Primordial Ooze

We eventually strolled into the parking lot at 2am. By 3am, steaks and sausage were hot and we ate under bright propane lights in a tent erected in 20 minutes.

This morning, I saw the F1 teams in practice. Those machines are loud, fast, and can turn on a freaking dime. I can't wait for the race.

Right now, we're watching FIFA, Argentina vs. Germany. Next up is the big game for this croud, Italy vs. Ukraine.

More to come.

By Nick at 12:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I don’t know how people do this stuff. Enjoy the movie, compliments of one of my colleagues via digg:

By Nick at 5:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I found a pretty neat CSS tool calle csstweak. With it, you can comrpess your CSS files. I took the Primordial Ooze’s very own modified Blue Crush css teme and passed it through the utility. If I left my layout alone, the file shrunk by 7%. If I allowed it to remove whitespace, I saved 13% in size. I suppose this is something you would do if your site started to get popular and your hits were rising and you were struggling for a way to save on bandwidth.

An even more advanced tool can be found over at cleancss.com. Cleancss allows you to not only compress your css, you can reformat it and make it easier to read. This is pretty awesome. As far as compression goes, it took my 11kb original css file and shrunk it to 7kb, about a 36% reduction in size. if I allowed it to nicely format the CSS it still wound up reducing the file from 11kb to 8kb.

All of my css bookmarks can be found on del.icio.us, http://del.icio.us/NickCody/css.

The last CSS link that I’ll mention here is the excellent set of CSS page layout tutorials over at maxdesign.com.au. You’ll learn more about CSS in ten minutes running through those tutorials than you will in ten hours reading your typical textbook.

Trust me.

By Nick at 5:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As you read this I’m probably on the road to Indianapolis for the United States Grand Prix Formula One race. Yes, this is a scheduled blog post. I’m not a huge racing fan but this seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity. Maybe I’ll be a racing fan when I emerge..

In reasearching this race, I came upon a neat site called tagzania. When I entered the keywords f1+2006+indianapolis, I goit a cool map of  he speedway, here:

f1 and 2006 and indianapolis tagged map by user - Tagzania

How cool is that?

I’ll be arriving in Indianapolis on Thursday night, in an RV with a few friends. We’ve got a camp site set up and we’ll watch some of the preliminary races on Friday and Saturday (maybe). I don’t think I’ll be able to blog while I’m there but I plan on taking a ton of photos.

By Nick at 5:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In Edward Tufte’s new book Beautiful Evidence introduces us to the concept of a sparkline, intense, simple, word-sized graphics.

Joe Gregorio (a participant in the IETF AtomPub Work Group) designed an awesome Sparkline Generator Web Application. With it, you can create URL’s that codify a sparkline. Sparklines are designed so they can be embedded in your text without even thinking about it. That one isn’t a static graphic, if you look at the underlying URI, you’ll see that it hits his web application and gets a dynamically generated image back.

I also saw (for myself) the first use of a sparkline in a completely distinct web site, not specially related to Tufte’s work or yapping about sparklines in particular. If you go over to the Mashup page over at the Programmable Web, look at the Mashup Stats info box in the upper-left-hand corner of the page. You’ll see something like the box to the left.

The whole page is put together rather well and you should definitely check it out.

For even more industrious use of Sparklines, don’t forget about del.icio.us’ page on the topic.

There are sparkline libraries galore out there. The one for Ruby on Rails written by Geoffrey Grosenback (of nuby on rails fame) looks very impressive!

And, of course, my fingers shook nervously as I googled for, gasp, “wpf sparklines”. I wrote about this a long time ago. To my surprise, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of WPF activity on the topic. Am I missing something?

By Nick at 3:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago I bookmarked an interesting site that I found on digg.com. The Google News Cloud is best described by the authors:

NewsCloud is a site experiment that fetches news from Google News, tries to find tags related to each news and presents a tag cloud of the daily news.

During the news process, there's no human intervention. All tags are discovered automatically from Google News by text analysis.

When a user passes the mouse over a tag, related tags gets highlighted. That way, you can have a glance of what the news is about.

When a user clicks on a tag, the related news are presented on the right box. Clicking on them goes directly to the news source.

The pages are served statically, and are generated every 30 minutes.

Currently, NewsCloud works on news for U.S. and Brasil. More countries are coming soon!

It shows up as a keyword cloud like those found on flickr and technorati. Actually, tag clouds are everywhere now!

So, I hovered over “Navy”:

Related keywords were highlighted in red. As expected, you can instantly see that there was a tragic accident today and the headlines give more detail:

Navy

Fighter Jets Collide Over Central Calif.

Fighter Jets Collide Over Central Coast Base

Navy Fighter Jets Collide Over Central Coast

I don’t think I’d every “go” to this site on a regular basis. It would be nice if it were served up as a feed, perhaps on a daily basis. I could then see the news cloud every morning and scan for keywords and related entries directly in my aggregator (assuming the JavaScript was preserved in the feed).

By Nick at 5:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you're reading this, it worked.

For some reason, categories did not load.

By Nick at 8:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

 I thought this was a humorous “guideline” on writing. Enjoy.

How to write good

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. Be more or less specific.
15. Understatement is always best.
16. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
17. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
18. The passive voice is to be avoided.
19. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
20. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
21. Who needs rhetorical questions?
22. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

Link

By Nick at 5:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Someone wrote a cool Feedburner widget for the Yahoo! Widget Engine. If your Feedburner feed has the awareness API turned on, this widget will show your circulation and hits, polled on a configurable timer.

From my experience, the circulation count is updated only once a day but I’m not sure about the “Hits” number.

The widget uses the new XMLHttpRequest capabilities of  the Yahoo! Widget Engine (available when Yahoo! came out with version 3.0, I think).

The request is simple, you issue a GET request for:

http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=primordialooze

and you get back this simple response:

 <rsp stat="ok">
     <!--
       This information is part of the FeedBurner Awareness API. If you want to hide 
       this information, you may do so via your FeedBurner Account.
     -->
      <feed id="29532" uri="PrimordialOoze">
          <entry date="2006-06-25" circulation="45" hits="214"/>
     </feed>
</rsp>

By Nick at 7:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The japanese video (narration in Japanese) of a very large meteor hitting the Earth. I’m posting this to see if I can yet a Yutube video playing in my blog,mostly.

 I first heard of this on my astronomy club’s mailing list, the link was here.

I think a real meteor, or asteroid, would not be so molten. It would likely be a piece of cold rock. Or, it would be an icy comet.

Enjoy the end of the world.

By Nick at 9:37 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

http://plasq.com/

Sometimes I question my existence. I’d love to pay these guys $24.95 for this but alas, it only runs on a Mac.

By Nick at 4:23 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A very long time ago, almost 2 years, I wrote a simple Python module which ran through an OPML file and printed out the feed URL to the console. I used it to extract the podcasts from my bloglines account for all feeds i n a partifular named folder. I tghink at the time I organized bloglines in such a way that my podcasts were all contained in a particular folder. I have since just switched to iTunes. Not a great podcatcher, but good enough.

I was contacted today by someone working on the open source Linix podcatcher client Cast Podder. They were using bloglines.py and wanted to know if it was ok to use the file since I didn’t specify any kind of license. Of course I said sure thing.

When I’m famous, I promise to remember all of you.

By Nick at 7:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I thought this was pretty cool. Black Sun in Denmark, from Earth Science Picture of the Day:

During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above. This phenomenon is called Black Sun (in Denmark), and can be witnessed in early spring throughout the marshlands of western Denmark, from March through to the middle of April. The starlings migrate from the south and spend the day in the meadows gathering food, sleeping in the reeds during the night. The best place to view this amazing aerial dance is in the place called "Tøndermarsken," where these pictures were taken (on April 5 from 19.30 to 20.30 local time).

Link

By Nick at 11:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As promised… here it the route I ran last Saturday. I haven’t run since, afraid I’ll screw up my knee and because I’m spending a lot of the time kicking pads and flipping on the mat at TKD.

http://primordia.com/test/permalink/running/route4.html

The route looks like 6.7 miles. Nice.

By Nick at 12:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What the heck is with the little piece of dirt on the Gmail editing cursor?

It’s annoying the fuck out of me.

By Nick at 11:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This weekend, I engaged in my first long run. By long, I mean that I ran for over an hour. Saturday was a gorgeous day and I found myself hitting the road around 1pm, probably my favorite time to go out. In my ears was an episode of Escape Pod, a science fiction Podcast I can’t say enough good things about. The episode that kept me going for most of my trip was called The Clockwork Atom Bomb and it was probably the best episode I’ve heard on Escape Pod yet.

Back to the run. I went to the second Bridge along the bike path leading to Jones Beach. I’ll post a live map to that in a few days. I’m now listening to the Podiobook, Infection by Scott Sigler and my free time is draining away.

Yikes, back to the run again.

After an hour, my knee started to “give out.” It was fightening considering a week before I was talking to a coworker who tore his meniscus. So, I walked back for the last mile. In the end, I ran about 6 miles (I think) and walked the last mile. 6 miles, holy crap! I never thought I would do that. And, I felt like I could have pushed myself easily to 8 but I didn’t want to find out what would happen to my knee.

So, I’ll wear a brace and keep my runs to 3 or so miles for the next week or two. This is fine, since I have a Tae Kwon Do test coming up and I’ll be busy training for that.

You’ think with all of this I’d be skinny.

In a few weeks, I’m going to throw it all away as I drink and eat myself silly at the  Indianapolis 2006 Grand Prix Formula 1 Race. Whee.

By Nick at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Nick at 1:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Georgy
Originally uploaded by NickCody.

By Nick at 6:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is a scathing review of the movie from a comic fanboy’s perspective, and a supremely well-written overview of the most significant portions of the 40+ year X-Men comic saga. Read on…

Another excellent review here. Notable quote:

I saw X-Men 3 this past week and I just have to say it was a very good movie. That is, it was a good Hollywood summer blockbuster movie. Solid action, not too long, beautiful people doing beautiful things all made this movie an enjoyable experience. However as a story about the X-Men this movie is an abomination before God and Chris Claremont.

By Nick at 12:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I am no longer splicing photos from my Flickr account into the Primordial Ooze RSS feed. for some reason, the same pictures kept appearing, maybe once a month.

I never wound up tagging photos in such a way that they would appear anyway, so the service simply wasn’t doing anything for me.

It’s gone now and we can all rest easy.

By Nick at 8:59 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)