Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

Dancing robots!

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.

Blog design changes.

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!

RIP Rodney Dangerfield

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.

Mac Geeks fall in! Help!

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 🙂

Once more into the breach!

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 <a href="http://www.e-thepeople.org/article/35573/view?viewtype="completely fabricated a report of Kerry making off-color comments after the debate, 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.

Journey into RSS, and Firefox bites it.

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?

Hello from Lake Tahoe, NV!

Made it! This is my first time in Lake Tahoe (in this case, I’m in South Tahoe, for those who know the area). What a fascinating place.
I do admit that going from Tampa, FL (Hot. Humid. Flat), to the Sierra Nevadas (Cool. Dry. Mountainy) was a bit drastic. Someone probably should have mentioned ot me that Lake Tahoe is at 6100ft, (and my hotel room is on the 11th floor, so I’m up around 6300ft). Nothing like running up the escalator and having to stop and gasp for 2 minutes before continuing.
On the important front, all my gear got here in one piece, it’s all set up and running. Gnomedex will go on as planned! Minor twitches that are the norm for any event, but the show shall go on!
One interesting tidbit. Lake Tahoe straddles the Nevada / California border. Since Nevada allows casinos, and california does not, all the casinos are -right- against the border (as in, crossing a street in town has a sign “Welcome to California”. 🙂
I’ll try and keep things up to date here, but the wireless for the event hasn’t gotten set up yet (and what’s with Harrah’s not having broadband access? It’s a mighty nice hotel, but no net access? Sheesh!

Hurricane update – 1:57pm Monday

What fun! The hotel lost power last night around 7pm. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the backup generators they said they had could only run emergency lighting. Not, say, the plumbing or the kitchens. Apparently a huge chunk of Tampa is without power – we’re guessing that a station got damaged badly. THe power came on at 2:30am for about 30 seconds, flickered, and went out. Probably Something Bad [tm] happened at that point, and the poor guys in the power company are rebuilding things from scratch.
The hotel stuck it out until noon today (I just went to bed early) and then they gave up the ghost and kicked everyone out. (It wasn’t much more pleasant than that, really). Through some fantastic help from Cat, we got the Fedex shipping arranged for my equipment, and I wrangled a room at a nearby place.
Arrived here, got the room, and lo! Power! Air conditioning! Running water! FOOD! Internet connectivity! (Yes, ranked that one last, it was getting that desperate). This is a ‘Chase Suites’ which is… shall we say, a step up from the Doubletree. This is a full studio apartment. Complete with kitchen. Really. Dishwasher, stove, over/under refridgerator, and microwave. Paradise!
Net connection is established, so I’m good there, now I’m gonna go scrounge some food.

Hurricane update – Sun, 9:10am

Well, now I’m seeing a hurricane kicking along at full speed. Jeanne is down to a Cat 2 hurricane, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. I’m probably less than 50 miles from the eye now, it’ll past to the northeast of me, but the ‘turn’ all the meteorologists were hoping for didn’t happen, and it looks like the eye-wall will pass pretty close to me. The picture is from the tropical section of Weather Underground which has always been my favorite weather site. The X is where I am.
I’m really tired of “on the spot” interviews and pictures on TV (right now the TV has a big colorful graphic “JEANNE’S FURY!!!!”. Dude, it’s a storm. Don’t anthropomorphize it. It doesn’t like that. They keep replaying this interview with some idjit newscaster who got blown over last night. He was on the shoreline where a category 3 hurricane was coming ashore, and he got blown backwards about 40′ by the wind. I suppose no one mentioned to him that it’s pretty hard to stand upright in 120mph winds.
I woke up to the sound of whistling wind outside my room – this room looks onto the courtyard where there’s a swimming pool and other hangout spaces. They took all the lounge chairs (metal frames and plastic seating spacestuff) and just tossed them into the pool. That actually makes sense – they won’t fly around and smash into the rooms.
Power and internet is working (yay!) and I think I’m going to make my way down to the restaurant and get some breakfast. I saw some families coming in last night with blankets and supplies and stuff to take shelter for the day.
I don’t think we’ll sell many registrations today 🙂