Because this was driving me fricking insane today, and because my google searches weren’t helping - if you’re using osx and following someone else’s tutorial in an effort to add additional directories to your path, say for example because you’ve installed the portage system and you need the port command to be in your path, then ignore what 99% of what folks are saying - all my efforts to use the .bashrc file to do this led to nothing but me swearing colorfully. Simply cp’ing .bashrc to .bash_profile did the trick though. Why no one, including me, is stating this obviously I have no idea. I’m no bash expert. All I can say is making my edits in .bash_profile works and .bashrc did not.

I inferred the answer from this handy bash tutorial.

Oh and if you’re like me and you never want to see an ls without an -al, add this to your .bash_profile: alias “ls”=”ls -al”

So I happened across an absolutely perfect sci fi movie about a month ago that I keep forgetting to blog. I’ve finally remembered. This is sci fi in the sense of ’speculative fiction that makes you think’ and not in the sense of ‘light labers and exploding wookies and spectacle, grand spectacle, oh my.’ I’m a big fan of the former. The latter I can still enjoy but it doesn’t really do it for me the way it did in, say, my 20’s. Anyway the movie in question is a New Zealand movie from 1985 called ‘The Quiet Earth’. Normally I’d link over to the IMDB entry for the film but this is a movie that challenges you to think about what’s happening and the comments there or anywhere else will spoil it for you. I’d strongly encourage you to NOT look into the film - just add it to your netflicks list and watch it when it shows up.

That being said, I’ll observe that while the movie has a decent imdb rating (7.0 at present), it’s not for everyone. It has the laconic pacing of a movie out of the 70’s, and the story, which involves the experiences of a scientist who wakes up one morning to discover he’s the last living thing on earth, develops slowly. Still if you’re a fan of sci fi, you simply have to check this out, I’d give it 9 out of 10. I’ll also offer this up in lieu of the comments on IMDB - after you’ve watched it, ask yourself this question: was this a sci fi film, or a film about one man’s religious experiences?

So you know how surge protectors, some of them anyway, have input/output jacks for telephone lines? I’ve never had a phone issue in my life and I’ve always ignored these inputs. No longer. Last night we had thunderstorms. Soolin and I were sitting in the doorway watching it all come down when a bolt struck very close to us. I didn’t lose power but there was a surge, I heard a sizzle over my shoulder, turned around and saw a flash then a wisp of smoke come out of my answering machine. It was dead as a doornail, with all the messages on it from when I was away at my sister’s wedding gone. If you called me since Friday last week, I didn’t get your message. Tonight I’m off to get a new machine so don’t bother calling till late.

As an aside - it’s pretty cool how common thunderstorms are here in the summer. I grew up on Long Island where summer thunderstorms were common and it was something I missed when I was in Maine - they were pretty rare there. If anything they’re more common here in Saratoga Springs then they are on Long Island. Of course frequent loss of power is the downside but I’ve got a plan to deal with this.

I posted about jotspot months ago - they had great buzz in the wiki community and I’ve been trying to get in on the beta ever since I heard of it. Anyway they’re finally live with their product and it is simply fantastic. It distinguishes itself from other wiki engines in a number of ways, most interesting being the way that you can construct new applications from your wiki using a set of simple tags. There are some great examples to be found on their site - anyone with moderate computer skills could build things like a task list or simple project management tools using jot, and they have a library of off the shelf tools to choose from too. They’ve also built in gui editing tools and the ability to use email to publish to the system, and they’ve stitched RSS into the system. The one downside is cost - this is a commercial endeavor. For free you get a wiki with a max page count of 50 and only a few users. This is sufficient for personal use in a variety of ways, but you won’t be able to scale up without running into the need to purchase a license, and they start at $9 a month. I don’t begrudge them the need to make money but I’m majorly bummed that this makes it unlikely I’ll roll this out at skidmore in anything beyond testing. I’ll be keeping my eyes on them to see how things evolve, maybe they’ll ad an academic pricing model. Oh, and you can check out dlh.jot.com - most of it is hidden away right now but if you want to join in the fun let me know.

What if it’s biomass production of hydrogen using new, manufactured cells? We’ll have a sense if this is viable in the next few years. J. Craig Venter, the guy who came up with a novel approach to DNA sequencing, founded a new company to commercialize this. The press release is over on yahoo. Cool, cool stuff. I’ve been watching/wishing for sustainable fusion since I was a teenager. I’ll laugh if it turns out I was focused in the wrong direction all along.

Originally via boingboing

I posted about the Mediagate MG-25 a few months ago. We got one in-house for testing at skidmore. We concluded it wasn’t appropriate for instructor use at the school because it’s a little touchy and the hardware doesn’t feel all that solid, though if you’re computer literate and looking to get content out to your television the thing is excellent and is a great value. Anyway I happened across another candidate, the Rapsody RSH-100k, which uses the more common 3.5 hard drive, has an internal display, serves as a USB host so you can copy materials to it directly using thumb drives or various other flash memory cards, can stream music to your stereo using an integrated FM transmitter (not that I would advise actually doing that), and costs around $200. The primary flaw is a lack of network connectivity, if it had it this thing would be perfect, feature-wise. One thing that puzzles me a bit is why these devices aren’t making their way to the US, you’d think there would be a big market for them if they were available and advertised. Most folks in north america don’t even realize they exist, meanwhile in asia, Europe and Russia these are common, judging by what I am turning up in google searches on them. I’ll keep pointing them out as they ship, hopefully they’ll take off here. There’s a possible version of the future where I don’t need the equivalent of a tivo attached to my tv, I just need a device like this that’s being filled via RSS and torrents from my subscription list/s.

You’re likely to notice a slight change in focus on my site going forward. Not so much a change but an emphasis I guess. My former boss, Peter Schilling, is part of the academiccommons project, a site devoted to sharing resources related to technology and teaching in the liberal arts. It just went out of beta last week and they’re going to be picking up slightly edited versions of a lot of the short product reviews I do here, especially the open source/free/off the beaten path stuff I tend to focus on. This means I’ll be trying to do more of that than I had been in the past, and trying to do it more consistently as well. I’ll still be the same almost incoherent and almost always profane blogger you’re accustomed to here, and I’ll still be covering games and hardware and whatever else tickles my fancy, I’ll just be adding a bit more on the software side of things, especially as it applies to education, and I might be posting more thoughtful commentary now and again.

There’s no need to worry about what you post in the comments section - the two sites are not connected, and anyone trying to google me is unlikely to find me due to the ‘real’ david hamilton. Please continue with your profane irreverence, I enjoy it.

The bonus is there’s a possibility I’ll get paid for some of this, which cracks me up - I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined my ramblings here would ever amount to anything more than something I share with friends and family, and when Peter first broached the subject, mostly I was embarrassed - I didn’t want my professional colleagues to see this stuff. But he convinced me, and initial feedback has been positive so I’m sticking with it.

I’d link over to the section of the site where my stuff appears but as I mentioned they’re in beta and today the links appear to be broken. As soon as things get patched up I’ll post about it.

Check out the uber-slick Giant-Ass image viewer. If you’ve seen google maps you have the general idea how this works, though it’s not (yet) feature comparable to google’s interface. This could be immediately useful to anyone modestly computer literate who needs to make large format images available over the web, and if the developer sticks with it and does everything he hopes to, this is going to end up being an enormously useful tool. I could have used this at Bowdoin on a number of projects, including The Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan site I worked on over the years.

And more expensive. I’m a big computer gamer, and like a runner who buys the best shoes, I’m constantly hunting after gear to improve my game. Most folks would laugh at how much I spend on mice alone each year. Several years ago I discovered the Func precision mousing surface and I’ve sworn by it ever since. Recently they updated the product and extremetech ran a review. To be honest I can’t tell what’s different about the new one as compared to the $20 one I have now, but if you’re serious about gaming this is definitely worth it, even at $50. Even if you’re not a gamer but prefer your mouse experience as little friction as possible, you’ll like this pad. It’s also easy to clean as compared to cloth-based pads, and if you couple it with some teflon tape on the feet of your mouse, you’ll have as close to zero friction as you’re likely to get.

I’ll observe that this come up on ebay for under $30 too - most of the vendors are of the ‘cheap product, expensive shipping’ variety but if you’re patient you can probably score one for lots less than the $50 retail they’re asking for it.

Pawfaliki is one of the easiest server-based wikis to get going - it’s a single php file and yet it’s very featureful - RSS feed, table of contents, access control and more. Chances are very good that if your webhost supports php, all you need do is upload this single file to their server and you’re in business.

Diplomacy has been around forever (well, since 1959 to be precise) and is often named as one of the finest board-games ever made. There have been tools to play it online since before the WWW, and there have been a couple of (abysmal) computer games based on it, but now there’s a reasonably good graphical, www-based version in development on sourceforge. You can check out the official homepage, which has some screenshots to give you a sense of it. Anyone interested in playing if I bring up an installation of this on my server? I’d love to get a game going. The rules are drop dead simple and if you like something like, say, Axis and Allies but without the luck and dice rolling, chances are high you’d really like it. Any takers?

Don’t they? I’m on a bit of an AJAX kick the past week or so and happened across magnetic ajax demo. Unfortunately they’ve since had to decouple the database because of bandwidth usage but actually if there’s any interest I’ll get this running on metamusing just because it’s clever and au courant. It’s an AJAX app that models the magnetic fridge poetry that’s fairly popular, in case you’re not interested in clicking through.

A Skidmore student recently asked me how I learned what I know of web application development and we talked about learning by doing, dissecting other folk’s code and so on, and at the end of the discussion he asked if I could share some of the links I use. I started to pull together a list of the most useful sites, like a list apart and Westciv’s css tutorials, but as I was doing this Vitaly Friedman’s fantastic essential bookmarks for web designers and developers showed up in my feeds. I poked around and quickly concluded he had done a better job pulling together all the best resources on the subject than I could and sent that link along to the student. Now I’m passing it along to you all to enjoy.

Anyone interested in 3d modeling has no doubt heard of blender, which has been around for quite a while. Art of Illusion showed up in my RSS feeds last week and I checked it out - this is a decent, free, java-based 3d modeling and rendering tool. If you’re looking to experiment with 3d modeling and are overwhelmed with Blender’s interface you might find Art of Illusion will fit the bill. I could also see this used as a teaching tool where the budget doesn’t allow for a lab license for Maya or 3d studio max.

When I moved to New York the layout of my office caused me to skip hooking my server to a UPS. Somehow I concluded that my gaming rig was more important in the scheme of things. No idea what I was thinking. Anyway last week I really got bitten by this decision as I lost power at least 15 times over the course of three days. Mostly it was for only a few minutes at a time, but twice it was long enough to cause the UPS to go down as well. All this is by way of explanation - this is why my site was down for a good piece of last week. After the third or fourth time of bringing the server back up I simply gave up and waited out the power losses. I stopped by Home Depot this weekend and got a long extension cord and now the server is on the UPS, so hopefully no more nonsense like I just went through. This also means I’m about to bombard the site with a bunch of posts I stored in my backpackit account.

Do you Digg? Think community tech news aggregation with commentary and a karma system, then go check it out. What it lacks in thoughtful commentary it makes up in volume and verve. Worth adding to your rss feeds if you want a constant stream of tech news and links, and if you’re inclined you can participate and help shape the flow.

Ajax is all the rage these days. Check out Rico, another collection of ajax/javascript widgets. Some really great stuff to be found here. Check out the accordion demo, I could actually use that for a project I’m working on right now.

It’s funny. 5 years ago I was so disgusted with the state of javascript support in browsers that I started actively avoiding using it. Things have come around though. There are still issues but the tradeoff is how cool and useful the things you can do are, and the issues mainly have to do with IE and its crap standard compliance which should hopefully be fixed in IE 7.

I’ll admit it, I have a minor fascination with all things zombie, err, excepting Rob Zombie that is. I recently happened across Monster Island. It’s a full novel that the author published using a weblog, a trilogy actually. Tolstoy it ain’t but if you like zombie action in the George Romero mold, this is the stuff for you. The author has also made it available for cell phones and ipods if you’d prefer to take your zombie brain munching action on the road with you.

Ever need a temporary ad-hoc mailing list? Check out conversate. The characteristics that make it more convenient than simply emailing a list of folks is that it generates a web archive of your discussion, it generates an RSS feed you can subscribe to or link folks to, you can open it to participants beyond the initial group easily, and it has a handy browser bookmarklet. It’s really more of a hybrid - depending on how you configure your preferences, this could be used as web-based discussion tool or you can conduct the conversation solely through your email client. At any rate it’s free and has a clean easy to use interface.