« March 2006 | Main | May 2006 »
Rule 122: The gun turrets on my fortress will not rotate enough so that they may direct fire inward or at each other.
This Evil Overlord rule is Copyright 1996-1997 by Peter Anspach. If you enjoy it, feel free to pass it along or post it anywhere, provided that (1) it is not altered in any way, and (2) this copyright notice is attached.
Quote provided by the Evil Overlord Widget by Thomas Cherry
Nintendo just announced the name of their new console, Wii. I kind of like the name but I see its weaknesses. The other console names like “xbox” or “gamecube” or “playstation” have physical items as part of their names, “box” and “cube” and “station,” respectively. It was clear you were talking about some kind of device. Wii doesn’t share this trait and so people may always be qualifying its use, “The Wii console” for instance.
Funny, though, how the Dreamcast console didn’t have this problem so it could just be the newness of the name affecting me. In the case of the Dreamcast, people just said, “come over and let’s play on my Dreamcast.” Perhaps people will become just as familiar with Nintendo’s latest console and invite people to come play with their Wii.
There is a new Yahoo! Widget Engine widget (that's a mouthful) which summons forth quotes from Peter Anspach's Evil Overlord list.
Sage advice in such complex times.
If you notice, my last post contained some blockquote text with some highlights. This was accomplished using the <span> tag. I simply defined this css in my sites style:
span.highlight
{
background: #FFFB94;
}
<span> differs from <div> in that the latter defines a block that at the very least necesitates a new paragraph and at the very most can be positioned as an arbitrary rectangle in any pixel location on your page. <span> is used to do exactly what I did for highlighting text.
I Googled for a good color for highlighter yellow since regular yellow was a bit too bright. I put these customizations in a separate CSS file which is separate from my site’s main theme-related CSS files. CSS does stand for “Cascading Style Sheets” so this layering is natural.
Plus, if I ever change themes, nick.css should remain untouched by Movable Type’s StyleCatcher plugin:
/* This is the StyleCatcher theme addition. Do not remove this block. */ @import url(/blog/themes/base-weblog.css); @import url(/blog/themes/theme-blue_crush/theme-blue_crush.css); /* end StyleCatcher imports */ @import url(/blog/themes/nick.css);
I just got an e-mail from a friend about the Brooklyn Brewery’s Beer Prom. For the love of all things good and pure, if only I knew about this sooner!
“To stay appropriately drunk through high school prom, you probably had to chug a stomach-pumping quantity of vodka beforehand. On Saturday, relive this magic night the way God intended -- with Brooklyn Brewery's Beer Prom.“At Beer Prom, your ticket gets you all the sauce you can drink: there'll be eight draught beer options, plus two varieties of punch ("spiked" and "more spiked"). Whatever your pleasure, you can down it in the middle of BB's cavernous great room, instead of while standing on a toilet seat.
“The rest of the set-up's just like high school: cheesy 80s music, "nerd chairs" along the wall, elaborate decorations, and heaps of hors d'oeuvres you'll scarf with blinding speed as your date admires the elaborate decorations. Formal attire's required, but since there's a "Worst Dressed" award, "formal" can include powder blue tuxes with frills -- a rebellious style statement your date won't admire even a little.“Of course no prom's complete without a king and queen, so pics will be taken of partygoers as they enter, then projected on a wall for guests to cheer for/laugh at. Win, and you'll not only get a fabulous prize pack, you'll also be drunk on smugness 'til Monday -- when you're once again waitlisted by Yale.”
I had Paul Graham’s essays bookmarked for quite a while. I read Paul’s book, Hackers and Painters and have been following his work ever since (well, it’s only been a few weeks). Anyway, I thought this passage from his Are Software Patents Evil? essay was insightful and a bit humorous:
Why do patents play so small a role in software? I can think of three possible reasons.
One is that software is so complicated that patents by themselves are not worth very much. I may be maligning other fields here, but it seems that in most types of engineering you can hand the details of some new technique to a group of medium-high quality people and get the desired result. For example, if someone develops a new process for smelting ore that gets a better yield, and you assemble a team of qualified experts and tell them about it, they'll be able to get the same yield. This doesn't seem to work in software. Software is so subtle and unpredictable that "qualified experts" don't get you very far.
That's why we rarely hear phrases like "qualified expert" in the software business. What that level of ability can get you is, say, to make your software compatible with some other piece of software-- in eight months, at enormous cost. To do anything harder you need individual brilliance. If you assemble a team of qualified experts and tell them to make a new web-based email program, they'll get their asses kicked by a team of inspired nineteen year olds.
And:
One thing I can say is that 99.9% of the people who express opinions on the subject do it not based on such research, but out of a kind of religious conviction.
The whole essay is well worth the read. From now on, though, I hope to start at the beginning of his list.
As many of you know, Google just released a new version of the Google Mini, their low-cost search appliance. The new mini has a ton of new features, you can read about them here. It’s clear that many of these features require a brand new box like having a smaller server footprint.
Some features may or may not be dependent on new hardware; like faster indexing and higher queries per second.
However, many of the new options don’t seem related to hardware at all. These are: unlimited collections and front ends, additional crawling options, enhanced administrator interface, additional reporting options, Google Desktop for Enterprise, etc.
A friend just found out that the Google Mini they bought just over the return period, 30 days, can’t be upgraded with any of these new features! It seems like the amazing patching system they bragged about is only for security vulnerabilities and bugs.
Isn’t this the antithesis of a web-application? Sure, the server isn’t behind Google’s own management infrastructure, but it just seems so dated to have these kinds of limitations in this day and age.
Bad Google, bad!
Here is part of the response they got:
Thank you for your message to the Google Mini support team and for your interest in the new version of the product. As we have made improvements which depend upon next generation hardware, it is has not been feasible to offer the new features in a software only upgrade.
Google offers a generous 30 day risk free trial period with your purchase of the Mini (counted from the date on which your appliance shipped from our distributor). We understand that customers who are interested in the new product and have recently purchased the Mini may wish to exchange their appliance for a refund of the original purchase price.
I don’t want to bore you but if you bear with me, I have a point to make…
A little over two years ago, I bought a Canon GL2 camcorder. This is a MiniDV-based camcorder which is classified as a prosumer device. It’s kind of an expensive consumer camcorder, but not so good that a professional would have much need for it.
It has worked flawlessly until earlier this year when the damn thing would refuse to connect properly to Windows. I thought the problem was either with Windows or the firewire port found on my Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS (not the platinum pro like the link says, mine isn’t made anymore). I tried everything with Windows, which included uninstalling and re-installing drivers, reading Knowledge Base articles, and lots and lots of snooping.
When I gave up on that, I went and I bought a cheap firewire card since my old firewire iPod was having trouble as well. Boy, did THAT wind up being a red herring. This track was a no go, but the iPod started working so I kept the card. Now I’m down $30.
So, then I bought a new firewire cable. Still, the camera wouldn’t recognize even in the new card. The firewire on the Audigy might be bad? Perhaps it shorted my camera? Now I’m down $60.
Then, my cousin came to visit I plugged my camera into her iBook and viola, nothing happened. So, my camera was clearly busted.
Then, I went over to canon.com and found the repair process to be quite straightforward. Unfortunately, my camera was out of warranty. In any case, I got a repair number, an address to ship to, and off I went to the UPS store. That cost me $30 since I had to insure the camera for the $2500 list price. The current price is $2k so I suppose that might have been a better price to give. Now I’m in the hole a total of $90.
Today, I got the e-mail from the repair department and it looks like the repair is going to cost me $273.74 (they only spent $13 on shipping!). All in all, I’m out $363.74. I went ahead and had the thing repaired.
Now comes my point. While I couldn’t avoid the new card and cable since that was just the price I paid to troubleshoot this myself, I could have said no to the repair and had them ship it back to me for $13. I could then use the $274 to buy a cheap and portable MiniDV camcorder. The cheap device would have been an excellent way to bring the footage I record with my GL2 onto my computer!
I’m not the first person to suggest this. I was talking to my brother a few years back. Buying a cheap device would save on the motor of the more expensive device and could increase the longevity of the primary shooting camera.
Maybe next time.
If you recall, last week my site had a pretty major meltdown. It all started when I used the one-click install feature offered by my hosting company, dreamhost. For some reason, I had installed the wordpress blog into the root of my site, which is a mistake. To me, it’s better to install each web app in it’s own subdirectory and use .htaccess and mod_rewrite magic to make your url space the way you want it.
I wanted to “uninstall” the one-click install but it obviously worried me to click on the button to kick off the script. What if my whole site got deleted? You can probably guess where this is going.
I consulted the dreamhost gurus and someone responded, exactly like this:
Hello, On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, you wrote: > I'm not sure when I installed Wordpress, but I want
> to remo ve the old site I added. However, I see
> that the new "upgrade/remove" list shows the account
> but lists my site's root (http://primordia.com) as the > worpress install location. > > I want to remove this entry (and install a new Wordpress
> install in a subdirectory) but I am afraid to click
> on the "remove" link since I don't want my whole site
> blown away. > > URL / DB Software Last Updated Action > http://www.primordia.com/ > oozewordpress > wordpress 2004-12-08 18:48:02 [Upgrade to 2.0.1] [Remove] > > There is a copy/paste of what I see. I apologize for the bad > formatting. Thanks. > > Nick The Wordpress removal tool will only remove related
files and databases. It will not touch any others you
have added separate from Wordpress. You may continue without
worry, then install to the new directory. If there is anything more we can help you with, please
let us know and we will be more than happy to accommodate. Thanks, Jeff T.
This was like over two months ago so removing the entry was on my to-do list. Last week, I finally started cleaning things up so I clicked on the link. A few minutes later, I got this e-mail:
From: DreamHost Installer Robot Subject: Success removing /home/ncodigno/primordia.com! As you requested, we just removed: /home/ncodigno/primordia.com from your server. If for some reason you need to re-install a one-click
there, just return to our panel at: https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=goodies.installer Thanks! The Happy DreamHost 1-Click Robot!
Sure enough, my entire site was gone. I wasn’t too worried and I took the news with surprising calm. After all, the dreamhost folks have restored individual files for me in the past with no problems. Plus, I perform my own backups every night. At any time, I thought, I could restore the site myself. I wanted to see how well dreamhost handled this situation. As I write this, it’s clear the experience could have been much better.
It was like 26 to 48 hours before they had restored the site. Even then, my /blog directory had the wrong files when I inspected the temp directory they created for my final review. /blog restored with the temp files I set up the morning after the site was down so they obviously pulled the wrong stuff from tape. Before that, an engineer had pulled some raw backup files and improperly unzippped things. He had responded in under 24 hours, but since he screwed up the restore, no one picked it up again for another 24 hours.
In a huff, I went and restored the two primary directories myself from my own backups. These are /blog and /wiki. My backups failed to contain my /cgi-bin directory, though, which is needed by the moinmoin wiki. I had to grab those files from the temp directory dreamhost provided for me so that was good.
In the end a few things will happen. I’ll e-mail this blog entry to their support team in hopes they can improve their restoration procedures. Second, I’ll make sure THEY perform risky procedures in the future. That’s what I pay them for, after all. Third, I’ve beefed up my own backup procedures so I can recover from errors like this myself. My faith in them is now somewhat diminished.
I still remain pretty loyal to these folks but that doesn’t mean I won’t send some criticism their way every now and then!
I’m back in business now and I’ve taken this opportunity to perform a massive clean and purge of some very old site files (from like 1999 and earlier), but leaving a few around.
I was so inspired by the latest feed item coming from Stu Nicholls' CSS PLaY that I had to make sure everyone knew about this awesome CSS design site.
In his latest entry, he has refined his CSS-only menu for all to see.
However, he has tons of other CSS gems such as CSS-only photo galleries, thumbnail generation, fluid drop-shadows, image maps, CSS animation, HTML forms with style, and much more.
Subscribe now!
Inside a kid’s head:
Happy Easter!
A colleague of mine has started a blog, specializing in Art, Design, and everything else. Her name is Liya Zheng and she’s our brilliant interactive designer super-genius.
Go check out her new blog!
So, I’m still waiting for my Krugle beta...
A colleague of mine were discussing the amazing opportunity these guys could have by selling their engine to corporations. If the search engine really does what it says, it would be a no-brainer for most organizations to install it behind their firewall and provide a search engine optimized for their own source code trees.
Plus, they can get the world to test it for them ;-)
Their survey results from their Alpha testers don’t offer any clues as to their strategy. They seem purely focused on indexing the developer communities out there in the public domain.
UPDATE: I got on the beta, I'll review it here at some point.
I think I mentioned last week that I had discovered that my raw RSS feed was detected alongside my Feedburner wrapper feed. Some people were subscribed to the Feedburner feed and some to the raw feed. Thus, I wasn’t able to get Feedburner stats on the folks subscribed to the raw feed.
Using some redirect magic, I fixed that and about 10–15 readers (or bots ;-) came into the radar. So, if you want to make yourself known, sign my frappr map!
This request is born out of pure curiosity, no obligation.
On Tuesday night, I stayed in the city and saw my fiend and work colleague compete in Guitarmageddon, an annual guitar competition hosted by the Guitar Center here in New York. He played brilliantly but a showman who could play the guitar behind his back won the event. Here is a quick shot of the contestants:
My friend Steve is second on the right. You wouldn’t know it, but he’s a brilliant database developer and from what I’m told an amazing singer. My other colleague Derek took some amazing shots of the players, but I haven’t asked him yet if I can post his photos here.
A bunch of us from work went to the event and afterwards we went to eat at the Heartland Brewery in New York’s Union Square. I ordered a salmon sandwich which was “ok” and a couple of their fresh brews which were also, just “ok.”
On my way home, I snapped this photo of the Union Square sign in the subway:
When I got to Penn Station, I was greeted by the music of Nicola, who sings down here quite often. My 11–megapixel camera allowed me to discern her website.
Finally, I was fortunate to take this photo of the old LIRR flip-panel main display. Later in the week, it was replaced with an LED version. I’m sure that the new signs will be far more reliable, but it’s still sad:
Our bearded Dragon, Cricket, wasn't too happy about having his food on his head. Moments after taking this picture, he shook it off.
When I got home from Tae Kwon Do tonight, I found my wife and kids making a gingerbread house full of jellybeans, icing, and candy bunnies.
I have to balance the gayness of this post with a picture of the beer I’m drinking tonight.
Southampton Public House Imperial Porter
A rich full-bodied "Baltic-style" strong Porter. Packed with flavors of dark chocolate, treacle and caramel. Also available in 22 oz. bottles at discriminating retail outlets.
og: 17.4
abv: 7.2
Maybe that explains things.
I don’t usually report on news items, but this is historical. From money.cnn.com:
Boot Camp will let users with a Microsoft (Research) Windows XP installation disc install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac computer. Once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS X or Windows.
“Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple's superior hardware now that we use Intel processors," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said in a statement.
"We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch."
I’ve already laid out for myself an argument to upgrade to a high-end Mac sometime next year and this announcement could be the final nail on the coffin. At some point I’ll write about my arguments but for now, I had to at least mention this here.
(Link)
I just got a beta notice from Krugle:
You are getting this email because you signed up to test the Krugle search
environment. Either that or a friend/enemy signed you up as some cruel hoax.
If that is the case, you can opt out right now by replying with “Opt Out” in
the subject line and we’ll never contact you again.
Assuming you want to be part of the beta test, you are probably wondering why it
took so long for us to get back to you. One big reason was figuring out how to
send mail to 35,000+ people. We had no idea this many would sign up, but we got
that sorted out, so here we are.
We started the beta last week with the first 1,000 testers. So far, it's looking
good. Those of you in the 34,000 left will begin getting login credentials (in the
order you signed up) beginning April 5. We hope to get the lot of you in the test
before April 14 or so, assuming nothing really unexpectedly bad happens.
I have no idea where I am in that queue but I’ll be sure to write a short review when I get my hands on the beta, er, link to the beta. The e-mail went onto offer a link to a 4–minute screencast overview of the project and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Technorati tags: programming, web2.0, source code, search, krugle
I promise these will stop soon, but this shot was too spectacular to pass up:
Pete Lawrence is fixated on Earthshine - the faint illumination of the dark hemisphere of the Moon by light bounced off Earth. Earlier this month he mosaicked two exposures to make a composite image clearly showing both the sun-lit and Earth-lit secments. Today he combines four exposures to capture the maximum possible Earthshine. Here is his explanation: When the Moon is new from the Earth, the Earth is full from the Moon. The light from the full Earth faintly illuminates the Moon making the new Moon visible against a dark sky. For the most part the sky is way too bright to see this effect. However, at the time of a total eclipse of the Sun, it is possible to capture this phenomenon. This image was taken during March 29 solar eclipse totality from ~20km to the east of Side, Turkey. It’s a composite of four images 1/350s, 1/30s, 1/20s and 1/3s. This is Chuck again: This is maximum Earthshine because an entire terrestrial hemisphere is reflecting light to the Moon, and the entire dark lunar hemisphere is illuminated. Normally Earthshine is viewed when the Moon is 2-3 days past new (and only part of the visible Moon is in Earthshine) and when the Earth is no longer full (and only part of its reflected light hits the Moon).
(Link to LPOD)
Tonight, my wife and I made the trek out east to the Southampton Publick House, one of the finer micro brewery/restaurants on Long Island. We were met by a group of friends with similar interests in good beer and a familiar Long Island setting.
In fact, out of the three couples that met together my wife and I had the least history with the place. The friends we met there had a rich history with the Publick House and many tales were told of the brewery, the town, and life on Long Island.
The beer was excellent and every pint I had was superb. I think I had 4–5 pints in all but “estimates” are all I can usually manage after 3 beers. I started off with a Southampton Secret Ale, then had a seasonal Abbey Blonde, then their awesome Imperial Stout, followed by their IPA. They have many more brews, even more than those listed here.
I brought home a few six packs, one of their Secret Ale and one of their IPA. The packaging looks like this:
I also got a growler of their seasonal abbey blonde and a large bottle of their Imperial Stout. You know, to keep me going through the Spring.
If you ever find yourself on Long Island, make the trip out to the East End and treat yourself to some of the best beer you can get in the region.
Here are some photos of the trip to Southampton the village, and the Publick House.
Oh, I had to get another picture of Cricket in there. Can you blame me?
Technorati tags: beer, micro-brew, publick, ale, IPA, pilsner, bearded dragon
Holey moley this is cool. That's it, the next solar eclipse will see me on a plane wherever the totality takes me!
This is just awesome.
(Courtesy Joel Moskowitz & Glenn Schneider)
