I’ve commented on the issue of interface clutter repeatedly on this site - modern apps spawn windows in multitudes, and even with a 20″ screen it’s almost impossible to keep things organized, leaving users to click around, mutter, minimize, tab switch, and curse as they try and find the right window that contains the piece of whatever project they’re working on at the moment. While no mainstream OS has an ideal fix for this problem (and really I think we need a new interface paradigm to solve this, though I’ve yet to see anything I like in this regard), things like my beloved quicksilver come close, and Macosx’s Expose helps tremendously. The good folk at Otaku Software have brought most of the features of Expose to win32 with their topdesk utility. It’s not free, but $9.95 is about as close as you’re going to get to free and this really is a tremendous productivity booster once you get used to it.

Vienna is a very promising free RSS reader for Macosx. It’s got your typical 3-paned interface, which you can set to three vertical panes or the more traditional 1 left, 2 stacked on the right interface you see in things like mail.app or outlook. It’s a little rough around the edges, especially in the interface department (lack of command keys being my chief complaint) but it’s small and fast and has two really great features - first, it’s pretty simple to re-style the visual appearance of the feeds using html and css. Second and even better is the ability to create what it calls ’smart folders’ - these are meta-feeds which are created by parsing the contents of all your feeds and creating a new one based on a very comprehensive set of filters. This is a feature I love in FeedDemon, and Vienna’s implementation is superior. To give you an example of how this works, in FeedDemon I have a filterset that watches for any occurrence of a set of terms related to diabetes, and every day I look over the output it produces, allowing me to take in at a glance all the research that’s been published on the subject plus every mention across the so-called blogosphere and in the mainstream press, every day. The usefulness of this can’t be overstated, and Vienna is one of the few RSS readers to add this feature - to my knowledge netnewswire is the only other one on the mac that has this. If you’re on a mac and haven’t paid for netnewswire yet, this is well worth checking out. More generally, if you’re not yet using rss to help you absorb info more efficiently, you’re wasting your own time. Get an RSS reader and spend a few hours figuring out how to work with it, your brain will thank you.

…would probably include a young student touching off the explosion that helps fragment a granite rockface so a new road can be laid down. I witnessed just this along with a small crowd of students this summer. Hard to believe but true. My employer is building new campus housing and some of the area has only a few feet of topsoil on top of granite, so they had to do some blasting before the could excavate. I got stopped by the road crew as they prepared to set off one of the explosions. A small crowd of students was there to watch, and the guy with the detonator coaxed one of the young women watching to come out into the road and flip the switch. There was a strangely satisfying deep bass ‘whump’ and the tire mats leaped into a jumble in the air as the students leapt back and cheered. On the one hand I don’t really find fault with this. On the other, I’m sure if the wrong people had seen it (or the right, depending on your perspective) heads would have rolled and possibly lawsuits would have followed.

I will also note that witnessing this all at close hand didn’t make me any more comfortable about being adjacent to this kind of work. Folks were smoking within 20-30 feet of the trailer marked all over with ‘this is explosive stuff, danger!’ stickers where they were storing the materials, and I was only 30-40 feet back from the field of tire mats they used to cover things up.

I have this love/hate relationship with Battlefield 2. On the one hand the game itself is superb fun with a great engine and beautiful graphics. On the other hand it shows so many signs of lazy programming practices (memory management? Fuck it, we got gigs to play with!) that at times I get really frustrated with it. One of the best examples of this is their in-game server and statistics browser. I swear my commodore 64 from the 1980’s could push piles of what is essentially text data around quicker than this piece of crap could. Unfortunately I don’t yet have a good solution to the server browser problem, but if you want to scope out your stats and don’t want to wait 30 or more seconds for the in-game browser to respond to your mouse clicks, check out bf2sr.com’s stat retriever. It’s a tiny little download which grabs the stats for any username in less time than it takes to double click it and will build an html page for you to post if you want to taunt your friends with your stats. Good stuff, and free. I’m Tempus67 if you’re wanting to scope out my exemplary work as squad medic.

Unfortunately I had some technical issues with my camera and most of the photos I took of my August vacation on Lake George were destroyed, but I did manage to salvage some using a very handy utility I blogged about a while ago. Anyway I finally got around to posting the images, which you can check out in my AGCW 2005 photo gallery.

Hopefully my friend Dave Goldberg will send me the photos he took, he has some really excellent ones of the same trip that aren’t available online anywhere, including some awesome tubing action shots and videos. As soon as I get my hands on them I’ll post them here.

Well, sort of. She got her intermediate certificate from the trainer last wednesday and is moving on up to the advanced class in a couple of weeks. Her progress is really pretty amazing, she’s a very smart dog. She’s still a puppy and can get distracted (of the “look, a squirrel, a squirrel, a SQUIRREL!….err, wazzat, did you say something?” variety), but as long as I can get her attention she knows and responds to all of the basic commands with solid reliability - sit, down, stay, come, over, drop, ‘get em!’ (ie fetch), Focus! (look at me) and ‘where is it!” (where is your ball, go get it - for when we’re going to go outside and play, or when she has forgotten to bring her ball with us when we’re leaving). She also sort of gets the notion of heel and so long as there are no distractions or temptations can be fairly reliable about it off leash, though she still needs lots of work there. As far as other behaviors she’s very social and gets along with most anything, dog or human. Even when they’re threatening, her approach is ‘whu? Hey let’s be friends!’ and not the aggressive ’screw you then, CHOMP!’ you often see in dogs. She never excretes inside the house anymore (and really aside from when she’s been sick she hasn’t in months and months), and she has had free run of the house when I’m not home for at least 3 months now. The only issue I’ve had with that was with her dog bed, which, being hers, she saw as something she could chew up. She loves to gut stuffed toys and strew their contents about the house and I think she saw her dog bed as a giant stuffed toy. This was painful to teach her about, I had to be very rough and gruff about it - no actual hitting but some very mean behavior on my part did ultimately work.

I’m not sure how much further I’ll take the training. I have about 9 sessions of advanced training paid up and I suspect after that we’ll be done, though there’s a possibility we’ll continue with some agility training or even some flyball for her. I know she’d absolutely love the flyball but the problem is the nearest league is 45 minutes away in Vermont.

So, that’s about it on the Soolin front. We’re about to return to our hiking now that cooler weather has returned and the car is fixed - weather permitting Saturdays are hiking days from now through the arrival of the real winter snows. She doesn’t know it but I know she’ll be psyched.

…Or at least your boss will think so from the clattering of your keyboard. Ever smirk at the people playing whackamole in say, a Chucky Cheese or at the local summer carnival? Now you can experience the joy that is the mindless bashing of things in the comfort of your own office, without fear of folks smirking at you. Check out tontie, and spend 15 minutes bashing little alien critters for some mindless and challenging fun. The other games on the site are also simple, novel and fun.

Notice how with every release it takes longer and longer for Adobe Acrobat to load? Turns out there’s a simple solution to this problem on windows - check out this blog entry for details, but the gist of it is, go to your acrobat folder, and move all the plugins from the plugins folder to the optional folder. This radically decreased the launch time (basically to instantaneous) and memory footprint of reader for me, and I’ve yet to have trouble reading any pdf’s after I did it.

On the mac I note if you get info on acrobat there is a plugins section to the preferences pane where you can turn off the plugins, but this led to a host of error messages when I launched acrobat. It still opened pdf’s with no trouble, but it’s annoying dealing with the error messages. On the mac you’re better off with preview.app anyway so I didn’t dwell on the issue.

The scenario - you download some Win32 shareware game, launch it, play, quit, and come back to discover the icons on your desktop have moved all over the place. Curse, then spend 10 minutes playing digital janitor cleaning up the mess. No more - go get yourself a copy of Pix-art. It’s free, svelte, and works beautifully. Just launch it, save your current setup, and then the next time windows decides to emulate the perfect desktop storm, launch it again and hit restore. Problem solved.

Check out the Netgear Storage Central. $150 gets you a 2 bay SAN device that can hold as much as a terrabyte (or more as drive capacities increase), connects seamlessly to your network, and is cross platform. I’ll have one of these by Christmas. The only downside is it’s IDE - I’d prefer SATA since it’s gradually displacing IDE in terms of volume of drives shipped. Still this thing rocks for the price.

Given my lack of leisure activities for the past three or so weeks, and because Nick emailed and asked, I’ll start things off with a game. How many of you are old enough to remember the original car racing game on the Intellivision (and for my circle of friends, how many remember huddling around the Leighton’s or Bruning’s tv to play it)? This was a top-down view arcade racing game with (for the time) realistic physics and a number of tracks. It was the best racing game of its time by far. 25 some odd years later, imagine playing a very similar game online against other folks, but with better graphics, very realistic physics and an avid fanbase. If the prospect interests you, check out miniracingonline. It’s free, under very active development, and is very fun. It’s got an arcade mode for those of you lacking pc-controller fu sufficient to keep your car on the track, and there are a ton of addon tracks available. The only downside is it lacks engaging solo play, but since you’re going to need practice on the tracks if you don’t want to be completely spanked online, you’d best spend some time in solo mode anyway.

OK. Just starting to surface after a really intense 3 weeks of work. Much tougher than anything I ever went through at Bowdoin for a semester launch, in terms of the amount I needed to get done, the number of people clamoring for my attention, and the frustrations I encountered along the way. But the worst of it is now passed and I will now be returning to a regimen of regular posting here.