.tar.gz [sic] and selp-binutils-2.15.94.tgz; While cute, it is missing a few very notable items, one of which is required. The GPL states that the tools required to produce the useable version (binary) should be provided exception being that they are common. While I don't need make or gcc, I do need stuff that packages it into an image on the USB stick the way needed for the "upgrade". Also Freetype and JPEG software is missing, but I bet that's a BSD license. It's a bit touchy in the case of Freetype, I'd have to ask someone like the fsf how that dual licensing works, since there's both a BSD and a GPL license, with the latter being there when you use it in GPL code. Of course the actual code that works with the TV and uses these parts is apparently considered proprietary and wasn't included, even in object form for the purposes of making a working binary bundle.Jan72008
Happy New Year, here's no source code.
Okay so I sort of waited for Samsung to get it together; I guess it was too much to expect them to use some kind of CRM on this matter. I must have fallen through. No GPL code delivered yet.Oct292007
Kart Rider, Nexon, NGM.exe
I downloaded Kart Rider from Nexon today. It is fun, well made, a little funky on the interface etc. The installation however brought up AVG anti-virus with an alert that NGM.exe contained a Trojan horse Downloader.Generic6.KQB. Now I ignored that because AVG is old and um Nexon probably does need to download stuff. Well... Now I notice that \windows\system32\kernel32.dll, user32.dll, ntoskrnl.exe have been changed since then too. This is bad. AND I keep getting memory exception notices from various processes that they can't access memory like that. With a string about the memory access. I believe that's all the anti-cheat mechanism nProtect from Nexon that probably doesn't let the memory get probed. I'm okay with Nexon wanting to do that, but I am pretty upset that I can't find any statement from them saying "hey guys, we plan on modifying your kernel and a few other system dlls to prevent you from cheating, cool?" Now I want to uninstall this... though it's addictively funUpdate Nov 20th 2007: It has been patched, it no longer pops up stuff, and I think windows itself is updating the kernel32.dll etc frequently.
Oct222007
Miranda 0.7
Okay I happen to like Miranda and am glad it's become non-beta in 0.7. The Black Mesa Skin looks like this. It features improved support for XMPP or Jabber. I plan on writing something up to show how JabberFleet can be configured with conferences bookmarked and everything. Only downside is that Aim avatar support seems non-working right now; Jabber avatar support seems fine.As an aside, here's a list of FireFox Plugins that I use, well I don't use the people search one. but the rest are pretty great.
Oct152007
Samsung LN-T3242H 32" 720P LCD under-construction
I have received a response from Samsung. It started a week ago by mailing Hyok S. Choi who worked on micro controller linux (μCLinux) for Samsung. I got forwarded through 3 people, and they assure me they are working on putting together a package. I assume they want it to be clean of proprietary items, while following the GPL and LGPL for release of open items. Hopefully they'll throw in anything else they can like BSD stuff and documentation. We'll see though. The TV family has been out for about a year now and I am surprised they still have work to do on the redistributable parts.Sep42007
Samsung LN-T3242H 32" 720P LCD without Linux
I have received no response from Samsung "vdswmanager" regarding the GPL and LGPLed source involved in my product. I am sad. And mad. But more sad.Aug152007
Samsung LN-T3242H 32" 720P LCD with Linux
I received my LN-T3242H today. I read the manual and it includes GPL and LGPL licenses and mentions that the TV uses JPEG libraries, Freetype, Linux, Busybox, and one more piece I forgot. There's a USB port where the menu can grab a new firmware image. I'm going to have to try to get this source for the whole family. Oddly I can't find any page via Google about anyone else getting excited by this. Apparently there's too many pages that incidentally contain Samsung, GPL, Linux and my TV's model number that aren't actually about the TV running Linux.Jun052007
La Fonera
I received my "La Fonera" router today. It's secretly a Fon branded Meraki mini at a small discount. The Meraki software and support is cooler though, so is their outdoor ruggedized version. Anyway long story short, I got this one for free. See I ordered one of the old Linksys Fon routers for $5 during a promotion. It never really worked. If I configured anything about it, it would stop accepting connections. Apparently this is a common problem because the email I got from Fon with the promo code for the Fonera said that their software updates to the linksys routers were no longer working reliably, and that I needed new hardware to remain a part of the community. Well I'm glad, but lets see if it works. Oh and Fon: Worst Support Ever. I ordered this on April 20th, and received it today, also today I finally got a response to the 3 tickets I opened at weekly intervals inquiring as to when my order might be processed how it will be shipped. I got a tracking number today, after the delivery.Oct302006
tsprakietsc
What is tsprakietsc? It's the kind of mistake your hands make when you've become accustomed to typing 'prak' 'tspacie' and 'jvdietsc' on the command line and somehow are indecisive about which one you're typing now. Also acceptable are tsprakie and tspacietsc. Somehow jvprak or some such doesn't happen as much. No offense Spacie, Prak, Dietsch.Sep192006
Net Neutrality = bad
Trust me, if you didn't have a clue about the internet and you heard people wanted to support net neutrality you'd think 3 things: 1) I like the internet just the way it is thank you very much; 2) I don't think neutrality works on a geopolitical scale, I hate the UN and I think countries like Switzerland and Finland are just luckily they're rich enough and isolated enough to be able to call themselves neutral; 3) I don't have a clue what it is you're talking about, so it's probably a bad idea. [#2 is widespread among taxpayers of militaristic countries, and one I don't share]Why couldn't someone have named that campaign something like "Defending internet consumer choice" or "freedom and equality for internet users"; the gut reaction there would be more supportive.
Sep182006
La Fonera mocks me
I'm probably the last person who got a Fon router for $5 that was not the Meraki Fonera. What's it been, a little over a week? And now I can't get the $5 Fonera, I must spend $50; not that $50 is bad. I am considering creating a second Fon user who is a bill. I mean I think if I have two routers I should be able to set up each independently. But first I'm going to look into making a custom chillispot out of my WRT54GS v3. The Fon gateway is pretty darned badly designed. An embarrassment to show anyone. I think I'd like to make it Fon compatible, but I can't see how to do that without referring to the lame Fon page. Also I wrote to support, who are a tad lagged due to the Spanish locale, about not being able to configure the router at all. Basically I just had to reset, but it took a week to reset properly, which means in that little bit of time I won over the new Fonera I gained nothing. Lastly the Fonera might fit in the 6v battery compartment of a cheap parabolic flashlight/lantern. If so it'd make a great housing for more directional communication.Sep082006
Fon.com and Foneros: Linus, Bill, and Alien
So I finally got a Fon compatible router. Yeah I paid for it. Because $5 is a good deal for a router, and I know I can comply and keep it always on for a 30 day initial period and provisionally in the future. So now that I have one I can talk about it. What I've wanted to say for a long time now is this:Fon the company says there are 3 kinds of Foneros (users), the Linus, the Bill, and the Alien. They say the alien is the one who doesn't share his connection and thus must pay when using Fon. The Bill does share but wants a 50% cut of the proceeds, and the Linus gives his connection away for free. This is essentially repeated as such when people talk about Fon or write about it. Unfortunately it's something of a lie. Actually Linus gets free Fon access in exchange for letting Fon charge non-linus users for using his bandwidth. The Alien isn't some untrusworthy moneyed cash-cow, but actually someone without the spare cash to have a broadband connection of his own to share, nor the cash for the router, nor the cash to afford a good ISP that can be shared versus a bad ISP. If everyone were a Linus that'd be okay, but Linus can't pretend he's being a nice guy in this situation. Fon is still making money off people. Bill at least doesn't let Fon get away with it, but Fon punishes Bill by making him pay as though he were an unknown Alien whenever he's not at home. Though Fon is a "Movemento" and might play out to be a good platform for wide access for Linuses, they maybe don't realize they come off as the bad guy. Linuses would REALLY SHARE FOR FREE if they had that option. And they do, with OpenWRT, chilispot or other projects like those. Unfortunately the quid-pro-quo is required to make sure there's a wide dissemination of open routers (for the Linuses at least).
Other minor issues are that the info on the English site lags the info on other sites, like Spanish, German, French and Korean. It's pretty clear the new Fon router is going to be a Meraki Mini which I would have waited for (October?). And it's probably going to be incompatible (though Linux based) with the OpenWRT firmware, so there goes my Fon-compatible idea... If only the English blog had said something about the new Fonera router, I wouldn't have ordered the Linksys, since I already own one (Which I didn't feel like bricking...)
That said I intend to make a Fon compatible OpenWRT which also gives out free low bandwidth connections. No video or games for you, but maybe some email and some movie-times, and a patient look up of one or two driving directions. But first that really bad portal page has got to go. Dear God it's like a bad advertisement designed to be bigger than most people's browser windows. All people need is a "Hey, this is a Fon HotSpot." Link to what Fon is, and provide a login.
PS the revolution comes out soon enough. But first: NAS Raid, PVR TV, and rooftop WiFi.
Apr282006
Nintendo Revolution
I've wanted a Nintendo Revolution since I reflected on my GameCube purchase as being surprisingly sturdy; I don't have to buy games often on a GameCube because there are few games, but the ones they do have are fun in about the way I like games to be fun, mostly, I concede to missing out on Rez and maybe Halo... okay I'll be honest I think there's a sick logic to Nintendo's longer games, like Zelda and Metroid that is evil and counter fun; the repetition of "cut scenes" unskipable interruption of your play and such... so Nintendo is far from perfect, but it's good for the <15min per session games like Pikmin, Super Smash Bros Melee, etc.Now I realize that a Revolution is a full turn, not an about-face nor a reversal, but at current I am unfortunately revolted by the new name. Nintendo Wii. I can call my GameCube just that without adjutting Nintendo in front for clarification, but it seems they picked something specifically so that their brand will have to be tossed about more heavily in our daily parlance; you can't seriously say "Let's play the Wii" to anyone and be understood, unless you happen to be gesturing towards the device.
Also there's an issue of spelling. When Be Inc chose it's name, made its BeBox and its BeOS they didn't change the spelling, even if they were mostly French. Now I understand I am to say "We" when pronouncing "Wii" but I can't think of it as anything but a typo. Please note that the double-U is common enough to have it's own character, but the double-I is not. In fact I can't think of anywhere a double-I naturally occurs in the 3 large Latin character based target audiences (English, Spanish, French (German would come 4th or so)) though conceptually it may occur in Chinese or Japanese. Now the 'i' was chosen, in contrast to the perfectly acceptable 'e' (not doubled) because it looks like the controller, or a tiny person with a head. That's a retroactive explanation I'm afraid. It is impossible that when the name was still either 'We' or 'Wii' someone said, well the 'ii' would better communicate that we have two or more stick shaped controllers, or that we encourage groups of people to play together. That's the kind of argument that should be deemed insufficient to any decision making body. Unless it was proposed by the CEO's nephew, whom has currently been given the option to pick someone to be his high paid executive golf buddy. I sincerely hope that is not the case.
There's a further complication. If this were named the WiiBox it would be more passable. Also the GameWii, or WiiGame. But Nintendo seems to want to have picked something that needs no translation. That's pretty good on its surface, except that there's plenty of options here. Also while Latin script is super popular with Asians in ways that are mysterious to those of us where it is so common that it cannot be popular-as-in-cool it should be noted that it is never ever pictographic. Sorry, maybe your language was once pictographic or is partially so, but you can't assign pictographic implications to phonetic characters 1000s of years after the fact. So now suddenly it DOES need translation. Someone has to stand up and say it is "Wii" pronounced "We" meaning the English meaning of "We" using the "i" because the "i" looks like a controller of ours or tiny people. I hope someone pointed out to them that it doesn't actually translate at all. We are lost in a foreign concept of pictographs that has been excised from our minds and culture for millennia.
Mar212006
Google Pages
I fear for the increase in spam these might generate. http://dlamblin.googlepages.com/homeOct172005
Google, pour vous.
Index this.Oct92005
I don't talk much
…Aug152005
It's Its own argument
Try these sentences out: "It's been hot out, but with the cold-front it's going to get its chance to cool down." And "The dog's been ill, thus the dog's foregoing the dog's food." I know the latter is cumbersome because I didn't use a pronoun, and the former is odd because the pronoun is used very generally. The issue at hand is the fact that people who feel they have some writing authority have this rule they like to correct people with. The rule is that possessive pronouns don't use apostrophes. This rule explains why we say "he him his", "she her hers", "they them their", "I me mine", "us we our", and a few more. Also this explains "it that its". Actually this is a rule made after the fact to excuse the current form of English having to do more with various north and west European contenders to the English throne than with what writers thought made sense. The correction often cited is that "it's possession" should be written as "its possession." Here's my argument: Who cares. Let's just spell "its" as "it's" in all cases and be done with it. How will we know the difference? Just as if you were reading both of the two sentences out loud, you can tell the difference in writing by context. We do it all the time for every other possessives (see the 'dog' sentence). Does it make English more consistent to say all pronouns have a special spelling for possession, or most pronouns have a special spelling? I'm betting on the latter. But here's a totally different tact: "Their car died so theyre going to get gas for its tank and then the cars going to work again." Whoa, I broke so many rules. I removed all apostrophes. Don't I know that they're needed to tell the difference between pluralizations and contractions? I contend that if you can tell the difference when you hear it, you can tell the difference when you read it. So either "it's" gets used in all cases, or no apostrophes get employed at all. Anywhere. Less special cases would be better in my mind.Jul302005
New York Area Companies
I think I've figured out why there's a concentration of financial firms, niche high tech companies, business consultants, law firms, large scale medical practices, and luxury goods outlets in New York. Its not that these businesses thrive here, it's that they survive while others don't. The cost of living gets passed on to employers and it is so prohibitive that only high margin businesses can make it.Jul212005
2nd Life L$
So lets see:| Transaction | L$ (266.667=1 US$) | US$ | Freq |
| Second Life Account | -- | $-22.50 | Every 13 Weeks |
| Paid account stipend | L$+500 | -- | Every 1 Week |
| Quarterly Sale | L$-6000 | US$+22.50 | Every 13 Weeks |
| GOM Commission | -- | US$-00.72 | Every 13 Weeks |
| Net Profit | L$500 (for in-game use) | US$-00.72 (for pocket use) | Every 13 Weeks |
Jul62005
X M L
XML is probably very useful for a bunch of things; I know I've used it to send info to flash because there's a none too good parser for it there. I've also used the var=value format far more extensively because the parsing for that is very predictable. But I'm sure you've noticed people using XML just kind of because they have data they want to share and they think XML makes that easier. Sometimes they even have data they don't care to share and are still using XML for it. Now I don't dislike XML, but I do dislike unthinking adoption of what is often times bloat.Imagine a game's internal level format. Sure, if you want to strongly promote community written level editors, using XML might be a small helping hand so people get to drop in a generic parser. It doesn't save tons of work though, only a little. In my opinion, the XML should be an intermediary format in this case. You should store your game levels in some optimal binary format that will load quickly or save space (say, for maps players might have to download before joining a server) and while XML will let you ignore endianness because all numbers / symbols will be ASCII-ized, you should be working out endian issues anyway at another level of network communication and can probably live with working in one or the other binary endianness for your maps. So you could provide your community a way to export the binary format to XML, and reimport the XML to binary. While you're at it, validate the input on the way in; meaningfully reporting errors. Of course, the format needn't be XML.
The important things for a format are: a standard (with versioning), a speedy validator (it would suck to have to load all the game's graphics, models, and sounds just to check if the map contains a "typo", and, if you're big into Object Orientation, a parser that puts the objects together for the OO language.
So, XML does that stuff (sometimes) but it does something else too. It makes it "human readable." Unfortunately that makes the file pretty big, and prone to human error. You should never let a human edit your XML without validation, and big is the antithesis of portable (think cell phones or HP graphing calculators). So we're not seeing big pluses here.
But the pre-made parser is pretty cool for an OO structure. Right? Can't do that with the tools I've got can I? Well, you know, if you just used a character stream line by line, you pretty much have a parser for any format you care to dream of that's expressed in characters and delineated by lines. And if you want to save and restore OO structures, try that there object serializer that your language probably has. It's probably more compact and direct.
But if I want to share my data I should be using a standard format. Sure, but notice that even CSS, a human readable shared format, isn't XML? It doesn't need to be. It'd be pretty messy and LESS readable.
And having said all that. Let me link to an example I like to call Super Simple Syndication. Its probably missing some features that the rare RDF based RSS has, but I bet it's not like you couldn't add those.
Apr102005
CSS is not right
In IE6 I'm always getting variances in the margins if I float an element or not. This is all IE's fault. Then between browsers, a containing div will either expand to hold an interior float, or it will consider floats to pop right out of the box and leaving the div empty and essentially collapsed. I'm not sure which is the correct behavior, I prefer the former. In Firefox I can't get nowrap working at all, which is apparently legal since it's optional for a UA to support, but it also doesn't fill in the background color if you try nowrap. at least not in this case I'm using.So read the white-space property on w3's CSS1; of the three possible settings normal collapses whitespace, but says nothing or wrapping at the right side; nowrap doesn't wrap till a break, and pre uses newline characters to wrap. And it cascades. So if I set my body to do nowrap (div boxed images going horizontally for an unspecified distance) then the boxes inherit no-wrap, which means image descriptions in the box under the img tag push the div wider and don't wrap. Setting normal inside the box accomplishes nothing since normal is about whitespace collapsing, not about wrapping. What a worthless group of options! Actually Firefox reinstates wrapping with the normal setting. IE does not.
Mar?2005
PlayStation Portable
Okay so, I was in times-square and this truck rolled up to Toys R Us and unloaded Sony boxes. I thought 'What Sony things does Toys R Us carry?' and went to investigate. Well they'd just cleared out the PSX/PSOne shelf space for PSP. I bought one; I was happy to find that the battery came with a charge, but I found out after I got it home and was about to plug it in, which is after sitting in a cafe staring at the unopened box for an hour. I went through the whole sample CD and then went to wipeout pure. Switching the 'skin' from black to white helped me check for dead pixels. I'm 100% certain I had none.Then it started crashing. I had put it in standby, took out the memory card and tried to find a slot on my memory card reader (only to find that memory sticks are a lot bigger than memory stick duos) and put the card back. Later when resuming the game I got some random colored triangles. It wouldn't turn off. I ejected the UMD and then tried to turn it off again. That worked. And I played for a while more.
Then in the middle of going for a gold medal finish while on the subway line, it froze. Then the music stopped. Then, slowly, garbage was written to the top 1/5th of the screen. Turning it off could not happen fast enough, I thought I was seeing voltage leakage into the LCD, some things were getting brighter. Eventually the UMD and power trick got it to power down. Upon next power up it was suddenly obvious I had a dead pixel. A new dead pixel.
Now it's happened on a friend's laptop that the full screen DVD mode would leave some pixels overcharged and notably dead, until they are massaged into a relaxed state. I'm uncertain of the physics here, but clearly the hardware MPEG decoder can drive the screen directly and does so a little less safely than the video driver. Problem is I can't massage my LCD because it's behind hard plastic. Personally a soft screen with a flip down lid would make me a lot happier, since you can scratch the lid but not the clear plastic, and I could also massage the dead pixel.
This post is too long. Any of you non web bots that can glean my email address from the following URL: http://slithy.toves.net/~daniell/ feel free to email me if you know of any PSP's reaping their pixels before their time. Also let me know if wipeout ever crashes. I'm suspecting subway EMF interference right now, but software bugs are more likely.
Update April 29th 2005: I further found 2 dead pixels along the top edge, one on the right edge, and 2 very close together where text normally appears. All are in the area where the random junk was drawn. Update July 6th 2005: I further found 2 dead pixels along the top edge, one on the right edge, and 2 very close together where text normally appears. All are in the area where the random junk was drawn.
Feb?2005
It's professional grade software for free!
And it keeps causing having internal errors! (website's ASP)https://microsoft.order-9.com/winxp64/addrform.asp
Has anyone actually gotten the order form for the free 360 day trial of WinXP Pro 64 edition to do anything other than generate an internal server error?
Update Feb 22 2005 Must be a President's day special. It worked for me now. Incidental to getting this I discovered a Microsoft Virtual ISO CD Drive that's very non-production. With it I read the release notes, which sent me to some other release notes that in depth discussed how little 64bit driver support there was so far. There is a list and a hacked ATI driver from DNA; there's also official graphics drivers from the big two.
Feb?2005
The Central Park Gates thing
There's a name for this artwork that two kinda nice sounding artists created for central park. It's a bunch of gates. They're nice enough. There's one problem though. Beside being made of plastic and nylon/vinyl mesh, they're also the wrong color. See the park is gray and white right now. And the gates are OSHA Orange. Oh they'll tell you its saffron (which is a golden orange. But it's actually the Standardized color for Under Construction. So it sort of looks.... under construction. The park is sort of Victorian, almost, so I thought you'd make covered walk ways or hedge rows with gates... or something. But not a construction site. Other than that, it's fun and nice, but not really pretty; which was the point.Jan?2005
Thinking about cards
So recently I had to buy a card and ship it. spark.com used to do this service for you. They'd even get someone to hand write it for you if you liked. This is great for those of us with poor hand writing, but a little tricky if you're going to use a foreign language (on the writist).But it looks like Hallmark now lets you do the same thing, minus the handwriting. Of course they're a typical American corporation and decide to ignore any addresses outside the US, possibly due to irrational fears of litigation. Hopefully that will change.
It's a little weird though that they veritably blog their new web-ideas. I'm confused why a consumer might be interested in the "Packaging Spot Welder": "A back-sealer fitted to a form and fill packaging line comprised of a heated star-wheel rotating in lockstep with the motion of the packaging film."
Anyway, the rant in this post is that if I bought a card, and I wanted to know how much it weighed and how big it was, I would assume that I could use the company's website to get that info. That's what the web is for (it's not for marketing with images). So if there's a URL on the back of the card, how come if I go there I can't even find a physical card (they're e-cards) much less the one I bought. Well... it could be because DCI studios sold adspace on the back of the card to a partner. Clever, but dumb.
Picture it: You buy a card, you write in the card, before you seal it in the envelope that it came in, you look on the back (that adspace) and see a line of specs: Weight: 1.3oz with envelope, Size 4"x6" B6 Envelope. This is of course not the reality. In reality there's only a URL and at that URL there's a sales pitch. Imagine if you could look though the whole catalog of cards looking for a certain size and weight maybe even the process colors used like silver or gold. And then you click on 'cost to ship' which then calculates the cost from any address to any address (or say, from any North American, European, and Australian address to any other). That would be service, which is what the web is for.
It's important to note that I was in a rush, I needed to send this card and didn't have time to hunt down a ruler and scale at my workplace. Eventually I guessed the envelope size was B6. I can't confirm this, other than it looked to be +/-2" in each direction. Which when you're talking about a 4" side is a terrible margin of error.
Jan?2005
Jenni Sohn's Design Work
Hi there. Jenni Sohn has put up a fine example of her talents -- in this case focused on professional design for corporate graphs, charts, and reports -- at her charts page. I think you'd be living an empty and meaningless life if you don't take a look at how nice diagrams for presentations can be. I mean imagine if you were stuck watching some PowerPoint or word clip-art slide-show. This is definitely not only better, but the concepts are also clarified. Of course it helps to actually get the context of the presentation too.Jul?2004
iTunes Sales Countdown. (now over)
On July 2nd 2004 I started tracking iTunes sales With a pretty rough Perl script that I wrote in like an hour. I then spent about 5 hours modifying it to make nicer output and to sync itself with an external server. I then waited for Google adsense to kick in. But the page was never indexed. It makes me sad.Anyway, at some point I expect to show you the code. And to revise this code with a better architecture real soon that may allow for some nice graphing, some archiving, etc. Unfortunately I don't think that will be done before the iTunes promotion is over.
May?2004
Defeat Spam.
Well, this is what I thought would help. Be warned it is a mean approach. Rather than passively filtering out and deleting the false negatives (err on the side of caution), I want to make it less practical for spammers to get my email address at bargain basement prices (free). If everyone threw a wrench in the bots and we spent a little effort making a loose linkage (a web-ring would be filter-bait), eventually there might be respite; I'm thinking to throw up dictionary words, but I fear they may be in use. If you think this wastes more internet bandwidth think of it this way: when a spammer sets loose a mass mailing it maxes out his connection, new addresses or old ones alike. If those emails get to a recipient they waste storage space, processor time, and human time. If those emails get bounced, they waste less storage (logs used in both cases), less processor time, little human time, and a little more bandwidth. Eventually good admins or good admin tools will recognize logs filled with bounces from one source, and may take measures to shore up the anonymous mail inlet. This would lead to less wasted bandwidth in some time, but until then, admins have to look at spam as more than a filter issue; admittedly many do, but not all.Feb?2004
While I have many suggestions for this world, the least useful is this:
Why don't we reverse engineer the trance vibrator (trance vibe for Rez on PS2). What's that you ask? Well its a force-feed back device for the music/synthaesia game Rez, originally for the Sega Dreamcast.
Now I don't have said device, nor can I afford ($50 on eBay) to get one, and I don't want one used (shudder). But if any Linux/BSD/capable geeks out there want to plug this little USB marvel into their Boxen and probe their USB controller to find out what it IDs as, and maybe further probe the device, or perhaps trick the PS2 into thinking it's talking to the device while logging, to get a control code idea out of it, that'd be good. Then I'm pretty sure some broken pagers/old dualshocks could lend the required motor, and an electronics store like active electronics, digikey or jameco electronics could get you a USB ready microcontroller to implement the same device exactly. A Trance Vibrator to your own liking. Now... of course, if all this thing does is act in unison with the PS2 controller's Force Feedback, it may be easier (may not be) to put something in line with a controller and give it some external power to do its thing.
You may think it's odd to want a trance vibe and I concur. But Rez is a great game; I just feel if the game I find so damn cool was made to have this device, then this device is an important aspect of the game, and may make it more unbelievably cool.
