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Saturday, August 17, 2002

$8/17/2002 02:05:57 PM

Heh, according to myelin's blogging ecosystem, I'm linked more than useit. Hah! Take that Jakob!

Wow, as a former spacegeek (with the encouragement of my elementary school librarian, I used to write regularly to NASA to request information packets and literature on the space program), this Man Conquers Space really hits home... The teaser movie is great - the music, the footage, the completely authentic diagrams. Who woulda known that this would be our future. Well things could certainly be worse... somehow. I'm sure we'll find out in the news tomorrow.

More great stuff at boingboing today, but your probably already knew that. (since you click there every 10 minutes because it's so damn awesome, right?)

Also from the NYT: a very positive G35 review. So pretty. The G35 is the American version of the Skyline. More info:http://www.infinitig35.net/.

$8/17/2002 12:44:53 PM

Woo! LCD Price War! 23" Flat screens for everyone!

Thursday, August 15, 2002

$8/15/2002 09:59:37 PM

The latest in a long line of badass Shynola videos: Junior/Senior - Move Your Feet

$8/15/2002 09:11:44 PM

Who Owns Even Brown's Brain? - This Register article summarizes the ongoing case of DSC Communications, Inc. vs. Evan Brown. Part of me wants to say, well, be careful of what you sign, or you're going to get screwed, but another part of me screams out that this is ridiculous regardless of what was signed...

$8/15/2002 11:52:42 AM

How to Monetize(tm) your browser - awesome ideas courtesy of hyatt, supergenius.

$8/15/2002 10:53:25 AM

Madhu "MadMan" Menon's Weblog: Avoiding personal conflict on mailing lists:

2. Avoid sarcasm. Cultural and individual sensitivity to sarcasm varies from person to person. Forget that silly quote about sarcasm being the highest form of wit. Remember that mailing lists can have people from all over the world. Respect their culture too.

Translation: Avoid sarcasm because there are so many stupid people on mailing lists.

Sarcasm? What's that?

$8/15/2002 08:14:13 AM

Gizmodo - the gadget weblog

$8/15/2002 07:54:30 AM

What's wrong with some plushies wrestling?

This rocks.

$8/15/2002 02:21:24 AM

Winamp 3 is out. Hopefully it's better baked than the pre-betas, but something gives me the feeling that it's not. Well, there's always Winamp 2.

More: Winamp3 faqs, backwards plugin compatibility: general/dsp/api, api, input, vis coming soon from nullsoft.

$8/15/2002 01:50:35 AM

Lots of linky love:

$8/15/2002 01:16:58 AM

So, I've been feeling pretty good about putting the free_culture presentation up online. I mean, hey, it's gotten about 20K hits in just a bit over a day. Not too shabby. I was thinking about it, though. A quick Google search shows that there are currently about 180 million people online in the USA/Canada. Compared to that, and the people who have seen this presentation is a tiny blip (most of which is already preaching to the choir in any case).

How can we get this out to more people? How can we expose this to the average AOL user? (carpet bomb cd's of course, but how else?) Are good one page explanations online that can spread the word as effectively? I admit, I'm a latecomer in actually thinking about these issues, but I think there needs to be a more effective way to reach out and make this reach critical mass somehow. If anyone has ideas (to actually implement), let me know...

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

$8/14/2002 06:45:06 PM

After talking and watching a friend drive stick last night something clicked, and driving stick became a whole lot easier. I'd been driving around most of the weekend (I bought my first manual transmission car last week) and was getting gradually more comfortable, but I think it wasn't until last night that I had my fun/scariness crossover threshold. Shifting into first is much easier when you put a lot more gas into it. My technique can still use work, but it's becoming much more natural. Last night I got into this sort of state where I wasn't even thinking about it. I think that's good.

$8/14/2002 04:41:49 PM

Vision Quest - Utterly fascinating.

According to a printout Dobelle hands me, the price tag for curing blindness is now around $115,000:

Also in this month's Wired, Hacking Vegas, an article on MIT card sharks, and Professor X, an article on the Alexander Shulgin, the chemist that reintroduced MDMA to the world. (it was first synthesized by Merck back in 1912)

$8/14/2002 04:15:05 PM

Taking a minute to veg out from work here...

So, I've survived my first /.ing. Still a lot of hits coming in, about 1 or 2 ever few seconds, but nothing too bad. Interesting seeing the /.ing happening first-hand. I don't think the server ever buckled, as I had a pretty reasonable throttle policy (50req/30s, set to 40req/90s to spread the love to some mirrors). Surprisingly few redirects though. About 1300 last night and 2700 this morning. So far, my servers kicked out over 60GB and still going. Some stats, brought to you 'grep', 'wc', and (what would we do w/o you) '|', approximately:

In any case, while this is all well and good, I just wanted to mention how much I love Apache. Creating a weighted redirect was trivially easy. It was just a matter of creating a custom error document and creating a little php script w/ a switch that would generate a random number from 1-100 and redirect w/ a Location header as appropriate (so, if $i<40 would redirect 40% of the excess load to a specific mirror). The only thing that would have been more slick is if mod_throttle passed the exact URI in the REDIRECT_ERROR_NOTES, which would allow more exact redirections (by default, it only passes the policy name).

$8/14/2002 03:36:13 PM

While the feedback overall has been positive, I swear some of these guys sending me email on this free_culture are 15 year olds. Total flashbacks to slides on mjd's Mailing List Judo.

$8/14/2002 08:19:16 AM

You'd think that "Special Agents" would have better things with their time these days, but who knows? - FBI releases advisory about 802.11-spotting "wardriving"

$8/14/2002 12:42:26 AM

I didn't even know there was a slashdot.jp

$8/14/2002 12:39:47 AM

w00t! Now that Mozilla has marquee support, I can finally view web pages as they were intended to be seen by their authors.

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

$8/13/2002 10:20:38 PM

So I come home from dinner with a friend (mmm, Pantry... steak..) a little while ago to see all kinds of referers coming from /... It's official, I'm being /.ed. On the bright side, mod_rewrite seems to be working like a champ. My server load is at 0.01 right now.

$8/13/2002 06:14:29 PM

This Snapple Breakdancers commercial is great. Ads.com doesn't have the selection that Adcritic used to have, but hey, it's free and still around. That counts for something.

$8/13/2002 05:47:31 PM

There've been some people bitching about the free_culture presentation being in Flash. As if simply by it's format it's somehow ickier or inferior. Now I've bitched about the difficulties of putting the thing together because of the technical weaknesses that Flash still has, both in its tools and design, however what gets me is these people that are dogmatic about it.

"You should use SVG. Sure you couldn't actually do it since the tools and players aren't there, but you should have done it anyways because it's better."

Or even better yet, you should spend your time contributing to that project instead of actually doing what you need to get done. (Obviously you should do this because the person posting this is much too busy and has more important things to attend to... like bitching on other message forums no doubt.

Now, it'd be nice if there were some alternatives to Flash, if only for competition's sake, but while SVG has some neat potential, it's nowhere near prime time. From a purely format/technical perspective SVG is better than SWF in almost ever single perspective (see: Comparing .SWF (Shockwave Flash) and .SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format specifications), but from the viewpoint of actually getting anything done (not to mention seen)? Forget about it

And what about SMIL? I don't know, you tell me? What about SMIL?

In any case, the source files are online. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

$8/13/2002 03:13:53 PM

I took a little break from work and did some more tweaking for free_culture. It's a page now that points to various files and mirrors and suchwhatnot.

$8/13/2002 10:56:11 AM

A friend sent me a link to thispast week's WSJ Personal Technology column, which talks about the T-Mobile Sidekick, a surprisingly reasonably priced piece of technology. It's like a Accompli, but priced at $199 instead of $599, and with unlimited (always on w/ GPRS) data usage (web, email, and aim) and 200 anytime / 1000 weekend minutes for $39.99 a month.

That's pretty damn impressive and has me almost convinced on changing service right now. If the web browser is decent (allowing me to program usable web services) or even if there's a decent programmable API (it has 4MB of Flash and 16MB of RAM...) and if it had Bluetooth (and a bluetooth headset accessory), I'd switch in a heartbeat. As it is though, I'm just going to lust for a while until I find out more information on its programmability. Hmm, I wonder if work will pay for one of these...

Random thought: imagine one of these puppies with built-in wi-fi and netstumbler. >;)

$8/13/2002 12:15:43 AM

Hmm, this is interesting... Originally, I thought that Mozilla's CSS error parsing was at fault, but discussing it with JesseR, extending the test case, and looking at how CSS2 blocks are defined, it appears that because blocks can be nested, Mozilla's parsing is correct and the W3C CSS Validator is wrong.

If declaration blocks can be nested, then this:

a { foo:bar; }
b { baz:qux;
c { quux:quuux; }
d { quuuux:quuuux; }

should evaluate to:

/* Mozilla's result */
a { foo:bar; }
b { baz:qux; }

and NOT:

/* W3C css validator */
a { foo:bar; }
b { baz:qux; }
d { quuuux:quuuux; }

Monday, August 12, 2002

$8/12/2002 11:45:03 PM

Looks like Netscape DevEdge redesigned under my nose. It now has this Navigatorish theme going again.

$8/12/2002 10:29:59 PM

We don't need no steenkin' title. Go free_culture go!

One nice thing about all these links rolling in is getting to see all the referers. Some pretty interesting sites/blogs/discussion going on. The only negative is that there are actually quite a few "members only" boards that I can't look at. For some reason this really annoys me. Anyway, here's a partial list of somet interesting sites so far:

Organica has it's own list of crawled blog links.

$8/12/2002 09:56:23 PM

Some things are so freakish that you can't help but point and gawk. Pointing and gawking: The HisTory of Michael Jackson's face

$8/12/2002 02:44:58 PM

Financial Armaggedon Is Unfolding in South America! (And it's by design) - is this article accurate? I have no idea. Still, it'd be interesting if the US headed into a cyberpunk style mega-debt meltdown.

$8/12/2002 12:20:08 PM

Heh, the Lessig talk is #2 on daypop's top 40 right now.

$8/12/2002 01:12:02 AM

Ok, I think I'm done tweaking. I've enabled mod_gzip for just about everything (turning it off for ns4 users because I'm a nice guy), and I've set up some mod_throttle rules that should hopefully keep me out of trouble in the very remote case that I ever get a lot of traffic. It's too bad that you can't assign multiple policies to one container. It'd be nice to be able to stack some of these.

$8/12/2002 12:22:43 AM

Site's going up and down right now while I tweak mod_throttle and mod_gzip stuff.

Sunday, August 11, 2002

$8/11/2002 10:01:20 PM

Where oh where does the time go? For those who read this blog for the technical content, I noticed Simon Willison's Weblog in my referer. If I updated my blog regularly, this is the kind of content I'd want to put up on it.

Simon has also recently started beta testing a searchable css-discuss database. This thing is really great. Really, really great. No, make that Insansely Great™. Now I can delete my old css-d messages without feeling like it might come in handy the next day.

Simon also links two other neat blogs: Mike Pletch's Daily Scribbling, and Column Two.

Mike Pletch talks about an interesting Business Week writeup on Macromedia and its financial woes. While it's sorta non-sequiter, I have to take that counterpoint and bitch about Flash MX. The reason it's not going to catch on is because it just doesn't cut the mustard if you need to do any real programming on it. Simply put, it's a huge pain in the ass to do anything vaguely useful with it (see previous rant).

Earlier this week, I did some work on the PowerPoint to Flash conversion. I thought that was it, but since the timings were way off and I wasn't anyone else to do it, I ended up spending the afternoon manually retiming the slide timings. In any case, here's the result (it's an exclusive for now boys and girls!):

Oh, do me a favor and don't submit this to /. — Larry will be doing that w/ his own servers soon enough.