October 2004 Archives

This isn't related -directly- to Politics, but it seems to be to be applicable to the current situation, where otherwise sane people still think George Bush is fit to lead this country...

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous.

- Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

How many of these make you go "I know what that is! I used to do that all the time!"

IN#4

Control-Alt [SIDEKICK!] - Delete

C> ^P[enter] [pause] "GodDAMMIT! "

Hmm. Cool machine. What's this? Superzap? That must be a game!

[S]pell "Tiltowait" HAHAHHA! DIE!

"Sure, I got Bilestoad. Whatcha got? Ooo, Karateka! "

"I'll take 2 doublesided, doubledensities please. Yeah, I could use 3, but I don't have the extra $2."

^R^R^R, hm... ^C... yeah... ^R^R^R... okay, i'm done. ^KX.. [C]... Damn [E].

"Whadya mean no command line!?!? It's a friggin PDP11! Yeah, I got another interpretation of POS...

"Dude, I found this box. $5! 2 RX11s, an 11/34boardset, an RK11D and.. YES! An RL11! You still have those 2 RL01s? Man, this'll bring me up to 10meg ! Score! Can I borrow some packs? I'll sysgen this weekend... should only take about 22 hours."

Wow. Can you imagine getting a 'login: ' prompt? On a LAPTOP? 'Hey, mind if I log into your machine? Here on the airplane?! Hahahahah!

That'll teach me to be heavy-handed with deleting blogspam.

I inadvertantly turned off comments on my blog for about a day (from Saturday through today). Thanks as always to Lisa for finding the offending rule in my configuration.

All fixed now. You may resume flamage!

I predict next Tuesday will not in fact decide who will be the next president. What will happen is we will see the largest voter turnout as a percentage of registered voters ever recorded. The vote will be close enough that there will be an immediate challenge in the courts. The fight will simply get uglier and for 2 weeks the election will be undecided. During this time stories of gross voter fraud will surface, be reported in the media, commented on, and either discarded as false, or simply lost in the shadow of "Oh yeah? Well [other side] did [this unsubstantiated rumor!]", thereby removing any weight to the story. Wash, rinse, repeat.

In the end, no matter who wins, the public will be disillusioned with the voting process even more so than usual. Unless there is a viciously polarized populace for the next election, I see a third party rising again in 2008.

And of course, The Onion has a perfect take on the whole schpiel. (Click on the image for the full banner). Make sure you also check out their election day guide, which includes helpful hints such as:

• Tip for those on the go: Voting a straight ticket can save you up to 15 seconds.
• If you are black and a resident of Florida, work out two or three alternate routes to your polling place to avoid police checkpoints.
• If you are a Flintstone, make sure to put the granite slab arrows-first into the dinosaur's mouth.
• If you live in Florida, for Christ's sake, look at the ballot very, very carefully this time.

Happy electoral college day, everyone!

"A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief," Bush told more than 17,000 supporters at an airport rally as he began a day of campaigning in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.
Yahoo news

Thanks to Steam for this pointer.

The November 8th, 2004 issue of The American Conservative, a magazine that has as an editor the likes of Pat Buchanon, is publishing commentary stating the positions of the staff on the upcoming election. Normally, this would be a no-brainer.

But not this year.

Yesterday was one of the most productive days I've had in ages. I did some huge revisions to CONGO's appserver (the core application that holds all the business logic).

After being sick for a day, and having a tooth extracted earlier in the week, I was feeling edgy about the amount of stuff getting done, but yesterday's 4-6 hour burst of code updates really helped.

For those into the geekier details, read on!

This afternoon I had the joyous experience of having a tooth extracted - nothing really dramatic honestly, it only took about 15 minutes, it was just unexpected. Went in to have the tooth looked at, and the x-ray showed the tooth almost totally gone. Out she comes!

After getting back, and nursing some gauze, we started chatting about the future of dental procedures, and the potential that sometime soon teeth may not need to be repaired anymore... they can be removed and simply re-grown.

In my delerious state, I decided to read the interview with Neal Stephenson over on my favorite geek news site Slashdot. They do a fair amount of interviewing there, but this is one of the best. Neal is in his prime. Highly recommended.

This is becoming somewhat of a pattern. After going away on business trips (in this case the trips lasted about 4 weeks), I tend to get sick when settling back into the house. Oddly, it didn't happen during the gap between Gnomedex and Ubercon as I expected.

It did however happen this week. So now I'm walking around the house, zombie like, feeling like my head is stuffed with a wet pillow.

So, things'll be a little slow until I return from the dead.

Did you know that Canadian coins stick to magnets?

I was carrying around one of the spiffy Google pins I got at Gnomedex in my pocket this weekend, and noted that one of the coins I had stuck to it (quite strongly). Fishing it out, I noticed it was a Canadian quarter.

Having been brought up with the knowledge that "Coins do not stick to magnets" this was quite an interesting discovery.

While down at Ubercon this weekend (which was a blast, btw - if you like gaming and webcomics, this is definately the place to be. Next Ubercon is in March, 2005!), I sat down in the LAN area during a break from registration, and played Evil Genius for a while.

This is one mighty warped game. You play your standard Evil Genius (straight out of Dr No and the like) building your underground fortress and trying to gain notoriety with your hordes of yellow jumpsuited minions and psychotic sidekicks.

This game was put together by the same folks who did Dungeon Keeper, a game that broke ground by placing you, the player, on the 'evil' side of the equation, trying to maintain your dungeon against those pesky heros and wizards who try to wipe out all your creatures. It's been 5 years since that game came out, and Evil Genius has revamped the concept into a slick, beautifully laid out, modern version of the same concept.

It's a LOAD of fun, and is making me ponder getting Transgaming Cedega tools in place to try and run the game under Linux.

I'm off to Ubercon in New Jersey. This is a great gaming convention that I've been working with for the last few years. LAN gaming, tabletop fun, and a great vendor area. If you're in the area, cmon by!

I'm a bike rider. I have 2 wonderful bikes - my Haluzak recumbent, and a Giant mountain / trail bike. I'm not one of those rabid riders who feel they must have top of the line equipment, lycra everything, and be emblazoned with screaming corporate colors like a mobile billboard. I ride because I enjoy it.

Today I rode into Somerville, as I am wont to do, to do some work at the Diesel Cafe, a wireless enabled coffee shop in Davis Square. This was my longest ride this summer, and not only did I break my record for a single days ride, it was also my first time riding in the city proper. Read on for some interesting observations.

From another mailing list, someone brought up this little applet (requires Java) that demonstrates a way to make very long pulldon menus navigable, by 'zooming' portions of the menus based on mouse position.

Apple used a similar concept with the OSX Dock, which can expand the portion of the menu you're interested in.

It's great to see folks thinking about new ways to approach old problems rather than falling back on "this is the way it's always been done". How many people really think about pulldown menus in this depth and spend the time to go "Hm. I wonder how this could be improved?"

I just introduced my mom to Wikipedia, and spent the next 1/2 hour updating and creating pages relating to fiber arts (her specialty).

If there's any project that truly represents the spirit of the Internet - global sharing of information for anyone and everyone who wants it - it's this project.

I encourage everyone who believes that Information Should Be Free, and wants to participate in the group-think that we all dreamed a connected world should be to hi thee to Wikipedia and contribute. Everyone has some information that's not there already. What do you know that someone else hasn't documented and shared already?

Reuters has published a quicky bit about how blogs have become a real force in politics, opinion, and commentary:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. presidential campaign between George W. Bush and John Kerry (news - web sites) has prompted a frenzy of gossip and conspiracy theories among Internet bloggers, hybrid online sites that blend news, gossip and opinion.

In particular, I like how the debunking of the CBS memo is attributed to bloggers who aggressively attacked the authenticity of them. Initially, I was very skeptical of the criticism being levelled at the article, but in this case, the skepticism was valid, the memo was indeed a fake.

The current bruhaha is about George Bush's 'bulge' that showed up in one of the debate pictures. It looks as if GW is wearing something under his jacket, and people are speculating wildly that this was a 'wire', and he was being prompted off-stage by Karl Rove. Personally, I think this is pushing it, but who knows how this will pan out.

On my cell phone (a Kyocera 7135 I'm sure ya'll are tired of hearing about), I had a wide range of browsers to choose from when doing webstuff. The Kyocera built in something or other was the one I chose first, and it was 'eh'. Palm phones aren't known for their screaming horsepower, and trying to render 150k jpegs down to something legible just brought the poor machine to its knees.

I rummaged around and found the Eudoraweb browser. It's a HECK of a lot faster than the browser I was using, perhaps because it never loads images unless you ask for it. It shows byte progress as pages are downloading, and it's bookmark system is nice and simple. I've switched to using it full time now, browsing Slashdot, my blog, a few other blogs, and various Livejournals seems to work perfectly, as long as you keep in mind this is a 33mghz CPU with 16meg of RAM trying to render pages that were designed for osmething with a lot more horsepower. Useable, but not quite the same as the desktop experience.

Could it be? Could Real have actually embraced the Linux world and decided "Hey, these schmucks aren't so bad, lets try and support them!" These are the trial and tribulations of me, a poor slob on the street, to get RealPlayer running on a Debian Testing laptop. Read on, if you dare!

This guy is definately loopy. He's attached a jet engine to a shopping cart. "After 50mph it starts to get unstable..." Yeesh.

Thaks to Greg Hughes for the pointer

This was just passed to me by some folks on IRC. It's about 3 minutes of a demonstration of choreographed dancing by 2' tall robots. I had heard about this particular piece a while ago (the file is dated 12/18/2003), but had sort of dismissed it as "yea yea, dancing robots, Marvin does the hoochee koochee. Big deal.

This is MUCH better than I expected. These robots are apparently built by Sony, and are called Qrio (also spelled 'Quro' some places). They are some of the most articulate robots ever made, able to run, jump, roll, pick things up, do visual face recognition, have tactile feedback in their hands, etc.

As noted on several other sites, Japan (Honda and Sony in particular) are YEARS ahead of anything the US is producing in this arena. The Qrio site above has many videos and pictures of the robot in action. Truly inspiring stuff.

Well you've probably noticed that Planet Geek is going through some changes. The original layout and design I had was aging, and my CSS-fu has improved greatly, so I'm taking a stab at building my own look and feel. The first couple changes are in place, and I'm going to continue tinkering over the next few days. Feedback is always welcome, but comments in particular regarding the wicky-cool tabs for the date headers will be given the most lavish attention. They were rendered in The Gimp and laid into the stylesheet. GEEK GEEK GEEK!

As reported on Yahoo News, via Reuters:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Rodney Dangerfield, the goggle-eyed comic famed for his self-deprecating one-liners and signature phrase "I can't get no respect," died on Tuesday at age 82, his spokesman said.

A lot of folks didn't like his style, but as a fan of the 80's goofy movies, things like Caddyshack and Back to School were wonderful and really let Rodney shine. He'll be missed.

Well, I've been stymied. I call on the blogosphere for assistance here.

I bought and built a purple gumdrop iMac for my mom about 4 months ago. This was to upgrade her from an ancient wheezing G3 running OS9 that was driving me nuts to maintain. This was my first experience with OSX, and I found myself liking it an awful lot.

Now comes the problem. I upgraded the machine to > 512meg of RAM and a 40gig HD, and installed OSX 10.3 on it. It was running fine up until a few weeks ago.

Now we can't start the Finder. No desktop, no nothing. If we didn't have the dock, the machine would be useless. Nothing I've tried has fixed it - neither starting the Finder from the command line (sorry, don't remember the command we tried, but it resulted in a crash), nor running system update, nor running Repair Permissions. A reboot will return to the dock-without-finder. I've tried switching users, but the machine wedges when trying to get to the 'select user' screen.

I've tried moving the ~/Library/ tree out of the way and rebooting, no dice there either.

The last problem is... well, it's at my mothers house. So working on it has to be limited to the 2-3 hours I'm there a week visiting. I'll be there tonight (7pmish east coast time), and on IRC and AIM. If anyone wants to help me debug this, either drop a message here, or be around tonight while I'm at the machine. Let me know though so I can msg / mail / poke ya when I'm online again :)

The New York Times is reporting that one of the administrations bits of 'irrefutable evidence' that Saddam was starting his nuclear program up, that being the acquisition of thousands of high stress aluminum tubes, was considered implausible by most of the top nuclear consultants, and that the administration routinely ignored all the arguments and evidence that showed these tubes were most likely being aquired for small artillery rockets:

But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery rockets.

It'll be interesting to see how this one pans out. I'm sure the bushies will immediately cry "The liberal media is trying to get us again! This is just more fabricated stuff!" Yeah, this the same liberal media that , without even a modicum of fact-checking, posted that Kerry had made off color remarks. FoxNews later retracted the story with what amounts to a shrug. "Oh, it's okay, we posted a retraction, so no harm done, right?". The author of the article was simply reprimanded.

After spending the weekend at Gnomedex, I've been bombarded with publishing, security, and blogging technologies. The biggest of these is of course RSS, which by all accounts is changing the face of online publishing.

I've naturally been using RSS for my syndicated feeds, browsing blogs using the Sage RSS aggregator within Firefox.

As I add more and more feeds to my view list, I'm starting to hit some problems. First of all, why is it that folks do not put RSS links on their blogs? This should be a given. "Click here for the RSS feed URL". Chatting around at Gnomedex, if someone doesn't have an RSS link on their page, you generally view the source of the page, and look for a 'link rel="alternate"' entry in the source code, and that will point out the RSS feed.

Yuck!

FireFox 1.0 has a nifty little tool in it for doing something called "Live Bookmarks". If an RSS feed is detected on a webpage, there is a small box in the tool bar that says [RSS]. If you click on it, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for that site, and updates from that site will show up in your bookmarks folder automatically. I tinkered with this for a bit, and found it cumbersome, not to mention seeming to 'hack' the concept of a bookmarks folder, which to me is generally static.

Sage does in fact update bookmarks, but all within a special folder ('RSS Feeds'), and it doesn't in fact add bookmarks for postings, simply gives you a quick link to view the feed. Also, the Firefox RSS handler doesn't summarize the feed, it links directly to the articles, so to view the article or the summary, you have to hit the site directly. Good for click revenue I suppose, but defeats the purpose of an RSS feed in my opinion.

But the really annoying thing is there's no easy process for bookmarking, into Sage, an RSS feed, unless the person who has the site has added the link into their page. The [RSS] button in Firefox can -only- update the 'Live Bookmarks' page, and manually adding a simple bookmark URL is difficult in Firefox (Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks->Select RSS Feeds->New Bookmark, fill out the info, click [Ok], then close the bookmark editor). What is really needed is a [right click] 'View this URL' or 'Bookmark this URL' or something similar, so it can be added into the Sage bookmarks folder.

So, in a nutshell, why have the RSS marker in the toolbar, if it's useless for anything but Firefox's idiotic implementation of an aggregator?

So. this is interesting. Throw a big party, give everyone laptops, and make sure you have people who like to publish interesting things on a realtime basis. Is this what it'll be like when ubiquitous computing becomes commonplace?

Folks are running around with various webcams, phone cams, and other goodies, here's a couple interesting bits...

PJ Morr's photoblog
Chris DiBona doing eeeevil things to some of the schwag

And the festivities continue.