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After weeks of neglecting my blogroll, compounded by my recent vacation, I just sat there 3 minutes ago and stared at bloglines not knowing where to start.
I solved the problem by clicking on the “Mark All Read” link and I found myself instantly up to date. Apologies to anyone whose brilliant posts I will now never read.
Clean slate baby.
A friend of mine wrote about a recent road trip (Jeez, it was a week ago and I’m reading about it now) and he mapped it out via Google Maps. My only objection is that he posted the map as a dumb jpeg file! When I clicked on it, I just got a larger version of the image.
What I think should have happened is that he should have shown something like this:
Same thing, basically, but it you click on my version you get the live Google Maps version. It would be a cinch, then, to click on Ithaca, get Directions to Wantagh, and then click “Reverse Directions” to see how long it would take for me to meet up with him. 4 hours and 42 minutes, by the way.
Trackbacks working yet Martin?
Illustrator has been causing me a bit of pain lately. I can’t save native AI files. I have been forced to save files as EPS. EPS files seem to preserve all of the atgtributes that I would otherwise need a native AI file for, but I felt more and more uncomfortable.
I “repaired” the install and still experienced the error.
I uninstalled and re-installed and still experienced the error.
I was about to, gasp, call tech support when I figure I would look for an FAQ on the problem.
No FAQ existed, at least not for my search criteria.
I then went to their troubleshooting section and found this troubleshoting doc. Viola, the problem was with my preferences section off of C:\Documents and Settings\ [user profile] \Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [version] Settings. It must have gotten corrupted or had settings which the application wasn’t prepared to deal with.
I removed that directory, restarted Illustrator, and was able to save the file.
If Adobe had a facility to collect user preference directories, they could probably reproduce user problems pretty easily.
My, don’t the swings get boring after our sixth visit to them?!
I was on Martha’s Vineyard this past weekend (awesome) and the swingset where we stayed was a biggest hit. At least I found a way to amuse myself while the kids went up and down the slide 50 times.
How typos become amusing e-mail threads.
ick
-----Original Message-----
From: Coworker
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 2:17 PM
To: Nick Codignotto
Subject: RE: New TT issue candidates
kay
-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Codignotto
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 2:16 PM
To: Sydney Gomez
Subject: RE: New TT issue candidates
es
-----Original Message-----
From: Coworker
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 2:15 PM
To: Nick Codignotto
Subject: RE: New TT issue candidates
hold off on what? the last TT?
My buddy Martin enabled TrackBacks on his blog and asked me to give it a try. Let’s see if my pings work…
This is a picture of Jupiter that I took tonight in my backyard in Wantagh, NY.
I took it with my Meade LX200GPS with a Nagler 13mm Type 6 eyepiece.
The camera is a Sony F707 f/2.3. The camera was physically clamped to my eyepiece and my biggest problem was the way the camera sagged when I let go. By the time I was ready to take this shot, I kind of fanagled the image into view.
I had to put the camera on timer shot since pressing the button was too traumatic for this delecate setup. In addition, I find that my deck is too shaky to take pictures on. I think I need to pour a concrete slab or something.
You can see the two moons Io (on top) and Ganymede (on bottom) to the lower-right of Jupiter!
Here is what Starry Night Pro 5.0 showed me:
(I had to rotate the image)
I just got this very nice e-mail from Flickr…
Hi NickCody!
You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to
reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in
the early days. Well, it's true! And since you're one of
those lovely people, here's a little something to say YOU
ROCK!
1. Double what you paid for!
Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to
2 years, and your new expiry date is Oct 16, 2006.
2. More capacity!
Now you can upload 2 GB per month.
3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!
This won't be activated for a day or two, but when it
is, you'll see a note on your home page telling you
what to do.
Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth
is and supporting us, even while we're in beta. Your
generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are
today.
Kind regards,
The Flickreenies.
PS - You can check out your account history here:
http://www.flickr.com/account/order/history/
We’re playing D&D tonight, this is the map I’m managing with Adobe Illustrator.
The o1–o7 are Ogres. 1, 2, and 3 are Frost Giants. The giants with the red slashes are dead. K is Kyrun, J is Jade, M is Mel, P is Kenyth.
As I write this, Kyrun has 8 hit points (of 81) and can’t really take another hit from a giant!
A few years ago, golly it must be 6 years, I helped write a computer game called Iron Dragon. My friend Martin reminded me with this post.
Martin wrote the game client, the music and sound effects, and was pretty much in-charge. His brother did the art. What the hell did I do? I wrote the game tools, the setup script, the web site, and the game server.
The tools were very simple. The main tool allowed you to drag images and other assets into a resource file manager. We created a file that had a nmrf extension. nmrf stood for Nick-Martin Resource File.
I wrote the server in staright C and it compiled under BSD. I did most of the development under Windows and made sure the code was portable. For years I managed the server too until I started to become unresponsive and I passed the torch.
I also wrote the server. Believe it or not, I wrote it in C as well. Pages are served up via CGI. It’s all dynamic and you can configure the web site to do a lot of simple things like post new articles, upload new verssions of the software, etc. The beta testers even got to submit bugs via a simple bug tracking system I developed. Finally, I implemented the ELO rating system for game rankings. This is the system used by most Chess ranking systems. You can check out the latest rankings, here. The HTML is a bit dated and doesn’t look nice in Firefox. I suppose I didn’t follow the standards well even though the page claims to he HTML 4.0 Strict.
It’s amazing all of the grunt work that went into getting the game to be a commercial entity. All in all, I can trace all of my hard-core knowledge of network and web programming to that project. Whenever I pull shit out of my hat, it’s probably based on something I learned while writing all of that stuff.
Now playing: Dave Slusher @ Evil Genius Chronicles - Apr 13, 2005 - "Psychic Used Cars"
First, the LIRR was all kinds of messed up. I got to the station and the whole place was closed. There were hundreds of people waiting outside. I could have rerouted through Jamaica station, but that’s usually a 2–hour trek where you spend most of your time waiting on line and standing for the whole ride.
So, I decided to go back to the office. Too bad, it meant I would miss an appointment with a financial planner my wife and I had.
Too bad, too, since tonight was supposed to be an observing night out East where I would have seen a lot of cool telescope gear.
However, I figure I could at least watch Smallville since I’m a huge comic book fan… a Superman fan in particular. The night could still be salvaged, right?!
No.
Channel 11 (the WB) via DirectTV was knocked out for exactly the hour Smallville was on. So, no Smallville.
If I play some World of Warcraft, my character will probably die.
If I go and mess around with my website, I’ll probably bring the bitch down.
I am taking enough of a risk just making this post!
If I drink some beer then I’ll get drunk… whoa… That ain’t so bad!
This is not a good sign. I do not need this kind of addiction. I must uninstall this now.
A friend from work gave me a free 10–day trial for World of Warcraft. If I like it, I get to pay $15 per month to play it.
I’ve been awefully silent lately. Lots of interesting projects are in the works. Details to come soon.
Here are some tidbits:
Last night I upgraded my Wiki 7 versions ahead and the process was a bit painful. I’m pretty happy with the results, though.
Ordered the new version of Starry Night Pro (5.0) for $80, which is an upgrade price.
Tomorrow is observing night at my local astronomy club. We chuck out east to the Vanderbilt Planetarium. Weather looks good so far. I can’t wait to see the other gear. Hopefully someone will show me how to really use my own scope!
Looking into downloading the free CCDTOOLS and possibly buying a Philips ToUcam Webcam… which just so happens to screw right into most telescopes. Supposedly the combination yields amazing results at a minimal expense.
http://sri.soygeek.net/pictures/
I really need to learn flash… or wait for Avalon. Damn. Also check out Macromedia Flex. Flex rocks and I tried to install it on my server but it only seems to support Red Hat Linux on the backend and I’m running Debian. Flex works by providing a declarative markup and then energizing it with the vector power of Flash. Damn cool stuff. Plus, they offer it free for non-commercial use.
I could try my hand at flash via Python, too.
Perhaps I’ll implement my venerable turn-based wargaming web service idea I had years and years ago.
Please ignore my last post.
I want to write a really funny post so imagine this is funny and you can start laughing. This is hilarious. Really, it’s so funny I can’t stand it.
Do pair programming at your shop? These expensive Aeron’s are for you:
A colleague sent this over and I was so excited about it. I can’t wait to get one, er, them.
Ever have a puddle of coffee on your desk and bewildered as to how it got there? I mean, the lid to your cup is on tight, isn’t it?
Well, I’m hear to reveal the great mysteries of life and today’s mystery is the infamous desktop coffee puddle.
When you put on the cap to your favorite Starbuck’s (or Murry's Bagel's coffee or whatever), notice where the cup’s seam is located with respect to the direction you’re tipping the tasty beverage. If the seam is aligned with the sipping hole (what’s that called?) as it is in this picture, you’ll get a drip:
This is the correct way to rotate the seam and sip your caffeine.
Enjoy!
My brother sent me this cool link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/
So, I had to do this myself. It was sort of a pain to remove the back of my monitor and rewire it so I could see through the back, but I eventually got it done. Cool, huh?
PS: Oh, and I don't smoke even though that white ashtray is prominently placed :-)
