For family wandering through, yes, it’s done - I’ve posted this year’s christmas wishlist. For non-family, I’ve tried to be my usual snarky self so you might get a kick out of some of it, but mostly it’s pretty boring stuff.
Archive for November, 2004
Help contribute to the networked future - install blog torrent on your weblog. It’s not yet feature complete (it only half works with macs right now but they’re focused on getting that fixed, and mac owners will love their rationale for why this is the priority) but this is another in a long line of examples of the kinds of things broadcast networks should be freaking about, and yet another reason why the damned ISP’s should be enabling fully asyncronous network connections for all of us, two issues longtime readers know I am passionate about. Drop dead simple to get up and running, and the only real requirement is PHP.
This will be up and running on my site as soon as I deal with the recent security issues and get the redesign done. In other words, umm, a year or so from now. Doh!
This is more like a Friday fun link, but what they hey, it’s lunchtime and I’m in a playful mood. Check out Pixelfest - a communal art project where each contributor provides but one pixel to the piece. Will meaning coalesce from the chaos? You can see the seeds of a woodland scene there but it’s not a sure thing that this will end up visible in the whole once it’s done. Contribute your little piece by clicking the link.
Blogbox is a pretty cool idea. They offer a selection of free, open source mini-flash apps you can embed in your weblog. A photo box like the one to the top right on this site (though more fully featured), a link collection tool, a weather box, and a couple of others are available. I linked to them some time ago when they first produced soundblox, their mp3 player. It’s good to see their collection has grown nicely.
It would be exceptionally cool if they integrated support for things like sitebar (a link collection tool which I’m actually running here and gallery. Seems like it wouldn’t be too tough to do.
None of this stuff is likely to show up here in the short term, though it’s possible after the redesign I’ll have two versions of the weblog, one with and one without flash, using stuff like this.
I’ve mentioned once or twice my mild fascination with the Curta mechanical calculator. I’m still angry with myself for not picking one up when I first became aware of them back in 1992 or ‘93 - at that time you could get one for under $100. At the time it was a lot of money to me and I never went for it. Now you’re lucky if you can get one for under $1,000. Anyway today I happened across an interactive flash simulation of a Curta. Check it out if you’re curious. And a note for the family - the Curta is very high on my personal fetish list. They’re exorbitantly expensive, but if someone wins the lottery or happens across a way to acquire one on the cheap, this is the absolutely perfect gift for me.
Who needs the yellow pages when you have local.google.com? Like most of their stuff it’s still in alpha, but this is still a very useful and functional tool. Looking for a local taphouse? Google’s likely got the answer. Google has become the acme corporation of the info age.
Sorry folks. Bastard spammers are onto me bigtime. I just looked through my logs and it isn’t a pretty sight. For now I’ve had to turn off comments. I have not rebuilt my templates, meaning the links to comments will still be present in most of the posts, for the time being. Very sorry for the inconvenience. It’s not like most of you readers comment much anyway though so not much harm done I guess.
While I rather like the current design of my weblog, I’m in the habit of redesigning it about once a year as an exercise in keeping my html chops solid. I’m about a month overdue on a new design so I’m starting to look around for stuff I like that I can use. I’m partly tempted to use the wikipedia.org design as the basis of my site, in part so I can stitch in a mediawiki-engine wiki right into my site (I’ve been experimenting with it at work, it’s really solid), but then I’d look rather cookie-cutter.
Anyway, I’m open to suggestions. There’s some urgency, in that the comment spammers are really attacking my site - (look through the archives and you’ll see that magically over the past month or so 10-12 comments from spammers have been added to the posts - it’s destroying the value of what few real comments there were) - and I need to switch engines or update MT to deal with this problem.
So - got a cool url? Send it along and I’ll consider it.
Check out the shopping list feature. Build your buying wishlist from thousands of vendors instead of just Amazon’s partners, and use price comparison tools to help you find the best deal. They should buy resellerratings.com and integrate their merchant reputation tools - if they did, this would be almost perfect.
This is well worth a look, especially if you want to do your part to contributing to the economic armageddon I mentioned in an earlier post today. Rack up those credit cards with christmas shopping and do your part, you know you want to.
I’ve been talking about IP/packet-based television for a while now and how the potential to completely do away with broadcast tv is getting close. Engadget has just run a great little tutorial on how to roll your own virtual tv station using the azureusbit torrent client and a couple of plugins for it. This is still not something your mom might do, but for most of the folks reading this site it’s a completely workable way to experiment with the packet-tv future now.
Today’s a virtual friday (I have thursday and friday off - it’s a 4 day weekend for me) so here’s something to celebrate the occasion with - a free, java-based massively multiplayer online role playing game. Been wondering what the fuss is about with these games? Go check one out. It’s evocative of the original Ultima Online in that there is a lot of focus on crafting and resource harvesting from the environment, but it’s got a fully 3d gameworld with some unexpectedly decent animation. It should run on any platform with Java installed and is well worth a look, especially if you’ve never played around with an MMORPG before and are interested in getting a taste of them.
The Boston Herald is running a story about recent comments by the chief economist at Morgan Stanley indicating his expectation that we’re…ummm…hosed. As in 90% likely to be hosed, most likely in the short term. The basis of his beliefs are the same we’ve been hearing for years now - runaway deficits combined with huge personal debt loads combining to wreck the economy. While I’m glad to not be a numbers geek working the stock market, stuff like this really does make me wish I understood the dynamics of economic systems better such that I could draw conclusions I can trust. I have no idea if this guy is right or wrong. Should I hold off on buying a house? Should I buy a metric ton of processed cheese food, saltines, and a shotgun and prepare for the end of times? Or should I just assume we’ll muddle through this as we have for the past decade or more (I first became aware of these deficit-related predictions when I was in college). I have no idea. Anyone with any sage wisdom on the subject?
Here’s a cool flash application. 75 folks at a time play with the digital equivalent of alphabet fridge magnets. It’s fun just watching to see the different patterns that emerge - folks trying for profanity, hoarding schemes, decorative schemes, scrabble and crossword puzzle-like structures, and more. I spent 10 minutes last night defending my turf, inexplicably fixated on the word ‘Fizz.’ Check it out when you need a 5 minute break today. It’s Flash-based, fyi.
Cinnamon, one of the dogs at Nicker Barker Farm where I am getting my puppy from, had her litter this week, and one of these puppies is going to be mine. As things stand now it looks like I have second pick of the females, of which there are either 3 or 4, I had a little trouble understanding the phone message I just got. Woot! I’m getting the dog a bit earlier than I expected. Sometime early January the dog is coming home with me.
I’m still sticking with Soolin unless I hear a better suggestion.
Most likely you’ve heard of Microsoft’s terraserver. I happened across an excellent alternative today, the acme mapper. Mostly it seems to be the same dataset that Microsoft has for aerial photography, but they also have the usgs topographical dataset stitched into the interface. It all looks very rudimentary/old school, but it works great and is relatively speedy. Check out this close-up of 5th peak in the tongue mountain range. The red target is where I was standing when I took thiscrude but effective panorama shot last weekend.
One of the main things that concerned me about taking the position at Skidmore was loss of access to the sea - my main summertime activities have revolved around kayaking the last 5 years or so. I consoled myself with the fact that I would have access to the adirondack park system, which I had hiked and camped in extensively when I was a kid. I looked forward to all the mountain trail hiking I would be able to do. Then I tore a muscle in my abdomen and got sick, and spent two months doing a whole lot of nothing in terms of physical activity, which essentially blew the warm months for me.
Fortunately I’ve been gradually recovering. I’m not lifting weights yet, but I can be physically active again, and the past month or so I’ve been getting out hiking as time and weather permits. I’ve also discovered something cool - I can hike even when it’s cold, whereas with the Kayak, while it was technically possible to paddle in the winter months, it wasn’t something that appealed to me.
Anyway, I’ve been snapping photos on these hikes, and I finally sat down and put a bunch of them online. You can scope them out in my gallery, specifically the new Lake George Hiking Gallery. In the past month I’ve summited Buck Mountain, 5th Peak in the Tongue Range, and (sort of) Prospect Mountain on the west shore of Lake George. If you’re not interested in browsing through all the photos (there are perhaps 50 across the 3 hiking galleries), then you might at least want to check out the topographical map of part of the region and possibly the crude but still cool panorama of the summit of 5th Peak
I just bought myself a GPS unit so I can produce better and more accurate topographical maps of the areas I hike. My intent is to summit all the peaks in the Lake George region and then ultimately become a member of the 46 Peaks club by summiting all the peaks in the adirondacks. Watch this space, there’s more cool stuff to come.
Damnit. Somehow the comment spammers have sniffed me out. You’re probably noticing the bs comments appearing with my posts now, you have to love marketers who are so desperate for eyeballs that they’ll stoop at nothing to get your attention. Should any of you decide to subscribe the offending websites to, say, child porn email lists from asia (webmaster@domainname.com and admin@domainame.com are two great addresses to use) I’m sure I won’t tell. Meanwhile this is going to force me into bringing a new server online and switching weblog software, and possibly also forcing folks who want to comment to undergo a registration process. I don’t know which combination of steps I’ll take, I’ll mention it here as it happens. In the meantime please pardon the inappropriate comments, I’ll turn off comments alltogether if it gets bad.
You can read more about this over on engadget if you’re interested - basically Creative has announced their intent to dethrone Apple’s ipod as the most popular portable mp3 playing device. My advice to Creative is - focus on the quality and interface on your own products, instead of your marketing. I have a Creative player. It was exceedingly cheap and I got precisely what I paid for - an inferior product in all aspects to an ipod. I don’t mind, I knew this when I bought it, and I bought it more to experiment with than to use (I use an iriver h120 for long trips and a rio cali for jogging). My advice to anyone reading this? Don’t be swayed by Creative’s $100 million advertising blitz - their products are generally inferior and their support is absolutely awful - ever try and track down drivers for one of their soundcard products, or waited interminably for updates to fix known issues? I have, take it from me, they’re not a good company
Here’s another option for using your gmail account as a networked file system - Filebunker. It’s Java based so in theory you can get this running on any OS that supports Java, though the FAQ states that it’s untested on Mac OSX. It adds a few features other utilities of this nature have lacked, including autocompression and autoencryption of your files. This is another excellent option for securely backing up your data.
Right. So I’m completely in love with the latest rachet and clank game. I got it a few days after its release a couple of weeks ago and have been playing almost every night. It’s basically perfect - balanced gameplay, a graphics engine tuned to PS2 perfection, and the right mix of platforming and satisfying shootemup action. If you have a PS2 and enjoy action platformers, you owe it to yourself to get this game.
It also got me musing about this console generation - this christmas is basically it on this generation, it’s at the height of its market power, and christmas is the height of the gaming season. They’ll still be selling games for the current console generation next christmas, but they’ll also be developing and marketing games for the next generation systems - xbox2 will supposedly be released by then, as will (possibly) the nintendo successor to the Gamecube, and Sony is making noise about making sure Microsoft doesn’t beat them to market (though most of the gaming journalists don’t believe them).
Anyway, even if NONE of the consoles make it out by next Christmas, what won’t be here next christmas is sequels to all the big games - those are all targeted at next generation consoles. This by no means indicates that no more good games are coming for the current generation - history tells us that some of the more interesting and innovative games come out at the end of console’s lifespans as the developers have basically perfected their tools - but it does mean no more (or very few) blockbuster titles are coming. This is it, they’ve spent their development load, so to speak, and are moving on to other platforms. There’s a side benefit to this - if you think this January/February is great for a huge library of discount priced games (sub-$20), just wait till next year. Meanwhile, enjoy it this year. Me? As soon as I finish Rachet and Clank I’m grabbing the latest Jak and Daxter game, which judging by the reviews is almost as good as Rachet and Clank.
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