2002.02 (Feb)
2002.02.28 (thursday)
7:32:07 AM #
2002.02.27 (wednesday)
11:42:48 AM #
Cool volumetric 3D display tech. The model here is pretty small, so the “military application” demo looks more like a video game than something that would actually give useful battlefield information. It’s unclear if these displays can show moving images. Based on the PDF specs, it seems the thing works by projecting an image onto a screen inside the dome that spins around at a high rate.
11:36:12 AM #
2002.02.26 (tuesday)
4:22:53 PM #
Lots of historical and technical information about the AT&T Princess model, introduced in 1959. Apparently the official Phone Company term for the ringer is “eccentric gong.”
11:42:56 AM #
Every man knows he is a sissy compared to Johnny Cash.
11:36:34 AM #
2002.02.25 (monday)
10:55:28 PM #
Huge, detailed cutaway diagram of the Saturn V rocket. Don’t miss the links at the bottom to tons of other information about the Apollo/Saturn program.
9:33:16 PM #
Dvorak proves that he really does “get it” even though the cluetrain dorks are already scrambling to discredit him:
I’m betting that most of these folks go to Burning Man and all of them write blogs about it and how cool it was. They link to each others’ blogs and read what they say about each other—all highly complimentary.
Jeez, he fucking nailed it! Any small random selection of weblogs from a big list somewhere will produce more than a few A-List sycophants. On the other hand, he uses the faults of the majority of weblogs (including banal content, in-breeding, and brown-nosing) to justify dismissal of the whole, neglecting the small number of really good sites out there. It’s still good reading, and nice to see the cluetrain crew get exposed for the idealist morons they are.
7:26:03 PM #
Don’t marry a lawyer.
Don’t date a lawyer.
Don’t be friends with a lawyer.
That said, I know several lawyers, and all the ones I know, I like and respect. All the ones I don’t know, however, are absolute scum until proven otherwise.
7:14:16 PM #
2002.02.24 (sunday)
Includes “stealth mode switch that turns off instrument panel cluster and radio indicators and dims PRNDL to lowest legal limit for stealth pursuit.” I’m not sure what the point of that is; it seems that it would be more useful to be able to turn the interior panel indicators on without the external headlights, parking lights, etc. Maybe it’s for using nightvision goggles or something. Aftermarket police add-ons have already started to appear, too. I wonder if that push bumper would fit on my 1995 Intrepid…
9:46:52 PM #
If you’re going to put a screen shot of your software on the Web, please use the OS default theme.
Corollary: If you insist on making your application “skinnable,” please include a skin that uses the default OS widgets. Don’t just include one that looks like the version of windows you happen have, because it will look even more stupid with a different version. And if you’re so fucking lazy that you just have to ship one that “looks like” some random version of windows, don’t make it win3.1, please.
8:33:07 PM #
2002.02.22 (friday)
A review written for a video game magazine.
Unfortunately, that gameplay is severely
lacking. For one thing, there are only six units in the game.
Of those six, two are practically worthless while one is an
overpowered “god” unit, the Queen. She’s your typical Lara
Croft-esque 1990s “me, too” attempt to attract the fabled gaming
girl audience from out of the woodwork to help solidify a customer
base for a game that simply cannot sell itself on its own merits.
10:57:42 PM #
Multi-page overview of advanced Windows text rendering, including the OpenType font format. A lot of these features were available in Apple’s QuickDraw GX font format, which never really caught on.
10:55:12 PM #
Demographic analysis of the census. It’s all in PDFs, which has brought the fact that I don’t have acrobat installed on this machine to my attention. How the hell did I go for three months without needing that?
10:48:44 PM #
9:32:58 PM #
2002.02.21 (thursday)
Lots of computing history documents, scanned in or converted to PDF. Very cool sub-museum covering Digital Equipment Corporation.
9:44:25 PM #
2002.02.20 (wednesday)
FUCK, I’M GETTING ANGRY JUST THINKING ABOUT YOU NOT GETTING EVERYTHING YOU FUCKING WANT!!!
11:09:16 PM #
2002.02.19 (tuesday)
10:50:43 PM #
NY Times interview with punk rocker Bob Mould [qv], focusing on his long-running connections with professional wrestling and briefly mentioning his upcoming album and thoughts on digital music distribution.
The music business is a bunch of wimps. And the drug and alcohol thing in wrestling — I was not prepared for that. They’re 300 pounds; they can absorb twice the drugs and alcohol that skinny rock guys can. It’s frightening.
10:48:47 PM #
2002.02.17 (sunday)
Excellent commercial-free MP3 stream from WAMU (public radio station in Washington, DC). Unfortunately, the actual WAMU stream is not available in MP3, though it is available in Windows Media format, which is kinda rare for public radio stations, which are dominated by Real.
8:16:27 PM #
Collection of stamps featuring anti-US propaganda from World War I Germany to Modern-Day Serbia.
8:08:25 PM #
The regular A-Z dictionary stuff, plus lots of great historical articles (a great piece on English Customary Weights and Measures), tables (eg comprehensive country codes, including ISO, Olympic, Internet, and UN Vehicle codes), etc.
7:33:33 PM #
2002.02.15 (friday)
HAW HAW!!! Actually, the museum is small, as it’s just a personal collection of (reletively large) Wang calculators and computers.
8:31:56 AM #
Longish history of Wang Labs, with lots of techno-pr0n pix of nixie-tube calculator displays.
8:26:54 AM #
2002.02.14 (thursday)
This spawned a rather lengthy thread on a mail list I subscribe to. Here are some highlights:
Funny that you mention this. I looked at the page, and by the third picture, recognized the tug boat company!!!
Take a look at the paint scheme on this tugboat:
http://www.tstarinc.com/wgn/images/wgntug1a.jpg
Still not convinced? Look at:
http://www.tstarinc.com/images/usx-logos.gif
Or:
http://www.tstarinc.com/wgn/index.html
If you look carefully at the exhaust stacks in the original URL that Mike gave, you’ll notice the “W&GN” logo. This stands for “Warrior & Gulf Navigation”, a company that travels the Black Warrior River through Tuscaloosa (among other places). (I cannot identify where or when the tugboat went under the bridge though).
A complete list of routes for the W&GN is here:
Other list subscribers deduced that the picture was probably taken near Demopolis, AL (a theory bolstered by the Bear Bryant lookalike in the third picture), maybe under a bridge on US 43 or US 80, which is of particular interest since the list is full of fellow alumni of the University of Alabama. One subscriber spoiled the fun of theorizing, and actually wrote to the page maintainer, who replied:
Hello Philip-
I wish I could tell you more about the pictures. I downloaded them from a site a while back and saved them. Not long after that the link disappeared so I (perhaps foolishly) posted them on my personal site. I expect my ISP is going to blow me off after a while for exceeding my monthly allocation. Anyway, I don’t know much about the pictures. I have heard it was on a river in Arkansas (or Alabama) in the late 1970’s so your guess might be correct. You are right, they are pretty amazing pictures. I suppose I should modify the site to supply that information since I get lots of requests like yours.
6:45:19 PM #
WARNING: THIS FREE DVD OFFER IS EXCLUSIVELY FOR &FNAME;.
5:53:28 PM #
2:08:08 PM #
This Win32 app will send phonebook entries, calendar notes, or regular text messages to your phone via SMTP. Technically you can do this from any MUA, but this one has all the secret formatting info built in.
6:45:57 AM #
2002.02.13 (wednesday)
11:42:03 PM #
Ambitious java visualization of data from search engine queries for numbers 0 through 100,000. The interface takes some exploration to fully appreciate; it seems very esoteric at first but is actually very clever. Hints: left and right clicks zoom in and out on the bar graph, click to select an entry in either the bar or dot graph, and click-n-drag to select a range in the dot graph.
10:50:57 PM #
2002.02.12 (tuesday)
From: cable-pparkinson@standard.net
To:
Subject: Specific instructions are included in the plans for each!
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 12:27:38 -0800WARNING: Don,t Build A TV-Descrambler without reading this report first !!
Finally… some spam I can use!
10:37:16 PM #
Lots of radio and TV broadcasting history and technical info, including a better Indian Head than the site in the below post, a detailed explanation of test patterns, brief discussion of the SigAlert traffic warning radio system, some high-tech Japanese Indian Head analogues, and a great collection of test patterns.
10:32:32 PM #
9:53:44 AM #
2002.02.11 (monday)
What would North America look like today if the confederacy had won the American Civil War? What if every seperatist movement in North American history had succeeded?
Under the Confederate Constitution, President Wallace could not run for reelection in 1976, even though he was still in fine health after not being shot while campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, which was outside the Confederacy so he didn’t even go there.
11:39:48 PM #
By net.celebrity Mike Jittlov. Oral history of the income tax, now recorded for your pleasure. Overall, it seems very plausible, though I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the details are off a bit or completely fabricated.
11:08:05 PM #
10:54:54 PM #
Series of longish multi-page stories from the Boston Globe. Good content, but crappy navigation and no option to get a printable, single-page version of each story.
6:30:32 PM #
Completely table-free Radio weblog, using CSS. Not technically impressive, as people have been doing sites like this with CSS for a long time now, but this is the first Radio site I’ve seen to use this technique (point deduction for using absolute font sizes (which is the real problem with the default userland templates, btw)). I’ve considered it [31 Jan 02], but decided to go with something simpler. I really don’t have anything useful to put in the margin, anyway.
5:56:23 PM #
Zimran Ahmed over at Winterspeak is talking about how Userland Radio doesn’t meet the ease-of-use hype that Dave and his gang are touting. I have to agree.
OK, fair enough, maybe there are some issues there. Oh, but wait:
(I have not tried out Radio yet).
Apparently, actually using a product is not a requirement for writing a long screed about how shitty it is. Neither is getting its name right.
Cam then pulls a bait-and-switch, and starts ranting about Manila, since he’s actually used that. It’s been almost two years, and I imagine he’s been repressing this rant for a long time, just waiting for an excuse to bring it up. Basically, his complaints boil down to the fact that he can’t understand templates or how to make a table-free manila layout, and he doesn’t understand why lots of manila and radio sites look the same.
I managed to build a table-free manila layout in about twenty minutes, and I’m certianly not a “professional” web-designer. The calendar is table-based, but if you place it at the bottom of the page as I did, it shouldn’t cause any rendering problems with obsolete browsers.
The complaints about site layout similarities are lame (lots of movable type logs use the default template, lots of blogspot logs look the same, etc etc etc). I’d suggest that many webloggers are more concerned with their content than their page layout. And besides, if it were a limitation in the software, wouldn’t we see more failed attempts at new page layouts rather than just a bunch of default-templated sites?
He finishes up by whining that he gets “blasted publicly” when he complains. Gee, I can’t imagine why anyone would take him to task for bellyaching about a product he admittedly hasn’t used. Does anyone take this guy seriously? Besides himself?
P L O N K
2:40:27 PM #
2002.02.10 (sunday)
Yahoo moves this thing every year, and they don’t make it easy to find. This java tool is designed to help you calculate how much you should have withheld from your paycheck to get you a refund of a given size, but now that 2001 is over it can give you a rough estimate of how big your refund will be (or how much you owe). It doesn’t appear to transmit any data back to the server, either.
5:38:18 PM #
Gallery of the promotional information of each state painted on the sides of U-Haul trucks. Lots of additional information as well, but each state’s mini-flash site breaks your browser’s back button. Also note that while the wallpapers are available in multiple resolutions, the only difference is that the higher resolutions have more whitespace padding. Oklahoma has the coolest, with it’s Tron-tornado and superdoppler radar.
2:22:24 PM #
Gordon Bell’s ACM 97 presentation on the difficulty of making good predictions, specifically in the computer industry. Includes a great slide of Ken Olsen’s infamous summary of Unix.
11:27:47 AM #
2002.02.09 (saturday)
The current temperature in Little Rock, AR is -999.0 Degrees.
That should get updated whenever this post gets re-rendered by radio, I suppose. To get that information I used a service provided by xmethods.com; actually getting it to work, however, was giving me fits. Simon Fell pointed me in the right direction pretty quickly, though.
The actual snippet to make that call looks like this:
<% ["soap://services.xmethods.net:80/soap/servlet/rpcrouter?ns=urn:xmethods-Temperature"].TemperatureService.getTemp ( "72212" ) %>
I’ve now built a few dinky web services, including one that calls another. I have no idea if this will work or not:
<% ["xmlrpc://novarese.dyndns.org:5335/"].radio.temp ( "72212" ) %>
It should work, just change 72212 to another zip code and see. I can call it from my local machine just fine, and my Radio server should be a full peer (5335 is forwarded through the firewall), but I don’t know if it will require authentication or not. Here’s what the actual service looks like:
on temp (zip) {return ("The current temperature at " + zip + " is: " + ["soap://services.xmethods.net:80/soap/servlet/rpcrouter?ns=urn:xmethods-Temperature"].TemperatureService.getTemp ( zip ) + "F") }
which is more verbose than it needs to be, but it’s just a proof-of-concept.
9:37:12 PM #
Searching a Radio site is more along the lines of what I was thinking. Currently, this is hard to do, because all the logic is here on my desktop and the website is staticly served from a remote, unknown webserver that may or may not have CGI. However, there is a blogSearch script for Radio that allows me to search my posts from my desktop website. Shouldn’t it be possible to put a form on my public home page that posts to my desktop machine through a web service? My machine is a full peer (I think, it’s vaguely defined) and I have a dyndns account so I’m always available. What’s the missing piece? The documentation is too skimpy.
How do I call external programs from Radio? I found the sys.unixShellCommand verb for Radio/OSX, but I can’t find anything similar for Win32. I’ve got perl scripts that would make interesting web services, but no way to hook them up.
9:27:37 AM #
An MP3 copy of the infamous Fresh Air interview (which is unavailable through NPR [qv]). I was pretty disappointed; Simmons has always given great interviews to print publications, but the dialog with Terry Gross was awkward and uninteresting. I turned it off after about five minutes.
9:14:57 AM #
Purported to be the 100 worst films of the 20th Century, it should be called “the 100 worst films some twentysomething guy could remember in the fifteen minutes we gave him to come up with this list, because they’re all 1980 or later.”
9:11:07 AM #
Yawn.
“Let’s roll” has since become a national catchphrase.
Has it? I haven’t heard one person in Real Life utter that phrase. The media thrives on stupid stories like this, though, so they want top believe that “Let’s Roll” fever is sweeping the country; this gives them something to write about now, plus a fad to bash later.
9:06:02 AM #
2002.02.08 (friday)
One-stop shopping for plastic food.
Available raw or cooked, our replica meats are the perfect compliment to your display case. Need hanging meats for decor in your deli? We have the hanging meat for you.
10:49:42 PM #
In the wooded heights of central Molokai is a rock so phallic it’s scary. Hawaiian women in ancient times used to sit on this rock in hopes that it would make them fertile.
6:07:22 PM #
X-Faces are small little graphics encoded in ascii that are intended to be crammed into your mail or usenet headers; compatible readers then decode them and display them. This page will take just about any image file, scale it down, convert it to one-bit color, and encode it for you. It will also decode ascii x-face headers; any ascii string is vaild, so you can experiment with different stuff.
X-Face: IiTl$-\v@XF..+YdO2}0}en9(D2Z{:b6L"P)k=lJ{C<K{r]1z<s=p"4ge!pyN34eu7ZC-i39t<11[{oU({9*r{5%p
4:30:06 PM #
2002.02.06 (wednesday)
The paintings from the artist’s alleged “Psychotic Period” look more sane than the ones from the so-called “Normal Period” to me. At least in the crazy ones he isn’t painting them in all kinds of weird human scenarios. What a fucking freak.
Hmm… I condemn a man for painting cats in human situations, but praise another (C.M. Coolidge) for his series of Dogs Playing Poker [15 may 01].
10:08:21 PM #
Awesome fractals. The images are disappointingly small, though.
10:03:28 PM #
Using a personal password that you create, Verified by Visa helps ensure that only you can use your Visa card to buy online.
Heh, yeah… until some dumb merchant decides its easier to store the passwords on their server along with the credit card numbers and they get stolen. I love the way they try to position this as something you, as a consumer, would want, when in actuality it’s just another hurdle to inconvenience you and reduce their liability (not yours). And the password is only required at “participating online stores” which are, most likely, not the ones crooks who stole your card want to buy from (at non-participating stores your card works just like it did before). I feel safer already. Oh wait, I wasn’t losing sleep over this in the first place.
8:23:01 PM #
Great personal page of an Ohio State physicist. Includes an excellent page of Physics inside a Microwave Oven, including photos of aluminum-wrapped pop-tarts, CDs, wet fax paper, and the obligatory grape in the microwave.
6:44:21 PM #
Don’t forget, we invented streaming media.
Is that some kind of threat? “We gave you this gift, and we can take it away! BWAHAHAH!!!” Or maybe he’s just reminding us that we should be consider ourselves lucky and we should take their crufty, ad-encrusted heap of a program and not complain.
A few weeks ago, I got an email which said that I, as a MS passport user, needed to go update my passport info for security reasons. I didn’t recall signing up for passport, but I followed the link and got a page which wanted me to enter my zip code, among other things. I said to myself: “Gee, this is a not very subtle attempt to get me to sign up for passport”. Now, that is evil. So why is there not an outcry against MS for doing it?
Good tactic, shift the focus to someone else. Let’s stay on topic, please.
This guy’s basic point is, “I work at Real and we invented streaming media, therefore we can do no wrong and our software doesn’t suck, plus Microsoft is even worse than we are, QED.”
He can’t provide any reasons RealPlayer doesn’t suck, but I can list some reasons it does:
- Let’s start with the website. The last time I went there (to get a copy of RealPlayer to use with TINRA), some shitty javascript code popped up a window with the status bar removed, and ever since then, I haven’t been able to get IE to remeber that I like the status bar visible. Thanks. Even ignoring that faux pas, the website is like a shrine to the clueless media mindset that people only exist as “consumers” for whatever garbage they want to shove down our throats.
- The free player is hidden, and when you finally find the tiny link to the “our free player”, it takes you to a page that pushes the free 14-day trial of the commercial player, with the actual free player hidden in the margin.
- Spyware. Even if it’s no longer there the taint remains.
- The program crashes all the time. No, I don’t have rigorous documentation for this, so if you want to discount it, go ahead.
- The only new “features” to be added in the last few years involve cramming more ads down the pipe, new annoyances aimed to get me to pay for the crap, or underhanded ways to monetize my browsing. Nothing that I would consider beneficial to me, the user.
- Offensive aesthetics. This is part of the previous point. I just want to see the controls I need to listen to the stream I’ve called up. If I gave a shit about what was on ABC news, I’d fucking ask them myself by going to their website, thank you.
5:51:54 PM #
Gallery of Apple designs, some real Apple prototypes, but most of which are unofficial concepts dreamed up by Macintosh fans.
9:45:44 AM #
Details on the short-lived clamshell Newton (featured prominently in the site below).
9:37:29 AM #
Hot XXX pics of computer hardware (lots of old Univac-era stuff and lots of apple products) and big stars of the computer nerd universe. This is actually a pretty good resource for historical images of computer hardware and advertising. The “bizzare fetish” section (Amiga hardware pics) is a stroke of genius.
9:17:57 AM #
Requires some lame, unsigned plugin that pegs my CPU and tries to become the default TIFF viewer, but it has the info I wanted. I got about 3-4 inches of snow here last night (about 2-3 on the pavement).
Update: More data: [2003.02.24]
9:14:57 AM #
2002.02.05 (tuesday)
This generic music application can emulate the sound hardware of various game consoles through plug-ins. Currently, it supports NES, SNES, Genesis, and Gameboy.
6:02:04 PM #
This MIDI-enabled organ creates its calliope-esque sound by blowing air over the tops of beer bottles filled with mineral oil. MP3 samples included.
5:57:19 PM #
2002.02.04 (monday)
Searchable, categorized directory of images, visualizations, and animations of the Earth.
11:45:53 PM #
11:23:13 PM #
2002.02.02 (saturday)
Monthly archive script for Radio, but it makes a big huge calendar instead of just a normal-looking page. Minor modifications to get the output the way I want it shouldn’t be too hard. I’m travelling tomorrow and monday, so it will have to wait.
11:58:47 PM #
Guide to XP services, with an eye towards disabling non-essential services to improve performance. This sounds attractive for me on my dinky 300MHz laptop, but I’m not too confident in the author’s research on many of these services. Most of his descriptions are directly copied-and-pasted from the non-helpful default explanations microsoft gives.
11:43:35 PM #
2002.02.01 (friday)
10:52:02 PM #
Lame outlook defense. I like Outlook, but saying Microsoft somehow isn’t responsible for its ease-of-use as a virus vector is pathetic.
The lame argument I hear from sysadmins (who wouldn’t know an ACK from their ASS) [wtf is that supposed to mean? –pvn] is that it allows for viruses and worms to be transmitted. Buzz! Wrong answer! Smarter sysadmins know how to: a) install patches; and b) install third-party software that’ll take care of problems before they start.
Bzzzt! Wrong answer! Shifting the blame to sysadmins is just enabling Microsoft to keep churning out shitty software, no matter how much attention billg says they’re giving to security. The smartest sysadmins know that patches always lag behind exploits. Plus, expecting someone to install a third-party application to fix gaping holes in outlook just further reduces motivation for Microsoft.
Sorry, lame Microsoft apologist *plus* shitty fixed-sized CSS fonts equals (you guessed it):
*** PLONKY McPLONKSTER! ***
3:04:59 PM #
Wireless security primer covers basic technology and security features (such as WEP and MAC address checks) and briefly goes into advanced techniques such as radiation management (signal strength, antenna shape, etc) and VPNs.
10:07:22 AM #
9:26:43 AM #