2002.05 (May)
2002.05.31 (friday)
This is without a doubt the sexiest radio ever. I’m drooling with obscene technolust.
5:49:58 PM #
Ah, Mark has a details, including a bookmarklet that will use this to subscribe your aggregator to the RSS feed so you don’t have to hunt around for the little orange XML button.
5:26:26 PM #
See also: IBM: Give hard drives the boot? (time-bombed yahoo news link)
IBM wants everyone to boot their PCs off of SAN-attched remote drives. That sounds great, but it’s not really anything new; I’ve been booting machines off of Fibre Channel for a while now. This does use SCSI over IP, which means you can use just about any ethernet card, but the technology isn’t anything new, it’s just a cheaper physical transport.
This would reverse some of the trends seen in high-end consumer PCs, which typically come with 80GB to 120GB hard drives to accommodate storing lots of digital photos and music as well as video. With faster networks and technologies like iBoot, consumers could store such data remotely.
Uh, consumers aren’t going to have SANs in their house anytime soon; the other possibility they could be referring to is the already-run-into-the-ground “cloud storage” model. Sorry, I’m not going to pay someone else to “host” my data outside of my home. This is squarely aimed at corporate PC networks, not consumers.
Even though this will massively reduce the cost of SAN infrastructure (ethernet vs. Fibre Channel (HBAs, switches, etc)), it probably has little to no effect on the cost of the actual storage controllers behind which the physical disks reside.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a central NAS box in my closet and keep all storage there (with RAID 0+1 etc), but then again, I do this stuff for a living and I don’t see it happening for Joe Average Consumer in the near future (5 years+).
The other obvious application is just carving up virtual disks on your san to serve to individual blades so you can remove the local disk and make them more dense. We (DEC/Compaq/HP StorageWorks) have been doing this for a while now, it’s not anything earth-shattering.
The iBoot technology recently proved itself in a demonstration, booting a diskless machine in Haifa, Israel, off an iSCSI target machine near Seattle.
That’s nice as a proof-of-concept, but not really any more impressive than doing it across the street. Once you can boot off of IP, it really doesn’t matter where the hardware is.
10:32:12 AM #
2002.05.30 (thursday)
This looks pretty exciting. It would probably be even more exciting if I ever used powerpoint.
10:07:26 PM #
XML is not an improvement but a hierarchy hamburger. Everything, everything must be forced into hierarchical templates! And the “semantic web” means that tekkie committees will decide the world’s true concepts for once and for all.
10:06:47 PM #
We have the opportunity to do something magical, original, and true. And you want to be journalists. Give me a fucking break.
I haven’t heard of any webloggers who want to be journalists. It seems to be the journalists who want to pidgeonhole webloggers as wannabe journalists because they can’t digest the concept any other way.
10:04:17 PM #
If you don’t customise you mobile phone with an up-to-the-minute ring tone you’re liable to be called “boring” by your friends.
So says an “independent survey” by mobile phone entertainment outfit WapOneline, which found that 15 per cent of those interviewed with a traditional “ring ring” ring-tone said that they had been accused of being “boring”.
This sounds like a shill study from all those companies that thought they’d be making about a billion dollars per year selling lame ringtones to people. Yep, you’re a big loser if you don’t buy “Elanor Rigby” from Cingular. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a cell phone with a ring tone that didn’t come with the phone. Certainly not a Nokia. Sure, plenty of people change the default “Nokia Tune,” but that’s just so they can tell their phone apart from everyone else’s when it rings in a crowded room.
I would probably have a hard time taking someone seriously after hearing the Knight Rider theme coming from their cell phone. The polyphonic ring tones that new phones are capable of using are even bigger credibility busters. It’s hard not to look like a moron when you’re in a meeting with vice presidents of three different companies and some baroque harpsichord piece starts blaring from your belt (I actually witnessed this). Not to mention the inferior ability of the polyphonic tunes to be heard in even a slightly noisy environment.
Does anybody actually buy a phone because of the ringtones? My phone is used to communicate with other human beings; it’s not a personal entertainment device or a conduit for my cell phone provider to shove advertising to me through (though I’m sure they’re thinking of ways to make it one). A cheap MP3 player sounds a lot better, stores more music, and doesn’t require a monthly service agreement. It’s like that stupid “MP3″ version of the Mazda they tried to sell… yeah, I’m going to buy a car just because it comes from the factory with a MP3-capable stereo, like I can’t get that in any other car I want with an aftermarket stereo that’s probably higher quality and costs less.
Even worse is this lame Spiderman faceplate tie-in that Cingular has going right now. Like I really want my phone to be a gaudy red-and-blue billboard for your stupid movie. Has anybody actually bought one of those? If so, have they been sufficiently humiliated by their acquaintances?
4:08:54 PM #
2002.05.29 (wednesday)
11:15:46 PM #
Closing your weblog is a bizzare concept. It’s one thing if your domain lapses or if you take your whole site down, but to close your weblog (and archives, apparently) while you’re on vacation doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I’ll change my “business hours” to 9-5. “Sorry, we’re closed, come back tomorrow.” I hear that ATMs in Japan do that after midnight or something. What a waste.
9:00:42 PM #
This company takes ordinary engine parts and coats them with different stuff. While this is sometimes actually useful (certain coatings can prevent rust, cracking, etc), they also offer Riceboy-special “appearance coatings.”
Since 1982, serving the needs of motorsports…
Yes, I need my intake in HiPerCrystal Emerald! It makes me go faster; it has to, because it’s from High Performance Coatings, Inc!
6:35:19 PM #
Nice online dictionary with no ads (unlike dictionary.com) and meaningful URLs for result pages (unlike dict.org) so you can bookmark, post, and email them.
3:20:52 PM #
This is a pretty lame story; it shouldn’t be any surprise that Blockbuster would consider Netflix a competitor and would actually do something about it. This, however, was surprising:
Last week’s successful Netflix IPO — like the PayPal IPO of a few weeks before — triggered euphoric cries that tech companies are on the rebound at last.
Netflix is a tech company? I thought we got over this bamboozlement after pets.com went under. By this line of thinking, any company that has a website or even has a computer is a tech company. Wouldn’t it be easier to classify all “tech” companies by what they actually do and single out the non-tech companies as “dinosaur luddite” companies?
2:31:38 PM #
Israeli security experts comment on US techniques:
The United States does not have a security system, it has a system for bothering people.
The difference between the Israeli and American systems is that we are looking for the terrorist, while the Americans look for the weapons.
2:22:53 PM #
Gee, this sounds a lot like the failed attempts to create a unified Unix. This really has a lot in common with OSF, which was a joint project of DEC, HP, and IBM to build a common Unix on the Mach microkernel. This was a direct reaction to the looming Sun/AT&T alliance. HP got CDE out to the masses and DEC managed to actually ship OSF/1 (which became Digital Unix and later Tru64) before the Sun/AT&T project fell apart, after which HP and IBM quickly lost interest.
2:18:46 PM #
The Web100 project will provide the software and tools necessary for end-hosts to automatically and transparently achieve high bandwidth data rates (100 Mbps) over the high performance research networks.
10:29:17 AM #
2002.05.28 (tuesday)
I wonder if our thoughts are made of the language we speak, or if there’s a universal brain-language we all use.
Does language govern thought, or does thought govern language? It’s pretty obvious that lauguage most often governs thought. This isn’t an absolute, though it’s practically impossible, once you have the tool of language, to think in raw, emotional terms. There’s no telling how restrictive the limits this places on our thinking truly are.
Many tough problems are easier to solve when you change your way of thinking. There are plenty of examples of this in programming; something might be impossible in Ada but easy in Lisp. Similar relationships exist between different branches of mathematics. Some (verbal) languages are considered more poetic than others. Maybe there should be languages specifically constructed for philosophy (in general). The only problem would be translating the discoveries back into common tounges.
Actually, that’s exactly what mathematics and, by extension, programming languages, are - more effective systems of describing problems. It’s not just the difference between algebra and geometry, it’s the difference between the “two tank problem” and a differential equation.
11:46:32 PM #
Yet another fascinating MoMA exhibition forced into a horrible Flash-based web interface. For another, see Workspheres [4 mar 01].
10:08:32 PM #
12:13:37 AM #
2002.05.24 (friday)
This package provides some test patterns etc to help optimise your monitor settings. It sounds useful, but it requires that you install some software, which is pretty lame. Wouldn’t a couple of TIFF images and a readme have sufficed? Or at the least just a bare executable that doesn’t cruft up my machine?
4:39:18 PM #
Audiophile wackiness. First there’s talk of using radioactive Uranium hexafluoride gas to improve speaker “imaging” or whatever, then there’s this:
The source of this peculiar reverberant quality eluded me for months but I finally tracked it down to the sound bouncing around between my glasses and my eyes before being reflected into my ears.
4:31:46 PM #
This product tacks HTML web-bug equivelents onto your outgoing mail so you can track when and where (IP address) the mail is read, even if the reader has return receipts turned off. The mail will include a banner-ad type message saying “The sender of this message requests confirmation when you read it. Click here to confirm.” However, it doesn’t matter if you agree to confirm or not, the webbug has already served its purpose.
if your email is forwarded to someone else, we can notify you. In many cases, we can tell you how long your recipient actually spent reading your mail, and how many times they opened it and re-read it as well. If your email gets published somewhere without your knowledge, you can usually find this out, and where. We provide a mapping feature so you can find out the approximate physical location of your reader. We also have Self-Destructing Emails, Ensured-Receipt emails, proof-of-posting certificates, proof-of-delivery certificates, message retraction, and many other useful features.
The company, Neustar, has similar offerings for tracking MS Office documents.
9:56:33 AM #
2002.05.23 (thursday)
The new Zelda for GameCube looks HAWT! The latest projected ship date I’ve seen is Feb 2003, which seems a long way away, but as soon as this game (or Metriod) ships, I’ll buy a GameCube. The graphics are a little cartoony, but they’re better than most animation on TV right now (examples: [1] [2] [3]). The more figurative, cartoony style was actually the basis of one of my last posts to slashdot [qv], which spawned a sub-thread on archaic Japanese honorrific titles.
10:24:16 PM #
Plate mail components and complete suits.
There are many popular misconceptions about plate armor. It is often portrayed in film and literature as so heavy and awkward that one has to wonder why anyone would wear it at all. We hear that if a knight fell down that he would be unable to rise and that he would have to be hoisted into his saddle by means of a crane. In many cartoons, plate armor is depicted as a permanently assembled, one-piece shell, entered and exited through a small trap door. All this, of course, is nonsense.
9:32:43 PM #
Art of the screen saver. I really don’t have time to install all of these, and I don’t really want them crufting up my machine; why can’t they just provide a QT movie of them so I can find the good ones?
9:23:03 PM #
Clever little keychain gadget lets you charge your Nokia off of a standard 9-volt battery.
9:19:46 PM #
2002.05.22 (wednesday)
I just got a new TV, and I couldn’t find the manual that came with my digital cable box, so I didn’t know what code to use to set the remote to control the TV (since digital cable hijacks your system and turns your TV into a big dumb monitor (which is a whole other bitch session), you only really need this for the volume and the TV power). There’s no model number on the set-top box, so I had to stumbe around with google before figuring out that it is a DCT 2000. I then was able to fairly quickly locate the user guide, but that document doesn’t contain the codes for the remote. In fact, the remote in the manual doesn’t look anything like my remote. Apparently, in an effort to make my life miserable, my lame cable company decided to substitue a remote from one-for-all, which I discovered when I looked on the bottom of the remote and found their URL.
Their site has no information about this model remote. No biggie, I figure the codes are probably all the same. Oh wait, the note on the bottom of the remote says that it needs a three-digit code for each device, and all the remotes on that site have four-digit codes. This doesn’t seem like that big of a problem since all of the four-digit numbers have leading zeros, and I figure I’ll just use the last three digits. This doesn’t work, unfortunately. I go back and search again, and in the “discontinued products” section, find this link to a third-party site which “is not directly associated with One For All” that has the codes I’m looking for. How fucking pathetic is that? They’re too cheap, lazy, or stupid to host their own legacy info? Classy.
Anyway, as I suspected, the three-digit codes are the same as the last three digits of the four-digit codes. Only after finding this did I realize that the code didn’t appear to work because the fascist set-top box had hijacked my TV and wouldn’t let it power up unless the box was powered up first.
The TV is pretty awesome, btw. I got a 32″ Panasonic 32D12D, which I picked because it had great reviews and was the cheapest thing I could find with component video inputs and two rear A/V inputs (it also has a front A/V input). The picture looks great, though the default settings way over-saturate the color.
I spent a while dicking with the video input modes, and I can’t tell any difference between S-video and component video, though both are a huge improvement over the component video which was the only thing I had available on my old 21″ POS. I probably need a better reference DVD than The Big Lebowski, though. Super Speedway is supposed to be good for that, since it’s supposedly one of the best IMAX transfers ever or something, and not a bad documentary to boot, but I’m not going to shell out $20 just to find out how inferior my new TV is to the 36″ Wega I could have gotten.
Maybe if I watched more than one hour of TV per day (the Cosby show) I could justify spending more on TV.
11:19:29 PM #
2002.05.21 (tuesday)
New Crusoe-based Beowulf cluster “Green Destiny” unveiled at Los Alamos. There will always be a need for more computing ability for scientific applications, but the trend of doing the same amount of work with less (space, power, heat, or more interestingly, transistors) is becoming steadily more important. See also: [2 Jun 02]
9:55:15 PM #
2002.05.20 (monday)
Chinese Moon Base: “Our long-term goal is to set up a base on the Moon and [establish a lunar-based nuclear missile facility there] for the benefit of humanity.”
Plus a special bonus: the return of Osama McDonald!
10:40:11 PM #
low and behold I found Wheel of Fortune on the radio. Immediately, I thought, “How nice! The old people have something to listen to while they are driving.”. It then occured to me that Wheel on radio makes no sense…
(I had dinner with this guy last night, he’s way too loud after a couple of beers.)
10:32:39 PM #
This has the potential to be a little more useful. You put in a few items, and it spits out a set of similar things. Results are very mixed. Example, when I input “square,” “circle,” and “oval,” the set I’m thinking of doesn’t include “TEXTAREA,” “dashbox,” and “canvas.” On the other hand, check out the set for Moe and Larry, then “grow” the set… impressive… yet I wonder if that case has been tuned for.
10:20:33 PM #
Google launched a bunch of new experimental stuff today, but this one is fascinating. I was boggled at the description, you call a number, say your query, then click a link to get your results. How the hell does that work??? Then you say another query, and it auto-refreshes the results! At first I assumed it must only allow one caller at a time, but I would think I would have gotten a busy signal by now. It stops auto-refreshing after I hang up, so it is obviously tying sessions to particular phone numbers. How many simultaneous callers it can handle and how it keeps their web sessions seperated is a mystery. If two people call close together, how likely is it that they will get each other’s results? Does it match geographical information about the IP address with caller ID info?
Operationaly, the results are pretty much the same as a regular google search, except your query isn’t auto-filled into the search form. Voice recognition seems pretty good… it got “hello kitty iron chef” right on, stumbled on “boogers lasers” and nailed “britney spears” (they probably tuned for that case). For “kibo” it returned “subaru” and “tivo.”
10:10:41 PM #
2002.05.17 (friday)
10:06:47 AM #
New alphanumeric keypad designed to facilitate text entry on cellphones. It places tiny, raised chicklet keys for letters between the number keys; although they are small, they’re spaced out enough to make it easy to hit just the one you want (supposedly). The keys are laid out in alphabetical order, which probably could be optimized, and it does make the keypad a good bit larger, since it requires two more rows of keys, but it seems like a pretty damn good idea. They also have a very interesting tiny qwerty keyboard.
8:19:11 AM #
2002.05.16 (thursday)
Excellent Ebert essay from 1999 on a new film projection technology that addresses all the issues that digital proponents try to frame as inherent defects in film that are in actuallity only related to the currently used implementation. Maxivision48 give a better picture (current digiatl projection systems are only 1280×1024, less than HDTV!), much cheaper ($10k vs $150k per screen), doesn’t obsolete current movies (the MV48 projectors will play all existing 35mm formats), and “protects” intellectuall property the old-fashioned way (film is obviously harder to copy than a digital stream of bits).
Note: this story was originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times (and logged here [24 dec 99]), and is now reproduced on the MV48 site. However, I personally think Ebert wrote it in good faith and not at the request of the MV48 people.
9:16:16 PM #
Two stars, due mostly to lame dialogue and a possibly shitty digital-to-film transfer. Shooting the whole movie in digital format is what really had me worried from the beginning - I think the format they are using is something less than 1600×1200 (or 1600×900 or whatever the closest 16:9 equivelent is), which is about a zillion times less detailed than 35mm film. Ebert is pretty picky about this, though, and I haven’t heard anyone else complain, and he did watch the film on the biggest screen in Chicago, which would magnify any problems. Furthermore, he has bashed digital in the past, though he had very good reasons for doing so, which were very well-explained [24 dec 99] (that link was timebombed, but I found it somewhere else (see the next entry above)). I’ll just have to see it myself.
9:02:14 PM #
2002.05.15 (wednesday)
One stop shopping the aspiring supervillian. I really dig the “Henchman Cybernetic Upgrade” package for the low price of… (pinky to mouth) six MILLION dollars! Also, check out the ultimate weapon, the robotic Ayn Rand!
Need advice about your latest megalomaniacal scheme? If only you could ask history’s greatest megalomaniac, “novelist” and “philosopher” Ayn Rand. Too bad she’s dead. But wait! In 1963, a secret cabal of Objectivists intent on taking over the Student Union at MIT built the first robotic Ayn Rand, and now you can own a Randroid® based on their original design. Comes with stock phrases such as “Morality ends where the gun begins,” “Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent,” and “Nathaniel! Bring me another gin and tonic!”
9:37:40 PM #
Actually, I went back to the page, it was some flash-based blipvert with obnoxious audio; earlier it had merely started the audio stream before IE finished rendering the page. Either way, loud audio with no warning equals plonkification.
As a side note, I don’t see a good way for Daypop to title their links in the top 40. If they take the text of the href from one of the citing weblogs, they risk getting something stupid like “link” (thanks to the otherwise interesting boingboing for this anti-helpful behavior), but if they take the title for the linked page they’ll often get something equally lame like “The Register.” I guess XML could theoretically solve this problem if everyone used some hypothetical meta tag that would suggest link text to use for context-free links (Hell, you could do that with a META tag). Wait, isn’t that what the TITLE tag is supposed to be for? I guess if someone is so lazy that they’ll abuse their CMS and put “The Register” as the TITLE of every page on their site they won’t go to the trouble of filling out some lame-o XML or META tag.
9:20:32 PM #
2002.05.14 (tuesday)
More on the Metal Storm million-rounds-per-minute gun. I figured the thing was some kind of electromagnetic propulsion system, but it actually works by using electricity to combust a propellant pre-sealed in the barrel. The inventor’s other noteworthy invention, air-cooled sneakers, sounds pretty sweet.
11:15:05 PM #
Finally, an actual study to prove that those dickheads who hardcode their sites at 9pt or smaller are sociopathic losers. Serif fonts came out ahead in reading speed, which is pretty much in line with everything I’ve heard before, and 14pt seems to be the optimum size; however, sans serif fonts seem to be more preferred, even if they don’t allow for quite the same reading speed. Obviously, the best policy is to allow the reader to pick the font face and size. I’ve more than a couple of sites that hijack the font selection then provide a tiny choice (usually four faces and three or four sizes) via some javascript gimmick, which is even more insulting than hard coding the whole thing.
Slightly off topic, since the HP/Compaq merger closed last week I’ve been getting more and more HTML/RTF emails in my outlook box using the Futura font that HP uses all over the place. I don’t know if people are doing this on purpose or if they made some change to the exchange servers that changed the default from arial. Arial sux, but its a lot easier to read than Futura for anything longer than about five words.
7:03:31 PM #
2002.05.13 (monday)
Cheesy, bloated website for a company that claims they have a new technology that can be used to build guns that fire up to one million rounds per minute. I don’t know how long they can actually sustain that rate of fire, but I would imagine its only for fractions of a second. I didn’t explore the site to much since I’m on a slow dialup until I get back home tomorrow.
10:53:28 PM #
2002.05.07 (tuesday)
Both HP and Compaq use IRC internally for communication between engineers and support personel spread across the country. On the Compaq side, this mostly grew out of the Digital support centers (which forms the core of Compaq’s support organization), and use inside Compaq is apparently much more widespread than at HP. The first contact between the HP IRC users and the Compaq IRC users was interesting; I imagine it was sort of like the meeting of American and Soviet troops in Germany at the end of WWII, except we all speak english and we weren’t in Germany.
The strategic roadmap seems very sensible, too. I have lot more confidence in the new company now than I did a week ago, when everything still seemed hazy. Sure, there are plenty of minor details left to work out, but they are mostly things like benefits, etc.
11:25:24 PM #
2002.05.05 (sunday)
The origin of the competition is based in Finnish history. A 19th century notorious character, Rankainen the Robber imposed strong physical standards on men he considered for his band. To qualify, the men had to complete a difficult course with a heavy sack on their backs. It was also not uncommon for men to steal women from neighboring villages.
cf. the North American “bonk a woman on the head with a club and drag her back to the cave” championships.
11:24:30 PM #
Exhibit A: USB Mouse and Memory Stick® Adaptor. Why stop there, how about a combo mouse and Ethernet/USB converter? This mouse seems like it will work with “regular” purple memory sticks, but I wonder if it will work with the “special” pink memory sticks required for Aibo etc (the only difference being a “sucker” bit set in the pink ones that tells the hardware that yes, you did pay more for the blessed stick).
Exhibit B: Logitech Dual Optical Mouse. I linked to a google search because Logitech has decided to squash deep linking by auto-directing you to the home page if the referer is outside their domain (at least they aren’t suing). Anyway, this mouse has two LED sensors on the bottom. Red LEDs are pretty damn cheap, why not just cover the entire bottom surface of the mouse with them?
PS: If you really are paranoid about door dings in your riced-up lime-green-with-purple-flames pickup truck and you feel the need to take up two spaces in the CompUSA parking lot, that’s fine, but don’t park in the front of the lot, asshole.
4:12:54 PM #
2002.05.02 (thursday)
Typical “sue everything that moves, ask questions later” page.
The program you are distributing on your website which allows a person to change the embedding restrictions on a font has been brought to my attention.
Bonus “infringing” haiku at the bottom!
10:00:21 PM #
Everyone loves these lists because it’s so easy to point out the obvious mistakes. In this case, everyone knows that (I was going to have a list of “song x is better than song y” leading up to “and everything on the list is better than Ratt’s “Round and Round” but the entire VH1 site has gone 404 in the middle of my typing. Even the root page. Lame. Oh, and this is awesome because it has the classic photo of Mark Mothersbaugh with the round red plastic ziggurat hat.
9:55:10 PM #
2002.05.01 (wednesday)
11:04:43 PM #
s/HP sux/HP r00lz/g
10:35:37 PM #
Hot new weblog; I dig it. Very purist (which I like): link, pullquote, comment, repeat; minimal meta-posts, ramblings, musings, etc. I really like the fact that this guy wastes his free time (and by the volume on this weblog, he’s got lots of it) weeding through the lame stories (and comments) on slashdot so I don’t have to. Kudos!
9:51:55 PM #