Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
No clue why, but for some reason my DSL modem apparently froze up somewhere around 3pm this afternoon. I’ve reset it and we’re back up and running, but it looks like my site was effectively down for about two hours.
I’m sure the 30 people who might have tried to stop by were heartbroken.
“Revolution Rock” by Clash, The from the album London Calling (Legacy Edition) (1979, 3:51).
- Specifications are for the weak and timid!
- This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!
- You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
- Indentation?! — I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
- What is this talk of ‘release’? Klingons do not make software ‘releases’. Our software ‘escapes’ leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
- Klingon function calls do not have ‘parameters’ — they have ‘arguments’ — and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
- Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
- I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again.
- A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
- By filing this SCR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
- You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
- Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Seeing as how old school programmers think like Klingon programmers, I believe that it can be reasonably assumed that all old programmers are Klingon.
(Found on /.)
Looks like the inevitable intrusion of advertising into RSS feeds just gained a major player, as Google‘s Adsense for Feeds program has just been announced.
On the one hand, I can kind of see where quite a few people might be happy about this. As more and more people read their news through RSS feeds, fewer people are as likely to visit a website and see their ads, and revenue drops.
At the same time — hey, that’s one of the things I like about RSS feeds. While I’ve not yet unsubscribed from a feed because it started carrying advertising, it is a little bit annoying. Not very, at this stage, as so far all the ads are at the tail end of each post and can easily be ignored, but I’d still be happier without ads.
So, while I do use Google’s AdSense program on my site (as unobtrusively as possible while still allowing for the occasional check to hit my mailbox), I’ll not be dropping ads into any of my RSS feeds. The way I figure it, the miniscule amount of extra revenue it might generate isn’t at all offset by the annoyance it could cause my readers (and since the ads annoy me, I’ll work on the assumption that they probably annoy others, too).
“Lords of the Rhymes (Kool-Aid Brothers)” by Lords of the Rhymes (2003, 5:03).
Something I meant to mention a bit ago, but spaced — I’ve recently become one of the contributing authors to Seattlest, the Seattle-centric group weblog run by the Gothamist empire.
I’m tracking any posts I toss onto Seattlest on my del.icio.us account for quick access, and my posts can also be found via this listing on the Seattlest site. Lastly, here’s my author bio.
Getting involved was actually pretty flattering, as I was actually invited in, thanks to one of the local editors reading Eclecticism and keeping an eye on my Flickr photostream. Hard to say “no” to an invitation like that!
“Silo, No. 5 – Three” by User, The from the album Abandon (2003, 2:31).
I hate to have to ask this, but two of the three trackers I knew about appear to be dead (TvTorrents went down a few weeks ago, and btefnet seems to have disappeared over the last week), and the third (novatina) has redesigned, isn’t quite as easy to navigate, and — most egregiously — doesn’t seem to have the last two episodes of Enterprise posted (4-21 “Terra Prime” and 4-22 “These are the Voyages“, respectively). Since they normally go up within 24 hours of broadcast, I’m rather surprised that they don’t seem to be on there yet.
Anybody know of any other good trackers out there? My Google-fu did me no good whatsoever, and as long as Season Four of Enterprise has been a bit more watchable than prior seasons, I’d kind of like to see how it all wraps up.
Apple’s just posted their latest iPod commercial, this one titled ‘Pop-Lock’, after the style of dance in the video.
Watching it, I’m struck by two things.
Is there any real difference between what’s now called “Pop-Lock” (or “Pop-n-Lock”, as I’ve generally heard it) and what used to be called “The Robot” back in the 80’s heyday of breakdancing? I can’t really see much difference at all, if any.
“Rock Star (Jason Nevins Edit)” by N.E.R.D. from the album Rock Star (2003, 7:42).
I ran across this amusing post today discussing Robot Johnny‘s upgrade to Tiger, linked first by Jeffrey Zeldman, then by Anil Dash:
And the built-in dictionary look-up is very, very cool, even if this definition of “blog” does seem like a sort of a challenge:
blog |bläg|
noun
a weblog : blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers.It’s like it’s saying, “Blog, THIS, nerd!”…
Of course, I had to see this for myself, so I checked it out on my own system, using Tiger’s way-cool (yes, that’s a technical term) contextual menu dictionary lookup:
So now I’m curious. Was Robot Johnny making a funny? Or is the definition of ‘blog’ that he saw something snuck into the Candadian localization of Tiger (I’m assuming Candaian, given that his about page says that he lives in Toronto)?
If you’re using Tiger and live outside the US, what does your system define ‘blog’ as? If the definition he quoted is actually in other versions of Tiger, I’m both greatly amused, and slightly bummed that we Americans didn’t get that particular snark. Hey, I think it’s funny….
“Pigs (Three Different Ones)” by Pink Floyd from the album Animals Trance Remixes (1995, 20:26).
After far too much stürm und drang, UPS finally managed to get their act together and drop my box from Amazon on my desk this morning.
I got home after work, popped in the disk, and hit the fateful “Erase and Install” button. A few minutes later (probably about 15 or so…I didn’t time it, but it went faster than I expected) I was prompted to reboot, and Tiger was up and running.
So far, I’m really liking the upgrade. Things are definitely a bit snappier than 10.3 was (I love the fact that each successive upgrade from Apple is actually faster than the prior version). Dashboard I’m not entirely sold on yet…great eye candy, I’ll see how useful it actually is as I keep playing around. I haven’t had much chance to play with Spotlight so far, as aside from importing my mailboxes, I’m running on a pretty clean slate at the moment, so there’s not a lot for Spotlight to work with yet. That will change with time, of course — and even without using Spotlight’s document-searching capabilities yet, it’s proved to be just as capable of an application launcher as Quicksilver was.
Most of the evening so far has been spent downloading the latest versions of the applications I use frequently and getting my day-to-day workspace set up. I’ve only run into two noticeable snags so far:
No matter how carefully I try to back things up, there’s always something that I realize that I’ve forgotten later on. I’ve grown to accept that over the years — it’s rarely anything I can’t live without if I have to, so I’ve gotten used to this element of Russian Roulette when doing a full Nuke and Pave. Unfortunately, this time the casualty was one I’m definitely going to miss: Photoshop (yes, I’m one of the many people who…ahem…’acquired’ a copy of Photoshop at some point). A definite bummer, as I’m not likely to have the $600 to get my own legal copy anytime soon, and I’ve long since lost track of any sources for less-legal means of acquiring software. Ah, well…so it goes, right?
So all in all, a pretty successful upgrade, and I’ve got lots of little nooks and crannies to play in as I poke around. Yay for new toys!
Update: Well, one more issue, this one potentially a little more serious. For some reason, I don’t seem to be able to send mail through either my Speakeasy account or the account on my own mailserver. Not sure what’s going on here.
I can receive message from both those accounts, and I’ve set up POP access on my gMail account, though, so I can at least send messages through gMail, but I don’t seem to be able to send through my @michaelhanscom.com address, which is a bummer. My mailserver’s been a bit tweaky for a while anyway…maybe it’s time to investigate rebuilding that. Oh, boy is that going to be fun…
“Where Time Becomes a Loop (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Difficult Listening Hour (full mix) (1999, 58:41).
Oh. My. God.
I installed QuickTime 7 the other day, and found Apple’s HD Gallery page where they’re showcasing a few HD trailers and video clips. The trailer for Serenity is available in both 720p and 1080p formats, and even though my system (a dual 2.0Ghz G5 with a 64Mb Radeon 9600 video card) technically doesn’t meet the requirements to playback 1080p, I downloaded both to see how they behaved.
Beautiful. Not a stutter on either one, and the video quality is amazing. What amused me, though, is that my screen (which I run at a slightly non-standard 1152×870) isn’t big enough to display them at full size! The 720p trailer just loses a little bit off of either side, but the 1080p trailer? I can only fit about half of it on my screen at once. Wow.
Just for grins and giggles, I decided to download all the different Serenity trailers available to compare them. I grabbed all four “normal” versions from the Serenity trailer page (small, medium, large, and full screen), the two HD versions from the Serenity HD page, opened them all up at once, and paused each one at 1:02.
(While I was doing this, I started them all playing at once just to see what would happen. Even with all the other versions playing at the same time, the gargantuan 1080i trailer still kept up a very watchable 18fps average framerate!)
Here’s the end result:
| version | size (MB) | fps | size (pixels) | data rate (kbits/sec) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| small | 4.8 | 8 | 240×104 | 288.78 |
| medium | 8.45 | 12 | 320×136 | 505.18 |
| large | 20.98 | 24 | 480×208 | 1259.23 |
| fullscreen | 40.4 | 24 | 640×272 | 2363.67 |
| 720p | 108.33 | 24 | 1280×544 | 6406.26 |
| 1080p | 138.36 | 24 | 1920×816 | 8182.54 |
Pretty damn impressive.
“Tell Me Why” by :Wumpscut: from the album Bunker Gate Seven (1995, 4:11).
Via Scoble, Ballmer’s e-mail announcing Microsoft’s re-committing to support anti-discrimination legislation covering sexual orientation.
After looking at the question from all sides, I’ve concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda. Since our beginning nearly 30 years ago, Microsoft has had a strong business interest in recruiting and retaining the best and brightest and most diverse workforce possible. I’m proud of Microsoft’s commitment to non-discrimination in our internal policies and benefits, but our policies can’t cover the range of housing, education, financial and similar services that our people and their partners and families need. Therefore, it’s appropriate for the company to support legislation that will promote and protect diversity in the workplace.
Accordingly, Microsoft will continue to join other leading companies in supporting federal legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation – adding sexual orientation to the existing law that already covers race, sex, national origin, religion, age and disability. Given the importance of diversity to our business, it is appropriate for the company to endorse legislation that prohibits employment discrimination on all of these grounds. Obviously, the Washington State legislative session has concluded for this year, but if legislation similar to HB 1515 is introduced in future sessions, we will support it.
Good to see.
Update: Here’s the Seattle Times’ story.